Tag: PTSD

+WORDS FROM MY MOTHER’S CHRONICLE: WHERE IS THE CHILD ABUSE HERE?

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Now, would you ever say that these words sound like they were written by a severely child-abusing mother?

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December 7, 1959 Monday

*Notes:  Our Family Is Never Bored!

The children spend many happy contented hours now working on various Xmas projects.  Cindy has made individual baskets for each member of her beloved family made out of egg carton sections, each wrapped in aluminum foil with a pipe cleaner handle and a marshmallow (how hard they’ll be by Xmas) and a lollypop in each one.  They’re secretly hidden and each day Sharon teases to see hers – it’s a constant thing to talk about, to whisper about and to be excited about for Xmas is coming.

Our Xmas books – we buy two each year — has grown to quite a collection.  These are taken out during the first week of December and read each day until Xmas. This year John and Linda can very expressively read them aloud!  It thrills me to see the younger two – eyes wide with wonder – listening in rapt attention to their older brother or sister read the magic words to them.

Yes, Xmas is coming.

No mention is made of money – we all know – it just isn’t there.  We will do what we can but the days of borrowing money for Xmas presents that we can’t afford are over!!  There will be Xmas presents though.

I’ve bought at half price knitting sets – with yarn and tiny needles for two girls and a needlepoint set for one – I hope John will get his skis and Grandma will buy his boots.  The girls will get a flying saucer from Santa to share and a tea set.  The 5¢ and 10¢ store and ingenuity and imagination and love will make a Xmas – you just wait and see….

What is important!!

More and more every day I realize what’s really important in life!

Being together – being a family unit and being loved and loving – these are the important things.

Health – to be healthy and well and to know that the ones you love are well.

(I hope my loved ones never suffer – how terrible it would be to see them hurt or sick – how terrible to ever think they might need me – and I wouldn’t know).

How thankful I am to be here writing this and know our family is safe and together on this night –

Dearest God in heaven above, I thank you for our family and our homestead and for the opportunities we have here to create a home for our loved ones in a land such as this.

I am content tonight – tomorrow we will plan and work for our future but I intend to fully enjoy each day as it comes – to work hard but to be content to wait – material things are really of such minor importance.  I feel we already have what really counts and must never lose it in hurrying and working too hard to get THINGS.

I see so many people – even up here in Alaska – doing just that, living in far too expensive houses – beyond what they can really afford to pay and working so hard to live there and meet the payments that the house as beautiful as it may be, holds no happiness for the occupants and they live separately in it.

No, no – never – we’ve had our share of money worries – no, no, no.

I’ll be content with less – Bill and I are so close now – never, never to be apart mentally and spiritually – nothing is worth that!

Our little hut and trailer mean more to me if we can be all together and happy and close here!!

The other – I pray God – we’ll be content to wait for.  If we can manage fine – if not, so what!?!?

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December 8, 1959 Tuesday 10:30 P.M.

*Notes:  How quiet and serene and peaceful it is.  Everyone is asleep.  Even our two kittens, Dixie and Pixie are curled up in Cindy’s bed.  I don’t approve but haven’t the heart to move them.  One is tucked under her arm with covers pulled up under it’s chin, all the world lie a toy.  The second is on the foot of her bed.

The dishes are done and the trailer is tidy and neat.

Everything looks cozy and cute and serene in the light of the single kerosene lamp I am writing by.

Bill went to bed – absolutely exhausted after a 24 hour ordeal of futile attempts to return here which finally terminated in his having to walk the last mile.  Even poor ‘Oliver’ our faithful tractor found this 10° to 20° below zero weather too cold!

I just went outside for a moment and it’s really cold and really beautiful.  The stars are so close looking you feel as if you could pick them out of the sky and the moon is so bright that you can see all the Mountains and the valley below.

How I truly love this place – no words can aptly describe how I feel about this land we hope someday to own.  It’s really an almost HOLY feeling.  I know it sounds silly but it’s the way I feel.  If only you could see it – you would see what a Shangri-la it is! – and what’s more we have created a home – be it ever so humble here!  It’s quite a grand feeling!!

Time for bed.  Good night!

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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:

From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder You may not be familiar with the term “splitting,” but it is a phenomenon that many people with BPD, and their family members, will recognize. This week, learn how to cope with splitting when it happens.

[Linda note:  IMPORTANT – THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER DID – What you just read above was from the ALL GOOD side of the split!]


What is Splitting?
Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms.
How to Handle Splitting
What should you do when a loved one is engaged in splitting? There isn’t always an easy answer — the best way to manage the situation will depend the nature of your relationship with your loved one, the intensity of the splitting, and the impact it is having on the family.

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Divorcing a BPD Spouse
Does BPD mean that your marriage should end in divorce? Some couples do make their BPD marriage work, but sometimes the relationship can’t be saved.
Family Therapy for BPD
Can healing from BPD be a family affair?

