Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Family

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Cooperation –

      Becoming a warrior is rough. The only thing harder than becoming a warrior is NOT becoming one. Then you’re subject to the wild vagaries of circumstance. What you must do Is fight your way up to the controls and try to steer this thing in a safe direction. You won’t be able to do that without assembling a team, and teams rely on cooperation.

      My mother died of breast cancer when she was 70 years old – and my father lost his mind. This was a complete surprise to everyone. My father had always been the strongest, smartest, wiliest person in the room. He was especially good at Reality. As the captain of our ship he piloted us through storms, foreign borders, bizarre customs officials and threatening cops and robbers. He once jumped overboard with a knife in his teeth to cut our propeller free. He untangled anchor chains, rescued a man at sea, founded successful businesses, managed money and liberated cash from international banks. He didn’t believe in God, he was scientifically educated and intellectually up-to-date.

      My mother’s death was no surprise – she’d been dying for five years, up until the time the hospital sent her home and said they could do nothing for her. After the body bag left, my father’s first impulse was to kill himself by swimming as far out to sea as he could go. He was rescued by my brother-in-law, but he was still talking crazy. A helicopter took him to a hospital on the mainland where he was diagnosed with grief psychosis and briefly institutionalized while various medications were tried.


      I took him out for lunch one day and he asked to stop at the Kwik Check for a newspaper, running in by himself. In the car I went into a slow panic – what if he bought razor blades? Luckily, he didn’t, but that was the way we all had to think as I strategized with my three sisters. We took turns with him. We could see the medication – Thorazine – had debilitating side effects, so checked him into the Philadelphia Mood Clinic to see if they could do a better job. They could, using primarily talk therapy.

      Here my father fixated on getting married again, and as soon as he was out of the clinic he was stalking a variety of women, all of whom turned him down. Finally, he hooked up with an old friend of the family who was coming out of a bad divorce where her husband wanted Someone Else. She needed a Someone Else to shake in his face.

      She certainly was familiar – having attended all the same churches and schools that we had. But she was not like my mother at all – flat-footed where my mother was imaginative, plain where my mother was beautiful, astringent where my mother was warm. But my father certainly calmed down. Creepily, he put her in charge of everything. He began referring to her as “your mother”. None of us were invited to the wedding. Newly married, they went on a tour of all our houses where he carefully explained to us that we wouldn’t be getting anything in the will, because he’d already done plenty, plus he’d made our stepmother leave her job so she could tour the world with him and he had to take care of her.

      My husband said, Great! I’ll take it from here! One of my sisters said, “It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it.” Another was so depressed – “He’s abandoning us AGAIN” – she couldn’t speak. The third sister said, “We’re helpless, we can’t stop him.”

      I said, I was taught to speak truth to power. I was taught that resistance is not only not futile but mandatory. Guess who taught me that? My conscientious objector father, who went to Kentucky State Prison for his pacifist beliefs.

      I wrote him a letter in which I said half of that money was Mom’s and she felt an obligation to and love for her grandchildren and daughters. I threw in every moral rationale I could think of. Incredibly – considering the way he’d distanced himself from us – it worked. He said he would leave us a small amount at his death and put the bulk of the money in a trust that would revert to us on our stepmother’s death. He didn’t leave us as much as he promised, but the trust idea is a good one. Someday it might even come to pass.

      ON BEING DISINHERITED

      These are the tasks
      To be performed
      Without feeling;
      The snipping the
      Slashing
      The shredding
      The with-holding, the
      Bundling into bunches.
      You play the remote ogre
      And I’ll be the crying child.

      Why do partitioned pieces
      Melt before they touch?
      You fear to give;
      I am helpless to receive.
      Suppose we changed places.
      Would that explain
      Your fear of me?

    1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

      Memory –


      After the bank took our house, we moved into one of the vacant condos in their project. My mother-in-law sued us with a federal injunction that accused us of damaging her tax credits.

        Throughout this horrible state of affairs my husband kept hoping his mother would come to her senses. I consulted a divorce attorney but realized that I didn’t want a different husband, I wanted a different life. I wanted to return to the past, when we were happy and everything was possible.

