At my graduation from AFI, 1993
The people who have most trouble believing my past are those who knew me in childhood or young adulthood, who were around when I was trafficked, who knew my mother and were charmed by her, or those for whom my story touches their own lives a little bit too closely for comfort.
I was also charmed by my mother. I also believed her to be the wonderful, modern, open-minded parent she wanted to be. I felt protective of her, tried hard to love her and had my heart broken in the most terrible ways, again and again, until I allowed in the whole truth and wasn’t blinded by her surface demeanor anymore.
My rescue from the network at age 11, came with a long, detailed set of instructions for my continued survival. After listening to surreal notions of how to avoid prostitution, drug addiction, the cities where I should live, the kind of man I should marry and to keep quiet about the network or they would find and kill me, my immediate future was addressed. I was going back home to a mother who would not be able to sell me to the network anymore. I was given a bag with sleeping pills and opioids, which I should use conservatively, one half a day at the most, to deal with my mother’s certain anger (for not being able to sell me anymore) and desire for revenge. I did need those pills. And could have used more.
The gangster who rescued me could easily predict my mother’s reaction, because he knew her. He knew her quite well. He had slept with her. In front of me.
It had been the moment that my mother’s sickness had reached its zenith, a perverse climax towards which all her actions with regards to me had led. My mother never sold me to adult men for the money - we were not poor - she entered me into sexual relationships with men so that she would be able to steal those men from me, to restore the righteous balance of adults loving and sleeping with each other.
This last reason may sound much too generous, coming from her primary victim. The restoration of adult love was the deepest layer of an entirely unconscious process performed by a psychopathic woman, who was completely caught in the trauma story of her own past and who perpetuated that story relentlessly.
Though my mother never told me that her father had sexually abused her, she was stuck in an incestuous triangle. From the photos I’ve seen, my grandfather and grandmother seemed to be really into each other. My mother was born in 1939 and her father left to fight in the 2nd World War soon after. He was captured and interned as a POW at Bergen-Belsen. He lost his middle finger in a work accident and would later reveal to me that being hospitalized had saved his life, because he was given more food there. There exist photos of him in his striped prison suit, skin over bones. He was released before the end of the war and returned home in 1944.
My mother’s emotional development seems to have come to an abrupt halt at age five, which was in 1944. Her town suffered famine and bombings in the years prior. Though I never observed any anxiety around food in her, she did at times starve me. She hated when my stepfather turned up the volume on the stereo, but then, he did put it on obnoxiously loud. The only way one could clearly detect she was off was in how she acted like a flirtatious, sexualized five year old girl. It looked like her greatest aim was to please men, especially by offering herself to them in any way possible, either sexually or through performing some other service. In this, my mother was far more eager than any other woman I’ve met, while obviously, it is not so uncommon for women to please men, sexually or otherwise.
My mother’s psychopathology did not stop there. She was highly invested in pleasing men, yes, but even more invested in getting revenge on me.
When my mother first saw the gangster, she was picking me up from a night I spent at a castle after a network orgy at the age of 10. He drove to drop me off near where she was parked. She noticed his red Porsche and blonde hair and was extremely excited, chatting on our ride home as if I had found a great boyfriend and prospects for marriage were good.
Once he started sexually assaulting me, he also started a secret affair with my mother. I was extremely attached to this gangster/perpetrator, who offered a reflection of some of my positive qualities to which my mother had remained completely blind. He was a parental figure. I had bonded with him, as per his invitation and suggestion that my mother was no good.
One unfortunate afternoon, I found them in bed together. My mother cried out:
“You thought you could have them all, didn’t you?”
I never heard or saw my mother as triumphant and elated as in this moment, penetrated by the man to whom she had pimped me out, so she could steal him back from me.
My mother was was four years old when her father returned home from the concentration camp. My grandfather once acted inappropriately with me. My mother was constantly acting from the place of a sexually abused girl whose spirit was deadened by trauma, who found life through the attention she received in the secret space of sexual transgression. She constantly relived a trauma story, trying to get the same kind of attention from men constantly, while her daughter served alternately as a split-off extension of her hated young self, and as the manifested dark side of her own mother, the secret rival.
The ultimate goal for this little girl would have been to be loved properly by both parents, and restore their unity.
Instead her mother died one month before her sixth birthday. Whatever feelings she harbored towards her mother, who undoubtedly did not love her very much, there would have been no way for that little girl to ever get past the shame and guilt of the abuse.
My mother continued to display the same patterns as she had in my childhood. The only difference was that in my adulthood I was not associated with any gangsters. She was charming to my friends, insisting I invite them to her place and spoiling them with hors-d’oeuvres and bubbly wine.
I once briefly dated an actor who met my mother. She was closer to his age than I was and connected with him, pleasing him in a subtle, sophisticated way, just as she had with the gangster. This was the pleasurable state at the beginning of a cycle which, had the opportunity arisen, would have ended with her stealing him from me.
Every time I met him afterwards, he asked how my mother was doing. With men who were with me, she was at her most charming, her most intelligent, her most attractive.
I lost friends who knew my mother. Having spent time with her, having been at the receiving end of her pleasantries and nurtured by her appetizers and desserts, they could not believe that she would have done what she did. She had a childlike quality, that made her seem extremely innocent.
It is always difficult to have known someone who turns out to be a psychopath and you had no idea. Psychopaths function. Psychopaths can be very intelligent and charming. Once they have you in their grip, it is hard to come to terms with their dark side unless you’ve felt the effects of their dark actions.
Trauma deadens. It is where we look for life that determines if happiness is going to be a short-lived high or an increasing joy. Everything is within. Our patterns are repetitions of past trauma stories that, once revealed and grieved, are forever changed. Joy comes from the boundless well of life that is our essence, which is increasingly revealed from peeling off layer after layer of trauma-induced ignorance.