Lost Time, Bad Dreams and Miracles

Introduction

My Mind, My Motivation, and My Book

The things in this book are absolutely true to my present memory, and to my life as it happened. Because of my retrieval problem, and my powers of recall being so scattered, gathering all these facts was a chore that took a long time, but I persisted because once I latched onto a missing fragment I found I could recapture it intact, conversations included. So over the last fifteen years by gathering and connecting one fragment onto a prior one I managed to inch my way through my past. Some events came easily because they were not buried very deep and were not as painful as others. I have enclosed photos to help verify those things in the few cases where such photos seemed suitable. There were more, but if I had used them all, the book would have become a confusing messy album with frustratingly long tag lines below each photo.

All that worked well enough for most bits, but there were other fragments that required real digging, instances that I could not look at even with the help of hypnosis. Vivian, my treasured counselor, wrote in her notes that I would just turn away in those cases, and said the intensity of my grief was startling. The most stressful example was learning that I had lost an eight or nine month period during our last year at Purdue. I did eventually recall the incident but not the cause, and remembered only being told that my amnesia was trauma related, memory of the trauma itself most likely irretrievable. That happening became the lingering challenge that made this a work in progress until its resolution this past year. I needed to know what had happened that was so terrible that it eliminated almost a year of my life.

The fortunate side to all this searching and resolving also gave me precious insights to an awesome journey that took me from a small town on the coast of Massachusetts to a stint overseas and back again. It was a journey filled with as many miracles as struggles. As a matter of fact I am in awe of my life—of the synchronicity with so many things strung along the same line, and I’m in awe of my family, my siblings and my children, and most of all of my survival. It’s my story, one I am proud to claim in this my eightieth year. I hope as a reader you are hooked by the journey and accept it as my truth if you can, and as a cautionary tale if you cannot.

AnnieMae Robertson

Weird Tag onto Introduction

Shortly after completing the first draft of this memoir I took time out to work on a book about my mother. That was when I learned that she had been born with a caul, a membrane that is stretched down over the face like veiling. Such babies are called caulbearers, and said to be born behind the veil. I was not familiar with the term caulbearer, or the superstitions surrounding such persons, other than to have heard they were believed to be clairvoyant. I have since learned that such births are very rare, possibly as few as one child born with such a face mask in 80,000 births. They have been known to run in blood lines, occasionally a caulbearer parent giving birth to a child also born behind the veil.

According to further research, a caulbearer child may be thought unusual because of their deep perception of the matters of their world. It is common for such a child to know things before they happen and to have experiences beyond the normal order of things. They believe in the reality of such occurrences, but their inability to explain these things to others can leave them isolated and prone to detachment. Since there is so much superstition and misunderstanding around the caulbearer these days, cauls are usually destroyed at birth leaving the child only more confused as to why they behave the way they do. That also puts them at risk of being mistakenly diagnosed and treated for some psychosis or schizophrenia…

(… Or, as possible in my case, a dissociative compartmental brain disorder which gave me a mix of extremely good and extremely bad experiences and was a hazardous truth to my life all these years.)

My interest piqued, I immediately sent queries to one of the caulbearer organizations who professed to be able to authenticate caulbearers by the date of their births since such occurrences were always predicted. I am presently awaiting some sort of response, all the while hoping that I have not set myself up as an ideally gullible victim for some weird con. But it is interesting—and further confuses already confusing issues.

Hmm.

Just a thought.

Chapter 1

There had been an enormous bird sitting on the roof of the rink when I had arrived at skating the night before the tremulous day when my first appointment with Vivian was scheduled to take place. On Vivian eve, so to speak. I don’t want to suggest that the bird was an omen, but I had never seen another like it. It stared down at me with such intensity it shook me out of my comfort zone as I struggled to haul my skate bag out of the car. I had the feeling it was trying to communicate and I hadn’t evolved enough to translate the message. I tried. I set the skate bag down on the pavement and stared back, focused hard as if I had all the intuitive powers of man and beast.

Its upper chest was dappled with brown and white feathers, sort of like those darker spots on a snowy owl, the lower body solidly off-white, but from where I stood the head was more hawkish than owlish. The feathers showing along the shoulders and back seemed solidly brown. I decided it might be a huge northern red-tailed hawk though I never believed they could be that large, or that the pattern was quite like that. Then again I had never had one staring down at me from such a short distance. I felt compelled to call up to it the way an Indian friend of mine would call up to eagles and red-tails. The bird twisted its head to listen, then looked down with more intensity. That was great, but I wanted so much for it to answer with that shrill bird cry that would imply a recognized kinship to that moment—or another, less remembered, when I was sure I too had wings.

I don’t know how long I stood there or even if I eventually went inside the rink, though I must have because I have a vague recollection of someone telling me the bird was an Osprey as I was lacing up my skates before going out on the floor. My not remembering things was common, and, interestingly enough, the very reason for my first unnerving appointment with Vivian. The image of the bird remained solidly in my mind where it continued to perch and to stare and not return my call, even as I drove up to Amherst the following day.

Vivian’s office was on a curve just past the school, as easy to find as I had been told it would be. I was both startled and pleased, startled that I had gotten there so fast, before I had time to wonder if I was doing the right thing, and pleased that I hadn’t managed to get myself lost on some back country road, also a habit of mine.

