Gretel In Darkness

 

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Gretel In Darkness

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead
Are dead. I hear the witch's cry
Break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...
Now, far from woman's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
We sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
From this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
Summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant
To leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you.
I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln come back, come back-

Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
Hiss in the stillness, Hansel we are there
Still, and it is real, real,
That black forest, and the fire in earnest.
-Louise Gluck

Intro To Dysfunction

 I suppose I will begin at the beginning. I was born to two alcoholic parents. My father came from a very poor family. His mother gave birth to him when she was sixteen years old. She was married to his father who was about forty years old (Pedophilia much?), but apparently, they split soon after his birth. My paternal grandmother was a hoochie coochie dancer in a traveling Irish circus. (A hoochie coochie dancer is like an old-fashioned stripper.) The circus was owned by her father, and she met my paternal grandfather in the course of their travels. The family had immigrated from County Cork, Ireland. I’m not sure what year that happened, though. Probably sometime in the early 1900s. I know virtually nothing about my paternal grandfather. I know his name and that he died soon after he split with my father's mother. 

My mother’s parents came from very poor families as well. I have a vivid memory of being in my maternal grandmother’s pantry and being astonished at how much food she had stored in there. Her pantry was the size of a small bedroom. I can remember her telling me that she lived through the Great Depression and how often she went hungry during that time. So, when she could afford it, she stocked up on years of canned food. I don’t know much about my mother’s parents except their families came to the United States so long ago that I regularly get invitations to the groups The Daughters of the American Revolution and The Daughters of the Confederacy, both of which I decline every year. I know that my paternal grandmother’s family is Irish and that my maternal grandfather’s family is Scottish. I know that my maternal grandmother was abused in every kind of way by her parents. She was another in the generational cycle of familial violence and incest. I don’t know much about my maternal grandfather’s background. I know he was a WWII vet. I know that he and another man were stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific for months after some kind of accident in the water or above the water. My mother told me that he nearly died and lost a good amount of his teeth as well.

Alcoholism and drug use runs rampant in both sides of my family. Both sets of my grandparents were hard drinkers. My mother’s parents added a side of physical violence to that lovely addiction. My mother told me so many stories about them beating on each other. 

Her father was a salesman for a company which sold granite and other kinds of stones for large construction projects. So, he was on the road for most of the time during which he would be mostly drunk. He would come home, and it would be sweet for a while, but after a couple of weeks it would start to go downhill. My grandmother would accuse him of cheating, and he would accuse her of cheating and then they would beat on each other. 

My mother related one story to me that happened when she was about nine or ten years old in which they were both completely drunk and had gone a few rounds with each other, Then, my grandmother got a knife and cut one of my grandfather’s fingers off. It was then that my mother had to drive them to the hospital. She said that was one of the scariest nights of her life.

My mother had two sisters. She was the eldest. When she and her first sister were children, she told me that they were so afraid of their parents that they would sleep nightly underneath their bed so that they would not get beaten or molested by one or both of them. Apparently, the youngest sister was an “accident” and happened many years after their childhood and after my grandfather had made his fortune (He became very wealthy.) so she didn’t get as much or the same kind of abuse as the first two sisters did.

The majority of the abuse that happened to me was inflicted by my mother and her parents. My father was abusive, for sure, but he was completely different. I’m not making excuses for him, but I believe that his physical and mental abuse of me was mostly because he did not know how to deal with me being the product of systematic and traumatic abuse inflicted on me by my mother and family. The abuse from my mother and maternal grandparents was by far worse, began in toddlerhood and lasted for most of my young life.

The First Four Years-Gaps In Time

 As a very young child, as my mother tells it, I was afraid of old men. The men who were around the same age as her father. I was very picky about who could touch me as a young child. Only my mother and father could pick me up or handle me in any way without me screaming bloody murder. However, my fear of older men went beyond this, apparently. My mother said that whenever her father (my grandfather) would hold me I would scream and get completely hysterical with hyperventilating and sometimes passing out. She said that they all thought it was just a phase I was going through or that I was incredibly shy. Now that I am an adult, I realize that this is not normal behavior for a baby. I am a parent now and if my daughter had acted that way when someone held her, you can bet that I would have investigated why very thoroughly.

