Finding the Phoenix

Contents

Introduction

Little Girl Lost

Words To Live By

How Do You Get A Transfer

Out Of This Chicken Outfit?

Out On A Limb

Eleanor

Norman

Aunt Martha

Cecelia

I Don’t, I Don’t, I Don’t,

I Don’t, I Don’t, I Do

The Outlaws

Is It Me? Or Is It Memorex?

Are You Trying To Make

Your Brother An Only Child?

A prayer

Free At Last

This Is What I’ve Learned

My Sky Is Blue

Vindication

A Fable

For Whom The Bell Tolls

To my family and a few friends who know who they are, thank you for loving me when I couldn’t love myself and without whose encouragement this book would not have been written.

To my angels and guides, thank you for reminding me to change some names to cover my assets.

To you, dear reader, thank you for coming with me on this journey to discover so much about ourselves and change our destination to a place of peace. I give you a single rose on this special day.

During the Depression of 1929 my maternal grandfather, Stanley, began what has become a tradition in the family. Special days like a birthday, or Mother’s Day, were celebrated with a single rose. Today, while we could now afford a whole bouquet, a single rose from my husband has much more meaning for me than an entire garden could bring and makes any day he brings me a rose a special day.

Introduction

This book has no heroine. There is no story being told within these pages. There is no time line being followed. There is no logical presentation of a problem developing and being resolved. There is no happy ending. There are no answers in the final chapter at the end of the book.

The answers can only be found buried deep within your own mind, heart and soul. By getting to know those who, for better or worse, molded my life, they may also hold up a mirror to yours.

This book is just a point of beginning. You may begin to understand. You may begin to change. You may begin to help others like myself. You may begin to recognize people you know. You may even begin to reflect on how this book let a skeleton out of your own closet.

You will look at a life lived in complete chaos, the result of child abuse. The years of rape and molestation by my father, together with my mother’s lifelong emotional and mental manipulation, her demands and efforts to control me until the day she drew her last breath, and her resistance to any improvement in our relationship in the name of making her family (her sisters, brother, nieces and nephews) believe she was a good mother, are here.

This book was written to focus on the recovery from child abuse, not recite the details of the abuse. As I read about others like myself, I found a great deal of attention paid to the description of the abuse and very little said about how to recover from it.

This book was not written to become a best seller, book of the month, movie or Oprah’s book club pick. It was written to help you. And if it helps only one of you, it will have been well worth all that it took to bring it to you.

You will glimpse my efforts to learn life’s lessons. You will observe my education in the school of hard knocks. You will wonder how I did it.

Every day I am still Finding The Phoenix.

Little Girl Lost

It was a time when every mother in America tried to clone Shirley Temple. Eleanor arranged my carrot-red hair into those Shirley Temple little ringlets. Because my grandmother and mother said so, I sang, danced and recited poetry. If someone in one of Hedwig’s many clubs was celebrating her silver or golden wedding anniversary, my grandmother took me to her meeting where I recited a poem, sang a song, and did a little dance. If a friend was celebrating her birthday, my grandmother took me to her meeting where I recited a poem, sang a song, and did a little dance. If it happened to be Mother’s Day one day soon, my grandmother took me to her meeting where I recited a poem, sang a song, and did a little dance. I wore a frilly dress and my ringlets would be bouncing as I performed for them. Hedwig doted on her first grandchild.

I sat on the front porch of Hedwig’s house. Hedwig heard a passerby inquire Little girl, does your mother know what you’re doing? and decided she had better find out what her granddaughter was doing. It was too late. Hedwig found me with scissors poised to do the next one. Most of my ringlets were neatly lined up next to me on the porch. Aunt Martha tried to salvage my new hairdo before my mother returned from work. All Eleanor had to say was I see you gave the child a haircut. Even then as a three-year-old, I found a way to express myself.

