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Life can initiate huge changes in people’s lives without giving as much warning as the earth gets before a lightning bolt slams into it bringing life-sustaining nitrogen to the soil.  While it would be traumatic for a human to be so bolted, the earth never winces.  I have had the equivalent of a lightning bolt hit me in my life and I never saw it coming.

Or did I?

I find myself increasingly using the term Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) to describe HOW I am in my body in the world.  Because so few “professionals” even recognize this disorder passing through childhood and into and through adulthood for survivors of severe early abuse, neglect and trauma I find myself tempted to throw “insecure” into the mix making this term as it applies to me into Reactive Insecure Attachment Disorder or RIAD.  But for my purposes today I will stick simply to RAD.

I did not anticipate that when my older brother came to visit me on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 and left on Tuesday, March 5th that my life would blow up in my face.  Now I know all the signs and clues were in place within me for this internal storm I am now in the midst of to hit me in exactly the way that they did.  Someone more astute than I have been would have predicted that what did happen would have happened. 

If I didn’t suffer from RAD nothing about me in my life would be as things are.  That other ME would have read the tea leaves in the cup of personal significance and meaning and would have been proactively prepared rather than reactively triggered by recent events as they have tumbled over me.  But, no.  Here I am in the center of my own reactive storm whose resolution is going to tax every possible inner and outer resource available to me — and then a whole lot more.

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I first arrived in Fargo, North Dakota in December 1971 to visit a friend who had returned home.  I had met her in San Diego in September 1970 right after my 19th birthday.  It would take several riotous, complicated chapters of a book yet to be written to describe all I had lived through between those two dates I just mentioned.  Oh, what a troubled life I had lived already by the time I reached the flat shores of the long gone Ice Age Lake Agassiz that bosoms Fargo.

I had experienced nothing in my life up until that point that had not been an ongoing reaction to trauma from the moment I was born.  In June 1972 I moved with my 18-month-old daughter to Fargo and began yet another long series of trauma-based reactivity patterns that should have left me broken into millions of incomprehensible pieces of a human being.

But, no.  I endure, survived and reacted through a divorce, more relocations, another marriage, birth of two more children, another divorce and move after move after move as one rotten boat I climbed into with my children after another fell apart and sunk leaving me (and my children) paddling for the next available shore.

In this nutshell movie-trailer account of RAD-me in my life I arrived down here with my 8th grader son in the gorgeous high desert area of southeastern Arizona in November 1999.  I still had upheavals and difficult changes to make it through.  In March 2004 my youngest left home for the Air Force leaving me alone at 52 for the first time since I was pregnant at 18.

It is this ALONE part that loops around and plugs itself into my brother’s recent visit and what has happened to me since his leaving.  At 7:00 pm last Saturday I snubbed out my cigarette intending that it be my last.  After 20 smokeless hours I began to cry.  When that kind of pain is triggered in me, by RAD takes over and my crying does not stop.  I know myself well enough not to fool myself into thinking those kinds of tears are temporary or passing.  By 4:00 pm yesterday I was smoking again.

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I have lived continuously in this area — content — and in this house — content — for the longest span of time in my entire 62-year life.  Yesterday the grand shock hit me that in the terrible sadness of my terrible lonely aloneness I am no doubt going to have to leave here and return yet again to Forsaken Fargo. (Oh do “natives” arise in defense at those words!)

My two daughters and my two grandbabies are there.  I am here, 1700 miles away.  They are not moving no matter how hard the frigid winter winds blow.

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If the building blocks (as I see things) of a non-trauma built person’s life get knocked down, if such an ordinary person’s dominoes begin to tumble, they could say, “Oh, no!”  True, everyone’s life has tough spots — for some, unbelievably tough spots!

If this happens to a RAD person something additional happens.  In our reactivity the falling blocks and dominoes are likely to disappear.  By definition we (I) do not have an internal safe and secure response system that reacts to stress, distress and trauma in ordinary ways that might allow for hope of a smooth ability to put the pieces of life back together again.  Repairing ourselves and our lives can be a most difficult process.

If I say to an ordinary person, “Sometimes life can be hard,” everyone agrees.  But having a body-brain-mind-self built and changed by responses to severe early trauma exposure gives survivors additional levels of difficulty in coping with tough changes that non-trauma-built people will (fortunately for them) never begin to comprehend.

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I have made a true home for myself here not only for the first time in my life — but significantly for the ONLY time in my life.  I mesh perfectly with the geography, with the climate and with the peaceful quiet tone and pace of this place.  I have found and built upon a niche. 

But the cold, hard, harsh truth is I cannot endure here being this ALONE.  If there was any possible resolution for this problem I would have found it.  I would NEVER choose to leave here if I didn’t personally have to.  I am a person with a most critical unmet need for ongoing quality relationship based on deep love that cannot be fulfilled in this location.

