Chapter 1: Lonely Is a Child In the mid-eighties, as a lark, I had a past-life regression. I was trying to find out why I''m a musician. Music didn''t run in my family, and I don''t believe that musical talent or ability is inherited anyway, so I just wanted to know if I was Mozart reincarnated, or something fun like that, in a past life. So one day, my doorbell rings and in walks the classic Crone, a big old wise woman who sat me down on my floor and began talking to me, gently and quietly. It was hypnotic. The rhythm of her voice took me back to five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, and then ages three, two, one. I''m back in the womb, looking for a light to be born into. I follow the light and start talking about being a half-Indian man in the 1800s.
A doctor who died of scleroderma, a disease that hardens the skin. Then I go back farther and I''m an actor in a German cabaret in the 1600s. I was a woman dressed as a man, performing for a group of townspeople. Who knows where all this stuff was coming from? It was bizarre. But very entertaining, very amusing, clearly all in fun. I just went with it. Then the woman began to bring me back, step by step, pulling me out of the regression, part of which is to guide you back into your current life through reexperiencing your own birth. She starts talking me through, saying, "You''re in the birth canal.
" And I was feeling it. I could feel what it was like to be in the womb and then in the birth canal. And then, all of a sudden, I couldn''t breathe. Out of nowhere, I was feeling this great pain in my legs. I started screaming and hollering and breathing really hard. The therapist was startled by my reaction, and she brought me out as quickly as she could for fear that I was really in pain. She said, "Whoa, okay. Okay, now you''re being born--one, two, three, four--five--six--seven, eight, nine, ten! Okay, you''re born.
Whew!" She asked me if my birth had been difficult. Not that I knew of. I had never heard anything about it. I called my mom as soon as I got home, and I explained to her that I had done this past-life regression and I wanted to know if there were any problems when I was born. "Well," she replied. "You were held back." Held back? What did that mean? My mom sort of fumbled through her words, and then, for the first time in twenty-five years, she told me the truth about my birth. I was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, at Cushing Memorial Hospital, on May 29, 1961.
My mother went into labor at home. As soon as she arrived at the hospital, they sedated her. That was the protocol in those days. It was one o''clock in the afternoon and all the doctors had just gone to lunch. My mother was ready to push and I was ready to be born, ready to enter the world and start my life. But it couldn''t happen without a doctor being there. Of course, this was before there were pagers or cell phones, so the nurses held my mother''s legs together so that I could not come out until someone could get the doctor. They held her legs together for fifteen minutes.
Fifteen desperate minutes of struggling and straining to get out. Her uterine wall was pushing up against me and, as hard as I tried, I was not allowed to enter the world as planned. And so my first experience in this world was that I was being crushed. I was in terrible pain. Mom isn''t the kind of woman who would make a scene. Not even if she were giving birth. Mother never wanted to make trouble, especially on an emotional or spiritual level, even though everything in her body was telling her to let me out! She acquiesced, and said, "Okay, we''ll wait for the doctor." That''s right.
She put the power in somebody else''s hands, and all the while, I''m dying. I was born severely black-and-blue and bruised. I had a hematoma, which became a birthmark on my chest that was there until I was twenty. And my mother had never said a word to me about it. For twenty-five years. That''s my family: "We just won''t talk about it." "Everything is fine." I survived, so we never talked about it.
Ever. And we would probably have never talked about my birth experience if I hadn''t had that past-life regression. I was born black-and-blue and close to death. I guess you can say that I was bruised from birth--figuratively and literally. I was born on my older sister Jennifer''s birthday. I don''t think I was the present she was expecting that day she turned four. From my very first breath of life, I would be this "thing" that took attention away from her. Neither of us ever had our own birthday.
We had to share the day like twins, without the joy of having a twin or the connection that comes from a twin relationship. As far back as I can remember, my sister has been one of the most powerful influences on my life. Not in a good way, necessarily. But powerful. She was prettier, she was thinner, she was more tan, her hair was nicer. She took care of herself, she knew what clothes to wear. She had that whole girl thing I never really had. I was very much a tomboy, completely awkward in my body.
