The Truth As I Have Known It

CHAPTER 6

My Vietnam ~Pink

Not long after my first foray into burglary happened, Mom starting working at the local truck stop restaurant. Sometimes my sister and I would color or practice writing in the back of the kitchen, while the cook would make us a basket of fries, but most of the time we were babysat by my oldest brother, who was 13 at the time.

Sam was born breach, so he had some slow learning issues, but for the most part was a fun big brother. He would take the furniture and make mazes for us. Sometimes we would watch bad movies on the television. We would play in the mud outside, and he wasn’t afraid to let us play with his G.I. Joes. My other brother was a little more selfish, and most of the time he would go hang out at our cousin’s house and fish of the bank of the bayou.

Yes. I lived in a trailer home next to a bayou where we could go fishing. We ran around barefoot in a cane field across the street from our house and would break off pieces of raw sugar cane, and chew on the sticky sweet stalk we peeled away. I caught my first bass that summer when my other brother tied a piece of fishing line to a staple stuck on a piece of window edging for a fishing pole. It was a baby bass, and I had to throw it back to grow up, but it was still a bass. Thanks for the memory Casey.

I love my brothers very much. Sam was my hero through most of my childhood. I didn’t understand why he touched me, I just knew what he was doing wasn’t right. I watched enough children’s television to know what ‘bad touching’ was. However, I didn’t want my brother to hate me either because Casey was always mean to me and I was afraid Sam would start being mean to me too. It only happened a few times, and there was no actual penetration as far as I can remember, but what I do remember is when my Dad found out.

Mom was at work when Dad came home from being on the road for nearly a month. The new company he was working for actually made a point of trying to get their drivers to see their families more often. Knowing that my Mom was probably not on top of all the hijinks my brothers were getting into, Dad casually told them that he knew about everything they had been doing when he was gone.

Sam started immediately blubbering like a baby and was barely understandable. Dad was a little surprised until he realized what his son was confessing. I started to cry because Sam was crying and I think my Dad lost his mind for a second. My memory is clear as a bell because all my father ever did was spank us once in a while. He cornered Sam, screaming “Never Ever!” and beat the shit out of my brother until he was bleeding and crying on the floor. I was begging him to stop and Dad just marched into the bedroom and slammed the door. When Dad came back out of the room. He sat down and cleaned Sam up, talking with him the whole time. We were never allowed to tell my mother about this. I later learned that she wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

I was about 5 years old when I did finally try to tell my Mom the truth. She slapped the hell out of me, called me a ‘Liar’ and grounded me for a month. In her defense, no mother would want to admit that one of their children had done this to the other. It is a horrible situation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but it was also too big for me to hold in, and if I am being honest, I was scared it would happen again. I loved my big brother, he was the best person, but I had been scared of him for years after the incident. I was also scared of all his friends that would sleep over and would lock my bedroom doors, constantly checking them. Once I even pushed my dresser in front of the bedroom doors because some new friends came over and they creeped me out, but everyone creeped me out honestly.

Mom never believed me and treated every word I said like a lie, until I was about 10 years old. She finally started noticing the door locking behavior, and that I didn’t want to be too close to anyone but her and my sister. She had me go see a Catholic Psychic that her cousin recommended. I loved Aunt Yvonne, but between her and my Mother, they were kind of weird. Whatever this lady was, she honed right in on the problem immediately and didn’t do any real mojo or crazy stuff. She put her hands on my arm and said a prayer and then asked me if I had been touched inappropriately by one of my family.

If you know anything about Cold Reading, this is a classic trick of people in the fortune telling business. It’s not rocket science or anything. It is the art of asking general questions that are common occurrences, and reading body language at the same time. This woman knew I didn’t like being touched, I was highly nervous, and how many 10 year olds have deep dark secrets? More pointedly, sexual abuse is everywhere. Every family has had a problem like this at one time or another. It is sick, it’s wrong, but it happens and it was an easy assumption for her to make. It took five years, my cousin taking my mother’s pre-adolescent child to a faith-healing whack-a-do to get her to realize that her daughter was not lying about sexual abuse.

Probably the worst reaction is the one my Mother had when she finally realized the truth of the situation. Instead of saying that she was sorry for not believing me, Mom asked for forgiveness, while reasoning that she could never believe anything a child would say. I would also point out that my brother totally denied it, but that was probably because he didn’t want to be beaten within an inch of his life again. Sam was known for his tall tales, I was not.

