My ADHD does useful things... sometimes

**Just some fluff after an arduous week following Hurricane Sandy and before another possibly rough road from a nor'easter about to pounce us. *groan* I sure hope we aren't about to be without heat and buried under a bunch of snow. It was bad enough going through that without the piles of really wet snow. I'll go bonkers. :-( **

So, I just came back from the Dark Ages which is being without power for just over a week due to Hurricane Sandy. Yes, I am positively GIDDY to have heat, a working stove, the TV, the internet (and the friends it connects me to) back. You never realize how much all this tech runs your life until it's gone for days on end. So, YAAAAAAY!

Right before this all happened, I had mentioned on Facebook that I was going to do some Turks over on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service so I could save up the credit to get myself a Kindle Fire to enable more choices with the NJ online library books. Well, it happened that fellow artist, Brandy Stark, had a Kindle Fire which had met with the destructive forces which can sometimes be generated in a house full of pugs. Seems the kids had managed to knock it from a table, crack the screen and nibble at the power cord a bit. None of it was enough to keep it from functioning. She offered me a wonderfully cheap price. I was more than happy to be her excuse to upgrade herself to a Kindle Fire HD. LOL

Originally, I had planned to have her wait until AFTER things got to rights after Hurricane Sandy, but the message got to her after she'd sent it already.  The mail was back up and running amazingly fast after the storm and the Kindle, to my utter shock, got to me pretty much on schedule. It proved to be a good thing, actually. See, without power, my poor ADHD riddled brain has nothing to DO once the necessary and still doable manual labor tasks are done. Bless her, Brandy had sent it fully charged which allowed me to do a little training in how to operate it and read the manual on it. I couldn't load anything, but it still gave me things to mess with. Not long after I started fooling with it, I realized I had nothing to carry it in at all. Not good. It really needs some manner of protection to keep it from getting all scratched up.

So, I started poking around at some random things in my room and thought, "Hmmmmm. Surely I can figure something out." And I did. I gathered up mat backing board, grey duct tape, an old boot lace, a slider from a broken camp chair bag closure, a wrist strap from an accessory pack for my Sansa MP3 player, a stapler, a pen knife and a pair of scissors. This is the result:


Ugly, yet functional. LOL And it'll serve until I can go do some Turk jobs to get an accessory pack for the Kindle with a case, screen protector and stylus. :-D

Why would anyone?

Wow. I forgot I had been working on this. I suppose I should thank a certain all caps using child  for drawing my attention momentarily  back to my blog. I've been too busy dealing with health issues and PITA crashing computers and lack of artistic inspiration to muck about in the past much lately.

Looking through the posters and stories over on Project Unbreakable really drove home the fact that far too many people are told "No one will believe you." And far too many say it was true, too. Why? First, I don't understand why  there are stupid people who are so desperate for any attention or want to hurt someone so badly that they would falsely accuse someone of rape. Let's face it, sexual assault (especially against a child) is THE worst thing you can accuse someone of. Even murderers will go out of their way to torture a pedophile or spouse abuser in prison. Murder at least CAN sometimes be "justified", after all.  You have to be severely fucked in the head to cry rape to "get back at" someone. You have to be a total vindictive asshole to want to ruin someone's life so completely because you feel slighted in some way. Mature people learn to walk away and get over things rather than deciding to become a wrecking ball aimed at someone's life by falsely accusing them of things.

Second, I don't understand why "They're lying" or "Maybe if you didn't (insert action), it wouldn't have happened." would be anyone's first reaction. So many of the victims over there said that their FRIENDS didn't believe them or said "I thought you wanted it." Far too many of them were raped by people who claimed to be their "best friend", usually but not always a male. What the hell, people? So you think your friends and family members WANT the kind of shame/blame shit sexual assault victims are going through?? Why would a doctor administering a rape kit say something so stupid as "Are you SURE you were raped? You don't seem to have much bruising."??  Does it not occur to people that someone who has been told they'll be killed might be AFRAID and unable to move or resist? Yeah, a rape victim so enjoys the "attention" of having a speculum rammed up inside an already sore vagina, snapped wide open (usually PINCHING because you bloody men have no fucking clue how sensitive that area is *scowl*) and having swabs rammed up there in the hopes the rapist actually left some evidence. Oh, and then there's the humiliating "attention" of having photos taken of your injuries. Sounds delightful, doesn't it:?

I have a lot of respect for the women who take a rapist off the street by going to the ER IMMEDIATELY and reporting it. Waiting for even just days runs the risk of prosecuting someone with no evidence and I'm not real fond of the idea of prosecuting someone on words alone. A persuasive enough person can call together a horde of "witnesses" who will say whatever they want them to. Without some sort of evidence, I can't say it's right to lock someone up. We have legal process for a reason and that is why it's important for  a woman to be brave and keep it from happening to another. I've got friends on both sides of this fence, either raped/molested and gone without justice or falsely accused.  So I kind of have a rather unique perspective. I AM one of those who were molested and never got justice. The bastard died peacefully in his sleep so I didn't even get the vengeance of him suffering in death. Kind of lame, really. But would I have tried to take him into court with nothing but my own words? No. Especially not when I was the only one at the time who willingly spoke of it. No. I would have recognized the futility of that option and just kept up our little war of occasionally bitch slapping each other to acknowledge he was, indeed, still a scum sucking piece of shit and I was not, with no exceptions, going to ever allow him to molest me or my nieces again.

I  know I sure as hell didn't "want attention" when I was 12 and trying to suss out with my siblings what the hell all of the crap I suddenly had crashing down on me was about. I mean, when you fall to your knees because you all of a sudden have back all those blank spots in your childhood memories and they are horrifying, the very last thing going through your head is "Oh, boy! Everyone is going to be paying attention to me!" In fact, that NEVER went through my head at all. What when through my head was "Why did my brothers keep running off and leaving me there by myself with him?" "How much did he do to the other girls before I caught him at it and stopped him?" "Could I have stopped him sooner if I'd been more brave and told Mom?" So many other painful and confusing thoughts hit me. Having people pay attention to me abecause my sperm donor was an evil, abusive piece of shit was definitely NOT something I wanted.

I definitely didn't want the feeling of needing to protect everyone for the rest of my life, either. Do you have any clue how fucking exhausting it is to always be on guard, trying to keep the "bad people" from hurting the innocents of the world? I have to stop, examine and make a call any time I see anything remotely messed up. Do I get involved or am I just being paranoid because of my life experience? What if I blow and off and it turns out I was right, but I did nothing? What if that mother goes home and drowns that kid or beats it to death? It makes me responsible for that, doesn't it? Intellectually, I know it doesn't. Sure. But tell my psyche that. It's something I have to deal with every day.

In my experience, I've seen what I call Defender types and Victim types, an odd sort that's a blend of those and  the Outright Denier among abuse survivors.

Defenders usually spawn from abuse survivors who started to fight against their abuser while still stuck with them. They're the older siblings who stand between their abuser and the little kids. They are the ones who fight every inch of the way, giving the abuser nothing freely and causing as much damage as possible in the process. What fuels them is not really quantifyable as anything other than sheer will. Defender types have that "protector" mentality like I do. Often they're tough and armored outside and a mess inside like me, too. They can be a dangerous foe in combat because they will do whatever it takes to stop harm from coming to an innocent, even if it means they die instead. It's hard wired and as difficult to control as a wolf's prey and territory drives. It's how we raise ourselves up from what happened to us. We pull ourselves out of our suffering by saving others from similar fates. It's the only way we see to make what happened to us MEAN something other than nasty evil stuff. We OWN it, USE it to give others protection and strength that maybe we didn't have when we were abused. It's how we manage to keep on keeping on. This type, if they finally get free of their abuser generally NEVER allow anyone to do that to them again. People who try find themselves kicked to the curb like my ex husband and one of my ex boyfriends. My philosophy is "I didn't put up with that shit from my daddy and I sure as fuck won't put up with it from any other man."

The Victim type is one I have a LOT of trouble understanding. They're like a loyal to a fault puppy who will keep crawling back to lick the very boots that kicked them. Sometimes it's not because they're just that submissive. Sometimes it's because their own psyche deludes them into forgetting they were kicked in the first place. Or, perhaps, it deludes them into thinking the abuse is how love is expressed. Even if they manage to get away from the one who initially abuses them, they tend to end up right back into circumstances which allow another predator to put them right back into the abuse cycle. Sometimes it's a conscious thing because they're seeking love. Sometimes they don't even realize what they're doing because they don't remember.  Often the Victim type believes so strongly all the lies they were told by their abusers that they feel they aren't worthy of being treated decently. They feel they deserve not only what theyir abuser did to them, but also whatever anyone else may choose to heap upon them. I used to help get women out of abusive homes and into safe houses where they could get help . SO many I talked to had been raped or beaten by their own parents and, when they became adults, their brains said "pain equals love". So they ended up with men who emotionally and physcially battered them. Sadly, they were often the ones who went back eventually, believing all the bullshit "Baby I Promise" lies told to them by their abusers. Things would be all peachy keen for a week or a month and then there would be another call for help. Sometimes they died before they could call for help again. It was both crushingly sad and maddening at the same moment when that would happen. I often wondered, "Why did she go back? She was SAFE! She was overcoming all the bullshit! Why the fuck did she jump back into the manure pile after all the counseling she's had??" I've never found any satisfactory answers to those questions. I have asked before. Most of them said they went because they were afraid... afraid he'd hunt them and/or their children down and kill them as he always threatened.