In all fairness I own the fact that I hate and detest Fargo.  I reserve that word hate only for use where it applies for me in powerful ways.  I hate the Siberian winters.  I hate cold and frigid darkness.  I am a mountain woman.  I hate flat land.  REALLY flat land!  I hate cities and city living.  I hate being confined within buildings, trapped in a cage.

I have reached the point of being nearly crushed in my unsolvable paradox.  Mine is a dilemma literally built of love and hate.  I have no delusions that anything more minor is at play or at work inside of me at this moment.

Having my brother come and go smashed into oblivion any more hope that I can find or create any solution to meet the deepest needs of my heart while living here.  I have known for a long time that if grandbabies appeared in my family that something drastic would change for me in my life.  My oldest grandson is turning 3 today.  I am not there to share that party in any way.

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I have pondered for years what call of destiny would have transported an Alaskan mountain wilderness girl to the barren-beyond-words (from my perspective) region of the northern prairie.  Divine wisdom?  Punishment?

There must be a point where reactivity transforms into equitable adjustment to the changes of life, or we could not survive with any quality of life or experience of well-being, let alone of joy.  We can call this “making peace” with something (or someone).  This process can be difficult.  It often is.

Returning to the place of Fargo will send me walking in alien ways upon the shadowy footprints of my so-troubled younger self 40 years ago.  There is a level (an opportunity?) for me to make peace with myself in my return to that place.  I have to dive into the deepest regions of my soul to follow into the future what feels like a blessed and a cursed decision.  I cannot imagine leaving here and not grieving with a homesickness very similar to what I still feel for Alaska.

I have never grieved for Fargo!  I do grieve for my loved ones.

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I do not live in an immortal body.  My soul knows better than to invest my true attachments to material aspects of my existence — and that includes mountains and warm climate.  The tests for my soul are meant to grow my spiritual qualities.  I wish I could say, “Oh Great!”  And mean it!

Perhaps it is exactly this text of my soul that is so narrowing my options.  To be a close part of my daughters’ and of my grandsons’ lives is a matter of spiritual significance to me.  I am related to and connected with my family through our souls for eternity.

Sooner or later I am destined to leave heat and cold, sunshine and darkness, flat land and rugged terrain behind me.  Sooner or later I will leave all this material existence including my body to then live in a world where only those assets of my character as I have chosen pathways and actions that positively impact the growth of my soul will come with me.  I cannot alter these forces.

Where my soul calls I will go.  I know that.  I am scared! 

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This blog isn’t dedicated to the stopping of the storms caused by all traumas.  It is specifically dedicated to finding ways to Stop the Storm of traumas caused by adults passing their own unresolved traumas down to their offspring.  I believe this is a reachable goal, one that requires the involvement of all people within a society as they come to recognize that what happens in the lives of infants and children impacts the course of physiological development in critically important ways. 

Most of these changes are permanent and cannot be reversed.  They cause complications and difficulties that early trauma survivors will suffer from for the rest of their lives.  These changes were – and are – preventable.

If America wishes to be remembered as a nation of plenty that squandered its offspring to cause the disintegration of their society from the inside out, we are well on the way to recognizing our most negative potential.  But, then, we are a nation that founded itself on lies told to and genocide committed against the indigenous people who lived here to begin with.  Perhaps we have never been a nation with a heart — but rather have been a nation with a ridiculous ego.

As the links here indicate

WE the U.S. and the WORLD

America is sustaining, and even gaining, global negative status when it comes to our lack of regard for our offspring.  Are we capable of national compassion and common sense?

In the meantime, this blog makes a point of discussing the other side of the “perfect American nation” mythology.  There are troubles in pretend fantasy land.  We could address and rectify the conditions that allow terrorism into the lives of our offspring.  Yes, we could.  Are we?  Will we?

Why on earth NOT?

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Why do I question my need to give, to share, to not be alone, to contribute to the whole?  I wonder if I have a biological mandate to be a productive helper.  My abuse-trauma history has caught up with me.  While I don’t like to be alone my body needs me to be alone much if not most if not nearly all of the time.

I don’t believe the foundation of American culture is all that healthy, based as it is on the competitive struggle for existence.  This culture turns a blind eye to suffering in many significant ways.  It allows parents (and others) to harm children.  It has not bothered to create an adequate system to guarantee safe passage for all out of their early years of life. 

When people tell me that children are better off being left in their abusive homes because entry into the foster care system “is worse” I question the sanity of any culture that has created and sustains such an unsafe and grim reality.

I find no way to wake each day (in my trauma-altered condition) knowing that I can spend my life doing anything that truly makes a difference.  My “loneliness” is therefore tied not only into the competitive struggle for existence that never helped me or my siblings when we were in our horrible home of origin, but is also tied into the fact that I don’t know how to find a way to enter this same system now in any productive way that I can tolerate.

