I think it was a blue de Soto car that my family had back in the 1950s. Well before the time of Velcro and baby car seats -- and well before that obnoxious invention of the ever-present cell phone. Back to a time when the transistor radio was all the rage, the Twilight Zone was astonishing every eye-riveted viewer and orange juice Popsicles only cost a nickel apiece.
Three young girls, Mexican, small and scared were hiding on the floor of the back seat of the family car in the still of a Los Angeles night, hoping not to be discovered by a "stranger," and praying no one would find them. Crouched down low and listening for their mother's footsteps, it was her face that they looked for whenever they made their fugitive runs to the window. My sister Susanna, age seven, was in charge of my sister Lilia, five and of me only four years old.
They had to go with their mother when she went for her shock treatments because their father refused to take care of them. I look back on those nights and wonder at the terror my mother had to live with, her stark desperation. Too proud to let anyone in her family know just how bad she had gotten and how bad things at home were with our father, she would haul us around to those appointments and somehow get us all back home again.
My mother was mute and dazed, rocking herself back and forth on the living room rocking chair. During most of my growing up years my mother suffered from severe and recurring depression. Childhood years bring back sharp and painful memories of being jolted out of sleep by my mother's piercing screams that would send us all running to her room. If it was at all possible for an 11-year-old to die of a heart attack, I surely would have been that child for these screams always made my heart come to a grinding stop. Year after year, my mother would wake up from the same nightmare of someone chasing her down. Eventually she grew to recognize the purser in her nightmares -- my father.
She wouldn't and couldn't leave him for her mother had taught her that "as long as he brings home the paycheck" he is a good husband. She had tried her best to marry a man in El Paso, Texas that would not drink the paycheck away. She thought she would then be safe though she later learned of life's other dangers.
My father was the supreme authority. He brought the paycheck home but kept punitive control over my mother. He hadn't wanted children and relented only when my mother threatened to leave him if he didn't let her become pregnant. So, the children came and so did his anger and resentment and many strange nights when he would lock himself into his bedroom and refuse to see us.
As the years went by shock treatments and voluntary hospitalizations grew to be familiar. I remember seeing my mother in trance-like states and I remember my father making excuses for her puzzling behavior to our family and friends. I was too young to understand what was going on at the time, I only knew that somehow my mother was gone and we were left with just the shell of her.
Then, when I was seven, she gave my father the son he had waited for. It was while she was almost ready to give birth that her own mother died. I can remember that morning, standing by the doorway, watching her sob uncontrollably. She had finally shattered because my father again refused to take care of us and insisted that she remain home when her brothers and sisters left to see their mother for the last time. She never forgave him for that.
She had my brother and, now that her mother was gone and she could not shame her by obtaining a divorce, she began to plan her escape from my father. With her English much improved by working as a clerk, she started to believe that she would be able to support the five of us when the time came for her to make her break. But before those years could pass that would ensure our survival on her salary, she had another and more severe breakdown and this time my baby brother's life was at stake. For my mother knew that he was my father's pride and his only weak and vulnerable spot. It was at this time that she began to hear voices telling her to strangle my brother when he was about one year old. Running in terror from these voices, she went to her sister's house (three doors down the street from us) and gave my brother to my aunt for safekeeping.
My mother had another voluntary hospitalization and more shock treatments. We all survived those times. No one was killed; no one was maimed. But the price of survival was high. My brother sought relief and escape with drugs and alcohol, my two sisters with a strict adherence to an even stricter religion, my mother with more marriages, all to alcoholic men who did bring home the paycheck. Myself -- with anger and with the sure knowledge that the world is not a safe place and if someone can hurt you, they will. Forever it will be my nature to feel unsure, to be easily frightened by the scarcity of food, to be the outsider, on guard for the next blow to land, watching out for the right time to run.
It does not matter what label the latest edition of the DSM would assign to my parents' mental illness. The scars remain the same and the legacy was handed down to their children just the same. Three grueling years of white-knuckling a coffee cup in group therapy and five years of painful individual therapy saved me from living that legacy and from handing it down to my daughter. My worst fear while in therapy? That's easy. I remember my first question to my therapist. I wanted to know what would happen to me if I found out something that made it impossible for me to like and accept myself. What if I couldn't stand myself?
During those five years of therapy I tried to open many doors but there was always one door that remained bolted and chained. I know it is there, waiting for me, for my nightmares tell me so, waking me with that all too familiar wide-awake jolt. My worst fear now is if I know what is on the other side of that door, would I be able to come back to the sane side of things? Ah, legacies, they never really die, do they?
We all have our fears and we all have our own private hell. There is a wall that every one of us will hit during our lifetime. It is an unyielding, unforgiving wall -- you slam against it hard when in your deepest, most private terror and you are certain that, this time, life will finally beat you. I work in the psychology field to help myself and others know the real truth about that wall. It can be endured, it can be survived, and it can even be surpassed. What lies beyond that wall and through our own particular door, is a life mostly worth living. And the people who walk through to the other side, though they look ordinary enough, happen to be some of the most courageous people you will ever meet. Look closely at them, if you can, and you may see a part of yourself in every hard-won smile that they give to us and in their not-so-simple pleasure in just being alive.
I am the keeper of the family secrets. It was to me, the least favored child of my parents, that these secrets were bestowed upon. Sworn to silence and to have them die with me, I therefore remain anonymous and go by the name of an honored aunt, who also survived.