Vindicating Margaret

Since Sunday afternoon (July 3) of my recent trip to Buckhannon, I have had a somewhat unusual internal experience and process that seems to be unfolding within me, in an unexpected and potentially interesting and healing way.

They say we must pursue truth, wherever that leads us.

It sometimes seems everyone has their own truth.

Even Pilate said to Jesus, “What is truth?”

In all human conflicts there seems that one person’s truth is pitted against another’s.

Or one political group or tribal group or religious group or nation’s truth is pitted against another’s.

In the Garden, Cain’s truth was that he was not his brother’s keeper.

Because of our personal histories with some people,

it may be difficult to take them at face value.

If we’ve witnessed enough credible distortions of truth by that person, then sometimes we may dismiss something they claim as just another distortion and their version of their truth.

I would say my mother, Margaret Ruth Linger Slifer, as I knew her, easily fell into this category.

I knew my mother personally, only since May of 1963, when I was born. And likely, to some degree, I knew her from within the womb. Simply put, I don’t think our knowledge of our mother begins with our first breath. Though our conscious memories have no recall, a baby can and does respond to their mother’s voice and touch and more prior to birth.

But I did not know my mother when she was in high school…nor a child…nor in 1946. Anything we can know of our parents prior to our birth must come from what they tell us, what family and others tell us, and what we can learn and observe through tangible means such as old photos, diaries, school records, letters written, old film, etc.

When I recently went to Buckhannon, West Virginia seeking any possible information and other explorations that would aid me in writing both my Memoirs (Life Stories from the past) as well as various current writings about my present and thoughts about my future, I had somewhat of a preconceived notion. The things I was wondering if I might learn more about (and still plan to explore) took a twist somewhat as I opened again my mother’s 1945/1946 diary (with notations made in it in 1967, retrospectively) and began reading again.

I had brought this old journal of hers and some others, and grabbed a framed photo and some other old family photo albums and such, in case I might want to refer to them or re-visit browsing anything while on this getaway.

I had heard on a small handful of occasions my mother telling her version (her truth) of what happened to her in April 1946. I suppose, because of my own very real issues and experiences with her being hospitalized a number of times, I dismissed the face value of what she said and claimed, presuming it was yet another of her twisted, distorted perceptions.

But there was one statement she had made note of that this time, stood out to me.

Perhaps it was because in recent times I re-read various older family group email discussions and other correspondence and noticed that I was told Carter was an alcoholic and had died in jail. My mother had told me he was a diabetic and that led to his early death and that he had fallen off a porch from a rocking chair and hit his head (or something like that), and that was the direct event that caused his death. It’s all hearsay to me…and I wonder if there are any public records that would validate any of these claims.

My mother had made the notation in her diary that “Carter was particularly ‘violent’ with her.”

This statement for the first time (and I’ve read through these pages at times before) leapt out to me. I have, for this moment, redacted other notations on this page. I am not yet ready to put that part out until I have explored and contemplated this statement by my mother more deeply. This redacted statement seems connected to other notations on other pages, and statements of her truth about this family event.

When I am ready and have explored – the degree possible – any factual basis for such statements, perhaps then, I will continue with these portions of my writings.

In a very real sense, my mother’s story is inherently part of my story. I cannot tell my story, without telling in some part, my mother’s story and her truth.

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Perhaps it was a deepening understanding of a number of other things one learns as years progress through listening to various stories of other people either directly, or through film and audiobooks.

Or, maybe it was increasing clarification I learned from a number of sources on my trip of how the old Weston Hospital (now named back to its original name, the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic Asylum) was utilized in those times by the locals and also by medical people who were utilizing all types of therapies we would now consider barbaric, to expediently take away symptoms of a person’s trauma.

I do believe that most mental and emotional disorders have trauma at their roots. I personally do not buy in to what I now consider, the myth of mental disorders being mostly produced by some brain chemical imbalance or genetic condition. This is just my own opinion. But that conversation is way too involved to express here. As are the best approaches and treatments. Any person struggling with personal trauma or other emotional and psychological difficulties should always decide for themselves what help is needed, and how to best get it. I am not a doctor offering any advice, to be clear. I am only writing my own thoughts and opinions and touching here and there on what I think, based on my own life experiences and awareness of the experiences of many many other people that have come and gone or remain in my life. All of us struggle in this spectrum and conversation about what is normal.

I will just say that I think that more and more we are narrowly defining normal, and we are doing it for expediency and from other biases, plus, there is a lot of money in this system, too.

While I do think some tendencies run in family, I think it is not so clear whether these genetic factors produce mental illness. Most people have probably noticed that for some reason, creativity and intelligence seem linked to some types of “named” disorders. I think this is problematic, to some degree, for inherent reasoning in this idea. That would need to be another writing, another time. Surely there is a lot already written on it, however. I would only add from my personal experiences and observations of how creative brains work.

