Tag Archive for: childhood

Stop Reinforcing My Trauma Response

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Glowing coals from a BBQ

Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen

“You are very grown up, aren’t you?”

“You are a very mature young lady!”

“You are wise beyond your years.”

These are just a few of the phrases I heard as a kid that served to reinforce my trauma response and help me build an identity around it. And as I built that identity, I got praised for it more and more, for thinking on my feet, for dashing in to fix things, for never letting ‘em see me sweat.

“That’ll toughen you up, kid.”

“Show ‘em your battle scars! Be proud of them!”

I think that’s part of the reason I’m such a good leader at the food bank. Every week is a new challenge – food deliveries don’t come at the last minute or what we thought we were getting turns out to be something else altogether. The weather turns awful and I have to figure out how to keep five volunteers dry outside while packing boxes in sideways rain and hail with just tarps and pallets. Years and years of hypervigilance and doom-planning are paying off. All the time I spent as a kid imagining alternate scenarios and planning for them, wondering what I could do if X happened and how I could manage if things turned sideways and Y happened instead.

You might be thinking, ok, so what? Your trauma is serving you well as an adult.

But you would be wrong.

It’s not your fault – up until this morning, I would have agreed with you.

But we were both wrong.

My trauma is re-traumatizing me as an adult.

I built an identity and a way of moving through the world that means I never let my guard down, that means I always expect to be on my own when the shit hits the fan and that I assume responsibility for managing crises and cleaning up after them without even being asked.

It’s who I am.

But this morning, I took the time to imagine what it would have been like if my 8-year old self had been told, instead, that it wasn’t her job to be “wiser than your years.” What would it have been like if she had felt safe and held within a community or family group that didn’t place adult responsibility on her shoulders? How would she have learned to calm her nervous system and ask for help when she felt overwhelmed? How could she have grown up not feeling as though she was the only one who could fix things, and that if she didn’t do it, nobody would?

What if someone had told her, instead, “I’m so sorry you have those scars. I wish I’d been there to keep that from happening”?

I spent so many years of my life searching for the Right way to get through painful, scary times – knowing with absolute certainty that if things got worse, it was because I hadn’t been smart enough, prepared enough, savvy enough to plan for the right contingency. It made me even more determined to explore every avenue. And I got really good at it. If there was a way to put it on my resumé, I would have.

But in my body, it meant I was alone, always. It meant that even when I was married, I didn’t think to trust my husband to solve really big problems, really scary ones, because I had learned that people without trauma didn’t think like I did – they couldn’t always accurately assess the potential dangers that lie ahead and plan for them. Those people were naïve. Lovely, and loving, but naïve. I couldn’t rely on them in a crisis.

It also means that, in my body, there are embers that flare when someone close to me is suffering and the flares are often disproportionate to the situation. I suppose that’s really the basis of PTSD, but it’s surprising to me to realize how much of that is applauded and reinforced in our society. The idea that hypervigilance is a muscle we want to build is so backward to me, but my entire life, I’ve been praised for it, and it is causing harm. Those embers that flare when someone close to me is in crisis give me a momentary ability to get clear and start the process of contingency planning, but they also cut my head off from my body because the sensations I feel in my body are too painful and frightening to feel in those moments. That severance is really seductive – feeling competent and clear and able to swoop in and offer my support to a loved one is a powerful drug. Why would I want to check in with my body? Just to feel fear? To experience the little zaps of grief and overwhelm that rise up and make me remember all the times I’ve felt that way before? Not likely.

But I have learned that disconnecting my mind from my body has consequences. Namely, my brain experiences a power trip and it also starts spiraling into scary places, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios just so I can build a strategy in case they come true. And as much as I try to divorce myself from my physical self, all I’ve really done is cut off communication from my body to my brain, not the other way around. My body is still absorbing energy, still taking in information (much of it from my spiraling thoughts that are generally wholly inaccurate), and lighting little fires everywhere. Eventually, I freeze in overwhelm and panic. I burst into tears, lie on the couch and stare, shake uncontrollably. So far, this generally only happens once the crisis is over and I know I’m safe (or my loved-one is safe), but those fires just keep getting bigger.

