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PART I

The Hardening

 
The Legend Begins

 

It was a Thursday, and I was sitting in a white plastic chair near the ocean's edge when something extraordinary happened.

I had a realization so singularly profound it changed my life forever.

Sometimes that's how epiphanies happen. You might not be doing much at all when a quiet little thought floats to the front of your mind. You pause, turning your little thought over for a moment, then all at once a new realization dawns and everything instantly changes.

That's how it was for me, that day I sat in the white plastic chair. It was like taking off a pair of glasses that didn't belong to me. The obscure elements of my life suddenly came into perfect focus and I could see things more clearly than I had ever seen them before. The crazy woman. The misogynist. The three sisters. The Voice. The church. The three children. The two ex-husbands. The white-haired old man. And the two white plastic chairs.

That's how the amazing thought came to be.

It all began in 1955.



Me

 

The world was an interesting place in 1955. Every month of that year saw an event that touched just about everyone in one way or another.

In January, the Soviet Union formally ended the state of war with Germany.

In February, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent over $200 million in aid to South Vietnam, a small Indochinese country attempting to resist communist takeover.

In March, a stage musical was broadcast on television for the first time. Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, capturing the largest viewership ever.

In April, Winston Churchill resigned as England's Prime Minister, Albert Einstein died, Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's, and the Salk polio vaccine was introduced to the public.

In May, West Germany became a sovereign state and joined NATO. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered school integration "with all deliberate speed."

In June, the first diamond mine opened in Russia, and the first automobile seat belt legislation was enacted in Illinois.

In July, Disneyland opened.

In August, hurricanes Connie, Diane, and Edith pounded the American Northeast after causing massive destruction in North Carolina. The Geneva Conference was held to discuss peaceful uses of atomic energy.

In September, James Dean was killed in an auto collision, the Brooklyn Dodgers took the pennant, and Chevrolet prepared to roll out a muscle car fittingly called the "Hot One."

In October, the world's most powerful aircraft carrier, the USS Saratoga launched.

In November, the Supreme Court of Baltimore banned segregation in public recreational areas and Elvis Presley signed his first contract with RCA Records.

And then there was December.

December 1st was also a Thursday. It was a day when all odds were against a black woman named Rosa Parks. The bus driver was against her. The laws were against her. Social standards were against her. And in 1955 not a single person rallied behind the Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress who boldly refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.

But that didn't stop Rosa Parks.

In the year I was born, some wars began and other wars ended. Storms blew. Technology evolved. People were born. People passed away. Careers launched. Careers dwindled. Rosa.

If you think about it, people live their lives a lot like the year 1955. There is always something going on. Sometimes we go to war with a person we disagree with. Sometimes we end a war with someone we finally forgive. Sometimes our careers are soaring, and sometimes they're in the gutter. Sometimes we have babies; sometimes we lose loved ones. Sometimes we make brilliant discoveries. And sometimes we have a life-altering Rosa moment when we decide we will no longer participate in someone else's screwed-up ideas about who we really are.

My life is a lot like that.

I was born in Santa Monica, California, on a Tuesday morning in August.

My mother's name was Helen. Helen is the crazy woman in this story. Her husband's name was William. William is my father. I don't often refer to him as my father. I prefer to call him William.

William is the misogynist.

I was the second of three daughters born to Helen and William. Their first daughter, twenty-three months my senior, is Cathy. Their third daughter, eighteen months my junior, is Danni.

We are the three sisters in this story.

Mother was just twenty-four when the first symptoms of manic-depression and schizophrenia manifested. Medical science suggests that some mental illnesses are hereditary. My mother's mother, Sybil, had also suffered from manic-depression and schizophrenia, as did several of Mother's siblings. It is safe to say my mother's condition was inherited.

But that was never the way William saw it. William said Mother's mental illness was all Danni's fault. Mother's first psychotic breakdown occurred just six weeks after Danni's birth, so in William's mind, this daughter - whom he detested her entire life - was to blame for his wife's sickness.

Eventually he blamed all three of us.

That's how William was. He was a hater consumed with anger.

His title, the Misogynist, may be a bit misleading. A misogynist is a woman-hater. William did hate women. He hated them openly and absolutely. He mocked them, despised them, humiliated them, and used them whenever convenient. But William also hated men. Especially men in authority.

William managed to hide his contempt for people whenever he wanted something. Or when he was covering up for something. That's when he would pull out his Mr. Good Guy routine. Mr. Good Guy was the phony alter ego he used to impress people with. Or, perhaps more accurately, to fool them with, cleverly fabricating concern in his voice or a mock display of affection.



The Crazy Woman



Mother's first nervous breakdown came in April 1957 and lasted a full year.

William immediately dispatched Danni into our grandmother's care, and Cathy and I lived with an aunt. This event set the pace for our entire upbringing. From that time forward, once or twice a year, Mother had a relapse and we were sent to live with relatives while she was confined to a mental institution.

Sometimes we all went to the same relative's home; sometimes we were split up. Those long periods of separation from our mother, and from each other, were tough on three little girls who never quite understood what was going on. It was never explained why our mother - who was so bright and funny and beautiful and affectionate, and who loved her daughters dearly - suddenly transformed into a raving madwoman who didn't recognize us. Her periods of lucidity between breakdowns were golden to us. We spent the entire time praying the next breakdown would never come.

But it always did.

Mother was rarely lucid for more than three or four months at a time. We always spoke of her breakdowns as "setbacks," and the in-between times as "good spells."

During her good spells she was a regular person - just like everyone else's mom. She baked pies and chocolate chip cookies. She helped pick out our clothes for school and took us for long walks. She taught us songs and painted pictures and told us funny stories. To us, this woman was Supermom, the most beautiful creature on earth.

Once, in the third grade, I saw my mother coming across the schoolyard when recess was in full swing. I don't remember why she was there; I only remember being mesmerized as I watched her confident stroll.

She was wearing my favorite outfit, a burnt orange wool dress that hugged her perfect shape. There was a small cigarette burn near the hem in the front, so she held her purse over it just so as she walked. She was tall in stiletto heels that clicked against the blacktop, her striking black hair pushed away from her face, Marilyn Monroe style. Cherokee cheekbones set off the radiant smile she flashed at me as she continued forward. She looks just like a movie star, I thought to myself, hoping the other children on the playground would see that this wonderful vision in orange was my mother.

Mother smiled often during her good spells. She was sweet and generous, and when William wasn't around, she was loving.

But the setbacks would come on swiftly, usually without warning. The transition would hit us hard. There would come a morning when we would all get up and Mother would be fine, fussing over breakfast cereal and double-checking our lunch money before we ran to the bus stop. But then, by the time the bus delivered us home after school, we would find our mother sitting cross-legged in a chair at the end of the dining room table, a lit cigarette dangling precariously from her fingertips, lost in a haze of unfettered smoke. Fixed, expressionless eyes would stare straight ahead, lost in a void of nothingness.

Such is the nature of a schizophrenic episode.

We would approach our mother carefully, knowing better than to alarm her, learning from experience how dangerous she could be in the hours just before being committed into an institution. Our job was to keep her calm until William returned home from work.

The rules of Mother's illness were simple yet critical. Don't ask her any questions. Don't make any loud noises. Never let her out of your sight. No matter how crazy the ranting becomes, go along with every single thing she says - whatever it takes to keep her calm.

Mother was extremely delusional during her breakdowns. She once thought a tribe of miniature Aborigines was running around the house, setting fire to the furniture. I had to pretend to put the fires out each time she frantically spotted a new one.

Once she thought she was the Statue of Liberty and it was her job to sew a bunch of flags together to make a giant blanket to cover up the poor.

Another time she thought our family cat, Clarence, was reciting poetry to her, and she was laughing hysterically.

Mother often hallucinated that we were her high school girlfriends. She spoke to us as if we were grownups, telling us sordid details about William that we squeamishly did not want to hear. But keeping her happy was key, so we listened as she talked of his violent sexual nature. His infidelity. His other children born to other women.

When Mother was calm, managing her on our own was easy. But one small misstep could set her off and a brutal struggle would ensue that could end in any number of horrific ways.

There were frenzied chases through the walnut orchard next to our farm, Mother kicking and slapping, pulling our hair, digging her fingernails deep into our flesh. Once, when Cathy was ten, Mother beat her with a house broom with such fury I feared for Cathy's life.

Another time I feared for my own life when Mother, pale and trancelike, walked out of the kitchen with a butcher knife poised above her head. She said the voices had told her to kill us. Thankfully we were able to keep our distance from her until William arrived home.

Most often we could deliver Mother to the hospital with relative ease. As long as she didn't know where she was headed, she was fine. Sometimes, however, she would recognize the hospital upon arrival and a horrendous scene would explode in the parking lot. By far, the worst incidents were the ones that involved an ambulance and a straightjacket. I am haunted still by fear-filled shrieks and her desperate attempt to escape the nightmare bearing down on her.

Eventually she would improve enough that we would be taken to visit her in the dingy government-run institution covered under William's insurance plan. These were typically tight-budget operations with dim florescent lighting against stark white walls and worn linoleum floors. Everything about those places creeped me out. The patients' bizarre behavior. The howling and hysterical laughter. The violent outbursts. The wandering dead-eyed zombies.

It was hard seeing my mother in the midst of all that. I felt ashamed of myself. I dreaded the moment when William would inevitably say, "Look around you, girls. This is what you've done to your mother."



The Misogynist



I was terrified of my father.

He wasn't a big man, but the hatred in his voice gave him a force that terrified me. The contempt in his eyes made my stomach knot in panic.

He never admitted to being an alcoholic, though he drank nearly every day. He stopped drinking the day my mother died. Why he stopped drinking that day will always be a mystery to me.

William claimed his doctors encouraged him to drink. Apparently, it was important that he find a way to help ease his burdens at home. The doctors saw William as a responsible father who was raising three children practically on his own while simultaneously working full-time at the post office and caring for a lunatic wife.

Frankly, the doctors saw what Mr. Good Guy wanted them to see him. William was a master illusionist - especially when it came to doctors.

It is easy to describe a typical day for William. He loved routine. We could set our clocks by the time he came home from work: exactly 3:15 P.M.

That meant it was time for us to be busy. William had a thing about laziness. He would fly into a rage if he walked in and found us sitting. We either had to be on our feet doing something constructive or be completely out of his sight. He often reached behind the television to feel if the tubes were warm. It infuriated him if we watched television without his permission.

Within five minutes of his arrival he would be changed out of his work uniform. He would do a few chores before settling in his green vinyl recliner. There he would drink his first beer of the day while reading the newspaper.

The newspaper would be on the coffee table, folded exactly as the paperboy delivered it. Not even the rubber band would be disturbed. No one was allowed to read the newspaper before William. No one was allowed to speak to William until after he had finished reading the newspaper.

Dinner would be on the table at exactly 5:00 P.M. Everyone must be in their seats before dinner could begin. Waiting made him furious. He dished up the food. All the food on the plate must to be eaten. If you complained about the food, you got seconds. You must ask politely, "May I be excused?" in order to leave the table, and your plate must be completely empty.

There was no laughter allowed at the table. No loud noises and certainly no singing. If an elbow appeared, even briefly, it was met with a hard blow from the handle of his butter knife. Clicking the fork against your teeth was a major offense. That earned a slap to the back of the head if you were on his left side, and a jab with his fork if you were on his right.

As we sat captive at the dinner table, this would be William's opportunity to berate us. He never asked "How did you do in school today?" Or "What shall we do for family vacation?" It was always "Why were dishes left in the sink? Which one of you morons left the sprinkler running? Did any of you lazy asses happen to notice the carpet needs vacuuming?"

Later, he would drink the remainder of his six-pack while watching television from his green vinyl chair. He decided what shows were watched. There were no exceptions to this rule. No one could speak while he was watching television. If you spoke, you were sent to bed immediately. If there was nothing he wanted to watch, he turned off the television and sat in silence.

This is the point when things could get tricky. By now he would be drunk and toeing the line between being a sappy drunk or a mean drunk. The sappy drunk whistled. Sometimes he sang, and it would always be the same bars from the same tunes. The sappy drunk made disgusting sexual advances to our mother and said shockingly inappropriate things to us kids. The sappy drunk called us "hun."

The mean drunk was a different story. This drunk was dangerously quiet and wholly unpredictable. He overreacted to the smallest things. The mean drunk narrowly missed being court-martialed in the U.S. Air Force after punching his commanding officer in a bar. Though we tried to make ourselves scarce when the mean drunk came out, it was usually too late by the time we realized it.

William's hair-trigger demons were provoked by any number of ways a child can simply be a child. I was beaten for poking a pinhole in one of his playing cards. I was beaten for saying "guy man" one too many times. I was beaten for swinging on the refrigerator door. I was beaten for leaving my bicycle by the side of the road.

Once the mean drunk punched Danni in the stomach for having a doll in bed with her. She was seven years old. He swung a belt so hard at Cathy that the buckle tore a gash in her leg requiring eighteen stitches to close. He told her to tell the doctor she fell.

Drunk or sober, William was quick to beat us with his belt. Sometimes he used a wooden hanger or a paddle. His favorite weapon was a purposefully cut switch, left just a bit jagged to leave its impression in blood. I can still picture him in my mind's eye, the raw hewn tool in his hand, ready to slash young flesh. The switch is menacing, but it is his furious gray-green eyes that make me shrink away in fear.

I was terrified of my father.



Me



I am five years old.

I am lying face-up on his bed.

The door is locked. The lights are off. Late afternoon sunlight filters in through a gap in the curtains.

He tells me to lie still and not move. Actually, he says "Shut up and be still or I'll beat the living shit out of you."

I do my best to hold still, but the pain of my limbs contorted in impossible positions spreads through me. My wrists are clenched tightly together in one of his white-knuckled fists. My knees are crushed together in his other fist. He molds me like a rag doll into a position that will afford him more friction as he thrusts himself between my thighs. He promises me it will hurt worse if I continue to squirm.

Instinct can be a cruel force sometimes and I cannot control the urge to cry out. A powerful hand clamps over my mouth. "Shut up, I said!" he hisses. My body shudders in fear beneath him. The hand slides up my face, first covering my nostrils and then my eyes. Soon all of my senses are engulfed in his suffocating palm. I gasp for the slightest whisper of air under the pressure of his full weight. He uses my face to brace himself as he pushes into the makeshift receptacle of my pinned-together thighs.

Fire burns in my chest as my lungs frantically pump to suck in air. I feel his palm begin to fill with my saliva, my mucus, my sweat, my tears. It becomes a pitiful mess that angers him even more. A scratchy chin barks into my ear, "Stop that, goddammit, and be still!" The slimy vise grip tightens. I can see light through a tiny slit between his fingers. I search the face hovering above mine for a sign of what little girls look to their fathers to provide. But there is no safety in this face. Only furious gray-green eyes and sweat and stubble and heavy breathing.

Suddenly a new pain erupts in my body. I can stand no more. The image above me erupts into a blinding white ball, then fades into a million pinpoints swirling about my head. Darkness moves in swiftly from the edges of my mind. It flows over me like a cold blanket. Pain dissolves. Blackness arrives.



The Crazy Woman



Mother never knew. No one ever knew. He had shown me his gun enough times. He said accidents happen.

My mother was a fragile person all her life, a tragic result of her own dreadful childhood. Her mother, Sybil, was a victim of schizophrenia in the early 1900's, a time when the disease was widely misunderstood and patients were not often hospitalized. Back then, insanity was thought to be a result of demonic possession or perhaps being kicked in the head by a cow. Sybil's untreated condition led her to make a series of desperate mistakes that had a profound impact on my mother's life.

Sybil's first husband was a man by the name of George with whom she had three sons. One day the young boys were playing near a washtub filled with boiling water intended for a load of laundry. The oldest boy tripped and tumbled into the tub headfirst, instantly scalding most of his body. The shock of that incident seemed to trigger Sybil's illness. George eventually had her committed to a mental institution and divorced her while she was there. He took the boys away and soon remarried.

A few years later, Sybil married again, this time to a handsome yet troubled man by the name of John. Sybil had only one child by this marriage, my mother.

John had been a machine gunner in the artillery division of the Army during World War I. He spent most of his military career on the front lines of battle, defending France from Germany's onslaught. The horrors of trench warfare took their toll, and when John returned home he struggled with what he had witnessed on the bloody battlefields.

They called it shell shock back then. Today it is called post-traumatic stress syndrome. To cope with increasing anxiety attacks, John turned to alcohol. He spent most days and nights in a local bar trying to forget the things he had seen, strumming his guitar and singing soulful tunes. One night, drunk and despondent, John met a young woman and engaged in a brief romance. The girl was underage, and when her parents discovered the affair they pressed charges of statutory rape. John spent the next seven years in the state penitentiary. Sybil divorced him while he was in jail. My mother never saw her father again. In fact, she was fifty when she learned John had died when she was only nine years old.

Sybil's third husband, a man my mother referred to only as "Mr. Butler," was the owner of a successful carpentry business in their small New Mexico town. He was a short, mean man with thin sneering lips and an off-centered hunchback. To Sybil, the marriage was a means of financial support for herself and her young daughter. She could not have known the price the two of them would ultimately pay for living under his roof.

Sybil had three more children with Mr. Butler, daughters Ruby and MaryAnn and a boy they called Sonny. My mother, now in her teen years, assumed much of their care as Sybil's condition steadily deteriorated. By now Sybil's emotional problems had become chronic, with deep periods of depression that lasted for days. Mr. Butler did not sympathize with Sybil's illness. Rather, he saw it as an excuse for laziness. His solution was to routinely beat Sybil, typically in front of the children.

My mother adored her younger half-siblings and protected them as best she could. When she tried to protect her mother from Mr. Butler's heavy hand, he responded with brutality. Nearly every day Mr. Butler stood just inside the front door of their home and waited for my mother to come home from school. As she stepped through the doorway he slapped her across the face, often knocking her to the floor. If she attempted to avoid the blow, the consequences grew much worse.

He once beat her with a whip he regularly used on his horses. It was a strip of tire rubber attached to a handle. On this day he heated the rubber strip over the flame of their backyard incinerator. The lashing tore chunks of flesh from my mother's bare back and left deeply pitted scars carved into her skin.

Mother was fifteen when she ran away from home. She made it all the way to Dallas, Texas, before running out of money. There, she found a job in a small café where the owners, a stern but kindly older couple, took pity on her and provided a room for her to live in. They were good to her, and as time passed she matured into a woman. At eighteen she caught the eye of a local boy who romanced her in the back seat of a 1946 Hudson. Nine months later she gave birth to a daughter she named Gloria.

That same year Mother received news that Sybil had died. Although Mr. Butler claimed Sybil fell down a flight of stairs, Mother's siblings told a different story. Apparently Mr. Butler had grown angry with Sybil for showing signs of yet another mental breakdown. He beat her. Nine hours later she was dead. Because Mr. Butler was well known in the community, no one ever questioned his account.



The Misogynist



William was a mechanic stationed at the Air Force base just outside of Dallas. One day William spotted young Helen, who was now a carhop at a popular drive-in. He was instantly smitten with her raven hair and asked flirtatiously if he could run his fingers through it. She laughed, but allowed it. Before he drove away, he said, "You're going to be my wife someday."

Theirs was a whirlwind courtship and Helen had a brave decision to make. What should she do about her daughter? Helen had mixed feelings about her daughter Gloria being raised by a stepfather. And a small mishap with the child had caused her to become even more unsure of her own skills as a parent. Making the bed one morning, Helen had flipped the bedspread in the air to smooth it out, momentarily forgetting the baby was asleep in its folds. The baby rolled to floor unharmed but Helen was unnerved. Right then she decided to let her former employers at the café, who had no children of their own, adopt he baby girl.

William and Helen had been married just over a year when Cathy was born. William was stationed near Roswell, New Mexico, at the time. When his enlistment was up, the young family headed to California and settled in a tiny apartment in Venice Beach. William worked at a gas station and Helen picked up waitressing work when she could.

In 1955 I arrived, and in 1956, just after Mother discovered she was pregnant again, we received an unexpected houseguest. It was MaryAnn, Mother's half-sister by Mr. Butler. Though she was only fifteen years old, Mr. Butler had kicked her out, claiming he didn't feel like supporting her any longer. She was too lazy, he said. She was old enough to be out on her own. With nowhere else to go, MaryAnn contacted Mother, who was thrilled to welcome her sibling. Helen enrolled MaryAnn in high school - she arrived just in time to start her freshman year - and began to pick up more waitressing hours now that MaryAnn could baby-sit for her in the afternoons.

The arrangement seemed to work out well; Mother was able to work nearly full-time as she entered her final months of pregnancy with Danni. Then came the day when business was slow and the shift manager sent Mother home early. Arriving unexpectedly, she found the house dark and thought everyone was asleep. But when she opened her bedroom door she faced a disturbing scene, William having sex with her fifteen-year-old sister.

Mother held onto her sanity through the final months of pregnancy before giving birth to Danni. Then, a few weeks after Danni's birth, the slow genetic rupture that had been forming in her psyche finally reached its unrelenting breaking point and she went crazy, threatening to kill William for what he had done to her sister. Terrified of her almost inhuman strength and fearing for his life, William locked her in a bathroom to protect himself until the ambulance arrived with tranquilizers and a straight jacket.

That was the night they took my mother away for the very first time, when William conveniently dispensed with us for an entire year. I was two years old.

During that year, another child was born.

A baby girl, to MaryAnn.

We were told she was our "cousin."

 

The Church



A few years into the illness, Mother recognized she was in serious trouble. Her mental instability was preventing her from being the kind of mother three young children needed.

Once, in a grocery store, Danni wiggled free of Cathy's grasp and ran out the door into the street. An oncoming car hit her, although fortunately Danni was not seriously injured - only scratched and bruised from making contact with the bumper.

I was four, and one day when Mother was napping, I pulled a bobby pin apart and stuck it into a light socket. I was knocked unconscious by the shock and my hand was badly burned. I spent two days in the hospital.

On two separate occasions Cathy got into the liquid bleach, which was stored under the kitchen sink, and swallowed several gulps before Mother realized what was going on. Another time Danni pulled a cup of boiling hot coffee off the kitchen table. It spilled over her, scalding her neck and chest.

Frightening events such as these weighed heavily on Mother's mind, so reminiscent were they of her own mother's failings. And William was no help when it came to caring for her children. One day, feeling desperate and with nowhere else to turn, Mother pleaded with God to help her find a way to safeguard her young daughters. A few hours later, two young Mormon missionaries knocked on her front door to deliver their message about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mother took that as a sign her prayers had been answered.



Three Sisters



William had never wanted children. He longed to have Helen all to himself and it infuriated him to have to share her with us. His greatest desire, he once told me, was to build a house in the middle of the desert surrounded by twenty-foot walls where just the two of them could live forever.

