Sunlight on My Shadow

by Judy Liautaud

  “Don’t look at the sun,” Johnny said. “It’ll hurt your eyes.” We had to remind ourselves of the most basic safety tips because our minds were off into outer space. Of course our pupils were dilated to saucers, so this was good advice.

  Over and over the ocean waves immersed us in their rhythm. Soon my skin was the same temperature as the water, and I couldn’t decipher the barrier between my body and the ocean. The pulse of the sea was my heartbeat, the rise and fall of the waves, my breath. I became the sea, the sun, and the heavy humid air. I felt like I could fly. I felt one with God.

  We only took LSD a few times, but something changed within me. I don’t know if it was the orange wedge that did it or if I was just ready, but I began to revere all things natural and of the earth. When I got back to school, I stopped wearing make-up: I thought that was disingenuous. I stopped cutting my hair and let it fly in the breeze. I stopped wearing frilly, fancy, or binding clothes in lieu of loose cotton and natural fibers. I strove for a pure version of me; I was one with the earth, like a Native American who had found sacred ground. I felt one with God while I watched the waves come in and crash on the rocky shore. I was spiritually uplifted watching pelicans dip for fish on the seashore or the clouds form into puff balls against the indigo sky.

  It had been several months now since I had attended Mass; my white leather missal was left at home, tucked away in my skirted dresser drawer. The ritual of the Catholic Mass—stand up, sit down, now kneel, now stand up—began to feel ridiculous. We were sheep following man-made directives with no other purpose than to prove we were followers. I didn’t think God heard me when I prayed those million rosaries to my savior. I wasn’t saved from my trouble. And besides, if my Catholic God did hear me, I knew he didn’t like me much. I had fallen away and violated his sacred law of purity.

  And the guilt, that raw dark wound I felt from failing to abide by the moral code, was all that necessary? Was it perhaps even harmful to my fragile young psyche? Maybe all that I had suffered could be eased. I started to realize that I had to buy-in to the guilt to let it eat away at my self-esteem. Perhaps I could forgive myself and love myself for who I was and what I had been through, and the guilt could melt away.

  I started looking at organized religion as a collection of dogma that mostly served to produce guilt and shame, yet I grieved for my loss of faith. I reminisced about my childhood days, when I felt protected and guided by God. I wanted to pray, but when I tried, the words seemed hollow and meaningless. I wanted that feeling of rejuvenation as I attended early Mass before my school day started. But now, nature became my new god; walks in the woods grew to be more satisfying than Latin words and mindless ritual.

  I believed in giving love and sweet caring because of how it made me feel, not to please God. I did it for goodness’ sake alone, not because I was afraid of burning in hell. I wasn’t sure what happened to us when we died, but I suspected that we just turned to dust. That was a frightening thought, but if the God I believed in might not exist, then heaven probably didn’t exist either. It was easier to believe there was no hell. I couldn’t believe a loving God would ban people to hell and let them burn forever. Maybe man invented this stuff to manage the congregation. To make them follow the desired path, and to invent answers to the meaning of life.

  For many years, I longed to return to that place of oneness that I felt from the effects of LSD at Big Sur. I took acid a few more times, but I never had the same spiritual awakening as the trip to Big Sur. It began to feel like it was too risky to increase the dose to repeat the experience. Rumors went around saying some of the acid was cut with nasty stuff that turned your mind to mush. How could you know? Then I had friends of friends who reported flashbacks that permanently screwed up their minds. Then there was the news report of some dude who took LSD and jumped from the fortieth floor because he thought he could fly. As the risks piled up, the drug lost its appeal. But I continued during my adult life to yearn for that place of peaceful oneness, to seek a path of spirituality that was introduced to me by the LSD.

  DAVE AND JUDY’S WEDDING IN THE MEADOW 1970

  OUR CABIN IN FRASER COLORADO

  PART III - COMING TO TERMS WITH MY PAST

  CHAPTER 40

  ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

  Johnny stayed in California and I returned to Southern Illinois for the rest of the semester. At the end of the year, I decided to transfer to my dream school, University of Colorado in Boulder. Now that I was a sophomore with good grades from my freshman year at SIU, I could gain admission. Boulder was full of hippie-type free thinkers, nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills, and in my opinion, way cooler than SIU.

