Invisibility and Dark Shadows

Sometimes I feel like I'm an emotional archaeologist. 
I'm a big believer that the only way for me to move past the pain the Crazymaking FOO, particularly my pathologically narcissistic mother and enabling father, caused me from birth to No Contact is to identify it, recognize it and feel the appropriate feelings in the present that I should have been able to experience in the past.

In order to move past the painful moments of the past and recover from the side effects and symptoms that they caused, I have to acknowledge the existence of the event/trauma in order to learn now how to deal with the emotions that it caused.  But...

It's hard to remember.  I used to wonder why I had so many blank spots in my memory.  I knew that I had begun blacking out as I approached my alcoholic bottom, so that memory loss was pretty easy to explain, but my drinking blackouts really only account for a short year or so just after I turned thirty.  In fact, I really didn't start drinking in earnest until my late twenties anyway.  So, why couldn't I remember large portions of time from my childhood, adolesence and young adulthood?  Now I know that my mind created those blank spots and lack of memory for me as a defense mechanism.  I couldn't have survived some of the abuses had I been forced to carry around my feelings around them every day, so I was able to ... dis-remember them until the time came that I was strong enough to dig them up, haul them out into the light and feel what I needed to.

As part of the process of healing - both recovery from alcoholism and recovery from narcissist parents - I've had to do a lot of digging.  When I am assured that I am in a safe frame of mind and can handle the excursion, I pack my rucksack with figurative tools, from pickaxes to toothbrushes, and I hike into the missing areas of my emotional map to do some excavating.  Sometimes I find happy things; friends that I'd forgotten about, hobbies that I used to like, books that I don't remember reading but would like to read again, songs I used to like to sing.

Sometimes I uncover horribly painful, destructive, monstrously toxic and evil things - cursed mummies of memories that block out the Sun - at least for awhile.

Usually, though, what I unearth are these seemingly middle-of-the-road events that aren't very shiny on the surface and don't initially appear to carry much weight.  When I find enough of these cheap trinkets of recall, though, it's easy enough to put them together as part of a bigger picture.  Put enough subtle pain points together in a row and it's not difficult to understand why I had to blank them all out.

I've recently discovered quite a few memories within the same timeframe, and here's how they string together.

I was about five years old at this time and we lived in a very cold place.  The snow in the winter was always above my five year old head.  I remember kindergarten and the first part of first grade (before we moved, yet again.)

The Baton
My earliest memory here is in the Summer.  OS and I were playing tag outside at the edge of the woods.  She had a baton - one of the old style metal ones with white rubber weighted tips on the ends.  Somehow I made her angry - probably because she couldn't catch me, who knows - and she retaliated by ripping one of the rubber tips off her baton and throwing it into the woods, possibly at me.  She repeated this with the second tip and I remember feeling great fear, not for my physical safety from her, though she was nine or ten years old at the time, but that I was going to get in trouble.  I can't think why I would fear being in trouble based a 'bad deed' that OS did, other than to believe that this pattern was probably part of my experience at the time, already.

Of course, OS ran inside to tell (at that time) narcissistic - I'm just going to start calling him ENF, I think - dad that Vanci had broken OS's baton.  According to her, I ripped the end tips off her baton and threw them both into the woods.  I protested.  Guess who was whipped twenty times with a leather belt? 

Now, I know from my own experience as a parent that most siblings go through phases in which they will use their sisters or brothers as a shield at the drop of a hat.  I get that.  My DD's have blamed each other for broken dishes, missing items, messes and myriad other minor problems over the years.  I'm even sure that in at least a few circumstances one of my daughters has paid the price for a crime that she didn't commit.  (And thank my lucky stars that 'punishment' in my house has always been logical and condusive to growth, rather than just physical abuse all dressed up as 'discipline.'  At worst, my DD's have missed out on ice cream due to a crime they didn't commit, or been forced to go without brain-killers like TV in error.)  Still, it's hard to always have the time to sort out what's happening between siblings, and mistakes happen.  I wouldn't fault any parent for that. 

What strikes me about this particular incident with me, though, is three-fold.  First, I distinctly remember attempting to plead my case and being summarily shouted down by both OS and the parents.  It didn't matter what I had to say; the decision to 'punish' me was made before I could even say, "I didn't do it."  I remember trying desperately to be heard, and I remember being told that if I wasn't quiet, I'd have more 'whippings.' 

Second, I remember that, after my poor little bottom had been beaten black and blue - I was finally able to get them to hear me saying, through sobs, that I hadn't done this awful thing my sister claimed.  And they finally listened, not because of me, but because GCYB who was three or four years old at the time, piped up that he'd seen OS throw her baton tips away into the woods himself. 

Third, and most terribly frightening, I remember that OS was made to apologize to me for allowing me take her 'licks' with the belt, and then they asked me if I wanted OS to be whipped too.  Holy hannah, who does that to a five year old?  Of course I said no - a normal five year old doesn't want to see any other person undergoing torture, I'm pretty sure.  So... I was beaten for OS's bad temper, then I was put in a position to choose to protect my abuser (OS) from one of my other abusers (ENF) because the Golden Child YB finally told the truth in my defense after I'd been beaten.  NM, true, true, true to her form, just watched all this transpire.  She didn't come to my aid, but I'm sure that her 'non-participation' in this cluster fuck of abuse absolves her of responsibility in her mind.

