I mentioned my mother briefly in Chapter 1 and feel it is necessary to discuss a little more deeply the lives of my parents, and the impact they had on my own life. Intergenerational Trauma is the cellular experience of genetically related individuals, handed down biologically from parents to children, and so on. The experiences of my ancestors before me live within my body, and now the bodies of my children. Patterns of repetition and themes of commonality exist between my father, his father, my ex-husband, and my son; myself and my paternal grandmother; my daughter, my mother and myself; and my son, and my mother. These themes exist and are manifest in our lives. I feel at times as though we are living the same exact story in different bodies across the ethers of time. In fact, the similarities are so profound, they scare the crap out of me.
My mother was the youngest of five children; a surprise baby. She was raised at my Grandmother’s knee, having been diagnosed by doctor’s early in her life as weak, sickly and frail. My Grandmother, afraid that my mother would die, kept her close, and so my mother was quite afraid of everything. She never traveled, and lives in deep seclusion. I’m uncertain of how old she was, but in my mother’s late teens or early 20s, she was diagnosed with a mental health disorder, most likely paranoid – schizophrenia. I can only imagine what her struggle must have been like trying work a job and then later, be a parent. She spoke of working for a company and her terror was so profound she would break out in cold sweats frequently. She didn’t last long at that job. I don’t remember her talking about too many other places she worked; eventually she was put on permanent disability. Her paranoia is profound. So is her body dysmorphia. Part of this condition may be related to her mental health condition, and part of it, I believe, is connected to the shame of being Latin. This acculturation was handed down to me, and while I don’t have the same struggles as my mother, I did become aware just recently of how severely impacted I was regarding her shame about her cultural origins.
My experience as her daughter was sad and lonely. I’m certain she tried hard to be present, to take care of me, to love me. And I’m sure she did love me, but everything else – being present and caring for me – was probably too difficult to manage. She cycled between manic phases where life seemed happy, and the darkness of a depression that would drive her to thoughts of destruction. I was traumatized by my childhood and her influence, and I was taught to lie for her at an early age. When solicitors would call, she asked me or my sister to answer the phone. We were placed in the awkward position of trying to ferret out if they were bill collectors or people who were friends, or someone who might be calling about work for our dad. Sometimes we were told to say that no matter who they asked for, they had the wrong number or that person didn’t live there.
Mostly what I see is that my mother was terrified. Her early mental health diagnosis meant years of medications and counseling, which she loathed. She suffered with depression, extreme paranoia, bouts of mania, agoraphobia, and anxiety. She was terrified of crowds, germs, spiders and dogs. She had married young to escape a very strict Catholic household and oppressive mother. And that marriage to my father was ripped apart by violence, terror, and drugs. Her own mental health struggles surpassed the inner need to survive and raise me without harm. Although I’m sure she tried, it didn’t work. The year I turned seven, and over the course of about 6 to 8 months, I was assaulted by a man in the neighborhood, had been hit by a car, and the 1971 Sylmar earthquake happened. Then, she gave up. I recall an early morning at a Greyhound depot, and a bus ride with her to somewhere. Many years later, I would learn that she had taken me to relatives in Arizona, dropped me off, asked them to adopt me and left. I blocked it out.
This fact was only verified when I was in my 30s. I can’t remember the details of how it all came about, but I think it was right around the time that my uncle and aunt died. They’d been married for 5 decades, having gotten hitched in their 20s, and died within 2 weeks of one another. I called their cousins to tell them what had happened and give them funeral details. When I was talking to J on the phone, she said to me out of the blue, “Mija, we were gonna adopt you. We love you so much.” I stopped, stunned. It took a moment for my ears and brain to process what she had said. Years later, I asked her what she meant. She explained how my mother had dropped me off one summer asking them to take care of me, and then disappeared. They were going to adopt me, but then my grandmother got word from her sister that I was in Arizona, having been left there by my own mother. My grandmother and aunt made immediate arrangements to retrieve me saying that “If anyone was going to care for me, it would be them.” The memories are gone for the most part – I’m certain that the Big-D was once again keeping me close and safe. But there is a photograph of me with my two 2nd cousins. It’s Easter I think. And I do have a vague recollection of something else – a pool or lake, a trip in a camper. But that’s all. It’s thin, like a veil across time, where I’m trying to look and see what’s there only to be thwarted by shadows and blurry images.
My father had been born prematurely in the 1940’s at a time when health care for babies born early was minimal if it even existed. I’m uncertain as to how far along my paternal Grandmother was in her pregnancy, but my father was so tiny, and frail, that doctors handed him to my Grandmother and told her to take him home, that there was nothing they could and that he would die. She did, and he survived. I recall asking my grandmother what had happened to trigger her labor, and she told me she had fallen while hanging drapes. I was young enough at the time of my query to believe what she said, but years later she told me another story.
