This is a living, dynamic accounting. It is also an invitation. By design, this is meant to be a place of reflection and quiet. Maybe even a place of healing and exploration. Therein lies the architecture of this site. It will take curiosity, it will ask of you a spirit of discovery. This is a journey, not a destination. Click on a menu link and see. That is the index for our stories. So many stories untold. Most of all it will ask you to slow down.
Alice’s is one story amongst a myriad of stories. And her story deserves telling, so I shall tell it. And in the telling we journey a life of hardships endured, injustices survived and a twilight shadowed by those adversities. In that telling will be nested the story of countless others who have endured.
In days of yore the weapon of progress has always been prose - first a quill, then a printing press; now my weapon is pixels, and this website is my qualifying credential—a public record of analysis, craft, and advocacy that traditional pathways refused to recognize. It is my cry into the wind for every undersupported person who feels this paradigm in their bones, misnamed an underachiever when they were, in truth, systemically under‑supported.
These pages are a storyboard — a place where stories are gathered, held, and honored as they are. Some are told. Some are waiting. Some may never come, because shame and fear have kept them locked away for too long. At the bottom of every page is my contact information. I do not expect anything, yet still keep the invitation open. If you reach out to me and honor me with a story, it can find a home here.
I am building this record for all of us living this paradigm. Stories are what knit us together,and they can help us heal.
A Living Record for those Who Endure
I built this site because I believe that when we share what we've carried alone, we discover we were never alone in carrying it. The names here — the letters, the words, the empty pages — stand for women and children whose lives were shaped by harm that went unspoken, unwitnessed, and unresolved.
Why do I invite your story?
Not because it's easy. Because it matters. Because when one woman speaks, another finds the courage to listen to her own truth. And in that exchange — across economic lines, across social boundaries, across every wall built to keep us separate — we find common cause.
We do this for our children's sake. We do this so the world they inherit is one where silence is no longer the price of survival.
If you see yourself in these pages, you belong here. If your story is untold, there is a room for it here. If you are not ready, the page will wait.
Alice is all of us.
Please make yourself at home here. Open the cupboards, look in the refrigerator. See what you can find. The index cards and their letters, used in the navigation, are not decoration. They follow the same structure as laws and statutes — big letters for the wide category, small letters for the lives inside of it. It will be small acts of defiance like this that lead to the healing of our nation’s wounded spirit of law. I hope you stay for a spell.
If any part of Alice’s story touches your own,
then I ask your help to interrupt the cycle.
As far back as my memories go, the woman I knew as Mother had been shaped in such a way that her thinking and memories were skewed toward distrust and imputing wrong motives. That’s just how it was. My own life path was steered by those tendencies. But there are consistencies to the telling and retelling — enough that I can knit together moments of significance in her life. Some parts are missing. Other parts are too horrific to believe. I have her contemporaneous writings — her poetry, her short stories, her own memoir in her own hand, some published, but many not — are my sources for the retelling now.
Prologue: Alice — A Life of uncommon endurance
The high cost of survival was paid by Alice’s body, her health, and her state of mind. Those consequences did not stop with her; they affected her children as well. The trauma carved its way into Alice’s spirit and left an indelible mark on her body and her mind, and its effects were multi-generational. Awareness of adverse childhood experiences has peaked and waned. If human behavior is not your field, the term “global neglect” may very well be unfamiliar. The fact that it happens at all shames any society that calls itself advanced. Together, we will explore that concept further. Please join me for a few moments on this page and, I hope, for a lifetime of seeing this story echoed in girls who become women with unseen scars. They walk among us, too many. Too many.
There are almost no pearls in Alice’s strand of life. For our telling there is only a series of vignettes, and not one of them should ever have to be endured. Yet they stacked up, one after another. Alice is ALL of us. She is every girl and woman whose pain is denied, whose body is used, whose truth is dismissed. When I share with you what happened to Alice, I am also telling the story of all of us who were taught to survive what should never, in a just world, be conceivable — much less survivable.
This telling will take time. We will start where all things do…
To be continued.
Please navigate to “A” in the index for the story to resume under the title “Abandonment.” There begins the telling of a universal story of compounded traumas, scars seen and unseen, of a child of the 1930s Oklahoma, USA.
Please navigate to “I” then “Iustitia for Alice” for my account of mom’s life as I understood it in the early stages of what we learned was Lewy Bodies dementia. Navigate to “Lost” to see the whole pixelated battle I waged for her against a system that never understood her. And in the days I spent entrenched in front of a keyboard I came closer to understanding her myself.
