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 7^th 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..