I am never satisfied by passing time — or rather by filling time — with pursuits that seem meaningless to me.  I seem to lack the requisite “selfish gene” that appears to me (as a virtual outsider to mainstream American culture) to be satisfying to nearly everyone else I encounter.

Being a mother of dependent children for 35 years evidently satisfied my deep, deep desire to contribute to the betterment of others.  My children grew up and now live a long ways from me.  They are independent and doing fine.  But living another life now alone and single does not suit my nature in important ways.

But then the way my body processes information, I would need a very orderly, kind and peaceful environment “out there.”  A sharing and caring environment.  A noncompetitive place — one I cannot find.

I think perhaps I have ancient genetic memory of tribal shared life.  Perhaps those genes were activated by the supreme isolation, abuse and trauma of my childhood.  Maybe those genes screamed for help from a social network of caring others.  I needed help.  There is no possible way to deny that fact.

I needed MY PEOPLE!  My people in the larger sense.  A people who would have been invested in my well-being and in the well-being of my siblings.  We desperately needed to be cared about, cared for, rescued, saved and cherished.  We needed to be noticed in our need.  We needed a community of caring others.

In our culture we are so often separated and divided, enclosed in individual houses, struggling in a competitive world to survive, not in one built of, by and for cooperation.  I often feel homesick for a different world that I am not sure even exists.

I do little things.  I am starting little rose plants from my climbers that can be propagated to give to a woman who comes to sell little plants at the farmers’ market faithfully every Saturday.  I grew jalapeno peppers last summer and made gourmet pickled relish from them that I donated to the booth that raises money to run the market itself.  I can give fresh eggs to a neighbor, bake cupcakes to leave off at the homeless shelter.  I can sew things, here at home, alone, to give to whom?

I don’t have the internal resources needed to volunteer or get involved unless I could find the most special situation that met my needs — my disabilities.  This saddens me.  All I can do is write, it seems.  I think of all this as I remain completely stalled in my book writing process.  I have always hoped those books could offer something of use to the greater good.

It is cloudy, rainy, very windy.  Stormy and gloomy outside.  The earth is being prepared for spring.  For new growth and life.  Nature is by nature productive and giving as is the earth itself.  Why do I question my own desire, my need to be a part of that kind of life?  It matters to me that my life matters, not in competitive ways but rather in cooperative ones.  My challenge is to find ways to make that happen.

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+LIFE. WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT?

March 4, 2013

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While I am not yet ready to return to my book writing I am prepared to turn in that direction.  In my dreams last night which I do not clearly remember I “was shown” that my process of writing for the book is not unlike the growth of a tree.  After watching the horrible experience my older brother had when he was here and I asked if he might offer some of his memories of his childhood with me for this series of books I have grown to understand more how difficult this process is for me.  Yet I am motivated and determined to write this story to the best of my ability.  My siblings do not share that mission — and why would they be?  We are each different people with differing lives.

When I write the really hard stuff I cannot force myself to reread what I write.  There seems to be a powerful force of nature that prevents me from editing my own work.  This is the job of my daughter.

In my dream my sleep thinking showed me that each word I write for my books is like a living cell in a growing tree.  Not one of them can be changed, rearranged or removed once they have grown into the story.  There is something else about when the branches will poke themselves out in all directions and when the bark will form on the tree of my writings.  I will know more what that is all about later on, I suppose.

This means to me that I have to inwardly be facing in the exactly correct direction when I write words that belong to my story.  They are fixed in place within the story once written, and then I move on as the story (tree) grows.  I might not LIKE the way this process takes place, but this IS the way my book writing happens, which makes my preparation for return to the writing an extremely important part of this writing process.

I guess I could name my writing style as the “flow and grow” method of telling my story.  As with so many aspects of who and how I am in the world I know when something feels RIGHT and when it does not.  Writing RIGHT lets words fall off my fingertips if I am using a keyboard or off the tip of my pen if I am writing first on paper.  There is a pace to this, and if my mind feels impatient that I can’t keep up with thoughts, I am not correctly in line with the story.

Writing seems to have its own pace.  Different kinds of writing have different kinds of paces.  This is part of the reason why this blog is so helpful for me.  It can receive the overflow of my thoughts so that the other book writing channel can hold within it only those words that belong to that tree.

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Last evening I read the notes I took down on paper while speaking with my mother’s longest-term friend to my daughter who structured them into “something else.”  That March 6, 2013 spontaneous interview was the 4th time this woman has expressed her impressions and memories of Mildred.  Each time Joe Anne reads more of Mildred’s letters her comprehension about the severity of Mildred’s mental illness readjusts all Joe Anne experienced in her “odd friendship” (as she refers to it) with Mildred that spanned the years from early August 1957 to Mildred’s death in January 2003.