It had taken only twenty-three minutes to drive from my apartment and every minute had been like a Buddhist meditation exercise that wasn’t going too well in spite of my persistent focus on the bird image. Once I was finally pulling into Vivian’s driveway, all that stuff had been pushed aside by a rush of panicky questions that were doing a ten-kilometer race in my head. I didn’t even know why I was there, couldn’t remember when I’d ever made that decision. What the devil was I going to say?

Parking was a challenge. Even given my expertise and the maneuverability of my small truck-like vehicle, it was difficult to edge past the shrubs and the back fenders of the other parked cars. The congestion forced me to indulge in automotive manipulations, forward three feet—back to the left—forward—back until I was fairly perpendicular to the house and wondered how on earth I’d ever get myself extricated when my appointment was over. That was so typical of me, to worry about something non-threatening before it was even an issue. Of course I’d get out. I’d manage, or I’d become a permanent resident in Vivian’s front parlor, if she had a front parlor, and that wasn’t about to happen.

I was early. That was my norm of course, always early, usually fifteen minutes unless I planned to be fifteen minutes early, then half an hour at least. There was something in my inner clock that was simply off-kilter. No, my inner clock was okay—it was my inner self that needed fine-tuning.

I walked up onto Vivian’s porch and stood facing her door wondering if I was to just walk in as one would at a regular doctor’s, or should I ring and wait since it was, after all, the front door to a home as well as an office. I pondered the dilemma, concerned that it would be the thing that would send me back to my Geo Tracker and car phone. Sorry, Vivian, I just couldn’t make it. I later learned that my confusion regarding ringing or not ringing was the result of incomplete information, which for me resulted in a gap that was difficult for me to cross.

Fortunately, by then it was too late to turn away. I had made it that far, and my concern shifted to the possibility that someone driving by would recognize me frozen there, and word would spread that I was a helpless psychotic idiot. I had also already used up most of my early minutes, which certainly validated my having them, but made a resolution urgent. Gathering myself in, I took a deep breath, pushed the bell and entered. After all, I rationalized, no one would expect me to be entirely under control on that first day. An extra minute or two staring at the knob wasn’t so terribly long.

There were a couple of doors to open, a screen-storm door and an inner, more solid, wood and windowed door. That screen became one of the irritations that persisted every time I visited Vivian. Like a Doberman watchdog, it would allow me to enter quickly, then freeze itself tightly into its latch when I was eager to leave. If I had truly wanted to escape from all the self-indulgent caterwauling (one of my father’s pet words), I was sure that screen would never have permitted it.

Once inside I found myself in a broad front hall facing stairs and doorways. There were no seats to settle on, no magazines to preoccupy my jittering nerve endings, no friendly smiling sophomore in a white uniform to take down my vital statistics on a clipboard. I felt as if I had fallen down the rabbit hole with Alice and was lost in some odd limbo that gave me no clue as to whether ringing and walking in was acceptable behavior when one arrived to consult one’s therapist.

Even back then, in my fifties, it was all new to me. Other people went for counseling, not me. I wanted to back out onto the porch and re-ring the bell. Then I wanted to stand there like a Mormon distributing pamphlets, or a vampire forced to wait until someone came and invited me in. I felt like an interloper—a trespasser—a transgressor, wondering again what ever made me decide to come there.

Vivian moved down the stairs to where I was standing. Hello, Bernice, she said and bent to struggle with the two sliding doors that opened into her front room, that space where she invited clients to sit. In retrospect, doors seemed significant that day. They had to have been an omen of sorts, much more so than the bird. They were like doorways into new stages in a person’s life. Certainly they were in mine.

I recognized Vivian at once, first by her cap of gray hair cropped in that boyish way, then her slender gentle smile. I had been told that we had met a number of times, at a movie once when Vivian was there with her husband and I was there with a mutual friend. There was another time at a gathering at the home of that friend. But in the present context I wouldn’t have had a clue who she was if it wasn’t for her standing just there where the therapist would be standing. She was Vivian.

I wondered if she was nervous too. Did therapists get nervous when new clients arrived? Was I the person Vivian expected to see? What was she thinking? Couldn’t be anything seriously unsettling this person. She’s obviously under control, a middle of the road sort of woman. Writes, I understand. Well, then of course she’s off the edge. Writers always are.

She invited me to sit, indicating the couch. Take a chair if you prefer.

Damn! It all sounds so innocuous, all of it, so innocent and unthreateningly unimportant, when it was huge. I had shifted from being Alice to being some cosmic loner wandering on the outer ring of Saturn, revolving in the dust particles. There were no lines tethering me to Earth or to a couch in Vivian’s front room. There were no features beneath my helmet, only a slick, shiny surface on a face, sans mouth—sans eyes—sans soul. How could I ever get past that?

Vivian offered me coffee from a carafe on her table, or tea if I’d rather.

No, thank you.

Water?

Nothing, please. I think I grinned and told Vivian I only drank diet Coke, that I’d been a hydrophobic since birth. I liked the melodrama of that word, hydrophobic. Did Vivian look at me confused, then smile and write that first entry on her legal pad? She considers herself a hydrophobic. Delusional? Possibly. Or did she write probably? Was that where we began?

We were sitting at opposite sides of that table, our knees up to the wooden edges. My back was against the couch cushions, Vivian’s against nothing as she bent to lean forward over her notes. Beyond her were her bookcases with titles that provided a great focal point whenever I needed one. Was that often?

