For some reason, after Mother had died, Lisa found herself to be unwelcome everywhere. Greyhaven didn’t want her around. I certainly didn’t want anything to do with her.
But I did want to speak to my brothers. I had seen David at the funeral, but Patrick was nowhere to be found.
I wrote to my brother Patrick again and again in the years since my father went to prison and died. No response. Eventually, in 2003, I wrote to him with great fury, and told him that if I had been the evil maniac he seemed to think I was, why did I give him our father’s entire estate except for two books and my strobe harp tuner?
He finally wrote me back.
He had found evidence which turned my father’s hoped-for innocence into an impossible dream. After Father had died, Patrick was the one stuck dealing with his estate. He found horrible things in my father’s room. Kiddie porn, “art books” of naked children, pictures by the stack. He called all such items “dead bats” and although occasionally lamenting the fact that the obviously priceless rare items could not be sold, he would dump them in the trash where they belonged. After all, what else could one do with a dead bat?
Notable among the dead bats, though: my brother found position papers for NAMBLA. They were originals, which had obviously been written on my father’s Selectric typewriter. They also went in the trash, where they belonged. There was a mountain of moldy books and papers in the recently flooded basement of the Goldfish Bowl, and they also went the way of the dead bats.
But the miracle had happened. My brother finally understood what our father had done. He changed his name to Mark Greyland in response, wanting nothing to do with our father’s name. He had also attempted the geographic cure, and moved to New Zealand.
We corresponded through email for years, and through chat.
My eldest brother David and I had not seen each other in some time. He was 6’6" and always wore black, including black nail polish. I loved him very much. He sent me a card which I kept for a very long time, with a photograph of a little grey kitten on the cover. Inside he explained this: He saw me always as being very much like the little grey kitten, except my claws were always stuck to the ceiling as though I was in mortal terror. He described how he never wanted to distress me or upset me when I had so much going on with our mother. He described her hilariously as “our mother who aren’t in heaven, hollow be her fame.”
Two days before he died, we had a long, long phone call. We spoke briefly the next day, and then he was gone, dead in his fifties of a heart attack.
Chapter 39: Aftermath: What has the past done to now?
Little girl lies in her bed at home
Desperately wishes she was alone
No way to cope with what’s horribly real
So her heart, overloaded, forgot how to feel.
And what has our past done to now
And what is still haunting and hunting you now?
Are you wide-eyed and staring? Do you feel past caring
Oh, what has our past done to now?
And what can we do about now?
Can we pick up the shreds of our life to save now?
The grief that we’re dodging, Our pain is dislodging
Are we brave enough to save now?
© 2003 Moira Stern, What has the past done to now?
After the lawsuits were over and my parents were both dead, I still had wounds to nurse and a lot of healing to do. Even though I no longer had to live in fear of their words or shenanigans, my neurological system had been altered by what I went through when I was young. I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and say “It’s all behind me now,” but that would not be realistic.
I wish I could tell everyone who has asked me whether writing my books or my poetry is cathartic, “Yes, it is all better now. Catharsis fixes everything.” But it doesn’t.
I have Complex PTSD, which means I am stuck with a variety of symptoms which make me feel like an idiot. Since the symptoms don’t look very good in public it would be very easy to avoid being around people, but I love people, and most of them are very understanding. I have had to learn a variety of ways to handle my symptoms. I have also learned to view them differently over time.
I have mentioned being afraid of the dark, which is absurd for a teenager, let alone for an adult, but it is something that I have never been able to shake. If I am in a situation where I need to sleep in the dark, I will usually feel very agitated and I will need to resort to one of several coping mechanisms to handle my feelings, which usually involve counting or breathing. More likely, I will turn on the light and try to sleep with it on, or just not sleep at all.
Sometimes these symptoms can be a bad startle reflex, or dissociation, which means we don’t feel like we’re in our bodies. Dissociation can result in PTSD seizures or even catatonia, but it isn’t as dire as it sounds. Often if I go to bed my brain will simply reset itself, and I’ll be better in the morning.
I startle terribly, which means if someone comes up behind me or touches me unexpectedly I will jump and often shout. When I was a teenager I used to hit people who startled me, which was awful for them and for me. These days I have more self-control and I can catch myself more quickly. I can laugh at myself these days, and I certainly don’t hit people who startle me anymore but still, it is embarrassing to be startled and it makes me feel silly.
