Rip VanWinkle

One of the fairy tales I recall from my childhood is that of Rip VanWinkle.
Remember that one?
This young guy falls under a spell and sleeps away his entire life.
He wakes up years later only to find that he has become an old man;
complete with a long white beard. That’s what I recall most vividly.
Poor old Rip looking in a mirror with shock at the sight of that old face.
A boy inside an old man's body touching that long gnarly beard.

Call me Rip.
I’m in shock and I’m grieving.
I slept through most of my life too. I should be a teenager, but I’m not.
I look in the mirror and I feel shock and confusion too.
It’s not because of vanity that I can never remember my real age.
I have to consciously think of my husbands age, then subtract 4 years.
Even then I’m never really sure.
Dissociative identity disorder, (DID), saved my life and my sanity.
There is a price for survival. I missed almost everything.
What I have in my memory banks reads more like a scrapbook
or a youtube montage video. Highlights and snapshots, stories and fantasy.

I sat in my therapists office yesterday and it hit me. I’m about fourteen.
I don’t know too many fourteen year olds who want to be married
to a fifty-one year old man or who want the responsibility of parenting
teens and twenty-somethings. I’m overwhelmed and afraid.
I feel trapped and I’m angry. I feel ripped off.
I awoke to a face that isn’t mine and the body of a middle aged mother of three.
How did I get here?
Oh, sure, I can flip through the images in my memory banks
and I can see exactly how I got here, but I’m still confused.
I can see it, but it doesn’t feel real.

The Attic

As I lay in bed last night I tried to go to “the attic” of my mind
where my emotional parts live.
Several times I said aloud, “Go up, up, up.”  “Up, up, up” 
but I couldn’t really get there.
I thought it would be easier to do for some reason, but it was not.

Then, I found myself lying on my back, wrists crossed
and arms extended over my head.
My legs shook and I heard a voice, “Open up. Spread your legs Gaye.”
My left ear shut off and I felt a part coming up. I felt small and silent.
I felt that familiar pressure on my abdomen and a cramping feeling.
I felt a warm sensation between my legs
and I had a gripping pain in my right thigh.
My ankles felt stuck to the bed and I couldn’t close my legs.

I heard a male voice with my ears, not just in my mind but
I couldn’t really make out what the word was that he had said.
It was something like “Julie or Jules” or something, but I heard it.
I started to doze off and I was awakened by a clinking sound.
It sounded like something metal on my headboard. I heard it twice.
I heard it with my ears. My heart raced and my eyes popped open.
I lay there frozen; motionless and terrified. Eventually, I fell asleep.
I had dreams but I don’t remember them now.

I woke up with the distinct sensation that I had been choked.
I feel a dull ache in my neck to the left of my trachea.
It hurts to swallow and when I touch it, but it’s not a sore throat.

I have a hard time sometimes to separate body memories
from actual pain unrelated to flashbacks, triggers or memories.
They all hurt and they all feel real.
Usually though, once I identify that it is a body memory, it goes away.
A couple of times over the past few weeks I have been alarmed by a clear feeling that someone is squeezing my upper right arm.
It’s real and it hurts.
I knew immediately that this was a body memory and it went away fairly quickly.
This has happened two, maybe three times over the past few weeks.
I believe that not only was I restrained probably with handcuffs,
but I think I was either choked or held down by my throat.

I woke up early, sometime before six o’clock, and I lay in bed and prayed.
I went to “the attic” briefly.
One thing I noticed is that I think there are “garment bags” hanging
on one side and I feel that someone or more than one
someone is hiding behind or inside of them.
I wonder if it’s my bigger, older parts.
Some of my parts aren’t afraid and have come out a lot over the years.
Where are they? Why don’t I see them when I go there?
If they aren’t afraid, then why don’t they come out?
The wee ones that hide under the eaves seem afraid.
Jersey girl, (the scrapper), miss showmanship, (the great entertainer),
and the sexy one aren’t afraid.
Where are they?
Who else is in there?

“My name is Mabel and my glasses catch my tears.”

Early one morning as I was waking up, I met her. 

So small and sad- so afraid.
Mabel has all my sadness and she cries very quietly. 

She told me that she wears those big glasses
to catch all the tears so they don’t leak out. 

She is small and tender. I’m guessing she’s around eight and she is very sad. 

Mabel knows it wasn’t safe to cry.
She knows what happened to me that made me sad 

and she has done the crying for me.
She doesn't believe that it's OK to cry. 

I wish she would let me have the pain so she could rest.

Wait, which one of us is in charge?

    My little ones live in the attic of my mind, under the eaves in the shadows in the back of my head. Each one is contained within a bubble, oblivious to one another and to me. Some of them have bodies but others only heads. Some have words while others only have feelings. It’s dark in there and the only light is what comes in through the windows of my eyes. They are small, lonely and afraid.

    The one I am most familiar with is Gaye. She’s about 14 and she is my fighter, my NJ girl, the boss. She has been in the driver’s seat much of my life-I just didn’t know it. With her, it’s like I’m the co-pilot. I see what she does and I hear what she says and I know how she feels, but I can’t always do anything about it. She’s a scrapper and she can be scary-even to me. I went by the name Gaye until I was about 12 when I took back my legal name. Just because we share the same name doesn’t mean that she is anything like I was when I was young. I think she’s more like what I WISH I was. She will go toe to toe with the best of them and believe me, she has!
    It was Gaye who 'threw down' years ago with that old drunk when we were at Wal-Mart. That big, nasty, scary man shoved my 6 year old son. I was scared, but Gaye stepped right out, getting in his face. She wasn’t backing down either. Unfortunately, I was pregnant with our youngest daughter and could have gotten hurt if security hadn’t come along when they did. Gaye didn’t seem to notice me or the fact that I was very pregnant but even if she had, I don’t think she’d have stopped. She is my constant protector and I love her.