The blended type of survivor often doesn't even recognize themselves as a survivor. They'll step in if they see imminent danger to an innocent, but only to a point. If the situation is too scary, they may say something, but back away if threatened. They may draw a line where they would NEVER stay with someone who hits them. Yet, if someone is only verbally or emotionally abusive, they may not even recognize that it IS abuse.  The few I've met who are like this kind of function in their own little plane of existence which only lightly touches ours.  They try their damnedest to make our horrid world match their sunshiny plane and then seem puzzled when it can't be made to mesh nicely. They're not exactly oblivious to the abuse they suffered, but they don't really acknowledge it, either. It's as if it's kind walled off like my memories were as a kid. They just make it to adulthood with the walls still up. They kind of peek over the wall occasionally and go, "Hmmmm. What's this? Oh, well, time to make cake." Then, sometimes out of the blue, they'll look you dead in the eye and say something like "All those dreams I've had about my brother... they weren't dreams, were they?" All you can do is pat their hand and say, "No, honey, they weren't." All you can do is hope that some day they'll really understand the scope of what they've been through.

Outright Denial is, unfortunately, one of the most knee-jerk defensive mechanisms human beings have and, possibly, the most destructive as well. The Outright Denier has told themself so often that nothing like that could POSSSIBLY have happened to them that the memories are locked in a box, covered in concrete and sunk to the very darkest depths of their own psyches. A Denier doesn't get that some of the issues they have as an adult are spawning from their abuse earlier in life. They do things like take drug or become alcoholics in an effort to feel better. But these are not solutions.  These things becomes crutches that prop them up  and then hooks that pull them down. They'll rage about their bad luck and take that rage out on others, not even realizing they are perpetuating what they grew up with. They have such blinders on that they often don't even recognize that the wall in their psyche exists. They don't realize that there are huge chunks of childhood where there simply is nothing.  They're like my brothers who have quite angrily denied what their own father did to them right in front of me. They angrily espouse the virtues of the one who beat them bloody in front of their little sister. The Denier often raises their abuser up on a pedestal as if to worship them as some sainted hero, turning them into the very opposite of what they really were. Of all  survivors, this type is the least likely to succeed in finding a happy life. Because they haven't dealt with what is causing all of the negative emotions in them, they never overcome the issues these emotions generate. They can't find the strength to say "Well, I'll show them." because they don't realize they NEED to. I guess for some people the betrayal of having someone who is supposed to love you and protect you do horrific things to them is just too much for their mind to process. So it gets shoved down never to be acknowledged again. Or maybe it crashes in eventually and they can no longer deny.

I get that, having had my own very painful WTF moment. But, in the case of my siblings, it just angers me that they refuse to stop trying to make ME the villain. I've met so many people whose families have just ripped them to pieces because an Outright Denier shouts "How dare you foul the name of our good and sainted, blahblahblah.?!" Then it becomes a rallying cry and the next thing you know, the person who spoke the truth is on the defensive and running for cover from the entire family. Only sometimes that person is someone like me who says, "You know what? Fuck you people! In fact, UNfuck you! Why should you have any fun? You have no clue because YOU didn't live with them!" Sometimes we survivors who are very aware of what was done to us don't run. Sometimes, not only do we not run, we may just charge you and punch you in the face for being an ass. Sometimes we just sit back and go, "I pity you the day your wall comes down. You go on and git. I don't want you in my life anymore." Regardless of how exactly it plays out, we know that it's necessary if we ever want to glue all the pieces we have left back into place.

Just Some Things

Since some people in my blood relations seem to be drinking their own Kool-Aid and have repeated certain lies so often that they have become their twisted version of truth, I'd like to point out some problems in your stories. I doubt it's going to change your perception that you are wonderful people who are the victims in all things. But at least I can say you were informed since I know little pitchers have big ears. 

First: It's rather difficult for things to occur as laid out in your lies when you state events happened at a time when YOU DID NOT HAVE the vehicle the alleged events happened in. Oh, you thought no one noticed that? Wrong. I did. My mother and I were threatened with jail time when we tried to request an inquiry into that little bit of sunshine.

Second: When you are conspiring to tell lies on someone, perhaps you shouldn't do it when other people are around. Didn't think I knew about an arrangement with a certain cousin to say HER kid was messed with, too, when it was a lie, did you? Wrong again. Have another drink of Kool-Aid.

Third: When you have a known history of lying to my face when I know the truth, you can hardly expect I'm going to believe ANY of the verbal diarrhea that spews from your face. I seem to recall a certain pear shaped girl being in my room running up my mother's phone bill while the children  she was supposed to be taking care of destroyed about $1000 worth of collectibles. This when they had been allowed to come into our house only with MY nod of approval when my mother asked about it so that their CHILDREN would not be sleeping in a car in winter. She then tried to deny it when confronted with the shattered bits of collectibles she tried to hide under the bed and a phone bill showing she was making calls from a phone which she had been told NOT TO TOUCH and which was in MY ROOM on the call dates. Yeah, your credibility is about zero in my book, liar.

Fourth: Let me give you a little enlightenment about child molesters so you can understand why your story gets shakier every time you tell it. When a molester targets little girls, there is only a 21% chance that same molester will target little boys.  So, you say my nephew molested a bunch of little girls and then just because you're too stupid to know better, sure why not let's make him look REALLY sick in court and toss in a couple of little boys, too. Yeah, he admitted something DID happen with his sister. I know why, too. It happened because they were trying to mimic the PORN you losers left where your kids could get it. Oh, did I mention I know the kids had been left in the house ALONE that day? Sorry, you idiots, but a kid doesn't lie about something that humiliating to their GRANDMOTHER when she asks what has been going on and says she wants the full truth. Oh, and a guilty boy would not have called me in tears and said, "Aunt Jolie, they're saying the only way I'll ever get out is to say I did all those things. But I didn't! What should I do?"  Yeah, indicators toward a bunch of immature, vindictive liars targetting a little boy? They're in there.

Fifth: The youngest children involved in this whole mess have been groomed and prepped and told the lies to say so much that they believe them now. Yeah, I heard about that, too. Again, you're too stupid to be cautious about where and when you plot and who you threaten.Things get around.

Sixth: You people have made an art of using little children to carry out personal vendettas. My brother's wife should be ashamed of herself that she is so jealous that my moronic sibling screwed someone else before her royal hiney that she has to take it out on the kids from the previous wife. Yeah, that's mature. Oh, wait, she wasn't exactly grown when my ADULT brother started boffing her. So perhaps expecting maturity out of a psychotically jealous, lying KID was too much to expect? I'm telling you right now, you people need to start acting like grown ups and leave my nephew and his sister ALONE. They are not in your lives or your homes any more, so you need to just shut the fuck up and leave them be. Yes, I've heard all about you verbally and emotionally battering the sister when she speaks up for her sibling. Don't you all feel so proud bashing on a young woman trying to cope with having a disabled son? Why don't you all do what you do best and just go get drunk and fall down all over each other and call it lurve?

Seventh: Do not EVER think for a minute that just because you can squirt out more little mini mes like a good little Catholic that any of you are in any way better than me. Do not EVER delude yourselves into thinking you are the ones who pulled away from me.Let me tell you something, I only went to family functions because it made MOM happy. Being forced to be around you drunken asses who couldn't make it through a holiday without a fucking fight was a nightmare. Don't make ME the villain when YOU people are the ones who are still pickling yourselves in alcohol at every available opportunity. YOU are the ones who still do drugs and act like no one knows it.

I'm clean. I pulled away from you people because it was necessary to save myself. Given the choice of save myself or hang around with you poisonous people, guess what I chose? In order to recover from addiction issues, you have to cut the people who refuse to get help out of your life. Guess what? That means you had to go. You know what else? I have been SO much happier without all of your bullshit drama going on around me all the time.  Know what else? I'm willing to give up that peace if it means you  fuckers have to wake up and face reality. I am sick to fucking death of you pointing fingers at me and at little kids who never did anything but be born and ask to be loved.  My brother may have thrown away the boy HE chose to claim as his son. I have not. Michael is MY NEPHEW and if you don't like that idea, it's just tough shit. As far as I'm concerned your opinions matter less than a little bird poop on a windshield because, at the end of the day, you're still a bunch of drunk assholes and I'm still a recovered addict/alcoholic.