        At this time, my own family sold our summer place in Maine and I gained a sudden influx of cash. I decided to use it to get my husband away from his mother and into a new life. There was certainly the possibility that he would feel obligated to choose her, because of his “sunk costs” or just feel emotionally unable to leave his situation.

        Through the nine years of our marriage we had found joy and release visiting his family summer place, StormFall, in the Berkshires, and it seemed to make sense to choose somewhere near there. Hartford was the nearest big city and Connecticut seemed halcyon and clean; almost a paradise in comparison with Philadelphia. The children were six and two at the time; as soon as I received my psychology degree from LaSalle U we took off to explore the Hartford suburbs. Manchester, “Silk City”; “The City Of Village Charm” seemed just perfect. I bought a cute little new townhouse and enrolled the kids in school. It took Toss only a few months to join me. He hired a lawyer to extract him from his partnership and he found a wonderful job writing for the Connecticut Lawyer. He stayed there twenty-three years! We were a happy family again.

        NEW HOUSE

        The pregnant car disgorges
        Us. It’s winter.
        We beat our gills as light
        As hummingbirds.
        In a town of green schools and
        Greener parks this
        New built house
        Gapes and swells
        To draw us in.
        There’s a science room and
        A writing room and
        A TV room and
        Rooms for children.
        We sleep aloft for safety
        High above the thorny osiers
        Unseen by the demon’s angry outriders;
        Cherishing a safe word
        She’ll never guess; it’s
        Love.

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Partnership –

          Right after our marriage, my husband went into partnership with his mother to buy two wrecked downtown buildings and turn them into condos. I was happy about this since I was already thirty years old and wanted to concentrate on starting a family. We moved into the recently vacated grandmother’s home – she relocated to a nursing home – it was a 45 minute drive from my mother In law’s house.

          I noticed right away that my mother-in-law was a contentious person. She flat-out contradicted people, turning social chitchat into argument. She talked so angrily and incessantly about her divorce you would have thought it happened yesterday, not ten years ago. Above all, she hated seeing other people happy and expressed constant envy, resentment and rage. She made regular false statements about herself as if challenging others to correct her, and she corrected me about my own areas of expertise where I could easily prove her wrong if I cared to. I didn’t care to – she was my mother-in-law, my landlord and my husband’s business partner. I just determined to see as little of her as possible. She liked argument, publicly humiliating the shy, frightened man she called her “boyfriend” and ruining countless holidays working hard to destroy his ego. (He had no visible ego.)

          This was unsettling, to say the least. My husband sank all his money into their venture, she kept the books and was supposed to pay him a salary – she never did. They worked hard to secure a construction loan and she used part of the money to buy her “dream home” which meant they didn’t have enough cash to finish the project. We began to get threats of lawsuits from the bank which stated that I, who was not a partner and had signed nothing, was also on the hook for the money. She had no regard for the truth and frequently claimed lying on sworn documents was a clever business tactic.

          My husband was better than this, tried to correct and help her and in turn was attacked by her. But he felt helpless – all his money was tied up and the condos were slowly being readied for sale. When I complained about her behavior he was worried I would “expose” her and make things worse. So our partnership, too, was threatened. They went into therapy together – she reading from a long list of criticisms of my husband and what a terrible person and partner he was. When I finally spoke to the therapist I discovered neither of them had mentioned the mother-son relationship (which they both considered humiliating.) ! Needless to say, the newly-informed therapist “got it” immediately. “Get the hell out”, he advised. (She never paid him and he joined the long line of suers against her.)

          We bought a modest house in a struggling neighborhood and began to upgrade it. We had two small children and I was finishing college for a bachelor’s in psychology. All the way along I asked for professional help trying to understand this weird woman who hated her own children, humiliated anyone who ever loved her and felt insulted by rescuers. It was my first experience of evil. The diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder was just being established and she fit it to a tee. The bank took our house. Ultimately I was able to convince my husband, who was contemplating suicide, that we needed to get away from her and sever all ties. He got a wonderful legal writing job that combined his best interests, we moved two states away and lived happily ever after except… there was always my husband’s pain. Having that kind of person for a mother.

