[Continued from Part 28. Click on the "Wuz" tag below to see previous entries.]

The alarm by my bed at my mother's and stepfather's house woke me up with its familiar high-pitched beeps on the morning of Saturday, October 24, 1999.

I switched it off and took a mental inventory. I felt ... different.

It wasn't like I bolted up from bed or anything like that; I have never been a morning person. Neither did I skyrocket from the dumps to the top of the world. The depression from which I had suffered since adolescence was cyclical. While I never felt manic highs, the dips that made me periodically suicidal were broken up by spells of relative stability. During the days since I had the great relief of getting laid off from my job earlier that month, stability had prevailed.

This new feeling, however, wasn't just stability. It was something strange, intriguing, and more than a little scary.

C.S. Lewis describes Narnia during the reign of the White Witch as "always winter and never Christmas." That aptly describes the state of my soul before that morning.

Winter isn't always horrible. Some people even like winter. But a winter without Christmas is a winter without hope.

On that morning, it felt like Christmas had finally arrived.

Again, that doesn't mean I was happy, exactly. I was excited, like a kid anticipating what might be under the tree. At the same time, there was the lingering feeling that whatever awaited me wasn't necessarily going to be exactly what I wanted.

I still didn't have a job. I still didn't have a boyfriend. I still had deep wounds from my past. But I no longer felt deep down inside, as I had felt practically every day since I was a teen, that I would be better off dead. The desperate longing to simply not be was no longer there.

There was not much substance in the longing's place. I wouldn't say I had a great lust for life. It felt more as though nihilism and hopelessness were simply closed off. They were behind a door that I could no longer enter.

I felt for the first time in my heart that God really cared about me. That He had a purpose, that life had meaning, and so I could no longer in good conscience foster feelings of despair. The Holy Spirit, I realized, was helping my will to move more powerfully in the direction it had chosen to take — toward Him.

Immediately, the scary part began, as I realized with some trepidation that I had to learn to be happy.

Before, what had gotten me out of bed was the feeling, however buried, that if life got too painful, I could check out. It would take some self-convincing — I'd have to go from being an atheist to an agnostic, or else convince myself that my "saved" mother would somehow drag me into Heaven — but it was at least a possibility.

Now, the possibility of suicide offered no more consolation. I felt, for the first time since childhood, the full weight of my responsibility for living. Realizing it was, on one level, truly wonderful, to be sure — but I'm not going to lie to you and say it didn't feel like a burden. Sometimes, it still does. But I could no longer dwell for any length of time on the alternative — it just wasn't permitted anymore, and, thank God, it hasn't been since.

* * *

Now is as good a time as any to revisit the nature of the depression I had suffered. At the time that I had my faith experience, it was diagnosed as "Major Depression" — "Dr. Olivier" had given it that label back when he first started seeing me in 1991. He had also thrown around terms like, I think, "unipolar" (as opposed to bipolar); "depressive-depressive" (as opposed to manic-depressive), and existential angst.

More recently — just this year, in fact — I was finally able to go off lithium, the last mood medication that I was on, which Dr. Olivier had prescribed to me in 1991, after receiving for the first time, from another doctor, what I believe is the correct diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is common in victims of childhood trauma, and, according to one expert, has also been found in the children of trauma victims.

I don't talk about the abuse much, and I only began to deal with it effectively in therapy only last year, after I began seeing a Catholic therapist who took a wider view of the sources of my spiritual pain than had previous professionals. My father wasn't aware of it; it occurred under my mother's watch, beginning quite soon after my parents separated when I was five.

Some of it was physical. Until I was 10, when she made a conscious decision not to beat me again, my mother practiced her own brand of corporal punishment.

It wasn't what normally falls under the label "spanking." That, I understand, correctly practiced, is something deliberate and methodical, in which there is a clear and direct connection between the violation and the punishment. Before the blow is committed, the child is calmly told why she is being punished and what the punishment will entail.

My mom would just get overheated, start crying and yelling, and hit me with a slap in the face so my cheek turned red. Or she would pull my hair — I remember that well, because it was so childish, though it may have only happened once.

