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.
I am one of those people who, when I get in the shower, relax and let everything slip from my mind. Which is precisely what my subconscious is waiting for!
The minute the mind goes blank and focuses on the snuggly warmth of hot water cascading over my skin, the subconscious starts talking. Some mornings just a word or two, and other mornings…a mile a minute. Everything from items for the grocery list, to what I need to write, connections for things I have been trying to figure out, or flashes of insight out of nowhere about a long forgotten question.
Aware that I can’t trust my memory to remember any of these things in my head until after my shower, I needed a way to capture them. Then I remembered that the nature researchers at the museum I taught at use waterproof field notebooks and pens to capture observations. So, I bought myself a package of “write in the rain” memo pads and a waterproof pen. And voila! I no longer have to worry about remembering.
Now, when a flash of insight pops in my head, I grab the notepad and pen which I keep on the shelf in the shower stall, jot it down, and fling it out of the shower and onto the floor. Afterward, I just collect them all and take action! And should the “thought flood” continue after I am out of the shower, I have another stack of recycled papers that I use to scribble more notes.
Today’s message – change the viewpoint
So the same thing happened this morning, related to my blog post yesterday, about why I write, draw, and paint my memories of abuse. In that post, I talked about looking back at the past in an intense “post-mortem” examination, like an autopsy…dig deep and see what it REALLY looks like, not just what I remembered it looking like.
Photo by author
In the middle of today’s shower, these ideas flowed out about why I needed to get those images out onto paper, in paint, and words. The note about “anger and grief,” I will come back to another time. But the others were key thoughts for today:
I had to change the viewpoint. I needed to, instead, see my young self the way others would have seen me if they were standing there at that moment. The insight said, “Put yourself outside of you,” as if you were an observer seeing an adult doing to another child, the things done to you. In that moment, how would you react to that scene?
When I remember something done to me in the past, I may know it was done in my childhood or my teens, or my young adulthood. But my current-day, “adult” brain isn’t seeing me for the true age I was at the time…isn’t seeing what I was capable of knowing, understanding, or doing.
Instead, I’ve been inserting the “adult me” into that memory. So I am thinking of the me in those moments, as I currently am, and judging the me in that abuse scene, as if I were my current age.
Looking at the memory from within, I am seeing me with the eyes of judgment, shame, and intense self-blame. Statements like, “How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I fight back in that moment? Why didn’t I know better???!!!!” I judge the me of “then,” with the knowledge base of “present-day” me.
It has taken me a lifetime to understand how awful I am treating me, and how grossly unfair those judgments and questions are.
The shocking discovery
Four years ago, I realized I needed to write this book. But I couldn’t find words. They, and tons of mixed emotions, were choking me and rendering me unable to say a word. So, I started drawing and painting. And I made a shocking discovery.
When I painted myself as that young child, pinned to the wall after supper, held there by my father’s fist….When I painted that small, scared child sitting by the stove and saying “I don’t want Daddy to come home,” …or, when I painted the Saturday afternoon image of my father pushing my young child’s head into his lap, I was shocked…horrified…then enraged.
The female elder in me now, the old adult, the woman who has been a mother for over 30 years, didn’t see an adult me in those paintings. I saw a helpless child. A child trying desperately to endure and sustain through absolutely abysmal situations. Situations she NEVER should have been put in.
Instead of judging me and hating me for not fighting back, I saw the total impossibility of that. How in God’s name could my little person have been able to stop him when my mother could barely pull him off of me? How could that young child have even understood what he was doing to me on that couch, much less that she was not to blame?
When I paint the scene I have carried in my head, I no longer hate myself. I am, instead, filled with horror FOR me, and compassion. Anger at him. And intense respect and admiration that my young self was able to keep going DESPITE being confronted with those things.
For years, I especially hated my teen and young adult self. But in doing these paintings, I then did the math for how many thousands of times over the years, from infancy to 28, that I was assaulted — physically, mentally, verbally, and sexually, I am now more upset that I judged me so terribly. That child, and teen, and young adult were doing the absolute best they could in that moment.
How could I have expected that young adult to have had the maturity she should’ve had for her age, after years of thousands of assaults? Those assaults and stress affected my cognitive and neurological development. My nervous system development. And assaults that robbed me of having any semblance of a decent childhood development process?
Now, looking at those pictures and writing those scenes, I am, instead, flat-out blown away that I fought back or held onto myself as much and as well as I did. And I NEVER could have made those realizations without doing those drawings and paintings, and writing out in black-and-white words on paper – just what was done.
My husband told me one day that he always heard and believed what I told him about my abuse. But he said that the paintings were so powerful that they made things so intensely real for him in a way that just saying it couldn’t. Powerful, yes.
Changing the picture
So, yes, I am revisiting the memories for a “second look” to see what I missed. But I am also revisiting them WITH DIFFERENT EYES. I have shifted my “viewpoint camera” from within me, to “OUTSIDE of me” and that has made all the difference.
Viewed in that way, THIS is how the picture changes:
Painting by author
I now feel so much compassion and love for my younger self. I feel remorse over judging her so harshly, and, instead, have such total respect for her….
