What hides deep within us are all the things we don't want others to know about us, and even more, what we don't want to know about ourselves. Until we face what we've hidden Behind the Mask, we live in fear of being seen We, also, live with the devastating effects of unconscious, fear-based protective patterns that rob us of the birthright of a fully lived life. Dr. Sandy uses the same style of writing in this second book of the trilogy, The Meaning of Three, as in her first book, The Mask. This unique style merges non-ordinary personal autobiography with transpersonal understanding for changing and transforming the human experience. To bring healing to physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds, all the way down into the DNA and beyond, Sandy embarks on journeys into her childhood, into past lives, alternate realities and into the organizing principles at the very core of us. In the end, she comes face to face with her own personal version of the worst of the worst, something that we all carry, whether we know it or not. In her own process, she provides a path for readers to find their own healing.
THE MEANING OF THREE: BEHIND THE MASK
By SANDY SELA-SMITHAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Sandy Sela-Smith
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4490-2317-1 Contents
DEDICATION.............................................................................................viiACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................ixFOREWORD...............................................................................................xiiiChapter One The Shadow Knows..................................................................1Chapter Two A Most Disturbing Memory..........................................................19Chapter Three A Most Disturbing Dream...........................................................31Chapter Four The Decoding Device...............................................................47Chapter Five Confluence of Three Stories.......................................................65Chapter Six I Hate What You Made Me Become....................................................73Chapter Seven These Boots Were Made For Kicking.................................................95Chapter Eight The Dungeon.......................................................................119Chapter Nine The Forest, The Box, and The Forklift.............................................133Chapter Ten Going Back to Go Forward..........................................................145Chapter Eleven Back at the Beginning.............................................................183Chapter Twelve A Hole in the Side of My Face.....................................................193Chapter Thirteen The Boat..........................................................................215Chapter Fourteen Three Levels of Abuse.............................................................229Chapter Fifteen The Long-Avoided Passageway To The Worse Of The Worst.............................257Chapter Sixteen Dealing with the Residues of 2009.................................................271Chapter Seventeen The Rest of the Story: Overcoming the Worst of the Worst..........................297Chapter Eighteen The Rest of the Second Story: Caring for the Causes of Cancer.....................315Chapter Nineteen The Rest of the Third Story: Owning My Place In The Universe......................329Epilogue A Deeper Understanding of Three...................................................357
Chapter One
THE SHADOW KNOWS
In a vain attempt to present a perfect image of ourselves to the world, it is not uncommon for us to hide what does not fit that image of perfection behind the masks that we wear. Then, we live in fear that what we have hidden will be exposed, leaving us unloved, unaccepted, and forever alone. We blind ourselves with half-truths and lies not just for others to think better of us, but for ourselves, as well. However, no matter how much we try to hide, we can be sure that deep inside us the Shadow knows.
So many more years ago than would seem possible, my family participated in a ritual that provided a sense of normalcy when normal would never have described the life I lived as a child in the far north country of pre-statehood Alaska. Before TV found its way to our town, radio was the main source of news, information, and entertainment, and sometime in my young childhood, my family got our first radio. The wooden console, made of polished Cherry wood, housed the radio that was taller than I by a few inches, and it had a mesh cloth that covered a very large speaker. It had an open back that provided access to the many lighted tubes and wires that we children were not allowed to touch, though I speculate I must have touched them because I knew from experience that those tubes were very hot. On the upper part of the radio was a glass "window" that revealed a panel with little numbers and marks to designate the frequencies of various stations that required very careful turning of the dial to achieve as static-free a reception as possible.
After dinner, on those special nights, we children assembled in the vinyl-floored playroom to listen to our favorite radio programs, one of which was The Detective Hour. As the designated time approached, we pulled up our chairs and gathered around as our father turned on the radio and tuned into a program that always began with an eerie organ prelude to help listeners conjure images of shadowy corridors in haunted houses, or dark city streets, wet with toxic rain dripping from awnings and forming rivulets that flowed into steamy sewers in the even darker back-alley ways. And then the sinister voice of Orson Welles began to speak with slow, determined words-as only he could speak-using deep theatrical tones that sent shivers down the spines of millions of listeners, as he said, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? ... The Shadow knows!"
All the time he spoke, if you listened very carefully, you could hear what might have been the rustle of a trench coat or maybe the sound of footsteps that seemed to be walking someplace towards that evil. This was followed by wicked laughter that sounded as if it came from someone who had lost his mind; maniacal enough to chill the blood of anyone drawn into what lay ahead. The laughter was accompanied by a swell in the dissonant sounds of the organ, like the music played in old-time films to warn the listener that something terrible was about to happen. This led into the story that would touch our imaginations and keep us all riveted to the glowing lights from inside the radio box that magically brought the sounds from what seemed like another world into our home.
