I Wan To Know The Truth Behind My Family's Secrets And Lies
Once when I was 15 years old, I was asleep in my bed dreaming. In the dream my mother was shouting at me, frightening me, though I couldn't understand her words. As I strained to hear, I woke up slowly hearing the voice of my mother in my room shouting at me.
As I opened my eyes, I saw my mother leaning over my bed shouting a sentence at me ending in:
"...AND YOU WON'T GET AWAY WITH IT!"
I sat up. "What's going on? Get away with what? Why are you shouting at me?"
My mother shot me a satisfied triumphant glance, whirled around and walked out of the room.
I got dressed quickly. It was a school day. I went into the kitchen. My mother had just finished scrambling some eggs and was putting them on a plate, her back to me.
"Mom, why were you shouting? Are you mad? Why? What did I do?"
She walked to the table, carrying the plate. I followed.
"Mom, what happened? What did I do to make you angry? I was asleep! Why were you shouting at me?"
She still did not turn around to look at me. She placed the plate on the table as she spoke.
"Eat your eggs," she said in a voice of quiet contempt.
I knew I would get no explanation. I thought about it all the way to school. How could I have been having a fight with my mother while I was asleep ?
It was the beginning of my eventual understanding that I was being interrogated with the use of drugs, at night, in my sleep.
In the 1930s, before I was born, my mother and father, who later adopted me at birth, joined the Communist Party. My mother was descended from two or more generations of Russian communist revolutionists in her family which gave her major social status and power in the Communist Party in America.
My mother was born in London, England, then emigrated from London with her family as they fled from Russia around 1915 when she was five years old. She grew up in Chicago. Her father, my grandfather, was a socialist union organizer.
My father came from New Jersey. His mother may have been in the Communist Party.
My mother was married in her teens, then divorced. She moved to San Francisco where she worked as a social worker.
My mother and father met on a blind date, met again a few weeks later at my father's apartment in Los Angeles, and decided to drive to Reno, Nevada and get married after knowing each other a matter of hours.
I believe this sudden marriage was arranged by the Communist Party. My parents were neither romantic nor sentimental. They were two sophisticated attractive confident adults in their late 30s, and neither of them lacked dates, a strong social life or attention from the opposite sex, nor were they impulsive. In my opinion, it was an arranged marriage, not a "whirlwind romance."
According to my father's files under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), my mother was the head of a special group that included my father and its purpose was CP infiltration of the film studios. My father was a quirky, eccentric kind of guy and apparently he balked at some of the orders my mother gave him, possibly causing the mission to go awry or be cancelled or reassigned to someone else.
Their marriage included some violence on my mother's part, sending my father to the hospital with serious injuries twice.
The CP was like the military; no excuses were allowed. Responsibility for the failed mission fell on my mother. My parents had to go to a CP hearing held by CP leadership in New York City. My mother was desolate, shamed before those she most admired and wanted to please and in trouble with some very powerful people. From my mother's point of view, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Her punishment was decided at that hearing after which my parents, along with me, returned to California, disgraced.
My mother was stripped of her power, demoted to being a rank and file member for a period of time. She had to go to work doing hard physical jobs for minimum wage, had her house and money taken away and her new car was replaced with a faded old Plymouth. She was very bitter about this.
To say she never forgave my father was an understatement.
I had been adopted at birth during the mission gone wrong. I was four years old when we began an entirely new, and much worse life. My parents divorced.
The Hollywood Blacklist killed my father's film writing career. It is not clear whether this was caused by Cold War red scare politics of that time, or whether my father was blacklisted from inside the Party as punishment, or under the influence of my mother. My father moved to New York and I only heard from him by letter and saw him when he made an occasional visit to Los Angeles.
My father was afraid of my mother, with good reason. Even after their divorce, she had, officially or unofficially, control over every aspect of his life. She did her best to take away any satisfaction he might have had in his life up to and including the night he died.
At one point, in my early teens, my father moved back from New York to Los Angeles briefly and became involved with a woman, Helene J., an actor who was in the Communist Party. My mother found out about it and became furious.
