At the library with son #5 last week, I watched him excavate from my library bag the books I wanted to check out; at the bottom of the pile was one of my flip-flops which had been missing in action since last summer. This struck me as hilarious; I got a case of the giggles, which I tried to stifle so the librarian wouldn't think I was wacky--but when I glanced over at her she was having her own fit of the giggles, her face a bright pink as she waved her arms around as if to say, "Stop, you're killing me!"

I discovered the reason my soap dish won't lie flat on my bathroom counter: I've been using it upside down ever since I bought it 6 months ago.

(Such a short list, I guess I haven't had much to laugh about lately. I figure it's good for my soul to remember life's humorous moments, however sporadic they may be. They help get me through my inner healing work which can be so all-consuming.)

During the decades of my 20's and 30's, even for the first half of my 40's, I lived from moment to moment. I lacked the ability to think of my actions in terms of their logical consequences. Since my mid-40's I've gone to  the opposite extreme: I rarely leave my home, unless it's a safe or necessary errand such as a run to the grocery store, bank or library.

On occasion, Sissyface and I walk over to the pub, but I'm extra careful there, remembering my earlier years of abusing alcohol and getting entangled in too many hopeless romances. When once in a blue moon she suggests getting drunk together, I say no. That's a good thing for many reasons. (Applause, applause.) But would it kill me to relax with one drink? Am I incapable of letting go of my incessant need to always be in control?

Or take my relationship with my cousin as another example of how I've disconnected from life. The last time I saw him was over two years ago, just days after my son Tim's motorcycle accident. I've moved many times since then, but he's left messages for me with various family members. I've yet to call him back.

For one thing, I'm afraid he might still be using drugs. If so, I don't want that chaos in my life. That's a reasonable concern, right? But . . . I miss him terribly. Aside from my one good brother, he's my only link to my dad and aunt. Not only do I miss hanging out with him, I long to probe his memory of these two individuals who are no longer living.

I understand my hesitancy, it plays into my whole new strategy of living my life deliberately. It's good to not unthinkingly complicate my world in the ways in which I used to. What I don't get is how to find a healthy balance, if there is such a thing, between my all or nothing mentality.

Can I see my cousin, but with healthy boundaries? Should I let him know where I live? He has a brother who rips off everyone, including family members. I don't want him getting a hold of my address. And then I have to question if these are the real reasons I keep putting off returning my cousin's calls. As viable as these reasons may be, is there something else going on with me?

I fear intimacy, so that's likely a part of it. And what of my general withdrawal from life? Is it fear, more than anything, that keeps me from seeing someone I love? How reasonable and responsible it sounds to be careful who I allow into my life, but what if it's not even that, it's simply fear of getting close to anyone? I know that I've disconnected a great deal since Tim's accident.

Sometimes I question whether puttering around my home, sewing, knitting, cleaning and having family over, is enough for me. Oh often it seems I'm just aching for something more. Some days I feel like a hamster in a wheel, always busy busy busy, but never getting anywhere. I play the role of mom and nana well. I'm the one everyone turns to for help, and that's not a complaint. I want it that way. Beyond these roles though, is there anyone really living beneath the surface?

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. I need more fun, I guess. Fun that's healthy and doesn't make for bad memories, and regrets.

I'm safe, it seems, because I've shrunk myself to tiny proportions to fit inside the box (prison) of my own making. A box of low risk taking, no dreaming, and few mistakes. Well it's hard to make mistakes when there's barely breathing room.

I know I've put myself here, inside this suffocating box. I'm the only one who can release me. But how, and will it happen before I suffocate to death?

I looked at the photos--just a glance, really, for I knew I'd devour them later in private. I can't explain such fascination--- it's not unlike my childhood lust for prying off knee and elbow scabs to see what my puckery skin looked like underneath. Well here's the thing, I've come to a point in life where I'd rather face my puckery fears and triggers than spend the rest of my days crippled by them. I've been hobbled in so many ways, why should I concede any more areas of my life to the two who raised, and abused, me?