Eighth: If you don't want to hear the truth, then you are more than welcome to not read what I have to say. You can't make me stop. It's not slander if it's true. In order for it to be "defamation of character" people have to give a shit who you are and you have to have a GOOD reputation beforehand. None of you do.  Your names are readily available online thanks to you having made sure you spread around all the articles about Michael being once again incarcerated without just cause to every body you could think of. Oh, you thought suddenly hiding all your little "yay us" posts meant I wouldn't find out? Yeah, online is a funny place. There are little crumb trails everywhere.  Oh, just so you know, since YOUR names aren't on here, you can't say I'm slandering you anyway. I have the right to speak about my life publicly if I want to. If people can dig your names up easy as pie on an ancestry or public records  search, well, that's not my fault, is it? *smile* See, I'm tired of cowering and hiding from the past. This shit has only continued to be the bane of our society because people like you continue to deny, twist things and take out your vengeful wrath for what's been done to you on the wrong people rather than dealing with your real issues. You plug your ears and yell rather than listening to the truth. Well, you can still choose to do that by closing your browser window. You're as free to do that as I am to write it.

I'd just like to say in closing that I really do pity the whole lot of you if you truly believe all the stuff your Christian faith espouses. Because come judgment day, ya'll are screwed and not in the fun way. I understand it that God supposedly has some mercy for people who acknowldege and repent for their downfalls. You people... hell you're so full of denial that you believe your own bullshit. And that means you're not getting the pass when the time comes. Poor itty babies.... Am I perfect? Nope. But I never claimed to be, either.

To My Niece

Since, as you do on FaceBook and taking after the chichenshit ways of your parents, you prefer to scream and yell in caps where the people you are yelling at can't reply, you get this, kid.

First of all Michael IS my nephew. Regardless of blood, my brother claimed him as his son on his birth certificate. That makes him MY nephew. Your father then threw him away like trash, so don't try to sound all high and mighty about your father. I RAISED that kid with your Memaw more than your mother and father EVER did. Second, how do I know Michael didn't do the things he was accused of as a kid? Because, unlike you, I was an ADULT at the time and privy to several pieces of information which were presented to the court by your lying mother and her scummy cousin which were LIES. Who am I supposed to believe, little girl? The child raised by a vindictive and manipulative mother who thought it was perfectly okay to beat on little children just because she didn't squeeze them out of her fat little body? Do you know Michael and his sister CONSTANTLY showed up at my house with welts and bruises on them telling me that your mother had been beating on them? And who else would it have been since they hadn't been with their mother and the bruises were fresh? Do you know that your mother constantly sent  you kids to her family KNOWING that members of her own family had molested her? Or has she just conveniently neglected to tell you these things so she can further warp your perception of things? Do you know those molesters in her family have STILL not been punished for the things they did to her AND to Michael's sister? The courts used FALSE ACCUSATIONS from when he was a child to prosecute Michael as an adult. Just FYI, little girl, that's illegal.  You want to know why the bitch he was married to accused him of this shit EIGHT YEARS after the fact? Oh, it could be because he was making something of himself without her and was planning to get the kids away from her ASAP because she's unfit.  Yeah, I've talked to MY nephew, kid. He's been put in jail with NO EVIDENCE and with your mom telling his ex exactly what to say because she's done it to him once already. How convenient.

 I am well aware of what occurred with Michael and his sister when they were kids. In fact Memaw and I spoke with them both about it at the time fairly extensively.  You want to know why that happened? It happened because your moronic father left pornography where kids could get to it. They were experimenting with what they saw on one of his filthy videos while you kids had been left in the house ALONE. Don't try to convince me how wonderful your parents are. You didn't have to grow up with my brother. You didn't have to put one of your nephews out of a SECOND STORY window to save him from being beaten to a pulp by his apparently coked up uncle. Do you know I had to protect your Memaw from your scum-sucking daddy? He would drink and snort all of his paychecks and then want to come over to Memaw's to take HER money for the things you kids needed. I was having to spend MY paychecks paying Memaws bills for her because she was so in debt from giving your moronic parents money. Oh, you probably don't remember that because you were the mewling baby in diapers he was using to guilt her into giving him money. You probably only remember the fairy farts and sunshine your mommy has been blowing up your ass since you were old enough to understand words.

So, yeah, I'm the bad evil person in the family since I'm the only one who has recovered from alcoholism and drug addiction. It's not YOU people who have nothing to do with ME. It's quite the opposite. When I got clean I had to cut out ALL people who still participated in my addictions OUT of my life. Unfortunately, that meant I also couldn't really spend time with the kids  I cared about because it meant dealing with the parents. Once your Memaw died, I didn't have to go to family functions to make her happy anymore, so I was able to finally make the cut that allowed me to recover from being a pre-teen to adult alcoholic and druggie. So, don't come on here trying to tell me what a horrible person I am, little girl.  I've had enough contact with different parts of the family over the last several years to know that almost all of them still drink to avoid reality and that some of them still do drugs and lie through their teeth about it. Yeah, such good Christian households! It's no wonder I fled and became Pagan. *smirk*

So, little girl, how dare YOU come onto my blog telling me I'm crazy when you don't even know the real truth about what your parents come from. You don't believe what's written on this blog? Go ask some of your older female cousins about what my father did to them. Go ask my half sister what he did to her. I'm not crazy. I woke up and got access to the memories my own mind shielded me from because a 5-year-old little girl usually isn't well equipped to deal with the fact her dad is a pedophile. You, unfortunately, grew up sucking down the bile your mother has always had for kids she didn't give birth to and learning how to be just like her. What I know of her from having been under the same roof with her and having to deal with the fallout of her actions is this: She is a liar. She will do wrong and outright LIE about it even when you hold the evidence up in front of her face. She uses people to the point of bankrupting them for her own gain. She is only happy when everyone around her is as miserable as she is inside. She thinks it's perfectly okay to beat on a kid half her size with a broom handle if it's a stepchild. She's a vindictive and immature little worm who will do anything to "get back at" people she doesn't like, even things like denying a grandmother visitation with her grandchildren when she refuses to give her money. So, forgive me if I can't exactly stand behind someone who, for all intents and purposes, has turned out to be just like her and is still manipulated by her. I've still got parts of my childhood I can't remember because of the shit I grew up with in this family. I can only assume that those times were worse by far than what I CAN remember. Isn't it convenient  that you can remember every tiny detail because they were fed to you since you were little to the point you have come to believe the bullshit you were fed.

Project Unbreakable

I wanted to post about this because I feel like it's a worthwhile project. It's called Project Unbreakable. Here's a little bit about it from the Tumblr Blog: "Project Unbreakable was created in October of 2011 by Grace Brown. Grace works with survivors of sexual assault, photographing them holding a poster with a quote from their attacker. Grace has photographed over two hundred people and has received over a thousand submissions. TIME magazine has also named it one of the top 30 Tumblr blogs to follow."

Before I post the link, I just want to warn you, if you're a survivor and you aren't coping well, this may trigger you.

I salute the bravery of the victims who have allowed their faces to be shown with their posters. You are helping others see that they don't have to hide and be ashamed and that it is not their fault. I encourage people to share this. The only way this epidemic is going to end is if we drag the whole stinking mess into the light where people can't deny it anymore. It's long past time for people to stop these cycles of abuse and to stop victim shaming and victim blaming. The best way to make it happen is for us to not be afraid to speak up. We're all survivors together. We can help each other keep out feet.

http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

Crazy Is As Crazy... Doesn't?

Throughout my life I've often pondered if I'm answering correctly when I'm asked if I have "any history of mental illness" and I say no.  My medical records show only one recognized psychological issue where I saw a therapist. One might guess that, with my past, it was related to my abuse. One would be wrong. It actually stemmed from a burn injury inflicted on me at age 7. I'll tell that incident later as it's not the point of this post.

Basically, while I spent three weeks in the hospital getting soaked in bleach water and having my ruined skin picked off my left arm daily, my best friend's house had been struck by lightning and caught fire while she and her teen sister were there alone. The kids  had gotten out unharmed, thankfully. Their family kitten hadn't. It was found in the debris, burned to death.  My young mind already had freak fits just looking at fire on the TV. Hearing the news of the house fire, my brain made a quick connection: Thunder is lightning noise. Lightning makes fire. Fire hurts! Fire kills little animals caught in it! Already traumatized by the burns and further shaken up by the painful burn treatments, it made my brain equate such terror with just thunder. It wasn't clear until I got home. We'd had an oddly dry spell while I was in the hospital, entirely thunderstorm free. But that first week I was home, we had a big one and I had my very first panic attack. I shrieked and panicked and fought my mom as she tried to hold me down and calm me down. I had no idea where I was trying to run to other than the blindly fearful thought to get out of the house before it burned down.

