The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 20

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20.  A durable, endurable child

April 2, 2013.  I begin this chapter with the same trepidation I felt writing yesterday’s description of what happened at the fair the weekend of my sixth birthday.  There is a two-week gap of silence in Mildred’s letters between what she wrote to her mother on August 30, 1957 and the next letter that appeared in the collection of her papers dated September 15, 1957.  Because I know the patterns of Mother’s rage and of her attacks on me I believe she did not let go of me as we traveled home from Palmer in our big Ford station wagon.  Her rage would have traveled home with us.

Alone in my tomb of isolation I would have spent my time on the trip home still listening to shrieking streams of verbal abuse about what I had done to destroy the joy of Mother’s wonderful day at the fair.  As I write this I insulate myself from knowing intimately how I felt.  I would have been terrified of what was going to happen to me next once we arrived home and Mother would be free to pursue her anger out of the public’s eye.  Mine would not have been a thinking kind of terror.  It would have been the creeping around in a shuddering belly kind.

I refuse to allow myself to follow my memory to the parking of the car in front of the log house, or up the steps into the house – and beyond.  When Mother was mad at me she had no brakes on her actions.  At the very least I would have been fully “spanked” bare bottomed and sent to bed without supper – and without the mercy of the sad, scared, concerned and worried looks from my young siblings (like little animals watching me clamped in a deadly trap) that would have let me know I existed at all in someone else’s eyes.

What I do understand as I write is that the aftermath of Mother’s self-justified rage and of her actions would have profoundly affected how I felt the day I started first grade after Labor Day weekend.  I don’t want to know this.  I have never on my own allowed myself to connect how Mother’s beliefs, feelings, judgments and abuse of me was transferred (like an infectious disease) to the sanctity of happiness and safety I have always believed I found outside of Mother’s reach when I was at school, beginning on my first day of first grade.

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The wooden paddle

The destruction of my delusion that I was able to live a different life free of horror at school came to me in two ways.  As I worked through the transcription of Mother’s letters I was shocked by dismay to read the nasty, hate-filled – and on behalf of my teachers, of their collusion with her psychotic madness about me – accounts of my “abysmal failure” to be a “good girl” at school. 

A few years ago my sister Cindy contributed to the bursting of my “school was a haven for me” bubble by reminding me of something Mother no doubt began doing the first of my school days.  “Remember the wooden paddles Mother used to bring to the school principals?”  No, I had not remembered until she reminded me, but then I remembered them instantly.

I am glad because the existence of those paddles gives me a way to understand how the long arm and rabid words of Mother formed and then crossed over the bridge she was fully capable of creating and of sustaining between her psychosis of me at home and her psychosis of me when I was outside of her physical reach.  She freely shared with willing others whose charge should have been to ally themselves with me on their school grounds.  Leave it to the skill of psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder Mother to invent a way to turn a toy into a weapon through which she could convey to school personnel her version of hatred toward me. 

(Now considered a retro toy wooden paddles with a small rubber ball attached by an elastic string were common during my childhood.  Although the history of handball tracks in Egypt to 2000 BC, it is believed that the involvement of a paddle to bounce balls against the walls of buildings was added by Irish and Scottish immigrants to New York before 1900 to prevent frozen hands in frigid winter months.  Wooden paddles with the balls attached began to appear in the 1930s in America so the competition could be taken indoors and played solo.)

Mother’s unique twist, as Cindy described it and as I then remembered was to remove the string and ball, write “Linda’s Paddle” on the wood and then march off into my future with the full intent of being a caring, involved so-helpful Mother of a little girl she assured the principal and thus my teachers was “nothing but trouble to me.”  Mother gave the school her permission to use “my” paddle on me anytime they needed to.  To whom does the credit belong that I was never “sent to the principal’s office” and never saw this paddle in any teacher’s hand?

How evil!  How unfair, cruel and sick was this humiliation of an innocent little girl who entered what should have been a sanctuary from all of these influences in her life at least during the hours of her school days?  As Joe Anne Vanover repeated over and over again in our last telephone conversation about Mildred, “You poor children!  You poor, poor children!”  And there I was all alone in a piranha cesspool of adult participants in Mother’s psychotic abuse leading me to believe from my first day of first grade, after being attacked for “envying” my siblings’ brilliant cotton candy in comparison to my dull brown apple, having my innocence and willingness to learn viciously sabotaged without my even knowing it.