Alone.

Without children.

When I was four we moved from Venice Beach to Ivanhoe, a tiny speck of a town in the middle of California's San Joaquin Valley. The house we moved into had been formally condemned by the city but back then, it was easy to skirt city regulations. The house was basically a wooden shack on a one-lane road out in the middle of nowhere. A small detached garage was converted into a bedroom for Mother and William. Its one window was covered with homemade muslin curtains through which the sun filtered in the late afternoon...

I hated going into that bedroom.

William hired on at the post office in neighboring Visalia, and Mother managed to work short waitressing stints between her breakdowns, which continued to come about twice a year.

A few years later we moved a mile farther up the road into another little farmhouse, this one in considerably better shape. The surrounding countryside went on forever, broken only by similar farmhouses located miles apart. My sisters and I liked running wild through that countryside when William was at work and Mother was sleeping off a heavy round of medication. Now and then there were days when we literally had no parental supervision.

Summertime was always the best.

Danni and I were fearless outdoor adventurers, dressed in ratty homemade shorts, no shoes, hair uncombed, and armed with our version of a picnic: mayonnaise and catsup on crackers. We spent the better part of each day conquering our unrestricted universe. Even barbed-wire fences posed only slight obstacles for us.

We swam in irrigation canals and picked perfectly formed grapes from Mr. Gunn's vineyard. We climbed every tree in Mr. Burgos's twenty-acre walnut orchard. We caught wild kittens in the barn and played with them until our arms burned with scratches from their razor sharp claws. We gave Mr. Whitfield's Shetland pony a beauty makeover and imagined ourselves as famous racecar drivers while sitting atop a rusted-out combine parked in the cotton field out back.

Sometimes my oldest sister, Cathy, joined in our outdoor quests. Other times she treated us to more elegant luxuries, painting our fingernails and combing our tangles into the latest beehive hairdo. Sometimes she read to us, and sometimes we decorated our bedroom from top to bottom with flowers cut from tissue paper and stars cut from newspapers. Sometimes we'd lay on the grass and sunbathetogether, listening to the sounds of the '60s on Cathy's transistor radio.

Though we were completely on our own for long periods of time, William still managed to make his presence felt.

He left for work each morning at 6:00 A.M, then called the house at 6:30 to make sure we were out of bed. We were never allowed to sleep in. Sleeping in was a sign of laziness. He couldn't stand the thought of us being in bed.

The evening before he would have assigned our chores for the day. It could be anything from doing the washing and ironing to waxing all the floors to cracking open a gunnysack full of walnuts. We were responsible for all the housework and all the yard work. The animals had to be tended to every day. We raised chickens, ducks, and turkeys, three hogs for slaughter each year, and several dozen rabbits. The rabbits were for eating. We didn't know that not everyone ate rabbits.

The chicken coops had to be cleaned, the rabbit cages mucked out, the compost pit turned regularly, the garden weeded. In the fall we gleaned cornfields and walnut orchards for twenty-five cents a bushel. William got the money. Sometimes we picked oranges and sometimes we worked in Mr. Gunn's vineyard, laying sultana grapes out on trays to dry in the sun for raisins.

William got that money, too.

We learned early on the importance of completing our chores to perfection. Back before postal workers used jeeps to cover their routes, William walked his five-mile route every single day, despite frigid cold in the winter and blazing heat in the summer. With the combination of hard work and hangover, he was cranky when he came home from work and difficult to please. For the slightest shortcoming - perhaps if one of us failed to make our bed properly - there would be hell to pay.

William was not concerned that one of us would expose his heavy-handedness to the world. He had a clever plan, in the event we tried, that ensured no one would ever take his daughters' claims seriously.

"Danni is a liar," he would tell anyone within his influence. "The way you can tell if she's lying is if her lips are moving." To family, friends, teachers, doctors, church members - whoever he had the opportunity to tell - William portrayed his youngest as a pathological liar incapable of telling the truth.

Cathy, he claimed, was the "dumb" one. Cathy had shown signs of having the learning disability dyslexia, and William seized upon it to prove she couldn't be trusted to keep her facts straight. "Cathy's intelligence is so far below average she'll have to rely on other talents besides her brain to get through this life."

And me? According to William I followed in my mother's footsteps. I, too, was crazy. I was "flighty," he would say, "emotionally sensitive." The slightest upset would push me into hysteria and, of course, you can't trust anything a mentally ill person has to say. Aligning me with Mother's illness was, of course, intended to create a deflection should I ever reveal what he had done to me. He would simply say I hallucinated it.

It is heartbreaking to recall how easy it was for William to convey these warped images of his daughters to the outside world. Everyone believed him. Not a single person in our extended family questioned his portrayal of us. Why they choose to ignore the fear in our eyes and the marks on our skin, I do not know. Perhaps they lacked the courage to confront a man capable of doing such things to his own flesh and blood.



Me



William stopped molesting me around age seven. Nevertheless, I was molested again at this young age, this time by a bum who wandered into our yard.

The town of Ivanhoe, originally called Klink, wasn't much more than a bar, a grocery store, a couple of churches, and a school. The railroad ran through the heart of town, and often, as freight trains crawled by in the dark of night, transient bums jumped either on or off, depending on their travel plans.

From there they wandered the countryside, poaching from a smorgasbord of produce. Grapes, oranges, tomatoes, apricots, almonds, corn - any dirt road led to a meal of some kind. Still, it wasn't uncommon for bums to come to our door and beg for a meal. William always chased them off. Mother never turned one down.

They would sit on the back porch while Mother scrambled a plate of eggs gathered from our chickens. While they ate, she would rummage through the house gathering all the change she could find, sending them on their way with a pocket full of coins.

This particular day a talkative old drifter had come by, and Danni and I sat on the porch steps next to him, listening to his stories while watching him shovel giant fork loads of food into his nearly toothless mouth.

He smelled horrible. They all did. His clothing was so dirty all the colors had blended into one grimy shade of gray. Bits of egg spewed from his mouth as he spoke, yet Danni and I remained spellbound by his boxcar adventures.

He was sopping the plate clean with his last bite of toast when my curiosity drew me to ask where he lived. He was pleased with my interest. He offered to show me his home whenever I wanted.

"You live nearby?" I asked, surprised we had a neighbor I wasn't aware of.

"Yes I do, little lady. I live right out there behind that field." He pointed to the alfalfa field to the west of us. "We can go there right now, if you want."

Elated, I cheerfully left with the bum, skipping beside him and feeling like I was a part of one of his wonderful adventures. Mother had gone back to napping by then so there was no need to tell her I was leaving.

It took us several minutes to reach the back of the alfalfa field, now completely out of sight of the house. A few yards farther down the dirt road separating the alfalfa from a cotton field, he stopped and asked me if I would do him a favor. He said he would give me two of the quarters jingling in his pocket if I would help him out with something.

Eager to please, I agreed.

Nodding, the bum took a few steps into the cotton field. He was unzipping his pants as he turned to face me. Something clicked in my mind as I watched him pull out his penis. I had no idea what was about to happen, but I instantly shifted into survival mode. I did not think about running or screaming or simply saying no. I did as I had been conditioned by William to do. I stood there and did exactly as the bum directed, praying desperately I would not get anything wrong.

He ordered me to open my mouth as wide as I could. I grimaced as he pushed the nasty- smelling thing toward the back of my throat. Holding one hand behind my head, he began to grind his hips into my face, forcing me to gag with each thrust. I was choking again, my eyes flooding over, mingling with snot and dirt. Finally he groaned and the foul thing erupted, filling my mouth with a salty fluid. I remained motionless as he zipped his penis back into his pants and fished the promised quarters from his pocket.

"Go home," he said, tossing the quarters at my feet. Then he turned and walked away.



Me



I was eight when I fell off the monkey bars at school and broke my right arm.

It was the early '60s and the monkey bars at Elbow Creek Elementary were different than they are today. Back then monkey bars consisted of a set of metal pipes welded into a cubical lattice some ten or twelve feet tall. Kids could climb to the top and dangle, or stand up, or swing wildly from bar to bar around the outer rim in a risky game of tag. No guard rails. No safety nets. No foam landing.

Champion tree climber that I was, the top rungs of the structure were my favorite sanctuary. One morning at recess as I was pulling myself onto the highest rungs, my grip failed and I slipped backwards off the bars. I plunged to the ground and landed with my arm twisted beneath me, the bone snapping at the wrist like a twig on a dying tree.

The school nurse called home immediately but Mother was napping off her meds and did not pick up the phone.

The nurse then called William at work, but he was on his route and couldn't be immediately contacted. I spent the rest of the day in the nurse's office crying and watching my arm swell, and then rode the bus home with my sisters that afternoon.

William didn't think my arm was broken. He ordered me to stop crying at the dinner table that night when I couldn't hold my fork in my right hand. He said what he always said when one of us was crying: "If you don't dry up, I'll give you something to really cry about."

Mother wrapped a wet towel around my wrist to help me sleep that night. It was to no avail. I didn't sleep a minute.

William made me go to school the next day. When my teacher noticed I couldn't hold my pencil, she sent me back to the nurse's office again. This time the nurse gave me a note for my parents urging them to take me to a doctor. She said I would need a doctor's excuse before being allowed back in school.

William was furious when he read the note. The nurse had no right to tell him what to do. Still wearing his Post Office uniform and in the rankest of moods, he drove me to town to see our family doctor.

The trip was miserable. He made only two statements: "This wouldn't have happened if you weren't such a goddamn idiot" and "I hope you're pleased with yourself." Then he lapsed into sulking, the look on his face murderous.

It was a different man who entered the doctor's office, however. His face immediately brightened up, his voice turned syrupy, he even placed his hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me.

This was his magical transition into Mr. Good Guy. This was who the rest of the world saw as our father.



The Crazy Woman



Often, when Mother was sick, she hallucinated about bugs crawling around under her skin. She would dig at her forearms trying to get them out. Sometimes she would scrub at her arms and legs with a steel wool Brillo pad.

Many times we stoped her from pouring liquid bleach straight into the wounds she had gouged into her skin.

Once she mixed a bottle of bleach with a bottle of ammonia in the bathtub, intending to take a bath in the toxic mixture. Cathy and I managed to stop her in time, but the fumes we all inhaled made us sick for several days after that.



Three Sisters



My sisters were fighting, as usual.

Cathy told Danni if she walked in front of this old wooden kitchen chair we had pulled outside to build a fort with, Danni would magically turn into a feather. Danni, defiant as always, immediately pranced out in front of the chair, hands on her hips for dramatic effect.

"Well lookee there!" Cathy giggled. "I think I see a feather!"

Danni wasn't amused, blue eyes glaring out from a furious blond-trimmed face. "I am not a feather!"

"Yep, you're a feather," Cathy replied calmly, ignoring Danni's ire.

"Oh no I'm not!" Danni stomped, her face now turning red.

"Yes, you are." Cathy insisted, rolling her eyes at Danni's theatrics.

I knew what was coming next. As if on cue, they both turned to me in unison wearing that look that meant I would be placing the deciding vote.

That's how it always was with those two. They bickered, they fussed, they beat each other up, and then one or the other invariably expected to get me to take their side. They were always angling for the old two-against-one maneuver.

I hated being in that position.

My greatest wish was that the three of us could get along. I loved my sisters. I agonized about taking sides. But just as I had expected, both faces were now turned toward me and the verdict was in my hands.

"See the little feather there?" Cathy smiled.

"TELL HER I AM NOT A FEATHER!" Danni demanded.

I did not want to be there. I did not want to be the one to decide. It was in that moment of feeling tortured that a voice spoke these words into my mind:

Do not join the battle, but be a peacekeeper.

I heard it as clear as day, although I knew it hadn't been spoken aloud by anyone. I stood silently, not really knowing what to do next.

The voice repeated:

Do not join the battle, but be a peacekeeper.

Danni was growing impatient. She insisted on my decision. Though I still didn't understand what the voice meant, I needed to appease Danni's temper. I opened my mouth to speak just as the voice came a third time.

Do not join the battle, but be a peacekeeper.

This time I knew what to do. I took a step forward and stood next to Danni in front of the chair. I looked straight at Cathy, smiled and said, "Now I'm a feather, too."



The Voice



I had heard this voice speaking to me before, but I did my best to ignore it. People who heard voices in my world were strapped into straight jackets and hauled off to the loony bin. I thought it would be wise to keep my mouth shut.

Still, it was always there.

It wasn't always a distinct voice, like the day with my sisters and the chair. Sometimes it was more like a feeling. I'd get a nudge, or inkling, or an idea about something. An instinct, perhaps? No matter what, there was always a good feeling connected to it.

Sometimes I could hear the voice speak through other people, like when Eleanor Roosevelt said, "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." Or it could be a random comment I might hear on the radio or television. Something would catch my attention and I would know the voice was somehow involved because it would have that good feeling attached to it.

Mostly, though, the voice was a simple little thought laced into the imagery constantly flowing through my mind. If I paid close attention, I could usually detect its presence.

Life with William had shaped me into a quiet, withdrawn child. Silence was how I became invisible. Being invisible was what kept me out of his line of fire. I learned from hard experience that the more I spoke, the more ammunition he had to use against me. It almost didn't matter what I said, he could twist it around and throw it back at me in an artfully vicious way. Holding myself silent was how I protected myself.

Although it nearly caused me to flunk the sixth grade - not because my grades were bad, but because the teacher said I daydreamed too much - being withdrawn allowed me to spend a great deal of time in my own head. I loved being in the world behind my eyes. I had control over what happened there. Though the outward experiences of my life were grim, in my mind was a pleasant world where good things often occurred.

In my mind I was pretty, and I could fly and breathe underwater. All four of the Beatles were in love with me, and I helped Chet Huntley and David Brinkley deliver the nightly news. My fashion designs were the toast of Paris. I won the Nobel Peace Prize ten times in a row. Once I built an entire house out of boards I cut from a rainbow.

But always, the best thing in my mind was when I noticed the voice mingled among all my other thoughts. It was a great source of comfort. I felt like I wasn't alone.

At first, I wasn't quite sure if the voice was God, or a guardian angel, or an intuition, or maybe just my imagination. And I didn't always understand what it was attempting to say to me. But the voice was always there when I needed it most, and I came to rely on hearing it. Sometimes a tiny little whisper, "You are not alone," was all I needed when things really got rough.



Three Sisters



The three of us could have been the best of friends - if it hadn't been for our father. Under his negative influence, my sisters and I had a terrible time getting along with each other as we were growing up.

I used to think it was because we didn't try hard enough to see past each other's faults.

Now I realize it would not have mattered how hard we tried to get along. We were doomed to be each other's adversary because William was in control.

William recognized early on that his daughters would be more vulnerable if we were emotionally detached from each other. United, the three of us might have stood a chance at protecting ourselves against him. Perhaps we would have been more convincing had we tried as a trio to find outside help.

William undoubtedly saw the problem in us drawing close to one another, so he devised a way to prevent it. His goal was to divide and conquer. His method consisted of three main tactics that were always in play between us.

His first ploy was to orchestrate arguments. No matter what we were discussing, he would angle to plant seeds of resentment between us. He would say something like, "Are you going to let her talk to you that way?" or "I sure wouldn't let someone treat me like that." He would bait both sides until a heated argument was in full swing, then he would continue fueling the fight for days and weeks and sometimes even years.

His second tactic was to pretend favoritism for one of us. He would lure one of us in by saying something complimentary. We so yearned for his approval that we easily fell for this trick. Though his compliments were never genuine, he would cleverly manipulate a sense of comfort. The favored daughter was far superior to the others. Once captured in this web, we were subtly encouraged to betray the others, to rat them out for some indiscretion he would later use against them. When the time arrived to use his ill-gotten information, William would gleefully betray the betrayer, and sister would be pitted against sister in a cruel game we were too naive to comprehend.

His third method was to encourage us to ridicule one another. He would pick on one of us, typically focusing on an aspect of our looks. I was an easy target, with skinny legs, freckles, and frizzy hair. He said things that sounded like he might be teasing, but he wasn't. It would be a blatant insult with a dark, sarcastic edge.

"I don't know how Patty keeps from falling off those toothpick legs of hers."

"If Patty ran away to join the circus, she wouldn't even have to wear a wig to be a clown."

He would taunt the others to join the game, which they would eagerly do to keep his focus away from them. No one wanted to be the butt of those sessions. We shamelessly demeaned each other for our own self-preservation.

His strategies were devastatingly effective.

As the years passed, William squashed our feelings of sisterly love whenever he could. He trained us to see each other in ways completely contrary to our true natures. He made Cathy out to be a bully; me, a joke; and Danni, an object so despicable we felt no guilt in mistreating her. He taught us to bury our innate sense of loyalty to each other and ignore our spirit of compassion. The three of us lived that awful nightmare together, but rarely did we rally to each other's defense. Seldom were we a comfort to the only other people on earth who knew exactly how each one of us felt.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "How did he succeed at turning us into enemies?"

If you will ponder what is actually taking place behind the scenes, you will notice that your sisters are not your enemies. Your real enemy is hardness. Hardness blinds persons from recognizing the goodness in themselves and in each other.



The Church



Having believed she had been guided to the Mormon Church by God Himself, the one and only thing Mother ever consistently put her foot down about was that her daughters would continue to be raised in the Church.

William didn't take that well. He resented having to drive us into town to participate in something he fundamentally disbelieved. He occasionally attended church with us, mainly to remind the church leaders his family was his domain. Other than that, he dropped us off in front of the church and then expected us to be in the parking lot waiting for him when he returned to pick us up.

That was not how a typical Mormon family operated. He knew it, we knew it, and they knew it.

Nevertheless, we were never blatantly ostracized for being the odd family in the congregation that everyone whispered about. Obvious attempts were made to help my mother feel valued. She was a chain-smoker and a coffee drinker in a church where those sins are perceived by some as tantamount to adultery. Yet many people reached out to her and, I believe, genuinely wished there was more they could do for our family.

My first memory of church is of attending meetings in the basement of the Masonic Lodge building. Our congregation was too small to afford a chapel. About a hundred of us gathered in the basement for services, which included a sacrament of grape juice and bread.

The congregation eventually grew large enough to build a facility of our own. Naturally, it was responsible for the construction loan, but local church leaders came up with a clever way to offset some of the expense. They rented the building to the Seventh-day Adventists, who consider Saturday to be their Sabbath.

It was a great arrangement. Their congregation used the chapel on Saturdays and the Mormons used it on Sundays. At times during the week both congregations might be in the building at the same time for youth activities or auxiliary meetings or such. The cheerful coexistence between the two denominations continued for about a year, both sides appreciative of a workable solution to their financial needs.

The interesting thing was, no one told me what was going on. I knew about the Seventh-day Adventist people, but I didn't know about that whole rental agreement thing. In my mind, I thought we were all the same people. I thought they were Mormons, too.

Even after the arrangement ended and they moved into a building of their own, I continued to believe Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists were the same thing. I was in my teens before I finally realized that was not the case. I was genuinely disappointed. I enjoyed being a Seventh-day Adventist Mormon.



The Misogynist



Sometimes he would sit in the bathroom on the lidded commode and watch Danni and I bathe. He would lean forward on his elbows with his hands clasped together in front of him and make fun of us while as we washed ourselves.

Mostly he mocked our breasts.

He said he couldn't wait until we had nice big jugs for him to look at, cupping his hands over his chest to illustrate the voluptuous size he was hoping for. Something worth his trouble to look at.

When I was twelve and my breasts finally began to develop, he said I looked like two coffee beans tacked on a two-by-four.

He delivered the birds-and-the-bees talk by picking up a pamphlet from the doctor's office and flinging it in my face without saying a word. Most of what I knew about being a woman came from taking care of Mother when she was too out of it to take care of herself.



The Voice



I once asked the Voice, "What is darkness?"

Darkness is anything that fogs your head or your heart.

"What's the problem with a fogged head or heart?"

You can walk around dead and not even know it.



Me



I grew up observing my father's tremendous darkness. His self-indulgent methods of maintaining destructive power and control over us were obvious signs to me that he was evil and wrong. I saw very clearly that although this man always claimed to be right, his blindness and his cruelty were sure indications he was evil and wrong and deceiving.

I knew William was a fake. The destructiveness of his evil ways was obvious. My resentment for him grew daily as I increasingly realized his deception. I said in my heart, I see through you. You are a destroyer of life and a snake.

Entering my teen years, I vowed to never let him or anyone else fool with me again. If I ever discovered anything in a man that reminded me of him, I would know that man was a phony, too. I would know he was like William and I would not tolerate him. I would never allow a man the opportunity to have power over me. No one would ever defile or control me again.

I became disgusted with the man who ruled my world with an iron fist, and I began to shut down my feelings to escape the pain of his wrath. In shutting down, I also began to disregard the peaceful promptings within me, and instead nurtured feelings of anger and contempt. Despite the warnings of the Voice, the hardening process had begun.

The more I listened to the voices of darkness, the more hardened I became.



The Voice



Hard hearts cannot hear a soft voice.



Me



We moved off the farm the summer I turned thirteen. William bought a house in Visalia from an old lady on his mail route who was headed for an elderly care facility. I missed the freedom of running wild in the country, but I had reached the age where it was suddenly wonderful to be closer to stores and lights and other people.

The old house we moved into was built in 1889. From a distance it appeared almost stately, with its grand pillared veranda sweeping across the front. The house had been built in the pure colonial style, evenly balanced, the same on the right as on the left. If there was a porch or a chimney on one side, there was the same feature on the other, otherwise the colonial effect would have been spoiled.

But upon approach, decades of neglect revealed itself instantly. Concrete blocks propped up one corner of the house where the foundation had long since rotted away. The slow settling had caused huge cracks in the outer siding. The roof sagged toward one side and years of badly laid tarpaper spattered across it like an asphalt crazy-quilt. Several porch floor slats were loose or missing, and most of the window screens hung in shreds.

Inside the house was similar. The gorgeous hardwood floors trimmed with intricate parquet lay hidden beneath yellow shag carpeting. Ten-foot ceilings created elegant, expansive rooms, but an eclectic hodgepodge of odd paint colors, improperly hung wallpaper, and cheap light fixtures promptly diminished the effect. When the old place had been retrofitted for electricity the conduit was hastily installed, running in plain view up walls and around doorjambs, leading to bare metal switchboxes that stuck out two inches.

The house was open and drafty. We sweltered in the summer and froze in the winter. Two swamp coolers lodged crudely in windows faintly dimmed the heat in summertime, but William controlled their use. The coolers only came on when William turned them on.

Likewise, one of the two matching fireplaces had been sealed off, and in front of it stood a boxy gas heater, which only William was allowed to operate. William was the one to chop the wood for the other fireplace, so that heat source was under his control as well. Mother was allowed a small space heater in her bedroom, but the rest of us might as well have been living outside for as cold as our rooms were during the winter months.