There is probably some interplay with environmental factors, including chronic, formative traumas (environmental nurture) or even, major specific traumas (including possibly early medical interventions by others to control an individual’s choices and self-directed behaviors that are not directly posing a significant harm to themselves or others) that needs closer exploration.

I am now wondering whether this piece of my mother’s story needs more serious exploration.

I do believe God created us with imagination, and it is not wrong to imagine certain things we cannot know for sure to facilitate healing and growth or for someone to find some way to process at least some aspects of their personal struggles. Who of us has not wondered at times if those who have died can somehow through God’s permission, have some knowledge of our lives.

I have friends who have seen butterflies or red cardinals and take it as a sign that their loved one is somehow watching over them. I have this same thing when I see a grasshopper – it is connected to a symbolic dream I once had involving my father turning into a small grasshopper as he was having his heart attack, and in the dream, I scooped him up in my hands! Some day, that full sequence of that dream deserves better blog writing focus. Lest my dream be dismissed, the Bible is replete with dreams, symbols and such. All cultures look to nature, signs and dreams for glimpses into holy, spiritual things. My Jesus (my God) can do anything He wants.

So in my imaginative ruminations recently, I wondered…since I cannot tell my own story without touching also on my mother’s story…and perhaps her mother’s story, too…(this seems to be a story -somewhat – of women) what might it look like if in even this one thing…I pursued on my mother’s behalf, searching out just a bit deeper so that anything truly dark might be brought into the Light?

Perhaps, I might discover, that at least in this one thing, my mother’s truth was actually the truth. And if so, this event may have had far-reaching effect in her own life, into my father’s and my lives…with ripple effect continuing to present and into the future, perhaps…

Pressing through the ongoing hard work of processing and growing and healing from trauma is lifelong, and well worth the focus and the struggles and all the naysayers that level accusations. They level these accusations at those who seek healing from the inside out, because it is far easier to bandaid something.

It is far easier to choose toxic positivity¹ rather than tragic optimism², and to gaslight and seek to silence those who are taking the road less traveled. I thought I had heard most every term possible and then recently, my therapist mentioned another.

I mean, I think we all know what toxic positivity is…I just didn’t know it had been given this new name.

“By finding a way to weave traumatic events you have experienced into your overall life story, you are able to place them in context and be in position to make sense of them. When tragic events are viewed in perspective, it allows us to use them as growth points rather than end points or reasons to stop in our tracks and give up. Trying to pretend the “bad stuff” didn’t happen won’t allow you to process or make sense of it; you are merely keeping yourself stuck in a space where unhelpful complications can arise.”

– Ditch Toxic Positivity for Tragic Optimism

I’m a big believer in honest speaking about one’s experiences, feelings and thoughts. I shun toxic positivity, it repulses me, when I perceive it. No one wants to be silenced from speaking their truth and especially, no one should be intimidated or coerced either into compliance with something they are uncomfortable with, or, keeping silent about things they want to speak out about.

My mother (like many in family systems of dysfunction and abuse) was often vocally intimidating that I and my father keep secret what went on in our home. She would say things like “what goes on at 333 Tamara Circle stays at 333 Tamara Circle.” When I think on this, it feels like some weird parody of Las Vegas!

I am sure that my mother’s actual paranoia that was clearly evident by the time I was a young child (and the extent of this before my birth, unclear…I only know what my father told me, and some other family members, and that, too, will be saved for other writings perhaps…) contributed to her forms of secrecy. But, especially after my father died, it seemed I began, slowly and increasingly, talking to others and divulging the secrets and the extent of difficulties and abnormalities in the entire situation.

I had to. I would not have survived, had I continued to keep quiet.

I do believe the direct or unspoken constraints found in so many families about not ever talking to others about past things or truly hard things, takes its toll on people, psychologically and emotionally, in so many ways into their adulthood.

Children may experience a number of things very young that they feel are their fault, or feel shame in the telling.

Sometimes when I write, I will receive feedback from some who seem to have the impression that I am either voicing things for the first time, ever, or that I am somehow living in the past. Both things are far from the truth. Perhaps, it is simply that some people have not had the same experiences as I have and even those who have, may deal with them in far different ways.

Never tell someone who is expressing or working through things in their particular way that they should just get over it already…because that’s obnoxious and you may not yet have any clue what they have NOT told you, and already, your ears are tired of it all. Too many people are uncomfortable with the process of someone telling their story. They want to be editors, but, it is not their story to tell. Likely, my opinion is that they have not yet got in full touch with their own story. And that is far more tragic than anything I could write about here.

The process of getting in touch with our own stories – the nitty gritty not the glossy flossy – has purpose. Because later, when opportunity presents itself to listen to another who is ready to reveal, we are all ears.

