++++

March 22, 2013.  I have chosen my book writing spot, a sort of cave filled with thriving houseplants and spring desert sunshine.  This south room of my house has been lying dormant, available for use by an occasional guest while it remains home to blooming scarlet and gentle pink geraniums and lavender violets.  Someone discarded a battered and rusty folding card table by one of our town’s recycling bins.  It’s in my writing room covered with a sun bleached cloth now waiting for me to move my old laptop in there.

I wouldn’t think I needed a room of seclusion to write in while I live alone in this house.  But I do.  Maybe there is a collection of words gathered in there.  I will find them.

Lonely work must require the quietest of spaces where only muses visit to bring words confined now to no eyes but mine.  There’s no internet access in that room.  No distracting myself now as this blog becomes quieter and quieter.

From that room I will watch the sunlight of spring unfolding new leaves and flower buds out in my garden.  Starts are putting out tiny roots as nearly wild roses, carefully tended, decide if they are going to live or die in their little pots lining my window sills.  If they grow I will give them away to a lady who sells plants at the Saturday Farmers’ Market.  I sure don’t need any more rose bushes in my yard.  Twenty two of them are enough for me, all of them climbers.

In this room only my clucking hens will awaken me to ongoing life as I write and as they lay their daily eggs.  In that room I will write of memories.  Intangible memories that may hold weight to nobody but me.  What I intend to say is beyond argument or commentary from anyone.  The rest of the world is busy elsewhere.

Such a big, wide world.  Open to billions of choices, each with their own story attached should anyone pause long enough to notice, to write them down, or tell them to self and to other.

We are a communicative species among all the rest.  Are we the only ones who take our stories that one step further outside of sound to capture them silently in words?  I think so.  Pack rats of the mind we are. 

Words.  Written words scurry into the past in a line as I reach ever forward into my own past toward the next word.  And the next.  Heart beat after heart beat.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 7

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

7.  A Cautionary Tale

March 21, 2013.  I have been posting chapters to this book on my Stop the Storm blog even though the book has not yet gone through its editing stages.  A reader named Jane responded back to me this morning in reaction to the preceding chapters:

Even to your mother I feel a kind of loyalty when reading her first letters.  She is no longer there to explain every word you criticize and explain in your own words on your own terms.  She has no way to defend herself or give a different perspective in how to understand her.  I do not know whether she ever had an official diagnosis.

To address the last sentence first:  Mother’s mental illness was never recognized or identified, which has absolutely nothing to do with whether she was mentally ill or not.  In fact, the psychiatric diagnostic category for Borderline Personality Disorder did not even come into existence until 1980, eleven years after I escaped my abusive home.  While I have no desire to attack my mother as a person, I do fully intend to expose the characteristics of her severe mental illness in any way that I can.  Because hers was an illness of her MIND, it is examination of her words in her writings that can show aspects of how her ill mind operated.  (These concerns have been addressed in books published prior to this one.)

I have what I refer to as great “informed compassion” for our very sick mother.  I am fully aware that she suffered until her last breath from the devastating, tragic effects of this disorder.  I am writing as a survivor of her having done such things to me as nearly beating me unconscious when I was 22 months old, of her brutally ramming my head repeatedly into the porcelain of a toilet bowl as she nearly drowned me when I was four – because she had psychotically evaluated that I was trying to murder my sister, and of her forcing me spend a night sitting outside in the driver’s seat of the family car with my head bent over under the steering wheel (I was 5’8” tall) and locking me into a shed for four days when I was in my teens.

I know what this woman was capable of and what she did to me because of her illness.  It is time for ME to tell what I understand about this woman and about her illness.  Out of respect for Mother, knowing that she was prevented by her illness from publishing her own writings as she deeply desired to do, I have published the entire body of her writings intact in the seven volume series, Mildred’s Mountain.  Readers wishing to read Mildred’s words without my commentary can share her own version of her life freely within those books.  I assure you, however, that her own writings do not contain anything like the truth about how she was who she was as a severely mentally ill person in her lifetime.

There will no doubt be readers who take offense to my writings.  I do not care.  It is not my job to do so.  I am not responsible for anyone’s reactions to the truth I expose.  Your feelings are your own.  Women such as Mildred was can be extremely dangerous mothers, and certainly NOBODY ever came to my defense or to the defense of my siblings.  At this point, ten years after Mildred’s death I am breaking a killer silence – and for a very good reason.

Readers who are uncomfortable with my take on Mother can simply stop reading.  However, it might be helpful for those readers to examine what it is they are taking offense to and why.  Anyone who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, especially if there is a psychotic component to their illness, will very likely struggle with my writings because their own minds cannot process the breadth of information I present.  They are not likely going to be able to discern the intent of my work, either. 

Anyone who has suffered from abuse from a parent with this illness and who feels overwhelmed or who remains in denial might struggle greatly to read my proclamations, as well.  People who have allowed infant and child abuse to be committed by such a parent without stopping it immediately might also not be able to read any further.  I understand this process and of course respect these realities but they have nothing to do with me. 

These books do contain trauma triggering topics.  It is every reader’s responsibility to do whatever is needed to take care of self, including stopping reading and/or talking to a counselor or therapist when necessary.

I will also mention briefly here something I address at other places in my writings.  While I do not believe that people are themselves evil they are certainly capable of performing evil actions.  It is not my place to judge Mildred.  Judgment is God’s.  Justice is another matter, and it is not justice to allow terrible things to be done to infants and children while everyone turns a blind eye. 

Sicknesses of the body including the brain, I believe, can greatly interfere with a soul’s ability to exercise full powers of conscious choice over actions, thus preventing a soul from manifesting itself fully in a person’s life.  To ignore this condition is to participate in shared delusion and shared responsibility when great crimes have been and are being committed against other people – especially against infants and children.  Readers of my writings will choose their side.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 6

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

6.  Always Wildflowers

March 20, 2013.  I am afraid of my childhood.  What I can know and what I allow myself to know about it probably amounts to a handful of dust in the desert.  I wonder what story I would have written had I thought of doing such a thing in the first few days of my life after I left home at 18.  Had I already forgotten then what I never knew I knew about what I had lived through by that age?

If I had the power to ring out my voice clearly enough to be heard by those escaping childhoods in hell I would say to them, “Write it all down now, as soon as you can.  Write down everything you remember and do not let go of those words ever in your lifetime.  Those words are your guide to understanding your reactions to everything you will encounter next.  We cannot fully understand our self if we cannot remember what we will spend the rest of our lives trying to forget.”

