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TORN From the Inside Out & THE JOURNEY

 MEMOIRS In 1973,  a young woman, barely sixteen years old, and a zealous member of a cultist religious group, married a twenty-three year-o...

Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The NARCISSIST You Married Wore a Mask

 

Narcissists are everywhere, because they have always been everywhere, we just did not know them for what they truly were behind the masks-in the shadows lurking.

The secretive self of the typical narcissist is an unbridled ID without a fully developed EGO and an Warped Super-Ego; but most are very intelligent people who know how to hide in plain sight.

You can Marry a Narcissist and live with them for fifteen years before you understand the dark enigma. Fifteen years of wondering if you were 'crazy' because he, or SHE, will make you think that you have lost your mind. The take the truth and make it a lie, and the lie becomes truth. Gaslighting is their second language and they are fluent in it; if you say 'Blue' they swear you said 'Red', and will argue and deflect until you give in and swear you are becoming forgetful and absent minded; after all, there will be no peace unless they are right.

But there are the Good Days when this human in hiding is charming and sweet, loving and 'kind'; but can it really be so, after being cursed and degraded the day before? Or, is is that confounded Love Bombing you just heard about?

You lost yourself years ago, out of a duty to keep the peace and eliminate unnecessary strife, as you found yourself giving up and giving in more and more often. Eventually you wonder where you ended and they began, or even if there is a 'you' left. Everything you do is to please and keep the peace, to absolve, compromise, abstain, suppress and regress. You have stepped yourself all the way backwards as the world passes you by...but The Narcissist has Grown in power over the years  until they are drunk with stolen power-YOURS.

Then it happened-the light shone in and you began to see what was hiding in the dark behind the mask all along. The rollercoaster emotional journey of intense love and hate, happiness and cruelty, lies and deceit, took  its toll on you until one day your woke up to the fact that the Stranger your married was a Narcissist. 

Not just ANY type of Narcissist, but a fully developed Covert Narcissist- a genuine Snake in the Grass. And you thought you had married 'one of the good ones'. The joke was on you.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Stop The Three Headed Monster and Make America Stronger


Sara Niles


How I Know

I have survived the most dysfunctional type of early beginning as a small child, and after a short hiatus spent with elderly relatives, I was once again thrown into even worse dysfunction as a teenager. In short, fifty of my sixty years have been spent as either as a victim of violence and abuse or as a survivor in a lifelong state of reconnaissance.  I am a Domestic Violence War Veteran, and as such, I know far too much about abuse firsthand. I know that once the primary abuser is eliminated from the earthquake of a family dynamic, the after shocks of dysfunction linger  from within the family unit for generations; more often than not. The collateral damage  that began when the family was young, grew as it steadily chipped away at the foundations of the family, by slowly destroying its members. Like water on stone, little by little, the rot of domestic violence took its toll.
I married a very intelligent, troubled, and violent man, whose intelligence enabled him to mask his true self by exuding a sweet and charming presentation to the public, while his evil self lurked in the shadows. I had five children with Thomas Niles before I was forced to flee from him over thirty years ago, when I was still a young woman of 29. I expected that my escape with my five children, had ended the abusive cycle of destruction, suffering and sorrow; however, the children already had damaged sense of selves and the world, eroded senses of trust, or total lack of it, and they carried the mold of domestic dysfunction with them. In addition to the dysfunction of domestic violence, my children were forced to do battle with what I call the Three Headed Monster: Domestic Abuse, Mental Illness and Addiction. Each of the 'Monster' heads took a victim: one by suicide, another by mental illness, and the third became a monster himself, absorbing all the ugliness of evil.  Only two of my five children survived on the positive side of life.  