    Having an adolescent in charge when you’re an adult can be problematic, especially when it comes to marriage. My little ‘go-to-girl’ loves my husband in the same way any little girl loves her father. She doesn’t recognize him as my husband, she relates to him like he’s her Daddy. The good kind of Daddy; not the kind of Daddy that has sex with his daughter. Not the kind of Daddy I had.
    You can imagine how this complicates my marriage. Gaye is very strong willed and she gets so mad at my husband for wanting to be intimate with us. From her perspective, that makes sense. Of course she gets mad! Fourteen year old girls want their daddy’s to love and cherish them. They want to be nurtured and cared for. They don’t want to be thought of “in that way” by the man who’s job it is to protect her. Gaye believes that my husband is her Daddy and as long as sex isn’t a factor, she likes him. She loves him, but she puts up one heck of a fight whenever we think about anything sexual-especially where he is concerned. Within a nanosecond, I can go from thinking about the possibility of being intimate with my husband and starting to believe I can do it, to a raging teenager smashing the windows in my mind!
    Shutting down is what I have learned to do best to avoid the her wrath. Shutting down is how I avoid the mixed up emotions; the guilt, shame and sadness. Unfortunately, shutting down has caused the man I love more than life itself, so much pain. I can hardly bear to think about it.

    A couple of weeks ago, my therapist made this simple, factual statement: He said, “ You know you’re not a virgin.” Any rational person with any intellect whatsoever, would seed that point without question. The indisputable fact is that I have been married for 23 years and have 3 kids. Of course I’m not a virgin!
Let me tell you though, Gaye was pissed! She glared at him, clenched her teeth and didn’t hear much of what he had to say after that. Those words replayed in my head all week and I felt her raging and then sulking about it. Gaye ranted  about his observation; “What kind of sick thing is that to say to a child?!” “I am SO a VIRGIN!” “P-I-I-I-I-G!” She hated my therapist for a few days.
I felt really confused by it all. I felt sad. I vacillated between sad, angry and confused. I’m not sure which one of us was feeling what feelings, but it all left me kind of queasy and embarrassed...and guilty...
...Always so ashamed and guilty.

Gaye and the Little Ones

    Almost every morning I wake up with a phrase, a word, a name or a place in my head. I either hear myself saying it or another voice saying it. Sometimes it relates to a dream I had or sometimes it seems arbitrary. Sometimes it’s familiar and other times it’s something I’ve never heard of before. Often it leaves my mind quickly but sometimes it sticks with me and I find myself replaying it throughout the day or even longer.
    Yesterday, I woke up to my own voice saying, “I met myself last night”. That statement haunted me all day yesterday and it got me thinking about my most pronounced, developed alter part of myself, “Gaye.”
    My therapist thinks "Gaye" is about 14 now. She was about 8 or 10 when we first became aware of her last summer. It seems as if her role has primarily been my protector, my “go-to girl.” The “boss.”  That describes her really well.
    As I thought about that, I had a very clear memory of being a small child with my babysitter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. I don’t know how old I was, but I had to have been less than 8 and I’d guess much less because I was standing up in the back seat of their car leaning up against the back of the bench seat. So, maybe I was about 5.
    I remember the white leather interior with red trim and it smelled of cigars, (I HATE the smell of cigars). Mr. Murphy was driving and Mrs. Murphy was riding in the passenger seat and we were talking. I think I said something cute or funny and he turned his head to look at me. I was a VERY shy little girl, so what came out of my mouth would have been unexpected and surprising I’m sure. I boldly, precociously said to him “keep your eyes on the road!” Based upon his response to me, I must have sounded like I meant business because he replied, “OK boss!” They both found it amusing but he did turn back and kept his “eyes on the road.”
    I think that’s my first memory of “Gaye” as a separate, protector part of me. Something about being in his car and the way he looked at me scared me subconsciously and she stepped right in to save me. I don’t have any memory of anything bad ever happening to me while I was in the care of the Murphy's, but I think I was triggered by the way he looked at me and by being in his car. Maybe that’s when I figured out “Gaye” was the boss and she could handle what I couldn’t.
    I will always be grateful to the parts of myself that took the abuse so that I wouldn’t have to. They allowed me to go up to “the attic” of my mind, to live in TV land as one of the Brady Bunch, to float away to wonderful places and to “sleep” through it. Without “Gaye” and the little ones, I surely would not have survived. They allowed me to get up and go to school everyday, to make friends, to go to college, date, meet my husband and raise a family. The blessings I have in my life, I have largely because of them.
    The challenge I face today is in discovering, reconnecting and putting my “pieces” together again. What once saved my life, now gets in the way of living that life. I had no awareness of this internal family of mine and because I was oblivious to it, I abandoned those little parts of myself. You can imagine how hurt, scared and angry little ones might feel about having to “stay and take it” without any thanks; about being left behind and forgotten and finally, about being rejected and resented once they were noticed. I owe it to them to come back for them. I owe them my gratitude, acceptance and nurturing. I'm trying to earn back their trust and get them to share memories and feelings with me. Today I need them to help me remember who I was and what I've experienced. I need them to help me heal. I want to help them too and I promise to never forget them again.