A few weeks later, my father "decided" to move to Europe. A few months after that, Helene was murdered in the middle of the night by a man who got into her apartment, struck her with an axe and then strangled her. My mother put the newspaper with the headline right in front of my breakfast dish on a Monday morning; the first page article about the murdered woman jumped out at me. I had known and liked Helene, she'd been kind to me, and it hit me hard.
As my mother served her punishment time, she gradually regained her status and most of her former power in the Communist Party. My mother then remarried. I was eleven.
My new stepfather was a psychiatrist with patients in the entertainment world and the mob. At that time, the mob had an informal pact with the Communist Party (it dissolved around the time of the JFK assassination). My stepdad had been a decorated hero in WWII. He treated me kindly and I adored him. He died in 1963 at age 50 when I was 18.
As a result of Party security policies, children would suffer along with their parents. People might be willing to risk their own lives to betray the Party, but no one would want to risk the lives of their children. In my early childhood, I had gone from being a princess, the heir to my mother, the red queen, to being nothing.
Perhaps because of my father's behavior, or perhaps because I was a timid child, I was not chosen for CP youth training. I was told nothing about this but it was crystal clear that, in some way, I had been demoted and was no longer considered worthy of affection or respect.
I believe my mother's secret group decided to mistreat me in order to bring home to my father and other people in the Party that it did not pay to disobey a CP leader--or her. I served as a warning. Also, as an unchosen one, I was seen as a security risk.
I have good reason to think that they thought they could manage me, and CP security, better if I wound up in a mental hospital. One purpose of her ongoing abuse was to get me to react in a way that would allow my mother and her powerful friends, to commit me to a hospital; if I tried to hurt anyone, or made a suicidal gesture, they could use that to send me where they could better manage me.
Also, as an "unchosen one," I had to be taught to be humble and subservient. And, for security reasons, I needed to be under my mother's control at all times, lest I fall under the spell or control of the CP's enemies or be harmed by them. I was surveilled at all times and had no privacy in my childhood; my mother found many ways to remind me of this.
My mother yelled, screamed, and slapped me whenever she felt like it. I could never predict her behavior. My mother did not believe in making "rules." She did not want to teach me to obey rules; she wanted me to obey her. I was to be made sensitive to her every mood, expression and tone of voice.
Her verbal abuse was intense. She told me I disgusted her and she no longer loved me. She humiliated me in public and in private. She warned her friends to never be nice to me, saying I'd be spoiled if they acted kind or caring.
Other people around her felt that if she would not hesitate to terrorize her own young, timid daughter, what might she do to them or their families if they dared step out of line?
My mother had a long career in the Party. I was told nothing about any of this, and I believed she had, as so many others had, dropped out of the Party during the Party's Hitler-Stalin Pact in the late 1930s. I was into my early middle years when I figured out, and she admitted to me, she had never dropped out of the CPUSA.
Everyone I knew when I was growing up acted as if my abuse was normal and fully acceptable; I assumed I was an inferior child, and that I deserved it. It is much easier for abused children to believe their abuse happens because they are badly behaved (something which they might improve) than to believe they are owned, body and soul, by a monster.
The people who surrounded my mother had to ask her permission for every single thing in their lives. They had to ask her about getting married or divorced, getting a job or quitting one, where they lived, renting or buying housing, what schools their children went to and everything else.
My childhood was a nightmare, sometimes a literal one; there were all those sleep interrogations. My mother would threaten me with horrifying tortures. She would suggest that I would become anxious and very sick if I ever dared to speak to anyone about the Communist Party. Sometimes I still react that way if I speak these words aloud or post them here.
My mother gave me very little affection, although she could put on an Academy Award winning performance with strangers.
She took pride and pleasure in hurting me. She wore a little sadistic smile of satisfaction when she got me to cry. She once told me, "To me, the sound of your sobs are like the sound of a fine symphony orchestra tuning up."
It is fair to say she did act as a responsible mother in terms of giving me good nutrition, regular supervision and an excellent education at a good private school (on a scholarship).