This is a tough road for Joe Anne to be taking.  Over and over again, as if speaking within a very private place within herself, Joe Anne said, “You poor children.  You poor, poor children.”  Is Joe Anne looking back and wondering if there was anything that she and her husband could have done to help us?  Is she going to eventually be able to tell me what she thinks might have helped her to do that?

I left home October 3, 1969.  Many of Joe Anne’s views of Mildred’s behavior as her Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) controlled her life, came from those years after I was no longer a part of Mother’s life.  I am left this morning as I go through my process of preparing to return to the book writing coming to understand that more than ANYTHING else — centrally and primarily these books are about the tree of BPD. 

Everything we six children experienced during our childhoods with Mildred as our Mother was influenced by that terrible disease.  I also think about a tree image in my mind today “as if” all six of us were little trees growing under the arching canopy of Mildred as she and her life had been made toxic by the way her brain had been changed as BPD took over her — as surely as cancer consumes cells of the body.

The little Lloyd forest image allows me to right myself in relation to my siblings who each of course would have their own story to tell about “she who cannot be named,” as my oldest brother calls Mother.  I can only write my own “take” on the overall, bigger story.  I might receive input from my youngest sister who is the only one of my five siblings who has offered to be somehow involved in this writing.

In following my tree-forest image I can say that Mother had a single “bad” tree forest, me.  She had a five tree “good” forest of my siblings.  Where the tree of Father would be placed in this image I don’t know — and at the moment I don’t care. 

In fact, at this moment I don’t care about any of it.  This is a gray rainy day in the high desert as moisture feeds the earth.  I hear drops tapping on my metal roof.  My concern now is to deliver a dozen fresh eggs to my friend as I head off to the laundromat.  I will bring along my spiral notebook and collection of ink pens – just in case….

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A fellow explorer has discovered this blog and I am thrilled by her arrival.  In Gertrude’s words I am finding new ways to name for myself how I experience my own life as a severe early abuse and trauma survivor.  It is through the sharing of our experience that all of us are learning a new language that lets us reflect upon our unique journeys as they share characteristics most of us have felt so alone with because while we understand that we don’t experience our ongoing existence in ordinary ways we have so few people to share how our life feels to us.

Instead of sending our own voice out into what can feel to be an empty void we are increasingly hearing our reality flowing back to us in the voices of wise and informed others.

You will find Gertrude’s voice in comments listed to the right side of the home page of the blog.  The ones I am referring to in this post can be found at the end of this March 6, 2013 post: +BOOK WRITING: DAMN SICK OF CARING

I was captivated this morning by her combination of words, “triggered into the traumstate.”  Gertrude described my reality in those words.  I know what she is saying.  At age 62 I finally understand how WHO I am continuously lives in that “traumastate.”

Everything I experience is filtered through that state in one way or another one.  I live in a body formed in, by and for that state.  Early and continuing trauma built my body (with me in it) to withstand repeated, continued and horrendous insane abusive attacks by my mentally ill psychotic mother.  My body was sculpted by trauma so profound and pervasive that the act of being alive was (and still often is) a trauma trigger.

Before I sat down at my computer this morning to open my email and find Gertrude’s (and other) blog comments waiting there I had walked outdoors into the glorious warmth of high desert Arizona sunshine only to encounter sadness at that so-familiar verge of tears.  My eyes fell on the spot on one of my garden benches where for a week my brother sat to join me for morning coffee.

He is gone.  He no longer is here with me.  But still I can so nearly see him with me and feel his presence that I feel stuck in a present experience of myself in my life that includes my brother being BOTH physically here at the same time he is obviously not here.

Gertrude gave me new words to comprehend even this brief overlap in my experience.  I am always subject to a “traumastate” perception of the passage of time.  I do not remember myself in my life in ordinary ways.  I remember rationally and logically that time moves forward as it continuously changes the visible “face” of my life.  Yet in my heart where I experience myself in the world my body operates on a level of what I can only name as being “simultaneous” time. 

My memory processes include the past in my present as if my life is “concurrent.”  More than one thing happens at the same time, often exactly because I have been hyper- “triggered into a traumastate” by events that are exceptionally significant to me.

I live alone.  Every family member I love lives well over a thousand miles away from me.  When one of them comes to visit me suddenly my life takes on a cast of increased significance that makes every moment we are together gigantic in meaning, value and importance.  Compared to my usual life and its passage of time, attachment-companionship-time is a wide universe while “usual” fits into a nutshell.

Any such comings — which never happen sooner than a year apart — are triggers from my “traumastate” to go into high gear.  This state does not allow for easy transition back to my “usual” experience of ongoing life.