Eleanor was just nineteen years old when she married twenty-six year old Norman. She cried on her wedding day, immediately regretting her decision to marry. She described her marriage as jumping out of the frying pan into the fire whenever we spoke of why on earth she married Norman. Her father Stanley was a domineering brute who ruled his roost until the day he died. Her mother Hedwig was a stern, no-nonsense woman who loved her family dearly.

I was born a year and a day later. A few months after I was born, Norman was drafted into the army and served driving a tank with Patton’s Third Armored Division in the Africa and the European Theatre where he was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Eleanor spent a full day ironing those frilly dresses after working all week in a bank. I wore hand crocheted dresses and had a white bunny rabbit fur coat and muffler. I was either a spoiled brat or a cute kid depending on which relative was telling the story.

My Uncle Stan was in the Navy and served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Eleanor sent him a photo of me surrounded by a couple dozen or so of my dolls. I still treasure a necklace made of seashells, which he brought home for me after the war ended. He felt I had earned that necklace. Uncle Stan made a small fortune on board ship by showing the guys this picture and betting them that they couldn’t find the real live doll!

Aunt Martha, just eighteen years old at the time, remembers giving me my first bath. Eleanor was resting. I had been born at the doctor’s office when Eleanor had gone for her routine appointment. She had a backache. We were sent home the next day by ambulance.

Aunt Martha became an officer and a gentleman eventually because this helped her become a nurse. She wanted to become a nun. Her mother would not allow her to do that. Hedwig told Aunt Martha she needed her at home to help her and approved of nursing as a career choice.

Aunt Florence (thirteen years old when I was born) and Uncle Stan (nineteen years old when I was born) remembers how I broke some records as a toddler, by walking on them. I wonder if either one also remembered who left them on the floor?

Aunt Florence never forgave her father when she won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. He would not allow her to go to the University. Stanley didn’t want to pay for any other expense campus life would create. He told her that women didn’t need higher education since they got married later and their education would only go to waste. A few years later, Aunt Florence got married. She worked in an office most of her adult life.

Aunt Donna, who was ten years old when I was born, went to the University of Detroit and became a teacher. She worked a number of part time jobs and Aunt Martha helped her get her education. Soon after graduation, Aunt Donna got married. Occasionally she worked part time as a substitute teacher.

I was three or four years old when I had been left home alone with Norman. Eleanor, Hedwig and Emily, who was Eleanor’s favorite cousin, came home and all hell broke loose. When I try to remember the details, it is difficult. There is so much anger. The details are fuzzy. Everybody yelling. A suitcase. Me sitting on top of the suitcase so it could be closed. I think this was the beginning. The details don’t really matter. What matters is this is about where I learned others could control absolutely everything else in my life, but only I could control my thoughts. Sometimes, the only safe place to be was deep within oneself. I look at the photo of myself leaning against a lamppost, which was taken when I was nearly three years old, and wonder where that little girl went.

November 2, 1949 the first of my five siblings was born and I was raped. Eleanor spent several days in the hospital and I spent those same several days in hell. I was seven years old. This is my first detailed memory of Norman’s sexual abuse.

Struggling to find the right words, I told Eleanor about it when she came home from the hospital with my new baby sister, Justine. I told her and told her and told her. Eleanor just told me Oh Cecelia, you have such an imagination. I was shouting at the deaf.

About seven months later I was preparing for my First Holy Communion. I was terrified going into my first confession. I remember crying and sobbing in that confessional. I told the priest what a bad little girl I had become. He told me to tell my mother. I did that already. No matter how often I tried to tell Eleanor I was telling the truth, she dismissed it as my imagination. At one point Eleanor conceded that all families have skeletons in their closet and nice people don’t talk about things like that.

We were living in Panama, the tropics. Eleanor found the baby had been covered with a blanket. I had not done it. Norman stood by silently as Eleanor punished me for something I had not done. I was beginning to learn how rape takes many forms.

Eleanor enjoyed the luxury of having a maid when we lived in Panama. And, Eleanor often gave the things we had outgrown to our maid for her children. One day I was with our maid as she did the ironing and noticed she had deliberately burned one of the baby’s dresses. Eleanor gave it to the maid for her children. Eleanor had been very upset by the burned dress.

