Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  I had been taken to the bone. My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out. And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

  BOOKS ARE MY FRIENDS, where it's okay to be silent, where you're not a freak if you don't want to get drunk, peel out in a parking lot, tip cows. Where it's okay to feel deeply, to languish, splashing and kicking in the deep end of the pool; even if I am all alone, and it's dark, after a big meal, with cramps, and I go under.

  Books are what I'm bedding these days. When I'm not working at the clinic, all my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself. They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies: That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully. That if the soul's human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery. They tell me that, because of this double-blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

  That if you lived in a dark cave you'd need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

  That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

  That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they're getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water. But it's only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

  I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing the truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

  My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously. They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them. They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much. If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply. They never dismiss me with Get over it. Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don't remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking a gun out of her mouth: “Jesus, Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn for support if not to her own daughter? You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don't have any problems? I can think of a hundred times you …”

  I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.

  IDECIDE TO TRY OUT MY FATHER AGAIN, to see if I can reclaim one parent out of the whole mess. I could still run on one engine. Even though we have stayed in contact, our interactions skate on the thin ice of surface talk and carry us in awkward figure eights around each other. I cannot say that he even knows me as his daughter. Sometimes he calls me Sandy or Danny, like his father did to him, or hesitates altogether, trying to remember my name.

  I meet him at the Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet of his choice and insist that it is only the two of us. He has already tried twice to cart along his girlfriend or Danny, anyone to maintain the space between us. I pull out a twenty-page letter on notebook paper that I have passionately penned the night before, telling him everything. He pulls out a pocket video game and begins to play solitaire.

  “Dad,” I say, leaning across the table, “did you know that Mom made things up about me?”

  “Julie, you think you had it bad. Let me tell you something: When I was ten years old, just a little boy, I fell out the tree in the backyard. Chester was sitting in his chair watching TV. I had to carry my arm in there. I knew it was broken, and you know that bastard wouldn't even take me to the hospital until his show was over? My arm was broken and I had to wait a half hour to go to the hospital.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “I broke both my arms and had to wait all day to go to the doctor.”

  “You broke your arm?” His brow furrows. “When?”

  “Dad! When I was in second grade and then again in fourth grade. That time I had to wait until you came back from Burns Road to take me to Township. Don't you remember my casts?”

  “Julie, I never knew you broke your arm.”

  At my prod, Dad reads the letter over his loaded plate. I am watching his face from across the table. From his expressions, I can follow the points in my letter; me telling him how much I loved him as a child, how he was my hero. And the loss I felt as he faded away and she got me all to herself. When he gets to the page where Mom slinks off to hide the tools that he is beating us for stealing, tears fall freely down his face and plop onto the greasy red-checkered tablecloth and I am crying with my father; we are reading the same letter, sitting across from each other, and it is the closest I've ever been to him. I am mesmerized by my father's tears; they are the tokens that will open him. I will turn to my father and catch the gold coins that pour from his heart like a slot machine and out into my open hands. I will scour my face with my golden hands and wash away the dirty tearstains of a trailer girl.

  As he finishes, the same backlog of words, lost on my mother, are surging against my throat, to connect me to my father. This is the chance for us to lace back together and everything will be healed. I can barely wait for Dad to meet me after all this time. I have cracked him open and the reward will be mine.

  Dad carefully folds my letter and stuffs it into his shirt pocket. “Shall we go, Sissy?”

  Even better, he wants privacy. He doesn't want to address me in this chintzy place. In the parking lot, this is it, the moment, and I am walking along with him, breathing very, very still so that I won't miss a word, no matter how faint.

  He clears his throat. “So, how's your car running?”

  “Dad!”

  “What?”

  “What about the letter? What do you have to say about the letter? The letter, Dad?”

  “Well, I've always told you I think your mother is sick. I'm sorry she did what she did.”

  “But Dad, you were a grown man, you have got to take responsibility for what you did, too! I mean, you made me eat Kleenex, Dad! For Christ's sake, you can't do that to a little girl! You have got to say you're sorry for the stuff you did as a grown man!”

  “Well,” Dad snorts, “I musta done something right! ‘Cause you never left any snot rags lying around the house again, now, did you?”

  TRUTH IS WHATEVER YOUR MIND BE-lieves. And beliefs are erected by those who raise us. If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you the straight answer.

  After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me the straight answer but me. I used the mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new ventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones. Sometimes I'd only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch. Sometimes, I could make it half a day before I'd have to rush back to see myself.

