Small Sacrifices (14 page)

Wes and Willadene came from large families; Wes was the

second child of four boys and two girls. Willadene was the oldest sister of three, and she had two younger brothers. They were members of the strong fundamentalist Southern Baptist church where a proper wife follows meekly behind her husband. Sex was accomplished with the lights out, but nobody talked about it. As a bride, Willadene believed that she should defer to Wes. She always would.

Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was born at Good Samaritan

Hospital in Phoenix on August 7, 1955, at 7:35 p.m. It was a stifling hot Sunday evening.

All memory is flawed, weighted and skewed by individual perception. What has happened does not matter as much as what we

remember. That mind-mirror freezes its own images. The child in Diane Downs's memory is pathetic--a skinny, wistful little girl, ignored by her mother, tormented by her father, a waif scuffing through the sifting Arizona dust with the wrong shoes as she walks home from school alone.

A child without friends.

Diane longed continually for a closer relationship with her mother. Willadene Frederickson, not yet out of her teens herself, failed to meet Diane's expectations of what a mother should be. She was so busy fulfilling her husband's expectations of what a wife should be. So young when Diane was born, she became pregnant again almost immediately; John was born a year after Diane. Kathy was born three years later, James a year after

Kathy, and finally Paul, eight years younger than Diane. By "ie time Willadene was twenty-five years old, she was the mother 01 five children, married to a man who was something of a martinet.

"There were more and more kids, and she ran out of time," lane explained. "Some little kids need mothers more. I used to 1 around the house waiting for my mom to come and talk. She

'eaned house for my dad and spent time with my dad--not me." The Fredericksons moved often, sometimes living in towns 92 ANN RULE

around Phoenix, more often on farms. Diane resembled Wes physically, but Willadene realized before Diane was five years old that she was not fond of her father. It puzzled Willadene; Wes didn't care, as long as Diane obeyed.

Diane probably received as much attention from Willadene as any young mother with five children could give. Pressed, Diane could recall some good times. Her earliest memory is of going trick-or-treating with her mother in Flagstaff when she was four. It was Willadene who took the kids to movies, who taught them to sew and cook. Willadene appears often in Diane's childhood recollections, yet, in the end, she is found lacking in her oldest daughter's eyes.

Willadene sided with Wes in disciplining the children. Wes made the rules, meted out the punishments.

"She never spoke out on anything. He spoke out on all subjects. Everything," Diane remembered. "Everything." Diane excelled academically; she was very bright, scoring, as an adult--even under pressure--a full-scale IQ of 125 on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale. If not a genius, Diane was just a hair away. She could have mastered any college curriculum and gone on for an advanced degree.

The childhood that Diane remembers is as bleak as the night wind keening across a dark desert. Some memories are crystalline; she also has vast empty areas of recall. For weeks, months, at a time, she might well have dreamed her life, a blurred diorama rushing by to be lost forever.

Outwardly, the Fredericksons epitomized the perfect family of the fifties and sixties. Of Danish and English descent, they were a mother, a father, and five children who attended church twice on Sunday and again on Wednesday evening. But Diane did not view her family as real, because it lacked "interaction." She denies any bizarre childhood fears or phobias. "Was I ever afraid of things?" she wrote to the author. "I am assuming that you mean obsessively afraid for an extended period of time

... I must say that I was afraid of 'little green men from outer space' because of a movie I saw on TV when I was about nine. That's why I don't let my kids watch horror shows, no matter how foolish they appear to grown-ups. As far as the real things in everyday life were concerned, I wasn't afraid of anything. I didn t like lots of things, but I wasn't afraid. I was a pretty trusting child. I had no reason to fear ... no one was really mean to me.

She cannot remember her brothers and sisters as children distinctly. She rarely babysat for them because she hated it.

"I wasn't allowed to punish them, and they were unbearable sometimes. I always got blamed for the breakage. If I told my dad, he said, 'Don't be a tattletale.'

