The Home I Know: Boundary
Chapter 10
Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
My fingers passed the rosary through my hands, as my lips offered incantations to Archangel Raphael, the patron saint of healers, guides, and protectors; marriage, joy, and travel. Word to word, bead to bead, I devoted nine days of prayer to the angel in hopes that he would intercede, so that I could meet someone, anyone, who could save me from this suffering.
~ ~ ~
Eventually, I returned to El Salvador on the same redeye flight that I had taken the first time down, but without the shoulder of a potential love to lean on. The Casa program offered alums the opportunity to volunteer for the year as a Community Coordinator (CC) to live in a house and accompany the students through their semester. I applied and within months received a call from the program directors inviting me back to that beautiful country where I had felt so surprisingly at home.
The man who ran the program picked me up at the airport, gave me a cell phone, and dropped me off at Casa Ita, the smallest of the three houses that students resided in. I settled in and made my new room more cozy by sticking inspirational quotes, images, and pictures of loved ones awaiting me back home on my walls. I stood on my bed, the mattress surrendering under the weight of my feet, as I stuck the paper to the orange painted wall with double sided tape. On it, a poem written by Antonio Machado1, read:
“Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.”
“Traveler, there is no road,
you must create the road by walking.
The next day, I arose and walked just a few blocks to arrive at the home of the founders of the program for a welcoming of this year’s staff. Some of the faces around the table looked familiar: I knew the Salvadorans from my time as a student, as well as one of the CC’s who had studied abroad with me. The other CC I hadn’t yet met, nor a priest who had been hired to support the staff and students. Father Matthew would teach Philosophy, as well as offer spiritual direction to the community.
A few weeks into the semester, Matthew and I gathered in the garden for our first spiritual direction session just outside of the “Casa de Paz” (Peace House). We sat across from each other, he the listener and me the speaker, as we began to explore the wounds and wisdom motivating my life with a cautious curiosity. Matthew sought to listen to my silent inner screamer. But she hadn’t yet learned to speak, so she communicated with compulsive thinking, constant worry, and picking and scratching. Still Matthew’s patience pursued me, his intelligence invited me, and his spirituality taught me to be differently. We began to practice an unfamiliar form of safety.
“What’s your relationship with your father like?” He began.
“Sometimes I enjoy his company, but mostly I feel afraid of him. I try to avoid him most of the time,” I replied.
“Why?” He questioned.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s your relationship with your mother like?” He continued.
“I love her,” I responded. “She’s my best friend and always there when I need her, but I don’t ever want to be like her.”
“Why not?” He continued curiously.
“Because she has no sense of identity apart from my father and that’s not a future I want for myself.”
In weekly spiritual direction sessions throughout the semester, Father Matthew listened attentively to my family’s values passed down to me. He called out the lies I had been taught by Disney, by the Catholic Church, by my family, by society: that I needed a male savior or a husband to survive. Colette Dowling has coined this, “The Cinderella Complex.”2 Or the idea that women have been socially trained to be dependent on men to meet their spiritual, physical, emotional, and economic needs.
“Prayer or a man will not save you from this suffering,” Matthew insisted.
“Then who will?” I asked desperately.
“I think you need to return to the US and go to therapy,” he suggested.
Heartbroken, I flew to LA just a week into the second semester, where my parents picked me up. Once again, I landed back in my childhood bedroom with only prayers, Bear-Bear, and the statue of Mary. I simplified my bedroom by deconstructing the wooden four post bed, carrying it down to the garage piece by piece, then climbing back up the stairs and placing the mattress on the floor.
I posted the same poem by Antonio Machado that I had pasted to the plaster orange walls in El Salvador. I hung a picture of Mary of Nazareth on one wall. Mary’s face shone brightly, with a metallic gold halo resting around her head that matched the gorgeous frame that held her in place. Her promise for healing still settled me, even if I felt enraged that it still felt so out of reach.
