In trying to answer the question of how I survived that household, I need to explore who that young girl was — me — in the times when Dad was not around, in the times I could just be “me.” In a lot of respects, so much of who I became, and still am, how I navigated life both then and now, came out of her spirit.
Even in my seventh decade, I am a 9 or 10-year-old at heart. I am still all of the qualities listed below that she had. Those things got pummeled and almost beaten out of me. But somehow, the spark stayed alive within, and slowly, ever so slowly over my lifetime, I’ve fanned those flames back alive. And I would say it is now, in my seventh decade, that I have fully returned to the spirit of that kid. And no, it’s not “second childhood.”
About the only problem, though, is that while I have reclaimed my inner 10-year-old and she continues to drive all of these things in my heart, my body begs to differ with me on some days. So I am learning now to “moderate” that 10-year-old to match the 70-year-old body!
But to come back to that question of how I survived, if I had to give a short answer, aside from key people along the way, and God, it would be: “Her spirit.”
Who was she? Here is a list of those qualities she embodied, and I’ll expand on them over the next few pieces.
- Dreamer
- Aspiring Writer
- Sensitive soul
- Stubborn stick to guns/fighter
- Adventurer
- As Good As Any Boy
- The “Oldest”
- Scientist
- Artist
They are important because, just as the abuse experiences are woven into my fibers and are part of who I am, these qualities, too, are also woven into my fibers and make up who I am. And it was these qualities that stood as a bulwark against his efforts to totally dominate and destroy me. These qualities were that little kid, and my salvation.
First and foremost, I am a dreamer, and always will be. I have always looked at the world and focused on the small and overlooked, and have used my vivid imagination to “go elsewhere” when I’ve needed to. As a kid, I created stories and adventures in my head, even when I was bored — which was often. And I still have that tendency.
I recently went for a hearing test and was getting tired and bored to death listening for little beeps. It was all I could do to stay focused and not daydream. But I had to concentrate so she wouldn’t think I was deaf.
That dreamer side loves stories of adventure and myth in exotic times and places. I still would love to be the Oracle at Delphi, then live in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood. Life has so many story possibilities, and I want to live them all. And I wanted to write them. Even at 8, I wanted to be a writer and tried to create my own Nancy Drew mysteries. And I was always lovingly checking out the journaling notebooks at Woolworths.
So I’ll start with the dreamer, then cover the rest of those attributes shortly.
The Dreamer
I absolutely loved that very first Boxcar Children’s book. Just the original one. I couldn’t have cared less about the rest of the series. While Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote the first version in 1924, I discovered the 1950 version in my 1960s Catholic school classroom. The book was everything I would have loved to do…my blueprint for escape to survivalist living at 8.
It was the story of 4 children whose parents died and who feared their alleged mean grandfather would come for them. So they ran away to …they weren’t sure where. Just anywhere that would hide them from their mean grandfather. They walked at night, slept during the day, and along the way, had to figure out where to get food, escape the clutches of the mean woman at the bakery, and find a place to shelter from a storm.
What kid wouldn’t prefer to set up camp in a boxcar in the woods, using only their own creativity, initiative, and hard work? I mean, give me that dry, warm boxcar with the bed of pine needles to sleep on, enough rocks and logs to build a fireplace for cooking and to dam the river for a pool, and a cold pocket of rocks in the river to keep my bottled milk fresh, and I’m ready to sign up!
I reveled in the descriptions of them foraging for blueberries and vegetables, finding some eggs, and discovering a cache of used dishes, pots, and silverware. Add in that they could split up the work of building, sewing, and doing odd jobs for extra cash — it was perfection to my 8-year-old mind!
Even today, part of me revels in that dream, though I think now, I would want my thick mattress versus the pine-needle bed on the boxcar floor. I think some of that “survivalist” mindset I would have later, to just live in peace alone on a New Hampshire mountain top, take care of my own needs, and not ever have to deal with anyone again, had its beginnings with that book. I would sit in class and daydream about having my own boxcar life.