"I mostly only remember looking after Paul--putting him to bed when I was ten and he was two. Once Paul swallowed a jack

and I got blamed for it."

Socially, Diane Frederickson was a shadow child who stood alone at the edge of any school group, never privy to secrets shared with screaming giggles.

"First grade is vivid. I went to a new school, and I was really scared. The kids picked on the new kid. My folks told me 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star--What You Say is What You Are,' and

'Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones' and all ..." It didn't help much. The names hurt.

Diane considered herself an ugly duckling. Her eyebrows

were thick, overshadowing her forehead and eyes. She was unaware that anything could be done about them; she accepted her fuzzy brows as a permanent defect.

"I didn't mix because, when I tried, I wasn't taken very well. I don't know why I wasn't liked. It started in first grade. I suppose I resented it and became angry. I turned against them and wouldn't play with them.

"The girls ignored me. When I tried the boys, I got thrown in the boys' bathroom. So I stood next to the door waiting for recess to be over."

She could cope very well with books, and she could beat the others by being a brain, but recess was agony. She was never chosen on a team until she was the last one left, standing scarlet with embarrassment.

"I had no confidence. I was very shy, real quiet, passive. I

"ate to sound like Charlie Brown, but I was the last one to find

°ut about anything or go anywhere. But ... the teachers loved me."

. Wes was strict about homework. When his children had no ^signments, he insisted that they read the dictionary.

Being a "brain" didn't compensate for being unpopular. Un" she was eighteen, Diane was invited to only two parties other ^an church functions.

, She manufactured magnificent, grandiose dreams to survive er childhood. Her most consistent ambition was to be a doctor.

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And, always, Diane--grown-up--would be rich and live in a wonderful house.

"When I was a child, I didn't feel like a total misfit. I thought everyone lived the same way I did. I knew there were things I didn't like, but I thought it was normal. I did not rebel for a very long time. I was an introvert, and I did a lot of listening and watching of people. As I grew, I began to make a distinction between what I liked about life and what I didn't like. And, even though I never expressed myself (either because I wasn't allowed or I didn't have the confidence) I still adopted ideas that I would apply to my adult life."

So often alone, Diane began to feel invisible, a child caught behind a wall of glass--screaming and screaming for someone to notice her and rescue her. She could see out, but no one could see in. Years later, she would describe how she fashioned her own survival.

"You go inside yourself. That's the same as blanking out. You're screaming--shut up inside."

As she neared puberty, Diane would have much to scream

about inwardly.

By the late sixties, teen-agers had emerged as a major faction in the marketplace. Records were made for them, clothing fads were aimed toward them. It was so important to fit in.

Diane fell further and further behind socially.

When she was in the sixth grade, mini-skirts and white go-go boots were de rigueur for every school girl over the age of eight. The Beatles had changed music and style. Diane Frederickson went to school in plain brown, lace-up oxfords, with sturdy white anklets. Her skirts fell far below her knee. When she saw the smirks of classmates dressed in Mary Quant mini-skirts and white boots, she rolled her skirts at the waist so they wouldn't look quite so long. She was scolded when Willadene saw how they were wrinkled and figured out why.

"When I was twelve years old, all of my friends stopped wearing bobby socks. They were allowed to wear footies or peds, and sometimes even nylons. I was not permitted the same liberties. I was the last one to be allowed to shave my legs. It seemed silly to my parents but it was a very sore problem for me.

"Then came the time when nearly all the girls in my grade started wearing brassieres. I still had to wear an undershirt, and I

felt like a freak or outcast when we had to dress for PE. I just knew everyone was watching me in the locker room."

When Diane was in the seventh grade, Wes came home one day raving about seeing a

"guy with a beautiful head of hair." It

inspired Wes to order Diane to have her hair cut short and permed. No one asked why Wes should want his daughter to look like "a guy . . ."

