Innocence Revisited

by Cathy Kezelman

  I wake up and hear Little-Cathy’s mother’s mouth say that ‘nothing happened’. I shake my head to try and change the words I’m hearing, because sometimes shaking your head can change words that you don’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear Little-Cathy’s mother’s angry mouth saying that ‘nothing happened’ because lots of really bad things did happen. I’m really sore down below and being sore and hearing that ‘nothing happened’ makes me cry.

  The lady with the funny hat comes back into the room and she asks if Little-Cathy is okay. Because none of us ever says when we’re not okay, I say ‘yes’. And Little-Cathy’s mother gives the lady with the funny hat one of her angry stares and makes the nice lady go away. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep and Little-Cathy’s mother who never sits still for long and who never stays when anyone is hurt gets up and leaves and we all go to sleep for real because we feel safe with Little-Cathy’s mother gone. But we can’t stay asleep for long because down below hurts lots because lots of yucky stuff is coming out and when we wake up more we feel some things poking into us on the inside of the down below bits. And the lady with the funny hat comes back and I’m crying and she holds my hand and I feel a bit better because I feel safe when the nice lady holds my hand.

  I have to do wee-wee and I tell the lady with the funny hat that and she brings a cold hard thing with metal like from a tap and makes me sit on it. We do wee-wee, but doing it hurts and we cry more.

  Growly takes over; Growly doesn’t usual y cry or say that he is hurt even when he is. But this time even Growly cries and he especially cries when he wees because that’s when it stings the most. Growly tries not to wee, but everyone has to wee, even Growly. And Growly has to wee lots and the lady in the funny hat holds Growly’s hand and she gives him some reddy-orangey syrup to drink to make him feel better. And she sits with us and holds Growly’s hand and the stingy bits feel a bit better; but then he has to wee again.

  The lady in the funny hat says that she wants to give us a bath and she asks us if we can get out of bed and walk. We don’t want to say ‘no’ so we say ‘yes’, but when Little-Cathy tries to walk she can’t, because it’s too sore between her legs to walk. Growly has had a sleep and he feels a little bit better so he walks with the lady with the funny hat even though it is sore.

  Growly thinks he likes the nice lady, but he’s scared in case she is really a Cloak. He asks us if we’re sure that the lady is not taking us to the Cloaks to hurt us. We’re not sure, but the lady takes us into a room where there is a bath and no Cloaks. Little-Cathy comes back out and the nice lady takes Little-Cathy over to the bath and helps Little-Cathy take her funny white gown off and asks her to get into the bath. Little-Cathy tries to lift her leg up so she can get into the bath, but it hurts too much and Growly takes over and lifts our legs over so we can get in. Growly tries to sit down but the bath hurts his bottom and he stands straight up. The lady sits Growly on the edge of the bath and wraps a towel around him. The towel is soft and smells sweet so we all come out and take turns to have a soft sweet towel wrapped around us. We want to stay inside the towel forever because it’s not scratchy like the towels at Little-Cathy’s mother’s place.

  The lady tells us that she has made a special bath for us with salt in it. She says that the salt will make us better and that she knows that the bath is stingy but that if we want our sore bits to get better we have to sit in the bath. I understand what the lady is saying, but Growly doesn’t so I take over from him. I know that I shouldn’t, but I lift the bottom of the towel up and take a peek at Little-Cathy’s bottom. It’s bluey purple with grey and it has some black threads coming out of it like threads from sewing. The lady with the funny hat tells us that the black threads are stitches and that the stitches inside us will make us better. We don’t know what stitches are, but we think that they are working because we don’t have so much yucky stuff coming out like before.

  Grownup-Cathy tells us that we must have been to hospital and had an operation. She tells us that a doctor put stitches inside us to sew up where we were torn. We didn’t know that we were torn but maybe that’s why it hurt so much and why so much yucky stuff was coming out.

  We stay in hospital with the lady with the funny hat and with other ladies with funny hats for a few days. Little-Cathy’s Daddy doesn’t come to see us in hospital and we miss him. Little-Cathy’s mother comes with an angry face and an angry mouth which says that ‘nothing happened’. We have lots of baths with salt and stinging and sore wee-wees and we cry and we try to sleep and the nice lady with the funny hat holds our hand.

