I was the second child and only girl in my family until I was twelve; my little brother was born then. I was born in Chicago to my Army dad and my stay-at-home mom (it was 1960) and I had an older brother. When I was three we moved to Germany for about three years. Those were wonderful years filled with castles, fairy tales, ballet lessons, pink and white tutus, satin toe shoes, flowers and flower boxes, feather bedding, trips to amazingly beautiful places and saturation in the European cultures of Germany, France and the Netherlands.
I was six when we came back to America. The return devastated me. We were stationed in Aurora, Colorado. America was dirty, littered, ugly; no fairytale black forest or castles, no beautiful art and architecture, just hick cowboys. I hated my own country. No one ever knew how I felt and I had no way of articulating my feelings then.
Soon after, my parents divorced; I was only seven years old. Their divorce was a shattering experience for my brother and I and he dealt with it by abusing me verbally and physically. We moved several times and my brother and I were left alone a lot while our Mom worked.
When I was in second grade, my Dad came to visit for Christmas. My brother and I were outside playing and I came in to use the bathroom only to see my mom flat on her back, my dad straddling her and beating her. I remember screaming and my brother came in with his new bow and arrow set in his hands; he nocked the arrow and told Dad to get off our Mother or he would kill him. Dad got off but Mom was black and blue in the face.
A few days later, we moved away from Colorado; my mom drove us three to her bachelor brother's house in Pennsylvania. A few days after we got there and she got us enrolled in school, she left and went back to Denver; leaving us alone with an uncle we barely knew. His first nanny was mean but the second one was nice. I remember crying myself to sleep at night a lot. My big uncle, (he was well over six feet tall) would rock me in the rocking chair, hold me close and call me his little old bag because I wore some old grown up dresses he had in his basement. Even though my brother was meaner than ever to me, I clung to him like a lifeline because by then, I felt I had lost my father and my mother; my brother was barely ten years old. My mother was only gone two months but it felt like a year to me. While I was there, my maternal grandmother got my hair cut on my birthday; it was so short it was like a boy and I cried because my curly dark brown hair was gone.
My mother came and got us and took us back to Denver where we met her new boyfriend. He was an African American and we lived in a hotel for the summer months. We moved to a house for the start of the school year and when I was nine, my mother married her African American boyfriend. He resented my brother and I because he really just wanted Mom to himself. That same year, my mom told me she didn't trust my dad around me so that was why we only saw him in the summer for a month at his mother's house. From then on, I was afraid to love my father.
We moved in the middle of the night because my step dad couldn't make enough money to pay the rent and we were running from unpaid rent. The new home we rented was in a neighborhood with mostly Black people. My brother was beaten up by some of the Black kids there; they used the tips of fishing rods to beat him which left welts on his back. He had been a gentle (except to me) person all his life, more the studious type. In that house, my brother and I were awakened in the middle of the night after my mom and stepdad had had a huge, screaming fight. My stepdad said he was taking mom to the emergency room because she tried to kill herself. I think I was ten years old. My brother and I clung to her the next day as she lay in bed, depressed. We were both afraid to leave her alone lest she try again.
We moved from that house to another in a different neighborhood. By this time, I was in fifth grade and looking big and chunky so kids were teasing me about being fat on a daily basis. My Mom got pregnant while my brother and I were on our annual summer month-long visit to our dad and fraternal grandmother's place. Those visits were filled with carefree summer days with our dad and lots of religious holy roller stuff.
When I was told that my mom was pregnant, I didn't feel anything but resentment. Her pregnancy was difficult so I was made, as the only girl, to do most of the hosuework, all of the laundry and run and fetch for my mother every day. My baby brother was born at the end of May so I spent my summer vacation getting up at 7 AM every morning to make my mom breakfast because no one else would do it. I was left with the baby every time the family went anywhere and I had to change his diapers, rinse them out in the toilet, wash, hang out, take down, fold them and put them away. My older brother just got to play with our baby brother so he liked him.
