Chapter Seven
Imagine There's no Heaven
My wife's mother was an only child and fleetingly, we thought her uncaring, self-absorbed nature might have been the result of lack of sibling interaction. Her parents were loving, hard-working people, who had moved from their secure lifestyle in the hills outside a major city to a remote coastal village to start their lives anew. Years later, we would wonder why a couple would leave a secure lifestyle with an adolescent school aged child and move to a remote area. There had to be some massive motivation for leaving their broad network of supportive family and friends for relative social isolation. Could it be their child was a factor? Had the child actually done something that made them move to another area where they were complete strangers?
We would never know the reason for the move, but there had to be a significant reason for the re-location. The motivation certainly wasn't money, as the local economy was pitiable and there was little chance of employment or self-advancement. A theory that may fit the mystery was the fact the very young teenager may have fallen pregnant and the scandal of teenage pregnancy in the 1950's, forced the family to move to a remote location. A forced abortion or pregnancy complications, fitted with a period of hospitalisation and later fertility problems. The fact that no close relatives ever visited the family hinted at some major upheaval in family dynamics. An intriguing mystery will probably remain a secret forever.
My wife's mother attended school in the small seaside village, but she had few friends and her social activities as a child remain a secret. After leaving school, she had brief periods of employment and went to New Zealand, holidaying for an extended time during her late teens. As she grew older, this period of her life would be the focal point of her memories and she would continually refer to this period of her life whenever she talked about her youth. It was as if she saw herself constantly as that young person in that era. She seemed to be 'stuck' in life as a young woman.
She met and married a bank clerk after a blind date encounter and they lived for several years with her husband's mother on a small rural property. Her husband was from a rural background and would soon quit his job in the local bank and join with his brother to operate a dairy farm in the lush green hills surrounding them. With some financial assistance from their family, the brothers were able to dissolve their partnership and move onto individual farms. My wife's parents were unable to have children and adopted my wife and a younger boy. They endured the same financial hardships as thousands of other rural families, engulfed in the massive Australian rural recession of the 1970's. My wife's earliest memories recall a smiling mother, but within a short period, the deception dissolved and replaced by an all-consuming monster, threatening to devour the shell-shocked family's very existence.
As a child, my wife received broadsides of continual abuse. Violent outbursts from her mother over trivial incidents like spilling some milk, breaking a glass, not packing away groceries that her mother had walked away from and left for someone else to put away, or sometimes there was no perceivable reason whatsoever for the vile displays of foul temper and abuse. Her mother continually threatened to kill the whole family with statements like. “If I had a gun, I'd shoot the lot of you.” These statements weren't idle threats; she was genuinely homicidal and meant every word she said. Fortunately, there were no guns kept on the property and my wife’s father, had reduced sharp knives from the kitchen as a precaution. She would constantly remind the traumatised family of her instability by saying, “I'm the only sane person here, you are all mad.” More chilling was the comment, “I hate all humans.”
My wife's frail health as a child meant her cries for help in the night received anger and disdain for having interrupted her mother's sleep. Everything seemed to be the fault of the tiny girl and the hatred of her daughter grew daily. My wife often described the look of pure, demonic hate in her mother's eyes as she faced her during the abuse. The vile language that flowed from her mother's mouth was beyond the comprehension of a small child and she would watch in terror as her mother threw everything in reach to the floor in frequent blind rages. She would then storm to her bedroom, slam the door shut, sob and scream about the ill-treatment she received from her family, while demanding her husband calm her and agree to her outrageous lies. She would sleep for hours, leaving a traumatised family to pick up the scattered items off the floor while her daughter tried to calm her own inner turmoil.
Her mother would wake from these displays of fury normally and demand an apology from her daughter, always insisting the small girl was at fault for whatever had caused the rage and insisting she was the vilest child on the planet. Usually this abuse came with comments about how awful the little girl was and “No wonder her ‘real' parents couldn't wait to get rid of her and adopt her out.” The hatred this woman had for her adopted child increased daily and maybe the fact she didn't have a ready-made slave to plug in and use and actually had to feed and clothe her daughter for five years before the daughter was useful, fuelled the rage. The mother had to wait until the girl turned fifteen before she could send her to work and steal her money. By this time, the hatred for her daughter was teetering well over the border of homicidal.
It's difficult to imagine the repercussions of that constant abuse in later life, but suffice to say, it's similar to the trauma experienced by soldiers in battle. No small child can receive constant abuse and hope to get through life emotionally unscathed. Physical abuse is a potent deterrent for normal human interaction, but emotional abuse is the slow blunt knife that tears at the very fabric of our soul. It may take many years for the fulcrum of the abuse to swing into effect, but the results are usually catastrophic with lives lived in emotional turmoil and victims unable to explore the true magnificence of their own being. My wife was unable to view her abuse in a rational manner and her mother managed to keep her separated from most of her peers. This meant that although my wife felt her treatment was cruel and unreasonable, she wasn't sure that this wasn't normal behaviour for other families as well. She had no valid yardstick to measure what real, loving, family life was like.
