TCBY was still making parfaits when we got back to California. And it was a good thing, too, because on a bright, sunny day not long after we returned home, I drove over there to buy one for me and some of my guys. There was a bit of an argument over what to order, but we eventually settled on crunched-up Heath Bar on the bottom, chocolate frozen yogurt next, then butterscotch topping, then vanilla frozen yogurt, and mixed nuts on the top. Oh, and a dozen spoons ... to go.
I put it all in a little purple cooler with an ice pack and drove over to Diablo. I parked, grabbed the cooler and a plaid blanket, and hiked the mile up to the top. I found a private spot overlooking the bay, spread out the blanket, and laid the spoons side by side. I wrote my guys’ names on the handles of the spoons with a fine-point magic marker, and one at a time we took turns sharing the parfait. Right there in the world. Looking at the bay.
When I got home and told Rikki what we’d done, she cried and hugged us and said we’d done a good thing, and that made me cry, too.
* * *
Not too long after that, one of the people I’d interviewed for my dissertation study asked me if I’d be willing to speak at a conference for survivors of child abuse. The topic was “connectedness.” For some reason I accepted, but right away I started wanting to creep out of it, and every day until the conference I was kicking myself for getting us into such a mess when we had so much else going on, like the dissertation, and therapy, and being a dad, and eating parfaits. But Leif made sure I stuck to it and didn’t grow feathers, and everybody agreed not to come out while I was giving the speech. So when the day finally came, I didn’t shave any further than skin deep.
My sweet Rikki came along for support, and boy was I glad she did. She teased me a little while I drove to Oakland doing about forty miles an hour, saying, “Cam, you can go sixty-five here, you know.”
The conference was held in a huge, beautifully restored Victorian house, and there must have been two hundred people there, many of them multiples and some of them therapists. When we walked in and I saw them all, I thought that I’d just as soon dive off the Sears Building into a brassiere full of tapioca as give that speech.
Rikki held my hand until I was called up to the podium and it was too late. I turned and glanced at her for a long second, like it was the last time I was going to see her, and she squeezed my hand and smiled wide showing all the china and said, “Honey, I’m right behind ya ... like a jogger’s fart.” I cracked a smile at that, and it hurt my face because I was so tense. I walked up with my notes in my hand, hoping not to trip on the stairs, and said this:
I was invited to speak to you today on the topic of connectedness, and I accepted for two reasons. The first is that as a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder, achieving what I think of as real connectedness has been, and still is, the single greatest challenge of my life. It’s what I strive for and want more than anything in the world. The second reason is to tell you about two connections I do have, to my wife Rikki and my son Kyle. They give me strength and hope and have literally saved my life.
It seems to me I’ve spent my entire life having nothing more than a toehold in this world. That’s all. Most of the time I feel like I’m just a piece of a human being, one of a bunch of jagged chips of glass from a broken vase, lying scattered on an old rug. I look over at the other broken pieces of glass and some of them look like me and some of them don’t, but we’re all just chips of glass on the same rug. And I say to myself, “Shouldn’t we be closer together?” We’d look a whole lot more like a vase if we were closer together, you know ... if we connected the pieces. And we’d be less likely to get swept up and thrown out with the trash.
I've got twenty-four alter personalities. I call them ‘my guys’ even though some of them are females, and we all live together in this body. We try to communicate with each other, try to get along and be concerned about each other’s problems, but sometimes it takes so much energy that somebody who may be in real pain gets left out to fend for himself. And if we let that happen ... if we don’t tend right to it and stick together, we eventually end up having serious problems. Either this body gets sick or gets hurt, or I can’t do what I’m supposed to do as a husband and a father. When my guys and I aren’t connected, things get dark and pasty and hollow-sounding, like a damp cave in a scary forest. And I don’t like caves. And I don’t like trees with eyes that follow me and branches that turn into hands when I’m not looking. No, I don’t like that at all. We need to stay connected. Then we’ll be out in the warm sun with the palm trees swaying, and shortsleeved shirts, and melty candy bars. And that’s much better.
I had a dream last night about me and my guys. In the dream we were all standing together barefoot on a deserted beach in the early morning fog with the sunrise poking through in soft yellow and orange streaks. Some of us were touching hands and catching glimpses of each other’s eyes, and some of us were just looking down at our naked feet in the sand.
We could all hear the waves lapping up on the beach and smell the salt air and feel the dampness on our faces. Some of us felt the cold ocean water wash up over our feet as it crept up onto the sand; others saw it coming and took a quick step backward to avoid getting wet. We all knew we were together on that beach, but we didn’t know why. Some of us knew they were in the present, some were sure they were in the past, and some thought they were far into the future. Some of us waited for the fog to lift ... and some thought the fog was white cotton candy. Anyway, that was my dream. Twenty-five people connected by the sand, the sea, and cotton candy.