My school was founded by and under the influence of the CP. But the other students, for the most part, were the "chosen ones," the ones who were being prepared for CP youth training. I was considered at a much lower status, though it was never openly discussed in front of me.
There were some basically decent people at my school, both students and teachers, and I was fond of them. The teachers were excellent and devoted to our education. The school's curriculum outpaced the public school curriculum by many miles. But no one could go up against my mother in any way.
When the school bully tormented me, I got no help or encouragment from my mother, only contempt. When I made two new friends who helped me stand up to the bully, a meeting was held, and my mother ordered their parents to keep them away from me. My two school friends never spoke to me again. No one would tell me why. I was devastated.
When I became attached to my beloved cat, my one true childhood friend, my mother quietly and secretly made sure the cat disappeared, then ignored me as I cried my heart out.
Although I was emotionally, and sometimes physically, battered (she once slammed my hand against a table and broke my right thumb), I still loved my mother. She had been kinder to me in my earlier years and we'd bonded. Her change to super-witch had been inexplicable to me. (I believe drugs and hypnosis were used on her during her hospitalization in the 1940s). I thought if I tried hard enough, was good enough, my mother, the one who had once loved me, would come back. How I longed to be one of the chosen children who were loved and cherished.
Today, I thank God I was not one of those selected red diaper babies who went on to Communist youth training. After early and prolonged, training, they went on to become lifetime slaves of the Communist Party, bound by extreme secrecy. They are an intelligent and proud group, convinced they are part of a vanguard of positive change in the world. I wish them well with their project, but if people who are like my mother and her friends wind up running the world, God help us all.
I was considered an ongoing security risk. I was to be watched and, in various ways, targeted for the rest of my life; it may still be continuing.
The closer I lived, geographically and emotionally, to my mother, the more I was bullied and humiliated by my mother. The further away I ran from her, the more the CP and their assets picked on me in an effort to drive me back to her, or drive me into a psychotic break that would put me firmly under their control in a mental institution.
I've experienced some rough times, including, but not limited to:
Two violent stranger rapes in my teens, many burglaries (disguised security searches), robberies, being held prisoner by an asset of my mother's enemies (COINTELPRO) for a horrifying day with a knife to my throat, attempts to keep me from college graduation, destruction of 64 pages of notes for my Master's thesis in grad school, my arrest arranged in a foreign country, multiple attempts to keep me from employment, many attempts to get me fired from jobs, killing my dog, disruption and destruction of my love affairs, my friendships and my life in general, loss of my inheritance from my father, very effective total sabotage of a play I had written and produced, and even regular, serious interference in my medical care (my mother broke down the door to the operating room during both of the surgeries I've had, and also interrupted my oral surgery once, in order to interrogate me).
I wondered why I was so often so very, terribly unluckly. I thought I was under some kind of curse.
Eventually, my mother got old and lost her memory. She forgot she was angry with me,forgot her contempt. She was no longer a domineering witch, but much more like the mother I remembered from my earliest childhood. She seemed like a stranger. I decided to make the best of it. I looked forward to seeing her in the home she was in every weekend. I took a certain pride in being a better "mother" to her than she had been to me; it meant I had not turned out like her.
After my mother died in 2005, I began to learn more about her activities in the CP. I talked to a family friend, who told me a tiny bit. Others told me nothing, or they told me obvious lies--which told me something in itself.
After he died in 1983, I obtained my father's file under the FOIA. I read a lot of books about the old CP, which was now defunct, having died in 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things came into focus.
I finally had some viable explanations for the many strange, unlikely and destructive things that had happened to me over the years.
I connected a lot of dots from my memories, put them together with what I learned from my father's file and all I'd been reading and a lot of things became clear to me for the first time. It was like having a light turned on in formerly dark room.
I began to develop some self-esteem realizing how much I had survived, both mentally and physically. I had miraculously obtained several college degrees and a teaching credential in spite of serious opposition. I had managed an adult life outside an institution, somehow. That I survived it with my sanity intact is a miracle. I even had a long, satisfying, though rocky, career as a teacher.