  By the end of my first semester, I met the man I would marry. I remembered Dad’s words about not revealing the secret to my husband, but I didn’t want to start off a relationship with that burden. Dave would load up his guitar and we’d hike above the Flat Irons to Dream Canyon. We called it our church. Nestled below the Continental Divide, perched on the side of a rocky outpoint, we gazed at the pine-studded canyon cut by the river far below while Dave sang, “In My Life” by the Beatles. “There are places I remember all my life … but of all these friends and lovers, there is no one that compares with you.” The stunning panorama sent our spirits soaring, or maybe it was the killer weed, but it was up there that I told Dave my secret. He didn’t react with shock or judgment but took it in stride as he strummed and sang. I was grateful and falling in love.

  We started out living together, which, for Mom and Dad, was salt in my wound of shame. “Oh, Judy, how could you do this?” Mom lamented. She cried over the phone and that made me cry. I thought, “She just doesn’t get it. Here I’ve met this cool guy who can sing and play the guitar and I’m in love and she’s crying about it.” The wedge that kept us from understanding each other after my teen pregnancy widened.

  Mom hadn’t met Dave yet and apparently got worried about his appearance when she heard his name was Rodriguez. She phoned me to ask her burning question: “Judy, is he dark?”

  I knew this meant dark-skinned, but I whined, “What do you mean, dark?”

  “Well, you know, dark-skinned.”

  “No, Mom, he’s not darrrrk. His grandpa is from Spain; they’re fair-skinned.”

  That still didn’t make Mom like him.

  In an effort to shed the lingering shame of my teen pregnancy, I told myself that I didn’t care what my parents thought anymore. I was losing at the game of pleasing them, anyway. Ricky Nelson sang, “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.” These words rang true. I tried to be strong and independent, devoid of caring what others thought, but why did Mom’s reference to me “living in sin” cut so deep to my core? And why did I cringe with embarrassment when we checked into a hotel without being Mr. and Mrs. if I really didn’t care what people thought?

  Dave and I didn’t call ourselves hippies, because we weren’t living in Haight-Ashbury or giving free love, but we believed much of the hippie creed: free thinking. We questioned the cultural standards, including marriage by law, my Catholic religion, and the pursuit of financial success.

  Growing up, I had everything I needed in a material sense. Yet Dad came from nothing and started working at the age of seven, sweeping floors in a newsroom to help feed his family that had just arrived in Chicago. Survival was Dad’s daily concern. Because of his hard work and entrepreneurial spirit, I was never hungry or cold, and I never had to get a job. At home, Dad just took out his money clip and peeled off a few bills whenever I told him I needed something. By the time I was in my twenties, it was easy to throw out Dad’s measuring stick for success and abandon pursuit of the almighty dollar. Today I have conveniently softened my views and no longer believe that pursuing your inner values and making money are mutually exclusive.

  Cop out or not, Dave and I had to eat, so he worked for $4.25 an hour at a ski shop, and I worked as a maid for $3 an hour at the Idlewild Ski Lodge. We rented a one-r
oom cabin in the Fraser Valley from Dave’s Grandma Miller for $40 a month. Fraser was called the icebox of the nation. Our cabin was the real icebox—no insulation, no water, and no electricity. We kept warm with our potbelly stove; Dave woke up several times a night to stoke and feed the fire as subzero drafts swirled through the cracks in our barn-board walls. My dad used to say, “Ferchrissakes, Judy, you can’t live on love alone.” I can imagine how heartbroken he was to see how far astray his daughter had been led by this cowboy from Colorado.