  As summer comes, I build on my new foundation, gaining momentum. I frisk and rub my skin, trying to jumpstart my appetite. I knead fingers into my flesh and pound my legs with my fists, to stimulate withered muscles. I use baths to alter my physical experience and break my time into more manageable chunks that structure the day.

  My “To Do” list reads: get up, wash hair, eat. Each time I finish something from my list I cross it out and feel the dizzy thrill of accomplishment. And every so often, I catch a glimpse of myself while walking past a mirror and my face snaps into recognizing the beauty I see before me. My smile comes more natural, without the chunky mental gap in catching myself up with what I see. Each flash in the mirror strings along my self-continuity like individual Styrofoam packing peanuts, making a colorful second-grade party decoration I tack up over the fading past.


  With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator. I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing. When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch up to capture the barrage: bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg. I scribble my thoughts and tweak them with words from my new vocabulary. I talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowded text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper, smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.

  My life is now lived in triplicate: one life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.

  I HAVE ACQUIRED ONE PURPLE YOGA MAT, my first instrument of health. I lie on it and roll around like an undernourished weeble-wobble, doing my own pathetic version of whatever exercises I can think of. I gradually work up to riding a bicycle, an ancient green Schwinn, my lucky number 7 painted on its lug-heavy frame. I manage short spurts at first, down the alley and back, around the block, and eventually I coast down small hills and chug back up at a snail's pace, puffing and panting in the August heat. My legs buzz with circulation. There is a current running through me, a current of life, of electricity, of excitement, a vague sense of health, like I could almost reach out and grasp it and tug it toward me before it dissipates. I strip off my clothes and look at my body in the mirror. It is transforming before my eyes. Each day I seem to grow by leaps and bounds; my hair, my height, I catch a faint shadow of muscle outlining my leg, my blue veins gone, gorged and drunk on the blood I've surged through them.

  I sit in the lounge area of my first gym, filling out membership forms. One reads:

  Have you ever been on any medication?

  Have you ever had a heart problem?

  Shortness of breath?

  Chest pain?

  Any hospitalizations?

  Surgeries?

  History of medical problems?

  Are you allergic to anything?

  If yes to any, please explain.

  How do you explain? The lines at the bottom aren't long enough. And if the answers to those questions were “yes” in my past, and that past was a lie, does that mean they really happened with enough validity to mark them now with a “yes”? What they are looking for are legitimate medical problems, but I don't have any. Right?

  With black pen in hand, I zip through the questionnaire, carving a solid black NO in every column.

  IT IS ONE DREAMY NIGHT and I am on my way to court a boy as sensitive and in need of protection as I am. He is my age and he is delicate and beautiful. The urge to be with him is enough to break me out of the safe ten-mile radius from home. The moon is huge and silvery, hanging in a gray winter sky as the city lights fade behind me and I head out to the country. And now I am passing Township Family Physicians where it all began. I have not seen its single-story nondescript edifice for ten years, and I have not thought about it once in all the time since I learned what it spawned in my life. I push down on the accelerator and race past it, as if Township could reach out and grab me if I don't make it quick. I drive to my boy's house and fall into his arms as the story exits me, for the first time understood; rough stones gone into the tumbler, smooth articulated gems fall from my mouth.

  And from there, I gather the courage to call Township for my medical file. I am ready to see what they saw and strong enough in the truth of what really happened to read my records without derailing. I go to pick them up and wait in the lobby where I sat all those afternoons as a girl. A television runs a loop of commercials promoting medications and medical procedures as if they were spa treatments: happy people in pastels running through fields, looking over their shoulders and laughing.

  Then I begin tracing the other places where my mother had taken me. Some doctors were dead, some had moved, the surgeon who did my nose job left town without a forwarding address. There were many onetime appointments where I could not remember the location or the name of the doctor. I was only nine, ten, eleven. Sometimes we traveled an hour to get me to a new physician. If we hit a dead end, there was no reason to return. Or forward records. Leaving behind the ones that said I was normal was as easy as not giving a forwarding address.

  The records poured in. As soon as I'd get a packet, I'd sit down wherever I was and rip open the envelope. A hundred and fifty pages of wasted time. A hundred and fifty pages of lost innocence.

  IN THE RECORDS ON MY HEART CATHETERIZATION is a letter written by my childhood cardiologist. It's from a follow-up visit when I was fifteen.

  You were a grown man, an experienced doctor. How could you have missed it? What fifteen-year-old goes to the cardiologist to discuss her dose of Atenolol?