And if I wasn’t day-dreaming about the boxcar, I had imagined adventures of living in the woods on the riverbank with the rats and hamsters and muskrats. That one came from the mornings I stayed home from school, sick, and watched the Hap Richards children’s morning show in the early 1960s. During his program, somewhere between announcing kids’ birthdays and the list of good deeds kids did that week, he would play a segment called “Tales of the Riverbank,” a program done in the UK. Real rats and hamsters would have all kinds of adventures in their realistic “riverbank” setting, with stories about Roderick the Rat and Hammy the Hamster.
So with just those two things alone, I was in daydream heaven. In fact, whenever my mother sent me down the street to buy bread and milk, and cigarettes from Hugo’s, I would stop on the way back by the little brook across the street from his store. I would stand there for a very long time, watching the water bubbling over rocks, looking to spy fish, and imagining setting up camp on the side of that brook, just like my boxcar and river rat heroes. When I’d finally get home, my mother was like, “WHAT were you doing by the brook?” She had been watching me from our front porch to make sure I got back okay and was totally frustrated with how long I’d been standing there daydreaming.
Other times, when it was my turn in the bathroom for a bath, I would get yelled at for taking too long because I was imagining myself as Nancy Drew in the book, The Mystery of the Tolling Bell. I sloshed the bathwater back and forth, pretending I was trying to escape the bad people through the secret door in the cave, before the ocean tide flooded in.
Daydreaming was also survival in school. I remember during religion class with the nuns in 3rd or 4th grade. They were trying to inspire us to want to be good and go to heaven. For a moment, I envisioned sitting there with a harp, having to sing holy songs all day on a cloud, and immediately decided I’d rather go to hell and come back as a devil, tempting people to get into mischief.
And church. Church sermons were the worst. I liked the Gospel stories and those I’ll talk more about later, because those stories told me how to live my life and not give up. But the sermons?! To quote my Slovak grandmother — Oy yoy!!!
Sometimes, while sitting there in the pew quietly, I would look all around our church for SOMETHING to lose myself in. I stared at the ornate walls, the many statues, and then would spot the medieval-looking lights high above. And THOSE were my escape.
I envisioned them as spaceships I could climb into, rev up, and fly around the church, dive-bombing some of the grumpy old silver-haired ladies up front. Just to annoy them.
At night, after a particularly bad day with Dad, I couldn’t wait to go to bed. Once finally free of him and his rage, I would dive under the covers and either read a book by flashlight, or imagine myself in all kinds of adventures…anything, anywhere, just so long as I was mentally “not home.”
Even our garage and the weeded hillside behind it, near the garbage cans, provided me with imaginary adventures. There were trails through the bushes that only I could see, and I would burrow through them on a quest for “something.” To add a touch of the mystical, the Milkweed bushes there were infinitely fascinating to me because if you pinched them with your fingernail, white sap oozed out — like milk! Even though I knew it wasn’t.
The inside of the garage with the old TV sets that one of my uncles stored there from his TV repair business, as well as the scary attic above, were all fodder for my dreams. The TV sets were scattered on the concrete floor when you walked in there, along with some tool cabinets along the right-hand wall. In the back was a staircase leading to a locked trap door to the attic
The TV sets were a total playground, with the dials being control panels on planes and space ships. Given the variety of sets and dials, I kept busy for hours. The attic, though, was, in my mind, the ultimate in danger and mystery!
The open wooden stairs in the back led up to a flat trap door that was always locked. You needed a key to get in, and then you had to lift up the trap door to enter the attic. I would climb the stairs, scary in its own right because there was no railing on the staircase, and huddle up against the trap door. With my face flat against the floorboards, I would strain my eyes to peek into the dim space. A fertile imagination conjured up all kinds of monsters and villains. It was nothing that exotic in real life.
A local liquor salesman rented the space from my grandfather and stored all his marketing materials up there. Whenever he was cleaning things out, he would give us billboards of various whiskeys and beers to play with. One summer, he gave us a 3-foot-tall Tia Maria coffee liqueur, plastic bank. I was never quite sure what Tia Maria was, but I loved the bank.
All of this early daydreaming set the stage for the writer to emerge years later. But more than just forming the future writer, the daydreaming was my salvation against bad times. During “my times” alone, I could live in a world of fun, adventure, danger, and victory, all within my own mind. And that was the “respite” that kept me going during the bad times.
Next, “You’re too sensitive.”
Tags: books, dreams, life, mental-health, writing
Soul Mosaic 
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