If I were to accept surface conclusions for my motivations in studying the photos, I would conclude I have a deep need to punish myself. I could guilt trip myself for once again punishing myself (punish myself for punishing myself? Oh make it stop!) Then I could feel even worse. I could blame the photos and give them back to Sissyface, thinking that was an end of it. Just stop looking at such things, I could scold myself, and you'll be fine.

I'm trying to teach myself a better way of dealing with the memories evoked by forays into the past. If I have the courage to consider the memories objectively (and let's face it, I don't always, nor the ability to do so), I sense there is more than just their instant replay striving for my attention. What are the memories trying to tell me, aside from the obvious facts of my childhood sorrow? My face turns hot as the searing thought scorches my awareness: it wasn't "some little girl" these things happened to. Not some vague entity whose stories I've just happened to memorize. I know these stories chapter and verse because that little girl was me.

Curiosity begins to build (in spite of my wanting to recoil from truth), because somewhere amid the ugly rubble I'm digging through lies artifacts to that life I lived. My artifacts, my history, my wreckage. Not some anonymous little girl's, mine.

The shock of my abuser's eyes framed in an old photo jars me. I want to back away in horror, curl up with a softie, stuff my mouth with chocolate. But wait, this time I don't curl up inside myself. I don't run, I barely flinch. Is it getting easier to handle the memories? No, but something inside of me has shifted. There is that curiosity again which refuses to be ignored. I need to know: Who, what, where, when and why. A journalist to my own shameful holocaust, I need all the gory details. I may not be proud of my childhood but it's mine, the only one I'll ever have. The need to know what shaped me into my present day self (okay, selves) sometimes overrides my automatic impulse to simply go limp and give in to the triggers.

I yearn to live consciously and deliberately. To continue living on automatic impulse is beginning to feel like colluding with my abusers in the destruction of my soul.

They took, with no thought of consequences.

They considered the well-being of a child not worthy of their attention.

They blotted out the sun, and muted my voice and forced my dreams underground with dead, buried things.

They caused me to doubt what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and my body's natural response to abuse.

Can I turn this around? Can I, in a sense, negate their legacy by living intelligently with heart, mind and soul engaged? And am I even capable of doing so?

I saw the photos, looked into the eyes which used to mock me, and which I used to (unwillingly) look up into from under the weight of my abuser. In a sense he won, but only temporarily--- for look at me decades later having the audacity to gaze into those monkeyish eyes, a smile curling my mouth. I'm alive in ways he never was! That's a major victory all by itself.

I'm giving in to my curiosity to unravel the mystery not only of the crimes committed against me, but the mystery of me. I am both the clue and the mystery's solution. My step-dad and my mother are the pages you rip out of a journal and feed to the fire, but not before reading them one last time to get the full import of every nuanced meaning.

At long last I'm on my own track, searching for the one missing person I've longed for even more than I yearn for my childhood best friend: myself. I have a hunch I won't give up until our paths, at long last, meet up.

Meet me where my front yard gives way to the side street winding away from that House of Incest. Sit with me on the curb, just as we did as kids, our shoulders scraping comfortably as we laughed and horsed around, two ordinary kids doing ordinary kid stuff. Touch my arm when we laugh at a joke, for I need once more your casual touch to assure me my flesh is more than a sexual play thing.

Look into my eyes once more with your keen, affectionate expression. Speak of your dreams, and encourage me to share mine. Stall when we hear your mother's voice calling, taking your time getting up from the curb, loathe to part from me. Call me after dinner just to hear my voice, though we just spent all day together lollygagging.

I have never again been that close to anyone as I was to you during those childhood days.

Meet me at the corner of Brightwood Street for oh, I miss you so . . .

My hands, in these dreams, gracefully fold cloth diapers into neat triangles with a deftness I'm sure they lacked in reality, so overwhelmed was I with so many to care for, and me in a state of perpetual frozenness.

These others--this new family of mine--sought me out, they who came to me so late in life. Or did I do the seeking? Confusion baffles me when I try to sort it out; I find it difficult to conjure up the sequence of events which led me (warily, I admit) from settling into a comfortable old age with well-thumbed books, and cups of tea, to a course both foreign and unwanted. I found myself unaccountably embarking, at this late date, on a journey whose reason for existence and whose destination puzzled me.

My new tribe (for how else to think of them?) came in a rush at a time when (at the urging of well-meaning friends), I decided to finally begin coming to terms with my painful childhood. Oh, they came to me as children I didn't remember giving birth to whose features were, nonetheless, vaguely familiar. They smiled shyly, the sweet ones, anyway. Others cringed, or smirked: the teens, mostly, with smudged kohl-rimmed eyes and the steely self-assurance of youth (which I'm sure I never possessed at any time during my own volatile teen years.)

They came, then: shy, aloof, clingy, rebellious--or, like Mrs. Homebody, the eldest of the bunch, all bumbling nervousness with a heartbreakingly eagerness to please.

I won't pretend to have greeted their arrival with open arms. Nothing like that. I eyed them, when I managed to catch a glimpse, with a sinking heart. I've raised my family, came my instant, rebellious thought. This is supposed to be my time now. How incongruous that I, a nana at the age of 50, should once again be caretaker to so many! Yet here they were, a ragamuffin gang my heart should have gone out to instantly. Surely I could spare for them, in all their oddities, at least a smidgen of the maternal instinct which as a mother had been my one saving grace.

Perhaps it's misleading to say they came to me during my 50th year. According to my therapist at the time (who was keen to recognize these others), they have been with me, as surely as my own bone and marrow and beating heart, since childhood. More accurately, they showed themselves to me during my 50th year.

"They are parts of you," she explained, her intense gaze boring into me, though her voice was kind, even gentle. "They are the others you created to endure the outrageous abuses of your childhood."

"Like Sybil," I said, saying it in a low moan.

"You couldn't have retained your sanity without them, " she said. My therapist was a short, squat woman with frizzy, greying hair and a frowsy way of dressing. Her name was Rose.

"But I would have known about them sooner," came my lame attempt at denial. "If they exist, how could I have lived so long without knowing about them?"

Rose leaned forward in her overstuffed chair in a confidential manner, as if we were nothing more than two middle-aged friends sharing confidences about menopause and hormones.

"The whole point of Dissociative Identity Disorder," she explained, "is secrecy. Your alters fear exposure. They fear that if they are seen they will be abused again."

I let that sink in, or tried to, as my eyes swept her small office, searching for something on which to fix my gaze.

"I don't change clothes a zillion times a day,"  I said in protest. "I don't change my voice!"

To this Rose said nothing. She settled back comfortably into the depths of her chair; I watched absently as she crossed the puffy ankles my sister and I would describe as 'cankles.'

"What are you thinking?" she asked after a few moments.

"I'm thinking this is an injustice. I've raised my family! I've been nurturing everyone under the sun since I was a little girl. I shouldn't have to deal with this. And," I added, "I'm thinking that most likely you're wrong about me being a multiple."

She raised an eyebrow, and reached for the lined pencil tablet I'd handed her earlier when she showed me into her office.

"Who's Jenny?" she asked casually, flipping open the tablet and glancing at the childish writing which filled the wide lines.

"Jenny?"

"Yes, you see that every page here is signed by someone who goes by the name of Jenny. Was this journal written during your childhood?"

"Oh no," I said, eager to correct this misconception. "I bought that tablet a month ago."

Our eyes met; in hers I saw gentle amusement, and I'm certain that in mine she saw the beginning of a dawning comprehension.

"Do you see what you're telling me? You wrote this recently, at the age of 50. And signed every page with the name Jenny."

"Oh . . . " I let my voice trail off as a soft sigh escaped my lips. "Jenny . . ." In my mind's eye I caught a glimpse of a black-haired pony tailed little girl of about 7, with merry eyes. "I think, I think I know who you mean. Sometimes, well sometimes I hear someone complaining that I'm brushing her hair too hard, or that she wants to wear it in a ponytail today." I gulped before continuing, "I thought it was just--well, my own silly thoughts. You know, like times when I keep hearing old childhood songs playing over and over in my head."

"As if someone were trying to get your attention?"

I jumped to my feet, began pacing the cluttered room, sidestepping the brown corduroy ottoman covered with cat hair, and a filing cabinet drawer left wide open.

"So basically, what you're telling me is I'm nuts," I said flatly as I passed her chair.

