So to recap Chapter 1 of Shadow Heart, the first novel in the Broken Bottles Series.
What are the challenges of our heroine, Nicky Young?
The story opens up as we hear her voice, at some age, talking about a time when she was eight years old and witnessed her father’s rage toward Jenise, her sister, just because they wouldn’t eat the cold creamed corn their father served them.
We also hear Nicky open her story by talking about her little prayer, the way most little girls and boys pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep . . . and please make my father quit drinking.”
In fact I prayed this way every night growing up, because you see, Nicky in many ways is me.
No amount of prayer changed my father. Sometimes he paused for a week, a month, a day . . . one time he was sober for eight months. What a joy it was to have my dad back. But you know what? It also heightened my anxiety.
Why?
Because a new edge was sharpened on my survival “knife.” Now each day I waited, dreading the man who was bound to fall off the wagon, once again red faced, seeking sloppy love when all we wanted to do was push him away.
Have you felt like that?
Growing up under any trauma makes us not only survivors, but keen observers, adept at analysis, and listeners like no other, but we need to weave and dodge through the bullets of dysfunction.
So what do we know by knowing Nicky in chapter 1? She prays, which means she must have had some exposure to religion of some sort.
She talks about the things she knows:
1. Something bad is coming; it always does.
2. I can’t ask for help; I’m too ashamed.
3. I can’t talk about our secrets; no one else understands.
4. I can’t trust anyone; they always leave.
Children of addiction/trauma learn by being abandoned. We are promised, day after day that this will be the holiday, birthday, school even, that our parent or loved one will be sober. But of course they choose the bottle or drug of choice over us.
We’re sure no other family is going through it, and we know we have to keep secrets.
What else do we know?
Nicky’s mother has gone through the same thing. She screams out loud in the Arizona desert in the summer monsoons to have the floods take her away from her home.
What does Nicky know now after watching her sister’s punishment?
She’s not safe.
Her mother can’t protect her.
Her father is no longer who he once was.
She knows, it’s all up to her, and she’d better pave her own road because no one is there to help her.
WHEN DID YOU REALIZE IT WAS ALL UP TO YOU?
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ROMANCE?
AAAHHH! JUST WAIT…IT’S COMING! DEEP, SENSUAL INTIMACY…WILL NICKY LEARN HOW TO GET IT?
MAR
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