Soul Mosaic

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??

THAT phone call…

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….

Cats

“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.

From my Journal – February 2, 2024

BIRTHDATE: IT’S COMPLICATED

Rebirth in her classroom

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.

(more…)

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.