Practitioners are now seeing the connection between childhood trauma and dissociation, where victims of abuse remove themselves psychologically from their hurtful situation; they disassociate from the reality of an abusive relationship. They learn to retreat into their own private world. Martha Stout PhD, American psychologist and author, noted that victims of abuse compromise reality to maintain their sanity, but this is not sanity at all and can become a form of madness where people sabotage the closeness and comfort of their relationships and lose vital pieces of themselves as they disappear in a self-constructed Machiavellian world.
In extreme cases of disassociation, people can become dangerously delusional. In an extreme example of disassociation, Adolf Hitler's father regularly beat him with a 'hippopotamus whip,' receiving 230 blows of his father's cane and another time Hitler was nearly killed by his father's fanatical beatings. When he grew up, his sexual feelings were so confused with his revenge fantasies that he believed his sperm was poisonous and might enter a woman's bloodstream during sexual intercourse and poison her. Months before this blood poison delusion occurred, Hitler had the only romantic infatuation of his youth, with a young girl named Stefanie. Hitler imagined that Stefanie was in love with him (although she had never met him) and thought he could communicate with her via mental telepathy. He was so afraid of approaching her that he made plans to kidnap her, murder her, and commit suicide in order to join her in death.
When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907 at the age of eighteen, he later wrote in Mein Kampf that he visited the prostitutes' district and was furious at the, “Jews and foreigners who directed the revolting vice traffic which defiled our inexperienced young blond girls and injected poison into the bloodstream of Germany.” The rest is history and the horror of World War II.
Fredric Schiffer, a noted psychodynamic psychotherapist, has since discovered that trauma is stored in one hemisphere of the brain and that we all have a part of our brain, which is traumatised and regressed. The degree of regression seems proportional to the level of trauma the subject experiences.
Delaware neuroscientist, Tania Roth's research into DNA methylation, found an epigenetic process that can reduce the ability of some genes to function properly and increase the risk for psychiatric disorders. Epigenetics are changes in genetic activity that are caused by something outside the genetic code -- things such as viruses, bacteria, exposure to toxins, dietary practices and other factors including psychosocial stress. Recent research has shown that such marks can be seen at a gene known as the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene (Bdnf).
My wife faced an incredible duplicity. Her mother in public appeared a mousy, shy woman, apparently lovingly caring for her frail daughter. This woman attended church fetes and school meetings and outwardly appeared a normal functioning human being. She was capable of social interaction, complex economic negotiations and seemed to laugh at jokes presented to her. As soon as the family returned to their isolated farm from these excursions, they confronted an alien monster, hell bent on their emotional destruction. A person, so far removed from her public persona, it was unfathomable. A creature so devoid of human compassion and love it beggared belief. A beast, so consumed with her own self-interest, she had no need of other people except to feed off their feelings like some salivating, extra-terrestrial life form from a horror movie. By unrelentingly undermining her family's self-confidence, she was able to use them as her personal slaves and wallow in a life of self-indulgence. Here was a creature so cunning, void of guilt, remorse and feeling, yet masquerading as a caring mother and wife.
There was no semblance of love toward her children unless she was in public or in front of professionals such as doctors. Here was a mother who knew only hate and revenge; she literally could not love her children. Here was a creature who gained 'pleasure' from the pain and punishment she inflicted on others. It was as if the human feelings of love and compassion were replaced by hate and contempt. Here was a consummate actor, playing the role of a human being, but no 'human' qualities lay at its core. Amazingly, she had no concept of love and caring and although she could mouth the words, she truly had no idea what they meant. To the rest of society, she seemed relatively normal; people had no idea of the pure demonic hatred that flowed through her veins. She had weaved a cloak of invisibility that prevented everyday people seeing the monster that lurked beneath the thin veneer of carefully rehearsed normality.
She refused to cook, clean, sew or do any domestic chores, instead, preferring to spend her entire days in bed, dozing, or reading and only rising to abuse her family for not doing her bidding instantly. Up at the crack of noon, she was ready to spit venom at the first family member she saw and more often than not, that person was her daughter. Her daughter noticed she took to her bed for increasingly prolonged periods, shortly after watching a documentary on Florence Nightingale. The documentary showed that Florence had taken to her bed, claiming exhaustion at forty. The mother reacted with sheer contempt towards Florence after watching the program, then proceeded to do exactly the same thing, even suddenly developing the same symptoms as Florence. It was obvious to the children what had happened, but everyone else blindly accepted that their mother had become ill overnight.
On a particularly freezing winter morning, when my wife was quite young, she fled the house in terror during one of her mother's demonic outbursts. She never knew what had created the murderous rage, only being aware that she was in mortal danger after seeing the blood-chilling look of hatred on her mother's face. The small, panic-stricken child raced down the back door steps, half expecting a knife blade plunging into her back as she ran outside. Wearing only a flimsy nightdress, she huddled in terror with a dog in its kennel to keep warm and avoid the pouring rain. The rear door of the house was abruptly locked behind her and after pleading to be let back inside; she spent half an hour curled up in a terrified, sobbing ball with the family dog. The door clicked open just before her father returned from the dairy where he was milking the farm's dairy herd. Lies flowed freely from her mother, as she feigned ignorance as to why her child was outside, blue from cold and sobbing uncontrollably. She claimed to have been sleeping the entire time and didn't know her sickly child was even out of bed so early in the day. Again, the child apologised to her mother, this time, for telling lies to her father.
