A MEMOIR
A BRIEF CHILDHOOD
Comfort, Texas, is a collection of essays and stories revealing my childhood in a southern good girl culture that emphasized politeness and obedience. It was all deception to conceal life-changing sexual and emotional abuse. My memoir about father-daughter incest gives testament to the secrecy and shame that surrounded an entire childhood and young adult years. I was a walking contradiction to how I appeared on the outside and the fear and trauma held inside. “Pretty is as pretty does,” my grandmother told me.
It was in the writing of this book that I came to see my life as a whole experience rather than cluttered painful pieces of it. What I thought I could never make sense of started to have meaning and clarity – like seeing something in an old grainy photograph that I hadn’t seen before. I finally made sense of how incest could move into a family and take root pushing out all the air and light and possibility.
There are astounding revelations about family history, an innate determination to save my own life through galvanizing work as an artist, and my ability to find the healing I needed to understand the generational legacy of abuse, neglect, and child abandonment that was handed down like soiled heirlooms.
I found out my father spent time on a prison farm at the end of the Depression and my mother was held captive in an orphanage in San Antonio after my grandmother was arrested for prostitution. My parents, Frank and Mary, met each other shortly after these traumatic events and got hitched. It seemed these two were, as the old country western song says, “born to lose.”
With little sentimentality, I do a deep dive into stories that shine a bright light on my narcissistic parents and my journey out of their madness. I came to understand the coping mechanisms and dissociation that got me through it all until I could leave. I found the language to describe the untellable – incest, rape, trauma.
Comfort, Texas will give hope to all survivors and the people who care about them. While we will never forget what happened to us as children, we can, with good therapy and healthy relationships and gaining the knowledge that helps us understand the complexity of child abuse, move on and claim sovereignty over our minds and bodies.
ART AND ADVOCACY SAVES LIVES
I believed I was finished deciphering my childhood. I had untangled the guilt; decoded the shame. In writing and performing my one-woman show, undertaking years of therapy and searching for survivors like me, I saw my parents as the children they had been. But I still had questions about why my father hurt his family so much.
It was my work in child welfare that introduced me to a body of contemporary academic study and research. I found startling insights into my own family’s pathologies and they revealed a more holistic picture of my childhood. Much like the period of second-wave feminism, my work in child welfare was life-saving.
From the perspective of girls and women assaulted by their fathers, the acknowledgment and public discussion of father-daughter incest as a gender and political issue was one of the most important accomplishments of feminism in the 1980s.
In my twenty years of child welfare work, I uncovered new revelations about myself and the trauma I had experienced. I read the work of social scientists who study adverse childhood experiences and the legacy abused and neglected children carry into their adult lives. I discovered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the answers for my suicidal ideations, night terrors, uncontrollable bouts of crying, and depression. Learning about the effects of childhood trauma and neglect I was able to construct a broader narrative about my dysfunctional family.
I found joy, wondrous adventures, and other contradictions readers might not expect. The treasures in my grandmother's closet, twirling on gritty dance floors in smoky beer joints, putting down roots on an island, and tossing my father's ashes over a bluff. And best of all, I found my happy ending - something all survivors deserve.
EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK
The night the Black Cat was raided, my mother was serving Manhattans and Pearl Beer chasers to fat cats who showed up with a wad of money to blow at the craps tables. My father was supposed to be posted at the entrance ordering the male patrons to check their guns. The owner, Red Nelson, didn’t want some damn crazy fool shooting up the place when his luck turned sour. But for some reason, my father was missing that night when the men with their Stetson hats, cowboy boots, and trim Western suits walked into the place. Not like in the movies with guns drawn yelling, “Everybody freeze.” No, the raid wasn’t like that.”
"My father had sex with me for many years when I was growing up.”
Dr. Adams inhaled and exhaled. I sensed a mild impatience when he explained to me that, “Parents aren’t perfect.” I stared at him as all the air went out of the room.
“Why don’t you try to get out of the house? Go shopping. You’ll feel better.”
The pistol was stored in a Cuban cigar box that sat on a stack of National Geographic and Playboy magazines.
I froze.
Should I call the police or shoot my father?
When my parents left me alone at home, I put a record on the HiFi, cranked up the volume and danced like mad from room to room. I craved dancing like other little girls craved riding horses. During middle childhood when my father began molesting me more frequently, I danced because it soothed me and gave me a way to be in my body that didn’t feel scary. I felt strong and nimble and safe when I danced.”
One morning, I stepped into her room and the iron lung was empty. Miss Brown was gone. Her room was eerily quiet. I can imagine I had brought the Rosenberg newspaper, excited to read her a story like the one about Leonard’s Drive-In Restaurant that used to be on Highway 59. The waitresses put the burgers and malts on trays, climbed up on horses and sauntered over to the customers sitting in their cars. I think she would have liked that story. I don’t know what became of Miss Brown. I don’t know if the polio killed her or if she recovered enough to go home. Wherever home was. I never asked and my mother never said.