Today, I’m starting the work to put out the embers; to go back and find every spot in my body where younger me was put in situations she didn’t belong in and relieve her of those burdens. I’m asking her what it might feel like to imagine that she was held and safe and free to be eight or ten or 14, instead of collecting battle scars and proving herself more adult than her age. It is my deep hope that in doing so, I will be able to face the next really scary situation without a fire flaring inside me. I would like to stay connected to my body and show up for my loved ones as my whole self, un-triggered and loving, secure in the knowledge that we are in this together and I can ask for help if I need it. I want to have healed those parts of me that were taught it is a good thing to tackle big challenges by myself, no matter what it costs, because those scars are something to be proud of. I want to come clear-headed and with a calm body responding out of love and not fear. The idea that I can put my energy toward helping hold what is rather than exhausting myself imagining what might be will hopefully be more seductive than thinking I can single-handedly save the day.

The Elephant in the Room

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When the girls were little, I signed them up for a program at the local park where they could learn to ride ponies. They sat in a barn and learned about safety, donned bike helmets and boots, and climbed atop plastic step-stools to hoist themselves up into the saddle. Over a period of weeks, they learned to groom, feed, saddle, and ride these gentle creatures while I stood and snapped pictures on the other side of the fence. After each lesson, they were excited to tell me about the ponies’ names and temperaments and the things they had learned about how to interact with them. When brushing the ponies, they knew to pat their way around the hind end so that the animals always knew where they were, and if they were walking near the ponies but in a blindspot, they were taught to do an “elephant circle” so as to be out of reach of a well-placed kick should the pony get spooked.

One thing you should know about me is that I prefer patting my way around to making elephant circles. If there is an elephant in the vicinity, I am the person who will point it out. I will tell you about it, indicate exactly where it is, tug on your sleeve to alert you, and describe it in great detail. Even if you indicate that you are not interested in anything having to do with this great beast in your midst, it is unlikely that I will stop trying to talk about it. In fact, if I am particularly affected by the sight of this elephant and you actively try to turn my attention elsewhere, I am likely to take you by the hand and lead you to it, make you stroke its leathery flesh, lean in for a sniff and ask you to look it in the eye.

It is not a characteristic of mine that all people appreciate.
I understand.

The other thing you should know about me is that this characteristic is necessary for my survival.

Most of my childhood was spent hearing that crying was an unnecessary activity. That sadness and fear were altogether useless. That the preferred emotions were happiness or anger and anything else was “wallowing” or “self-pity.” From time to time there were entire herds of elephants living in my house that went unacknowledged. The adults perfected elephant circles as they went through their days, picking their way carefully through and around and underneath so as not to discuss any subject that might be uncomfortable. Living like this makes a person feel a little crazy. As a kid, I tried in vain to point out the elephants and was either ignored or reprimanded. I began to believe that I was the only one who saw them, that there was something wrong with me. Or that my ability to see them – my “sensitivity” (spoken with a sneer of derision) – was a fatal character flaw. I alternated between jumping up and down and pointing and cowering in my room wondering whether there was something seriously wrong with me. Eventually, I learned to avoid the rooms where they lived altogether and take cues from other people regarding which things were ok to speak of and which ones were not.

My tactics as an adult are quite the opposite. I have come to realize that, for me, ignoring the elephants is an exercise in self-destruction. To deny my feelings about any particular situation is to pretend that they don’t matter. So while I won’t ask you to see the elephant in the room the same way I do, or to experience the same emotions in response to it, don’t be surprised if I lead you to it and describe it in great detail so that you are forced to acknowledge that it exists. So that you might begin to understand why it is something that is important to me. So that at least we can agree on one thing – that I am not crazy. I apologize if this makes you uncomfortable, but I’ve learned that leaning into discomfort is the best way to define its edges and begin to loosen its hold on me.