I have huge gaps in my memory of my childhood. There are pictures in my mind or flashes of things that happened, but no continuous memory. The very first memory I have is of being a toddler and climbing out of my crib, walking down the hallway of our house to the living room and crawling up on the sofa to snuggle with my dad who was eating ice cream while watching Johnny Carson. When I told my dad of that memory, he didn’t believe me at first, saying that he didn’t believe children that young could have detailed memories. However, when I began to describe the layout of our house to him in detail, his eyes got wider and wider. He was shocked that I could remember all of that when I was still in diapers. The memories I do have are very detailed and accurate. I notice little things around me like if there are chachkis and where they are placed in a house or what the weather was like on a particular day. I can remember dreams I had when I was a child in great detail. I think I had a photographic memory. When I started elementary school, all of the things I learned I snapped pictures of in my mind. I have this memory of being around ten years old, sitting at my mother’s dining table studying for a test the next day. I had a page of notes, front and back, in my own handwriting that I was reading and re-reading. The next day, during the test, I was able to recall the notes I took in the form of pictures in my mind which were organized into paragraphs or sections of the paper. My mind still works this way to some extent.

My parents divorced when I was four years old. I was completely devastated. My mother said I cried every night for six months. I was very attached to my father. Not long after I was born, my mother had to undergo heart surgery for the second time. She was born with a congenital heart defect and had had surgery to correct it when she was a child, but evidently, that surgery was not done correctly. So, after I was born, she was recovering from that surgery for a long time. During this time, she could not hold me, and she definitely did not breast feed me. (When I mentioned to her years later that I had decided to breast feed my own daughter, she screwed up her face in disgust and made an “ewww” sort of sound.) My father had to take up all of the duties caring for me. He was the only one who held me, fed me, changed me, played with me, took me to daycare, etc… My mother did not have anything to do with me for practically the first year of my life. So, it’s no wonder that I was so attached to my father. My father told me that when they talked about who would get custody of me during the divorce proceedings, it was agreed that I would be better off with him. However, my mother told him that she was going to fight for custody of me because she “needed the money” that she would get from his child support payments. My father’s exact response to me regarding this was,

 “It’s terrible to use a child like that. For money.” 

I think this statement sums up perfectly the major differences in who they were as people and their parenting styles.

My mother remarried almost immediately after her divorce was final. She had been having an affair with a child psychologist at the hospital where she worked. When he moved into our apartment after they married, I was still crying every night over the loss of my father. His continuous presence just made things that much more difficult. Every night, I would lay in bed crying and heartbroken and every night, one or the other of them would come into my bedroom, drag me out of bed and beat me until I stopped crying. This happened nightly for around six months. I had bunk beds at the time, and I can remember moving to sleep on the top bunk thinking, in my childish way, that if I were on the top bunk that they couldn’t reach me to pull me out of bed for the nightly abuse. As children often do though, I misjudged. After I moved to the top bunk, they would just yank me off of it and I would crash to the floor. A startling and rude awakening. 

When the time came that I finally stopped crying every night for my father, I began to hear at night strange noises coming from my mother’s bedroom. Since my bedroom was adjacent to hers, I discovered that if I put my ear to the door that connected her room to mine, I could hear everything that was going on. This is just what I did. For the first few times I listened, I couldn’t understand what was going on. During the day, though, my mother began to appear with various bruises on her face or body and she seemed always to have a purplish red ring around her neck which she tried to cover up with makeup.

Things I've Never Said To Anyone

 I think about suicide every day. I think about it several times a day every day. I have been doing this since my first suicide attempt at seven years old. I would never attempt it again. Mainly because of my daughter. What would happen to her if I died? I have no will because I can’t afford to a lawyer to get one made, so if I die, she goes into foster care. This is something I would never want for her. I have never told anyone, even my many therapists over the years, that I think about suicide every day. Suicide is a trigger word and people have automatic knee-jerk reactions to it. I can understand why, which is why I have never told anyone. Some mornings, like yesterday, I wake up and the first and only thing I think is, “I’m so done with this world, this life. I’m so done.”

I get hard mood swings. I never go very high, but I definitely go very low. Last night, I was sitting at my computer doing something fairly routine for me and all of the sudden, my heart dropped and I had visions of myself slitting my arms open from wrist to elbow. Intrusive thoughts and more intrusive feelings. When I was in my twenties, the intrusive thoughts were so bad that I thought I was losing my mind at times. So, I learned, for the sake of my own sanity, to visualize pushing those types of thoughts away. Now, I’ve become very adept at it as was the case last night. It’s exhausting, though, to have to constantly monitor your thoughts and to actively push away some of them and replace them with more positive ones. There have been several points in my life where I was so exhausted that I just stopped doing it and let those thoughts run wild. As a result, I nearly went over that emotional cliff that I’ve always been terrified of. 

Involuntary. 

Psychiatric. 

Hold. 

