the adventures of me

The emotional abuse was often subtle, insidious, the physical abuse more dramatic.  They beat me so many times that I lost count.  I don’t remember most occasions.  Oddly enough, my siblings do.  Reminiscing with my youngest brother on one occasion, he said to me, “Do you remember the time … ?” and proceeded to describe in detail various beatings I received.  In several instances he remembered the clothes I was wearing at the time.  To our mutual surprise, I had little or no recollection of any of the events he described.  Apparently I have blocked a lot of it out.

Rarely did my parents lay a hand on my half-sister or my sister:  rarely, as in I don’t remember it ever occurring although I would not put it past them and would not doubt it if either one of my sisters reported to me having been slapped or hit.  My parents never touched my step-sister.  My step-mother was never so inclined and my father would never have dared.  Years later my step-sister told me about an incident in which my step-grandmother witnessed Dad beating me as he carried me up the stairs in his arms – talented at the abuse business, he was – and she quietly told my step-sister to let her know if he ever did anything like that to her.  The old lady was dead serious and Dad would have certainly lived to regret it had he done so.  My younger brother got a slap or two, but was probably never beaten.  Neither of my parents would have dreamed of physically abusing the child they had together, around whom the household came to revolve.  By contrast, Jack and I caught hell.

My step-mother was responsible for the mundane, day-to-day assaults, like breaking a plastic glass over my head at the dinner table – I don’t know what I said – or slapping me so hard first thing in the morning that I banged my head up against the wall and couldn’t get my eyes to stop watering for hours.  I got that one because I didn’t say “Good morning” in a pleasant enough manner.  Thankfully, no one at school asked me about my red and teary eyes.  It would be impossible for me to remember all of the times she hit me.  She also got in some good beatings in her day.

It was also her job to set my brother and me up for most of our major beatings at the hands of my father.  She seemed to prefer that.  I guess she preferred not to work that hard, and knew that Dad enjoyed the task.  He was like a simmering pot, and all she had to do was turn up the burner to bring him to a boil.  He was also a pretty sadistic son-of-a-bitch.  I later heard about how all the way back to when we were infants, he used to delight in tipping our highchairs to the side until we would begin to cry.  The older we got the more he went all out, and did so on a regular basis.  I suppose that as the child’s bones become harder, one gets a sense that one can beat harder as well.

Many of these signature events were precipitated by an interaction Jack or I had with my half-brother, Henry.  Henry could do nothing wrong, and could do or say anything he wanted to any of us.  All he had to do was say, “Jump!” and we had to jump – unless he was talking to my parents, in which case they jumped.  He was the only one of us besides my father who got special meals at dinner time.  (Well, on occasion my step-brother did, too, but not often.)  The rest of us had to eat what was on our plates or eat nothing at all.

It would begin like that.  We would do something that Henry didn’t like, and he would tattle to my step-mother.  That is where the exaggerations invariably began.  After my step-mother got hold of the story, however, it would be transformed into a work of art.  In a calculated and deliberate effort, she would begin her tale.  Accidently bumping into Henry as we passed him in the hall, for example, would become maliciously and violently throwing him against the wall.  She told her stories slowly, methodically, meticulously, to ensure their maximum effect.  She would add whatever embellishments and make up whatever details were necessary to guarantee the result.   With her, it was not only an art but a science, and it worked every time.

The whole thing would have been comical if it hadn’t been so demented.  More demented still is that my siblings and I would joke about her techniques afterwards.  My sister and my younger brother didn’t suffer the same fate, but that didn’t stop them from recognizing the absurdity of my step-mother’s behavior.  Jack and I had to commiserate with someone about the hell we were going through, right?  Sometimes you have to laugh through the pain.

My father would listen to her with rapt attention, and you could watch the expression on his face subtly change with each new detail.  Like clockwork, one could watch his temperature rise.  Then, sure enough, he would explode and rip into us like a savage tornado.  He used his hands and fists and sometimes handy nearby instruments.  It would a while for his energy to be spent.  Then everyone went back to their places to await the next act.

Posted by Me at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I learned very early on that having a positive interaction with my parents was an iffy prospect at best.  It wasn’t that positive interactions with them did not occur, and they certainly did, but their regularity and frequency were unpredictable.  One never knew what one was going to get with them.