I would tell these people that although they will not be able to make sense out of the experiences they write down immediately, over time the bigger picture of how we fit into our lives will begin to appear to us like an image developing in a photographic darkroom.  Such a written record of the specific details of trauma and abuse we suffered in our childhoods, as well as the beauty and the goodness that was mixed in, offers us a road map that tells of where we came from.  It tells of our genesis.  It tells of the creativity and strength within us that allowed us to endure and survive all that we lived through.

Such a written record would be a kind of geological survey of the terrain that formed us.  Our stories matter because we do.  To remain afraid of the fearsome story of my childhood leaves me being afraid of myself.  Had I documented my childhood experiences at age 18 I would not have “awfulized” them.  I would have reported them factually without fear, without judgment, and I fully believe my report would have been complete. 

I had no reason to question what I had been through when I was 18.  I knew no other life.  I had no way of knowing how awful my childhood had been, or how bizarre or how unique.  I had no way of knowing that I had been abused at all.  At 18 I had simply survived.  At this point?  I am a survivor.  There is a lifetime of adult living between these two states for me.

°<>°

Mildred wrote the following in a diary entry on our second day in Alaska, August 2, 1957:

We always have wild flowers on our table, picked by anxious to please tiny hands.  What greater pleasure is there then to watch small children discovering the wonder of nature in the woods – streams to watch flow, questions to answer – where does the water come from and where does it go, will it ever dry up?

Mommy are these berries good to eat?  Will this water really freeze and will we really have snow?  Yes, darling, yes darling and isn’t it a bit of heaven for us right here in the woodland and don’t you feel closer to God here as I do?  Yes, Mommy, yes and so our life in Alaska begins.

A Bit of Heaven in the Woods –

°<>°

“Always?”  How could we have had “wild flowers on our table” “always” when we had only been in the log house one day?   (This “table” was a card table someone had loaned to us to use because all of our own furniture was still in California waiting to be shipped.)  How long in Mildred time was “always?”  Mildred’s “always” existed in her universe of “make-believe,” “pretend,” “once upon a time” and “forever.”  It gave us as her children no firm ground to stand upon.

We were young children, and I don’t believe feeling “closer to God here” as “Mommy” did had anything whatsoever to do with our experience of being children in our own life.  Mildred continually overran our lives, usurped our experience, placed her thoughts, impressions, feelings, desires, and observations inside of us.  Again her words reflect the fact that we did not exist as people in our own right separate from her.  We-were-she in her mind.  Mother had no boundaries to separate herself from her doll-children.  We were nothing but movable props her in dramas, even when a moment of drama came that seemed harmless, having to do with wildflowers, berries, and creek water.

Were Mother’s intentions malevolent in the actions she wrote about or in the words of her writing itself?  No, but that did not make her actions and thoughts any less harmful to her children.  Mother invaded us.  Possessed us.  Owned us.  

Mildred’s search for “heaven” was directly connected to her moving cycle madness.   “Heaven” is what her psychotically split-in-half Borderline Personality Disorder brain-mind continually strived to create in her upper all-good world.  “Heaven” could only exist as a possibility for Mildred if she could keep me down in her lower world of hell as the replacement for (projection of) her perceived all-bad self.

We children had no need to name heaven.  We had no need to identify heaven with “the Woods.”  Mildred was projecting herself onto and into us.  Were we happy during the moments she was describing?  No doubt, yes. 

But our ability to experience happiness was always directly connected to and dependent upon Mother’s state of mind.  If she was happy we were allowed to be happy.  If she felt anything else, she pursued us with those emotions, as well.  She chased us down and pounced on us with her adult version of how her children were supposed to be children.  That is not what mothering is about.  That is not what having a childhood is about. 

We were all Mildred’s prisoners, though it was I that was so frequently her targeted-for-abuse prey.  She could be outraged at me, “punishing” me and then turn nearly at the identical time and be “happy” with her other darling children.  The advantage to me of these earliest days in Alaska is that Mildred was so “in heaven” that I was not picked out for “special attention.”  I could be just one of the crew of Mildred’s mental space ship living her version of our life in “always…wildflowers on the table” time in her own little girl pretend fairy tale life (that most unfortunately DID contain evil monsters).

This meant none of us were ever safe.  Never, never safe.  But I do not believe any child can continue to exist in a conscious state of terror all of the time.  We had to have the ability to live as children ANYWAY, and as I have written before, being a child experiencing childhood is NOT the same thing as a child enduring trauma. 

We MADE our own inner space of freedom when and however we could because we WERE children.  Not only did I have the ability to be a child “in between” but my siblings did, as well.  They had to go on being children experiencing their childhood even when I was being beaten, punished, forced into isolation away from and apart from them. 

There was nothing any of us could do to change anything.  We were powerless.  Mother controlled it all.

We endured.  We adapted.  We always, as the children we were, chose the “high road.”  We always did the “right” thing.  We always did the best that we could do in every single ongoing moment we lived. 

My siblings were Mother’s imaginary friends and I was her imaginary enemy.  Sometimes we seemed to be “let out” of our emotional prison by a mother who was momentarily giddy with “heavenly joy.”  But I do not believe that in our perpetual lack of safety we could ever put down the heavy, heavy burden that each of us carried of being the children of a maniacal madwoman no matter how many wildflowers were “always” on our table.  Being forced to “play” with our mother when she was “in that mood” – as she herself was “playing” as if she were THE child (without her ever recognizing that fact) – left us always “playing along” with our mother as she monopolized OUR childhoods. 

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 5

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

5.  The Log House

Mildred next described the log house and its surrounds in the second half of her August 1, 1957 letter to her mother.  Readers of the letters Mother and Father wrote to one another while Bill was in Alaska and Mildred was impatiently waiting in the Los Angeles area to join him are familiar with the key code phrase Mildred first introduced and Bill then captured to recite back to her during his house hunting process:  “Find us a house to put our home in.”  Mildred had now entered the most significant “honeymoon stage” in her moving cycle madness history (as described in Story Without Words). 

From this point forward in this book I will use boldface type to emphasis important thought patterns of Mildred’s writings as they appear in her words and phrases.  Searching for and finding “a bit of heaven” in physical locations was part of her moving cycle madness.

Our home is truly beautiful.  As nice a house as I’ve ever lived in – barring none!  The living room is large!  There’s, by the way, a large black bear skin on the wall – really Alaskan!