For one night each week, my family listened to a story that nobody even thought of pretending we weren't hearing, and at the end of the program, the evil people were caught because The Shadow knew! He exposed the evildoers to the rest of the world, at least to those fifteen million or so of us who were listening throughout the country back then. While The Shadow exposed the wickedness of the evil hearts of men on the radio program, a part of me knew there was no one who could expose, much less bring to justice, the people who inflicted much more evil onto children, such as myself, in our town, and no radio program back in the 1950s would have exposed the depths of evil that lurked in the hearts of the abusers. I suspect, that even as the 21st century has moved into its second decade, there is still a reluctance to accept the existence of the kind of evil that was too much a part of my early years. Our culture would prefer to believe that extremely wicked hearted evil is exceedingly rare and belongs only to the few truly perverse among us and on CSI programs or horror films, but not in their own lives, or the lives of people they know. However, my experience has caused me to hold quite a different perspective.
* * *
From outside observation, we seven looked like a model family, not unlike television families with whom many of us grew up, some of which started out as radio programs and became TV shows later in the 50s and 60s and watched as reruns in the next 30 or 40 plus years, such as the Andersons on Father Knows Best, and Ozzie and Harriet. Later there were The Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver and then Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show, the Brady Bunch, the Waltons, the Cunninghams on Happy Days, and the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie. And later still, there were the Huxtables of The Cosby Show, and the Keatons of Family Ties, all with images that onlookers could easily have attached to my family.
Not unlike Ward Cleaver, Charles Ingalls, Andy Taylor, or Jim Anderson, there was my handsome black-haired father, tall and slender, a popular athlete, salesman, and for a while, not only the local church's lay minister, but also, the town mayor. And there was my mother, a beautiful, shapely redhead-strong, powerful, and independent-who, after graduating from her nurses' training, moved to the last frontier without support of family or friends. She ventured into the cold northern territory all by herself, willing to discover what this unknown life had to offer. But when she married, she became the obedient wife, not unlike June Cleaver, in Leave it to Beaver or Margaret Anderson, in Father Knows Best, who were dutiful, submissive, and obviously willing to defer decisions to their "more capable" husbands. But any surface appearances that match these characters or any of the others from loved TV families are where the parallels end.
My parents first meeting might have been compared to a comedy such as the old I Love Lucy show, when fiery redhead Lucile Ball as, Lucy McGillicuddy, first met handsome Cuban nightclub bandleader, bongo drummer, and singer, Ricky Ricardo, played by her husband in real life, Desi Arnaz, and soon, thereafter, in the TV series, Ricky and Lucy married and years of comedy followed. Instead of being a comedian taking the role of a musician and singer, as was Ricky, when my parents first met, my father was a Standard Oil man, playing the role of a comedian.
Not long after her arrival to the far northern territory, the young nurse received an invitation to a 4th of July dance that was to be held at the community center in Seward, a small town nestled against Mount Marathon at the head of Resurrection Bay. Her roommate arranged a blind date for her with a guy she was told was very handsome and quite a catch. When she arrived with her girlfriend, they saw the young man who was to be her date for the evening standing on a table top, in comedic fashion, holding a Bible above his head, mimicking some generic hellfire and brimstone preacher. He was condemning the partygoers for their sinful, drunken ways, all to the delight of his friends. Despite the frivolity of it all, the young woman who was to become my mother found his behavior to be rude and irreverent. She was sure she would never have anything to do with a man she considered unacceptably disrespectful and irreligious. Six months later, she walked down the aisle to marry the man she found abhorrent a half-year before and was ready to begin another exciting chapter in her life.
Very soon thereafter, the beautiful redhead became pregnant with her first child, and, upon hearing the news, her husband sent the young mother-to-be to his parents' home in Washington State, to give him time to build a new home for their family in the Alaskan wilderness. All this could have become a pilot for a family oriented TV series, but the next events would have had to be left on the cutting room floor.
For a number of months, the young man didn't communicate with his bride. She wrote weekly, and sometimes more often, but in all the months she was gone, she never received a single communication from him. She waited and waited for a letter or a wire telling her that their new home was ready for her return, or maybe a note saying that he missed her, but nothing ever came. Less than nine months after her wedding day, and shortly before the child was to be born, the beautiful redhead made a decision to return to Alaska. Without telling her young husband of her intention, she booked passage on the Baranof, a passenger and cargo ship that departed from the Port of Seattle, crossed the Gulf of Alaska, and headed to the far north territory. And as fall was making its way toward the cold and dark of winter, the very pregnant young woman disembarked from the ship onto the dock at Seward to reunite with her dashing husband and their new life together.
But instead of finding her new house completed, or at least under construction, she found that her husband of less than 9 months was living with an Alaskan native woman. The details of what happened immediately afterward never became a part of the family story; the indiscretion of her husband was mentioned only once to me, and then it was put back in the box of unacceptable memories, never to be brought out into the open again.
A few weeks later, when the redhead came home from the hospital with her infant daughter, the three of them lived in a small apartment until her husband completed remodeling a slightly bigger home for the young family to live. Buried in the other clippings of unacceptable footage would have been the scene at the hospital in which the young grief-stricken mother sobbed with heart-breaking disappointment when she was told she had given birth to a lovely little girl. The redhead wanted a boy.
