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I keep speaking of having to keep my feelings to myself. And that included showing no trace of any negative reactions to things he said or did. I was risking physical injury if I did that. He would come at me in a split second if I dared to make a face.
And while he “might” not react as badly to angry eyes, because that meant you were “tough,” if you dared to do an eye-roll…God help you.
The difficulty was that the further into my teens I got, the more my emotions were all over the place. That is true of the teens, even under normal circumstances. But to add shame, alienation, despair, suppressed emotions, and building rage into the mix — that was difficult.
But I wasn’t really aware of WHY I was feeling the way I did. I just FELT it. And so what registered mostly on my face was either surly defiance, but not to him. Or…despair.
The misplaced self-hate
For a long time, when I looked back at my teen self, I often viewed her with disdain and thought, “Why couldn’t she have stood up to him more?!” I was so ashamed of her and for many years, just HATED that part of myself.
Well, in going back over my life through this writing, and studying the photos and paintings, I regret that self-hatred…and how I’ve treated my younger self. Seeing what I had to live with and the mental and emotional twists he put me through, I realize how grossly unfair my self-judgment has been.
The truth is, considering how totally abusive, controlling, and manipulative he was, and what a formidable foe he truly was, my teen self did an admirable job. I stood up to him as much as I dared. And as I got older, I would hold out from giving in to him as long as I could before I couldn’t stand it anymore.
And in spite of the amount of shame I felt then, still, that teen side of me held out hope of convincing him to change, and of finding my own way in life. I really thought that if I could only get it to stop, life could be normal, finally, and I could just move on into my future. We could focus on the good things about our family, leave this shameful mistake behind, and never speak of it again. I figured that if it stopped, that would be the end of it and no repercussions. Yes, well…
Fighting back in small ways
But I give that younger part of me real kudos for keeping a spark of defiance alive in her. In keeping with the example Terry Doyle had set about doing a daily journal, I actually created one of my own, my junior year of high school. I made it to my own liking out of notebook paper, bound it with tape, and labeled it with a German title — I was studying German in school — so he wouldn’t know what it was if he found it. And I hid it so I could write openly…sort of. When I referred to him, I just said, “L+M” for “Lord and Master.”
But what really jumped out were the lines in this photo, “Never feel you are someone’s lesser…YOU ARE EVERYONE’S EQUAL!” WHERE did that feistiness come from? Even as the other pages talk about how much I felt alone, how I didn’t fit in with school friends, and felt ashamed, still…WOW, what a line that blurted out on the page. So in spite of his domination and his attempts to crush my spirit, every now and then, a spark of my true inner soul remained.
Paradise!
One of the things that really helped was that during my sophomore and junior years of high school, Dad’s job changed, and he had to be away all week. WHAT a gift.
For the first time in my life, he was out of the picture EVERY WEEK for five days straight! Such a huge block of time was like paradise. It was peaceful, no chaos, no tension.
And school itself was going well. I was expanding into advanced sciences. More history. Aced geometry, and I was even getting pretty good at German. In fact, I started making my “dream list” — things I wanted to do and places I wanted to visit in the future. I would get myself a sports car, like Terry Doyle’s. A good stereo to blast my music. Clothes. And travel – Germany. Italy. England.
A taste of my own power
Speaking of dreams that would take money, I managed to get a part-time job that year at a local pharmacy. I tended to customers, stocked shelves, and made deliveries.
Yes – that too – I had gotten my license. In fact, it was that achievement that clinched the job for me because part of it involved making deliveries to homes and convalescent facilities.
The deliveries I had to make in the job gave me a tremendous amount of driving experience in all weather and road conditions. That fueled my self-confidence and dreams of having my own car someday. And I was trusted to take the car more at home to run errands or even meet up with friends now and then. Not a lot. But still, I was having more chances to be away from him and always “available” to him.
The job also gave me a bit more spending money. I could actually buy clothes I’d not been able to before. And makeup, including that strawberry lip gloss I can still smell and taste to this day. Without him around, I could actually practice using makeup without being mocked. Little by little, I was starting to feel better about myself and build some self-esteem.
Of course, there were the usual teen “experiments” with cigarettes – easy to do since the pharmacy sold them. But I was too afraid of getting caught to ever mess with drugs. I knew the guy in the store near us sold pot, but I didn’t want anything to mess up my hopes for college, and frankly, I hated the way it smelled. And with the little money I had left from my paycheck, I preferred to buy books. To me, books outranked cigarettes or pot.
These may have been small gains of independence, but they gave me the taste of what could be POSSIBLE in my future. What an independent adult life could be like once I got through college and had a career. And once you let the genie out of the bottle and give a person a taste of freedom, there’s no stuffing the genie back inside.
Music
My “rebellion,” my desperation to break free, and to get my needs met showed up in other ways too. The ‘60s music I chose showed my visceral response to spoke to those things. Songs like “People Got To Be Free” expressed the growing force within to have more control over my own life. “You’re All I Need to Get By” spoke to the awareness that even one person, like Terry Doyle, could be enough to sustain my drive to keep growing. My desperate fight to be heard and to get what I needed in life mirrored Eric Clapton’s energy in “Layla.” And the willingness to endure the fight, climb to mountaintops, or whatever it took to free me, came through the energy of songs like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Wait a Million Years.” It wasn’t all of the lyrics that applied, just a stray line here or there, and especially the energy of the song that expressed longing, sorrow, drive, and fierce determination.
The “Gauntlet” thrown down
Even the term paper I wrote that year showed that my streak of defiance and willingness to take up a dare was still intact. That paper was the gauntlet thrown down by a male teacher with a puffed-up ego who thought he could intimidate. Like my childhood friend challenging me to outrace his football toss on my bike, this was the same irresistible taunt, and I wasn’t going to fail.
He told us to pick our book topic to write the final paper on, BUT not to use Jonathan Swift’s *Gulliver’s Travels* because that was the book he wrote his college thesis on, and he was an expert in it. Translation – none of us would ever be good enough to match his expertise. That clinched it for me. As soon as he said that, I picked it for my paper.
I researched the living hell out of it and wrote a 13-page paper with over sixty footnotes. I documented every last source and quote. When he handed it back to me, he said, “I read this paper three times trying not to give you an ‘A’, but I had to.” VICTORY! I loved it. And at least to his credit, he gave me the grade I earned.
The beginning of the end of an era
So it was a year of MUCH change for the better. Slowly over high school, the support system I’d had in the neighborhood with friends had pretty much disappeared. And the final change that would unravel the rest took place that year.
It was in the middle of the night in mid-March. A loud crash that shook the house. Jolting awake, it didn’t take long to realize it came from upstairs – my grandparents’ apartment.
Mom and I bolted up there to find my grandfather flat out on the floor. He was totally unconscious. My grandmother had his hand and was tugging at him while literally pleading, “Johnny! Get up! Johnny, get up!”
Johnny. I’d NEVER heard my grandmother call him that. I barely remember her calling him John. But Johnny. That bore an intimacy and familiarity, a love and connection that predated me by decades. Her trembling voice, begging him to get up, begging for things to be okay, shocked me.
The ambulance came. Grandpa’s sister from the third floor stood there watching. The EMTS strapped him into a gurney, then huffed and struggled to carry him down the narrow staircase.
Grandpa had had a stroke. Within three days, he would be dead. And within a couple more months, his loyal bird friend, Pretty Boy, would die, too.
And then, the problems with Grandma would begin…and things REALLY changed.
Tags: family, life, love, mental-health, writing
Soul Mosaic 
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