I was a child of Alabama, but being a Southerner didn't make sense to me. I knew our Southern heritage was supposed to mean our family was special in some mysterious way I didn't understand. I couldn't figure it out, and I was baffled by the inconsistencies I noticed all around me.

As a child, I remember asking lots of questions about what I noticed and did not understand. "Why does that water fountain say 'colored?' Why do they have different restrooms?'" I wondered.

These things were confusing. Black women took care of me and seemed to love me. The cleaned our home and cooked meals for us. Surely they must have use our bathroom. Surely they drank the same water we did. Why was it different when we went downtown?

I wondered what it meant when I heard people at church saying the beautiful words of the Episcopal Prayer Book, confessing their sins, asking for forgiveness, and praising God. Then, only moments after church was over, these same people gathered in small clusters outside, criticizing, judging, and saying cruel things about those who weren't present to hear. How could that be? Why didn't church work better than that?

Contradictions like these made no sense to me. Neither did the answers I got to my questions, when I got any an answers at all. Sometimes I was admonished not to be impudent by asking about such things. I was told that when I grew up I would understand why black people were different. They were supposed to be dirty somehow. But they cleaned our house. How could that be possible? I just knew that they liked me and I liked them.

I noticed contradictions like these all around me. My curiosity created a profound dilemma for me. Was I to decide that I saw more clearly than the adults who sometimes answered and sometimes refused to answer my questions? Or did they know something that was beyond my grasp? My survival need for these adults led me to conclude that surely they must be right! I must be mistaken somehow. There must be something children couldn't see or understand.

And so I decided not to trust my own perceptions. My solution was to disconnect one reality from another. I began to disassociate.

Learning to disassociate solved another, even more perplexing and painful problem for me. By disassociating, I made sure I kept the terrible secret I held deep inside me. The good girl in me didn't know the bad, guilty girl who played doctor with Daddy in his workshop. He always locked the door after the good girl skipped happily across the backyard to "help" him out there. She didn't know what happened after the lock clicked shut. Only the bad, guilty girl knew about the rest. It was years before they discovered each other.

Though my capacity to disassociate helped me avoid this confrontation for many years, I paid a huge price for the secret I protected by forgetting. In the meantime, other incidents reinforced the costly choice I made not to trust my own perceptions of my own experience. I learned that children were to be seen, not heard. I translated this to mean that children must have nothing to say worth hearing. Their thoughts, their feelings, their ideas obviously did not count. Children didn't count; I didn't count. What I experienced, said or thought wasn't important.

It was also strange to me that adults were careful not to say anything nice about a child when the child could hear what the adult had to say. That was supposed to keep children from thinking too highly of themselves. In practice it meant that criticism was OK, but praise and affirmation were suspect. Fear was in charge.

In those days, the South was afraid of its children; afraid of a new generation; afraid of the future; and afraid of change. Its glory was in the past when plantations were plantations and slaves were slaves. In those golden day, people lucky enough to come from "good families" enjoyed a lifestyle that Yankees finally destroyed with their foreign, evil ideas, and their cruel generals like Sherman.

Everyone knew Southerners were the only ones who really loved Negroes. After all, they looked after their faithful servants. They gave them their leftovers and old clothes; they gave them a ride to town in the back seat of the car after they'd cleaned  house, cooked lunch, washed, and ironed, earning $2.00 a day.

Why "colored" people were so different bothered me; but I was a child and my status sometimes felt similar to theirs. The idea seemed to be that children existed to meet their parents' needs, just as blacks apparently existed to take care of white people. Sometimes I'd ask myself how I got so lucky to be white instead of black. Yet when we rode through "colored town" on a Saturday or Sunday, I got the distinct impression that the colored children were having lots of fun, jumping, dancing around, and getting to eat catfish cooked on street corners by old black men who seemed to be enjoying themselves, too. They looked lots happier than I felt.

For mine was a fearful world. We talked about love, but lived in fear. There was fear of the future, fear of blacks, fear of change, fear of children, fear of other people (especially what they thought and might say), fear of illness, fear of Yankees, fear of ideas, fear of another Great Depression, fear of money, fear of death. There was fear of just about everything. And fear is a painful energy.

Fortunately for me, my first seven years taught me a lot about love. My mother adored me, though she too crossed sexual boundaries with me. Those experiences I carefully blanked out and assigned to the bad, dark, guilty child in me. The good girl helped Mother with chores, listened to her read marvelous stories, played school with her, and learned to read. She even brought my goldfish, Lucky and Silver, back to life when we found them floating on tope of the fishbowl. She was magic. She was everything in my eyes.

My father was happier during my early years, too. World War II was raging. He was too old to enlist, but he had a victory garden. Sometimes he let me help pick vegetables. I was "Daddy's Little Girl." We adored each other. I sat on the curb everyday at lunch time waiting to catch the first glimpse of his car rounding the corner, bringing him back to my world for a little while.

