4: Shame, Silence, and Neglect

Reading time: 18 minutes

Thanks for joining me! This email contains the fourth chapter of my “Dreaming In the Real” manuscript, a work in progress. Bi-weekly episodes reveal how immersing myself in the natural world while preparing vibrational essences helped me gain insight and healing after my adult life crumbled due to unaddressed trauma and childhood adversity.

This chapter of my early teen years was one of the most difficult to write and process. It's still heartbreaking to look back on the unaddressed pain and trauma underlying and influencing my parent's lives. Still, acknowledging and sitting with this timeline helped me uncover deeply held beliefs and traumas controlling my adult decisions. I learned that bringing the past into the light is the only way to embody the awareness to heal and change.

PLEASE START HERE to access the episode list and preceding chapters.

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CONTENT GUIDANCE: This manuscript tackles sensitive themes of parental neglect, abuse, drugs, and domestic violence. Reader discretion is advised.

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“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”  ~ Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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A POOR CHOICE late in eighth grade became a turning point in how I viewed myself. A neighbor girl two years ahead of me invited me to town with her and a friend. The neighbor girl’s mom drove us to Long’s Drug Store, where we ogled over the brilliant glittery blue of 1970s eye shadow and mascara. One of the girls suggested we shoplift some makeup. I didn’t wear makeup yet, but I wanted to fit in with the older girls, and I slipped a mascara package into my jacket pocket. I don’t remember how it happened, but I was caught and charged with shoplifting.

My parents didn’t have much to say when they picked me up from juvenile detention that evening. We didn’t talk about anything in our family. We didn’t need to. It was obvious they were ashamed of me. I didn’t blame them. Instead, I fed an ever-growing sense of shame.

At school the following week, the teacher I admired most, Mr. Huff, shook his head and turned away from me with obvious disappointment.

“Marnie, I thought you, of all people, knew better than this.”

He stopped asking for my help grading papers and brainstorming class projects. As word spread, many of my long-time school friends stopped hanging out with me, which resulted in me spending less time with healthier and happier families and more time with kids left unsupervised to experiment with drinking and smoking weed. After being the proverbial good girl, it was a disturbing change, and I began to wonder who I was. Of course, I wasn’t good at drinking and smoking weed either. I was the first to get sick or giggle uncontrollably in front of our parents.

That summer, my dad received disability benefits long overdue since his heart attack seven years ago. He sold the business and retired—he was home all the time. With more time to blame my mom for everything wrong with his life, she quietly deferred to her circumstances with small acts of self-treachery. She was drinking more and painting less—and Aretha stopped singing.

It was a turning point for all three of us. We watched shadowy and disintegrating fragments of who we were and who we were to each other crumble away while trying to maintain our version of normal.

I alternated between avoiding and trying to connect with the brooding man who desperately needed love. After my dad sliced through some tendons in his hand on his table saw, I sewed snaps on all his button-down shirts so he could dress more easily. I made cards with notes with drawings to say I love you, cards for Valentine’s Day, and a German chocolate cake from scratch for his birthday. Nancy once told me she was jealous of my relationship with him, but the difference between her and me is that I tried. I believed being better would earn his affection. It didn’t.

Soon came mornings when I found my mom on the floor in random places in the house. My dad couldn’t have walked through the house without stepping over her. Once, I found her face-down in a pool of blood from hitting her head on the coffee table. I helped her up and into bed, washed and bandaged the cut on her forehead, and cleaned the blood off the carpet. I didn’t know how to protect her. We all lived together but survived independently, like tumbling snowballs of unaddressed cause and increasing effect.

ONE DAY, near the end of eighth grade, I came home from school, and my mom was gone. Her place at the kitchen table was a gaping hole of empty. I don’t know where she went or why she left. I busied myself with household chores and prepared my dad’s dinners to fill the space.

He entered my bedroom two nights in a row while I was reading and listening to music. Both times, he threw me face-down on the bed, pushed my face into the pillow with one hand, and with the other, pulled my panties down to make his mark with the palm of his hand. One night, it was for singing too loud, and the next for reading with the light on too late.

One day, he came out and stood at the edge of our above-ground pool, where I floated on an inflatable neon-colored mattress. Nervously fidgeting with the keys and loose change in the front pockets of his trousers, he explained how unhappy my mother made him. He said he regretted marrying her and told me about a woman he wished he'd married instead.