My bedroom - which I was delighted to have under any circumstances - was an enclosed section of the veranda that wrapped around the back part of the house. I shared quarters with the water heater, the electric meter, and the backside of a fireplace. The floor slanted down, as porches are inclined to do. A layer of gritty black dirt from the attic constantly rained down on me through the warped slats of the ceiling. My curtains were made from an old plastic tablecloth. But I didn't mind any of this. My room was a far cry from the room I had shared in the country with my sisters - the cracker box painted pink, with only a narrow walkway between two sets of bunk beds. For better or for worse, this room was all mine. My only complaint was the night.

I was terrified of the dark. William would never allow a nightlight. He didn't even want us to turn on a light to use the bathroom. He considered it a waste of electricity. So at night, being in my own room, alone in the farthest reaches of the house, was miserable. I always tried to convince our dog, Teddy, to sleep near me to take the edge off the horrible anxiety that nightfall always brought.

One such chilly night the first winter we lived there, my fear of the dark was justified when I awoke from a sound sleep to find an icy-cold hand clenched about my neck. In one swift move I grabbed the hand and jerked it away from my neck, sat up, and screamed bloody murder into the inky blackness.

Within seconds William burst through my doorway and flipped on the light. To my absolute horror, the situation instantly grew much worse. Now William was standing only feet away from me buck-naked and with flames shooting from his eyes.

He took a step toward me. I was almost as afraid of him as I was the zombie creature trying to choke me to death. I screamed again, louder. Storming to my bedside, he grabbed my shoulders and shouted, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

That's when I stopped screaming. That's when I looked down at my lap to the thing I had cleverly captured as it was attempting to kill me. It was a hand, cold, pale, and lifeless. But as I lifted the hand by the wrist to inspect it, it began to look familiar. It was small, with long, thin fingers. And it was wearing one of my rings. It slowly dawned on me that one of my own hands had somehow gone missing in the midst of this wildly bizarre encounter.

A few seconds later I pieced all the clues together.

William should have laughed. He should have put his arms around me - after putting on a robe - and comforted me. My arm had fallen asleep outside the blankets. That sort of thing happens.

But he didn't laugh. He was furious. I had awakened him in the middle of the night for no good reason - heaven forbid. I should have known better. Four-thirty in the morning comes awfully damn early for people who work for a living, you know.

That was his typical reaction when a childhood episode like this would occur. We should have known better than to inconvenience him.



The Voice



No matter how thick the darkness is, the light is always greater than the darkness.



The Crazy Woman



My mother had a room of her own in that old house, too.

On the rare occasions when she felt energetic, she would go to the garage and find a bucket of paint. Then she would paint something. It could be a door, or the baseboards in the bathroom, or a wall. It could be one of the fireplaces. It could be a chair. There was never rhyme or reason to what she painted, nor was there much discretion about what color of paint she used. At one time, our kitchen featured nine different colors of paint.

Usually, though, she spent her waking hours sitting at an old metal desk set up in her bedroom. There she smoked cigarette after cigarette between sips of Pepsi. In front of her was a blue canvas binder filled with college-ruled paper upon which she jotted random thoughts.

During her good spells, the pages of her binder were filled with elegant cursive paragraphs detailing the comings and goings of her small world, each word perfectly formed at a slender twenty-degree angle.

The girls brought home their report cards today. All three got A's and B's. Cathy needs new gym shoes. William wants liver and onions for dinner tonight. I want spaghetti but he said no. The white rose bush is about ready to bloom. I should get out there and do some watering when it cools down. Mrs. Johnson called and said our dog was in their front yard again.

During her setbacks, her writing turned dark. Hunched over her binder, hands trembling, a brown crust of caffeine and tobacco lining the corners of her mouth, Mother's thoughts meandered from fear to loneliness to doubt.

Dear God, be near me.

I'm so afraid -

I don't understand.

I'm bored and lonely.

God forgive this wretch that I am.

Something has happened to me and I don't know what.

I always thought I'd get well but now I'm not sure.

I can't stand this much longer.

Lord, please don't let me rot in this kind of hell I live in.

I am afraid of something large and powerful.

I don't laugh anymore.

I feel hard and scared inside.

I want my love of life back.

The tears choke in my throat as I think what I may be in for.

The pain in my heart consumes me.

Dear Lord, where did I lose touch with reality?

I feel as though something were going to explode in my face.

I'm sinking.

What is wrong with me?



The Church



I loved going to church.

I loved sitting on the wooden pew between Cathy and Danni, pale olive curtains over floor-length windows casting an emerald glow over the congregation.

I loved singing the hymns. I didn't have much of a voice, but that didn't stop me. When I sang "Abide With Me" and "The Spirit of God," an odd feeling would come over me. Often, for no reason, I would start to cry. Sometimes I saw Danni and Cathy crying, too. And there we would be, sitting in the pews, singing and crying in the glow of those olive curtains.

It was the closest thing to genuine happiness I ever felt.

There was a tough part to being a Mormon, though. The part where I was the daughter of an abusive alcoholic nonmember and a mentally ill, mostly inactive "jack" Mormon. Plus, I was from the wrong side of the tracks. I was from the "north side" of town, the side where most of the minorities lived. That had never bothered me, but it was one more thing that distinguished my sisters and me from the rest of the well-heeled, perfect-family-unit churchgoers.

I never became close friends with the other Mormon girls my age, although they attended the same schools I did. I was never asked on a date by a Mormon boy. Some of the kids, unlike the adults in the church, were neither diplomatic nor considerate of our situation. I could sense them whispering about us, and sometimes staring. One girl in particular - her name was Jenny - would make a big scene of skittering away from us as if we were diseased.



The Voice



The mistaken opinions of others are not the foundation of who you really are.



Three Sisters



The summer I was fourteen was the last time William hit any of us. His temper had roared over some idiotic thing and he exploded on us with a wooden hanger.

He started with Cathy. The blows were heavy, but I immediately noticed Cathy didn't cry. Nor did she attempt to dodge any of the blows. She just watched him calmly as he landed the hanger again and again until her thighs were covered with welts.

Next, he hooked me under my left armpit and began to pummel the back of my legs as he had done with Cathy. I looked over at her and she remained calm, casually taking in the scene as if it were a walk in the garden. I decided to follow her lead. I resisted the urge to react and instead stilled my face to a placid look. I made it through the beating without making a sound.

He went for Danni last.

Danni never cried when William beat her. She would never give him the satisfaction of seeing her tears. As always, she stood unflinching as the blows rained down. And as always, he immediately lost interest in beating her. William got off on inflicting pain. It was no fun hurting someone who wouldn't react to pain.

Afterwards, panting with sweat streaming down his face, he ordered us to go to our rooms. We turned and walked single file to the closest bedroom to us. It was Danni's little hole in the wall, which was actually the pantry for the old place, a seven-foot-square opening at the back of the kitchen.

None of us spoke as we sat in a row on the edge of her bed. We looked side to side into each other's faces to see how each was reacting. There was no sign of tears. We continued the scrutiny wondering who would break first, and then something unusual occurred. Someone grinned. Someone else snickered. Within seconds we were all three laughing and talking.

"Did you see how his face puffed up like a blowfish?"

"Did you hear him yip when he accidentally hit himself on the hand?"

"I kicked him in the shins and he didn't even notice!"

We knew he was outside the door listening to us laugh. But this time, we didn't care. This time William realized his beatings had failed. Physically abusing us was no longer going to be an effective way of controlling our minds.

But he was not one to yield his control. Over the next year, he honed in on a new way to exercise his dominion. Knowing how important the newfound freedom of living in town was to us, he switched to a new tactic, which was to prevent us from leaving the property.

William was aware our horizons had expanded. We stayed busy babysitting to earn our own money. We participated in youth activities at church. And in school, we were all involved in sports and music. He recognized he could control us by using these activities against us. He would confine us to the house for any offense he deemed worthy.

Being grounded could last a day, or it could drag on for weeks. In 1970 we were grounded for the entire summer for a "crime" we could not avoid.

It was the Fourth of July. Cathy had driven the three of us to the high school football field where the annual fireworks celebration was under way. William had given orders to be home by 10:30 P.M. sharp.

Dusk had already settled into dark when we took our seats on the stadium benches. With patriotic music blasting from the loudspeakers, we soon lost all track of time amid shimmering explosions, boy-watching, and delicious cherry snow cones. Wrapped in the wonderment of it all, reality struck hard when the music ended and the lights came up and we discovered it was already 10:15.

We ran to the parking lot as fast as we could, hoping to beat the exiting flood, but traffic was already at a crawl. Inside our car, tension mounted as the minute hand of the dashboard clock continued to sweep forward. Visions of William's reaction created a morbid mood.

We raced around every corner and ran two stoplights in our rush to get home. It was 10:45 PM when Cathy turned off the engine and coasted our Pontiac Lemans into the driveway, hoping we could slip in without notice. The house was completely dark. That was a good sign. At least he wasn't waiting up for us.

Our last obstacle was to get past his bedroom window, which was at the very front of the house. We held our breath and tiptoed over the creaking boards that lined the ancient veranda. We prayed the squeaks and groans would not give us up. But they did.

He heard us.

He was standing in the shadows of his doorway as we entered the house.

"You're grounded until school starts up again," he growled as we sheepishly walked by.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "I can't bear having to stay in this house all summer long, especially for something I didn't do. Why does my freedom have to be taken away like this?"

No one can take your freedom from you. Your freedom is you. It is who you are.

"But I don't get it. How can that be?"

Within yourself, you are free to feel any way you choose. Even though you are stuck at home, you have resources within yourself to draw from that can provide you with one of the most enjoyable summers of your entire life.

"How can I do that?"

Do you remember back in elementary school when you realized that in your mind was "a pleasant world where good things often happened?"

"Yes, I remember."

That pleasant world still exists. It resides in your own personal resources within yourself. In that world, you rule. You are free to be happy, joyful, excited, and free to discover many interesting things to make your summer a wonderful experience.




The Misogynist



The summer I turned sixteen, I helped William paint the old house we lived in. I spent weeks scraping off cracked and peeling paint from what seemed like miles of ancient wood siding. When the job was done, he showed his appreciation by having a T-shirt made for me. In fuzzy brown letters across the front was "President of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee."



Me



I was always kind of a geek in school. I was in the Spanish club, played flute in the marching band, joined the tennis team, and wrote for the high school newspaper. I didn't mind being on the nerdy side. I would have done almost anything to keep from going home.

In my senior year, I landed my first real job working as Girl Friday for the local newspaper. I wrote obituaries, church news, the TV guide, and wedding announcements. I saw myself capable of much greater things, so I constantly pressed the editors to give me bigger writing assignments. To my delight, some of my human-interest stories began to appear in the printed columns alongside the "real" reporters' stories.

I was enchanted by the busy newsroom. It was my first exposure to the world outside our little town. My appetite for life and adventure was whetted by the bustle of headlines and deadlines and the constant whir of the ticker-tape machine. My newspaper job made me feel important.

I didn't date much in high school. I didn't even go to my senior prom. Once a boy named Bruce asked me out. When he came to the house to pick me up, our dog Teddy, a feisty little spaniel mutt, would not stop barking at him. William was three beers into his six-pack by then. Belligerently planting his index finger in the middle of Bruce's chest, he announced, "My dog doesn't like you, so I don't like you. Now get out of my house."

When that got around school, no one asked me out again.

Dating came easier when I started college. By then, I had been kicked out of the house so I didn't have William to frighten my dates away. Two weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I came home from work one day to find all my possessions in a pile in the front yard. William's exact words to me were, "You're not going to use my house as your private landing strip any longer."

I rented a tiny studio apartment and put myself through junior college working two jobs that couldn't have been more diverse. I worked weeknights behind the parts counter at a Kragen Auto Supply. On weekends I sold wedding dresses in the bridal salon of Gottschalks department store. It was a crazy mix of work, but I thoroughly enjoyed both jobs.

Cars and engines fascinated me. Speed fascinated me. I could hold my own with the greasy mechanics who came to the store to test my knowledge. In no time at all I worked my way up to third manager in charge and developed quite a devoted following of customers.

Working at the bridal salon watching the happy brides-to-be swirl about in their voluminous folds of delicate lace was wonderful. I had the best of two worlds working those jobs. My only complaint was lack of sleep.

After junior college I transferred to Fresno State University and parlayed my newspaper experience into a journalism major. It was tough to afford tuition, books, and gas on top of the rent. Food was a luxury most days. Boxed macaroni and cheese was a gourmet meal.

The next few years brought a dramatic change. I began to have a lot of fun in my life. In my early twenties, I adopted a group of friends who drove fast cars and owned Harley-Davidsons and guzzled cheap beer by the gallon. We were the cruisers of our generation, looping up and down Mooney Boulevard, showing off our horsepower. Afterward, we met up at Jack's house to continue the festivities.

Jack was a tough-talking, big-hearted guy who lived in a little house on the south side of town. Adorned with only a kitchen table, a beanbag, and a neon Budweiser sign that hung crooked on the living room wall, Jack's was the place to be. Jack was cool. Jack's favorite T-shirt bore the slogan, "Screw 'em if they can't take a joke." (Only it didn't say "screw.")

At Jack's place, where the eight-track stereo blasted Journey, Aerosmith, The Who, and The Rolling Stones nonstop day and night, life was different from the drudgery I was used to. Jack and the others were alive and in the moment. I was drawn to their spontaneity, their independence and confidence. They lived life on their own terms, they followed no one else's rules.

Ours was a generation that couldn't predict its future. The conflict in Vietnam loomed over young men threatened by the impending draft. The Soviet Union had nuclear warheads aimed at most major U.S. cities - the launch command would have annihilated half our population. There were civil uprisings, race riots, and political assassinations. There was bra burning, Fidel Castro, the IRA, campus shootings, the Berlin Wall, the Cambodian killing fields. The prior generation had handed down a world dizzy with problems and our response was a "live for today" attitude that quickly became our axiom.

While my friends drank their cheap beer, I took amphetamines.

I didn't drink alcohol or take the psychedelic drugs of my generation. I'd had a lifetime of crazy people and I couldn't understand why someone would want to make themselves nuts on purpose. I never wanted to be in the condition I had seen my mother in so many times, out of her mind and babbling nonsense. I had long since turned to "whites" for my escape. Those tiny little cross-scored amphetamine tablets granted me endless sleepless nights that were perfect for my "landing strip" lifestyle.

I flew through life in a blur of speed for years.



Three Sisters



William kicked Danni out of the house in an equally dramatic way, but he found a way to make Cathy's life so miserable she decided to leave home on her on.

Cathy was seventeen, a senior in high school, and worked after school as a nanny for the two children of an active couple. The job required her to spend many weeknights and nearly every weekend away from home. She was also a cheerleader, which regularly took her to school sporting events. Between school and her job, Cathy was away from home a great deal of the time.

Since her newfound independence made it difficult for him to impose self-serving groundings on her, he found another way to maintain power and control. Verbal abuse was always a part of William's arsenal, constantly undermining our self-confidence with insult and criticism. But as Cathy bloomed into womanhood, he stepped up the abuse by attacking her sexuality to shame and humiliate her. Cathy was popular but she would never have exposed a boy to our home life. So she said no to all the invitations she received, including to her own senior prom. Because of this, William accused her of being gay. He knew it wasn't true, but he also knew it hurt her to be suspected of it. He even put Mother up to discussing it with her.

The stress of William's attacks caused Cathy to break out in painful boils all over her body.

One day Mother got a call from the bartender at the Shamrock, a bar where William frequently stopped for drinks after work. William was on a mean drunk and the bartender wanted him out of there. Cathy was the only one with a driver's license, so it fell on her to go pick him up. He was furious when he saw her walk into the bar and refused to leave with her quietly. Cathy had to pull him off the barstool and, together with the bartender, drag him out the door. Humiliated by this, William increased his campaign of verbal abuse toward Cathy, who barely held out the remaining months before she turned eighteen. She wanted to leave sooner, but William threatened to call the police and have her arrested if she tried. When she was finally old enough to move out, William screamed a tirade of insults while she packed. Only whores live alone, he said and suggested she hang a red light outside her window. Cathy left in such a hurry, I had to sneak most of her belongings out of the house a few days later.

Where Cathy was driven out by attacking her sexuality, Danni's relationship with the Church became William's weapon against her. Danni was seventeen and a senior the night she caught William slipping out of the house, cleanly shaven and smelling of cologne, only moments after Mother had nodded off. The next day she told Mother what she had seen. William, of course, denied any wrongdoing. He said Danni was lying "as usual" and that he hadn't left the house at all.

Later that night, after Mother went to bed, William stormed into Danni's bedroom and shoved her against a wall. Pressing his forearm across her throat, he hissed a hateful threat into her ear. He was throwing her out of the house the minute she graduated from high school. He made good on his threat a few months later. The night she graduated, he coldly ordered her to get the hell off his property.

Suddenly homeless, Danni turned to the Church for help. She went to the Mormon bishop and explained what had happened, hoping for a place to stay until she could make permanent arrangements. Because of her age, the bishop felt it was his duty to contact her parents and tell them where she was. William had anticipated the call and had prepared a different version of the story for the bishop. He said Danni had run away from home and it was breaking her mother's heart. He begged the bishop to send his wayward daughter back so her poor mother could end her grief.

The bishop bought into it. He reprimanded Danni and sent her "home" with a stern reminder to always honor her father and mother. She had no choice but to return to the old house and beg for a place to stay until she could get a job. But William was smug in his victory. He had tarnished Danni's reputation in the eyes of her beloved church and now he would enjoy sending her away yet again. When she arrived on his doorstep, apologizing and feeling defeated, he laughed. He looked around to make sure Mother was out of earshot, then growled, "I told you to get off my property!"

His last words before slamming the door were, "I guess that church is good for something after all."



The Voice



Everything you experience in life can be made appropriate to your growth, no matter what it is.



Kent



Life changed again for me in the wee hours of Friday, July 7, 1978.

Jack had been sitting alone on his living room floor where several of us had gathered only hours before. The usual amount of beer had been consumed by the usual consumers, Jack included. Jack wasn't drunk when the last person headed home for the night; still, something went wrong as he sat in the neon glow of the Budweiser sign, fiddling with his .22 pistol.

Jack loved that pistol. I never saw him fire it, but he was always fooling around with it. Showing it off. Polishing it. I suspect that's what he was doing that Friday night when it accidentally discharged, sending a bullet ricocheting through his chest cavity. He managed to crawl out the door and into the yard before collapsing. And dying.

I was twenty-three years old and Jack's death was the last straw. I wanted out of that town. I wanted out of my body. I wanted out of everything. I was ready to run and all I needed was a place to run to. My chance for escape appeared six months later at a New Year's Eve party. His name was Kent.

Kent was a handsome local boy who had made the leap from farm town to Southern California a few months earlier. He was back in town visiting his family for the holidays. I arranged to be standing next to him when the countdown to midnight began. At the festive moment, I grabbed his face and kissed him. That was the beginning of a whirlwind courtship and we were married within a year.

At long last, I said goodbye to Visalia for good.



The Voice



"There is something that gives radiance to everything," the Voice reminded me. "It is the idea of something around the corner." -Gilbert Chesterton



Three Children



Kent and I had not planned on having children. At least, not right away. We were running a business, a high-performance auto parts store with international distribution. Our goal was to expand the business into a chain of stores, and that would require our full attention. But that's not how it worked out. I came home from the honeymoon pregnant.

Even though I was sick throughout the pregnancy, we still managed to double the size of our business before Dawn was born. We also bought a fixer-upper house that we remodeled ourselves and sold for a handsome profit. By the time Breanne was born three years later, the business was earning millions, and we had begun buying and selling homes amid the real estate boom of the early '80s.

We had more money than we knew what to do with.

To me, we had a great life. We both worked long, hard hours at the store, but we had everything our hearts desired. We had a beautiful home, we drove a Mercedes Benz, we traveled all over the world. And we had those beautiful little girls. I thought we had the brass ring.

But Kent was restless. Home life didn't interest him much. He was rarely ever around. A workaholic, he was focused on the business, and that left me feeling lonely at times. His absence did have its advantages, though. I got to make all the decisions about raising the kids.

My main concern for the children was the same as my mother's concern for her children: I wanted them raised in the Church. Kent was not a Mormon and he almost never attended church with us, but he never objected to our going. Actually, he never objected to anything I did. I could go anywhere I wanted, I could buy whatever I wanted, and I could hang out with whomever I wanted. The only thing we ever really argued about was sex. I wasn't a big fan of it. He was. That was rough for him. It was probably the biggest factor leading to the demise of our marriage.

Kent's idea of life was to work long hours, play expensively, and party hard. He also liked the nightlife. Eight years into our marriage he discovered something else he liked. He liked to drive racecars.

By this time we were investing most of our business profits into an elaborate drag racing operation that took him to tracks all over the United States. He was good at it, but it was a huge drain on the business. Besides the two cars, there were tow vehicles and tricked-out trailers and high-end tools - not to mention paying for and outfitting a team of five guys who traveled around with him.

I didn't like spending our money like that. Plus, I wanted him home. I wanted family dinners together and walks in the park and taking turns telling bedtime stories. And I wanted another baby. Kent finally did agree to have another child, though I suspect it was to keep placate me about his busy schedule.

I was even more sick during this pregnancy than the first two. The condition is called hyperemesis, but that's just a nice way of saying I puked my guts out all day. By my fourth month, I had lost ten percent of my body weight and was hospitalized with dehydration and malnutrition.

Even then, Kent did not slow down his racing schedule. He continued to be a crowd pleaser at the tracks, putting on a great show with his flashy cars and entourage. He was getting a lot of attention. In particular, he was getting a lot of women's attention.



Kent



It was Memorial Day weekend 1988 and I was seven months along. Kent was racing in Sacramento. He kissed me goodbye before he left and promised to call each day. I never got a call from Kent. Instead, the wife of one of his crew guys called on day two to ask if I was aware of what was going on with my husband. Apparently he had taken our twenty-year-old cashier along on this trip and he was not being discreet about their relationship.

Stunned and devastated, I telephoned his hotel room repeatedly until he answered. When I begged him to come home, he refused, saying he wanted to stay and race. We could talk about "it" when he got back.

It wasn't much of a talk. He wanted to move out. He said he needed to experiment with being a single man again because he didn't know if being a family man was right for him. I begged him to at least wait until after the baby was born. His response was that it would be just as hard to leave then as it was now, so he might as well get it over with.

Years later I was able to forgive Kent for leaving me like that, for leaving me when I was pregnant. At least he had the courage to do what he thought was right.

But it was difficult to forgive him for the reasoning he gave people when asked how he could leave me that way, pregnant with his child. He told them the baby wasn't his.
 
