Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old

263 Pages·1998·12.94 MB·English

by  Anna J. Michener

BEe 0 MIN G ANN A

ANNA J. MICHENER
Becoming Anna
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD
THE UNIVERSITV OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
TheUniversityofChicagoPress,Chicago60637
TheUniversityofChicagoPress,Ltd.,London
©1998byTheUniversityofChicago
Allrightsreserved.Published1998
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
1312111009080706 6789
ISBN:0-226-52401-9(cloth)
ISBN:0-226-52403-5(paper)
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Michener,AnnaJ.,1977–
BecomingAnna:theautobiographyofa
sixteen-year-old/AnnaJ.Michener.
p. cm.
ISBN0-226-52401-9(cloth:alk.paper)
1. Michener,AnnaJ.,1977– . 2. Abused
children—UnitedStates—Biography.
3. Psychologicallyabusedchildren—United
States—Biography. I. Title.
HV6626.52.M54 1998
362.76′092—dc21
[b] 98-11049
CIP
(cid:2)∞ Thepaperusedinthispublicationmeetsthe
minimumrequirementsoftheAmericanNational
StandardforInformationSciences—Permanenceof
PaperforPrintedLibraryMaterials,ANSIZ39.48-
1992.
For my Uncle Dave
The names of all institutions
and all persons except the members
of Ms. Michener's new immediate
family have been changed.
ONE
My grandmother says I destroyed my
mother before I was even born. A little flame of hate burns
behind her ordinarily cold gray eyes when she says that.
When she says, "You were so big, you tore her apart."
My mother gives a slightly different version of the story
of my birth, but I still don't know what went wrong. Why
was I a caesarean? Why did my mother need surgery after
wards? Whatever the reason was, it happened again when
my brother was born two and a half years later. How come
no one blames him too?
"It was all the surgery that caused her pancreas to go
into shock."
In other words, when the paramedics came one night
to take my mother away in a diabetic coma, it was my fault.
I was only four the first time it happened. I watched in
stunned silence from my doorway as strange men in uni
forms wheeled my mother away on a stretcher. There was
a needle jabbed in her hand, and a little trickle of blood
ran from it. The whites of her eyes flicked back and forth
like metronomes gone mad beneath her half-closed lids. A
little cloud appeared suddenly on the mask over the bottom
of her face. I heard a desperate khuhh sound, and it vanished
slowly. She didn't see me, didn't see anything, couldn't tell
me what was going on, that it would be O.K.
My mother came back eventually. But it happened
again. It happened many times during my childhood. Each
time my grandmother sat me down to say to me, "It looks
2
like your mother is not going to live this time. Don't you
wish you had been less stressful to hed'
My grandmother did not move next door to us until I
was six. My grandmother made a deal with my mother:
whenever my mother was in the hospital or otherwise ill,
or whenever my mother just didn't want to deal with one
or both of her children, she could send us to my grand
mother. But my grandmother was to have complete control
of us, and my mother was not to interfere.
From one night to up to a month at a time, my brother
and I were shipped next door. During our stay, we were
not allowed to go near our own house, to set foot in our
own yard. We had no contact with our parents, not even
with my mother when she was in the hospital.
A thunderstorm raged outside the huge front window
of my grandmother's house while I slept on the couch bne
night. I dreamed that my mother had died in her bed. The
tree out front shook violently, and I thought God was
angry with me because I was killing my mother. I wanted to
scream but my grandmother would not allow me to make a
sound. She said if we cared for our mother we would have
no need to cry. I bit the blankets.
My grandmother had a Ph.D. in child psychology. She
had worked for about thirty years at a center for children
with "emotional disturbances" and "behavior disorders."
This meant that if she believed I was crazy, she was not
going to be disputed.
I would call it nothing less than an obsession, my grand
mother's drive to find every last "problem" of mine, liO mat
ter how slight or even nonexistent, and "bring it to light."
When I was seven I dreamed of being a ballerina and I
flitted around on my toes a good deal of the time. My
grandmother said the children at the center who were
schizophrenic walked on their toes.
She would have me sit across from her for hours at a
time and listen to her "diagnosis." I had no conscience. I
had no self-discipline. I cared for no one but myself. Appar-
3
ently I was sociopathic. I was a pathological liar. I was a
viciously manipulative pervert who could never love. (And
thus "did not deserve to be loved," was the obvious conclu
sion.)
My grandmother claimed to love me, however. She used
to say that if she did not love me she would not have both
ered to try to "save" me. She would not have pointed out
everything I did wrong and explained how everything I
did well could have been done better. She would not have
carried a stopwatch around her neck to remind me just how
long it was taking me to get dressed in the morning. She
would not have had the bus rerouted to drop me off at her
house instead of my own every day after school so that I
would have to go straight to her to be hovered over as I
did my homework. She would not have called my teachers
and school counselors constantly to see what trouble I was
causing and to explain what a trained psychologist did with
a "child like Tiffy." She would not have had me bend over
the sofa or hold out my hand so that she could inflict nu
merous welts across the bare flesh of my arms and legs
with a thin metal knitting needle that had a heart welded
on top.
Perhaps if she had not "loved" me so much I would have
felt a little love for her. I was not even impressed by the
times she made cookies with my brother and me, took us
to the park to sail boats, or allowed us to play with her
toys for an afternoon. We could only "earn" these things
from her by doing whatever she said we had to do for them.
Nothing came for free, in the true spirit of grandmotherly
love. While my brother was easily controlled with bribes,
I resented them more than the thin metal rod my grand
mother kept at the top of the stairs.
I was always the "willful" one. When my grandmother
could no longer make me cry out when she whipped me,
she whipped my little brother in my place. She knew I
would rather die than see him hurt.
Although I could never be bullied into anything, my