E.6 A Tiny Bible before Milk

A child learns the rules of a house long before anyone writes them down. The story isn’t told for shock; it’s told to understand how a nervous system adapts when home becomes a surveillance state and love looks like control.

We unpack how chronic abuse trains the mind to expect loss after joy and silence after need, and why seemingly small anchors—magazines, a transistor radio, Dylan's blowing in the wind—can be lifelines. If you’ve ever felt guilty for wanting or scared when life gets good, this conversation offers company.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review with one thing you want to reclaim this year. New episodes every Tuesday.

Special Thanks to our supporters, who have made this podcast possible.

• Lucy Mathews Heegaard: Audio Engineer
• Terry Gydesen: Photographer

• Polly Kellogg
• Kate Tillotson
• Dawn Charbonneau
• Jacob Wyatt
• Molly Tillotson
• Julian Bowers
• Wendy Horowitz
• Pat Farrell
• Lynette Tabert
• Laura Jensen
• People's Farm Collective
• Deborah Copperud of "Spock Talk" podcast

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage
• 0:39 Early Glimmers Of Play And Fear
• 1:37 The Little Bible And A Violent Discovery
• 5:20 Sleeping On The Porch And Elsewhere
• 9:32 Music, Winter Cold, And Survival Tricks
• 12:05 The Pattern Of Being Denied Safety
• 13:38 Food Theft And The Milk Punishment
• 16:05 Aftermath, Suicidal Feelings, And Witnesses
• 18:20 The Cabin Journals And Early Healing
• 22:16 Perspective, Progress, And Closing

Transcript

Setting The Stage

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Sadie Green Story about an older adult looking back on her abusive childhood. It's a conversation between Sadie and myself, Pam Colby, her longtime friend. We are exploring how early trauma can affect a lifetime. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Hi, Pam. And hello also to our loyal listeners.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hi, Sadie. It's good to be here. Today we're gonna walk through some harder stuff.

Early Glimmers Of Play And Fear

The Little Bible And A Violent Discovery

Sleeping On The Porch And Elsewhere

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Yes. Well, our last episode focused on some positive memories of living with my family. Today we're going to go in the opposite direction. I still want to believe things started out okay. Even after we moved into the second house when I was about nine. I remember playing hide and seek one night when company was there. The yard light was turned off, and I remember just racing through the dark and wrapping my arms around a big tree. And it was so dark. A brother who was it ran right on by. I also remember wondering if Ma knew I was out there playing. Another time I see Pa was organizing a baseball game behind the barn, and I swear he threw the ball at me, inviting me to pitch, and I was so afraid because I thought she might see me having fun. Moving forward here, I have two hard scenes to expose today. One will close out this episode, but I want to start reading the easier of the two. There were not many books Susan could read on the farm. When Pa came in from chores at night, he often read from books he must have picked up in odd places, books about war mainly. He served in World War II. Sue never heard him talk about that time, but privately he read a lot of war stories. Rows of condensed readers digest books sat on shelves in the living room, but even those books Sue had little access to. Through her grade school years, she read many of the books in the school library, like Crazy Horse, The Jungle, Louisa May Alcott books, all eight Laura Wilder books, and others. But at home she did not read except for when she lived among those piles of red book magazines on the front porch. One early evening, while walking the loop of road between the gray farmhouse and grandma's, she found a pocket-sized Bible. There was a streak of days that summer when, on Ma's command, she often walked that piece of road. Ma, hoping perhaps to show the neighbors Sue was mentally unstable, made the girl walk back and forth for hours between her house and Grandma's. Sue wouldn't really go all the way to Grandma's, however. She'd go up to the corner, past Abby's house, until she was out of sight, then sit back off the road and daydream the amount of time it took to walk that last quarter mile. Then she'd get up and come around the corner towards the gray farmhouse again. She'd see a lot of things along the roadside, mostly beer and popcans, or small dead animals. But this time she spied the tiny Bible. It was a well-worn little book with black covers that stuck out wider than the thin pages in between. Susan thought little about Bibles, but this small book with tiny print became a treasure. She stuck it in secret hiding places on the porch, in the garage, or in the basement. When she escaped into the woods, she hid the Bible in her clothes, then took it out to study when she was alone. She memorized the chapter titles in the Old Testament, beginning with Genesis, and when she had those down, she memorized the chapters in the New Testament until she could recite them all together like the alphabet. She read a certain number of pages from the little book each day, like duty. Not that she understood the words or even wanted to, but she could make up any number of games with it to pass the time. But even that was not the main reason she kept it. It was the joy of ownership, how she loved the size of it, the feel of it, but most of all the privacy of it. The precious little book belonged to her like nothing else. She had it secretly tucked inside a pair of cutoffs one afternoon when Ma called her to the kitchen. Ma was feeling generous, offering leftover scraps for Susan like a dog. When Sue leaned over to pick the dish up from the floor, the front tail of her shirt fell open where a button was missing. Ma saw the little book. Where did this come from? she demanded, throwing it up on top of the refrigerator. Now Ma had nothing against the Bible. She came from a strict religious family. But she didn't like Susan having this one. Sue never saw that little book again, but she carried a one inch scar above her forehead, where hair never grew again from being banged against the door frame that day until blood ran down the wall, and Ma's yelling finally stopped. Do you still have the scar? I still have that scar. Yes, I'll show it to you here.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