While in a heightened “traumastate” with its heightened sense of overlapping, concurrent, simultaneous passage of time, I am especially set up to feel “disorganized” and “disoriented.”  At these times, in this state, the sensation of “depersonalization” and of “derealization” leaves me swimming in a sea without visible shores where the sense of the ordinary passage of time no longer exists.  I wait for its return at the same time I know I am simply suffering from being overwhelmed by TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

That condition is how I understand living in a trauma-altered body.  I know where these complications came from for me.  As I lived my own ongoing life from birth forward to age 18 when I left home I was continually interrupted by the violent, overwhelming attacks on me by Mother.  I was forced to let go of my own self in my own life to cope with and endure these insane attacks which could often last a long, long time.

I was therefore forced to endure the experience of living two lives at the same time as they both took place as time moved with me forward.  I had all of my attention diverted from my own self experiencing my own life as I was repeatedly forced to endure Mother’s version of life as she attacked me.

Because her abuse was psychotic there was no possible way I could incorporate the overwhelming information contained in HER “traumastate” into my own experience of being alive.

“Dissociation” is a trite word to use in description of this kind of life — especially during critical early stages of infant-child body-brain development.  My memory systems were permanently altered.  I remember myself in my life differently, but when there is no great input coming in during “ordinary” times the changes in these memory processes do not cause me signficant troubles.

Thanks to the concept Gertrude has so succinctly, accurately and helpfully given a name to I can move forward through my life from this point forward with “this issue settled.”  Yes, this “traumastate” comes from “malevolent-world” experience.  But those two terms are not interchangeable.

There is no malevolency present in my sun-filled garden this morning, nor was there any present in my brother’s visit or in his return home (which my body translates into his disappearance).  What IS present is this “traumastate” that I live in all of the time in this body as it has at present been hyper-triggered by my built-in Reactive Attachment Disorder.

I am reacting to powerful forces in my body — as trauma built it.  How do I establish some sense of peaceful calm?  I am a native to the universe of the “traumastate.”  I am not an immigrant into it nor am I a tourist passing through its terrain.  “Traumastate” geography is my home in my body in my lifetime.  Yet now that I have Gertrude’s name for this I am better equipped to creatively and constructively work within my “traumastate” world.

Like I have done with my physical home and my garden (see: LINDA’S ADOBE PEACE GARDEN) I can look around for tools to use to improve my inner world to make it more beautiful, to make it better suit me, to give myself ways to reframe how I feel and how I live.

Thank you, Gertrude, for this gift!

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I am ready for something uplifting.  A few posts ago I mentioned a book I am reading:

Walking With Loneliness by Paula Ripple (1995) Ava Maria Press

There’s no money being made from this blog, so for educational purposes only I am going to copy here a story Ripple wrote in her chapter IV, Noticing Life.  Times have changed since this was written.  I am not sure that even parents who are sending young children on a plane who are not flying themselves can get through security let alone visit with the child once it has boarded.  But here is Ripple’s very nice story:

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Rhonda, the little balloon lady

“I was flying from a religious education congress in Spokane to Minneapolis.  When I got on the plane, sitting in the front row of the nonsmoking section and crying very hard was a little girl.  Kneeling beside her, and clearly not flying with her, was a young man.  With tears streaming down his face, he hugged the little girl as the cabin attendant announced that all visitors had to leave the plane.  I have seen this in so many airports in the country:  “child visitation” they call it.

“I was sitting in the row behind the little girl, and I reached to touch her shoulder and ask her if she wanted to come and sit with me.  As she turned her tear-stained face upward, she was crying too hard to speak and could only shake her head to say “yes.”

“As I took her by the hand I asked her if she wanted to sit in the center seat or by the window.  She was very clear about wanting to be near the window.  As the plane was being pushed back from the jetway, she was crying ever so quietly, looking at the gate area in the airport and saying, in a barely audible voice, “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.”  As she spoke these words, her left hand was cupped around her face.  She was barely moving the fingers on her right hand as she waved good-bye to her daddy.

“This little child was bearing her pain with such dignity.  She was so protective of her daddy and told me later that she had tried hard not to cry because she knew it was difficult for him to leave her.

“During the first hour of the flight my little friend told me that she was almost five and that her name was Rhonda.  She reviewed, through her stories, all of the ways in which the divorce experience affects children.  She spoke of her divorce, never of her parents’ divorce; she believed that the divorce was her fault because she had been naughty; she knew that both her daddy and mommy were hurting and so she didn’t want them to know how she felt.  She also believed that, if she was good, the divorce might not happen.  Such large problems for one so small.  Such inner burdens for which there was no present relief for her.

