I had a hard time in school, socially. I made good grades until about the 8th grade. It was making friends that I had a hard time with, not grades. It always seemed as if the bullies picked me out of a crowd. Not the beat you up kind of bully. The mock you and call you names and find your weak spot and poke it with a stick kind of bully. They gravitated to me. At first, I just took it, quietly. Then I started to argue and take offense and get into arguments. Then, I started to go along with it. Laugh with them. It was miserable. I let on that it was better than being quiet or arguing because I was told that it was better, but it wasn’t. I felt like a fool. It made me sink lower and lower into a funk. I started to crave friendship and affection, and I got very little of either one. I felt like everyone would rather not mess with me. The only reason they were so protective, I thought, was because they didn’t want anyone to think that they were negligent or a bad parent or grandparent. After I grew up and they continued to “keep tabs” on me, it was more of a nosy thing. Something to keep the gossip fresh. Something to talk about at breakfast. At least I kept it interesting.
After my Daddy left, two men in black suits came to the door asking for him. My mother said they had FBI badges. She told them that he left and took everything that belonged to him except a pair of socks, “he even took our marriage license.”, she told one of the men. I never knew why they were looking for him, we never saw him again. I learned, recently, through a source that I’ll explain later on, that he passed away on January 3, 1999. The day that my divorce was final from my second husband. He’s buried in Lexington, Kentucky in an unmarked grave. I actually grieve for him. I pray that he got right with God. I just wish he could have made it right with me. I’ve been in contact with one of his cousins and I asked her if he ever mentioned me at all. She said he did a couple of times. Over almost 40 years, he mentioned me “a couple of times.” Did he feel too guilty and ashamed? Was he afraid he might tell someone what he did if he talked about me at all. Or did he just not care? Was there no natural affection? I’ll never know. And I suppose I’ll never get over it. I just wanted a Daddy.
Where my Daddy left off, my mother’s sister’s husband took up. He started out by having me help him shoot up drugs. You could buy Paregoric over the counter back then. It had opium in it. I can remember my mother using it to calm my brother when he was teething. She’d just rub some on his gums and he would go right to sleep. She did the same thing to me when I was a baby. I can remember the smell of Paregoric. I loved it. It smelled like …..psycho mint. It was almost sweet smelling with a slight chemical smell. It’s hard to describe.
My Uncle had a Zippo lighter. He’d have me flick it and light it, then set it down on the table…a make-do Bunsen burner. He put the paregoric in the spoon and held it over the flame until it started to bubble, then he’d lay the spoon on the table and draw the liquid through the needle into the syringe. He’d grasp the arms of the wheelchair and push himself up so his butt hovered above the seat of the wheelchair. I’d pull his pajama bottoms down to mid-thigh and he’d lower himself until his butt rested on the seat again. Then, he’d tie his belt around his thigh and have me pull it tight until he told me to stop. Then he’d inject the paregoric into the vein in his thigh, and I’d help him pull his pajama’s back up and “get rid of the evidence”. Sometimes my mother’s brother was there. He did most of the “helping” if he was present. I remember it being surreal. Scary, but I assumed it was what all uncles who were crippled did. Whenever he was high on that stuff, his appearance changed. I always got scared as soon as he got off. His eyes changed. He looked mean and he talked mean and he threatened all kinds of things if I didn’t do what he wanted me to do . Everything from “making sure” that my brother and I were put in an orphanage because, he said, my mother had not proof that she was ever married to my Daddy. A lot of things that should have taken place between me and a boy of my own age happened between me and my old, toothless, skinny, crippled uncle. Right under my Aunt’s nose, my mother’s nose. I can remember times, like at Christmas, when he fondled me right in front of a room full of people. He’d caress my boob…..I started to develop at about 10. He’d rest his had on my butt, but he’d do it quickly…I knew what he was doing, but no one else noticed.
IF they had been paying attention, they’d have noticed. But the least they saw or heardfrom me, the better. I never got affection or praise or positive …..anything. If I was sad about something, I was being a sissy. They were always calling me “spoiled rotten”. I could never figure out why. I hardly ever got anything …period, much less whatever I wanted. If I did something wrong, I got the crap beat out of me with a belt or a fly swatter. I never got to join any groups or organizations, especially if it cost money or required the purchase of a uniform or equipment. So, the spoiled thing, I don’t know where that came from. I was not, by any definition of the word, spoiled. Anything I got, which was not very much and not very often, I had to BEG for. Literally BEG. I usually had to have an adult ally as well. Any other child that we knew who received any kind of affection, like hugs or “I love you” was considered spoiled. I never got any of that either, so I still am bumfuzzled about being spoiled.
