Power-A Memoir

PREFACE: POWER

Lack of power is the cause of all suffering.

Power is all that is and all that ever was. At the dawn of the Atomic Age physicists in Germany were probing the possibilities of splitting the atom and releasing the power that bound it. Adolph Hitler, likely the most notorious survivor of brutal child abuse, had sucked the world into his hideous vision of slaughter as if avenging some writhing, coiling demonic spirit of hate deep in his brain. Fearful of the weaponry that the Germans might develop from the atom, the U.S. began its own probing. In the desert of New Mexico, humans created a miniature sun on earth for a fleeting moment, unleashing atomic power beyond mortal capacity to contain it.

Hitler eventually retreated to a bunker and killed himself as international forces closed in on him, ending his doomed rampage for power. Meanwhile, the human fascination with the power locked in atoms continues, not just for bombs, but for peaceful uses too, though disposal of radioactive waste remains a problem.

All things considered, human fascination with power is not limited to atoms. Power surrounds us; attracts and repels us. Our relationships are made of power. We talk, eat, and wear power. We are made of the power contained in every atom in every cell of our being, and those atoms came from the sun. The sun is everything, and we would be nothing without it. Our cells are packed with its converted light.

I was born in the tropical sun and grew up under the blazing sun of the Mojave Desert. In the desert I saw sun-kissed people with brown and black skins denied the power accorded to pale people. I saw segregated schools. Living on society’s margins beyond the nearest school’s reach, my brother and I wound up in an Anglo school. There our classmates saw us as interlopers. My education channeled me to college. My brown brother’s color channeled him to shop classes. I went to college. My brother explored our indigenous roots.

Later my nursing career led me to work in psychiatry, an area that scares many. The mentally ill seem inscrutable, menacing, but to know them is to realize we are them. We are them when we feel we lack the power to go any farther. The mentally ill are likely the least powerful people of all after women, children, and the poor. Mental illness consists of family, genetics, socio-economic conditions, gender, the language of nerve cells at the molecular level-- and power dynamics in every situation I have observed.

Feelings of being helpless, weak, and powerless are frequent hallmarks of mental illness. For example, the person with a bi-polar condition enjoys the feeling of power experienced in the manic phase and abhors the helpless despair of the depressed state. Delusional patients aspire to power. They want to be God or the Mother of God, not the guy who drives the stinking garbage truck to the stinking landfill. Feelings of powerlessness are often compounded by the mental health power hierarchy. Right or wrong, the patient is often seen as bad and wrong by treatment professionals who will show them the error of their ways instead of the value of their behaviors. Very often the professional and the patient engage in power struggles.

While I became a nurse to please my mother, I never wanted to be a psychiatric nurse…not after I took my original psych. affiliation at a major California state hospital. When I completed the rotation the instructor, Ms. Miller, told me, I think you ought to be a psych. nurse.

Why? I wondered. After all, I had been kind to the patients. It was the staff that disturbed me with their treatments.

Psych. was the only place where I ever came close to fainting as a student nurse when observing ECT (Electro-convulsive Therapy, or Electric Current Therapy). Patients got up early and waited in a long line. When their name was called, they lay on a gurney. The psychiatrist, a gleam in his eyes, clenched a fat cigar between his teeth in a grimace. He placed an electrode on each side of the patient’s head and ordered the current to be switched on, triggering a grand mal seizure. The staff held down the convulsing patient who would have bitten his tongue were it not for a chunk of rubber hose to clamp down on. Occasionally, a bone would break. The patients like it, the staff assured me. They feel like they deserve it.

Given my Cuckoo’s Nest experience, I balked at taking another psychiatric rotation. However, I was forced to comply by the university’s school of nursing curriculum where I had applied to advance my nursing degree. I took the course and found therapies had become more thoughtful and respectful. Even the ECT was gentler with the use of only one electrode, sedation, and less frequent use. The only sign of the seizure was a tensing of the toes. Though I am still not convinced of ECT’s efficacy, it has its advocates. The psych. rotation eventually played a role in my path of brain discovery. My professor, Ms. Betsy La Sor also urged me to become a psych. nurse. After graduation I volunteered at the local county mental health clinic to see if I wanted to take this path. It became my favorite place to be.

