A podcast I liked

This week I heard a podcast about grief and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). A woman who is 32 told the story of losing her mom as a child and her father’s remarriage to a woman who eventually triggered family fights. The little girl, then in middle school, discovered Harriet the Spy (via the movie), totally related to this character, and found her to be a powerful hero, AND was obsessed with her tape recorder.

Twenty years later she listened to a tape recording of her stepmother yelling at her and fighting with the dad. I love that she still had these tapes.

She didn’t say anything about keeping a journal, but she had a lot in common with me though 23 years younger. I emulated Harriet the Spy as much as I could as soon as I read the book, at age eight, in 1973. The thing about Harriet that changed my life was that it was the book that inspired me to start keeping a journal. I also was beyond thrilled to get a tape recorder for Christmas. (I didn’t surreptitiously record my family, but I had fun creating fake news interviews with my friends.)

The ACEs quiz always confuses me because it classifies experiences in a more extreme way than what I went through when my mother died. For instance, “did you often or very often feel that you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you?” and “did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs?”

I can say yes to the mildest versions. I felt there was no one to protect me as I grew into my teens, but I did have a stable home with my dad, and nothing terrible happened to me anyway. (Wait, is that true?) I lived with my dad who I would say was a problem drinker, but he never lost his job or abused me because of it. And yet he was not himself as he used to be. Depending on the exact language used in versions of this test, I may or may not feel I should say yes to any of the questions. And yet I can say unequivocally that I was isolated and unseen and that that changed the shape of my personality as I grew.

Was I “neglected”? Emotionally and socially, yes. Was my mother’s death a trauma when I was eleven, even though it wasn’t sudden? I’ve been unsure. Other people, such as friends and therapists I’ve talked with, tell me it clearly was a trauma. (Who gets to decide what’s a trauma?)

My ACE score is 4: feeling no one in my family thought I was important; feeling I had no one to protect me; loss of a parent; substance abuse in the home (my dad’s drinking). I experienced “toxic stress,” as the podcast describes it, sometimes — or was it in fact so much of the time that I didn’t recognize it until I experienced it again in a fraught love relationship?

I also had a lot of the positive, resilience-building experiences that help protect against some of the risks caused by ACEs. I always had at least one trusted friend to confide in. I often, not always, had an adult to confide in. I had abundant love from both of my parents before my mom got too sick to be present in my life. I’m sure that’s why I’m fortunate enough not to have had the more severe problems that ACEs can lead to.

In my memoir, I’m trying to create a lively, relatable, emotional story about the shadow of growing up as an only child with only a dad. This type of podcast-listening and quiz-taking helps me put words to some of my harder-to-describe experiences. I’m also reading loads of memoirs as well as fiction about all types of personal loss.

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