Did I try to validate myself right up front? Did I mention the reams of prose—novels—poems—plays I’d written trying to write something palatable that mirrored the imagery journeying through my mind? Did I explain how much easier it had been to present it all as fiction than to admit even to myself that many of the stories were provably true and the rest I could only guess about? Did I give Vivian reasons for my being there, tell her I was aging, graying down, feeling the need to understand, to resolve old arguments, mend old fences, claim truths while I still had time? Was I asking her to become one of the cerebral archeologists helping me gather notes while chipping away at those old ruins?

Was Vivian quickly aware that the major complication to any resolution was that while I seemed to know a lot about myself, I really knew nothing? I had ends with no beginnings, middles with no edges, a fluidity to protagonists that made me consider, contrary to Vivian’s reassurances, that I was crazy. Possibly I came from a long line of crazy people, layers and layers of them. Instead of fighting that fact, maybe I should be proud of bearing along old family traditions like banners into the fray.

Early on in our association, a week or so after that first day, Vivian gave me her diagnosis. I was told that my abnormality was MPD, Multiple Personality Disorder, a conclusion about as acceptable to me as Hoof-and-Mouth disease. I didn’t blame Vivian for that possible misdiagnosis because she had come to it by way of all the information I had given her to analyze, all personal perceptions. Perhaps that had been too misleading. I also wished I had a more accurate record of those first things we talked about so that I might better understand why Vivian had arrived at that god-awful conclusion. Unfortunately, during our first session I had requested that Vivian not tape anything. I couldn’t imagine what I had been so afraid of; perhaps the stark undeniable witnessing of myself, by myself.

Multiple Personality Disorder? I could feel people cringe even as I hit the keys on my word processor. Just the thought of MPD raised a Sybil image of a multiple, and I had no desire to write another book about child abuse probably filled with boiling water douches (or was it ice water?) and cigarette burns. To the contrary, my earliest recollection was of my mother’s gentle face leaning over my crib murmuring something about having no milk for my bottle until the milkman came. (I suppose I should have written milk-deliverer, but in those days only men delivered milk, hopping from their trucks and hurrying up the drive to the back step with bottles of milk rattling in those wire carriers.) To me that didn’t sound like trauma enough to cause MPD, but who knew? It might have depended on how long it took the milkman to show up or how annoyed my family became at my fussing about it.

Back then, so early in our association, MPD was not a direction I could even go. I’m sure I would have gathered up my belongings on the spot and headed out through those doors if Vivian, in her gentle way, hadn’t allowed me to consider that possibility without forcing me to embrace it as an absolute explanation of my being. Nonetheless, I was too shaken by such a bizarre diagnosis to let it stand without a lot of positive input and a reliable second opinion. I liked Vivian and was relieved when she encouraged me to have a full psychiatric work up done, days of physical and mental tests by the best specialists I could find in the area.

I needed to be certain there was not some other more cleverly hidden reason for my peculiar responses. After all, if I could so easily hide time and events from myself, one aspect of MPD, what else could I have buried under all the layers? I was strong-minded in ways I myself didn’t even understand, much stronger than Vivian was, and I needed to be certain that I was not conning her, or myself, in some weird, unexplainable fashion.

I felt if the psychiatric tests were extensive and explicitly controlled they would measure things clearly enough to point out a lie if there was one. I had heard those tests were set up in such a devious way they could not be faked. I was relying on that. And, to be certain there would be no offsetting opinions, I didn’t let the psychiatrist know I was seeing Vivian until after we had discussed the results.

As things turned out, I thoroughly enjoyed the tests, even the hundreds of questions and those notorious ink blots. The physical tests were interesting and hardly painful or frightening, though the one with the small things a young man stuck to my head was a bit much. He shut me in a quiet dark room for the duration, then kept rushing in to stick more of the little things to my cheeks and eyelids and brows. Never saw so much activity, the young man mumbled in explanation. Must be picking up extra movement around your eyes and all.

The end result? I was given additional assurances that I was at least functionally sane. Thank you, God! But, although the psychiatrist did not mention MPD by that term, he also did not discount it. In explaining my personality, he clarified our follow-up discussion by writing in his report that the tests suggested that my inner life was fertile in precepts and sensations, and fluid in its shifts among them, the flux of which can stress her capacity to manage all the movements, to keep it orderly and acceptably bounded.

He went on to write that she experiences herself as a whole composed of choreographed parts—which she generally seems to feel are cooperative rather than competitive or cruel. There is, however, a sense of a dominant agent of some sort, whom she experiences as demonic, who lurks beneath the placid surface of her identity and is capable of scattering its components much like tossing a rock into a still, reflective pool. (Damn, so much for those inkblots. Demonic? I don’t think so.) Her inner life, though not unstable, is fluid, and when most efficient is a coordinated whole composed of independent components.

The whole experience was a major breakthrough in my life. After fifty years of confusion and heartache at last I was given a fact-based explanation of the oddity of me. Maybe I’d finally be able to deal with what I was, even though I knew from the first I could never consider the components to be a multiple of beings with individual names living inside of me like a pack of cats scrapping in a burlap sack. And when Vivian suggested I name each individual component, I found it difficult—no, impossible—to attach names to those facets or faces or whatever, other than the names I had already been accustomed to using. There had always been times when Bernie seemed more familiar and appropriate, and other times when Babs or Bobbie or Bernice seemed right, but no matter how Vivian explained things, I never felt the components were anything more than exaggerations of my moods, the same moods everyone has.

