anniversary trauma

All my life, appearing normal was my goal. Abuse had chiseled me into an expert concealer of emotions. Unknowingly, to disguise my feeling whorish, I dressed puritanically. But recall has liberated my thoughts and reshaped my self-image. I wear short skirts and snugly fitting clothes, but no nail polish. I don’t want to be seen as a painted woman.

My father had sole rights to my body, but didn’t trade it to others, as Elly Danica reported that her father did, in her book, Don’t, A Woman’s word. Elly often sounds like she’s telling my story. Thighs that reflexively clenched closed as soon as the enemy’s hands touched them. As a matter of fact, my knees were so glued together, reluctant to separate, that my fourth-grade teacher made fun of my peculiar run, knees barely separating while calves and feet swung to the side. I always sat with one leg wrapped around the other, locked. As though these restrictions were unrelated to me, until recall, I was oblivious to their existence.

Being in graduate school now, floodlights my non-memory. Since age three, my brain has programmed itself to forget. My unconscious goal, instant burial of all matter, good or bad, that could cause an association, making the sludge of childhood rise up into recall. Forgetting is a vast bandage, an automatic self-protective mechanism. It’s said that humans would have difficulty surviving if we didn’t forget the pain of childbirth and some of our losses.

            If we ingest what the body can’t cope with, involuntarily, to minimize toxicity, we expel offending material through vomiting or diarrhea. If material is too toxic for our psyche, like child abuse or war traumas, we bury the events, or develop loss of affect (become indifferent, numb to much of life). In extreme cases we separate mind from body, preventing events from being fully recorded. Most often my coping mechanism was repression and numbness. Occasionally I left my flesh in Father’s grip while my mind disappeared.

            For most people, when one lets repressed memories surface, capacity to retain information improves, yet my memory still clings only to safe topics. My therapist insists that it is due to lifelong repression. I know many people with traumatic pasts; none have as limited a memory. Yet I’ve always had exceptional recall of addresses and phone numbers. They are innocuous and don’t trigger old events.

            As the retrieval of my past began, some memories stalked me, then, like leaf shadows, they merely left a glimmer of awareness. Finally, they came into sharp focus, in vivid color. I purposely dug out others to wrest power from my dead father, to gain control over my fears, to quell nightmares.  

The first memory-attack happened after returning to psychotherapy in my mid-forties. My husband playfully put his hand on top of my head and twisted it left to right a few times. I yelled, “Stop”. A flash of electricity ran through me; I felt Father’s hand on my head, pushing it down to his crotch to force his penis into my mouth. Jaw locked, lips sealed, I tried to pull my head away. I dared to resist; which ignited his rage. He wrapped his large hands around my tiny throat, and shook my whole body back and forth, back and forth.  

I assume he walked out of the room and told Mother to see what was wrong with me.  Back then doctors made house calls. Dr. Rosenhain confirmed mother’s diagnosis, asthma. For years after that, I often got birthday-asthma. My whole family thought the mold spores in our basement caused it; yet Mother made my twins’ and my September birthday parties there anyway. From Dr. Rosenhain’s injection of adrenaline, I instantly felt catastrophically weak and my heart raced like hummingbird wings.

            When submerged in recall, for a moment memories seemed real then imaginary. Months later memory strung together other details. Connecting those dots, a picture emerged.  Alternately, I felt nuts to imagine my father did that, or was depressed by its truth. 

For years now, parental violence has been front-page news, and it would be easier to believe, but in the mid 80’s it was all hush-hush, I was alone. I didn’t forget getting asthma on many of my birthdays, but never linked it to my repressed history. It took two more years of seesawing between he did, he didn’t, till I knew, the real precipitator was Father’s third birthday gift. It was not the mold spores in our basement. My resistance to his first attempt to orally rape me, made Father choke me. Birthday-asthma-attacks were body-memories screaming, but I was too deaf to decipher my rasping breaths.  

            I still wonder, is recall a desert mirage or a cactus spiking truths? After making the asthma/birthday connection, I became a serious journal writer, a geologist of the unconscious, to gain perspective and release anguish. Sometimes, standing knee-deep in dross, digging out fossils, an avalanche of debris tumbled out, threatening my survival. For more than a year, I often felt too repulsive to be seen by anyone except my husband. Depression and shame weighed heavily; it was hard to lift myself out of bed. I stopped working for a few years. The kindness and warmth of my therapist and husband slowly revived me. But no matter how much material surfaced, my retentive abilities remained minimal.