Doing that at all any time it thundered (and that happens a LOT along the coast near Galveston) was bad enough. The doctors said it would probably calm down as time went on, though Mom seemed skeptical about that prognosis. Then I was cleared to go back to school finally. I was nervous because I was already getting fat by then. I'd stopped growing up and started growing out instead. I already wore ratty hand-me-downs since Joe drank so much of the household money. So, having to go to school with my left arm wrapped in a bulky hard plastic brace and compression bandage affair intended to keep my hand from curling into a claw wasn't my favorite idea ever. I knew I was just going to get picked on more.  I did. But it was worse after that first freak out at school. I laid out two teachers as they tried to stop my blind panic. They had to call  the nurse and Mom and they sent me home. Yeah, that was a self-esteem builder. And all the kids just added that to the arsenal of jibes they already had.

When it continued to happen and I got picked on for it more and more, Mom put her foot down with both the doctors and Joe and decided I needed to see a psychologist. I didn't want to, even at that age. I thought the guy I was sent to was an idiot. He talked to me like I was stupid and I would make up shit to tell him just to see what kind of bullshit I could make him believe. It got to be a game and I actually took a malicious sort of glee in it. In the end, it wasn't the shrink who did me any good. In the end it was me reading about how lightning worked and studying it that helped me ease the panic. It still would make me startle or gasp, but I could close my eyes, count to ten and tell myself I was being stupid and to just stop it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stop being stupid.

There are so many things in my life like that. When I became a pre-teen alcoholic and pill popper, it wasn't some intervention or rehab that cured me of it. It was me looking into the mirror and seeing Joe. Scared straight. It was hard, but I pushed that garbage out of my life by sheer force of will along with those people who refused to stop clinging to it. I lost a ton of friends that way. But they refused to change and had to be left by the wayside.  I understood that to beat it, I could not be around people who did it. When I would recognize that I would suddenly be trying to replace that addiction with cigarettes or chocolate or whatever, I would step back, take the deep breath. I would close my eyes and tell myself. "Stop being stupid." I refused to be controlled by it. It's a cycle that still repeats now and again even now. I slip up and find myself repeating old mistakes and have to put the brakes on.

I recognized that the traumatic life I had growing up had done things to me as it had to my mother. She was a hoarder. Once Joe was no longer around to yell at her for it, it escalated until it took over most of the house. As I grew older, I fought that for both of us, too. Once I was 16 and working and helping her pay bills, I had enough leverage to lay down rules in our home. I made her start sorting and properly storing usable items and ridding herself of what was garbage and debris. Every six months, like clockwork, if her things had crawled out of the one room she was allowed for her "stuff", there was a great purge and she was forced to constrain her hoard to her designated space again and strictly organize what she kept so it wasn't a mess. Every six months, I purged my own belongings, too,  ridding myself of things I could say I no longer enjoyed or could no longer use. Needless to say, Goodwill and Salvation Army loved me. I was always dropping off huge bags and boxes of things for them. Hoarding is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. What made it odd in the case of both my mother and I was that we recognized this tendency. We worked at controlling it. It was never diagnosed, because we never let it get to the point of those people you see on Hoarding: Buried Alive and we never sought counseling for it. Of course, back then, they knew so little about OCD and hoarding behavior. They've made leaps and bounds in knowledge with a lot of metal illnesses since then.

I have other odd compulsions I fight with daily. My previous room mates had a toddler. My room wasn't big enough for me to keep my video racks in, so they were in the living room. While I lived with them, I discovered that keeping the movies in order wasn't just a preference. It was compulsory. When the baby would knock the videos down and they would just shove them up there in random order, I would actually just twitch upon discovering it. I would have to stop right there in that moment and put them back in order. It was making me twitch to have my things stacked up in the garage in totes. My environment was not MY environment anymore. I was crammed into a space that was far too small. My room mates would leave dishes in the sink overnight. There was really no excuse. We had a dishwasher that worked. I had to fight the urge to stop and wash them just about every morning. I had to tell myself "No. Stop. Deep breath. No time now. You have to get to work. Put the scrubber down and turn away." But there were times that didn't work even though I would tell myself, "None of this mess is yours. Your dishes are all in the dish washer. You are not their housekeeper. Leave it." Those days I would be late to work and say I'd overslept. It wasn't a biggie. I was always ahead of the game at work so five minutes or ten weren't much of a difference in what I got done.

Even before then, cleaning my own house was horrid because I would micro-focus on the "wrong" things, get distracted and flit to and fro like an idiot. I never seemed to get anything done. It took one of my boyfriends actually sitting me down and listing all the stuff I actually HAD done to make me quit beating myself up for that. It was just that at home, where I was in charge of the structure (or lack thereof), I wasn't as efficient as I was at work where I HAD to do things a set way or risk losing my job. Basically, if I'm in charge of everything including the consequences, things will slip a lot before I go "Bloody hell! What am I doing?? Stop being stupid! Get shit done! Move your ass!"

I've taken neuro-psychology tests at various points in my life. They used to give them to you in school sometimes back in the day. One was done when they discovered I had an IQ that was 5 points below super genius on the scale they were using back then. They got curious because I was marked as "precocious" with my ability to read long before kindergarten and my eidetic memory.  I had Duke University all over me trying to convince me to become a lab rat for some think-tank experiment they were doing when I was in 7th grade. They'd given me the SAT and been impressed with my scores, especially since I (unlike the other kids chosen from my school) had declined all of the prep classes because I wanted to see what my "raw score" would be like. My score was high considering I had no idea what algebra and geometry even were and still managed deduce right answers on some of that. On the non-math portions, I scored extremely high.  I took another neuro-psych exam when they were trying to assess me after the brain damaging complicated migraine incident in my 20's. Even in 7th grade, I was cognizant of the fact that I should not answer some of those questions truthfully if I valued my freedom. As a 20-something, those questions actually made me hunch over the desk in an attempt to hide my hysterical giggling. I was thinking, "Yeah, if you think I'm dumb enough to answer THAT shit truthfully, think again." I think that psychologist didn't know what to think of me, really. I seemed to confuse him terribly.

So, if you know that your truthful answers would probably mark you as insane and you don't answer truthfully, are you insane?  If you recognize that you have compulsive behavior and you fight to rein it in,  do you really have OCD? Or are you, as a human being, so fucked up and mentally fractured that you exist as several people at once. Maybe those several people you are each have control of certain things, so you can control yourself or disconnect a part that's fritzing one day so that a part that isn't so worn out can take over for a while. Or maybe those different parts can sort of "gang up" on things that one part alone isn't sufficient to handle. Sometimes it feels like that. Some days I'm just so fucking tired and I want to crawl under a rock and die. Then, after a while,  it's like I kick myself in the ass and say, "Oh, just fucking stop it, wuss. Drag your ass up and do what needs doing. GET OVER IT!"  I'll be okay for a while after that and it starts all over again, one giant fucked up roller-coaster, only without the benefit of safety harnesses. 

As I get older I wonder more and more if I'm certifiably crazy, too smart for my own good or maybe a little of both. I'll probably never find out for sure because I'm not the type who feels the need to go sign myself up for therapy for every little thing. I've always been wary of going to therapy. I don't like the feeling that someone is picking my brain. They're my cobwebs and I'll thank you kindly to stay out of them, pretty much. Up to now I've been strong enough to push through things. There are times, though, when I feel old and tired and wonder if I really can push through some of this shit anymore. It's like drowning in Jello.

Scams

I have to wonder if there are actually people who are naive and/or stupid enough to still fall for the overseas "we have money that belongs to you" scams. Some people must be that dumb because I still see them in my spam box now and again. They wouldn't continue if they weren't getting something out of it. I mean, seriously, if you've never been to a country before and don't know anyone in that country, why they hell would you believe someone has money that belongs to you there? Why the hell would you send your personal information to someone in another country considering how often stories about identity theft air on the news? Are people just that damned desperate in this crap economy that they'll believe anything?

It's not just people in other countries, either. There are people right here in the USA who are preying on people who are out of work and in desperate need of funds. I keep seeing all of these "job listings" where you basically have to pay people to teach you how to scam others with phony advertising blog posts. Amazon's Mechanical Turk site is always full of those kind of things. Then there are the sleazy "dating" sites which are apparently paying people to go onto those sites and send emails through them and that sort of thing. One of the freelance sites I'm on constantly has listings where people are looking for graphic artists to doctor images for their product's before and after shots.