  Dave and I acquiesced to a legal marriage, but for us, it was just a piece of paper we signed for the sake of the old folks. In a mountain meadow outside our cabin, Dave’s Grandma Miller, a freelance preacher, helped us with the “I do’s,” which we never said—too conventional. Instead of exchanging rings, we shared water, like the aliens from the book Dave was reading, Stranger in a Strange Land. I wore a handmade, yellow-Swiss-dotted pioneer dress; Dave wore a red-plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, and mountain-man hiking boots. Mom, Dad, and my brothers attended, worrying about the lasting nature of our vows and shaking their heads at the bizarre ceremony, yet also a little relieved that we would no longer be living in sin.

  When I met Dave, he was working as a welder at the Coors Beer factory in Golden, Colorado, saving money for an extended trip. He said he’d marry me as long as I was willing to join him in his dream to travel the world. It sounded like an appealing adventure: blinded by love, I followed his lead. We used our wedding money and an inheritance from my godmother, Deds, to travel through Mexico, Central America, and South America. We took a boat to the Galapagos Islands and rented a cabin in the highlands of the main island. We foraged for fallen avocados as soon as they fell from the trees, harvesting them before the birds could convert them into seed carcasses. We rented a hut on the shores of the Bonda River in Colombia and picked wild mangos. We hiked along the Inca trail in Peru to visit the ruins of Machu Picchu. We were roughing it but were seasoned for hardship after living in the cabin in Fraser. We stretched our $5,000 for a year and a half by shopping at farmers markets and staying in hotels for $1.50 a night.

  At the end of our travels, we realized it didn’t matter much where we landed, but a place was what you made it. Each city began to look like the one before. Having spent time with the poverty and filth, we longed to be back in the United States, where the toilets flushed and the tissue paper was handy. We moved back to Fraser, Colorado, and I soon became pregnant with our first child.

  Determined not to repeat the horrific birth experience I had at the home, I devoured books on home birth, and on January 28th, 1974, gave birth to Kiona in our cabin in Fraser. She was the baby who would be mine to keep. I didn’t hold her right away. There were complications with the placenta, and she lay quietly in her bassinet until long after the doctor had gone. I picked her up and marveled at her rosebud mouth and full head of hair. This time I was proud of my body and how it could grow and birth a child. And how did she know how to suck with such fervor on the first try? It must have been her exceptional intelligence, I mused with motherly pride.

  As I nursed and rocked her in our mountain cabin, my love for her blossomed. She went everywhere with me in a papoose carrier. We cross-country skied to the laundromat to wash diapers. I brought her from room to room with me as I cleaned the ski lodge. During her first year, I didn’t trust a babysitter to care for her properly, so I never left her. My Kiona was precious and my world revolved around her needs. This was sweet and at the same time overwhelming.

  The love I felt for Kiona caused me to second-guess my decision to give away my own child in 1967. I hadn’t made an informed decision. I wondered how I could have let it happen like that. Now it seemed inhuman and heartless. I wasn’t much better than the mother gerbil I saw gnawing on her newborn like an apple in her paws. The whole birth and relinquishment was contrived, unnatural—unconscionable. What if I gave her away to incompetent people, thieves, or thugs? I didn’t know anything about them. Did they have enough money to give her a good life? Did they laugh together? Did they love every little thing about her? I didn’t linger on these doubts or let them take over, but they sat there, silent, churning in some uneasy place in my heart. I yearned to know what became of this child I gave away.

  After our trip to South America, Dave heard about people strapping kites on their backs and jumping off mountains. Adventurous at heart, he learned the hard way, spraining ankles and getting caught in turbulence on the Continental Divide that bounced him around like a rag doll under his hang glider. I was sure I would be widowed at a young age, but his skills and wisdom improved until he became the Masters of Hang Gliding Champion in 1978.

  We moved from Colorado to Utah to start our own business, Wasatch Wings, because of the ideal terrain and weather for teaching and flying hang gliders. My dad financed our start-up business, although he was skeptical about its money-making prospects. We struggled. It was a seasonal business. We laid ourselves off each winter so we could draw unemployment. We were milking and benefiting from the system we criticized, yet living our dream of making money at something we loved. We barely made enough to feed the family and pay the rent. My main jobs at Wasatch Wings were bookkeeping and designing and sewing hang-gliding harnesses.