Mother I can’t describe to you my impression of this house.  It’s plain on the outside, just as the slides showed but is a bit of heaven inside.  Bill performed no less than a miracle when he found this.  It’s shining clean and waxed!  As I said the living room is lovely.  The ceilings are high and the walls are beautiful polished pine (I think).  The beams run across the ceiling and are also smooth and polished.  There’s a beautiful lantern (light fixture) somewhat like an oil lamp hanging from the high point in the ceiling.

A small partition with pretty shelves for what-nots partly divides the dining area – which is bigger than ours in Glendora.  The bedrooms are newly painted and the top half of the walls and ceiling are knotty pine.  The bathroom is large and roomy and modern.

There are custom drapes in one bedroom and a lovely new rug set and plastic shower and window curtain set in the bathroom.

There’s a separate thermostat heater in every room, we have it on now, to take the chill off.  It’s cool this morning but was very warm yesterday – when I landed!  (At least 80°.)  I felt silly with even a sweater on.

Now for the kitchen.  It’s beautiful.  The windows overlook the woods which are full of birch and pines, and little Xmas trees – the window in here, and living room and dining room overlook our beautiful stream!  It’s wide and clear and tumbling.

As you can see, this house has thrilled me and quite taken me by surprise.  It’s so entirely homey and lovely.  She left drapes in the living room, a huge chair, a double bed with new sheets, pillows and bed spread on it!  Large and small throw rugs in every room.  It almost looks furnished!  There’s also a desk and one straight chair.

But Mother the kitchen is modern.  It has the newest Kenmore stove with two ovens, two broilers, a deep fryer, completely push-button electric!  It quite took my breath away.  Next to it is a large dish washer.  Opposite is the sink and cupboards which are knotty pine with black wrought handles (like Elsie’s) for dishes.

There’s a large back hall with a deluxe refrigerator (Bill never told me) with a big freezer!  It was just like Xmas morning seeing this house!  Next to it is a new (less than two years) Kenmore washer and separate dryer!  There are lovely enamel white cupboards over for storage.  Then I have an ironer, really!  I haven’t tried it yet – but will.

She left a sweet letter telling me how to use her wonderful appliances and telling me she took her two dogs but couldn’t take her four cats and didn’t have the heart to do away with them – if I couldn’t keep them would I send them to the vets and send her the bill!  Imagine – after all she left us.  The kitties were fed and loved this morning and are purringly happy and so am I!

I interrupt Mildred’s letter here to bring a brief message from its sponsor – me!  Besides saying “Watch out for what happens to the happy kittens later,” I will say there are things I know about Mother that I cannot pinpoint exactly how I know them.  Certainly during the teen years of her daughters she repeatedly occupied hours of our life by taking out photograph albums and scrapbooks of her own teenage years to reminisce about how  happy and well-liked she had been and about how much fun she had had.

I will write more about my experience of her diatribes when I reach that part of my story, but at this moment I mention here that part of her ritual of remembrance was completely inappropriate as she was married to our father while she wandered down memory lane to describe in great detail her enduring love for her lost love, Guy, who had joined the Merchant Marines during the war to disappear from her life forever.  During these bizarre “lectures” it is likely that Mildred “accidentally” let her daughters know of her fear of impending spinsterdom at the time she met and married Bill when she was 23 (after a short six month courtship).  I certainly knew that in Mother’s mind she had felt quite old and feared running out of hope and prospects for marriage by the time Father appeared in her life which freed her to finally leave the home of her mother and grandmother.

Tied into all her repetitions to her daughters in her verbatim accounts of younger self, even as Mildred accounted for her first impressions of her first Alaskan home in this letter, was the dreamy-eyed, take-my-breath-away post-WWII era’s confusion between a woman’s true self and her culturally mandated and approved of image of what was necessary and required for a woman to be adequate and fulfilled as a wife, mother and homemaker.  In the era of the American 1950s great value came to be attached to household items designed to “easify” women’s lives within their home at the same time these pacifiers were marketed as status symbols that gave worth, value, contentment and increased life meaning to the women who used them.  While these items supposedly granted women greater freedom in reality they increasingly imprisoned women in their minds and in their lives by circumventing women’s true personal feelings about themselves in their lives. 

While Mother was not immune from these culturally affirmed and promoted mainstream American constrictions and restrictions on women’s lives, she had lived under similar oppressions long before she married.  Mother told us from the time we were very young that she had wanted to be an actress and that her pursuit of this vocation had been condemned and prevented by her Bostonian mother and grandmother who told her, “Only whores and harlots become actresses!”   The education and training Mildred was allowed to pursue had led her in the direction both of nursing and of early childhood education.  She had accomplished an Associate’s of Arts degree before she married.  This direction was NOT Mother’s own desire, nor was being a mother a choice that a “free Mildred” would have ever made on her own.

Given the writing talent that Mother was born with (see her childhood writings in Story Without Words) and given the great powers of her imagination that were both her great gift and possibly one of her greatest risk factors for developing Borderline Personality Disorder psychosis, under the disguise of being a thrilled and satisfied “Home-Ecky Becky” wife and mother – prancing around her modernized Alaskan log house – lay a tortured and unfulfilled creative woman whose deeply troubled mind and emotions suffered from an unrecognized (and as yet unnamed) severe mental illness. 

Who knew?  Who could have known?  How “inwardly happy” could split-mind Mildred ever be?  Certainly I knew the dysregulated, hate-filled, seething, roiling, explosive dark lower-world side of this woman who craved escape from hell and its threats, this woman who took care of her fears by brutally attacking me.  Certainly Mother’s impetus to homestead fed and was fed by her upper-world side craving for heaven.  Certainly what fundamentally mattered to Mildred had nothing to do with a deep freezer, an ironer or a dishwasher that were never used anyway.

°<>°

I haven’t seen too much of the country yet.  We do live in the woods and it’s even in our lease that we can’t cut any trees down.  They have purposely left it this way – it’s beautiful.  John is out raking now and building the beginning of steps down to the creek!  He’s in heaven!  – And very busy!  We seem to have adopted a police dog – that used to hang around her [the landlady] (she loved animals) and John likes him!

The house in front of us is large – even nicer than this.  They have a large front lawn and rustic fence around it (and a fireplace).  It’s just far enough away and is For Sale.  The people moved out yesterday.  I hope for nice neighbors!

