My mother’s irritation with my physical condition went far beyond trying to tell me what I was supposed to enjoy—She accused me of having a host of ailments. When I drank a lot of water after exercise, she would tell me that I was pre-diabetic and we should run to the doctor and get me a blood test right away. When we went to the skating rink, she would go on and on about how I had “weak ankles” when I was first learning to skate.
Yes, this ballet dancer magically had weak ankles after years of dance training.
I don’t have to tell you that my ankles work just fine and I am still not pre-diabetic, despite test after test after test. The actual ailment that I had was major depression and PTSD, which was called “shell shock” or “battle fatigue” back then and not diagnosed in children until years later. Of slightly more concern were PTSD seizures, which nobody had ever heard of back then. It would have made perfect sense for me to have inherited my father’s epilepsy, but the EEG did not agree. I didn’t have epilepsy either. I suppose I should be grateful that she knew that something was wrong and had some concern for me, but her concern did very little good.
Yes, something was very wrong. Yes, it was a problem for me every single day. And yes, she had a lot to do with it. My difficulties with food were just one more symptom caused by her ongoing physical and sexual abuse of me, and her lifelong attempts to dominate me. This elephant in the room was dressed up as anything else from pre-diabetes to anorexia.
I have had to learn several different coping strategies over time, because I have not gotten less weird about food. Sometimes I overeat, and sometimes I get too overwhelmed to cope with food at all.
Part of my trouble with food can be chalked up to depersonalization: if I don’t experience myself as a human being and I can neither feel nor accept the feelings I have, I may not recognize that I am hungry or thirsty until it has become a problem.
Tick, tick, tick.
Wind me up and watch me go
Stick, stick, stick.
Stick me back on the shelf
Ever wonder what a doll thinks
Before she falls into the fire
Or is crushed beneath a tire
Break, break, break
Hear the clockwork break
Take, take, take
Your leave lest you hear her cry
The crunching of glass in her hollow chest
Can soon be mended at the shop
What you don’t see is that
Something else has stopped.
Tick, tick, tick.
—Moira Greyland
Chapter 19: From the Looking Glass to the Funhouse Mirror (1977–1978)
“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I am a trained pony.
In my family work, learning, and accomplishments were valued above everything else. Relationships were impossible. In the rest of the world, work is important, but relationships are also important. Why was I there? Why did I exist? No reason I could think of to be alive except to achieve, so Mother could point her finger at her “gifted” daughter.
I had always known that I was destined to create, and that my entire worth was to be gauged by my output of creative acts. My empathy was worthless, my company was worthless, everything about me was worthless except for my ability to create. No kindness, no love, no connectedness counted; my personality was completely unimportant. My humanity was unimportant, and I didn’t even get to have a gender. All that mattered is that I would create…something.
I was absolutely forbidden to be beautiful, sexy, or female unless I was onstage. After all, as far as my mother ever knew sexy girls don’t create, and any girl who gets a man instead of a quest is contemptible. I was used to service my parents sexually—and I know that sounds disgusting because it was—but I might as well have been invisible. I had no personality in their eyes, other than evil.
I know that sounds contradictory, because I was meant to perform sexual acts to please my parents. Remember that their issue was with gender roles, not sex. I was meant to have sex, but not to be sexy, let alone to be beautiful.
I was 12 when my mother abruptly became famous and successful. My mother seemed very happy to suddenly have money, and behaved as though a great weight had dropped off her shoulders. It did not really alter our relationship in any meaningful way, but it allowed her to do some things that she had always wanted to do.
I hope this does not sound rude or mean. My mother was very busy with her writing and did not spend much time with my brother or me. In a way, this was a mercy but in another way, it felt sad and lonely to me to not ever be near my mother, even though I knew she was dangerous. Once she had money, she realized she liked to spend it on my brother and me.
For the first time in my life I got new clothes. She took me to The Limited and let me pick out what I liked. I got a plaid shirt and two pairs of pants, and two T-shirts. She got me new underwear, which I had never had in my life. Always before then, everything had come from the second hand store.
At that time, my mother had put me into Berkeley Alternative School behind Willard Junior High on Telegraph Avenue. For once, the misfits outnumbered the normals and I hit my stride. There were several Faire brats there including myself, and although there was rather more academic work than there had been at the last two alternative schools I got to do a lot of what I wanted to do. My friend Aria from the Faire and I co-directed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She played Viola, and I played Olivia. The costumes were very easy, of course, since we had tons of Faire stuff already.