I have a hard time digging through all these cobwebs and thinking about these things. It makes me angry at my Mother, my Grandmother, my Aunt… for not believing in me and not recognizing that I withdrew for some reason. I can remember being outgoing and always “putting on shows” and singing and dancing and wanting to sing and dance. I was in all the school plays. I was happy. Then I just wasn’t happy anymore. I tried to tell that my own father had taken it upon himself to abruptly end my innocence without asking me if I was ready to end it. He confused me and was not a good father. He abandoned me, then came back and turned my brain to mush, then he abandoned me again. He was supposed to be my hero. He was supposed to tell me that I was the prettiest girl in the world. He was supposed to tell me that no boy would ever be good enough for me. He was supposed to protect me from bad people and bad things. He was supposed to teach me to ride a bike and drive a car. He was supposed to actually spoil me. He wasn’t supposed to warp my mind and abandon me. Twice. He made me a prisoner of my own mind. I think all the time. I think about him a lot. I always have. He didn’t even give me the opportunity to miss him. I could only wonder what he looked like, what he did everyday. If he molested other little girls. He left me with a brother who worships him, even though he never laid eyes on the man. He can’t believe that his father is a child molester. Whether or not he was a “pedophile”, he was definitely a child molester in December of 1967.
I never tried to bluntly tell about my Uncle. When he died, I almost blurted it out at the cemetery, ….but I didn’t. I had a breakdown instead. They all thought I was overcome with grief. I was actually relieved that he was dead. I was overcome with emotion because I was glad he was dead and I wanted to shout to the world that aside from the fact that he fought in a war, he ruined the innocence of a girl who was left in his care from time to time, trusting that he would protect her, not harm her. I am her and I still get angry about the things he made me do.
He had a pornographic novel called “Family Circus”. It was a paperback with artwork of a woman in a dominatrix outfit, smiling, creepily, as she pops a whip, surrounded by a variety of male and female characters of all ages. A shirtless man,. A young boy in sneakers, shorts and baseball cap with unbuttoned shirt, young girl with daisy dukes and crop top with nipples protruding, pouted mouth, doe eyes, man with sinister smile, drooling and groping at the young girl from behind.
My Uncle would make me read to him from this book. It was about a Mother and Father, a brother and sister and an uncle. They all had sex with each other, separately and together. If you’ve ever heard Bob Saget tell the joke, The Aristocrats, that’s what it was like. My uncle would have me read to him and when I came to a work like “fuck”, I didn’t want to say it. Being 8, 9...10 years old… he would spend a half hour coaxing me to say it. Then he’d get excited and I’d have to jerk him off. At first, he was teaching me “how to make a boy pee”. When he ejaculated, he said it was pee. Then as I got older, he said he was “teaching me what to do with ’the boys’” when I got “old enough”.
This is so hard for me sometimes, but I feel like I have to do it. It’s like exorcising demons. I have been an accidental, unintended victim my whole life. And I don’t like it.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Another Day Another Dysfunction
It's been hard for me to write about myself. I've had several people in the medical profession tell me that it would help me if I wrote these things down instead of holding it in. Since I have no one to confront these days. Everyone has died or lost their minds. It's hard to do, this writing thing. The ever famous "they" tell me that I should write as if I'm talking to someone. Which tends to become boring because I ramble when I get emotional and going over all this crap makes me emotional. But, I'm here, trying to write it all down, for the miracle cure, as if I'm talking to someone.
We moved to Dallas just after my 5th birthday. I still remember the anxiety I felt, thinking about moving to a strange place. I wanted to say goodbye to my friends in my kindergarten class. Mama said, “We don’t have time to mess with that. You’ll forget all about those kids after we’ve been there a week.” I don’t remember many of their names, but I still remember their faces. I cried myself to sleep the night before we left and I remember saying goodbye to them in my mind.
