Fighting for Our Tits - A Woman's Battle Cry

Chapter 1

Birth of a Wounded Healer

Healers are Spiritual Warriors who have found the courage to defeat the darkness of their souls. Awakening and rising from the depths of their deepest fears, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. Reborn with a wisdom and strength that creates a light that shines bright enough to help, encourage, and inspire others out of their own darkness. Melanie Koulouris

Famous psychotherapist Carl Jung identified a number of personality archetypes that operate in the unconscious of all human beings. In Jungian psychology, an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic image embedded in our psyche from the past collective experience of humanity that is present in the unconscious of the individual person. It’s kind of like how the seed of an apple just “knows” how to grow into an apple tree without anyone telling it how to do it. There is an instinctual programming that lets it know what to be so that it doesn’t turn into a lemon tree. An archetype is like that. It’s an instinctual pattern that is universal to humans and most of us fit a particular archetype.

One of Jung’s better known archetypes is the “wounded healer”. A wounded healer is a person who helps others because ultimately helping others helps them heal themselves. Wounded healers almost always come from difficult life circumstances; for many the suffering has been intense in some way. They want to save the world. You know … like Joan of Arc or Harriett Tubman or the unsinkable Molly Brown or Wonder Woman ... one of those kinds of gals.

So … that’s me. Your local neighborhood “poster child” of a wounded healer. Currently planted here on planet Earth, I’ve avowed to save the world and my own ass all at one and the same time. As I ready myself to defend and protect, however, a familiar question arises: Where did I put my red velvet cape and ample cleavage, without which I cannot fly about to wage my war of love to save humanity?

Sigh. It’s really hard to be a wounded healer sometimes.

The Wounding Begins

I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me. Joshua Graham

I was born December 21, 1959 in Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami to a just barely 17-year-old mother. In 1959, an anesthesia known as “Twilight Sleep” was administered to a woman in labor. This medication promised a painless labor and a complete erasure of the mother’s memory of the trauma of giving birth. Like everyone else, my mother was given this cocktail prior to my entry into the world. When the drug eventually wore off, the nurses presented me to my mother. She promptly became hysterical, screaming at them that she had not had a baby; I wasn’t hers, and she kept insisting that they take me away. She had no memory of my birth, of course, because of the drugs. (“Twilight Sleep” was a crime against women and their unborn children … check the link under the Works Cited pages in the back of this book if you are unfamiliar with the practice.) What a horror show. The practice was discontinued in the USA in 1970.

Anyhow, the staff must’ve eventually convinced my mother that I was, indeed, her offspring and she took me home. My mother was married to a man named Gene (not my biological father) who was in prison at the time, but he kindly lent me his surname and spared me the title of “bastard” which was a term still in use at the time. I didn’t see or meet my natural father until I was 28 years old. He never tried to contact me nor did he ever send a penny of support to help my mother.

My mother had returned to live with my grandparents and my bond to them was deep, especially the bond to my grandmother. I owe them all so much, of course, but to my grandmother, I owe the most. Without her, I surely would have died.

My mother tied baby booties on me once she got me home and left them on. For weeks. Soon, they couldn’t get me to stop crying, so my mother took me to a doctor. Turned out she tied the bootie so tight on the left leg she almost cut my foot off above the ankle. They weren’t certain they could save the foot, but fortunately they did. I gratefully bear a huge scar above the ankle on the left leg to this day.

The Early Years

A man’s true character comes out when they’re drunk.
Charlie Chaplin

My mother, Mary Jo, was a larger-than-life character, as so many violent alcoholics tend to be. My family life would put the HBO Series “Shameless” to shame, doing much better than matching it one-for-one. If you think people don’t really live like that, well, you’re wrong. They do and we did and it’s a lot worse than it looks on TV.

My mother had a second child, again while husband number 1 (Gene) was still in prison. Not the same man as my biological father. It didn’t work out between them, so the second daughter, just like the first, got the last name Scarborough. Not long after my sister’s birth, my mother divorced Gene. I was about three years old at the time. Prior to the divorce, she took me to the prison to visit him every now and again. According to my mother, Gene and the inmates loved me and I loved them back. As a result, I have had a life-long interest in criminal justice, prison reform, and in the causes of mental illness. Funny what shapes us.

After a string of fellows, and my sister and I getting bounced around to anyone who would take us - or to those she abandoned us to - Mary Jo remarried. Husband #2 was a man with a prison record whose claim to fame was killing his cheating wife and lover with a hatchet. At the time, juries were more sensitive to crimes of passion, and so husband #2 served a few years and was released. My mother married him not long after his freedom was returned. Turns out he didn’t like kids. At least, not us.

After my mother separated from him, we were living in another string of welfare housing. It was in the afternoon and she was sleeping. I was about 5 or 6 at the time, I think. I pulled a chair over and climbed up on the kitchen cabinet and reached up and got the jar of baby aspirin out. I ate the equivalent of a cookie jar’s worth of orange-flavored Bayer baby aspirin. Finishing, I carefully put the ripped packets back into the jar and returned the jar back to its place. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital, asking my mother if I had had a baby and where was it? I almost died; I was comatose when she found me. After stomach pumping and a blood transfusion, I lived. I always think that my higher Self thought it would be a good idea to get the hell outta dodge, but the Universe said no. So, stay I did, whether I wanted to or not. I’ve come to believe that we are sent to complete a mission and there’s just no way out until we get the job done.

There was an enormous amount of physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse heaped upon me, and the majority of the other children in my family suffered as well, but to varying degrees. For me, it came not only from my mother and her husbands, I somehow also became a target for my peers and one of my step-siblings. Pretty, quiet, intelligent, and unassuming, I was a moving target. My mother married again a couple of times, and we moved constantly. Until I was 11 years old, I was never in a single school longer than maybe three-four months at a time. My mother worked in bars and restaurants and made very little. Another baby came, another drunk and abusive father left. None of them paid support or had contact with us. We were three little girls - poor, fatherless, welfare waifs.

My mother’s final marriage happened when I was 10 years old. He was yet another rageoholic and alcoholic and the violence which was already intense in our lives escalated to a whole new level. He had two children from another marriage. By the time Mother and husband #4 stopped breeding, there were eight of us. I left for good when I was sixteen, but remained active in my family until my mother died at the age of 51 from a ruptured jugular. I am still connected to some degree to my blood brothers and sisters and love them dearly, albeit sometimes from afar.

The Years Following

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
Cheryl Strayed

Up and out I went. At 16, I left home to attend the Atlanta College of Medical, Dental & Business and trained as a legal secretary, graduating at the age of 17. I received federal funds to go and served as a nanny to a family in Atlanta during the course of my 12 month studies in return for room and board. I then returned to Oliver, Georgia and lived briefly with my grandparents for a bit waiting until I was 18 and old enough to marry the man I had been dating for the past few years.

Because I grew up in a rural area, I did a lot of field work as a teenager. Picking beans, watermelons, corn, tobacco, you name it. At the age of 15, I met a man eight years my senior while working in his daddy’s tobacco field. We began dating, then married soon after I turned 18. He was violent. We divorced a year later.

As soon as I graduated college and returned home to Oliver, I began working as a legal secretary. After my divorce that job dried up and I wasn’t cutting it in my new job as a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner...