Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  “I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you in so long, Mom, but I’ve been going through a terrible time.”

  She nodded, indicating that she understood.

  “About two years ago, I started having memories,” I said. “At first I didn’t want to believe it, but it soon became clear that I was a little girl being abused. The person abusing me was Dad.”

  My voice was shaking. I felt a little ill. At first she said nothing. She was sitting at the end of the bed and I was on a chair facing her. Alvin was a little distance away.

  “It started at Grandma’s house and continued in that room on East 94th Street. That’s why I was so scared to stay in that room.” Fear slipped into my breast. This could be the end of my relationship with my mother.

  As I spoke her face transformed. I could see the horror of what I was telling her about my father, her husband, was beginning to sink in.

  She started speaking slowly. “It was a time that I was worried about him. He was acting kind of crazy during those years, getting angry for no reason. Lashing out all the time, getting into fights. I thought it was because he was unhappy at work. It’s why I agreed to move to Toronto.”

  “I didn’t remember until now so maybe he didn’t remember what he did either.” I explained dissociation to her and how given that his father physically and emotionally abused him, he might have dissociated from his traumatic experiences, too. I didn’t disclose the multiple personalities to her. I figured it would be too much for her.

  “Will you come and talk to your dad?” Even after what I told her, he was still her most important concern.

  “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I explained how I was healing and didn’t want to do anything that would set me back.

  “Please.” She was begging now. “We need our family back. You’ve got to talk to him, please.”

  I said I would think about it, and she and Alvin got up to leave. Alvin gave me a hug.

  Later Alvin wrote down his experience of the meeting. His main observation was that it was as if my mother and I were having two totally different conversations; it was as if we were in different rooms talking about different subjects. He saw our tragic inability to communicate with each other.

  She didn’t apologize or say anything remotely compassionate to me. She didn’t get angry with me or reject me. She believed me, at least in that moment. And she knew it was wrong. That was, in part, what I needed. Opening her arms and holding me, gently stroking my head and crying with me would have been good, but that wasn’t my mother. How I longed for that mother.

  After she left, I called Marcia to ask her opinion about seeing my father.

  “I don’t think you’re ready, Judy. Really, it’s very risky. Maybe next time.”

  After I hung up, I thought, What next time? Alvin is here now. I don’t think I could do it on my own. My mother had never begged me to do anything for her. He must be making her life hell. And talking to her hadn’t set me back. I hadn’t heard from the alters or lost time or had an anxiety attack. I was fine.

  * * *

  In the morning, I drove my rental car to my parents’ place. It was a thirty-minute drive but it felt like hours. Staring out the windshield with my hands glued to the steering wheel, I drove the familiar route to their suburban condo. My chest felt as if it would explode. I was terrified. Never in my life have I felt more afraid to come face to face with Jack, the villain of my alters’ imaginations. But I didn’t turn back.

  My parents lived in a comfortable two-bedroom townhouse in one of the residential complexes springing up all over the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale. Alvin greeted me at the door. We walked by the kitchen and the dining room on the right; the bedroom where I usually stayed was on the left. There in the living room in his La-Z-Boy chair was Jack. It was my father’s energy that made him so attractive to people, but now that energy was gone. His graceful body had shrunken to an almost skeletal form. He seemed feeble. Of course I knew he was old, but I think the alters had to see that he could no longer hurt me. My fear lifted.

  Alvin took me to the four-seater couch next to Jack. It was a strange place for such a confrontation. Like most of these apartments in Florida, everything was soft pastel and soft pillows. My mother was sitting on a chair opposite. I was closest to my father but on the far side of the couch.

  Alvin held my hand and I began.

  “I think you know why I’m here.”

  Jack said nothing, which was something new. I had no idea what he was thinking or feeling. I held Alvin’s hand tighter. Alvin was keeping me in the room, preventing me from dissociating. It was all I could do to stay present.

  My first emotion was anger. “I’ve been going through a lot. Two years ago I started remembering what you did to me. I was only five years old when you got me to touch you. Only five years old. How could you?”

  He found his strength to challenge me. “What do you mean by ‘touch’? What kind of touch?”

  I stood my ground. “You made me touch your penis.”

  “I didn’t do that. That’s disgusting. I would never do such a thing.”

  “And that was just the beginning. It got much worse when we moved to East 94th Street.”

  “Stop.” He collapsed into his chair. “I didn’t do that. I don’t know why you’re saying that.” Now he was quieter. My mother might have been giving him signs to shut up.

  I was having trouble speaking. My heart was pounding so hard that I could barely hear anything else. I didn’t want to start crying in front of them; I didn’t want to show him my pain. But the confrontation was overwhelming, and I started to regress. I was becoming a small child. I couldn’t think of what to say. I was confused.

  Finally, I managed to say one more thing before I became a child, confused, scared, and sad: “I’m sorry I didn’t remember earlier, because then you would have suffered all your life instead of me suffering.”

  My mother spoke for the first time: “Okay then, can we put all this behind us now?”