We had a children’s blackboard in the basement play area of our house in the suburbs.  My half-sister and step-sister had their bedroom down there as well, off to the side.  One day someone started a word game on the board by writing a few strokes and curves with the chalk.  It lasted several days, and at some point I realized that the intended word was “shit”.  I was around seven or eight years old, but I was familiar with the word and I placed a line or two on the board myself.  Once the game had wrapped, my step-mother noticed it on one of her trips to the basement to do laundry.  None of us would fess up, and immediately we were all grounded until such time as someone did.  In reality no one single person had written it, a fact to which I could attest.  The days wore on and I was tired of being grounded, and wanted to think that they would understand if I told them what had transpired.  They called me a liar, said I had done it, and promptly washed my mouth out with soap.  None of my siblings spoke up in my defense, and instead let me take the blame, and suffer the consequences.

Speaking of shit, at age nine or ten my parents sent us to summer day camp for a day, something that was supposed to broaden our horizons as we had never before spent time in the country.  (That was where I encountered those scary horses and other wild animals.)  While there I had to use the bathroom.  I couldn’t find it on my own and was too shy to ask where it was.  The attendees were separated by grades so my siblings were nowhere around.  I couldn’t bring myself to address any of these strangers with whom I was surrounded, youth or adults, to find out where the bathroom was, and ended up spending the rest of the day fighting to hold it in.

I did whatever my child’s brain could think of to do to try to hold it in and keep from defecating in my pants.  Needless to say, I was ultimately unsuccessful.  The failure of my efforts was not something that I could easily conceal upon arriving at home, and my parents quickly discovered what had occurred.  Rather than explore the reasons why I was so paralyzed by social anxiety that I could not manage a simple enquiry regarding the whereabouts of the restroom, they made me strip naked and wash out my underwear in the toilet, with the bathroom door open, humiliating me in front of my brothers and sisters.

My parents wasted years trying to find the perfect formula for physical punishment that would ensure that we would never again transgress against them or one another.  They experimented with various regimens and went through various phases.  At one point they informed us that our basic disciplinary needs would be met by my father pulling our pants down in front of the rest of the family while he paddled our behinds with his bare hand.  It was all eerily ritualistic.  My father would sit down on the couch.  We approached him in a gesture of self-sacrifice.  He would pull down our pants and we would lay across his lap, after which he would administer the predetermined number of blows, methodically and rhythmically, until he was done.  We then stood up, pulled up our pants, and went back to whatever we had been doing.

Much later they would force us to apologize to one another, should the necessity arise, by shaking the hand and kissing the cheek the offended sibling.  Since we were not a physically affectionate bunch by any means, this was anathema to us.  They continued struggling to arrive at the perfect disciplinary regimen, though they never managed to do so, and we continued misbehaving, at least from their perspective.  They were abjectly incapable of humanely addressing the psychological component of anything we did or said.

Why couldn’t we manage their simple demands that we exhibit unfailingly impeccable behavior and uninterrupted pleasant emotional states?  These demands got harder and harder to meet the older we got.  Another memorable moment, which we joke about amongst ourselves to this day, was my step-mother screaming at us one Christmas morning, “You kids are going to be happy if I have to beat it into you!”  We were such failures as children.

Posted by Me at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My parents were emotionally abusive.  My step-mother called me “the scum of the earth”, and in a household where the budget was perpetually tight I was the only child to have his own room.  It was a tiny room carved out of one end of the family room specifically for me, so that I could be separated from and wouldn’t “contaminate the others”.  She told me that I should consider myself lucky that she and my father housed me and fed me.  They would both make subtle digs at us and openly make fun of us, but this was a specialty of my father.  They were two of the most judgemental people you would ever want to meet, and constantly criticized our relatives and other assorted people.

By the age of ten I was doing chores, as were all of my siblings.  We had our regular assignments as well as our “Saturday work”, and there were always additional, periodic tasks like mowing the lawn and cleaning out the garage.  There is nothing wrong with any of that, in my opinion.  The point is that we each earned a small allowance as a result of our contribution to the upkeep of the household and the smooth functioning of the family.  As an aside, I might add that my father did nothing around the house, and my step-mother did the laundry, shopping and cooking while incessantly complaining about all of the work she had to do.  Funny thing, though:  she wouldn’t let anyone else do it.  The shopping probably would have had to remain on her duty list, but she claimed that she was afraid if she let us wash the clothes we might break the washer.  I’m not sure how we could have worked the dishwasher, lawn mower, stove and other devices, but couldn’t be trusted with the washer.  I started cooking every now and then as soon as I got to an age where she would let me.  I used the excuse that I wanted to experiment with foods that she didn’t know how to cook, and my lasagna was a big hit within the family.  That was partly true, because she was not a very creative or interesting cook, but it was also in hopes of shutting her up a bit.  But I digress here.