            I still get absorbed by a film, a book, I am truly engaged, but a day later only a couple of things echo as familiar. I am enthralled by some museum paintings, then walk out and recall little to discuss with friends. If asked, who are your favorite poets, which books have you recently read, I fudge answers or admit that I’m an amnesiac. I’ve now read hundreds of poets, have many favorites, but when asked who mine are, almost nothing comes to mind. Because of the black hole that swallows up information, I’ve always been drawn to things that require logic, not knowledge.

            In school, I liked math and loved art. I became a lingerie designer. Later I designed textiles, home furnishings, and decorated model homes. These endeavors merely needed a sense of style, a sense of balance with color and shape, a love of the visual. Draping silk or nylon on a mannequin, using fingertips to work in folds and pleats was as tactile as finger painting.  Decor-ating nightgowns with lace and embroidery, was playing dress-up. They required a minimum of learned skills, mostly intuition. My pursuits satisfied child-like pleasures that had I had no connections to in my early years. These were my belated mud pies and sand castles.  

            I was a natural at sports and acrobatics but did little playing in childhood. Later, painting floral or geometric designs, experimenting with texture was fun. Learning through play, I expanded my textiles designing skills. Requiring concentration and precision, it put blinders on my brain, didn’t let thought drift back to dangerous turf. Painting the same motif in numerous angles, various colors combinations was meditative, as hypnotic as knitting complex stitches at a high speed, entrancing as repetitive prayers.

            Compromise and an ability to read your audience, anticipate its wants, (not memory) were essential to my getting along with clients or bosses. Compromise is easy for me. In contrast to Father’s dictums, where at fourteen I still had to ask permission to take a cookie, compromise is almost like getting my own way.  

            One thing I never forgot, the fire-hot pins and needles from Father’s frequent spankings.  My antennae were always out; reading his moods lessened my chances of getting hit. Early-learned survival skills prepared me for many of life’s rigors.  

            How much of my memory function is atrophied from lack of use? I need to get tested, find out about self-imposed, or auto-amnesia, learn if part of my brain is dead, what parts need exercise, can I reawaken any of it?  Prior to recall, I barely read and never wrote; now my mind is active, I want to remember the present, use it to build knowledge.

            Since fleshing out some of the abuse I’ve been released from my cocoon. I want to explore the planet and my place in it. That means, read, listen, think and write. But, as a writer, I suddenly have a vocation that places me amidst people who know what’s happened, is happening, in politics, science, literature, pop culture, etc. Writers don’t have the memory section of their brain under lock and key, don’t consider many topics off-limits.  

            To improve my writing, I’ve immersed myself in the academic sphere, which I had avoided. I feel progressively more alien; my connection to their world is tenuous. Lifelong protective censors chiseled a chasm between writers and me.  Before recall, fear-censors were less strict, I watched some frightening films. Now I avoid most violent literature, films, tv, or news. Hitchcock is a permanent squatter in my psyche. I keep him at bay or fear of being raped and murdered grows into a menacing shadow that I can’t outrun. Sleep becomes my enemy, again I’m a defenseless target. Censorship (violence-avoidance) is my valium; botanical gardens and Mozart are my Prozac. I am addicted to both. 

            Much of me was born after childhood miseries had surfaced. I now live more of the world through my fingertips, my eyes and nose, and I express my feelings. Curiosity, necessary to learning, bloomed. I formed opinions, became vocal. Yet selective memory and self-imposed bans keep me out of sync with my peers. When I wrote only poetry, as long as my senses were alive, I communicated. Modestly educated, I wrote visceral poems that touched people. My handicaps were less visible to me and to others. Surrounded by equally impaired friends, though their paralysis was in different parts of their psyche, I felt a kinship with them.

            My recent desire to write prose has set me, a one-armed-one-legged athlete, on a playing field with four-limbed competitors. Luckily, outside the intellectual arena I’ve always been nimble, didn’t need prosthetic aids. It takes lots of know-how, an excellent sense of balance to maintain intimacy for extended periods. I have close friends and an excellent marriage that rescued me at nineteen.