Lying about me that way was just so . . . William.



The Voice



"Why is it so hard for me to forgive someone who has hurt me?" I asked.

Whenever you focus on the misdeeds of another person, influences of darkness take control of your heart and mind. That darkness establishes wedges of enmity between yourself and the other person. Enmity leads to feelings of nausea and contempt, which is a very deep-seated hardness-of-heart.

Hardness of heart destroys persons away from being able to see the genuine good in each other. It is impossible to forgive someone when you are blinded by hard-heartedness and contempt.

"Can you help me soften my heart and forgive Kent?"

You won't be able to forgive Kent until you are able to change your mental images of him. You will need to realize he was only trying to protect himself and meant no real harm to you. Your burden of animosity toward him will become much lighter as you realize he didn't fully understand what he was doing.

"But he did understand what he was doing. He knew very well!"

Would you like to test your mental image of that?

"Sure."

Have you ever severely injured another person's feelings?

"Yes...unfortunately, I have."

Were you upset at that person at the time?

"Yes, I was furious."

Did you know what you were doing when you inflicted the injury?

"Well...yeah, I was looking to get even for something and I definitely understood what I was doing at the time."

Since then, have you had any regrets over what you did?

"Absolutely. I feel terrible about it. I wish I could turn the clock back and undo it all."

So, there is something you are aware of now that you didn't realize then?

"Yes, I didn't realize how bad the damage would be to the other person, how it would affect so many other people, and how awful I would feel later on."

So you didn't fully understand what you were doing at the time?

"No, I guess I didn't."

Your ability to forgive Kent and others will arise out of your realization that they "know not what they are doing."



The Church



After Kent left, my first inclination was to seek help from my spiritual advisor, my bishop. In my case I was lucky. My bishop was also an attorney. So in addition to spiritual guidance, he also gave me legal advice for my divorce, which was swiftly becoming a nightmare.

I met with the bishop twice during the difficult period between Kent's leaving and the baby's birth and was thankful for the small sense of comfort I received from him. He counseled me to be strong, to hold my head up and not cave in to depression. I was scared about being alone with two other children to care for during those final weeks. The bishop assured me I could rely on the Lord and the Church to help carry me through.

Delivering the baby did not go smoothly. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck several times - which normally isn't a problem, but he was wrapped at my end of the cord, not his. Every time I had a contraction, the pressure on the cord reduced his heart rate to 50 beats per minute. The normal rate is 120 to 160. Because of the baby's distress, I was given Pitocin to speed up the delivery. It worked, but it also magnified the labor pains to an unbearable level. I was a complete wreck when Ryan was finally born, his face blue from lack of oxygen.

Though it took baby Ryan a few days to shake off his rough beginning, he recovered beautifully. I took him home and neighbors and friends helped me through the first weeks while I adjusted to my new family. Noticeably absent was any help from the Church. There were no calls, no cards, and no visits.

That was highly unusual considering how I had seen the Church respond to other women in similar situations.

Kent had never joined the Church, so I was accustomed to being a bit of an outsider. Temple marriage, or the marriage of two members in good standing, is a key principle of Mormonism. I understood the difference of being married to a nonmember.

But I wasn't prepared for the response I received from many of my fellow churchgoers when I became a divorcée. Suddenly I wasn't just an outsider. I felt like a leper.

Some people stopped speaking to me. Some avoided making eye contact. In a church full of people who had once been fairly supportive of me, only one woman offered a gesture of help after Ryan was born. She brought over a tuna casserole.

It was strange being treated that way. It was worse than when we were kids and people whispered about our crazy mother and alcoholic father. I was puzzled that people would respond so negatively to my divorce. Divorces happened in the Church all the time. There was sympathy for individuals struggling to readjust their lives. They reached out to them. Why was it so different for me?

I soon had my answer. The shift in attitude toward me had little to do with my divorce and everything to do with a rumor the bishop's wife had started about me. At some point following the two meetings I held with her husband, she concluded I was chasing after him, assuming I was in the market for a replacement husband - hers. She was vocal in her suspicions and many people believed her.

That hurt. I didn't need this woman adding to my troubles at that particular time. My world was shattering. Kent had bankrupted the business and let the house go into foreclosure. I ended up with nothing after the divorce and had to scramble to resettle the kids in an apartment and find a job to support them. Right then I needed stability and a sense of belonging somewhere. This woman was trifling with something very sacred to me.

My feelings about the Church did not change after that incident. After all, the bishop's wife had started the rumor, not the Church. But I did feel the need to withdraw a bit from the general congregation. I became more private about my personal life. When things got bad and I couldn't afford groceries, I applied for food stamps rather than go to the Church leaders for help. Getting help from the Church meant meeting with the bishop. I would not put myself in that position ever again.



The Voice



Schizophrenia generally manifests between the ages of eighteen and thirty, so it was a big relief when my thirtieth birthday rolled around and I was still lunacy-free. The last vestiges of concern about hearing "the Voice" finally disappeared. Now I felt I could relax and enjoy the promptings I continued to receive.

Cathy and Danni heard voices, too, though we rarely spoke about it. William had deliberately created such fear among us, it wasn't easy to trust and be vulnerable to each other. Besides, we had become so wary of the risk of being seen as crazy, it was hard for us to talk openly.

Studying aromatherapy, Cathy developed an interest in methods of natural healing, so she was actually the first to openly admit to feeling a distinct spiritual connection within her. Her experiences were quite different from mine, but I was glad to know she too had been buoyed through the bad times of our childhood as had Danni. Each of us, in our own way, had been able to detect the still, small voice that whispered hope into our hearts...when we were listening.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "Why is it that, at times, it seems like you're not speaking to me?"

There is never a time when I am not with you, guiding you, and comforting you. I am always radiating my peace, love, and joy into you.

However, persons are not automatically enabled to hear my voice.

Hearing requires sensitivity. Sensitivity requires letting go of hardness, especially hardness rooted in fear, anger, frustration, depression, greed, vanity, and selfishness.

As you let go of hardness, you will become much more sensitive to hearing my voice and knowing I am right here with you.



The Crazy Woman



Mental illness seemed to lose some of its grip on Mother as she entered her fifties. At one point she was completely off her medication and was as bright and chipper as we had ever seen her. We marveled at her lucidity. An article on the Internet said studies had shown some types of mental illness might actually diminish with age. We prayed that was the case with Mother.

It was amazing to hear Mother speak optimistically about life, about living a fuller life, about pursuing hobbies and spending quality time with her grandchildren. By then she had eight grandchildren - three from me, four from Danni, and one from Cathy. I found myself much more inclined to make the 221-mile drive to see her, even though it meant having to deal with William.

After William had pushed the three of us out, his new game was to use Mother as a lure. He had a craving need to continue bullying us, to pick at the emotional scars he had created. He needed an audience to control. We mostly tried to visit Mother during the day when he wasn't around, but on occasion he would call and say Mother wanted us all over for dinner. We would comply, happy to do anything that pleased her.

We got a lot smarter about William after we left home. We learned we could simply walk out when he started his insults. He caught on to that, too, and it forced him to become more subtle. He went from overt criticism to snide remarks. For example, Cathy's first husband drove a Jaguar. William would say things like, "I bet you two drive up and down streets just hoping people are out so they can see you in that." It was always unpleasant to be around him, but we did it willingly for our Mother.

Mother's improvement came after I had moved away from Visalia, so I enjoyed her mostly on a long-distance phone call basis. But she was able to spend a great deal of time with Cathy and Danni and their children. She even set up a nursery for them in my old bedroom. With renewed zest for life, Mother got a cat, a calico named Brindle. She sewed and baked and painted many more odds and ends around the house. For the next few years, Mother was as well as she had ever been. This was the closest we ever came to being a "normal" family.

Then came the unexpected day when I received a phone call from Mother. She said she'd had it with William. She was leaving him. She asked me to come get her. I was shocked, but I didn't hesitate to get in my car and drive those 221 miles.

I avoided looking at William as I loaded Mother's suitcase into the trunk of my car. It was obvious how mad he was. I could feel him glaring at her. I could feel his fury toward me. I tried to ignore him as I helped Mother into the front passenger seat. She wouldn't look at him either. Her eyes were glued to the dashboard when he leaned in through the window and spoke in a chilling voice, "I love you, Helen. You'll come back to me soon."

Overcome with loathing, I drove away as fast as I could. Neither of us looked back.

Mother lived with me for six incredible weeks. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like I had a mother. We went shopping together and to the movies. We saw a Kenny Rogers concert. Sometimes we'd stay up half the night talking.

It was just like real mothers and daughters do.

I needed a mother just then. It had only been a few months since Kent left me. I was in over my head with three kids and trying to fit back in the employment world.

Mother seemed happy. She said she felt wonderful being off the meds. She cooked and cleaned and helped get Dawn and Breanne off to school every morning. She took care of baby Ryan all day while I was at work. When I walked out the door each morning, I never worried about leaving her alone with my children. She was perfectly sound.

Although she didn't like talking about what had happened between her and William, she admitted she was sick of his drinking and his terrible behavior. She was especially upset that he had sold the old colonial home in town and purchased what she called "a tacky mobile home in a dinky old folk's trailer park." She hated living there.

"Did he often yell at you?" I asked one night as we were clearing away the dinner dishes.

"Yes, he did," she answered in clipped syllables.

"Did he ever hit you?" I pressed tentatively.

"Yes he did and I hate him!" Her voice brimmed with tears. She turned and walked away. The conversation was over.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "I was only trying to help Mother vent out her feelings. Why did she walk away?"

What persons offer as help is not always helpful.

Sometimes helpful people hinder.

The test of whether or not your help is actually helpful is in the attitude of the person being helped.



The Misogynist



William called Mother from time to time, but always when I was away at work. When I'd ask about their conversations, she always said the same thing. He wanted her to come back home. She would tell him to quit drinking. He would get mad. The conversation would end.

She wasn't planning on going back to him. If he didn't want to stop drinking, she would never go back to that mobile home. But clever William...he soon found a way to get around all that.

It was a Friday morning, exactly six weeks from the day she had arrived. We got up and started our day as usual. As I headed out the door for work, Mother asked if I could bring home some small boxes. She and Dawn were planning a big project. They were going to organize all the toys and books in Dawn's bedroom. Mother was in terrific spirits when I left. That would be the last time ever I saw my mother lucid.

Rounding the corner into our cul-de-sac at 5:30 that evening, boxes in tow, I saw instantly there was going to be trouble. William's black Chrysler Cordova was parked in the middle of my driveway. A hunted feeling poured over me. I had no idea what to expect when I opened that front door.

He stood in my entryway, fury blazing from his eyes as he saw me approach. It was a look I had seen countless times. Bile inched toward my throat, burning a path up my chest.

"What's going on here?" I asked, trying hard to sound casual. I took a step forward and craned my neck to see around him. I needed to know where my children were.

"I'm taking her home," he scowled. "That's what's going on here."

William was slightly crouched as if ready to pounce, Mother's packed suitcase resting on the floor beside him. When I made a move to step around him, he shifted to stop me. An erratic movement behind him caught my eye.

It was Mother. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen under the fluorescent lights, her arms flailing about her head as if swatting at gnats. Her voice was low and mechanical and I could hear the familiar rant of insanity. I took another step into the entryway, closer to William. I had to know if my children were okay. I was close enough that he could have grabbed me or hit me, but I didn't care. I was finally far enough inside that I could see them.

They were all three on the living room sofa, staring at Mother in wide-eyed alarm. Dawn held Ryan on her lap. Breanne was pressed so tightly against her side she was nearly invisible. I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I looked back at the man standing in front of me and my loathing plunged to a new low.

"Don't bother with your excuses," he growled. "Your mother called me today and begged me to come get her."

My excuses? I thought. He's pretending this is my fault?

I didn't say a word.

"I can't believe what you've done to her!" he bellowed. "Look at her! LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO YOUR MOTHER!"

I braced for what I knew was coming next. I assumed the proper stance, blank face, motionless, indifferent. His words were no less absurd than his tirades of my youth. He said he knew all about the mistreatment Mother had endured while in my care. How I had forced her to baby-sit all the kids in the neighborhood for free. How I had allowed men from the Church to molest my daughters as I looked on. How I refused to let Mother bathe or use laundry detergent to wash her clothes. How I had given Kent permission to come into her room and have sex with her several nights in a row.

It was all so ridiculous. But then, his tirades were always ridiculous. The only thing making this one different was that it was happening in front of my children. He had found another way to demoralize me.

As I listened to his verbal knifing, my gaze shifted to the nightmarish scene behind him. Mother babbling nonsense into thin air, moving in strange, jerky motions. Dawn trying valiantly to console her siblings, yet so clearly needing to be consoled herself. The people I loved most in the world suffering because of this man. I wanted to scream. I wanted to claw at his face. I wanted to unleash on him what he was imposing on me. But I knew that was what he was hoping for. He wanted an outburst. He wanted to make me  seem crazy. He wanted to justify the nonsense he was spewing. But I stood silent knowing the best thing to do was deny him my emotions.

He eventually ran out of accusations and the timbre in his voice dropped back to a hiss. He stepped closer, his face only inches from mine, to deliver his final blow. "Oh, and by the way, here's a message from her doctor. ‘Congratulations, you've really pushed her over the edge this time.'"

Turning on his heel, he stormed into the kitchen and grabbed Mother by the arm. He dragged her out the front door pausing only briefly to reach for her suitcase.

"I hope you're pleased with yourself," he spat, steely eyes assessing me up and down.

My throat constricted in a dull ache. I wanted to curl my fingers around his throat and take him to that place he had thrust me in so many times before. But again, I stood silent. I spoke only to whisper as Mother brushed blankly by me, "I'm sorry, Mom. I'm so sorry."

The door slammed. An engine roared. Tires squealed. And just like that, my mother was gone.

Again.



The Misogynist



It didn't add up.

Him showing up there, saying she had called him. A cryptic message from her doctor. No phone call to me at work to let me know she was having problems. There was no time for all the things to occur the way he had portrayed them, the call from Mother, the visit to the doctor, and then a four-hour drive.

It took me a while, but I finally figured out how he must have done it. I knew what William wanted, and I knew what he was capable of doing to get it.

First, he had gone to see one of her doctors, one who believed in his Mr. Good Guy routine. One who would fall for his pretended worry and dispense a prescription for anything he requested. Probably Haldol.

Then, he showed up unannounced at my home while I was at work, catching Mother completely off guard. He knew exactly how to get to her, how to trigger instability. He knew what to say to break her down. It probably took him less than an hour to render her a psychotic mess.

He would have drugged her next, slipped her a couple of pills from the doctor. Haldol would ease her into a state of compliance. She could be easily managed after that.

From there it would only be a matter of getting her past me. He staged an extra-belligerent outburst in front of my children to intimidate me into submission. It had worked. For the sake of the kids, I was silent throughout the entire ordeal. I had let him take my mother away. His mission was accomplished.
 
But that would be the end of it. That would be the last time he exploited me. I was tired of being silent. I was tired of being pushed around by this evil little man. He had messed with me my entire life, and now he was messing with my children. This would be the last time.



The Voice



The worst way to fight hardness is with hardness.



The Crazy Woman



I wasn't allowed to visit Mother for over a year. William said it would be too upsetting to her. He was punishing me. We both knew it.

When I did finally visit her, I experienced the most heartbreaking version of my mother I had ever seen. She was basically incoherent, vacant like a zombie. He had her on Haldol, 20 milligrams a day. Haldol is what is used for acute situations, such as violent psychotic breaks or LSD flashbacks. I asked him why he had her on such an aggressive drug. He said her doctor insisted on it.

She didn't do well on Haldol. There were no more good spells. There was just the trance state, which he controlled. He got her out of bed each morning and dressed her. He sat her in front of the television in the recliner next to his. He brought her meals on a tray. He led her to the bathroom. He occasionally took her for a walk.

Sometimes he would hire a caretaker to sit with Mother while he was out playing pool, but no one ever lasted long. No one could take working for him.

As years passed, Mother began to develop obvious side effects from the Haldol. Adding to her stupor-like condition were facial ticks, slurring of words, drooling, and trembling. Sometimes she sat for hours rubbing her hands together as if applying lotion.

I questioned William repeatedly about the use of Haldol. I had heard of newer medications - Risperidone or Clozapine, for example - that reported better results with fewer side effects. Each time he was adamant that the doctor insisted she take Haldol. I couldn't stand seeing my mother like that, so I decided to talk to her doctor myself. I thought I could persuade him to try something different.

I shouldn't have been surprised at what Mother's psychiatrist told me. He said he had suggested alternatives several times, but William insisted she was doing great on the Haldol. The doctor trusted William's observations. If William was happy with Haldol, then he was happy with Haldol.

William was livid when he found out I had interfered. Cornered in his lie, he was now compelled to put on a show by agreeing to change her medication. It lasted only two weeks, then he put her back on Haldol. He said the other medication didn't work. He said Mother would sit in her chair and glare at him. It made him uncomfortable. Clearly he preferred her in the Haldol stupor.

My challenge to his authority shook him up. Not long after that, he started telling people Mother had Alzheimer's disease. I immediately asked who had diagnosed her with Alzheimer's, knowing full well it didn't come from her psychiatrist. He said their family doctor did. I asked what test had been used to determine it. He said the doctor - the same one who set my broken arm more than two decades before - had asked Mother to name six vegetables. She could name only four. He then asked her to name six towns within the county. She could only remember three. That's how he determined she had Alzheimer's.

It was one of the most ludicrous things I had ever heard. I didn't believe a word of it. Few people did. William eventually gave up the story.

The longer Mother's stupor lasted, the more determined William became in covering up the real reason for it. He could have taken her off the drug at any time and given her back her life. But he knew she would leave him again. He wanted her there with him in that run-down mobile home, even if it meant drugging her into obedience.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "Is there any way at all I can win this battle with William?"

Yes, you can win gradually, here a little and there a little. However, you must be willing to exchange weapons of darkness for weapons of light.

"What are weapons of darkness and weapons of light?"

Weapons of darkness are centered in negative emotions and generate ever-greater hardness in you. Dark weapons destroy your life energy and distort your vision of who you really are. Weapons of darkness include anger, hostility, impatience, greed, and vengeance.

Weapons of light create life in you and bring you to an ever-greater awareness of who you really are. They are centered in the full-blown glory of your creative emotional structure. They include peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, comfort, rest, and gentle sensitivity. They are infinitely more powerful than weapons of darkness.

Remember always, the greatest battle of life is fought out within the silent chambers of your own soul.



The Misogynist



The phone rang. It was William.

"Why, she's as ugly as a mud fence," he slurred.

He was drunk.

"Even I coulda found someone better looking than that," he went on. "I can't for the life of me see why the newspapers are making such a big deal out of her. John-John shoulda just kept lookin'."

William made me sick. Mother was lying barely conscious in a hospital bed, and all he could do was talk about John Kennedy, Jr.'s new bride. Not only was I struggling to see the relevance, but I also happened to disagree with the belligerent old man. I thought Carolyn Bessette was beautiful and smart. I was glad the world's most eligible bachelor had chosen a woman of such substance. Good for them, I remember thinking when I saw pictures of the two of them together, their faces so full of love.

But for now I had to forego defending this sweet couple. There were more urgent matters at hand. A week earlier, Mother had somehow taken a near-fatal dose of Haldol. William had driven her to the emergency room and dropped her off. He called Cathy and told her Mother had some sort of attack. He didn't give any details. He then asked Cathy if she would come to the hospital and take over for him because he said he "jes cain't handle any more right now."

While Cathy managed everything during Mother's hospital stay, William went on a drinking binge. He had only surfaced this night, a week later, because Mother had regained consciousness. He wanted to get her out of the hospital as soon as possible, before she was lucid enough to tell anyone how she really came to have comatose levels of Haldol in her system. Mr. Good Guy had convinced the hospital staff Mother had gotten up in the middle of the night and taken the pills without his knowing. That was a good story, except for one thing. Her medicine was in his room and there is no way she could have gotten to it without his knowing. He was still droning on the other end of the telephone: "It's just like that NASCAR race I watched on Sunday. I wanted to puke."

"What are you talking about now?" I groaned.

"When they went to start the race, the announcer said, ‘Gentlemen and Tammy Jo . . . start your engines!' I just thought damn! Now they've gone and ruined auto racing, too."

William was the world's biggest sexist. If a woman happened to be a NASCAR driver, the entire sport was tainted. He boasted of yelling to his television set, "Get outta that car and back into the kitchen where you belong, Tammy Jo!"

Oh brother, I thought. Can we just be through with this women-bashing for now?

No, there was more. From Tammy Jo, he went on to how wrong it was for a woman to become an astronaut and go into outer space. Then he launched into how women were ruining the sport of golf. Women should never be given a golf club. All they need is a spatula in one hand and a toilet scrubber in the other.

It was nauseating. I'd heard it all a million times. As he continued, my thoughts drifted back to Mother. Would she be in the hospital long enough for the drugs to clear so we could get a glimpse of our real mother? My sisters and I were hoping the doctors at the hospital would see she really didn't need to be on medication at all.

His voice began to sound sleepy. "I sure am lonely here, hun."

Ugh. There it was. The sappy-drunk "hun."

"I sure didn't like leaving your mother behind at that hospital," his voice raspy from chain smoking. "I'm bringing her home tomorrow."

What? Tomorrow? Nooooooo!

I forced myself to not panic. I tried not to sound anxious. I stammered, "Well, you know . . . if the doctors wanted to keep her for - for more observation, or whatever . . . you'd agree to that . . . wouldn't you?"

"There's no need to keep her there, hun." (Ugh.) "Her regular doctor will see her in the morning, and then she can come on home."

Her regular doctor? What did he know? He'd only seen Mother once. That was three months ago. And he had been snowed just like all the rest of them.

"OK . . . fine." I had to concede. I had to let it go. He was her legal guardian. The doctors listened to him. He could bend them however he wanted. The opportunity appeared to be lost.

William did take Mother home the next day. When I asked if he would be putting her back on Haldol, he sneered, "I'll do whatever I want with your mother."



Tim



It was a Christmas party in 1994 where I was introduced to Timothy Joseph Curtis. It was love at first sight for both of us. We eloped after our third date.

Tim was gorgeous, tall and dark with chiseled features. His eyes were cobalt blue and his smile broke like a ray of sun in the clear patch of a rainstorm. He was a commercial roofer by trade, so his skin was a bit leathery from decades of working in the sun. It could have been from the surfing, though. He practically grew up in the waves of Redondo, Hermosa, El Porto.

Tim had been a free spirit all his life. His mother had suffered the same type of mental illness as mine. Schizophrenia. She, too, was constantly in and out of mental institutions. She eventually died from an accidental drug overdose in a mental hospital when Tim was a teenager.