Mealtimes were happy times. Mother, and the cook when she was there, started early in the morning, cooking vegetables for lunch. When we sat down at the dining room table at noon, ther4 was a wonderful array of fresh tomatoes, turnip greens, beans, fried corn, salads, and on very special days, sweet potato pie for dessert. We had tall glasses of iced tea with lemon. I loved the fun of stirring in sugar that never dissolved completely, but floated to the bottom of the glass and sat there inviting me to stir some  more and play cook at the same time.

I had two grandmothers, a grandfather, two uncles and aunts, and one first cousin, who was adored by everyone. He was a boy. I knew that was important. I'd never be quite as special as he. But he was fourteen years older than I, and I thought he was wonderful, too. His occasional visits when he would play with me, bring me presents, and call me "Muffin" were highlights of my growing-up years.

When I was four years old, the challenges of tragedy and death confronted our family. No one seemed to know how to cope with grief. And no one was there to help us learn what we needed to know about living through such difficult times.

The first tragedy was the death of my uncle, my mother's only brother, in an automobile accident. Mother was devastated by her grief. She cried, she was ill, she suffered. Nothing seemed to comfort her. She was overwhelmed with guilt and stopped her sexual activities with me.

The following year, my father's mother died. I saw my father "break down" only once. It was at the hospital when he was told that she had breast cancer. After that he buried his pain deep inside as men who were "real men" were supposed to do.

Eventually, Mother made a partial recovery from her grief because her parents needed her. My grandmother had several slight strokes but was not physically impaired. My grandfather was becoming more deaf and senile. They moved from Tennessee to Alabama to live with us. Their presence gave Mother a purpose. She could express her love for them and deal with her guilt while sublimating her grief for her brother.

And now I had "Nanny" all the time. I was her namesake, and we adored each other. She was my only grandmother after Mom, Daddy's mother died. Nanny was the center of my new world after all these changes. She was my first spiritual teacher. I learned to say the Episcopal creed. She made sure I was standing, even if it was in the middle of my bed at naptime, when I recited those sacred words. She taught me to read from her New Testament that had great big letters she could see with her aging eyes and I could follow with my young ones. I shared her devotionals every day.

Nanny talked to me about death. She hoped she'd die healthy and suddenly one day when the Lord was ready to receive her spirit. She also prepared me for her death, for what she taught me to read was the 14th Chapter of John's Gospel. "Let not your hearts be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me. I go to prepare a place for you...I will come again to bring you unto Me....In My Father's house are many mansions..."

But I knew she'd never leave me. Death just couldn't happen to her. It couldn't happen to my Nanny.

One day when I was seven, I told her goodbye after breakfast. As I went out the door, I turned to wave to her once more. She was sitting at the table, on the edge of her chair as she always was, full of energy to begin her day. I knew she would be helping Mother with the house, doing her share of the work.

Three hours later, a friend's mother brought me home for lunch. An ambulance was parked in front of our house, its back doors gaping open. Daddy met me in the front yard. I saw Mother's friend, Sara, on the front porch. Granddaddy was sitting in a chair on the lawn, beneath my favorite tree. I knew something terrible had happened.

"Nanny has gone away to live with God." I heard what Daddy said. But, I was dumbfounded. I looked at Granddaddy. How could he possibly be just sitting there like nothing had happened, like this was a normal day? And where was God? How could He so mean and so selfish? Didn't He know how much I needed Nanny here with me? This must be some terrible punishment for me. God must be punishing me for all the times I had been bad. This couldn't really be happening.

Mother was inside the house, overwhelmed with grief. She sat in front of her dresser mirror, sobbing. Her tears were terrifying to me. Everyone was trying to comfort her. Her world was shattered; her brother, and now her mother were gone. She was left with her deaf, already senile father. Somehow the fact that she still had Daddy and me didn't seem to matter. I always knew that the bond between my parents was not strong enough to fill her needs. I was not enough either. She was desolate. And she never fully recovered from her grief.

Twenty-nine years later, during my first therapy session, I was finally able to cry for Nanny myself. In 1948, no one around me realized that children grieve, too. Instead of crying, I became a straight A student. I got lots of strokes from adults for being smart, and I wanted to be sure I didn't upset Mother anymore than she already was. I also wanted to make up to Daddy for not being the son I was sure he wished he'd had. In my child's mind, I interpreted his sexual doctor games with me as an effort to make me like him; a male, instead of the female I am.

Yet, the love I experienced in those first seven years was stronger than all the fear, hurt, and sexual abuse that were also there. Love, woven through the pain, gave me the foundation I needed to survive the fearful years of unresolved rage and sorrow I faced in the future. That powerful love I absorbed early in my life kept me going, kept me seeking ways to cope, kept me active, even though I also experienced severe depression and battled physical illness. The energy of love carried me through until, as a woman in my 30's, I learned that through love and lots of dedicated work with myself, I could heal my life.

Ultimately I became the therapist-teacher I'd needed as a child. In learning to help myself and others, I've found that life is incredibly beautiful and precious. The inner peace I know now is more beautiful that anything I'd ever dared dream was possible. I've learned to live in love. I feel as safe and special again as the little girl, Muffin, was snuggled close to Nanny, reading those beautiful words.

"Let not your heart be troubled..."

Only now I also have the depth and strength that come with meeting life and its challenges head.

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