At my graduation from AFI, 1993
The people who have most trouble believing my past are those who knew me in childhood or young adulthood, who were around when I was trafficked, who knew my mother and were charmed by her, or those for whom my story touches their own lives a little bit too closely for comfort.
I was also charmed by my mother. I also believed her to be the wonderful, modern, open-minded parent she wanted to be. I felt protective of her, tried hard to love her and had my heart broken in the most terrible ways, again and again, until I allowed in the whole truth and wasn’t blinded by her surface demeanor anymore.
My rescue from the network at age 11, came with a long, detailed set of instructions for my continued survival. After listening to surreal notions of how to avoid prostitution, drug addiction, the cities where I should live, the kind of man I should marry and to keep quiet about the network or they would find and kill me, my immediate future was addressed. I was going back home to a mother who would not be able to sell me to the network anymore. I was given a bag with sleeping pills and opioids, which I should use conservatively, one half a day at the most, to deal with my mother’s certain anger (for not being able to sell me anymore) and desire for revenge. I did need those pills. And could have used more.
The gangster who rescued me could easily predict my mother’s reaction, because he knew her. He knew her quite well. He had slept with her. In front of me.
It had been the moment that my mother’s sickness had reached its zenith, a perverse climax towards which all her actions with regards to me had led. My mother never sold me to adult men for the money - we were not poor - she entered me into sexual relationships with men so that she would be able to steal those men from me, to restore the righteous balance of adults loving and sleeping with each other.
This may sound much too generous, coming from her primary victim. The ultimate and unconscious restoration of adult love is what I believe to be the deepest layer of an entirely unconscious process performed by a psychopathic woman, who was completely caught in the trauma story of her own past and who perpetuated various aspects of that story relentlessly.
Though my mother never told me that her father had sexually abused her, she acted as if stuck in an incestuous triangle. From the photos I’ve seen, my grandfather and grandmother seemed to be very much in love. My mother was born in 1939 and her father left to fight in the 2nd World War soon after. He was captured and interned as a POW at Bergen-Belsen. He lost his middle finger in a work accident and would later reveal that being hospitalized in the concentration camp had saved his life, because he was given more food there. There exist photos of him in his striped prison suit, skin over bones. He was released before the end of the war and returned home in 1944.
My mother’s emotional development seems to have come to an abrupt halt at age five, which was in 1944. While her town suffered famine in the war years, I never observed particular anxiety around food in her, though she did at times starve me. As to the bombs that would have dropped on the city, she did hate it when my stepfather turned up the volume on the stereo, but then, he did put it on obnoxiously loud. The only way one could clearly observe her arrested development was in how she acted like a flirtatious, sexualized five year old girl. It looked like her greatest aim was to please men, especially by offering herself to them in any way possible, either sexually or through performing some other service. In this, my mother’s energy was that of a young girl and she seemed much more eager than most other woman, while obviously, it is not such an uncommon thing for women to please men, sexually or otherwise. My mother was highly invested in pleasing men, yes, but she was even more invested in getting revenge on me.
When my mother first saw the gangster in the spring of 1974, she was 34, he was 21 and I was ten years old. She was picking me up from a night I spent at a castle after a network orgy. He drove me down a large lane of the estate to drop me off near where she was parked. She noticed his red Porsche and blonde hair and got extremely excited, chatting on our ride home as if I had found a great boyfriend and prospects for marriage were good.
Once he started sexually assaulting me, he also started a secret affair with my mother. I was extremely attached to this gangster/perpetrator, who offered a reflection of some of my positive qualities to which my mother had remained completely blind. He was a parental figure. I had attached to him as though he were my primary caregiver when he had helped me to understand that my mother did not love me, that she was no good.
One unfortunate afternoon, I found them in bed together. My mother cried out:
“You thought you could have them all, didn’t you?”
I never heard or saw my mother as triumphant and elated as in this moment, penetrated by the man to whom she had pimped me out, so she could steal him back from me.
My mother was was four years old when her father returned home from the concentration camp and immediately impregnated her mother. I can’t know of course if during his wife’s pregnancy he was inappropriate with my mother, but he did once act inappropriately with me. Right afterwards, his usual quiet and rather vacant manner switched to sullen and gruff. That same sourness could always be observed in all his interactions with my mother, while she continually tried her best to please him.
My mother seemed to constantly act towards all men from the place of a sexually abused child whose spirit was deadened by trauma, who came to life through the attention she received in the secret space of sexual transgressions. It was as if she was constantly reliving a trauma story, forever trying to get that attention from men, while her daughter served alternately as a split-off extension of her hated young self, or as the manifested dark side of her secret rival, her own mother.
The ultimate goal for this little girl would have been to be loved properly by both parents, which would mean that the couple’s unity would be restored. That would be the perfect, ideal family.
Instead my grandmother died one month before my mother’s sixth birthday. Whatever feelings the little girl harbored towards her mother, who undoubtedly did not love her very much, there would have been no way for that girl to ever get past the shame and guilt that the sexual abuse would have heaped on her. Once the mother died, her confused feelings of jealousy, rivalry, anger over not having been protected and not loved properly, must have been forever buried. All that was left towards her mother was an idealized image of a distant woman.
My mother continued to display the same patterns throughout her life. In my young adult years she charmed my friends, especially the males, insisting I invite them over to her place and spoiling them with hors-d’oeuvres and bubbly wine.
I once briefly dated an actor who met my mother when he picked me up at her house. He was closer to her age than mine and my mother flirted with him the moment I had turned my back; I just saw the immediate aftermath, her glow and his smile. It looked like it might have been the beginning of a cycle which, had the opportunity arisen, may have ended with her stealing him away from me, like she had the gangster. Of course both candidates were in fact more suited to be with her rather than with me. Two people of around the same age ending up in a love match is more appropriate than a young man with a child or an older man with a young adult woman. The restoring of the parental bond almost made sense if it weren’t for the creepy incestuous note, of her having to steal them from her daughter.
Every time I met that actor afterwards, he asked after my mother. Whenever my mother met my boyfriends, she was at her most charming, her most intelligent, her most attractive. When she met my future husband, she familiarly put her hands on his arms. He sensed her manipulation and took an instant dislike to her. He was the only one to see through her.
I lost friends who knew my mother. Having been at the receiving end of her flattery and pleasantries, mellowed by the Prosecco, nurtured by her appetizers and desserts, they could not believe that she would have done what she did to me. Her childlike enthusiasm and her eagerness to please them made her seem extremely innocent.
It is always difficult to have known someone who turns out to be a psychopath and you had no idea. Psychopaths function. Psychopaths can be very intelligent and charming. Once they have you in their grip, it is hard to come to terms with their dark side unless you’ve felt the effects of their dark actions.
Trauma deadens. It is where we look for life that determines if happiness is going to be a short-lived high or an increasing joy. Everything is within. Our patterns are repetitions of past trauma stories that, once revealed and grieved, are forever changed. Joy comes from the boundless well of life that is our essence, which is increasingly revealed from peeling off layer after layer of trauma-induced ignorance.