Trick Memories

I lived in Wyoming for a year when I was a kid. The stories I’ve always told about that time come with a whiff of distaste, a prolonged eye-roll, and a disgusted shake of the head.  I talk about the dusty dryness, the near-constant 40mph winds that drove any plant over six inches tall right out of the ground and into the neighbors’ yard, and the ugliness of it all.  I know, somewhere back in the recesses of my mind, that much of my disdain had to do with the fact that I was twelve or thirteen when I moved there, the emotional turmoil I felt related to my parents’ divorce and my father’s remarriage, the guilt I had about actually liking my stepmother, but somehow the story stuck over time.
It was punctuated with examples of how out-of-place I felt moving from southern Oregon to Wyoming, making the transition from ballerina of five or six years to…nothing. There was no ballet studio in Green River, Wyoming in 1983. From the Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans that fit me perfectly to a town where Wranglers were the only option, and they were preferably worn with cowboy boots.  From my mom’s homemade lasagne to chicken-fried steak and cow tongue sandwiches. I was in an alien land and I tell people that I hated every second of it.  
But last week when Bubba and I took the kids to Jackson Hole (admittedly a great deal different than Green River) for a vacation, as soon as I stepped off of the rolling staircase from the plane, I was reminded of other things about Wyoming.  
I remembered the smell of sagebrush after a rainstorm.
I recalled chasing (and sometimes catching) horny toads on the hill at the top of our street in the blazing sunshine with the neighbor kids.
I was transported back to the clear, warm nights sleeping in the backyard under the stars – millions of stars – listening to the dry schuck-schuck of the tumbleweeds as they rolled past the fence in the empty lot behind our house.  
I spent last week doing new things like paragliding off the top of Rendezvous Mountain with Lola (abso-freaking-lutely the coolest thing I’ve ever done, hands down) and paddleboarding around String Lake, but I also spent a significant amount of time reminiscing about the things I loved about Wyoming.  
I remember the epic thunderstorms we would get in the summertime when the sky would turn absolutely black in one spot and you could smell the electricity in the air mere seconds before the lightning struck the low hills around town.  The sky would unzip and water would gush from the clouds for five or ten minutes, and sometimes hailstones the size of shooter marbles would rain down, too.  When it was over, the sun would appear hot and unperturbed and the wet streets would steam as we all wheeled our bikes out of whoever’s garage we had taken quick refuge in to chase each other through the puddles while they lasted.  
I remember the freedom of getting to reinvent myself in the sixth grade. Always before, I had been a shy, girly-girl who was not very adventurous, but when I arrived in this new town with a new family I was free to be whomever I chose – not tethered by my past and the people who had known me since Kindergarten.  I rode my bike down steep streets, a squirt bottle in one hand, weaving and cutting in the thick of a water fight among all of the kids on our block.  I went out for basketball and spoke my mind more than ever before.  I sliced my ring finger open from the nail to the first knuckle and didn’t realize it until the cute neighbor-boy pointed it out, marveling at how “tough” I was that I didn’t pass out at the sight of so much blood or scream that it hurt or shed even one tear. Never before had I been called “tough.”  
As Lola and Eve discovered the wonders of Wyoming (even getting so lucky as to witness a “gullywasher” of a rain/hail storm), I found myself doing a little more reinvention, or perhaps revision.  From now on, I will tell a different story of my time in Green River, this time complete with all of the things I had forgotten.  I feel as though I have gained an entirely new chapter of my childhood by revisiting this place and being open to the memories that were triggered by the unique smells and characteristics of this place.  

Chain Letters and Concrete Thinking

Lola got her first chain letter (email) yesterday.

They were so much more work when I was her age.  I remember getting the intricately folded sheet of notebook paper slipped into my palm or underneath my textbook on my desk during class, excusing myself to the restroom to open it up, and feeling my heart sink.

I distinctly recall sitting in the bathroom stall contemplating my next steps. Once entrusted with the note, smeary with pencil lead and softened in the creases, I now had to choose 10 or 15 others to pass the message on to…OR ELSE.

Sometimes I was promised magical outcomes upon successfully forwarding the note – the boy I had a crush on would walk me home from school or my most fervent wish would come true – but more often there were dire threats should I fail to identify enough friends to pass it to.

The difficulty was embedded in the intricate social structure that existed for a girl in the fourth or fifth grade.  There were a multitude of ‘best friends,’ many of whom the note had already passed through. Choosing the wrong girls meant that I would either hurt someone’s feelings or look like an unsophisticated fool.  Not passing it along was not an option.  Boys didn’t count, even if they were my friends, because they would never keep the chain going. You had to pick people that would perpetuate the note, and you couldn’t give it to anyone who wasn’t cool or skip over girls in the established hierarchy.  I was somewhere near the middle of the pack, which made it hard because I was never the one to start the chain.

Inevitably, on the evening that I received the note, I would settle down on my Hollie Hobby bedspread with ten fresh sheets of notebook paper to hand-copy the message. By the time I was done, the callous on my middle finger would be throbbing and red, complete with pencil-imprint in the center, and my heart would beat along in desperation that I had chosen the “right ten.”  Finding a clandestine way to pass the notes at school the next day posed nowhere near the danger that not passing it did.  I didn’t want to die in my sleep, for goodness’ sake!

