childhood trauma

the storyteller’s daughter

“I will never be like him,” she laughs, as he recalls a childhood memory of his, the time he almost swallowed and choked on a whole baby mango because he didn’t want to share it with his siblings. He seems energetic and happy at the wobbly dinner table, surrounded by mismatched chairs. When he’s done eating, he leaves the table abruptly to smoke a cigarette outside and commands the family to clean up. She sweeps the floors, the easiest task for the youngest. Her brother puts away the leftover tum makhoong that Pa had made and the rest of the khao niew, still half full in the woven rice baskets.

“I will never be like him,” she ponders admiringly, as he builds a shed in the corner of the backyard to store gathered scrap wood, tools, and spare knick knacks that the house can’t hold. “Jao het heuan hai mah, boh? Are you building this house for our dogs?” she asks innocently, 6 years old, hoping that that’s the case. He doesn’t respond. “I guess he thinks that’s a dumb question,” she thinks, as she walks away to play in the herb garden that he’d grown, searching for snails to bother.

“I will never be like him,” she mopes, as she watches him sitting stone silent, staring at the rain pounding against the truck windows, immobile, stuck, hungry, as she waits to gather her school things and to go inside the house. “Pa,” she murmurs. It had been a long day for a second grader. He makes her wait in the truck with him until the rain subsides. They don’t speak.

“I will never be like him,” she tells herself, over and over, tears streaming heavily and quickly down her face as she watches her mother put the household back together after another of her father’s rage episodes. She helps take the belongings that aren’t broken out of the trash and takes them to the kitchen sink. Her mother moves just as slowly and deliberately as he had moved so rapidly and destructively. She hears him crack open a Budweiser in the next room over.

“I will never be like him,” she screams internally, watching, helpless, as yet again, another of her siblings takes a whipping for his irrational “reasons.” This time, she throws herself across her sister’s back in the hopes that he won’t strike his smallest, youngest child. She is wrong.

“I will never be like him,” she walks away reluctantly but still without hugging him goodbye, as he remains seated in the living room of his care facility. He wears a scarf around his neck, gifted to him by her loving brother, taken off of his own neck just moments before. Pa said he was often too cold inside the building. She vows to return, to interview him and ask him the questions he has promised to answer, to write his story, the family’s story, but she never gets the chance. “Bye, Pa.”

“I will never be like him,” she declares, out of the corner of her mouth, lighting a cigarette, drinking a Budweiser, sitting on the tailgate of her truck. She waits.

Nai Kettavong standing in front of the fireplace in western attire, a cowboy hat, vest and bolo tie, leather belt with buckle, brown slacks, and black cowboy boots. He is wearing sunglasses.

Lasamee Kettavong stands outside on a back patio, cigarette in hand. She is wearing a cowgirl hat, bolo tie, and sundress, smiling. There is a puff of smoke near her.

portkeys

Some moments in life when they’re happening you think to yourself “I will remember this forever.” Some moments happen and you’re unaware that they’ll remain with you for the rest of your life, even if you resist and even if they’re buried deep within you. Occasionally, they will float back up to the forefront of your mind. Sometimes you won’t be prepared for it and you will find yourself crying at work. Or in the supermarket. Or just on a walk in your neighborhood.

Those moments with floaty bits that come to the front of your mind can be sparked by seeing and experiencing a piece of mail in a backpack (before she left, my sister asked me to save her mail for her…so my secret place as an 8 year old was my backpack), crayon boxes (dad thought new crayon boxes were completely frivolous if last year’s were fine, which is NOT what a first grader thinks AT ALL), white bread and vanilla ice cream (IYKYK, my Southeast Asian fam) in a way that is connected only to you and your life’s history.

Thunderstorms. Pepper packets. Puffy, blue winter coats. Go Fish. Phone books (remember those?). Sometimes they’re not objects but scenes. You might witness a sweet-nothing moment and feel something tugging at your heartstrings. Or the smell of a sterile place makes you feel sick.

These moments are like Portkeys that snap you to a time and scene rather than a place. You’re transported. You feel like you did on that day, in that moment, in the monster’s presence. Your heart races. Your throat tightens. You are a naive adolescent again.

If you’re not familiar with the Harry Potter world in which I love to get lost in annually, usually near my birthday, a Portkey is a magical object that serves as a transportation tool. When you touch this seemingly inane object, you are magically transported somewhere. (Link to a very HP nerdy site)

How did I get here? Let’s start with an on-again, off-again relationship.

Which is what my relationship with my counselor was for a while (yea wow millenials all cringe at the sight of those words in relation to something between another person). The spring that my fiance proposed to me, I “graduated” (my words, I think, not my counselor’s). I had been relatively healthy, mentally, and we put a pause on my previously bi-monthly sessions in therapy.

It was a wonderful summer. Picture perfect, in my memory. Freshly engaged, loving my work, life on the upswing, looking forward to a trip to Hawaii to visit family I hadn’t seen in years. Occasionally the depression and anxiety would knock at my door and I’d slam the door shut in it’s fuckin’ face, dust off my hands, and pour myself a celebratory drink.

And then one day, a sweet little child in a baseball uniform popped into my workplace, walking next to his dad. I watched them talk and laugh, head towards his dad’s desk, and the little boy plopped himself in an office chair and spun around. Joy. His father worked and he read (or was he playing a video game? Probs.) and I sat at my desk. Wanting to sob. I felt a few powerful emotions all at once. “This is so sweet!” “I wish I’d had a dad like that.” (See previous blogs if you don’t know why I’m saying that.) “Why am I about to fuckin’ cry?” So I called up my counselor later that day and told him I’d just had some childhood trauma pay me a visit. “When can I see you next?” [Insert millenial joke about dating here.]

