Where Hope and Mercy Meet: Making Something out of Nothing. Building Everything That Matters

By Maggie Hart

As a young woman, she began her healing journey when she enters the office of remarkable, uncompromising psychotherapist. A man who brilliantly challenges her to confront, face and heal her childhood demons, through teachings which built the bridge from her past to her future, a triumphant leap through shame, suffering and heartbreak to forgiveness and inspiration and powerful self love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532091940

Maggie Hart

As a young woman, she began her healing journey when she enters the office of remarkable, uncompromising psychotherapist. A man who brilliantly challenges her to confront, face and heal her childhood demons, through teachings which built the bridge from her past to her future, a triumphant leap through shame, suffering and heartbreak to forgiveness and inspiration and powerful self love. Today, Maggie's mission is to inspire young girls and women that there is a promise and a dream inside all of us. With the will to not give up or give in to addiction we can accomplish anything we instill in our minds. The key is forgiveness and self love. Inspiring one abused child at a time by bringing them home to themselves. "Come home to yourself, come home to love."

Book preview

Where

Hope

and

Mercy

Meet

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Making something

out of nothing.

Building everything

that matters

MAGGIE HART

38194.png

WHERE HOPE AND MERCY MEET

MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING.

BUILDING EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

Copyright © 2020 Maggie Hart.

Author Credits: Maggie Hart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9193-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9194-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019921216

iUniverse rev. date:  01/21/2020

Authors Note

The story in this book is a true autobiographical account of my life. A true story, how a beautiful little girl survived an abusive childhood from both parents and how she healed the damage that was done to her.

Because of the raw nature I have written about and the sensitivity and privacy of the material I have used fictional names, places and Geographic’s.

The dialogue I have created is honest and the conversations have been recreated from memory and my sentiment.

Contents

Chapter 1     Take Heart

Chapter 2     Mother’s House

Chapter 3     1954

Chapter 4     Magical Day and a New Home

Chapter 5     Life; Days and Years

Chapter 6     Rain Drops

Chapter 7     God

Chapter 8     Fire in My Bones

Chapter 9     These Things I Remember

Chapter 10   Softening

Chapter 11   Suffering

Chapter 12   Living Two Lives

Chapter 13   In Search Of

Chapter 14   Letters

Chapter 15   Masking My Darkness

Chapter 16   On The Edge of My Existence

Chapter 17   Where Hope and Mercy Meet

Chapter 18   Extraordinary Under My Skin

Chapter 19   Everything Worthwhile Catches Up To You

Chapter 20   Old Propensity-New Again

Chapter 21   Justice Matters More Than Bloodline

Chapter 22   Shelter

Chapter 23   Buried Secret

Chapter 24   Meager Wisdom

Chapter 25   A World of Conformity

Chapter 26   Easy Independence

Chapter 27   Beginning Over

Chapter 28   I Remember Goodbye

Chapter 29   Rubbing Against the Edge

Chapter 30   Craving to Be Loved

Chapter 31   Discovering My Way

Chapter 32   Listen Closely and you’ll Hear Your Wake up Call

Chapter 33   Lasting – Wisdom

Chapter 34   New Mercies I See

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Take Heart

M y golden hair pulled to one side, fell in one long graceful sweep to my shoulders as I kissed my mother’s cheek. There she lay in her last hours of life. My eyes reaching to find her, I said, Mother, I love you. Her large brown eyes pensively starred into mine; eyes that whispered something lost in a distant dream and removed from the present including my words. She turned her head from me, unable to speak…starring at the ceiling listlessly entwined in the passion of love and pain that had shaped her life and its power to impact the destiny of mine. I left her bedside once again feeling empty inside. It was clear to me the grief she had carried inside of her was now the sting I felt. She held the answer I would never hear from her, the one I was destined to seek and find myself: a gift of love, the one thing she wanted the most. I set out to triumphant over her pain.

The author, Dorothy Allison, wrote in her essay:

Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made.

Reading these words a few years ago profoundly moved me deep inside to devote my time to broach the mysteries of my mother’s life. In so doing I have written the path to finding my way home to my soul and how I became Cinderella. This is a story of a little girl who became bonded to shame and violence and a victim of hopelessness. My first emotion I learned was fear.

1950. It was a busy year and the beginning of a new decade. United States President Harry Truman orders American military forces to aid in the defense of South Korea and the development of the Hydrogen bomb. The first Volks Wagen type 2 rolls off the assembly line in Germany. The comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schilz is first published in seven United States newspapers. Sunset Boulevard and All about Eve were the top movies of the year, while Nat King Cole sang Mona Lisa and Ernest Hemingway wrote The Disenchanted. That same year after hours of excruciating pain my mother gave birth to a baby girl she named Lilly. This is the beginning of my journey and how I learned to take heart and grow courage.