For all of that, though, I never faced the fear that Lola experienced when she opened the email from a trusted friend last night before bed.  Lola’s unique perspective on the world is often quite literal. She has difficulty sussing out nuances when it comes to threats or promises and discerning whether or not they are real, and while I am fairly certain that she didn’t truly believe some horrible fate would befall her before morning if she didn’t quickly choose five friends to forward the email to, she definitely felt some sense of foreboding.  It made for a very difficult bedtime routine.  Following a candid discussion of what chain mail is (complete with the admonition that it’s more of a scam to get people to pass on viruses or phish their email inbox than anything social like it was in my childhood), we went through two rounds of cheesecloth and a meditation before she would even consider laying down.  It was another hour and a lot of cuddling before she was able to get out of her own head enough to feel safe and fall asleep.  This morning, we’re crafting an email to her friends to ask them to please not pass those emails on to her and I am struck by how much more work it was for my generation to hand-write each and every note we were passing on. We had to put in a lot more sweat for our terror!

Confessions of a Shoplifter

When I was in the 4th grade, I started shoplifting.  Actually, the first thing I stole was something from my friend, Jacque’s, bedroom.  We took piano lessons one after the other at her house every Tuesday afternoon and while I waited my turn with Mr. Fox, I sometimes explored her perfect bedroom.  She didn’t have to share with her sister in this enormous white colonial house with black shutters on the windows.  It looked for all the world like what I expected a plantation would look like in the deep South – wide bay windows with window seats for reading, and light streaming in from every angle.

Jacque (pronounced “Jackie”) had everything. And I wanted in on that.  While it may have appeared as though I, too, had it all – two parents, a large house, enough extra money for piano lessons – there was an undercurrent of danger in my life.  Beneath it all was a deep fault line that threatened to shift and rumble at any time and I used to lie in bed at night wondering how it would go.  When the ground opened up, who would be swallowed and who would scramble clinging to the edge, screaming in stark fear?  I had my moments of wishing for certain individuals to fall endlessly down that dark chasm but that always left me behind. Alone.

And so I felt entitled to any small trinket that would make me feel better. I reasoned that my life was nowhere near as safe and secure, neat and tidy as Jacque’s, and she had so much stuff she wouldn’t possibly miss whatever I took.

She did. And I got caught and that was the end of shared piano lessons.  After that day, Mr. Fox with his bulbous alcoholic’s nose streaked with red veins and impossibly large pores, shuffled in to my house once a week, his leather briefcase full of loose sheet music and his pea-green trench coat flapping around his shins.  I had been exiled.

And so I started stealing things from the local mini mart, instead.  I had lost a friend in the last round of theft and I, who was so desperate for affection, could hardly afford to lose any more.  It started with lip balm and I was shaking so badly I had tunnel vision.

I never used it.  It sat to the side in the drawer of my nightstand for years.  Other items gathered next to it – a butterfly barrette, licorice taffy, a box of candy cigarettes.  These were symbols of my entitlement. They were my great, silent, “Screw You!” to the Universe that had placed me with two parents who couldn’t be what I needed them to be.  They were a sign that I was allowed to have something that I wanted.

By the time my parents divorced and spread themselves a few states apart, I lost the desire to take anything more.  I felt so conflicted about the shoplifting; knowing it was Wrong and that, somehow, it wasn’t going to fix anything, anyway (clearly not, since my family had just come apart like so many dandelion seeds on the wind). Was this Conscience? I didn’t remember details of the bad times – the angry arguments or physical abuse – but I recall everything I ever took that didn’t belong to me.  I trace the edges of that Bonne Bell lip balm in my mind’s eye, the opaque wrapper of the black-as-tar salt water taffy.  I can still smell the sugary, waxy, dark licorice scent of my drawer every time I cracked it open.

I still feel shame.

Many years ago when Bubba and I were traveling with the girls I did it again.  He had been so sick off and on for two years and I was terrified to be so far from home in case he relapsed. He wasn’t scared. That was part of the problem.  He was never scared, even when I was calling 911 or racing to the ER myself, two toddlers strapped in to car seats in the back seat as I whipped my gaze back and forth from his ashy face to the road in front of me.  His lack of fear meant that I had to hold it all – every sour-smelling drop of it – for all of us.

And then it happened. One night in the middle of the night in a foreign country, he got sick.  And I didn’t panic. I got him to the hospital and they spent an entire day inserting IVs and pushing fluids and taking photos of his internal organs.  And I spent the day trying to entertain two small children in the park, among a sea of strangers whose language I didn’t speak, not knowing whether he would emerge from that big brick building at all.  I fed them and played with them, changed diapers and didn’t let one tear fall.  I deflected curious questions about where Daddy was and when he would be back, all the while feeling that old familiar fault line beneath my feet.

