Acing The ACE

Answering the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire

If you want to understand where you are going first you need to understand where you’ve been and where you came from. Flesh and blood. Flawed. Humans. With biological connections to the past and the future. Feet in the dirt biodegradable beings. Next month it will be two years since I began posting here. Sharing my story of growing up on the road with my troubled mother. Sharing my unpublished books, books I’ve written while looking back on the life I have lived. I decided to share my story here because I care about what happens to other children. I know more now than I did when I began. More has been revealed. About myself, my experiences, the nature of memory. And my desire. For one more conversation with my maternal grandmother Clelus Inabelle. Bom Bom I called her. Born in Bunch, in the county of Adair, Cherokee Nation. Indian Territory. Not a citizen of the United States until she was thirteen years old. “I’d love to see a photo of her when she was a young girl,” I said to cousin P. recently. Just once to see her as she was when she was a child. The woman who raised our mothers. The matriarch of our family.

I wanted to know what she looked like back then.

Wished aloud and the next day found an email from the son of one of her brothers. A cousin to my mother. A man I had never met had found me online. Through these stories of mine posted here for free. I called him and we talked for hours. Though we’d never met the cadence of his voice was so familiar to me. A voice from the past and one I needed to hear right then, right now. After we talked his wife sent me a photo of his grandmother, my great grandmother, Martha Jane Sixkiller Gipson.

I was shocked when I enlarged the image. The woman in the center of the family photo looked nothing like the person in the photos I’ve posted here representing my great grandmother. So, I checked the dates. Counted the children. And finally recognized the girl standing behind her. My grandmother. When a girl. A young girl, a child really. Twelve years old by my calculations. A girl with a too serious face. Her hands resting on the shoulders of her younger brother and sister. She stood behind her mother who sat holding a baby in her lap, another newborn who would not live.

She was born Martha Jane Sixkiller on the 28th of March 1885 in Stilwell, Indian Territory, located in what is now the state of Oklahoma. Her mother Julia died when Martha was seventeen years old. Martha most likely took care of her younger siblings after her mother died. Like me she married an older man when she was twenty-three years old. He took over her allotment of one hundred and sixty acres. And ran it into the ground. Martha gave birth to eleven children in twenty years and died in 1938 at the age of fifty-three. She was buried in Bunch, Oklahoma, where a few years back I stood over her grave and introduced myself. To a woman who had also been bankrupted. A descendant who I carried with me in body.

And soul.

Native Americans became U.S. citizens with the passage the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. My grandmother Clelus Inabelle was thirteen years old at the time. Nineteen when she gave birth to my mother, the girl standing to the left of her in the photo above, refusing to look into the camera. I was fourteen when I sat for a family photo with my baby sister on my lap. The two of us posed for the camera with our moody younger sister, and our twin sisters, on a couch in our rental alongside our mother who held our newest sibling, our baby brother. All of us were recipients and witnesses to trauma well before the age of eighteen.

My grandmother, my mother, my mother’s children.

On and on and on.

For many years I felt ashamed of where I had come from. Ran from where I had come from. Eventually I slowed up, took a breath. Learned that people do not create their own circumstances; bad things don’t happen to you because you were thinking negatively.

In 2018 I set off for San Diego with cousin P. to meet my younger brother who was flying in from Florida. The three of us on a weekend quest to find my chronically homeless brother S. Researching for the weekend I came across the ACE Study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997. Meant to chart Adverse Childhood Experiences which, if not recognized and treated would become risk factors for illness, disease and early death.

Child abuse and neglect was defined by the ACE Study as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child. Acts of omission, or neglect were categorized as physical, emotional, medical and dental, educational, inadequate supervision and exposure to violent environments. The study’s researchers came up with ten questions and an ACE score to explain a person's risk for chronic disease. Results of the initial study showed that adults who had experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences showed a twelve times higher prevalence of health risks such as alcoholism, drug use, depression, and suicide attempts.

