Verified by 
My upcoming memoir, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder, emphasizes the healing process and the nature of resilience. These installments from Chapter One contain some descriptions of violence only for the purposes of illustrating why and how dissociative identity disorder is formed. If you are a survivor of violence or someone sensitive to these scenes, please take care in reading these installments.
The Sum of My Parts
Chapter 1: Installment 3 of 7
Each day at Doña Graciela's ended with my mom hurrying over to bring me home. After she started working, my mom changed. Even though she still had to make dinner and clean the house, she looked happier. She walked as if she were skipping and held her head high most of the time. She whistled a lot. I think her coworkers liked her and she was valued for her skills in two languages. Yet my father still scared her. Just about every day he said something mean to my mom, made fun of her in some way, or hit her. When he wasn't being mean, he seemed to not care about her at all. Her job gave her a chance to feel normal and get away from it all, like Doña Graciela's home did for me.
On a particularly bad evening at home that summer, I was in my room and heard my mom start screaming. I had heard her scream this way before and knew my father was hurting her. I always wanted to stop him and often tried to, but I was never strong enough. On this day, she was pleading with my father to get off her and I heard him hit her. Like so many times before, I ran to help her. As I ran through my brothers' room, I saw them hiding under their beds.
In my parents' bedroom, my father was on top of my mother on the bed with his pants pulled down. Her nice work blouse and her bra had been ripped off and I could see her breasts. Her skirt and slip were askew and a large hole gaped in the crotch of her pantyhose. I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him off, and yelled at him that he was hurting Mame and he should stop. He turned his attack on me.
He hit me across the face over and over and said, "I'm going to teach you what happens to girls who don't respect their fathers." I grabbed his leg and screamed, "No Popi, no!" But I knew in some distant way that I wasn't going to be able to stop him, that I had been hurt like this before, and that he was going to hurt me in a way that made me feel really bad. As he started to rip my clothes off, I panicked. I gasped for air. The room started to spin and my head felt fuzzy. When he pinned me on the floor, I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin, and I couldn't catch my breath. I thought he was going to kill me. My head felt fuzzier.
I wanted Mame to stop him. I could hear her telling him to stop, but her voice seemed flat and weak. I searched her face but found only a blank stare, and none of the concern or love I was looking for. I could tell my mom wasn't really there; she had gone away in her head. Popi deliberately hurt me in front of my mom. Raping me in front of her was a way of hurting her too. Popi told me that Mame didn't care about me, that she never really wanted me, and that she didn't really love me. And she wasn't trying to stop him. His words and my mom's seeming apathy were devastating, leaving me wondering, Does she love me? Does she really care?
My mind got fuzzier and fuzzier and everything in the room seemed far away. I stopped struggling and became very still. My eyes couldn't focus on my father or anything else in particular. I could no longer hear his words clearly. Deep inside myself, like a turtle in her shell, I became smaller and smaller, until finally the panic of being trapped subsided. My breathing calmed and I left my body. I felt myself rising up from the floor, where I was pinned. It was a very strange sensation to me, almost like splitting into two little girls. My hands felt weird, and I noticed that I had more fingers than I should. Each hand split and formed into two separate hands. While I could still feel the pain Popi was inflicting, it was fading and becoming more distant. At last, I split off my mind and floated up to the ceiling, where I watched in safety.
I looked down at my tiny body tangled under my father's. I could tell that it was me he was hurting, but somehow it didn't feel like me. Being able to watch the attack as if it were happening to someone else helped me feel calmer and safer. I couldn't feel or even hear anything. My father could tell from the look on my face that I wasn't really there, and this seemed to push him to make the rape as painful as he could and hit me more to make me come back. But by then I was too far away.
This protective response happened with no conscious effort on my part. My mind adapted instinctively to the terror and chaos by dissociating. Life was simply too painful to feel, and over time, I grew to welcome the comfort of numbness that dissociation brought.
Eventually both of my parents left the room. As I slowly reentered my body, bleeding on the floor, I whimpered. I didn't want my father to hear me cry, but I wanted my mom to notice and come back. Mame had seen what he did to me, so why wasn't she there to help me and tell me she loved me? I wanted to be held. I wanted to be comforted. My father had hurt me badly and I was all alone. Overwhelmed with despair, I felt hopeless. I slowly got up and, feeling no pain or fear, walked to the bathroom to get a washcloth, thinking, I have to clean this mess up before Popi returns. I became intently focused on using the washcloth to clean the blood and semen off the wooden floor. When I was finished, I returned to the bathroom to clean myself up, then I put the dirty sheets in the laundry. I had to make everything look like it never happened.
Cleaning up was an automatic response, almost a reflex. I've since remembered a time when I didn't clean up after one of Popi's attacks. He stormed into my room, dragged me out of bed, and whipped me with his belt for making such a mess. Cleaning and putting everything back in order also gave me a little sense of control over the chaos, which was comforting. To this day, cleaning still comforts me when I'm upset.
That summer night, I quietly walked through my brothers' room. It was past our bedtime, and they were hiding under their blankets for fear that my father would find them awake and beat them. I passed through my curtain door and glanced desperately at the framed picture of Jesus with the big heart and hands open at his sides. I looked nervously at the bathroom window to see if anyone was watching before I put on clean pajamas. I was afraid that Popi would come up behind me and hurt me again, so I crawled carefully under the bed backward. I pushed myself past my shoes and the doll heads I had put there, back behind the boxes of pictures that my mom kept under my bed, and kept pushing myself all the way back until I could feel the wall against me. I brought my knees up to my chest and quietly let out a big sigh. It would take a bit of work for Popi to reach under there and pull me out.
I felt exhausted, cold, and hopeless. My mind was racing, but I didn't try to sort out my thoughts. I just let it all flow. My racing thoughts gave way to a cottony feeling in my head, then my eyes started moving from side to side and my eyelids became so heavy that I couldn't keep them open.
I now understand that as I lay under my bed in a state of dissociative sleep, my mind instinctively worked on creating separate parts of myself. It was like my mind was a house with different rooms to hold different aspects of what I saw and experienced that night. It was a sophisticated way of keeping the knowledge of the attack away from my consciousness -- the central part of me that was always there -- so that the next day I could get up and function. My mind broke the trauma into parts or rooms so I wouldn't stumble across everything that happened that night all at once. One part or room held the knowledge that my father raped me. Another room held the physical pain. Others held the look on my mother's face, the look on my father's face, and the panic I felt, and yet another held the rage. And one part held the realization that Popi was the one who was hurting me and all of the things he said: "You are a bad girl. This is your fault. God is going to condemn you. You are going to hell. Everyone can see that you are very bad." I held these words and my fears of being bad, of going to hell, and of being unlovable in a part of me that would go undiscovered for years.
That night was not the first time I had been attacked in that way. At that point in my life I had already experienced so much trauma from the violence in our family that I was unable to be a whole person with a whole consciousness. Most children that age who haven't been traumatized have minds like an open floor plan, in touch with the entire inside structure at a glance. But my mind was divided up intricately. Even though there was a central room that I lived in and always had access to, there were secret doors, usually locked, leading off that central part. Those doors opened to even more doors that led to closets or a series of connecting rooms. Over time, as I was attacked again and again, the rooms developed in complexity and detail: windows appeared or dark curtains and paintings were hung. In fact, instead of just being places in which my mind stored unpleasant memories, these rooms were becoming selves in their own right, with roles, personalities, wishes, and fears. I wasn't scared of what was happening inside me, but I was terrified of what was happening in our home.
Look for installment 4 next week.
Find out more about the memoir or Olga's work.