At the time this conversation took place, I was contemplating ending my marriage. I remember standing in the kitchen of our home staring out the window and feeling a deep sadness and despair as I gazed at the fallacy of my dream. I told her about the violence in my marriage and my desire to leave, but that I was afraid of how I would raise two children alone. The story goes something like this: her first husband, my father’s father, had been a violent man, and one day he tried to choke her. She packed up and left the marriage. Was her early labor a result of this incident or some other assault? She never said, and I never thought to ask. My father’s father later remarried, and shockingly, he did kill his second wife. He went to prison, and that is all I know. I never did try to verify this story, but when I mentioned something about it to my mother shortly after I had spoken with my Grandmother, she flipped her lid that my Grandmother had told me what had happened all those years before. We never spoke of it again.
I don’t know much about my father. He was an artist and loved to play music, I know that much. He and my mother divorced before my first birthday, and I saw him three times that I can remember; once when he was in jail serving time for drug possession, once again after he’d been released and came to see me at his mother’s house, and the last time when I was 15 years old. I’d been arrested for burglary (Seriously, it was shoplifting) and my mother thought that a visit with him might “do” something.
My father struggled with alcohol and drugs for probably most of his life. One day I received a letter in the mail from a private investigator in Northern California. They were trying to reach my father’s relatives regarding a private matter, and could I contact them. You see, my father was a loner, and didn’t have much of a relationship with my Grandmother. He would contact her for money periodically when he needed money, and then disappear again. He had no home or permanent address. The letter was dated the summer of 1996 or 1997 (These abstract dates are simply because the letter is in a box in storage. When I find it or his death certificate, I will correct this vaguery). When I finally got someone on the phone, they informed me that in 1995 / 1996 he had died of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver. It had been one full year since his death. That letter broke my heart and left me gutted sitting on my kitchen floor, and crying. It was a Monday, and I’d been sick that weekend. I stayed home from work that day, and my children were at school. It’s weird the things you remember. I knew I would have to call my grandmother and tell her that her only son had died. I remained on the floor, and called her crying to tell her the news. I only wish I could have driven up to see her, to tell her in person, and to cry with her.
She and I made plans to fly up to Northern California to give him a proper burial. It was an awful trip. We were both brokenhearted and had never traveled together as adults; I felt awkward to say the least. Until we flew up to bury him, I had never been on a plane and truth be told, I was fucking terrified. Unintentionally, I kept checking in and out of my body, and I felt that my grandmother was relying on me to remain present. She was a strong woman, independent and coherent, she probably didn’t really NEED me to be present and handle things, but I felt a duty to do as much as I could for her so she could grieve and lean on me. I wanted to take charge, to be the granddaughter I thought she needed, the granddaughter I wanted to be, but I wasn’t capable. Big-D came along to ease my terror when I became flooded with fear and too much information, which happened often during that trip. The airport, the funeral home, the cemetery, and meeting two girls who claimed to be his daughters were all too much for me. We went to the cemetery to purchase a burial plot and headstone. The city had cremated him and placed his simple urn in a common grave with others until relatives could be notified. When the director of the cemetery placed his urn in the grave, my Grandmother gasped, and cried, “That’s all that’s left of him, my little boy.” I swallowed my own grief and choked quietly on my own child-like wail. They stuck in my throat like granite.
Before my father died, and during a time of relative calm in my marriage, I recall a telephone conversation with him. I had recently given birth to my son. I don’t remember exactly how I’d been able to find him. I think I reached out to my Grandmother and she had an old address of someone he was close to in Northern California. I must have sent a letter and included my address and phone number. I wanted him to know he was a grandfather, and so I included pictures of both my daughter and my son; smiling faces gleaming from glossy Polaroids. He received my letter, the photos and then called me. We talked a little but I don’t remember too much about what we discussed – Northern California, guest teaching at a University, his art and paintings. Later, I received a letter from him with photos; large canvases of paintings stacked along a hallway (which he said had all been stolen), and another of him playing bongos at a festival. He was brown, and worn out, years of struggle and suffering etched into his skin, combined with a far away look in his eyes. I’d seen this look before on my own face in a mirror, and in photographs. It was the last conversation I would ever have with him and the last image I would ever see of my father.
My mother is still alive, living in deep seclusion. Her terror still plagues her, paranoia rising like a tsunami threatening to swallow us all whole. My sister runs errands for her, and I help when I can but mostly she has cut me out of her life and I accept that. It’s so painful on some days, but what choice to I have? She vacillates between needing our help now and then, and deep mistrust for us. It’s a difficult relationship but we recognize that her suffering requires our compassion. As much as we would like to have our “mother”, we accept her as she is, and quiet our inner child as best we can.
These stories, these experiences of both my parents and their parents live in my body and the bodies of my children. I see how my children are emulating the stories of their ancestors in their own lives, even though my family, as a whole, has not really ever been close. My children never heard all the stories. My children didn’t experience fully the events of our family and their dysfunctional dynamics. I tried to shield them from some of it, and mostly our family was so splintered and hell bent on avoiding one another as we all aged, that keeping the stories under wraps became easy. Gossip was not something I really enjoyed. Regardless of it all, my children mirror the catastrophe that is our family history quite well.
Photo Credit and date: Unknown. Subject: Author.
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the ethereal soul and our somatic wisdom 