No surprise that trust was always an issue for me after that. Even the people who are supposed to love you and help you, can be the very same people who will hurt you the most. It didn’t affect me in a way that I didn’t understand the difference between being touched in love or being touched in abuse, but it did make me super paranoid of people’s motivations—mainly males. I can tell you, dear reader, that the “Me Too” movement has done nothing to restore my faith in our species either.

My father was a prime example of someone who would never do something like that to any child. I have met men like him since who are above reproach, and I know they are good people. The chaos of that trauma still hangs over me and watches everyone’s moves around children. I feel that creeping worm of doubt in every person I meet.

When my oldest brother starting having children with his wife. He ended up with two girls, and I was terrified. I was 14 at the time, and for the first few years, whenever I was near them, I watched those children like a hawk. I had severe insomnia and didn’t sleep for days at a time. My Mom didn’t know what it was, but tried to put me on sleeping pills. The worry about those two little girls kept my adrenaline going until I would pass out for 16 hour stretches, wake up and do it all over again. My other brother also had two little girls. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep as a teenager.

I later learned that my brother chose to block the entire memory from his mind. It was so traumatic for him, he just blanked it right out. Probably due to his hero worship of my father, and having his ass handed to him for doing it.

He was sitting down talking about abuse his wife had once had, and how that never happened in his family. Our sister-in-law corrected him and mentioned how I had been abused. Sam got extremely angry and wanted to know who the “motherfucker” was that had done it. When my brother, Casey, told him, the bottom dropped out of his world and he was devastated.

My family had to call me to calm him down because he had locked himself in the bedroom and was trying to kill himself. When I got him to open the door, the bed post had been splintered and there was blood smeared on the walls from him punching holes in the wooden slats. He couldn’t understand why I allowed him anywhere near myself or his own children, and that he was a monster for not remembering this awful thing he did.

The decision was not to burden him with my paranoid issues, instead I told him that of course I forgave him because I learned a long time ago what he had never realized. I don’t blame my brother for what happened because it happened to both of us. Sam and I were part of a cycle of sexual assault. Apparently, my uncle sexually abused our cousin as a child, who when he was about twelve, sexually abused a 3 year old Sam, who sexually abused me. I don’t know for certain how far back the pattern went, but the cycle stopped there. Statistics show that female victims of sexual abuse are less likely to continue the pattern of behavior, which was true in my case.

As usual though, there are always the consequences. Even my husband, whom I love very much, and would never consider as a person to be an abuser, I still watch every move with that fanatical, unfounded paranoia. It’s a horrible, horrifying, unreasonable burden that has followed me all my life. I truly believe that its intent is to never let it happen to another child. However, there is no peace for me because of it.

CHAPTER 7

One ~Creed

After my family came back from Germany, my father made a point of not letting me spend too much time with either side of the family. I don’t really understand what the issue was, but I was not close with either of my sets of grandparents. Mom often said it was because I was the spitting image of my father, which her mother hated; and I had the mouthy attitude of my mother, which enraged my Dad’s mom. Needless to say, the alienating behavior was marked enough that I noticed them treating me differently than my siblings at an extremely early age.

The only person who did not do this was my Dad’s Father. I called him “PawPaw Lay” and he was an old, uneducated Cajun man, who enjoyed the Sunday Comics. When I started learning to read before the age of four, he had me sit on his knee and read Beetle Bailey to him. When I declared that pink was my favorite color ever, he had my grandmother buy me my first pair of pink high tops.

At nine years old, I became obsessed with collecting cigarette ads out of old TV Guides and organizing them by the nicotine and tar data. I was a little awkward in school and didn’t have any friends. My brothers said it was because I was fat and a weirdo, but PawPaw Lay just laughed and came from the back of his barn with stacks of old magazines from the 1950s and 1960s for me to continue my collection.

When I was twelve, he went to the doctor because he was feeling tired. One month later, he passed away from stomach cancer. It was the first time I actually mourned someone in my family passing away, but I could not cry because other things were happening all at once.

For years, my father had been dodging the bullet of being a diabetic, while driving cross-country. Diabetes can be dangerous if it is not monitored and maintained properly. In fact, it is one of the main illnesses that prohibits hard working people from operating heavy machinery. No one wants someone who will forget to eat right and pass out with 85,000 pounds of expensive freight being driven at high speeds. Living on the road isn’t the healthiest way to live, and time constraints were a real problem, when trying to take care of a medical condition like that.