My mother made my well being and happiness a sacrifice to Communist Party security.
I know she took pride in that.
Nothing in her life meant as much to her as CP security. I never had a chance.
I believe my father suffered through a deathbed interrogation by my mother the night he died as I lay in a drugged sleep at my father's home a mile from the small private hospital he was in. She may well have tortured him. This haunts me.
Sometimes, late at night, I am still afraid that some old dragon from the CP will find me, and I will wind up dead after some horrifying ordeal.
I know there is a new CP out there somewhere, but I don't know much about it, and I don't want to know. Rumor has it that they are not as cruel as the old Stalinists.
I have a genuine fondness and real admiration for some of the people I grew up with, but they have generally seen me as lesser.
One day, after holding this inside me for years, I talked to my Russian immigrant neighbor about it. I sat at a bus stop bench with Luba on a holiday when we knew no bus would come. It was a cold day with a fine mist and rain threatening.
We talked about the old Soviet Union, in which Luba had grown up. She told me about the good and bad of living under communism before coming to the USA. She talked of how many of the workers had more benefits (vacations, good apartments, medical care) than many workers in the USA could expect. She talked about the pervasive and very real fear of the government that people had, how they hid books in closets behind walls, how they did not dare discuss politics even with close friends and relatives.
I told her about my mother, about the abuse, the extreme secrecy, the fear I still sometimes felt. I told her how I had hated, and loved, my mother.
I told her, "It's almost as if my mother had lived her life as some sort of spy. I love my country! And I know you do, too, Luba. I cannot admire what my mother did."
Luba sighed. "I know. Is not good." Then she took my hand. The light mist was starting to turn to rain. "But your mother...she was...idealist."
I almost pulled my hand away. "No!" I said. "My mother was not an idealist! She was an ideologue !"
Luba had just learned English that year and I was afraid she might not understand the word.
But she squeezed my hand and said, "I know what is ideologue. Is not good. But...before ideologue...was idealist."
I sat there weeping in the light rain as she held my hand.
Before ideologue...was idealist.
It excused nothing, of course. But, somehow, the wounded daughter in me felt better.
As I opened my eyes, I saw my mother leaning over my bed shouting a sentence at me ending in:
"...AND YOU WON'T GET AWAY WITH IT!"
I sat up. "What's going on? Get away with what? Why are you shouting at me?"
My mother shot me a satisfied triumphant glance, whirled around and walked out of the room.
I got dressed quickly. It was a school day. I went into the kitchen. My mother had just finished scrambling some eggs and was putting them on a plate, her back to me.
"Mom, why were you shouting? Are you mad? Why? What did I do?"
She walked to the table, carrying the plate. I followed.
"Mom, what happened? What did I do to make you angry? I was asleep! Why were you shouting at me?"
She still did not turn around to look at me. She placed the plate on the table as she spoke.
"Eat your eggs," she said in a voice of quiet contempt.
I knew I would get no explanation. I thought about it all the way to school. How could I have been having a fight with my mother while I was asleep ?
It was the beginning of my eventual understanding that I was being interrogated with the use of drugs, at night, in my sleep.
In the 1930s, before I was born, my mother and father, who later adopted me at birth, joined the Communist Party. My mother was descended from two or more generations of Russian communist revolutionists in her family which gave her major social status and power in the Communist Party in America.
My mother was born in London, England, then emigrated from London with her family as they fled from Russia around 1915 when she was five years old. She grew up in Chicago. Her father, my grandfather, was a socialist union organizer.
My father came from New Jersey. His mother may have been in the Communist Party.
My mother was married in her teens, then divorced. She moved to San Francisco where she worked as a social worker.
My mother and father met on a blind date, met again a few weeks later at my father's apartment in Los Angeles, and decided to drive to Reno, Nevada and get married after knowing each other a matter of hours.
I believe this sudden marriage was arranged by the Communist Party. My parents were neither romantic nor sentimental. They were two sophisticated attractive confident adults in their late 30s, and neither of them lacked dates, a strong social life or attention from the opposite sex, nor were they impulsive. In my opinion, it was an arranged marriage, not a "whirlwind romance."