            Neither my husband nor I understood or questioned my truncated memory. Herb accepted me as I was. Our marriage hasn’t been all high jumps and flawless exercises on the balance beam. We took falls, got bruised, I have a few small scars. In fact, without the balance-umbrella of therapy I wouldn’t be walking on this tightrope of fidelity and love.

            But, relocate me into academia, especially as a campus resident, and my trauma-related handicaps gain a neon glow. I have no childhood music or songs to join in with friends. I can’t participate in discussions of data:  history, literature, music. My muteness replicates the mandatory silence when Father was home.

            Being an alien among classmates is a re-run of my foreignness among my family and most adults. Usually, I’m glad that I’m no longer numb but it has a down side. Like an arm that fell asleep and tingles awake, amnesia’s repercussions quiver through me with phantom pains.  More awake, I feel more estranged from my fellow writers—trauma’s partial lobotomy.

            My brain has vomited up reams of memory fragments:  an eight-hundred-page journal, over a thousand poems, and essays. I’ve cleared out so much junk from the formerly locked attic trunk. Why can’t I store knowledge in it and retrieve recent material? Is the trunk so crowded with atrophied brain cells that nothing else can fit in? To counteract despair I remind myself, I have a heightened ability to read people that many non-amnesiacs do not have.

            My intellectual endeavors began in my mid-forties; most people start before their teens.  Now I have urgent wants, intense emotions. Pre-recall I had fooled myself, and others into thinking that I was exceptionally agreeable.  Actually, I was a blob but didn’t know it till feelings began to announce themselves. Opinionless, preferenceless, numb, I left most decisions to others:  what to do, which restaurant to go to, where to meet, who to invite.

            One day, feelings knocked on my rib cage, demanding to be let out. Slowly I let them inch their way up to my vocal chords. Before I knew it, I began speaking more. But as feelings arose, my tolerance of the world diminished. Opinions spewed out of me. As though making up for lost time, my moods shifted quickly. Now decisions are as natural as blinking. But being memory impaired still is excruciating.

            Even if I retained what I now read, I’d be at a great disadvantage. If only I could digitize information like a computer, I could play catch-up, appear normal. I’m ashamed to say it, but when I see people with severe physical handicaps, I’m glad that most of my scars are internal. I need to conceal my scars, unlike author, Audre Lorde, who was brave enough to not wear a prosthesis after her mastectomy.

            On second thought, I do have some of her bravery. I go public, reveal my history at poetry readings, peer workshops, and in published journals. And I finally stopped hiding behind my pen name. Lacking memory skills merely means I have to work harder to puzzle-fit pieces together, use more intuition to make necessary leaps. It’s okay if recall is an impressionistic painting rather than a surrealist vision.

My lengthy journey to exhume childhood is over. My lost sense of smell was not allergy-induced, as I had always thought.  It was burned out by the acrid stench of Father’s groin, and by my craving to shut out the world. Perhaps he thought his penis was an electric plug and my mouth was a socket. He needed constant current.

            I couldn’t shut my ears to his orgasmic frenzies and raging tantrums, nor stop the incursion of his octopus-fingers, tongue, penis. But I magically sealed my nostrils.  A survival-instinct that helped. Knowledge of his forays instantly hid in deep creases of gray matter, and was not released until recall decades after his death.

            No, there never was one blossom, one bud, not even a butterfly to light up childhood. No berries for the birds and no birds to sing lullabies, only volcanic eruptions within the brick walls of home. Only slugs, centipedes and snakes in my bed. But I’m that staghorn sumac that finds enough nourishment in the smallest asphalt crack, the darkest shade, and manages to sprout up with just a bit of rainwater. I will unfurl my leaves, send out new shoots in all directions.

            But I’m much sadder than I used to be, and presently would prefer to not have recalled any of my early life. I suffer the phantom pains of an amputated childhood and the stampede effects of father’s hands, mouth, tongue, penis pounding my body and mind. 