Must Reads
What is BPD?
Symptoms of BPD
Diagnosis of BPD
Treatment of BPD
Living with BPD

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+FROM THE CHRONICLE OF “MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN”

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I do not understand this ‘thing’ my mother had about ‘dreams’!  Is this because I have never really had one of my own?  Was this ‘dream thing’ of my mother’s related to her Borderline split between what is/was real and what is/was not real?  Between the ‘darling’ version of her world and ‘scary one’ as reflected in her inability to tolerate the real world with its fully integrated good and bad’?

The following is why I am NOW bending toward this as a title for the book(s) of my mother’s writings:

Mildred’s Mountain –

A City Woman’s Chronicle of Living Her Alaskan Homesteading Dream

OR should I put it this more accurate way:

Mildred’s Mountain –

A City Woman’s Chronicle of Living In Her Alaskan Homesteading Dream

I will have to think about this.  Adding that little tiny word “in” into the title really IS a reflection of my ‘analysis and interpretation’ of my mother, of her life and of her homesteading venture.  My use of the word ‘chronicle’ in the title (as mentioned in last night’s post) is supposed to MEAN that I am doing neither of these two actions in relation to her work – either analyzing or interpreting it!

And yet I do suspect that the way my mother’s brain-mind worked did mean that she was unable to tell the difference!  Was she ‘living her dream’ or was she ‘living IN her dream’?

I do suspect the latter.

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November 24, 1959 Tuesday

*Notes:  Why do we struggle so hard for our homestead on the Mountain –  Here I’ve had the children out of school for going on three weeks – still no credit for living on our land – Obstacles so great – can we, will we overcome these new obstacles?

Yes, yes, yes – we must but why?  What is it I hold onto so dearly – certainly not – our humble hut on the Mountain.  It’s not this that I cling to so desperately.

No, no, no – it’s my dreams – still so dear, so dear, so bright and untarnished.

I remember when we first filed on our homestead – ah, how great our dreams were then – and still are –

A neighbor of ours was over two years ago when we were living at the log house and mentioned our homestead claim.  I felt like a new parent with a brand new baby – beaming and proud – bring forth slides of our lovely one.  But all the neighbor sees is LAND.  “Aha,” she exclaims, “You’re eager to get hold of this land for speculation.”

“No, no I cry!” – but how can I explain our tender, sweet dreams to someone like this?  I try but to no avail.

She puts me down as ‘land hungry.’  How hurt and angry I was – she said, “You’ll never be satisfied with 160 acres.  You’ll want more and more.”

Oh how cruel – and oh, how untrue.

But yet – well, how simple if that were the case.  For then I would not struggle for that land.  We would never have climbed through mud, mosquitoes and carried burdens on our back.  Not for land alone – land for speculation.  Time and money is too dear.  Our family and their comfort are too great.  Would we now do what we’re doing just for land?

No, no, no.

We would have relinquished our claim soon after filing.  But we can’t relinquish our dreams.  It’s our dreams that brought us here to Alaska –made us sell our home and leave our family and friends.  It’s our reason for being here and our very reason for homesteading in the first place.

When – if ever – I see that our dreams cannot and will not materialize, then and only then will I give up.

This summer there was a time when our dreams were faint.  We were never together and always worried and tired – “But it is temporary.”  I said.  “We must always remember our dreams and make them come true.”

Our family must always be first – and our dreams for our family – they all center around our homestead and the life we have planned there.

I never want to sell that land or any part of it.  It would be like selling a member of our family.

Yet, Sunday when I saw that glacial ice on our road – standing thick, slippery and full of ridges – so bad even the tractor couldn’t pass over it and we slipped and could have broken our necks.

Can it be true?

Will we ever be able to live there? – all year round or will it always be a continual battle —  wearing Bill out?  And making him old before his time.

The road has always been our trouble from the beginning and yet our land so peaceful and beautiful is always there beckoning us on and on and on –

to our dreams!!

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+BEING MY MOTHER’S ‘FAIR WITNESS-OBSERVER’ – I WANT TO OWN MY CHOICE

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It gives me great comfort this morning as my thinking moves forward along the lines established in my previous two posts and in my reply to the comment included with the first of these two posts to find pages coming up in my Google search directly connected to the words “archetype fair witness.”

I never thought about it before these last days as I finished the process of organizing and transcribing my mother’s writings that in some – still seemingly bizarre way — I WAS BORN TO BE MY MOTHER’S FAIR WITNESS.

For all the billions of moments I spent as a child during my 18 years of suffering abuse from this woman, I was at the same time being her witness.

Is that something that happens as a PART of being an abused victim?  Are we at the same time we suffer the abuse being the witness to our perpetrator’s OTHER SIDE?  Do we come, as a direct result, to know our perpetrator’s truest reality (in their body-brain in this lifetime)?

According to this author of this book – I might be right on track:

Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life by Joshua David Stone

It would be logical and reasonable to accept that I was, along with the mountain and the homestead, an embodiment of what my mother needed for her healing.

I was the projection of ‘badness’ for my mother.  I was badness personified.  Hell, literally, of a place to spend one’s infant-childhood!

