Mother would tell me, “Go and be happy”.  At age three and a half, I began thinking, “Where?” How do I do that? and “Why?”

Excerpts from a memoir, Laid Bare: Rendered to Truth, By Karen Amanda

… I was three and a half years old when enrolled at Seattle Day Nursery School …

Some grownups came to the day nursery. We children were grouped together. Then the big people left. The next morning my mother had the ironing board up and was pressing my outfit for the day. She looked right into my eyes and told me that some people were coming to take my picture. Mother gently held my arms tight as she fluffed my hair and giddily instructed, “Be sure to smile so that your dimples stand out.” Then stated, “Go and be happy.” In that moment I felt a short tickle of delight.

When I got to nursery school, the people were already there. They made a commotion and told me to sit atop the slide. Being chosen made me feel special and less jealous that the other kids got to out for an early playtime. I climbed up the ladder and sat on the seat. A woman arranged the pleats of my skirt. The man laughed and said, “Smile a big smile!” He felt creepy. Then, I remembered what my mother had told me and hoped my dimples would pop out and shine. A few flash bulb lights went off making me see dots and it was all over and they left, like the black spots in my eyes.

My auntie Amanda and grandma, and most especially my mother each had placed on top of their pianos that singular photo framing my dimpled smiling face. Wondering what it was all about, much later, I was told that I had been selected as the first United Way poster child for Seattle.

… It was during this time when I began to hide from people and the photograph taken that day, a dark secret. A mean man had invaded the home life of mother and me to sadden and terrorize and scar my existence. My mother would provide no protection or emotion …

On an unassuming Saturday afternoon, after picking up her paycheck at Firestone, my mother and uncle crossed the street to walk the half block to Smokey Joe’s Tavern. Inside of the smoke infused neighborhood joint, a dingy atmosphere smothered the glow of outdoor sunlight. Suffocating twists on a desperate fate took place on a stool next to the two of them. One man sat having a smoke and drinking his beer. The three bar flies, without reckoning, had positioned themselves into the dead center of an inevitable chance meeting. The stranger slithered in between to join them and an intermingling conversation began. All the while their lungs sucked in an intoxicating aura as their mouths sucked down beers. Mother and Norman brought the stranger home.

I was still of nursery school age and alone at my house that ominous afternoon.

A relief came with a jump of joy when I would hear sounds from my mother’s key unlocking the front door. This time it was different. Beside my mother and uncle stood an unknown man. The three of them blocked out the brilliant light from the setting sun. Their large shadows preceded them as they entered our living room. They were drunk. As they sat down on the couch quarts of beer landed on our coffee table. My mother introduced me to the stranger, “This is Curley.”

The man coldly slurred two spooky words, “Hi punk’n.”

Their drinking plunged with consistency. Recognizing kindred souls of depravity, Curley laid claim over an unconscionable submission of my mother and uncle through his unleashed temper of angered power. This triune chiseled dominion into my alter stone. Their abhorrent behaviors were played out before my young, wide, terrorized eyes. Going to day care took on new meaning practically overnight.

Childhood was about to become something I wouldn’t know what to do with.

Voices would raise, in the late of night, to shrill shrieking which pushed through my engulfing bedroom walls. Horrific sounds stunned me sleepless. Glasses breaking and bottles banging against the floor and furniture tumbling held captive my terrified senses. I sweat puddles but couldn’t cry tears. Prayers from the wholeness of me begged for the sanity of silence. Curley’s hands slapping mother around sounded deafening like whacks from a big brass cymbal. Thuds of the bedroom wall receiving the blunt force of a body thrown up against it shook my foundation.  I knew whose body it would be. Visions of my mother’s imminent death and mine to follow devoured my soul with fright. Time moved slow, almost stopping the motion of its passing. There in my room and in my bed, all alone in the dark left me to feel that I would dissolve into a black bottomless hole.

To escape, for a break in time, I became the sky that God was in.

One late night, Curley pulled back the blanket that cozily covered all of me. With the same movement, he shoved my bewildered body against the wall to make a space for him to crawl into. The half-tossed blanket twisted to wrap around my ankles. By gripping the waistband of my pink flower imprinted pajama bottoms, he shattered my previous calm into stupefied splinters. “There’s no escape, I’m trapped.”, regurgitated inside the pit of my stomach. My nerve fibers felt like they were going to vomit.
Everything in me fought against looking at his sickening face. Drunken with a cold stare and firm unsympathetic hands the uncontrolled man petrified me. Held
against his hungrily driven power signaled that I was about to, in some horrible way, become consumed.
Balancing on his side Curley forcibly pressed his boney aged flesh against my supple and soft little kid skin. I was about eight and a half years old, Curley was somewhere in his fifties. His body and breath stunk.

 

What would follow in challenges over the years could never be predicted or be deemed as “next”. But I had developed ways of coping in crisis to squeeze blood out of a turnip.

 

Woven in, throughout the absolute of my existence, a thread of constant knowing that I’d always press on remained unbroken. Selah … pause and think, would compose an anthem sung in my mind. Laid bare, rendered to truth, would become written in my soul.