hunger (reprise)

Shame is the deepest wound

Warning: Long. And likely to provoke discomfort.

I hope you know this too

I hope you know this too –––

I hope you know

I hope you know –––

Complex

Instead of those words, someone wrote these - - - 

close the door

close the door

don’t look in

only dark things

live within

they whisper black

thoughts ooze rivers

of shame poison

the light make

leaden with blame

you’ve been in this place

you’ve felt its embrace  

do not peer in

close the door

nourishment

i nourish myself ––– 

hunger

I WILL

       I will not ~ 

I will not suppress the truth of my lived experience. 

I will not brush lightly over the terrible cost I have paid for your actions. 

I will not forbear the artistic recolouring of the circumstances of my life. 

I will not carry the weight of your convenient denial. 

I will not avert my gaze from your complicity, your failure, or your guilt. 

I will not validate your actions by accepting your excuses. 

I will not wear the dysfunction of lives that are not my own. 

I will not be defined by events that were not of my making, volition, or intent. 

I will not power your personal redemption with the force of my life, my goodness, or my charity. 

What was done, was done.  

       I will ~ 

I will find my own peace with it. 

Instead

So, instead of those words, I write these - - - 

care

solicitude

regard

concern

gentleness

esteem

respect

love
consideration

goodness

support
affection

kindness
safety

trust

This is not silence

If I wrote about how it was,
  

Alive

I found solace in the strangest place

Way in the back of my mind 

#44

Scars

That honours the scars of suffering transformed

The thing that abuse teaches you better than anything else is to doubt yourself. In writing about it, I have found myself wondering whether my child-mind has overstated the events of my childhood, whether it was actually as bad, as painful or as distressing as I remember it to be.

The whip-called-martinet that was made and used at home did not resemble the pictures on Wikipedia. It was sturdier, bigger, the hollow handle was made from some kind of metal piping. The cords were made of tough leather cord, square on the cross-section, cut diagonal at the tips. And those tips bit.

I remember this. I remember the pattern of the stripes on my legs and the bruises and the broken skin and the length of time it took for those wounds to heal. Weeks not days. And I have understood, for the first time I think, the severity of the whipping.

So for the first time in my life, I took a mirror and looked at the back of legs. And yes, right there in the places I remember the lacerations, are scars.

I have real scars. They are evidence of real abuse.

My memory is accurate. I have not imagined that any part of this was worse than it really was.

I don’t want to overstate the whip-called-martinet. It is not the whole of what happened, but it’s the part I can tell that people might understand. It was an infrequent event that punctuated a span of experience that is so distorted and overwhelming and incomprehensible that I may never find the words to convey it. But the whip-called-martinet was a tangible expression of every other thing that lay behind it – every thought, word, deed that caused a whip to seem acceptable to those who wielded it. And it was in those thoughts, words, deeds that the greatest injury was done to the child who was me.

This is the house

This is the house that Jean built.

Silent/Spoken

I recently reconnected with an old and painful memory.  

In reaching out to touch the psychic lacerations, I was confronted by the sharp facets of the silence that I have held tightly around me for many years. Each time I have remembered and chosen not to speak, my silence has been strengthened, reinforced by the weight of protecting others.  It has grown around me like scar tissue greedy to reclaim the wound. I have been complicit in smothering my own freedom, and with it my power to face the world.

Even now there are questions I ask but have no answers for, because I have not lived through the speaking of them. Is it ever fair to burden another person with the fullness of your harrowing memory?  To write about it?  Will there be repercussions for other people?  What judgments or impressions will be formed by people who know me, away from the page, in the real breathing world?  Does that even matter?

I am mindful that the impulse to conceal, to protect with my silence, is tied to a deep sense of shame.  As if having terrible things done to me is somehow a reflection on me, on my character, on my worthiness.  And that is exactly the reason it is so vital that I express the truth of this lived experience.  

It was something that happened to me, but it is not about me. Speaking about it, writing about it, transforms it.  I take something awful, and with it I create something beautiful.  I weave the rough unruly strands into a rope ladder, silken and strong, that lets me climb free of the thorns that have surrounded me for too long.

Overshare?

So it was Thursday (AGAIN), and therefore writer’s group day. 

Theme for the month:  When I was young…

Shortly after the theme was set, my mother (who I maintain a degree of contact with) made a comment about all the reading she did with us when we were little.

I don’t remember it.  Neither does my sister.

Unremarkable, except that I have very vivid memories of my young life, and they are perfectly carbon dated by the details of the house we moved out of when I was four.  I remember being a baby on my tummy, and being able to see the underside of the couch. That was when the floor was still sea-grass matting, and a long time before my mother went wild with the funky wallpaper and a can of lime green paint. 

I remember the morning of my 2^nd birthday, and my 3rd, and the desolate footage of Cyclone Tracy on our black and white telly on Christmas morning when I was three.  I remember the arrival and mysterious departure of various furred and feathered family members, and a million small details like the cupboard where Dad kept his liquorice, the pattern on the floor in the kitchen, the smell of the flowers along the side of the newly poured concrete driveway.  But I don’t remember her reading to me. 

I remember our books, and I remember sitting by myself trying to read them.  The day I started school, the teacher explained that you sound out the letters and run them together, and I remember my astonishment that it was so easy, and the anger that no one had explained the single crucial detail that meant I could now read.  But I don’t recall any moments of closeness, snuggled up, listening to my mother’s voice.

Interesting disconnect, don’t you think?

So I thought I would explore this more, by letting the books in my life tell a story.  I was interested in the device of writing about one thing (the books) to talk about something else (the real story).  I got to the point where, at age 10, I decided I was a writer.  Short of time, I finished it, gave it a quick edit, printed it off and headed out straightaway for the meeting. 

I prefaced my reading with a request for people to comment on the effectiveness of the device.  I thought I had achieved a fairly dispassionate telling of the details, without straying into the emotive.  I was wrong.

I read aloud ok right up until I got to this:

Then one day she buys me and my sister new zip-up cardigans and packs a pair of jeans that are too small into a Jetset overnight bag, and puts us on a plane.  I’m nine years old and clutching a soft toy dog.

The sobs rose up in me.  Someone offered to read on for me, but in that moment there was nothing more important than speaking the words myself.  I pulled out a tissue, took a deep breath, and continued reading with my voice and face contorted with emotion.  

 Without warning or even shoes, we are going to live at Nanna’s.  Mum doesn’t look sick at the airport, but it must be very bad because she doesn’t ring us or write any letters, except once, when she sends us a bookmark. Mine is a kitten sitting on a stack of books.  It is instantly my most treasured possession. I hold it while I read, and keep it inside its grubby yellow envelope until the edges are so worn they fall apart.  When the colour wears off, I carefully restore its tabby striped tail with coloured pencils.  I read a lot.

So, I guess this counts as a Public Ugly Cry.

Overshare?  Or free therapy?

I have lived with this experience for thirty years now, but never openly grieved it.  I guess it took looking at the stark, unadorned details through the eyes of someone else to realise the depth of the injury to the child who was me.  It’s only one paragraph in a long catalogue of displacement, disregard, and disempowerment.

The group was kind. Afterwards, one person said to me that I should always feel like I can read whatever I want to, and how important a process that was for her.  Another spoke to me of all the 9 year old children she had taught with stories like mine, and how powerful it was for her to hear mine and know something of the ending.  Maybe there are some in the group that resent me serving up another chunk of me-me-me, but there again, this may give them permission to reach a little deeper next time they sit down to write. 

The next meeting will be in a month’s time, and by then we’ll all have moved onto the next thing.