(I note here that the pervasive deterioration of American’s educational system removes a platform of safety that is essential for children who are being abused at home.  In the era of my childhood child crime against child (including drug sales) was not “in session” yet.  Had I been bullied at school in any way during my school career I am not at all sure that I would have survived my childhood intact.  It was soon to be my school experience to be nothing but utterly ignored.  I could live with and through that.)

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Increasing my powers

What powers did I have to combat this conspiracy of abusive aggression against me as it took place between Mother and my teachers?  I consider it both a divine irony and a gift to me that with an August 31^st birthday I entered school being the absolute youngest child in my classroom.  This disadvantage hurt me in considerable ways throughout the history of my childhood. 

Not only did I live under the gargantuan shadow of a psychotically abusive mentally ill woman in my home life, I was deprived of stepping out from under this shadow even in the one place some degree of safety, protection, compassion, understanding and of rational objective intelligence (let alone of professional ethics) should have protected, assisted and helped to sustain me.  I had not been allowed any opportunities to play in ordinary ways with my siblings or with other children.  I therefore had been deprived of the opportunities necessary to become even remotely socially and emotionally competent or adjusted. 

Add to this extremely hurtful, difficult and disadvantageous condition the fact that I always suffered from being the youngest student in every grade of my schooling it might be a wonder that I consider these age-related challenges as having been one of my most useful protective factors that strengthened my resiliency so that I could endure and survive within the hell I was trapped in.  The key word here is “challenge.” 

Obviously I was born with the challenge of making it through the deadly mine field of Mother’s psychotic brutality that defined the 18 years of my childhood.  I never wavered in my course and I never succumbed to her harm.  I do not consider myself special.  I took the only road through my childhood that was available to me.  This was a completely natural road.  I lived and I kept on living.

Mother did not specifically design me to be the youngest child among my school peers.  Nature and the laws of Alaska regarding school attendance gave me that challenge.  I did not survive Mother by being weak.  As I grew older and as her psychosis worsened my strength had to increase in equal measure.  I had to continue to be a durable child.  Spending segments of the time of my childhood outside the worst of Mother’s abuse allowed me to find my own ways to meet the challenges presented to me by my age which included a corresponding diminishment of my physical size compared to my classmates.

Given the combined conditions of my childhood if anyone was going to save me it was I.  I had no way of knowing that the obstacles so familiar to me were any different than anyone else’s were.  Nobody ever told me I could not win the race through the years of my childhood. 

I therefore was preserved from any self-doubt.  I was able to live heroically because I had no other option.  The challenges inherent in being the youngest and smallest person in my classes therefore simply made me stronger as a matter of course.  To use a popular phrase, “Failure was not an option.”

Fuel added to a healthy fire will by nature’s design simply feed the fire and burn itself up.  The more the fuel the greater the fire.  Challenges were my fuel and because the age challenge was a persistent one I never ran out of fuel.  Lucky me.  (The challenges of our continual moves, changing schools and often starting school late gave me similar patterns of advantage.)

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I am left now, however, needing to be an emotional acrobat, an intellectual gymnast of great flexibility and endurance, a skilled contortionist to make my way through what Mildred reports to my grandmother in her letters about my “behaviors,” my “attitudes” and “shortcomings” at school.  As I first encountered Mother’s statements I felt dismayed beyond belief and words to find my teachers had apparently not returned to me the thrilled adoration and blissful appreciation I so innocently, naturally and unconditionally gave to them.  I have throughout my life preserved in every recollection of school nothing except positive thoughts and feelings about my teachers and my classroom experiences. 

School was my sanctuary.  Have my rave reviews been tempered now by reality?  By whose reality?

A friend of mine who has read the first four manuscripts of the Mildred’s Mountain series assured me that if Mother had received the same reports from teachers of her adored children that were given to me she would have translated them through her all-good filter either into something positive or would have criticized the error of their teacher’s ways.  At the same time if the same reports were given by my teachers as were given about my siblings Mother would have filtered them through the all-bad half of her psychosis about me into something negative.  I will comment on these patterns as they obviously appear in Mildred’s following letters throughout the volumes of The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series.