With that meager background I went on to be charge nurse in a locked intensive care psychiatric unit. I thought the directors were crazy to put a greenhorn in charge of the busiest unit in the hospital. Maybe they saw something in me. I worked the evening shift, the shift where all hell breaks loose on a regular basis after the hospital’s daily routines and programs are done, and the majority of the staff and psychiatrists go home—and the families come to visit. It’s the time when power struggles erupt at home, and someone comes to the hospital in restraints via ambulance.

Years later I returned to work in the clinic where I had volunteered. My peers there once referred to me as The Miracle Worker because my clients did well. I am embarrassed to say I believed them. How arrogant, smug, and even rude, I was to some clients. And selfish, especially selfish. I took credit for what they were doing for themselves. Then one day a client who had been doing great asked for another therapist. I was stunned. After all I had done, this was my thanks? I suggested we meet one more time. Meanwhile, I did some soul searching and got honest with myself. In our final meeting I told her how I had taken credit for her work, when I was the one learning.

Gee, you’re a good sport, she said.

I realized then that she was living the role of a mental patient, a humble life, raising a small child, taking college classes, and living on Disability with her mother. She was doing well without me. Who did I think I was? After that humiliation, I realized MY clients did not belong to me. They had been taking care of themselves long before they met me; doing the best they could figure out. I used to think that if the clients could gain insights and develop job skills, they would no longer need to be on Disability. They could get jobs and become self-sufficient. Who was I fooling? Life is scary for the powerless. Skills and self-esteem are fragile. Some do not have the stamina to deal with demanding working conditions. Employers are not going to hold their hand through crisis and fear. Had the client been deemed cured, who would help her with her mother and daughter? She had risen to a high position in her pecking order of mental health client. She had an income and a roof over her head. Her little girl was going to school. Her elderly mother was safe. Any more help from me and they could all have wound up on the street.

All of us are doing the best we know how to do. People are more alike than different. We all live small lives. Some live on a grand stage, others on lesser stages, but our needs are the same: food, shelter, emotional attachments, pleasure, reward, and freedom from suffering. Life consists of food chains and pecking orders of power. The human spirit struggles for survival in pecking orders of power. Position on the pecking orders results in access to or denial of what one’s culture prizes. Most of us are born to our positions. We would like to think we merit our successes due to hard work and our wits, but chance and luck play a big part. Life is not fair. If it were, we would all get what we want when we want it, and little children would never suffer. Meanwhile, injury, death, and power conflicts stalk our every step.

That first summer in the Mojave Desert, my mother created a crude awning out of a blanket so that I would not burn. For my part, I had shielded bean sprouts I had planted from the sun. Knowing nothing about photosynthesis, I put a pot over the seedlings to protect them from the burning light just as my mother had fixed a canopy to protect me from the sun. The little sprouts grew pale, wilted, and died from my misguided protection even as they taught me about photosynthesis, a word I had yet to learn. In addition, I was still to learn about the mindless hatred that drives people of privilege to keep the oppressed from climbing higher in the pecking orders of power, often because their pigmented skins’ ability to protect itself from sun damage. My mother may have been able to protect me from the sun, but she was helpless to protect my dark-skinned brother from racial hatred, especially from our father. For his part, our father was filled with racial self-hatred, a condition common to minority groups like Native Americans.

Bean sprouts and people need sunlight. In Spanish the term dar luz, means to give birth, but translates into English as to give light. As an experiment with a group of clients in the mental health clinic I had us all pick a Crayon and draw our earliest memory using our non-dominant hand. I figured that using that hand would make us feel as young and clumsy as when we first started drawing and writing as children. I picked a rosy red Crayon and made slow, easy circles on the paper, over and over until the paper was covered with a large, solid red circle. Other people drew toys. One man drew a tricycle up on blocks that he used to ride every day as a small boy, going nowhere. As an adult he felt that he was still going nowhere.

I stared at my early memory." It was just a red circle. Then it occurred to me that that is what light must look like to a fetus…sunlight through the mother’s abdomen, a warm, rosy glow. I have no conscious memories until the age of two, though I have earlier unconscious memories as we all do. One of those was recalled by a relative, and it explained a certain terror that stalked me for years until the knowledge set me free.