It's sad, really, that people will set aside all ethics and morals for a few bucks.

Some Days....

You know, I'm slowly coming to the realization that I'm not as strong as I used to be. It used to be I could shove all the bullshit aside and fight my way through another day, another week, another year without any problem at all. Now... well, there are some days I wonder what the hell I'm doing still around.  I'm kind of drifting aimlessly right now. While I would love for my art to be enough to live on, I know it's not likely. I simply cannot produce fast enough. My last job was a desk job. Even that was becoming hellish with the fibromyalgia kicking my ass on a weekly basis. My back specialist down in Texas had also told me I was no longer allowed to lift/move more than 15 pounds. A box of standard printer paper these days is 32 pounds or more. My cart full of files I had to slog back and forth daily from the file room weighed more than that AND it was awkward to deal with because it was short. I had to hunch over and shove it along, which made my back shriek. It's not like I could keep asking people to move it for me considering most of those girls couldn't lift a paper box or water bottle safely and the only guys in the office were older and had back issues themselves. 

A lot of the office jobs I look at these days say you need to be able to lift 25-50 pounds safely. I can't.  I spent more than a month having to recover after I moved up here to NJ because there was very little help loading my cube in Texas and none when I got here. Retail jobs all require hellishly long hours of standing. I can't do that anymore, either. My spine starts settling down toward the pelvis and, after a while, walking becomes both difficult and painful. It just disgusts me that I can't even clean my little 10x10 room without it taking all day or longer depending on the state of it when I start. Just cleaning the kitchen thoroughly can be a 2-day job a lot of the time. Now I'm getting to the point where some personal care tasks are becoming problematic, too. Top that all off with some apparent problems keeping my balance and I'm getting unsafe. I'm thinking we will need to install a rail on the back stairs before winter comes again or I'll be risking broken bones trying to use them in freezing weather. All in all, I wish they'd come on and invent cyborg bodies so they can just put my damned brain in a robot.

It's not just the physical strength that's waning, either. I'm not used to having these kind of issues so it's emotionally strenuous, too. I try to push through like I used to and some days I just don't have it in me. Some days all I can do is sit and dully stare at things on the computer and get not a damned thing done. That frustrates me so much. It's like my brain is filled with soggy, rancid cotton and it's gumming up the works.  Of course, trying to explain any of this to a doctor makes them look at me like, "Uh-huh, come on and ask for the drugs already so I can tell you no." The fact is, I don't WANT the drugs if it can be avoided. I've heard far too many artist friends say that the wide variety of "mood altering" drugs they give people these days totally KILL the the creativity. I've had pro fantasy artists tell me they dropped anti-depressants and other such drugs for that very reason. At this point, the creativity is ALL I have left. No way in hell am I going to risk losing that. What good is being a vapidly happy little zombie who doesn't feel anything and has no real
 passion for anything?

But I'm not sure what to do with all this tangled up mess. I wish I could find a way to get a car. Then I could at least get some piddly part time job or something and have some cash. Maybe I could even manage to find an indoor pool somewhere so I could decompress my back the way it needs to be. I've no idea what all this Plan G Medicaid is going to cost me when I go to the doctor yet. I can't seem to find that information. And I have blood tests and junk coming up. At least those are free on the charity care at the hospital.

So, basically, I'm going around in circles like a one-legged duck trying to swim. I wish I'd get that "Aha! " Moment as Oprah likes to call it. I've never felt the need for some sort of guidance this strongly before. The problem is, I don't even know WHERE to look for it because I'm not sure exactly what I need.  What a fucked up conundrum.

Art Toys Are Sanity Savers!

Childhood wasn't awesome for me, but I did so love my giant Deluxe Spirograph set. That was actually a good Christmas when you subtracted the usual drunken idiocy.

That year I ended up with a Mighty Men and Monster Maker and a Creepy Crawlers Bug Maker, too. The three were sanity savers. I could run and hide in my play shed and make heroes and bugs and swirlies with my music up loud enough that I couldn't hear the scream and yelling from the house. Yeah, good times. And people wonder why I don't call that "The good old days".... :-/

WTF is Wrong WIth Some Doctors??

When I went to the Ocean County Health Initiative clinic yesterday to try and get set with them so I will have my meds when my current scripts run out, the doctor pretty much indicated (without directly saying so) that two different sets of docs I had in Texas (one at Kelsey-Seybold and the other in Harris County Healthcare system) didn't know what they were doing.

She "didn't approve" of me having the cyclobenzapine (taken to keep my legs from tap dancing me out of bed at night or cramping to the point my knee is on my chest), diclofenac (taken for the arthritis) and gabapentin (to calm the diabetic neuropathy). She said she NEVER gives pain meds unless "it's a patient dying of cancer or something and then maybe only in the last couple of months".

I SO need to print out this article I read on Web MD recently about how being a pain patient himself really opened a doctor's eyes on how very poorly patients with chronic pain are treated and give it to her. The doctor said even HE got the stupid "It's all in your head" crap and couldn't imagine how it was for someone who wasn't a medical professional if HE got treated that way. Needless to say, I'm going to request a change of physician and note the fact that she pretty much said the program of treatment which has HELPED me over the last 4 years or so won't be continued because she "doesn't like" it. Yeah, well, I don't like people acting like good doctors who listen to their patients don't know what they are doing. *smirk*  It's not like I begged for drugs and they gave them. They said. "We have some avenues we can try. Let's find out what will work best for you."  I agreed and we tried different things until a combination worked. THAT is how medicine is SUPPOSED to work.

Hell, the Harris County doc took one look at the list of drugs, asked me what each was for, glanced at the x-rays and stuff from Kelsey and said, "You SURE you don't want that pain med script done here?" I almost fainted. Those county docs are notorious for not wanting to give anyone anything for pain control. Truth is, I don't take the pain meds when they give them to me anyway. There's too much risk of addiction and I don't what to be zombified. They knock me out and I don't like it. So pain pills are reserved only for the kind of pain that makes me attempt to curl up into a ball (which I can't do anymore) and cry. I generally don't cry much (I'm more of a "get pissed off and cuss" kinda gal), so crying is a very good indicator of my pain level and/or emotional state.

Surviving My Family, Part Five

It wasn’t long after that I had a weird ass dream. I’d passed out on the sofa watching horror movies the night before. Mom had taken to sleeping in her own little room upstairs and letting Joe have the master so I could stay up and watch late night movies in the den if I wanted. Cable was new then and I was enjoying it. I was huddled up under my blanket and I had a dream that I went up to wake Joe up for some reason. I get up there and there’s this log in the bed. I shake the log, at first saying, “Dad, wake up! It’s time to get up!” Nothing. Then I tilt my head, grin slowly and loudly say, “Hey, asshole! Get your lazy ass up!” Nothing. I’m outright giggling by then and I start slapping where his face would be going “Dead-ass motherfucker! Get up!” I start chanting it in a sing-song, slapping and slapping the log where it rests on the pillow.

That was about the time I started waking. I could hear Mom on the phone in the kitchen. She was on with emergency services telling them to send someone because she thought her husband had passed away in his sleep and didn’t seem to be breathing. She sounded… numb, like part of her wanted to cry and she wanted to kick her own ass for it at the same time. I just listened for a while to try and figure out if it was still the same bizarro dream I was having or if it was real. It wasn’t until I’d actually started to drift back off thinking I was still dreaming, that she came into the den. I guess she’d been trying to figure out how to act considering how he’d treated both of us all that time. In the end, she chose matter-of-fact and told me she wanted me to go next door to the neighbor’s house so I wouldn’t have to see a dead body getting wheeled out. Being around corpses had always weirded me out a little because of the way adults acted around them. Since I wasn’t afraid to die, I couldn’t get why it freaked them out so much. So the whole vibe creeped me out a little. This one, though…. Oh, I wanted to see that dead body. I wanted immediate, undeniable verification that that son of a bitch was never coming back. 

But I went next door to make things easier on Mom. I think she would have been far more worried for me if I had gleefully watched them wheeling him out. I knew she was already pretty worried after I threatened to kill him. The neighbors were going to Astroworld that day and they told Mom not to worry. Their mom went to the house and got some clothes for me and they said they’d keep me for the rest of the weekend to give her time to “deal with things”.  It was kind of irritating because they all were tiptoeing around, nervous that I might suddenly break down and bawl. Then they were confused and concerned when I didn’t and, in fact, had a blast at Astroworld. As far as I was concerned I had just begun the greatest fucking vacation ever called “The Rest of My Life Without That Evil Fucker Tormenting Me”. But being around them and seeing their reaction, I knew I had to at least be quiet and not dance a gavotte and a jig in sheer joy at new-found freedom. 