My mom kicked out our stepdad when the baby was about 4 or 5 months old. Later, after Christmas, my older brother went to live with our Dad and my Mom, baby brother and I moved to inner city Denver. I was alone in a public bathroom in Denver when I was molested by a young man who felt me up, forced a kiss on me, touched my breasts and threatened to hurt me. He was pressed up against me, full length and my back was against the wall. I was lucky that I got away before anything worse happened but that shook me to the core. I was five feet seven inches tall, a BIG girl and up until then, feeling perfectly capable of taking care of myself but that confidence was destroyed in those few minutes against that wall in that bathroom. I was attending yet another school.
The summer I was 13, my mother decided to divorce my stepdad and let me move in with my dad, too. I loved living on base with my Dad because it meant stability. I was still wary of my Dad, though he never did try to do anything sexual to me. Military bases are such microcosms where everyone knows what you are going through so they are just more cohesive and accepting to some degree. It is like living in a small town. On my 14th brithday, my parents remarried. I was fairly content then. I loved my little brother by then and felt like I was his second mother.
when I was 15, my dad got orders to go to Okinawa so we packed up and moved there for a year. That was so much fun! I loved living there and seeing the Japanese culture, people, architecture, music, food and so on. Though I was still fat and introverted, I was enjoying the church youth group and the camping trips we made.
We moved to Lawton, OK after that year in Okinawa. After I turned sixteen , my brother went to live with our fraternal grandmother and I loved being out from under his overbearing influence. When we got on-base housing and it would mean switching schools (which would have been my 15th school in 11 years) my parents took me out instead and allowed me to work as a child care worker for the post chapels. I earned money but most of all, I was allowed to study anything I wanted. I came home with stacks of books on ancient civilizations, religions, anthropology, psychology and history. My brother came back to live with us and then, after being there for a year, my Dad prepared to retire in Tucson.
My whole life, throughout all this, I was aware that I seemed to have intuition though I didn't know what it was called back then. I would lie on the ground, spread eagled, on a rainy day and feel the rain fall on me. I felt like I was one with the earth, as though the rain soaked into me and then into the ground. The wind caressed my face and lifted my hair during storms and I loved the electric feeling of storms. I always felt like an old soul and like someone that knew things that I could never describe to anyone else. I seemed to know what people were feeling or when they were lying. In Fort Sill, when I was 16, I would light a small flame in my room, chant some words, face the west window (I had three windows in my room then), feel the energy rise up in me until my fingertips tingled and I fairly burst with it. I wanted to let it out with a primal scream but on-base curfew being what it was I could not so it was a wordless and silent scream. I felt things so much and I could not tell anyone because my family were predominantly air signs who lived in their heads and were not familiar with intuition; they often belittled me for it. I felt like I was different from my family and most people.
We moved to Tucson and I was 18; I took my GED and passed and read everything I could get my hands on about astrology, Paganism, tarot cards, and Robert Wilson's book "Cosmic Trigger." This book was about thinking about what you think about and being aware.
I was a sheltered but aware virgin, taught to think for myself and to think out of the box. I was very innocent and unprepared for life; I knew all the facts and correct info about sex and procreation and a lot about politics and how people really think and act but I was ignorant of relationships for the most part. I was intensely curious about sex and relationships after reading so many romance novels (including the smutty ones) but was afraid; I felt that men couldn't be trusted. Even my brother was messed up. I overheard him tell my mother (through the AC vent between our rooms) that he thought I "wanted him" sexually. I was sick to my stomach. I didn't like my mother, I was estranged from my father though I lived in the same house with him, and now my older brother, who I looked up to, was getting sexual thoughts about me. I didn't belong to any of them and my little brother was too young for me to relate to much. I wanted to get out and away from this sick family. I was looking for love and acceptance. Within a year, I would travel and my life would change drastically.
But that is for another post.
I was six when we came back to America. The return devastated me. We were stationed in Aurora, Colorado. America was dirty, littered, ugly; no fairytale black forest or castles, no beautiful art and architecture, just hick cowboys. I hated my own country. No one ever knew how I felt and I had no way of articulating my feelings then.