The scariest part to me now is how incredibly non-existent Vanci was in all this.  I seem to have existed even at five years old as a scapegoat, whipping girl and object.  Even then at that young and tender age, they were conscientiously and consistently stripping me of my humanity.

The Spot on the Table
This is from the same period of time and house.   We'd been away for a few days, as a family, though I don't remember where. 
What I do remember is that we came home and there had been some anciliary adult taking care of our house.  Shortly after arriving home, they sat us all three down at the big oak dining room table and ENF proceeded to rant and rage about a spot on the table.  It looked like a cigarette burn.

ENF and NM smoked.  We, at 3, 5 and 9 years old, did not.  Somehow, though, even though we were young and didn't have access to cigarettes and weren't ever home without NM AND we'd all just been away from the home together, ENF decided that one of us three children were somehow resonsible for the cigarette burn on the table. 

After who knows how long being subjected to verbal abuse and rage, we were all 'punished' yet again with bare-assed whippings at the end of ENF's leather belt.  What I remember is that we were all being 'punsihed' because ENF was convinced that one or all of us were lying.  NM, again, stood by and watched this.

Apart from the obvious gaps in the Crazymakers' logic on this one - we'd been gone with them, there had been another adult (likely a smoker too as it was in the early '80's) in the house while we were gone, they were the adult smokers in the house - this incident just falls right in with the underlying patterns of crazy rage directed at the kids in the house as an outlet.  ENF was the active participant in the abuse, but NM was compicit with her inaction.

Now, all these years later, a couple of other things come to mind.  First, I remember that spot on the table.  I've seen it many times since I was five years old as they still have and use the same table.  I decided during some family meal years ago as I stared at that marr on the table that the spot is not a cigarette burn; I'm pretty sure it's a flaw in the wood and varnish that they just hadn't noticed before.  Second, I'm fairly certain now that I remember ENF and NM having a fight in the car on the way home.  Which makes me very certain that a lot of these incidents of rage toward us from ENF were simply his (f'd up) way of releasing the tension between him and NM in their (f'd up) marriage. 

And that, my friends, is about as f'd up as it gets.

Dark Shadows
Last significant memory from that house, and thank goodness because this is getting long!
I wasn't in school yet, but I remember that OS was.   I stayed home with YB and NM, who was a pretty active homemaker at the time. 

When we lived in this house NM chose to take a nap, on her bed, every afternoon, with YB.  During this two hour mommy and golden child nap time, I was not required to take a nap.  It was, however, my job to stay on the outside of NM's closed bedroom door and keep quiet. 
Okay, sanity break:  who does this?  Who leaves a five year old on her own to roam an otherwise empty house for two hours while her grown woman mother sleeps behind closed doors with the three year old son?  Wow.  She should have just given me the keys to the car and a Miller Lite tall boy.

Okay, back to the story.  Eventually, of course, I figured out how to turn the TV on.  Of the three or four channels available to us, one happened to broadcast the show Dark Shadows during nap time.  I don't remember any of the story lines or plots, but I do remember: vampires, monsters hiding in dark places, absolutley inappropriate for a five year old quasi-nudity, and being so absolutely terrified that when NM woke up from her afternoon nap, I'd often be sitting on the floor in the middle of the hallway outside NM's bedroom door. 
This went on for months. 

There are an awful lot of disturbing things to ponder in this scenario, but here's the sticking point for me.  NM later told this story over and over again in company in her 'isn't it cute' voice.  But the way she told it, man, in retrospect, what she really meant was:  Vanci was so difficult that I had to shut her out of my life every single day.  Even then, she did 'bad' things that she wasn't supposed to.  The special child in my life was safe behind closed doors with me, the good mother.  Look at what she did to herself without me there to stop her.  And look at how much she needed me, she had to sit all by herself alone in the hall waiting for me once she realized that I was the only thing that could save her from her 'bad' self. 

The fact that I remember these incidents so clearly now is astounding to me, and speaks to the depth of emotional pain that they caused me. 

Well... I think that's enough loot pulled out of this tomb of mysteries for one day.  What a lot we've learned about this endangered species from the past, don't you think?  They made me invisible, took away my humanity, broke my spirit, took away reality, isolated me, disfavored me and created scar tissue thick enough to hide the truth of my memories behind cutesy stories or outright denial of the abuse.

My primary take away is this:  the pain and suffering that the NFOO in all its incarnations caused me always existed.  If this is the way that life was for me in my earliest memories at five years old... wow, nothing ever changed. 

Thank all the saints, gods, apostles and little baby Jebus's that I got away.  And thank you, my friends, for listening and reminding me that I might have to feel those yucky feelings in order to get through them, but I don't have to expose myself to further abuse from these people ever again.

Love,
Vanci