Dear Readers,
This week we push the pause button on behalf of my younger self and her well-being.
To support her and to maintain her dignity this is an appropriate place for:
‘INTERMISSION’
At this point in her story, three empowering gifts, comprised of two books and an unexpected letter, have been received.
The Farm has given her a vision for how she would like her life to look.
In taking this intermission, I stretch my hand across time and space to touch her and encourage her. I hold space for the next part of her journey.
Sheltered in the apartment, she does not know the people surrounding her. I have been fact-checking and verifying the validity of this part of her story. She doesn’t know who the Medicine Man is. She has no idea that he and three other men made front-page news in May 1968.
In Review
Our story begins in the fall of 1967. The young girl, recently graduated from high school with the dream of being an artist (she works two jobs and shares an apartment with her best friend) finds out that she is pregnant.
Her boss at the dress shop thinks to solve the problem by sending her to Mexico for a weekend abortion. The eighteen-year-old refuses to go stating, “I didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t deserve to be punished.” The boss calls mom in for a meeting, wanting to convince her that Mexico is the answer. The girl continues to refuse. Mom, frightened and embarrassed invents a story: her daughter is promoted and will move ‘to Chicago’ to work at a branch of the advertising agency that employs her.
For clarity: there was never any plan to actually move to Chicago. Instead, mom takes the girl to a downtown convent run by Catholic Charities. She plans to leave her daughter in the convent/home for unwed mothers. The legal arrangement is made. The infant will be relinquished to the Catholic Charity adoption system. When the young girl refuses to stay at the convent the social worker makes special arrangements.
Three months later, in January 1968, mom delivers her daughter to a mansion owned by an elderly couple; major Catholic church benefactors. The girl will live and work as a domestic until the baby is born in June.
Six weeks later an ambulance is called when she is found collapsed. She has been overworked and is at risk of losing the baby. The doctor prescribes two weeks of complete bed rest. Mrs. at the big house tells the girl that she cannot return. Mother is forced to make new arrangements and moves her daughter to the home of a young widow where a family grieves the loss of husband and father.
In the early morning hours of June 8, her best friend’s father drives her to the hospital. The morning after the baby arrives a nurse makes a mistake and places the infant into her arms. The girl quickly draws her little boy’s portrait on the back of the adoption papers. The error is quickly realized, the baby is taken away. The girl suffers a breakdown and is quickly sedated.
The following day a taxi waits outside the hospital and delivers her ‘from Chicago’ to the family home. She does her best to act normal.
The first words she hears her younger sister call out as she runs to meet the car, “Donna! Donna! Guess who’s dead?!” She learns of the shocking death of someone that she loved.
Numb yet needing to pretend that everything is fine, mom tells her that there is no room for her in the family home, instead, she will stay next door with neighbors in their attic room.
After some week’s pass, mom reluctantly loans her car for the afternoon. Calling in advance the nineteen-year-old speaks to a man who sounds excited that she will be coming by. She doesn’t know it’s a trap.
Feeling joyful and relaxed for the first time in many months, she arrives at the artist’s house. Inside she is met with attempted soul murder. She is overpowered by three members of a motorcycle gang with an attack dog and guns. They lock her into a dark stair, toss a coin, swig alcohol, and pop Quaaludes. She is held at gunpoint, physically overpowered, and sexually assaulted.
Left battered and alone, a man in a business suit finds her in the kitchen where the perpetrators have spray-painted their names onto the ceiling. He tends to her and insists on giving her something, saying, “This will help you feel better.”
The ‘medicine’ (LSD) takes her to another realm. She experiences a visually beautiful magical mystery tour. Her trip delivers her to The Farm. There she experiences a mystical vision; she sees the image of Jesus rising above the trees as she receives the message that ‘All is Well.’ She meets musicians living at The Farm, the band manager makes her shoes, he also gives her a book of ancient wisdom. Days into her stay she explores the lush garden and sees Alice diving into the dazzling pool. She and Alice meet and become companions. During these two weeks at The Farm, the young woman sees how her life could look.
Asked to leave The Farm when her companion hurts her ankle the nineteen-year-old disassociates; goes numb. Displaced, bereft, no moorings, her body scarred, and infected she seeks help. The doctor determines, in addition to severe STD, a diagnose of depression but she rebels against this label, and instead, he gives her a book (the second gift) saying, “Read this. I don’t want you to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
With no place to go, she is harbored by the Medicine Man. He puts her in an apartment in an ethnic pocket where she rests and heals. She is now in a dangerous underworld of rebels.