I was cast as the female lead in the school musical, which was a parody of a Sam Spade story called “The Mystery of the Missing Link.” I had auditioned by singing a Jean Redpath song: probably “Tae the Weavers Gin Ye Go” or something like that. In retrospect, I do know how very odd that is! In any case, I got to play a slinky vamp in a black dress. By then, I had not let my mother come to any of my shows for years, so I didn’t have to worry that she would see me wearing a dress and makeup and freak out. After all, it is one thing to dress up as a girl at the Faire in costumes from a hundred or four hundred years ago, but dressing up as an actual girl from modernity, especially a hot one? It would infuriate my mother and father both, because gender roles, stereotypes, blah blah blah.
As long as I could remember, any time my mother caught me singing or saw me in a show, she would either give me inappropriate, exaggerated praise or she would rip me to shreds, telling me how horrible my performance was. I was either the best or the worst, which hurt more than I can say.
I believed her criticism of me no matter how vicious, because I knew I was a kid and relatively untrained. Any performer worth her salt will take the criticism and try to improve, but the criticism my mother gave me was so vicious and so incomprehensible that there was no way for me to fix whatever it was that she was upset about. I knew, somehow, that what she was saying was not real and it was not right, but I couldn’t make the pain go away. I couldn’t just discount her and pretend she was wrong. I had to be doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what.
I couldn’t believe the praise, because it was so exaggerated and so incongruent with the criticism. I could not be both amazingly wonderful and completely horrible at the same time. So rather than continuing to jump in the blender, I decided I would not sing in front of her and I began to refuse to let her come to my performances. I would ask my father to come, but never her. He would tell me the truth about my performance, whether I was good, bad, or merely OK.
Why did she agree to my wishes? I had become such a spitfire that I would scream back at her, and I would fight her tooth and nail. She probably figured that if she came to one of my s
hows and I saw her in the audience and I made a scene it would not do her any good.
Even now, even though I have been a professional singer for decades, I cannot think about the things she said to me about my singing without my stomach twisting up. Even though she was not an authority on singing, as a mother she was supposed to be an authority on me. I know that is ridiculous. Also, although I will work like a demon if I have a show coming up, I don’t sing for pleasure, and I don’t sing unless I am rehearsing. It simply stirs things up. Again, I know that is ridiculous. People would say I am letting her live rent-free in my head, but I know what happens.
On a much more cheerful note, I had been earning money at the Faire and saving it up for some time. My mother offered to go in half and half with me, and let me buy a horse. She found me one for sale in the Richmond Hills. Touche was not very tall, only 14.2 hands high. She was half Appaloosa and half Quarter horse, so she was compact and fast. As a show horse, she had been a wash: her previous owner gave me her green seventh-place ribbon, and inexplicably also told me that she had been a bronc and that she liked to buck. This was probably the result of poor training. I have no idea who owned her before the girl who sold her to me, but I can understand why she was for sale: She liked to buck and her mouth was ruined, exactly as her former owner told us.
I was an experienced rider and I had taught riding, but I was not an experienced trainer by any stretch of the imagination, and my ideas on how to help my new horse with her issues were completely wrong.
The only time she ever unseated me was the result of mistakes I made based on my lack of training in, well, training. To begin with, I thought I could help her mouth heal by putting her in a comparatively gentle snaffle bit instead of the Western bit with the high curb her former owner used on her. I also thought she might be more comfortable in an English saddle.
I put her in a snaffle and an English saddle for a trail ride alone in the Richmond Hills. She ran away, and I could not induce her to slow down at all. I lost a stirrup, then a rein, and then my seat when she went around a turn. I landed in gravel on the back of my left shoulder and the side of my face. I walked back to the barn and she was there, eating.
I didn’t break my neck, but it could easily have happened. My neck was never the same after that but it could have been much worse. I learned my lesson, and after that I rode her in a Western saddle and she never threw me again. I also put her into a hackamore, which sidestepped her ruined mouth. A hackamore does not have any bit at all; they don’t hurt the mouth or teeth, but they put unpleasant pressure on the nasal cartilage if the horse decides she wants to do something untoward. Horses don’t argue with hackamores.
Not long after that, Mother had us move her to Skyline Ranch in the Oakland Hills, so I could get there myself via BART and bus. Mother did not want to spend her afternoons at the stable while I was riding, which I can understand.
She did bring me up a few times, though. Once when she was there, a lady stopped her and told her to not let me ride Touche, exclaiming “That horse is crazy! No child should be riding her!” My mother said only “That’s her horse!” When Mother told me that story, it did not occur to me that perhaps the lady at the stables had a point: My horse was not safe. No horse is “safe,” of course, but the fact that I could cope with a horse who loved to buck did not mean that I should do such a ridiculously risky thing.
I have wondered from time to time why she allowed me so much freedom. Not only was I allowed to ride trail by myself, which in retrospect seems insane, but I was going about on BART by myself since I was old enough to put money in the machine.
So in review: I can perform, but I can only be a girl onstage. I can be trusted in situations of appalling peril, like going everywhere alone, but my makeup must be micromanaged. I can look beautiful, but I can never be beautiful.
