STORIES FROM MY LIFE: THEME OF BETRAYAL
I learned about betrayal very early in life. It is a theme that repeats itself from my earliest memories to this day. Don’t get me wrong, in that I am not implying that I had been betrayed just last week, or at any point in recent history, but that to be truthful as a teller of the stories from my life, including in my new memoir, betrayal is still with me, but only has a “hot button,” as I have been conditioned from youth to be ultra-sensitive about it.
Telling The Stories From My Life In My Memoir
In writing my memoir and the stories from my life, my earliest memory was of my parents’ betrayal. They were supposed to be my protectors. Instead, my father was my antagonist. Starting with my earliest years, my cousin Judy Derman once told me, while we were at a family wedding, that she heard my father once kicked me when I was only two years old. Now, I am not on solid ground with that memory, but I do have memories of the beatings thereafter, at around three or four years old. This was my first taste of betrayal, as a parent is not supposed to beat their children, but to love and protect them.
My mother, to a lesser degree, betrayed me in that she did not always protect me from my father’s wrath. In retrospect, as back then, all I felt was hurt and rage. My thoughts today are: where was she to stop the madness? Of course, I do understand that a woman in the 1940’s had far fewer options than today’s emancipated women. However, while I know this, I still find it hard to reconcile the fact that she let me down and did not or could not stop the abuse from my father.
I guess my understanding of the role of the parent as “protector” on behalf of a child was that it meant protecting at all costs. I was not always protected, as I was betrayed in that. Betrayal became my central hot button at a very early age, as reflected in the stories from my life.
Betrayal Continued When My Sister Left
At the age of four, I had a hard lesson in abandonment. In telling the stories from my life, I did not become aware of how this affected me until I grew much older, but as a little kid, full of rage, due to the beatings and ill treatment from my father, and my very young age, I could only express my feelings with rage. Right about the time that my sister left our home, I tossed a brick from the roof of our apartment, on Clarkson Ave. in Brooklyn, N.Y., narrowly missing a baby in a carriage.
My sister had come to live with us immediately following my birth and helped take care of me, and thus we bonded. When she turned twelve, and I was four years old, her mother “called in the loan” of my sister Tina. My father had been married before meeting my mother, so we had different mothers. Tina’s mother met and married an extremely wealthy man, and they wanted her to live with them, so she left. As a small child, all I knew was that my sister was no longer there, that I was abandoned and therefore betrayed. To my little mind, at that time, abandonment was betrayal. How could anyone abandon such a cute little kid as I?
In The Stories From My Life, Repetition Carried The Day
By the time I was six years old, I was a mental wreck. There is just so much abuse a child can take. So, the icing on the cake was to deal with my reactions to abandonment and betrayal, only to give me more of the same. My father, in his warped and mentally ill brain, could not figure out that his beatings and making me feel unsafe at home caused me to act out.
Thus, it must be the kid’s fault. My next stop on the hell-bound train of betrayal was for me to be sent away. At the ripe old age of six years old, they sent me to a mental hospital for “observation.” Yes, it should have been my father, but he was, of course, the “breadwinner” and the head of the family. Yes, whilst there, my parents and the staff committed further acts of betrayal. I will not go into further detail here, as this has been amply covered in my memoir, the detailed stories from my life.
This was to be the setup for my life thereafter. I would possess a raging “hot button” for abandonment and betrayal.
