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.

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.