He did emerge, grey and tired, and we holed up in the hotel for several days. I put the children down for a nap, got him some tea, and crawled into bed and sobbed.  Every time I closed my eyes I saw me, fingernails dug in to the red clay at the edge of the Grand Canyon, alone and dangling.

The next day we ventured out to the lobby of this old hotel, sitting by the fireplace, looking at the views, checking out the gift shop.  And I stole a necklace.  An inexpensive but beautiful necklace.  I told myself that if I got caught, I would simply claim exhaustion and tell them to put it on our tab.  But I didn’t get caught.

I love that necklace. I wear it often, but it has a loose clasp and a nasty habit of coming unhooked and sliding down inside my bra from time to time.  Every time I put it on I think about that dark, dark time in our lives and feel ashamed.  And I think that maybe this is Conscience.  I could have afforded that necklace a hundred times over. But that wasn’t the point, was it? The point was that I felt entitled to something. Something free. Something compensatory.

But it didn’t compensate for any of the pain I was feeling any more than that barrette did when I was nine.  And none of the things I took had the power to change circumstances in my life. They reminded me, in some small way, that I had self-worth, however misguided.  These were symbols that I mattered to me, that I still valued myself enough to give myself something nice.  I see the twisted logic in all of this and don’t condone my behavior, but I will forever be grateful that, throughout the darkest periods of my life, I was able to retain some small measure of belief that I deserved something.

I Miss My Easy Bake Oven

*Note: This photo is not of me. This girl is waaaaay younger than I was when I got my Easy Bake. I got it from Wikimedia Commons

Times have changed.

Man, even thinking about uttering that phrase makes me feel old – as old as I thought my grandparents were when I was a kid, and that’s ancient!

I was having coffee with the mother of one of Eve’s friends yesterday and somehow we got to talking about the things we fear most about having a teenage daughter.  It’s hard to even begin to know what we are up against, given how different their world is from what we knew.

The two of us shared the requisite stories of summer days spent completely unsupervised by anyone other than our older siblings (who often meant us as much harm as not).  Those mornings when we would dash out the door in packs, or looking for the roving packs of neighbor kids, to the familiar refrain of, “Be back in time for dinner!” were absolutely priceless.   Not in small part due to the fact that if our parents had known half of the stupid stunts we pulled, their hearts would have stopped no less than a dozen times a day.

We did things I wouldn’t let my girls do one tenth of. I rode my bike barefoot or with flip-flops (and lost toenails when I crashed). I rode on the handlebars of my brother’s bike as he tore down our steep hill as fast as he could.  No helmets. Only a front brake that would catapult both of us off the bike in a heartbeat if he squeezed it.  Oh, and did I mention that at the end of the street was a set of train tracks running perpendicular to it?  We never stopped. We never looked. Despite the fact that I lie in bed at night listening to the whistle of those trains coming through, it never occurred to me that one might come ripping down those tracks at the very moment we were bumping across them in a mad dash to get to the park that lay on the other side.  Never.

I could go on, but I suspect we all have stories like that from the 1960s and 1970s. Stories of freedom and exhileration and death-defying stunts that we only realized were incredibly stupid when we became parents ourselves.

And then the car seat laws had been enacted.
And we knew about sex predators lurking and lying in wait for unattended children.
And we bought bike helmets and knee pads for our kids and made them wear them.

And the dangers became more nebulous. Like online stalking. Cyberbullying. Sexting.

At least while we were endangering ourselves, we were having fun.  Real, actual, physical fun. We were playing slingshot tag (yes, someone sat in a tree with a slingshot and hurled a bb or a gravel bit or a plastic pellet at people running by and if you got hit, you were ‘it,’) or exploring construction sites or playing hide and seek in the condemned house down the road.  If someone pissed you off, they did it to your face and, often, others in the group would choose sides and it would be settled right there.  Generally with blood spilled or rocks being thrown, but it was settled face-to-face.

When I think about Eve turning 13 and wanting a Facebook page and her own cell phone, my head hurts.  I am fully aware that I don’t know most of the things that could go wrong. Yes, we’ve talked about being careful not to share too much personal information about herself and not “connecting” to people online that she doesn’t know in person.  But, just like my parents, I’m certain that most of the things she will encounter are not things that I could have anticipated, and it’s because of this that I wish I could get her to trade me her digital identity for some of those other things we had as kids.