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April 3, 2013.  I did not mention this when I first wrote this chapter because I did not want to believe my own certainty.  I cannot continue to leave this part out because the vision of this is only growing stronger.  It will hang around haunting my mind and my emotions until I put it where it belongs.

Father must have ridden to work in Anchorage with someone else on the first morning of the school year, or perhaps he didn’t go to work at all.  Mother had the car.  She drove John and I to Chugiak.

John’s class was in a two-story building separate from mine.  She walked John to his classroom door and left him there.  Then she walked with me to the principal’s office which was in this same building.  I was told to sit down in a chair in a row beneath a window.  My feet did not reach the floor.

Mother stood talking to the principal who was seated behind his big desk.  She took the wooden paddle with my name written on it with red crayon out of her purse, holding it in front of her while she told this man what a bad child I was and all about the paddle.  When she finally handed it to him, the principal took it in his right hand, reached forward and laid it on top of a pile of papers at the front corner of his desk.

Then I had to follow Mother who kept telling me to “hurry up” across the playground to the long one-story building where my class was.  She scolded me, left me standing at my first grade classroom door and walked away.

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The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 19

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19.  Unfair at the fair

April 1, 2013.  I did not find any reference to my sixth birthday on Saturday, August 31, 1957 in Mildred’s writings.  Not a mention.  Not a breath of a word.  Nothing.  Deafening silence.

Labor Day was celebrated on Monday, September 2, 1957, and on one of the days of this holiday weekend our family went to the Matanuska Valley Fair in Palmer.  I was so small when I saw my first full grown hog at this fair, its back being nearly at my eye level, that when I next saw another one when I was 23 I was stunned at how small it was!  Until I actually saw another one I had never questioned the impression of “great pigness” that I had stored away in my body-mind about hogs during this Labor Day fair visit on the weekend of my sixth birthday.

Something else that happened to me at the fair that weekend continues to defy my ability to counteract what I knew as a young child with what I “should” rationally know at this stage in my adulthood.  There I am standing on a dirt area in front of a concession stand with my parents.  Mother told us we could pick what we wanted to eat.  I doubt she had ever let us do that before.  It was a very big choice to make.

Once I held the stick in my hand that poked through the bottom of my caramel apple I turned to see each of my siblings holding a brightly colored fluff of spun sugar.  My sisters’ held pink and my brother’s was blue.  Instantly my heart sunk in disappointment.

Oh, that I had opened my mouth only to take a bite of my apple.  Even now 55 years later what comes to mind next is, “How could I have been so stupid not to have been able to anticipate what would happen if I let out my sigh with the words that followed?”

But, no, child that I was I made the mistake of forgetting to remember that never was I safe to be myself or safe to be a child.  But I didn’t know this!  What young child can think such thoughts and then have the smarts to NOT do what I did?

I am sure the expression in my face gave me away before any words popped out of my mouth.  I must have looked as downcast as I felt when I let it slip out, “Oh!  I wish I’d gotten one of THOSE!”

If it is possible for a grown human to jump down the throat (as the saying goes) of a little girl that’s what Mother did to me.  Accusing me of never being content, of selfishly wanting what everyone else had, of never being happy no matter what anyone did to try to please me, of being jealous of my sisters and brother, of being greedy and always wanting more more more, of always spoiling everything nice for everyone else ON PURPOSE, Mother continued to roar at me.  “You made your choice!  Nobody forced you to get an apple.  That’s what you said you wanted!  You don’t deserve anything!  Give me that apple right now.”

I guess Mother taught me a lesson that day alright.  I’ve never forgotten standing there sad with my family at the fair with my hand empty.  Mildred brought up her abuse litany segment about how this was “just like when” I was four and “complained” when our 4th of July fireworks sputtered out that there wasn’t any more, when I sighed, “Oh!  They were so pretty!  I wish there was more!”

I had been slapped and “spanked” and dragged to my bedroom that day.  There I was in the same kind of trouble again.  What is wrong with me now that I want to say, “I didn’t mean to do it?”

I am a mother.  I raised my children in the opposite way I was treated.  I logically know that a loving, calm, rational parent might have taken my disappointment at my own choice when faced later with the glowing beauty of colored cotton candy as an opportunity to talk to me about feelings, about choices, about consequences and about changing my mind. 