I watched Mom and I realized that what made her cry wasn’t that he was gone. It was the fact the asshole hadn’t gotten any insurance because he didn’t want to go to the doctor. While that made us lose the house, it was probably better for us since the heart problem he wasn’t even aware of was what killed him. Congestive heart failure thy name in my book is justice. So Mom was worried about what would happen to us since there would be no money and only more debt from his death. In time, when our home and food situation was seen to, she started to relax and be a real person again. She never even dated after that. I think all of that time married to such a horrible person pretty much turned her off on the idea. Men were always hitting on her because she had an awesome personality when she wasn’t under some jerky’s thumb. She was smart, funny, creative and independent in her recovery.  She just ignored the men and went along her merry way. I was always grateful for that because I sure as hell didn’t want another daddy after the disaster I started out with, not even as an adult. No.. thank.. you.

I managed to get sober. That was probably a good thing since not long after I had what they call a complicated migraine. It makes all the blood vessels in your head swell. Left untreated for a week as it was in me, it can also make your brain swell. Brain swelling causes damage no matter how you look at it.  So my once eidetic memory became more like a sieve. I couldn’t drive for months. It took me a long time to get my scattered remaining memory back into somewhat correct chronological order (kind of like defragging a hard drive). Some things, like my work history, I have to keep written down or I can’t remember which job came after which too well.  But I still remember a whole lot of what hit me that horrid summer day. Still, there are some areas that never filled in even before the brain damage. As bad as what I CAN remember is, maybe it’s better that way.

Years later, after I had put up with all of that ridicule about lying about the abuse from my family and having NO ONE stand up for me, I had pretty much written the whole lot of them off. Mom was gone. I only ever went to family events because it made her happy and I got to at least TRY to give the kids something educational or useful when I could afford it. With her gone and no longer acting as a buffer and most of them still being heavy drinkers and/or drug abusers, I realized I just really couldn’t have them in my life even if I wanted to. I can’t be around people like that and stay sober for long. I’ve been sober for about 20 years now. If I find myself slipping, I just stop. I watch myself closely for the signs. I can have 2 drinks and stop. I don’t get drunk. I don’t even take my prescribed pain pills and muscle relaxers unless I am in so much agony I can’t even move. My doctors bitch at me about that. They say “You need them. Take them.” And I basically flip them off and tell them I’m mean and ornery and will take them when I damned well please. :-p

So I’m chugging along in life  trying to figure out just where I want and need to be. It’s weird… when you figure out why you’re so fucked up and start dealing with it, what you thought was a clear path in life suddenly reverts back to jungle you have to hack down with a machete again.  Funny how that works. Anyway, chugging along and I run into one of the nieces El Pervo had been abusing.  It turns out that she and one other BOTH decided it was time to deal instead of trying to cover it up.  My half sister also came forward and admitted he’d done it to her, too. The young nieces both apologized for not coming forward when my brothers were digging at me and calling me a crazy liar. I don’t know how most of the family took that version of things coming out. I still don’t communicate with most of them at all. I’ve talked to some of the nieces and nephews because it’s really not their fault their parents are total hose-heads. But by and large, I think we’re happier out of each other’s hair. They can’t annoy me or beg for money I don’t have and I don’t browbeat them for STILL being drunks/addicts and setting shitty examples for their multitudes of kids.

Surviving My Family, Part Four

I don’t think my mother was truly aware of how much I hated Joe until our final confrontation. As fate would have it, she was right there in the room with us when it happened. It was a day when coastal Texas was having one of those chilly fall howlers where the lightning blinds you for a minute, the thunder rattles the whole house like an earthquake and you don’t dare go outside because it’s just this side of being a hurricane out there.  At the time, I had a dog named Pechudo (after a horse in a movie I saw when I was little). He was my first all-to-myself pet. He was a big, goofy, dumb mutt dog but he was MY big, goofy, dumb mutt dog and I loved him with all my heart. Sometimes when I didn’t feel like having to fight with Joe, I’d vanish before he could get into his rip-roaring and just go curl up in Pechudo’s big dog house at the back of the yard. The dog hated him, too, and Joe was afraid of him because he’d bare his teeth at him if he hung around too long. Pechudo would lie across the opening so he couldn’t see me in there and growl at him if he came poking around his run. Well, being big and goofy, that poor dog was terrified of thunder and lightning. A lot of the time, if I was home and saw a storm coming, I’d grab my little flashlight and a book and go crawl into his house to keep him company until it was over, even if it was in the middle of the night. Joe bitched about that. Mom never did. That particular day, with a big nasty howler going on, Joe was doing everything he could think of to make me stay in the house. 

He knew I was going buggy worrying about my dumb dog out there all alone. Pechudo panicked. He busted his chain and popped the gate to his run. I was just hustling out the door when he came tearing up the back yard, throwing mud everywhere. Before I could get him, he barreled past and into the den… right as Joe was heading for the bathroom. He grinned… that horrible, mean, shit-eating grin and he stepped in the den as the dog came charging in. Before I could move from the door, he hauled back a leg and he kicked that poor dog so hard that he let out the most horrible yelp I’ve ever heard a dog make. He flew back the ten feet to the storm door. It had closed and latched as I’d turned. He hit so hard that he popped the latch, broke it and went flying about another 5 or six feet into the mud beyond. And he just… lay there. I couldn’t tell if he was even alive.

I then had the first instance of what I call red screen rage that I can recall. It was beyond any anger I’d had before. All of my vision was colored this ugly throbbing red color.  I also did something that friends who saw me do it later on in life called “blinking” because one moment I was in one place, you blinked and I was somewhere else, incredibly fast for a little short, fat girl. It generally only happens when I’m in red screen rage.  I went from the door to the big ottoman I typically flopped on to watch cartoons and was on it so fast that he tried to step back in surprise. But I was sober and much, much faster.

Up on that ottoman I could reach his throat and I grabbed him by it. It was weird. Not even a teenager and somewhere deep inside a little voice whispered, “Windpipe. Grab the windpipe. One good twist and it’ll all be over. You’ll be free.” And that other part said, “No! No, you won’t. They’ll lock you away in the loony bin and throw away the key.” But my fingers held on and I pulled him until he was nose to nose with me and I growled at him. “Motherfucker, if you EVER touch anything I love ever again I will fucking KILL you!”

I shoved him staggering backward, coughing and looking like he might puke. He beat feet toward the front of the house to go upstairs. As I spun and hopped off the ottoman I saw Mom’s face. Her jaw was hanging open and her eyes were so wide they looked like they might fall out of her head. When I looked at her, her mouth snapped shut and she just stared at me like she didn’t know who I was. “I’m going out to take care of my dog.”

That was all I said as I went out into the rumbling, chilly night like a thunderhead joining the rest of them. It took days for me to nurse that dog. Mom and I quietly took him to the vet while Joe slept off his hangover the next morning. We told the rather suspicious looking vet that he’d been winged by a car. He told me what to watch for and what to bring him back for. I slept in that doghouse for a week. I wouldn’t even go to school for fear Joe would try and finish what he’d started.  Eventually he did. A few months later he teased him with a burger so he could get hold of him and clipped his collar high up on the cyclone fence so he’d strangle. He claimed the neighbor boy had been teasing the dog and he must have gotten stuck. He thought I didn’t know, but I saw him grinning out the kitchen window when I found him like that. Bastard. I knew he had me in a stalemate. I couldn’t kill him. If I did, I would get locked up. If I ratted him out to Mom, SHE would get locked up for killing him. So all I cold do was pray to whatever powers that be there might be. I wasn’t Catholic anymore by then, I’d quit being Catholic when I was seven and I hadn’t figured out if I even wanted a religion anymore. But I had a notion there must be something bigger than the stupid hairless apes who think they run the place, so I prayed to whoever might be listening to please take him away so Mom and I could be at peace.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Surviving My Family, Part Three

The war really escalated closer to the year he died. It got worse because I’d actually had the chance to go and spend the night with friends whose families weren’t some nightmare from Hell. I realized it wasn’t me or Mom and it just flat out wasn’t normal to live as we did. I hated him even more for that. I hated him with every fiber of my body for denying me the happy childhood so many of my friends had. I hated him because me knowing better meant I had to do what I could to shelter those friends who were going through it, too, as best as a kid could. Even if it just meant I let them hide out in our garage until shit blew over, I had to do it because I could save them that one little shred of dignity and give them half a clue that not everyone in the world was a raging prick.