I started school in Dallas in September 1967. I was ready to go. My mother was worried that I would have separation anxiety. She seemed pissed that I didn’t
We lived in a house that had an upstairs apartment in the back and my mother lived there. She wouldn’t let me stay with her. I never got a good reason why. Besides, “You’ll mess around and fall down those stairs and break your neck and I can’t afford the doctor bills.” We weren’t there very long when Mama told me that my Daddy was moving to Dallas and we were going to live with him. I remember having a ton of questions and I got the same line I always got when I asked questions…”You ask too many questions.”
We moved to an apartment with my Daddy. I was terrified of him, just because he was a stranger. I couldn’t call him Daddy, which made my mother mad. She’d tell me, “You’re going to have to call him Daddy whether you want to or not. He’s the only Daddy you have, so you better get used to it.” He seemed to be nervous around me too. He didn’t treat me like I imagined a Daddy would treat me. He treated me more like the man at the grocery store or the man at the car lot where my mother made her car payment. The closes I ever came to calling him Daddy was Daddy-O.
It was their 7th Anniversary when he came back. October 7, 1967. He got a job at a Shell Service Station. This was before self service gas stations. My mother worked nights at a nursing home as a nurses aid. Sometimes my Daddy had to leave for work a little while before my mother got home and he’d leave me by myself until she got there. I was terrified for the half hour that I was alone. I can’t remember Halloween that year. I don’t remember if I went trick-or-treating or what costume I wore. I don’t remember if we ate Thanksgiving Dinner at my Grandmother’s house, which we always did. I’m sure we didn’t that year, or I would remember it. I don’t remember if we had a Christmas tree that year. I remember the gift that my Daddy gave me. It was a record album of songs from Walt Disney movies.
Sometime after Christmas, things started to sour between Mama and Daddy. I remember hearing her tell him, “Don’t take that baby across the river with you to buy whiskey.” Back then, you couldn’t buy alcohol in the area of Dallas that we lived in. You had to go across the trinity river to the North side of Dallas. The first time he was left to care for me while my mother worked a double shift, he took me across the river and bought whiskey. The drunker he got, the more shy I became. He got angry with me because I was so timid. He got frustrated with me because he stopped at Jack-in-the Box for something to eat and I didn’t like Jack-in-the-Box. He took me to his job and I slept in a chair inside the service station while he “hung around” the station. He got a toolbox full of pennies and took them home with us and made me help him count them
while he rolled them. He seemed to be completely put out with me by the end of the day. When we finished counting pennies, he took the TV and put it in the bedroom and said, “Why don’t we watch the late movie and then take a nap before your mama gets home from work.” The African Queen was the movie. I think I fell asleep in the middle of the movie. When he woke me up, the old priest who came on after the late movie and gave a small sermon was on. Daddy said, “Why don’t you straighten these covers up so we can take a nap before your mama gets home.” I was excited because he was asking me to make up the bed. I always wanted to help make the bed, but Mama wouldn’t let me help. “You’ll just screw it up and get in the way, go find something else to do!” I stood up on the bed and started to try and rearrange the big thick quilt that was covering my Daddy. I pulled it off of him and was shocked when I saw that he was naked. He had an erection and I didn’t know, exactly what it was. I was terrified. I dropped the blanket and fell on my side on the bed and reached underneath and grabbed the bedsprings with my left hand. He hovered over me and pulled on my arm saying, “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re my little girl, I’d never hurt my little girl.” He would, occasionally, chuckle. He finally pulled on my arm and I lost my grip and let go of the bedsprings. He turned me over onto my back and I looked at the hand I had been gripping the bedsprings with. There was a huge, deep, white crease in the middle of my hand. I just stared at it while my Daddy hovered over me, and masturbated while kissing me all over my body, including between my legs. Sometime later, I don‘t remember if it was immediately after he finished or later, but he took me into the living room and put me in my bed and told me, “We‘ll have to not say anything about this to Nellie, it‘ll kill her.”
This was the second sore to take hold on my soul. It seems that it started to fester immediately..
We moved to Dallas just after my 5th birthday. I still remember the anxiety I felt, thinking about moving to a strange place. I wanted to say goodbye to my friends in my kindergarten class. Mama said, “We don’t have time to mess with that. You’ll forget all about those kids after we’ve been there a week.” I don’t remember many of their names, but I still remember their faces. I cried myself to sleep the night before we left and I remember saying goodbye to them in my mind.