There are all kinds of houses in Anchorage and as Bill said, many shacks.  That would have once bothered me – but no longer does!  Now I understand!  People have to live somewhere and if they wanted to come here as much as we did they’ll live anywhere temporarily to do so.  This place – rented – is an exception and I feel God led Bill to it.  There’s no other answer.  Our car is another exception.  It seems to run well, is well priced, and station wagons For Sale are scarce also.

I hope we’ll be happy here and I feel I can be inwardly happy in this house (you know what I mean).

I just added Charlie’s and Carolyn’s names – this is such a long, informative letter I can’t duplicate it.  Please feel free to read it to them and the girls [Mildred’s California friends].  I will write to everyone later.  It was written for you, Mother, up until now but I would like to include them too.  I want everyone to know about the house Bill found and my first reaction to Alaska!

By the way, the airport in Anchorage is very modern and nice!  Anchorage is a mixture of the old and pioneering and the new and modern.  Eventually the old will be gone!

I haven’t seen the downtown section as yet.  We had to go to his Barracks (such an awful room) and get his things.  He borrowed, free of charge, mattresses, sheets and Army blankets at the Army barracks – a service to employers – and the children camped on the floor.  The furnace was on and they were very cozy!

This letter is a BOOK – I must walk now to the store for bread and milk.  I hate to stop as there’s so much more I want to tell you but will save it for next time!

I’ll send you a night letter tonight to let you know I arrived safely – last night I was too tired to budge.  I hadn’t slept a wink the night before and lay down on the bed after dinner last night and never woke until this morning.

I love all of you and hope you can understand a little our reasons for coming – it remains to be seen if we’ll stay or not.  But already the experiences have been invaluable to me and to the children.  The move was a hard one and the trip a tedious one but I am glad we came!

Take care of yourself Mother, get strong and rested and we’ll have fun next summer!  Thank Charlie and Carolyn for taking me to the Green Hotel and helping me.  Charlie I was so excited I couldn’t have even locked my suitcase.

We had your candy Carolyn for dessert last night!  I love you all!  And a X for the children.  Mildred

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

 

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 4

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

4.  Migration North

All I remember of our trip north from Los Angeles was the Little Golden Book titled How to Tell Time that I held in my hands for the duration of or flight.  All I see of my arrival at the log house is an expanse of hardwood flooring stretching ahead as I walked through the front door.  At not quite six years old I was not very tall so the floor is closer to me than the ceiling is far over my head.   The living room seemed very large with unexplored rooms ahead of me to the right and to the left.

Did I first walk across this room to stand in front of the black bear rug (as I have always called it in my memory) splayed across the far living room wall?  Its dead gaping mouth full of great teeth, its wide staring glass eyes set to star at anyone who noticed?  Two wide feet with smooth claws low enough on the wall I could run my fingers down them to their pointed killing ends.

Was everyone else so busy gliding around excitedly in this nearly empty house, in and out of rooms, opening and closing closet and cupboard doors that  I could stand transfixed in front of this strange fierce beast, pushing my hands through its thick fur so that lines of black bristles stood up between my small fingers?  I am quite certain the narrow pinking sheared edges of felt surrounding the bear was green.  I have always seen it as green but it could have been some other color.  But because I have always known that bear was there on the wall to greet me in our new house I felt a thrill of affirmation in the powers of my childhood memory to find it described within Mother’s letters.

Mother was terrified of bears.  Log house photographs of its interior confirm that the rug was not allowed to stay on the wall very long.  It had been left there by the landlady who had gone off to Africa with her husband just in time for Father to rent us her house.  Where did the great rug go?  Was it rolled up and carried by Father up the narrow ladder to be hidden above our heads in the attic?  Did Father haul it out the front door, across the yard, into the cave of the canvas Jamesway hut to store it forever in forgotten darkness?

I am proud of my nearly-six year old self that I never forgot this bear who had appeared in my life long enough to imprint itself into my memory so that I alone of the Lloyd children have carried thoughts of its life along with its death around with me for 56 years now as an emblem of my childhood.  Perhaps I was motivated to do so because I might have impressed as a young child that of all I knew about the world with my often raging hurtful mother in it only bears seemed to hold the power to scare her. 

Through all the later years we lived on our mountain homestead it was the ring of Mother’s metal cow bell that defined the area around the house we were allowed to wander.  We were never allowed to stray further than the sound of her bell could reach.  Any time she chose to ring it we better have appeared before her eyes.  In one piece.  With no bear chasing us.  Her plan worked.  We all survived our childhood.  Thanks or no thanks to Mother.

°<>°

Our family moved into and out of this rented Eagle River log house several times as our Alaska life unwound into our future.  Mother recorded her impressions of her trip north and of her new home in the first letter she wrote from the log house to her mother in Pasadena, California on Thursday, August 1, 1957.  In the first part of her letter she began her writing by describing our trip north:

Dearest Mother (Charles and Carolyn) [her brother and his wife]

It’s really hard to believe I am actually in Alaska!  I feel as if I were transported here on the Magic Carpet in Grandma’s stories she told when I was a little girl.

One of my primary motivations for publishing Mother’s and my own writings is to add what can be known about Mildred’s version of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) with psychosis to the body of documentation about this serious and devastating mental illness.  Any future determination to change the name and/or the description of symptoms of BPD needs to take into account the reality of what it is like to live with this disorder and to live with someone who has it.  This is a REAL mental illness with specific and unique parameters that must not be lost sight of because it might be uncomfortable or unpopular to know the range of truth about it.  While “emotional dysregulation” is certainly one of the complications of this disorder, it is the permanent alterations in the way the BPD brain operates as it can create alternate realities within a very disturbed mind that demands that this disorder retain its own carefully distinguished psychiatric diagnostic category.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Mother lived in a crooked world of her imagination in which boundaries between fantasy and actual reality were fuzzy or entirely missing.  Much of her world was formulated along the lines of fairy tales so that their words, imagery and storylines permeated how Mildred perceived reality and lived her life.  In a recent telephone conversation I had with Joe Anne Vanover the first week of March 2013 (a woman you will meet shortly in Mildred’s early Alaska 1957 letters) I was reminded by this outsider to our family about the role that the fantastic played in Mother’s mind.

Mother had told Joe Anne that during the homesteading years when her life was “really” difficult she made the hardships more tolerable through pretending.  Joe Anne told me, “Your mother described how when she built a fire to heat water beside the creek below your place to wash laundry she pretended she was an Indian princess.”  In Mildred’s mind such pretending was not play.  While the pretend actions were taking place they were REALLY happening in Mildred’s mind.  This kind of pretending is a “step over the edge” into a blurred twilight world that Mother SEEMED to be able to walk into, through and out of again – but in many important cases REALLY did not.

