She walks the bridge between this plane and other worlds unlocked by dreams.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website contains links to multiple studies published in journals about the potential impact of scoring high on an ACE test, not a test anyone wants to ace. The acronym stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences, and the first time I took it, I could imagine legions of female forerunners standing behind me, sneaking glances, exchanging looks and commenting on my answers.
“Look at this. She thinks she had it rough.”
“Didn’t she start working at sixteen? I’d already had two kids and a third on the way by then.”
“She rises at seven, makes coffee and reads the news? Does she know we buried our own children?”
Embarrassed by my privileged, almost self-indulgent life as a writer, I shut down my computer and went to the park. I watched the weekend farmer’s market set up, and wished the genetic memory of grafting fruit trees, growing tomatoes and baking bread had been passed down as easily as the tendency to develop diabetes.
There is a vestige of ice that never melts, stays in a state of permanent winter, hibernating in the bodies of people who have endured harsh circumstances. Whether the remnant is lodged in their hearts, minds or kidneys is another matter. No doctor can pinpoint that frozen spot by x-ray or an MRI, but I suspect that the shred lurks in people everywhere, in their tendency to contrast suffering, carve notches into a desert island palm tree, count the obstacles in place, note what has to be overcome: lack, miserable surroundings, poverty, an absence of love and nurturing, betrayal or abandonment. In these stories we tell ourselves and others, we should proceed with caution and forgo comparison. The potential pitfall is that we become enamoured with the self-made myth and discount serendipity. “Look what a person can do,” we say, “all on their own, if they try enough, work enough, are good enough.”
Does anyone genuinely feel safe, buffered or prepared for the unexpected? Wealthy people who grew up poor think the wolf is still lingering near the entrance, waiting for one mistake to pounce and put them back in a perilous situation.
Violence is a virus passed down through generations; no one is immune to its effects. There are no antibiotics. The changes made to DNA, established neural pathways, competent modes of coping, altered brain chemistry are a riddle science will solve one day. The gamble, by which I mean the winning lottery ticket—finding or building a safe, stable home environment, means you did it despite the odds, with the deck stacked against you. The past is always clamouring to be heard in the present and attempting to weigh in with an unwanted opinion on the future.
TST: Trauma Standard Time, the result of growing up in a home or culture steeped in brute force, is as pervasive and persistent as the common cold. Symptoms include growing accustomed to head-jerking slaps and still feeling their sting years later. Living with random regularity: the constant chaos of the world, the change-is-constant factor of our universe, the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Our bodies spinning through space on a bigger body turning in the cosmos—living with the unpredictable and still trying to forecast the future.
On the day I discovered the ACE test, I decided to use it for a lesson plan linked to an article on the problematic language around addiction (sticks and stones our ancestors fought with to survive, and we now use labels to tell people their value, to indicate their worth). I clicked through all the stages and scored what amounts to a C+ in academia and an “Oh, no” in the real world.
That night, I tossed and turned until two in the morning. In the brief window of sleep, the three hours before needing to get up and get gone to make it to campus on time, I had one of the dreams that has stalked me through adult life: I never left home. Never escaped the bungalow in Etobicoke. On waking, I splashed cold water on my face to shock the details out of my mind. At least, I mused on transit, I didn’t repeat the upsetting one about my parents expecting another child.
At some stage growing up, while my brain was storing memories and sorting through experiences, cataloguing information, it must have called a production meeting and hired a director, a script consultant, a camera assistant and a set decorator to prepare for late-night viewing that persistently surfaced when I stressed. TST ticktocking in the background like a cuckoo clock.
In the worst recurring dream, my parents had another baby and I’d snuck into the house to kidnap the kid. I rarely made it down the creaky hallway to the front door before waking up, shaking and sweating, relieved that none of it was true—that my parents weren’t so thoughtless, that I wasn’t an insta-mom responsible for another human’s happiness or well-being. Some nights I woke clutching a pillow—the babe I intended to steal.
In the other dream, I still lived at home, but worked at my current job, or the folks populating the dream were all people I’d met after leaving home. The nightmare machinations meant we were all stuck in my Etobicoke reality. Each time I had the dream, I would think, “How can this be? I thought I was done with this part of my life.” In my journal, I recorded the second dream again, full of the Vancouver cast of friends, three months before moving back to Toronto.
In the realm of REM sleep, both my father and I brooded that we would have to relive the worst, endure the hassles, the legal battles and the trouble all over again.