After my PawPaw Lay’s death, my father was devastated and ended up at the doctor with chest pains. A normal blood glucose reading is somewhere in the vicinity of 70 to 125. My father’s was tested with a blood glucose reading of 380. While mourning the death of his father, my Dad was officially diagnosed as a Type 2 diabetic and black-balled out of the only livelihood he had known outside of the Army. There was no history of diabetes in my father’s family whatsoever, and it was later discovered that it may have been caused by his exposure to Agent Orange, a jungle clearing chemical, during his tours in Vietnam.

Dad wasn’t a great provider on his best day, but we all knew he loved us, otherwise he would have cut and run long ago. Sam had married and left right out of high school. Casey was still home, but had dropped out. He, myself, and Brandy sat in my bedroom, playing Monopoly, scared to death because Mom and Dad had been fighting every night about money and Dad’s health.

At this point in our lives, my mother had officially become a pill popper. She kept a steady stock of Xanax on hand and was known for taking ‘naps’ throughout the day. My Dad was finally home enough to notice that his wife never actually took care of the kids.

I had started washing the dishes for a five-person household when I was eight. Casey did all the laundry and Brandy would help, but was pretty much just a kid. Hell, we all were kids, but someone had to clean the house and take care of Mom. I was a house maid dressed as a little girl.

My brother and I resented Brandy for being babied so much. Many times over our childhood, something would happen with Brandy, and we would get punished or blamed for it. It got to the point where I just emulated my mother’s behavior and began to baby her myself. We didn’t want her used, so we went easy on her. Honestly, she sucked at washing dishes anyway.

Mom would sometimes be up to cooking, but a lot of times we would be out of food. I remember when we didn’t even have bologna for sandwiches and my brother invented “mustard rolls”, which was basically slices of bread with mustard rolled up. I had that for lunch and dinner a few times. I never eat bologna now, and rarely eat mustard.

Most people grow up thinking their parents are infallible, and only learn the truth at an older age. My siblings and I were not so lucky. From my adult perspective, I know that it was just too much at once for someone like my father to take. One day he was there, the next Dad had left us in a house, miles outside of town, with no car, the phone disconnected and no money. Casey had left with him, and I felt betrayed by the one person who understood what we were going through.

We spent the summer in that house. I got a homemade quilt for my thirteenth birthday. Every day was the same monotony of my mother getting up late, crying and sleeping and screaming. She would tell me awful, intimate stories. Some were just out-an-out lies about my Dad. Anything to make sure she had an ally. I still didn’t really know my father well at that point, and now that my mom and sister were my whole world, of course I believed every word she said as gospel.

School started again and I was about two weeks into eighth grade when Mom sat me down and told me that we were going to miss school tomorrow because the electricity was going to be cut off and she wanted us there. If you know anything about Louisiana, August is the worst time of year for the summer heat. The moisture point is over 100 degrees. People drop like flies from dehydration and heat stroke if they aren’t careful. We were about to go through hell and my mom wanted us to stay home for it. Had I been thinking clearly, I would have questioned all of this, but my life was upside down too and I was just as lost as any kid would be.

We slept late and got up to my Mom in her night dress waiting for us in the living room. It was quiet for a long while, before Mom suggesting that we all go lay back down for a ‘long rest’. Brandy and I went to lay down, as Mom went to the bathroom. My little sister wanted a glass of water, so I got up to go to the kitchen. Near the sink I started to smell the gas from the stove fill up the area. I realized all the pilot lights were blown out and the knobs were turned up high. I turned off the stove and opened the window.

I was so angry that I started shaking. She wasn’t giving us a choice, she just decided not to live anymore. I didn’t know whether it was the gas inhalation that made me nauseous or the shear rage, but I found myself in front of the bathroom door. I had so little control over anything in my life. The only words that rang in my head were, “I want to live”.

I could hear her hopeless sobbing, and there was no sympathy in me. She was weak and pitiful and I had enough. I just started hammering the door with my fists. On the fourth try, I broke the fucking lock and slammed the door open.

“I don’t want to die. Brandy doesn’t want to die. You have to stay alive and take care of us!”

