PTSD First Trauma Experience

First Trauma

Trauma in the 1950’s
I got thinking about this, and it's taking me back, taking me back, I realized that my trauma's happened in the 1950’s. Here in Canada women didn’t have very many rights, or rights over there bodies, like birth control, there were a lot of things going on, and legally to become an adult one had to be 21.

In my late 40’s my mother told me the story of her life and her pains, from her perspective. She was rebellious at the time, or what society called rebellious in those days, not wanting to attend church, live at home. She didn’t feel loved by her mother, felt very lonely, pushed out and not accepted by the family.

So she moved in with a man, as her story goes, she was sixteen when she left her home and was living with a married man. He was in his early 20’s. Divorce was not a common in the 50’s, anyways when she was seventeen she became pregnant with me.

My grandmother was very religious and felt my mother was living in a sinful way, and as my mother refused to live at home, Grandmother called the police and had my father arrested for Statutory Rape, which is having sex with a minor under the age of 21. Mom was put in the court system and sent out to foster care. My mother told me that after living in several bad foster care situations, she felt alone and uncared for. While in foster care she gave birth to me. After my birth, one family went so far as wanting to adopt me without my mother's permission. She was very unhappy during these times.

My father left town, before going to court, after robbing a place and the short story he ended up in jail in another province. When he was released a few years later, he was transferred to Calgary to do his time for the Statutory rape. I have never met the man, and he has since died.

Finally, after a few more foster homes, my mother ended up living with a couple who had two children, in which she was somewhat happy and doing well. Here is where things start to turn upside down. The family went on a holiday with their parents, who had a farm in Drumheller, Alberta. It was arranged for my mom, who at the time was 18, to look after the cooking and cleaning for the farm hands while the family were on holidays. So in April 18, 1957 exactly six months to the day I was born, I experienced my first Trauma. I was seriously burnt.
Trauma, Trauma, Trauma

Trauma came in so many forms, for me as a baby to learn and handle. Baby’s absorb everything from birth onwards and my experiences were of being burnt, operations, loss of being nursed, stripped away from my mother, needles, extreme heat, moist air, dry air, not learning to crawl, loss of sight, limited use of my right hand, isolation, in a loveless atmosphere, fear of everyone.

This is when PTSD was set into my soul being for life.

The First Set of Trauma Learnt PTSD The Burn

My mother – young, just turned 18, had a baby. Me! I was just six months old, had a cough/cold. To her, I seem to have a breathing problem. The doctor was too far away and not accessible, so she took the advice of a neighbour on a treatment.

What is known, my mother decided to create a steam moisture atmosphere around me, to help with my breathing. I may have had a cold or tonsillitis. I actually had tonsillitis until I was three when they were removed.

She got a tobacco tin, and hot plate, and menthol vaseline which at this time was flammable. In the late morning of April 18, 1957, I was placed in a crib, the tobacco tin was filled with water and Vaseline. The tin was placed on the hot plate beside the crib to create steam to make it easier for me to breathe. She had rubbed me down with menthol vaseline as well. Then she put a sheet over the crib and hotplate. Sometime later, it’s coming up to lunch time and she was cooking for the farm hands when she recalls hearing me crying. She did not attend to me as she was trying to get the lunch ready, but then, suddenly, her motherly instincts kick in, she hears a different sound in my crying. My crying changed. I’m screaming. It made the hair curl up on the back of her neck! She knows something is terribly wrong. She rushed to the room and pulled the sheet cover from over the crib.
Everything went into flames! Including me. My right hand, arm and across my head I have scarring, that has never healed.

The theory is
My hand, as tiny as it was, somehow got stuck between the bars outside the crib, and it was over the heat of the hotplate. The hotplate was heating the Vaseline on my tiny right arm and especially my hand. The Vaseline was bubbling, boiling and burning my skin. It was even more extreme because the tobacco tin had run out of water, so the air became hot and dry. There was very little oxygen under the cover. So when she pulled the cover from over the crib, it knocked the tin over onto the hotplate, which would have been straight Vaseline by then and everything went up in flames. Including me. The flames burnt my right hand, arm and ran across my head. It had appeared from the burns that I had my head turned into my other arm, so it protected my face.

She wrapped me up and a farm hand took me to the hospital. Needless to say, the farm burnt to the ground. At the time there were no fire hydrants, no extra water store for fires, and I am not sure if they even had a fire hall or truck nearby.

Although to date, she has never expressed her feelings and emotions towards my life experience. Her regret is too overwhelming and as a mother, she carries them in only ways she can cope with.