I still have flashbacks which are disgusting. Out of nowhere, I will remember things that happened long ago. I will suddenly feel as though I am three, or six, or eight, even if I know perfectly well that I am an adult and I am not there, and the people who hurt me are dead. The memories are vivid, and often multisensory. I might feel a sensation on my skin, or smell something, or remember what was happening back then as vividly as if it were happening right now. Sometimes they are very brief, and sometimes they last a bit longer. The aftereffects of flashbacks can be longstanding. While I wrote a few of the chapters of this book, I had hundreds of flashbacks. I became so overwhelmed with symptoms at one point that I had to use long successions of coping mechanisms to handle the distress I was feeling. I had to count my breaths, or count slowly backward from 100 to take a shower, or to get dressed and undressed. I would sometimes even have to remind myself of where I was.
A host of relatively ordinary things will trigger me into symptoms. What is triggering? Originally, “trigger warnings” were used mostly in therapy chat rooms for PTSD patients. A post talking about childhood sexual abuse would say “Trigger warning: CSA,” then several blank lines, then the writing would start. The point was to give each survivor an opportunity to not read stories that would upset them. When we are triggered, it means we are reminded of our own trauma to the point that we are having symptoms.
Sometimes being triggered can make us feel quite sick. What happens to a normal brain when they have the “fight or flight” reflex triggered is that it goes on for long enough to get out of trouble, with a release of epinephrine and cortisol. A PTSD brain has forgotten how to shut off the release of epinephrine and cortisol, and our “fight or flight” response goes on for hours instead of minutes. Over time, bathing in stress hormones takes a terrible toll on our health.
I cannot be still. I work all the time, or I type all the time. I have to do something with my hands all the time, or I will literally and not figuratively rip off my skin. I don’t like this about myself, and I wish I could mend it but since I have not yet figured out a way, so I simply stay busy. When I was little, I read, then learned to sew and make things. I spend too much time on Facebook, or I embroider for ten hours at a stretch. I wish I could stop the agitation but until I find a way, I’ll accept it, keep breathing, and keep busy in a way that will not harm me.
Do I sit around all day long thinking about my father and mother? No, not at all. If I did, I might actually feel something. Most of the time I feel nothing, or I feel agitation. Some days I vacillate between uncontrollable tears and feeling numb or frozen. Sometimes being triggered amounts to being jolted into fe
eling anything.
Many people believe that talking about trauma will heal it. It can. Sometimes talking about things can help, either by robbing the stories of their power to isolate us, or letting us know that we won’t die or be rejected if we admit what we have gone through. Sometimes talking will lead to a catharsis, which can either bring relief, or ironically, trap us in further pain through triggering. But the most important part of the talking which we can do about our pain is the sort of talking which involves replacing lies with truth.
That is why I have written this book: I needed to eventually realize that I was not evil, and that I did not kill my father. It is so easy to believe the lies our parents tell us, especially if there is no way to challenge them with truth and reality.
People wonder why people who went through sexual abuse end up so broken. Why can’t we suck it up and leave it in the past? It is because although we almost never think about it directly, it affects everything in our lives. We choose weird relationships because our models are our parents, and later our models become our abusers. Every choice we make because of emotion is suspect because our emotions are broken: we tend to be frozen—or at least I am. I can thaw around other people and feel like maybe I can be normal here and there, but when something reminds me that I am not normal, it makes me want to run away and hide so nobody will see how abnormal I am.
A better model for “getting over” trauma might be to view it more like an amputation than a broken bone. Where a broken bone will heal and often be nearly as good as new, an amputation creates a set of problems which require daily adaptation. We will never go back to what we might have had, or what a normal brain is supposed to be like. But many people learn to cope beautifully with amputations, and we can learn to deal with our new, different brain.
Forgiveness is supposed to make everything all better. Does it?
No book on trauma would be complete without a few platitudes about forgiveness and about how it makes everything All Better. Add a few inspirational quotes, and a bandage slapped over the gangrene, and presto—Instant healing!
More likely, instead of instant healing the result of pressure to forgive will be a survivor who no longer feels safe about talking, and has now identified you as a person who does not understand.
The truth is that forgiveness can help some, but it is neither the beginning nor the end of healing and it cannot be used instead of other things, any more than one would try to treat a brain tumor with a cast. Obviously, the right treatment at the wrong time or the wrong treatment at the wrong time can do no good at all.
One reason I found it difficult to forgive my parents, though I went through the motions of doing so thousands of times, is that I never really understood that they had done anything to me that I could have a say about. I knew that what they did hurt me, but my sense of self was wrapped up in pleasing them and I couldn’t really figure out that I had anything resembling a right to not be hurt. It was more like I was a pet or a doll, and if I said the wrong thing, they would hate me.
Forgiving them means that I have a self, I am separate from them, and they did me an injury. I can take this to understand the Biblical instruction to forgive another way. If I must forgive, then I must realize I have a self. I must realize I am separate from them, and I must acknowledge that they hurt me. It is as much for me as for them.
