This is a memorial. It is also an invitation.
These pages are a storyboard — a place where stories are gathered, held, and honored. Some are told. Some are waiting. Some may never come, because shame and fear have kept them locked away for too long.
But stories are what knit us together as a people.
A Movement for Women Who Continue to 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 — represent women and children whose lives were shaped by harm that went unspoken, unwitnessed, and unresolved.
This is an invitation to share 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 that was 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 place for it. If you are not ready, the page will wait.
Alice is all of us.
If any part of Alice’s story touches your own, then I ask you to help make sure the cycle of tragedy ends.
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 written by 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 it was 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 more. Please join me for a few moments on this page and 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 no single 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 1930’s Oklahoma, USA.
Please navigate to “Lost” for the legal and medical narrative of Alice’s life. It is a chapter now closed.
If any part of Alice’s story touches your own, then I ask you to help make sure the cycle of tragedy ends.