Abuse and Dysfunction as a Nation

The casualties in the United States that are directly related to the  Three Headed Monster, are in the hundreds of thousands each year: according to the CDC over 100,000 deaths a year are attributed to alcohol alone, and over 50,000 from drug overdose, over 40,000 from suicides and close to 2000 domestic violence homicides are reported each year (many are not labeled as such), this does not include the thousands of children abused, neglected, or murdered each year. The prisons are full of domestic violence victims, usually as children, and often as adults in the case of female inmates. The broad reaching power and range of the Three Headed Monster, extends into every public sector, including the White House of the United States of America; Including the film industry, the sports arena, and every place you find people, you will find both former victims and sometimes active perpetrators of abuse. Abuse of power, and misuse of control, leads to a an unstable and unbalanced society at its worst, unstable and unbalanced individuals and families at the least. The result is a loosening of the Three Headed Monster, chaos and dysfunction, suffering, and catastrophe.
The saying about Rome was that it fell in a day, which is not literally true, however, while the process of Rome's fall was ongoing, the conquest of Rome was declared abruptly. Rome abused power, festered corruption and exploitation, and allowed the imbalance of chaos and dysfunction to take over the empire and the government, much like a large dysfunctional and abusive family. There are similarities between the Roman decline and Trump's control of the GOP and the government, as the abuse of power through catering to the groups in power while abusing those without, has lead to an unbalanced state of affairs.  The relationship between domestic violence and abuse in the homes of world leaders when they were themselves children, is obvious in the case of President Donald Trump: his childhood based insecurities still drives his ego, and his need to create his own reality through lies, threats and manipulation, are all vestiges of the Three Headed Monster. The imbalance within Trump, created in his own childhood is the reason for the imbalance in the upper echelon of government. This is a paramount example of how far reaching childhood abuse and/or dysfunction is; and more importantly, how society is directly and indirectly affected by dysfunction.
The recent school shooting by Nikolas Cruz, is another example of how the larger society suffers as a whole when even the mental and emotional health of one member is damaged, and under-treated or ignored. It is evident that the most dangerous part of the school shooting was the easy access to a deadly assault weapon, and mental illness was a secondary factor, and both of these factors are part of a dysfunctional society. When society acts as a dysfunctional unit, important issues are neglected and society's children and their needs are not met. When the most powerful faction of society, the governing faction, misuses power and ignores the rights and needs of the people, society as a whole suffers.

Treat the Three Headed Monster

The Three Headed Monster: Mental Illness, Family Dysfunction (Abuse, Violence & Neglect), and Addiction, will wage war against us, if we don't wage war on it first. In order to restore balance in the United States as a Nation Family, we must recognize the needs of the people. In real life terms, funding cuts  to Mental Health programs, Substance Abuse and Addiction programs, and Family Violence programs that deal with sexual assault and abuse, domestic abuse and violence and family health, all amount to Neglect, and Abuse of Power in the name of Greed. The needs of the people require annual expansion of funding and services (and I don't mean 1% as in the recent VAWA renewal) that aid in the prevention and intervention of domestic violence and abuse, mental health treatment, both prevention and treatment, and all substance abuse and addiction services.

Balance the Top-Balance the Bottom

Before the top level of government can reclaim balance, the bottom tier where the people live, needs attention. The creation of legislation that will demand immediate intervention in the case of the mentally ill in need of treatment, as well as secondary responses when treatment is rejected, will not only make society safer, it will offer hope for saving the hopeless individuals who commit atrocities like the one that was perpetrated at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Valentine's Day of 2018. Reclaiming balance means taking back the power that has been loosely given to any person capable of buying and Assault-grade weapon like an AR-15, that enabled Nikolas Cruz to effortlessly kill so many so fast.
America is already Great, but its strength is in its people: stop abuse and dysfunction, from the government down, and America will be stronger.

Sara Niles




Thursday, December 29, 2016

Danger in the Home: Mother kills children

The type of domestic violence abusers who are willing to end life, do not value life.
Obsessive and controlling people who are usually laden with past issues, are self-centered, or egocentric, only value their own needs and emotions over the needs and emotions of others. Those who kill never held the strong values of the dominant culture: do not kill and do not wrong others, being paramount. Abusers of this nature exhibit red flag warning signs.