On the other hand, though I remained inclined to write off the possibility of being a multiple, I had to admit there had been plenty of incidents in my life that might have satisfied the Sybil benchmarks if I took a good look at them—or if I even knew what those benchmarks were since I had never read about Sybil or any other bits of like material available. I had, in fact, always pointedly avoided anything dealing with such a peculiar mental aberration. I suppose that could be like an alcoholic avoiding stories about alcoholics for fear of recognizing oneself. Who knows? But I had heard a battery of things from people who did read those sensational stories, even from a few MPDs struggling in that arena.

For instance, years earlier I discovered I was extremely easy to hypnotize. I believed that ruled out schizophrenia, but apparently was one of the accepted indications of an MPD personality. At the time, I was told that I was a hypnotic virtuoso since I responded so well to post-hypnotic suggestions that, for me, even stimulated hallucinations. I had also been adept at entering spontaneous trance states—a problem occasionally, but sometimes, such as undergoing painful medical tests, a real asset. I remembered one such instance when a medical technician was giving me little shocks up one arm to find out why my fingers tingled. If there had been an underlying demon at that moment there would have been one technician with the wires clipped to his tongue. Fortunately, I managed a preferred method of problem solving, mentally distancing to an open field in some imaginary spot far away from that medical facility and its aggravatingly painful tests.

Unfortunately, there were always negatives to balance the assets, occasions I recalled when I automatically responded to the words Come here! Vivian suggested those words tended to render me totally submissive, a definite switch for such a self-protective, don’t-touch-me kid.

(Come here, honey! I won’t hurt you!

Okay.)

A feeling of inferiority was another indication of MPD, and that was certainly not me. Even as a youngster I was inclined to see myself as someone quite majestic, not so much regal as godly, or at least responsible for everything that ever went asunder up to and including the living or dying of anyone I knew or heard about. It was as if I was certain I could have saved them if I had only been paying attention. Hmm, maybe visualizing oneself as an inferior god could be as oppressive as an inferior mortal? Less amusing, I’d always had that main prerequisite: an alter; a sexually aggressive, caustic, detached persona who had been around for a long time, gotten me into plenty of difficulty, and left me with gaps in my already fractured mind.

Before I am done butting into the nature of myself, I should mention some of the other types of episodes I had experienced at one time or another that may prove or disprove the MPD issue. Occasionally I experienced a change of abilities, dancing when I could not dance, singing publicly when I couldn’t hold a tune, directing a major production for an established theater group when I knew nothing about directing.

I’d run organizations, taught classes, taken jobs without the required skills or education, having only been credited with completing the tenth grade. I’d designed forms up to and including computer-generated cut sheet checks that needed to be run and mailed by the hundreds of thousands, using my own format and method no other company in the country had managed to accomplish, when for the corporation, that need was still just a directive. I once computer-automated a manufacturing company’s warehouse procedures, including purchasing, production, inventory and sales, all without a clue. I also designed the floor plan in a large retail store as if I were an expert in spatial requirements.

I had counseled all sorts of people with all sorts of problems, and in spite of my propensity for becoming speechless under pressure, I had occasionally lectured to a variety of groups on a variety of subjects. I persistently felt the need to control any group in which I became attached, except the writing workshops where I remained constantly uncertain about my skills, since no matter how hard I tried, I persistently made the same errors in my writing.

I had occasionally traveled alone into strange places even though I was prone to panic in unknown areas, and, too damned often, I dressed and behaved like an uncontrolled, passion-driven teen, or looked like someone who should have been hovering in a doorway on Pearl Street in my miniskirts and thigh high boots and body jewelry, instead of looking like the frazzled, blue-jeaned mom that I really was.

I was rarely aware of those changes and clearly not in control of them. When confronted, I usually mumbled something inane such as My abilities always dictate my aspirations, or My aspirations always drive my abilities, whatever the heck that all meant.

There were an equal number of times when the opposite was true, times I’d been unable to move onto a dance floor no matter how pressured, or sing even in an outdoor sing-along where everyone was off key. I couldn’t turn on a turntable or hi-fi equipment, and occasionally couldn’t speak at all, or touch, or focus, or move.

During another type of episode I’d been flooded with an inconsolable homesickness that had a frenzy to it. It was a child’s fear and more overwhelming because I never knew why or where the home was to which I was so drawn. There were memories that I couldn’t quite latch onto, that sat inside my brain like a name on the tip of my tongue. I knew if I tried just a little harder I’d see it all clearly. But it never happened. The more I tried, the less I could recall.

There were days—weeks—months—that I never got back, often never even knew they were gone or had ever existed. There were strangers from within those spaces of time who were confused and hurt that I was so coldly indifferent when they saw me again. I could never acknowledge them at all—strangers from strange places.

During one of the most bizarre episodes that happened, I had moved back into my head until I could see the inside of my eye sockets, until the space in front of me became two openings of light. Then suddenly I was across the room watching and knew someone or something had taken my place in my body. There was no shift of position, but the person I had been in conversation with knew instantly that something drastic had occurred. I never wanted that to happen again—EVER! But I have a feeling that it did.

I tried to push my confusion all away, to deny there was anything unusual happening. I told myself that if one minute I was an adult and the next an annoyingly self-centered emotional teenager with ghastly flirtatious, extremely nauseating pubescent overtones, it was just me being momentarily silly. There were also times when I became an abrasively opinionated business woman who had practical solutions to just about any problem. Sooner or later I managed to annoy everyone in my vicinity—including myself. Of course with all that happening, I was still that nurturing mom raising the best kids ever. I knew I was busy, and odd sometimes, and that I had a lousy memory, but sooner-or-later wasn’t that true about everyone?