According to my father's files under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), my mother was the head of a special group that included my father and its purpose was CP infiltration of the film studios. My father was a quirky, eccentric kind of guy and apparently he balked at some of the orders my mother gave him, possibly causing the mission to go awry or be cancelled or reassigned to someone else.
Their marriage included some violence on my mother's part, sending my father to the hospital with serious injuries twice.
The CP was like the military; no excuses were allowed. Responsibility for the failed mission fell on my mother. My parents had to go to a CP hearing held by CP leadership in New York City. My mother was desolate, shamed before those she most admired and wanted to please and in trouble with some very powerful people. From my mother's point of view, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Her punishment was decided at that hearing after which my parents, along with me, returned to California, disgraced.
My mother was stripped of her power, demoted to being a rank and file member for a period of time. She had to go to work doing hard physical jobs for minimum wage, had her house and money taken away and her new car was replaced with a faded old Plymouth. She was very bitter about this.
To say she never forgave my father was an understatement.
I had been adopted at birth during the mission gone wrong. I was four years old when we began an entirely new, and much worse life. My parents divorced.
The Hollywood Blacklist killed my father's film writing career. It is not clear whether this was caused by Cold War red scare politics of that time, or whether my father was blacklisted from inside the Party as punishment, or under the influence of my mother. My father moved to New York and I only heard from him by letter and saw him when he made an occasional visit to Los Angeles.
My father was afraid of my mother, with good reason. Even after their divorce, she had, officially or unofficially, control over every aspect of his life. She did her best to take away any satisfaction he might have had in his life up to and including the night he died.
At one point, in my early teens, my father moved back from New York to Los Angeles briefly and became involved with a woman, Helene J., an actor who was in the Communist Party. My mother found out about it and became furious.
A few weeks later, my father "decided" to move to Europe. A few months after that, Helene was murdered in the middle of the night by a man who got into her apartment, struck her with an axe and then strangled her. My mother put the newspaper with the headline right in front of my breakfast dish on a Monday morning; the first page article about the murdered woman jumped out at me. I had known and liked Helene, she'd been kind to me, and it hit me hard.
As my mother served her punishment time, she gradually regained her status and most of her former power in the Communist Party. My mother then remarried. I was eleven.
My new stepfather was a psychiatrist with patients in the entertainment world and the mob. At that time, the mob had an informal pact with the Communist Party (it dissolved around the time of the JFK assassination). My stepdad had been a decorated hero in WWII. He treated me kindly and I adored him. He died in 1963 at age 50 when I was 18.
As a result of Party security policies, children would suffer along with their parents. People might be willing to risk their own lives to betray the Party, but no one would want to risk the lives of their children. In my early childhood, I had gone from being a princess, the heir to my mother, the red queen, to being nothing.
Perhaps because of my father's behavior, or perhaps because I was a timid child, I was not chosen for CP youth training. I was told nothing about this but it was crystal clear that, in some way, I had been demoted and was no longer considered worthy of affection or respect.
I believe my mother's secret group decided to mistreat me in order to bring home to my father and other people in the Party that it did not pay to disobey a CP leader--or her. I served as a warning. Also, as an unchosen one, I was seen as a security risk.
I have good reason to think that they thought they could manage me, and CP security, better if I wound up in a mental hospital. One purpose of her ongoing abuse was to get me to react in a way that would allow my mother and her powerful friends, to commit me to a hospital; if I tried to hurt anyone, or made a suicidal gesture, they could use that to send me where they could better manage me.
Also, as an "unchosen one," I had to be taught to be humble and subservient. And, for security reasons, I needed to be under my mother's control at all times, lest I fall under the spell or control of the CP's enemies or be harmed by them. I was surveilled at all times and had no privacy in my childhood; my mother found many ways to remind me of this.