Certainly her level of “pretending” I was the devil’s child replacement for her own bad self in hell happened through operation of a permanent and dangerous psychotic break that could have been recognized at the time it happened when I was born if anyone had known what they were looking at.  Pretending she was an Indian princess with a feather in her hair washing clothes beside a tumbling Alaskan glacial mountain stream might not have harmed anyone, but the changes in her brain that gave structure to her pretending were not normal.

When my youngest child was four he used our old pale yellow metal kitchen stool laid sideways on the floor to sit inside as he pretended the round seat was a steering wheel.  At his developmental stage my son WAS in his mind-world REALLY steering anything from a truck to a race car to a space craft during his play.  He so enjoyed his imaginary games that he ignored my warning as his body grew larger that he was getting too big to fit safely inside the metal rungs between the stool legs any longer. 

One final day he did squeeze himself inside the stool legs and could not get out.  I couldn’t get him out, either.  As our apartment walls rang with his terrified screams I sent his older sister racing to fetch our landlord who appeared with his hacksaw and crow bar to extricate my son who next graduated to building space ships out of Legos filled with loaves of Lego block bread to feed its invisible crew. 

I have no reason to believe that Mother had been all right when she entered her developmental stage of imaginary play.   She was not OK as she passed through this stage, and she was certainly already suffering mentally when it was time to leave this stage – because she never fully did. 

When Mildred wrote of feeling transported to Alaska on a Magic Carpet she did know on one level that she had REALLY traveled in an airplane.  “Feel” is the key suggestive word in her sentence because what Mildred felt to be real was real to her.  If there ever was a conflict that required a choice be made between what felt real to her and what was actually real, her feeling reality always came out on top.

 It never mattered to Mother what anyone else ever felt about anything; only Mildred’s feelings were real to her.  What anyone else needed or wanted never mattered to her, either.  Ultimately this was true because no other person actually existed in Mother’s mind.  Everyone had a part to play as a figment of her imagination and as a projection of her feelings.

It is significant of Mildred’s thinking processes that although she glowingly describes her first airplane travel in this letter, from this point forward she claimed to be mortally afraid to travel again by air.  I read her future statements of this fear as being forms of manipulative tactics used to support her demands to get what she wanted when she wanted it the way she wanted it.  I do not believe that her future supposed fear of flying had anything to do with either fear or flying.

°<>°

Airplane travel is certainly wonderful – I arrived in Anchorage at 10:45 yesterday morning – a half hour before scheduled, so Bill wasn’t there to greet us.

Really, Mom it was the most thrilling, exciting thing that has ever happened to me.  The trip here was all worth it just to have flown!  I could write you pages and pages just telling you about the flight but there’s so much I have to tell you.  I am bursting with news.

First of all, Mom you must plan to visit us next summer and you must fly!  There’s nothing to it and you don’t even need ‘a change of clothes’ – only your purse.

The children loved it, were as calm as could be.  [At this time Sharon had just turned two, Cindy four, John seven, and I was nearly six.]   I am still recovering.  It was a thrill, but also quite terrifying to climb 20,000 feet.  John‘s nose was pressed to the window every minute!  (when he wasn’t sleeping).  Oh Mom, I am so anxious now for you to experience all I have – I know you’d be a wonderful traveler.  On the Northwest Orient Flight there were two Grandmothers coming up to see their daughters who had also migrated to Alaska….

The finesse of reading Mildred’s writings lies in noticing important words that contain information above and beyond any ordinary level of meaning.  These words can slip by outside the range of the attention they merit, as could her phrase “migrated to Alaska.”  Mildred just elevated her family’s move to the status of migration, a step even above immigration at the same time this concept was “normalized” in her mind because other people did it.  Migration happens as a result of an innate function for species built that way.  Mildred just made her decision to move north into an instinctive act that she had (obviously to her) been incapable of interfering with.

I also find this sentence to be very interesting:   “I am so anxious now for you to experience all I have….”  Up until this time over the 31 years of Mildred’s life there had been no separation in distance between her and her mother.  There could be no kind of Star Trek Spock mind-meld through which Mildred could now share her new world with her mother.  An entirely different kind of relationship had suddenly come into existence between my grandmother and her daughter which is exactly what Mildred had wanted so that her mother’s “interference” in her parenting could be stopped.  What next?  What now?

°<>°

The children were wonderful and so good.  The stewardess and all passengers remarked on what exceptionally good children they were and it was a long Flight.

We reached Los Angeles about 11:00 P.M. and plane left at 1:30 A.M.  The man that checked my baggage offered to help me board the plane early.  So at 1:15 I boarded and had a choice of seats.  I was so excited and thrilled by then after watching all the planes take off I could hardly stand it.  This plane proved quite rough, part of the trip, but I did enjoy it even though my stomach was ‘queasy’.  Every time I felt sick, I’d breathe deeply and try to relax and soon it was easier riding again.  The children slept until we landed in Seattle.  But I was too excited and watched out the window all the way.  Sometimes all I could see were stars and clouds – it was such a clear night!  Other times I could see the lights of the world below it looked like a beautifully lit up Xmas tree.

We landed in Seattle after a twenty minute stop in Portland.  From what I could see it’s a beautiful spot and when you come to visit us you could stop and visit there!

This statement, for as simple and innocuous as it might appear to be, is another example of the kinds of peepholes into the complexities of Mildred’s mind that appear within her writings.  Because I have closely studied Mother’s expressions of herself in relation to other people I can detect the kind of undifferentiated thinking Mildred had.  Why on earth would her mother want to stop and visit Portland simply based on her daughter’s passing observation from the inside of a plane that Portland looked to be “a beautiful spot” to Mildred? 

Mildred was incapable of forming clear boundaries (borderlines) in her mind between her thoughts and the thoughts in the minds of other people.  From Mildred’s strange mind-melded, joined-together, overlapping and invasively “possessive” (projecting) point of view what she observed, thought, felt, intended, etc. was OF COURSE the same thing that someone else would share in exactly the same way that she did herself.  I suspect that this “you-is-me-is-me-is-you-is-we” mental reality that was certainly how Mother operated is probably a key aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder.  It makes such a woman as Mildred was an extremely dangerous and damaging mother to her children who are never able to – because they are not allowed to – develop their own clear healthy mind-selves under the influence of such a mentally ill mind from the time of their birth.