***

We spent a week in that house without electricity. Before they turned the lights out, we filled every container we could find with water, and the little food we had was put in a cooler. I’d walk to school, come home and do my homework while there was still daylight. We had all the rooms and windows open. The three of us would lay down on the floor of the room with the most air flow and sweat ourselves to sleep. Sometimes we would sing the oldies my mom used to play on her radio. I still get nauseous when I hear ‘Unchained Melody’ by the Righteous Brothers. Other people think about a sexy Patrick Swayze love scene from an old movie, and all I think about is sweating.

From that moment forward my mother and I were never the same around each other. I didn’t trust her, I only saw a pathetic person who would kill her own children before trying to survive. She only saw this disrespectful girl, who cheated her from her plan to get back Dad. My Mother never said this in so many words, but I wasn’t her child anymore, and as much I would have liked her to love me the way she still did my siblings, this was the way she treated me from that moment on.

As an adult, there were so many factors that would have clued me in to what she was thinking of doing. I now realize that our deaths were something she had been planning for weeks. In fact, when I finally felt strong enough to remember the details. My Mom had been crying in the bathroom, an insulated part of the house. The window had been open. She had planned to survive it. This woman tried to kill her children to make a point to my father, and garner sympathy to get him back. She never confirmed this, but that is the truth as I have known it to be.

When I ruined this plan, she came up with another sympathy rending narrative. We spent a week of hell in that house, it was to arrange to get a place in the housing projects. Electric companies don’t just turn up and cut off your electricity, they call or mail you and give you at least a months’ notice. My mother had multiple family members that were only a phone call away, and her father lived just down the road from us—I passed there every day to get to school. All of this could have been prevented, including the week she tortured her own children.

We lived in the country, but my godmother, Dad’s sister, lived right next door. She hated my mom, but she would never have allowed my sister and I to stay in that house without power. Instead, I relied on a drug-addled psychotic, who couldn’t park her pride long enough ask for help or arrange for housing.

I spent many years blaming myself for not taking more action. Going to a neighbor to call Child Protective Services or the cops on my mother. Then I remember that I was just a kid, who wanted to believe her parent would take care of her. Someone who spent the first thirty years of her life, that’s right I said thirty, still trying to earn the unconditional love and respect from a woman who, for all intents and purposes, was a manipulative sociopath who tried to kill her own children to win her husband back through the power of guilt.

CHAPTER 8

Come As You Are ~Nirvana

It was not long until my mother found my weakness and exploited it for all it was worth. I still loved my mother, and I wanted her to be happy. I woke my sister up in the morning. I cleaned the house, washed the dishes, and did the laundry. Hamburger Helper became my cooking teacher. I needed to feel in control of something in my life and winning my mother’s approval seemed like an easy task, if I made her life easier.

I had never been one to have close friends, but I had a little group of girls I sat with. Strength in numbers was the idea for all of us. Anti-Bullying campaigns were non-existent, and bullying in general was considered a ‘character building’ fact of going to school. I reached out to a new girl in my class because she looked like a female architype of a nerd.

I figure I could kill two birds with one stone by making a new friend, and helping someone join my little group to avoid bullying. We were still living in the projects at the time, so we stayed at each other’s houses once or twice. Then little Janice found a great way to make friends and keep people from making fun of her: Make fun of the fat, poor kid that had a druggie mom and an absent Dad. I went from a small group, to no group at all, with the bonus of my old group as daily tormentors. The only saving grace in all of this, I did my school work because I had no one talk to, causing my g.p.a. to go up to a 3.5. Just imagine if I had been a serious student.

When the internet became a way to contact old friends, I was sent a letter by one of these girls. I told her to forget my information and fuck off. She did, but not before apologizing by saying that she was just a kid too, and scared to become the butt of jokes like I had. In my heart, I know that it was a sincere letter of apology, and what happened was a drop in the bucket compared to the other things that had happened to me. However, it doesn’t make up for the missing piece of my personality.

Most people make friends in high school or college and keep contact with them for the rest of their lives. I was never able to make that connection with anybody and attracted users for many years because of the stink of neediness surrounded me like a dark cloud. I got to the point where I could recognize a new person as being someone that could possibly be using me, and I’d just cut them off like a festering limb. At forty years old, I have never had a best friend, and until recently, I never even had a good friend I could talk to. It’s been a lonely life.