            Color has always been my friend. It does not contain hidden danger. I am especially attuned to visual details, texture, color. I can look at our old black and white family photos and know the color and feel of most fabrics. They were my indoor garden. Much of the world I instinctively tuned out, but flowers and fabrics were safe, predictable. I loved Mother’s satin robe, though I seldom was close enough to feel its silkiness. I don’t recall the sleeves, but her robe was diagonally striped magenta and silver, with a fitted bodice and wide skirt. At six, Anne, my twin, and I had royal blue silk dresses from B. Altman. The Peter Pan collar was perked up by pink embroidered flowers, and three small pearlized buttons going down the center.

            True, many people recall fabrics from their childhood but I recall little else, except for splinters that my body spits out, until I relent and acknowledge them. Along with all the bad that constituted a few hours per day (when Father was home), into the waste bin went the rest of each day, leaving me quite bereft of a history, converting my past into tattered lace, sections missing. 

Afraid to relax, not letting go is infinitely fatiguing. By 5 p.m. I can barely stay awake, unless I’m in class, which distracts me from my microscopic world of abuse, and transports me into the lives of others. One good thing about recall, it’s made my poetry freer. I’m more willing to be buffeted by unpredictable or unexpected waves, as they roll or crash into each other. I anticipate buoyancy once I let my body experience my intolerable past.

BODY ALERT — Three classes on family violence and incest, two shelves of books on trauma have yielded a lot about the mind/body connection. Forty-five-years-old is not too ancient to return to school. I love Dr. Lovrod’s class but it requires hours of reading each night.

            Trauma victims of war, incest, or natural disasters have lots in common. An incident reminiscent of one’s trauma can trigger the same neurological reactions that happened thirty years ago. For a war survivor, gun shots in movies or air raid drills can ignite the nervous system, set a process in motion as though dangers presently exist. As I read somewhere, a war, mugging, or rape victim may get “anniversary trauma symptoms”. Their body duplicates certain pains, nightmares, or fears each year on the date of their attack.

            Till nine years ago I was oblivious to most of my childhood abuse, and my anniversary symptoms, but I had instinctively avoided most violent films or books. When my terrifying history began its journey out of repression, psychotherapy’s curative powers were insufficient. I wrote compulsively, mostly poetry, to make some sense out of my early years. Years later, I expend less energy burying childhood, which frees my brain for intellectual pursuits. I’m no longer insulted if an illness is said to be psychologically induced.  

            I hated, Don’t, Elly Danica’s autobiography. I wanted to fling it into the garbage while reviewing it for my final exam. Then I realized she’s a great writer, but not knowing how to cry made each page feel like another cinder block was falling onto my chest. The more I reread, Don’t, and wrote my report, the better I understood the impact emotions have on our own biochemistry.

            Elly and I lived in constant fear of our fathers’ footsteps and loud or whispered commands. Our homes were torture chambers, not a corner of safety; but her history was far worse and so are her emotional scars. To end her abuse, she married her boyfriend who turned out to be another aggressor. She escaped, barely gripping her sanity, and leaving behind her newborn infant. Years after, she could only socialize minimally. She still lives on her own, never had a real family. I also married to escape home but miraculously chose a gentle man. We have two sons. Unlike Elly, who remembered what happened, my mind hibernated till I was 45. We both write to witness our emerging self, erased by the usurping of our body, the taboos against feelings, and demands that we display false emotions.

            Why does she forgive her mother? It skyrockets my blood pressure; she wants a relationship with her. Perhaps, because her father also victimized her mother. I don’t talk to my old, dying mother about anything real anymore. 

            I’ve learned my frequent spankings were actually beatings. Our mothers enabled the perps; and our siblings adhered to the, I don’t hear or see anything statute. We were abandoned by each family member. Compounding our isolation, were our fathers’ lies, I’m not doing anything; It doesn’t hurt, making reality unreal. Everyone acting as if nothing unusual transpired made us doubt our sanity. Keeping up appearances was the family motto.   was forced to kiss Father hello when he came home from work, and good night when I went to bed. Getting near him was like putting my face into vomit. Mother cared more about our dog’s feelings.

            Elly’s history was worse than mine yet she trusted, confided in several adults. Like gold nuggets in a dump, Elly found her daring. Only her grandmother came to her aid. Then, to escape intervention, her father moved the family from Holland to Canada. I didn’t trust anyone, never even told myself. I unconsciously feared being murdered if I told. 

