Mother (right) in a huff at customs, 1956? Dad keeps his distance.

I don't find it unusual that my first DP experiences seem to have occurred when I was traveling. Time changes and unfamiliar places still exacerbate my DP to this day. These are stressors or traumas to the brain, especially the sleep-deprivation that often accompanies travel. It is common for the population-at-large to experience fleeting, not chronic episodes of DP when sleep-deprived. My parents both loved to go abroad and had traveled extensively during the two years before I was born. My father considered travel relaxing and educational. My mother on the other hand made any trip a military exercise; there were too many things to see and one was "a lazy fool" not to take in every sight possible. It didn't matter who traveled with my mother; they were guaranteed to return in an agitated state.

I took many trips with both of my parents as a very young girl, most notably a trip to Mexico when I was about four years old. I wasn't able to sleep well or eat on airplanes and often suffered terrible ear pain. I was even afraid to use the toilet as I was certain I'd get sucked out of the plane when I flushed. My mother's response to all of this was that I was "making a fuss over nothing." "You don't want to eat, don't eat then. Don't complain about it if you're hungry later." When we arrived in Mexico I felt I was going to pass out. I saw stars, felt nauseated, faint, mentally confused and disoriented. I specifically recall my father's concern and only his efforts to comfort me. He found a restaurant that served pancakes and orange juice at all hours -- comfort food to this day. I have fleeting memories of feeling odd the entire trip. At some point I literally hallucinated my cat, Hatse, under a chair in our hotel room. I reached out for her and she disappeared. I was overwhelmed with great sadness, a painful desire to go home, and a pervasive sense of fear. There was more arguing than laugher on that trip, as usual.

Wanting to be home with my cat, Miss Hatse Moody.

World class travelers. World class sparring partners.

Once my father became persona non grata at home, I became my mother's travel companion, her baggage handler, her "husband," and her verbal punching bag if things didn't go exactly as planned. Again travel was a lesson in discipline, in stoicism -- no time to relax. "You will see the Mona Lisa if it kills you!" Without my father as a buffer, the most potentially wonderful adventures became biannual jaunts to foreign boot-camps. I feel I shouldn't complain as I have been to virtually every continent on earth. And it is true I have had every advantage in my life -- every enriching experience -- cultural, educational, and social. Yet all of these things are meaningless as I never felt truly loved or accepted by my parents and was basically despised by my mother for being so "unlike her," so much "my father's daughter" -- a "lazy ne'er-do-well."

I believe I can pinpoint my first DP thoughts and feelings to a trip my mother and I took on our own to Tobago when I was around five years old. I was always left to my own devices to explore hotels and their grounds and would frequent gift shops, information desks, crash parties and dance to the amusement of the guests or find the rare youngster to play with. I was frequently left alone to entertain myself as soon as I was capable of doing so. One evening I purchased a book on Dracula in the Hotel gift shop that had a disturbing illustration on the cover that initially fascinated me then gradually began to terrify me. I sat staring at that hideous image and became increasingly anxious and frightened. I recall leaving the hotel room in a panic and flying down a plush spiral staircase into the lobby. My mother was chatting there with another woman. When I interrupted her to tell her I was petrified, she shooed me away; "Don't be ridiculous, it's just a picture, you're not scared of that are you? Can't you see I'm having a visit here with Mrs. X?"

Berlin zoo with a lion cub. Animals always made things better.

My mother frequently denied the veracity or very existence of my emotions. Her usual reaction to any emotion was I "wasn't really feeling that way" I was just "acting" or "looking for sympathy or coddling." Early on I began to lose touch with my true feelings and to this day have difficulty sometimes connecting emotion to experience; I am sometimes doubtful of how to respond emotionally in various situations. My reactions can be greatly exaggerated. My sadness overwhelming, my rage extreme, my anxiety crippling. Even joy is self-conscious, less spontaneous, sometimes forced.

Plumping up dinner in Montreal. Expo 1967. Good with company as buffers.

A few days after the Dracula incident, my mother came down with some mysterious tropical malaise. She "felt miserable, had a fever, and there were 'all sorts of red dots in her very sore throat'." She lay on her bed and I on mine. I grew increasingly certain that she would die. When I mentioned this serious concern she remarked, "If you are afraid I'm going to die, you must want me to die. Just leave me alone!" Here Freud was again unceremoniously exhumed and thrown in my face. My mother's theories changed regularly and randomly from psychoanalytic to neurobiological. Afraid to disturb her I turned towards the blank wall by my bed and began to focus intensely on my body. I began to think, "Who am I? What am I? What is this lump of flesh laying here? Why am I here? What is it to be alive, what is it to be dead?" These extreme existential thoughts took on a life of their own and manifested themselves as a physical sensation -- a perceptual shift.

Egypt, 1980. The Aswan Dam. No smiles. I refused to travel with her ever again -- and never did.

I felt I was merely a thought. My body was merely a vessel containing the illusion of life, of the world, of the universe, all existence. At the time none of these thoughts or feelings were frightening to me and I could "shake myself" out of the trance. But here was the beginning of the vicious cycle of over-introspection, over self-consciousness, and the physical manifestation of pure existential thought, that would return to haunt me on and off throughout my youth and ultimately envelop me as an adult.

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© Sandy Gale, 2000-2008 The Pear Blossom Project

April 17, 2008