  Even now as I write this, my heart is broken.

  “Judy and I are leaving now,” Alvin said. He took my hand and led me out. Once we were outside, he put his arms around me and I wept. He held me as the grief overwhelmed me.

  “Do you want me to drive you back to the hotel?”

  “No, I’m okay,” I said.

  When I got home I wrote in my journal: “Is this the final chapter? He never questioned that I had been abused. It was a pathetic defence. Confronted him and got over the fear. Got back my mom.

  “Brave new world. I am not alone and Alvin was wonderful, just wonderful.”

  Despite having confronted my father, not much changed. The alters did not see the old man sitting in his easy chair as the Jack who terrified them. Perhaps they realized he was gone for good.

  * * *

  A few months later, the “false memory syndrome” controversy made the news, causing a backlash against recovered childhood memories. The so-called syndrome has never been proven and has since been discredited, but both my parents grabbed on to it as a way of maintaining that the abuse never happened without blaming me. The therapist must have influenced me, they said. I had had flashes of the memories before I went to Marcia, but they didn’t want to hear that. Denial was always my mother’s modus operandi.

  I talked to my mother now and then on the telephone, but I never went to Florida again. Alvin and Glenna had moved back to Guelph after their Ottawa restaurant went bankrupt. A couple of years later, my parents moved to Guelph, so that Alvin could help my mother deal with my father’s illnesses. Alvin said it was up to me whether I wanted to see them and he would support whatever decision I made. After much deliberation, I decided that not seeing them now that I was feeling better would be abusive on my part, but I remained wary around my father and kept my distance. My relationship with my mother remained strained unti
l her ninety-fifth year, the year that she died.

  My father died for me that day in Florida. The day he actually died, some ten years later, I felt nothing. I was in Costa Rica on holiday and couldn’t get back for the funeral. It’s the only good thing my father ever did for me, I would joke. Even my fiercest feminist friends couldn’t understand how I could feel nothing when my father died. “Why should I feel anything for a man who violated and betrayed me?” I said. Now I realize that I experienced the grief of losing my father that day in Florida. Jack, the bogeyman of my childhood alters, was so tied up with my charismatic, funny, brave, exciting father that once the fear was gone so was the love. And he didn’t fight for his daughter. He just let me go.

  Epilogue

  Is It Over?

  Following my trip to Florida, I made a lot of progress in therapy. After confronting my father, I was able to bring the different fragments of my personality together. One by one, each alter disappeared. That summer, I had another prophetic dream.

  I am in the backyard with my old lover Jeremiah. High up in a tree is a little boy. Jeremiah says to the little boy, “Revenge. You want revenge. Come on down here.” The boy laughs and climbs down. He is very small but sturdy with a fierce look on his face and dark skin. He is only big enough to be three or four, but he has the manner of an older child. He looks at me fiercely and then over the fence where there are other children. He looks again, turns, walks away, and climbs over the fence. All the children are cheering.

  Later in therapy, I found out the boy was Trouble, the one who was most afraid of my relationships with men. He had taken his leave. By that time, only Sophie remained. And at some point, she, too, was gone. As Marcia had predicted, I had integrated the alters. I was now the guardian Simon, the playful Lobo, the skeptical Phoebe, the fun-loving Sophie, the furious HIM, and the five others, too. Whenever I feel sick or fatigued, I stop to rest and see what’s wrong. Sometimes the source is physical and sometimes it’s emotional, but it’s no longer Trouble.

  My superpowers have mostly deserted me, too. I get scared now — my fearlessness is gone. But I can still dissociate in a dangerous situation. In January 2009, I was one of eight Jewish women who occupied the Consulate General of Israel in Toronto to protest Israel’s attack on Gaza. I was in charge of negotiating with the police. We got in by pretending to be tourists. Once all eight of us were inside, we sat on the floor and declared, “We are occupying the consulate in protest of Israel’s attack on Gaza.”

  Instantly, a wall came down around us protecting the staff from the threat. Two security guards ordered us to leave.

  “We’re not leaving,” I said.

  One of the younger women declared, “We’re not leaving until Israel leaves Gaza.”

  The older security guard grabbed one of her legs and started dragging her out.

  “Take your hands off her!” I ordered him in my warrior voice. In the meantime another woman was filming the whole scene with her smartphone. When the guard saw her, he ran over, slapped her across the face, and grabbed her phone. That’s when the dissociation kicked in.

  “Do you know who we are? You’re looking at some very prominent women in Canada. If you touch one of us again, you’re going to jail,” I said calmly, but firmly.

  “Forget it,” he sneered. “You’re on Israeli territory now. Canadian law can’t protect you.”

  “This is a consulate, not an embassy. It is not Israeli territory,” I proclaimed with total certainty, having no idea whether what I said was true or not. It’s not, but it’s amazing how people will believe you if you speak with confidence.

  “Well then,” he stuttered, “we pay the rent here and we want you out.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until the police force us to.”