Chapter 20: The Stormqueen and the Queen Mother (1978)
“Marion Zimmer Bradley is a great writer. Dorothy’s mother is a bitch!”
—Kallun of Clan Colin
When I was 12, my mother’s book Stormqueen came out. She told everyone that the lead character, Dorilys, was based on me. Back then, I was still going by Dorothy, my middle name. When I read Stormqueen, I was horrified. The heroine went about zapping people to death with psychic lightning, and she got stuck in suspended animation because nobody could deal with her.
I wondered if my mother had ever met me. Not only was Dorilys a naïve ninny who got all freaked out in situations I had been fielding for years, but she had no ability to control her temper. There was a tiny grain of truth in the midst of Mother’s tall tale: I had a temper, a truly terrible temper. Of course, my mother had been calling me an “evil child” for a very long time.
It is possible that my temper was the sole inspiration for the book and the rest was fiction, since I didn’t kill people. I just screamed and yelled a lot. Not only was I the sort of perfectionist which people rightly dread meeting, I had a typical artistic temperament. It might be surmised that I came by it honestly…or that I was simply a fiend from hell, which was my mother’s conclusion. But what did I actually do? I screamed and yelled, and refused to do things; that was as far as it went. I did not do drugs, I always did my homework, and worked hard in school and everything else I did. I did not blow up entire cities, or stomp on them, Godzilla-style.
Mother made a huge fuss about how impossible I was to deal with, and I will agree…to a point. I fought her tooth and nail when I felt she was being unjust, and considering the form her abuse of me had taken, it felt rational to me to fight her rather than to surrender. If I was not being threatened, there was nothing to fight. My father and I did not fight. It is possible that the bottom line of my fiendishness was simply that I would not let her win, ever. Not even if she had beaten me to within an inch of my life. I would still be defiant. I could not see her as a legitimate authority, because she was unjust. Oh, I had to obey her, but I did not have to pretend she was right.
I had friends who cared about me, lots of them. They overlooked my temper, or maybe I was not as much of a fiend as my mother claimed. Most of them had a much different perspective on her. In fact, most of my friends who met my mother were so appalled by her that they usually didn’t tell me how they felt until much later, for fear of offending me. Other people, even strangers, observed her behavior and offered condolences.
I was working at the Northern and Southern Faire when I was twelve, and I was very busy. Already my temperament was asserting itself there in a penchant for advancement and leadership. I became the youngest Journeyman and then the youngest Mistress in the history of St. Cuthbert’s Guild, and I was entrusted to teach banner waving to those who carried banners in the parades, finally becoming Banner Captain. Although I was busy with St. Cuthbert’s Guild, I also worked with other groups, including Court, where I played both a young noblewoman and an evil pastry cook. I also started to hang around with Clan Colin, the Scottish group at the Faire. I met my good friend Kat there.
My friend Kat let me stay at her house in San Francisco, a BART ride and a green cable car away from my school, and she would share her rice and beans with me and make me tuna sandwiches to bring to school. I adored her. Once she got a boyfriend, she was no longer able to have me over because she moved into his place, and I was only invited once in a while.
It was easy to be in different groups at the Faire. The difference between a peasant costume and a Scottish costume is a belted plaid, also called an arisaid, pinned at one shoulder and worn over everything else. I got into Scottish dancing there, and I started spending time at Duntamknackan, which was the house of the Chief of Clan Colin, Eoin Mackenzie.
Eoin MacKenzie did me a huge favor while giving me a rather substantial challenge. I told him I wanted to learn how to make kilts, so he gave me an old kilt of his to turn. He was left-handed and kilts typically fasten on the right side, so my challenge was to take it apart, and put it back together inside-out, thus hiding all the worn parts of the
fabric. I would mend all the moth-holes using military darns and hair-canvas, a fusible tailoring cloth used in wool jackets to add stability where necessary. I would also re-line it, hand-stitch all the pleats, and make new buckles and leather fittings and sew them on.
I let it sit in my mending basket for months out of sheer terror.
Once I finally got to it it was not as bad as I anticipated, and by the time I was done I knew more about kilt-making that I ever would have if I had simply gone from a pattern. After all, everything was where it was supposed to be already. I did not have to figure out how many pleats, or how deep, and I could measure their width at top and bottom rather than experimenting.
I was so fond of going to see the MacKenzies that I went there for an event when I should have been convalescing. I had to have my tonsils out, since they were like golf balls and kept compromising my breathing when they got infected, which was many times a year. After I was sent home from the hospital, I hopped onto a bus to Petaluma—almost fifty miles away—and brought my sleeping bag to Duntamknackan, with my Tylenol and Codeine in my backpack. I was miserably sick and in pain, but it beat being home. My mother was not necessarily horrible when I was sick, but considering how quickly she could change I didn’t want to be a captive audience.
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