Vivian said no, most people were just people doing their thing the best they could. That was all I wanted to be, just a person, who did okay at the usual things, with someone who loved me, and kids and maybe a dog or a couple of cats and a football game to watch every fall weekend. Maybe, just maybe, it would also be sweet to be able to dance to slow music any time I wanted.

One other major problem the psychiatrist had mentioned in his report was a trauma related damaged retrieval system I’d had since early childhood. He told me I didn’t file events in my mind in the normal sequential way. Therefore I always had difficulty retrieving even the most recent facts. I was told it was a problem that would never go away. I forgot names and faces in the time it took to turn around. I didn’t remember longtime acquaintances if I ran into them in places that didn’t provide clues. For instance, if I knew someone fairly well at the roller-skating rink where I went twice a week, unless that person was a particularly close friend I wouldn’t have a clue who he or she was in Sears Department Store. Something would need to trigger the connection. It might be as simple as seeing a roller-skating character on their sweatshirt. Time was as big a problem. I never knew if a happening occurred last week or three weeks earlier.

I was startled to find that I also didn’t complete circles when I drew them, or squares for that matter. So, the psychiatrist explained, it would have been difficult for me to be a graphic artist, though my graphic designs had managed to win silver one year and bronze another in a major international competition of in-house printing projects. That was how I made my living for a number of years. But, admittedly it was often a struggle. Without fail there was one major error on each project piece, which meant I had to do everything twice to get it right once.

I also learned I was not able to remember items on lists, or digits beyond the first three. Unfortunately, that included my own phone number. For years that also kept me paying additional for a three-digit license plate for my car, and still does.

Without sufficient directions it was difficult for me to complete even the simplest tasks requested. For example, if I was in someone else’s kitchen and they asked me to get out the potato peeler without further directions, I’d simply become immobilized and embarrassed. God forbid they would ask me to cut up the potatoes without showing me the size they wanted, because the same thing would happen.

Interestingly, eventually my incompetence paid off handsomely, well at least somewhat handsomely. When I realized I couldn’t function on the subordinate level, I simply became the boss. Then I was the one giving the directives. Though I didn’t work out what was actually going on in my head until the tests, years earlier I had decided there had to be someone—a guide or guardian angel—or something even more odd that managed my survival when things became too stressful, someone or something making sure the company liked me well enough to keep those paychecks coming, as small as they were.

Recognizing and keeping friends was another mountainous struggle. After all, how many times could I walk right past my best chum completely unaware before the friend decided it was more than just a casual snub? How often could I get away with denying I was at a certain place on a certain night just because I couldn’t remember being there? On the other side of the coin, how long could I stay mad at someone if I couldn’t remember why I originally became angry? I must have become the most forgiving creature in existence—other than my dog and some ancient well-known godly beings.

There were plenty of times my handling of difficult situations just didn’t work. If someone rushed up to greet me, for instance, I would assume he or she was a friend or acquaintance and respond accordingly, hoping they’d clue me in before I said or did something inappropriate. In most instances the worst result would leave me mumbling pat excuses. Oh, sorry, I guess I was off in never-never land. Of course I remember. People were kind. Except in the case of the woman who shouted into my face, Stay away from my husband! That was interesting, especially when I had no idea who the woman or her husband were.

There was also the stranger who by design or by chance said, Hello or Hi, honey, you waiting for me? or How about a kiss for your old uncle. I had an impressive number of uncles that I acknowledged before realizing they were not behaving in an uncle-like way.

I felt as though I was a person without a social immune system, only for me there was no plastic bubble in which I could safely survive. I depended on family and friends and was grateful to Vivian for giving me the courage, at long last, to explain some of my trauma to them so they could understand.

The most unsettling thing that came out of my association with Vivian was the realization that my personal history, as I had accepted it, was not valid. I thought about that as I was leaving Vivian’s early on. By the time I reached the bottom step I had decided that I no longer knew if my villains were really villains, or my heroes really heroes. I was floored by the dreadful possibilities, ghosts of severed relationships, lost friends, old misdirected angers. How many people had I simply walked away from for no reason other than my bizarre inability to remain connected to someone I had concluded was unfriendly; or had simply walked around an unfamiliar corner, out of sight, out of mind?

Though I finally seemed to know what I was, I sure didn’t know who I was. What had happened to that little kid who started out just wanting more milk in her bottle? I stood there at the bottom of Vivian’s steps sick with the need to find her, to know everything that had happened, to reattach my lifeline. I decided I had to confront all the demons that had suddenly become mine and learn to forgive them if they were the ones in the wrong, and forgive myself if I was. Maybe if I was lucky, that child would finally not be scattered like dandelion fluff through my psyche but would have became a major part of the whole of me, Bernie.

Vivian wanted me to write some of my feelings and thoughts down between our visits and bring them along with me. I was diligent. Each evening, in the quiet of my small apartment, I would sit with a legal pad on my lap and write without lifting my pen off the paper, letting whatever happened, happen. Then I dutifully delivered those disconnected images and brief stories to her. She just took them and tucked them into her notebook, to read over during her free time, I suppose. We never discussed the contents of those notes, though I’m sure they had some bearing on the questions she would ask as well as the comments she would make during following sessions.

