About

My name is Brunhilde, or “Nanny Brunhilde.“

It is a “nom de plume”, a pen name I write under.

However, “Nanny Brunhilde” is more than a nom de plume.

She is the creation of my own vivid imagination sprinkled with a generous amount of fragmented memories and childhood fantasies. I created in my mind’s eye a plump, loving, German Nanny from Minnesota who powders me and diapers me in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Nanny Brunhilde is everything you would expect from a 1950s German Nanny from Minnesota, who is a middle-aged mother of five, with wide hips, a big bottom and a love for children and caring for them.

Nanny Brunhilde is the living embodiment of motherly love and nurturing. She exists in my mind because my 67 year-old mind has been wounded and ravaged by a lifetime of horror and childhood trauma. Nanny Brunhilde is my comfort, my “safe space” that I go to in order to keep myself sane. And Nanny often tells my story from her point of view.

Again, everything about this blog is a mix of truth and fiction, of fragmented memory and vivid imagination.

What is “Truth?”

What is the “truth” about your life? What is a memory? Are they the same thing? I have wrestled with these questions for years. My best answer is that our minds remember things and then “embellish” those memories with various hues and shades of colors in order to maintain a structure or framework for our day to day living. If we remembered our lives in pristine clarity, we might not keep our sanity.

I was born into a very different America then exists today in its collective moral sensibilities, demographics, values, etiquette, culture, and of course technology.

When I was born, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President.

Each family in my time, had between 4 to 6 children each. (Some families I knew had 7 or 8 kids.) I was the oldest of 4 in my family. Large families were the norm.

This era was called “the Baby Boom” for good reason.

Babies in diapers were everywhere, with some families having 2 or 3 babies in diapers at the same time.

The diapers were cloth diapers: Curity flat-folds which were 27 X 40 inches and could be folded to fit any size or age of baby. There were also Gerber Birdseye pre-fold cloth diapers and various kinds of plastic (“rubber”) baby panties which were waterproof and covered the diapers.

Diapers hanging on clotheslines were the norm in my time.

Welcome to my world.