I began to see Barbara once a week, technically a therapist, but mostly the grandmother I wish I would’ve had. She listened to the stories of my family and began to teach me the pedagogies of psychology. She offered behavioral changes, not rote prayers, to practice. Namely, the importance of boundaries. While I took care of everyone else, Barbara was more concerned about who was taking care of me. I began to practice distancing myself from unnecessary interactions with my family and dealing with the guilt of not meeting everyone else’s needs all of the time.
My brothers and I attended a group therapy session all together with Barbara. The four of us sat there in a circle on sofas and chairs. I was trying to get us to be on the same page, so that we could possibly influence our family to change. They all named the same issues, admitting their awareness of them: our father’s power, our mother’s powerlessness, the rest of us caught in between. They acknowledged my father’s obsession with sex, but they felt the situation was fixed and were just supposed to deal with it. Just like my mother did. After all, we were family. I didn’t agree. And the constant work to try and change them when I had so little energy exhausted me.
I needed more support to manage the confusing currents flowing through my body in this context of family fighting my new personal beliefs. When a famous Palm Reader visited Newport Beach, I knew I just had to see him, so I could seek more answers to my failing and flailing system. Maybe he could help me understand my inner screamer, the pressure in my pelvis. So, with my mother and all of her friends, I walked to my next door neighbors house and waited for my session to begin. I sat before him while he held my palm gently.
“You had a terrible childhood,” he said. “One where you didn’t have any control.”
“Yes!” I agreed, “I was very sick with seizures and surgeries.” Finally, I felt validated. He looked at me as if he knew something I didn’t.
“You have a demon inside of you,” he continued. “Once you kill it, you will come to live a long and beautiful life.”
I began urgently. I chose to pursue a Masters in Theological Studies for nothing more than to get me away from family. With the Catholic degree, I could eventually work in parishes and hospitals, at high schools and community colleges, or I could pursue a PhD and become a professor. With a full-tuition scholarship, the ability to earn with a work study job, as well as take out student loans, graduate school meant I could finally break my financial codependency on my father and family.
So, just after my 23rd birthday, I moved away once again from my childhood home on Bunya St. I hopped in the car, turned on the engine, then created miles of distance between my father and me, my mother and me, my brothers and me. Between my grandparents too: Pops and Joan, Jay and Magdalene. The hot, flat, agricultural land between Southern and Northern CA began to lift into hills covered with green trees and a cool breeze. It was Fall now, and the leaves had begun to fall.
My school sat on the top of a hill in Berkeley, CA. Just outside campus was an apartment building the school rented out to students. The penthouse, a six-bedroom, one bath apartment, had been reserved for community student-living, like Casa Romero in El Salvador. I parked my car after the long car ride, walked all my things up the few flights of stairs to the top floor, chose the smallest room in the house because it felt cozy, and unpacked.
My body continued to tremble as it stretched away from the unfamiliar and experienced the new. Just like when I left for LMU, I unrealistically expected myself to get better as soon as I moved out of the house. Instead, I became sicker: deeper sleeps, demonizing dreams, an inability to participate in usual social routines, constipation, harrowing fatigue, constant picking and scratching at my skin.
Suddenly, my usual coping strategies proved to be inaccessible. The sea, with its endless horizon, was far away from me. The salt water in the bay lapped the shoreline gently at the bottom of the hill, but felt far too cold to swim in. I got in the bath, sometimes repeatedly each day because it provided me access to the water, which helped me to relax.
A razor rested on the edge of the tub. While I sat on the floor of the bath in the fetal position allowing the water to pour over my heavy head, hurting heart, and burdened body, I stared at the sharp blade longingly, feeling confidently that one deep slit across a wrist would get the job done quickly. Death felt like the only liberation from this suffering.
Annie, it’s going to be okay.
Suddenly, an ease settled onto my shoulders then into my soul, as I heard a voice speak softly and clearly in my mind. I remembered that same tone, that same message, when I tried to run away from home the first time as a little girl. Now, I lived over 400 miles away and had finally left my childhood home, but still felt it so deeply present within my bones.
Machado, “There Is No Road.”
Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence.