Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old PDF
Preview Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old
BEe 0 MIN G ANN A ANNA J. MICHENER Becoming Anna THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD THE UNIVERSITV OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON TheUniversityofChicagoPress,Chicago60637 TheUniversityofChicagoPress,Ltd.,London ©1998byTheUniversityofChicago Allrightsreserved.Published1998 PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica 1312111009080706 6789 ISBN:0-226-52401-9(cloth) ISBN:0-226-52403-5(paper) LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Michener,AnnaJ.,1977– BecomingAnna:theautobiographyofa sixteen-year-old/AnnaJ.Michener. p. cm. ISBN0-226-52401-9(cloth:alk.paper) 1. Michener,AnnaJ.,1977– . 2. Abused children—UnitedStates—Biography. 3. Psychologicallyabusedchildren—United States—Biography. I. Title. HV6626.52.M54 1998 362.76′092—dc21 [b] 98-11049 CIP (cid:2)∞ Thepaperusedinthispublicationmeetsthe minimumrequirementsoftheAmericanNational StandardforInformationSciences—Permanenceof PaperforPrintedLibraryMaterials,ANSIZ39.48- 1992. For my Uncle Dave The names of all institutions and all persons except the members of Ms. Michener's new immediate family have been changed. ONE My grandmother says I destroyed my mother before I was even born. A little flame of hate burns behind her ordinarily cold gray eyes when she says that. When she says, "You were so big, you tore her apart." My mother gives a slightly different version of the story of my birth, but I still don't know what went wrong. Why was I a caesarean? Why did my mother need surgery after wards? Whatever the reason was, it happened again when my brother was born two and a half years later. How come no one blames him too? "It was all the surgery that caused her pancreas to go into shock." In other words, when the paramedics came one night to take my mother away in a diabetic coma, it was my fault. I was only four the first time it happened. I watched in stunned silence from my doorway as strange men in uni forms wheeled my mother away on a stretcher. There was a needle jabbed in her hand, and a little trickle of blood ran from it. The whites of her eyes flicked back and forth like metronomes gone mad beneath her half-closed lids. A little cloud appeared suddenly on the mask over the bottom of her face. I heard a desperate khuhh sound, and it vanished slowly. She didn't see me, didn't see anything, couldn't tell me what was going on, that it would be O.K. My mother came back eventually. But it happened again. It happened many times during my childhood. Each time my grandmother sat me down to say to me, "It looks 2 like your mother is not going to live this time. Don't you wish you had been less stressful to hed' My grandmother did not move next door to us until I was six. My grandmother made a deal with my mother: whenever my mother was in the hospital or otherwise ill, or whenever my mother just didn't want to deal with one or both of her children, she could send us to my grand mother. But my grandmother was to have complete control of us, and my mother was not to interfere. From one night to up to a month at a time, my brother and I were shipped next door. During our stay, we were not allowed to go near our own house, to set foot in our own yard. We had no contact with our parents, not even with my mother when she was in the hospital. A thunderstorm raged outside the huge front window of my grandmother's house while I slept on the couch bne night. I dreamed that my mother had died in her bed. The tree out front shook violently, and I thought God was angry with me because I was killing my mother. I wanted to scream but my grandmother would not allow me to make a sound. She said if we cared for our mother we would have no need to cry. I bit the blankets. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in child psychology. She had worked for about thirty years at a center for children with "emotional disturbances" and "behavior disorders." This meant that if she believed I was crazy, she was not going to be disputed. I would call it nothing less than an obsession, my grand mother's drive to find every last "problem" of mine, liO mat ter how slight or even nonexistent, and "bring it to light." When I was seven I dreamed of being a ballerina and I flitted around on my toes a good deal of the time. My grandmother said the children at the center who were schizophrenic walked on their toes. She would have me sit across from her for hours at a time and listen to her "diagnosis." I had no conscience. I had no self-discipline. I cared for no one but myself. Appar- 3 ently I was sociopathic. I was a pathological liar. I was a viciously manipulative pervert who could never love. (And thus "did not deserve to be loved," was the obvious conclu sion.) My grandmother claimed to love me, however. She used to say that if she did not love me she would not have both ered to try to "save" me. She would not have pointed out everything I did wrong and explained how everything I did well could have been done better. She would not have carried a stopwatch around her neck to remind me just how long it was taking me to get dressed in the morning. She would not have had the bus rerouted to drop me off at her house instead of my own every day after school so that I would have to go straight to her to be hovered over as I did my homework. She would not have called my teachers and school counselors constantly to see what trouble I was causing and to explain what a trained psychologist did with a "child like Tiffy." She would not have had me bend over the sofa or hold out my hand so that she could inflict nu merous welts across the bare flesh of my arms and legs with a thin metal knitting needle that had a heart welded on top. Perhaps if she had not "loved" me so much I would have felt a little love for her. I was not even impressed by the times she made cookies with my brother and me, took us to the park to sail boats, or allowed us to play with her toys for an afternoon. We could only "earn" these things from her by doing whatever she said we had to do for them. Nothing came for free, in the true spirit of grandmotherly love. While my brother was easily controlled with bribes, I resented them more than the thin metal rod my grand mother kept at the top of the stairs. I was always the "willful" one. When my grandmother could no longer make me cry out when she whipped me, she whipped my little brother in my place. She knew I would rather die than see him hurt. Although I could never be bullied into anything, my
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