  You as a doctor are an authority on human behavior; able to smell a rat and ferret out a liar. Do you think I perhaps had other things to do as a fifteen-year-old than come to your office? Are you sure it wasn't possibly my mother who made the appointment? Who spoke to you about new symptoms, who told you I had asked her if you would amp-up my medication? Who leaned forward on the edge of her chair and cocked her head to discuss the dangers of a young heart patient traveling that summer, or doing sports, or having friends? And is it possible that you are the same doctor who stood in the hallway just two years earlier and firmly told my mother to drop the quest for the holy-grail heart operation? And now you sit discussing calmly with her my wish to double my heart medication?

  Hmmm, I thought so.

  THE MEEK CHILD WITH A HEART CONDITION has died. I am a real woman now, with a woman's body and temperament. I can articulate my thoughts, feelings, wants and desires. I stand tall in the grocery store. I talk to people without bolting. I interact with men as a woman, not as a doe in season. And as my docility turns to dust, I have the growing undeniable awareness of something very evil and dark surging against the inside of my skin, trying to claw its way out.

  My rage is unstoppable. It vomits out of me; I tear the head off of store clerks, telephone operators, anyone too slow to stop me. I am meticulous and merciless. They are all incompetent. They are all stupid. They are all worthless. I want to beat them with the flyswatter. I crash hours after my blinded frenzy with the insight of what I am doing: making someone pay, just like my mother made me pay, just like she made the foster kids pay, just like she made the doctors pay; unleashing fury on any person too scrambled by the attack to call her on it. And now I want to make people feel bad, extract guilt with precision instruments and fillet another's self-confidence, just as I saw my mother do to the doctors who saw me. I have got to stop.

  IN SHEN THERAPY, you climb into a cloth bed that is slung up on a tabletop as a hammock. It's suspended in a dim, peaceful room and the SHEN practitioner does a gentle placement of her hands just above the body, mostly hovering around the stomach, where nerves that run between your sternum and your pelvis lock emotional trauma. The SHEN practitioner then guides you into deep breathing, while she tries to unblock the emotions. Judith, the therapist, has asked me to commit to two months of sessions. After our consultation, she decides to give them to me, free of charge.

  Lying in the SHEN cocoon, I slip into a deep state. We are halfway through our weeks and I am opening in ways that defy my skepticism. I am floating under Judith's hands and she is warm, serene, and all-encompassing. I have never felt safer. Our sessions are usually silent, but today she has me visualize where I was the first time I felt something wasn't right.

  I remember. I see a little girl with short choppy hair. My fists grip. The little girl is clutching a flyswatter. A smile curls her mouth, just like her mother's.

  “I see her.”

  “How old is she, Julie?”

  My eyes squeeze tight trying to stop the sight of her.

  “She's eleven,” I growl. “I can't stand her!”

  “Why don't you like her, when she's that young?
”

  “She beat those kids, she beat those kids till they screamed. I hate her. I want to kill her.” I'm starting to hyperventilate.

  “Okay, Julie, let's let go of her. Let's slow down the breath.”

  “I hate her. Judith, I hate her!”

  “Okay, let it go. Is she gone?”

  My breathing slows.

  “Now I want you to fast forward to a later age. How old were you the next time you knew?”

  I'm in the bottom bunk bed of Danny's room. I can hear them through the thin trailer walls. “Oh, my God. I was twelve. Mom and Dad were in bed at night and they were fighting over me, over what they were going to do to me. I wanted to take a kitchen knife and stick it in my gut before they did.”

  “So you can see this girl and she is twelve. And she is there in the bunk bed. You are there standing in her room, looking at her. What do you want to say to this girl?”

  “Say? I'm not going to say anything to her! I've got to get her out of there, Judith! Those people are crazy. I can't let her stay there. They'll destroy her. I have to take her now. Now, not wait for some pansy-assed case-worker to drift around trying to find an undetectable poison. I have to get her out, Judith. I have to take her!”

  “Okay, so get her out of there. Scoop her up and run out of there. Now you are out. She is with you and you are living safe, years later. What are you going to say to her?”

  “Oh, Judith,” my head flops to the side and I beam into the dark room, “she is so precious; every day I'm going to tell her how she's beautiful and how much I love her and how I'm so sorry for everything she went through and I promise I'll make it up to her in love. And she is going to grow up to be the most loved little girl ever and she will heal. They'll never get her again.”

  That was where SHEN took me.

  I NOW FEEL READY to try a talk therapist again. Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP. I answer her questions: How did it slip past doctors? Why didn't anybody notice? Didn't you have any neighbors? Were you really sick?