°<>°

My oldest grandson who just turned three had a very sad evening a few weeks ago.  Earlier in the day he told his mother, “Mommy stay home.”  She works fulltime and explained to her son that she would go to work and be home after his daddy picked him up at daycare and brought him back home at the end of the day.  This message did not get through to my grandson’s super-attached-to-Mommy burgeoning mind.  When he did not see his mother’s car parked in the garage as soon as the door opened he burst into heartbroken, inconsolable sobs.

His daddy could not begin to repair whatever rupture his young son was reacting to.  Eventually after bringing the baby into the house he was able to get his bellowing son to come inside, as well.  But it was not until Mommy got home, lovingly and care-fully took my grandson back out to the garage, put him into his car seat where the crying began and then took him out again to THEN enter the house that all was made well enough again the crying could stop.

What manner of trial was this for all concerned?  After my daughter related the events to me I spent some time thinking about what had happened until the problem from my grandson’s point of view became clear.  He was not being a tyrant.  He had not thrown “a tantrum.”  In his mind of course if he wanted/needed/wished for his mother to spend her day at home SHE WOULD!  How could she not?  Because my grandson has not yet fully differentiated himself from his mommy she is still he and he is still her in very significant ways.  Once I understood this about the no-mommy-home little boy disaster I understood that my mother never differentiated from her mother – ever!

And why not?  My first guess is that she had never safely and securely attached to her mother in the first place as my grandson has so fully done with my daughter.  Because of the broken places inside of my mother that corresponded to the broken places in her attachment relationship with her mother, Mildred never got to join with her mother correctly so that she could later, through appropriate attachment-related processes, differentiate from her as my grandson is certain to do in his own time and in his own way with his mother. 

One of Mother’s greatest difficulties related to her mental illness was that she could not separate her mind from anyone else’s, or even truly comprehend that other people even existed as self-agents separate from her with minds of their own.  There is a very good chance that this problem came directly from her insecure attachment disorder created by her inadequate, traumatic early relationship interactions with her caregivers.  Even if mind-melding is a “symptom” of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) its origins began long before Mildred even had verbal language abilities.  This makes the insecure attachment disorder a primary problem in my thinking and the BPD a secondary one.

I also note that these same unrecognized patterns enabled Mildred to take over the mind and life of her husband, as well.  It is for this reason that I highly recommend the book, Stop Walking on Eggshells:  Taking your life back when someone you care about has borderline personality disorder, by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger.  When I was 53 I finally recognized that all that was wrong in my childhood came from this mental illness Mother had by reading the list of characteristics of this disorder that were included in the 1998 first edition of this book.  This list has – I think most unfortunately – been removed from the second 2010 edition.  I suggest that any reader of my writings who begins to catch a glimmer of recognition that patterns in Mildred are similar to those of an important person in their own life find a copy of this book and read it ASAP!

°<>°

The wait from 5:25 to 7:30 in Seattle was long!  I had to wake the children up at 4:45 A.M. and then wait two and a half hours in the airport but they were angels.  They were grand and helped carry bundles and were just plain good sports.  I am very proud of them.

We boarded the Northwest Orient plane at 7:15 A.M.  It was a lot bigger and crowded (three seats in one row whereas the other had two).  Much to my surprise they served breakfast and lunch no charge.  It was hard for the children to eat on their lap but they loved it.  Breakfast:  Melon, toast, scrambled eggs and bacon, sweet roll and milk.

I couldn’t eat a bite and haven’t eaten a meal yet!  I guess I’ll get my appetite back – my stomach quieted as soon as I landed in Anchorage.

The second plane was more like a bus and not as noisy as the first.  The people were nice all the way and so helpful.  Why even the PILOT in Seattle carried Sharon and my case clear up to the check-stand (up several flights of stairs) and saw me to the desk to check in for my next flight!

Once we safely arrived it was hard to believe we could be here.  From 1:15 A.M. to 10:45 the next morning.  Amazing!

Bill got our car and it’s very nice and roomy!  He got paid yesterday.  What luck!  Our payments are $75 a month too and it will be rough.  I am going to be watching every penny now.

It’s wonderful to be here and so good to be with Bill again.  This morning when I woke up and realized where I was I was so happy to see Bill next to me – but it also hit me that I was far away from my family.  I’ll miss you Mother, Charlie and Carolyn and the children – will write you often.  Mother I know I’ll see you next summer.

The second half of this letter follows in the next chapter.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

 

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 3

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

3.  Hesitant Story

What story lurks inside of me that I find myself so afraid, so hesitant, so unsure of how to begin to tell it?  Do I stand at the magical gate of my own secret garden holding in my palm the skeleton key that I know will open this lock to let me inside?  Am I approaching one of the gates of hell (I assume there are many)?  Do I stand in some dark-walled somber court room about to lay my right hand upon the cover of a Bible to repeat an oath that what I am about to write “is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God?”

I want to run away yet find myself glued here, poised to let words come into my mind and then out the ends of my fingertips to write a story I am so aware of not being able to fully remember.  No one is forcing me to move from this point forward.  I am at that balance point between ordering myself to write at the same time I respect myself enough to ask for permission to cross a threshold of memory to retrieve what I can know about myself in my life beginning one month before my sixth birthday as I crossed the threshold into the log house in Eagle River, Alaska on July 31, 1957.

Pausing here I note my own rule:  Every word that appears to me as I write belongs in my story.  Once placed it cannot be removed.  To refuse a word’s existence within this story is to separate myself from the gift of my story as I follow the scent of it, the feel of it, the shape and form of it as if the story exists already.  My job is to find it and express it.  My challenge is to let it come forth one word at a time no matter what.

No matter my own doubts, my own unfaithfulness to my truth, my own fear of failing, my own intimidations of myself.  In spite of my own self-imposed critic.  In spite of my mind that will often wish to wander away, to find something in my adult present so much more pleasant to think about, pay attention to and do.  In spite of my discouraging self, my discounting self, my unbelieving self I will give credence to my own words and to that which they humbly try to communicate.  I need not make any claim of perfection.

°<>°

Any thoughts about why I write take me back to myself sometime in my early teens.  I am sitting on a knoll in one of our homestead fields below our house on a summer day.  The hill is well established with a plant I grew up to believe was called Dogwood.  I know now that was not its real name although Dogwood is what I always call it in my heart of hearts.  This is its proper nomenclature:

Cornus canadensis COCA13

bunchberry Cornaceae

HABIT: 2–8 inches.