The next time I saw the maid burn something I made a mistake. I told the maid I was going to tell my mother that it was done deliberately. The maid told me exactly what she would do to me if I did that. She showed me her mayonnaise jar filled with very large roaches floating around in what looked like water. She wanted me to know that she was not making an idle threat. She would dump these pickled roaches on me if I told my mother what she was doing.

I told Eleanor the maid was burning the clothes on purpose. I told Eleanor about her promise to dump a jar of roaches on me if I told my mother. All together now, Oh Cecelia, you have such an imagination. was Eleanor’s response.

A few days later Eleanor left the house to run an errand and, as promised, the maid got out her jar of roaches. The maid was chasing me with that jar of very, very large tropical roaches when Eleanor returned unexpectedly and found my imagination running rampant through the house. The maid was fired. To this day I cannot look at anything creepy crawly without seeing a jar of pickled roaches, feeling my flesh crawl and wanting to run the other way.

I learned Eleanor would only protect me from someone she did not consider to be family.

One day I asked Eleanor how she happened to choose my first name. Because I liked it was her reply.

We had been talking about how Eleanor had nearly been named Gloria. Day in and day out her grandmother Augustina would be singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo while Hedwig was pregnant. Augustina was expressing her dislike for the name. Finally, Hedwig relented. In exasperation she declared the new baby would be named for the next female to visit her. A cousin came in and then the problem became which way to spell the name. Elinor? Elinora? Elinore? Eleanore? At the age of thirty-eight she had her birth certificate corrected to Eleanor.

Maybe Eleanor understood how I felt about my name. Maybe not. I asked her once why she chose to spell my name as she did and was told Because it was different.

Most people spell my name Cecilia. Eleanor spelled my name Cecelia. Eleanor always corrected anyone who mispronounced my name, telling them I had her Baptized Cecelia! She wanted to hear both of those e’s, emphasizing the second one. Altogether now, let’s hear see-seal-ya! I felt so embarrassed by this as a child. I can’t help but think of Eleanor every time I have to correct the spelling of my name in all of those situations when it is normal to give someone your name, and it is spelled the way most people spell it. I knew I was in trouble whenever my name grew another syllable. When Eleanor called me see-seal-lee-ya, look out! Family is different. Eleanor’s family called me Ciel (seal), Celia (seal-ya) and Babe.

I have no doubt whatsoever that she did not like my college nickname. Eleanor hung up on anyone who called the house and asked for CeCe. She told them no one by that name lived there. Eleanor hated it when I also acquired the nickname Rusty in my adult life. A rose by any other name; my middle name is Rose, but I never wanted to hear anyone call me Rosie. One day at the office I realized everyone else on the staff had a name, which began with the sound of soft g, like Jean, Joan, George, Jennifer, and Joe. I mentioned this and told them that just for today I wanted to be called Ginger. Most days I’ll answer to anything but Red

As a teenager in Germany I experienced an identity crisis of another sort. I told Eleanor that I hated Norman so much I didn’t even want to bear his name. Did I have any other name in mind? Eleanor’s maiden name would be just fine with me. It was a family name. Eleanor didn’t even bother to explain the implications of that choice. She just said no because it would cost too much money. That was when I decided to change my last name to Smith. I actually looked into it and was crushed to learn I had to wait until I was an adult to make such a change.

What happened to that little girl? I don’t know. I’ve often wondered how life might have been different for me had I not come from a dysfunctional family.

Words To Live By

We’ve heard them. Some were even listened to. Some were not. Some we’ve actually heard coming out of our own mouths when we were raising our own children.

Gasp! We’re turning into our mothers!

These phrases played over and over in our heads long after we learned that they weren’t necessarily words of wisdom. Whatever else they’re called, they turn out to be words to live by.

Never expect anything; you won’t be disappointed. Eleanor must have been very, very disappointed often during her lifetime. I doubt that