Discover the path at Hestia's Hearth presents

A Survivor's Series

Stories of extraordinary events lived by ordinary women.

Estsenetlehi's story

My story starts with an end. Without this end, I would have no story or at best the details of my life would remain obscured in the dark recesses of my mind. My story starts the day I woke up and knew that I could remember everything that had happened the day before and the day before that and the week before that. It was the day when I realized that most of the multiple personalities that normally inhabited my mind and body had integrated. I became me, rather than us. Here is my story

My mother was born into the harsh depression life of the 30's and 40's. That was also the time when there was a great migration west, especially from Oklahoma. When she married her handsome Navy Lieutenant in California, she may have had hopes of a better life for herself than her parents. That was what she hoped. Life has a way of spoiling our plans.

My earliest memory of my young days was the abuse of my biological Father. I don't remember all the details but he did things to me that left the deepest scars in my life. I wasn't alone. I remember seeing my mother pinned beneath him while he beat her violently, her pregnant belly trapped between his thighs. I don't remember the birth of my brother. I only knew that one day we were on a bus headed out somewhere.

We stopped in Southern California near a relative of my mother. Events are not clear but I do recall one night in our small house when we had to lay still and quiet in the dark as a tall stranger walked up to the door. My mother was scared to death. We all crouched and hid, nervous until his footsteps receded.

After that, we stayed in California and life was good and happy for a while. There was a day school that I liked. I enjoyed learning and parties sometimes. I knew that my mother was dating. She used to go out with him at first, then he started coming to the house. I really like him a lot. He was kind, and gentle with me and my brother, often including us in many things that they did.

One day, Mama was away for a few days and when she came back she said, 'children, I want you to meet your new father'. My brother and I were very happy and ran to him and hugged him because we liked him too.

For quite a long time we lived in Washington State in a house in Tacoma. For some reason there were a lot of people that came to visit us from both sides of the family. Eventually my parents bought a house in the mountains of California and that became our permanent home. It sounds like it should have been wonderful but things changed for my mother and me.

There were a couple of incidents that hurt me a lot. When I was seven, I had a bout of encephalitis that started with a sore neck and back pain. We were still living in Washington then and I was put in hospital and isolated in a sterile room redolent with that awful smell of carbolic. It was a lonely time and a scary time. I couldn't see anyone. They all wore masks and gowns when they came into the room. I couldn't even have my stuffed animals for a comfort. That feeling of isolation stayed with me for a long time.

Later, when we moved to California, I was looking forward to the day when we could open the boxes that were in storage and move into our new rooms. Things had been packed away for a long time because the house that my parents bought wasn't finished. In the meantime, we lived in a small apartment and had no room for all our toys.

Those stuffed animals that I couldn't have when I was sick were so precious to me and I wanted to get them out of the boxes. When the boxes were opened, the mice had gotten into the toys and they were all destroyed. I cried and cried to no avail. They were all thrown out. When I looked in the garbage for my favorite, it just got thrown out again.

My mother also had incidents that affected her deeply and she changed too. She got pregnant while we were in Washington and had a little boy named David. He died within eight hours of his birth. I had German measles while she was pregnant and I felt that this had caused his death. My mother never blamed me but she changed after the baby's death. She was moody and withdrawn and cried a lot. But she also got angry with me a lot. She yelled at me and I got rebellious. This tug of war went on and on escalating until the time when I finally left home.

When my third brother was born, life became unbearable. He was sickly too, vomiting all the time after feeds. His throwing up was serious and he had to go back to the hospital for surgery. My little brother's needs became the centre of the house and everything else was secondary.

My Mother took to beating me in an effort to curb me or to release her stress or both. I don't know what triggered her violence to me but it was fierce and painful. If she didn't use the leather belt, it was the 18" ruler. Eventually, I just got into the habit of running away rather than trying to deal with anything.

The canyon near my home provided a haven from the abuse and as young as I was, I found a support system with some church elders. My memory of me wasn't so bad but there must have been so much more. After one battle with my mother, my Father came after me and we got into a fight. Next thing I knew, I was being dragged into a hospital/sanitarium and held down while a needle was driven into my bum.

For years before during the violent times, I had been taken to see numerous psychiatrists and was labeled with many diagnoses from schizophrenia to manic depression but nothing ever fit. At the time of my admission in the Sanitarium, I was apparently a very violent, angry young woman. I spent a week in the facility and then returned home. I still had no diagnosis.

Some time after my release, I was attending a church wedding in Long Beach and saw a young man from Canada who seemed interested in me. I realized that this was an opportunity to get away from home. When he asked me to marry him, I said yes and headed north to more pain and heartache. We lived with his parents, well chaperoned, until we were married in a short civil ceremony.

The marriage lasted for about 6 years. In that time I had four children, all boys. My husband felt just as abusive as my mother had been. Most of our time together was a blur. Much of my life with my children is vague and clouded with so much confusion. Who I was most of the time, remains lost to me. As I look back at old photographs, I can tell that different personalities were present in the photos. The way I was dressed, or the posture or the facial expression was just not me. Sometimes my eyes looked dead.

There were vivid events that stand out. Like my mother, I lost a son, my firstborn. He was a beautiful baby, just four months old when he died of SIDS. It was thirty years before I was able to put together the pieces of the puzzle of all that had happened to me during that time. There are moments when that seemed like a dream in my head. When I had a chance to hear and see the reality of it, my grief was as if it had happened the day before.

