Another memoir--my beginnings

Some people say that before you are born, you get to choose your family. It’s difficult for me to buy this idea because my family of birth had no warmth, no lightness nor laughter in it. Why would I choose such a tense, unhappy environment to grow up in?

(Later in my life when we would go visit my parents for holidays, my second husband would call it going to the house of "doom and gloom." He was right about that, and I can not yet see how my being born into this family helped anyone, least of all me. Maybe I was some small comfort to my parents.)

Perhaps we were in heaven and God said to us, “Who will be born into this family?” And we all could see what it would entail, and everyone of us stood mute. And finally I, with my gift for martyrdom, sighed and said, “I will go.”

Before I was born, there was already tension between my parents. While I was still in the womb, I heard them arguing.  But of course, I was pulled out of my mother’s womb--a warm, safe place--into the chaos of my family, into the darkness of a damaged family, into a family that would never know me.

Later when I was in my 50s and went to a soul reader, she told me that we all come to earth with spirit guides, and then when they are no longer needed, they leave us. She said that my spirit guide was still with me, had never left me!  I was glad to hear that, for I still felt that I needed guidance and protection.

Everyday, I can still strongly feel the little girl Laura within me, and I want to help her feel safe and confident enough to finally grow up and to let go of the past and the spirit guide and to become her own guide. When I get there, perhaps I will no longer be pretending to be grown up!

This is the only family portrait that we had taken--the only picture we have of the four of us. Circa 1958, the interesting thing about this portrait is that the photographer had set me up on a box, so that it appears that at nine years old, I am as tall as my 6' 2" father and my 5' 5" mother (My mother must have been sitting on a box, too!), but you can see from where our waists are in comparison to my father's that mom and I are elevated. Lynda and I were 9 and 13, and we were wearing our new blue poodle skirts!

As far as the four elements go, my father was fire, my mother was water, my sister is also water. And I, I am earth and air.

I choose fire for my father because of his rageful temper. Even when I was the littlest girl, he would lose his patience with me over the littlest things, like helping me with my math homework. He is fire because fire is strong and takes control; it wants to be in charge, and that’s my father to a "t." He wanted to protect and control his wive and daughters. Being an electrical engineer, he thought that he could solve any problem or fix anything, even his family. I imagine that on the job, he came across as self-assured and self-confident, but at home, he was a tyrant.

Once my Uncle Joe, my mother's brother, came to our house for a visit when my sister and I were quite young. I don't know what happened, but in a fiery rage, my father told him never to come back, and he never did. My only memories of Uncle Joe were through a couple pictures, a few postcards, and some art work that he drew--a lovely sailing ship named the Lynda-Laura. Now I wonder how could my mother not see her only brother and sibling for the rest of her life? And why were Lynda and I deprived of an uncle, who seemed to love us?

My father went off to work five days of the week for long hours. He told me that he was an engineer, so for the longest time, I thought that he drove a train! On weekends at home, he would play golf with his business associates or sit in his chair and watch sports on TV. He didn't really interact much with his daughters. There was talk of his having wanted a son. In his big family of origin and in our society at the time, word was that boys were better than girls, that men were superior to women, as were perhaps men who had sons. (Dad seemed to envy his older brother C.F. who had a son, who was himself the first son in the family [Dad was the second son], who was named after his father, and who seemed to be the apple of his mother's and his aunt's eye.)

When I was a little girl, I connected wholeheartedly with my mother. I thought that she protected me, and I thought that I should protect her. A typical 1950s, stay-at-home mother, my mom took care of us kids, kept a spotless house, and cooked dinner every night of the week. Being born and raised in watery Charleston, South Carolina, my mother was like water. One-sixth of the city of Charleston is water. My mother was often trying unsuccessfully to put out my father’s fire, which was miserable for her and for my father. But sometimes her arguing with him caused his fire to spread.

I was often afraid in my house, fearful that my parents would start fighting again. Fighting mostly at night and with my bedroom usually the one nearest to theirs, I would lie awake night after night, hearing their arguing. My mother's voice was soft and muffled. My father's voice was loud and verbally abusive, often bordering on violence. They would fight for years and years about the same things--something my dad had done or not done, about his big family, and later about my sister--never seeming to resolve anything. The next morning the fighting was never mentioned as if it had never happened. That's the way things were in my family. Hush, hush--keep the secrets. But these secrets were nearly killing me.

So my mother was the water element, which is sensitive to a fault. Trust is a big need of the water element, and my mother spent her life looking for someone whom she could trust. For a while, she trusted me, but eventually, I had to let her down, too. So emotional is the water element that the simplest things can get blown out of proportion into big dramatic scenes, which happened often in our home. The water element does not like fire nor air, which eventually caused my mother to alternately boil and freeze.

Like my mother, my sister is also water--though one is salt water and the other is fresh water. My sister was also born in Charleston, South Carolina, which is bordered on its two opposite sides by two tidal rivers, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Like the two rivers, my sister Lynda and my mother seemed to be always competing with each other. Was Lynda somehow trying to win my dad's love, approval and affirmation? She did not know that he did not have those things to give.

Charleston is known for its thunder storms and hurricanes. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 was a major threat to the city and its coastal lands. That's about the same year that a major upheaval occurred between Lynda and my parents and me. And so the home of my family had been built on shifting sands and unstable grounds, filled with storms and even hurricanes at times, that threatened to tear us apart, and eventually did.

I, too, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but I never connected to that city. My family had moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, ere I was four years old, and Chattanooga chose me for hers. I am red earth and spring-green grass and trees and mountains and fresh blue air. I love the outdoors, especially the mountains. Because we moved around as I was growing up, I learned to carry my house on my back. I became a turtle. Legend has it that the turtle dove to the bottom of the seas, scooped up some dirt onto its back, and swam up through the seas to create land. I had learned early how fire and water can destroy earth and air, and I had begun to fight back in the only way I knew how, but it was nearly too late. I often felt the weight of the world--of my small world--on my back.