I was shocked. Not knowing what to do, I pushed back.

“You think mom is happy being married to you?”

Standing still but still fumbling with the keys in his pocket, he looked at his feet and asked, “Should I leave? I’ll leave if you think I should.”

Fourteen-year-old me panicked, and a scream erupted inside my head and stayed there. My throat felt full like I had swallowed a sock, and what felt like an ocean rip current tore through my guts. Eventually, I found my voice.

“No. Don’t go,” I managed to croak.   

Without looking up, he nodded and walked away, leaving the weight of our dysfunctional lives on my young shoulders.

TWO MONTHS AFTER she left, I woke up to find my mom was home, sitting at the table, reading a book, smoking a cigarette, and hiding a glass of beer behind the toaster as if nothing had happened. Following her lead, I kept to myself. I was haunted by my response when my dad asked if he should leave, so I didn’t ask questions. I knew better than to ask for something I would never get. I wondered how long my parents would sacrifice their happiness for this miserable life. It seems they were biding time until the pain was gone, but no one knew how to end it.

Not long after, my grandma Agnes suffered a stroke and came to stay with us. She slept in my room, and I slept outside under the stars because it was summer. I was camping with some girlfriends in my neighbor’s yard when we saw the ambulance come and take her away. My mom’s distant expression and rigid posture revealed everything when I entered the door. Grandma had died, and we wouldn't be talking about it.

HIGH SCHOOL STARTED, bringing with it a new kind of distress. I attended Newcastle Elementary School from fourth through eighth grade with one teacher for each grade and the same fifteen to twenty classmates. The sprawling campus of Placer High School in Auburn covered several blocks with over 1,600 students. I felt lost without the friends who filled my days for the last five years. They were involved in sports, clubs, and other activities, the things I wasn’t allowed to do—the things I grew to believe I couldn’t.

I WAS TALL AND SLENDER like my mom, with long, thick, partly wavy brown hair and my dad's blue eyes. Old-school, fully banded silver braces graced my smile from age twelve to fourteen, along with a silver crown where one of my top front teeth grew in at a ninety-degree angle and broke off when my face hit the ice at school one day. When the braces came off, the silver crown was replaced with porcelain.

Like many of my friends, I wore bell bottoms embroidered with tiny flowers, leather Earth Shoes or sandals, muslin peasant blouses and halter tops that I sewed myself, and an embroidered purse I sewed from old denim. I wore a floppy felt hat like Breezy from the controversial movie of the same name. My parents considered the romance between a fifty-something Frank and teenage runaway Breezy scandalous. Still, I saw that Frank provided Breezy with love and support when no one else could, and she was free of her home life—things I was beginning to long for.

My mom drank more and spoke less, rarely leaving her spot at the kitchen table. Sitting still and silent, she began to blend in with the large, shadowy antique lithograph hanging behind her. Sometimes, I looked twice to find her, as if looking through a windowpane smeared with Vaseline. I was losing my person.

With no other outlet for my dad’s growing resentment, he frequently stormed from his woodshop into the house like a raging bulldog spackled in sawdust to accuse my mom of losing a tool he misplaced. Her tendency to do nothing but recoil in silence fueled my anger at him, and I stood between them to protect her. When I yelled back, he grew louder, and I grew smaller.

Looking back, I see that my mom’s submissive behavior was not only for her protection. It was for mine.

A school-based internship program secured me a job working a few hours after school each day at the new county library. Designing and creating background scenes and painting sets for elementary students' after-school programs was my perfect quiet and creative job. I felt like a child immersed in the ultimate form of make-believe.

Unfortunately, school was proving to be challenging. The sights, sounds, and activities of high school invaded and assaulted my senses. It would be decades before I learned about being highly sensitive and sensory processing sensitivity, so I pushed through without any way to manage. My stomach rumbled, and my bowels lurched when I walked into classrooms full of students or the crowded cafeteria. The overwhelm sometimes forced me to walk right back out. When forced to attend mandatory pep rallies, I withdrew into a safe inner place and did my best to show cheer on the outside. I was always pretending. On the inside, I was quivering.

Before long, my body rebelled. I developed a stress ulcer and irritable bowel syndrome and had my first migraine with aura. I never told anyone about the nausea, indigestion, diarrhea, or the waves of light and blind spots that preceded my headaches.