Ever since I’ve had my daughter, though, I’ve given that particular cliff a very wide berth. I’m the Champion of Mental Monitoring. Even though, being a single mother is very hard, I suppose this is one benefit for me. I love her so much that I have, for the last ten years, kept myself from falling in the hole.

I’ve never been diagnosed as Bipolar, but I have been diagnosed with chronic depression. Sometimes, I wonder if I have Borderline Personality Disorder, but then a part of me thinks, “What good are labels?” I mean, don’t labels just limit us in terms of what we think about ourselves and what we can do with our lives? Isn’t living with a label somewhat akin to living in a box-shaped life? On the other hand, I don’t have very much hope for my life as it is now. I can only imagine just living one monotonous, miserable day after another until I die. For a couple of years in my thirties, I was in a serious relationship with a guy in his early twenties. (I remember telling a good friend about this and she said, “I had one of those once. They’re fun.”) I can remember his constant hopefulness about his future, which was in hard contrast to what I felt about mine. His unflagging optimism about his life was so unfamiliar to me that I looked at him in my mind sometimes like a strange being from another dimension. Like a unicorn. We were so different in so many ways, that now I think the only thing that kept us together for as long as we were was the sex.

The Ice Cream Incident

(Trigger warning: childhood abuse)

 I learned how to fight from my mother. I can remember her saying such hateful things to me as a child and a young adult, but I never stood up for myself. (Because that's how some traumatized children react. They coil up into a shell for self protection. I learned how to do this as a toddler.) Later, in the quiet of my room and the solace of my anger, I would think to myself all of the things I should have said to her. 

We had food issues, Mother and I. There always seemed to be an over-abundance of food in the house, but no one was supposed to eat it. I guess we had to at least appear to be a functional and normal family. I remember vividly one day after school. I was thirteen and in the seventh grade. My mother thought I was too fat and had decreed that I be forbidden food until I lost what she deemed was a reasonable amount of weight, which was twenty pounds. The thing was, though, I had started my period that year and my body was actively having growth spurts. My breasts were growing and I was getting taller (although I would only ever make it to five feet two). I know now from being a mother that when major bodily changes happen to children, their appetite increases to deal with these changes. The caloric needs increase, because they simply need more to function and grow. Also, I was never "fat". I looked like a normal thirteen year old should look. I wasn't thin, but I wasn't overweight either. If I had lost twenty pounds, as my mother wanted me to (because I was never just myself but a reflection of her), I would have been in the hospital on a feeding tube. 

On this day, I had walked home from school after not having any food for the previous three days. My mother was effectively starving me. To say that I was hungry is a vast understatement. At that point, I would have eaten almost anything. The mere thought of food made me salivate and actually drool. Mother was not home from work yet, so I went to the kitchen and stood in front of the refrigerator longing for some deus ex machina to swoop in and give me permission to eat or to fly me away from that house and Mother so that I could eat and be content.  I was so much longing for food and yet, at the same time, afraid to eat. I had no idea what new and inventive punishments Mother might inflict on me if she caught me eating. I opened the freezer and there on the shelf in a prominent front placement was a half gallon of ice cream unopened, of course. I stared at it while the minutes stretched out and it seemed that time slowed to a creep. An eternity later, as I was dissociated from my body, I watched myself get the ice cream out of the freezer, scoop out three balls, put the container back in the freezer, walk to the dining room table and start to eat. As I ate, I snapped back into my body and suddenly became present to all of its pain and hunger. I don't remember tasting the ice cream. I don't even remember what kind it was. I just remember the feeling of the iciness of it going down my throat and hitting my stomach. I could feel the coldness from inside my body. 

Exactly four bites later, Mother strode in through the door. I could smell her perfume the minute she stepped inside the house. I heard her bracelets jangle as she dropped her purse on the sofa right inside the front door. I felt the clack-clack of her heels on the wood floor through my bare feet on the wood floor as she walked toward the dining room. She saw me once she entered the dining room. An ugly, self-satisfied sneer slowly spread across her beautiful mouth and I could see the hate coming from her eyes as if it were a physical thing. I couldn't move. A predator and prey situation. I could feel my heart in my chest beating so hard that I thought very briefly that I would have a heart attack. My body was involuntarily frozen to the chair. As she continued to slowly walk towards me, I could see her fists clenching and releasing. I braced mentally for one of those fists to land anywhere on my body. Instead of punching me, she began this weird chant in an off key child-like singsong, "Fatty, fatty, fatty! Little piggy wants ice cream!" While she was doing this odd singsong, she began to pinch me anywhere on my body that she could reach. At this point, I had gotten out of my chair, although I don't remember when I did it, and was actively trying to get away from her pinching fingers which seemed to somehow have elongated. From my panicked perspective, her fingers had grown to be about two feet long. She had rings on every finger and I saw them flashing as she reached for me with her bracelets jingling. She pinched my stomach, my breasts, my bottom, my thighs-anywhere she could reach. She continued this punishment mercilessly until I miraculously slipped her grasp and managed to get into the bathroom. I slammed the door on her and locked it (We lived in one of those houses that was so old that every door had a different key, but we didn't have any of the keys since they had long since been lost or destroyed). 