My older brother Jack and I had our allowances taken away at the age of twelve and eleven, respectively.  This was done not because we were deficient in the performance of our chores.  That would have been impossible, as my step-mother carefully inspected all of our work and we couldn’t do anything else until we completed them to her satisfaction; and she was a demanding task-master.  To this day I am appreciative of that, because even though I do not like to do domestic chores, I know how to do them and can perform them in such a manner that it would pass the toughest review.  Rather, we were deemed unworthy based on our personalities – for lack of a better way to say it.  They never again gave either of us another penny – literally – except when they were giving all of us kids hot lunch money for school.

My step-mother would manage the church rummage sale every year, partly so that we could get first pick of the best clothes, and Jack and I would get to see what clothes we might like, just like the rest of my siblings.  We got a few new school clothes and some school supplies at the beginning of the academic year, just like the rest of my siblings, but we would get only what my step-mother deemed absolutely necessary.  I imagine that we got a present on our birthdays, just like the rest of my siblings, although there would not have been money for much for such extravagances for any of us and it would have been something that we felt we needed anyway.  We would get presents at Christmas, too, just like the rest of my siblings, but ours would be fewer and again it was something they decided that they had to buy for us regardless.  Beyond these occasions and these items, they never again offered either one of us any financial support.

Shortly thereafter, Jack secured a paper route.  It was a small-town weekly newspaper and was distributed door-to-door on a “pay what you wish” basis.  I was too young to get a paper route, so he got two and gave me one.  I paid for all of my clothes, except the few mandatory items I got at the start of school, my birthday and Christmas.  I bought myself my first watch, my first camera, my first adult bicycle – and the second ones and third ones, as the case may be.  I paid for my own school pictures, and have them to this day.  I would give my parents a few copies to pass along to relatives, and I kept the rest.  I would have destroyed them rather than hand them over to them, after paying for them with my hard-earned money, and I still have them to this day.  I paid for my high school ring, my own prom.  You name it, I paid for it.  To a great degree, I became financially independent at the age of eleven.