With no way to cope, I started cutting classes. It was easy to catch rides down the winding canyon road to the American River, where I explored trails and beaches I’d never seen before. One day, I joined some friends at the home of an older boy who lived up the road from me. After many shots of various hard liquors and snorting the contents of some red and blue pills, someone drove me home. They leaned me against the door of my parent’s house, knocked, and drove away. I have fuzzy memories of the faces of emergency room nurses asking me what drugs I had taken. Of course, I didn’t tell them. They pumped my stomach, but I wouldn’t let them find my shameful secrets.

Not liking the out-of-control results of pills and alcohol, I began hanging out with kids experimenting with mind-expanding drugs like LSD and psilocybin. I immersed myself into a magical world where psychedelics alleviated all my mental and emotional distress. Avoiding school-related studies, I studied my conscious awareness and the unseen realms of a world that made more sense than mine.

After missing most of the second semester of my freshman year, the vice-principal expelled me. As usual, my parents didn’t have much to say. My mom looked right past me when she spoke.

“You should be ashamed. I wish you wouldn’t do whatever it is that you do.”

My dad looked at me with a face cast in iron. I stared back, daring him to reveal an emotion or say anything. When he turned and walked away, I felt a knife in my back, a pain I couldn't reach. Learning what was modeled, I lived with shame and packed the hurt into a growing black hole of undesirable in my heart. I felt like I could implode into nothingness, and no one would notice.

Dismissed by those who were supposed to love me, I packed some things in a small suitcase. As they slept, I opened the front door and walked toward the small rural community of Ophir. My friend Dawn joined me at the end of her driveway, leading me to an abandoned barn she knew of between there and Newcastle. She went home the next day, preferring the discomfort of home to the discomfort of the barn, but the dirt floor and wooden walls offered me peace. Giant oaks, golden poppies, and blue lupines became my daytime companions, and in the evening, friends visited and brought me food, a sleeping bag, and a pillow. I stayed in the barn for a week until a girlfriend with a car gave me a ride to Sacramento to stay with a friend's father. He fed me and let me stay in a small bedroom. He was kind and seemed to understand me, but one day I hitchhiked home.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table when I entered the back door. One glance at me, and she turned away. Gazing at something on the wall across the room, she said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

I didn’t know if she meant going away or coming back. I didn’t ask. My dad was watching the news in the living room. He stood up and walked to his bedroom without looking at me. They never asked where I had been, how I survived, or why I left in the first place. They didn’t seem to care, and I didn’t blame them. I ran away to look for a home and returned feeling even more untethered than before.

I have no idea how they felt or what they went through when I was gone. Was my mom out of her mind with worry? Did my dad look for me or report me missing? Nancy left home at sixteen and Paul at seventeen. They, too, must have left with a burning desire for love and belonging—to be seen and heard.

LATER THAT SUMMER, after a teenage party, I woke up on the shag carpet of a friend's family room beside a boy I barely knew. My shorts and panties were below my knees, and I was swollen and covered with dried blood between my legs. I reached over and smacked the sleeping boy who vandalized my body. I was angry. I didn’t want to have sex, especially not with someone I barely knew. I didn't really know what sex was. Now, I had experienced it and didn't even remember it. Sadly, another part of me thought I deserved it. Like everything else I was ashamed of, I hoped no one would notice the expanding collection of darkness within.

There was no point in saying no anymore, so I started seeing Jeff, a stereotypical bad boy. He had longish blonde hair parted on the side like Glen Campbell. I don't remember why I liked him. Maybe it was because my heart fluttered the first time his hand held mine as we roller-skated to America's "Daisy Jane." Perhaps it was because he treated me poorly, and I was comfortable with that. Or because he tattooed MARNIE on his arm with a needle, thread, and India ink. I thought that must be love. Or maybe I craved the closeness and connection I felt when we began exploring sex.

I obliged Jeff’s attention with stupidity and bad decisions, including writing our names on freeway overpass pillars with spray paint and wondering how the sheriff deputies knew it was me when they knocked on my door. I learned how to siphon gas from cars with a short section of garden hose and to slip pint bottles from liquor stores into my jacket pockets. Stealing was an extreme way to cope, but the thrill of it displaced the anxiety of my disintegrating life. When one of Jeff's friends left a window open and asked us to lift his stepfather's prized reel-to-reel, a neighbor saw us climb in. We were caught and arrested.