Mother did not want to hear about anything happening with me at school. Our relationship had changed, and she told me on more than one occasion that she ‘just didn’t want to hear it’. This was not the case when it came to her problems. If my mother needed a shoulder to cry on, I listened to everything, even the stuff I never wanted to know, i.e. her prom night. She and Brandy were all I had, so I did my best to be there for them. And most importantly, I was totally on her side and hated my father.

During this time, Mom was going out with friends to bars. Occasionally, Dad would visit and they would have a little fun, but he wasn’t really ready to make it work—it didn’t help that his two youngest children hated him. Mom even hooked up with a guy once and told my Dad to hurt him. It didn’t exactly work out that way, when he also confessed to getting a blowey from my oldest brother’s new Mother-in-Law.

Frankly, I knew the lady and she not in the least bit attractive, but my mother was still livid. Whether it was because my Dad had ruined her revenge or because she was genuinely hurt, this was the first of many ‘public suicide attempts’ my mother would perform. In a room full of people, she would pick up a knife and hold it to her wrists, threatening to kill herself.

Not the best timing, considering what her two young daughters had already witnessed. My sister had to sleep next to me for days after that because of nightmares. As I held my whimpering sister, it was the first time that I realized my mom had sick obsession with my father, no matter the cost to others.

I knew that she had always felt like the ugly girl in her family because her older sister looked like a thinner Marilyn Monroe. When she tore the cartilage in her knee and had to have surgery, Mom came home pretty drugged up. It was probably the most scared I had ever been because the drugs weren’t new, but they just usually made her sleep.

Whatever she was on, there was screaming and crying about how she wasn’t beautiful and my Dad was too handsome for her. There was some more suicide talk and my sister started crying. I had to call an aunt to come get Brandy, so she wouldn’t see my mom that way. It’s the kind of baggage your kids don’t need to see, and I sat through the whole thing for six hours until she passed out.

***

Two years into their divorce, we were seeing my Dad pretty regularly. He was working for his brother in a tire business. Sam had the first grandbaby of the family with this second wife, Casey had a steady girlfriend and a decent job, and we had even moved out of the projects into this nice little house where I had my own room. I was still being bullied at school, but I had made a friend who was younger than me and occasionally, we would get to hang out. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the happiest we had been in a long time.

Not long after Christmas, my Mom brought us to visit Dad, but suddenly had us leave and return home early. Her friend had called because she had set up a date with some guy her friend knew. I’m pretty sure that Mom’s friend told the guy to make sure Mom had a ‘good time’. Needless to say, she had a great time to the point of shaking like a leaf and showing the signs of someone coming down off of Ecstasy. Freaking out, she called my Dad claiming she was raped.

The new normal was turned on its ear. My parents were back together. Dad found a place to rent not far from his work, took us out of school, and we moved us 80 miles away to where he lived. We were now living with a man I barely knew and was trained to hate. He was in charge, our little home was gone, and I wasn’t running the house anymore.

When all of this was happening, I truly believed my mother had been raped, and that her friend was an evil slut who set her up. From a clearer point of view about who my mother was, and what her motivations were, I can easily surmise that it was all a ploy of opportunity on her part.

I have met someone who was actually raped, and my mother showed none of the trauma behaviors involved in being violated. It may not have been planned, but my mother knew how to push the right buttons to attain her ultimate goal: getting my Dad back.

CHAPTER 9

Operator ~ Jim Croce

The mother I knew from my childhood was not the one I experienced during my teenage years. When I have told this story to people, it seemed unlikely that the spiteful person I described might have, at one time, been a really sweet and caring mother. It also seemed unbelievable to them that I would have spent so many years of my life trying to find those redeeming qualities, hoping that they were still there.

In truth, as I write this, my mother has been gone for over a year. I stopped speaking with her a year before that, when my sister’s mental health meant less to her than her need for attention and drama. My last words to my mother were “Fuck You”. It makes me sad to think of that now, but not for the reason that you would think. There was no regret in my statement. What was sad to me was that a daughter felt it necessary to take that kind of stand to protect someone against their own mother.

Two months after her death is when I finally cried and felt the loss. Not for her specifically, but for the mother I never had, who never really cared about anyone more than herself. I cried because, at my core, I am a hopeful person. I always held out hope that she would say ‘I love you’ without a string attached. I know how pathetic it sounds, but that is the truth of how I saw myself. I never want to lie about what I was feeling, it only cheats me out of knowing who I am and evolving as a person.

