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)