Once in the bathroom, I forced three fingers down my throat and vomited what little ice cream I had eaten. I was so panicked and upset that after the initial purge, my body continued to dry heave and expel stomach bile for good while. I was left a sweaty, crying lump in the corner of the bathroom floor and all the while, I could hear Mother laughing manically outside the door. She was celebrating her victory. I don't know how long I stayed in the bathroom. I felt safe there, but at the same time, every time I looked at the toilet, I remembered what had happened and I hated being in there. I hated being in that house and most of all: I hated Mother. Recovered somewhat, I pulled myself off the bathroom floor and shuffled to the sink. It was one of those porcelain pedestal sinks that are usually in old houses and accompanying it, there was an old medicine cabinet hanging on the wall above the sink with an equally old mirror which was in need of re-silvering. I braced myself by placing my hands on either side of the sink and slowly raised my head to see my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. I had light blonde, curly hair (Mother hated the curls.), sky blue eyes, full pinkish lips, very pale skin and prominent dark circles under my eyes. I hated that reflection because I didn't look like Mother who had long, straight raven black hair, eyes so dark that you couldn't see the irises, beautiful and smooth olive skin, always had a blush to her skin as if her fire was just there pulsing underneath and lips the color of dark red roses. I had always wanted to look like her, because from the time I was a small child, I had thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I was so pale and colorless that I felt I could never compare to her. I felt that I had not the fire that she did. 

As I washed my face and rinsed my mouth, I felt my anger rise up and rest in my throat. I wanted to scream. There were no words. I just wanted to scream at her like some primal being. However, I could not scream. My punishment would only have been worse had I done it. So, I swallowed and my anger went down my throat and came to rest in my belly and stayed there. I turned to the mirror once again to see that I indeed had some fire within me only it came out from my eyes. It burned me from the inside. It was at that point, and for the first time in my life, that I thought: She will not ever break me. 

(Taken from a handwritten journal entry 8/30/2002)

Irish

 

 I found out at the end that they called her Irish. I never knew why because no one knew if she was even from there. I thought she may have been about sixty years old, but she may have been older or younger. Regardless of whether she had lived a hard life in her youth, it was plain that she lived a hard life now and it showed on her face and the way she carried herself. Irish was not hunched over by any means, as if she had that bone-wasting disease that so many women of her age have. She stood straight and rested most of her weight on one leg and kicked the other one out in front of her as if to tell the world that she had claimed whatever spot she happened to be standing on.  She was not very tall and slight of build, but she was wiry and strong for her size and had short and coarse curly gray hair which she had brushed back from her forehead. She wore mismatched items that seemed as though she might have gotten them dumpster diving. She wore a black leather patch over one eye which had a strap that went across her head and cut through her thick hair. Her brown leather jacket was a duster and fell to her ankles. You could tell it had been worn a lot before she got it. It was marred all over with cuts and creases and completely covered in a layer of dirt. She wore a belt that was made for gun ammo, but it never seemed to have any in it. She never wore skirts or dresses. Always trousers and those were mostly cargo pants. You know, the kind with all the pockets. God only knows what she kept in them. Her shirts were always thin and full of random small holes. If there was a design or a picture on them, they were always so faded that you could only see what might have been there when it was new. To complete her ensemble, Irish always wore a pair of black army boots that were never tied all the way up. Somehow, the laces always seemed to drag, but she never tripped. That was a miracle, I thought. Overall, Irish gave off the air of someone who had come up the hard way and still had to grapple for everything she had and what she did have she would not give up without a fight. She was not a woman whom most would approach easily. This was how she looked when Sam, our local detective, brought her to stand on my front porch. 

She had kidnapped my daughter and a number of other townsfolk's children. My daughter was 9 years old when she disappeared. A blur of giggles and long hair, she was. Sweet, stubborn, insanely smart and empathetic and the love of my life. The day she was taken was the day I died inside. So, when Sam knocked on my door that chilly fall morning, I opened it hoping that he had news of the whereabouts of my daughter. I pushed open the screen door and looked to my right and there she was. On my porch. In handcuffs. Smirking with that damned leg kicked out standing there in front of me like she owned my house. 