  Little-Cathy’s Daddy comes to take us home. Little-Cathy hugs and kisses him, but then Little-Cathy’s mother comes with her angry mouth.

  Little-Cathy’s mother’s angry mouth screams a lot at Little-Cathy’s Daddy because Little-Cathy’s mother screams a lot when she is angry. Little-Cathy’s mother is angry lots after we come out of the hospital and her screaming make us cry.

  Little-Cathy’s Daddy doesn’t take us back to the cave ever again after our time in hospital. We don’t know why but the good thing is that we don’t have to see the Cloaks anymore. And we don’t have to go to Little-Cathy’s grandmother’s place on Sundays or any other day. We don’t see Little-Cathy’s grandmother for a long time; we don’t know how long but we’re happy because we don’t want to see her because she’s mean.

  And we don’t have to get hurt on Sundays anymore and we don’t have to let the Cloaks do bad things to us.

  Although my mother confirmed that we didn’t see my grandmother for several years at one juncture, she would not validate any of my memories. Instead she described an incident in which my grandmother pinched me on the bottom, in response to me pinching her. The story was that my mother had been so outraged at my grandmother’s assault on my person that she’d made my father drive her straight home… and as a result our family broke off contact for years. I don’t remember the incident my mother describes at all.

  chapter 32

  I’m staring at the walls of the room and the walls are boring. It’s taking a long time for Kate to come and take us into her office.

  I don’t really want to see Kate today. The others don’t want to either. We’re feeling sick and Growly is too. Growly’s been feeling sick for days. There’s something wrong with him but we don’t know what, and he won’t say. Growly doesn’t usually say much but this time he’s not saying anything at all.

  Kate’s making us wait. I don’t want to wait when I’m feeling sick; I think I’m going to throw up. Grownup-Cathy threw up on the weekend. She had a bad pain in her eye which wouldn’t go away even when she took tablets to make it go away. Grownup-Cathy went to bed to get rid of the pain, but she couldn’t sleep because the pain kept her awake. And she had to get up out of bed to go and be sick, and come back to bed and feel sick in bed, some more. And she did that lots of times.

  ‘Cathy, come on in,’ Kate calls out in a big voice.

  Pissed-off calls out on the inside, ‘About time!’ but Kate doesn’t hear her.

  Grownup-Cathy isn’t with us when Kate calls out; she’s gone away and I’ve taken over because no-one else wants to. I go inside Kate’s office by myself and I don’t like doing that when I feel sick, but I have to because no-one else will. I sit down in Grownup-Cathy’s chair and my body starts going away from me and that scares me and I’m worried, because no-one wants to take over because everyone is feeling sick, but then Growly does take over even when he is feeling sick too.

  Something really bad is happening to Growly and we’re watching from the inside, but we don’t know what it is. Growly has his hands over his eyes and he looks really bad because really bad things are happening to him. We don’t want to look because we don’t want to see what they are, but we do look a little and that makes us want to throw up more. Bad yucky things are happening to Growly and we’re scared and Growly’s scared and Growly’s really scared and he’s really sick and the things happening to him are really, really
bad.

  Growly is making lots of bad noises and he’s getting hurt really badly but none of us can come out to help him because the things that are happening are too bad for any other parts and we’re too scared to come out. Growly is all alone like he is all alone in a cave of baddies and the baddies are hurting him all over. And we’re watching Growly when we can and we’re watching his face and his face is all screwed up and Growly’s crying and his eyes are closed and tears are coming out of Growly’s closed eyes. When Growly does open his eyes his eyes look dead and Growly’s eyes look as if they can’t see anything and we get really scared because if Growly’s eyes are dead then maybe Growly is dead too.

  ‘Help! Help! Growly’s dead!’ I cry on the inside but no-one answers me. That’s when Growly throws up on the outside; it’s good that Growly throws up, because when you throw up it means that you’re not dead.