No healthy parent would have berated and beaten a young child in a situation like this for making an unforgiveable mistake!  Yet unlike how my consideration of the actual size of a hog changed in my adulthood, I cannot find any way within myself to take the word “mistake” out of my thoughts about myself at the fair that day.

The truth is I wasn’t told I made a mistake that day.  I was told in every way Mother could manage that I WAS a mistake.  I WAS trouble.  I WAS bad.  Being an irredeemable mistake was who and what I was. 

I know the utter despair I was thrown into through yet another one of Mother’s ceremonies of brutality against me right there in front of the concession stand, in front of my family.  Like prey cut out by an attacker relentlessly pursued I had no way to defend myself or escape.   I had no choice then but to be resigned yet again to the isolation I knew as the only child in my family doomed to fail because I WAS the failure half of Mildred’s mind.

How could I know or understand any of this as a child?  I could not.  The sad fact and the mystery to me is that no matter how hard I work at it knowing or understanding all of this is still beyond me.  I would have to start off in life all over again and have all of that torture absent, start over again to grow an entirely different body-brain without all the trauma built into it to be able to make right inside of myself what I cannot make right today.

I sank into darkness on that day in a singular way because I did not have a single shred of resistance to what happened to me.  I could not hold some of my own light inside of me where I could find it like my mind did when Mother’s version of what I had done didn’t match what I knew had happened.  I always knew what I had done all of the time.  I knew my own truth because my mind was not broken.  I knew reality.

This ability served me well.  It kept me intact in my mind when I was attacked for doing things I had never done.  But this time was one of those different times.  This I had really done.  I had done what Mother said I had done.  This time not only was I under attack with Father there doing nothing to help me, but I could not even save myself with my own mind.

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Tone of my mind

I can use the word “tone” to describe the difference between my mental experience of these two types of Mother’s abuse.  As I look back to those times I was “punished” for something that had not happened at all the way Mother insisted they had, even though I suffered through the agony of her attacks my mind was very clear and strong.  At those times I was shielded from the kid of inner personal crumbling of my experience of being a self separate from Mother that happened to me when I was attacked for things I “really” had done – like what happened at the fair.

The strength of the tone of the “muscle” of my mind as it contained my core vision of me NOT having done what Mother battered me for kept me from dissolving as a person within her abuse.  When I was “guilty as charged” the tone of Mildred’s mind washed over me like a Tsunami because I had nothing in my mind to resist her with.  I had plenty of both types of abuse from the time I was born. 

As I write about these differences in my inner experiences between these two patterns it seems to me now that had I not had the opportunity to endure Mother’s horrendous attacks against me when she was delusionally psychotic (beating me for what never happened) – as they gave me the chance to exercise the powers of my own mind with this sense of myself intact and in operation – I might not have survived her.  Except for one incident I will write about when I get to my middle childhood part of my story, the intensity and viciousness of Mother’s attacks did not vary between her delusional and her non-delusional abuse (the fair being in the non-delusional category).  The difference between them was only tied to the additional “punishment” I received for “lying” to her when I could not admit to her delusions.

Even when my mind held a clear vision of a reality I knew as different from Mother’s delusional ones I had no ability to THINK about what I knew.  I felt a quality kind of confusion which I know was an excellent sign.  Although my confusion was appropriate I could not wonder why she accused me of doing something I had not done. 

I would have had to travel all the way back to her accusations that I had intended her to die while birthing me and then travel all the way forward through my childhood to have begun to unravel how Mildred came to her conclusions.  I would challenge the best minds on earth to work their way successfully through that maze.  I sure couldn’t do it as a child although I am finally making some progress in that direction now.

At times when I was in “trouble” for something I had “really” done I equally accepted what Mother did to me in supposed consequence just as I had to do when she was delusional, but when she was not delusional (making me “guilty”) I was not accompanied through her attacks by my own self at those times.  To be viciously berated (and no doubt physically battered) as happened on the fair day for saying something few parents would ever be concerned with in the least, was to experience yet another collapse of my own ongoing experience of myself in my childhood.

Mildred added my fair “crime” to her abuse litany so that along with her psychotic repetition of all my other “crimes” I was reminded of this one with every beating I received until I left home at 18.  Because her litany was itself psychotic it made no difference if the “crime” added had really happened or not.  I continued to be “punished” for Mother’s version of reality year after year after year and there was NOTHING I could do to stop it.