Every relationship is about power. Even conception is a power struggle between sperm competing with each other for entry to the ovum. Although the mother’s endocrine system devotes time and energy to ripening an egg and preparing a uterine nest for gestation, the mother’s ever alert immune system would consider the fetus a foreign invader. To avoid detection the fertilized egg overwhelms the mother’s immune response. If the fertilized egg succeeds, it implants in the uterine lining and commandeers the mother’s body for its own needs. If the mother’s immune system wins, it evicts the foreigner.

Despite its biological defenses, the fetus may still face hostility from domestic violence, as did the killer Robert Alton Harris who was kicked into a premature birth when his father assaulted his pregnant wife. His sister recalled how their father knocked him out of his high chair as a baby. From his lowly, helpless, unwanted position on the pecking orders of power, emerged a vengeful youth who murdered two teen boys, stole their car, and ate their hamburgers afterward. The arresting police detested Harris’ defiant smirk. I have seen that smirk on abused youth. It seems to say, Do your damnedest to hurt me. I can take anything you dish out.

Harris’ birth, childhood of fear and pain, with its murderous outcome, make for a compelling illustration of the dangerous results of what the British psychiatrist, John Bowlby, termed insecure attachment. Insecure attachment results when the infant or child has no safe, loving person and haven to buffer them against fearful events. We are forever children. Our conflicts as child or adult are often evidence of the trauma we suffered in a state of insecure attachment. We don’t overreact. Our behaviors are equal to the emotional currency of the event.

This book’s goal is to decrease suffering and show the reader that such tragedies are preventable, to recognize power struggles, and use them to make life better. We are problem solvers, not quivering bundles of neurosis or malice without reason. All behavior has value. There are no senseless acts, only acts that don’t make sense because we don’t understand what led to them. We exist in pecking orders of power in a never-ending struggle for the sun’s light.

No book on power would be complete without exploring male posturing and positioning for power--and the corresponding suppression of the female point of view. But males would not be possible without the female pudendum, translated from Latin as that which we should be ashamed of. The book abolishes the shame and celebrates the specialness of the mandorla, which I first observed in a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Chicano artist, Alfred Quiroz, of the University of Arizona, has given me permission to print his painting of the mandorla as the Virgin Mary, a work that scandalized his Catholic mother.

I explore the cells that burn the sugars that plants make from the sun and fuel our every thought, feeling, and move. My expertise in this area comes from teaching pharmacology to nurses and writing a book on it. My curiosity about thoughts and feelings led me to Ph.D. studies in psychology, which led me to studies of neurology, and eventually led me to the University of California at San Diego, where I studied the limbic system informally for years with Stuart Zola as a volunteer in his university lab where he researched the brain cells that create memory and are involved with emotions.

People make sense. The seemingly inexplicable behaviors that make us scratch our heads or wring our hands in despair make sense. Join me as we take a long journey, following the trail of the Mother of All My Mothers out of Africa and her descending chain of daughters that leads to my mother and me in Mexico where both of us were given light. Mexico has a special relationship with the sun and was gifted with the perfect soil to give us a cornucopia of foods the world treasures…chocolate, vanilla, corn, beans, squash, chilies, tomatoes, and so much more. Mexico made mammals ascendant and human life possible eons after the Chicxulub asteroid collided with its Yucatán Peninsula, ending the epoch of the dinosaurs.

My mother’s story and Mexico form the matrix that binds this book together. I have been writing it for decades and went back to get an MFA in creative writing to better tell a fascinating tale. For twenty years I taught creative and research writing, as well as Chicano/a literature at San Diego State University where I am an emerita. Many of this book’s stories were refined from my lectures. The old adage is true, ‘When you teach, you learn.’ Those students taught me with their questions, challenges, and insights.

I used to end each lecture with the words, Make the world better. Many students made it their mantra. A former student now involved in elected government told me that every morning when he wakes up, he asks himself, How can I make the world better today? I hope the reader will discover the power in all things and how to use it to make the world better.

CHAPTER 1—A MEXICAN IN THE HIGH DESERT

What is the secret of life? I have wondered about the secret since I was a small child. The secret is power. The answer came to me, not in a blinding flash, but in a gradual dawning, the way night gives way to day, the way life unfolds.

A ruckus startled my brother and me from sleep. We rubbed our eyes and blinked in curiosity. The sepia glow of bright sun, filtered through the canvas of the Army surplus tent, revealed an orange range cow poking her white face through the tent flap. She rested her head on the high wooden gate of the tent’s wooden wall and stared at us as if asking, Where did you come from?

