Miss Malone
I felt ready and it felt necessary to do EMDR work on ‘father issues’ and I addressed a lot of painful memories of being in the car with him and childhood physical abuse. I also processed a fonnected memory of being hit in the face with a rock when I was a kid after which I needed glasses. It is connected because that is one time he actually stormed into that kid’s house and stood up for me, and also, for various reasons, I feel sure that event would not have happened if not for the influence of his abuse on my life.
I felt so wounded and so numb as I worked through it and through this was one trauma that was never going to get better but miraculously EMDR got me somewhere… though I am terrified of going all the way. The most traumatising moments with my brother also came up. But the breakthrough, if you can call it that, happened when I remembered the very first time he told me something was going to change and he was going to pull down my pants and spank me. He told me this in front of the cellar door. I did not forget that memory so much as I dissociated around it and sort of forgot it but didn’t exactly repress it.
It was like remembering for the first time because I felt for the first time my emotions around it, my sense of confusion and pain, and I remembered somehow who I was before that event. I could naturally be myself, a generally unwounded little kid, and that was the event that came to mark me as wounded.
I do not remember the spanking. I just know that I didn’t do anything to deserve it and I was innocent. but he made me feel sooooo bad from then on and nothing ever came around to fix it. I couldn’t get the confusion of feeling like I knew and was indignant that I was innocent and good and did not deserve this but I must also be bad bad out of me, ever.
It messed me up, not just the change, but how it got worse and worse, and I think it was after this I had these terrible traumas with my mother, too. The traumas with my mother were for a long time the only ones I remembered. ai also have no somatic sense of having been sexually abused by anyone before this event, or at least if it happened I was too young to have any clue what was happening. I am thinking maybe word got around that I had started to be spanked and that is when my confusion was taken advantage of by others because it was safer to abuse me and I wouldn’t be able to tell apart the different abuse: and in a way I couldn’t, all I could remember was the onset of pain and a life I could no longer understand.
His physical aggression towards me got worse and worse likely as I responded as any traumatised kid would and my mother’s treatment of me hurt most of all because I loved her so much unconditionally. I have no idea where recent memories of him sexually abusing me himself fits into this at all. I was abused by others though and I had to hide my emotions. I was such a loving sensitive innocent kid before that but I started having to hide… and in elementary school probably right after the sexual abuse I looked at myself in the mirror in the sink in the classroom and I felt such shame around it that I could not admit it to myself: I just knew I felt a compulsion to do something, that made no sense, and that probably made me feel bad… I scratched my face on my cheeks with my fingernails and made wounds there in the classroom sink mirror. It was first or second grade.
No one ever said anything at all about it or offered anything that felt anything like healing, real therapy, anything. I was just always alone in my experience, and that was my life. Thinking of it now I can’t believe the teacher wouldn’t have seen it. I got no care for the ways I was hurting in school or out; the only thing that happened is that, right around that time, a girl named Amanda encouraged me to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom without telling anyone. So I walked out into the hall and the teacher came out and asked me. “What are you doing, why did you leave the classroom?”
Feeling guilty for doing something I did not want to admit because it was against the rules, I said, “I don’t know.” This, along with the fact that I kept chicken bones from lunch in my desk because of conversations with my grandfather about inventing and building things where we mused it might be possible to bring the chicken back to life, were disturbing to my teacher so I had to spend all night awake to go through neurological testing because this naive educator took me at face value that I actually had no *memory* of why I left the classroom. I jad issues but this wasn’t the issue at all and I was totally overlooked in every way and I had no idea how to express what I needed or to have any idea what that was. I just said what any guilty feeling kid might have said: I don’t know. I am getting strange shivers right now realising part of the reason I felt so guilty is that I did it because of peer pressure from a girl named Amanda who encouraged me to sneak to the outside the classroom bathroom without telling the teacher.
There were several girls in school named Amanda in elementary school and I had a crush on every one of them. I think the Amanda who td me to do it was the one I later in elementary school found to be a really kind, caring person, Amanda S., who was kind of mature and intelligent beyond her years, and her family was also Jehovah’s Witness, and we actually sort of became friends, maybe my first experience of friendship with a girl I had a crush on, which says a lot, considering this other Amanda taught me I could never ever say a word to a girl that I liked. Leave it to Mrs. Tivnan, my fifth grade teacher, to work miracles. Mrs. Tivnan was something truly special, a genius innovative educator, but also, she affirmed me and saw me as everything that my woundedness with unfair and unjust evaluation did not.