I don’t know if the rage in me will ever go away. As I write this, a year is how long it took me to truly miss some things about her, to give her any credit at all for the some of the positive influences in my every day, and the reason I never gave up on her until almost the very end of her life. You might even sympathize with her because she was raising 4 kids, 3 of which had learning disabilities, on the brink of poverty, in a small town that thrived on gossip and rumor, where her more prosperous family members painted her as white trash.

I realize now that the mother I had witnessed when I was little, was the mother of two boys who were 8 and 4 years older than me. She was utterly devoted to them and I truly believe that my sister and I were adored by her, but four kids were just too much. That still doesn’t change the mother I knew this woman could be.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother drawing with chalks. There were beautiful wildlife pieces of birds and squirrels. I think she was really talented, though you are reading the words from a memory that is fuzzy with 38 years of time. When I was four, I remember her teaching me how to draw a face in profile. Even though people were not in her particular wheelhouse, she did her best to instruct me on what I was favoring in my drawings. It was the base of what became a lifelong love of art and color for me. And though my childhood is tainted by some of her behaviors as I began to evolve as an artist, I never forget the gift she gave me that day. My noses still err on the side of too large.

I am also my own worst critic. You will find that most artists are that way as a rule. She was talented I so many artistic ways. My mom was obsessed with needle point mediums, crochet, and even designed wall hangings with ribbon. The part of her that I think was the most talented, but she was the most under confident about, was her poetry.

Mom had a small carved box, from her father’s woodworking, filled with poems over the course of her life. It covered each of her children’s birth, her marriage, divorce, personal frustrations. It was a profile of the beauty and pain that her life was. It was promised to me, and I fully intended for all of that work to go into a published work, as a tribute to her talent. I promised her it would be done after her death.

This is the book I wanted to originally write, but no one will ever get to read now. Artists being their own worst critics, my mother wasn’t quite in her right mind and forgot all about the promise I made. As she got older, her mind just seemed to be in the moment of what she was dealing with at that time.

It had become a habit of hers to give away old things she had as a gift. In her dementia, she threw all the papers away, so she could gift the carved box to one of her grandkids. When I found out, I cried and screamed at her over the phone. She just thought I was upset about the box, which tells you how detached my mother was from her work and how much she didn’t believe in herself as a writer.

As I wrote previously, we lived the first seven years of my life in a three bedroom trailer. My sister and I shared one room with a small twin bed, and my brothers had the other spare room with a bunkbed with a zillion Legos, Transformers, and various action figures that would be worth a small fortune if they had survived my brother’s machinations. They even had all their available floor covered in the green Lego turf tiles. Sometimes you would walk in their room and feel like a certain Asian lizard about to destroy a city.

Occasionally, G.I. Joes would take shore leave in my room, which usually ended in my sister biting their heads off. I don’t know why, maybe she liked the taste of plastic, but all our dolls had baby teeth marks across their eyes and chewed off feet. We did not have a dog inside the house. My brothers were less than pleased, and considering the current value of the 12” G.I. Joe dolls, I sometimes think my sister was the real Godzilla of Lego land.

Whether it was hand-me-downs from my well-off cousins, garage sale bargains, or just dollar store knock offs, we did not lack for toys or clothes. I know this because had a card board box for a toy chest and managed to litter our entire floor with toys looking for my prized possession: Beach Barbie. What had actually happened was that I took her for a swim when I had a bath the night before and left her in the bathroom. My mom refused to let me have it until I cleaned up the mess. I didn’t like that crap one bit. However, as an adult, I have to give my mother props for sticking to her guns and teaching me to clean up after myself.

According to my parents and various relatives, I did not speak English until I was three years old. I had my own language, and wasn’t a demanding child, so they didn’t seem too worried. The vicious old biddy that was my Dad’s mother, said I was speaking German and obviously my mother had cheated. She was really reaching on that one because I was the only child, of the four of us, which was a dead ringer for my Dad. Smiling eyes and chubby cheeks, I was Pillsbury-adorable.

Books were everywhere in the house. When it was time for bed, Mom would choose from the monstrous collection and she read to us many times as we would drift off to sleep. My version of Cinderella and Snow White weren’t from Disney Movies. I never even got the money to go to a theater until I was about 13 years old—The Addams Family, if you were curious.

