Here is "Mary's Story" that was sent to me to interpret.
Mary’s Story
The nightmare began at birth. When “Mary” was born she was dubbed “The Devil’s Daughter,” as her paranoid schizophrenic mother bizarrely identified her as a child from the Devil in a family where she desperately wanted only male children. Sexually abused herself as a child, Mary’s mother began to abuse her daughter at birth, putting her crib in a confining closet at the back of the house. She was convinced that her newborn daughter was trying to destroy her marriage and would end up having sex with her husband. When she was three weeks old a mosquito from the nearby swamps got through a hole in Mary’s closet and bit her, causing encephalitis, a high fever, convulsions and eventually a coma. Mary had to have her spine drained and spent weeks recovering in a hospital. All along her Mother insisted that she had been “born crazy.” At six weeks, Mary had to be rushed to the hospital when she stopped breathing and turned blue from lack of oxygen. Her Mother claimed that “Mary tried to kill herself” by stuffing her blanket down her throat ( as if a six week old were able to do that,) not admitting to paramedics that she had tried suffocating her daughter until she was near death. Mary, being the oldest daughter, took the full brunt of her Mother’s abuse, although younger sister “Betsy” was also badly mistreated when she was born. They were both routinely subjected to vindictive deprivation and homicidal rage, yet Mary was her Mother’s main target. The family also included two boys, but only the girls were subject to the terror and dread dealt to them by their mentally disturbed Mother. “My Mother wanted nothing to do with me or my sister Betsy, who was born eleven months after I was born in 1962,” says Mary. “Both of us were kept in separate cramped closets as infants and toddlers, and when we moved to our second home we were kept in a damp, musty, unfinished basement with just a mattress. The meager food we received was placed on the stairs, as if we were sub-humans or pets. Neither of us ever had any potty training and we would go for days without having our diapers changed and we both had terrible rashes and sores from our soggy diapers.”
Mother just wasn’t cut out for housework either, and didn’t think it necessary to attend to cleaning and housework. “She never washed dishes. There were pots of food molding in the kitchen and in the refrigerator,” Mary says. It was a terrifying existence for a child. Every day was simply something to endure, a test of survival. Eventually young Mary thought her father might come to her rescue and become her savior, but he was a slight man and powerless to deal with the destructive behavior his domineering 5-foot 9-inch, 250-pound wife exhibited toward his daughters.
I want to thank Jane Malock for inviting me to participate.