I also hated him to the depths of my soul because I discovered it wasn’t just the immediate family he was abusing. Oh, no. That wasn’t good enough for “good ol’ J.C.”. He went after my younger nieces, too. I came in from outside one day and caught him with my niece in his lap and his hand in her panties. I froze. I took a deep breath and told her in a very hard voice “Go upstairs and play and don’t come down until I say to. No matter what, you stay up there until I say. Go.” She looked scared and bolted for the stairs at the front of the house. It was his turn to freeze. He sat there, not knowing what to do and fully aware that I was old enough to know for sure what he was doing was wrong.  I went over to the counter and I pulled his 13 inch chef’s knife from the block and buried about 2 inches of that blade into the wooden lazy Susan in the middle of the table. It hit with a bang that made him literally flinch and almost fall out of his chair. I leaned in with my teeth bared at him and I remember how it seemed my voice growled up from my chest like an animal. I told him. “Old man, if I EVER see that shit again, I will cut the damned thing off! Understand?!” Sometimes I didn’t really know where the words came from. They were old words, almost alien in my mouth, not words a little girl should know how to twist just so. He made to open his mouth to yell at me and my hand flicked back to that knife handle and just rested there. “Do… you… understand?” The growl was deeper, softer. But he looked more scared than before and he nodded. “Good. Now, LEAVE. I don’t care where you go, but don’t come back until you know for sure Mom’s home.”

After that, I had to go up and calm my niece down. I had to explain to her the terrible thing that had been done and why it was wrong. I had to explain to her that when he said “You’re Pepaw’s good little angel, such a pretty girl.” It did NOT make it okay and that what he was doing was NOT what a loving grandfather should be doing. I also had to tell her why we couldn’t tell Mom. Again, ME. A KID. And people spent the next 20 or so years wondering why I was so pissed off? Hmmmm. I can’t imagine why…. And I couldn’t say a fucking thing because I didn’t want my mother in jail for murder.

From that point on, I watched him like a hawk when he was home. I finagled to make it so the girls weren’t around when he was home from the rig and Mom wouldn’t be there. I played sick if I had to, anything to make it impossible for him to be alone with them. I had no idea if he’d gone after any of the boys like that. If he had, he’d probably terrified them to silence. I did notice that the one nephew who lived with us briefly seemed nervous when the old man was home and tended to stick close to me, somehow knowing the shit wouldn’t dare try anything with me there. I don’t know if he was just scared because J.C. was big and imposing or because he’d done something to him when I wasn’t around.  I never did find out. That poor kid was so messed up in the end that he got arrested and tried to hang himself in his cell. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed. That probably would have been kinder because he did irreparable damage to his brain that night and never got to really grow up and have even half a shot at a decent life.

It was during this part of my life that I figured out alcohol and drugs could make me forget for a while and a very destructive cycle began. When I didn’t have to protect anybody, I was finding ways to drink or get high, often both at the same time. It’s amazing how easy it is for a kid to get booze and pills in a trashy industrial town, especially a smart one with a mind trained to deviousness from underhanded warfare with her own father. It’s amazing how easy it was to hide, too. Again, being smart helped. Very few people knew where I vanished to on the weekends. Those who did know also thought that snitching on me would unleash on them the insane girl who wasn’t afraid to have a gun put to her head. Yes, that happened one night at a party. Some punk pulled a gun on me for calling him out for the wussy, girl punching jerk he was. I leaned my head into the barrel, looked right up into his eyes and said, “Go ahead, champ. Do me a favor and end my fucking misery.” He backpedaled like I was a rattlesnake. They knew I’d already died when I was seven and come back, so I was unafraid of dying. To them, that was insanity of the highest degree, extremely dangerous and it scared them shitless. Everybody in the room looked like they were trying to climb walls to get away from me. I could have said “BOO!” and they probably would have pissed their pants. Instead I headed out on my own for a nice long walk to sober up.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Surviving My Family, Part Two

I have siblings who seem to forget running off and leaving their little baby sister with a drunken, abusive man they still worship to this day for some gods forsaken reason. They seem to forget that same little sister, at the tender age of 5, heard them screaming while our sperm donor beat them bloody with that big, ugly Texas shaped brass belt buckle on the end of his belt. I remember it flashed and little spits of blood flew off where the pointy tip of Texas had gouged their backs while they were spread-eagled against the wall. They forget that it was ME who stood up to the bastard with the loose spindle arm I’d ripped off of the cute little short-legged chair my Pawpaw had given me because I loved to sit in it when I was visiting. Yeah. Five years old and there I am beating the living shit out of my dad’s knees and shins, (all I could reach because I was so short) screaming at the top of my lungs “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! LEAVE MY BROTHERS ALONE!” while they first froze in confusion and then ran out of the back of the house and into the night.  Me. Five years old. Tiny little toothpick of a girl, swinging a chair arm like a billy club. Can you fathom how fucked up that is? I backed him down the hall with that chair arm, right back into his bedroom (Mom hadn’t slept in there at any point I could remember; she slept on the sofa.). Then I sat with my back against the opposite wall, glaring up at him with that club across my knees, silently daring him to be stupid and put a foot past that threshold. His eyes were wide and glassy and he just backed into the room enough to shut the door. I stayed there all night until I heard Mom’s car pull up out front. At that point, I rabbited to my room, threw on my jammies and pretended to be asleep when she came in.

I’m not certain which happened first, the chair arm incident or the first time “good ol’ J.C.” decided it would be a wonderful idea to fondle me while I slept. I suspect it was the fondling because I was scared beyond all reckoning when he did that to me and I was most definitely not afraid anymore when I fought back for my brothers. I must have been ill at the time because that was the only time I usually slept with either parent. I don’t know if he realized I was awake, roused by an innate sense I seem to always have had when something just isn’t quite right around me and reeks of danger. I froze. I didn’t know what to do. His hands were in my little flowery undies doing things grown men shouldn’t do to little girls. I knew that even if no one had told me yet. Screaming wouldn’t work. Mom wasn’t home because she worked nights in admitting up at John Sealy’s ER. I doubted the neighbors would do jack shit for me. They all thought Joe was swell. I could never figure how they kept that delusion with all of the screaming and yelling and Mom hauling ass out of there with me late at night. But, hey, it was the 70’s and you didn’t butt in because it was none of your beeswax, was it? As long as he looked spiffy when he was outside, how could you possibly believe he was a monster behind closed doors, right? Pft!  I finally just moved, made an unhappy grunting noise, purposely rolled off the bed and set to caterwauling like I wanted to all along. He tried to comfort me and tell me, “It’s okay, baby. You fell off the bed, that’s all. Just crawl back up here with Daddy.” 

“No. I don’t want you,” was all the answer he got. I snatched my stuffed toy from the edge of the bed and ran across the hall to my room. I slammed the door shut and barred it with a chair the way I’d seen people do in movies so he couldn’t get in. I cowered in my bed and I cried until I fell asleep again. The next morning when Mom came home and tried to come in my room and found the door barred, I told her some silly shit about having bad dreams about monsters in the hall and that I had put the chair there to keep them out.

I think that at some point after that, I realized that this wasn’t my fault. Something was terribly wrong and fathers just weren’t supposed to do that to their precious baby girls. That part of me got angry, oh so very angry to the point that I declared war. So, that’s why I assume the fondling happened first. I do know the events happened close together. I was never sure, but I think Mom may have suspected something was rotten in Denmark but couldn’t prove it because she taught me how to kick someone in the crotch if they touched me in ways I didn’t like. The very next time Joe decided to try and have a go at me he ended up with a nice, hard-edged patent leather little girl shoe in his nuts. From that day forward, the war was on. Where before Mom would have to drag me from my bed at night and we’d sleep in the car on the beach while Joe tore the place up, for a long time all I had to do when he would come stomping in looking to cause a drunken row was turn, narrow my eyes at him and give him that dark, feral look my best friend later dubbed the “You can die now, asshole” look. He would clamp his mouth shut, turn right back around and either go back to the kitchen to drink until he could barely walk or stagger off to bed, leaving my mother bewildered but relieved.

I know now that I did the worst thing you can do to an abusive child molester: I took his power. A little five year old girl stood up to him and showed no fear and he hated me for it because it robbed him of the only way he had to not feel like a puny, rotten little maggot. He constantly tried to buy my affections, giving me lots of gifts. But he also tried to tear me down, too. See, right about the time I went into school, I started going from willow thin to positively rotund. They kept telling my mom she was feeding me too much when my diet hadn’t changed at all. So nothing got better. I just kept getting fatter even on a reduced diet.  He’d pick at me when Mom was at work and he was home. He’d tell me I was fat and ugly and I better marry the first boy who asked because I would be lucky to be asked at all. He told me to stop being stupid and dreaming about being something other than someone’s pregnant, ugly wife. Kid glove on one hand and iron gauntlet on the other. I guess he figured he would wear me down. No. I’ve had my stubborn streak a long, long time and I waited him out. He’d run my brothers out of the house as soon as they were old enough to either go into the military or haul ass to our half-brother’s house to live until they could figure out how to be grown men when he’d beaten them back to little boys their whole lives. Once again, they left Mom and I to deal with “good ol’ J.C” all by ourselves. There were little battles here and there, but he eventually started working on an oil rig. Mom and I could rest easy for weeks on end, knowing the fucker was miles out in the middle of the Gulf and couldn’t come home without aid of a helicopter. We probably both silently wished the asshole would fall over a rail and get eaten by a shark. I, for one, pitied any shark that might get that meal. It probably would have the most horrid heartburn ever. He would verbally beat us down while he was home which, to me, was preferable to him tearing up the house and ruining my books and toys. I would wait until he passed out, raid his wallet and give Mom what he hadn’t drunk away so she could pay bills and get groceries. When he’d bitch about where his money went, I would give him the patented saccharine sweet face and say, “Why, Daddy, don’t you remember? You ran out of money at the ice house last night. You came in cussing because you were out of money and out of beer.” He couldn’t really argue it when he’d come in shit-faced the night before and couldn’t even remember getting home, could he? And so it went.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Surviving My Family, Part One

I've been working on this for a couple of days now and I thought I'd start parceling it out in parts to make it a little easier to read.