My parents Wallace and Lillian were an unmatched couple if ever there were such a thing, yet both of them came to California in search of love. My mother was from the sophicated side of Chicago Ill. and my father came from the swamps of Florida. Mother was intelligent, beautiful, well groomed and resourceful. My father grew up on a farm where the women chewed tobacco and the sons helped take care of the farm and didn’t go to school. Mother was educated and father was illiterate. My mother 17 years older than my father stepped off a train in Southern California arriving from Chicago wearing her fur coat, alligator hand bag and a broken heart. She walked into a drug store in June of 1947 and met my father behind the soda fountain. She looked up and there was Wallace, a dark haired, good-looking man behind the counter washing dishes. Wallace truly thought she was a movie star; she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

They were both children of the depression and both suffered in their families as most Americans did in the 1930’s and each of their fathers suffered from mental illness that would manifest through out their lives. They’re differences came together and two months after they met in the drug store they married and began their life together.

I was told that my father’s mother Edith lived in an old tiny house in the black section of Los Angles later called Watts. In her garage my parents starred their life together. Their polar differences took roots right away; Edith told me many times. Their screaming matches were louder than the Watts riots in our neighbor hood. Soon my mother declared my father was unmindful and just plain ignorant. It wasn’t long before Lillian became the mother and Wallace the child. She worked hard to get him in night school so he could learn to read and write, helped him find a job in an aircraft assembly line and in so doing he developed a craft and realized he couldn’t read or write but he could read blue print. Mother could save money like no other person I have ever known and while she was breeding my father she was also building a nest egg for the future. Eleven months later my brother Daren was born. Edith told me my mother stopped complaining for a while because she was so in love with her new baby boy and more importantly she was so elated Daren was not a damn little girl.

Mother’s worst fear came to her when I arrived two years later and became Darren’s little sister Lilly. After Darren was born Nan, my mother’s mother moved from Chicago to Los Angles to be near her grandson. Nan was at the hospital when I was born and told me that when she first layed eyes on me that I was the most beautiful little baby girl she had ever seen. You had rose bud lips, they were perfect. And little specks of white toe-head hair.

Nan had no idea when she first held me how much we would come to mean to one another and how her love would make such a difference in my life. I would always be her little Lilly.

Hush

Tree lined streets marked quintessential neighborhoods,

    who breathed in pure air,

     and secrets of shame that skipped the roof tops.

Happy homes tingled with purpose,

    whilst pain stings that’s unfolding truths; soaring the night.

Unmasked the wholesome soul in private nights

     floating above the hush.

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Mother’s House

I n 1949 three land developers purchased 3,500 acres of sugar beet farmland in California. They began assembly-line construction of 17,500 houses to become a model-planned community; which became the first ideal post-war II suburb in the nation. Foundations were poured, framing and roofs followed and fifty houses a day were completed. Soon the streets were lined with palm and eucalyptus trees and landscaped residential districts known as a bedroom community were built in time for war veterans and their families to purchase their first homes.

In 1952 my parents bought their first single-family home among the newly developed area. In the 1950’s a mother was the bedrock of the community, life was simple, people believed in their dreams, and family was everything. My parents first home started with humble beginnings as they both came from poor childhoods and the depression. Mother took pleasure in her role as a new home owner. She loved our home, taking great pride in the outside watering by hand in early mornings and again in the late evenings while my brother Daren leaned over the opened window and talked to mother. The grass was precisely cut and juniper bushes were trimmed perfectly so that they framed the front of the house. She took lots of pictures and sent them in her Christmas cards to friends back in Chicago. I remember she wore beautiful skirts to her calf that flowed when she walked. In the summer she wore halter dresses just like out of a 1950’s Elizabeth Taylor movie. Her makeup was flawless addressing her lovely features and the high cheekbones she was proud of. Mother’s deep, brown eyes seemed enormous; giving the appearance of happiness, as no one knew the torment she wore deep inside of her. Her dark thick almost black hair was still styled like a late 40’s mode. Mother did everything she could to not look seventeen years older than my father or a mother having children later in life. Lillian assumed the role of wife, mother and neighbor with a style of her own and different from the other wholesome women. My mother had always been devoted to her appearance and brought her Chicago glamorous looks into the neighborhood that didn’t quite fit in; backless sundresses or strapless tops and skirts with always a strand of pearls and some kind of heals.

My earliest memory recalls a home with wood floors and large wool rugs everywhere. Sheer Pricilla curtains on the dinning room windows and heavy drapes in the living room, where I remember the cat hanging from the drapes one evening. There was a swinging wood door that separated the kitchen from the dinning room and my potty chair sat in the kitchen so mommy would remember to make me sit and learn a new task. I must have been around 2 years old and it seems amazing to me that I remember so much in detail from such an early age. What I remember most at this age is everything was beautiful and normal. Things would become different and the changes were my first lessons that life is change and change is hard to accept.

During the next 2 years I remember the swing set in the back yard that I felt like a free bird flying high with the biggest smile on my little freckled face that pierced deep inside of me. My brother Darren was two years older than me and I would beg him to push me higher and higher until he finally said he was tired. Darren and I played Annie Oakley and cowboys and Indians. He taught me to play hide-and -seek behind the oleander bushes where I learned how to count to ten. He played house with me and I used buttons as the pretend food on my play dishes.