The next episodes would likely have included the births of the next four children, one girl after another and another, with the last being the long awaited boy.
And later episodes would include camping trips in the summers, retreats to the cabin on the Kenai river, and blizzards in the winters with images of the young family of seven making its way through the normal challenges of life in the cold north, maybe something like the stories of Little House on the Prairie. We four girls even began singing together, and if we had the right opportunities we might have given Lawrence Welk's Lennon sisters reason to be concerned about the competition.
But unlike the TV episodes in which everything was depicted as good and problems were solved in the allotted half hour or hour, all was not well behind closed doors of my family home. And as a sidebar, it is interesting to note that the people in the TV families were fighting demons of their own behind the scenes, but, in either case, such things were not made public back then.
Much of what happened in the icy cold territory disappeared into the unconscious of most all of my family members' psyches. While some of the darker events were dismissed as being uncharacteristic of an otherwise wonderful family, they were seldom discussed, even to this day. However, the extremely dark events that happened to little Sandy, and perhaps, to others in my family were not only not open for discussion they were not acknowledged as ever having happened at all by everyone but my oldest sister and me.
* * *
Explaining to anyone what it was like being little Sandy growing up in a household of abuse has never been an easy task because most of my adult life I had almost no recollection of being little Sandy. A few scattered memories, like tiny puzzle pieces, fit the preferred picture of the perfect family, but most of what I call the very difficult "always" memories didn't fit in that perfect puzzle; they just couldn't be made to match the image we wanted so much to claim as real.
The preferred picture did exist now and then. I recall building snow forts and snowmen with my siblings, as well as experiencing blizzards in 40 degree below zero temperatures that kept us out of school and all bundled away in our little home for days at a time keeping warm against the oftentimes treacherous winters. I remember camping trips in the summers, encounters with moose and bears, and feeding baby deer by hand from the garden behind the old log cabin on Kenai Lake at the headwaters of the Kenai River. My heart smiles when I recall listening to stories told under the stars around the crackling, sparking campfire. On one of those memorable log cabin nights, my father made his famous fudge, and while it was cooling, he made popcorn for all seven of us. My parents seemed truly happy that night, and at least a part of me felt safe and loved. Every now and then, when I get into a dismal mood, I have a longing for fudge and popcorn.
These were the good things that made it easier to forget the not so good things and helped us bury the really bad things so we'd never have to remember them at all.
* * *
Just after I turned 9, around Thanksgiving time, my family moved from Seward to Anchorage and life changed dramatically for us. The truly terrible things that happened in our birth town stopped. We had the most extravagant Christmas we'd ever had that year and even got a television set and later, a new automobile.
Lowell Thomas Jr., the famous film and television producer, who's home was over the river and through the woods in a very different neighborhood than our house, arranged for a gigantic children's Christmas party. It included a sleigh ride through the snow-packed streets, as children were picked up along the way to join in the season's festivities. There was real hay in the sleigh, and horses had bells that jangled when the magnificent animals shifted from trotting to dashing through the snow, just like we were living the Jingle Bells song. We sang Christmas Carols, like something from the movies, and I remember having hot chocolate and cookies in the biggest living room I had ever seen. We were living out own version of the famous White Christmas movie.
That first Christmas in Anchorage, one of my gifts was an exquisite pair of ice skates that I wore constantly that winter. With blade guards, I could wear the skates to school instead of shoes so I could skate to the bus stop and back home again, and of course, I was able to skate on the huge ice rink outside Northstar Elementary School, for recess, gym class, and lunchtime. For just a little while, I dreamed of being a professional ice skater. About that same time, the neighbor girl taught me the words to Silent Night in German, while we made angels in the freshly fallen snow and tried to sing the lovely version even more beautifully when a neighbor boy we both thought was so handsome walked past us. That was a storybook winter.
There was such magic when spring came, which meant that jackets, scarves, gloves, and boots could be put away and we could run, unencumbered, wearing canvas shoes, t-shirts, and corduroy pants. The most "spiritual" experience for me in my Alaskan childhood was the first day the tiny green buds opened on trees, a sign that life was returning after what seemed like an eternity when all life was gone.
Just a bike ride away, there were excursions to the cliff, overlooking the fjord, where my older sister and I believed we actually discovered an island that no one had ever seen before, and we found our way through the forest to a place of beauty unmatched by any place I have ever seen in this world, before or since, that my sister named Happy Valley and another we called Pine Valley.
All of these memories fit the picture that would be acceptable, not just to us, but also, as a showpiece to the world about our family. And, I suspect that some of my siblings hold tightly to this picture, choosing not to open the doors that go into places where other images might be remembered for fear they will loose these wonderful memories.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE MEANING OF THREE: BEHIND THE MASKby SANDY SELA-SMITH Copyright © 2009 by Sandy Sela-Smith . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
