8. Shame and Fear and the Strength of the Human Spirit…

Note: This is the eighth installment of the serial publication of my memoirs, “What’s Left Behind.” To read previous chapters, go to https://medium.com/whats-left-behind.

Broken memories are a disconcerting reality. Indeed, what is missing can be more disturbing than what is there.

I’ll never forget the day my mother pulled me out of the house by my hair, the burning pressure on my scalp. It couldn’t have been long after I fell out of the coop because I remember, too, the pain in my leg; it was hard enough to walk without someone dragging me by the hair.

In her other hand, there is a black, plastic VHS tape, a handwritten title on the faded label — my parents’ bootleg copy of Body Heat. In the garage, she found my father’s crowbar and smashed the video to bits, the thin plastic film inside it yanked out and strewn all over.

I remember the night I was home alone with Colin. He had found the video, put it into the VCR, and had me reenact some of the scenes with him. It is one of my most vivid memories, one of the handful that has revisited me regularly, bringing tremendous shame and suffering with it. But what transpired between that night and the day my mother smashed the video is disconcertingly blank, erased from all conscious thought.

Had we been caught again that night? Had our dark secret been unveiled?

I only recently realized that this memory may actually be a dream — a nightmare, to be more exact, I experienced as a child, indelibly burned in my psyche for decades. Why would she be so enraged to discover we watched an R-rated movie? Why bring me out to the garage to destroy the video when there were countless ways to do it inside the house? Was there some metaphoric significance to the crowbar? And where, by the way, was Colin in all of this?

The memory sparks more questions than answers, which makes me consider its authenticity. Then again, maybe this reasoning is yet another defense to protect me from whatever truth was too painful to process in the first place.

It is unsettling to know that something happened for as many as three or four years, yet a handful of broken memories is all that remains. Perhaps more harrowing is what I do remember: the daily onslaught of overwhelming guilt and anxiety, the unrelenting self-disgust and paranoia.

It’s difficult to recall events. It’s impossible to forget the feelings.

“Yes, Aisling?”

“Can I use the bathroom?”

“Again?” my teacher asked.

It was the third time that day — the second that hour.

Even so, it felt like I’d been holding it all day. I was afraid to ask again but I was more afraid to wait, afraid that I would have another accident.

That seemed to be happening a lot lately.

Only that morning, I woke up cold and wet. A large, darkened stain saturated the center of my bed. I was just peeling the sheet off the mattress when my mother entered.

“Ash, did you — ”

“Ma, look what Frosty did!” I blurted out, pointing to the giant wet splotch and trying to appear appalled by my poor, unassuming cat sleeping in the corner.

The shame I felt was instantly relieved when my accusation went unquestioned; it quickly turned to guilt when I watched my mother smack Frosty for his incontinence.

“Go ahead,” my teacher told me.

I walked to the bathroom at the back of the class and flipped the green construction paper sign on the doorknob to red: STOP.

The door had hardly closed behind me when I was unfastening my pants, panicked that I might not make it in time. But when I sat down, hardly anything came out. And it burned.

Badly!

Whimpering, I smothered my face in my shirt so no one would hear me. The pain was intense — a caustic twinge pervading my body, bringing tears to my eyes and a bolus of fear to my throat.

I knew something was wrong. I also knew it had to do with the “bad things” I was doing, so I never said anything, always bearing with the pain until it passed. That was better than humiliation.

I sat for a minute until I was certain I had finished, then returned to my desk located at the front of the classroom.

My desk was always in the front.

When I was in the second grade, my teacher discovered I couldn’t see the blackboard. She sent me to the nurse, who instructed Mrs. Hendriks to move me to the front of the classroom, then sent me home with a letter to my mother.

On the school bus, I examined the letter. I couldn’t read everything it said, but I recognized “see” and “glasses,” and I understood “four-eyes” and “ugly.” I remember my heart racing in sheer terror as I stepped off the bus, then the palpable relief that my mother had not come to meet me that day. Without a second thought, I ripped the letter into pieces, stuffed it deep into the hedges, and continued home.

I don’t recall if that letter ever came back to me — if I ever got glasses as a child. Because if I did, I definitely never wore them. But from that day forward, my desk remained in the first row.

Sitting up front certainly had its benefits. It definitely made it easier to see the board. It also made it more difficult for kids to kick my chair and pull my hair with the teacher so close. On the other hand, it meant having forty eyes boring into me every time I went back and forth to the bathroom. I knew they were watching, cracking jokes about my frequent trips to the toilet.

In fact, I had started to believe that any time kids would laugh, point or whisper, they had uncovered my dirty little secret. It began as an idle dread while I was at school but sowed so deep it morphed into an unqualified paranoia preying upon me every day, everywhere.

I have never known my mother’s family. Throughout my earliest years, however, my father’s kin played a fairly significant role in my life; they were often a lighthouse in the darkness, a buoy in the surf.

My grandparents had four children — two boys, two girls — who begot 11 grandchildren, of which I was seventh in line and, until my cousin Erin came along eight years later, the only girl.

I always loved going to family gatherings. Nevertheless, when I did, I couldn’t help but sit amongst my cousins, thinking I would give anything to trade places with them — cousins who were pure and good and had all the things I wanted in life, like beautiful homes, loving parents, and friends; cousins who, incidentally, welcomed Colin to join in their fun and games but wanted nothing to do with me.

It never occurred to me that I was the youngest and the only girl. As far as I was concerned, they didn’t want me around for all the same reasons my classmates didn’t want me around: I was dirty and vile. Disgusting. And as this feeling intensified, I retreated. In one memory, I had gone to a celebration of some sort at my Great Aunt’s house. Colin and I had been together earlier that day, and with my paranoia in overdrive, I couldn’t tolerate being around anyone. Instead, I sat on the front porch alone, listening to the mirth and merriment of the party in the backyard.

The consensus in my family was that I was “shy” — a truth in its own right, but definitely not the extent of it. If the complete picture could be seen, I was not so much shy as I was regularly consumed by fear, shame, and unbearable sadness.

It was easy for everyone to say I was shy; it was easier, even, for me to play the role.

And so I did.

I learned at such a young age to hide my feelings, stashing them away so deep that not even I could see them anymore.

It served its purpose, of course, because, as I got older I grew increasingly phobic about exposing my true self. If I gave them no cause, no one probed, no one asked questions. More importantly, I protected my mother’s belief that I was strong, self-reliant, and unflappable — or, as she put it, the sole source of hope and pride in her life.

On the surface, I appeared poised and tranquil and, in the end, my mother, as well as my entire family — and essentially everyone who ever met me — remained oblivious to the preponderance of facts surrounding my life.

While I found great satisfaction in my ability to conceal the truth for so long, I could hide from everyone but myself, and eventually, everything I had stuffed inside began searching for a way out. It started as bedwetting and urinary tract infections, creeping into my brain, morphing into a depression and anxiety so intense that, in search of comfort, I only became more susceptible to the advances of my brother.

I felt trapped.

Hopeless.

I was consumed by a pain I was too young to understand, ensnared in a nightmare I was too vulnerable to end. And by the time I was nine years old, I decided it all had to end.

I was lying on the living room floor, encircled by my many boxes of Crayola crayons and coloring books — Rainbow Brite, Thundercats, Care Bears. Name the cartoon and I had the corresponding coloring book.

The TV was on in the background, but I wasn’t watching it. Then, suddenly, the voices coming from the large wood-framed box snagged my attention.

“…supposedly, drowning is among the least painful ways to die. Once you take that initial breath of water, your lungs fill with fluid and it causes a feeling of relaxation and euphoria…”

That I was intrigued by this tidbit of knowledge in the first place is significant in itself; that I stashed it in the back of my mind for future reference is even more telling.

It was a summer afternoon. I was lying in my bed listening to rain collect in the tin coffee can I kept outside my window to measure the rain, the pitter-patter of the rain in sync with my tears. I knew I needed to find a way out of the mess I’d created. But how?

Then I remembered what I’d heard on television.

No one was home. I figured that was as good a time as any.

In the bathroom, I turned on the tub faucet, flipping the little lever that closed the drain, then sat, waiting for the tub to fill. When there was enough water, I clamped my nose with my hand and lay down. As a child, I loved putting my head underwater and running my fingers through my hair that floated all over. At that moment, however, it was the last thing on my mind.

The plan was to wait as long as I could hold my breath — then let my nose go.

Take that initial breath of water…

I lay there, waiting, desperate to be free of a pain I couldn’t stand any longer. My head began to throb violently — the pressure burgeoning with my body’s increasing demand for oxygen — and I began to have reservations about this being the “least painful” way to die. But the pain was tolerable. Negligible, really, compared to the misery I suffered every day.

A moment later, it was time. I let go of my nose and opened my mouth.

I shot out of the water, gasping for air, choking on the bit of water that had gone up my nose stinging the back of my throat.

I just had my very first lesson in the tenacity of the human spirit.

No matter how much pain we are made to endure, there is a relentless human instinct to preserve one’s own life at all costs — and it is among the most powerful forces to overcome!

Continue on to Chapter 9: Treasure Troves, Tupperware, and a Turn of Events