The other night I dreamed about my mother. She has been dead for about 50 years, but as far as I remember that was the first time I dreamed about her. In the dream we were happy to see one another and she hugged me close. In my dream I felt love and relief.
I loved my mother but our relationship was painful. She blamed me for reporting sexual abuse by my father and called me, “the little hussy who stole my husband,” or “the selfish tramp who broke up my family.” I was not the only daughter my father abused, but my older sister denied the abuse. She said it was so as not to hurt my mother. The end result was that after my father went to prison, I was blamed and scapegoated. My mother turned cold toward me and my sisters dared not show me affection for fear that my mother would believe that they were taking sides against her. It was a hostile home environment and the county children and family’s social worker sent me to live at Our Lady of the Highlands, a home for girls in difficult predicaments like me.
Our Lady of the Highlands was no easier for me. While not diagnosed at the time, I had PTSD and suffered tachycardia and severe anxiety. The symptoms started by the time I was 9 years old, and doctors could not identify the reason. While at Our Lady of the Highlands the bouts of tachycardia were fewer, but I functioned by constantly fighting off panic attacks which meant my focus on the task at hand was always impaired. In an environment that was rigidly regulated by a merit system governed by the clock that meant I was ever earning demerits for completing a task a minute, or even a mere 20 seconds behind my peers. Friendships were strongly discouraged due to the fear of homosexual relations. The hours of solitude left me locked in my internal emotional hell.
I do not, however, regret my years at Our Lady of the Highlands. I learned about morality and personal integrity. That was a foundation that I did not get from my family. I often thought everyone in my family lied for different reasons. Some lied to protect others from pain while at other times they lied to inflict personal pain. My father was the worst liar of them all. He even lied about his race, his name and date of birth and no, he was not hiding from the law! My dad simply made up stories about himself and his family and usually, they were self-aggrandizing. I had heard so many lies that I refused to be dishonest, and by the time that I was a young woman, I was described as ‘brutally blunt.’ Needless to say, I was lacking in social skills because not everything needs to be said just because it is true.
Members of my family continue to lie. They lie to avoid shame and recrimination. They lie to seek approval. They lie to rewrite their personal histories. They lie for the same reasons that they gave 50 years ago as well as some new ones. That means after all of these decades I remain the outsider. They do not want their lies confronted or their myths destroyed. I think all families do this to some extent. Mine is just extreme.
My mother was the most honest person in my family- when she was not drinking. Considering my mother’s experiences in Germany at the end of World War II, I am certain that my mother also suffered from PTSD. Her home was bombed by the Allies. She had been repeatedly beaten and survived a German firing squad. My mother had a silver pin in her leg where her femur was shattered by a bullet in that execution. At a time when PTSD was not recognized, I now understand that drinking was her way of drowning her pain. While I felt betrayed as a child, now I also understand why my mother chose to not believe me and to blame me. She was not a U.S. citizen and feared what would become of her and her children after my father was incarcerated. She had no means of supporting us and we skidded from below the socioeconomic poverty level into destitution while she herself slipped from depression to despair.
In my dream, there was no resentment or recrimination. There was only the warmth of being held by a loved one. Ω
dottieriley 