She was beautiful. Radiant even. I’ve always loved this photo of Mom…such a face of youthful joy beaming out from her high school yearbook page. So much might have been in store for a spirit like that.
Photo by author
And yet, by that photo she had written a single word: “Hopeless.”
My God. What a statement. It just begs for clarification…which is too late to get.
Questions race. When did she write that? And why? Was it a lonely teenage girl wondering what life held for her? Or a self-deprecating joke with friends? Maybe a young adult despairing of her prospects for love?
Or…was it later? The scribing of a scarred and disillusioned wife looking back and regretting her choice?
Years later, I struggle to reconcile the picture with that word. In fact, I literally cringe at the word, pained to think that “Hopeless” is what she felt about herself.
Yet to look back now and know what her life became, was it the word that set her up? A chilling prediction of where the path would lead?
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina
Where next?
Before continuing my path through this Citrinitas section of the book, I need to take a moment to reflect on the “WHY” of this book and “WHERE NEXT?”
As I’ve worked toward finishing this first “Bible-sized” draft of my story and my insights, I’ve also been thinking about draft # 2.
The important question about that next draft that has been percolating in the back of my mind is:
What is the best way to shape a publishable book from this full first draft, one that will deliver a useful, powerful, needed message to other survivors?
A fiction writer I follow described a story’s theme as “the truth of the main character.” I liked that. And I realized that works for memoir as well as fiction.
The bottom line is that however I shape the next draft, it needs to deliver my truth in my life…it needs to answer: What “theme” do I stand for and give the reader?
The REAL question
But there was an even bigger question that loomed over the first, one an agent, or editor, or publisher might ask: “Why another book on abuse?”
From the start of this endeavor, I knew there absolutely NEEDED to be another story for readers on this topic; I knew it in my gut. But I also knew I would need to put that “gut knowing” into the right words of a compelling argument for any editor.
It has been in reading the news about yet ANOTHER incident of sexual violence against women…human beings…this time at Cornell. It is another HORRIBLE story that thankfully was brought out ONLY BECAUSE YOUNG WOMEN on the school newspaper refused to let it drop. And in that moment, I had my first clue to answer why another book….The power of STORY. It is only in the courage of the school newspaper’s reporters to deliver this story that there is a chance for justice to happen.
Now, I am not a lawyer or police officer or forensic analyst. So I cannot help the fight for justice in those ways.
But I am a survivor. A storyteller. A person who has BEEN THERE, even if my story details are different. I am a person who has had to walk, sometimes CRAWL back to healing…and eventually, even to thriving.
I have a story of my particular path through struggles, learning, survival, and despair. I have my own story of how I held on, refused to give up my life, and eventually reclaimed it to the best of my ability.
When I looked again at the question: “WHY ANOTHER STORY ON ABUSE?” I suddenly realized THAT IS THE WRONG QUESTION.
Already on our “emotional knees” from his “behavior training, isolation, humiliation, and identity destruction,” we received his knockout punches from these next three “big guns.”
The formula for this part involves: Intimidation + Alteration of Perceptions + Intermittent Reinforcement
Used simultaneously and alternated masterfully, the result is the abuser having absolute coercive control over the victims, while they form deep “trauma bonds” with their abuser.
I’ve already talked a lot about his intimidation tactics – getting in our faces, yelling, threats of violence, and actual violence. For sure, those were powerful. But their power was magnified exponentially by the other two. So I will focus on those.
Alteration of Our Perceptions
While this sounds like some lofty, academic psychology term, put in plain English, it simply means the abuser tells lies and, through his methods, gets the victims to embrace them as the truth.
There are things left within that remain still totally alive today, buried alive, even though you don’t know it. They lurk…in your psyche. Your nervous system. Your memories. Waiting.
Something happens in the moment – a loud noise, a smell, a touch- and you are suddenly spiraling backwards in time, to a place of total emotional chaos and terror. It doesn’t matter how old you are now, or how long ago that memory was buried.
They are happening again…right now.
Triggers and Flashbacks
There are so many instances that I will be having a pleasant day, absorbed in something fun, and then, when I least expect it, it overwhelms me.
A knob on the kitchen cabinet catches my shirt, and I react with fear and rage at “being pulled.” Someone starts up a loud motorcycle unexpectedly, and I jump out of my skin because the loud noise was like the noise of Dad coming into my room ready to grab me. Body and sensory memories.
Then there are the emotional ones. I have hated weekends most of my life. Except for when I worked in the hospital lab. At least on those weekends, I wasn’t home and was doing something useful. When I was at home, he was at me. Either sexually, or physically if I refused. It took me years to realize that my weekend “dread” was a powerful emotional flashback to “those weekends.”
These days the weekends still haunt me. I will be cleaning the house, then I sit down to rest for a moment and look over my to-do list. Immediately, from out of nowhere, I am filled with intense anxiety and the sense I am “bad.” I feel afraid. I feel like I’d better not be “caught” sitting down. I am in danger…or I am a “bad person” because he has made that clear to me.
Then, there is the “3:00 p.m. sense of dread” every day because “Dad will be home soon,” even though he is long-dead and I am in my seventies.
Or every year in July, on the anniversary of the first moon landing. I hate that day, feel anxious, and full of dread. I just want to sleep. That’s because it was one of the worst days of my life then. I had “avoided him,” and so he was at me all day verbally and emotionally. He didn’t hit me that day – he might have had to explain why to my mother. But he would shoot me “The Look” – that intense glare of pure hatred and rage that kept reminding me I was unloved and in deep trouble. When he wasn’t doing that, he was totally ignoring me. If I talked to him, he looked right past me.