KEY CHARACTERS: Leaves 4–6 in a terminal whorl with 1–2 pairs much smaller, opposite stem leaves below.  Flower bracts white, petal-like.  Fruit clustered red berries.

HABITAT: Spruce and birch forests, muskegs.

°<>°

These thriving short plants were thick beneath me where I sat, so I know several years had to have passed since Father had first torn up this land to plant crops of Timothy grass as required by the government’s homesteading proving up requirements.  There was no sign of tall grass on this hill.   Rather this lush carpet of green was half full of white flowers and half full of red clustered berries at their fruition time of summer.

I was at a similar stage of transition from young to older childhood, yet I had no more sense of my own history than did the wilderness I was a part of that measured nothing about itself in nanoseconds or millennia.  Small grasshoppers popped up and down around me as I disturbed them by lightly brushing my palms in wide sweeps over leaves, flowers and berries around me.  Rushing glacial river water far below me on the valley floor surrounded me with muted roaring.  I was anything but alone.

It seems I have two simultaneous lives at this moment.   I am here writing at the same time I can return to my body on that sun graced knoll experiencing a state of perfect peace.  There I am met with bird songs drifting past me in an untroubled warm breeze.  Here I feel tension in the muscles of my torso as if they are preparing to lift a great load.

Every time I consider writing my whole childhood story I see myself there on that blue-sky day on that mountain suspended in my memory as if that part of me has refused to leave that spot.  I feel brewing tears as I write these words.  I cannot exactly say why I want to throw a line of words back through time to myself sitting there.   I had such an untold story to tell even then. 

I would trade these tears for that joy, but I don’t think that is what my writing is meant to accomplish.  Is this more than poignant melancholy?  Is this story a scratching, gnawing, clawing thing twisting and insisting on being formed and getting loose?  Will it no longer sit still within me?  It demands words.  Only then will it leave me as it takes to the sky beak, talons and all – finally setting me free.

Or so it seems….

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Plant information is from:  Forest Plant Identification Guide Chugach National Forest, R10-MB-421, by Robert L. DeVelice, Susan L. Boudreau, Charles Wertheim, Connie J. Hubbard, Chrystal Czarnecki

May 2001

USDA Forest Service

Chugach National Forest

3301 C Street, Suite 300

Anchorage, Alaska 99503–3998

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Perhaps it will help me clarify my thoughts, feelings, perspectives, hopes and intentions this morning if I give words to something that has been bothering me in regard to a long-standing friendship for over seven years.  My friend lives on the other side of the country from me, and as far as I know will arrive for a short visit – again – within the week.  I have something I need to voice to her, something I need to talk to her about — important to me — only I don’t know how.

Having been raised and formed within an insanely abusive early home for the first 18 years of my life I was forced to adapt myself to three conditions that are appearing to me today in these words:  (1) terrorism, (2) tyranny, and (3) another person’s pervasive and damaging sense of entitlement.

I had no way to ever fight back against any of these “conditions” of my life.

I often wonder how much of who-how I am in the world would have been ME even without the abuse and trauma.  Would I have been a retiring, quiet, shy, unassertive person anyway?  Would I have had the troubles that I have in defining my own needs and desires, as well as being able to articulate my reactions to people’s actions if I had not been forced to survive in Mother’s hell?

Would I still have had trouble sticking up for myself, stating my perspective, telling people how I feel in reaction to things that transpire in relationships?  Would I still have had trouble in doing something other than enduring and watching while I say absolutely NOTHING about what bothers me?  Would I be able to believe that how I feel and what matters to me has value, enough so that I could risk (dare) to speak up when it best suits me?

Would I still have been a watcher?

I notice things.  I notice something that happened all those years ago when my friend and her daughter and partner came to stay at my house for a few days back then.  I had a part-time minimum wage job.  I HINTED – meaning I thought I had made myself clear enough – that I needed to work while these people were staying with me.  The hints did not seem to be (a) heard or (b) respected and honored. 

I dared not leave the house while they were visiting because it seemed to me they WANTED me to remain with them — why?

I spoke with my boss on each of these days, a woman who gave me flexibility to not come into work, although I lost my meager income for these days.   My problem is that I could not speak about my own reality in the face of somebody else’s!

I suppose I did not wish to upset them, to risk making a mess of this friendship.  My pattern is to let things happen, let them go on, not interfere, make my own adjustments to other people’s patterns, with the hopes that “in time” things will naturally take care of themselves.

That’s how I got through the first 18 years of my life.

Time did go on, and two years ago my friend came back for a short day visit.  We went to lunch in town, sitting to eat outside on a warm day on the cafe’s plaza.  A woman my friend had known many years ago while they both lived in a nearby city walked by.  My friend struck up a conversation over the low fence that separated the tables from the street with this woman — and talked for 45 minutes.

Not once was my presence acknowledged.  I sat there eating in silence – alone – as I usually am – and said nothing.  I felt awkward, disappointed, and screwed up all of my own courage not to feel hurt or angry.

Here it is, time again for my friend to return for a short visit.  Meanwhile?

All the questions that go with my patterns are implied here instead of listed in detail.  On the one hand I understand why at my advancing age I am completely unskilled in negotiating situations like these.  On the other hand I don’t want a repeat of this, nor do I want to know on the inside of me there’s a pile of unresolved feelings that I am paralyzed to give words to in order to tell my friend about any of this!

I just want “things” to be fine – always fine – and in my universe that means never speaking up for myself it doing so “might” upset someone else – so that they “get mad” at me.

This is a big deal to me or I would have forgotten about all of this long ago.  I am stuck between my social awkwardness and my fear.  I put in a call to my friend this morning who was busy and will call me back this afternoon.  I am not looking forward to trying to address these concerns of mine.  I don’t know how.

What peace do I think I am trying to keep?  At what price?  Do I have my friend on a pedestal?  Do I not feel I am her equal in every way?  Nobody is going to do this for me, this work that I detest!  This is not a perfect world and nobody is perfect in it.  This is not about fault or shame or blame.  It is not about accusations or apologies.

In fact, I don’t really have a CLUE what this IS about!!!  Not really.  Well, perhaps today when my friend and I speak something about this mess will straighten itself out, no matter how scared I am.  I guess I will soon find out.