The first time I took the ACE test I scored eight out of ten.

Answering the questionnaire was memory altering. I could see so clearly the harm done and the consequences. Sure, I recognized how far I’d come, yet I could also see how much I was still affected body, spirit, and mind.

Our homes are where our bodies first thrive and grow and sing. Our homes are where we learn to love, to feel safe, to provide safety for ourselves and other. Our homes are also where harm can happen.

The second time I took the ACE test I answered nine out of the ten with a yes, this had happened to me before the age of eighteen, yes, I had witnessed this when I was a child, yes this was laid on my young eyes, ears, body, soul and mind. Humbling and somewhat frightening to know how vulnerable I was back then when I thought myself so strong.

I was just a child.

A child like all children wanting to be loved and cared for, to feel safe.

Ravenous my need to belong my need for safety and loving attention even when the threat of harm is no longer omnipresent. I can see danger coming from a long way off. In my dreams I navigate unnamed horrors, steer myself through a vortex, a labyrinth, a map I cannot read.

My inheritance a tangled spiral. Which I have passed on to my own child.

I took the ACE Test to better understand the reality of my own life. We can’t make good decisions without facing reality. That’s what’s helped me to age out of foster care and the aftermath. A hard look at reality. I had to face how I was treated. How my siblings were treated. Had to recognize the ways in which I could have been a better mother to my own son. And I continue to condemn the way our culture refuses to take care of its weakest members.

Children and the people who care for them.

The ACE Test

Before the age of eighteen…

1. Did you feel that you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, or had no one to protect or take care of you? Yes. I had to live with lack. Take it. Suck it up. Childhood neglect showed up first in gut dysfunction. Then in my blood. “High cholesterol. Your Native American genes are showing up,” the cardiologist said. Medication was needed. Also, too high levels of cortisol. Stress sent me for a sleep test which diagnosed sleep apnea. Gasping for air in the night. Sleepy during the day. Now in my seventies brittle bones always about to break are yes, an age thing. And a diet of fast food all of my young life too. Baby burgers and root beer. Jack in the Box tacos. Road food. Eaten in the back seat of the car. My body just skimming by.

2. Did you lose a parent through divorce, abandonment, death, or other reason? Yes. When I was ten years old I lost my stepfather, the man I believed to be my real dad. My bio dad abandoned me over and over. From the beginning he was gone, off somewhere I could never travel. The first time I was in the womb, the second time I was three years old, on the edge of language, the third time I was a mouthy teen who didn’t know who she was or where she belonged.

3. Did you live with anyone who was depressed, mentally ill, or attempted suicide? Yes. Mama was either packing up to move across country or face down on the couch all day. I was told she was diagnosed as bipolar, but when I describe her disassociations from reality, and how she would see and hear things that we did not, her unexplainable terror and erraticism, mental health professionals suggested it was more likely that she had undiagnosed schizophrenia, concurrent with a plethora of other disorders. But who knows, who can explain a mother’s raging pain. Certainly not her first child and oldest daughter.

4. Did you live with anyone who had a problem with drinking or using drugs, including prescription drugs? Yes. Mama drank. But more importantly every man in her life was a heavy drinker. My father, my stepfather, all the men who came after them. Boogie men with bad breath.

5. Did your parents or adults in your home ever hit, punch, beat, or threaten to harm each other? Yes. Mama gave as well as she got. But she got into a ton of fights. Screaming fits in the night. Objects thrown. When I was eight years old I woke up to two men fighting across the end of my twin bed. Blood down the hall. Threats of revenge. Mama screaming, “Nobody messes with a Sixkiller!” and we were off.

6. Did you live with anyone who went to jail or prison? No. That experience happened later. When I was in my forties my younger brother S. was incarcerated. Not for the first time. But that is his story. Mine is the story of an older sister who regularly searches the website Who’s in Jail San Diego and has an online account with the San Diego County Sherriff’s Office so she can send her brother emails and the meal packages he enjoys when he is locked up.