We stared back as our mother shooed the curious cow away with a broom. So began our lives of invention, adjustment, and discovery as strangers in an indifferent and sometimes hostile land near Dead Man’s Point

Dead Man’s Point—a small, elongated, boulder-strewn mountain the color of burnt sienna--freezes in the icy winters of the Mojave Desert and bakes in the blazing summers. The extremes of cold and heat split and crumble its boulders into smaller and smaller rocks until they become gravel then sand in the high desert. To add to its sinister name, a slab of the mountain collapsed on a group of campers who had built a roaring fire under it one chilled wintery night, crushing several friends.

The Point looks like a huge, petrified Egyptian mummy with the black asphalt ribbon of Highway 18 running over its ankles. The dry lake adjacent to its east side holds a species of miniscule, transparent fairy shrimp from a long-ago primordial sea that once covered the land. The shrimp lie dormant in the dried-out, cracked mud, but come to life when snowmelt leaves a film of water. They eat, dance, and spawn until the water dries up. Then, like little Sleeping Beauties, they wait for the next kiss of water to wake them from slumber.

When I was seven years old and my brother, Rudy, was five my parents caught a hard case of land fever and got it into their heads to move to the Mojave Desert near that pile of sunbaked rocks. They bought twenty acres of land that had been used as a practice bombing range for WWII pilots, since the only life they could have hit would have been chipmunks, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, coyotes, or the occasional orange, white-faced range cow grazing on sparse tufts of tough, tiny plants that flowered in the spring and early summer.

My parents were still in love back when my father left Los Angeles ahead of us to prepare for our move to the desert. He built a tiny plywood shed, slept in it on a cot, and worked as a laborer at the cement plant in Victorville during the day. He spent his time off constructing a square wooden, gated wall over which he fitted a canvas army tent for us to live in while he and my mother built their dream home on twenty acres at the mercy of the elements beyond the pavement, beyond electricity, water, telephones, sewers, and society.

I have never recovered from the impact of the experience that spun our four lives in new directions. From the teeming housing project of Aliso Village in East Los Angeles--with its lively music spilling into the streets from bars; its grime; and gangsters, now romanticized as Zoot Suiters, called pachucos loitering behind the Project with their lean, angry dogs, marijuana cigarettes in hand--we moved into the tent pitched among the creosote bushes and a sprinkling of Joshua trees and cholla cactus. The desert silence pressed in on my eardrums. The dry heat coiled around me; evaporating sweat before it could shine on my skin. And always the afternoon winds came howling out of Cajon Pass to the southwest.

We arrived in the middle of a June night under sparkling spill of the Milky Way splashed against a black sky. I could see the glow of Los Angeles backlighting the pointy mountains to the west. Morning came in a blaze of heat and chirring grasshoppers. Our father dug a hole in the meager, lacey shade of a creosote bush. In it he placed a metal cylinder to keep a quart of milk cold. We soon learned that milk would curdle by 11 a.m. in the heat. (Rudy and I did not drink much milk in those days and years to follow. Later, during his growth spurt, he had a seizure from lack of calcium.)

At the altitude of 3000 feet above sea level, the High Desert day has two distinct parts. Still mornings are followed by afternoon winds pressed down from the sky over Cajon Pass in the west where air masses from the east collided with the easy Pacific coast climate. Afternoons, our mother filled a watering can from a large converted metal oil drum and sprinkled down the dust of the tent’s dirt floor. She looked happy when she lighted the Coleman camp stove that sat on a table where she cooked the evening meal. The kerosene stove was a major improvement for a woman who once cooked beans in an earthen olla or pot over a charcoal fire on the floors of shanties in Tampico, Mexico.

The afternoon dust devils that herald the daily walk-bent-over winds from the Pass chased away the circling buzzards that soared on thermal updrafts of morning heat. The intense heat of summer with its wild afternoon winds cooled to gentle autumn, followed by November’s stiff, chilled wind. From season to season wind was the only constant. One night the tent ripped open in a howling blizzard that blew in over Cajon Pass. I woke to a swirl of snowflakes falling from a black sky onto my bed. My parents stood on my bed, clung to the ripped, flapping canvas, and stitched the seam together with a huge curved needle. We moved the next day to the unfinished concrete-block room they had been building as the first part of their dream house. That first winter piled four feet of snow across the desert. I learned to ride a two-wheeled bike without falling as the snow melted, afraid to land in mud and frozen snow banks.