I started school in Dallas in September 1967. I was ready to go. My mother was worried that I would have separation anxiety. She seemed pissed that I didn’t
We lived in a house that had an upstairs apartment in the back and my mother lived there. She wouldn’t let me stay with her. I never got a good reason why. Besides, “You’ll mess around and fall down those stairs and break your neck and I can’t afford the doctor bills.” We weren’t there very long when Mama told me that my Daddy was moving to Dallas and we were going to live with him. I remember having a ton of questions and I got the same line I always got when I asked questions…”You ask too many questions.”
We moved to an apartment with my Daddy. I was terrified of him, just because he was a stranger. I couldn’t call him Daddy, which made my mother mad. She’d tell me, “You’re going to have to call him Daddy whether you want to or not. He’s the only Daddy you have, so you better get used to it.” He seemed to be nervous around me too. He didn’t treat me like I imagined a Daddy would treat me. He treated me more like the man at the grocery store or the man at the car lot where my mother made her car payment. The closes I ever came to calling him Daddy was Daddy-O.
It was their 7th Anniversary when he came back. October 7, 1967. He got a job at a Shell Service Station. This was before self service gas stations. My mother worked nights at a nursing home as a nurses aid. Sometimes my Daddy had to leave for work a little while before my mother got home and he’d leave me by myself until she got there. I was terrified for the half hour that I was alone. I can’t remember Halloween that year. I don’t remember if I went trick-or-treating or what costume I wore. I don’t remember if we ate Thanksgiving Dinner at my Grandmother’s house, which we always did. I’m sure we didn’t that year, or I would remember it. I don’t remember if we had a Christmas tree that year. I remember the gift that my Daddy gave me. It was a record album of songs from Walt Disney movies.
Sometime after Christmas, things started to sour between Mama and Daddy. I remember hearing her tell him, “Don’t take that baby across the river with you to buy whiskey.” Back then, you couldn’t buy alcohol in the area of Dallas that we lived in. You had to go across the trinity river to the North side of Dallas. The first time he was left to care for me while my mother worked a double shift, he took me across the river and bought whiskey. The drunker he got, the more shy I became. He got angry with me because I was so timid. He got frustrated with me because he stopped at Jack-in-the Box for something to eat and I didn’t like Jack-in-the-Box. He took me to his job and I slept in a chair inside the service station while he “hung around” the station. He got a toolbox full of pennies and took them home with us and made me help him count them
while he rolled them. He seemed to be completely put out with me by the end of the day. When we finished counting pennies, he took the TV and put it in the bedroom and said, “Why don’t we watch the late movie and then take a nap before your mama gets home from work.” The African Queen was the movie. I think I fell asleep in the middle of the movie. When he woke me up, the old priest who came on after the late movie and gave a small sermon was on. Daddy said, “Why don’t you straighten these covers up so we can take a nap before your mama gets home.” I was excited because he was asking me to make up the bed. I always wanted to help make the bed, but Mama wouldn’t let me help. “You’ll just screw it up and get in the way, go find something else to do!” I stood up on the bed and started to try and rearrange the big thick quilt that was covering my Daddy. I pulled it off of him and was shocked when I saw that he was naked. He had an erection and I didn’t know, exactly what it was. I was terrified. I dropped the blanket and fell on my side on the bed and reached underneath and grabbed the bedsprings with my left hand. He hovered over me and pulled on my arm saying, “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re my little girl, I’d never hurt my little girl.” He would, occasionally, chuckle. He finally pulled on my arm and I lost my grip and let go of the bedsprings. He turned me over onto my back and I looked at the hand I had been gripping the bedsprings with. There was a huge, deep, white crease in the middle of my hand. I just stared at it while my Daddy hovered over me, and masturbated while kissing me all over my body, including between my legs. Sometime later, I don‘t remember if it was immediately after he finished or later, but he took me into the living room and put me in my bed and told me, “We‘ll have to not say anything about this to Nellie, it‘ll kill her.”
This was the second sore to take hold on my soul. It seems that it started to fester immediately..
Saturday, January 29, 2011
I’m not famous, I’m not rich, I’m nobody, in fact. A well known nobody among my peers. But I have a story. Everybody has one, some are all flowery and touching. Some are amusing and anecdotal. Some are exciting and unbelievable. Some are just sad and boring. I fall into that last category.