WITH MY HEAD bent low, I shuffled into a courtroom wearing an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and shackles. I didn’t look up. I wanted to avoid the silent disapproval of those who didn’t know me. My parents weren’t there, and I didn’t blame them. I was the source of their greatest shame.

Already on probation for shoplifting, the county attorney charged me with several other break-ins that I didn’t do. Jeff was released with probation, maybe because he blamed the other break-ins on me. I’ll never know. Coping with being truly powerless, I removed myself emotionally. I was barely there, disappearing into the faint lines of an erased pencil drawing like the blur of unwanted pigment.

Today, I tell fifteen-year-old me that she matters. I hold her close so she knows I’m always with her and I have her back. She trusts me now.

On the first night of almost five months in juvenile detention, I heard the girls in my wing talking to each other through the vents at the bottom of the cell doors. When I wouldn’t tell them what sex was like with my boyfriend or what his penis looked like, they assaulted me with obscenities and threatened to beat it out of me the next day. After breakfast, one of the larger girls knocked me down, and I covered my face with my arms and curled into a ball as multiple kicks assailed my head, back, and gut.

The staff placed me in solitary confinement for protection. I was good with isolation—I knew how to be alone. My parents didn’t visit because they didn’t know how to manage the person I had become, so with the support of my probation officer, I focused on catching up on my neglected high school courses.

While I was catching up on schoolwork, my mom’s emotional burdens continued manifesting in her body. She had surgery to remove a cancerous kidney. I didn’t know about the cancer until I served my time and was released to my parents. By then, she had mostly recovered from surgery, but her drinking increased in proportion to her stress. With familial survival patterns fully activated, especially the distraction of my mom’s drinking, we stayed enmeshed in our trauma, suffering in separate silent worlds.

In preparation for my return, my dad had boarded up my bedroom window with plywood and two-by-fours. I could still walk out the front door after they were both asleep, and I would often sneak across the gravel road into my close friend’s house and climb into bed with her. She didn’t understand why, but I craved the connection and belonging her friendship provided.

When the boarded-up window didn’t keep me home or away from Jeff, my dad drove me to Coos Bay, Oregon, to stay with my mom’s oldest brother. After only a few days, I swallowed every pill in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom attached to the tiny guest bedroom where I slept. Again, I woke up in the emergency room of the local hospital. I didn’t want to die; I just wanted it all to end. My dad drove up the next day to take me home. But a glimmer of hope arose from my experience. I realized I didn’t want to be like Jeff and his friends. I broke up with him.

Mental, emotional, and spiritual toxins brewed under the surface, but I was changing. One night, after a fiercely ugly encounter between my raging dad and my timid mom, I entered my dad’s bedroom to change things further. My bare feet were silent on the cool oak floor as I stood an arm’s length away, watching him breathe. In my fifteen-year-old mind, I thought that if he were dead, my mom and I would be free. Squeezing the heavy-handled butcher knife in my hand, I felt powerful. But, watching him sleep, my heart took over. I saw a man without joy. I saw sadness, pain, and a lifetime of lost dreams. I left his room and climbed into bed with my mom. I explained how I wanted to kill him, that I could have, that I already had, over and over in my mind. She held my hand and listened in silence.

The next day, my mom and I hatched a plan and snuck away to see my probation officer. Mrs. Riggs had wild red hair, oversized hoop earrings, and bright red lipstick. She was both kind and edgy. You wouldn’t want to mess with her, but she was on my side and made me feel safe. She reached out to hold my mom’s hands and mine and listened in silence as we told her about the dynamics of our home and what almost happened the night before. She agreed to arrange to make me a ward of the court and place me into foster care, assuring my mom she had a safe home for me.

After signing a pile of paperwork, my mom hugged me tight. There were tears in her eyes when she turned away. She stood silently with her back to me for a few moments before hiking up the strap of her shoulder bag and summoning the courage to open the door and walk out. I was relieved I wasn’t going with her, but I was afraid for her life. Not that my dad would kill her, but that she wouldn’t want to live. I understood that.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if my mom helped my sister and brother escape all those years ago. Maybe she wasn’t the victim; maybe she was the hero.

NEXT: Chapter 5: Building Resilience

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