I had three more children after that. Only the last one was born without any complications. By that time my husband and I were headed for divorce court. Without mental stability I had no chance of keeping my older children and so my husband was awarded custody. I was not giving up the last one though. Because he was so young I was somehow allowed to keep him. But, my life became very complicated and I felt unsafe with my youngest. I called my Father to come and get him. On the same day he arrived, he took him back to California. He spent some time with my parents, then was adopted by my brother and his wife who raised him to an adult.

I was a physical and mental wreck. There were several personalities operating in my head. I adopted an androgynous look that served the male and female entities. Some were very violent and controlling and others were gentle and sweet. There were two or three children, one of whom has been the hardest to let go. She seems to be the child that was most hurt. Sometimes I would come to myself and be crying for no reason that I could understand. But I would look at the walls and see the crayon marks and know that she had been present.

I could communicate with some of the personalities but not with others. Some had allergies, some smoked, drank, partied, stayed at home or did any number of things that made my life topsy-turvy. Just as I would get my life on track with a job and savings, I would suddenly wake up in a strange place, no money, no job, no knowledge of where I was. The wallet would tell me something but there were gaps in my memory for months on end. As time went on I became more and more isolated, working at jobs that kept me out of contact with people, like truck driving, working on an oil-rig as a cook, and home repair. I had no stability, no family and virtually no contact with my youngest son and none with the two older boys. My 'ex' had every reason to believe that I was mentally unstable and a danger to my children. I was even a danger to myself!

The longer I spent with the other personalities, the more I got to co-exist with them. We all wanted to survive but there was a constant power struggle. I stayed way from relationships but every so often there was someone, a friend or partner, who came along and enabled me to be in control for a while. Most times, no one would put up with me, male or female and I found me being hurt and abused for things that others had done.

I don't know what made me try to fulfill a life long dream but by the late 80's I was in southern Ontario and decided to go back to school and become a Nurse. I started in the RN course but that created problems somewhere in my life and I had to give it up. I was transferred to the RPN course and finished. My diploma is one thing that I am very proud of but it didn't stop the personalities from playing havoc with my life.

Working was just another way of earning money for the others to spend. I was in and out of relationships and accommodations every year. By 1992, my head was out of control. It felt like there was a convention going on inside of it all the time. I tried seeing a psychiatrist but if I wanted to go, someone else inside didn't and would control the situation. The little girl was terrified of the Doctor and prevailed on the older woman or man to help her. The rebel Jesse was the worst and most responsible for much of the violence in my life. I know now that they had everything to lose from my integration but it came to a point of me or them.

There were so many issues involved in living just one day at a time that death may have seemed preferable but I was not a quitter. Where I am today is because someone else believed that I was not a quitter and invested the time and support to enable my story to have a happy ending.

In all my travels from Southern California to Southern Ontario, there has been a constant in my life. Somehow, my Stuffed Bear has managed to survive the relationships and the moves. He represents the stability that I so wanted to have. In every town or city along the way, all I ever wanted was a place to call home. During one stretch of four years, I moved four times, each time with dwindling possessions.

After getting my diploma, I moved to the big city to try and get a job and earn some money but I was living on the edge every day with the stress of multiple lifestyles. Fortunately, I got some work on a hospital unit but they were doing procedures I just could not handle. After attending a seminar on loss and grief, I approached the bereavement counselor to talk about my concerns. She invited me to walk with her and share a lunch. Before I knew what was happening, I was telling her things that I hadn't shared with anyone before. This was not a day of reckoning. I still had miles and miles to go to reach where I am today, but she listened while I talked and I knew she didn't judge me. I knew that I trusted her right away. If she had any idea of what she let herself in for that day, it didn't show, but that is when the healing started for me.

As difficult as it was sometimes, she supported me in getting to appointments with my doctor, listened to all my 'baggage handlers', as we used to call them, sorting through their problems as well as my own. It was a rough ride on some days and others were pretty good. We had a lot in common and could share activities that brought normalcy to both our lives.

It took a few days before it hit me about two and a half years later. I tentatively realized that I could remember a good portion of the previous days. I know that my friend could ask personalities to leave if they interrupted conversations but I knew that had not happened and yet I felt like there were fewer and fewer gaps in my day until suddenly they were gone! At the same time bits and pieces of memory started to return gradually. Even though I knew that I had not experienced some events physically, they had apparently been stored in a common memory bank.

My friend told me that certain physical behaviours stayed with me for a long time. Even after the integration I was still not emotionally or mentally stable in the sense that I was unsure of how to behave in certain areas that had been automatically handled by one of the personalities. This process has taken quite a few years but it was like growing up all over again.

As I celebrate the anniversary of my first steps to freedom, I am profoundly proud of the meeting the challenges along this very rocky road. Integration has given me back a sense of personal accomplishment. I have a home and stability for the first time in my life. I have mended fences with my Mother and Father and best of all, I have been reunited with my children after over 20 years of being out of their lives.

Without fire, there can be no transformation.

Multiple Personality Disorder

This is a complex mental health problem in which periods of amnesia are experienced by one or more personalities inhabiting the same physical body.