February 29, 1952, red hair, skin glowing white, and soon enough found to be a lefty. I was born a mutation from parents with black-brown hair and olive complexions. My father's heritage was Canuck from his father's side. My mother was French, Scottish and Native American. All my siblings resembled our parents. OUTCAST, eldest child, molested at the age of four by an older, trusted family member at a party my parents had. I walked to church, across the street, the next morning in the dirty dress, barefooted. I could hear the music playing and the congregation singing as I cracked the swinging door to look for a safe place to sit. There was an elderly woman close to the isle with a spot open next to her. I sat. After a short time, she looked down at me with a sort of complacent smile, and explained to me in her crackly voice that my knees were dirty. I was dirty. Yes, I knew that. That's why I was there. I don't remember anything after that. I remembered the trip to church in my messy condition all my life, but I just remembered the nasty uncle about 15 years ago. My body remembered it. My stomachaches, my anxiety over seemingly nothing, my fear of men - these were plagues out of nowhere.
My father was an unregulated blast furnace bent on turning his children into pure molten gold, or, if all else failed, slag smudging the bottom. Unfortunately, he ever only saw slag and cursed the ground we landed on, especially my brother, Rick, and me. He began my brother's beatings when he was just a tiny four years old. His favorite forms of physical torture on the small boy were shaving his head, thumping him on top of his head, banging his head on the wall, and throwing him down the stairs (ours were concrete). By the third grade Rick was diagnosed with epilepsy. His teacher flunked him because he wouldn’t pay attention sometimes and wouldn’t respond to her urgings, even slobbering in class to make the other students laugh. He was seizing. Rick told dad once when he was about 10, and still small, “You just wait till I grow up tall! I will come back and beat you up!” Rick ran away when he was 14, came back at 17, and knocked on dad’s door. My father did not recognize the 6’4” beautiful, muscular man with a long ponytail standing before him. After a couple minutes of dumbfounded silence, he comprehended but all he looked at was the ponytail and he shut the door in his son’s face.
Watching my brother be continuously hurt, physically and emotionally, from the time he was a so young, was like watching torture victims in a gulag. Often, my brother cried out, “Dad please don’t hurt me!” Even when dad played with Rick, it was in the form of pain, like taking his belt off and flicking it at him until he cried. That made my father smile.
My dreams reflected these things. More than times than I can remember, I heard my dad’s voice in the night barking out my name, “Kathye!” My pulse raced, my face flushed, and I was prepared for flight. I even used to hide from him. One time I hid under the bed. After a while, he walked over to the bed and just stood there, his boots at my face. He just stood there, waiting for me to acknowledge him. I died a thousand deaths under that bed, just waiting...
Usually my torture was in the form of a flow across the face for whatever made him angry at the time. He would find a reason, and then strike out. These blows were open handed and did not leave marks. Another form physical violence was to grab me by the hair and drag me around the house. This also did not leave marks. Occasionally, my inner rebelliousness/intense anger would stick out its ugly little neck and I would call him ‘sir’. That would glean a quick and almost certain slap. At the same time, there were times when I caught a very brief glimpse of admiration in his eyes. Possibly… I now believe I might have garnered his respect if I had fought back. He was a sick man. His mother was a sick woman. These things go on and on, don’t they?
So, I ran away from home in the winter of my 17th year. We lived on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho. A few times I had to sleep in sheds and abandoned houses outside of town. On one occasion, I pulled board from the wall of a house and burned them for fire to keep warm. Mostly, though different Native families housed me on different nights for several months until I turned 18. My father had one time shown his violence towards me in public at the local community center. He was out looking for my sister and found me. He grabbed me by my hair and dragged me all the way out to the pickup while cussing me out and slapping at me. It is difficult to write the degree of violence my father portrayed. He struggled with his own demons; drinking alcohol did nothing to alleviate his own pain.
I married a man just like him a year later. I was pregnant. He beat me. I miscarried. The suffering almost caused me to kill myself. Instead, I literally beat myself up. He beat me; my dad did also, so I beat me too. I drove very fast and recklessly.
A year and a half later, we had a daughter, Zoe. 18 mos. Later, a daughter, Kara. Almost 6 mos later I woke up one morning about 9 am with a foreboding that I cannot begin to explain and slowly walked to her room. Somehow, I knew her spirit no longer existed in our house. She was at the edge of the crib wrapped tightly in the blanket, her little legs curled under her little bum, her arm curled up around her head and those precious long, black eyelashes pressed to her cheeks. When I picked her up her tiny body was already stiff. Still, her dad and I both tried to breath for her (no CPR in those days 1974), but of course it was too late. A mother never recovers; she just learns to walk through life with it. Even her father, in this case, was never able to deal with this particular misery. Her dad and I finally divorced. He had finally made some major changes as a father and a husband, still this was the final stressor.
Next, my 46-year-old father, who had finally experienced guilt and regret for his part in muddling the minds of his children, was diagnosed with cancer. We, at long last, had a father trying his very best to show love, and he was quickly taken away. We watched him fade and waste from a tall handsome man still in his prime, to a small bent man who could not leave his bed. His bones protruded from his skin, which tightly stretched across his body like the hide on a native drum. Only his eyes still held the sparkle he was probably born with, the sparkle, which existed whether he tortured my brother in fun with his belt or teased one of my cousins about kissing boys. This death, so close to my precious child, nearly annihilated my heart.
I began waking at night in the middle of my dreams, sometimes leaving my apartment in my gown, barefooted, to stalk ghosts. Unfortunately, there were none to be found – outside, anyway. One night I heard voices in my living room telling me to break a window in my bedroom. I walked towards that window. I know, because I saw myself do it. Then, I saw myself break the window with my open left hand. After that, I took a piece of the glass and cut myself on the top of my right hand where the veins are so visible, over and over again. My hand would not bleed, so I turned my hand over and began to score it across my wrist. While I could see the skin split and the tissue underneath, for some reason, I could not bleed. The nurse explained that my body was in shock from stress which caused my body to detour my blood supply from my extremities to my trunk. I was 24 years old then, I am 56 now and I still have those scars. I decided then to get help. Regrettably, I wasn’t very good at accepting help.
So, Kara died Feb. 17, 1974; dad died Feb. 23, 1977. My brother, Rick, died December 16, 1983. He was hang gliding (he and I both became ‘edge walkers’) and he was lucky enough to fly into a thermal lift (nice warm air current) which enabled him to fly much longer and farther than usual. But, when it was time to land, he had to find a place sort of last minute. He was going to land on top the local state college, which he had done before, but he chose the ‘easier’ route, which was the park in front. Sadly, there were trees and he clipped one and fell quickly thirty feet to the ground landing on his chin and chest, bending his head backwards. In this case, his headgear actually broke his neck. Forty-six days later, he died of a staph infection in his lungs. He was 29 years old. My brother died, still believing that, in our father’s eyes, he was a failure. Fortunately, we had talked about Jesus and unconditional love and acceptance. Even though my brother wanted to live and strive for the best kind of life, no matter what his condition was to be, I know he came to his own peace within himself because he knew he was loved and there is a God. My sister, Ila, and I hang glided his ashes over the awe inspiring Snake River. Our mother watched trepidatiously from below. She was proud of her daughters, yet anxious, lest she lose another child.
February 29, 1992 my mother died (59 years old) after a ten-month struggle with brain cancer (stage 4 astrocytoma). My birthday! My birthday was only once every four years. Now I never have a birthday. This may sound morose and selfish, but that is not my intention. The 29th of February is one of the saddest days of my life now. The death of our mother is stupendously horrible. She brought us into the world, nurtured us (however neglectful or successfully), and almost all humans wish to know intimately and remain forever in the hearts and minds of their mother. I’m not saying that her death was worse than any other, but it was definitely different. It knocked me sideways!
While my mother was dying, I birthed my fifth child, Kristen. She was born with Kabuki Syndrome, a very rare disorder. She had a small head/brain, heart problem, no anus, cleft palate, and many dysmorphic features. On top of that, my fourth child, Josh, 16 mos. at the time, had just been diagnosed as being autistic. He screamed all the time, pounded his head on the walls, the floor and on other people heads if he got close enough. It was a sort of nightmare. Getting away to see my mother was almost impossible. My husband left me. He asserted that there was nothing wrong with the kids; I just needed to control them better. I threw the Christmas tree at him, after I stripped the ornaments off and flung them in his general direction. He hated confrontation. I checked into the local ‘Fifth Floor’ suite at the hospital for the remainder of the Christmas holiday and he had to make do with kids.
September 27, 2006 a loud knocking at my front door at midnight shocked my heart rate into overdrive as I was studying for a class I was taking. I hollered through the door for the night knocker to identify him or herself. It was a policeman. He asked me if I knew Ila Ankney and if she lived at a certain address. Immediately my butt hit the ground. I looked at him and asked him if she was dead. He tried to say something else and I just repeated, “Is she dead?” He finally told me that her house burned and they found her inside, almost untouched by the fire. We learned a short time later that my sister had escaped the fire, but her animals were still inside (they were her babies), so she went back inside. When she opened the door to the room they were in, a blast of super heated air hit her and killed her instantly. I have one sibling left from this family, out of six members. No one from this family has reached the age of sixty.
I know I must stop. These, are just a few things. I have left out rape, as well as other beatings. My house has been burned down twice (once by my autistic son, once on Christmas day by some drunk and drugged up young boys on the rez), I’ve been extremely busted up after a horse accident (many, many broken ribs and a punctured lung), perforated ulcer, and now I have a tumor that needs to come out. Still there is more.
I have been reading some of the other posts and I am blown away by what people have experienced. We really do not know all the suffering until we somehow communicate with others. Please forgive me for the length of this posting. I hope I can learn some things in here.
