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.