Soon after, my parents divorced; I was only seven years old. Their divorce was a shattering experience for my brother and I and he dealt with it by abusing me verbally and physically. We moved several times and my brother and I were left alone a lot while our Mom worked.
When I was in second grade, my Dad came to visit for Christmas. My brother and I were outside playing and I came in to use the bathroom only to see my mom flat on her back, my dad straddling her and beating her. I remember screaming and my brother came in with his new bow and arrow set in his hands; he nocked the arrow and told Dad to get off our Mother or he would kill him. Dad got off but Mom was black and blue in the face.
A few days later, we moved away from Colorado; my mom drove us three to her bachelor brother's house in Pennsylvania. A few days after we got there and she got us enrolled in school, she left and went back to Denver; leaving us alone with an uncle we barely knew. His first nanny was mean but the second one was nice. I remember crying myself to sleep at night a lot. My big uncle, (he was well over six feet tall) would rock me in the rocking chair, hold me close and call me his little old bag because I wore some old grown up dresses he had in his basement. Even though my brother was meaner than ever to me, I clung to him like a lifeline because by then, I felt I had lost my father and my mother; my brother was barely ten years old. My mother was only gone two months but it felt like a year to me. While I was there, my maternal grandmother got my hair cut on my birthday; it was so short it was like a boy and I cried because my curly dark brown hair was gone.
My mother came and got us and took us back to Denver where we met her new boyfriend. He was an African American and we lived in a hotel for the summer months. We moved to a house for the start of the school year and when I was nine, my mother married her African American boyfriend. He resented my brother and I because he really just wanted Mom to himself. That same year, my mom told me she didn't trust my dad around me so that was why we only saw him in the summer for a month at his mother's house. From then on, I was afraid to love my father.
We moved in the middle of the night because my step dad couldn't make enough money to pay the rent and we were running from unpaid rent. The new home we rented was in a neighborhood with mostly Black people. My brother was beaten up by some of the Black kids there; they used the tips of fishing rods to beat him which left welts on his back. He had been a gentle (except to me) person all his life, more the studious type. In that house, my brother and I were awakened in the middle of the night after my mom and stepdad had had a huge, screaming fight. My stepdad said he was taking mom to the emergency room because she tried to kill herself. I think I was ten years old. My brother and I clung to her the next day as she lay in bed, depressed. We were both afraid to leave her alone lest she try again.
We moved from that house to another in a different neighborhood. By this time, I was in fifth grade and looking big and chunky so kids were teasing me about being fat on a daily basis. My Mom got pregnant while my brother and I were on our annual summer month-long visit to our dad and fraternal grandmother's place. Those visits were filled with carefree summer days with our dad and lots of religious holy roller stuff.
When I was told that my mom was pregnant, I didn't feel anything but resentment. Her pregnancy was difficult so I was made, as the only girl, to do most of the hosuework, all of the laundry and run and fetch for my mother every day. My baby brother was born at the end of May so I spent my summer vacation getting up at 7 AM every morning to make my mom breakfast because no one else would do it. I was left with the baby every time the family went anywhere and I had to change his diapers, rinse them out in the toilet, wash, hang out, take down, fold them and put them away. My older brother just got to play with our baby brother so he liked him.
My mom kicked out our stepdad when the baby was about 4 or 5 months old. Later, after Christmas, my older brother went to live with our Dad and my Mom, baby brother and I moved to inner city Denver. I was alone in a public bathroom in Denver when I was molested by a young man who felt me up, forced a kiss on me, touched my breasts and threatened to hurt me. He was pressed up against me, full length and my back was against the wall. I was lucky that I got away before anything worse happened but that shook me to the core. I was five feet seven inches tall, a BIG girl and up until then, feeling perfectly capable of taking care of myself but that confidence was destroyed in those few minutes against that wall in that bathroom. I was attending yet another school.