My wife soon realised that the majority of her mother's rage seemed focused on her. Her younger brother rarely received the same level of personal fury, was the ‘golden child’ and pursued a few of his childhood interests, while his sister found all requests for any external interaction denied. Her brother attended tennis practice, football matches and other social events, while his sister agonisingly discovered all her wishes for social activity, abruptly refused. There seemed to be a reservoir of infinite hatred in my wife's mother that would boil over at any time and be directed more often than not at her daughter. On the rare occasions that other children would visit the farmhouse, the mask of sanity would occasionally slip and the visiting children would experience dumbfounding rage. They would leave in shock and never return.
My wife sought solace from her father and as a child; he appeared to offer some protection from her mother's abuse. She would help him with small jobs around the farm, travel with him to nearby farms and help wherever she could. He showed her the practical side of farming and my wife enjoyed learning all the intricacies of farm life. She loved her rural life and would try to embrace it's magnificence as often as her frail health would allow. She enjoyed her time away from the house, away from the real life horror movie that lay lurking on her return.
As an adult, my wife was able to analyse her father's behaviour and although he did offer some protection, he actually used his daughter as fodder to shield himself from the abuse of his wife. It was like throwing the child to some all-consuming, drooling, teeth bearing, alien organism. While the child was the focus of the frenzied rage, he was not the target. He had become his wife's total slave, surrendering his masculinity and morals and allowing his wife to continue her unnatural behaviour without recourse, punishment or medical intervention. He bent to her totally unreasonable demands and sacrificed all of his social activities, friends and in fact his life, to her strange behaviour. Through unrelenting psychological abuse, his wife had distorted his perception to the point he felt worthless, damaged and defective.
He was an enabler, who once again in public, appeared to be a well-adjusted, friendly, intelligent individual, but in reality was morally bankrupt, capable of extreme cruelty and equally guilty of emotional abuse toward his children. In later life, he became as cold hearted as his wife and took no interest in his daughter's success or trials. He too, became a clever manipulator of circumstance, designed to create trauma and distress to his only daughter. As an example, while staying in his house many years later, his daughter suffered heart attack symptoms at 1 A.M in the morning. A hurried trip to the hospital revealed no major problems and they released her the same day. Her father showed no interest in his daughter's condition and refused to talk to her for most of the day when she returned. He has never asked her about the procedure she went through, how she feels or showed any interest in her condition whatsoever to this day.
Who were the people that could treat their children so cruelly? Why couldn't they feel the emotional pain and suffering of their children? What the hell was going on? It did not make sense.
As children, my wife and her brother would escape to their patch of bushland and explore the beautiful country around them. The quiet serenity of the forest was an alternate reality compared to the trauma of the house of horror just a few hundred metres away. The native forest was teaming with birds and animals and their childhood curiosity led them on wild adventures and games. Like me, they learned the incredible beauty of their natural environment and the amazing diversity of life that it supported. They could spend hours in their native forest, letting their childish imaginations run wild. They had a small creek that fed picturesque dams that contained fish, tadpoles and other aquatic creatures that just yearned for childish investigation. There were beautiful moss covered gardens known only to them and secret paths that led from one area of the eucalypt forest to another. Strange mushrooms and other brightly coloured fungi would poke out timidly from the carpet of leaf litter, or cling precariously to rotting, fallen trees. The whole area had some magical quality, amplified with childish curiosity. They too, experienced the radical changes to their world, as the seasons would change from wet and cold to hellish heat and crisp, dead grass.
My wife yearned for a horse to ride wildly through the hills and valleys as a young teenager, her hair streaming behind her in rivulets of dark silk. She had spent years studying horse anatomy, talking to vets who visited the farms and neighbours who had horses. A strong equine community in the district would have happily donated and old horse to the child at no cost, knowing that the horse they gave away would be loved and cared for by a doting young teenager. Her parents always adamantly refused to allow her to have a pony, despite having adequate acreage on which to keep and maintain one. They insisted their daughter would not take care of such an animal, despite her taking total care of orphaned lambs and baby goats each season without assistance from her parents. They always raised the issue of cost, challenging the isolated home schooled child to come up with the finances to pay for fodder, vet and farrier bills. They came up with unsubstantiated stories of how horses were a problem for goatherds and the dangers associated with falling from horses.
For god's sake, these creatures wouldn't allow their only daughter to keep an old nag that some kind hearted person would probably donate or loan. I know the young girl would have treated the animal with love and tenderness, just as she did with all the pets she had later, during our married life. She had the knowledge, commitment and caring to look after horses, yet her passion and interest received no assistance. She was her mother's slave and any caring and commitment was only directed toward her mother's self-indulgent life style.