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.

Sleepy and Mother

~Sleepy~

Scarves floating like ghosts
Twirling and twirling
tickling my knees
Silken pink slippers
playing gypsy dancer
Gossamer wings
to fly and flit
petals waiting on the wind
floating softly
fairy boats on the water
Dappled sunlight
playing warm on white stones
mermaid sunning
blue-green wetscales
and Ophelia's petal-hair
Siren songs
sing sweetly
of Secret Gardens
follow blackbird
to the iron-keyed door
where swings are twining vines
swallowed in sweet scent
of pollen bees buzzing slowly
Leprechauns have houses of gold
where the rainbow ends~
-------------------------------------

~Mother~
I wondered why that spot inside of me was so vulnerable.
That secret place I had tucked away in a far corner of my heart.
Growing dusty in the attic of my mind.
That traveler's trunk of insecurity,
locked securely and strapped tightly.
Yet I walked into your the room of your mind,
into the dim interior of your idiosyncrasies,
and you opened that rusty trunk as if it had never been locked.
I know... I know...
I told myself over and over,
that I am not those things you think,
not those things you say.
I bled everyday as the lies I swallowed became razors in my throat.
Working their purpose
destroying me from the inside out,
bleeding away all of my self-esteem
all of my security,
all of what is me.
I was sick unto death and my hatred of you grew and grew
until it became its own entity.
Living and breathing,
the stench of the cesspool of vileness it exhaled
morbidly intoxicating,
replicating,
doting on its horrid spawn,
cultivating more and more
of me.
And building upon itself seared my vision
white hot with insurmountable rage
and lashing out wildly in the end,
uncontrollable,
I imagined that you were dead.
That I had cut you to pieces
and left you in a quivering, bloody heap.
And then I vomited up all of the sickness
and all of the lies
you fostered
that I believed
and I felt relieved.~

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)

Break The Rock

 

 As I lay in half sleep, listening to her voice, she said with a Russian accent angrily, "Who is this person who is so bad that you hate her so much? Why? Why do you hate her so much? What has she done that is so terrible? Is she a serial killer? Does she steal? Does she lie? Does she abuse children? Why do you hate her so much? Why?"

I thought back, "She lies a bit about some things. She has stolen a few things when she needed them and had no money. She's never killed anyone and she's never abused her daughter."

Again in her deep voice she said, "Why does this person not deserve abundant material wealth? Why does this person not deserve to be healthy? Why does this person not deserve to be sound in her mind? Why does this person not deserve all of the good things that the Creator has made for her?" 

I thought back, as if stuck in a horrible loop, "Because I hate her."

Angry again, the voice yelled, "WHY? WHY DO YOU HATE HER?!"

I had no answer. So, I lay there miserable wondering why this angry Russian woman was questioning me so harshly. 

Minutes ticked by ever so slowly. I don't know if I was waiting for her to begin again or if I was trying to go back to sleep or if I was continuing to try to justify hating someone I had no real reason to hate.

She came back with a boom in my head," Let me tell you why you hate her. You hate her because you mother taught you to hate her when she beat you and cursed you. You hate her because your father taught you to hate her when he beat you and said those cruel things to you. You hate her because your grandfather taught you to hate her when he said he loved you and violated your body when you were such a small child. You hate her because the men told you to hate her when they raped you. They told you that you deserved it and that you really wanted it. You hate her because you have never found a safe place for your heart in this world which can be so cold and soulless. You hate her because she is you." 

And then she showed me the image of my hate in a place in my mind in which it floated. It looked like a rock suspended in water or jello. The color was grayish black and from behind the rock there was a glow of reddish pink shots of light interspersed with dots of white. As if it were set against a backdrop of spiritual fire and sparks. 

This is what she told me and this is what she showed me. I am waiting for her to come again. I am waiting to break the rock.

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.