Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ and I said, “Mary Jane’s father’s home but my mother’s still in the hospital”, and she said, “I guess you didn’t pray enough, dear.” How can these people say such things to children! They probably think it’s good for your character. I just had a double worry then, that my mother was sick and that I hadn’t prayed enough. I continued in that attitude, that I wasn’t good enough.’

      Pat accumulated the evidence that she was bad and unacceptable slowly. She does not remember being a baby, but family photographs show her with her parents who look as though they loved her and were proud of her. Her first dear memory is of being shut out of her mother’s bedroom and later being told that she had a baby sister. Her father is not present in this memory. She cannot remember ever sitting on her father’s knee.

      ‘He wanted a son,’ she told me, ‘I was a great disappointment to him. In later years he was very fond of my youngest sister – she was very pretty, not like me – but I think he just felt uncomfortable in a house full of females. He spent all his time working, and when he took up golf we never saw him at weekends. Mother was affectionate to me, but she was always busy. The only way I could get any attention from her was to be useful. I’ve been doing housework for as long as I can remember.’

      So Pat gradually formed the opinion that as herself she was valueless. Only what she could do for people had some value.

      ‘I never consciously thought, “I am valueless”,’ she said. ‘It was just something I knew, like I knew the sun would rise each morning. It was a fact of the universe. What I did think about was how I could please my mother and father. I thought that if I tried really hard to please them then they would be proud of me. I knew they loved me, but it was in a distant sort of way, like I loved my great aunt. She was a relative, so you were supposed to love her. I wanted to make them notice me and be proud of me. That’s why I wanted to be a doctor.’

      ‘Your father stopped you from being a doctor?’ I said.

      ‘Not stopped, like saying, “You can’t”. He just let me know in different ways that he didn’t think that medicine was a suitable profession for a woman. And he told all of us that he couldn’t afford to put us through university.’

      ‘Were you angry with him?’

      ‘Angry? Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of being angry with him. I was sure he was doing what he thought was best for me.’

      Dan remembers very clearly the day he concluded that he was bad. It was the day his father died. Dan had just turned seven.

      Dan said, ‘My father was a great believer in “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, and he was always taking a stick to me. My mother would get upset, and she and my grandmother especially would always try and make it up to me with some sort of treat. They usually made me feel I wasn’t as bad as he said. Of course there were times when I deserved a beating – as a kid I was always getting into mischief – but sometimes I didn’t. He had a quick temper and he’d just hit out. And you couldn’t reason with him. Once he’d made up his mind he was going to give you a thrashing nothing you could say would make him change his mind.

      ‘Well, it was just a week before my seventh birthday, and he came home on the Saturday evening and found a whole bed of young tomato plants all trampled down. He decided I’d done it. I hadn’t. I’d been at a neighbour’s house all afternoon because my mother and grandmother had gone to visit an aunt who’d had a baby. When he saw me coming in the front gate he just grabbed me by the collar and dragged me inside. Then he got his razor strop – do you remember those heavy leather straps that men used to use to sharpen their cut-throat razors on? – well, he just started in on me. I thought he was never going to stop. I was sure he was going to kill me. When he did stop, he shoved me in my bedroom and locked the door. I was crying and hurt, and I was so mad at him. When I knew he couldn’t hear me I said out loud, “I hope you die. God, make him die.” A week later he did. Had a heart attack and keeled over, dead. I knew I’d done it. I knew I was wicked. After that I just had to make up for being so wicked. That’s why I’ve always worked so hard and why the place burning down really got to me. I thought that at long last I was being punished for my wickedness.’

      When Dan had first come to see me, many months before he told me this story, his wife had said to me that she thought Dan had been too strict with their son Danny when he was a child. ‘Nonsense,’ Dan had said, ‘children, especially boys, need a firm hand. My father often took the stick to me and it never did me any harm.’

      We all, like Dan, have very convenient memories, or, rather, forgetories. We all can forget something that is too painful to remember. Thus many of us who concluded from one traumatic incident that we were bad have forgotten all about the incident.

      Lisa had done this. When she first came to see me she described her childhood as idyllic and her parents as perfect. Months went by before she could tell me about her parents’ quarrels, and many more months before she could allow herself to remember a terrible incident when she was five and her grandfather had undressed her, explored her genitals with his fingers, and then put his erect penis in her mouth. Lisa found it impossible to describe this clearly, but when she said, ‘I thought I was going to choke to death’, I guessed what had been done to her.

      She told me that her grandfather was a minister and that her parents were very proud of him. He lived in another state, so a visit from him was a special occasion. On that particular day, her parents had to go out and her grandfather had offered to mind her. Her parents had instructed her that she had to be very obedient and do whatever her grandfather wanted her to do.

      ‘I was very confused,’ Lisa told me. ‘I knew it was wrong to take your clothes off like that, but I didn’t dare be disobedient. I thought that perhaps this was something ministers did and that I was stupid, that I wasn’t doing it right.’

      ‘Did you tell your parents?’ I asked.

      ‘I didn’t dare. I thought they’d blame me. I hated him, but I wanted him to like me so he wouldn’t turn my parents against me. I already knew they thought more of him than of me. He took over my bedroom when he came to stay and I slept on a couch on the back verandah, and they always served him first at meals and gave him second helpings. So I just kept it to myself and tried to forget it.’

      My friend Jill had a similar experience and, like Lisa, did not tell her parents.

      ‘I kept my mouth shut, until I was about nineteen or twenty. It was my mother’s father. Everybody was reminiscing about him and deifying him. I’m not sure when it started, I might have been eight, it certainly was between when I was ten and twelve. It was just sick. I kept saying to my mother, “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to go there.” I finally got him caught by my grandmother, but then, of course, my grandmother would have nothing to do with me.’

      These experiences left both Jill and Lisa extremely frightened and disgusted with themselves, but they each expressed this fear and disgust in different ways.

      Lisa, being an extravert, ‘ran away’ from what was happening in her internal reality into her more real external reality. She always kept herself very, very busy. She had a full time job, kept her house perfect, and was a superb cook and dressmaker. She sought and made friends, and was a popular, sociable woman. The fear inside her could not be denied, however, and she located the source of her fear as being in the world around her. Lisa feared spiders and all creepy crawlies, she feared ugly people and anyone who was deformed in any way, she feared crowds and open spaces, and, most of all, she feared that everyone she loved and needed would reject her. She believed that no matter how hard she worked to make people love and need her, sooner or later they would discover that ‘inside СКАЧАТЬ