As I recall, the offenses that caused Mom's outbursts were not stealing or breaking any other commandment, save for perhaps "honor thy father and mother." I simply provoked her verbally, probably by talking back when she had a migraine or something.

Most of the abuse was far more subtle. It is very hard to describe, but I recognized it in M. Scott Peck's classic The People of the Lie after that book was recommended to me by my Catholic therapist.

My mother has apologized profusely for the physical abuse. As for the psychological abuse, the last time we spoke, in June, I was convinced she did not understand the nature of what she had done. That, I realize, does not in any way resolve me of the responsibility to forgive. She deserves forgiveness even more because she knows not what she did. Healing that wound remains part of my prayer life.

When I think about the psychological abuse, what stands out the most is the way my mother separated me from my father's love. As I wrote in The Thrill of the Chaste, my dad already didn't seem to have much love to speak of; he was distant, often painfully so. But, having become closer to him over the past ten years, I now realize that he cared about me far more than I ever realized. I believe he would have acted to protect me had he known what I was enduring.

Two memories come to the fore. The first is of when I was eight years old and my father's brother's wife, my Aunt Barbara, who was teaching at the school where I attended third grade, made a complaint to my mother.

Aunt Barbara made the complaint after, while overseeing my class as we did jumping jacks, she noticed I was wearing a key around my neck. She quizzed me about the key and I explained that, after school, a carpool dropped me off at my mother's apartment, where I let myself in and waited alone until Mom or my older sister Jennifer (age 13) came home.

That earned my mother a piece of Aunt Barbara's mind, as my aunt believed an eight-year-old had no business letting herself into an apartment building alone and staying home unsupervised for hours. (I think it was the fact that I let myself in that bothered her the most; it would have been easy for a predator to trail me and force his way inside the apartment.)

My mother was terrifically irked at the complaint. After all, she said, my dad's child support didn't give her enough money for a baby-sitter, and, anyway, I was a fabulously mature, independent eight-year-old who was a brilliant reader and could take perfect care of myself, thank you very much. I was annoyed at my aunt too and believed everything my mother said, being very proud of my "maturity and independence."

Today, I realize that, if my mother really couldn't afford a sitter, she had only to tell my father that he either had to pay for one or she'd leave me home alone. He wouldn't have been happy about it, and would likely have argued that she already had enough money to take adequate care of me and my sister, but I'm certain he would have given in rather than let me be exposed to danger.

The other outstanding memory is from four years later — the winter of late 1980, when I was 12. My sister was a freshman in college, so it was just me and my mother at home. We had moved from Galveston, Texas, where I had lived since the age of 3, back to New Jersey, where we were staying with my mother's parents until Mom could find a job. I was attending Millburn Junior High School, where the combined Millburn-Short Hills school district was the richest in the nation.

Attending MJHS was not the easiest experience for a child of an unemployed social worker. It was the height of the preppie fad, and my frayed, faded, hand-me-down bell bottoms (yes, bell bottoms — in 1980) looked painfully out of place among my schoolmates' $45 Jordaches and Calvins.

During that winter, Mom and I made a brief road trip to Washington, D.C., to visit my sister in her George Washington University dorm room, where I recall being met by my dad, who lived in the area (and still does). He asked me how school was going, and I let slip that I was on the free-lunch program.

I must have subconsciously hoped the news would make Dad dig into his pockets, because I really hated being on the free-lunch program.

Every morning, I had to stop by the school office, where I was given an envelope containing a 50-cent piece that had a numeral etched in beside JFK's profile. At lunchtime, when I brought my tray to the cashier, I would hand her the coin as surreptitiously as I could. The idea was that it would look as though I were paying. The problem, however, was that lunches were 75 cents. And all it took was one student behind me to notice that I was only paying 50 cents, and with a single coin at that, and the entire school knew. Of course, the cashier, who saw me every day, had to make a point of eyeing the coin to make sure it was a "special" one.

I was already subject to the meanest, most vicious teasing from schoolmates that a poor, brainiac outsider from Galveston, Texas, could receive, and This.Did.Not.Help.

When I told Dad that my lunches were free, he straightaway rebuked my mom severely for not telling him. I remember feeling torn between pride in my mother for trying to make it on her own without additional help from Dad beyond what he was contracted to give, and feeling enormous relief at having one less reason for my schoolmates to tease me.