  “They’ve already been called.”

  “Fine.”

  Then the other security guard, silent until then, said, “I’m a police officer.”

  “Let’s see your ID,” I demanded. When he showed his RCMP credentials, I said, “Get him out of here.” And he did.

  Once the police arrived they were very polite, supportive even. Nevertheless they handcuffed us and put us in the police wagon for almost an hour. In the meantime, our supporters had gathered at the back of the building, where the police had escorted us out.

  We had a support network that was getting updates and sending out media releases. When we were finally released without charge, we faced a barrage of cameras and reporters. I noticed the son of a friend of mine was in the crowd, grinning from ear to ear. He had been arguing with his father about tactics like occupations, and here was a friend of his father’s pulling off the kind of direct action he supported. When my eyes connected with his, he gave me the thumbs-up and my feelings flooded back into my chest. When I told the media why we did this as Jewish women, my anguish over the situation of the people of Gaza was obvious. That clip was picked up by Al Jazeera Arabic TV and ran with a headline that translates as, “Jewish Women Protest Gaza Attack.” A Palestinian friend told me later that it did more to combat anti-Semitism in the Middle East than any action he’d ever seen.

  I can still dissociate when I’m in a crisis, but I try to avoid such situations as much as possible because now I feel the price my body and my mind will pay. For a couple of years after, I paid for the action at the Israeli consulate with PTSD symptoms like flashbacks, but in this case it was worth it.

  * * *

  I feel grateful to my five-year-old self for having the imagination, the courage, and the tenacity to split off from the unbearable horrors inflicted upon her by the man who was supposed to protect her. She created heroes who protected her from the knowledge that might have driven her mad and certainly would have made her dysfunctional.

  I don’t see multiple personality disorder as a disorder at all. I think it’s a brilliant defence mechanism that a child who experiences severe trauma without help can employ. The alters helped me not only survive but thrive in many ways. Given my economic and social privilege, I think the abuse I suffered and my need to face my fragmented personality helped me be a better activist, one who could understand multiple realities faced by people in different circumstances due to colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. When I told my friend Donna Mergler, a brilliant neurophysiologist, about my personalities she said, “My god, you have a beautiful brain, Judy.” I think we all have a beautiful brain but sometimes trauma provokes extraordinary creativity as well as extraordinary destruction. Understanding that helps me understand how much creativity and energy is lost to the world because we marginalize people labelled “mentally ill.”

  Without my brother Alvin, I don’t think I would have survived. He has always been with me, even when things were very difficult. He has taught me what family can be, and in the process we, along with my brother Leonard, have healed our family so the new generation of beautiful, loved, and lovely children will not suffer from the injuries that were inflicted upon us. It was my mother’s dying wish that we stay together and we have.

  I have learned to love and even to accept love. I’ve learned to trust and am now much more open-hearted and emotional — sometimes too emotional, but that might also be age. I’m still single, and in my seventies likely to stay that way.

  I almost never feel alone anymore. Of course I never was.

  Acknowledgements

  A lot of people helped me write this book. This memoir is very different from the other books I have written and I had to learn to write in a new way. It has taken me eight years to complete it, with a lot of help from editors, friends, and comrades.

  Janie Yoon, my editor at House of Anansi, put up with my resistance to deleting some of my favourite stories to produce what I hope is a well-crafted story of the most important part of my life. Her patience, determination, kindness, and skill served me well and I am very grateful.

  Almost a decade ago, Wa
yson Choy, my teacher at the Humber Writer’s School summer program, encouraged me to write a memoir based on a single story I wrote for his class.

  My old friend Bob Chodos generously helped me with editing throughout the process. Friends Derrick O’Keefe and Cynthia Flood kindly gave me feedback on early drafts of the book. My former editor Barbara Pulling provided helpful feedback on a first draft. Karen Connolly, through the Humber College Creative Writing by Correspondence course, gave me invaluable instruction that transformed the book. And friends Susan Swan, Sheila Heti, Mike Hoolboom, and Corvin Russell gave me feedback and support on a later draft.

  Halfway through the process I worked with a stellar writers’ group that included b. h. Yael, Suzanne Weiss, Jacob Scheier, and Phil Hébert. Willa Marcus generously examined the text with a legal eye.

  I am deeply grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for providing me with a mid-career writing grant in 2012 that helped me make the transition from professor, journalist, and activist to full-time writer, and to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for offering me a supportive space that allowed me to delve into difficult memories.

  Next I must thank my agent Samantha Haywood, who took me on even though she was so busy, and sold the book with great integrity and transparency.

  Before I started working on this version of my life, I interviewed a lot of people, many of whom don’t appear in these pages. They know who they are and I thank them, as well as the people who made it despite the many cuts.

  To my friends, new and old, who have given me much support through what was sometimes a very difficult process, please know that I couldn’t have done it without you.

  To my family, who are the most important people in my life. They have always had to put up with my public profile, but revealing your family secrets is very difficult, especially when you are not the one telling the secrets.