I have now written and shared with you four "chapters" of my memoir. There will be several more. Writing them is turning out to be rather therapeutic for me, so thank you for reading them. To get my stories out in public, so to speak, has been somewhat cathartic. I had told several of these stories to a few close friends, but of course, no one, but me, has the complete story! That took me a long time to lace together with harmony and meaning.
Which reminds me of what someone said about my serial memoir, "I can't wait to see how it ends!" Well, all I can say is that it's not over yet! I guess that part's of the reason that I am finally getting my story down on paper and "out there" is because my parents both died when they were my age--both died before they turned 65, ten months apart. And no, one definitely did not grieve to death because of the other's death.
Ultimately, my writing and sharing my memoirs is about healing. I write not from a place of neurotic suffering or self-pity, but from a place of creative suffering. For the purpose of emerging into a more genuine life, to find what is real in me, and to break through to life itself. As Marion Woodman expressed it, "Real suffering burns clean; neurotic suffering creates more and more soot." Healing can come out of examining/exploring the wounds and scars one last time.
Another friend said to me, "Well, all families have their bad stuff," as if to imply that my "bad stuff" wasn't any different than anyone else's. But I disagree with her for two reasons: First, some families truly don't have much bad stuff; they are functional and give to each family member what they need to live a satisfied life. And secondly, as Tolstoy said, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." My memoirs are about my family's particular "bad stuff" and especially about how it affected me.
Still a third friend said to me, "When is the change coming?" He said that the story was just too sad; he could hardly bear to read it. I guess he is asking, "Where's the turn in the story or its climax?" Well, not yet, there will be some more crises first. As in most stories, the climax doesn't occur until near the end.
Also his saying after only reading four of my memories, "When is the change coming?" reminds me that we are a society of immediate gratification, that some of us always want to "hurry up" and fix things, but most truly important things in our lives don't get healed that fast, and sometimes not at all.
And one more thing. About my memoir from last week. Why did I call it “a fatal wounding”?
Because my believing that I was ugly wounded me in a huge, somewhat fatal, way. It killed my confidence. It made me too self-conscious and caused me to look at the world through crooked glasses.
One of the main messages that I got from my family of origin was that appearances are everything. That’s why we were to keep the secrets of what my sister did in college and later, of what was really wrong with my father, of my mother’s drinking problem, of my parents’ rage at each other and their vicious fighting.
We were to appear to be a "normal" family. Another message was to be loyal to the family and keep the secrets. And that silence nearly killed the heart in me.
The other messages that I got from my family were that my mother was beautiful, that my older sister was pretty, and that I was ugly. Not plain. Not average. But ugly.
It’s amazing what we will believe about ourselves. If, as we are growing up, our family says or implies that it is true.
Perhaps I was particularly sensitive. Surely my mother and father did not mean to give me the impression that I was ugly. But they did nevertheless. And of course, my sister was there to tell me directly that I was “ugly,” just as I was beginning that perilous journey into teenhood.
And so unfortunately, I took their assessment of my looks to heart. And their judgment affected the rest of my life in so many significant ways.
Now if I had come from a different family or a different society, then perhaps my thinking myself to be ugly would not have affected me as it did. But my family religiously watched the Miss America contest every year on TV, commenting on the beautiful women, and we watched the beautiful Lennon sisters sing on the Lawrence Welk every week, commenting not on how well they sang, but on their good looks. And I got the message: To be pretty was the most important thing of all.
Because my family was not physically demonstrative nor verbally affirming, eventually I equated my thinking that I was ugly with being unlovable and unloved. Still later I thought that if I could just be perfect. Bottom line is that I thought/felt that if I were pretty or if I were perfect, then my family would love me. I did not know, until decades later, that they had their own issues to deal with, which had nothing to do with me.
The delusion of my ugliness perhaps wouldn't have mattered so much if I had been told that I had some good traits, such as intelligence or hard working. Perhaps then the looks issue wouldn’t have gotten so blown out of proportion in my mind. But actually, though intelligent, I felt intellectually inferior to the rest of my family. After all my father was an electrical engineer. I was somewhat (though certainly undiagnosed) dyslexic. My mother and sister would make fun of my spelling. Making good grades in school was expected and was nothing that I got praise for. Actually, I don't remember getting praise for anything. What I was overly sensitive to was the criticism: I recall my mother telling me one time that I was lazy. My father once said to me, "Laura, you are not slow; you are just deliberate." I had not known until then that anyone thought that I was "slow."
And so this thread of my thinking that I was ugly runs through and affects the rest of my story in major ways. I now see it as the tip of the ice-berg of my l-o-w self-worth issue.
Because of what had gone on and what was going on at home, the first couple years that I spent in college before my early marriage were some of the worst years of my life. As a matter of fact, it was there that I developed a lifelong habit of insomnia, of worrying about my family, of feeling incredibly inferior. But that's another story for another day.
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