This is my actual child, approx age 2. I'm with our Japanese maid. In 1950, in Japan, even the lowliest enlisted families had Japanese maids. I think I owe this woman whatever scraps of sanity I have managed (with therapy) to knit into a semblance of a functional personality. My father told me that she was absolutely devoted to me, that in her eyes I could do no wrong. She stuck to me like glue, fussed over me, and indulged me with endless patience. My father said that Japanese was almost my first language.
At that time, my father was drinking heavily, and my mother was very unhappy. Being in a foreign country was very hard for my mother who had no self-confidence and was painfully shy. She came from an immigrant family of 10 children and grew up in a close-knit ethnic neighborhood in the east. My mother did not like having a maid, and she didn't want another person in the house, especially a cute, perky young woman. Those were dark days.
Thank goodness this Japanese woman took me under her wing and "mothered" me in those early days. I don't know how long she was in my life, maybe a year or so? I'm sure when it came time for us to leave to return to the U.S., no one thought to forewarn me and encourage us to say good-bye to each other. Probably just one day she didn't come and I never knew why.
Then on the way back to the States, I contracted measles on the ship and was quarantined in the hospital as soon as we got back. My parents did not visit me for a week. They said they weren't allowed to see me. Hard to fathom that... there are such things as gowns and masks, aren't there? My father said that when they came to pick me up, I was a very angry three-year old. Always after that I was afraid of being sent away somewhere... so I became a model child and model student. I was too afraid to commit even the tiniest infraction. As an only child, as far as I knew, this was how families were run. Parents were not to be trusted... in fact, they were the source of greatest danger.
Later when I went to grade school and started visiting the homes of my friends, I figured out very early that something was deeply wrong in my home. Some homes had a healthy vibe; ours did not. I had a few other little friends whose homes were like mine. When I was with them, I knew something wasn't right. In other homes, I saw parents who hugged their kids, talked to them, took an interest in what they were up to, encouraged them to get involved in school stuff like sports, clubs, music, etc. There was none of that in my house.
When I got to high school and college (by this time my father was out of the service and we had settled where I still live), other families started "adopting" me. My friends' parents always really like me, and that meant so much to me. The mother of a old boyfriend (from 30 years ago) is still very much my adopted mother.
But I digress... (what else is new?)
I'm so glad I have this picture. In this picture, the hospital episode hadn't happened yet. There was discord in the family, but that great betrayal (from my p.o.v.) hadn't yet robbed me of innocence. I've tried to be hypnotized to take me back to my normal mental/emotional state before the hospital incident, just to get a sense of what it felt like to be me before that happened. My therapist and I had partial success with this effort one time. For a few seconds I was there, in that little girl, looking at the world through her eyes, but the rush of emotion-- the vividness and depth of the sensations I felt-- were so intense and overwhelming that I pulled back from the scene. Haven't been able to replicate that experience.
