Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Special Treat  -  Peggy Ann Doak

August 20, 2007

I am delighted to introduce you to Peggy Ann Doak, our newest writer who becomes writer number 425 for Storytime Tapestry.  She is a very good writer and has gone through so much turmoil in her life.  Please make her feel welcome in our Storytime Tapestry Family.

Clueless

Peggy Ann Doak

In the past few years, after I came back to Maine, I have become more and more isolated.  There were a lot of outside circumstances that brought this about, or rather set the stage.  I cannot even go thru them now, except to say that, as I said before, I lost everything.  The stimulus was external just like when I was a child, and everything dear to me was systematically taken away.  The more I loved it, the more leverage my stepfather used it to abuse me with. 

   One time, because I didn't do something that I may or may not have been told to do, I was forced to pack up all my horse statues.  All 99 of them.  And all my stuffed animals.  I had to put them in a trunk and then into the musty old attic.  I had a fear that they would not be able to breath.  I was a kid.  Those horses watched over me like my guardian angels.

   Wow, now I am crying.  Some of them came from my Dad and my Grandmother, both who died the same year in 1962.  The rest I had scrimped and paid for.  One jewelry store used to give me any that came in damaged.  When I slept at night, I would count them all to make sure they were still there and then I would take all my stuffed animals and surround myself on my bed.

     One night at supper my step father began his usual terrorism.  One of the things he would focus on was my hair.  When he had married my mother I had long beautiful dark brown hair, to the middle of my back.  He kept saying that I needed to have it cut off.  That night, he forced my mother to cut all my hair off and made a home video of it.  I remember the horror I felt as I kept trying to put my hands over my head, over my ears.  He kept saying, "more."  I think that he actually got off sexually on this defeminizing me.  Once it was over I was sent to bed.  I was laying there, still in shock, my hair no more than an inch long.  My stepfather came up to my room and asked me what book I'd like to hear that night.  I didn't answer so he just picked one of my horse books and started reading to me like this was a damn normal thing to do.  How DARE He!!!

       I wore a scarf over my head and made up stories in school about why I had to wear it.  I was in third grade.  My Dad had only been gone a year and a half.  I began blacking out in school.  One moment I would be in one place and then I would find myself somewhere else.  Migraines began with an intensity that was so brutal.  But I could not tell my mother.  Oh, once in a while, if I literally could not get out of bed.  But my stepfather would say that I was faking it.  And I would be forced to go to school.  I spent as much time at the neighbors as I could.  One of my neighbors was the family that took me in when I was fifteen.

         I lost the will to live.  I had a rabbit and I let it die.  I didn't know why.  I just couldn't go feed it.  And then, I am sure my mother and stepfather knew it was dead, because suddenly my mother had this wonderful salad that she gave to me to feed it.  I ran up to the barn, and it was dead.  I was so ashamed.  So ashamed and so deeply sad.  I had guinea pigs that that happened to also after my stepfather made me take them to my room.  My room was awful.  I never cleaned it and my mother would just shut the door on it.  On me and the guinea pigs.  I carried that shame until I was in my thirties.  Then I told a therapist about it and she said, "Where were your parents."  and I asked, "HUh?"  and she asked again, "where were your parents" and all of a sudden it came to me.  When children have animals the parents monitor them.  My son, who was around the same age as I was then, had a guinea pig.  And guess who ended up with it?  He got an iguana (from Hell I might add) and who got bit up and slapped around by this critter?  Wasn't my son!  But they were taken care of!  They had no right to leave me like that.  I was being neglected, starving for love and I had nothing to give these poor babies.  And I love animals so much.

     Today, I find myself almost back into the same place.  Oh, I take care of my animals, but I don't take care of myself.  Several nasty things happened when I came back to Maine, and because of the hate of other people, it triggered my childhood neglect and isolation.

      Tonight, a friend wanted me to come up to his house and he and another friend would cook me supper and then take me out to an open mike that is being run by a childhood friend of mine who I have not seen since school years.   I wanted to go.  I couldn't.  I just couldn't.  Not anymore than I could take care of that rabbit or my guinea pigs.

      Some said to me a while ago, that his wife was an orphan and she is hypervigilent about things that could happen.  And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.  But that she is equipped better than most to live.   And I thought...But she has you.   She has you.  Nothing compares to having someone right there who loves you and can pick up the slack, and can tell people to go to hell when they want to hurt me.  But there is no shining white knight for me.  And I have closed myself off almost completely from people.  I don't want to.  Perhaps if my friend didn't live two hours away it would help.  I don't know. 

      Someone wrote to me and said that after having a memory of their childhood and sharing it they feel more energy.  Maybe writing this will help me also.  This is certainly the first time that I have written and cried while doing so.  I also think I am closer to the core.  But how many people ever make it beyond that? 

     I have seen many friends die.  Many. I myself am an alcoholic, and though I haven't drank for 27 years, I have withdrawn from AA meetings as well.  If I ever drank, it would because I know there is little chance of another recovery for me.  Many people who do get sober and hit the core of their pain simply commit suicide one day, even if they are out and about, going to AA and the works.  It's all the same disease. 

     When I hear "Children are resilient," I want to scream, "No.  Children are fragile!  They don't show it because they are afraid, you flipping idiots!"

Peggy Ann Doak

pdoak333@peoplepc.com