          #Haiku: The Definition of Evil

          Lost souls
          Twist truth:
          “Trust” is “punish”
          “Wild” is “Poison”
          “Conserve” is “destroy”.

        1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

          Resources:

            To our father, we were the Four Princesses – Alyssiana, Genviana, Merrillana and Avrilana. He grew up with a mother, a sister, two brothers, a grandmother and four great-aunts in circumstances of extreme frugality in the Depression. Nonetheless, they were a family of snobs and social pretensions kept afloat by a “bachelor uncle” who made a fortune in the insurance business.

            My father came into the capital from his trust fund when he was 25 (I was born when he was 31) built us a house and rented out surrounding properties. He went into the construction business with an architect friend from college, then into the laboratory development business with one of his tenants. He replaced his blue-chip stocks with high-flying ventures like Xerox and Sony, which in the sixties was like coining money.

            By the time I was 11 he quit his job and went into philanthropic work in Africa. I was concerned that we would be “poor”. I had already seen the stark divisions in my Ohio hometown and I never aspired to shift to the other side of the tracks. He told me not to worry, but when I saw the desperate refugees from a war-torn country he was trying to help, I had to worry.

            My father had a yacht built, my beautiful mother bought high-end clothes, they invested in art and traveled all over the world, but one by one his daughters fell off the gravy train. We went to boarding schools and approved colleges, shopped at re-sale stores and were discouraged from thinking of ourselves as “rich.”

            My father bought a house in a 50 acre park (in the middle of the city!) and slowly filled it treasures acquired abroad. I felt guilty for all the money he gave me and aspired to pay my own way. I was relieved to dodge college – that was a big price tag.

            I achieved an artist husband like myself – a touring musician with a wonderful sound who could play anything. We bought a house in the woods and I settled down to write. I figured we were set. But I had confused “intrinsic” with “extrinsic” values which can be easily swept away. I didn’t have “resources”. When my “house of cards” collapsed I found myself sitting in a temp office, paid minimum wage, waiting in case someone wanted to hire me for my only known skill: typing.

            HORROR STORY

            Lubricity
            Darkens into sweat;
            We face each other
            Across the cooling dinner,
            Night by night
            Stiff as andirons
            Masterpieces seen best by candlelight
            To hide the cracks,
            Well-meant improvements by
            Another’s hand.
            A well-matched pair.
            A fountain sings but
            One tune only. It didn’t look this way
            Proceeding forward.
            Backward is a different view.
            I could have sworn that we’d last longer.
            I caught flak from my mother,
            Who cast a role in Wuthering Heights;
            Preaching doom
            In guise of cheer.
            All I wanted was
            Sufficient light
            To read my tarot; recycled
            Tea leaves brewed
            From your used bathwater.
            The leaves are dank and do not speak.
            I shiver with cold and you
            With anger; a
            Brace of disappointments.
            Speechless.
            There’s still too much
            We can’t admit.

          1. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Solitude

            I’ve always enjoyed being alone, where I can sort my thoughts and groom my feelings and arrange my objectives. This fact was startlingly obvious from the first, and later I found out that people like that are called “introverts’. We draw energy from being alone, whereas our energy is depleted by contact with others.

            My most profound warrior resistance, so ancient I can’t recall its inception, is my allergy to being “directed.” For my poor parents it must have felt like their third daughter never emerged from ”the terrible twos.”

            My father was a very self-directed man, happiest with just my mother for company, so I had a model of resistance to being “molded.” He explained that he never could work for anyone else because their management style always rubbed him the wrong way. He formed two companies that he directed, and towards the end of his life was the kingpin or a charitable organization with a religious bent. He was grateful to that religion since they’d helped him with his conscientious objection in World War II, but he was never a believer. My mother was more mystical, with a strong response to beauty and design, who felt the most important things in life cannot be expressed. A wonderful challenge for a writer.

            Conscientious Objection

            I said No to

            Trooping past the David statue

            Attending parties

            Avoiding concerts,

            Wanting to be alone to write.