The purpose of the telling of my tale is strictly for selfish reasons, for my benefit first and foremost. I feel like I am going to burst if I don’t let some of it out and there is no one who wants to listen…no one who doesn‘t want $125 for each 45 minute session. For anyone in my family, it’s sad and ….they’re all old now and I can’t see telling them the things that would surely shock them and probably make them feel a bit guilty for not recognizing that something was wrong, maybe feel a bit guilty for the way they’ve treated me, and that’s not what I want.. Anyone who offended me is gone.
What I can hope for is maybe that someone who has been through similar things…or is going through similar things might read my story and find comfort in knowing that they’re not alone or gain the strength to tell someone and get help. Or it might help someone recognize signs in their own daughter and maybe start a dialogue that will help her to tell her story and get some help. It’s a lonely existence, carrying secrets around with you. They get heavier and harder to bear as time goes by. People judge you because you “didn’t say anything sooner”. People feel like they have problems that are equal to or worse than yours and they don’t have the patience to listen or feel any sympathy for your problems. People get sick and die or lose their minds. Time passes. You still have the memories and the demons to go along with them. And life goes on.
Dysfunction. Webster’s dictionary defines Dysfunction as … Abnormal or impaired functioning of a bodily system or a social group.
I suppose my dysfunction started early on. Like at birth.
I wasn’t wanted. I've tried to imagine what it was like for my mother and put myself in her place. There was a time, when I was about 16, when I thought I was pregnant, but I never, once considered feeling any animosity toward a baby. I was scared of what my mother would do.
I knew that from the time I was 5 that I was a burden and ... basically a mistake. My mother would tell me, blatantly, that she had plans to go to nursing school until I “decided to come along”. I can remember being very young, saying to her, “How did I decide to come along?” One of the many questions that went unanswered during my childhood.
I was raised in a household with a mother who didn’t want me, a grandmother who resented me because I was conceived out of wedlock and because she didn't like my Daddy, and 3 uncles who I thought were my brothers until I was 5 years old. I was very confused about what a father was. Other little girls had daddies. My mother’s oldest brother was married with two children when I was born and as I grew up listening his children call him ‘Daddy’, I started to call him Daddy too. I was scolded for it. “He’s not your Daddy, he’s the boys’ Daddy.” Wasn’t I supposed to have a Daddy too? All the other kids had a Daddy. "Well, your Daddy lives somewhere else and that's all there is to it."
I have always assumed that my Daddy didn’t want me any more than I felt like my mother wanted me. He left us when I was 2 weeks old. The story I was always told was that my mother got sick with an infection in her breast and she was unable to nurse me, and in fact, almost smothered me while she was delirious with fever. She got chilled and thought I was cold too. It was the middle of June in Texas and she lit the heaters and got under a pile of blankets and put me under there with here. If not for the landlady, I would have surely smothered to death.
The landlady called my mother’s sister and she came and picked us up and took us back to my grandmother’s house, hundreds of miles away. No one ever made it clear whether my Daddy was working somewhere when all this took place or if he had, in fact, left us with no intention of coming back. I will never know what the exact circumstances were. Which bothers me. Anytime I asked any questions about him or anything that happened during that time, I was waved off and told that I asked too many questions.
I remember being a lonely child. There were few children living close to us, so I would go across the street to my Aunt’s sister-in-law’s house. They ran Powell’s nursing home. Mrs. Powell was a retired nurse and she had several elderly people living in her house. They had a backyard with gold fish ponds. She let me play with her typewriter and her piano. She fed me endless bowls of cereal. They had an apricot tree in the front yard. It was like a wonderland for a little girl with no one to play with.
The first dog that I remember having was Lewis. He was half border collie and half cocker spaniel. A little black and white bundle of genius. He would herd me out of the street like a sheep. If I was doing something that was dangerous, Lewis would run to the house and bark and run back to me until someone came to check. I picked him from a litter of puppies when I was 4 years old. He loved me and I loved him. We were constant companions.
When I was 6 years old my uncle JL “hauled” Lewis off. Everyone claimed that he tried to bite the mailman so they just threw him away rather than put up a gate or a fence. I came home from school and not one person said anything until I started to look for him and call for him over and over. My Granny finally said, with utter irritation, "JL hauled Lewis off this mornin'". The story that I got was that he took Lewis and my Aunt's dog, Hogan, to the pound. It wasn't opened yet and he was waiting in the car when the garbage truck came along. The man on the garbage truck saw them and wanted them so he gave them to him. ... As a child, I believed that story. As an adult, I don't see the garbage man taking two dogs on the garbage truck with him.