7. Did a parent or adult in your home ever swear at you, insult you, or put you down? Yes. I refuse to repeat the names she called me. Let’s just say that Mama did not give me the idea it was good for me to be alive. Somehow I was able to create a listening space to live within. I began to draw and paint and write first for myself and then for others. Through art making I found that long lost inner voice which says life is good. Live it. No matter what.

8. Did a parent or adult in your home ever hit, beat, kick, or physically hurt you in any way? Yes. Mama did very often push, grab, slap or throw something at me. Hit me so hard I had marks or injuries. I wasn’t born with stray eyes. They were knocked out of alignment by physical abuse. Damage that’s hard to talk about, to face, to see, to change. But not impossible. If I could at last regain peripheral and 3D vision in my fifties. If in late middle age I could gain true perspective, anyone can. As long as they have help: a supportive partner who drives you where you need to go, a step daughter who makes you pasta when you can’t see to cook, a step son who reminds you how hard your brain is working to rewire and regain what was lost, a dog who follows you as you stumble through the house, friends who don’t make fun of you when you tell them you can no longer drive freeways because your mother hit you in the head too many times way back when.

9. Did you feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were special? Yes. I felt unwanted, unloved and very alone. Only felt special when I was truly alone. Outside, up a tree, running through tall grass. Out of doors. In the sun. The sun’s light like its opposite can be blinding making it hard to focus hard to see our way forward. But it can also light your way. Before I was a writer of my own life I was a visual artist. Trained to look hard at what was in front of me. An Oklahoma landscape. A bowl of eggs. Apples. Self-portraits endlessly different because I was always changing. That kept me observing myself, others, the world. Every day a new day. Every decade another enlightening insight into what it means to be a human being in this world.

10. Did you experience unwanted sexual contact (such as fondling or oral/anal/vaginal intercourse/penetration)? The first time I took this test I answered no to this question. Soon afterwards I had to admit to myself that Something had happened, but I still didn’t fully understand what it was. How to name it. Now, I can say yes. When I was eight years old my mother accused my stepfather of sexually molesting me. They were in the midst of a divorce when she prodded me to me to say he’d hurt me, he’d touched me. She was so sure adamant that something happened and yet to this day I do not remember how or when that might have happened. What I do remember is her examination of my vagina. In an attempt to prove he had abused me she took me to a doctor for a vaginal examination. Small girl on a cold metal table her legs spread open for a strange man. Who did not give my mother the answer she wanted. So, she examined me herself with the help of one of my aunts, her sister. That is why I can say yes. Answer yes to this particular question.

Taking the ACE Test showed me the totality of my experience growing up, reminded me why I asked the state of Missouri to place me in foster care, and clearly delineated why aging out of my childhood has been a lifelong challenge. It also helped me to find the professional help I needed. Convinced me to take better care of myself. Eat better food. Exercise more and get a good night’s sleep. Meditate. Most of all I learned to be kinder to myself. To have more compassion for myself and others. For my siblings and for my mother, and her mother, and her mother before her. All of us recipients and witnesses to trauma well before the age of eighteen.

Unspeakable childhoods. Uncared for, it remains a mystery how any of us had survived. Recovery takes time. Recovery takes community and it takes a strong imagination.

Changed personal behavior won’t erase the effects of lack of nourishment as a child, or the C-PTSD come from repeated physical threats. Still, we have more power over our own health and our children’s health than we think. To quote from a 2022 article by D. Brendan Johnson, MTS published in Harvard Medical School’s Perspectives in Primary Care: ‘As psychiatrist Judith Herman writes, “recovery from trauma is the (re)creation of the capabilities for “trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy” through relationships with others.”’

The need to love, the need to transcend, the need to survive. More than survive, to make something of my own life. Those primal motivators kept me going.

Links

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html

https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/perspectives/articles/ace-scores-fifth-vital-sign

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/