Posted by Me at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A person can only hold their grief for so long until something has to shift, to break. Eventually the tears have to flow, the screams have to come, the anger has to be expressed. The dam inevitably bursts. If not, the pain will be turned inward to become guilt, self-hatred or some other destructive force. That’s just the way it is. In the absence of a healthy and positive way in which to express our sadness over the loss of our mother, my siblings and I started changing. Of course, this occurred in the context of our family culture and our family norms. Every family has its own history, its own dramas, its own expectations and norms, some of which are developed in the immediate family and some of which are passed down through the generations, and all of this plays out within the context of the larger community and the larger society. What my father brought to the mix was that he was reared by his grandparents after they chased off his mother, their only daughter, whom they adopted shortly after coming over on the boat from England. She married very young and began having babies one right after another, just like my mother. Did my grandmother get pregnant with her first child out of wedlock? Did her parents dislike their son-in-law, my grandfather? Whatever the details, her parents were not pleased with her. My father, his brother and his sister were still toddlers when the marriage fell apart. My great-grandparents told her they would bring up the children as long as she removed herself from the picture. Unable to see a way for her to care for three very young children as a single mother in the early 1930’s, my grandmother agreed to the arrangement. She went off to live her rebellious, adventurous life and marry her other assorted husbands, while my father and his siblings stayed with his grandparents. My great-grandfather had immigrated to the United States and become a college professor, back in the day when professors were considered part of the upper echelon of society and before we as a society decided it was a negative thing to be cultured and intellectual. They lived in a small New England city not far from Boston. I know that my father adored his grandfather, though rumor has it his grandmother was sadistically abusive. My father was the quintessential East Coast, left-leaning, progressive, liberal type. The term “Yankee snob” would not have been an inaccurate description. My step-mother was from a working class, Midwestern background, and grew up in a larger city. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither one of her parents had finished high school. Her father was a barber who also ran numbers to make ends meet during The Great Depression and died of a heart attack when she was still a teenager. Her mother went to work in a home for girls (as they were called in those days) to make ends meet, although she had retired before we came into her life. My step-mother finished high school and went on to secretarial school, started the marrying and baby business, and met my father while working as his secretary at the television station where he was hired as a reporter . She was not book smart but had a lot of common sense, and because of her interest in climbing the social ladder was well-schooled in the social graces as well. To complete the trinity, there was my mother, the oldest child of middle-class parents, from the Southern part of the Midwest. I describe it that way because there are big cultural differences between Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, for example, and southern Ohio, Indiana and Missouri. My maternal grandfather was a businessman who had a car dealership in the years following World War II, when car sales exploded. Growing up I assumed that my father had converted to Catholicism when he married my step-mother, though later I discovered that in fact he had converted in order to marry my mother. My grandparents didn’t have the traditionally large Catholic family because my grandmother kept having miscarriages. They had my mother and her brother and then managed to have a second daughter almost twenty years after the first two, so my aunt was around the same age as my oldest sister and we called her by her first name. When the little one went off to school, my grandmother went off to work, and she worked until she reached retirement age. When my mother was nine years old, they moved from the big city to a smaller, provincial city. She told me later that at the time she thought she had died and gone to hell. My mother was valedictorian of her high school class, yet was also quite the rebel herself. She was almost denied the honor because of her pattern of defying her teachers when they wanted her to do artwork as part of a history class project, for example, or caught her reading novels in shorthand class after she had learned the material so much faster than her classmates that she had grown bored. She met my father while he was married to his first wife and working at the radio station on campus of the large state university which was located in town, where my mother was earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Within the family dance, every member has his or her role. In a large family like ours, those roles can be even more obvious and pronounced. Unable to appropriately express his grief, my older brother became extremely disagreeable and irritating. Whatever he could do to get under our skin, he would do. He would tease us and torment us, subtly or directly, physically or verbally, in any way he could. He did the same to his peers at school, and had a hard time getting along with the other students. As an adult he keeps it to the verbal and is the ultimate Devil’s Advocate, compelled to disagree with or comment negatively on whatever anyone else saying, regardless of whether or not he actually holds an alternate view. My sister, who was more or less a nobody in my father’s male-centered, misogynistic world, remained the good child that she always was, careful never to make waves and always doing exactly as she was told. I’m sure that somewhere deep down inside she was terrified that if she didn’t she would lose yet another mother, especially since this one – my step-mother – gave her more attention. My youngest brother, who had been only two years old when my father and mother divorced, became the court jester. To this day, I swear that he can say anything to anybody, no matter how blunt and direct or sarcastic and biting, and instead of being offended you want to laugh. He has a certain wit and a way with words. From my youngest years I can remember being observant, thoughtful, and analytical about my parent’s behavior. They say that children don’t have the same cognitive abilities as adults, and I don’t completely understand myself how I was this way. I became so incredulous, so angry and so disgusted with them. I was simply appalled, and I could barely contain it. I did not dare express these feelings overtly but still managed to make them very, very obvious. It was easy peg me as the trouble-maker, the instigator of whatever the others did that sent my parents into a tizzy, because I was so obviously displeased with them. It only got stronger as the years went by: both my disgust and their response to it. I went from what my step-mother called “my charming Christopher” to being the family scapegoat.

Posted by Me at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My mother was a ghost.  I don’t say that because she disappeared.  Rather, she was always sort of there but not there.  I have many, many memories of my mother from when I was a toddler, but I don’t ever recall hearing her speak to any of us.  She was holding my youngest brother while others gathered around to see the newborn she had just brought home from the hospital.  She was sleeping on Saturday morning while we were in the kitchen, making our breakfast of sugar-water and bread and butter with sugar on it.  She was driving us around in the car, including that time she turned left in front of an oncoming vehicle and we ended up in the hospital.  She was coming out of the bathroom naked, toweling herself off while we were gathered around the counter, munching on Vienna sausages.  She was talking to the babysitter before heading out the door for work for the day.  I remember all of that, but through it all she seemed to be physically present but not quite there, as if she were in the situation but not of it.

Here was a young woman who had a baby every year for four years in a row, beginning at the age of twenty-three.  She did not have the time or energy to give sufficient attention to any of us.  She lived far from family and could not develop a circle of friends while constantly chasing babies and toddlers, and uprooting herself to follow a career-climbing husband.  Her marriage steadily deteriorated, and at the time she was pregnant with my sister, two other women were claiming that they also were pregnant with my father’s children.  One was the wife of one of his best friends, and the second was my step-mother.  My mother was isolated, must have felt utterly alone, and was undoubtedly depressed.  She moved through our lives like an apparition.

She was a benign figure in our lives in that sense.  Still, she was our mother and basically the only parent we knew until my father married my step-mother.  I have no negative memories about her whatsoever, and I knew that she wasn’t a bad person.  Somewhere deep down inside I knew that she loved me, and as years passed and my new home life became ever more hellish, I held onto her phantom presence to help me get through it.  I was drowning in a terrible storm and had been thrown a lifesaver.  The rope was long and I could not see the rescue boat through the wind and the rain, but I knew it was there, somewhere in the distance.  I hung on for dear life.

Posted by Me at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)