My Brother Darren’s birthday party was probably the largest the neighborhood ever had. I was so mad that day because it was for him and not me. My grandmother Nan was there too and she put the toothpicks in the entire petifor sandwich tray mommy made for Darren’s party. I noticed every detail and never forgot because I wanted the same things at my birthday party. Years later I realized Darren party was the only one we would ever experience.

Darren was a good brother to me, but I was mad at him so much of the time because even at an early age it felt like mommy liked him better than me. I remember as such a little girl, studying them together sitting on the hide-a-bed in the small den mother would talk to Darren for long periods of time and I was not included, it seemed as though they were lost together and didn’t know I was there. Darren was sensitive and mommy gave him his way most of the time. I remember feeling stronger than him and didn’t understand those feelings.

I loved my bedroom and how it made me feel special and secure. It was my own world there. At a very young age I was content to be alone in my room and pretend. My room was safe and everything was in its place and that was such a good feeling to me. I didn’t know that would change.

By the age of four I can remember my mother changing. Even though she dressed like a movie star and her house was perfect in every way, mommy was angry most of the time. My father who was 17 years younger than her, did exactly what she said in her house until he would get mad and then the voices became louder and louder and sometimes a neighbor would knock on the door and ask my parents to please lower their voices.

The loud voices happened more often now and I didn’t understand why they were always mad. I went into my bedroom and began a pretend world of my own.

I remember it was a Sunday night because on Sunday’s there was chicken on the dinner table. But this night no one ate the chicken. I was told to go to my room and I did until the voices became louder and louder and I opened the door and saw mommy pick up a lamp and hit my father on his head as the broken lamp pieces fell to the ground I thought it was a game or I wanted to think it was. The next thing I saw was my father hit my mother over and over again until she fell to the floor and was covered in blood. Father walked to the front porch and sat down and he put his head in his hands and cried. The next thing I recall is my mother telling Darren and myself to tell the policeman that our father beat her. When the tall red haired man came inside and asks my mother what happened she would only say, Ask my son. The policeman told her that he needed her to answer the questions but she refused and so the tall man turned to Darren and ask him if he saw what happened and he told him just what mommy instructed him to. He turned to me and asks if this was true and I said, No. I told the truth instead.

This was the first time I remember denying my mother control. It was also the first time I experienced real fear. This fear became the first real emotion I learned.

I remember my father being put in the police car a few more times while we lived in the beautiful house. A few days later mommy put on sunglasses and we drove to the police station and picked my father up.

We moved away from the beautiful house.

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1954

O ur family moved to a different part of southern California in 1954 where we rented a house in a quiet neighborhood. I remember several things that happened that left large impressions on my heart and life in the one year we lived here.

I recall strong feelings of wanting to belong to the other girls in the neighborhood. Most of them were Hispanic and that never made a difference to me, I just wanted to fit in and play with them. I was four years old and Brother Darren’s back yard birthday party was the only one I had ever attended. All the girls in the neighborhood were talking about the girl who lived two doors from us whose birthday party they were invited to. Saturday I noticed neighborhood girls wearing party dresses going into her house so I marched down the street to her house and knocked on her door. Her mother opened the door and told me that her daughter had company and couldn’t come out side and play. I just stood there for a moment and then replied, But I’m here for the party. She didn’t try to be kind, instead she just told me I was not invited and to go home. I can still remember the feeling of rejection I felt. I slowly walked home and began feeling so sad and unwanted and then I cried a little. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what just happened. When I walked in and told my mother I remember she was watching the television and she ask me if I hurt myself. I told her what happened and without turning her head from the program she said, I told you that you were not invited, but you wouldn’t listen to me. She was right. I didn’t want to believe I was not a part of this family of friends. I stayed hurt over this for many years and it started a trust issue between me and other girls my age for many years. How could someone I played with every day as much as the other girls played with her not include me in a day of celebrating? My mother was too involved that day with her television program to sit down and talk to me and comfort my little heart. I did it myself. It seems painful and unsettling that a little girl would try so very hard to create a family mold at just four years of age; a little ray of sunshine lovingly embarrassing everyone and could not understand why in the world I was not wanted. My heart needed those girls…I needed to love them…I needed the love I didn’t have in my family. I needed a family.

The second memory I recall is the inside of our house was not pretty like the first home. The boxes in the living room were never unpacked. After a while it made me feel strange that no one was unpacking them and this was a part of our home life now, but I didn’t dwell on it. Mother never wanted me to bring friends over. She always told me to play at their house; it just became one of her rules I followed. This house didn’t feel like our old home, it didn’t feel like home, rather we were on hold and someone had made up their mind this is how we were going to live and didn’t talk about it. As an adult I look back and feel how odd our home felt and the need I had for order and beauty in my world.

This memory sets up the next eleven years of my life: My mother has decided she does not want my father in her bed any longer. I don’t really know this at this moment but later I would grow to understand this is where it began. I am in the living room and Mother is watching television, somewhere near I hear my mother tell my father he is going to have to sleep with Darren from now on. That is all I hear. I don’t remember thinking about it, but I remember these words. Again, my mother’s resolve had spoken and it was