  I never was as passionate about flying as Dave, but I did manage to learn to soar, staying aloft for hours above the Widowmaker in the Salt Lake Valley. The ridge got its name from the motorcycle races that were held on the steep incline. I spent my hang-gliding career teetering between the love of feeling the wind beneath my wings and fright at being suspended thousands of feet from Earth by aluminum tubing and Dacron. I was careful to fly when conditions were smooth and the weather stable. During the years, we lost friends and professionals to the sport, but kept at it, always trying to make the sport safer.

  By 1979, I was pregnant with our second child. Eventually we upgraded our living situation to a single-wide trailer complete with running water and an avocado-green washer and dryer set that my dad bought for us. This is where my not-so-little Tessie, nine pounds, thirteen ounces, was born at home with the help of a midwife. Kiona was now five and was by my side as Tessie slipped into Dave’s hands and took her first breath. I hadn’t been planning on a second child right then, but was grateful that she found her way when she did. She was my blessing in disguise.

  My yearning to make the birth experience better for women, and perhaps a desire to heal from my teen birth, propelled me to study and become a lay midwife. The home-birth movement was well established in the Salt Lake Valley, perhaps because of the underground polygamist fundamentalists who all had their babies at home. I studied for seven years as an apprentice under another lay midwife and eventually delivered babies on my own. I felt a deep spiritual connection as I gave support to laboring women and was privileged to be present when their babies took their first breaths. But, as a lay midwife, again, I found myself on the fringe of society, going against the establishment and subjecting myself to scorn by the medical profession and some of the public who shook their fingers at our activities. Doctors did not believe lay midwives had the education, skills, or technology to be delivering babies at home.

  But we believed in it like a religion. We attempted to weed out the high-risk cases by doing prenatal checks: if there were any warning signs, like high blood pressure, protein in the urine, breech presentation, or a stalled labor, we would refer the woman to the hospital. We heard stories of botched hospital births and blamed it on trying to fool nature with the flow of drugs to speed up labor, slow it down, take away pain. We believed that nature had it perfectly designed and we didn’t want to intervene unless safety was being jeopardized. We were diligent in our pursuit of safety. It worked, most of the time. But if you are in the profession long enough, there creeps up the unforeseen complication. Seven years into it, I helped deliver a baby with shoulder dystocia, which means the shoulders were stuck in the birth canal after the head had delivered. We took the baby to the hospital
shortly after birth. The resilience of the newborn amazed me, again, and the baby was okay, but this incident scared me enough that I quit lay midwifery to go back to school to become a doctor.

  After three years, I got my undergraduate degree and finished the requirements for medical school with a high GPA. Maybe it was my age—I was now forty—or my mediocre scores on the entrance exam, but I wasn’t accepted to the University of Utah Medical School. It was a bitter disappointment. I had secretly questioned whether I had the right stuff. I thought I was probably smart enough, but didn’t know if I had all it took, emotionally. Displays of anger still put me in a frozen state, and I wondered how I would react when I was in training and got scolded by one of the doctors. I could just see the unwelcome tears start to flow. Was I tough enough? I also worried about births with a negative turnout. I was sure I would second-guess whatever I had done. Birth can be a risky business regardless of whether it is at home or in the hospital.

  Yet, I loved the work. I was honored to stand by the laboring moms, offering encouragement and back rubs, and finally, sharing in the baby’s miraculous first breaths. I felt spiritually connected to the dear women whose births I attended. Perhaps these home births served as a way to redo my own teen birth and make it better, vicariously.

  Even though I told Dave about my teen pregnancy, I was still obeying the vow of secrecy, not necessarily because of my dad’s instructions, but because it had saved my reputation and I was ashamed. My intention was to just slice those nine months out of my life: simply put a patch over the time that was ripped from my life.

  But now, with the birth of Tessie and my work as a midwife, the patch was wearing thin. I came to understand that the only way to heal from the trauma was to take off the cover-up and attend to the wound. Take a good look. Let it air out. Share the secret.