The Mind: Protector of the Innocent

In a departure from the usual ranting and proselytizing that this BLOG entails I thought I would use this entry for a bit of self-examination. The fact that I am making it public - not that anyone actually reads this site, it remains "public" - is not for any other purpose than...well, I am not sure what the purpose it. Perhaps, I will refer to it in some future rant about "We all have s#%$ in our lives and we have to deal with it as best we can" or a "Life sometimes sucks so deal with it!" sermonette. The point is: we can all cry in our beer to varying degrees and all we end up with, ultimately, is varying degrees of salty beer. So be it.

More on topic, the mind is an absolutely amazing organ. Contrary to most ancients, I believe if there is a soul - a "life force," divine singularly human energy that exists after death, whatever you want to call it - it must reside in the 3 pounds of gray and white matter that lies between our ears. It is our own personal lens through which we perceive the world. Every human not only observes and senses the world differently but also interprets it uniquely. All because of our wonderful, uniquely-human, ours-and-ours-alone brain. It never rests. Even when the rest of the body slows to a crawl during sleep, the cerebrum works on, doing some of its most active and creative work. The pulse rate may fall, the metabolism may slow, body temperature may decline but our magnificent collection of neurons just shifts gears and enters a new pattern of activity. We dream, we create, we "experience" wonderful things, often impossible to even imagine when awake. We may not always remember them when we wake up but, while the other 98% of our physical existence slept, our mind creates an limitless and unfettered world.

The mind can also serve another function and that is the subject at hand. I can’t remember my childhood. It’s the oddest thing. I hear others talk about the puppy they had when they were 3 or the fishing trip they took with their father when they were five with such clarity and vividness. It’s seems as if it were yesterday to them. For me, there are only foggy and hazy snapshots. No movies exist in my memories of growing up. All I have are faded, yellow photographs. I suspect my mind has good reasons for not lifting the curtain on my past. I can, however, put together as much of the story as I can hear from hearsay and family legend. You can decide the why of the mystery for yourself.

I was born the second of 3 children. The only male. Our "starter" house was a small 2 bedroom frame dwelling in a working class neighborhood. We didn’t have a car early on and my dad would catch the bus to and from his job at U.S. Steel, a big industrial complex set up to take advantage of the burgeoning iron ore deposits in central Alabama. He worked hard, I am sure, at the smelting pots and the furnaces to earn his 25 dollars (we're talking the 1950s here) per week. My mother did not work and stayed home, as virtually all mothers did in those days, tending the brood of rug rats.

Now, here is where things get a little complicated. I cannot, for the life of me, remember anything at all about my mother. I cannot see her face, hear her voice or remember a hug. I cannot remember sitting down as a family - mom, dad, little sister, big sister and me - and eating a meal. I have a vague recollection of the layout of the house (for example, my older sister and I shared a bunk bed on what was the back bedroom), what the backyard looked like, and similar snippets. But, curiously, nothing at all "family" related. Clearly, all was not well in this little family.

When I was about 7 or 8, we moved to a slightly larger house in a slightly more upscale neighborhood. This was probably about the time dad passed the examination to hire on with the U.S. Post Office and became a mail carrier. I suppose we got a car. This little upgrade in our lifestyle was, apparently, not destined for good things.

Story has it that my mother fell prey to the "diet pill" craze of the late 1950s and became quite the addict. Diet pills at that time were simple amphetamines and addictive to the point that they were taken off the market a few years later. This intervention came too late to save my little family.

Again, referring to family lore, the grand finale of this little drama occurred late one summer night when I was probably 8 or so. My hyped up mother had apparently packed several grocery bags with clothes - hers and ours - loaded her 3 ducklings into a cab and stopped off where dad was working his second job (loading dock setting) for some traveling money. Her plan was to catch a Greyhound Bus and visit the Gulf Coast, lovely that time of year. After what was sure to have been a rather dramatic scene for the others unloading the trucks that summer evening, dad insisted that the kids remain and my mother, presumably bought off with some traveling money, went her merry way. The 3 ducklings went home with dad and took up residence with my paternal grandmother and he. I am led to believe that divorce proceedings were set in motion.