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In the aftermath

Added to the horrors of my childhood was the fact that if any similar “infraction” such as the one Mildred attacked me for at the fair was ever done by one of my siblings her reactions were usually the opposite of how she reacted to me.  She would have made sure my siblings had what they wanted at the fair.  I had no way to think about the massive gap that existed between the ways I was treated compared to my siblings.  The negative impact on me was that I was missing any words to use to think about myself in relation to the abuse I suffered.  The positive impact was that I did not feel the complication of feelings I could not have resolved such as anger at Mother, envy of my siblings or any self-pity.

Writing even about this comparatively very minor abuse incident today has been very hard on me.  On some level I am aware of how much horror I have to hold at bay to go back to retrieve this much information about that day.  The process exhausts me.  It leaves me wondering – again – how I survived 18 years in that home.

I had no choice but to live through whatever that woman did to me.  I had no choice but to be the child that I was.  I WAS a child!  I had feelings in response to my life AS a child has such feelings. 

Whatever it was about my having chosen a caramel apple over gaudy cotton candy that flipped on a little dismay switch inside of child me there was nothing wrong and bad and awful and horrible and evil about me that caused me to have my feelings.  I did not intend to “ruin everyone’s day.”  I did not deserve an attack from Mother over this, nor did I deserve to be chastised and berated, scorned and shamed over this same “crime” countless more times before I left home.

Through these repeated patterns of abuse I was not only deprived of the right to be a child, I was also deprived of the ability to grow up knowing what being human even was.  As I have written before, I struggle with the underlying and pervasive damage done to me on this level every day.  Nobody can wake suddenly at 18 when they escape a psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder parent and instantly know every antidote to every cruel and biting debilitating criticism every leveled against them from birth.  The awakening has to happen gradually if it happens at all.

Who was Mildred that she had the right to dismantle my sense of self the way that she did?  She was a mentally ill woman whose ability to (a) self regulate her emotions appropriately, (b) to use higher cortex brain functions to anticipate consequences, (c) to make wise, informed and reasonable choices and decisions, (d) to experience empathy and exercise compassion, (e) to even have a human conscience had been removed from her by her illness.  Yet while I rest my case on my knowledge of her illness I cannot ever pretend that her treatment of me didn’t hurt and harm me greatly.

When a parent competes with their offspring for available resources the child always loses.  The imbalance of power in our family disempowered all of Mildred’s children but none as severely as I was.  Being suddenly handed the power to choose something I wanted at a fair’s concession stand overwhelmed my abilities.  What other choice had I ever been allowed to consciously make on my own before that moment?  Probably only a few.

Healthy parents begin to empower their children with the process and language of choice before they can talk.  Choices that young children can be empowered to make might seem to be very small ones from an adult’s point of view.  Those choices, however, when presented clearly and age appropriately, build choice-making abilities into the brain-mind-self of a child as the foundation is being built upon which all future choices and decisions will be made.

Mildred was a professional bully when it came to me.  She was a tyrant and a terrorist.  The power to know one’s self and to anticipate outcomes from actions based on choices is one of the most important skill sets we leave our childhood with.  Mildred, in her sickness, did everything in her power to make sure I could not succeed.

I don’t see that it is possible for any abused and neglected child to enter adulthood with their sense of self and their ability to choose healthily intact.  Missing these abilities puts child abuse survivors at the highest risk for confusion and for making small and large decisions in the best way that they can – that will likely lead to a lifetime of difficulties.  Adults who were not abused as infants and as children do not suffer from this great debilitating disadvantage.

This great discrepancy between the “haves” and the “have nots” is a major contributor to what we see as quality of life differences across adult lifespans.  People who did not leave childhood knowing and loving themselves and who do not have the capacity to make wise choices are the ones most likely to create “trauma dramas” in their lives that pass onto their offspring the same patterns that so harmed them.

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The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 10

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10.  Dreaming Books

March 23, 2013.  I woke this morning when my hens began cackling outside my bedroom window just before daybreak remembering a dream.  I began having dreams that were important to my ongoing life the winter I was 9 in 4^th grade.  I will write about that transition in my development when I get to that part of my story, 1960 to 1961.