“Then she turned to me, asked to borrow a Kleenex and dried her tears, as if to suggest that she wanted to think about something else now.  She asked me if I wanted to see the presents her daddy and her grandfather had given her.  She showed me a set of felt-tip markers and a coloring book that had some blank pages for “Rhonda originals.”  I asked her if she would make a picture for me.  She asked me not to look so that the picture would be a surprise.  When it was completed, she presented a picture of a lovely clown.  When I asked her how she knew I had a special fondness for clowns, she looked so pleased.  Then she put out her hand to take the picture again for a moment while telling me that she wanted to give her clown some balloons.  When she handed the carefully drawn picture back to me with the balloons added, every balloon was black.

“How I envied this little girl whose feelings were so clear to her.  How grateful I felt for her trust in sharing them with me.  What a paradox that picture was — the happy clown figure with the black balloons.  How much it was like her life with its sadness of separation from her father and the periodic happy space of a visit with him and her grandfather.

“As I was tucking the picture into my briefcase, the cabin attendant came to take Rhonda’s bag to the front of the plane.  Rhonda looked up, pointed a finger at her and said, “I don’t want you to take my bad.  This lady will do it,” pointing to me.  How quickly bonds form between people who share life.

“When it was nearly time for us to land in Minneapolis, Rhonda tugged on my sleeve and said to me, “I’d like my picture back, please.”  With sadness and reluctance I reached for it and as I did she must have noticed my disappointment so she quickly consoled me by saying, “I want to make another for you.”  The second clown was nearly identical with the first but this time only two of the balloons were black.  Somehow I believed it was her way of telling me that I had made her life a bit brighter that day.

“As we were leaving the plane, she had to wait for a cabin attendant to take her and I had another flight for which I was nearly a half-hour late.  She put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “You are a very nice lady.  Thank you.  Why were you so good to me?”  I hugged her and said, “You are nice, too.  I like you very much, Rhonda.”

“We said good-bye and parted.  As I walked to my concourse my mind and my heart were filled with this child who had been such a gift to me.  I felt so good about myself because, for me, it is very special to be loved by children.  I spent the entire flight to Boston thinking about the qualities that I loved and had come to admire in this young child, qualities that she had been neither embarrassed nor afraid to share.

“Rhonda was very much in touch with her feelings and she was trusting enough to share them, even with a stranger.  I wish that at any given moment I could be that clear about how I feel and wise enough to entrust it to someone who would either help me accept the black balloons or help me exchange them, one by one, for a brightly colored balloon bouquet.

“She was very good at making decisions and clear about what she wanted, whether it was where she would sit, who would carry her bag, or what she wanted to share with her father as he left her on the plane.  I wondered why I so often have difficulty in making decisions or, even more often, why I sometimes hesitate to tell someone what I have decided.

“Rhonda did not feel sorry for herself.  She spoke much more of her daddy’s pain than of her own.  She was so sensitive to my short-lived disappointment of losing the clown that she quickly offered to make another.  She who was so tiny and carried such large hurts made me realize my own ability to magnify small hurts and to let them fill all of the space inside me….

“…Rhonda somehow knew that meeting people and sharing life with them was one sure way to become happier, one sure way to see another facet of life.

“Because Rhonda liked herself she was not afraid to give others the opportunity to love her.  She needed some reassurance from me that I cared as I left her, but through the hours that we shared, it was clear that she liked herself enough to believe that I cared.

“By the time I reached Boston I had noted, in a journal that I keep, 27 qualities about Rhonda that I loved and admired.  I did this because she had reached deep into my life, and thinking of her was a way of reliving the happy time we had shared.  I did it as a reminder to myself to notice my own life a bit more and to see if I am doing as well as she did….

“I am thankful that I met Rhonda.  My “dedication to thankfulness: demands that I remain faithful to all that I learned from her about allowing others to be present by letting them into my life.”  (pages 62-66)

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I can’t tell if I’m losing ground on my book writing project or not.  I fear that I am.  I fear I will give up completely.

The woman, Joe Anne, who knew Mildred from her August 1957 arrival in Alaska until her death in 2003 just called me and talked for 1 1/2 hours about her history with my psychotic abusive Borderline Personality Disorder mother.  Joe Anne just finished reading book 4 of Mother’s writings to be published in the Mildred’s Mountain series, The Up Down Mountain Waltz.  Joe Anne had a lot to say, but I am not sure today was the day I wanted to hear things like my father very nearly killed his wife twice after I left home.  (I know the abuse done to me prevented Mother from turning on Father and then he on she until after I left home — one helluva burden for me — I was only a CHILD!)

This conversation coupled with how clear it became to me through my brother’s visit that he is so NOT PRESENT in any possible way with me in my writing work about our family leaves me at this moment having my memories of being SO ALONE with the abuse I suffered for 18 years while my siblings lived their entire different all-good life in Mother’s psychotic split world.