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I give you fair warning. This is not fiction. It is not nice. But I’m at a point now when I think the bullshit needs to stop and I’m no longer in the mood to play nice or mince words. This writing is spawned by an event in my family which apparently is huge news in Comal County, Texas considering how quick it’s all over the internet. I figure certain… unsavory elements in my family don’t seem too worried about spewing their dirty laundry all over the internet. So, I guess I should feel no reserve in letting people know exactly how dirty their laundry is. My name is Jolie E. Bonnette, daughter of Joseph C. Bonnette, Sr. and Alice Y. Bonnette . I’m aunt to Michael D. Bonnette who was just sentenced to life for something he did not do.  

I’m no angel. I never claimed to be, though for some reason certain people thought that I did. Nope. That was just Mom pointing out that (unlike SOME people)  I wasn’t being brought home by the cops three times a week and *gasp* had something resembling good grades as long as they weren’t boring me to tears at school.  I’ve alternately been seen as smart or a smart ass for pretty much my whole life depending on what mood someone caught me in. As a kid I was mostly quiet and studious, preferring art, music and reading to most other things. I was a nerd who was reading well before kindergarten and came out of fifth grade with a reading comprehension level well into college mid-range. For most of the last few decades I’ve been trying to get a handle on some bad things in my life. At times it took some drastic measures. At times it took things like pretty well divorcing myself from most of my family because of the kind of people they were and chose to remain. I’ve tried to work on my temper, on certain things I’m a little OCD about, on trying to keep my health under control and a myriad of other things. In some regards it’s been successful. I’m not an alcoholic anymore. I haven’t been since I was in my early twenties. I don’t do illegal drugs anymore. I got rid of those around the same time I stopped getting drunk to forget because I was taking them for exactly the same reason. I knew it was time to remember and deal instead of trying, without much success, to forget. I basically woke up one morning after a VERY rough weekend, looked in the mirror and had an “aha moment” as Ophrah likes to call it. Only it was more of an “Oh, my dear gods! I’m becoming my fucking father!” moment. Let me tell you, that was enough to scare me straight. Cold turkey isn’t easy, especially not when it pisses off the majority of your friends who just don’t get why you can no longer hang out with a bunch of stupid drunks and druggies.

Pretty much a lot of the garbage in my life stems from one steadfast trait in the bad ol’ Bonnette family: DENIAL. Not just a capital D there. No, that whole word gets it because they have it in spades. Well, once my father had been in the grave a little over a year, I no longer had that option. A smell, a blend of aromas drifted into the house, pulled in by the monstrously huge and loud attic fan on the upper floor. We were poor and Mom ran it with all the windows open to try and cool as best she could without spending what little money she had to do it. That day she was out working her ass off at the newly installed Wal-Mart to try and keep us with a roof over our head. So I was alone, a typical latchkey kid. That mix of Texas City refinery funk, cut grass and hot summer day hit just the right blend that it opened up some floodgates I didn’t even know I had until that moment.

There’s a funny thing when little kids are traumatized. Their brains can sometimes take all of that and shove it into a drawer and lock it away because they aren’t old enough to deal with it. In the worst cases, their whole personalities fracture into multiples, each designed to handle some facet of their pain. It’s a defense, a means by which the mind protects itself when it isn’t mature enough to comprehend certain things fully. So imagine you’ve got around a decade of nasty that’s crammed into a drawer literally full to popping and someone just flings open the lock and it all explodes out… all at once.  I can tell you it’s not pleasant. One moment I was walking down the hall and the next I was on my knees whispering at the floor, “What the fuck?!” over and over and over with tears pooling up under my face. Yeah, I was foul-mouthed even then. Another of those things I’ve tried to curb with only marginal success through the decades.  So, a lot of this is stuff I hadn’t remembered until that awful summer day.  I had huge patches where things were just kind of greyed out and I didn’t know why.

I didn’t know what the hell to do. I wasn’t even a teenager and here I had all of this… putrid garbage to deal with all of a sudden. With the memories came one bit of knowledge: I couldn’t tell my Mom. I remembered that I hadn’t told her all along because one night I’d heard her and my dad fighting and she’d told him, “Joe, if you ever hurt my kids, I will KILL you!” I knew my mother. I knew she meant it because she wasn’t a woman that said things like that lightly.  I knew that if I told her, she WOULD kill him and then she’d go to jail and I’d be without her. Worse, they would probably ship me off to my abusive and racist paternal grandmother who took great joy in humiliating me every chance she got because I looked like “that wetback bitch your daddy married” than I did her son. How Pawpaw put up with that vile woman was always beyond me. He always apologized for her like it was his fault she was such a bitch. So I kept quiet to the point that my brain apparently decided it would be best to forget for a while.

So, once I had the whole mess back, it gnawed my guts for a while. If I’d told my mother at that point in time, I knew she would blame herself for not doing enough, for not leaving. But where would she have gone? She was a good 200 miles from her nearest family members and she hadn’t any money of her own once he started railing at her to quit her job so he could work wherever he wanted instead of having to coordinate around HER job (and she made more than he did which just pissed him off more).  I didn’t want her to feel bad because the 70’s sucked and you just didn’t talk about this shit back then. There weren’t a whole lot of widely publicized and easily accessed resources for battered women and kids back then. It was more like a damned secret society and you had to have the map, the password and the secret handshake to get in. Plus, Mom, bless her for all that she was strong in many ways and smart as she was, she stepped right into that snare. Her dad was also an abuser. Like far too many abuse survivors, she fell right in with one just like her abuser.

I decided I had to talk to my two full brothers about this. They were both a good bit older than me, already grown. I approached them in the hope that I would find some kind of assurance and support. What I got was pretty much a slap in the face all over again. They called me crazy and told me to stop telling lies about their father. I was pissed. Who the fuck would make that kind of shit up “to get attention”?! Were THEY fucking nuts?! At the time I hadn’t learned about that defensive ability of the brain and couldn’t understand why they were doing that to me. How could they not remember when they were so much older than me and he’d BEATEN them? Well, now I know it’s a male thing most likely. Abused men often have a worse time dealing with it because, well, manly men aren’t supposed to be weak and get beat on and cry about it, are they? Never mind they were KIDS when this shit was going on. Logic has no place in this silliness, apparently. It’s all about the dumbass societal programming that says men are supposed to be strong and not show emotion.  Whoever made up that fucking bullshit needs to go straight to their own personal version of Hell. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. 

(TO BE CONTINUED)

I needed a little something

Well, I have a very bad habit of keeping a lot of shit to myself. Truth is, it causes to many issues with my health because it keeps me stressed out. So, I figured I'd just start writing about things. One might ask why I choose to do this publicly. There are a few reasons. First, I want it where other survivors might see it. Maybe reading some of this will help them in some way. If nothing else, it's just another illustration that they are not alone. I don't claim to be a professional anything. I'm just a person and all I can write about is my personal experience.  Second, I am sick and tired of certain people keeping skeletons in the closet and not owning what they do. They are hurting other people because they can't grow up and get help. They want to sit back and talk shit about other people when they are up to their eyeballs in bullshit themselves. Third, well, i just need a place where I can vent, talk, to whatever. I'm not doing this for attention. I ;m not doing this for fans. Frankly, I couldn't care less if people like this, hate this, or anything else. Like most things I do, I'm doing it because I FEEL like it and I don't give a tinker's damn what other people think of it.  So, I'll be adding things here as I can and you're welcome to comment or whatever. But I have comments on moderation. Just so you know, this isn't a democracy. This isn't the press where you get all those nice little freedoms. This is MY little blog space and I'm free to allow your comments or not as I please. Being a whiny little bitch about it if I moderate you won't do a damn thing but make me laugh my ass off at you.