The Shadow Box

It’s funny, in a way, the leaps our minds make to compensate for the less than savory parts of our lives. In my family, violence was the invisible elephant in the room. I had to endure it from infancy on, but if I ever dared to try to expose it, the violence escalated and spread outside the family walls.

That latter was accomplished because my father was adept at casting the net of blame and shame as far from himself as possible. Nowadays, it might be more difficult for a parent to smack his child in public and somehow turn the sympathy of bystanders toward himself. But in the ’50s and ’60s, all a parent had to do was to declare, “She deserved it!” and then run a litany of all the ways the child had provoked or disrespected him.

That pattern, that societal tendency, meant that I not only had to live in fear 24/7, never knowing which day or days my father would return home ready to crush something between his meaty hands, but that I had nowhere to turn for help, understanding, compassion or support. Since the pattern of abuse continued for nearly twenty years, by the time I finally was able to escape, the idea of support was so foreign to me that I didn’t recognize it when it was offered.

To survive childhood, I turned to music, art, and reading the works of great authors. Music bled off a little of the compressed frustration, and art gave me an outlet—albeit a sterile one—to express my creativity. I say sterile because every moment of my life was closely monitored.  

Why? Because I held the family secrets. I’d seen the worst of my parents’ rages, and violent behavior and though my psyche was battered I knew that if someone would just hear me and believe me, that maybe the abuse would end. My parents were cruel but not stupid. They knew that if I drew what I really felt, or things that I’d seen, images of blood, anger, and panic would emerge.

So I turned to classic writers: Steinbeck, London, Kipling, Poe. I especially loved Kipling and Poe because they described in detail when an animal drank the blood of a creature it had killed. I read those sections over and over, and as I did, I imagined my own life’s blood leaking into my parents’ mouths, perhaps nourishing them for a few hours.

For me, childhood was a living hell. Each time I was beaten or molested, my life’s blood leaked out. Each time the beating or molestation ended, I held onto the sharp edges of my shattered sense of self, hoping that maybe this time I would die so that I wouldn’t have to endure the cycle of abuse over and over again.

By the time I was in fourth grade, I was blanking out regularly. My teachers complained about it, which scared my parents into a brief visit to a doctor, who wrote on my medical chart that maybe I was autistic. The irony of this was gigantic. Again, I was being blamed, even given a diagnosis, when all my outward symptoms were the bits of evidence that I could produce without using words to beg someone, anyone, to see what was happening in my home and to save me from it.

When I was in fourth grade, my favorite book was Jack London’s White Fang. I loved this book because the main character, a wolf-dog named Buck, also spent much of his life being abused, beaten, even tortured. But in the end, a kind man saved him and nursed him back to health. In many ways Buck’s life mirrored my own, except that I was still hoping for my savior.  

My teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, assigned the class a book report, including making a shadow box of our favorite part of the story. Even though I’d read White Fang many times, I got away with using it for my report since it was well above fourth-grade reading material. I made my shadow box of a scene toward the end of the book, where Buck killed an intruder to protect his master and savior.