If there was not some benefit in people telling their stories, why are there so many books and other things written and expressed? Why are you even reading this, if you have actually made it this far?

And how might one write and tell their story if they don’t make time or permit themselves an amount of recall and even, at times, hours or days of being “in it” once again? In it enough that they can articulate it. I think there are many people who have lived what I lived and far worse. When someone has the desire and writing skills to articulate their story – whatever that is – their truth – they should pursue that.

In 2006 I illustrated my first little short story about a true event in my childhood that was full of both comedy and tragedy, of sorts. It was called “Crime and Punishment of the Problem Child.”

The theme of being viewed as a problem child (or problematic adult) is not at all uncommon. I would venture that most children who suffered a variety of abuses/dysfunctional family systems at some level feel they must be to blame.

And that is what makes it so abhorrent to me when any adult attempts to silence another adult from expressing their story in whatever form that takes. I wish my own mother had told me horrid tales of her upbringing, truly. In fact, in my 20’s and 30’s, at times I tried to pull things out from her. She was secretive…dismissive that anything was unusual, unseemly or less-than-grandiosely-valiant about her parents.

But, what she did tell me is that

her siblings all tried to control her.

I now feel I have many a reason to believe her, on that one.

When I was in college and taking psychology and social work classes, I was searching for anything from her. Was she sexually abused? Was she physically beaten? Did she go without food? Anything.

Tell me, Mother.

I vaguely remember pressing her – maybe even being like an interrogator of sorts, leading the witness somewhat – one time. I believe it may have been during one of my brief overnight sleeping at her house after I moved out into a dorm during winter session of my freshman year at the University of Delaware.

After that, I think there were only a handful of nights/weeks I ever again slept in that house with her, and these would have been times when the dorms closed at holiday, or the summer of 1984 when I took a two-month missions trip to Mexico and had a couple weeks (maybe only days) before and after returning, prior to moving into an apartment probably late August/early September of my senior year in college.

It was during one of these times I tried pulling out of her any story or detail from her childhood. I think I asked if she were ever molested by her father or brothers and she immediately denied the idea of that. I recall asking if she had to sleep with any of them (because of the hard times and number of siblings, perhaps…limited space…I just wondered…) and she said they were all poor and of course sometimes the children crawled into bed with their parents, maybe even to keep warm during winter. I specifically remember her saying that her father said to her, “Child, your feet are cold.”

It was during this same conversation I pressed her for more details on the 1946 hospitalization, since somehow I knew of this.

What I recall her telling me was brief and unclear. She said there was a “swimming (diving?) accident” she was involved in when she was at West Virginia University in Morgantown and her brothers (I believe she mentioned Robert at the time but I had assumed who the other was, and now I read differently and see in hospital notes…it was Robert and Carter) showed up at the school and “busted out her teeth” and took her to the state hospital. That’s pretty much all I got.

So Mom, this one’s for you…this time…

~~~So Mom, this one’s for you. This time. If I can find out more information, I will! I saw your notation in 1967 that you wanted to know who signed the form to withdraw you from college, and that you were a student in good standing. While it would have never been my dream to pursue a business degree, obviously, it was your dream. I imagine you wanted to get out of those hills of West Virginia, too, for whatever reason. I read your other notes, too. I’ll see what I can find out down here. You were a “hot mess”, quite honestly, as they say!…and those Elton John glasses you wore were just the beginning of things I needed to process and cope with. We all – including myself – could have done just a bit better for our children. We are human. Degrees of culpability and personality and spiritual issues are always on the table of processing…but…I just want to say, wrong is wrong. You were twenty-two years old, an adult, and according to your diary, working hard to put yourself through school. In fact, perhaps you were the first woman in that family who attended college. I do not know for certain. I learned about the guidelines and burden of proof to drop off a relative – especially a non-compliant one in some family situation – at that hospital. Being submerged in ice cold water with a sheet up to your neck and restraints…and lifelong damaging electroshock treatment, relatively new in 1946, sounds terrifying. And I imagine if what you stated is actually true, and you were violently taken from the address in Morgantown you made notation of, and your teeth busted out in the process and withdrawn from college against your will…that a lot of women in that situation might have been yelling in a room, alone, for days. And, if what you wrote is true, and I have other resources/records saved from your home to someday read more closely…I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of it and VINDICATE you. At least in that. I promise. ~ your daughter, Eileen

PS…I’m not sure you ever asked me what my favorite color is…it is purple. What was your favorite color??~~~

PSS…isn’t that a terrible still shot of me in front of that Lunatic Asylum? I have such a crooked smile. No wonder you coached me for hours to not give a cheesy grin in my first grade photo.~~~

(Imagination Mom: You are beautiful! Keep me posted! That’s my girl!)

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¹ Toxic Positivity

2 Tragic Optimism