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

++++

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

Ron Finley tells his story in an engaging TedTalk presentation. Watch for when he talks about the impact of gardening on the kids and about turning the kids away from gangs into becoming “ecolutionaries” and “gangster gardeners.”

Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central L.A.’s food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating. Full bio »

Filmed Feb 2013 • Posted Mar 2013 • TED2013

 ++++

February 20, 2013, 9:00 am 125 Comments

Is there a science to parenting?

For all the current discussion in the United States about gun violence and mental illness, there has been little attention paid to root causes. Any effort aiming to reduce gun violence — or child abuse, intimate partner violence, suicide or sexual abuse — must include a serious discussion about how society can improve the quality of parenting.

Read more here:

The Benefits of Positive Parenting

By DAVID BORNSTEIN

++++

Holey Brains
March 4, 2013

What will you do today that will matter tomorrow?
-Ralph Marston

“Children who have had almost non-stop stress — from abandonment, threat, violence, neglect, or abuse — have huge holes in their higher brain structures,” observes Pennie Brownlee in Dance with Me in the Heart. [not available at the moment] “They don’t have the hardware to run the software of peace and partnership. Instead, they have highly developed defensive brains for fight and flight. Highly developed defense-department-brains don’t grow healthy partnerships; they lead to baby-battlers, violence, and war. Scans of violent adults reveal the holes are still there — they don’t repair themselves. It is the first three years that the growth is laid down, or not….

“Babies who have been peacefully nurtured throughout their growing are very different. Their brains have huge prefrontal cortices. Researcher Paul MacLean termed that part of the brain the angel lobes because they are associated with the highest human qualities. These children are perfectly set up for their divine birthright; the happiness that comes from loving and being loved…. If your baby could tell you what she would really like from you, she wouldn’t ask you for toys and things. She would tell you that she wanted to feel safe and loved, and now you can see why it is so important for her. Her future rests on it.”

 ++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 2

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

2.  Inner Landscape

If I were to begin writing the story of my childhood from this point forward without having Mother’s letters to work from and within, I cannot imagine how I would proceed.  But I don’t have to imagine and I don’t have to write without them.  Mother could give me nothing I needed while she lived.  After her death she provided a great deal of what I need to heal my story.  For this I am grateful. 

Children are supposed to be lovingly guided through childhood by their parents.  Most of how I was treated by mine was criminal.  Yet I was not without benefit.  I partook of a child’s life simply by the accident of being a child.  I had a child’s body, a child’s brain, a child’s imagination, endurance, creativity, flexibility, adaptivity, simplicity, curiosity, sensitivity, and an innate sense of hope that came from having no other way to live.

Nobody could take my being a child away from me.  I was naturally eager, interested and open to ongoing life.  I was a native to innocence.  I did not question what had no answer, nor did I look for reason.  I expected nothing other than what was given to me, good or bad, nor could I ask for anything different.

I make a distinction between being a child and being able to experience childhood itself.  Abuse removes safety by definition.  My experience of being a child experiencing childhood was always brutally interrupted at some point.  At those times I was not a child having a childhood.  I was a child surviving abuse.

The patterns of being interrupted by abuse in my childhood were more damaging to me than was the abuse itself.  Physical injuries heal.  Changes made in the developing body-brain-nervous system from abuse during early years of life do not.  These patterns had been present since my birth (see Story Without Words and book 1 of this series).  They built dissociation – alternative physiological patterns of connecting self and experience together – into me and long before the time we reached Alaska I had already suffered greatly from the abuse Mother in her psychosis had done to me. 

Only in a world of hell would I consider dissociation to be of useful benefit to a child as it was to me.  I could not have survived if my own reality could not have been separated from Mother’s periodically.  The physical reactions of the powerful emotions related to living under continual duress alone would probably have made me sick and/or destroyed me if there had been no way to shut them down, turn them off and make them go away whenever possible.

None of these patterns were anything I could think about.  I was too young to do so when the trauma began in my life.  Being hated, blamed, shamed and abused was my only reality.  I knew nothing else, and I had no way of ever knowing there could have been a different life for me.  How could I have?

After I have finished writing my way through the Alaska years of my childhood I plan to return to the start of my life to track myself through the California years.  Preserved among Mildred’s papers were a collection of her diary entries that cover part of those earlier years of mine and my siblings’ lives.  It is extremely difficult for me to face and write about the abuse that Mother did to me when I was so very, very small.  I have discovered that when I get close enough in my writing to those experiences my body reacts with its own overwhelming memories.  It would also be difficult for readers to face that level of abuse to one so young, as well.

As I move forward through the next years of my childhood in Alaska it is easier to imagine that I could have had some clear inner resources to draw from to survive Mother.  I did.  But it is important to realize even by age five I had not developed in the same ways that ordinary non-traumatized well-loved and cared for children do.

I had no language for feelings.  Any part of me that existed as my own had been instinctively hard fought for at great cost to me in ways I had no way to comprehend.  I had been told I was different from my siblings in extremely negative ways since I was born.  I had been terrorized and battered in ways few can imagine during those California years.  My personal self-space had been continually aggressively and violently invaded so that I had been forced into narrow and confined inner spaces at a time in my development when my self-space and my mind needed to expand rather than contract.

There had been almost no play (an essential component of childhood) allowed to me either with my siblings or with other children.  I had suffered wild uncontrolled verbal and physical attacks by Mother for things that made no possible sense to me for so long before we moved to Alaska that it was impossible for me to consistently form any concept of my own self in the world I lived within other than the one Mildred had beaten into me from my birth.

Sooner or later every segment of my own experience of myself in my childhood had been interrupted by a psychotic eruption within Mother that shocked me out of my life and into hers.  I could not prevent, predict, avoid or escape any of these attacks no matter what I did or did not do. 

I was fair game to Mother.  I was her prey.  I was the target for the terrible sickness in her mind.  Her insanity ruled and ran my life and had done so forever as I knew life.  There was no reprieve.  There was no salvation.  There was nowhere to hide and nobody to help or to save me.  Through all of this I had done the only thing anyone could have done:  I lived. 

It was not the negative patterns of my life that changed once we moved to Alaska.  It was the positive ones.  Alaska itself sustained me.  The benefits of living there far outweighed the harm mentally ill psychotic mean Mother could do to me.  I was no longer a veritable orphan under attack, surviving hell alone.  I had been called home, and I didn’t need to die for that to happen.  Instead I was given the abundance I needed to go on living.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++