Priorities, “triage,” and setting up the “base camp”
For any successful team to operate, there must be an agreed-upon set of rules and priorities. And Ed and I were a team. So, during this “adult” phase, we had five priorities:
Sitting at the dining room table, I stared across the room and studied my husband’s face. He was seated at the desk in the living room, speaking on the phone. I watched every expression for a hint as to the “bottom line” of this call. The conversation seemed pleasant. The call was brief.
Hanging up the phone (Yes, this is before cell phones), Ed turned to me and said,
“Well, the job in North Carolina is ours if we want it….Do we want it?”
Never has there been more of a pregnant pause between us…not even the time I called him when I was actually pregnant….
“As you can see, I’ve been remiss in my journal writing – 21 months. That last retreat (Nov 80) really did me in, and I just wanted to tune it all out for a long time. But since then I finally got up the guts to go to another retreat…a FEW of them actually. One-day retreats at a new place — The Cenacle in Middletown…”
Looking back, what a difference a place makes…though, maybe it was a difference in the person going to the new place that mattered, too? At the very least, the fact that I sought out a new retreat center in spite of how the previous one triggered me, implies that I was willing to trying again…fertile soil just waiting for the right seeds to be planted?
Either way…this became the turning point of my life. More on this, shortly…
I was waiting for Dad to pick me up from my dorm at the main UCONN campus at Storrs. My stomach was tight, knowing that, as always, I had to go home for the weekend and back into that atmosphere.
This was my third year of college, the one I got to live on campus, like a REAL college student. It was early in the fall semester, but I was already loving it. I was rooming with a friend from high school and the branch. Her father had set our room up with bunk beds, and we had a good arrangement.
Photo by author
Also, I reveled in being surrounded by the other students, having real connections with the other girls in the dorm, and making friends. There were all different personalities and attitudes, but I was learning how to “work and play well” with them all. They even seemed to enjoy me, and one of my late-night study companions in the dining room would leave me funny notes when I fell asleep over homework. It was all so NORMAL…
Even the campus grounds were a pure joy to be in. A campus the size of a small town. Leaf-strewn walkways, farm land across from my dorm, even a campus dairy with fresh ice cream. Being on campus made home recede into a background a million miles away, and let me lock that reality into a little compartment…at least for the weekdays.
How to make this end
I realized that, somehow, as I continued my education, the whole sexual thing with Dad needed to end. And even his whole wanting to control all my time to be with him. I wasn’t sure how it would work out, but certainly, this new level of separation had to be the next step to finally bringing things with Dad to an end. After all, he couldn’t expect “it” to go on forever, right? I mean, once I finished college — and I wasn’t exactly sure how it would play out — but SOMEHOW, no longer being a student, but an actual adult, it had to stop.
My path to a future…whatever that might be, even as I didn’t yet know.
The expectation that somehow by the end of it, I would be independent, on my own, somehow no longer being abused, and just living a peaceful, “normal” life.
What else could I want?
Yes…..
My own world
The University of Connecticut, Torrington Branch, may have been only a mile away from our new home at “the Lot,” but in another way, at least for me, then, it was a world away. It was a place I could go and “stay all day” and into the evening if I wanted. Classes were not the solid schedule of high school and strict rules, but were on a schedule you set. And you were your own boss. You failed or succeeded on your own, and no one interfered with your right to that. As long as you paid your tuition.
Most of the friends I had in high school had gone away to college. But a few of my friends continued on here and there were new people from the local towns, all of us in the same boat — able to go to college only because this local branch gave us low tuition. We bonded over our mutual situations.
It was a long hallway. They all were. Our trek seemed endless as we moved from one locked ward of the mental hospital to another.
I was vaguely aware of the noise of the institution drifting in — voices…clangs from gurneys and carts being moved. The narrow walkway was framed on either side with sterile tiled walls and locked doors.
But our eyes stayed focused on that one locked door at the end of the hall. I remember someone on the other side of it peering through the small window as we approached. Words were exchanged. Then there was the clunk of locks being opened.
Closing the door behind us, the aide immediately re-locked it, then pointed us to the left. Three or four empty beds lined the wall. But in the last one, right next to the nurse’s station, was the person we’d come to see– my grandmother…
Painting by author
The impending crisis
The weeks after my grandfather’s death were difficult for my grandmother. They had been married for 46 years. Four children — one killed in a car accident, way too young. A lifetime of joys and disappointments. So it was understandable that the grief ran deep.
Oddly, though, she never spoke about my grandfather again after the funeral. Ever. That upset my mother, who tried to speak to her mom several times about both of their feelings about losing him. But Grandma went silent, as if he’d never existed.
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.
Drawings by author
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.
Drawings by author
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.
Photos by author
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.
“Yeah, I always hated cats. I’d catch them by the tail and spin them around, then throw them. Sometimes, I’d tie a cherry bomb to its tail, light it, and boy did they run when it went off!”
I couldn’t react as I listened to my father recount this story like it was just a harmless prank. To react badly wasn’t possible, or I’d be in trouble. But I was also a kid, and he was telling this like it was no big deal. He laughed. We laughed.
But inside, I was trying to wrap my head around that story. First, what was so bad about cats that he thought they deserved that? Didn’t it hurt them, especially when the cherry bomb went off?
WHY would you do that to an animal?
His confidant and co-conspirator
Right from that toddler car ride when he molested me, car rides with Dad in later years were no better. In fact, as the years went on, they became a special form of hell.
I was born in November 1955 at 11:40 pm… which maybe explains why I always like the quiet solitude of late nights and even enjoyed working second shift in the hospital lab for years. But to be honest, I was actually reborn in September 1969, at 8:10 in the morning, on a day in my freshman year at Torrington High School, in College English IA, B-building, Room 204 with teacher “TD” (as it was listed on my computer class assignment card). Never have two letters so understated the full amazingness of an individual or what she would come to mean to me, and to so many others.
TD — her students either loved her or hated her, but no one was *indifferent* to her. She had that effect.
Trigger alert – The descriptions here may upset some readers. Please proceed gently.
Who WAS Dick Phillip?
When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his novella, *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde*, he had no idea that 45 years later, his character would enter reality as my father.
Dick Phillip. Richard Phillip. Richard M. Phillip, Richard Marshall Phillip…Richie.
Who WAS Dick Phillip…and as an aside, as a kid…and an adult, I always wondered why he preferred “Dick” for a nickname. Except that in his case, it seemed to fit in more ways than one.
To me, who he was varied with his mood and his needs. Sometimes he was so warm and fun, and other times it was like I didn’t exist, or worse. Intermittent reinforcement. Alternate love with rage, with love, with cold isolation, and back to love again. Mix it up until I was so confused and convinced that somehow it was my fault, and if only I could figure out the right things to do, then it would be okay.
As for how he treated others, it just depended on what you were to him, where you stood in relation to what he wanted and needed, and who had the upper hand in the power dynamic between you.
When I started high school and was worried about succeeding in a public school after years with the nuns, his advice was:
“If you want people to like you, find out what they need or want, and give it to them. Then they’ll like you and you’ll look good.”
Even then, I thought that seemed like a cold way to treat people, and being a young teen, I ignored him. But it was his modus operandi in life because he wasn’t looking for friends. He was always about getting something out of an interaction.
If you were outside of the family and had nothing he needed, you were off his radar…except to make sure you weren’t a threat. If you were a family member, at the very least, he would put on enough charm to keep the peace and preserve any future usefulness you might have to him. If you had something he wanted or you could advance his goals, now you had his attention.
Soul Mosaic 