Abusers come in all forms, genders, and socioeconomic statuses. The most common denominator for seriously abusive people, is they desire to control their world to the point of obsession; if they can't have what they want, then no one can...at least no one in their immediate world.This type of abuser is usually egocentric, self-absorbed and autonomously insecure. Although most murders of female partners and of children in a family unit by domestic abusers are male perpetrated, female abusers commit similar atrocities. Domestic violence killers are not always men,such as in this case of a female who killed her own child in order to punish the child's father. If cases like this were rare there would not be a major societal problem concerning domestic violence and domestic homicide; unfortunately, these cases are common across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Domestic violence takes the lives of thousands of men, women, and children each year, and will continue to do so until the tide of this disastrous trend is staunched. Domestic violence begins before the first abusive word of emotional assault is hurled, and before the first slap or fist punch. In most cases, abuse begins with abuse.

The reciprocal effect of adults with a history of abuse as children is that it becomes a risk factor that exacerbates the likelihood they will also abuse their children. Abuse often predicates abuse, as learned behavior compounds traumatic childhoods in adults with poor stress management skills. Other factors that lead to serious child maltreatment and even murder, include environmental stress, poverty and lack of support systems. The breeding ground for domestic violence begins in a history of domestic violence. The cultural climate of domestic violence can be changed by raising public awareness through education, and by slowing the spread of dysfunction and abuse within families through prevention and intervention. In order to weed out domestic violence and slow its effects upon families and society, we need to change the climate in which domestic abuse grows.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Child Broken by Sara Niles: April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month

Child Broken by Sara Niles
Broken families tend to create broken children. 
I worked for almost a decade for a domestic violence agency, and during that time I came in contact with children who were severely damaged by the trauma they experienced during their short lives. The cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of child development can be altered by trauma; and in extreme trauma that also includes betrayal and abandonment, children can be reduced to an almost animal-like state.
In a Child Broken, taken from Out of the Maelstrom, such a case is presented:

"We all assumed that the boys and their mother would relax and become friendlier after a few days, but what we did not know was the extent and duration of the torturous life these two boys had lived, the kind of life that can make an animal out of an innocent child" 
Free on Amazon April 7-9


Saturday, March 22, 2014

Domestic Violence: A Societal Issue? by Sara NIles


By Sara Niles author of Torn From the Inside Out

Is Domestic Dysfunction and Domestic Violence a Societal Issue? In other words, does the societal beliefs and attitudes fostered within a culture, affect how domestic violence is treated as a social and legal issue, and does it affect how domestic dysfunction is  cyclically perpetuated from generation to generation? Attitudes help form beliefs and beliefs perpetuate atttitudes.

People tend to examine the world from their own points of reference, which limits their understanding of some issues-that is-if they did not experience it to the same degree then they many not understand it-that in turn, limits the empathetic response and encourages apathy.

Another societal problem with abuse is that many former victims of childhood abuse think they need not think about it again-just move on, stuff it, and pretend it did not happen.This does not fix the problem with the individual, and it does not improve the collective health of society-instead it fosters the 'sweep-it-under-the rug' societal state of denial.

In addition to societal denial,there is societal 'projection' in which the victim is blamed for being 'stupid'....and of course if you can believe that what happened to 'the victim' happened only because they were stupid, then you only have to be 'smart' to not be victimized. The illusion of invulnerability is created and it helps people feel they have control when they say "I would never let that happen to me", not understanding the total dynamic involved. Just as individuals use such tactics to avoid feeling vulnerable-so do collective groups; and eventually, group attitudes become cultural 'norms'...that is what we have now.

In both cases,societal denial and victim blaming- the real issue gets ignored, which is the need to do something to change the cycle of abuse, 
that affects huge numbers of children growing up who will have issues as adults. Changing cultural norms is part of what needs to be done (much like in the situation when slavery existed, and when gay people were considered outcasts).

Domestic abuse is extremely widespread and includes all forms of family dysfunction from emotional and psychological abuse by caretakers of both genders, to sexual and physical abuse.As you both stated-many children are affected and this is a BIG issue in our society.When you consider most people addicted to substances and negative behaviors, were childhood abuse victims-and most people in the prisons were childhood abuse victims-this is an issue of pandemic proportions. It is a societal issue, not just an individual one, and will have to be consistently addressed on a societal level in order to change things.

Public awareness and education is essential to changing public perception. The children absorb societal attitudes-and then the children grow up and become the 'new' society.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

FREE download: Torn From the Inside Out 2014 Edition by Sara Niles

February 18-22 Free Kindle download:Link to Amazon

Torn From the Inside Out 2014 Edition

Sara Niles

Literary Narrative Domestic Violence Memoir

In 1987, Sara Niles fled for her life in a February thunderstorm, with five small children in tow.


Read Chapter One:

Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.

Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:

“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!” He screamed.


It was February 13, of the year 1987, the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old. 

Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles, and this is my story.


The Deep South, 1957

I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all. I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of ragged grass running down the middle, like frazzled, green ribbon. This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money. Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines. Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.

My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed. She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area. I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level. A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence. My mother was a prostitute. I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children. Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods. It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.

It was the year 1957, a date that became a famous marker in the racial history of conflict between Blacks and Whites; when The Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between Blacks and Whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline. My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the White man in the black community. Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her. I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.

We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’. It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte. Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house. Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful ‘croker-sack’ door, made of rough burlap. The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold. It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free. She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us. The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine. She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind. I was four years old. 

The house had three entrances. The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names. On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window. I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly. Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks. I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed. I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked. 
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me. My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail. Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses. Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily. He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us. We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came. I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both. Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill. Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and on hot days his hat-less bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us. We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him. I was selected.
The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm. I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
“I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara. Just let me talk with your mama for a minute. You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised. 

I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different. My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within. We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
“I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert. You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother. She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine. They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight. My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes. Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other. I was holding his bald head with both my thin, dirty arms. I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.

I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster, and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.

Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me. 
My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry. I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt. 

“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick. Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly. 

“Nah. This child probably has never eaten her fill. Let her eat till she bursts.” He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter. For the first time in my life, I was home.

I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel. My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded. I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks. She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine. I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been. On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town. My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need. I remember the things that I didn’t need the most, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors. All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.

Relatives were notified, and they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts. My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years. Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week. From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy. I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said. There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily. I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy. 

My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did. I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed. It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm. My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word. We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant. A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief. Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.

Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.

For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it. The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep. Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight. The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.

Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons. I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did. I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache. I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground. Dirt and smut on his sad face. I can still see them. I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.

I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer. I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end. It was gone; I would never get it back. The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries. A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.

My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me. Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on. I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland. 

Monday, January 13, 2014

"The The Garden of Eden" from Torn From the Inside Out by Sara Niles

Chapter 1
The Garden of Eden




 Thunder rattled the window- panes two stories high and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints.  Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.
    Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare-feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:
 “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU—YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH—STONE DEAD!!!!!!!”  He screamed.


  That was the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.
   
 Many people asked of me since that day, many ‘whys’ and I gave many answers. It takes a lot of ‘why’s’ to make a life, mine being no exception. Maya Angelou said ‘you can’t know who I am until you know where I have been’; until you know the circumstances and people who contributed to the making of me, you cannot know me. We all are complicated mixes of many other people and life events. We are all of everything that has ever happened to us. If we suddenly got amnesia, we would cease to exist as who we were, except in the memory of others. My pain is me, and thus my life that once was, is what made me now. I am the hungry little girl who sat in the sand over forty years ago waiting to be rescued by an ancient old man, I am Sara Niles and this is my story.