  ‘Help! Someone help! They’re trying to kill Growly!’ I call out again. Growly is hurt and blood is coming out from down below Growly, but we can’t do anything to help him. None of us can.

  When the memory stopped I became partially aware of my surroundings again, but soon lost contact with the Growly part of me as well as with Sensible. Despite having little idea as to what had been done to Growly, I felt exhausted and was snoring loudly even though I was partially awake. My body was trembling from a combination of the terror and pain that Growly had withstood; my snoring was shaking Kate’s office to its foundations.

  As I lay gasping in that familiar armchair in Kate’s office I realised that Growly had withstood one hell of an onslaught and that if not for the Growly part of me, I would not have survived.

  I was just starting to pull myself together, when I was assaulted afresh. I switched back into the Growly part of me as the grimacing agony overwhelmed my adult part. The second assault reached its climax, ended abruptly and I started snoring again.

  ‘I’m so sorry! ‘I’m so sorry! Please, please forgive me!’ I cry from the inside of Grownup-Cathy, shocked at how mean all of us parts were being to Growly. For the very first time, I can understand what Kate has been trying to tell us all. She’s been saying that Growly had risked his life to save us and she was right. Growly is a hero and instead of pushing him away and being mean to him we needed to be kind and look after him. We do need to embrace Growly after all.

  ‘We didn’t know!’ I shout out loud to Kate and I mean it.

  As Sensible started to appreciate the gravity of what Growly had withstood so too did I. Growly had been repeatedly tortured within an inch of his life. I hadn’t ever fully grasped the depth of Growly’s experiences; the full brunt of those memories hadn’t surfaced before. But I had known about other times when the Growly part of us had taken the brunt of our abuse; it had suited me to ostracise the Growly part rather than to acknowledge it. There were many aspects of his personality and behaviour that I didn’t want to accept and internalise as my own. Not only had Growly perpetrated acts which I would rather deny, but he also exhibited characteristics which I preferred not to acknowledge.

  I feel bad that I had called Growly yucky and smelly. If Growly had been yucky and smelly he had only been like that because of the things that had been done to him. And I had stood by while the other parts were mean and nasty to Growly and I hadn’t tried to stop them. I had let them keep Growly in a cage inside our head, and joined them in leaving him all alone, like when he had to be all alone when the baddies were hurting him.

  As I accepted Growly’s suffering as part of our experience, I was overcome with remorse at my lack of compassion. As I reflected on what Growly had done to save us, I considered all of the other parts which had appeared mean at different times, as if they wanted to hurt us. And appreciated that the ‘mean’ and ‘bad’ behaviour of others on the inside was their way of dealing with the pain and the hurt and the ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ of their childhood experiences. After eight years of therapy, it finally twigged that none of the acts any of us perpetrated in that cave had been our fault. We had not been given any choice. Even when we did bad and sometimes terrible things, we were children under mortal threat. We were not bad and never had been. The Cloaks had been the bad ones.

  ‘But what about the Little-Ones? What if Growly hurts The-Little-Ones?’

  Long-Suffering was expressing a fear which many of the inside parts had held for a long time, a conviction that Growly couldn’t be trusted and that if we stopped keeping guard over him, that he would hurt us all and especially The-Little-Ones.

  ‘What if Growly hurts The-Little-Ones?’

  ‘No, Long-Suffering, Growly is not going to hurt The-Little-Ones. Growly is not going to hurt anyone. Growly saved and protected us all. We should be grateful to him!’

  ‘But how can you know that for sure, Sensible? What if you’re wrong?’

  I want to answer, but I can’t. What if Distrustful is right? How could I be sure that Growly wouldn’t hurt us?

  As Sensible’s head clicked into a familiar cycle of mistrust and judgement, I struggled yet to unpick the messages which had been implanted into our psyche years earlier. As years of terror distorted our ability to think, we were sucked back into the poisonous indoctrination we had received at the hands of Cloaks.

  Growly’s snoring makes me come back out. I look out at him and am able to see him clearly; he looks like someone who has been badly beaten.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I shout. ‘Why didn’t you let us know?