We last see her as she reads the letter written, and illustrated by Alice.
No matter what happens next she has received three ‘coming of age’ gifts.
Here is a brief overview of the 1968 cultural/political climate:
The Revolution That Was 1968
In 1968 our country was in chaos and crisis. There was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. prompting civil rights protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots#:~:text=The%20King%20assassination%20riots%2C%20also,experienced%20since%20the%20Civil%20War.
It was an election year. A presidential candidate was assassinated. There was an on-going war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_in_the_Vietnam_War
The year 1968 remains one of the most tumultuous single years in history, marked by historic achievements, shocking assassinations, a much-hated war, and a spirit of rebellion that swept through countries all over the world. Occurring at the dawn of the television age, the historic events of 1968 also played out on TV screens across the country, bringing them home in a way that had never been possible before.
https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/1968-events
Two assassinations, a bloody war, violent protests, racial unrest, colorful hippies, a celebration of sex and rebellion, and John Lennon’s countercultural anthem, “Revolution”—1968 had them all.
It was the year that shattered the fragile consensus that had shaped American society since the end of World War II. It was the year when assassinations ended the last hope of a nonviolent civil rights movement and the creation of a new biracial political coalition. The year witnessed the coming of age of the baby-boom generation, the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, who rebelled against tradition and all forms of conformity. And it forged, for better or worse, the world in which we live today.
The 1960s began with hope and optimism, with policymakers and intellectuals celebrating the dawn of a new age of consensus. But the fragile harmony quickly began to fray. Young Americans took to the streets to protest President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the Vietnam war. African Americans had marched to end the southern system of Jim Crow. Women fought against gender stereotypes that confined them to the role of housewives. And hippies questioned the cultural assumptions that informed American life.
These political and cultural resentments simmering beneath the surface of American society exploded in 1968. Nearly every week produced news of another earth-shattering event.
https://www.history.com/news/the-revolution-that-was-1968?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history
The nineteen-year-old has been unknowingly drafted into a personal warzone.
Next week’s post requires a Warning:
Use discretion before reading its content.
Dearest D – Sharing my support as well! And ditto what Donna S said. Thank you for the “review” as it provided a fluid context and perspective as the young girl goes through these traumatic, soul killing times – hollowed out indeed! Glad she is taking some restorative time to breathe… I remember the tumultuous 60’s – the whole decade was such a violent time in America…
I wanted to share a poem that I just happened to find on my desk last week in a pile of papers I was going through…
“We delight in the beauty of the
butterfly, but rarely admit the
changes [trauma] it has gone through
to achieve that beauty.” Maya Angelou
Much Love… MM
Dear MM ~ Love the Maya Angelou poem. Thank you.
Yes. The decade. It was a challenge.
The beauty of growing UP^ through all of these following decades is the learning to see challenge as opportunity.
The nineteen-year-old didn’t have that level of brain development. She was simply attempting to put one foot in front of the other. She is up against a wall. She isn’t really able to describe what happens next. It appears the Intermission will be longer than I would have thought.
I’m honoring my commitment to letting her say what she needs to, as she can, using her own words.
Yes, I totally understand… I completely honor how the nineteen year old needs to reveal her experience in her own time and in her own way… Thank you for being her voice…
Thanks, MM ~ The pace is not mine to set. I appreciate so very much those Readers who are able to go the distance as the nineteen-year-old parses out the experiences that came to meet her.
So interesting that you say she is hollowed out. A card will be winging its way to you next week that resonates with that idea. Synchronicity!
Thank you for giving the 19 year old some space to encourage her storytelling. When we tell our own stories, there is no voice over to explain the cultural context that shapes our experience or gives meaning to it in retrospect. Of course we can always interject with our own explanations, but many of us don’t ever consider, let alone understand, how our lives resonate with broader movements in our small communities, or countries, or on the planet as a whole. (We can’t even understand our own family dynamics, although later we might try.) We can’t sustain awareness of how our bodies register social cataclysm, or know exactly how often our naivety leads us towards danger. Living in such shattering times, the 19 year old is shattered. And yet she remains intact. I hear your warning. And I hear your need for understanding. I’m ready to listen.
Thank you, Donna.
Your reflection on this chapter is helpful because as you point out; “We can’t sustain awareness of how our bodies register social cataclysm or know exactly how often our naivety leads us towards danger.”
This young woman is hollowed out and remains in danger. She is naive and yet as you also observe, she does somehow remain intact.
I am so appreciative of you being a Reader, bringing your understanding, listening to a young person moving through a challenging year making for a lasting rite of passage.