 The Deep South, 1957


 I was born in the bowels of the South where willow trees hang low over ponds and creeks surrounded by the lush growth of woody fern. My beginnings were in a place where knotted old oaks twisted their knurled boughs upwards, their majestic leafage allowing slithers of light to penetrate the shadowy forest floors to lend peeks upon the backs of huge Diamondback rattlesnakes; their gargantuan size owing to seldom meeting the sight of the eyes of man, if ever at all.  I was born where the bottomland hoarded teems of wild boars known to rip hunting dogs open from end to end, and where the narrow little graveled roads twisted and wound their way past humble mail boxes, usually the only evidence of the habitations miles into the forest. These humble country homes were usually only accessible by traveling down dirt, tire-rutted roads with strips of grass ribbon-ed down the middle.  This was oil country, so oil wells were scattered every few miles, their slow prehistoric movements signaling that the owners were receiving money.  Neighbors lived far apart on beautiful little farms or in ragged shacks, with a Cadillac and a television, or neither plumbing nor electric power lines.  Depending upon which neighbor you were, you had plenty or nothing at all.
 My mother had nothing at all, except seven hungry mouths to feed.  She was by everyone’s opinion an exceptionally beautiful woman.  Her mother before her was a French white woman from New York, and her father was a black and Indian man; born, bred and still living in the same area.  I never met my maternal grandmother, I strongly suspected that she mated with my grandfather on a purely business level.  A business that is considered to be one the oldest vices, the one I have to thank for my very existence.  My mother was a prostitute.  I was an accident she had with a client, a rich white oilman who found her little shack a convenient stop on his trips from town, and she found in him food for her children.  Things may have been different for my mother, if a white man, living in a racist time, had not shot her first husband in the back for the unforgivable crime of stealing gas- gas that he swore to pay for that evening when he left the billet woods.   It was a time when racism ruled, a ‘cold war’ between blacks and whites established the climate, and therefore no trial ever took place.
 It was nineteen fifty-seven, the Little Rock Nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard.  This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times. The line of demarcation between blacks and whites was decided by color, and I was born on the centerline.  My bright light skin marked me as a product of the enemy, the white man in the black community.  Black women drawled sweetly to my mother that my long wavy brown hair was so pretty in tones meant to be a reproof to her.  I was unacceptable, too white to be black… too black to be white.
    We lived in what our relatives fondly called ‘the old homestead’.  It was the home built by my great- grandparents, a newly freed slave by the name of Henry Howell and his wife, a full-blooded Crow Indian bearing the European name Charlotte.  Henry and Charlotte had twelve children, each born in the front room of this now dilapidated old house.  Great old cottonwoods rattled their leaves noisily in the wind in front of the house and massive oaks guarded the back, dwarfing the little outhouse with its pitiful croker-sack door.  The exterior of the house bore the aged gray look of hardwood that had never been painted in its century of withstanding the pelting rains and the great extremes of heat and cold.  It was a tough, neglected old house, abandoned to my mother to house us in rent-free.  She could ill afford to care for the ancient structure that needed attention so badly, or us.  The job of watching and caring for us fell to my oldest sister, Francine.  She was thirteen years old at my earliest remembrance of her, my brother was twelve, and the rest of our ages ran closely behind.  I was four years old.
   The house had three entrances.  The front and back doors we children were allowed to use freely, but the side door facing the setting sun was off limits to us. It was the ‘business’ door, the door that the strange men used; some used it so often they even knew our names.  On a rare occasion when my mother was absent, I was molested by one of these men while the noon-ish sun shone through the window.  I knew nothing of what he was doing, he sounded friendly.  Something was wrong, I felt some odd shame and my heart pounded with relief when my tigress of a sister burst through the door demanding that the  ‘no good son of a dog’ take his filthy hands off me in a voice strong with authority and rage that was strange to hear in the voice of a child. He unhanded me without a word and fled as all my siblings ran up to flank her in the ranks.  I remembered that incident, though I never once mentioned it again until three decades passed.  I merely held my head self-consciously tilted to one side when I walked.