In 1998 when I was 47 I had the last dream in what seems to be a series that lasted through all those years.  In 1997 I had realized, finally, how much more I preferred the world in my dreams than I did my waking life.  My attitude troubled me enough that I suspect in some ways I stopped remembering my dreams through my own choice.  However, I also wonder if my dreaming history as it began three years before my menarche and ended three years before my menopause possibly had something to do with the healing, enervating, soothing and very helpful influence of estrogen – until this benefit departed.

Although I very seldom remember any aspect of my dreams now, occasionally one of their themes carries through to my waking awareness, as happened this morning.  I feel blessed both by the nature of the dream and by my recollection of it.  I can think of no people I would rather have had appear in my dreams and no better outcome than the one I was shown today!

Our homesteading neighbors will be introduced in Mildred’s letters beginning in 1959.  Among the ones most important to the success of our family’s venture were the people who lived closest to us at the bottom of “our” mountain, Lowell and Dorothy Pollard and their two young sons.  I last saw these people the summer of 1969 before I left home after my 18^th birthday that fall. 

It was through Dorothy’s homesteading book which she thoughtfully gave a copy of to each of us Lloyd children that she and I connected in 2008.  Eight Stars of Gold:  Notes from a Mid-Century Alaska Homestead Journal (2008, Vantage Press) is, according to Joe Anne Vanover, who is a lifetime Alaskan and herself a homesteader, “one of the loveliest accounts of homesteading ever written.”  Interestingly, although Joe Anne and her deceased husband John were good friends with Lowell (who passed from this world nearly 20 years ago), they never met Dorothy.  I am greatly honored to be in contact with both of these astounding women who are now past their mid-80s.

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The season of my dream was a warm one.  I had no battle with snow and ice as I repeatedly walked a long road upon rich black soil into the Eagle River Valley that led to Pollards’ inviting cabin – and then back out again.  Dorothy was lovingly caring for my siblings while I worked on my task.  Sharon was 2, Cindy 4, and John was 7 in my dream just as they were at this current 1957 stage in the Lloyd family story.  I was the age I am now.

Lowell was slumbering peacefully in a quiet part of the house as my contented siblings benefited from Dorothy’s tending.  In the dream I hiked many times to their house to lay the next completed book on the ground at the base of a thick root that arched out of the soil under a large spruce tree that grew to the left as I came up the gentle slope of Pollards’ driveway.  Each time I entered the house, paused for a brief visit with Dorothy, checked on my siblings and then left again to hike back out of the valley.

At the end of the dream I returned to place the final book I had written on top of the tall pile of volumes stacked neatly at the base of the spruce tree.  As I entered Pollards’ house Lowell, looking rested and relaxed, sauntered into the cheerful kitchen yawning and stretching luxuriously.  When he saw me a wide grin flashed across his face as he spoke the only words I remember from this dream, “Hi, Linda!  How are ya doin’?”

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This dream cheered, comforted and encouraged me.  I no longer feel so alone in my work, and I can visualize completing it.  This dream clarified how I see my siblings in relation to this task of telling my trauma story within Mother’s words.  I want them to be innocent, free from any burden, safe, happy, content and lovingly cared for while I busily complete these books.

When it comes to my question, “Whose book is this?”  I now know a lot more than I did yesterday because of this dream.  Ultimately this story belongs to the earth.  I will lay it down.  I will offer it.  I will let it go.  Somehow I tell this story for my siblings as well as for myself.  Something about this task is rectifying to me, as if its completion can in some way even help to heal my parents.

This is a sharing story.  The Lloyd family members were the participants in the story as it was lived – so that it can now be told.  These books are a gift to all who might learn something new and useful from reading them, even if the only lesson some readers come to understand is that adults who survived hellacious childhoods of abuse and trauma will NEVER be able to leave their childhood in the past as many uniformed and misinformed people seem to believe that we can.

I feel refreshed, restored, reinvigorated and very hopeful now that this journey is right for me, that it is good, that the books will bring benefit, even that they are a gift to all of us being brought forth through the writings of Mildred and myself.  I am dedicated.  I know how to focus.  I know how to work.  All that remains for me to concern myself with is the writing of these books.  I need fear no longer.

All life belong to the Creator.  The Creator.  The Great Mystery.  The greatest storyteller Who began all stories with, “In the beginning was the Word.”

To be the writer of a truly tragic tale who makes its story beautiful would require a great gift.  I will do my best, with gratitude, to be so worthy.

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