He had two recurring dreams. In the first, though separated in 2004 and divorced in 2008, he remained married to my mother, and he had this ongoing matrimony dream again before I returned to Toronto.
In the second dream, stranded in Bonefro, he relived a dreadful time from his life. Bad weather had trapped him on a mountain pass, fighting with a mule to return to the shelter of the village.
The first time I heard this one, my jaw dropped. “You serious? You, the mountain pass and a donkey? I don’t know what the word for cliché is in Italian.”
The chore of collecting firewood meant a sixteen-kilometre hike to the woods round trip, and my dad did the route three times daily, three days a week in winter. Half the wood sustained the family through the snowy season, fuel for warming the house and cooking; the rest my dad sold to purchase sustenance. “Forty-eight kilometres a day of walking. From the time I was a young teenager until I went to Switzerland when I was 21.”
Me, the city slicker raised in a house with electricity, running water and a furnace, I asked the dumb question: “Wouldn’t it have been better to do it all at once?”
“You can’t overload a donkey, it will collapse. The donkey falls down, how can you bring home wood to stay warm at night?”
The donkey, Serpent, belonged to another villager. My father borrowed the animal daily. Once, during a particularly bracing winter, the wind through the mountain pass blew bitter and harsh. My father felt his skin prickle with frostbite. He wore weathered old shoes, threadbare socks and a thin blazer over a buttoned shirt, over a wool undershirt. No scarf, no hat, no gloves. The pass worked like a wind tunnel blasting everyone who went through. The donkey refused to continue on the return leg of the trip. It brayed and stayed in one spot, stalled them there for over an hour, while my father yanked the collar again and again, trying to get them both home.
In both dreamscapes, he would think, “How can this be? I thought this ordeal ended a long time ago. I thought I was finished with the miserable part of my life.”
Fifteen years before their divorce, I dreamt I was stranded in my parents’ village at night. I stood outside on a rock-tiled road in the rain, looking into brightly decorated North American shop windows; faceless white mannequins, as attractive and becoming as plastic coat-hangers, were draped in pastel clothes. Fluorescent light spilled out of the stores; neon lights from shop signs glared off the wet pavement stones. The stores had replaced street-level spaces that used to house chickens, goats and mules.
Everything had changed, I thought. I’d never find what I needed.
In a blink, I stood at the entry to my father’s childhood home atop a crooked, steep stairway, scared and alone—wondering where my parents were.
I knocked on the door: no answer.
I tried the handle, pushing against the wood with my shoulder in case the lock had rusted shut. I had no idea how to get in, or what was inside. No one had lived in the house for over twelve years.
An extended loop played: How could I let this happen? How could I let this happen? How could I let this happen? How could I let this happen? I can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. This is not safe. This is not safe. Not safe. Not safe. Not safe.
I leaned my forehead against the door, unsure where to turn.
A man appeared at the foot of the stairs and made the gesture for ‘there’s nothing left,’ his hand cocked like a pistol and pivoting his palm. “You won’t get in without your mother. She has the key.”
I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t make out if he was family or foe, or as with my mom’s relatives, both. “But I’m not talking to my mother!”
“Boh.” He shrugged, and threw both hands up. In the mental dialect dictionary I used to suss out conversations, “Boh” was in between “I don’t know” and “I don’t care.” A daughter not speaking with her mother: poor woman, giving birth to such an ingrate.
“This isn’t her house. It’s my father’s,” I shouted. No reply. As conveniently as he appeared, he vanished, the winding roads empty in every direction I looked. I sat down on the steps, huddled against the wall and wished for a guide, someone who would explain everything.
I woke up wondering about the key.
I woke up and started recording my dreams in a diary.
By that point, my early twenties, I’d been looking for answers for a decade. Searching for reasons with the help of first a psychiatrist and then a therapist. The first of many attempts to solve a problem that had no solution.
In the fictional world built by Gene Rodenberry into the enormously successful Star Trek franchise, cadets at Starfleet are put through their training paces with a test based on a no-win situation: the Kobayashi Maru. The only person to ever “pass” the test is Captain Kirk, and he cheated. Every Saturday morning when episodes of classic Star Trek aired, I sat on the couch, eyes fixed on the television, dearly wanting to believe in a future where peace was the singular option. My mother would watch with me when she’d finished prepping salad and rapini for lunch. She liked Kirk, and I loved Spock, the Vulcan who favoured reason over rage. Played by Leonard Nimoy, Spock often remarked on humans as unruly, irrational and illogical beings.
Every day, my parents proved him right.