Yet because 99.99% of what my mother saw in me, what she blamed me for, what she ‘punished’ me for, had NOTHING whatsoever to DO WITH ME, I WAS the ‘fair witness’ of her literalized OWN suffering from inside her own SELF that she dissociated from herself and associated with me.

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“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.”

From  Joshua David Stone in Soul Psychology: How to Clear Negative Emotions and Spiritualize Your Life, Page 263

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When, such in cases like mine, a human being is born into particularly a mother’s malevolent world of ‘disturbed psychology’, the tiny growing and developing person JUST BARELY MIGHT be able to develop its own self as a separate being from its abuser.  ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else that happens to that little one belongs to the perpetrator and NOT to its own self.

This means for ME that I spent the majority of my infant-childhood NOT being my own self.  For ALL of the time my mother was verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically abusing me I was DOING one thing:  Enduring her abuse so I could survive.  During ALL of THIS time, I was in that ‘non-archetypal’ place that I believe we are born into as new and innocent beings that meant I was ONLY being my mother’s ‘fair witness’.

If there had been some other pattern to my relationship with my mother that would have meant at least SOME OF THE TIME I got to be myself, then perhaps I could have moved off of that point of being at dead center as a nonbeing observer of my mother’s madness.  Perhaps then I could have wondered about what was happening to me.  Perhaps then I could have been envious or jealous of the treatment she showed her other ‘darling’ children.  Perhaps I could have THOUGHT for myself.  Perhaps I could have not only FELT the abuse but been able to associate, connect, and string together all the associations belonging to my ongoing experience of myself in my own life – abuse included.

But I couldn’t do any of that.  I never got the chance to.  It is only now at age 58 that I am discovering this NEW information for myself about how being such a victim of such terrible abuse happened AT THE SAME time I was my mother’s primary, intimate WITNESS-observer.

Being at that ‘place’ of what Stone is describing as ‘being without an archetype’ might be fine and good for a person who has been allowed and able to develop and individual clear and strong healthy self from the start.  To ‘get back to’ that place, or to re-achieve that degree of detached non-participation in one’s life might be a goal towards so-called higher spiritual living for SOME.

But for those of us who endured and survived our infant-childhood while being the victim of our caregiver’s UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS this entire process is as reversed NOW during the times of our healing as it was reversed ‘back then’ in the times of our being so hurt and wounded.

I have to find my own choices to BE or NOT to be my mother’s Fair Witness!

As I discover this new level of deep choice, I am beginning to define my own self NOW as I needed to back there from the time I was born.

So if anyone wants to benefit from the experience of actually being able to converse in the here and now with a person who KNOWS what it is like and feels like to be a Fair Witness, talk to a severe infant-child abuse survivor.

During the time we were being overwhelmed by someone’s abuse of us, we were LIVING life as a Fair Witness-Observer being.    Yes, I believe this does mean that all abuse survivors carry the double-sided injury of being not only the victim of the trauma of abuse itself, but also of being a WITNESS ABUSE survivor on the grandest of scales.

In the end, it might be that having our power of CHOICE removed from us is what hurts survivors the most.  I can’t even say, “I want my power of choice back so that I can choose whether or not I want to be my mother’s Fair Witness.”  I never had this choice from the first of my life.  I am only seeing right now what I missed – and when I get this choice, AS I find within myself what this choice IS and how I can make it – I am moving off of this dead center of being a non-person who was the Witness-Target of my mother’s mean madness.

At the same time, these new insights are helping me to realize how FAIR I have ALWAYS been as I consider what my mother (and my father) did to me.  NOW I want the conscious choice to be FAIR or NOT!  I own that ability to be fair or not to be fair!  It was stolen from me at the start of my lie, at the moment of my birth.  So IF I say, “I want my ability to choose to be a remote-viewing observer of my mother’s abusive madness or NOT to be RETURNED to me,” I am saying that I am claiming what must be a Universal Human Right.  This right was mine from within my mother’s womb!    It is that far back that I have to re-turn to re-claim it!!  Look out!  Here I come!

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+GRADUATION – ON TO THE NEXT STAGE OF PUBLISHING MY MOTHER’S WRITINGS

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I guess in a way it’s time for me to celebrate my ‘graduation’ from the job I assigned to myself to transcribe the complete and utter chaotic mess of my mother’s letters and papers that somehow found their way to me when my mother died in 2002.  I am done.  After working most of this past weekend on two more of her homesteading journals that I found at the very, very bottom of the papers piled here by my computer, I cannot find one more single scrap of paper left to do.

The surprises are over.  Now I am working to fine-tune, tweak, correct spelling and edit format in completion of the process that will finally lead to some form of publication of my mother’s words.  While this is still no simple task, it feels to me to be an entirely different step that could NOT happen until I finally finished sorting, organizing and transcribing her work.

I realized yesterday as I transcribed the last pages that never once in all these thousands and thousands of words does my mother ever write about ME in the same way that she does for her other ‘darling’ children.  That left me knowing that the dichotomy that existed in my mother’s mind between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ let her make the distinction between her DARLINGS and her DEMON child, Me.