The whole thing probably sounds terribly minor now, not fitting anyone's definition of "abuse," but that's kind of the point. So much of what I went through growing up with my mother wasn't obviously abusive, but was emblematic of the twisted way she viewed my relationship to her. I existed as an object, an extension of her. I was there to protect her. She was not there to protect me.

* * *

Last June, as I was preparing to move from my Morristown, N.J., condo to my new digs outside Washington, D.C., I unearthed an unfinished essay by my maternal grandmother's eldest sister, my beloved Aunt Alma, an accomplished writer who died in 2002 at the age of 96. It was typed on her old Royal, and she had jotted a note at the top in her characteristic tiny scrawl, disparaging what she had written as being too negative and resentful. That it was. The piece was a broadside against Alma's own mother, castigating her for bearing children she did not love.

Writing in a manner reminiscent of early Margaret Sanger, my great-aunt (right, standing over some of her siblings in 1930 — my Grandma Jessie is in the center) bemoaned the fact that her mother had not used contraception. Instead, she wrote, her mother bore child after child, simply for the sake of outdoing the neighbors.

Alma was a convincing writer, and I admired her very much, even though many of my opinions are widely divergent from ones she upheld in her prime. (I'm fairly sure she was a personal friend of SIECUS founder Mary Calderone and, like her, an early supporter of what is now "comprehensive sexual education.") Her essay's argument was strong enough to make me pause to wonder despairingly for a moment if maybe she were right; perhaps contraception could have saved my maternal grandmother's family from the depression that dogged so many of its members. (That is, assuming my grandmother would have even been born.)

My eyes went back to the yellowed page and I realized as I read on that contraception would not have solved my great-grandmother's problems. There was an evil present, an evil of which the bearing of children was a symptom, not a cause.

People outside the family thought that my great-aunt's mother was a tremendously generous person, always raising funds to help the poor and others who were oppressed. If only they knew, Alma wrote, that her generosity did not extend to her family. She meant well, but she ultimately saw her children as objects.

As I read those sentiments, I broke down in tears. There it was, in black and yellow, the root of my family's problems. No, not likely even the root, but a branch from a tree that had been poisoned, God knows how long ago.

Somewhere down the line, someone on my mother's side of the family had felt a profound lack of love. That lack of love expressed itself through the generations in a seeming inability to truly love maternally, to love others for who they are and not just what they are. It had passed, like an original sin, from my great-grandmother, to my grandmother (who had traits much like those my great-aunt saw in her mother), to my mother, and to me. (I delve into its effects upon me to a great extent in The Thrill, though I had not read Alma's essay when I wrote the book.)

When I was a child, taking care of my beloved plush Snoopy doll, my mother quoted her own mother to me, saying something that I thought at the time was rather sweet:

"If you take care of your dolls, God will take care of you."

That was what my Grandma Jessie told my mother, and that was what my mother told me, and back before I lost my childhood faith in God, I was very happy to think it might be true.

Looking back, my grandmother's adage sounds terribly dysfunctional — backwards, really.

God takes care of us, period. It is only because He takes care of us that we can take care of anyone else.

Perhaps I'm making too much out of an innocent expression, but it strikes me that it reveals how my grandmother saw my mother as a children's doll, and my mother saw me as one in turn.

I mean, how does one "take care" of a doll? By fawning over it; playing with it; dragging it by its foot down the stairs so that its head goes "thwack-thwack-thwack" like Winnie-the-Pooh being dragged by Christopher Robin; leaving it alone for hours at a time, only to pick it up at one's convenience and drop it again when something else becomes more interesting.

So, my mother "took care" of me, expecting that she would receive care in return. Only, God fell out of the equation somehow, as He does when we reduce Him to the second half of a bargain.

When I received my faith at the age of 31 on that October day, it was the first time I ever truly felt that I had value in God's eyes not because of my ability to take care of my mother, myself, or anyone else, but simply because I existed.

Even with the attendant fears, it was the most beautiful feeling in the world. It still is, even though I have yet to embody it as much as I would like. God willing, I will, as time passes and I become more mature, more prayerful, and more forgiving.

To be continued ...

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