They were there among her other papers delivered to me after her death a few years later. Her comments, inserted in her minuscule handwriting, mainly had to do with how the writing style changed as the voice changed, and how consistent that always was. She frequently noted which part of me she felt was doing the writing, That was particularly interesting as I was attempting to decipher all those comments. There were also many underlinings and a few asterisks with more notes attached, as well as a multitude of Interesting!!s scattered along the margins.

But it was during those sessions themselves, once I was inside those sliding doors, when I would burst like a ruptured kernel of corn, exposing the intensity of my anguish to myself as well as to Vivian. Each time, I thought it wouldn’t happen, that the drive up over the notch was so pleasing, the air so approaching spring, I was almost giddy. I was also not someone easily given to exposing that sobbing, gasping, cataclysmic side of myself. Then the darkness would build until I was groping for a seat, floating pressures of movement terrorizing me. Vivian would speak in that calm way. What is happening? she would ask. Who do you see there behind you?

It was like hot tar flowing over me, blood red and burning. Home, I wanted to go home. Everything was guttural, grinding up from deep inside until I was sobbing into my hands, tears dripping between my fingers, totally lost.

Bernie, you are safe here, she would say. Go into your safe place. Let everything go… And the session would began.

I knew it might be a lifetime’s job. After all, the location of the actual origins of my screwed up existence might have been in the back bedroom of a manor house in the fourteenth century, or ten thousand years earlier on the upper slope of some great sea. Perhaps going back might even take me all the way to the hard crust of the Twelfth Planet where I’d be waiting for the worlds to line up in this solar system so I could begin my journey here. I might have had scales or feathered wings, or leather ones more likely. Then getting from there to here might take too many volumes and too many eons. So I decided to focus only on this earth and this life, which could prove to be epic enough and stressfully complex. If I hoped to accomplish anything, I knew I would need to start from now and work my way back to the beginning. It has not been easy and it has not been fast, but that is what I have done.

Now I am ready to write it forward.

5/4/92 Session: (Vivian’s notes)

Cited instances of trauma—clearly has PTSD.

Trance: safe places, future goals, revisits trauma. She didn’t know what happened when she lost track of out-of-body recounting. looked to one side etc. After 30 seconds picked up thread.

She feels frightened as if that part of her shouldn’t be here in this world.

Loses track again, looks confused, sad. Isn’t always sure if she hears Caron’s voice or her own voice.)

Chapter 2

First off, I had been born in a town that had once been called Bare Cove when it was developing a history. By the time I sat facing Vivian, the town, in its maturity, was less romantically named Hingham, after a similar place in England.

If a person was heading from Boston down along the south shore, they would drive through it. If they slowed down just when they could see the expanse of its harbor to their left with its scattering of small masted boats and islands, and took a detour through the picturesque center off to the right, they would recognize the classic New England style, with its white church steeples and the old white Colonial houses that still proudly display the black rings around their chimneys. Chances are that half of those houses still belong to the descendants of the original Tory owners.

I was born there in 1933, in a less historic bungalow alongside a railroad track, the house belonging to Mr. Benedict, the track switchman at the railroad junction in town. I was delivered by my father during a power failure caused by a severe electrical storm. The doctor hadn’t arrived in time.

(While telling all this to Vivian I wanted to add that the power failed because a hovering spacecraft, waiting to see if their implant had survived the birth experience, had drained it, but I wasn’t too sure she would be amused.)

The actual story went that a neighbor had to pull his Model-T up to the house so the car headlights could illuminate the delivery process. In the telling the neighbor always came off as the hero of that occasion, but in my mind my mother, who was agonizing the birth of her third child in the darkness of that small house next to the tracks, and my father who kept his cool and delivered his daughter, were the real heroes.

Perhaps Vivian started our sessions with my mother. Certainly that would have been a fruitful place to begin, since I had plenty of questions related to her that could have used answering. I often wondered how she felt about that third child, if she was already too exhausted, trapped in that homemaker, loving mom role. She was young, in her early twenties, and Hollywood beautiful, with her exotic green eyes and auburn hair. Her name was Marilyn—Lynn, and she was one of the numerous enigmas in my life.

My mother had a brother Stewart—my Uncle Stew, who was a happy man when they lived in Passaic, New Jersey, the center of the boxing world back then. It was a city where they measured a man by the size of his fists, with or without the usual axe handle attached. Uncle Stew had huge fists and it was said that he loved proving he could swing an axe handle with the best of them. He was the scourge of many a Republican political rally. He was also an avid boxing fan.

My father Bob was just out of the navy and making his name in the ring as the promising young Bomber, a serious contender for the lightweight title. He was six foot three, a Democrat and as blond and handsome as a superhero, the perfect man for Uncle Stew to take home for his beautiful sister Lynn.

Bomber Bob instantly fell in love with Lynn. He made that clear in ways she was not expecting. After her brother had barred her from associating with a young Italian she had fallen for, Bomber courted her with flowers and gentleness and she responded. After their marriage and the birth of two children, and after my father’s trainer died, he gave up boxing and moved his family to Massachusetts closer to where my grandmother had recently settled.