I don’t just struggle with trying to be connected to my guys, the people in this body. Nope. I’ve felt disconnected from most other people for my whole life, too. For as long as I can remember, I’ve avoided looking too deeply into people’s eyes, because I was afraid that if they really looked at me ... if they really looked into my soul ... they’d see that nobody was there.
But I desperately want to feel like I’m part of this world and somehow connected to the people in it. I guess that’s why I'm here today. I’m hoping that somebody will look into my eyes and tell me they see somebody there, tell me they see Cameron West there. And if they see other people in there, well that’s okay, too. It has to be okay. I’m through being disconnected from me. I am who we are, and it’s got to be okay, or I’ve got no chance for a better life.
Over the past few years I’ve met a lot of people who, like me, had some really terrible things happen to them when they were young. And I know how damaging that can be, and how bad it hurts, and how hard it makes every aspect of your life. Child abuse is a dirty, oil-soaked jacket that’s almost impossible to take off, so you just seem to wear it right into all your relationships, and every time you brush up against something, or hug somebody, or eye some clean sheets on a freshly made bed, you just know some of that foul stuff is gonna rub off and spoil everything. And it usually does. You can pretty much count on it. And it’s a sad thing, because it keeps a lot of young relationships from growing up to be old ones. They just die young and sooner or later end up as tear stains in somebody’s journal.
Somehow I managed to be one of the lucky ones, though, and my relationship with my wife Rikki didn’t die young. It’s lasted for sixteen years, and it’s taken faith, and commitment, and Kleenex, too. I know it’s been difficult for Rikki these last few years, and confusing too, living with a bunch of people who all look like me. You might say our life together is a real patchwork, and it’s taken a lot of patching to make it work.
Rikki has lived in the tempest of a terrible war between the conflicting forces of will and pain, hope and uncertainty. Mine, and her own, too. And sometimes the smoke has gotten so thick we’ve almost lost the precious connection between us.
But there’s always been a little boy there to blow the air clear, even though he didn’t know he was doing it. His name is Kyle and he’s nine years old.
Now I think that being a parent isn’t easy even for regular people. And I know that being a parent and being a multiple is harder than a Georgia peach pit. It’s a source of both incredible joy and unspeakable pain for me. I know that Kyle needs and deserves normalcy and consistency in his life in order to grow up well adjusted. And I’m one of the two people responsible for providing him with those things. And that seems sort of like a cruel joke to me, because the only thing normal or consistent about me is that I’m consistently abnormal.
With all my heart I want Kyle to have a regular dad. And I want him to feel connected to his dad ... someone he can count on and look up to, not a dad who switches and usually doesn’t know what's going on. And I desperately want to feel connected to him. He’s my son. My little man.
So every day I struggle to look Kyle right in the eye ... and in the heart ... and be the same for him. And in that sameness, that repetition of daily stuff ... reading to him, making his lunch, talking things over ... that’s where Kyle and I connect. And that connection is its own gift. It gives Kyle the fathering he needs, and it helps me to feel more whole.
The really hard part, the one that cuts me like the sun’s glare off a shiny hood, is that as I’m doing that stuff, that daily stuff, trying to be a regular dad, I’m often looking at Kyle and interacting with him from some tiny island in my mind. And Kyle knows it, too. He knows it.
When an alter’s out or there’s some leakage going on between some of my guys, Kyle says, “Dad. Can you hear me? Come back.” And I’ll hear his little voice come floating in on a bottle cap that drifts across my ocean, and I’ll say to myself, “Damn, I’ve got to get back! I’ve got to get back!” And I’ll jump in the cap and paddle with all I’ve got till I find my way back to this small person who’s counting on me. Just knowing that Kyle’s at the end of the sound helps me to get back, but at the same time, knowing that I’m so far away, so much of the time ... that I’m never really there ... well that’s almost more than I can take. I don’t want Kyle to grow up and think his dad was crazy—that Dad was howling in the attic when he should’ve been playing on the porch. I want to be the daddy on the porch.
But you know what the worst thing in the whole world is to me? It’s not the thought that Kyle will think I’m crazy, or that Rikki won’t love me anymore, or that I’ll have to go back to another psychiatric hospital. It’s a rake. I call it Denial’s Rake. And it’s been dragged across my body, screeching its hideous tune, practically every waking and sleeping moment since I was half Kyle’s age. Denial about what happened to me, denial about the people who hurt me, and denial about being a multiple.
I’ve spent too long covering my ears and screaming, trying to drown out the ugly sound of Denial’s Rake. And I’ve only just recently begun to understand that for all those years it was my own hand holding that rake, my own voice singing that screeching tune.
Well, I finally put that rake down, and it feels strange, too, because I’m so used to carrying it. And my inclination is to pick it back up. But I’m leaving it down, and I’m determined not to touch it again. And little by little I’m accepting and understanding who I am and how I got this way. I’m connecting to myself, or, I should say, my selves.
And though my life isn’t easy, it isn’t always hard, and lately it even seems to be getting a little easier. Why just this morning I told Rikki I haven’t had a bad week in days.
And you know something? It’s true.