What strikes me is it just like another thing in your world that you can't have. That was just how she thought. My other thought was just the way that she was giving food to you. So they were family scraps from after a meal. And was she really putting it on the floor?

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Yes. She put it on the floor. I remember coming in the front door. She was in the kitchen. It was on the floor.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Did she say, here's some food?

SPEAKER_02 6:23

I don't recall exactly what the words were, but it was for me.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Do you remember did she feel like you'd stolen it?

SPEAKER_02 6:31

No, I think it was just that I had something.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Was there any kind of sense that she regretted bashing you? I mean, you probably needed stitches, but that wasn't gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Oh no. Heads can really bleed. Yeah. I just remember seeing blood. I don't remember seeing a lot. And then I must have just left. But I still do have that scar.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

So at the time that that happened, were you sleeping outside yet? What was going on for you?

Music, Winter Cold, And Survival Tricks

SPEAKER_02 7:02

I was in the second house. I can see that kitchen so well still. I know I moved into the pink bedroom with my sister after we moved in. We had bunk beds. But I also know that by the time I was eleven or twelve, the closest thing I had to a bedroom was the front porch, which no one in the family used. No one went into the house through the front. It was always the back. It was just a storage room for the family. And it was really cluttered with boxes. But that became probably the most like my bedroom after the age of eleven or twelve. And it had windows on three sides that rattled when the wind blew. There was no heat, but there was a double mattress in the corner, and I could literally roll myself into that mattress like a tortilla. I want to read a little bit of being on that porch. It was the red books that kept her company. As she turned the undyed vanilla pages in the back of Ma's magazines, she entered other houses in her imagination. Houses with high ceiling foyers, where healthy green plants grew indoors, where wide lattice paned windows opened out to sunny beaches, where delicate, long-armed women in broad brimmed hats and filmy dresses walked by. Bedrooms had flush carpeting, dining rooms had chandeliers and dimmer switches where kind and pretty people laid their heads on tables and wept when they left each other. That's all. It's just an example of a way that I lived in another world, very different from my own. I think that front porch was also where I must have kept my clothes. Though I don't remember normal things. How did they get washed? Were my clothes washed with the other clothes? How did I get them out of there? I don't remember washing them myself, and I must have had many days of normal clothes. Anyway, on the other side of the wall from that porch was a den where my older brother slept in a single bed next to a roll top desk. And he listened to a transistor radio late at night. That's how I heard the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Janice Joplin. It was 1968, 1969. I remember memorizing that Bob Dylan song. How many roads must a man walk down? I must have heard it on the radio enough. And I was so fascinated with that song. How many seas can a white dove fly before it rests in the sand? Something about how long before you can hear people cry. I had that song memorized.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

So what I think about is what was the temperature in the winter on that porch?

SPEAKER_02 10:09

It was cold. It was really cold. There was no heat.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

No insulation.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

No, I don't think there was any insulation, no.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

So you would have to just run out there and dive into that mattress and I must have had coats.