I’d give her a woodburning set for her Facebook page.  Sure, my brother used it to threaten to brand me if I didn’t do his bidding, but that’s how I learned to stand up for myself. And think creatively (it took me a while, but I finally figured out that if I broke the tip off the damn thing, he couldn’t sear his initials in my left butt cheek).

I’d give her an Easy Bake Oven for her text minutes.  My sister and I kept ours in our bedroom. And lest you think we had rats or ants, let me be clear that we only baked cakes in it for the first week we had it. After that we experimented with Shrinky Dinks and our brothers’ socks and Barbie dolls. Yes, in our room. Yes, it’s a wonder that we didn’t burn the freaking house down.

Okay, maybe I wouldn’t trade her any of those things.  But I do hope that someday she has a friend that she can reminisce with about all the insane stuff she and her sister pulled behind my back. And I truly, honestly, deeply hope that none of it has anything to do with the Internet or cell phones.  Lawn darts maybe.  Or a bb gun. Or a bungee cord.

Acknowledging the Darkness Within


There is a little girl that lives inside of me and when I least expect it she shows up to remind me that the world is a scary place. She reminds me that I ought to be wary and protective and that it might just be best to crawl in to bed and hide for a while.

When she comes I get frightened. Even though she is small and nobody else can see her, she reminds me of what it feels like to be powerless and alone. She tricks me in to believing that I can’t trust anyone and that I need to be taken care of. Because she wants to be taken care of. Because she feels like she never was. And she feels like she never will be.
Over the years I’ve learned that the best thing I can do is comfort her and remind her that she is okay. In years past, I have alternately slammed the door in her face and become her – to the point where I did actually climb under the covers and retreat from the world for a bit. Unfortunately, denying her existence only makes her scream louder and look for more profound ways to grab my attention. Becoming her pushes me over the edge in to that deep, dark hole with no way out. And so when she shows up, I have to keep my wits about me and try to come from a place of love instead of a place of fear. That doesn’t mean that I don’t worry that she will get bigger if I ‘feed’ her. But if I can remember that I am not her and offer her love and understanding I feel safer.
Today, with the help of a good friend, I came to yet another plane from which to see her. As we talked about those parts of us that feel dark and scary, those parts that we don’t show to the world, I mused aloud whether there was a way to acknowledge those pieces of us that are just as vital as the rest and see them for what they are. If I think about it that way, this little girl is amazing. Despite the sexual abuse and trauma she endured, she found a way to survive. Her protective instincts not only spared me the pain of living each and every moment of the abuse by walling it off in my brain until I was ready to remember it, but she set up a strict criteria by which to decide who could be trusted as I moved through life. True, she over-reacted in most cases, but with her 8-year-old intellect and intuition, she led me to a place of independence and strength I needed to deal with my parents’ divorce and the loss of my foster brother and other difficult times in my life.
As I began to understand just how central a role this frightened little girl has played in my evolution, I was amazed at how much I owe her. And as I move away from defining myself as a sexual abuse survivor, her existence is threatened. As I begin to heal some of the deepest wounds I have, excising her from the essence of who I am is not an option. Instead, I must honor her for the role she played in protecting me and reminding me how important it is to tell the truth about my experiences in order to help others heal. That doesn’t mean I need to allow her to have power over my life as an adult, but it does mean that she deserves to feel safe and validated. I hope that as I continue to process all of this I can finally give her the rest she has earned and neither of us has to be scared of those things that happened so many years ago.

Losing My Brother


(Alternately titled “The Fourth, Part Two). Here is part one of this story.

After a year, Cameron is taken away. All of the new clothes my parents have bought him are packed away in the small suitcase he came with and he walks solemnly behind some woman out the front door of our house. His smile is gone, but it hasn’t been around as much lately, anyway. His head is down, looking at the orange shag carpet in the living room and he doesn’t turn around to say good-bye. I can’t say anything. I can’t breathe. I follow them onto the grey cement steps of our porch and hold on to the black iron rail so I won’t sit down hard.

I watch the door of the white van shut and the lady get in the front seat. The van sat in our driveway, engine chugging the entire time. Someone knew he would be packed already. Someone knew he would be ready to go when they got here. I can see Cameron’s one cloudy eye watching me. I can feel the thick ball in my throat as the van backs up into the street. I watch the smoke from the back of the van curl up past his window and make it hard to see him anymore. I can’t look. I have to close my eyes. I can’t go inside. I’m just standing here in the springtime sunshine feeling cold and little.

