More than once in every person's life, it becomes appropriate to pause, reflect on your life and consider making changes. Being at one of those points, I began looking backward at my life.

Concurrently, I came across a scrap of paper on which I'd written, "No matter how you tell your story, that's never the whole story." I'm sure that little gem of brilliant thinking (yeah, gee. nobody else ever thought of that before, did they?!) arose from an encounter with my daughter's version of our shared reality— i.e., her childhood. Her narrative and mine seem completely unrelated in many instances, another  rare occurrence between mother and daughter, right?

Anyway, as an exercise, I began to write a "memoir" that included only the events I actually remembered and left out all the stories/reminiscences the family has told through the years that become so ingrained they may pass for memory for many years.

I'm not ready to draw any hard and fast conclusions from this exercise — I'm only up to about age 5 so far — although I will say that already a pattern has emerged. This pattern consists of being abandoned in the grip of terror.

I do not, however, leap directly to searching for someone to blame. Having been blessed with some years in recovery and the opportunity to discover a whole new perspective on the people who participated intimately in my early life, I remain open-minded/undecided about whether painful abandonment is the reality or simply the way my personality rolls. It seems a good idea to let the indecision stand. Let me uncover more memories vs. stories before I make up my mind. (And perhaps the answer will be some third or fourth possibility, instead of a poor-me personality or a cold, heartless mother.)

Wait and see? No need to erect a rock-hard opinion and defend it to the death? What a change that is from the family of my childhood, who fervently believed and judged everything as right or wrong. There was only one right way to do anything, only one right way to act. Only one right way to feel, too, apparently, since I DO remember being told many times, "No, you don't" after expressing how I felt about something.

Only now, after some years in Al-Anon recovery, do I see how ridiculous, obscene, dismaying and demeaning that is. I love new clothes. No, you don't. I admire those who sacrifice to fight injustice. No, you don't. I hate winter. No, you don't.

The other thing that occurs to me now about my childhood memories of being left to drown in fear is that I didn't drown. Regardless of who or what "caused"those painful times being the only recollections of that childhood, I felt overcome...but in the end, I overcame. Maybe I was left (or left myself) to drown, but I learned to swim through my fear, to find a shore on which to stand.