I got scolded for crying for Lewis. I cry for him, still. I lose sleep over that dog to this day. I can’t imagine what he thought was going on. I pray that someone took him and cared for him and loved him as much as I did.
Poor little Lewis was with me the first time a grown man put his hands on me, inappropriately. I can’t remember what the man’s name was, but he wore overalls and smelled like bologna, B. O. and tobacco with a hint of alcohol. He had a can of Prince Albert in the bib pocket on his overalls. His fingernails were long and dirty….filthy. He had snuff spit running from the corner of his mouth into his scraggly beard.
He approached me as I was squatted at the corner of the house, trying to coax “doodle bugs” out of their craters in the soft dirt of the flower bed. He walked right up to me and asked where my uncles were. He was used to my mother being at work. I was always with my uncles during the day. I told him they went to haul hay. He immediately squatted down in front of me, as I stood there, and hooked one of his filthy fingers into the leg of the sun-suit I had on. Lewis started to growl and the hairs on his back stood up. Just then, my mother came around the corner of the house. She picked me up and had a conversation with the man about where my uncles were. Almost the same conversation that I had with him. He walked toward the street and we went in the house where she proceeded to plop me down on the couch so hard that I bounced once and she scolded me for staying outside when he came into the yard. I was told, through gritted teeth and a red face, to always come in the house when he comes in the yard. I thought I was in trouble for what happened. The first warp in my psyche, the first sore on my soul, which would eventually start to fester.
The purpose of the telling of my tale is strictly for selfish reasons, for my benefit first and foremost. I feel like I am going to burst if I don’t let some of it out and there is no one who wants to listen…no one who doesn‘t want $125 for each 45 minute session. For anyone in my family, it’s sad and ….they’re all old now and I can’t see telling them the things that would surely shock them and probably make them feel a bit guilty for not recognizing that something was wrong, maybe feel a bit guilty for the way they’ve treated me, and that’s not what I want.. Anyone who offended me is gone.
What I can hope for is maybe that someone who has been through similar things…or is going through similar things might read my story and find comfort in knowing that they’re not alone or gain the strength to tell someone and get help. Or it might help someone recognize signs in their own daughter and maybe start a dialogue that will help her to tell her story and get some help. It’s a lonely existence, carrying secrets around with you. They get heavier and harder to bear as time goes by. People judge you because you “didn’t say anything sooner”. People feel like they have problems that are equal to or worse than yours and they don’t have the patience to listen or feel any sympathy for your problems. People get sick and die or lose their minds. Time passes. You still have the memories and the demons to go along with them. And life goes on.
Dysfunction. Webster’s dictionary defines Dysfunction as … Abnormal or impaired functioning of a bodily system or a social group.
I suppose my dysfunction started early on. Like at birth.
I wasn’t wanted. I've tried to imagine what it was like for my mother and put myself in her place. There was a time, when I was about 16, when I thought I was pregnant, but I never, once considered feeling any animosity toward a baby. I was scared of what my mother would do.
I knew that from the time I was 5 that I was a burden and ... basically a mistake. My mother would tell me, blatantly, that she had plans to go to nursing school until I “decided to come along”. I can remember being very young, saying to her, “How did I decide to come along?” One of the many questions that went unanswered during my childhood.
I was raised in a household with a mother who didn’t want me, a grandmother who resented me because I was conceived out of wedlock and because she didn't like my Daddy, and 3 uncles who I thought were my brothers until I was 5 years old. I was very confused about what a father was. Other little girls had daddies. My mother’s oldest brother was married with two children when I was born and as I grew up listening his children call him ‘Daddy’, I started to call him Daddy too. I was scolded for it. “He’s not your Daddy, he’s the boys’ Daddy.” Wasn’t I supposed to have a Daddy too? All the other kids had a Daddy. "Well, your Daddy lives somewhere else and that's all there is to it."
I have always assumed that my Daddy didn’t want me any more than I felt like my mother wanted me. He left us when I was 2 weeks old. The story I was always told was that my mother got sick with an infection in her breast and she was unable to nurse me, and in fact, almost smothered me while she was delirious with fever. She got chilled and thought I was cold too. It was the middle of June in Texas and she lit the heaters and got under a pile of blankets and put me under there with here. If not for the landlady, I would have surely smothered to death.
