I read a short story about a woman who had debilitating fibromyalgia for years and started using EFT to immediate positive results. Then we learned that the woman as a young girl had witnessed her mother being repeatedly beaten by her father. At reading that my inner thought went something like this, ‘Yeah, so what. Who didn’t watch their mother getting her ass kicked by their father or step-father? I did, she did, probably most people did, so what. Stop whining.’ Following that thought I sat still. I had heard myself loud and clear and since I have been doing a lot of work in the Religious Sciences and other new thought and spiritual practices, all basically about changing your thoughts to change your life, I realized I had stumbled upon a big thought that was at the core of my development. For the first time ever I allowed myself to review in detail what had happened that night when I was only a nine year old girl.
They were arguing, mother and my stepfather. We had a small green house that mother had gotten when she moved us from our family, friends, and home in Newark, New Jersey to live near her best friend in Milwaukee. I didn’t really want to move but I was told later that it was because my mother wanted to protect me from my father. My father Lloyd was a charismatic charmer who had a candy store through which he also ran drugs. Everyone knew my father. He had a very small-time Frank Lucas type air to him back in Newark during the 70′s. There was a notorious story of him shooting a white man in a bar for disrespecting him. Lloyd ended up in jail for only a short stint for that assault because no one in the bar, except the shot white man, would say he did it.
My father and mother were never married. She was a “good” Christian girl from a well to do family and well, he was, well, Lloyd. Their relationship was based on good times and good feelings and when that was no longer present, they parted ways. Not before conceiving me though. Lloyd always gave my mother plenty of money and even spent a decent amount of time with me when my mother, would allow.
When I was about five and she came into his store and saw me playing with his unloaded gun at the counter. She calmly removed the gun from my hands, exchanged some seething and cold words with my father and swept me off to our apartment. My father came later. I don’t recall if it was days later or when, but she wouldn’t let him stay and he snatched off her glasses and left. A while after he had left she peered through the peep whole, opened the door and saw that her glasses were there unharmed. My father was a violent man but he always boasted about how he never ever put his hands on my mother. He said she was special. So what that he beat other women with the butt of a gun. At least he never hit my mother.
It was immediately following the glasses incident that mother moved us to Milwaukee. It was during a bus ride visit returning from Jersey where we met my step-father Eric. Eric and Erica. My mother recalls that I kept chatting him up and eventually asked him if he would marry my mother.
I was 7 when mother and Eric married. I was visiting my grandmother for the summer, as I did every summer, when mother and Eric decided to tie the knot. I was getting Baptized that summer and my mother was getting married. I remembered feeling hurt because she didn’t wait for me to be at the wedding. She later told me she was hurt that I got baptized without her being present.
Things between Eric and I were great. I called him my dad. I basically forgot about Lloyd, whom I later learned was looking high and low for me and mother. My mother had sworn the entire family to secrecy about our location. So Lloyd was never able to find me. However, it was okay because she had replaced him with Eric and Eric was fun. He loved to play. He played monopoly and scrabble with me. He carried me around on his shoulders and even took me to my first movie, E.T. It is still one of my favorite movies ever, I cry every time I see it. Eric was fantastic! He jumped into the playing, parenting and loving me role even better than Lloyd ever had, for a while. Then he started drinking a lot and could’nt keep a job. Then mother got pregnant. I was 9 years old. That was the Christmas when Eric, in a drunken stupor, told me there was no Santa Claus. I remember mother being so mad at him. I just played with my Barbie condo and the fur coat, hat and muff set that no-Santa had given me.
One pretty cold winter night in Milwaukee, Eric and mother were arguing and arguing real bad. He had been drinking and she was 8 months pregnant. He wasn’t working and she had been working full time. It was the first time in my young life that I saw and heard such rage. Mother wouldn’t stop yelling and Eric hit her. Mother still didn’t stop yelling. I’m sure that I started screaming as well. Mother told me to go to the car. I yelled, ‘I have to find my new shoes!’ I had just gotten a brand new pair of black patent leather Mary Janes. I was frantic to find them. I was not going anywhere without my new shoes! Mother continued to yell and Eric continued to hit her. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just shut up so he would stop hitting her. Ultimately I took too long finding my shoe and Eric had had time to yank something out from under the hood and mother and I were unable to escape using the car. So mother bundled us up and we hit the streets to the nearest pay phone. Eric didn’t follow us. Mother called a shelter and that’s where we stayed until she and Eric had worked it out. I don’t remember going back to the little green house. Mother and Eric moved us into a new townhouse after the big fight and soon after that my sister was born. They never fought as hard again that I saw, but I knew they still fought and that he was still hitting her.
It is 30 years later and that scene is still so crystal clear. I feel like I could fill in so many more details, colors, scents, images.That scene could be a book on it’s own.
Through spiritual healing and psychotherapy I can very clearly see where I have played every character in those early childhood abuse scenes. I have been mother, Eric, and even my unborn sister. I have been the victim and victimizer. Yet, I have rarely been able to merely see who I was at that time. I was a 9 year old little girl experiencing one of the most life-changing traumatic events of my entire life. I was a 9 year old girl learning how to behave in the world of relationships. I was a 9 year old girl left to her own conclusions and assumptions about how relationships worked.
I never knew how lasting an impression that bout of violence had on my life. The effects rippling full and deep, all these years, up until I left my marital home six months ago.
For decades I have carried shame about this event and subsequent events. For months and years I have carried deep shame and regret for my behavior in my marriage. I am continuing to work through the shame. I am learning forgiveness. First and maybe most importantly I am learning to forgive myself. Forgive myself for witnessing, internalizing, and replaying all those roles. If I don’t forgive my 5 year old self for playing with that gun, that led to the move away from my family in Jersey to the mid-west, then I can never begin to forgive the 9 year old who caused her mother to get beat because she was too concerned with her shoes.
This is not just the start of acknowledgement, processing, and healing but it is the beginning of a perspective that is about more than just my immediate family and community. This is about the journey to faith and consciousness and God. This is about homecoming.
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