Nothing stood out in my early childhood worth remembering until the fateful day when the world kindly changed for me.  My great uncle and aunt lived on a farm a mile’s walk through a wooded trail.  Robert Howell was born in eighteen eighty-three to Henry and Charlotte Howell in the very same curtain-less room that my siblings and I slept in, on the pallets and old mattresses.  Although my mother was treated as an outcast in the family - never visited and quietly talked about by the conventional ones who may have feared their heavenly reservations may have been cancelled if they dared come near her- my uncle Robert visited us daily.  He cared little for convention and hated hypocrisy; he would not permit either to stifle his compassion for us.  We looked for uncle’s visits just as faithfully as we expected the sun to rise, and just as faithfully, he always came.  I never remember his coming unheralded by our squeals of delight because we knew he had candy or fruit, if not both.  Our yard’s stingy spattering of trampled grass wore a distinct trail that led to the east corner where a roof covered water well crested the top of a steep red clay hill.  Uncle Robert’s head would always appear first, and  on hot days his hatless bald head would bloom at the top of that hill prettier to us than any flower, because he not only brought us gifts, he luxuriated us in his time by talking with each one of us.  We loved Uncle Robert dearly, and any one of us would have been glad to have been taken home by him.  I was selected.
   The monotony of our lives made the mentioning of the names of days unnecessary, so I don’t know what day it was when my uncle took me home, just that it was sunny and warm.  I was sitting in front of the east steps in a pile of cream-colored sand pouring it’s warmness across my legs when Uncle Robert came.
   “I’m coming to take you home with me little Sara.  Just let me talk with your mama for a minute.  You’re going to be me and Mollie’s little girl” my uncle soothingly promised.
I felt something that must have been excitement, although I had heard him say he would take me home before, somehow I knew this time was different.  My brother and sisters gathered around the front door trying to overhear the conversation from within.  We could hear the muffled conversation getting louder as my mother and uncle walked down the hall to the front porch.
   “I’ll find her birth certificate later Uncle Robert.  You just take her on home now”, and as an afterthought she added “Tell Aunt Mollie hello for me”.
 And just like that, as easily as one changes shoes, I was given away unceremoniously without tears or protest from my mother.  She never hugged me good-bye, nor did she come outside to watch me leave. My brother and sisters gathered around me looking sad, their bubbly excitement dying, as they followed us down the steep hill, all the way to the ravine.  They yelled ‘good –byes’ until we were out of sight.  My uncle let me climb upon a stump so I could ride astride his neck, since I had no shoes.  Uncle Robert talked excitedly, gesturing with his hat in his free hand while holding one of my ankles with the other.  I was holding his baldhead with both my thin, dirty arms.  I don’t remember much of what he said, only something about how happy my aunt Mollie would be, and all of the things they would buy me. These golden promises meant nothing to me yet, since I had no prior means of comparison and I was too distracted by apprehension mixed with unformed expectations.
 I knew we had almost arrived when we reached the water spring at the bottom of the hill. The spring bubbled up fresh water continually, with the overflow creating a running stream of branch water that was covered over by a long plank bridge. Two thick, smoky black water moccasins raised their ugly heads up from the water and opened their cottony mouths in silent threat. I tightened my grip on Uncle Robert’s head. The roof of the house appeared first as we ascended the long incline. A large grayish brown farmhouse, surrounded by bright flowers, arose into view. My senses became acute, recording every minor detail, while the smells of flowers and fruit trees enchanted me, as my uncle stooped to unlatch a peg lock on the back gate. My heart was beating faster and faster,  and my blood raced through my veins with such force that I became dizzy, my hearing muted and time slowed.
 Fear ran through me as two large silky black Labradors ran toward us barking hysterically, the barking giving way to tail wagging and happy howls of joy at seeing my uncle. I could see an immense expanse of ordered property. There were pastures and barns, cows and a big-eared mule, chickens scattering across a fenced yard and New Guinea fowl shrieking in tropical song. There were huge yellow and gray-striped Tabby tomcats sitting calmly upon fence posts. I was bedazzled. While my head whirled in excitement, I was gently stood upon the grounds on legs almost too weak to hold me. It was incomprehensible to my dazed senses that all of the commotion was over me.
    My uncle yelled to my aunt to hurry out and see what he had, and in an instant my aunt ran across the back yard with a spatula in one hand wearing a white apron across the front of the prettiest flowered dress I had ever seen. I was being smothered in hugs while my uncle and aunt both talked at once. The animals sensed the excitement and were howling in unison. I tried to see everything at once, such as the number three bathtubs hanging outside against the back porch wall, animals, a smokehouse and old farm buildings. I thought I had entered a new world when I smelled the most wonderful aroma of foods floating upon the breeze; my senses were overwhelmed, as the hunger awakened in me, compelled me to cry.  I was fed while still caked with grime and dirt. 
“Robert, I’m afraid she’ll get sick.  Don’t you think we should stop her from eating now?” Aunt Mollie asked uncertainly.
 “Nah.  This child probably has never eaten her fill.  Let her eat till she bursts.”  He answered glad heartedly before they both melted into joyous laughter.  For the first time in my life, I was home.