The landlady called my mother’s sister and she came and picked us up and took us back to my grandmother’s house, hundreds of miles away. No one ever made it clear whether my Daddy was working somewhere when all this took place or if he had, in fact, left us with no intention of coming back. I will never know what the exact circumstances were. Which bothers me. Anytime I asked any questions about him or anything that happened during that time, I was waved off and told that I asked too many questions.
I remember being a lonely child. There were few children living close to us, so I would go across the street to my Aunt’s sister-in-law’s house. They ran Powell’s nursing home. Mrs. Powell was a retired nurse and she had several elderly people living in her house. They had a backyard with gold fish ponds. She let me play with her typewriter and her piano. She fed me endless bowls of cereal. They had an apricot tree in the front yard. It was like a wonderland for a little girl with no one to play with.
The first dog that I remember having was Lewis. He was half border collie and half cocker spaniel. A little black and white bundle of genius. He would herd me out of the street like a sheep. If I was doing something that was dangerous, Lewis would run to the house and bark and run back to me until someone came to check. I picked him from a litter of puppies when I was 4 years old. He loved me and I loved him. We were constant companions.
When I was 6 years old my uncle JL “hauled” Lewis off. Everyone claimed that he tried to bite the mailman so they just threw him away rather than put up a gate or a fence. I came home from school and not one person said anything until I started to look for him and call for him over and over. My Granny finally said, with utter irritation, "JL hauled Lewis off this mornin'". The story that I got was that he took Lewis and my Aunt's dog, Hogan, to the pound. It wasn't opened yet and he was waiting in the car when the garbage truck came along. The man on the garbage truck saw them and wanted them so he gave them to him. ... As a child, I believed that story. As an adult, I don't see the garbage man taking two dogs on the garbage truck with him.
I got scolded for crying for Lewis. I cry for him, still. I lose sleep over that dog to this day. I can’t imagine what he thought was going on. I pray that someone took him and cared for him and loved him as much as I did.
Poor little Lewis was with me the first time a grown man put his hands on me, inappropriately. I can’t remember what the man’s name was, but he wore overalls and smelled like bologna, B. O. and tobacco with a hint of alcohol. He had a can of Prince Albert in the bib pocket on his overalls. His fingernails were long and dirty….filthy. He had snuff spit running from the corner of his mouth into his scraggly beard.
He approached me as I was squatted at the corner of the house, trying to coax “doodle bugs” out of their craters in the soft dirt of the flower bed. He walked right up to me and asked where my uncles were. He was used to my mother being at work. I was always with my uncles during the day. I told him they went to haul hay. He immediately squatted down in front of me, as I stood there, and hooked one of his filthy fingers into the leg of the sun-suit I had on. Lewis started to growl and the hairs on his back stood up. Just then, my mother came around the corner of the house. She picked me up and had a conversation with the man about where my uncles were. Almost the same conversation that I had with him. He walked toward the street and we went in the house where she proceeded to plop me down on the couch so hard that I bounced once and she scolded me for staying outside when he came into the yard. I was told, through gritted teeth and a red face, to always come in the house when he comes in the yard. I thought I was in trouble for what happened. The first warp in my psyche, the first sore on my soul, which would eventually start to fester.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Sometimes I’m sure I have to be the saddest person in the world. For no particular reason, I just start to cry. It’s a sad, broken hearted cry. Like grief. It comes from deep inside and radiates outward, sometimes taking the strength from my legs. I find myself in the bathroom at 2 in the morning, bent over double, crying from the very pit of my stomach, trying not to wail and wake up the household. I tell myself there‘s no reason for it, but I know there is. There‘s plenty of reason for it. Sometimes it’s triggered by a sad scene in a movie… or a Hallmark commercial, or a thought that goes through my head. I hold everything in until it spills out. It has to come out sometime. It can only stew for so long, and it‘s been stewing for almost 50 years. Every now and then, I have to open a valve or something, ya know? It can‘t be good for a person to feel “grief“ so often, when there‘s nothing to grieve except their own pathetic life. It can’t be good for a person to have a pathetic life. And I know what everybody says, it’s my fault because I just didn’t ignore all that stuff and “overcome”. It’s so easy for people to talk about how comfortable your shoes are until they put them on and wear them. I couldn’t pay anybody to wear my shoes, but I got a lot of free advice and opinions. To most of them I would respond in the words of my late sister-in-law, Linda Duncan, “Opinions are like assholes and yours stinks.”