            Prior to recall, I took Mother for nature drives, wanted her to enjoy my sons. Now just hearing her voice churns my gut. Before Parkinson’s debilitated her, had I recalled my history, I might have tried to make her face the crimes she partnered. If she didn’t insist that I made them up or was crazy, I’d have forgiven her. Maybe.

            In, Don’t, Elly describes how her father fucks her all the time.  When she’s nine, from the back of a farmer’s car he begins selling her to strangers.  All takers, till a Chinese man gets on the end of the line.  Her father thinks, yellow people are disgusting, really inferior.  He refuses, never will let a Yellow Man fuck his daughter, . . .  his color might rub off on her.

            Astonishingly, a few days later, Elly’s entire body turns yellow. For the six weeks that she has hepatitis her father stops fucking her. She wrote, “It was the happiest six weeks of my childhood. . .  I tried to stay yellow as long as possible.” One’s mind can wield a sword or a magic wand over the body.

            My happiest moment was Father’s death. It was a very sweet-sixteen birthday. My guilt-free wish came true. My lungs expanded, I could finally breathe. But now Elly’s words stampede my brain. Did I use illness to ward off Father? He hated me as soon as he was finished doing things to me, or, when I was sick. When I had asthma, he banned me from the living room. He was repulsed or enraged by my wheezing. Why did I never realize, sick was my weapon? He never entered my bedroom, or sexually abused me when I was sick. Actually, he probably hated to hear my raspy breath because of that first time, my third birthday, when he tried to force his penis into my mouth.

            Elly’s book is electro-shock-therapy in reverse; causing tremors that jolt memory into wakefulness. I learn, my clenched heart can let go of illness. There are options. Words like:  No, You can’t, I won’t, Get away from me, I hate you, You can’t touch me anymore. I can stop defending with my swollen liver, raspy lungs, tired thyroid. Maybe I can unplug my tear ducts.  Or would that make me dissolve?  

            Two months pass; I wake up realizing, at 18, I too got hepatitis. It must have been in response to my boyfriend, Al’s, insistence that we go all the way. By bus, student council members from all the New York State colleges went to Albany. As Vice President of the Fashion Institute of Technology, I also went. A rare opportunity for fun, not a minute wasted on sleep.  We partied all night. We had a bash, healthy, tipsy fun, no drunken brawls. Enid S., always on a diet, always in a tight straight skirt and cashmere sweater, ate almost nothing but guzzled Martinis. I was jutting-hip-bone-skinny and wanted desperately to gain weight but one scotch was my limit. A few people could and did hold their liquor well.

            Al came along for the weekend. For two years we were inseparable as a pair of loons.  We spent hours in his car, our bodies entwined. Unexpectedly, Al was very persistent about going all the way. At eighteen, I thought one had to wait till marriage to have intercourse.

            Al must have assumed I’d have objected to his joining me if I intended to refrain from sex. But we always spent as much time together as we could. It hadn’t occurred to me, sex was why he came to Albany. He ended up having sex with buxom Marilyn M. who didn’t wear underpants. That really pissed me off and humiliated me in front of my friends, who told me about his escapade. On the bus ride home, as everyone sang Day ‘O, 16 tons, Whim O Way, I tried to act unaffected by Al’s not so secret tryst, but at home we had a big argument and I temporarily broke off with him.

            Last night I woke up saying, That’s why a few days after the Albany trip I got hepatitis.  Our house was quarantined. No one could get near me, or force me to have sex.  Al’s pleadings and demands had put my body back into red-alert-defense-mode.  Hepatitis was the only answer. 

            Reading, Don’t, broke the secret code of illness that my body screamed but my mind never understood. Asthma was the repellent for Father. It’s as obvious as a giant yellow balloon, yet it took me two more months to decipher the hepatitis code. How does the unconscious know enough to cause a mysterious illness to isolate me from the world?

            From the age of three, I was permitted zero self-defense: not verbal or physical, no withdrawal from his attacks, no flinching, no crying (ditto for Elly). Any action incited Father’s hitting mode; or he’d squeeze my bones between his thumb and fingers. Usually after he pried my legs apart, he had only a warm corpse beneath him, flesh yielding to the forces of his weight.  The child inside disappeared.

            Other incest survivors whose stories I’ve read or heard, can leave their body, float to the ceiling or elsewhere in the room and observe their body’s violations from a safe distance. I’m the only one I know who simply disappeared or stopped being. I often didn’t see a thing.