            I kept a diary my sisters

            Jeered at and it was

            Pretty stupid – training ground for

            Plays and proms

            Novels and stories –

            And I still make notes on

            Everything.

            “You’re not important,” said my

            Cohort –

            “You have to become important

            To have anything to say.”

            I knew that was wrong – every

            Artist I had studied –


            Every thinker –

            Bubbled like a kettle

            From inception.

            Reading tealeaves is as

            Necessary as

            Finding tea.

          2. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Rebirth –

            I’m convinced the main attraction of the evangelical religious movement is that it offers the opportunity to be “born again.” But I believe that option is always available to you without the necessity of signing up to be a cog in a “movement.”

            When I was twelve years old I read a James Bond novel in which he is washed up on a beach and needs to be nursed back into life without any of the previous appurtenances of his personality. I was very taken with this idea. Of course, it has literary antecedents in all the “castaway” and adventure stories of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. The question revolves around your essential self: do you have one? Or can even that be remodeled and rebuilt? This is the question warriors try to answer.

            Warriors pare their needs down. We keep ourselves ready for action. We are shapeshifters and time travelers – if that sounds attractive to you, keep listening.

            The first rebirth was rather brutal. At age 12, I was sent to live with my father’s sister and uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts. Since these people didn’t believe anything my father believed I found this cross-training startling, and the more I behaved in my father’s image, the more I was punished. My uncle was enormously excited to have a pubescent girl in the household, snuck into my bathroom, groped and French-kissed me. I did my best to fend him off, while crushing on one of my cousins. In intervals, we exhibited social politeness. (I attended dancing class where white gloves were mandated for touching specimens of the opposite sex.) I also was taught to ski. Sort of. This hot-house atmosphere lasted only nine months.

            My parents simply refused to listen to, believe in, or pay attention to any of this. I realized I needed to become a different person –the person I truly was, underneath, the person without all this reflexive training and behavior. And the question was, who was that?

            The Kilning

            “Shame” means

            Should Have Already Mastered

            Everything. Excoriating

            That you couldn’t

            Eviscerating

            Failure on top of

            Guilt.

            Once fire retreats

            Examine the scorch marks.

            Yellow mud

            Fuses into azure glass

            Shining for

            Eternity.

          3. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Serendipity –

            People often translate “serendipity” as “luck” – highly desirable and a very rare commodity. I think it translates better as “surprise” – equally desirable and much more common. It’s easy to imagine yourself into a modality where everything’s a surprise – as it is for a three year old or a friendly and excitable dog.

            Warriors enjoy surprise. We ride its drafts, like a hawk aboard breezes. Seen this way, all life becomes a joy.

            Art is built on a framework of serendipity and so are warriors. The idea is to take advantage of what’s around, use your imagination to aggregate seemingly unconnected objects/ideas and shepherd them into usable, satisfying and constructive formats. Usable for what? To get where you’re trying to go. Natch. Share the surprise.

            The “warrior” ethos first emerges when we bump up against the “forces” trying to block us. What are these forces? Sometimes individual people, but more usually combinations of people, working together to pound you into a shape for their purposes, not for yours. They’re not interested in imagination and surprise, but in coercion and control. It doesn’t take much observation to uncover their conviction that all resources and power belong to them, and you should cooperate with that. Why? The pay-off is mutable and unclear, but the punishments are stark and immediate.

            Warriors become wily. Serendipity itself – its recognition, use & joy – all in our corner. Their side is having a miserable time and they have to crank up the addictions to get through it.
            We, on the other hand, are finding invisible breezes. And riding them.

            Disappearing Act

            First, my sister and I ran together

            Then she disappeared.

            The baby was too young to run

            I regarded her speculatively:

            Would she ever be ready?

            Better go on alone

            Braving the night’s reaches

            Breasting the sunrise

            Singing to myself and

            When I get home

            Writing the music down.

          4. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Intuition –

            Intuition is the Warrior’s most critical tool. It starts in childhood when adults say something that sounds “not quite right” to the child. Something about their facial expression and the way they hold their body suggests they’re hoping you won’t inquire further, meaning they have no evidence or rationality for what they’re proposing. Sounds like they don’t quite believe it themselves and they’re just passing it to you, like an infection. It’s an infection you don’t want to get.