"Not at all. You simply learned to dissociate at an early age, as a coping mechanism."

"Right." I bit off the word, my voice suddenly low and raspy. "Every one who didn't have a golden childhood is a Sybil, right?"

"There are no golden childhoods," Rose said. I came to a stop in front of the love-seat I'd vacated, and plopped down on it with force.

"Oh sure there are," I said in a growly voice. "Aproned mothers who feed their kids from the four food groups, and make sure they brush with Crest every morning and night. Dads who go to work every day and tuck their kids into bed at night and kiss their foreheads instead of pawing them with their big hands."

My own hands flew up to cover my face, ashamed of the tears which out of nowhere began flowing.

"You've switched several times since you've been here," Rose said in her low key way. She closed the journal and set it on her lap.

"I'd very much like to get to know this Jenny," she said, clasping her hands together as if in entreaty. "And the low voice, so quick to deny everything. I suspect this could be on of your system's protectors."

"Protector?" I echoed the word and broke out into laughter. "You're speaking greek, sister. Never heard such nonsense in all my life." Now I was talking out of the side of my mouth, like a gansta.

"Most DID systems have at least one protector," Rose explained, "often male."

I wrinkled my nose. "Now you're way off the mark. I never dress like a man."

"You don't have to," she said reasonably. "He only has to protect you. It doesn't matter how he looks to the external world."

And so it began, this awareness of the others I had (now that I dared be honest) sensed sneaking up the back stairs of my soul, making themselves at home in the universal tentative manner of children who have known abandonment, and fear its reappearance.

I couldn't grasp how I'd had time to create these others, as busy as my younger self was with just trying to survive.

While you were being mauled, stupid.

Afterwards, walking stiff-legged back to the tenuous comfort and safety of your own room.

They came to me, then, this new/old family of mine, those I've come to think of as my beauties: utterly human, utterly mine.

I will no longer:

• Hold myself accountable for the decisions my mother made decades ago, much less the ensuing dysfunctions and lifetime sorrows which--for so many individuals-- followed in their wake.
• Automatically denigrate myself because that's the role forced on me as a child (my step-dad calling me an idiot, and my mother laughing, always laughing.)
• Feel sorry for my mother, when I can't even give myself permission to feel sorrow on my own behalf.
• Cultivate and nurture feelings of guilt as the result of not being able to love my mother, or have contact with her.
• Continue diminishing my value, dreams and sorrows, as a sort of penance for being the redheaded stepchild in the family: the one child who was the bridge between the past (my mother's first brood), and the future (the family with which she replaced her original children.)
• Perpetuate my own dumbing-down, a habit so deeply ingrained in me from years of being the family scapegoat that I've only recently begun realizing how insidious is its hold on me (both the habit itself, and the need to indulge in it.)
• Apologize to anyone for the areas in my life and character which are in some manner out of whack, or what are not considered "normal" by those who insist on labeling things.
• Waste another moment attempting to puzzle out the whys of who and what my mother is. I will learn to let the facts speak for themselves (for when they do, they speak volumes.) My mother abused me, end of story. The driving force behind her treatment of me, her motivations--neither of these are things I've anything to do with. Trying to sort it all out into some kind of sense is crazy-making at its best.
• Listen to anyone making excuses for my mom. She wasn't a victim, she doesn't deserve the compassion every true victim needs and is entitled to.
• Perpetuate my step-dad and mother's attitude towards me. I do this, unthinkingly, mostly by poking cruel fun at myself.
• Continue searching for the one thing I did that turned my mother against me.
• Go out of my way to make family members feel okay about having a relationship with my mom.
• Lower my head in the presence of anyone. (Well, God of course.)
• Stifle my moments of joy and pleasure because of the lie that I don't deserve them.
• Deny that I'm angry all the way to the bone, and full of sorrow.
• Speak words I don't mean because others want to be flattered.

These are the things I plan to work on. Because Sissyface told me the truth about my mother's attitude towards me, I feel that for the first time in my entire life I can begin the process of grieving. Grieving what I sorely needed and never got as a child: a mother who loved, adored, nurtured and protected me.