I wanted to be like her. My mother never showed me how to do my hair, how to dress "right." I still don''t know how to braid hair, I never learned to wear makeup and I never dressed especially feminine. I didn''t know how to do any of that girly stuff you''re supposed to learn as a kid. I longed for that and, on many levels, in a strange way, I got that from my sister. But, what I also got from my sister has affected my ability to connect emotionally in every way. One of my earliest memories of Jennifer is at around age three or four. We were playing in the basement of our house.
She was trying to get me to drink a Coke. I did not like anything carbonated, and for the most part, I still don''t. I can tolerate champagne, but just barely. I kept refusing to drink the Coke. I just didn''t want to drink it. My sister finally decided to hold me down on the floor and forced the Coke down my throat. She just poured it into my mouth, choking me. After all, she was angry at me from birth.
I can only imagine that she was home, expecting to celebrate her fourth birthday, and her mother and father were nowhere to be found. She sat there alone--no party, no cake, no celebration--all because I was about to come into the world. My family, who hid any sign of emotion, never explained to Jennifer that I wasn''t a threat. All she knew was that whatever little love and attention she usually got on her birthday wasn''t going to happen that day, and she has stayed angry and envious ever since. I felt cared for in my family, but I never felt safe. As a baby, I never learned to crawl. I scooted. There are home movies of me scooting, but none of me crawling.
Experts say that this is a sign of fear. I also used to stick my finger in my ear, and my parents were concerned that maybe there was something wrong, but there wasn''t. I guess it was just a comfort thing. Comfort and safety were two things I never really sensed when I was growing up. I think this lack of warmth and affection is the spine of a lot of issues that I still carry with me today. Outside the home, of course, was a different story. Classic America. We lived about two miles from downtown Leavenworth, down a barely paved road packed with houses full of children.
There were open fields and always something to do. Kickball. Baseball. So it looked perfectly normal. Except for the prisons. The Federal Penitentiary. The Kansas State Penitentiary for Men. The Kansas State Penitentiary for Women.
And the Army Penitentiary. All of which were the main industry for the town. My best friend''s dad was a guard at the prison. He used to walk to work. So it never seemed like anything out of the ordinary. Not at the time. The Federal Penitentiary had a dome, so it always looked like the Capitol Building as far as I was concerned. And I thought that every town had one.
As I got older, Jennifer got angrier and more physical. She used to torment me by hiding in the closet, or under my bed, and there was always this awkward silence just before she would jump out and scare me half to death. I knew she was hiding there and I''d just stand in the middle of the room and wait. Wait for her to scare me. To this day, I still can get frightened if someone hides and tries to scare me, even if it''s just in fun. It was very manipulative and controlling behavior--two traits that today I find so attractive in other women, especially women I am romantically involved with. When I was around six years old, things started to change with Jennifer. She began to want things from me.
Things I was uncomfortable with. I know that all kids experiment and play doctor and that might have been all Jennifer thought it was, but it sure wasn''t that to me. At night, in the bedroom of our home, she would be gentle with me, talking sweetly to me, which was curious in itself. She would tell me what to do and I would follow her directions. I would do as she asked. I knew that touching her was wrong and I knew that it was something that would never be talked about. Not in our family. I felt tremendous shame, though I didn''t know what to call it at the time.
My mother''s family was from Arkansas, right on the border of Louisiana and Texas. Just Southern, Southern, Southern. We''d go down and visit my grandparents in their house in El Dorado (that''s El Dor-AY-do, not El Dor-ah-do). My grandfather was in the oil business and the whole place smelled like oil. The whole town. We''d visit for a bit. And then we''d all pile into the pickup, four grown-ups on the front seat, all the kids in the open back, and just drive down the freeway, eighty miles an hour. I''m surprised we didn''t lose one of us, going so fast.
We''d head over to my g.