Around this same time, the little boy that was me became ill. I was progressively losing both my appetite and weight and became decidedly yellow. The medical term would be "jaundiced." The family doctor didn’t have a clue. An infectious disease perhaps? Hepatitis? Bad water? As I, more and more, resembled a shrinking pumpkin, I was also becoming more and more anemic, life-threateningly so. It was time for a specialist. After some testing and some poking and prodding, I was diagnosed with a fairly rare and hereditary deformity of my red blood cells. My father was told that, if untreated, I would soon be dead.

I would later learn much more about the problem but, suffice it to say, my red blood cells (RBCs) were round instead of the usual disk shape. They were also smaller and less flexible than normal RBCs. As a result, when they passed through narrow blood vessels, they would get trapped and, well, explode. The hemoglobin they released was turned into the yellow pigment giving my skin and eyes their "pumpkin-esque" color. They were exploding faster than my body could produce them, thus the anemia. Further, since they were being trapped and destroyed in particular organ, the spleen, the only ways to stop the process was to remove the offending organ. A splenectomy would not change the RBCs but it would stop the cycle of early destruction and life-threatening anemia.

So, off to the hospital the decidedly sick little pumpkin went. Coincidentally, since the disease (if interested, it is called "hereditary spherocytosis") was hereditary, my sisters were also tested. Unfortunately, my older sister had the problem as well. Though she was not, as yet, symptomatic, the specialist recommended she have her spleen removed as well. And so it was that I shared not only the same surgical procedure but the same hospital room with my elder sibling. Both our recoveries were uneventful; mine a bit slower and augmented by multiple blood transfusions.

The curious thing about all this is that I can’t see my mother anywhere in this drama. Surely, she visited my sister and I in the hospital. I can remember the hospital room - my sister had the bed closest to the window, mine to the door - and the constant finger pricks to check my blood count. I can even see the hematologist’s face. But no mother.

The fact of the matter is, I cannot recall ever seeing my mother a single time after that fateful summer night at the loading dock. My childhood memories are, otherwise, fairly clear after I was unceremoniously transferred to the care of my grandmother and my father. After my sister recovered from her surgery and the final divorce degree was granted, my two sisters went to live with mother and I (the logistics and the bargaining, if there was any, remain mysterious to this day) stayed with dad and my grandmother. For all the rummaging through my mental cabinets, I cannot recall ever seeing my mother - while see was alive - or my sisters again for the next 30 years. My father remarried after about a year and, when I was 11, my new family - father, stepmother and recovered pumpkin - moved into our own shiny-new little nest. We lived, happily ever after (so to speak), in the same home until college called me off for another adventure. My revised parental units live, to this very day, in the same little love nest. The next time I saw my mother was at her funeral in the early 1990s. I did not cry. I don't really think at the time I felt much of anything.

What is disquieting to me is the method - and motive - for the erasure of my biological mother from my memory. Further, the loss of all those family memories from birth through 8 or 9 years old that I should have but don’t are a bit of an uncomfortable emptiness. I can only assume that these were unsettled times and that I must have been a bit unsettled myself. Maybe my parents argued a lot and it was "traumatic" for my mind to handle and imprint. Maybe I saw or heard things that my mind thinks it best not to unveil. I will probably never really know. I do know that I survived and am, today, only slightly less for the wear.

My consciousness has decided, in its own mysterious way, what I should be able to recall and what I shouldn’t. And that is fine with me. Do I feel the need to explore what I am missing? Perhaps endeavor to unlock my childhood through hypnotherapy or psychoanalysis? Nah. I have trusted my unknowable, enigmatic little 3 pounder for this long. I guess I will not rock the boat.