SPEAKER_02 10:23

I must have had. I mean, it's it's unrealistic to think I didn't. I remember in the garage, my father had stashed these long old wolf coats from World War II. And I do remember wrapping up in those coats. I don't remember them being on the porch, but they might have been, or something must have been on the porch.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

And you don't have any memory of when the porch became your bedroom.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

Yeah, it's hard for me to place things at any certain point. I know I spent time in that pink bedroom. And if we moved in when I was about nine, if I go by what the teacher who came to the school in fifth grade, I would have been eleven. And I was already spending time in the woods. I don't remember if I was sleeping outside at the age of eleven, but I certainly was by the age of twelve, somewhere in there.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

So the porch was your transition. At first you had a bedroom, then you were to the porch, and then eventually you weren't in the house at all.

The Pattern Of Being Denied Safety

SPEAKER_02 11:30

You know, it wasn't necessarily chronological. Like I remember sleeping in the old Pontiac in the yard. I remember sleeping in the barn. I remember sleeping on the front porch. And I remember the front porch was a regular space for some period of time. I also would we the family got a new freezer at some point in this big huge box. And the box was set under the basement stairs. You know, they didn't have backs on the stairs. That box became the laundry box to throw dirty clothes in before washing them. And I remember going into the basement halfway up the stairs and dropping into that box, and I could sleep in that box. My mother eventually caught on and grabbed that box and pulled it over on its side. But I remember sleeping in those clothes so I could cover myself up and the basement was heated.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

That is just so revealing about your mother that she was tracking and your relative safety, really. If you were in a place that was less dangerous, less cold, then she destroyed it. Your memory of playing baseball with the family, worrying that she would discover that you were out there having fun. That is so in your psyche that there was somebody who was tracking whether or not you were okay. And if you were, then it was her job to stop you from being okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

Now that I'm in my 60s, this is part of doing this decades later. Even though I had all this stuff written down in my 30s, it's just hard for me to think that she didn't have more kindness, or there must have been times when it wasn't so harsh. But it is so true that what I remember is if there was something known that I liked or wanted, it was going to be taken away from me.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Let me just go to the rest of your life then. And has that been an issue for you just to feel like you can have fun or enjoy things? Do you feel like that has been a lifelong anchor on yourself or your psyche?

SPEAKER_02 13:54

It's really hard for me to ask for what I want. Even identifying what I want has been hard. On the other hand, I've appreciated the life that I have since I left home. I've had a good life. I've been busy, and it really is now when I have slowed down that I am learning a lot about how to identify what I want and ask for what I want. I often assume that people think less of me than they might actually think. I've had people tell me how I assume things that are not necessarily how they feel.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

That would make sense because in most of our lives our mothers are the ones who are supposed to be there to assist or or a parental figure of some sort to make life easier for you rather than be such a direct obstacle.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

In the end, I believe she hated me. I was just a burden or a point of rage.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

But she made you more of a burden than you even had to be. She went way out of her way to make you the whipping post or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

I remember wanting so badly just to do things. Simple things like do dishes. I remember telling myself even, if I ever have a daughter, she's gonna help me do things because I wanted to do things. I wanted to do normal things. And I didn't I didn't do anything normal. I just didn't have a normal life.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

To me it seems like she just went way out of her way to make you feel as unnormal as possible.