My uncle Stew, who would have preferred it if my dad had continued boxing, since as the Bomber he had been making enough of a name for himself to have a real following, must have hated that. It was said that he punched a few extra holes in the walls in his frustration, punching holes in walls being his usual way of releasing his ire. Then he followed them to Massachusetts to share their space in Hingham. He even tagged along when my mother and father relocated to a larger house on Cherry Street, not so close to the tracks, and therefore much safer for us kids.

There was a barn behind the new place. The most I remember about it was the wide door that opened into a dark scary interior that smelled of motor oil and hay. Uncle Stew worked on his car in there. If I squint my mind, I can visualize him sitting on an upturned crate, muscular and mean and covered with oil almost to his elbows. I think he looked like the actor who played the captain of a tugboat in the early talking movies. He had a gravelly voice and swaggered when he walked, very like a tugboat captain sporting his sea legs on dry land.

We kids, my sister Lee Ann, brother Carl and I, were not allowed in that barn. Get the hell out of there you damned kids! he’d shout and we’d move fast. Carl, at the age of four, found a large caliber shell in there one morning, one Stew had been saving to make into a paperweight. To defuse our mom’s anger when she heard about the shell, Uncle Stew set out to remove the gunpowder as he had planned. The shell exploded and blew off two of his fingers. I always had the feeling my mother felt that had been just punishment for his jeopardizing her son. I personally never remembered any concern about our uncle living with us. He seemed just another member of the household, a neither here nor there person in my life. Back in those days families shared their homes more freely than they seem to do these days.

(In all the old photos I was the minuscule blond creature with a pouty expression. Or was it dazed? Even when my siblings cavorted in the sun, their mouths wide open in squeals of laughter, there I was, little Bernice, looking pensively off to one side, such an introspective toddler. What on earth had been going on in my small brain? Had things already happened to me, as the psychiatrist suggested? I can’t remember anything abusive, sexually or otherwise. Maybe I knew then what was going to eventually happen—if the things Vivian and the psychiatrist implied really did occur—and the premonitions were the scarring events.)

I fell into a small pond in a wooded area across the road from our house on Cherry Street when I was three. The psychiatrist insisted that was not the trauma that left such an aftereffect, but I wasn’t so sure. I had certainly written about it in a dozen pieces, fiction and nonfiction. That was because no matter what the psychiatrist thought, it had been a core moment to my early development and remained an influence all my life.

As an adult, my brother Carl persisted in reminding me that the pool had hardly been more than a puddle. He was wrong. It was an accumulation of water filling an excavation once intended to become a cellar hole, an irregular rectangle with long grass hanging over the edge the way it does on the upper rim of a golf course sand trap. Though it was probably not much wider than seven or eight feet, the water was still deep enough to cover an old iron stove resting on the bottom. I remembered that black stove for a long time, even after so much else had faded. It had embossed, white enameled letters on the door.

We shouldn’t have been there of course, which proves we were not entirely obedient kids. Carl and Lee Ann were the disobedient ones, scooting across the street and into the edge of the woods with their friends. I was just a pesky little tagalong that couldn’t keep up. By the time I reached that pond in the small clearing the others were lying on their stomachs looking down at that stove. That was why I stepped out on that overhanging grass, so I could see too. The overhang gave way and I slid down into the water.

The thing so unique about it, I explained to Vivian when we were rehashing things years later, was that when the overhang gave way and I started sliding, it was only the physical child that was involved. My spiritual self, if that is what it was, became an adult on the bank watching the three-year-old slip into that pool with hardly a splash.

That child ended up face down, moving in slow circles on the water’s surface. I knew the child was me, realized the dangerous possibilities, but never felt any concern. I experienced that sensation of peace so many others have mentioned feeling during similar events, that calm that made me happy to be there on the bank. I knew I wasn’t standing there alone even before Caron put his hands on my shoulders. I also knew I loved him with an adult intensity that was more intimate than anything I experienced before or since. I felt the brush of his breath against my cheek when he leaned to tell that me I had to go back. It isn’t time yet, he said, and I thought my heart would break. But, as I told Vivian, no matter how much I wanted to stay, I knew he was right, it wasn’t time. It wouldn’t be for years.

(I feel it’s important to the truth of this book for me to explain that my friend who stood with me on the side of that pond and became such a constant in my life was only called my friend until he gave me his name years later. I decided to use that name, Caron, from the beginning of this book to eliminate some of the confusion.)

Jacky Riley, a kid who lived up the drive from our house, was about twelve then. He was the hero of the day who rescued me. Carl said Jacky just happened along looking for his brother Joey. I never could recall if Joey had been there or not, but if he had been one of the other kids with Carl and Lee Ann he must have been shouting along with them. It was the noise they were making trying to get me to move to the edge to get out of the water, that attracted Jacky to run along that path to my aid. He had to use a thin branch to snag a bit of my clothes and maneuver me to the side so he could get a better grip to drag me out, sliding partway in himself in the process.

Caron watched that bit of drama with me. He even slowed the moment so I could realize its urgency. You must go, he said. See, the boy believes you have drowned. Don’t let him be so distressed. He was right.

Jacky hurried toward my house with me flip-flopping in his arms. He must have been incredibly relieved when I suddenly stiffened and squawked to get down. My parents knew I had fallen into the water because my clothes were saturated, but they never accepted what had really happened to me. No one did. But the significance of that day to the rest of my life was mammoth—way beyond mammoth.