I can’t afford a therapist so I just have to run this stuff through my head, day in, day out….hoping I’ll come up with some kind of solution or I’ll hear the voice of God, and he’ll actually tell me what to do….or maybe I’ll have one of those epiphanies and my life will change in an instant. Or something. For the most part, all I’ve done is confuse myself more. I was born into a ball of confusion and a den of dysfunction and closed mindedness. People with blinders on. Good people, just unwilling people. Unwilling to move on with the rest of the world. Willing to judge, but unwilling to lead by example. I always felt like a burden. I can’t remember not feeling that way. I can remember praying at night for God to let me die because “things would be better if I wasn’t here”. I was 13. A 13 year old shouldn’t feel that way.
A lot of the things that my family finds ‘unattractive’ about me, in my adulthood, are things that I learned from them.
The things I learned as a child are as follows:
Make sure they’re pulling out of the driveway and driving away before you start talking about them. No one is immune to this. Whether it’s the people you live with daily or people you haven’t seen in years, whether it’s a holiday or a surprise visit. Everyone gets a good raking over the coals after they leave the house. Everything negative that they’ve ever done and every negative opinion that you have should be voiced. In front of the children or not. Doesn’t matter, children aren’t people yet.
Always hold a grudge. No matter whose fault it is, or if it would make me the bigger person if I extended my hand in friendship or if my very life depends on it…. by God, hold a grudge. Take it to the grave. Never forgive anyone for anything.
Never respect anyone’s privacy. Only “high and mighty” people knock before entering a room. If you’re a relative, it’s not necessary to knock when you visit, just come on in!!
Children are to be seen and not heard. Actually, we don’t want to see them either, get out of here.
Children are not supposed to have fun or laugh in the presence of adults. Giggling is absolutely prohibited.
Name calling is completely ok, you “slab ended hussy”.
People who hug their children and say Grace at the dinner table are “putting on a show”.
Children lie. Especially if they’re saying something unbelievable and horrible about an adult. They lie.
The things that I’ve discovered since I gained a clear mind and have really thought about it are as follows:
I had a dysfunctional childhood.
I can’t afford a therapist so I just have to run this stuff through my head, day in, day out….hoping I’ll come up with some kind of solution or I’ll hear the voice of God, and he’ll actually tell me what to do….or maybe I’ll have one of those epiphanies and my life will change in an instant. Or something. For the most part, all I’ve done is confuse myself more. I was born into a ball of confusion and a den of dysfunction and closed mindedness. People with blinders on. Good people, just unwilling people. Unwilling to move on with the rest of the world. Willing to judge, but unwilling to lead by example. I always felt like a burden. I can’t remember not feeling that way. I can remember praying at night for God to let me die because “things would be better if I wasn’t here”. I was 13. A 13 year old shouldn’t feel that way.
A lot of the things that my family finds ‘unattractive’ about me, in my adulthood, are things that I learned from them.
The things I learned as a child are as follows:
Make sure they’re pulling out of the driveway and driving away before you start talking about them. No one is immune to this. Whether it’s the people you live with daily or people you haven’t seen in years, whether it’s a holiday or a surprise visit. Everyone gets a good raking over the coals after they leave the house. Everything negative that they’ve ever done and every negative opinion that you have should be voiced. In front of the children or not. Doesn’t matter, children aren’t people yet.
Always hold a grudge. No matter whose fault it is, or if it would make me the bigger person if I extended my hand in friendship or if my very life depends on it…. by God, hold a grudge. Take it to the grave. Never forgive anyone for anything.
Never respect anyone’s privacy. Only “high and mighty” people knock before entering a room. If you’re a relative, it’s not necessary to knock when you visit, just come on in!!
Children are to be seen and not heard. Actually, we don’t want to see them either, get out of here.
Children are not supposed to have fun or laugh in the presence of adults. Giggling is absolutely prohibited.
Name calling is completely ok, you “slab ended hussy”.
People who hug their children and say Grace at the dinner table are “putting on a show”.
Children lie. Especially if they’re saying something unbelievable and horrible about an adult. They lie.
The things that I’ve discovered since I gained a clear mind and have really thought about it are as follows:
I had a dysfunctional childhood.
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