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Just before noon the following day, Daina had finished with morning
church and called me at my apartment wanting to talk more and
wondering if she could stop by my place in the afternoon. I was
thrilled, simply because she had called me back. I had
spent the afternoon and evening after I told her of my 'situation'
expecting she'd call back to ask questions or something. Instead I
had a long evening of waiting by the phone for nothing. But now she
had finally called back and it wasn't to let me know that I'd never
see her again, but that she wanted to talk more...
When Daina arrived she was very quiet and sat at the end of the couch
and uncharacteristically, rather than placing her purse on the floor
next to her feet, she placed it next to her hip as if she were
sitting in the corner of the couch for safety and using the purse as
a shield to protect her. She explained to me ''how unfair it had
been'' for me to talk about my secret issues to her. She herself
had secret issues that she'd been hiding for many years since her
childhood as well. While she had tried to talk about them to a
coworker of hers during her college years, she soon learned that
people didn't want to hear about others' troubled childhoods and
Daina had kept her issues to herself ever since. Now I had
foisted news of my issue on her.
I apologized and, as I had grown up deciding to do unto others as
I would have them do unto me, I asked her what her issues were as
I was open and willing to listen to them.
She seemed to poise herself for a moment realizing she was going to
break past a wall she'd been living behind for multiple decades
whereas in my case it had only been a mere thirteen years. I
recognized her building up the courage from my own experience and
simply let her have the time to begin when she was ready. And then
she did, first introducing the topic of the ideal American family
home and how hers had not lived up to the myth. As my own family was
shy of the mark, too, I understood what she was talking about. Then
she explained the environment she had grown up in.
She told me of a family where her father practiced, in my
words, 'marital rape'.
Coming from an orthodox religious family he knew any form of
contraceptive was a terrible sin against God and, while he didn't
worry much about being a true believer in other areas, refusing the
use of contraceptives was his way of keeping the faith. Her mother,
already having had many kids and many miscarriages, tried to at least
practice the rhythm method to reduce the chances of getting
pregnant, but Daina's father had needs that called upon him on
days other than the ideal ones for her cycle. Her mother refused his
advances and, given advice from his religious counselor, knew that
she was to cleave unto his needs. He forced himself on her and it
soon became a normal part of their family life. Daina told me of
night after night hearing her mother screaming from the master
bedroom below as her father first tried yelling their mother into
submission, then used other methods. Daina told of the next
mornings seeing the fresh bruises her mother tried to cover up and
the bottles of alcohol she would begin to drink to take herself away
from the pain and realization of 'her place in life'. This drinking
would start her mother's day at the kitchen table as the children
scrabbled to figure out breakfast for themselves.
Sometimes Daina would try to console her mother as she was crying and
drinking while her one year older sister moved onto getting the other
kids ready for school. Her mother said that she didn't mind having
sex so much, it was just that she couldn't face having another kid
each time and she damned the church and their father for not
allowing contraceptives. Being in the nineteen fifties, she
didn't have the pill as an option. Of the eleven pregnancies her
mother had, four were miscarried, and Daina ended up with three
surviving sisters and three brothers as well. Daina noted the time
when her mother found she was pregnant with the last of the kids and
how she intentionally threw herself down the home's flight of stairs
in the hopes of inducing another miscarriage so she wouldn't have to
go through yet another pregnancy, but she hadn't succeeded.
As a result of the frequent pregnancies, all of Daina's siblings
where closely spaced together. Her earliest memories were of the job
of her and her sister raising the remaining kids just a few years
younger than themselves. Daina's sister took 'the authoritative
father role' for the siblings while Daina took 'the caretaking mother
role' in the family. They would make sure the other children were
taken care of as best they could but, as they didn't have any
examples in their family life to draw from, they just did what seemed
best to their child minds. Physical violence among the siblings had
been very common though Daina, as the caretaker of the rest of the
kids, avoided this fate instead serving as the one trying to
break up the frequent fights of the other siblings. Once the end of
each day came, the siblings would retire to their bedrooms and once
again spend the early hours of the night listening to their mother
screaming, their father yelling, and occasional sounds of punches and
objects being broken until he got his way. In her adulthood,
Daina wasn't able to listen to dynamic female vocalists singing songs
because the high pitched vibrato brought back too many bad memories
of those nights as her mother tried to fend off their father.
Daina then talked of a shadowy figure that would stand at the foot of
her bed many nights and seemed to just stare at her. She wasn't sure
if it was a ghost or something else and steeled herself to be as
still as possible and not even breathe in the hopes that this
ghost-like figure would conclude there was nobody there and leave her
alone. As a result, not only was going to sleep a seeming
impossibility in her home, but then staying asleep was as well and
she began to stay awake for fear of the figure at the foot of her bed
returning, and she didn't want to be asleep when it came.
On the times she finally did fall asleep, she would have nightmares
of this looming figure standing next to her bed and she'd wake up in
terror. These nightmares continued into her adult life and even
twenty years after getting out of her family home she was still
having them and had accepted them as just a normal part of sleeping.
As a child in this environment, Daina one day decided to kill herself
and did as she had seen on a television show and locked herself in
the bathroom and took a bottle of pills out of the medicine cabinet
and contemplated taking them all. But after about an hour of
internal debate, she put the bottle of aspirin back into the cabinet
and returned to her childhood life, accepting it for what it was.
If it was a case of her mother becoming sterile, or her father
loosing his 'interest', or finding a way to satisfy himself
outside of the home, the worst of these times were over by
Daina's teenaged years just leaving her with a frequently drunk
mother and a threatening, though less violent, father. Daina did
note that there had been some good times with her father. They were
typically on the weekend when he would take some of the kids out of
the home and to a museum or other places of interest. Daina credited
him with her life long enjoyment of going to museums of various
types.
Daina talked of the isolation she felt in this childhood. Despite
living in a home filled with siblings, her older sister was the task
master and all the younger kids were 'a responsibility', not
simply her brothers and sisters. Any friends she might start to
make in school she would fear bringing home, given they would see the
environment she lived in and that would taint those budding
friendships. Daina kept mostly to herself and buried her mind in
books as the only respite from the life around her and escape into
the lives of other people, some fictional and some historical. By
her teens she was a member of the Junior Great Books Foundation and,
also using her studies as an escape, became the Valedictorian of her
Senior year of High School.
She saw College and an education as her only way to avoid the life
her mother had lived and took a job in her teens to save money as she
knew she would have no financial support from her parents. Having to
choose a College based on closeness rather than preference, as she
would have to continue living in the home to save on her expenses,
she found one a bus ride away associated with her family's church.
It was during this time that she had tried to talk about her
childhood with a coworker, but then that coworker kept her distance
from that point forward and Daina decided she would never tell
anyone. Four years later College was done and she finally,
physically, escaped her childhood environment though
emotionally it had continued to haunt her for the rest of her
life.
The story told, I wanted to give Daina a consoling hug, but
with her pinched in the corner of the couch and her purse as a
defending wall next to her, the best I could do was sit on the floor
at her feet and give her calf a hug.
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