Years later my mother spoke of moving to that hell of heat and ice to have land and a house of her own, but there was a moment when she told me that, before we left L.A., Dad had been chastised by the head of the daycare Rudy attended for cutting the buttons off of his little son’s pants as punishment for not being able to button them. He wanted to move where no one could tell him how to raise his children. My little brother started wetting the bed that first winter. He and I slept on a couch that opened into a bed at night. He would sleep on as the puddle spread and woke me up. Bedwetting is one of the signs of a child in emotional distress, but we did not know that then.

Pockets of despair like ours are still spread throughout the desert. In them fathers drink and beat their children, and no one knows. No one hears the cries of pain and misery carried on the howling afternoon winds. Even then I knew someplace better lay over the mountains where the sun set, a place of palm trees and the scent of orange blossoms. I vowed I would escape to the remembered coast one day and never come back.

Meanwhile, I found shelter in books. Books carried me through time and space. Books helped me endure. Books made life bearable. Squiggles on a page could transport and transform me. I discovered books on the life of the English Queen Elizabeth I, who outwitted her tyrannical, mercurial father, Henry the Eighth, with his penchant for beheading wives. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series showed me how a girl could survive the elements and thrive without electricity, running water, phones, and indoor bathrooms wherever her itinerant father took the family.

Elizabeth’s royal family conspired in dangerous court intrigues, and she had to use her wits to avoid dangerous, scheming relatives or anger the brutal King Henry VIII. Laura’s family followed a restless father, living in a range of small, often primitive, dwellings on the fringes of civilization without complaint. My own father, though never murderous like Henry, nevertheless, seemed like an amalgamation of the two fathers in the books, one frightening and emotionally unconstrained; the other at odds with social constraints. I felt reassured by the daughters’ stories that I could survive the desert.

Much later, as an adult, I read and disagreed with Leo Tolstoy’s words, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy had a case of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side in the famous opening to Anna Karenina, given his own tumultuous marriage. Happy families and unhappy families are similar, with one important caveat. Their level of happiness depends on the nature of the families’ power dynamic. The happy families agree who is in charge, in which areas, and for how long.

Closer observation might have shown him that all unhappy families are also alike in the same way. The unhappy family is locked in a power struggle where no one can agree who has the power, in which areas, and for how long. Putative family leaders become twisted in contorted struggles for power to oppress and control other members and resist their need for autonomy and self-expression. Sometimes the oppressed resist with passivity in which the putative power figure is checked by insubordination and undermining their authority. All unhappy families are locked in the power struggle. The members disagree on who has the power, in which areas, and for how long. The ones unwilling to share physical, emotional, or monetary power over the others abuse them in order to keep a grasp on power. The abuse of power results in all human misery not caused by nature. Our families show us how it’s done.

Meanwhile, books remained a lifeline to me, and to my mother. On our biweekly visits to Victorville to get groceries and do the laundry, we got books. Our mother took us to her favorite place in town, the little wooden, clapboard cottage of a public library with its Virginia Creeper-draped porch. The librarian, Mrs. Johnson, possibly the loneliest woman in town, was delighted to see customers. She helped maintain my mother’s sanity with books that lifted her mind from the sweltering tent…books that talked to her in those lonely days in the house lighted with kerosene lamps, without a car, without neighbors, except the elderly couple, Mae and Lee Best, two miles further up the dirt track. Their ditsy, flirtatious daughter attracted a man with a bulldozer who plowed his grader up to her house and straightened out the car trail—but not before an intrepid salesman for Encyclopaedia Britannica found our one-room, concrete-block house up that winding dirt car track off Highway 18. My father bought the whole set on credit and built a huge shelf for the books. I fed my brain from those books until I left home for college.

Unlike my mother, he never read fiction and considered it frivolous. He had a fractious relationship with fun. We could start out for a picnic, watch him spontaneously combust into a rage, turn the car around and take us home. He knew little about having fun with us. Fun was doing push-ups, lifting weights, building his desert house, or reading nonfiction, and his oil painting. As the house they were building grew, he created a small alcove where he set up his easel and painted when not at the cement plant or building onto the house.

He got a commission to do an oil painting of a house on stilts over a lagoon in the Virgin Islands. He had been given a photograph to work from, but struggled without success to capture