What exactly will happen with all this information next I do not know.  Time will tell.  But I look forward to experiencing an every-growing sense both of pride in the accomplishment of the goal I set for myself and a kind of relief in my freedom from this task during these next days ahead.  The work I have to do now is something that ANYONE could do.  It doesn’t even require that I be any more ‘present’ for the task than I would be if I were editing writing that I am completely remote from.

This is unlike what happened to me last night as I worked with the very last of my mother’s letters.  She was describing where we were on the Jeep road of my childhood when we saw our first black bear.  I was actually following that story as I mentally following the startled scared bear as it crashed away from us through the woods when my daughter called me.  The ring of my telephone literally caused me to jump right off of my chair.

No more surprises.  I am glad for that.  I have worn out the plastic carpet protector under my computer chair until it has cracked and broken into little pieces under the wheels of my computer chair.  I have worn the lettering off of many keys on my keyboard.  But I still have work to do here if you should wonder where I am!

I am here working on my mother’s chronicle of living her Alaskan homesteading dream:

CHRONICLE
Etymology: Middle English cronicle, from Anglo-French, alteration of chronike, from Latin chronica, from Greek chronika, from neuter plural of chronikosDate: 14th century

1 : an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation <a chronicle of the Civil War>
2 : narrative

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Planting beside the Eagle River log house, spring 1958 (I was 6, still wearing the infamous turquoise parka with the white fake fur cuffs)

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Main Entry: 1chron·i·cle
Pronunciation: \ˈkrä-ni-kəl\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English cronicle, from Anglo-French, alteration of chronike, from Latin chronica, from Greek chronika, from neuter plural of chronikos
Date: 14th century

1 : an historical account of events arranged in order of time usually without analysis or interpretation <a chronicle of the Civil War>
2 : narrative 1

+THE LIGHT FROM WITHOUT MEETING THE LIGHT FROM WITHIN

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If we are going to survive we have to have the light from within us met by the light from without.  Abused children DO find that light – somehow, somewhere – or they could not possibly survive.  Looking back, where did we find that light?

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I was wide awake around 4 o’clock this morning and started my day as the first light began to flood the world even though the sun itself was nowhere to be seen.  Filling the outdoor animal’s water dish, sweeping lose dirt from my adobe walkway, watering and turning my ever-growing compost pile, until finally, just now right before 6:30 in the morning the first rays of the sun reach over my eastern neighbor’s trailer, and then just over my tall old corrugated steel fence where the rays begin the day by caressing the ferny tips of the tiny little carrot plants my neighbor children brought me to plant a little over a week ago.

Before long these sun rays will be blazing.  They will challenge with their parching heat every green leaf within my yard at the same time that they feed them.

I am thinking about the amazing experience I had as I transcribed that long letter yesterday that my mother wrote down over fifty years ago:  +A ROAD IS A LIVING ‘THING’ – 1959 HOMESTEADING ‘STORY’.  The more I watched the story contained in her words unfold before my eyes, the more I scanned in the photographs and trimmed them up to add in along with her words, the more my body remembered those days on that mountain road when I was seven years old.

As I remembered I felt something happening inside me that I could not name until just now as I watched these sun rays appearing out of the darkness of the night, bringing a new morning to the world on THIS day, THIS day that cannot possibly ever be exactly like any day that has ever passed over this earth in all of its very long history.

What I now can name is that especially because I was a hated, shunned, usually-frightened and terribly abused child, any time that darkness went away even for a little while the light from without that met and touched my light from within helped me to grow by ‘leaps’ and by ‘bounds’.  As I walked my little, growing feet over the virgin land of that Alaskan mountainside something new and different happened to me.

I felt fine.  Absolutely fine.

I see in my mother’s homesteading letters that she often turns her scathing tone to my slowness as I trudged along with my family up that mountain.  “There’s Linda, so slow as always, lagging far behind the rest of us.”  As if I was some foreign albatross, some anchor around everyone else’s neck that dragged down the rest of them no matter what they were doing and no matter what I did.

But as the light from without touched me yesterday as I transcribed that story and remembered every smell, every sight, every tone of the mountainside itself along with what glorious shows of life that lay along the road that led back to OUR mountain along the valley’s floor, I could feel those same sun rays from fifty years ago lighting up my skin on the outside as my soul and spirit lit me up on the inside as clearly as today’s morning sun rays are out there at this instant nourishing those tiny carrot sprouts that rise above the soil’s darkness into their new life.

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At this same moment I know inside of myself that I walked that mountain as slowly as my mother would allow because I was eating it up.  I noticed every step I took, every sound I heard, every wafting sweet-smelling breath of air that swirled around me.  I noticed every twig and branch, every sight of water seeping from the cut earth banks and flowing, the edges of every patch of mud, every freshly cut root from every tree that had been hacked apart by some big caterpillar tractor that had TRIED to make that mountain road.

I heard every bird.  I saw every cloud pass above me.  And for all the meeting of light from without with my seven-year-old and growing light from within that happened to me upon that mountainside I remembered.  I dreamt about those old mountain road switchbacks and the steep walk well into my 40s.  I would travel there in my dreams on a road I knew only I could still find.  And, oh how I grieved for most of my adult life for those days, for those nights.

I grieved for the mountains as the tractors came to strip away the trees and plants to add in the power poles.  I grieved for every freshly cleared strip of land designed to reach someone’s newly built house rising among the trees.  I grieved for that light I felt then, and I didn’t even know it.  Today as I realize how naturally I responded to that Alaskan sanctity of land only newly touched by people, I also grieve for the eagles and bears and moose and beaver that fifty years ago belonged back in that valley and on that mountain before so many people came and scared them all away.

When I returned to that valley and to the place of my childhood last summer I found that the road all the way up that mountain is paved now.  How nice for those who live there, content as they must be with their money, their good vehicles, with the plows that come and clear away all snow trouble before it bothers them.  Nestled in all their houses built on subdivided land they are to me nothing more than signposts of change, of the passing of years, of the continued traveling of people who will go as far as they can around this world until there is barely a single thing left over from long ago and no more far away.

At the same time I am grateful that I was allowed as a small child to be a part of history there in that valley, on that mountain, in that time.  Because there was so very little light allowed to shine for me in my terrified, suffering and very dark childhood, what light came to me in that place, on that land was essential for my very survival.  And here I am today, writing these words, because of my part not only in the horror of my mother’s story that she never truly tells in her written words, but because of the beauty that she also knew — and wrote about.

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Our own life force is as much our light within as it would be for a plant – or for any other creation.  We are designed biologically to respond to light from without.  No matter how abused we have been, as I mentioned at the start of this post, we DID receive light from without that met our own life force light from within.

Because we are members of a social species we are designed first and foremost to respond to the light in other PEOPLE as our emotional-social brain and our entire nervous system-body grows and develops from birth (and before).  Yet for some of us the human environment was far more toxic than light-enhancing.  That could not possibly stop us from responding to nourishing, life promoting influences in our environment no matter what our age.

Perhaps we could see the love and devotion in a pet’s eyes.  Perhaps a stranger offered us a compliment.  Perhaps we became aware of a miracle of nature around us.  Perhaps we loved to run, or to draw, or to cook, or to hit a ball, or to feel damp grass under the soles of our feet or squish wet sand between our toes.

As long as we are alive in a body supportive and nurturing influences surround and encompass us.  They feed and sustain us every bit as much as air, water, food and sleep.  And in that world we were born into SOMETHING and/or SOMEONE DID delight us – or we would not have survived.

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+THE DOOMED MOVE UP MILDRED’S MOUNTAIN

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Well, in the final throes of digging up ‘stuff in words’ I have (unexpectedly) unearthed the last of my mother’s homesteading journals.  Today, if I was going to name her book I would title it something like this:

Moving Mildred’s Mountain — The Road to a Good Dream is Seldom Easy

An Alaskan Family’s Homesteading Tale

Oh - the road - 1959

“Of the deep wilderness of the wood where you and I shall walk free”

– words evidently written by Mildred around 1933 when she was 8-years-old

SEE: +SOMETHING ODD I FOUND IN MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD HAND

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There were nearly more obstacles in my family’s story than a person could count – and moving the mountain to make a passable ROAD was certainly one of the main ones.

But even above all others the Number One Obstacle our family carried along with us throughout all time and over all distance and to and from every place we lived was NEVER identified, recognized, named, accepted or dealt with:

My Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder

In the end this WAS what doomed The Dream.  The demise of the homesteading dream happened not because of her mental illness itself but because it WAS never recognized, named or healed in any way.  The family was left ‘playing parts’ on my mother’s dream-stage in a continuing downward spiral no matter how hard our family participated in Mother’s ‘drive’ to move up that Mountain and to find a way to stay there.

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+SOMETHING ODD I FOUND IN MY MOTHER’S CHILDHOOD HAND

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Yes, I am working my way to the bottom of my mother’s papers and just found something that strikes me as being SO STRANGE!

In with my mother’s mother’s college graduation information from Boston University 1917 and masters graduation transcript and information for the University of Minnesota in 1918 I found two very old regular size envelopes with ‘Bureau of Educational and Vocational Guidance, 6 Park Street, Boston, Mass. printed on them.  Neither envelope was ever mailed or addressed – but here is what is written in my mother’s child handwriting – evidently before she even knew how to spell her own name (I am going to correct the spelling here in this text):

On the first one:

and presently upon her breast a baby raised and cried aloud.  Her mother was so surprised she wept upon her golden hair which was upon her breast.  She wept and wept until a bride arrived and swept

On the second one:

a ruined city in my heart.  Of the deep wilderness of the wood where you and I shall walk free as when I rode that day where the bare foot maiden raked the hay.

Mildrid

[actual spelling of her name is Mildred] – ah, my youngest sister solved the puzzle – partly:

“As you point out, very precocious of her to understand the meaning of the poetry.”

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Famous poet, John Greenleaf Whittier:

http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/maud_muller.html

“Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay.”

