Galit Atlas on the fantasy of independence. ‘Children create a fantasy world in which they are entirely self-sufficient.’
Mine was a caravan/tent arrangement, sealed at its base and zippered in the front to keep out spiders and crawlies. By magic it contained a refrigerator filled with innumerable delectables from the range of sweets I loved: choc coated cobblers with caramel in the middle, milk bottle lollies and White Knights, mint chocolate coated bars, along with sachets of Sherbert and aniseed balls, round lollies you could suck for hours before they disappeared. And a freezer box jam packed with ice creams, choc wedges, Cornettos and Street’s Gaytimes. All the treats we could scarcely afford on Sunday drives when our dad, if we were lucky, might splash out and buy us an icy pole.
My cocoon was warm with a thick comfortable mattress and soft blankets under which I could stay warm and I’m not sure I ever bothered with windows through which I might view the outside world.
My cocoon was a place where I could escape from the world, stay safe and warm. I never factored in my need for people.
An ersatz return to the womb and perhaps this is the intention, the illusion of independence built on our need for others to care for us so entirely we don’t even notice their existence. They become extensions of us, when we’re tiny ahead of the slow and somewhat painful recognition that others are separate entities. And not under our omnipotent control.
These mornings when the cold is brittle as ice and your toes tingle with numbness before you put on socks and shoes, it’s easier to stay inside the cocoon of your bed, than leap out and face the world. Sleep is more enticing then, as for hibernating bears.
I never sleep so well in the heat of the summer. When the temperature stirs my blood to such a fury I can only toss off sheets and try my best to stay perfectly still so as not to generate any excess energy.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading a long essay from Rachel Aziv about Alice Monro’s ‘Passive voice’. A long and fascinating exploration of a story now well known, that of Munro’s youngest daughter Andrea, the youngest of her three girls, and how when she was nine and staying alone with her stepfather Gerry Fremlin while her mother was away at her father’s funeral, she asked to share the second bed in the parental bedroom.
He mistook her desire for closeness as a sexual overture and began a long process of abusing her body as if she were an adult asking for sexual connection. Lolita he called her in some of the letters he wrote to justify his behaviour.
The deeper story lies in the extent to which both Andreas’ parents, her father who lived elsewhere in Canada, who was the first, to learn of the abuse after Andrea told her stepbrother who told her stepmother Carole, who told her dad Jim who told his wife not to share this secret with Alice as it would kill her. Thereafter the experience was shelved though Andrea’s father asked her elder sister to accompany her on summer visits to keep her safe was Gerry, which only worked up to a point. The abuse continued.
It took until Andrea was 25 when she finally found enough courage to tell her mother about what Gerry had done, but her mother both believed her and disbelieved in so far as she behaved in ways that suggested she could not tolerate this knowledge, as Munro was dependent on this man for her ongoing life. She left him briefly at the news but soon returned and even after Fremlin was found guilty of the charge of sexual abuse of a minor, she stayed by his side.
She stayed with him and in time became estranged from her daughter who at various times cut off contact form her entire family. Though in the end, Andrea was able to reconnect with her siblings who took some time to register the seriousness of what happened to their little sister by which time Alice was losing her mind to Alzheimer’s and could scarcely remember the story.
It’s a happy ending in so far as the sisters are reunited but not so for Andrea given the layers of trauma she now carries.
As all traumatised children who must carry the burden of their parent’s behaviours.
Reading this story, I found myself tripping over the names, the who was who was Alice and Andrea’s name, both beginning with A sometimes became interchangeable to me. Such is the crazed world of childhood sexual abuse.
And reading snippets of the crazy letters Fremlin wrote acknowledging the sexual relationship with his stepdaughter – in his mind justifying his behaviour and blaming her for her seductive behaviour – is enough to make my skin creep.
The way as William Branston writes of ‘the alchemy of dehumanization from person to thing’.
And it typically begins in childhood. No wonder we sometimes crave the illusion of absolute independence, even as we know it cannot exist. We need one another.