            Sometimes you ask further, other times you snoop around for evidence on your own. You can usually catch the Grownups talking earnestly in what they think is privacy about what you will buy and what are the consequences if they fail to persuade you.

            Reading is a helpful source of information. You can always find evidence that completely contradicts any BS du Jour.

            And right then, you’ve become a Warrior, because you’ve realized you need to rely on yourself. Not them.

            Breaking Free

            In retrospect we
            Forgive ourselves
            Imperfect inspirations
            Unbecoming intuitions
            Seeing how high we flew;
            Unaltered
            Compared to many others
            Scraping by along the
            Substrate;
            Just a memory of cloud’s
            Enough
            To settle into sunset
            Pillowed into selfhood;
            “I heard
            I saw
            I
            Flew”

          5. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            The Life Force

            We teenagers at our co-ed religious boarding school wanted to mate. This desire was more powerful than the faculty, it was more powerful than anything. They were always digging us out of bushes, rescuing us from ponds, chasing us out of the woods. We were lustfully ablaze. They kept trying to demand we give an account of ourselves but reason had been bypassed – we were in the grip of an eternal force powering the planet, perpetuating our kind.

            I knew that force again when I turned 29 years old. Suddenly I wanted to have a child. There were men on the scene – but they were a shiftless crew of can’t-bes, don’t-bes, and wanna-bes. Warriors don’t take No for an answer. I had to be able to do better than that, but my parents assured me that because of my career of exposing My Body For Profit, no decent man would have me.

            But suddenly High School Boyfriend showed up, a working journalist, half-way through law school, interning for Ralph Nader. On our first meeting he told me he’d never loved anyone but me.

            Hey, I thought. This could work.

            Your Biological Time’s Up

            This crowded world could not make do


            without your life;


            Summoned up, you surged


            you split the crust


            Shocked, I shuddered in my sheaves


            as you uncored


            Loosened my skin as we 


            Unmerged. 

            We travelled to the rim;


            Your fragrant cell became


            a soul unsheathed.


            From my rind’s brim


            you blinkered on the world


            wondering at the fuss.


            We are you and yet


            You are not us.

            Committed to a course beyond our love –


            a forfeit tithe;


            gentle as a snake and


            wiser than a dove;


            As stars consume their fuel


            you were birthed to speed our lives.

            Against the odds we found you


            You found us


            against the odds.


            Consecrated to the great transformer 


            We love like mothers


            We create like gods.

          6. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Conflict

            It’s in Conflict that warriors emerge. My uncle insisted people in authority be “respected” and said whether they were worthy of respect was not the point. My parents were never that crass. It was a subtle game with them. My mother referred conflict to my father; we were ”hurting” her by not being the people that she wanted. It was hard to take seriously. But “discipline” quickly transferred to my father and he was a much scarier proposition. He was physically violent – spanking me, breaking down my door, visibly losing his temper and then further enraged over losing his temper. This was a whirlwind I could not ride and it hardened me against him. Some facts he refused to accept, actual truths he rejected with “No.” I understood that my mother was too weak to face things but Dad claimed to be a fearless seeker in life. It made me disrespect him.

            Detaching From Dad

            Dad taught us to stand up for ourselves


            Except around him.


            Dad enjoyed being silly


            When we were little.


            Entertaining story teller –


            Teased us to obedience.


            When I said wild horses couldn’t drag me


            He played wild horse.


            He was the captain, and


            Life wasn’t ship-shape


            When I was a shape-shifter.


            He wanted to go to Europe


            Without my eldest sister


            She called her congressman


            To change Daddy’s mind.


            He institutionalized her in


            Switzerland


            Two thousand miles from


            Our new home.


            I was stubborn and


            Honest: the worst combination.


            When I was twelve and Genevieve fourteen


            He sent us to school across


            Oceans.


            As my dad had before me


            I stood up to uncles and teachers


            Because I had to respect somebody


            Might as well be myself.