Little Girl Crushed

In the telling of my story I promised myself that I would be totally honest, which in the past has gotten me into immense trouble, yet, I continue to be very open and honest about my life. Many people like to hide their past, pretend it didn't happen, or live in the past, as if they are reliving each hurt done to them on a never ending merry go round for pain and disappointment. I think that maybe I decided I would not live on the merry go round because that is where my Mom chose to live out her life. She remembered in vivid detail everything that anyone had done to her that caused her to suffer, and she would relive those moments over and over again. Sadly Mom never learned the freedom that comes with forgiveness.One of her famous sayings was, "I can forgive, but I will never forget." Because the memories brought her such anguish, she lived her life out being angry and bitter at those who wronged her.

So I continue my story as a young girl adopted into this dysfunctional situation. I learned at a very early age that I was adopted. Although my Dad's family totally accepted me as 'family', Mother's side was divided on whether I was truly family or not. There were cousins who told me at every family reunion until I was grown, that really I was not part of the family because blood was true family. There were cousins and Aunts and Uncles who never treated me with anything but acceptance and love, and whenever family reunion time came around I would try to stay beside them. Our reunions were always at Zilker Park, in Austin. Us kids would ride the train, and swim in the pool. I don't think I have ever swam in water as cold as in that pool. It was created from natural springs and it was freezing!

I keep faltering here with the right words to explain the darkness which crept into my little girl world. The darkness which stole my innocence from me when I was in the care of my mother's sister. I long to focus on the joys I find in those early years, and yet to be complete in my story I must tell what happened. I have written in depth the truth of those years in a story entitled "The Cavern". It is very explicit in describing the sexual abuse I experienced and was the tool I used to bring about much healing to little 'Charlotte Jean'. So, I have no desire to repeat here the happenings of those hot, humid Texas nights. I will just say that for months, if not years, I endured being molested by one of my female cousins. To this day, if I close my eyes, and picture the curtains blowing gently in the heated breeze, I can smell the interior of the room and feel the rabid fear begin to take hold. From those nights I grew into a adult terrified of the night. It has only been since Marty and I have been together that the night fears have faded and I am at peace with being alone.

I never told my Mom what was taking place because this was, after all, her family. Plus I loved my cousin. I admired her. She was older than I was and I remember watching her put on her makeup to go to school, or out on a date, and she would put lipstick on me. I loved to play cheerleader with her pompoms and she would teach me the cheers and we would laugh until our stomachs hurt. I felt loved. To say that seems like such a contradiction, but I was so hungry for someone to love me, that I mistook her affections for me as real love.

Many years later I was able to talk with my Mom about the abuse. She responded very casually by telling me that her older sister's daughter had been molested by the same cousin, and Mom had known about that before she allowed me to be babysat by this Aunt and my cousin. I asked her why she let me go, and she said she thought that my cousin had outgrown her tendencies to molest. I was stunned to say the least, that Mom was 1) so naive; 2) so nonchalant about the whole thing. It was then that she shared her own experience of childhood molestation and told me that she just didn't think about it. That was how she had tried to cope for about 65 years. It was after this talk with her that it became so apparent to me that my mother's side of the family was filled with incest and sexual abuse. Thank goodness that by the time I had this talk with Mom, I had worked through all the anger and hurt, and had come to a place of not blaming. All I felt was this tremendous sadness for my Mom's stolen innocence, and for the brokenness of so many of her family. It gave me understanding of so many of Mom's behaviors over the years, and I saw her as a frail little girl, just like me, who had been abused.

There was so much pain that lived in her family members. One cousin married a pedophile, he was caught taking photos of her own younger sister. Another cousin committed suicide. One cousin was an alcoholic/drug abuser for many years. One cousin beat his sons with a razor strap..which I witnessed on numerous occasions. And the list could go on and on. I look at each one of them NOW, and I hear the deepest, darkest painful cries of their own wounded spirits, and it just crushes me. I pray that as the years have grown on, that each soul has found healing and forgiveness to bring wholeness and peace to their lives.

It is my hope and prayer that each one of us who experienced the loss of our innocence be totally healed in body, mind and spirit.

I hold the deepest love and gratitude to each person who helped me through, to my angels, to my spirit guides, and also to myself. I would not have made it through to this place of peace if it were not for you.

Namaste'

Little Girl Lost

My fondest memories of my childhood were days I spent with my Dad. I don't remember much about being with Mom, only brief glimpses of her sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, her hair always in an immaculate coif. She took great pride in her looks, and her weight. I can also see her standing with her hand on her hip wagging her index finger at me telling me to go pick a switch from the peach tree. If I got the wrong size then she would go pick one a whole lot bigger, so I learned quickly to pick the right size. The switch of course was to punish me for something I had done 'wrong'. But that is for another day's telling.

Right now I want to look at the early years when Daddy would take me to work with him on Saturday mornings. He would give me a hammer and some nails, and would let me hammer the nails into any piece of wood I wanted too. I wonder how many houses that he built in Austin have those hidden little nails standing at attention behind wallboard. I liked to go to work with Daddy because I thought it was just the most wonderful thing to have a Daddy who could build a house from the bottom up. Daddy owned his own contractor's business, City Builders, and he had two partners. They did not believe in unions. They were experienced house builders who could pour foundations, frame it up, put the windows in, put the roof on, do the electrical and plumbing, put in the cabinets and flooring, do all the drywall work and they even did brick work on some houses. My Dad built the house that I grew up in at 700 Sandpiper (now changed to 704 Sandpiper), just on the outskirts of Austin on I35. It used to be a beautiful red brick house with green trim, but the company that bought the property when Mom died painted the brink a gray color. Poor beautiful red bricks.