   I was scrubbed in sudsy lather and wrapped in a towel.  My only dress was so dirty that it was discarded.  I stood behind my aunt holding the back of her chair while she sewed dresses and matching bloomers out of floral, cotton flour sacks.  She sang and talked as she wheedled her Singer treadle sewing machine.  I said nothing. I was happier than I had ever been.  On Saturday, I remember because every day I was told to just wait until ‘Saturday’ and we will go to town. On Saturday, we went to town.  My aunt bought shoes, dresses, ‘britches’, baubles, and toys, and everything that a little girl who had nothing, would need.  I remember the things I didn’t need, the candies and soda pops of all varieties and colors.  All of downtown was comprised of one street covering a couple of blocks, so in a town of that size everyone knew Aunt Mollie. My aunt told every listening ear, both White and Black, that she and Uncle Robert were like Sarah and Abraham, blessed with a child in their old age.
   Relatives were notified, they came by the carloads to see me, and brought and sent gifts.  My Aunt Fannie from California sent two huge packages of clothing and toys from J.C. Penny, a habit she continued for the duration of my early years.  Physically, I went from nothing to everything in one week.  From no attention to being squabbled over; my emotions knew no precedent, therefore I was overwhelmed in joy.   I began to talk incessantly, ‘like a jaybird’ as Uncle Robert said.  There was so much to see and do, to taste and touch. I was experiencing the tastes of new foods almost daily.  I became a whirlwind as I tried to enjoy everything at once in a frenzy of ecstasy.
    My uncle took me with him to visit my brother and sisters each day, they were always so happy to see us, only now I knew that they did not have the good things I did.  I used to ask Uncle Robert and Aunt Mollie to bring them home to live with us; I was too young to know what their sad faces revealed.  It was impossible; they could only save one, the child most likely to suffer harm.  My mother moved away when I was five years old without a word.  We went for our daily visit and the house was vacant.  A feeling of loss pervaded my happiness as we stood staring in disbelief.  Years would pass between brief glimpses of any of them.
    Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently.  These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment.  The strength of character I gleamed from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.
   For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’ as Cousin Andrew called it.  The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep.  Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight.  The record ice storm of the early sixties was a great memory to me as I watched through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, I felt perfectly safe as I expected I always would.
   Those days will be forever frozen in my mind. I can still see my uncle and aunt standing among the prized garden vegetables, amid four-foot tall collard greens reaching my aunts shoulders. I can see the tanned sinewy frame of my uncle stretching his short frame proudly towards the sky as he brags on the size of his watermelons.  I can hear their laughter coming from lungs almost a century old, and I can see the twinkle in Uncle Robert’s one good eye. I could never imagine him killing the man who gouged out his eye with a pool stick so many years before, though the relatives said that he did.  I only knew that the blue glass-eye looked odd with his one brown one, set against his tawny gold skin, his head crowned with a semi-circle of silky white hair with a matching heavy white mustache.  I can see the bright flash of his red plaid shirt through the school bus window years later as he walks hurriedly to the highway to escort me home, on the cold November day the house burned to the ground.  Dirt and smut on his sad face.  I can still see them.  I will always be able to see them in the vivid imagery of my mind.
   I used to wish with a fervor that I could have held on to the past and preserved all that was good about it, that I could have prevented my aunt the years of suffering as she lay dying, bedridden with cancer.  I used to wish that all the good years would have never ended; time cured the wishing as I realized that the fairy tale had to end.  It was gone; I would never get it back.  The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue.  I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead.  I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul, so that part of the past would always remain with me.  They would be there for me to draw strength from, on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.
   It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes.  Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future.  A foreign land of war, a land besieged by helicopters, machine gunfire, and mortars, held a young man prisoner to its boundaries.  A man I would never have met if my uncle had not become sick.
   My uncle became acutely ill when I was fifteen years old and he asked a young family that he was fond of, to adopt me.  Life had changed course for me again, and the changes were becoming less kind as time wore on.  I was about to be thrust into a situation where my lack of experience would affect my judgment and cause a permanent change in the person I would become. My future would become as uncertain and unstable as a howling wind in a wasteland.