So there is no question but that those memories are totally alive yet within me. I experience them all the time.
“The Look”
We all know those family photo albums full of pictures, especially those candid ones that can range from fun to outright silly because the camera caught the person off-guard in a hilarious position.
And then there are those posed family shots too, the ones everyone gathered for and smiled in unison.
My father’s posed photos sometimes captured a smile. But, especially back then, they usually looked more like his work badge. Sour. Unsmiling. “Tough guy.” Even when we were celebrating.
This was the photo from the celebration of my First Holy Communion when I was seven. In the Catholic Church, it’s a joyous time. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, everyone’s together laughing, smiling, eating. And photos. Lots of photos.
The smiling “posed ones” would always be taken outside by the flowering bush in the backyard. Here is Dad’s posed, “celebratory” face. Could he have been any happier that day??
I’ve been reading a book by Jim Collins called What to Make of a Life. Over ten years, he and his team researched hundreds of people to see how they managed the challenges and moments of truth in life by harnessing what he calls “their encodings.” Those are people’s special innate talents held within and waiting for us to discover them. When used in the right moments and circumstances, those encodings propel us to fulfill our destinies and lead rich, satisfying lives.
He writes the book using the stories of matched pairs of individuals from all walks of life. For each particular life path, he showed how each member of the pair got started, found their way professionally and personally, then confronted a “cliff” — a moment of big change. Using their unique encodings, he showed how even very similar people can navigate transitions in very different ways.
It’s a great book and one I find very uplifting. It is heartening to read how even the likes of John Glenn, Carlos Santana, Admiral Grace Hopper, or Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant can struggle, be enmeshed in a fog of “what next,” even choose poorly, then dig deep within to find their way.
I just finished reading the chapter about writers Toni Morrison and Barbara Tuchman. Morrison, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize in literature, wrote stories about the young black girls that did not seem to exist in any books she had read. So she wrote for herself, to create the stories she wanted to read. Barbara Tuchman was passionate about history and making non-fiction as rich a read as any good novel. Very different women, very different writing. But they were similar in one way.
Both were absolutely passionate about writing. They could not “NOT write. “As Morrison put it, “If all the publishers had disappeared in one night, I would have written anyway.”
And both used the word “compulsion” to describe what drove them to write. It wasn’t self-discipline enforced from outside themselves, but an inner compulsion to keep going for the sheer love and desire to see how their next sentence, paragraph, and story would turn out.
I resonated with these two women because that is exactly the word I would use to describe my attitude toward writing this book — compulsion. I MUST write it. I WANT to write it. I NEED to write it, to follow the story’s lead, to learn what wisdom it will reveal along the way. And I NEED to share it with whoever is supposed to find my story.
So I get up, write, research, and plan every day. And every day I channel a driven energy from somewhere within me. And that energy is always there.
At the beginning of this memoir, I wrote about the nature of my “journey” and the tools I would need. That first part – The Old Country, the story of my life experiences – was one of exploration…going back. Observing. I needed things from that past, as well as my paintings and journals. I described the process as a lab experiment, which included gathering the supplies, then running the experiment. That part was my revisiting the past to see what was there.
The Undiscovered Country is that part of the experimental process that generates the final lab report and gets at “What did I learn” and possibly, “What have I missed?” It involves assessing, analyzing, and questioning. It often requires some extra research to help with drawing my conclusions.
So, the bed full of folders, books, paintings, journals, and research, and the binders holding the entries for the story of my life, is my overwhelming pile of experimental data. Now, somehow, I have to bring order to it, make sense of it all, and see what it tells me.
I think of this part of the Undiscovered Country as a journey through the Underworld. I have to go where I have not yet been and be willing to stay in the discomfort of not knowing what I will find.
The autopsy
In a way, it is an autopsy. All of the data are the “body to be examined.”
Photo by author
To do an autopsy, first you need a logical, ordered, step-by-step procedure. Here, my procedure is mapped on a chart – my mind map. It lists all those topics laid out on the bed that I need to address, the order in which I will tackle each, and extra notes and reminders for the important points along the way.
Photo by author
Another requirement is autopsy tools. My “scalpels and probes” will include:
Questions
Action Verbs
Extra Research materials: Paintings, journals, books, movies, songs, quotes, whatever it takes to expand on each topic
And the last step requires time: To reflect, to decide, and to write up the results.
The things I write will be that “midrash” – the parts missing from the story itself that add clarity and reveal things not seen before.
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….
It was the summer of 1985. I had resumed the dating service and met several generally nice men. I say “generally” because a few were just “non-starters,” but certainly not harmful.
There was the divorced man who spent all of our supper date talking about his ex-wife. No, thank you.
And the one who kept calling me to arrange to meet, but could never quite figure out if he wanted to because he also wanted to go play paintball with his friends. After several rounds of this, I told him to go play paintball and stop calling.
But the absolute “best” of the non-starters was the computer engineer who worked in the same company my father had. We met for lunch at a burger place. I’d been running around all morning and skipped breakfast, so when we met up, I was ready for my burger and fries.
As we talked, or rather, I TRIED to start a conversation, I made short work of my lunch. He was rather …aloof? No matter what I asked, it was one or two-word answers. I mentioned that my father worked at the same company that he did.
No response. Oh, he did note that I had finished my lunch quickly and said, “Gee, you eat a lot.”
“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.
