Write my autobiography or memoir

and a fact about me and a facet of my character sort of “jelled” in the middle of the exchange.

I was born fighting. I had to. I was 3 months premature and weighed three and a half pounds at birth. The doctor told my Dad he didn’t think either Mom or I would make it, but we both pulled through.

I was supposed to be born around Valentine’s Day but was born on Thanksgiving instead.

I guess the next time I rail about always having to fight, I need to remember that I’m ALIVE at all simply because I have always been a fighter. Sort of puts things in a different perspective, or it sure did for me yesterday.

Thanks Ruth for helping me see this!

jkd

and today I pasted in some of the pertinent entries here. They’ll have to be modified, but it’s kind of gratifying to know that many of the words are already down, I simply have to arrange them into a cohesive whole.

When Ruth first suggested this to me, it felt completely weird, foreign, as if I was listening to a phone call meant for someone else, not me. (This is a sign of my growth?) It now nseems dubious perhaps, but I get it. Even huge intellectuals rarely spend 50 years trying to do something, and I did.

I’ve always remembered the story my dad told about his doctor’s thesis. His thesis is something about quantum leaps, oddly enough. He built his apparatus, tried to run his experiment, and the apparatus failed. This, or something else, happened for THREE years. He wrote his doctor’s thesis on one successful run of an experiment after three years of failures. He told me, “If you expect failure, you can be pleasantly surprised. But if you’re counting on success, you can be terribly disappointed. It’s often more productive to expect failure.”

I wish the people planning the Iraq war had listened to my dad!

jkd

have affected me, but here’s a little one. It’s ripples are still being felt in my life time, and I doubt the woman even knows how much her comment changed my life….

I was working in a college book store in Florida. We also handled the bursar’s office functions so we collected the money for tuition. We took in a lot of money. One day I said to my coworker, “I must be a terrible person, I keep trying to think of a way that I could get away with keeping this money.”

She said, “Would you do it?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not a bad person, we all think things like that, it’s whether you’d do it or not….”

For all the years of my life until then (I was past 30 when this happened.) I had thought that having selfish, amoral, (fill in the blank with whatever nastiness you’d like) thoughts were the proof that I was indeed the terrible, flawed, foul person my abuser had said I was.

And all of a sudden I was not any worse than most people.

I’m sure this woman has no idea how that 30 second conversation changed things, but it was one of the significant threads pulled out of the abuse, and it has caused me to unravel those “truths” over and over again.

jkd

Abuser,

I wish like hell you’d just dealt with your life rather than spitting negatives on myself and your child.

Did hurting or wounding us make you feel better? Neither of us did anything to you to deserve the hell you created. No one deserves that.

Why didn’t you get some help? Why didn’t you ask? Being a vicious drunk to two little girls didn’t change what your life was or became.

I hated you for many years. I don’t know what I feel about you now, pity and anger, I think.

Your daughter probably feels the rage I have for my family.

I just want your legacy gone. I don’t wish you ill or well, I just want you exorcised from my life and mind.

Judy

Dear Mom & Dad,

God how werid is that to write! I’ve always felt like an orphan.

I suppose if I have one question it’s why wasn’t it enough to not pass on the wounds, to try and overcome them? Why did you just give up (Mom) and hide it (Dad) and damn me to a legacy of pain? I didn’t deserve it. Neither did you, but in the same way that your parents were supposed to care for you and not cause you pain, you owed me the same curtosy.

I really resent that you know. I’m really sorry you had lousy childhoods, but I wish like hell you’d had the emotional fortitude (one or both of you) to get past it enough to not pass it on.

Thank God, it ends with me. I had no kids, which I really regret. I know that I could have purged a part of this by not passing it along and nurturing my own child as a child should be.

I have wondered what you thought your actions would do to me? Did you think there’d be no consequences in my life? Or, did you run away so much that it just never entered your mind?

My guess is that you tried for the latter and when you couldn’t quite manage it, you did your distraction of choice, alcohol (Mom) or some technical problenm (Dad).

I’m paying for the legacy of your abusing parent (Dad) and your absent Dad (Mom). I didn’t do either of them, I didn’t abuse you nor abandon you, but you did or set up both for me. And you did it when I was too young to know or understand what was going on. I carried that overwhelmed, abandoned, abused kid around as flashbacks for my undiagnosed PTSD for nearly 50 years.

I understand why and how things happened to you, but what about me?

You were never there for me.

My half-sister at 10 watched me fall out of my high chair and my 12 year-old half-brother being the only person to react, you both just sat there.

My aunt told me about a visit right after I was born; I was crying in a crib. She asked you, Mom, if you weren’t going to pick me up? And your response? “No, she’ll stop eventually.”

So – WTF did I do to deserve that? I was a baby in both cases.

And the only answer is that both of you were so wrapped up in what was happening to you that I wasn’t a person at all, but a toy and a symbol, rather than a being that mattered.

So, was I simply a marker? You both waited out your divorces before you could marry each other. Was I just a symbol of your new marriage to your former spouses? I think to some extent I must have been.

Except that I was and am a person. Not as bright as my brother, socially adroit as my sister, or whatever. But we’ll never know who I might have been because of the legacy you gave me, the little girl’s pain that I couldn’t shake; couldn’t find the edges of. The stigma of being called “crazy” almost as long as I can remember, the years of feeling defective, that I didn’t fit, had no home, no right to what I had, that I simply wasted the oxygen I breathed.

How can I forgive your vanity and weakness and what it has caused me? There is a part of me that wants to kill you both, it is so enraged. HOW DARE YOU!

But more, there’s a larger part of me that just wants peace. It would be really nice to know my parents would have liked me, would have been proud of me, and even have loved me a little. It would have been nice to to not always cry alone, to actually feel comforted, believe in the comfort that’s given and let it heal me.

One legacy of the abuse is that I have a really hard time accepting comfort as genuine, which has made all of this much harder.

This isn’t easy; it wouldn’t have been easy for you either, but I pity you.

You never healed and I will, or do my damnedest to. Surviving and finding ways to hide or numb down, even if you’re successful doesn’t make the pain go away when you’re alone. (Boy do I know that one!)

I hurt much less than I used to. And, oddly enough, the idea of the two of you as a couple has healed a wound I didn’t even know I had. I don’t feel like an orphan anymore, although I miss you both.

I wish you were here: I wish I could tell you all of this face to face; I wish I could have provided some healing for you; I wish you’d loved me enough to try and push yourselves, and I wish like hell you’d hired someone else as a caretaker, someone who wouldn’t have made this so much harder! Finally, I wish I could be held by my parents and know I was safe and loved; something that apparently was always in short supply.

All children deserve a safe platform, the physical care in their babyhood. All children deserve that, even me.

and have (finally) just found it again, so I have a place to start.

Many of my entries here can be rewritten and/or edited to fit as well. Which means getting up to 10,000-25,000 words isn’t likely to be a problem. It’s the “connective tissue,” organization, and overarcing focus that will be difficult.

I have no idea how long such a thing should be. I can’t imagine anything much larger than Gifts from the Sea or Illusions or 84 Charing Cross Rd. We’ll see.

Also, how do I end it? I have no clue. I suppose I should just follow Lewis Carroll’s advice: “Begin at the beginning, when you reach the end,then stop.” (or something close to that).

jkd