So what, if anything, did I come home with? Mostly summer clothes for Maddy and Anna. I did find a nice bit of material I couldn't resist. What to make with it? Hmmm, it'll be nice to have I can see this as a make-up pouch, or some such thing.on hand for when inspiration hits. I found this cute children's book and it was irresistible. The publishing date is 1954. I was drawn to it on the spot. (Yes it's true, I'm already longing for fall-sigh.)

 The next day my son and daughter in-law went to a Goodwill outlet store without me. What did they come home with? An old fashioned over stuffed chair, of the kind I've been pining for forever. How rude is that? I'm going to own that chair if it's the last thing I do! I don't know how, but it has my name written all over it. No one else can see it because it's done in invisible ink, discernable only to nanas with bifocals and weak bladders. But my name's there, alright. It's there.

Last night she dropped by for a catch-up visit, and I asked her what she'd meant by that comment, fully expecting to hear that it was my abuser, The King of the Mountain, who'd bad mouthed me for years.

"You meant your dad, right?" I prompted.

She frowned in concentration and said, "No, actually I don't remember him talking about you. It was Mom."

Shouldn't I have expected this?

"But what kinds of things?" I'm sure I whined, reverting to a sniveling child.

"I honestly don't remember . . . and it wasn't so much what she said as how everything changed whenever your name was mentioned. Like suddenly there was all this tension, and she'd get an ugly look on her face."

"As she's always done when Doreen (our stepsister) was mentioned?"

"Yeah, that's it. The same kind of snippy, arrogant attitude."

"But," I objected, ready to plead my case, "what was I doing that was so bad? I mean sure my life was screwed up for a long time, but gee, I wonder why. Even so, I raised my kids, I didn't abuse or abandon them. I wasn't like certain family members who have consistently ripped off everyone in the family, or tried to have sex with their own sisters!"

Sissyface didn't have an explanation but, alone later that night with my thoughts, I found one of my own. Sometimes, I realized, sometimes it's got nothing to do with what you do. I could've been the perfect child (and in truth nearly was), but it wouldn't have made any difference. It wasn't about what I did: it was about who I was. My father's daughter. Oh but more than that: my very existence, the fact of it, was a constant trial to my mother. I must have aggravated her like an embedded sliver. And how appropriate a comparison: didn't she and my step-dad spend 8 years whittling me down to nothing but a mere sliver of my former sturdy self?

During Sissyface's visit in Arizona, our aunt and our other sister flew in to join them. One evening our aunt began recounting her tale of being molested by her stepfather. When she finally told her mother when she was a teenager, her mother promptly called her biological father and told him what was going on, and that she was sending their daughter to live with him.

I'd never heard this story before. My mother could've done the same for me, couldn't she? After witnessing her hubby's molestation of me she could've sent me where I'd be safe, with my real dad. But of course not, I decided. He'd once threatened to kill my step-dad, and that was without any knowledge of the sexual abuse. She couldn't risk the killing of the goose who laid the golden egg!

I asked my sister what, if anything, Mom said while our aunt was recounting her story. She said she didn't say anything, just kept shaking her head in disgust. I can't believe how phony she is. I shouldn't be surprised by it, but I am. As if their step father's perversions were disgusting, but her own hubby's weren't.

I'm digging into my past as if it were one big giant scab. Relentless, I probe and probe, not caring if I cause myself pain and actual blood. Let the blood flow, why shouldn't it. I want . . . oh! I want to send a message to my little girl self who had that whole wilderness of abuse before her. I want to tell her not to believe a word of what was said about her. I want to tell her she doesn't deserve any of the treatment she's about to receive. I want to comfort her. I want to be her. I want to curl up into a ball and be that little and innocent again.

I want to send a message in a bottle so years later she can look back and say, "Hey, at least there was one person who cared enough to tell me the truth."

I want to.

Sassy

This morning I discovered ants in the kitchen. I woke up early to watch Maddy and Anna, discovered the ants, and promptly turned my head and pretended not to see. Drank two cups of coffee, had a smoke, glowered at the clock every few minutes to see if it was time to walk over to their place.

When I brought the girls back to my place everything was good for a while. Anna was her usual grinning, pilfering self. I'm up to her tricks, having raised five little pilferers myself, yet still she managed to nearly choke on several small items.