He never knew his father. The man ran off before his mother even had a chance to tell him she was pregnant. Being an unwed mother was strictly taboo back then, so Tim's mother paid a family friend to marry her so her child would have a last name. The marriage was promptly annulled after Tim was born.

The postwar 40's and 50's were busy times in Redondo Beach where Tim was raised mostly by his grandmother. They lived just off The Strand in a quaint Victorian-style home, complete with an immaculate parlor and a copy of "The Blue Boy" hanging on the wall. Grandma Campeau owned a specialty bookstore that drew people from far and wide. The shelves were lined with such rarities as first edition Mark Twain, Zane Grey, and Leslie's Illustrated History of the Civil War.

Tim remembered his grandmother as being "a rocker and a roller." She would sit in her worn sidearm rocking chair and tear a brown paper bag into strips about an inch wide and a foot long. Taking a lock of her long dark hair, she would then wrap a strip once or twice around the hair, keeping it flat and smooth, then slowly draw the paper down the strand until the hair ends were neatly enclosed in the paper. Rolling the flattened strand around her fingers, two quick twists at the end and the curl was then firmly set against her head. All through this process she would be singing old vaudeville tunes at the top of her lungs.

"In the shade of the old apple tree,

Where the love in your eyes I could see,

When the voice that I heard, like the song of the bird,

Seemed to whisper sweet music to me."

Grandma Campeau passed away when Tim was only fourteen. After that, he was on his own for the most part. He soon learned the art of hitchhiking and logged over 100,000 miles on his thumb before he got his first car. Mostly, his thumbing took him to other surfing hot spots to the north or south of Redondo. He paid so little attention to high school that it took being sent inland to live with an aunt and uncle - away from his beloved ocean - to finally complete the twelfth grade. He didn't attend the graduation ceremony. He was already thumbing his way back to the beach.

Tim lived on the streets and filed pennies down to the size of dimes so he could filch food from vending machines. He had a nickname on the beaches where he spent most of each day watching the water, watching for his waves. They called him "Corbina" after the fish he would catch in the surf line each morning using nothing more than a garden prong on the end of a broomstick. The corbina would become his breakfast, and sometimes his only meal.

When Tim was nineteen, he went on a two-year mission for the Mormon Church in Texas. After the mission, he returned to the Hermosa Beach area where he eventually got married, and became a roofer, and had six children. His first marriage had ended after nineteen years. He had been single for four years when I met him that night at the Christmas party. The night he swept me off my feet.

Our first few months together were magical. He had a spiritual depth that mesmerized me. Tim could blend religion and philosophy and life experiences in such a way that I was caught up into seventh heaven.

But soon the reality of our folly in rushing into marriage while barely knowing each other became apparent. Combining our families was a challenge between nine kids with varying personalities. Our finances turned upside down when a drought hit and Tim's roofing jobs dried up. I got involved in a messy business lawsuit with a former partner. Angry that Tim had remarried without her knowledge, his ex-wife continually caused problems between us.

My lifetime experience of dysfunction and mixed signals had not prepared me for a situation like that. I had no idea how to handle being married to such a free-spirited person, let alone manage so many unaccustomed difficulties. We did the best we could, but by the end of our second year together we were both looking for a way out.



The Voice



When persons are overcome with hardness, they often blame others for the things they do to themselves.



Three Sisters



For a while there, all three of us were having a rough time. As I was going through my second divorce, tragedy struck Danni's family when her husband, Rod, died after undergoing a liver transplant.

Rod had long battled a rare disease known as Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, which causes the bile ducts to become narrowed due to inflammation and scarring. It is the same disease that Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears succumbed to in 1999 when he didn't make it to the top of the donor list in time. Rod had been on the list for seven years before finally making it into surgery. The operation seemed to go well but it soon became apparent the liver wasn't working. He died seven days later.

His death was an awful blow to the family. A widow at thirty-nine, Danni faced the ominous responsibility of raising four young sons entirely on her own. Cathy and I tried to be supportive, but Cathy was going through a divorce as well. Her husband blamed her emotional baggage for turning their marriage into a roller coaster ride. In fact, he said many of the same things to Cathy that Tim had said to me before he finally gave up on our marriage.

The truth is, the three of us weren't just having a rough year. We were having a rough life. We were all three emotional roller coasters. How could we not be? We weren't raised up. We were jerked up. We had learned to be tough. Too tough. And hard. Way too hard. Mother's sickness alone had been enough to ruin us, yet it was William's alcoholism and his steady dose of mindless cruelty that had callused us beyond the point of ever reaching real intimacy with another person. We had trouble knowing how to get along with people. We could barely get along with ourselves.



The Voice



No matter how wrong the other person may be, your hardness is the roadblock to your joy.



The Misogynist



Less than a year after the overdose, Mother was back in the emergency room again. This time her coma was brought on by a toxic combination of Haldol and alcohol. This time William insisted she had gotten into a bottle of wine without his knowing.

That sounded fishy to me. My mother didn't drink alcohol. She was adamantly opposed to drinking. I called him one night and quizzed him about the wine story.

"Why would Mother get into your wine?" I asked. "She hates the taste of alcohol."

"That's not true. Your mother loves wine. She asks me for a glass or two every night at dinner."

I didn't believe him. Mother wasn't lucid enough to specifically ask for anything. If she was drinking wine, it was because he was pushing it on her.

"You give her alcohol on top of the Haldol?" I asked, horrified. I was certain there was a drug warning about combining alcohol with such a powerful anti-psychotic.

"Yep. It calms her down," he said.

It calms her down? Why on earth would he need to calm down a person who existed in the chronic state of a zombie?

"It calms her down from what?" I asked.

"I dunno. She just gets agitated sometimes."

"Like, how agitated? What does she do?"

"I don't know! She just gets agitated!"

William was becoming belligerent. He didn't like being questioned. His next chilling confession was made for the sole purpose of flaunting his power over her.

"Sometimes I give her one of my Xanax pills, but the wine works a lot better."

"Xanax? Did the doctor say you could do that?" My heart was starting to pound. I didn't know a lot about mixing medications, but considering how sedated Mother already was under the Haldol, I couldn't imagine that adding Xanax could be a good thing.

"Like I told you before, the doctor said I could do whatever I want with her medication."

I hung up the phone and immediately called my sisters. Something had to be done. Together we agreed to tell the medical staff at the hospital what William had just disclosed to me. We thought we had finally caught him at something he could not get away with. We hoped this information would finally get someone's attention.

But that was not to be. William had so thoroughly Mr. Good Guy'd mother's doctor that he only eyed Danni and Cathy with suspicion when they approached him at the hospital. William had convinced him his daughters were liars. The doctor did nothing with the information we provided him.

But then William made a mistake. He disappeared on another drinking binge. This time he stayed drunk for three weeks, refusing to answer his telephone. Cathy was again left in charge of Mother's care. This time it was the nurses who finally realized what was going on. The nurses - not the doctors - listened to Cathy and saw the real problem. William was finally busted.

When Mother left the hospital this time, she had a caseworker from Social Services assigned to her. The caseworker was to check on Mother every few weeks from that point on. William was furious with the social worker for intruding into his personal business and he was furious over our betrayal. But we didn't care. This was a major win for us. Now William would have to behave. Now someone would be watching him. Someone would be looking out for our mother.



The Voice



The notion that anger is power is an illusion. Anger arises out of weakness. When persons feel threatened by a loss of control, they often resort to anger as a display of power to themselves and others. In reality, their anger is an indication of inadequacy and helplessness.



The Crazy Woman



Our victory was short-lived.

It was during one of the caseworker's routine visits when Mother was found in a yet another coma. This time she was catatonic, her body so rigidly formed to the recliner that paramedics couldn't strap her to the gurney.

I asked William what happened and he told me.

A week earlier, they had been walking down an aisle at the grocery store when Mother suddenly collapsed. The store manager wanted to call an ambulance but William convinced him to help carry her to his car instead. William took Mother home. He placed her in the recliner next to his. Over the next few days he watched her slip in and out of consciousness, continuing to give her Haldol. This was the condition the caseworker found her in.

A CAT scan showed Mother had suffered an ischemic stroke. This type of stroke occurs when an artery to the brain becomes blocked. The brain depends on its arteries to bring fresh blood from the heart and lungs. The blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and takes away carbon dioxide and cellular waste. If an artery is blocked, the brain cells cannot produce enough energy to continue working. If the artery remains blocked for more than a few minutes, the brain cells start to die. Immediate medical treatment is crucial. William denied Mother that opportunity. He consciously, purposefully prevented Mother from receiving key medical attention.

I told the caseworker what William had said. Naturally, he had given her a different story. I asked if anything would be done about that. She said no. His version of the story had gone into the official records first. Now it would be his word against mine. He was there, and I wasn't. They had no other choice than to believe him over me.



The Crazy Woman



On a foggy October morning in 2001, Danni called to let me know our Mother had passed away. The three of us had only recently visited her in the full-care facility. Her eyes were open, but it was clear she wasn't in there. There was no one inside that oddly twisted frame, frozen in a catatonic grip, fingers and toes splayed as if shot with electricity.

Together, we had asked her to let go that day. We prayed that God would take her, that she could end the pitiful existence she had been reduced to. There would be no recovering from this depth of ruin.

Perhaps she heard us praying. Two days later, she slipped quietly away, alone, only hours after a visit from Cathy. The hospital called William to inform him of his wife's passing, but he wasn't home. He was out playing pool. They called Danni next and asked her to relay the message to him. When she was finally able to talk to him, he responded coldly, "Well, you knew it was going to happen." The message in his tone of voice was, Spare me the emotion because I don't really care how you feel.

William did not go to the hospital. He simply instructed the staff to bag her body and deliver it to the funeral home where she would be cremated immediately. He told them to not let his daughters interfere with the plans. He said we were gold diggers and he didn't want us anywhere near her body.

He forewarned the funeral home as well. When we went to make arrangements to pick up Mother's ashes, we were told we couldn't have them. William's instructions were to have her ashes mailed away that very day. We asked where they were sending them. They refused to tell us.

Cathy braved a direct conversation with William, pleading for Mother's ashes, if only for the funeral. "There isn't going to be a funeral," he said. "Your mother didn't want one. Besides, you don't deserve her ashes. You don't deserve anything that belonged to your mother."

I made the next attempt to reason with him, driving out to the mobile home park to talk to him in person. Slouched in his recliner watching television, he barely looked up when I came in. I noticed the door to Mother's bedroom was open. The room was empty except for a bare bed against one wall

Stunned, I asked, "Where are all of Mother's things?"

"I boxed everything up this morning and took it to the post office," he grunted.

"Everything?"

"Everything!"

"Well...wh...where did you send everything?"

"To Gloria," he snapped. Gloria was Mother's first daughter given up for adoption when Mother married William. "Gloria deserves to have her mother's things. You don't."

I stared at him while I trying to regain my composure. I realized then it would be pointless to ask for Mother's ashes. He would enjoy baiting me along, then burying a dagger of spitefulness deep in my chest. I'd make a little smalltalk then get the heck out of there.

"How are you doing here alone?" I asked, feigning interest. "Are you okay?"

"I'm more than okay," he sniffed. Without further prompting, he went on to tell me he had quit smoking and drinking the day Mother died. I asked why he had chosen that day to stop. He said he had no reason to do those things any longer. I thought of my mother begging him to quit drinking, and his constant refusals.

I noticed a vase of white roses sitting on his coffee table. I asked if they were for Mother. White roses had been her favorite.

"Nope. Those are for Doris."

"Doris? Why her?"

Doris was William's long-term girlfriend. It was Doris who William had been sneaking out to see the night Danni caught him thirty years before. William said Doris had lent him her pickup truck to use for hauling the boxes of Mother's things to the post office, so the flowers were his way of saying thank you.
 
I was dumbfounded. 
 
A dozen white roses to thank Doris for lending you her truck so you could take all my mother's things to the post office?

Standing motionless in his stale-smelling mobile home, my mind reached to comprehend this bizarre situation.

My father was sending all of my mother's things to a daughter she hardly knew because she deserved to have them and I didn't.

My father was giving another woman a dozen white roses - my mother's favorite - because she had let him borrow her truck.

My father waited until the day my mother died to stop drinking because he no longer had a good reason to drink.

My father wasn't just refusing to give us our mother's ashes; he was also intent on preventing us from honoring her with a memorial service.

My father.

What a joke.

He had denied us our mother our entire lives and even in her death he wasn't through denying us.
 
Well, my sisters and I went on to hold a memorial service for our mother, despite William's best efforts to thwart it. We held it at the Mormon Church that Mother had loved so well. There was music and flowers and poetry, beautiful things that she had always enjoyed.

Most of our extended family did not attend the service because William convinced them that his gold-digging daughters were up to no good. "They're going against her last wishes," he claimed.

After the service, we contemplated a fitting way to honor Mother since there would be no tombstone or vault. The local cemetery had a garden where people could plant rose bushes to memorialize their loved ones. We decided that would be a perfect way to honor our mother - with a rose bush.

A white rose bush.



The Misogynist



The day I visited William in his mobile home was the last time I ever spoke to him, although I saw him a few times after that. When my cousin was killed in a motorcycle accident, hundreds of people gathered at his funeral to honor him. I saw William there and wanted to tell him, "This is the way it's supposed to be. This is what people do when they lose loved ones."

I later learned that William mailed Mother's ashes to her brother Sonny. The ashes were buried in her mother Sybil's grave and a small brass plaque was added to Sybil's tombstone.

Mother would have liked that.



 
PART II

The Softening

 
Me



For a while after our divorce, Tim and I tried to remain friends. But it wasn't long before my hardened ways created more anxiety than he could stand. My final communication from him came in the form of an email. These were his parting words:

"I'm not interested in continuing the kind of relationship we had (or didn't have) before. It was nerve-wracking. I do not see any value in attempting to make it anything that did not come natural before. Our relationship was neither comfortable, nor healing, nor fulfilling. ‘We' did not exist."

That stung and I felt terrible about it. I tried to call him, to visit him, even to email him back, but he would not respond.

Six months later I was talking on the phone with a mutual friend, Kristine, and Tim's name came up. Kristine was in regular contact with him so I prodded her for news. I wanted to know if he had softened toward me yet. I was hoping for another chance at being friends.

Kristine hedged around my questions but I kept pressuring her. Finally she gave in, and I learned exactly how Tim felt about me.

Tim said that being married to me had left him dead inside. He said I sucked the life out of him. Not only did he never want to speak to me again, he didn't even want to hear my name.

I was devastated. I had been pining away for him, thinking he would come around. Now I knew that would never happen. The damage had been done and it appeared to be permanent. I thanked Kristine for her honesty and hung up the telephone. Tears began to roll down my face as panic and despair set in.

I was disgusted with myself. I knew what it was like to have the life sucked out of me by someone who should have been more careful with my feelings. How could I have done that awful thing to Tim? How could I have driven away the one man who had once genuinely loved me?

Sitting on the edge of my bed, a massive wave of grief came over me. It became overwhelming. I needed to make it stop. I needed to force myself to go numb inside or else crumble into self-annihilation. Instinctively, I shifted into the self-preservation mode of my youth, the place where feelings terminated and survival began. Up came the wall of blessed numbness. Numb was how I had gotten through those bad times. Numb had protected me from the pain.

With a deep breath, numb began to take over. This is no big deal, I thought. I'll get through this like I get through everything. I'll just pretend Tim never existed. None of this existed. None of this is real. Soon, I will forget all about Tim in the same way he has forgotten all about me.

Another deep breath eased me completely into an emotional void. Numb cast the panic and despair far from my mind. Almost robotically I got up from the bed and moved over to my desk. I scribbled a "to do" list of chores that needed to be done around the apartment. Then, starting at the top of the list, I methodically went about completing each task while the stereo blasted a Kid Rock CD. All thoughts of Tim were effectively displaced.

So effective was my numbing process that several hours passed before I experienced even a hint of an emotion. I was sitting at my computer typing an email when I felt a little nudge. I hadn't felt that nudge for a very long time. Between my eroding marriage and Mother's death, along with all the facets of working and being a mom, I had been too distracted to notice the nudge, to hear the voice speaking into me. I really wasn't in a mood to deal with it now, so I did my best to ignore it. I continued to type and redoubled my effort to maintain my wall of numb.

Then I heard the Voice. It spoke into me as clearly as the day Cathy had turned Danni into a feather, so clear I turned my head to see if someone was standing near me.



The Voice



What caused you to shut down?



Me



I typed the question into the computer and watched the words form on the screen. I stared at them for a long moment, trying to think.

Then another question slipped into my thoughts.



The Voice



What brought about such hardness in you?



Me



I typed that question too. The words began to tumble about in my head. Dusting up old memories that moistened my eyes, I fought to keep the words from coming together into a legible answer. I didn't want to think about those things. I didn't want memories or tears or reminders of what I had done to Tim. All I wanted was to crouch safely behind my wall of numbness until the turmoil passed. But the words would not stop echoing through the chambers of my mind. My wall of numb was cracking and a messy blur of emotion threatened to flood out.

I don't recall moving away from the computer. I don't recall drawing bath water or taking off my clothes or sitting down in the tub. I only remember sobbing. I remember hunching forward and burying my face in my knees and crying so hard I started to dry heave.

Why had I shut down? What was the cause of my hardness? The answers broke loose from their bands and paraded across my mind.

It was from living an inconceivable childhood and having no one there to shield me from the tyranny of my father or from the constant abandonment of my mother.

It was from having my self-confidence so beaten down, I was a wallflower in school and a misfit in church.

It was from a failed marriage with Kent and the utter humiliation of him branding me as the unfaithful one, disowning our son and leaving me to deal with the financial devastation of bankruptcy.

It was from worrying myself sick raising three children, scared to death I was screwing them up too because I had no concept of what it meant to be a good parent.

It was from the loss of my mother and from a million arguments with my sisters and from trying to create peace in a family constantly fractured by William's spiteful interference.

It was from feeling like a "nothing" every single day of my life.

It was from being overwhelmed by everyone else's will and feeling like their wants and needs were my number one priority.

It was from straying so far away from myself that I could sit at my computer and calmly type an email just hours after learning the most important man in my life wanted nothing to do with me, ever.

Why did I shut down?

I shut down to protect myself.

What was the cause of my hardness?

My hardness was my own decision to anesthetize myself from any further heartache.

It was just as the voice had once predicted. I had allowed darkness to fog my head and harden my heart, and now I was walking around dead and didn't even know it.

I realized Tim was right. Our relationship had never been comfortable or healing or fulfilling. Tim had been married to a robot. "We" never existed because "I" never fully engaged with him emotionally. After a lifetime of hardening my heart and shutting down my emotions and racing off to numb, I was just the empty shell of a person who never quite emerged.

I wondered if it was too late for me. Was I too far gone to be saved, too broken to be fixed? Was there any hope for a desperate soul like me?

I sat in the bathtub until the water turned completely frigid. I wanted to feel the cold seeping into my bones. I wanted to feel something.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "What is sin?"

Sin is damaging yourself and/or another person.

"What is the worst of all my sins?"

The most damaging of all your sins is not hearing my voice.

When hearing breaks down, all other systems of a person's life break down also.



Me



Losing Tim became the biggest impetus for change in my life.

I couldn't bear that I had become the kind of person who could suck the life out of another. I had become the awful memory of a man I swore to never be like. Without even realizing it, I had taken on aspects of his persona and was now striking back at those closest to me with the very weapons he had used to suck the life out of me. I was being controlled by the dark baggage of my youth. Now the victim had become the perpetrator. I had not been deliberately unnatural or unfulfilling in my relationship with Tim. I just didn't know any better. In so many ways, I had become the product of my conditioning.

The damage had taken control of my mind and now it was ruining my life.

The conditioning had left me fearful of men. I cringed at their touch, convinced their only interest was to somehow exploit of me. I went into battle mode whenever a man so much as offered me help, afraid he was secretly out to control me. Men were not protectors. They were predators.

But then I met Tim and something deep within me was awakened, a love like I had never felt before. And Tim loved me. There was no secret plan to take advantage of me or exercise power over me. Tim was simply a wonderful man offering me genuine love and compassion - yet I could not see him through my damage-hardened eyes or hear him through my damage-hardened ears. I saw him only through the William filter. I could not trust him. I treated him with the same fear and trepidation I felt for my father, and in the end I left him feeling as dead inside as I was.

Losing Tim awakened me to a dramatic realization. I did not want to live out my life as the damaged product of a dysfunctional childhood. It was time to make a change. I had spent forty-five years hauling around th dark baggage of my youth, and I was ready to set it down.

In my heart, I knew I was not really the kind of person who would suck the life out of Tim. Not on purpose, anyway. There was more to me than that. Even though I had become hardened by distrust and anger and resentment, there was still a stir of life deep within me. I felt it as clearly as I felt the voice. Somehow, there had to be a way past the negative conditioning I had endured, back to my tender inner core.

But how? I wondered. How does a person change?

I didn't know where to begin. Formal counseling was out of the question. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of discussing my childhood with a therapist, either because of William's pistol-waving methods of insuring my silence, or from watching psychiatry continually fail my mother. Besides, I couldn't afford it. Perhaps there was a book I could read instead, or a class I could attend? I knew I needed help, but I wasn't sure where to find it.

Then I remembered Ches.



The White-Haired Old Man



Ches had been Tim's closest friend and lifelong mentor, a philosophy professor who had befriended him during his vagabond days of surfing and beachcombing. I had only known Ches a short time before he passed away in 1998. But it was long enough to know that Ches had important keys. He had wisdom. Ches knew strange and wonderful things about patience and love and happiness.

I loved visiting Ches in his little wooden house on Douglas Street in Salt Lake City. He appeared the typical genius professor, with long white hair, ruddy cheeks and a round belly. His beard was mostly white too, though fading remnants of red gave hint to its once brilliant color. His usual garb was a brown button-up jumpsuit to which he would add a worn tweed sports coat for church on Sundays. He could quote verbatim all of the great philosophers dating back to Socrates, yet he rarely remembered to change out of his slippers before leaving the house.

Ches was extremely well educated. He had two Ph.D's in history and philosophy, two master's degrees, and four bachelor's degrees. He was fluent in Latin, Spanish, Greek, German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. During his career, he taught at several major universities and wrote five volumes of his own philosophical discoveries. Ches was easily the most intelligent person I had ever met, and without doubt the most eccentric.

He prided himself on being thrifty, often referring to himself as "frugal, bordering on cheap." He wasted nothing. I once saw him fish a slightly used shower curtain from a trash can, cut it to size, and then mount it on an art frame. He painted an amazing landscape on this odd canvas, one of my favorites of all his works.

He was funny when it came to food, too. Ches wasn't particular about presentation - he ate many of his meals straight from the can. But food was a luxury to him, a pleasure, so he ate very slowly and savored every bite. It could take him an entire day to eat a toasted cheese sandwich. A can of soda could last a week.