Oh, but right, it wasn’t in Mrs. Tivnan’s class I felt like I became friends with Amanda. It was in 8th grade history class, maybe, though I felt that way before that, and I wish we could have been better out of school friends. It was in fifth grade that Mrs. Tivnan discovered I was thinking of the letters on word searches we were creating using certain ofher words and since those were not the words to be searched for I thought Mrs. Tivnan would never notice that I filled in the word search around the words with variations of “Amanda is so sexy.” Mrs. Tivnan said she discovered interesting things in my word search but did not tell me what.
I feel like mentioning too another girl named Amanda who I secretly suddenly developed a crush on and I realised I could not talk to her: I knew I would never be able to say a word to her, ever. I honestly did not think it was possible that any boy could say a word to her and it actually amazed me when my friend Jonathan who had moved from Boulder, Colorado, asked her so nonchalantly if he could borrow a pencil like she wasn’t even cute. It might have been that same night that I heard my mother talking on the phone, maybe to her sister, whose boyfriend I think had probably abused me riiight before all of this, I suspect with her knowledge and failure to do a thing about it, snd my mither was saying something like, “She’s so beautiful, she could/should be a model.” I don’t know why but Inwas hiiighly suspicious that she was talking about Amanda and for some reason she was saying it for me to overhear. I still feel like the odds arr maybe 50/50 that she actually was… and ai have no idea at all how I felt about hearing it. I just remember so clearly that it happened.
So then I had to stay to all night for neurological tests because I ‘didn’t know’ why I was wandering the halls compounded by concern that I had kept my chicken bones from lunch to see if I could bring the chicken back to life as I had pondered with grampa (even though years later I discovered an actual book called something like, How to Build a Dinosaur Out of Chicken Bones). We planned activities because it was going to be hard to keep me up all night. I’d never done it. We watched Milo and Otis (and years later a dog named Otis just happened to become mine, which makes it even more painful to think about my mother’s treatment of me with him, like it makes me feel bad and defective just like back then, and once again just ehat I needed was taken away). Then my father and ai went out for a drive in the middle of the night towards morning. We went to Dunkin Donuts in the city and I just remember thinking about the stuff on the doughnuts called sprinkes, or jimmies, which happened to be the name of the guy that had hurt me. We drove up the biggest hill in town at dawn and saw a mourning dove and a doe.
Then I went to the hospital and they stuck sensors to me. I fell asleep right away, into such a deep sleep that they said it was impossible to get an accurate test and maybe I shouldn’t have stayed up all night after all. I never got tested again. I got special services at school, though, like speech therepy and occupational therapy. I felt resentful of things like being evaluated for how many times I could bounce a basketball, how I wrote, and… stuff that didn’t happen in a normal classroom so why was this woman focusing on me like this? I remember her making notes about how I could not talk about my brother, like words wouldn’t come out of me when asked to describe him or my relationship with him. I could hardly finish a sentence.
He was more than three years younger than me. I loved the little kid, back then, and I had so many dreams for him, but none of that was ever adknowledged, nor does anyone in my family recall that Intaught him tonread in about ten minutes when he just wasn’t getting the concept at all at school. I remember explaining how letters made sounds and how they came together and I remember being in the hallway with some kind of little chslkboard or easle and both of us being so excited when it happened. It clicked. He could read. Everyone denies this to this day, one of those early innocent memories Inwish would be remembered. One of my biggest hopes for him was that he would remember the nursey rhymes I made up — which were loooong and probably made no logical sense constructively, and it was a little strange and annoying that he could remember “ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” but he could not remember my own rhymes that I made up specifically for him, because ai wanted him to habe a good chikdhood, and remember them forever! It was that same hallway where a trauma happened so many years later, when he became addicted to drugs, and I have no idea what provoked it but he mocked and ridiculed my hidden piercings, pointing to them and calling me a ‘little b****.” That exacerbated my trauma in ways I cannot even say.
Anyway, way back then, in occupational therapy… oh my gosh, I remember that her name was Miss Malone, and I looked her up, as I write this, not expecting to find a thing. I saw an obituary that she had died in 2020 and ai just cried the first tears I have been able to cry in as long as I can remember, like over a year, when I used to cry all the time and… enjoyed the catharsis of it. It is so sad, and… I was so mean to her! I could not talk about my feelings and how I didn’t know why I was there in the first place and how I felt judged and evaluated but had no idea why and I felt like she thought something was wrong with me. In retrospect she was a kind and patient person but she took motes on me that I could not see and I was a smart inquisitive kid who hated not being let in on why things were happening to me, never being given a reason for anything! I needed to understand how everything worked and… I had probably recently been sexually abused and I felt the same sort of ugh annoyance with her that I felt about myself when I clawed at my face in that mirror. I think I had never felt annoyed with anyone like that before. I was a kid who loved everybody and had no issues with anybody and saw the best in everybody despite receiving such confusing and horrible treatment myself sometimes but Miss Malone was the first person who, because of her profession and authority and the mysteriousneed of it all and the randomness of her asking me to do this or that for reasons that made no sense to me… grated on me.
That is the best word for it. She grated on me. So I started manipulating her notes: doing things intentionally to make her think certain things about me, pretending to have no clue how to do things I actually full well knew how to do, and… I have been ashamed for years about the folders full of pathologizing notes and evaluations of me in elementary school, but I also enjoyed reading through those folders from time to time, especially the bits where it suggested I was a second grader doing things at a tenth grade level or something like that. It was far from a hard science but the evaluations of me and especially the pathologizing parts felt obnoxious like the practitioners of it thought they were doing a hard science on me and that therefore they were full of themselves and thought they were hot stuff. I was a very scientific and mathematical kid and ‘wise beyond my years’ in some ways these pretentious evaluations infuriated me and such things continue to do so to this day.
That has not changed a bit and in fact when a certain person that I trusted told me a few years ago that she had been evaluating me and recommended a counselor and said I was rejected from an event I always trusted to be a safe space I flipped my lid!!! I replayed in a lot of ways what I did to Miss Malone way back then, consciously and deliberately skewing and tainting the data she was apparently collecting and feeling it grating in the same way. It was like, hah, I knkw you think you know what you are seeing, what data you are collecting based on my behaviour, but you don’t know what is reeeally going on, and that is the only place I felt like I still had power. You can’t look inside of me and you don’t know. I hate that you are evaluating me but since you insist on doing that, you want some data? Here, take *this*’for something to evaluate!
And oh my I gave her something — and I regret that in the same way I regret these folders of evaluations way back then. It was like, with Miss Malone I knew all the data she was collecting was skewed and wrong and ai also wondered what she would donwith such a strange and unusual case and I was bored and how else to pass my time. I did the same thing with her except regrettably the data, as it can this say in age, probably reached everyone on my Facebook account back then, and now I doubt there is any way to convince anyone that the ways they
likely evaluated me are likely wrong because I… replayed old trauma and chose to present myself that way as a defense mechanism. It was like, I don’t mind if you are confirmed in believing that something is seriously wrong with me, there isn’t! The more prove you right by manipulating your notes the more I know *I* am right and that’s what matters! I felt like no one got that despite ranting and raving about how much I hated the fact that I was being evaluated like that I actually chose to make it worse and it really was Miss Malone all over again. You’re gonna make unfair notes on me and not tell me why? I’m gonna *play* your notes, how about that?
And yeah, it was immature and a replaying if childhood trauma, and you know what? Way back then, I think Miss Malone would have been right to draw the conclusion that something concerning was going on… her data pointed to something being up and she was right. She would just never be able to guess from her data *why* she was right that *something* was up… and yeah, I could not talk about my brother, dissociated when asked to write simple descriptions of my family, and those were real things going on. Her conclusions were all wrong for sure and she couldn’t help me, and yes, that was maladaptive behaviour… but I was abused, I was hurt, I was smart and deep down I *knew* what was going on with me so much more than she and I was no fool. She was kind to me though and I regret that towards the end Instarted acting out and became too stubbornly recalcitrant to even play along.
I remember that I think one of the first things to annoy me was that she asked, “Do you know cursive?” I thought the word was strange and I had always heard it called handwriting so that was weird but also I never learned it in the classroom and she seemed serious about it being something I should know so I was like um don’t you know they don’t teach that stuff till third grade? I’m not gonna use it in class so why do it? And I came to believe partly through that that she had no idea what she was doing. Really I had deep-seated beliefs and values about the politics of the experience of childhood and that no one knows better what is going on in andhild, or in a person in general, than they do themselves. Back then and in the more recent re-enactment I needed empathy more than anything, to know that my own knowing and intuitions about myself were being taken seriously, and it kind of felt like I was right back there again with my political rights around my own experience not being taken seriously. I often hated the word because I thought and think it applies to eberybody, and everyone is genius in their own right, but to use a phrase from Alice Miller, oh, the drama of the gifted child…
And oh my, I really wish I could share all this with a friend right now, so much, it so wants to be heard and held and only with an understanding friend will I ever be able to try to explain any of this to my mother and I want to! I will oray for the intuition to know eho that friend is, I just hope it comes soon. I have never put it all together like this and I’d never be able to if not for what I nust processed in EMDR.
(Photo: Specimen #1, unskewed data).
RIP Miss Malone. I actually miss you. If you were still alive I’d want to find a way to see her and say I’m sorry and offer her a hug.