Now, back to the next pieces on my “Wider Circle” – grandparents, school, and God.
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.
I was racing my bike around the block, happily flying down the hill on the last leg, before bombing down the sharp decline into my yard. My friend was on the sidewalk tossing his football up in the air. A mischievous smile crept across his face.
“I bet I can nail this football right in front of your bike tire!” His eyes danced with glee at the prospect of the challenge.
Mine did too, and I could feel the spark of excitement rush through me. It would never occur to me to show fear or back away from a challenge, especially one from a boy. In fact, this was all about showing him up and proving, yet again, that I was as good as any boy.
Taunting him back, I threw down the gauntlet with, “I DARE you!”
Then I shot past him down into my yard and started my next circle of the block. This was too good to pass up.
Rounding the corner of his street, I pedaled to the top of the hill and stopped. I could see him waiting for me, tossing the ball in the air, then taking his position to throw, a big grin on his face.
I grinned back at him, lowered myself flatter against the bike, and pushed off. Pedaling with all my might, I flew down the hill. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his arm go up. I pedaled faster. He took aim. I leaned flat against the bike. He spiked the ball.
From the moment I came “galloping into the kitchen” on my stick horse at 5, I was bound to be an adventurer. I grew up with TV shows like Zorro, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Cochise on Broken Arrow, and Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger. So I was always swinging a sword, galloping my horse, or sliding across the floor.
Of course, that particular day I fell, slid headfirst into the cast-iron radiator, and learned what it meant to get stitches in my forehead at the local hospital ER. I wasn’t scared at first, more intrigued by all the medical tools and equipment. At least, that is, until the girl across the hall started screaming. Not sure what was coming, I panicked and started screaming, too.
I did survive it and even got homemade chocolate chip cookies from Mom when I got home. So, I was an old hand at stitches when I ended up back in the ER again the next year, when I fell off a bench and cut open my jaw. The bottom line is that in spite of my reticence to ever let go of the side of that YMCA pool, I not only learned to swim, I became the adventurer.
Nothing was more exciting at the beginning of every summer than the Saturday night family shopping trip to a discount store in Unionville called Myrtle Mills. It had everything, but most especially, sneakers! The new summer sneakers’ trip. To this day, I still remember the smell of rubber as we approached the basement area in the back, where all the new sneakers were on sale.
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.
In many stories, the place and the time period are considered characters in their own right. Certainly, I would agree given the unique flavor of where I grew up, and when.
Torrington, Connecticut:
Nestled in the valley between the foothills of a section of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Berkshire Hills, Torrington is built around the Naugatuck River, which flows south through that valley, right through the center of town. When the town was originally founded, it was located on the hillsides east and west of the river valley, where the climate was healthier and less swampy and mosquito-infested in the summer.
A lot of the surrounding county area was, and remains, rural, with dairy farms, state forests, and nature trails. It is hilly countryside, and as such, the geography itself gives a sense of “constriction” between those hills, and isolation from nearby areas because of them. There are a lot of hardwood forests, including things like oak and sugar maples, and in spite of steel-gray cold skies in November, Fall, with its amazing color display, is my favorite time of year there.
The town and surrounding areas are steeped in history. Whether it is of ancient Mohawk tribes living in longhouses, or the story of Connecticut as the Charter Oak State, the state is living history.
The latter story is based on the fact that the state was given a royal charter in 1662, allowing for self-governance. During the Revolution, the charter was hidden in an oak tree to prevent it from being confiscated by the British.
Many locations around Torrington and throughout the state have markers noting various sites of importance from the 1700s and during the Revolution. The culture of the area was heavily influenced by the strict ethics of the Puritans, who had moved there from England to have religious freedom. And throughout the area, there is still a strong sense of individual ruggedness. That ruggedness is further fostered by the climate, which can suffer extremely cold winters with blizzards, and summers and falls with hurricanes, tornadoes, and Nor’easters.
Torrington was and is a small former factory town in that Northwest corner of Connecticut. It was an industrial powerhouse in the 19th and part of the 20th century, providing employment, a decent standard of living, and a strong economic base for the towns there. Industry included things like brass production, arms manufacturing, skilled tool and die companies, and small factories providing parts for the automotive and aerospace industries. Most of those places shut down and moved south during the 1960s-1980s, and later those things moved overseas. So the employment and economy of the area have taken a hit. But during my childhood, especially with the ’60s space race, things related to aircraft and aerospace industries were still thriving.
Most people during the early and middle of the 20th century lived in the main town because they worked in the local factories. This allowed them to walk to work, shops, churches, and doctors. My grandparents did not have a car, nor did most of the older Slovaks. In fact, our house was just down the street from the church and school we attended, so easily within walking distance.
The homes in town, including the one we lived in, were multi-family 2- and 3-story homes, in keeping with the blue-collar, industrial flavor of the area. There were some single-family homes scattered around in town, but more of those were on the outskirts, in more residential or agricultural areas.
Soul Mosaic 