Maddy's potty training and doing really well. I sat pretty much in a stupor of exhaustion, rousing myself to excavate misc. odds and ends from Anna's mouth or to change a diaper or the TV station. Fridays just kill me, but today was harder than usual. Then it got worse.

Maddy decided to shove toilet paper up her nose. Not a huge amount, and she didn't even freak out until I said, "Oh Maddy, don't put things up your nose!" Her eyes got huge, she began crying and blubbering, which made her go into a coughing spasm, which resulted in throwing up the M&Ms she'd just eaten. Then Anna began wailing because of Maddy's freak out. I didn't know how I'd calm Maddy down, I'd never seen her so hysterical. I walked into the kitchen to grab something to clean up the mess, and she followed me and suddenly announced, "I okay now, Nana. Nana, now I okay."

Whew.

Anyway, just checking in briefly before I go lie down and rot my brain with TV reality shows. Tomorrow is the once a year neighborhood garage sale I love to go to whenever I get a chance. I'm hoping to come home with lots of good stuff. My son and daughter in-law gave me money expressly for this purpose. Yahoo!

You are so inspiring, and so strong . . .  you just don’t know yourself . . .  how you are. Don’t ever “not be yourself” as a grown person. You have inspired me greatly! I will never forget you.

I don't really know what to do with comments like these on the rare occasions they come my way. My first automatic response is to laugh. Like, wow, if she only knew me she wouldn't write such things. My next reaction is, does anyone really see me this way? Because if they do, I need to be more mindful of my influence on others.

Leave it to me to turn a heartfelt compliment into the means of laying a guilt trip on myself! You'd better toe the line, comes an annoyingly nagging thought. Others look to you to be strong, so stop monkeying around and get with it. I wonder, though. Does being strong mean I never falter or beat my breast, or experience sagging spirits (which rival my increasingly sagging breasts?) Does being strong mean I should only write about my times of strength, cleverly forgetting to mention the more frequent seasons of despair?

I know I've a deep residing stubbornness, but I'm not sure that's the same thing as being strong. On days when I want to throw in the towel I've just enough obstinacy to not want the abusers and their enablers in my life to win. The naysayers, the prophets of doom--who for decades have predicted my downfall, and no doubt eagerly awaited it--why should they win? Why should they get to write the final sentence in the book of my life, the one that comes right before The End. I'm the writer in my family, let me write that final sentence. And, on a much larger scale, I'm the redheaded step-child (all grown up, but one nevertheless) who's had to face so many daunting mountains and tribulations. Let me decide whether or not I fail. I mean if I do, let it be because I couldn't take one more lonely step. Let it be from a lifetime's accumulated weariness, rather than the automatic playing out of a role dictated to me by those who would like nothing better than to see my life, finally, fizzle out pathetically.

I've realized I like receiving comments like the one in my inbox today, not because they feed my ego (though I suppose there's a little of that), but because they make me think. They make me pause and take a kind of spiritual/emotional inventory. Am I like this, or that? Am I more like how the author of this comment sees me (strong, for instance), or more like those who have contributed to my woundedness and must continue to take their stance against me (as a means of avoiding holding themselves accountable?)

Sometimes I'm full of self-pity. Sometimes I'm so weak I haven't the heart to do much more than get out of bed day after day. I've a tendency to think that someone who is strong never feels weak at heart, or consumed with self-pity. I picture them as giants walking the earth, full of unflagging optimism and vitality. They are the Incredible Hulks of the world, and I know I can never be one of them. I've only my humble little sling shot and a handful of pebbles with which to fight against the Goliaths in my life. But wait a sec. What if I take what's at hand (these annoying little pebbles of despair, for example, on which I'm constantly tripping) and use them to my advantage? What if I take a handful of these ordinary pebbles and use them as weapons to defeat my enemies? Not  the individuals per se, but what they represent in my life: negativity, hatefulness, and the need to see my utter downfall.

You see how seriously I'm taking one little comment. For crying out loud, I must rouse myself from this little reverie of mine and drink more coffee. Such heavy thoughts so early in the morning make me drowsy.

(But hotdiggidy, I still enjoyed receiving this morning's comment!)