My mother yelled, screamed, and slapped me whenever she felt like it. I could never predict her behavior. My mother did not believe in making "rules." She did not want to teach me to obey rules; she wanted me to obey her. I was to be made sensitive to her every mood, expression and tone of voice.
Her verbal abuse was intense. She told me I disgusted her and she no longer loved me. She humiliated me in public and in private. She warned her friends to never be nice to me, saying I'd be spoiled if they acted kind or caring.
Other people around her felt that if she would not hesitate to terrorize her own young, timid daughter, what might she do to them or their families if they dared step out of line?
My mother had a long career in the Party. I was told nothing about any of this, and I believed she had, as so many others had, dropped out of the Party during the Party's Hitler-Stalin Pact in the late 1930s. I was into my early middle years when I figured out, and she admitted to me, she had never dropped out of the CPUSA.
Everyone I knew when I was growing up acted as if my abuse was normal and fully acceptable; I assumed I was an inferior child, and that I deserved it. It is much easier for abused children to believe their abuse happens because they are badly behaved (something which they might improve) than to believe they are owned, body and soul, by a monster.
The people who surrounded my mother had to ask her permission for every single thing in their lives. They had to ask her about getting married or divorced, getting a job or quitting one, where they lived, renting or buying housing, what schools their children went to and everything else.
My childhood was a nightmare, sometimes a literal one; there were all those sleep interrogations. My mother would threaten me with horrifying tortures. She would suggest that I would become anxious and very sick if I ever dared to speak to anyone about the Communist Party. Sometimes I still react that way if I speak these words aloud or post them here.
My mother gave me very little affection, although she could put on an Academy Award winning performance with strangers.
She took pride and pleasure in hurting me. She wore a little sadistic smile of satisfaction when she got me to cry. She once told me, "To me, the sound of your sobs are like the sound of a fine symphony orchestra tuning up."
It is fair to say she did act as a responsible mother in terms of giving me good nutrition, regular supervision and an excellent education at a good private school (on a scholarship).
My school was founded by and under the influence of the CP. But the other students, for the most part, were the "chosen ones," the ones who were being prepared for CP youth training. I was considered at a much lower status, though it was never openly discussed in front of me.
There were some basically decent people at my school, both students and teachers, and I was fond of them. The teachers were excellent and devoted to our education. The school's curriculum outpaced the public school curriculum by many miles. But no one could go up against my mother in any way.
When the school bully tormented me, I got no help or encouragment from my mother, only contempt. When I made two new friends who helped me stand up to the bully, a meeting was held, and my mother ordered their parents to keep them away from me. My two school friends never spoke to me again. No one would tell me why. I was devastated.
When I became attached to my beloved cat, my one true childhood friend, my mother quietly and secretly made sure the cat disappeared, then ignored me as I cried my heart out.
Although I was emotionally, and sometimes physically, battered (she once slammed my hand against a table and broke my right thumb), I still loved my mother. She had been kinder to me in my earlier years and we'd bonded. Her change to super-witch had been inexplicable to me. (I believe drugs and hypnosis were used on her during her hospitalization in the 1940s). I thought if I tried hard enough, was good enough, my mother, the one who had once loved me, would come back. How I longed to be one of the chosen children who were loved and cherished.
Today, I thank God I was not one of those selected red diaper babies who went on to Communist youth training. After early and prolonged, training, they went on to become lifetime slaves of the Communist Party, bound by extreme secrecy. They are an intelligent and proud group, convinced they are part of a vanguard of positive change in the world. I wish them well with their project, but if people who are like my mother and her friends wind up running the world, God help us all.
I was considered an ongoing security risk. I was to be watched and, in various ways, targeted for the rest of my life; it may still be continuing.
The closer I lived, geographically and emotionally, to my mother, the more I was bullied and humiliated by my mother. The further away I ran from her, the more the CP and their assets picked on me in an effort to drive me back to her, or drive me into a psychotic break that would put me firmly under their control in a mental institution.
