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.
As a scientist, one of the best ways to capture what happens in a reaction, especially a chemical one, is to set up a formula. On one side of the equation are all the reactants, the items that are mixed together for the reaction to take place, and on the other side is the final product or outcome.
I wasn’t aware of what was happening to me all those years, because when I was living in the “water” of that house, I just considered it the norm and never questioned anything. But now, when I look back, I can see the patterns. If I want to visualize life in that house, I could use the following formula:
My nature + Time (Day/Wk/Yr) + Where Dad Was vs Where I Was + His Mood + His House Rules = My Experience
More generally, the ingredients were people, time, place, and rules. But no matter how you look at it, the equation was heavily weighted toward the power of his ingredients: Time, Where He Was, His Mood, and His House Rules.
Another thing about chemical reactions is that some ingredients have more power over the others, especially if they are present in overwhelming amounts, versus the others. In reactions, the reagent with the least amount present is called the “limiting reagent.” Once that particular ingredient runs out, the reaction is done.
For example, consider my nature. At any given time, my ability to be calm or in control of what was happening to me, was limited. If he he wasn’t around, most of the time I could be me, indulging in play with friends, books, daydreams, school. I say “most of the time” because there were times even when he was gone, that if he was angry with me, I would be a nervous wreck anticipating what was coming when he returned. But generally, I could use those “in-between” times away from him, to recharge, and live a “normal life.”
But when he was around, I needed to be on guard. I learned early on that everything about my day revolved around him and his mood. The absolute constant was to always be focused on him, assess the state of things, then adjust me to match what was happening. So in thinking about it, this required some amount of psychic energy no matter what.
If he was in a good mood, I still needed to stay on guard because I couldn’t be sure how long it might last or what might trigger a change. But if he was in a bad mood, I was consuming vast amounts of my emotional energy rapidly to “prepare or endure.”
The bottom line is that my emotional energy would run out long before his. So I was the limiting reagent. He could control me and have his way with me, even when I tried to resist, because all he had to do was keep battering me with his reagents — his mood, twisting his house rules, picking fights with me and not leaving me alone. Since he had these infinite amounts, sooner or later, I would run out of fight out of sheer nervousness. I would have to cave because I just couldn’t stand it anymore.
The last thing about chemical reactions is that they are either one-way or reversible. One-way reactions are “all-consuming,” that is, they can only go on until the limiting reagent is used up. Then the reaction stops. And there is no going backwards to restore any of that limiting reagent.
Reversible reactions can flow back and forth, sometimes benefiting one side and other times benefiting the other, depending on conditions. The chemical reaction in our house was one-way and all-consuming. His way, and I was being consumed.
Only now do I realize all of this, and the full extent of what I was up against. Yet, I am still here. I sustained, somehow, even if I am left with permanent scars. How did that happen? And what does that mean for my continued healing?
It’s time to look at not just Mom and Dad, but time, place, house rules, and the one “people” I haven’t said much about yet…that kid…me…that person in those “in-between” times. Just who was that kid, and why did she survive?
So that is next. But to start off, I will start with “place” — my world, the house and immediate area that I lived in. Then I’ll visit that young child and see what she was like, especially when he was not around…those “in-between times” when I could be myself.
As usual on any afternoon, my Mother was preparing a full meal for dinner, including a homemade dessert. Dad expected full dinners, including desserts, with his meal. While store-bought” Oreos were allowed for snacks because Dad liked them and he brought home the paycheck, desserts had to be homemade.
On this particular afternoon, Mom had two cake layers cooling on top of the stove, and they gave off the sweetest vanilla aroma that I couldn’t miss as I ran into the kitchen. I stopped near the stove to examine them because they smelled so good, and that’s when I spotted the problem.
Poor Mom! She always worked so hard to make all her desserts from scratch, usually from recipes out of the red binder — her Betty Crocker cookbook. But today, looking at the cake tops, I felt bad at how they were turning out. That’s when the perfect idea popped into my head for how to help her and fix the problem.
Happily, I set to work with a knife. A few minutes later, I was almost done when Mom came into the room. She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes wide in horror, and she yelled, “What are you doing?!”
“I’m helping you!”
I pointed to the piles of cake chunks I’d cut off the top of each tier – the uneven bumps that, to my mind, marred the smooth surface.
“The cakes were all bumpy, so I figured I’d cut them off and make it all smooth for you!”
My mother stood there, staring from me to the cakes, then back again, as she struggled to process my logic. For several moments, she said nothing. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. This was not the reaction I expected.
Then, she took in a deep breath then let her shoulders drop as she exhaled slowly, and said quietly, “It’s okay. Go play. I’ll fix this.”
Now, many years later, I realize the artful skill it must have taken her to spread frosting onto those two cake layers whose tops were almost totally crumbs….
**
I love looking at pictures of my Mother from her early years. She was beautiful and had a radiant joy that seemed to burst out from within.
A “talisman” is often defined as a magical object that brings luck or special powers to its owner.
If it is not obvious by now, maps, mind maps, charts are talismans for me. Being a visual person, these tools empower me to bring order to my life. It is how my brain works. Whether it’s a road atlas, a treasure map, or a topographic map, I love them all. Give me a map and I can do anything.
Maps give you knowledge, and thus, power. They show you everything that exists, where it is, how to get there. Maps make the unknown visible, clear, quantifiable, and possible. With a map…a plan, you can get anywhere you want.
So maps would become one of the key tools in my life, both for my journeys and my understanding. When I discovered “mind maps” I became a power user. Just a sheet of paper and some markers let me plan my life, a project, or my writing. And it all started with one Christmas when I was very young.
Soul Mosaic 