Aftermath, Suicidal Feelings, And Witnesses

The Cabin Journals And Early Healing

SPEAKER_02 15:42

I think she just wanted me gone or Or maybe even dead. Yeah, I I I did think in the end that it was just a matter of time. Some of the cruelest memories I have with my mother were after I stole food. And I often stole food. That's why they got the new freezer actually. At least that's what I was told. And she made sure the new freezer came with lock and key. So let me read about one of those times. Sue was caught one night in the kitchen stealing fancy biscuits from a fresh batch Ma had just baked earlier that afternoon. Too eager to eat. It was not until the next evening that Ma came up with a punishment she thought was suitable to match the sin. If you're so damn hungry, I'll make sure you get filled up, she said. And she sat Sue in the middle of the living room floor. Then handing her a quart of milk, she stood above her like an overseer until Sue drank the whole thing down. Then Ma went and filled the jug again. Handing it back, she said in that hard voice, and don't you stop until you finish every drop. Sue was already full, but of course that was the point. While Pa read the newspaper, and the family moved around her like she wasn't even there. Sue screamed and screamed behind her face, like she was falling down and round and round a spinning ball into the center of the earth. A piece of her was miles and miles away from this dark, worn to the tar linoleum on which her body sat. Her body that could not possibly keep drinking milk, except she had to. Ma kept standing over her. Sue's stomach eventually could not take it anymore. The milk came back up of its own accord, right there in the middle of the floor, in the middle of a family evening. Ma grabbed Sue by the hair and wiped her body through the puddle, then filled the jug and thrust it back again. Sue pleaded, please. She swayed her body sideways, moaning in pain, but it only continued. Irritated by the mess, Ma kicked her with the point of her shoe. More than once that night, Sue was the mop near to hysteria. I can't, I can't. Forced to carry on what seemed impossible, just one more swallow. She thought that she would die. She wished she could die. That seemed the only way this agony could end.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

For me, just hearing that, what is so powerful is your father sitting there in the room.

unknown 18:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Well, this is going on reading the paper.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Yeah, it's hard to believe, really, even for me. But that is how I remember it. And the other kids.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Yeah. Yeah, I remember I know there were others around. I'm not sure he was reading a newspaper.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

But they were around. I I know they were around.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

And what's it like for you to read that now?

SPEAKER_02 19:24

It's unbelievably painful still. It's so far removed from my life now. Nothing in my world is like that. It's hard for me to believe even.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

But when you read it, my feeling was that what I was hearing was you feeling like you would rather die than live through what was going on. And you've really shared some really other very hard stuff. And I've never heard you that the this is the most almost suicidal you were Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

You know, when you're in a kind of place like that, there's no w I mean it felt like there was no way out. There was just no way to end it, to stop it. And of course you wanna just be done. You wanna be done in any way that you can be done. And that's what I remember.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

So what was it like when you originally wrote this and remembered this?

SPEAKER_02 20:27

When I was in the cabin at age 30, writing down these memories, I did have a journal where I talked about what was going on with me now, presently, so I could read from that journal. I forced myself to write tonight. It feels especially silent and lonesome here. I could easily knock this kerosene lamp off the table and let the house burn down, or just sit here forever, with no one noticing I'm gone. Lots of silence today. I turn off the radio soon after I turn it on. Radio is an escape, like Red Book magazines were in the old days. I tell myself I need people, I do, but the essence in my life is bare. My inside world matches the outside world today, with its howling wind and snowflakes falling down. The warmest contact that I count on are the big brown eyes of my dear dog, witnessed my every move. She doesn't take away the truth, the pacing, or the tears. She doesn't hurt me. I move the table so it faces out the window. It takes up the center of the room so I can watch the birds and look out on the fresh, unblemished snow. I worry that this self absorption makes me selfish.

Perspective, Progress, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 22:00

It really is so good to have those journal entries within the context of your writing because it really tells us more about who you were then and how far you've come. And to me, feeling worried that you're being so self-absorbed in this or selfish or in any way taking too much time to reflect on this part of your life is so telling, Sadie.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Yeah, I really felt that way at the time. I mean, I I I believe I did. I wrote that, and I don't feel that way anymore. You know, I was out there by myself for the most part and immersed in this world that I hadn't really looked at. And I did feel very self-focused. And I am self-focused now, but it is really a different kind of way.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Yeah, and if you hadn't taken that time to do that as a young woman, who knows what would have happened with your life. You've really had a very productive, interesting life, and people need to know that it's okay to heal and to give yourself room to not just shut memories away, but to bring them forward and think about them. And the way so many of us grew up, it's not okay to talk about things that happened to us.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Yeah, it was really a cathartic time. I really got to know myself in a way that I hadn't, and it was life-changing to do that, but that isn't how it felt at the time.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

No. But I appreciate that you're able to share that that you took that wonderful journal along with that time, period, so that we have both memories.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Yeah, that is that is nice. Thank you everybody for going through this stuff with me.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

And thank you, Sadie.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

See you next time.