(The psychiatrist expressed the opinion that the time in the water could not have been traumatic enough to affect my processing. He explained that it only takes four minutes for a child to drown even if the water is only inches deep, and considering I had been face down, my rescue must have taken only seconds. He didn’t get the point. In such instances time is not relevant. It stops when it is necessary for it to stop and moves forward when it is necessary to do that. No wonder he felt that something with more impact had to have happened. He obviously hadn’t taken into account that the fall into the pond left the three-year-old me with the distinct memory of being an adult on that bank with an awareness of my very intense love for the man standing there. More important, from that moment on, in spite of my age, I understood without any doubt that this life was not my reality. I knew there was something somewhere else, parallel—above—below—inside, it hardly mattered. The thing that did matter was that the other place was where I understood everything with a calmness I could only wish had remained as clear here, and where I was loved unequivocally. At three that was a major knowing. It was definitely enough to bend my young mind into any number of interesting dimensions. Vivian never argued that point even as we discussed it. She just made copious notes.)

Our Cherry Street house was a brown-shingled frame structure. I don’t recall much about the inside, or the outside for that matter. I do remember the barn was at the end of the drive slightly back from the house, and there was a water pump near the far edge of the drive. We had a dog tied to the corner of the barn who liked to sleep close to the stone base of that pump, his tongue protruding to catch some of the cool drips from the spout. The dog was a part Shepherd, medium sized, slow moving mutt that I can’t recall caring about one way or another. I felt he and I mutually chose to ignore each other. I had such a need to go wherever I was not allowed, particularly if my sister and brother were there, and the dog couldn’t have cared about anything other than that drip of water. For both our sakes, the dog’s and mine, my mother should have tethered me to the corner of the barn and let the dog run free.

Beyond the driveway, further down the hill, there was a large open area, possibly an extension of a neighbor’s hay field. It was bordered on the far side by a typical stonewall. The main road to West Corners was on the far side of that wall, and across that road there was an attractive nuisance, a candy store. In reality it was a candy store on the inside but outside it was a small gas station, with an IBM clock above the doorway and a couple of round-topped old gas pumps in the front.

(Coincidentally, my father sold that clock to that station back when IBM was a company that manufactured clocks and adding machines, years before it was the gigantic computer-generating mother company supporting my children and me. And isn’t that interesting?)

The candy store was a very powerful draw to all three of us kids when we were barely tall enough to see over the stonewall, but agile enough to climb over it. Even tough parental rules were no match for a six-year-old with a dime in his pocket and a hunger to spend it at the candy display case with all those wonderful bits and pieces—Mary Janes—Bit O’ Honey—Tootsie Rolls—tiny candy dots on white paper strips—licorice twists—Bulls Eyes—Baker’s Chocolate squares with the Baker woman embossed on them—Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddy lollipops. Of course there was also bubblegum with movie star cards in the wrappers, mostly cowboys, and those small chewy squares of taffy, banana—strawberry—chocolate—vanilla, individually wrapped in squares of wax paper.

Carl and Lee Ann had been given permission to cross the road if they looked carefully in both directions, and promised to share. I had not. At three I was still too young. I don’t remember climbing over the stone wall after them, but I retained a clear memory of dashing out into that street. My focus was on the face of that clock as if I needed to be aware of the time stopping. Everything stopped, the wind, the fluttering of the leaves in the trees, the sound, everything muted—motionless as if the whole universe was holding its breath.

The front end of a large car also stopped—just inches from where I was, the grill towering above me. That was when I saw the man standing solid and familiar on the far side of the road. I knew he was Caron from the pond. Only this time I remained a three-year-old. My perspective when he crossed to me was small child to towering adult. He tried to mask his amusement, his frown forming a deep ridge between his eyes. Yet, when he looked down at me, I saw the upturned edges of his mouth, and felt the gentleness when he reached to tilt up my chin. I see you are going to be nothing but trouble, he said, and took my small hand in his large one. He led me across to the gas station and turned me so I could watch the driver of the car step shakily out of the driver’s side door. I knew she was anticipating the worst possible horror. Caron wanted me to know that. Fortunately, there was no child lying bloodied in the street, only a little girl standing silently by the gas pumps watching a shaken woman cry.

6/25/92 Session: Vivian’s notes.

(Very sad in trance and safe place. I ask what part knows what or who it is supposed to be?

Ans: I think quite a few parts—can’t stop things that are supposed to be.

I remember the child who died. Square and dark. I stand on the side.

I can’t cry because everyone there watches to see if I will. I know the child is gone,

but I don’t know. But I will stand and I will say ‘at least she does not hurt anymore.’

I can’t see who it is. I know all the other faces. I don’t want to know. I’m tired.

I was trying so hard.

Chapter 3

Our father and grandmother in the back.

Carl, Lee Anne and me in the front

It was only a year after the candy store incident that my family moved to Canterbury Street to a small house directly across from the one-room school where Lee Ann was already enrolled. The new place, new to us at least, was at the mouth of a long drive that led past Mr. Duffy’s rhubarb patch and the cottage where he lived with his wife and one of his sons, Henry. The drive ended in a cul-de-sac where the Rileys’ two-story house was. Betty Riley and her sister Ellen, and her two brothers Joey and Jacky, the boy who had pulled me from the pond when I was three, lived there with their mother.

Across the drive from our house was Stanley and Clara Duffy’s place where Kenny, a bit older than my brother, lived with his family. Old Mr. Duffy with the rhubarb was his grandfather. There was a cow pasture that extended behind Kenny’s back yard with a big gate separating the two areas. The older kids liked to swing on