I felt so alone as a child because I WAS alone.  I feel so alone now with this writing because I AM alone.  Why should my siblings care?  Why should they have cared then and why should they care now?

I have one of five siblings who can tolerate even thinking about Mother.  She has told me she will talk/write something at some point down the road, but she is busy with her own life.  At least her support helps me.

I was not prepared to have this reaction to spending last week with my brother.  If I can’t get past how I feel right now what needs to be written next will never be written.  I am OK with taking a break now — but I have no way of knowing if I am headed toward abandoning my work or toward finding a new place inside of myself to return to it.  If I have lost my way I would say the timing of my brother’s visit was devastating to me.

If I become swallowed in the family denial my book writing is done for.  I am dangerously close to giving up.  I knew I needed at least one of the nine books in the editing queue to be finalized and epublished to help carry me forward in this awful work.  My daughter is too busy to give any time to this project.  This has been very, very difficult for me.  I wait.  Those books wait.  And I have always known there is a line beyond which — if I cross it — I will NEVER finish these books.

Where is my commitment and determination?  I feel as though I’ve been hit head on.  I fear I have crashed.  Yes I am strong, but without even the remotest encouragement or remotest interest, concern, compassion, support or assistance from my siblings I am not sure today that I am strong enough to write what needs yet to be said.

My siblings suffered.  We all had an insane Mother.  But as the child chosen to be the target of Mildred’s psychotic abuse my suffering so far surpasses theirs that I cannot understand why they would not WANT to help me in any way that they could.  I am deluded.  I live in an idealized world.  This one is real.

I am feeling discouraged.  Stupid for caring or trying.  Is this a low spot I am in or is this a bottom?  I am angry, feeling my siblings have turned their back on me as surely as Mildred made sure that they did while we were growing up.

Maybe I am damn sick of caring.

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This is a mere collection of thoughts.  A few words.  First, to talk about my new drums.  When my brother was here he took me to a nearby town (I can’t get to on my own given my old car and cost of gas).  There was a small music store there.  I was waiting when the door opened and bought these:

THE DRUMS

I couldn’t afford them.  I couldn’t afford not to afford them.  I have flour and yeast and a bread maker.  Lots of peanut butter and jelly.  So I turned my food budget + into drums. 

My new friends.  Their heads are loosened waiting 24 hours, resting, becoming accustomed to this altitude (about 4500 feet) and this climate.  This afternoon I will tighten them again and begin to play.

I have a Latin station on Pandora radio.  I can play that music.

Rhythm.  Sound.  Bringing the apex of heaven and the center of the earth together with those drums through my hands.  Through this body of mine.  I need this.

Trauma survivors.  We all have gifts.  We all have pure joy inside of us somewhere.

Permission.  Granting permission to let our talents and our joy come together no matter what we’ve been through.  It’s not easy, I don’t think.  With the weight of the world not far from us how do we find our own freedom?

I still have my keyboard.  I am still teaching myself to read music and to play.  But I cannot deny the damage done and the healing needed as I work rather than gamble around freely with music that way.

My mother’s raging abuse began before my ears could tell voices apart from overwhelming sound.  When I hit a note on the keyboard I do not hear that sound in ordinary ways.  Much sound actually hurts me, according to its pitch.  My brain shuts down listening to any note above middle C when I hit those keys.  Damage done to my developing brain by verbal abuse, by screaming by my mother.

Drums.  A different matter.  I finally understand that.  I know rhythm.  Mother did not damage that about me.  So at 62 I finally granted myself permission to gather into my home and into my life the tools I need to express myself this way.

I walk through my front room now and there stands these two drums.  They feel like sentinels of freedom to me.  Friends.  I lay my hands upon their heads and feel peace.  Gateway to FUN!  All by myself.

I so often feel like an exile in this world.  I need time to fly, and I found instantly that playing these drums gives me the closest feeling to flying I can probably ever have in my lifetime. 

It’s never too late to fly.  Forget the world, Linda!  At least some of the time, forget the world.  All the complications, all the difficulties of this journey.  Forget it.  Go for the rhythm.  That which joins all the world together, every tiny part of it.  Heartbeats.  Top to bottom.  Inside out.  Outside in.  All combined rather than taking it all apart into little bitty pieces.

Giving up the struggle.  Letting go.  Flying.

I began having dreams about flying when I was 9 in the 4th grade.  I flew in my dreams sometimes until I was 30.  So many years since I have flown.  Life has been WORK for me!  Work, from the time I took my first breath.  I am getting tired.  Tired of the struggle, of the battle, of this work of life.

Tired of thinking.  Tired of feeling.

Tired of asking and seeking.  Tired even of the finding.