The basement of Ches' little house fascinated me most, and I could scarcely resist poking around down there during our visits. Inching my way down the rickety staircase, I paused on the third step to pull a rusty chain that lit a bare light bulb hanging from a cord. Darkness withdrew revealing a wild array of stuff piled high on a dirt floor.

There rested stacks of leather-bound books and boxes that bulged with black and white photos and faded old letters. Rough-hewn shelves sagged under the weight of dusty jars full of unrecognizable food pickled decades ago. In one corner, a pile of ancient garden tools had rusted and fused to form a bizarre sculpture that cast a ghostly shadow. Broken filing cabinets, slatted-out wooden barrels, and skeletons of furniture budged little for the narrow path that wound through it all. And square in the center of clutter was the most peculiar object of all: a wildly unkept bed where Ches would sometimes sleep at night. He liked the solitude down there, he said. Some of his best ideas were formed in the cool earthy womb of that old house.

I thought back on some of the ideas Ches had shared with me during our brief friendship. His advice was always profound. I'd talk to him about Tim and the problems brewing between us. Ches had a way of turning the conversation around so we would end up talking only about me and what I personally could do to feel better about myself.

Whenever Ches and I talked, he encouraged me to get a pen and paper and keep notes of our conversations. Perhaps it was a holdover from his days in front of a classroom. Years later I was glad I had done as he asked. Several notebooks filled with his words were tucked in my bookcase alongside my autographed copies of his published books. In the days following my bathtub realization, I turned to those notebooks to refresh my memory. In particular, I studied one page where Ches had taught me, "A person cannot do for anyone else what they cannot do for themselves."

I remember that conversation with Ches well. We had been sitting on his front porch in some white wicker furniture watching his eight-year-old grandson "dig for gold" a few feet away. "So, you're saying I can't get along with Tim until I can get along with myself first?" I asked.

"Precisely," he nodded.

"Well, what makes you think I don't already get along with myself?"

"That's simple. Do you like yourself?"

I was tempted to say yes just to be ornery but the truth was no, I didn't like myself. "You're not supposed to like yourself, are you? I mean, isn't that a sign of vanity?"

Ches' next statement caught me off-guard. I didn't quite understand what he was trying to say.

"The secret to the creation of life is to feel good about yourself...to get back to your own glory."

"How...wait...how do I start feeling good about myself?" I asked.

"By discovering who you are," he replied plainly.

"How do I discover who I am?"

"By getting along with yourself!" he answered gently.

I was growing impatient with this philosophical merry-go-round. "Ches! You're going around in circles with this. Just tell me how to do it."

Chuckling, he answered calmly, "It's not so much what you do, it's who you are that matters most."

"Well, who am I?" I asked.

"That's my question to you. Who are you...really?"

"I-don't-know-Ches! Just tell me who YOU think I am!"

"I can't do that for you, Patricia. The answer to that question is within you."

Now, staring down at my notebook, I still didn't comprehend what Ches was trying to tell me with his circular statements and his final question. But in my heart it sounded right. It felt good. I wanted to feel good about myself. I wanted to feel good, period. I would take Ches' challenge to figure out who I really was, and someday...well, I hoped that someday I would feel good about myself, and I would be happy, and I would enjoy solid relationships, and feel more confident as a parent, and maybe even make friends with Tim again.

I couldn't worry about Tim for now, though. I needed to focus on myself. Ches said a person cannot do for anyone else what they cannot do for themselves. My first priority was to make friends with myself.



The Voice



You must penetrate your personal veils of darkness before you can penetrate the veils of light.



Me



Although life's circumstances had driven me to behave like an introvert, by nature, I am an extrovert.

I've never had a problem making friends, although it usually takes a little time to overcome my life-imposed inhibitions before I can feel comfortable interacting with other people. Yet once the ice is broken, it becomes very easy for me to focus on the other person and learn about them. Most people love to talk about themselves and enjoy when someone expresses interest in them. I've found this is the best way to initiate a friendship.

And so it was that I turned my friend-making skills on myself. I used the same question-and-answer approach to befriend myself. I focused on myself. I paid attention to my thoughts and feelings. I had "conversations" with myself about things that interested me and looked for things I liked about myself.

It felt awkward at first so I kept it simple. I started with a list of observations in my notebook. For example, I liked that my teeth were straight and that I still had a lot of energy. I liked my freckles, though fading with age, and the shape of my mouth when I smiled. I liked that I could drive a four-speed car and that I could eat spicy food. Once I got the hang of it, I wrote about some of the deeper aspects of myself, such as my sense of humor and my enthusiasm for learning new things.

It wasn't long before I recognized how Ches' circular-sounding advice really did work. The more I noticed about myself and wrote down, the more I liked about myself. The more I liked about myself, the better I felt about myself. The better I felt about myself, the easier it became to recognize more good things about myself. The more I recognized about myself, the closer I came to answering Ches' question of who are you...really?

For several months I was on a roll of self-discovery!

Then came a day when my progress ground to a halt. It was my forty-sixth birthday, a Tuesday in the summer of 2001. The day had started well when I bounced out of bed in a terrific mood, always pleased to celebrate my personal holiday. But by the end of that day, I would be sliding into a pit of darkness I could not comprehend, and I would not see the light again for more than three months.

I fell into depression.

It was my first birthday without Tim and even though the kids were there, I felt alone. When the mailbox yielded not a single birthday card from a friend, I was convinced they had all deserted me.

The next morning I woke up feeling even more unsettled. I started wondering about myself. What I had done to alienate everyone? Had I said something wrong? Did I make someone mad? Why was everyone avoiding me?

My thoughts continued to darken throughout the day. By that evening I had run through the entire list of people I knew - my children, friends, co-workers, neighbors, even casual acquaintances - and I couldn't come up with a single person who I thought cared about me. I began to dwell on the notion that nobody liked me. It was as if spending my birthday alone had opened a Pandora's Box of insecurities and I could not stop my tumble into bitter lonliness.

Then it got worse.

A week passed, with my self-loathing intensifying by the hour and the sadness as well. No matter that my friends had finally surfaced with cards and gifts and well wishes. Something inside me had been triggered. A dark switch had been flipped and I was freefalling into a pit of gloom like I had never experienced before.

By the end of the second week, I stopped wanting to get out of bed in the morning.

By the end of the third week, I stopped wanting to live.

It was the twenty-first day of my depression that I awoke to news that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. That day put me over the edge. I couldn't take it anymore. The depression had dropped to its lowest point and I couldn't think of a reason to continue living.

I decided to kill myself.

One of my friends - I'll call her Diane - had told me about her struggle with depression and had raved about Paxil, which her doctor had prescribed. It had banished her blues in only a matter of days, she said and suggested I give it a try. As a matter of fact, most of her prescription had gone unused, so why didn't I just take hers?

Perfect.
 
I quickly formed a plan. I would do myself in with an overdose of Diane's Paxil. It did not occur to me to take the pills as she had done and possibly recover from depression as quickly. No, I was on a mission of doom. I would wait for the weekend to do the deed, that way I wouldn't have to fool around with calling in sick at work. I hated calling in sick at work. I never thought they believed me. I placed the packets on my bathroom counter and started the countdown down to my demise.

(I have since learned that overdosing on Paxil is a terrible way to try to kill oneself. The amount I had would probably have damaged my kidneys but left me alive. Thankfully, my suicide was thwarted by a couple of events, saving me from the ugly effects of acute renal failure.)

Saturday morning my plans were spoiled when Jill, my old friend from Arizona, arrived in town unexpectedly. There was catching up to do, along with shopping and dinner at her favorite restaurant. I put the pills away during her visit and reset my mental counter forward another seven days.

But the next weekend was yet another miss. My son Ryan was preparing for a Halloween party and needed help putting a costume together. We had a great time shopping and experimenting with ghoulish make-up. For a while, his contagious excitement made me forget about the pills tucked away in my medicine cabinet at home.

Another week passed and Saturday arrived with nothing in the way of my plans. There were no visitors expected and no family obligations, nothing to prevent me from swallowing a handful of pills and ending my pitiful existence. I crawled out of bed and went into the bathroom. I opened the cabinet door.

I wonder if I should clean my oven before I die, I thought, staring at the packets of Paxil. I wouldn't want the landlord to know how filthy it was. I had cooked a lot of meals in that stove.

Yeah...I better wait, I thought, closing the cabinet door. Seeing the sprinkling of fading freckles swing into view made one corner of my mouth curve upward. I like the way my mouth looks when I smile, I thought, and I really like those freckles.

Studying my reflection in the mirror, those freckles reminded me of something. My list of things I had been writing about myself back when I was trying to become my own friend. That seemed like a lifetime ago now. A lot had changed in the world since then. The country had received a crippling blow that brought its people to a time of crisis.

Yet in the settling dust of that awful day, the people of this country had picked themselves up. They had dusted themselves off, thrown back their shoulders, and shown their determination. That day had proven the indomitable spirit of mankind, the innate will to overcome. Looking now at myself in the mirror, I wondered how I could have forgotten that. How had I forgotten about my own indomitable spirit?

The depression made me forget. And now it had run full course, and I could see the powerful grip depression once had on me. It made me think things and believe things that simply weren't true. I had been ambushed by the depression. I fell into it without even realizing what was happening to me.

From that day on, Ches' words became evermore meaningful to me than ever. The secret to the creation of life is to feel good about yourself. I never wanted to forget that again. My journey into depression had proven one thing: the secret to the destruction of life is to feel bad about yourself.



The Misogynist



In the somber mood after September 11th, Danni took pity on William and invited him to her home for Thanksgiving dinner. She ended up regretting her generosity.

William was grandly full of himself upon arrival that day. It was the mood of self-importance he typically donned with the family, checking his Mr. Good Guy routine at the door. He had big news for everyone, and he shared it with the braggadocio of a frat boy on spring break.

Things were going well with his new girlfriend, he announced.

William bragged about taking her on a drive to the river, giving details of their first kiss. He boasted of sending her roses. When he started to brag about his newfound state of sexual arousal, Danni ordered him to stop. He wasn't just saying this to Danni, but also to her young four sons!

Danni was mortified, yet she was determined to make Thanksgiving a nice occasion for her family. Cathy and her daughter Amanda were there, too. When William showed signs of being angry at Danni for having censured him she offered him an olive branch and placed him at the head of her dinner table.

But William wasn't ready to behave. He was mad that he wasn't allowed to say whatever he wanted. He changed his tactics a bit and leveled a new attack against her.

The gravy was too salty, he whined.

The turkey was too dry.

The dressing didn't taste right.

And where were the candied yams?

Cathy tried to silence him after each round, but he pressed on. Intent on spoiling Danni's day, he even tried to recruit the kids into his crusade. William wanted revenge and nothing was going to stop him.

Nothing except for Cathy, that is. Watching Danni wither under his relentless criticism, Cathy turned to the old man and ordered, "You're being a horse's ass, now stop!"



Me



Providing for myself in Southern California took every penny I earned. So when I was offered the chance to make a thousand dollars more a year at a different company, I jumped on it.

My new job was a good fit since it was in the auto industry. This company manufactured custom wheels, and some of their clients were old customers from the days when Kent and I had an auto parts business.

I thought my working there was a good fit for them, too. The owners were a young married couple in business for themselves, much like Kent and I had been so many years before; he a good-looking workaholic, and she, pregnant with their third child. I could relate to what they were going through. My first three weeks settling into the job were pleasant and productive.

But something wasn't right. One morning the young couple called me into their office. The man, uneasy and hesitant, informed me I was fired. When I asked for an explanation, he looked nervously at his wife and said there really wasn't one. I was being terminated for no reason, and there would be no severance pay.

The wife glared at me as I emptied my desk. I told her she was putting me in a very difficult position. I hadn't worked long enough to qualify for unemployment, and it would take weeks to find another job. With no savings to fall back on, I now had no money to live on. She did not respond to my plea as I carried my belongings to my car. For some reason, she just wanted me out of there.

I started job searching immediately, but it was obvious I wouldn't be able to make the next month's rent, even if I maxed out my credit cards. With no other choice, I gave my landlord a 30-day notice and sold off my last few items of value - my dining room furniture and my Movado watch. I rented a small storage unit to hold the last of my belongings and moved in with my dear friend, Carrie, who offered her home until I could afford another place. The kids moved in with their father.

I ended up staying with Carrie for four months, during which time I did a lot of personal reflecting. Glimpsing myself at forty-seven years old now, homeless and with little to my name, I was surprised I wasn't more upset. Actually, I wasn't even a little upset. I was rather enjoying the freedom of not owning a lot of stuff.

That was a big revelation.

There had been times in my life when I had more money than I could spend. I had driven a Mercedes and skied at Vail and golfed the private clubs of Palm Springs. Now I had nothing, not even a home, and I felt surprisingly good about it.

Why wasn't I more worried? I wondered. What was this lack of anxiety?

With the answers that came to me I added a full page to the list of things I liked about myself, vividly describing the feeling of contentment. I had learned I didn't need "stuff" to be happy. That was big.

Since I hadn't landed a job out in the workforce yet, I dusted off an old talent to try to earn some cash. I started to write again.

Using the Internet to locate clients, I offered my technical writing skills, writing everything from policy manuals to website content to annual shareholder reports. Soon my newspaper experience and college degree in communications paid off, and I was able to rent my own place, a little apartment with a narrow garage and a patch of dirt in the backyard. I set up my computer on a small wooden desk in the dining room from which I churned out writing assignments.

I had no furniture to start off with so Carrie gave me a bed and a television. Another friend, Beth, contributed a sofa and a lamp. My daughter, Dawn, chipped in with bar stools, and Cathy provided wall decorations and a throw rug.

I was set for a real bohemian lifestyle and that's exactly how I lived for the next three years. I ate what I wanted, slept when I wanted, puttered in my yard, cooked, golfed, traveled, listened to music, studied philosophy, wrote and danced and spent time with my family. Everyday was an adventure in discovering my newfound personal freedom.

Being fired from that job had given me the opportunity to look inward and recognize two amazing things about myself. First, I was a writer. And best of all, I was a free-spirited bohemian.



Me



Over time, my "Things I Like About Myself" list became a lengthy piece of writing. I would read it from start to finish whenever I felt the blues coming on and it would cheer me instantly.

I continued to pursue the answer to Ches' question Who are you...really? throughout my bohemian years, carefully journaling my experiences. I didn't keep an elaborate journal; it was mainly a paragraph or two of my impressions whenever a thought-provoking situation arose. I enjoyed that kind of writing as opposed to the sterile technical writing my work required.

I also enjoyed reflecting back over my personal writings. I realized they had a powerful effect on me. At times, I could see "The Voice" subtly emerging, like an inner guidance system, through my words as I recorded various thoughts and feelings. Though often hastily written, my writings contained a rich source of inspired counsel from myself to myself.



The Voice



I asked the Voice, "Sometimes I can't tell if you are speaking to me or if it's just my own thoughts running through my mind. How do I know when it's really you?"

If you aren't immediately sure, don't give up. Whenever you have even the slightest inkling that something might be an inspired thought or feeling, take notice of it. Work with it. You may be tempted to think you made it up, but it could very well be me trying to get a word in edgewise with you. It would be wise to not throw these things out.

You will notice that your awareness of my presence in you has had very small beginnings. When I speak to you, my thoughts and feelings ‘overlay' your thoughts and feelings. The overlay is extremely subtle so you will need to pay close attention to those ways in which your thinking is enhanced. Watch for ways peace and comfort are added to your feelings.

At times you may experience an increased power of your mind. This increase may be recognized as added clarity of thought. You may notice your thoughts flowing with wisdom and spiritual awareness. You may also notice that you feel good, that you feel peaceful. You will perhaps feel a type of quiet assurance or gentle confidence.

As I speak within you, we are actually sharing ideas and feelings back and forth. We are thinking together. We are combining our wisdom and experience.

As you attune more and more into really listening and hearing, you will become evermore aware of the nature and of the ways in which I convey ideas, wisdom, and experience into you. Attuning leads to receiving. Receiving leads to recognition. Recognition leads to discerning. Discerning leads to realizing I am in you personally. You sense the overlay of my personal presence. In this way we are as one; I am in you and you are in me. We are a team.



Two White Plastic Chairs



Karlene and I first met at an office job many years ago. We disliked each other immensely. One day we nearly came to blows over a seven-cent discrepancy in her petty cash account. It was remarkable how easily we started off having the complete wrong impression of each other.

Karlene had been in accounts payable for over a year when I was hired as executive assistant to the company vice president of operations. Our respective bosses had offices directly across the corridor from each other. That meant Karlene and I were stuck facing each other all day long.

My immediate impression of Karlene was that she was rude, bordering on antisocial. Ten years my junior and in a completely different department than me, we had nothing in common. She clearly had a low opinion of me. Talking to her inevitably produced a cold shoulder or a sour dismissal. Sometimes both. I was positive she talked about me behind my back, enlisting the other women into her snot-nose clique.

From Karlene's perspective, I was bossy and controlling. I had waltzed in and taken over like God's gift to the typing pool. My mannerisms seemed condescending to her. I came off as a major threat in a business atmosphere where competition breeds distrust among women fighting to keep one foot on the corporate ladder.

One day, my boss sent me on an errand to purchase some computer supplies. That required me to first get money from Karlene, who was in charge of the petty cash box. Ours was a chilly exchange in which we both attempted to out-minimize the other. Yet, this conversation was nothing compared to what occurred when I returned from the store and handed Karlene the receipt and change.

"Um, excuse me," she shot snidely across the corridor. "According to this receipt, you're seven cents short here. Where's the rest of the money?"

"What do you mean, where's the rest of the money?" I replied coolly from my desk. "I gave you all the change."

"You're seven cents short here." she persisted. "Where's the rest of the money?"

Good grief, I thought. This is ridiculous. From the tone in her voice, you'd have thought I just robbed Fort Knox.

"Karlene, I gave you what the guy at the store handed back to me in change. I didn't count it at the time. If it's short, then he shorted me and I'm sorry. You'll just have to deal with it."

I turned away and went back to work.

"Well, I still want to know what are you going to do about the missing seven cents."

Was she kidding me? Was she really going to pursue this? I stood up, walked across the corridor, planted myself squarely before her, and with hands on hips replied, "I'm not going to do anything about it, Karlene. What are you going to do about that?"

"Well," she snipped, "I guess I'll just have to report to the CFO that you are responsible for shorting the petty cash box seven cents. Unless, of course, you're willing to pay the seven cents out of your own pocket."

I didn't want to pay Karlene seven cents out of my own pocket. I wanted to drag her down to the parking lot and give her the thrashing of her life. But the thought of her boss thinking I had taken money from the company was too much. I stormed back to my desk and pulled some coins from my purse. Knowing I was defeated but still wanting to have the last word, I tossed the change into the cash box and sneered as caustically as I could, "Whatever, Snarlene!"

What happened next was nothing short of amazing. I thought Karlene would come back at me with something even more insulting. But suddenly her faced changed. She began to laugh. She thought the name I had just called her was hysterical. Listening to her laugh, I began to laugh too.

We were friends from that day forward.

Later, when Karlene and I talked about our initial misimpressions of each other the problem was obvious. She didn't see that my take-charge attitude was a by-product of my codependent upbringing - my deep-seated habit of excessive care-taking and hyper-vigilance to whatever I thought my mother needed from me and my father demanded of me. And I didn't see that Karlene's aloofness at work stemmed from a volatile situation she was going through with her husband at home. She could hide the bruises, but the emotional pain left her feeling diminished and humiliated all day at work. The abuse made her sensitive to overbearing personalities...such as mine.

Over the next few years, our friendship continued through divorces and marriages, and divorces from those marriages, and job changes, and children growing up, and a wide variety of life's ups and downs. We had a lot of fun things in common, such as a mutual appreciation for the country singer, Dwight Yoakam. We took occasional road trips to see him perform in places like Primm, Nevada and the Friant Indian Reservation in Northern California. We both liked to travel, and we had a penchant for carrying notepads in our purses to jot down memories for future reference. We'd fill page after page with interesting observations, profound thoughts, crazy ideas, and details of our budget-priced travel adventures.

One evening, just over a year into my bohemian period, Karlene and I were sitting on my back patio in a couple of white plastic chairs given to me by my friend Carrie. We chatted about the events of the day and of the past two weeks since her last visit. She caught me up on the latest office gossip and we shared news about mutual friends. We talked about current events and politics and the latest buzz in Hollywood. Eventually, the topic rolled around to me and what was new in my world of bohemian independence.

Karlene had done her best to understand my departure from conventionality. She knew I had reached that now-or-never point in life when a person decides to either go for their dreams or live out their days in quiet complacency. I was on a mission to find myself. I was going for my dreams, and she was supportive of that. Karlene also knew Tim. And she knew how much I missed him.

Even though Karlene and I had been friends for years, I never told her about my childhood, about the dark secrets that had delivered me to this point in my life. I didn't think she would understand. Karlene had grown up in one of those Ozzie and Harriet homes where her biggest dilemma was grabbing her fair share of attention behind an older brother and sister who demanded most of their parent's time. How could she possibly understand my childhood when hers had been so idyllic?

Overhead, a slow-moving passenger jet temporarily joined chorus with the whirring traffic, blocking out the stars behind it as it glided across the sky toward the nearby airport. We paused in our discussion for the din to fade. Then Karlene asked me a curious question.

"Are you happy living like this?"

"Heck yeah, I'm happy. I love the life I have here."

"What does that feel like...happiness? I mean, what's it like to live life completely on your own terms?"

I didn't see that one coming. After all, hadn't she grown up with baseball and apple pie and good old middle-American values?

"Karlene, you're asking me what happiness feels like? Don't you already know?"

"Not really," she sighed, slumping a bit in the chair as she watched the plane disappear. "I don't think my childhood was quite like you have it pictured. I mean, I wouldn't trade it for the world, but it certainly left its share of scars."

Scars? Karlene? From what?

For the first time in all the years we had known each other, Karlene told me how lonesome her childhood had been, how she had felt invisible and inconsequential next to her limelight-stealing siblings. She didn't blame them for their extroverted ways. She only lamented the emptiness of being an introvert following in the wake of such huge personalities. Her pain was so genuine and so deep. I had no idea Karlene felt that way. I began to wonder...

...if Karlene can comprehend the struggle to survive when everything around you seems so ominous and overpowering, could she possibly relate to my experiences as a child?

I hesitated, watching another jet carve its shape across the constellations.

Could she...?

I decided to give it a try.

That night, seated in those two white plastic chairs in my backyard, I shared with Karlene my story of growing up the middle daughter of a mentally ill mother and an abusive alcoholic father. I only gave her the highlights, needing first to see how she would handle it. I didn't want to overwhelm her with too many gory details. She received my story with quiet respect.