My mother’s love of books led me to speaking and, by the time I was 3 ½, I stopped speaking my own little language completely and started reading primers. If a small child can have a goal, mine was to read the stories hidden in the pages of massive tomes my mother collected. The gold lined pages contained entire worlds I wanted to know about. I was fascinated by the smell of the bindings and I always tried to make the symbols on the pages make sounds with my mouth. BTW thank you Sesame Street and Mister Rogers.

Another well ingrained memory in my life was music. We rarely afforded cable television, and when we did, you had five people fighting over what to watch on our one television. Mom just enforced a rule of no T.V. during the day—there were exceptions for Saturday Morning Cartoons and after school, if we had done our homework.

Lack of television, and at this time, no inkling of the internet, was where music came in. My mother had a staggering collection of cassettes, vinyl albums, and even some 8-track tapes. Her brothers had once had a little rock band in the 60s, and she still had their demo on a 45, which is a small vinyl record that plays on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute, or rpms.

She was a child growing up on the roots of Rock’n Roll and Motown during the 50s, and a teen during the 60s. Music was as popular to her generation, as social media is to the current one. It was the breath of life that spoke to the soul of every person and communicated a new way of thinking and feeling to the world. My mom cut her teeth on Elvis Presley and Richie Valens, danced to Smoky Robinson and the Beatles. In the 70s, marriage and motherhood changed her and she began listening to more mature ideas of the Eagles and Jim Croche.

I love Jim’s stuff and I would have never known any of these beautiful artists, plus many more, if it hadn’t been for that rule in the house. The radio was my first singing teacher and those songs were my first writing instructions. I can’t go back and change the last thing I said to my mom, but if we had been on good enough terms to say goodbye, I would have said, “Thanks for the Music.”

CHAPTER 10

Love Hurts ~ Nazareth

When she wasn’t working a job, Mom was sewing to make ends meet. At one point she had a small business, in cooperation with my Uncle Clarence, to paint giant butterflies for landscaping decoration. I still don’t agree with her color aesthetic, but that is the art snob in me. I don’t think it did very well, but there was always a side hustle to try and bring money into the house. My brothers even helped her run a small bicycle repair shop out of their garage. She may not have known shit about how to budget, but she did try her best to help her family.

My oldest brother had severe dyslexia where he had to wear colored lenses and was a slow learner because of it. Being 6 feet tall and well sized to his height, he asked play football, to which my mother gave a resounding “No”. Knowing the bone defects he had in later years, it was a blessing that she was so protective of him. She did, however, host parties for his Special Education classes and allowed him to compete in the Special Olympics. She was at every track meet and was always involved in his extra-curricular activities.

Sam was also in his high school marching band. He played a plethora of horn instruments, including the Tuba for Christmas concerts, and for parades he was the big guy with the base drum. There is always the fun nostalgia when I see a high school band in a parade because of it; I get excited to see the dance and flag teams routine and what song they adapted for the march. I know that is the geeky part of me, but I didn’t get to participate in band like my brothers. We never had the money to buy Sam his own instruments, but Mom was a part of every fund raiser and made sure my brother got the newest uniforms so his bandmates wouldn’t bully him about it.

When Sam was in his senior year, he was informed that he would not be receiving a regular diploma like the other students because of his Special Educations classes. This was 1989, so eventually this divisionism was abolished. My mom, being a tiny crusader that she was, made sure that Sam got the senior experience that he deserved.

My grandmother had left several beautiful pieces of jewelry to mother upon her demise. They were so nice, that mother would not even wear them. She sold them to her aunt, grandma’s sister, to pay for a professional senior photo package, his class ring and the ability for a senior trip.

She also scrapped enough together to buy an old 1969 Ford Ranchero, a type of truck that was made like a car. I am probably not describing it properly, but it was in really poor repair. My mother had us all working on this classic vehicle, from spray painting, to killing the bugs, and even laying down new upholstery.

My mother even arranged for Sam to have a Prom date and a tux. Of course, it was a garish powder blue with cummerbund that matched his date’s dress, but like I said, my mother had no eye for color, or the fact that this particular fashion choice went out in the 70s. Needless to say, she went all out for her son’s senior year.