My general questions before deciding to either do things or not do things include “Is my life inhibited by this?” and “What will the repercussions/consequences of my actions be?” and “If x is preventing me from living my life to the fullest, being present, and enjoying x, then I need to do something differently/do something about x.” Seeing children happy in the company of their dads should not make me want to cry.

So therapy was on again. Hello darkness, my old friend. Let me fight with you again.

Then, last fall, I met Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, Hunger, and many others. Sitting in the audience with two of my best gal pals, I hungrily swallowed up her words and tried to memorize her voice and listened to the brave and fortunate souls who were able to pose questions to her at the end of her readings.

If you have read anything by Roxane Gay, you will know how profoundly her writing can affect you.

You will think, “Yes, demons, come forth and let me slay you!” She calls them nemeses.

And so it was, for me. I was profoundly touched. I prepare for battle. I am mother of cats. I am a Lao princess warrior, and I have an army of elephants, and I will smash. my. trauma. into the. ever-lovin’ ground. (That actually is written in Lao history, elephants in battle – and then! A general was crushed by his falling elephant and that was that. More on that later, it’s from a A History of Laos by Stuart Fox.)

But the thing with trauma is that you do not know when you will be challenged to a duel. You do not know what object, scent, or sound will call out to you, “Heeeey girl hey, I am about to mess. you. up.” And so, how do you prepare for battle when that sneaky bastard, childhood trauma, doesn’t play fairly?

Yeah, I don’t actually have a complete answer to that question either BUT I will say that understanding how and why this happens has been empowering.

The thing with Portkeys is that you’re not transported anywhere unless you touch them. Now I know how to handle Portkeys; some of them, at least.

spoken self & sisterhood

Lao word of the day: euy (sound out each letter and then say it, real fast) and you’ve got it. It means “sister.”

“Describe your sister. In Lao.”

I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch in my counselor’s office and not as present as I should be, confused as to why I’m irritable and miffed about my relationship with my eldest sister. It’s a late fall day, and I’ve been hating how short the days have been getting as we approach winter. I don’t feel like cooperating.

But I’m in therapy for a reason, so I take a deep breath and start.

“She was loving. Kind. Thoughtful. She used to let me pick out my outfits when I was getting ready to go to school in kindergarten.”

I stop. My vocabulary in Lao isn’t what it used to be. I don’t know the verbs and the adjectives to describe my memories in Lao like I used to. It’s hard to think of what words to say. But it’s not the words that get me.

“Go on,” he urges gently.

“She raised me. She was my best friend growing up. We did everything together. I followed her like a shadow.”

…silence… weight. the familiar feeling of heat in my throat. I can’t swallow. Clear as day, in my mind’s eye I see me and my siblings piled into an old tub pretending it was a pool in the backyard on a summer day, an activity engineered by my eldest sister for her kid siblings.

“I miss her.” I choke this out in Lao and then I say it in English. (I mean, this dude has been listening to me speak in Lao for a few minutes after all, so throw him some familiar words right?)

And now I’m fucking sobbing. I keep on sobbing. I suck in air. I breathe. Now I guess I’m just crying, normally. OOP nope, sobbing again. It’s a painful however-many minutes for me. It’s the kind of cry that aches from deep within that spans time and space and what I know and don’t know.

My counselor is quiet, supporting me from across the room. Listening. Waiting. Patient. It’s not the words that get me; it’s the language I’m speaking.

When I was young, my sister inspired me to (eventually) write song lyrics by once encouraging me to “make up the words” to songs that I didn’t know that played on the radio when she was driving us somewhere. It was a lightbulb moment for little me. It delighted me and stayed with me forever. I wrote then, and I write now.

She would make something out of nothing – in a good way. Cutting and pasting pictures from junk mail to make collages with me. She even made an entire card deck so that we could play Go Fish (money was tight) and to me, she was an incredible artist. In so many of our family photos, she’s holding one of us in her arms. The best big sister we could have.

She was always there for me. Until she wasn’t.

When I say “my sister ran away” many people ask, “Well, how old was she?” and I stop and think … she was at least 18. Leaving home is common for 18 year olds in American culture. But not for my family, and definitely not under my father’s controlling watch. To leave was to break a family, household rule.

There were circumstances that I didn’t understand that lead her to go. I realize now that I forgive her. Was there anything to forgive in the first place?

Suddenly, I was alone. I didn’t have that kind of bond with my other siblings (not yet at least). I felt abandoned by someone who was the world to me. Left behind. And I held on to that feeling for decades.

I missed her. But who could I tell? So I held it in. Until that seemingly normal, “I’m grouchy” day in therapy.

Language has the power to unlock memories and emotions.

“Discovering your Self in language is always an epiphany, even if finding the words to describe your inner reality can be an agonizing process.” – The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk

I’d been hitting a wall with describing how I felt about my eldest sister. Why was I so annoyed with her? What couldn’t I understand? She experienced so much pain and trauma; she did what she had to do. How could I continue to be upset with her for something that I felt like I understood now, as an adult? How had I forgotten this initial upset that was followed up with so many other things I could. not. understand?

Until my counselor asked me what language I spoke growing up.

Lao and English, interchangeably, was my response. My parents mostly spoke Lao, and my siblings were the ones who taught me English until I entered grade pre-school.

How much I had loved and adored my big sister when I was a little girl, and the pain that I felt when one morning, the family rises, and she is gone … returned to me only when I described her in Lao.

She and I have lead very separate lives for a very long time it seems. But we’re okay. We’re re-building our relationship. And I miss her. I finally told her so.

Love you, fam.

-Lasamee