Could she relate to my story?

Not really.

Was she willing to listen anyway?

Absolutely.

It had been a long journey from our first silly misimpressions of each other and our fight over seven cents. In the safety of those white plastic chairs, I went on to tell Karlene many more details of my upbringing. We made a pact with each other that night. The white plastic chairs would be a sanctuary where all our life stories, the good and the bad, could be respectfully shared between us. The chairs would be a place of solace. A place of relief. A place of brutal honesty. A place where no judgment would ever be cast.



Me



It felt good to finally talk about the strange "legends" of my past. Each story I told took me back to the point in my life where I had moved further and further away from myself, where I closed my real self off and put up a defensive front that would enable me to endure the situation without being destroyed by it.

I made notes after each conversation, highlighting the story then reflectively writing about my feelings. Talking about my experiences with Karlene helped me envision the process of my becoming conditioned. I could see how the course of William's abuse and Mother's illness had hardened my emotions. I had gradually become "unnatural," as Tim once pointed out. Writing my stories and searching through the matrix of my newly emerging feelings helped me to "remember" some of the natural feelings I had buried and basically forgotten about.

The "plastic chair writings" seemed to hold a lot of clues about the ways of being I had suppressed as a child. Carefully re-examining those hard times helped me uncover them and then re-ignite them. Ches said the answer to who a person is lies within them. The plastic chair writings were like maps leading me back to myself, back to my real self before the programming took effect.

The answer to the question was in me. The answer to the question was me.



The Voice



The way to heal a hard heart is by operating with a soft heart.



Beth



Beth was the receptionist at the company where Karlene and I first met. More than a decade later, we still managed to meet up for lunch a couple of times a month.

Over salads and lemonade one day I noticed a gorgeous new bauble on Beth's right hand. She always wore the most exquisite jewelry - and this stunning green emerald ring was no exception. I commented on its striking beauty. I wasn't expecting her negative response.

"Thanks," she grumbled, eyeing the ring disdainfully. "Frankly, I'm not all that crazy about it."

She moved her hand out of view, clearly embarrassed that I was looking at it.

"What on earth...? Why don't you like it?" I implored. "It's really beautiful, Beth!"

"Oh, I don't know," she sighed, "Steve bought it for me when I wasn't with him. I wish he hadn't done that."

"You don't like the setting, or what?" I pressed on. This reaction wasn't making sense.

"No, the setting is fine." She said. "The problem is the emerald. There's a huge flaw in the middle of it and I just can't stand to look at it."

I saw nothing wrong with the ring. It looked perfect to me.

Slightly annoyed, Beth pulled the ring from her finger and insisted I put on my glasses so I could properly observe the offending blot. I held the ring up to the light and looked carefully into the stone. She was right. With considerable squinting I was finally able to see the flaw. A tiny spot of carbon. A miniscule speck, actually.

"Oh come on, it's hardly noticeable, Beth. No one would ever see it if you didn't draw their attention to it."

"Yeah, but that's not the problem. I know it's there and it really bothers me. I can't help it. I just wish Steve hadn't bought it."

I marveled at her disapproval. Poor Steve, I thought. He was just trying to be nice and here she was being a pain in the butt about it. Why couldn't she just relax and enjoy the fact he did something sweet for her?

Then I remembered Muzzy.

Muzzy, or Stephanie as the rest of the world knew her, was Beth's eighty-but-only-admitting-to-sixty-four-year-old mother who now lived in a retirement high-rise in San Diego. Beth had been raised an only child by a woman who was driven to social perfection. In an almost phobic need to be admired and seen as beautiful, proper, fun, popular, and accepted within the upper echelons of society, Muzzy had raised her beautiful blue-eyed, blonde-haired daughter like a showpiece. Beth was made "presentable" for the public at all times. Her hair was pulled into two perfect braids with not a hair out of place or Muzzy would panic. Her dresses were frilly and intricate, ironed to flawless perfection. She was trained in all the proper pronunciations, the exact articulation combined with the modern catch phrases of the cultured elite. Trotted out in public, Beth would say "adieu" for goodbye, "savoir faire" for stylish, and "faux pas" for mistake. "C'est la vie" would always be accompanied with a slight toss of the hand.

Beth's childhood was absent muddy jeans and tree climbing and street tag. Muzzy kept an iron fist over her daughter, constantly dissecting her perceived character flaws in minute detail. In her destructive drive for perfection, an entire lifestyle and way of seeing the world had been imposed on Beth while she was growing up. She had been conditioned to be all about presentation.

Beth's mother was a classic narcissist. With all the programming that had gone into constructing Beth into the perfect reflection of her own elevated image, no wonder the flaw would now offend Beth, I thought. How could it not? Beth had been so schooled in the idea of enslaving oneself to social standards that of course a flawed emerald would now be seen as common, or "bourgeois" in the language of her youth.

Later, as I made my mapping notes about the incident, I reflected on the lifestyle that had been artificially imposed on my dear friend. I wondered what she would have been like had she been allowed to emerge naturally throughout her childhood, had she not been programmed to think like Muzzy. How many of Beth's ways of being were authentic to her and how many were her mother's orchestrations?

Who was Beth, really?

From that day forward I decided to pay closer attention to Beth to see if I could detect clues of her real self shining through in her thoughts and feelings and actions.

From my observations of myself, I realized that programming happens in obvious ways, but it also occurs subtly. In fact, I soon discovered an inauthentic feeling in myself over something as trivial as tomatoes.

William hated "store-bought" tomatoes. He complained bitterly about the taste and texture. Compared to the tomatoes we grew on our farm in the summertime, store-bought tomatoes tasted like Styrofoam to him.

One day, as I was walking through the produce section of the grocery store, I glanced at the stacked tomatoes, pale and waxy, all uniformly sized. I instantly thought to myself, "Gosh, I hate store-bought tomatoes."

I thought about how good the tomatoes from our garden on the farm used to taste. In the summer, we could run by a bush and pull off a fat red fruit, so juicy we had to lean forward to bite into it to keep from wearing it. There's nothing like the flavor of a fresh picked tomato exploding in your mouth. Or is there...?

I pulled my cart alongside the display of tomatoes and contemplated the question.

I had eaten a million of those store-bought tomatoes in salads and sandwiches and simply sliced plain with a sprinkling of salt and pepper. At that moment, I couldn't recall distinctly not liking the flavor of those tomatoes. Or even thinking twice about the flavor of those tomatoes. Oddly, it seemed like I rather enjoyed the store-bought tomatoes I had eaten. The only time I felt bad about them was when I was standing in the grocery store looking at them. That's when I would hear William's mantra slip into my thoughts: "I hate store-bought tomatoes."

In that two-minute exercise, I realized I didn't actually hate store-bought tomatoes. That was William's baggage, not mine. I liked store-bought tomatoes. Now when I walk into a store and see a stack of tomatoes, I think to myself, gosh, I bet they taste delicious.



The Voice



Don't let your life be run by other people's decisions. Work toward making your own decisions in wisdom.



Jeanne



There was another incident, this one involving my old friend Jeanne, that showed me how people are not only inauthentically programmed in the way they see themselves, they can also be programmed in the way they see each other.

Jeanne was our next-door-neighbor when I was married to Tim. Just past seventy, she was a retired math professor. At one time Jeanne had been a tall, strong-boned woman with an angular face and thick chestnut hair. Now she was arthritic and bent with thin wisps of graying hair, horn-rimmed bifocals, and yellowed teeth. Her one remaining breast swayed gently beneath a typically food-stained blouse as she lumbered along on painfully swollen ankles.

Jeanne lived alone in a rented house, which was several times too big for her - unless you counted her dogs. She had five of them ranging in size from a toy poodle to a German Shepard running wild through the house and yard. No animals were ever treated more royally than Jeanne's five dogs.

Eccentric in a dozen ways, Jeanne was a gardener and an avid collector of junk. She amassed a vast assortment of stuff - stuff she would temporarily place somewhere while casting about to find someplace else to put it. Meanwhile, she would drag home even more stuff, which she would then also try to find a place for, all the while the old stuff was still sitting right where she first put it. Jeanne spent most of her days puttering endlessly about her yard, which was filled with her precious stuff and endless potted plants.

Inside the house, every square inch of space brimmed with a clutter of ancient furniture, dirty dishes, musty trinkets, knick-knacks, memorabilia, and flat-out junk - all covered with a thick layer of dust, cobwebs, and dog hair.

Jeanne was as sweet as she was odd, so I liked having her as a neighbor. But it wasn't long before her landlord grew tired of her mess and evicted her. He said she wasn't maintaining the property to his standards. In truth, he was right. The place was close to ruin. Tim and I helped her move once she had found a new rental house about twenty miles away in the town of Norco.

I stayed in contact with Jeanne even after her move and my divorce. I drove out to see her a couple of times a month and mowed the lawn whenever I visited, hoping this landlord wouldn't notice the "Jeanne effect" that was swiftly taking over. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, in less than a year her new place was an exact replica of the last. The inevitable again occurred and Jeanne was soon evicted.

I was annoyed with Jeanne the day I drove out to have a stern talk with her about her disorderly ways. I was facing having to pack her house up again, and I knew what a job that was going to be. I was going to chastise Jeanne for being so caught up in her strange little world of pets and plants that she would allow herself to be forced from her home again.

But Jeanne was nowhere in sight when I pulled into the driveway. I knew she never locked her doors so I went in to await her return. As I stepped into the silted shadows of her entryway, five hairy faces rushed up to greet me.

Alone in the house, I decided to have a look around to assess how much work it would take to pack the menagerie into a giant storage container, since Jeanne could not secure another rental. This time it would be Karlene and me helping her. No Tim. It would be a nightmare. The awful question - how on earth are we going to move all of this crap? - looped through my mind as I stepped from room to room.

It was absurd to me that one old woman should possess so much useless junk.

I had wandered into her office now, pausing in my fretting as I caught sight of her doctorate certificate hanging on the wall...askew, of course, and adorned with cobweb strands wafting in an imperceptible breeze. I studied the document carefully. Phi Kappa Phi. Hmm, impressive, I thought. My eyes drifted to the next document. It said "Magna Cum Laude" in big black letters.

Next on the wall was a series of institution and community awards she had received throughout her rich academic career. A second doctorate, this one from the University of Guadeloupe in Mexico. More awards written in Spanish. A picture of her with Ronald Reagan.

My eyes continued to move around the room. A dusty bookshelf housed hundreds of yellowing dog-eared classics: Thoreau, Voltaire, Wharton. There was a collection of Bibles, probably fifty in all. And next to them, an unruly assortment of owls, dozens of spry critters shaped out of glass, wood, ceramic and plastic, all returning my wide-eyed look of curiosity.

I had never noticed those owls before. I had never noticed anything about Jeanne's house except the dust and cobwebs and dog hair. But that day, standing in Jeanne's jam-packed office, I began to become aware of something. I began to realize that Jeanne was not just some eccentric old woman who had replaced her too-busy-to-visit family with five canine companions and who lived in utter chaos. This was a person who really "got" life. She was educated and sophisticated, but she lived life on her own terms. She was happy. It pleased her to be surrounded by dogs and plants and memorabilia. I realized that each piece of what I had seen as useless clutter only moments before was actually a part of her being. This was who Jeanne really was. This was Jeanne in her authentic ways of being herself, and she hadn't forfeited that to anyone.

As I slowly continued my stroll around the house, I noticed hundreds of things I had never seen before: exquisite rice paintings from the Orient, rows of gold-leafed painted thimbles, a collection of teapots - one as tiny as the tip of my little finger. Crystals hung on fishing lines casting their rainbow silhouettes about the room. Jeanne had traveled the world, and everywhere she went she brought a piece of that place home with her.

I glanced out the window at the yard that had always seemed so impossible to me. Now it looked lovely. Blossoms billowed from every part.

Jeanne believed that anything alive had a right to stay that way. If she pruned a Creeping Charlie, the clippings went into a paper cup until new roots sprouted. Then all the little Charlies went into red plastic pots, which later joined one of the colonies of red plastic pots that populated every nook and cranny of her yard. If a tree sapling sprang up - even if it was in a crack in the sidewalk - she simply added it to her watering routine. She postponed trimming gangly bushes until the path around birdbaths and rusting lawn furniture was all but hidden.

That day, as my eyes passed over the teeming jungle, I saw something truly beautiful. I saw Jeanne's soul. I was suddenly transformed out of my programmed misperceptions of Jeanne, and I could see her natural, authentic ways of being herself. Jeanne had been happily living her life her own way. I was the one trying to impose inauthentic expectations on her. I was the one who needed to retract my images of her and simply enjoy Jeanne being Jeanne.

That was precisely where I had gone wrong with Tim. I had expected him to be the exact antithesis of William. I wanted Tim to be my knight in shining armor who had absolutely nothing in common with the fire-breathing dragon William. Any little thing he did that reminded me of William caused me to shut down and withdraw from him into my world of protective numbness.



The Voice



There is nothing more important than human connection.



Me



My tendency to see people through the "William filter" didn't stop with Tim and Jeanne. My childhood conditioning had caused me to approach all of my relationships the same way. I had learned to refrain from getting too emotionally attached to either of my parents or my sisters since those bonds were in constant jeopardy of being broken. Those relationships were about performing a job. With William, my job was to jump through hoops to appease him. With Mother, my job was to jump through hoops to keep her sane, and then take care of her and keep her calm when she went insane anyway. With my sisters, my job was to take my share of the heat and be the peacekeeper between Cathy and Danni.

That was the way I had approached all my relationships since childhood. I was initially attracted to a person out of genuine feelings of love or respect or interest. But having forgotten (or suppressed) how to truly connect with others, I would hold that person at arm's length emotionally. And then, depending on the nature of the relationship, I would perform whatever my "job" function was to the best of my ability. With Jeanne, my job was to help her avoid eviction. With Tim, my job was domestic. With Beth, my job was lunch twice a month. I couldn't stand the idea that I had probably behaved this way with my children, but the reality was obvious. I had been that way with everyone. There were wonderful people in my life, but to a large degree I was emotionally disconnected from them. I was just going through the motions.

It was no wonder Tim said being married to me was uncomfortable. It was probably like being married to a robot. During our marriage I kept myself emotionally aloof and performed my duties mechanically. I was a great homemaker for our combined nine children. I was in good shape. I always tried to have something interesting to talk about and I kept our social calendar full. I never understood why that wasn't enough to make our marriage work.

Mapping it out on paper helped me see all the ways I had become closed off from myself. Trying to understand, I pushed myself to keep remembering, to keep going back to those damage points and look at myself closely. I was ready to confront it all.



The Voice



I could feel the Voice speaking into me:

There is nothing greater than peace in any universe at any time . . . and love and joy are equal to it . . . and these things come in degrees.



Three Sisters



Where a supportive parent would look for a child's strengths and work to build on them, William had looked for our weaknesses and found ways to prey on them.

We all suffered a sense of worthlessness as we were growing up. William not only refused to acknowledge our strengths, he forced us to deny them to ourselves as well. We were programmed to be ashamed of our achievements because "good people don't seek for recognition."

Once, in elementary school, Cathy's class was electing a room president and she had been nominated. The voting proceeded with each child scrawling a name on a slip of paper, then giving it to the teacher. Cathy wrote a name, then closed her eyes tightly and wished with all her heart the voting would go her way. She handed her slip to the teacher.

Cathy did not win the election. She lost by only one vote. When the teacher noticed the disappointment on her face, she pulled Cathy aside and told her, if she had written down her own name she would have won.

Why couldn't Cathy write her own name? Because William made her believe it was wrong to think that highly of herself. Had she become class president, he doubtless would have browbeaten her for months about it.

Testing had shown Danni was a genius; her straight-A report cards bore witness of that year after year. A good parent would be proud, but William resented it. He feared her high level of intelligence would diminish his control over her. He routinely refused to acknowledge her grades, throwing her report cards in the trash without even looking at them.

When I was a sophomore in college, I was editor of our campus newspaper. The staff had submitted a few articles to a statewide writing competition being held in Sacramento. Mr. Snelling, the class advisor, gamely sponsored a trip to the awards ceremony, hauling seven of us upstate in his old Chevy station wagon.

The awards ceremony was tense with hundreds of people jammed into the Sacramento Convention Center, young eager-faced writers from all over. With this many contenders, I held little hope for the three stories I had entered in the competition. I was so convinced I wouldn't win that I didn't even recognize my own name when the first place award for hard news writing was announced. The girl sitting next to me had to shout over the applause, "Hey, you won! Go up there and get your trophy!"

Our newspaper staff went on to win several more awards that night in various writing categories. Afterward, Mr. Snelling hosted a pizza party in his hotel room to celebrate our wins. During the festivities, one by one the award-winning students used his room telephone to call their parents and share their good news. I dreaded making that call. I knew it would be a mistake. William would not be impressed. If anything, he would make a crude remark about me being in a hotel room with my teacher.

I had to do some quick thinking when it finally came my turn. As I dialed the number with my right hand, I discreetly disconnected the call with my left hand, hoping no one noticed. I stood there several minutes pretending to talk to my parents using the same inflection in my voice I had heard the other winners use. "Hey Dad, guess what? I just won first place in a statewide writing competition!" For added effect, I ended the call with, "I love you too, Dad!"

William didn't want his daughters to be smart or talented or well liked. He didn't want to be outdone by any one of us. In his mind, that would threaten his superiority over us. Denying our achievements kept us beneath him, less important than him, and certainly less credible than him to the outside world.

Even so, William's daughters had gone on to achieve success for themselves in a variety of ways.

The little girl who couldn't vote for herself became a widely known specialist in the art of holistic healing.

The girl with the perfect grades became a political consultant and served on a major grand jury.

And the girl who had to fake a phone call home was now a magna cum laude graduate, a successful business entrepreneur, and a free-spirited self-employed writer.

Though William was truly a powerful destroyer of life, he could not extinguish the light of who my sisters and I were in the core of our being. Our talents and ambitions had emerged despite him. We had struggled with feelings of worthlessness, and we had each suffered our share of defeats along the way, but the light within us was stronger than the darkness around us and we had outdone William.



The Voice



It is not so much what you say or do that has the greatest influence on others, but who you are in the radiance of your own personal presence - the spirit you carry within you.



The Misogynist



William had only one tool left in his bag of dirty tricks to use against his daughters. His plan was to hold his Last Will and Testament over our heads and threaten to disown us.

Not long after the Thanksgiving Day fiasco, we received this handwritten letter, which he addressed to his "three asshole moron daughters":

"You girls don't have any idea, or maybe you just don't care how much you hurt me. That hurt makes me feel justified in what I am going to do. You girls have until the end of April to make some kind of amends with me. If you don't, then you won't be in my will. And to keep you all from having the last laugh at me, neither will your children."

We gathered in Danni's living room to discuss how we should respond. Of all William's self-serving plans, threatening our inheritance was the most ridiculous of all. How would we get by without his natty old mobile home and his 1998 Ford Escort?

Our meeting at Danni's that day reminded me of the one in her bedroom following our final beating with the wooden hanger. It took only seconds for the first smile, then the first joke, then the first tissue to dry away tears of laughter. What was William thinking? We didn't care about his ridiculous will.

In the end, we never responded to The Ogre's letter. We let him figure out for himself there was nothing for us to make amends to him for.

Sitting there laughing with my sisters that day reminded me of the times we had laughed together over the years. For certain, we had argued a lot, but surprisingly, we laughed a lot, too. Humor was our best coping mechanism. Our sense of humor was one thing we all three had in common.

As kids, we would often make fun of William behind his back. Mocking him seemed to help dissipate our fear of him. For those brief moments, we felt less vulnerable to his overpowering ways.

William was born in Texas and never lost his drawl. We amused ourselves imitating his country jargon and the funny way he pronounced certain words.

"Mexican" was "Meck'skin"

"I was going to..." was "Ahh was a-fixin'to..."

"I can't stand it" was "Ahh jis caint shtand it!"

He would tell us to hush or shut up in a weird low Exorcist-like growl, "Hiiiiiiiiish!"

He had a set of crude phrases he often used. A favorite was, "You can want in one hand and shit in the other, and tsee which one fills up faster." If one of us displayed a little too much satisfaction in ourselves, he would say, "She thinks the sun sets on her ass."

He had another trick, too. Since we had to sew our own clothing, sometimes he would take a garment we were working on and wipe it across his bottom like toilet paper, then smirk, "Ahhhh yeahhhh, that'll work jis fine."

It was tough hearing those kinds of things as children, so laughing about them together helped relieve the pressure. It allowed us to go through hard times, then look back on them in a different way. If we could laugh at a tough time, sometimes we could file it away in our minds without so much pain.

I made up a word one time. The word was "osheemodo." Cathy and Danni thought my word was hilarious so I said it as often as possible. I would say "osheemodo" in place of "gosh" or "oh boy!" or "give me a break." I had been peppering my speech with my funny word for a couple of weeks when William finally overheard it.

"What did you just say?" he demanded, the fire already igniting in his eyes.

"I...it's just...I just said osheemodo...it's a word...I made it up...it doesn't mean anything."

Well, William decided "osheemodo" was a cuss word and a good reason to unleash his belt and give me a fierce whipping as Danni and Cathy nervously looked on. I hadn't yet developed Danni's steel will to not cry so I howled like a banshee. he beating went on for some time.

Afterwards Cathy and Danni felt bad for me. They tried to rally me with our standard joking routines, but I was hurting too much. I couldn't make myself laugh. Then Danni came up with an idea to get our minds off of it. To spite William, we would invent our own language and speak it freely among ourselves. The language would be called Osheemodo. Osheemodo included all the ways we would mock William's country drawl, plus his weird sounds and body movements, which we distorted way out of proportion. Like the grunting noise he would make under his breath whenever he was drunk - "mmmffhh... mmmffhh" - or the chewing noise he made with his front teeth because those were the only teeth he had.

We still speak Osheemodo to this day.

It required quick-wittedness on our part to get away with Osheemodo without William ever catching on. We had to be sharp to pick up on the comedic timing. It had to be subtle and clever yet completely inconspicuous in order to fall under his radar. Later, we would double over in laughter at what we had just gotten away with.

Mother knew about Osheemodo, and from time to time she would join us. Once during one of her very best good spells, we were sitting at the dinner table and I had somehow managed to earn William's disgust. William was strict about table manners and the rules were always changing. We would painfully learn about each new rule when a fork was jabbed into the back of our hand or we received a thump on the head with the handle of his butter knife. He was particularly sensitive about our chewing with our mouths open or putting our elbows on the table. This particular day I had upset him by using my own fork to serve myself a piece of ham. He was coming after me for not using the serving fork.