  Growly shakes his head and looks away; I can see that he has tears in his eyes.

  ‘Look what he had to do!’ I shout to the others.

  ‘But how do you know Growly won’t hurt us? Long-Suffering’s voice shudders. When I see how scared Long-Suffering is, I get confused and I don’t know what to think. We’ve all been scared of Growly for a long time and it’s hard to let go of that fear.

  ‘Cathy, sometimes you have trouble being compassionate, don’t you? One minute you’re feeling sorry for what Growly experienced and the next you’re being harsh and rejecting him.’ Kate’s voice cut me to the quick. ‘Why don’t you put your arm around him?’

  I screw up my face. The thought of putting my arm around Growly makes me sick. Growly is smelly and yucky and I don’t want to put my arm around him. The others are watching me and as I move away from Growly, the others follow my lead and they move away from him too.

  ‘But I don’t know who or where he is. He is not part of us. We’re watching him from a place which is a long way away. How are we going to find him?’

  ‘I think the others will be able to tell you where he is.’

  ‘No, they don’t know.’ I reply angrily.

  I hate Growly and I want to scream at Kate: ‘If you love Growly so much, you put your arms around him! You take him home!’

  The internal battle to accept Growly paralysed me for months. Accepting the less appealing parts of our ‘self ‘ caused an inner tussle which challenged the fixed messages of our indoctrination. As children, we hadn’t had the tools to analyse the methods the Cloaks used to intimidate us, but their frequent threats had taken their toll. Much has been written about cults and the methods they use to brainwash people. Suffice it to say that the cult’s manipulative methods rendered me subservient, befuddled, self-hating and self-destructive. Reclaiming my mind after the members of the cult had systematically commandeered it, required a massive wrangle.

  Every human being has parts of themselves that they find difficult to accept, parts they don’t like or feel proud of, as well as behaviours which scare, or shame them. In my case, those parts were distinct entities and some of those entities were responsible for past behaviours which seriously challenged my belief systems. It took a long time to accept all of those parts of myself and integrate them into a single being. In one respect it had been convenient to be able to externalise aspects of behaviours I didn’t like. Accepting Growly meant accepting a part of me which I found aversive. And it meant absorbing the shame and the hurt
and the pain and the guilt of being Growly and all of the acts he had been forced to perpetrate. Before I could fully accept Growly, all of the parts had to do accept him, including Sensible.

  ‘Come here Growly. Let me help you. You look sore and sad.’

  Growly opens one eye and he looks confused. Then he starts to cry and I mean really cry. I think it’s because no-one has ever offered to help him before. And as Growly cries, I do too and Grownup-Cathy comes out and she cries too and for once the tears come out of all of our eyes.

  I reach out my hand and touch Growly and he isn’t yucky or scary at all; he feels just like a little girl who is just like me.

  ‘Growly, let me put my arms around you, so that I can make you warm.’

  Growly pulls away.

  ‘It’s okay Growly. I’m not going to hurt you. Growly reaches out his hand and I take hold of it. We sit holding hands together and it feels amazing because we’ve never done that before. And soon Growly’s hand doesn’t feel as cold as it first did. I help Growly take his clothes off and I give him a nice warm bath, but I don’t put salt in the bath because I don’t want to hurt Growly. He’s been hurt way too much already. And I sit on the edge of the bath and hold Growly’s hand as he sits in the warm bath. I put a warm washer on his sore bits and he smiles at me.

  Since that day Growly and I have spent lots of time together and we’re getting to be friends. Growly is funny and he makes me laugh and he’s not smelly or yucky or mean or bad at all.

  Like Sensible I’m embracing Growly now too and I’m feeling so much richer for being able to do so. I’m embracing lots of parts of myself and gradually, ever so slowly, other parts are coming forward and introducing themselves. And as they get to know one another they’re embracing each other and they’re learning to embrace Growly too. As all of the different parts of us come together and start to accept one another, we are feeling much more peaceful on the inside. Life is looking up and we don’t need to go to The Gap anymore. We don’t even think about going to The Gap. We have far too much to live for and far too much to do and enjoy, to ever throw any part of us away.