The drums seem to be alive.  I lay my hands on them and rest them there as the drum heads are resting.  For a few more hours.  They feel like a part of my body.  Mine.  Claiming a space.  Claiming a right to pure joy.  Nothing else to it.  Just joy.

Joy without a name.  Joy of the smell of the still desert air as the crescent moon above me slides soon into the light of day.  Joy of birds waking up.  Joy of spring coming.  All joys combined together.  So big there is no room for sadness.

A sound.  Once made.  Does it live forever?

Being a part of sound, not apart FROM the world, a part of me with a part of sound sent into the cosmos — out and up and through.

I’m OK with that.  By this afternoon I can tighten the drum heads again and they will come alive and an ancient part of me will awaken with them.  One single simple word:  JOY!

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I can never, never fool myself into thinking a life with so much deep sadness built into it from child abuse from the start is easy.  There are days like today is as my brother flies home after his visit here when the sadness feels so big it’s hard to make space around it to get through the day.  This has happened to me in large part because of the stage I am at in my book writing as experiences are closer and bigger to me from my childhood than they have probably ever been since I lived through them in the first place.

I know enough now to name the largess of my current feelings as the body memories that they are.  My brother’s leaving today is triggering in resonance how both he and I felt around my age of two and his of three when our insane mother began to remove us from one another’s presence — always when she was in a psychotic state of rage at me that meant I was being hurt.

Today I realize not only was I traumatized terribly from whatever form her attacks would have taken but probably more so by the repeated loss of my brother who could not reach me — nor could I reach him — when these attacks happened. 

NOTHING in our life was right.  Nothing stable or safe.  No reason.  No sanity or predictability around our mother.  No reprieve.  No salvation.  All I had was my little brother.  I know during these attacks he suffered right along with me even though he was Mother’s adored darling all-good world child.  She hurt him as much or even more than she hurt me.  He is still hurting.

I know enough now to understand the impact of the combined, cumulative pains of the trauma especially from abuse when I was so small I had not even developed enough of a mind to use it to help myself get through what happened to me — and simultaneously to my adored and adoring big brother.  Yet we both remember and will never forget what happened to us — me with my words.  My brother without.

I do not fool myself into thinking that our shared trauma and pain isn’t present every time he and I are in one another’s presence even though he is 63 and I am 62 years old now.  I don’t choose to think about these things.  My body tells me with feelings.  Feelings that do not diminish, do not go away.

I cannot avoid knowing what my body tells me about being torn apart from my brother from the time we were very, very small and young.  Those feelings are awakened today.  There are so many levels of suffering that happen to little children when they are terrorized and abused that comes exactly from being tiny and little, helpless and vulnerable and defenseless.

It doesn’t matter how big or how old we are we are not invulnerable to the awakening of the feelings our body holds in memory for us.  They will appear at times throughout our lives.  They add themselves into our present day experience because they cannot be separated from who we are as people.

This super-sized suffering takes effort, energy, resources and attention away from what we have available to get through our days.  The added costs of coping with massive trauma from infancy and childhood can steal the joy out of our present life.  It can make what might be a difficult problem to non-trauma survivors feel nearly insurmountable to survivors. 

I cannot be awake and aware in my body without being influenced by the burden of my trauma history.  The abuse was too severe, too chronic and it lasted over 18 long years. 

I guess I could have seen this response to spending time with my brother and to his leaving coming, yet I would never have denied us this visit.  I have a belief that when I have completed all my writing I will be “better,” although I don’t even know what I mean by “better.”  More immune to the “old” feelings?  More protected from their awakenings?  More distant from them?

I cannot sugarcoat the fact that as our culture allows infant and child abuse to happen we are creating degrees of additional suffering in those who survive it that cannot be imagined by those who were not so cursed.  The very least we can do as a culture is to honor the complexities survivors face in their lives that come directly from the unbearable and inescapable suffering that was built into all of us. 

Some days call for a gentleness that ongoing life does not easily or often offer.  Such days as this one is for me are especially hard for survivors.  I am reminded of a quote I heard once although I cannot remember the source:  “Never hurt anyone, no matter whom for no matter what.”  I want to remember to practice softening and gentling of my voice and heart toward other people, and toward myself.

I triage my pain.  My oldest wound of love has been touched.  It is open, raw and weeping.  I cannot heal my brother’s pain.  I love and pray for him.  I hold him close to my heart as if he is a new robin’s egg without its shell, so full of life lived.

When people tell me, “I cannot start to cry because if I do I will never stop,” I believe them.  Still, I can tease this sorrow into the light a little more than ever before.  I let my feet move slowly, full of lead.  There is something to be learned here even about great sibling love in toddlerhood and before.

What depths of life.  What breadths.  Crashed upon the rocky shore through raging storms of terrible abuse this love did not break.  Can there be a more tender love or one more brave?

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