The strangeness of these two pieces – archetypal image of the mother and baby – but why with the sorrow and the weeping?  – prophetic?
THIS is what I believe took my mother to Alaska. THIS is what called her to homestead.
Archetypal – prophetic of the HUNGER FOR THE LAND, of the ruined city in the heart – reminds me of her dark rainbow storm dream – healed upon the land?

I would think because of the misspelled words that my mother did not copy these words from some other text, which does not mean that she didn’t know the words from some other place.  Of course the context for these writings will never be known, but they definitely have been saved for a very long time – probably since around 1935 (when my mother was 10 or even from an earlier time).

This looks about like an age eight handwriting – even then the seeds of how my mother’s life turned out had certainly already been planted within her beginning with not having her needs met from infancy forward.  The loss of her grandfather, of her father, and the loss of her mother when her mother went to work to support her family once she had divorced when my mother was five.

Whatever all the combined influences were in her very early years, I can’t help but wonder about these images contained upon these envelopes that have probably traveled 25,000 miles and are 75 years old today, June 16, 2010 when I found them:  The a troubled mother with her infant daughter and the yearning for the healing of the land.

How would it happen that a child this young would understand the meaning of these phrases, “a ruined city in my heart” and “the deep wilderness of the wood where you and I shall walk free?”  I wonder.  I have to deeply wonder.

(And if these are archetypal images with their archetypal figures, whom might the ‘bride’  and ‘the barefoot maiden’ be?)

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This reminds me of something I wrote August 21, 2007 on a little piece of paper that I dropped into the ‘mess’ of my mother’s papers and also found today:

Did Mother have to pay the price for “going on being” by leaving the biggest part of who she was and who she could have been and was meant to be — behind?

(Informed compassion) – Understanding frees me to love my Mother — and then to love myself better — as an extension of her (and Dad).  If we “hate” a parent we cannot help but have that hatred carry over to how we feel about our self.

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+’MOVING AROUND’ VERSUS ‘STAYING STILL’ – WHAT IS THE DEAL?

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Sometimes I wish I could talk to some ‘mental health professional’ just about the moving around that my mother did.  As she mentions in her piece of writing that I transcribed yesterday and posted the link to in *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE,  my mother believed that my father provided a kind of stabilizing counterweight to her impetuousness.  But I wonder what would have happened to her in her life if my parents had not yoked themselves to one another?

I still have not completely delineated and visibly lined up the number of moves that my mother arranged and that mostly my father accomplished during their married years prior to my leaving their home when I was 18.  Some part of me this morning wants to stop and take account of the moves that had already happened before my mother had written her October 1958 description of their Alaskan ‘venture’, as she called it.

My parents married June 11, 1949 and as far as I know they lived on/at Almont in Los Angeles at least until their first child was born on June 15, 1950.  Then comes a move.  I don’t believe I was born while they were living there, so probably by August 31, 1951 they were living in a rented house on Calavaras (wherever in LA that was).

So, from Almont to Calavaras to a rented apartment by July 10, 1953 when my sister was born, then probably to a house my parents bought in Altadena that they did not sell until they were moving to Alaska even though my spring of 1956 they were in another new house they purchased in Glendora (still in LA area).

We must not have lived in this location of the 4th move for much more than a year, but that would have been four moves in the first seven years of their marriage.  The move to Alaska, which involved my father leaving first and being gone from us for two months in June and July of 1957.  According to mother’s writing, they sold the Glendora house (and the Altadena one) before my father went to Alaska and moved into a ‘court apartment’.

From this apartment, after my father had left, my mother then moved us into a motel, out of the motel into a rented house, out of the house into her mother’s, up to the mountains for a week, back to her mothers, and then probably into another motel before she left for Anchorage.

So, adding up these longer and shorter term moves and locations, let’s see – that’s around 11 moves that were made with children in tow before mother reached Alaska and the infamous Log House in Eagle River on August 1, 1957.  The log house was probably move number 12.

We stayed ‘all cozy’ in the log house until June 1958, by which time my father had already located the 160 acres spot of our homestead and had staked claim, or filed on the land.  We moved out of the log house into Bockstahler’s ‘shack’ or ‘cabin’ (its title depended on mothers move moment to moment) where we stayed until October 1958.

At that point the six of us moved into an apartment on Government Hill in Anchorage area where we stayed until about the following March, and by April 1, 1959 we were off on our homesteading adventure.

So by the time my mother wrote her *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE piece she (I’m quite certain it wasn’t my father) had orchestrated, staged and managed to accomplish 14 moves.  I was 7 when this piece was written, and already by then I had been dragged around through probably 13 moves with my parents, and that was only the beginning.

So, talking about ‘life’ and ‘childhood’ in attachment-related terms, right along with the incredible vacillation and instability of my mother’s moment-to-moment mental-mood states and the insecurity they caused in the lives of all around her came the physical moving from place to place that even further guaranteed a complete environment of lack of safety and security for my parents children.