            Luckily, Father didn’t sense that my secret dialogue between mind and body (unbeknownst to me) manufactured physical illness. In sickness, not me, but my body was allowed to rebel, shriek, defend, and withdraw into a sickbed. I accompanied my body into seclusion and relative safety.  

            Especially in the early years, repression was the preserver for my sanity. The real savior was Father’s cancer. His death freed me from murderous fantasies, released me from his strait-jacket rules.

            I think my intense desire to be invisible, my fear, and a constant defensive posture, instinctively made me a shallow breather. Mini-breaths became a learned reflex that lingers.  Instead of being liberated by his death, my pit bull history refused to unlock its jaws.  Disease became my shadow.

            Therapy in my mid-twenties did not dislodge recall. In my teens I was keenly aware when Father pinched or squeezed my breasts, soul kissed me and bit my lip.  He liked to stroke my neck. But when Dr. Stein (my second therapist) suggested that more had happened than I revealed, I was certain that he was wrong. Yet the body knows what the mind refuses to know.  Under siege from my dead father’s lingering threats, from memories struggling to surface, and, my doctor coaxing them to the surface, my body sought the most strenuous defense, typhoid.  Being confined in a hospital and later put into isolation, I legitimately retreated from my therapist and the group members, unconsciously, avoiding my past.

            My internist misdiagnosed the illness. Since I hadn’t left the country, he thought that I had ulcerative colitis. He said that I had to be hospitalized, get bed-rest, and be away from all stress (at 26 I had two young sons).  When the lab tests revealed that I had typhoid fever, the doctor switched me to a private room in the contagious-isolation area and said, “Don’t tell anyone. they’ll treat you like a leper”.  I understood the subtext—Don’t tell anyone, or the hospital and I could get sued for placing you in a room with three other patients.  “Don’t tell!  “Don’t tell!”, echoes from childhood.

            My parents and older sister were from Vienna, Austria. When Father was in concentration camp he got typhoid; did he transmit it to me, and it lay dormant until my therapist threatened me with recall? 

            Instead of getting angry, it depressed me that my internist referred to me as a leper. That was how Father felt when I was sick. But that’s what fueled my micro-power. My body armor was asthma. It’s decades late, but now I must, must, must exchange flu-bugs for hammer-words.  And I’ve just learned one of the best words in the English language, Don’t. 

            Disease still is my nemesis and my ally. When I get emotionally too tired to live, my body screams in revolt and my immune system erases me. That’s the most guilt-free form of suicide. I fight that temptation with reading and writing to regain power over my body.  Knowledge is my ammunition, like learning from Elly’s, Don’t. Writing is a form of mental nutrition, it puzzle-fits chaos into a coherent pattern.

            I also wonder about a different type of trauma anniversary. The adrenaline injection the doctor gave me when I was three, after being choked, is that why my body goes into panic mode with crazy-rapid heart beating and my whole body gets extremely weak? All these years I had assumed it’s just my hyper-reactive body. Now I think it’s that early connection. But despite pairing the two, at the dentist, I still can’t convince my body not to over-react to the novocaine which has adrenaline in it. It’s as if the body memory became a reflex, and won’t adjust to new information.  It’s another anniversary but on a cellular level, not on a specific date. 

My frequent colds no longer flatten me with flu-like symptoms, and their duration is shorter. I am learning to turn my body into my friend.

Jane Berger Herschlag—A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, was an apparel designer, textile designer, and model home decorator.  Jane got her B.A. in Creative Writing and Women’s Studies from Hunter College, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from CCNY, having won numerous awards.

She curated open mic readings at the West Side YMCA in NYC for seven years, and at a Fifth Avenue Deli in NYC, Picnic Place; reviewed by the New York Times.  Jane ran a peer workshop for ten years.  She taught creative writing at NYC schools and at ESCAPE to the Arts—the Writer’s Voice at the regional YMCA of Western Connecticut. 

Her Docu-Poetry chapbook, Bully in The Spotlight is published by Pudding House Publications. Her full-length poetry collection and photographs, When the Mouth Can’t Speak the Body will, is published by Finishing Line Press.  She is included in many university presses, anthologies, and on-line journals.