Because Mother was feeling so good at the time, she jumped to my defense before William had a chance to administer his punishment. She said it wasn't a problem because my fork had only touched my piece of ham and none of the others. It visibly aggravated William that Mother was defending me. He didn't like to be defied. But unfortunately for him, he had to swallow his annoyance because Mother was uncannily strong -- much stronger than him -- and she could straight up kick his ass if she got mad enough. William could only push her so far when she was feeling good and we were all aware of his predicament. Silent Osheemodo passed furiously between Mother and us girls, and we all struggled to not laugh.

Sensing his defeat, William stood up and threw his fork into his plate of food. "Ahh jis caint shtand sittin' here with a bunch of pigs like you!"

"Fine," Mother said, smiling as she reached across the table and plucked a piece of ham from the platter using her own fork. "You can be excused from the table."

William stormed out. The rest of us enjoyed our meal, made pleasurable with cheerful conversation and laughter. Mother dubbed William "The Ogre" that night and it would become his Osheemodo name from then on.



The Voice



I once asked the Voice, "Why does my father's pettiness have such control over me today?"

It is a result of the mood you are in. Being in a mood is part of your everyday, every-minute experience. You are always in one kind of mood or another.

Without exception, your mood directs how you see your situation in the world. When you are fatigued, every problem somehow seems much larger than when you are feeling rested and energetic. The weaknesses of others are more annoying. Their odd habits annoy you and you are much more likely to confront them about it - and in ways that may even make things worse.

You cannot solve problems in another person unless you can solve problems in yourself first. Your mood is the very best place to start.



Two White Plastic Chairs



Karlene noticed the change occurring in me. Apparently, once my defenses started coming down I was a lot more fun to be around. Living life on my own terms was such a liberating experience, such an exercise in personal freedom, it reflected broadly in our friendship. I was becoming free from old habits that didn't serve me, the shutting down and the hard-boiled resistance. I could feel myself coming into myself, and I could feel myself coming alive.

Karlene liked what was taking place and wanted the same for herself.

One night as we sat in the white plastic chairs, we discussed a game plan for her. It had taken me three years to reach the point I was at. We devised a way to reduce her time to a single year by working through some of the processes together. Our goal was to reach the point where we were both truly living our own lives, and living our lives on our own terms.

We called the plan "My Way" after the song made famous by both Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. The lyrics seemed appropriate to our objective, which was to thoroughly answer the question for ourselves, who am I...really?

"For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught."

We would use our weekly plastic chair discussions as the basis for practicing self-discovery procedures. Karlene's first mission was to start a "Things I Like About Myself" list. From there we made up a variety of game-like writing processes and conversation techniques designed to cut through inauthentic programming and get down to who we really were in the central core of our being.

Beyond our regular discussions, we planned a series of road trips where we would have the opportunity to practice "being ourselves" out in the world. "My Way" would end with a week's vacation in Hawaii, which would also be the celebration of Karlene's fortieth birthday and my fiftieth.

The "My Way" rules were simple. We made three promises about what would be essential to living life "our way":

First, we each promised to take personal responsibility for our own happiness. We agreed we would no longer rely on other people to "generate" our happiness for us. If we took control of our own happiness, it would be entirely up to us personally to determine when and why and how much happiness we could experience in our lives.

Second, we promised to handle every situation that occurred in our lives in a way that felt instinctively best for ourselves, rather than cave to the expectations of other people. For example, if Karlene was asked to work overtime and didn't really feel it was best for her to do that, she would have the courage to tell her boss no. Or, if one of us was out socializing and it was late and we felt we'd like to go home, we would have the courage to tell our friends goodnight even if they tried to pressure us into staying longer.

The third promise was that we would regularly practice being completely honest with each other. We felt that if we could learn to speak our truth to each other, we could learn to speak our truth with the world. It isn't always easy for people to express their needs or feelings or beliefs if they think they might be opposed. We promised to create a space where we did not need to patronize each other or speak in safe, friendly-sounding platitudes. Even if we were at total opposites in terms of our feelings or beliefs, we would speak our authentic truths to one another and receive each other's truth without argument.

"My Way" was about examining ourselves closely and honestly. Our goal was to get down to the true essence of our most authentic ways of being. Living life on our own terms could only be achieved if we were living our lives as ourselves. We would have to pay close attention to our thoughts and feelings and desires, which is where those authentic elements of ourselves would be revealed.

Karlene created a special "My Way" journal in which we documented our progress along the way.

Our first road trip took us to Laughlin, Nevada, to see the world's best Elvis impersonator, Trent Carlini. Karlene had won weekend lodgings at the Pioneer Hotel, where the famous neon cowboy, River Rick, waved endlessly outside our window. We also planned a side trip to Oatman, the historical mining town on Route 66, so I could write a travel piece for a magazine I was freelancing for at the time.

A fun "My Way" exercise we shared was called Operation Discovery. In this process, we pushed ourselves to try new things or to learn about something new. It could be a food we had never tasted before, like the night we cooked an authentic Irish meal of corn beef and cabbage. It could be an activity, such as skydiving or going to the opera. It could be learning the meaning of a word like "vicissitudes" or reading the history of the ancient Etruscans.

Throughout Operation Discovery, we did a variety of things neither of us had ever experienced before. We learned to play dominoes. We rolled our own sushi. We went to a lobster festival. We ate a spaghetti squash. We spent Mozart's 250th birthday exchanging obscure trivia about his life. We learned the etymology of the word "guffaw" and constructed the perfect sentence around it: "Guffaw, and the world guffaws with you." We watched a pro bull-riding event. We bought Brie cheese and experimented eating it with and without the rind. (It's better without.) We went to a Ryan Adams concert. We aren't Jewish, but we learned about Passover and celebrated our own small version of it.

"My Way" wasn't just about sorting through all our past experiences for clues about ourselves. It was also about discovering new things about ourselves by having new experiences. Like the song said, doing it "my way" was living a life that was full, traveling each and every highway back to self. We opened the door to as many new experiences as our calendars and limited budgets would allow.

It wasn't long before Karlene began to notice the changes taking place within her. She too was dismantling defenses and growing comfortable with her own natural ways of being. She was becoming more self-assured and outgoing. She started taking risks she would never imagined having the courage to take before.

Karlene had been at the same job for over eight years, always quietly yearning for a promotion but never having the confidence to pursue it. An introvert, she was nervous about putting herself in front of strangers.

Then one day she noticed a job posting on the company bulletin board for a corporate trainer. The job would not only put her in front of strangers, it would also put her in strange towns all over the United States. All by herself. The job was daunting, but Karlene listened to the voice of her true desires. She embraced her "My Way" powers and went for the job. She was hired immediately ahead of six other applicants.



The Voice



I once said to the Voice, "I need help. A person at work is trying to undermine me by criticizing me to others. What can I do?"

What do their criticisms have to do with you?

"What do you mean? It's me that's being criticized."

Is it really? Do you actually have the weaknesses or flaws you are being accused of?

"No."

Then it isn't really you that is criticized, is it? It is their false image of you.

So here's a question: What does someone else's inaccurate mental images have to do with you?

"Not much, I guess. Not if their mental images are inaccurate. If they're accurate though..."

The good news is, if their criticisms are accurate, you can make amends and do something about it and things will be better all the way around.

"What causes me to get so upset over the criticisms in the first place?"

You forgot who you really are. That's how you fall into difficulties, by losing awareness of yourself.

A lot of difficulties persons have are of their own making, but they are not aware of it. The difficulty arises when they are thrown off track by everyday comments, criticisms, observations, and judgments that aren't very accurate.

"How can I avoid falling into this trap in the future?"

Check with yourself first. Get back to your own glory. Like Rosa Parks, don't buy into someone else's screwed up ideas of who you really are.



The Church



I never saw myself as a "typical" Mormon.

I didn't look the part.

I had never canned, pickled, or dehydrated anything in my life. I didn't have barrels of wheat and rice and powered milk stored in my garage. My house wasn't spotless. My ancestors weren't pioneers. My children didn't attend BYU. And, all told, I was only married for twelve years - a bit short of the "for all time and eternity" that typical Mormons go for.

Still, I was glad I had grown up in the Church. The scriptures were always a source of inspiration to me.
 




Me



Though I was always fascinated with Mormonism, I also had a powerful curiosity about how other faiths practiced their beliefs. It was probably my brief stint at being a Seventh-day Adventist that sparked this lifelong interest in world religions.

I first realized there were different versions of the Bible when I came across a bright green book tucked away in a hotel dresser drawer entitled "Holy Bible, Placed by the Gideons". Intrigued, I stole the book when I checked out and left a five-dollar bill in its place.

I read my little green Bible from cover to cover, engrossed in the imagery of the first- century prophets. It was similar to the King James Version that I had grown up with in the Mormon Church. But there were enough differences that my interest was piqued, and I went on a search for other versions. I learned that Catholics used one called the Douay-Rheims Bible, which was different by far from the other two, beginning with the very first chapter.

It was in reading this version of the Bible that I first came across the Apocrypha.

The Apocrypha is a group of scriptural texts that disappeared from the King James Version in 1640. Reading those omitted texts opened my eyes to something I hadn't considered before. In ancient times, there was a lot more writing going on than modern people generally realize.

There were also the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of hundreds of manuscripts found in 1947 in caves near Jerusalem. Some of the writings resemble books of the Old Testament. Others give a fascinating yet fractured history of the ancient culture that eventually gave formation to Christianity.

Next, I studied the Nag Hammadi, fifty-two writings found buried in a jar in Upper Egypt. By this time, I was using the Internet to download texts of these Gnostic authors of early Christian history. These writings were peculiar and mysterious, yet they added amazing texture to my growing understanding of how current views of religion originated.

Searching the Internet, I learned of the strange cuneiform tablets of the ancient Sumerian people, some dating back as far as 3000 B.C. Thousands of tablets found in places like Iraq and Syria tell stories of vastly intelligent civilizations and of worshipping powerful deities.

Over the years as I continued to learn more about history and other religions, I came to understand something important about spirituality. I realized that the Voice has been speaking since the foundation of the world, throughout all ages, in all languages, and to all people.



The Voice



The Voice whispered into me:

Each day, millions of persons ask me in a vast variety of ways to be enabled to see beyond the veils of uncertainty. They yearn for signs of my presence. What they don't see and what they don't hear is me being right there with them, loving them, speaking to them. The reason persons don't notice my personal presence is because they are almost always looking at the ceiling or at the clouds, and they're trying to see an image of me take form in the clouds. They gaze at the stars and hope I am out there somewhere and that I am watching over them and their families. They would do well to look for me in their own hearts. It is in their hearts that I reside. It is my home. I dwell within every person. I am much nearer than anyone can comprehend.



Me

 

In the final month of "My Way," Karlene and I agreed we had made good progress. She was starting to feel genuinely good about herself and I had come a long way from the person who had unwittingly sucked the life out of my beloved Tim.

Still, something wasn't right in me. There was a lingering sense of apprehension that flared up seemingly out of nowhere. It would strike unexpectedly. I could be going along doing something quite pleasant when suddenly a mysterious dread-like feeling would come over me. I tried to map the feeling out in writing, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Could it be a resentment toward Mother? I wondered. Cathy had entertained a mild suspicion of Mother. To her, it seemed like Mother gave in to the illness too easily. She thought Mother might have used her sickness as a means to escape from William.

Do I believe Mother worked hard enough to stave off the illness? I asked myself. Could she have used the illness to shirk her motherly duties?

I gave the questions considerable thought, though I immediately felt in my heart the answer was no. I didn't think my mother had chosen to be mentally ill. I believed she inherited it. Mother was a champ who put up a good fight at a time when medical science didn't have adequate solutions for people like her. She didn't want to be mentally ill - her journal writings were proof of that. She was terrified of getting sick and cried out to God for help. To me, she did her best to confront her illness and to be there for us.

Besides, Mother had also lived a very difficult life. Her father was a war hero turned alcoholic. Her mother, a schizophrenic. Her stepfather, a murderer. And her husband, a misogynist.

If anyone had good reason to end up crazy, it was Mother.

I thought about the connection between my mother and myself. Ours was a complex relationship that defied all the rules, a constant reversal of the mother-child role. I had watched her do things few people could fathom. I had wiped up her blood spilt in unspeakable ways, and trembled in fear, knowing she was capable of killing me.

I felt a great sadness that I had been denied the special kind of relationship that mothers and daughters sometimes have, the kind I had shared with my own daughters. Was this the source of the elusive dark feeling I was searching for? Could this be my lingering unease?

I probed deeper into my thought recesses and noticed that merely thinking the questions had triggered feelings of dread within me. I figured I was on the right track.

My mental journey was bringing me ever closer to the source of the problem when suddenly I stopped in my tracks. I realized I was approaching a memory I would never allow myself to recall.

Way back in the darkest reaches of my mind, there is a door. Behind the door is a forbidden memory. I had not allowed myself to conjure up the memory of an event that totally destroyed me when I was ten years old. It was an event too terrible for me to emotionally withstand. Something inside me died that day, and I never wanted to think about it again.



Two White Plastic Chairs



It was time for our trip to Hawaii. I still felt a slight uneasiness, but the year had passed and we were ready to embark on our grand finale. I set my concern aside and got into the spirit of fun.

We could only afford one of those cheapie vacation packages that herd people in and out of second-rate hotels. But no matter, we were out to have a good time. Our room had a gorgeous view of the building next door, the beds were lumpy, the toilet ran, and each morning at dawn, a flock of tropical birds awakened us to a piercing cacophony of sound. Yet, it was the perfect "My Way" celebration and we spent our first four days in touristy bliss, soaking up the island surroundings.

Then along came Thursday.

Thursday I had my life-altering epiphany.

It was late afternoon and Karlene and I had finally torn ourselves away from the pool cabana to walk along the beach. The sun was riding low in the sky splashing gold and tangerine across rippled clouds. The breeze was soft and warm, laced with salt and plumeria. Haunting strains of a ukulele drifted from the poolside speakers of the neighboring second-class hotel where we had paused at an amazing discovery. There, less than a hundred yards down the beach from where we had been frolicking for days, were two white plastic chairs stuck in the sand near the water's edge.

We promptly took our seats.

Our conversation was lighthearted, different from other conversations in other plastic chairs. We laughed when high waves washed over us, snatching a sandal or a pair of sunglasses we would then chase out to rescue. We laughed again at our goofy rescue attempts, now covered with sand from the shallow surf. The moments leading up to my epiphany were pleasant, as golden as the setting sun.

How perfect this is, I thought to myself, inhaling the settling dusk. Balmy air filled my lungs and warmth spread throughout my body. The gorgeous scene flooded over me, swelling in my chest and exploding into my veins until every last nerve ending vibrated. I could not remember ever feeling so blissfully at ease.

No wonder they call this paradise.

Suddenly, I felt that awful quake within myself. Bliss and well-being instantly dissolved and foreboding took their place. In my search for answers I had trifled with the memory locked behind the door, and now it was beginning to rustle. I took a mental step away from the sunset and the island warmth. I wanted to leave that place . . . now.

I turned to Karlene to suggest we head back to the hotel. It was time to get ready for dinner. But Karlene was engrossed with her ever-present digital camera, contentedly snapping photos of the shimmering sunset. I didn't have the heart to disturb her. I settled back into the plastic chair and dug my feet deeper into the moist sand. I would give her a few more minutes to finish with her task.

I closed my eyes and drew another breath of fragrant night air. A wave rolled in, tickling my ankles as it withdrew back into the ocean. The sun was gone, but my skin held onto its fading glow. A feeling of relaxation slowly eased back into my mind and I relaxed into its welcoming arms.

This really is paradise, I thought again, smiling inwardly as peace resettled over me.

Just then, the memory aroused again and a swift rush of dread raised goose bumps on my arms. I sat forward and looked again at Karlene, hoping she was through with the sunset. I really needed to get out of there.

But no, Karlene was riveted behind her camera, still capturing remnant streaks of light.

How much longer can this go on? I fretted, slumping restlessly back into the chair. I wanted to relax and enjoy the moment, but something had triggered a horribly dark feeling and I had no choice but to run from it. If I could get busy doing something else, the darkness boiling inside me might subside.

Oh, what's the rush? I tried to console myself. It's a glorious sunset and Karlene is having a ball.

The rush is I'm scared, the frantic part of my mind countered. It's best we get out of here.

Come now, the calm part of my mind soothed. Is all this alarm really necessary?

The mental tug-of-war continued in my head. I could feel myself sinking into a terrible quandary of confused emotions, part of me wanting to luxuriate in the island paradise and the other part wanting to run from it.

I could feel the darkness stirring ever stronger with each moment. My heart beat wildly in my chest. Fear pushed at me, I wanted to run.

And then the Voice spoke.

Don't be afraid. You'll be all right. This memory cannot destroy you.

Don't be afraid? I was terrified! I didn't think I would survive reliving the painful event I had stuffed away so many years ago.

You will survive this. I'm right here with you. We'll get through it together.

I did not want to heed the Voice. I was scared out of my mind. But the memory was bubbling to the surface on its own volition and I could no longer hold it back.

I drew in a deep breath.

My fingers gripped the arms of the white plastic chair.

I exhaled.

The apparition began to unfold.



I am ten years old.

I walk through the door. The house is silent but I know she is there. A thick veil of smoke clings to the ceiling casting an ashen pallor throughout the room.

It is happening again, I tell myself. I can already tell it has started.

My mother will not say to me, "Hello, dear. How was your day at school? Come, sit down and have some milk and cookies."

I walk into the house and there is nothing. No sound. Mother is in the bathroom. I don't know how I know that, but I do. I bang on the door. There is only silence. I bang again harder. My tears begin to well up.

"Mother, are you in there? Mom? Mommy? Mother, please open the door."

Finally, I hear her move. I hear the hook slide out of the latch that is holding the door shut. The doorknob turns slowly and she walks out. I gasp at what I see.

Mother has cut off all her hair. Jagged fistfuls of her dark curls cover the bathroom floor. The scissors are still in her hand. She does not look at me. Her eyes stare off into the distance.

"Mother? Are you all right?" I ask. I know she's not all right.

"Your mother is dead," she vacantly replies. The scissors drop to the floor.

Yes, my mother is dead, I think. My mother is dead again. The kind, funny, beautiful woman who loves me is gone, and in her place is this. In her place is a woman who does not know me, who is not funny, who is capable of taking my life.

And I am dead now, too. There is no one left to love me.

This wretched trick has been played on me again. I have let down my guard hoping this time joy could last, hoping this time love could always be there, hoping this time her comforting arms around me would never go away.

But no, everything is taken away again. It always is. I will never trust this awful joy that continues to betray me. To have joy...to have joy ripped away...the continual disappointment only intensifies the pain. I cannot survive this seesaw. I can barely survive my life as it is.

In my young mind I reach a breaking point that will change the course of my life. I decide to bury my joy, to hide it away where it can never be taken from me again. I decide to take this awful memory, along with my hope for joy, and lock them behind a door in the furthest reaches of my subconscious. I vow to myself to never think of these things again.



Me



Back on the beach, my breath catches in my throat. I lower my head into my hands. I remember the vow I made as a ten-year-old and I ache inside.

Oh dear god...what have I done to myself? I have been denying myself joy so I wouldn't have to risk losing it!

My heart breaks for the little girl who was forced to make a brave decision far beyond her years in order to protect herself. It was wrong...it was so wrong to have to forfeit joy in order to limit the pain it would ultimately cause. But joy was simply too big of a risk in the face of growing up the daughter of a misogynist and a crazy woman. Joy had made me vulnerable all those times when I was left to fend for myself. I became afraid of joy. I became afraid of losing joy and of being left with the resulting pain and emptiness. Fear drove me to erase joy from my life. Better to deny it than to have it destroyed by someone else.

Looking back over my life, I wonder what price have I paid for denying myself joy. The answer is immediately obvious. The price for shutting down was the hard shell I had built around myself, the shell I had spent the past four years trying to tear down.

What was my shell made of?

It was made of all the anger, and all the resentment, and all the impatience I spent a lifetime developing in the place of peace and joy.

A ten-year-old believed that peace and joy would make her weak and that anger and resentment would make her strong. That belief continued throughout most of my adult life.

But now, in the white plastic chair at the ocean's edge, I can clearly see that it was the anger and resentment that had made me weak, and that peace and joy could make me strong.

No longer do I need to run from joy. No longer do I have to obey the knee-jerk impulse to pull away whenever joy is close by. A child had made the decision to lock away joy, and now an adult was making a new decision.

I decide on joy.

I look at Karlene, who has finally abandoned her camera and is now frolicking waist deep in swirling indigo waves. A single star glistens above a line of charcoal clouds, the evening star, I muse to myself, consciously allowing my senses to be refilled. The aroma of food being prepared in distant restaurants mingles with the perfumed smell of island dusk. I bask in my glorious plastic chair epiphany and I etch a new decision in my heart.

I will no longer run from joy.

Hardness will have no place in me.

I will no longer forfeit my joy to anger, or resentment, or impatience.

Joy belongs to me.

Joy is who I am.



The Voice



The secret to the creation of life is to feel good about yourself, to get back to your own glory.



Me



Who am I...really?

I am 1955.

I am running wild through the countryside and putting makeup on a Shetland pony.

I am sunbathing on the lawn listening to 60's music.

I am a feather.

I am a champion tree climber.

I am Fourth of July fireworks.

I am Girl Friday for the local newspaper.

I am winner of major awards.

I am mother.

I am entrepreneur.

I am bohemian.

I am free-spirited adventurer.

I am payer of seven cents.

I am friend.

I am store-bought tomatoes.

I am fading freckles and a great smile.

I am road trips to Dwight Yoakam concerts.

I am guffaw.

I am tangerine sunsets.

I am a writer.

I am Osheemodo.

I am a hearer of the Voice.

I am joy.



The Voice



Sensing the presence of Divine Light, in the discovery of who you really are, is the greatest basis of joy one can have.









So, who are YOU . . . really?

 


Epilogue

 
The Final Legend


Tim hadn't spoken a word to me in four years, though I had done everything short of hiring a skywriter to get a message through to him. I had been through an amazing transformation and I wanted to share it with him. I wanted Tim back in my life. I wanted him for a friend.

But Tim continued to ignore my efforts. He didn't know about the changes I had been through and he still felt the need to protect himself. My phone calls continued to go unanswered and my emails went unopened.

Finally, I went back to my old friend Kristine for some assistance. I asked her to relay an invitation to Tim, a challenge to a game of Scrabble. Scrabble is the one temptation so alluring, Tim is powerless in its grasp.

He accepted the match.

The game was played.

I beat him by a hundred points.

We became the best of friends.

 
 
 
 
 
This book is dedicated in loving memory to…

My Mother
Dr. Montchesney Riddle Gottfredson
Alice Kotzbauer
Rodney Dean Taylor
Claude Snelling
Jeanne Guertin
Jack Duane Hendree (“Rags”)