My mother wrote *October 1958 – DREAMS CAN COME TRUE from within the small enclosure of a massive, ugly apartment complex.  True, the move ‘to town’ was no doubt simply seen as ‘as step in the right direction’ toward accomplishing fulfillment of their Alaskan homesteading dreams, but I still find the contrast in location and place interesting as I read her written piece.

By the time my mother was actually on the homestead, and had her ‘dark rainbow dream’ about the horrific wind storm contrasted to how it stopped in her dream when she met the right ‘person’, she had already in her lifetime experienced probably close to 30 moves.

If I could talk to this ‘mental health professional’ I would like to ask what this kind of moving is seen to represent in a person’s life.  That the moving, at least in our family, seemed to be connected to and integrated with this ‘pioneering’ drive makes me suspect that it was then connected to the genetic undercurrent that MANY immigrating ‘pioneers’ had within them as they traveled to America in the first place.

But it is hard to feel a part of the mainstream American current with this kind of ‘traveling’ background – and I have certainly done my share of moving around in my adult life, as well.  I still haven’t counted my own moves, but I do know that right now being here and staying here in this little house I live in now is the single most important aspect to my own current life.

So when I work in my yard on my adobe projects it is in part the grounding I experience as I work with the physical DIRT that helps me right now.  As I looked around me out in my yard this morning I just had this thought:  I wish I had thought beforehand that I could have actually encased my mother’s individual letters I have completed transcribing right into those bricks – where they also would have finally met their final grounded end — because they probably would have remained within those bricks for a very, very, very, very LONG time without GOING anywhere.

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+’SUPER INFANT-CHILD ABUSE’, WORSE THAN WAR CRIMES, IN THE REALM OF GENOCIDE-INFANTICIDE

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The comments that have grown at the end of yesterday’s post, +WHAT MY MOTHER FORGOT TO WRITE IN HER NOVEMBER 1957 LETTERS, are about a kind of ‘borderline’ that I believe exists within the mind of most members of ‘the public’.  If the kind of abuse parents like my mother was cannot be imagined, conceived of, or even BELIEVED by ‘the public’ there will not be much hope of true recovery for survivors of this kind of abuse or protection for its current victims.

Although I posted an allusion yesterday to this type of parental abuse as being more closely related to War Crimes (see +THE GENEVA CONVENTION – WE NEED WORDS TO PROTECT ABUSED CHILDREN) than it being related to the ‘species’ of child abuse most members of ‘the public’ might imagine, abuse (which is in itself far to minor a descriptive word) perpetrated against infants and children by parents like my mother was is, in my thinking, even so far PAST war crimes that if it hadn’t happened to me I probably wouldn’t be able to imagine, conceive of or believe it even could be possible myself.

Members of ‘the public’ are, by and large, reasonable (reason-able) people.  They exist on one side of this ‘borderline’ I mention in regard to coming to terms with the possible ranges of infant-child abuse (as well as with the far ranges of ANY kinds of abuse humans can perpetrate).  On the other side of this ‘borderline’ are people like my mother was who have what Dr. Martin Teicher’s Harvard research group names ‘an evolutionarily altered brain’.

But it certainly isn’t JUST their brain that is altered.  It is their ENTIRE physiology.  Once this kind of abusing adult has been created within the malevolent environments of their own early developmental caregiver relationships, the degree of change that might be possible down the road of their lives (much past the age of three, I believe) is minimal — and WILL NEVER make these people magically into SAFE infant-child caregivers.

The kinds of crimes they are capable of committing against their offspring are so far past what ‘the public’ could even begin to imagine as being even ‘war crimes’ that reason-able people cannot usually conceive of them.

No matter how despicable, how devoid of ordinary human conscience any ‘war crime’ might be, if the crimes are committed against adults they are of a different nature than the kinds of infant-child ‘abuse’ that I am talking about.  The kind of trauma altered evolutionarily altered brain that Teicher refers to IS one adapted (along with all the rest of a survivor’s physiology) to continued existence in the worst kind of malevolent world possible.  When this adapted-to malevolent environment does not contain within it even the most essential resources to ensure continued survival – elimination of offspring can very easily be the end result FOR MOTHERS.

This is, of course, not a consciously recognized aspect of the kind of ‘mind’ my mother had, but this obliviousness to FACT does not make the FACT any less real.

On this level I would say that we are not talking about ‘ordinary ranges’ of infant-child abuse.  We are not even talking about ‘ordinary ranges’ of war crimes.

The only closest collection of information that ‘the public’ might be able to reach for, accept and rely upon in their consideration of the kinds of parents I am talking about and the ‘outside-the-range of ordinary’ treatment of their offspring would be to include in their consideration all information currently available about both GENOCIDE and INFANTICIDE.

Such a ‘trauma changed mother’ operates with a physiologically-based biological imperative to eliminate offspring (one or all) in the same way an animal in the wild would (or our ancient ancestors) should life within a hostile, malevolent environment be just about as hard as possible.  The BODY that took this evolutionary detour in its earliest development CANNOT BE CHANGED BACK AGAIN to become at some later date a benevolent-environment body-brain-mind.