Other than building houses and doing some remodeling work, Daddy loved spending time fishing and working with amateur radio. He would take me fishing about once a month, and now I realize that he had to be the most patient of men, for my line would get snagged repeatedly and he would reel his line in and come rescue mine. Needless to say we didn't catch a lot when I went with him.

I loved being with my Dad. To this day when Marty is working on some remodeling project around the house, and he smells of sawdust and sweat, I am instantly transported back in time when I would run out to meet Daddy when he drove in from work. He always smelled so good....sawdust!

Those early years came to a close very abruptly when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I never understood why, but my Mom would no longer let me go with Daddy. And once my Mom made up her mind about something, there was no changing it. I spent the next 23 years not being able to have a normal father/daughter relationship. I did not realize it until the weeks before she died when she was able to share with me but she had been molested when she was a little girl. She never did tell me by whom, but her fear of leaving me alone with my Dad seems to tell her story. She was molested by her own father at the early age of 4.

What my Mom didn't realize was that when she stopped us from spending time alone, it opened a hole in my little girl heart. I felt lost and alone. Through the years that came and went, Daddy and I learned to adjust to mother's needs. We spent time watching TV together, when she was present. We would work on his HAM radio in the garage, with the door open from the den to garage so she could always hear us and see us. When I got older, and was not living at home, we had to make sure that if we had phone conversations, Mom was on the other phone listening, or we had to tell her of what we spoke about if she wasn't home. It was a very dysfunctional home, but it was home.

One of the things that Daddy and I did that was just for the two of us was this: we would have a bowl of ice cream almost every night while watching TV. That is why I went from this:

to This:

And so, my battle with weight began.

And my self esteem spiraled down.

Happy Birthday to ME

So, today is my extra special Life birthday because it occurs on 1/11/11. Yep. January 11, 2011. Plus this is the year I turn 56, which 5 plus 6 equals 11. So I am anticipating some awesome things to happen this year. I took this photo at 1:11 pm (I already saw 1:11 am) when we were headed down to Phoenix to see our daughter Sarah and go out to the movies and dinner.

I am ready for whatever this year brings.....Universe? Bring it on!

And So the Story Begins

So, 56 years ago today at 2:05 p.m., in a small hospital in Georgetown, Texas, I was born. But there is a wee bit more to the story than that, of course.

The woman giving birth to me was my birth mother, Rachel Teague. She was a young woman, single with one son already, and she could not afford to take care of me. She told me that my birth father's name was William "Red" Lawson, who was in the military at the time, either stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base or Camp Mabry. She never told me which one. At any rate, he left Austin without even knowing of my existence.

I must digress here and say that there is still a little more to the story, and as my husband likes to believe, I just may well be kin to Elvis Presley. You see, there was a time when Elvis was in Austin, Texas, traveling in his pink Cadillac. Rachel and a friend of hers went on a double date with Elvis and a friend of his. They had quite the time dancing in Austin and various honky tonks, and driving around the Austin area with the top down enjoying the atmosphere of the 1954 era. I will let you be the judge as to weather Elvis plus Rachel could equal Charlotte!

 I did find another interesting photo of Elvis when he was a baby himself, along with his parents and a baby girl who looks suspiciously like me when I turned one year old. I do believe Mr. Presley's ears have been passed on to the young girl. Hmmmm....very interesting.

Sticking to the facts of my birth, via Rachel, and the information that my birth father's nickname was 'Red' (and 100% Irish), and seeing as I was born with a little tuft of red hair meself, I do believe that I am the DNA product of Rachel and Red.
Since Red was no where to be found, and since her parents were the very strict religious type, her father being an Assembly of God preacher in Austin, she decided it best to give me up for adoption. She found Hunter and Clarine Degress through a mutual friend in the Sheriff's office, who knew that they had helped another girl 'in trouble' and found a home for her baby. Hunter and Clarine knew that my adoptive parents had been wanting a baby for the past 14 years. Hunter had been my Dad's best friend from his childhood days up until Dad died in 1984. So, they set it all up that Rachel would be taken care of, all expenses paid, and when I was born, I would go home with a new set of parents.

Waiting in the hospital to take me home were my new parents: Robert Eugene Bryan and Mildred Lucille Pearson Bryan. My birth grandmother Susie Teague Mooney was there also and she held me before I was taken home by the Bryan's. That incident angered my Mom very much because she had specific instructions that Rachel nor any of her family were to see me or hold me after I was born. One she found out that Nanny (my birth grandmother) had held me, she did everything in her power to get them to release me to go home, and after speaking with my pediatrician, Dr. Clifford Thorne, I was released to go home...at 8 hours old.

I have some old movie footage of Mom and Dad coming out of the little hospital in Georgetown, along with Clarine and Hunter, coming down the steps of what looks more like a house than a hospital. I did forget to mention that Mom did not want me born in Austin, so that the birth announcement would not come out in the paper. Hence, being born in Georgetown, which back then was very far from Austin.

I arrived home to 5102 Woodview, Austin, Texas...ready to be loved by my new family.

This is the Year of Music

For quite a few years now I begin the New Year by finding it's name. This year began it's dawn as beautiful music woke me from my sleep. Over the next few days my world seemed to be filled with song, and I felt compelled to sort through all the CD's we have, and of course, putting them in alphabetical order! I even went through the songs I have on my computer and put them in order. (Aha..there's one lesson...music has order to it.) My heart soared as I decided that this would indeed be the Year of Music. From time to time I will be posting songs which have surfaced, wanting to be heard..to make the list so to speak, of the music that will guide me through this year. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I will.

Cat Stevens - Morning has broken

Morning has broken on this New Year of 2011