Kitchen wall writing by Maisy, Age 14
My little family is shattered due to my actions with regard to what we think is an addiction to alcohol and its requisite behaviors.
My life has been one of extraordinary privilege. Amazing parents, I am conceived and birthed in Japan and physically carried for two years by a young mama-san by the name of Totsui. I never walk during this time ~ yet I am held, always. Later my primary socialization is in Germany ~ beautiful Germany.
I have no memory of my mother’s voice or her touch ~ the only visual I have is one of tears. Yet I know from brain research that I could hear and was imprinted with her heartbeat and voice while in her womb.
My father, a United States national record-setting swimmer and speaker of seven languages, retires from the United States Army. He is a writer who lives during the Great Depression in the writers’ colony of Paris. His bloodline is Irish and he is a self-taught intellectual who travels the world as a nuclear war expert and presents “peace through preparedness”.
My mother’s fine arts degree prepares her to play and write for each instrument in a symphony orchestra. A former beauty queen and in the first United States Women’s Army Corps, she possesses perfect pitch, is elegant, and stunning. She is a trained water ballet swimmer. She has the voice of an angel.
The other side of this finely sharpened sword is brittle, notched, misshapen, and uneven…and shockingly twisted. Disfigured by today’s standards and by my own torched memory and soul.
It is my belief that our secrets can and will destroy us.
My mother’s three primary secrets involved being First Nation at a time when indigenous cultures were considered a scandal; coping with severe mental illness with tendencies toward extreme violence; and, what we thought was the misuse of alcohol and prescription drugs.
There are daily episodes of sometimes extreme unthinkable violence. These occur when I am alone with my mother. I am the fourth of five children. I have no knowledge of what my siblings experienced. We are like islands, together yet not touching. We do not speak of what we see. I do not know why.
A memory at the age of nine: I am pushed up against a wall watching and listening to the clacking of a gurney covered in blood with my mother under a sheet. I clean the dripping blood from the ceiling and walls. She has attempted suicide. Again, I do not know how or why.
At twelve years of age, I testify in a court of law so I might live with my father at the completion of what has become their dissolution of marriage and a two-year custody battle. The State of Florida awards me to my father. My mother disowns me.
Several years later I drop out of high school and announce to my father on Christmas Day, I am pregnant. A dear aunt touring with the American Embassies around the world has flown in to take me to spend two years in Hong Kong with her.
While I will fight mightily for your right to decide whether or not to birth, I believe children do not ask to be born. After numerous options, some illegal, I choose to keep my precious child.
How can it be? Here I am twirling on a planet in a galaxy experiencing one one-trillionth of all that is developing. So, do I surrender? Do I thank my higher power for this opportunity? Even for this most exquisitely disastrous experience? It is all I have. It is all that I am. All that I hope to become. This being inside me is there for a reason. Maybe it is to ultimately receive all my hungered love.
The heart is simply two question marks facing each other. It is hollow. Empty.
It is 1966. What is love? Is it ownership? Is it a ponderous responsibility? Has my higher power given me this capability to know love in its purest form ~ as a child cradling her stunning children in the midst of a drug-infested commune full of mental illnesses, open marriages, and violence?
There is a repeat of severe violence, drugs, and alcohol. I remember thinking, “Oh. This hurts. I must be home.” The father of my children is diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. By the time I reach 21, I birth three incredible children ~ and, devastated beyond breath, bury one.
It is my belief, even though life patterns modeled for me are different, that my deepest dirt-filled ditch of bloodied sketches and sounds, that there were and are wise, tragically courageous gifts handed down to me by my biological parents. If I can continue the quest, I will look to them, remember them, and align them with my heart.
As the years pass it is my fervent prayer that I will never be like my mother. Yet I find at the age of fifty, I am identical. I drink to blackout until I hit a three-month blackout upon the death of my brother. I decide it is enough. Help is requested and freely given midst all the pain I cause.
A dear friend, Jenny, shares over tea this very morning (January 10, 2018, 10:13 am):
“If you could just let go of your children’s opinions of the family splintering and hurt you have caused…they are in their prime and have full rich lives
which don’t appear to include you.
And that is okay.
We must give wings to our children ~ so they can rise up and start anew.
In many types of recovery, we begin again.
We know this each day, we begin again, dearest Fawn. So, just do it. Give it all to your higher power. Rise up.”
Just do it.
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