"Sam," I said tentatively, "Why is Irish on my porch in handcuffs?"

He cleared his throat nervously.

"She has something she wants to tell you, Fae." 

I turned toward her and right then her smirk broke into a wide grin revealing teeth that looked like they had been blackened with a marker. 

"I took yer daughter," she drawled nonchalantly. 

I looked at Sam questioning, "Is this true?"

"I'm afraid so, Fae," he said lowering his head. 

I came fully out on to the porch at that moment and let the screen door slam. I was numb or livid or desperately sad. I couldn't tell which. I stood still for a couple of minutes, which, to me, felt like millennia. I was trying to process what had just taken place. Out of all the emotions I was feeling at that moment, anger became the foremost. No, it was not just anger. It was homicidal anger. I turned my body toward Irish and lunged at her screaming. A sound that couldn't have come from me tore itself up and out of my body through my throat. I sounded like a wild animal. When I landed on her, I smelled whiskey, cigarettes, and unwash. It permeated everything about her. As if by my touching her, I loosed some weird spores that made up her being. I felt surrounded by her essence and I hated her for so confidently telling me that she had taken my daughter, whom I loved more than anything in the universe. I punched and clawed at Irish until Sam managed to pry me off of her.

"She's not dead, Fae!", Sam yelled as he pulled me off Irish, "That's what I come here to tell you!"  

I disengaged from Irish and looked alternately at Sam and at her. I noticed that when Irish got to her feet, she wasn't so nonchalant. Her face looked like it had been through a meat grinder. Two black eyes, a broken nose and, I noticed a few of those black teeth littered my porch. Now, it was my turn to smirk. 

"That's right, she ain't dead and neither are them others," Irish hissed through her missing teeth. 

Sam let out a breath as if he had been holding it since he had arrived, "Irish told us where all them kids are, Fae. They're out by the old airplane graveyard." 

I started awake. The last thing I saw in my dream was my daughter running toward me down a hill of airplane trash with her beautiful hair trailing behind her. I lay in bed for some time trying to convince myself that this was not real. I got up and padded down the hall to my daughter's bedroom and peeked inside. There she was. Her angelic face relaxed and her hair all around her looking like a burnished bronze halo. It was all a dream. Just a bad dream.

Life Is Lived In Moments

You left. You stood on my front porch and said flatly,
"I'm leaving for band practice and I'm never coming back."
 At that moment, I was so angry with you.

A few weeks before, we sat in my sunroom with the sun setting outside the three walls of windows and settling over us like a veil of spun gold. I asked you why you had not introduced me to your family. I asked you why you had never invited me to your house. We were engaged to be married, yet I had no idea where you lived and had never even met your parents. You launched into a monologue about past hurts, trust issues, and compartmentalization. You eventually agreed to work on being more open, more trusting and you agreed to introduce me to your parents.

Christmas season came. I remember laying in my bed with you and hesitantly asking you if you would go with me to my family's Christmas dinner. You turned to me and smiled. I never thought you would say yes, but you did. I was so happy at that moment. I felt that our relationship was progressing, deepening. All I ever wanted was to be with you. I wanted domestic bliss with you and all that that entailed.

My family adored you. You were charming. You smiled and were funny and witty. My cousin even pulled me into an unused room and asked me if you had proposed. When I told her that I had proposed to you, her eyes went wide as saucers. She laughed and hugged me. It was nice to feel accepted. It was nice to finally feel like I belonged in my own family. I felt like you had made that possible and I was so grateful. I loved you at that moment.

When I asked you a few weeks later why we had not gone to your family's Christmas dinner, you became evasive and irritated. You gave me some half-excuses. I was skeptical and hurt. I felt like you had completely forgotten our conversation about being more open, more trusting, and the introduction to your family. Then I thought that maybe you hadn't forgotten, but that you had previously told me just what I had wanted to hear because you wanted to continue our relationship without furthering your responsibilities. Then, I thought that maybe you had something to hide. Or both.

Later that night, after you had gone, I lay in bed going over and over everything I could remember that you had ever said with regard to how you felt about me, our relationship and things that had been said in arguments or discussions. I was so hurt and angry with you at that moment. So, I acted on what would be the beginning of the end of our relationship. I texted you,
"You have until the new year to introduce me to your parents. Otherwise, we're done."
I never would have thought, at that moment, that you would have retreated back into your distrust and compartmentalization.

I remember your face as you stood at my door preparing to leave. I think you were waiting for me to suddenly change my mind, to say I was wrong, to beg for forgiveness. I, however, did none of those things. I loved you at that moment, but I had to let you go. At that moment, I had to choose to love myself.