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Sunday, October 6, 2013

Interview with Sara Niles, Memoir Author

Question:
Sara Niles primarily writes nonfiction memoirs-Why is that?

I am on a mission to make a difference through The Torn Trilogy memoirs, which addresses family dysfunction, domestic violence, child abuse, mental illness and drug addiction issues, and the destructive effect it has upon human lives.

Most people read books for two reasons: to be entertained and to be informed.

 Many readers have been conditioned to view nonfiction writing as a medium that is purely informational and fiction writing as purely entertaining. The fact is, nonfiction can be both entertaining and it can pack a powerful informational message as well; as an example, the movie Titanic was filled with information about a historical event, but it was also highly entertaining; a fact that also holds true to literature, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was hailed as a masterpiece in nonfiction literature simply because Capote wrote a true story as though it was fiction.

I have lived an extraordinary life in which the odds were heavily stacked against both me and my children, placing our mere survival at risk countless times. The element of rising suspense that captivates audiences was an actual part of our lives, and the unusual twists and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat, was a normal part of our survival.  When the saying ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was coined, it aptly applied to our lives and the multitudes of people who have lived similar lives.

 Torn From the Inside Out, The Journey and Out of the Maelstrom, each tells a story that is filled with both entertainment value and informational content. Each of the memoirs can provide whatever a reader is seeking: a good read, insight and information, and entertainment. Regardless of the reason for reading The Torn Trilogy, the reader will come away entertained and enlightened and in the process, the dark veil of family dysfunction will have been lifted a little higher with each reading.

What is the greatest joy of writing for you?

The empowerment of writing life-changing memoirs that offer enlightenment and insight is the greatest joy and is most rewarding for me.

Knowledge and insight is like a light in a dark tunnel, especially if that 'tunnel' is years of denial. I delight in providing insight through my writings that empowers and enables people to change their lives for the better. Most people do not realize that knowledge can help a person forty or fifty years after a traumatic event but shedding light on hidden secrets and enabling people to reexamine the way they saw themselves.
A large percentage of drug addicts and a disproportionate number of the mentally ill are troubled by a past that involved domestic violence or some form of abuse during their childhoods. Light needs to be shed of those faulty perceptions and attitudes.

My writing enables me to become a light bearer in a dark place.