"I cried and cried ..."

Of course. In 1967, hair was supposed to be long and absolutely straight. Some girls even ironed their hair, and Wes had made Diane cut hers off and curl it as tightly as Little Orphan Annie's.

She hated him even more.

Wes Frederickson had begun to work for the U.S. Postal

Service when Diane was about five. Although he never carried mail, he worked sooner or later at almost every other job in the system. He progressed steadily up the ladder, headed for the prestigious perch as a supervising postmaster. For a family man, the postal service offered security and a salary that, while not munificent, was steady and dependable.

For the Fredericksons then in the sixties, things should have been all right. But Elizabeth Diane was not happy. She still felt invisible. She studied harder, hoping to achieve acceptance with better and better grades. No one seemed to notice her.

She vowed that one day she would show them all.

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Child Abuse

Excerpts from an essay, by Elizabeth Diane Downs

Mesa Community College, July, 1982

The gruesome crime of child abuse not only destroys

the lives of our children but it usually brings

terror into the lives of our grandchildren. . . .

Abused children develope [sic] different personalities,

depending on the type of abuse they receive and

the amount of abuse they must endure. The personalities

developed in abused children stay with them all

their lives. They may receive conciling [sic] or some

form of help which turns the child around, but no one

can take away the scars and pain inflicted on an

innocent child forced to submit to mistreatment... it

will ultimately affect that child's life as an adult.

Then, when this scarred child, turned adult, has children of his or her own, these children . . . are usually

abused in some way or another by their parents. . . .

... I wish we could stop this vicious cycle. If we

could only take a whole generation and stop child

abuse, we could wipe out the plague. . . .

Generation after generation, the abuse continues.

If you abuse your child, he or she will no doubt abuse

your grandchildren.

^ ^Ai

"7" was trapped. The only way out was to leave the house. My dad said if I told--everyone would hate me.-'-'

--Diane Downs

When Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was eleven or twelve, and Paul--the baby--was almost four, Willadene went to work for the post office too, as a clerk. Her late shift kept her away from home most of the night. Wes stayed with the children.

Diane learned now that there were many kinds of "love," some of them ugly. She described more than a year of unquenchable terror. Her father never denied her accusations; he has never commented on them at all.

Hovering at the edge of puberty, Diane knew virtually nothing about sex. She had no breasts, her eyebrows still flourished thickly, and she wore plain little girls' dresses. Boys didn't approach her. She listened to other girls discuss S-E-X and deduced that, "If boys fondled and touched you, that meant they loved you."

No one loved her. Sex held no interest for her. She was not happy where she was, yet she was a little afraid of growing up.

| ""like most pre-nubile girls, Diane wasn't anxious to date. She was still different.

There was the darker reason that separated her from her

eers-She believed that no one else had experienced what was "appening to her. She felt guilty and dirty and afraid to tell

11^01^-Diane was twelve, she remembers, when Wes Frederickson "^an to molest her sexually. If he had blocked her way before,

"e surrounded her now.

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There was apparently no one with whom to share her night secrets. She couldn't tell Willadene. And she certainly couldn't confide in her other source of comfort--Grandma Frederickson Wes's mother.

Five times she packed her bags to run away ". . . but I had a responsibility to my family."

Loquacious on other subjects, Diane speaks haltingly about her premature introduction to sexuality.

"He was forcing me to grow up too soon. I realize now it was much more serious than I did then. I didn't understand sex then." Diane had her own room. She thinks that her siblings were unaware of her father's stealthy visits and of the rides she took alone with him. She denies actual intercourse, but she remembers

"talking . . . touching . . . fondling."

"I blanked it out,"

Throughout her life, Diane had withdrawn behind the curtain in her mind--blanking out--when she could not stand the truth. She slipped more and more easily into the blurry place without memory.

When the late afternoon shadows lengthened, Diane's depression and anxiety began to build. Wes arrived home from work