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

What follows is taken from a letter I just wrote to a friend.  We have established an amazing reconnection after more than 40 years without contact, having found one another through the book Dorothy wrote which I read last summer during my travels:  Eight Stars of Gold: Notes from a Mid-century Alaska Homestead Journal by Dorothy Pollard Price

Dorothy, her husband and two sons were our neighbors whose homestead was below ours at the foot of the mountain.  This letter is about a memory I have of something that happened one day on their property when I was a little girl.

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

Dear Dorothy,

This just crossed my mind — again.  I was thinking that I don’t remember anybody from my childhood while my sister, Cindy can remember everyone.  I think I mentioned this before.

But I do have this strange memory.

Remember when there was a Bible Camp by your place when we first went back there — maybe spring of 1959?  [Way back in the valley, down a narrow, rough jeep trail]

I would have been 7 — I remember some about the camp.  I remember sitting on the ground at the edge of the road — maybe your driveway — next to your son, J.   [he was my age].  Our legs were hanging over the dirt bank; I remember sitting there with him, my palms flat on the ground on either side of me, swinging my legs and kicking my heels against the earthen bank.  We were talking.  I think I was just feeling like a kid at the moment

Not allowed.  Mother saw me and came and got me, yanked me up and dragged me away by my arm, embarrassed me in front of J.

I got in lots of trouble, and I didn’t understand any of it.  She said I was boy crazy.  She was really making sexual accusations I of course DID NOT understand — I never understood why she was so angry with me all the time.

++++

This memory is tied to an earlier one when we first moved to Alaska and lived in the log house — I had just turned 6 there.  One of the V. boys, the one about my age, crossed the highway and came down our driveway.  I remember it had rained.  There were golden leaves wet on the damp ground.  Everything smelled so wonderful.  The rain had brought skinny earthworms up and they lay mostly lifeless on the driveway’s mud.  Many had drowned in puddles.

I was standing there looking at them and thinking (I’d never seen worms like that in Los Angeles before) that they looked like broken rubber bands — thinking of my grandma because for some reason she always picked up rubber bands when she saw them on the pavement and in the gutters where people threw them away after they took them off their rolled newspapers.  Grandma always put them around her left wrist, often she’d have a whole bunch of them there.  I missed my grandma.

Whichever of the boys it was told me he would give me a nickel if I let him see my belly button.  So I pulled down the waistband of my white pedal pushers just far enough to show him.  He gave me the nickel and went home.  I was going back to watching those gray worms and thinking about my grandma.

But my mother opened the front door of the house and screamed for me, “LINDA!  LINDA!  GET IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

I knew from her voice she was very mad at me.  I had no idea why.   I went back into the house and all hell broke lose.  Mother said she had watched me from the window pull my pants all the way down in front of this boy.  I didn’t.  I tried to tell her what had happened, that he had asked to see my belly button and given me a nickle.  She told me I was lying, that it was my idea.

NOTHING I could do or say convinced her otherwise!  She just got madder and madder at me because I had done this horrible thing AND I was lying.  She knew what she had seen with her very own eyes!  Crazy making.  Insane crazy making — and the violence and brutality that went with this……so terrible……

This incident was brought up again, all over again that Bible Camp day.  Both ‘crimes’ were added to my mother’s abuse litany — and brought up over and over again (along with hundreds of others) every time she beat me again and again throughout the years of my childhood.

++++

There was never anyone, not one single person that acted as a ‘reality check’ person for me in my childhood.  I was so abused — and I didn’t understand.  I did not understand.

It started when I was born, had been going on long before we moved to Alaska.

I think it bothers me I can’t write more about the abuse.  Not on my blog, not for a book.  There are a few memories I can get close to, and thousands I cannot.

++++

Not at all sure why I wanted to write this to you, Dorothy.  I don’t want to cause you sadness.  I guess when you mentioned my not seeing F. [her other son] when I was in Alaska this summer — I don’t remember him.  I don’t remember anyone.  I should be able to.  So much, so very much of ME, of my childhood, was robbed from me — Linda suffered.  Linda was always suffering.

Gotta go — obviously — not easy to say these things —  Just that those few brief moments of sitting there with J.  are among the ONLY moments of my childhood when I felt like a child — or made the mistake of feeling free to be a child.

I guess that is part of what’s so important about the Chocolate Lily memory — mother had no way to take that away from me.  She wasn’t there.  She never knew it happened.  She could not interfere with any part of that experience.  She couldn’t steal it, pervert it, distort it, rob me of it, contaminate it — it has remained simple and pure and good and so important to me for my entire life!!!

++++

Thanks, Dorothy, for reading this, and for having such a wonderful heart!  love, always, Linda

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

I am also reminded of a comment I wanted to make about the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) research and the interpretation of their findings.  Not only were people without HMO insurance not included in their initial ACE studies, there is also no room in their studies for talking about the depth of horror child abuse can create within the broad categories they are using to distinguish between TYPES of abuse.  They are measuring MULTIPLE trauma sources, not degree, intensity of abuse, chronicity, duration, age of onset, etc.

They are also not assessing the presence or absence of secure attachment figures in an abused child’s life OTHER THAN THE ABUSER, which is, in my thinking, the single most important resiliency factor that mitigates the impact of child abuse on a child’s development and lifelong degree of well-being.

I also know from my own experience that I was 30 years old before I had a clue I had been abused at all.  When research on child abuse is based on self-report, this has to be taken into consideration.  How many people are like I was until age 30 when I sought therapy, having no frame of reference about what is normal and ordinary for a childhood, and what is horrendous and despicably torturous abuse?

The researchers need to add a description of what constitutes some infant and child abuse scenarios along with their questionnaires — something I doubt the CDC has ever thought about.  After 18 years of suffering from insane violence and cruel abuse, I DID NOT UNDERSTAND that I had been abused!!  No clue.  Not a clue!  Not one single clue!

I had a trauma-centered body, a trauma-centered brain, a trauma-centered mind — and no self to be aware with.  Hard to believe?  What happened to me was absolutely, completely normal in my world.  I had been born to believe I got what I deserved and I deserved what I got.  Simple as that.

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