++++++++++++++++

(This letter also posted:  *1963 – September 4 – Letter from dad to mother)

++++++++++++++++

Hang onto your hat, the top’s down and we’re going for a ride……

++++++++++++++++

This letter is mother’s (to me, shocking) response to dad’s long (to me, thoughtful and honest) letter of —*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico.   Here is an excellent opportunity to look at the pitiful and destructive dynamics in my parents’  relationship.  This is a rare letter because in it she is honest about how she felt both about her mother and my father — and neither honesty nor the truth was my mother’s strong suit in these hundreds of letters of hers I am transcribing.

This letter shows the kind of ‘switching’ that my mother would do, and shows how, even on pieces of paper with a pen as a weapon she would work herself up into a rage filled frenzy.  The best thing for us children would have been — a long time prior to when this letter was written — for our parents to have chosen a place for us to live in so we could get on with some semblance of growing up while having our needs met.

We were growing up anyway.  *1963 – Trip to Santa Fe – Here at Grand Canyon – mom and kids It was not OUR choice for five of us plus my mother to run over two thousand miles away from my father, or to be jammed into a tiny motel room in a strange town, to start school late in the year, to have no certainty about what was going to happen next in our lives.  And as much as any of us children might have loved the homestead, it was not our biggest need to have ourselves dragged back there as pawns in my mother’s sick, distorted ‘mind games’ with my father.

++++

Another factor that is of course not mentioned in these letters flying back and forth between my parents is the fact that we had lost what might as well have been another member of our family — the log house.  It had been sold.  In order for massive ‘trauma drama’ to be enacted within a family, there must be a stage and a setting.  The dynamics of my mother’s chaos worked prior to this time with three main settings:  the log house in Eagle River, the homestead, and the Panoramic View Apartments in Anchorage.  She had lost the log house, and that fact — like a child growing up and leaving the family — changed how mother’s, and hence our drama was to play itself out after this time.

(For background on the truth of mother’s actions during the year prior to the time this letter was written in 1963, read particularly her late summer, fall and winter letters here: *1962 – MOTHER’S LETTERS and the letters *1963 – Mother’s Letters written prior to our leaving Alaska in August of 1963)

In this September 6, 1963 letter she tells dad:

“I don’t mind if we don’t live there this winter as it isn’t our fault but I’m not the one for you if you feel we should buy a house.  I can’t return under such circumstances.  I simply can’t.  I know I’ll yell, scream and fuss again and I won’t….Bill if we don’t live on the homestead I don’t want to live in Alaska with you.”

It seems clear to me from letters months and years prior to this that it has always been mother who orchestrated the moves off the mountain and  Dad simply obliged her.

From my point of view, certainly toward the second half of this letter, mother is writing ‘crazy-talk’!  She tells him,

“But I don’t, and won’t deliver ultimatums.  You must feel it’s right.  I can’t build my life or our children’s lives elsewhere and if I live there I must depend on you to build our home and work side by side….I’m convinced – always have been – and you’re not!!”

++++++++++++++++

Please follow this link to read

*1963 – September 6 – Mother’s Wicked Response to Father From Santa Fe

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In a letter September 5, 1963 she stated about the opposite of her letter 1 day later:

“You’ll know what you want to do after your trip – live there now or next summer.  I don’t care.

I want you – I love you – and will work out our problems together.

I am absolutely lost without you!!

Write soon and often.  Your ever loving wife, Mildred -”

++++++++++++++++