My other brother, Casey didn’t have a severe mental disability like Sam, but he did have undiagnosed ADHD. Mathematically, he was a genius and was taking Trigonometry in the ninth grade, but his reading comprehension held him back severely because of his hyper activity. I can remember the late nights when my mother would stay up trying to drill information into his head, just so he could pass. Any time she knew he had a test, there was just this exhausted, albeit determined look on her face.

The hardest part of dealing with Casey was that he was stubborn as hell and easily bored. He liked spending more time with his friends and scoping girls, than being at home. Parents and Teachers had written him off as a “Bad Kid”. He was a wired 5’6” and would have excelled at any sport he put his mind to. He desperately needed an outlet that would structure and focus him. My mother was just too frightened by the idea of him getting hurt, and put a tone deaf kid in the marching band instead.

Dear reader, you probably have concluded that when a child is put in a situation that was doomed to fail, it can really bash his self-confidence. For someone like Casey, who was popular with the girls, and had his own little entourage, getting bullied by band geeks for sucking at music was just too much. He quit band very fast, and with no real outlet, he kept getting into more and more trouble. When his favorite teacher was terminated for helping students on personal time, he dropped out altogether.

‘Love Hurts’ maybe a song about heartbreak, but sometimes it’s the focus of love that can be just as hurtful. Sam and Casey were as different in size as they were in temperament and personality. Where my mother’s smothering affection allowed Sam to blossom and stand tall, it suffocated Casey. Being who she is, when her version of love was rejected, Mom refocused her attentions even harder on her tough luck cases, such as Sam and Brandy.

This is where my mom’s maturity would take a hike. If you acted like you didn’t need her for something, she assumed you wouldn’t need her at all. I picked up things pretty quickly, played well by myself, and was a self-sufficient child. She always referred to me as a ‘breath of fresh air’ or her ‘easy child’. After having three kids who were a bit challenging, I can see why she would say those things, but it is entirely different when you take it for granted and start ignoring your kid like she can raise herself.

When I was five, I started kindergarten. All the other kids were crying, and one kid even wet himself. Mom and I walked in and I went up to one little girl who was crying and clinging to her mother. I asked her to be friends and we sat down and started coloring. I told my mother, “You can go home now.”

Later my mother revealed how useless it made her feel. She just went home and cried like a kindergartner on her first day. I don’t know if there was something wrong with me at that point. I only know that I was a product of having to do most things by myself, which was a direct result of how my mother treated me as her ‘breath of fresh air’. My mother ended up hurting herself that day because she loved being needed. It’s a common trait that I share with her, although I’d like to think I wouldn’t use emotional manipulation the way she did.

They say big things come in small packages, well that described my mother to a tee when I was a kid. I have seen grown men tremble in fear at the sight of my mother on a tear. Her vicious talent was to find your weakness and cut you at the fucking knees. When the principle of Sam’s high school accused him of having a fake hair color, my mom went to his office with baby pictures of Sam’s natural bright red hair told him to “Go fuck himself”.

In third grade, I was being bullied by my Home Room Teacher. Yes, a teacher. You got a personal pizza if you read so many books. I read the books and she said I didn’t need it because I was fat. I turned in an assignment, and because the answers weren’t in sentence form, I was paddled. This was common at the time, but in my case, she didn’t wait until after class.

My teacher paddled me in front of the other students and then laughed about my butt jiggling with the students. She even had another teacher come in and watch, which ironically, was Casey’s teacher, who yelled at him that he was ‘stupid’ for not reading enough. Yeah, the 1980s public schools didn’t have near the monitoring they have today. I was so ashamed that my mother didn’t find out about it until a few months later when the story had gotten around to my sister’s first grade class and she told my mother.

Turns out the elementary school principal at the time was my mother’s underclassmen in high school, and she knew every dirty little secret about him. All four foot eight of my mother walked in to that office and tore him a new asshole. Kids from my class were called in and several confirmed the story. The teacher was reprimanded, but they didn’t have the resources to move me to another classroom. Enraged that the teacher wasn’t fired, she just took me out of that school and borrowed money for me to go to the private school in town. That teacher was already set to move, but my mother eviscerated her reputation during the time she had left.

When I started fourth grade at that school, everyone had to take home a paper for their parents to sign. It was a permission slip for corporal punishment or detention time. Vengeance: Thy name is Mother.

Hey, I said she had done some nice things, but ‘perfect mother’ was never a phase she accomplished. This does however, give you an idea of the ‘good mother’ I had witnessed as a child growing up.