The summer I was 13, my mother decided to divorce my stepdad and let me move in with my dad, too. I loved living on base with my Dad because it meant stability. I was still wary of my Dad, though he never did try to do anything sexual to me. Military bases are such microcosms where everyone knows what you are going through so they are just more cohesive and accepting to some degree. It is like living in a small town. On my 14th brithday, my parents remarried. I was fairly content then. I loved my little brother by then and felt like I was his second mother.
when I was 15, my dad got orders to go to Okinawa so we packed up and moved there for a year. That was so much fun! I loved living there and seeing the Japanese culture, people, architecture, music, food and so on. Though I was still fat and introverted, I was enjoying the church youth group and the camping trips we made.
We moved to Lawton, OK after that year in Okinawa. After I turned sixteen , my brother went to live with our fraternal grandmother and I loved being out from under his overbearing influence. When we got on-base housing and it would mean switching schools (which would have been my 15th school in 11 years) my parents took me out instead and allowed me to work as a child care worker for the post chapels. I earned money but most of all, I was allowed to study anything I wanted. I came home with stacks of books on ancient civilizations, religions, anthropology, psychology and history. My brother came back to live with us and then, after being there for a year, my Dad prepared to retire in Tucson.
My whole life, throughout all this, I was aware that I seemed to have intuition though I didn't know what it was called back then. I would lie on the ground, spread eagled, on a rainy day and feel the rain fall on me. I felt like I was one with the earth, as though the rain soaked into me and then into the ground. The wind caressed my face and lifted my hair during storms and I loved the electric feeling of storms. I always felt like an old soul and like someone that knew things that I could never describe to anyone else. I seemed to know what people were feeling or when they were lying. In Fort Sill, when I was 16, I would light a small flame in my room, chant some words, face the west window (I had three windows in my room then), feel the energy rise up in me until my fingertips tingled and I fairly burst with it. I wanted to let it out with a primal scream but on-base curfew being what it was I could not so it was a wordless and silent scream. I felt things so much and I could not tell anyone because my family were predominantly air signs who lived in their heads and were not familiar with intuition; they often belittled me for it. I felt like I was different from my family and most people.
We moved to Tucson and I was 18; I took my GED and passed and read everything I could get my hands on about astrology, Paganism, tarot cards, and Robert Wilson's book "Cosmic Trigger." This book was about thinking about what you think about and being aware.
I was a sheltered but aware virgin, taught to think for myself and to think out of the box. I was very innocent and unprepared for life; I knew all the facts and correct info about sex and procreation and a lot about politics and how people really think and act but I was ignorant of relationships for the most part. I was intensely curious about sex and relationships after reading so many romance novels (including the smutty ones) but was afraid; I felt that men couldn't be trusted. Even my brother was messed up. I overheard him tell my mother (through the AC vent between our rooms) that he thought I "wanted him" sexually. I was sick to my stomach. I didn't like my mother, I was estranged from my father though I lived in the same house with him, and now my older brother, who I looked up to, was getting sexual thoughts about me. I didn't belong to any of them and my little brother was too young for me to relate to much. I wanted to get out and away from this sick family. I was looking for love and acceptance. Within a year, I would travel and my life would change drastically.
But that is for another post.
1 comment:
hello Carrie,
You are wonderful storyteller. I'm sorry for the harsh lessons so early in your life. Perhaps because you had to shield it when young, your light shines more brightly today.
I saw your question on PW re Sabian symbols, please enjoy this link....
http://sabiansymbols.astrologyweekly.com/list.php
Yes, you round up, 3 pisces 24 is read as 4 pisces
I first encountered Sabian symbols many years ago, through my first astrology teacher and later through a friend who is also a counselor. I am just starting to study them myself.
The degree of the Asc, MC, North node, Moon, point of fortune, any really strong aspects, etc. can add insights and richness to your chart. I found some degrees seem to resonate more than others with me. My Sun totally fits its degree in many ways on many levels.
again, enjoy!
liminali
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