I understand why it feels so hollow to forgive: I have no problem at all with never even getting mad at what they did to me. My response is frozen in time. I cannot even begin to forgive them for what they did to other people, which is why I was able to take action against them when a child was in danger.
I have been told so many times to forgive, but forgiving the people who hurt me will not change my startle reflex, or make it so I could be around loud noises without going to pieces, or suddenly watch Sybil or The Wicker Man without becoming hysterical. Seriously, if someone came into a hospital with a head injury, nobody would tell them to “forgive.” Instead, the trauma team would be stabilizing the patient and making appropriate medical interventions!
Saint Paul had a thorn in his side which he prayed would be removed from him, and his prayer was not answered:
“…I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
—The Holy Bible, 2 Corinthians 12:7–9 (NIV)
From this I observe that if Saint Paul can live with an infirmity, so can I. If I can learn from this infirmity and shine a light on it for other people, it is worth it, many times over.
None of us said anything, so why am I talking now? Because the elephant in the living room is bigger than the living room now. It has grown over time. I can no longer keep her secrets. I can no longer pretend to be a radio, pretend only to be the singer of other people’s songs, with the center of my life being a screaming void with nothing in it but pain and sorrow.
I will not go on pretending to be what she wanted me to be. I will not be a stranger in my own life, only doing what she wanted me to do and keeping her secrets so she could be perfect and famous, and I could hold all the agony in my heart where nobody would see it.
I am a singer without a voice. This impossible contradiction has left me feeling deep futility in all my ways: I don’t know what I want to do because I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I am because I am not allowed to be who I am. After all, if I told the truth about myself, she wouldn’t like it…
I want my heart back
February 7, 2005
Good morning Mother
Will I please you today
Or will I find myself sobbing in a corner again
Forgetting as fast as I could what I still don’t want to hear
The sound of my voice screaming again, as though I didn’t know how to talk
Don’t hit me Mommy!
The chorus of my life.
I can’t live with that little voice
Don’t hit me Mommy!
I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
And instead of that voice being real
I have become unreal
The woman of iron, who feels only strength
But I look deep in my heart and find a to-do list.
And I don’t care about myself, or this list of things that I must become.
I don’t care what I do, nor who I am,
As long as I don’t have to feel anything
As long as I don’t have to hear that little voice
Mommy stop it! Mommy don’t hit me!
Please please stop it! I’m sorry! I’m sorry
I’ll never do it again!
And I don’t even know what I did.
I will never know what I did
What could I do to make me deserve to die
And I don’t remember anything except my screams
And her self-satisfied confession.
“I tried to kill you twice, but I stopped myself.
You were a terrible child”
So now I have done what Mommy wished
And slaughtered all traces of me.
I am merely a shell, meekly doing her bidding
And trying to be famous in the way that she wished
Because if Mommy wants me dead
Who am I to argue?
I must have argued
I begged her to stop
And I can’t stand the thought of my weakness
I can’t stand to think that I couldn’t have stopped her
Mommy don’t kill me! Stop it Mommy
Please stop it, please!
And the thing I can’t even understand
Could it be she was wrong?
Could it be she was cruel?
Could it be I have strangled my own heart
Out of obedience to a crazy illusion?
A sham of a mother?
If so, then I want my heart back.
I love �
�Still in Saigon” by The Charlie Daniels Band because it describes PTSD so well: the isolation, the feelings, the utter powerlessness to stop the adaptations that one does not want.
Chapter 40: The Blog Heard Round The World (2014)
“Children are brainwashed into believing they don’t want sex.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
In addition to raising my family, I had been directing operas and playing the harp and singing for some years now. I routinely performed all over the country, as well as at science-fiction conventions, where a lot of people knew me for one reason or another. Deirdre Saoirse Moen arranged for me to play a concert at a convention, and so when I heard from her in June of 2014, I thought maybe it had to do with the harp again, but it was not.
Deirdre was writing to ask me about my late mother. Tor Books had Leah Schnelbach write a puff piece on Marion Zimmer Bradley to commemorate her June 3 birthday. Deirdre was surprised and understandably angry that Tor, which published several books by my mother, failed to mention anything about the scandal of her husband’s criminal conviction, preferring to simply paint her as a great feminist hero. Deidre blogged about Marion, and in doing so, quoted her 1999 court testimony:
“MR. DOLAN: And to your knowledge, how old was [Glenn Frendel] when your husband was having a sexual relationship with him?
MZB: I think he was about 14 or possibly 15. I’m not certain.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 37