(It seems entirely possible to me that the genetics behind suicide and well as perhaps genetic combinations (not yet identified) behind self-harm and eating disorders might also be connected to the permanent ‘evolutionary alternative developmental changes’ related to the influencing physiological (epigentic?) factors that are involved in adaptation to early malevolent environments.)

(Another critically important factor to consider is what Tomkins describes when he says that a human infant’s adrenal gland ‘system’ is 2 1/2 times ‘more powerful’ during the earliest developmental stages in proportion to its body size than it is in our adulthood, making sure that stress-related responses to malevolence within the early environment that require adaptations-changes to best ensure survival happen as FAST, as early in development and as permanently as possible.)

That human infant-children do somehow OFTEN manage to in fact physically stay alive and survive the malevolent treatment that was done to them does NOT exclude the range of ‘abuse’ from the arena of considerations related to GENOCIDE and INFANTICIDE.  In cases such as my mother’s was, the ONLY reason she did not actually eliminate my body from the world of the living is because of her narcissistic desire to avoid reprisal for her actions.

When an infant-child is NOT actually physically killed, this means that the level of suffering from torture, terrorism, ‘abuse’ and malevolent treatment continues on and on and on and on……..  The fact that these survivors did indeed survive in NO WAY lessens the reality of the acts toward GENOCIDE and INFANTICIDE that these ‘super abusing parents’ commit.

Perhaps, I mentioned in one of my replies connected to yesterday’s post about what my mother ‘forgot’ to tell my grandmother, ‘the public’ is perfectly fine with allowing for a range of ‘acceptable losses’ related to allowing the worst of the worst possible infant-child abuse to continue – in effect, right under our noses.

When thinking about Universal Human Rights of Children we must at the same time consider that when these rights are massively denied and the reverse of human rights is what is actually happening to infant-children, we need to begin to understand that we need the equivalent of a Geneva Convention’s rules for what is to be done on behalf of these ‘super survivors’ of ‘super abusive’ parents — and what is to be done to, with and about these parents, as well.

NOTE:  I nearly always add to my posts over time once they are published – best to come directly to this site to read the up-to-the-minute versions!

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+THE GENEVA CONVENTION – WE NEED WORDS TO PROTECT ABUSED CHILDREN

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Having just posted +WHAT MY MOTHER FORGOT TO WRITE IN HER NOVEMBER 1957 LETTERS, which follows the series of selections from my mother’s letters last week about me, ‘my clothes’ and my grandmother has led me in one direction, and one direction only.  While NO child should EVER have to experience abuse of any kind – no PERSON – abuse does continue to happen.

As I work toward the publication of my books I am realizing that some child abuse (and other domestic abuse situations) lie closer in their reality to conditions surrounding being held as a Prisoner of War than they do to any other situation we could think of.

I am including in this post the wording at the beginning of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.  Victims of severe infant-child abuse and other domestic violence victims are attacked by armed force.  While I don’t know if anyone has come up with a version of the Convention’s wording as it might relate to civilian attack, even reading these words as they were designed to address circumstances of adult armed conflict gives me a lot to think about as a survivor of my mother’s nearly unimaginable attacks of abuse against me over the 18 years of my infant-childhood.

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From the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library

Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 75 U.N.T.S. 135, entered into force Oct. 21, 1950.

PART I

GENERAL PROVISIONS

Article 1

The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.

Article 2

In addition to the provisions which shall be implemented in peace time, the present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them.

The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance.

Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations. They shall furthermore be bound by the Convention in relation to the said Power, if the latter accepts and applies the provisions thereof.

Article 3

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Article 4

A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

(c) That of carrying arms openly;

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.

4. Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.

5. Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.

6. Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

B. The following shall likewise be treated as prisoners of war under the present Convention:

1. Persons belonging, or having belonged, to the armed forces of the occupied country, if the occupying Power considers it necessary by reason of such allegiance to intern them, even though it has originally liberated them while hostilities were going on outside the territory it occupies, in particular where such persons have made an unsuccessful attempt to rejoin the armed forces to which they belong and which are engaged in combat, or where they fail to comply with a summons made to them with a view to internment.

2. The persons belonging to one of the categories enumerated in the present Article, who have been received by neutral or non-belligerent Powers on their territory and whom these Powers are required to intern under international law, without prejudice to any more favourable treatment which these Powers may choose to give and with the exception of Articles 8, 10, 15, 30, fifth paragraph, 58-67, 92, 126 and, where diplomatic relations exist between the Parties to the conflict and the neutral or non-belligerent Power concerned, those Articles concerning the Protecting Power. Where such diplomatic relations exist, the Parties to a conflict on whom these persons depend shall be allowed to perform towards them the functions of a Protecting Power as provided in the present Convention, without prejudice to the functions which these Parties normally exercise in conformity with diplomatic and consular usage and treaties.

C. This Article shall in no way affect the status of medical personnel and chaplains as provided for in Article 33 of the present Convention.

Article 5

The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.

Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

READ REST HERE

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