Finally someone tells me to come inside.

“Can I write him letters?” I ask my mother and my voice sounds high and whiny. She shakes her head and her eyes are full of tears.

I don’t understand. My big brother shrugs his shoulders to say he doesn’t know anything, either. My sister is too little to know anything. All I know is that Dad didn’t like Cameron very much and now he’s gone. Dad doesn’t like my little sister very much, either. And he is trying all the time to make my brother tougher. He was really pissed that Cameron could play soccer better than my brother could. Dad’s the coach and his own son ought to be the star player.

It takes a while but the cold ball in my throat finally settles in my stomach. I’d better be really good from now on.

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This was the “scene” from my perspective as an eight-year old girl who knew that something was wrong. I knew that my parents were fighting a lot and things were not easy at home. Mom was unhappy and the kids were all walking on eggshells. This incident proved to me that it wouldn’t take much for our family to simply disintegrate. Indeed, it was shortly after this that my father moved out and they announced they were getting a divorce, although I don’t recall any of the specifics. Within six months, my father had accepted a job transfer in another state and I was even more certain that, one by one, we would all be picked off, our ties as family members dissolving as easily as the translucent rice paper wrapper on that Chinese candy we got at the store sometimes. From that moment on, I made it my mission to keep my brother and sister as close to me as possible and never do anything wrong. I didn’t want to be next.

Tempting Fate

I am always amazed when I read childhood memoirs. Not only at the vast array of experiences in people’s lives and the way children interpret things with their developing minds, but at the ability of the storyteller to conjure up such rich, detailed images of things that happened so many years (often decades) ago.

Other than the family stories that have been told and retold and a few snapshots that I have seen hundreds of times, I have no memories of my childhood before 5th grade. I can recite the story of my first day in Kindergarten where I was too short to hang my coat up on the hooks mounted in the hallway and was rescued by a classmate who would become a treasured friend. I can’t tell you what the hallway looked like or what color my coat was or what the weather was like outside. I also couldn’t tell you what the rest of the day was like, or even if I attended full day or half day Kindergarten classes. That story came from my mother.
I have several other “memories” like that – that were witnessed by others in my family but resonate with me no more than they would with you if you heard the story several times. I know the names of my first and second grade teachers, couldn’t tell you who my third grade teacher was if my life depended on it and am only marginally certain who my fourth grade teacher was because there were only two to choose from in the entire school and I think I got the mean one. Or was that my brother?
For most of my life, I thought that was normal. I didn’t realize that other people had vivid memories of times in their childhoods and it wasn’t until I had my first flashback nearly sixteen years ago that it occurred to me that there was a reason I didn’t know anything about my life as a child. I don’t even know if I can properly call what I had a “flashback.” It was more of a still photo than anything else. From that memory came a clear knowledge that there was a song associated with that period in my life – the period during which my sister and I were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the teenage son of the woman who watched my sister after school until I could come get her and take her home.
The only other clear memory I have is of the day when our adopted brother was taken away from us. I have searched and searched for the post that completes the story I began with the above link and it appears I never did. I guess I know what my next post will be. I have to finish that story now that I feel as though I have more memories of it. Sorry – stay tuned for that one and in the meantime, go back and read the first half so you’ll be up to speed when I post the finale, as it were.
For the last several years in therapy, I have examined the themes and patterns in my fears and anxieties and have found them to be mostly related to abandonment issues, control issues and not feeling as though I am worthy of unconditional love. I have often questioned where these strong issues come from and, several times, have wished I had more concrete information about my childhood. That wish is very quickly followed up by a resolute slamming of that door in my head. No f*ing way! Stay out of there. It could undo you.

Today as I practiced yoga I once again wished for some more clarity about my history. And instead of succumbing to the knee-jerk response that admonished me to Shut.The.Door., I asked myself why. What was it that I was hoping to gain from having these memories? I realized that what I want is to know who to blame. Who can I legitimately be furious with for screwing up my life? I have done a lot of work around forgiving the boy who abused me and feel as though there is a light spot in my heart because I have let go of most of that. And, while that is certainly trauma enough to cause me to lose memories, I know that none of that happened until I was at least in the 3rd or 4th grade. There is more. I know that.
I was so surprised at my ultimate reason for wanting to recover these traumatic memories that I nearly fell out of my side angle pose. Do I really want someone to blame? Yup. And even though I know that I will likely not find any easy answers or any justice, the idea that someone other than myself is to blame for what I experienced is huge. For years I have carried around the notion that I was unlovable, incapable of deserving nurturing attention, the person who blew things out of proportion simply to get attention and I’m tired of that story now. I was a kid. I deserved love and affection and care and comfort. And knowing that someone else should have been responsible for that and dropped the ball lets me off the hook a little bit.
That’s not to say I’m not freaking terrified of these memories. And a friend of mine who suffers from PTSD and has had flashbacks has warned me that I have no control over whether or when I might get them back, in any case. Personally, that’s the part that turns my knickers inside out. I want to know and I want to know on my terms. But like they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans. Still, I feel as though I’ve tempted fate by simply writing these words and I suspect that I ought to have been more careful what I wished for…

Tempting Fate

I am always amazed when I read childhood memoirs. Not only at the vast array of experiences in people’s lives and the way children interpret things with their developing minds, but at the ability of the storyteller to conjure up such rich, detailed images of things that happened so many years (often decades) ago.

Other than the family stories that have been told and retold and a few snapshots that I have seen hundreds of times, I have no memories of my childhood before 5th grade. I can recite the story of my first day in Kindergarten where I was too short to hang my coat up on the hooks mounted in the hallway and was rescued by a classmate who would become a treasured friend. I can’t tell you what the hallway looked like or what color my coat was or what the weather was like outside. I also couldn’t tell you what the rest of the day was like, or even if I attended full day or half day Kindergarten classes. That story came from my mother.
I have several other “memories” like that – that were witnessed by others in my family but resonate with me no more than they would with you if you heard the story several times. I know the names of my first and second grade teachers, couldn’t tell you who my third grade teacher was if my life depended on it and am only marginally certain who my fourth grade teacher was because there were only two to choose from in the entire school and I think I got the mean one. Or was that my brother?
For most of my life, I thought that was normal. I didn’t realize that other people had vivid memories of times in their childhoods and it wasn’t until I had my first flashback nearly sixteen years ago that it occurred to me that there was a reason I didn’t know anything about my life as a child. I don’t even know if I can properly call what I had a “flashback.” It was more of a still photo than anything else. From that memory came a clear knowledge that there was a song associated with that period in my life – the period during which my sister and I were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the teenage son of the woman who watched my sister after school until I could come get her and take her home.
The only other clear memory I have is of the day when our adopted brother was taken away from us. I have searched and searched for the post that completes the story I began with the above link and it appears I never did. I guess I know what my next post will be. I have to finish that story now that I feel as though I have more memories of it. Sorry – stay tuned for that one and in the meantime, go back and read the first half so you’ll be up to speed when I post the finale, as it were.
For the last several years in therapy, I have examined the themes and patterns in my fears and anxieties and have found them to be mostly related to abandonment issues, control issues and not feeling as though I am worthy of unconditional love. I have often questioned where these strong issues come from and, several times, have wished I had more concrete information about my childhood. That wish is very quickly followed up by a resolute slamming of that door in my head. No f*ing way! Stay out of there. It could undo you.

Today as I practiced yoga I once again wished for some more clarity about my history. And instead of succumbing to the knee-jerk response that admonished me to Shut.The.Door., I asked myself why. What was it that I was hoping to gain from having these memories? I realized that what I want is to know who to blame. Who can I legitimately be furious with for screwing up my life? I have done a lot of work around forgiving the boy who abused me and feel as though there is a light spot in my heart because I have let go of most of that. And, while that is certainly trauma enough to cause me to lose memories, I know that none of that happened until I was at least in the 3rd or 4th grade. There is more. I know that.
I was so surprised at my ultimate reason for wanting to recover these traumatic memories that I nearly fell out of my side angle pose. Do I really want someone to blame? Yup. And even though I know that I will likely not find any easy answers or any justice, the idea that someone other than myself is to blame for what I experienced is huge. For years I have carried around the notion that I was unlovable, incapable of deserving nurturing attention, the person who blew things out of proportion simply to get attention and I’m tired of that story now. I was a kid. I deserved love and affection and care and comfort. And knowing that someone else should have been responsible for that and dropped the ball lets me off the hook a little bit.
That’s not to say I’m not freaking terrified of these memories. And a friend of mine who suffers from PTSD and has had flashbacks has warned me that I have no control over whether or when I might get them back, in any case. Personally, that’s the part that turns my knickers inside out. I want to know and I want to know on my terms. But like they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans. Still, I feel as though I’ve tempted fate by simply writing these words and I suspect that I ought to have been more careful what I wished for…