I've experienced some rough times, including, but not limited to:
Two violent stranger rapes in my teens, many burglaries (disguised security searches), robberies, being held prisoner by an asset of my mother's enemies (COINTELPRO) for a horrifying day with a knife to my throat, attempts to keep me from college graduation, destruction of 64 pages of notes for my Master's thesis in grad school, my arrest arranged in a foreign country, multiple attempts to keep me from employment, many attempts to get me fired from jobs, killing my dog, disruption and destruction of my love affairs, my friendships and my life in general, loss of my inheritance from my father, very effective total sabotage of a play I had written and produced, and even regular, serious interference in my medical care (my mother broke down the door to the operating room during both of the surgeries I've had, and also interrupted my oral surgery once, in order to interrogate me).
I wondered why I was so often so very, terribly unluckly. I thought I was under some kind of curse.
Eventually, my mother got old and lost her memory. She forgot she was angry with me,forgot her contempt. She was no longer a domineering witch, but much more like the mother I remembered from my earliest childhood. She seemed like a stranger. I decided to make the best of it. I looked forward to seeing her in the home she was in every weekend. I took a certain pride in being a better "mother" to her than she had been to me; it meant I had not turned out like her.
After my mother died in 2005, I began to learn more about her activities in the CP. I talked to a family friend, who told me a tiny bit. Others told me nothing, or they told me obvious lies--which told me something in itself.
After he died in 1983, I obtained my father's file under the FOIA. I read a lot of books about the old CP, which was now defunct, having died in 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things came into focus.
I finally had some viable explanations for the many strange, unlikely and destructive things that had happened to me over the years.
I connected a lot of dots from my memories, put them together with what I learned from my father's file and all I'd been reading and a lot of things became clear to me for the first time. It was like having a light turned on in formerly dark room.
I began to develop some self-esteem realizing how much I had survived, both mentally and physically. I had miraculously obtained several college degrees and a teaching credential in spite of serious opposition. I had managed an adult life outside an institution, somehow. That I survived it with my sanity intact is a miracle. I even had a long, satisfying, though rocky, career as a teacher.
My mother made my well being and happiness a sacrifice to Communist Party security.
I know she took pride in that.
Nothing in her life meant as much to her as CP security. I never had a chance.
I believe my father suffered through a deathbed interrogation by my mother the night he died as I lay in a drugged sleep at my father's home a mile from the small private hospital he was in. She may well have tortured him. This haunts me.
Sometimes, late at night, I am still afraid that some old dragon from the CP will find me, and I will wind up dead after some horrifying ordeal.
I know there is a new CP out there somewhere, but I don't know much about it, and I don't want to know. Rumor has it that they are not as cruel as the old Stalinists.
I have a genuine fondness and real admiration for some of the people I grew up with, but they have generally seen me as lesser.
One day, after holding this inside me for years, I talked to my Russian immigrant neighbor about it. I sat at a bus stop bench with Luba on a holiday when we knew no bus would come. It was a cold day with a fine mist and rain threatening.
We talked about the old Soviet Union, in which Luba had grown up. She told me about the good and bad of living under communism before coming to the USA. She talked of how many of the workers had more benefits (vacations, good apartments, medical care) than many workers in the USA could expect. She talked about the pervasive and very real fear of the government that people had, how they hid books in closets behind walls, how they did not dare discuss politics even with close friends and relatives.
I told her about my mother, about the abuse, the extreme secrecy, the fear I still sometimes felt. I told her how I had hated, and loved, my mother.
I told her, "It's almost as if my mother had lived her life as some sort of spy. I love my country! And I know you do, too, Luba. I cannot admire what my mother did."
Luba sighed. "I know. Is not good." Then she took my hand. The light mist was starting to turn to rain. "But your mother...she was...idealist."
I almost pulled my hand away. "No!" I said. "My mother was not an idealist! She was an ideologue !"
Luba had just learned English that year and I was afraid she might not understand the word.
But she squeezed my hand and said, "I know what is ideologue. Is not good. But...before ideologue...was idealist."
I sat there weeping in the light rain as she held my hand.
Before ideologue...was idealist.
It excused nothing, of course. But, somehow, the wounded daughter in me felt better.
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