Note:  please, no complaints or insults from people from anywhere in the world who may disagree with me: i did purposely say - in all caps, "GENERALLY SPEAKING" - and i also said that these were merely my impressions!

There was no negotiating with Jack, no talking sense into him.  Ultimately, my only option was to tell on him.  Being a tattle-tale was not a negative thing in our family.  My parents were very strict and very restrictive, and were always looking for ways they could police us more closely and to make sure that we didn’t infringe upon the rights or privileges of the favored ones.  I went and told on him, and was sent back with a message from my father to tell John to move his stuff.  He didn’t.

I told again.  Same message.  He didn’t.

I felt I had no choice but to tell again.  Knowing my father as both John and I did, there was no mystery as to what was going to happen next.  Yet part of me was hesitant, confused.  I felt like an unwitting pawn in some sick and twisted game.  What, pray tell, was going on in John’s mind?  In any case, I couldn’t let John, who was already prone to bullying and teasing and similar obnoxious behaviors, get away with summarily pushing me out of my space.  Whatever strange dance was going on, I was now a full partner.  My father followed me back out to the camper.

We almost never got beaten because of what we did to another sibling, unless of course that sibling was the Golden Boy.  Those beatings happened frequently, because of his place in the household and how difficult it was for us to avoid displeasing His Highness.  I think those beatings were my step-mother’s favorites, since she was certain that they were well-deserved and necessary to maintaining proper household order.  I think she believed that we were jealous of him and would mistreat him for fun.  Those were downright righteous beatings.

The reality is, my siblings both knew better and we dared not.  We knew better in the sense that we knew very well the difference between his behavior and theirs, between him and them, and were smart enough and mature enough not to confuse the two and to take their behavior out on him.  Part of me thinks I shouldn’t be able to say that with a straight face, that it would have been impossible for that to be the case, but I cannot recall one instance, minor or major, of another sibling expressing jealousy toward him verbally or behaviorally.  I know that I was extremely careful not to let myself confuse the issues, and it appeared that my siblings were as well.  Sure, we would talk about how he was favored; it would have been hard not to.  That’s not the same as holding him responsible for their behavior, or taking their behavior out on him, or even wanting to be treated like he was.  In terms of the special treatment he got, I am naïve enough – and know my siblings well enough – to believe that none of us wished that for ourselves because we saw how it impacted the rest.

My father pulled John out of the camper and started berating him while pounding on him and kicking him all over the yard.  He beat him mercilessly, using his fists and his feet, and it seemed to go on for hours.  I was unaccustomed to being complicit in the beatings of others.  At the same time that I knew what was coming, I was also completely mortified and racked with guilt.  I could hardly bear the knowledge that I had John’s blood on my hands for that one.

I arranged my bed and belongings as I listened to John’s screams, and then I went back outside.  Hiding behind a corner of the main trailer where I could see into the shadows, with every blow and kick my father landed I found myself wanting to offer myself in John’s place.  Look at what I had done – was doing – to my brother!  How could I live with that?

I was torn up inside, at one point taking a step forward and then taking another step back.  The one thing that kept me from running out there was that I was absolutely terrified of what my father would do to me if I did step forward, especially in light of the fact that in his twisted mind he was beating John at my behest.  Finally my father was spent, and he stopped.  I hurried back to the camper before John could collect himself and get back there.  When he came in he seemed to have an eerie calm, peaceful, satisfied air about him.

I was afraid of my father well into my twenties, if not into my thirties.

We steadily climbed up through the social classes.  There were two reasons for that.  One was that my father steadily climbed the career ladder and thus earned more each year in salary, and the second was because each year there was one less mouth to feed as one by one my various siblings and I moved out of the house following our high school graduations.  It was only the last four kids who stayed in the house for any length of time after earning their high school diplomas, while the first four got out as soon as we hit age eighteen.

Growing up we were limited in the portions of food we could eat and the amounts of beverages we could drink at mealtimes (except water, which was what was usually on the menu unless there was orange juice available for breakfast).  Popcorn, ice cream, soda pop, candy and those kinds of things were special treats for us.  There were times when we had to improvise a meal in order to have something to eat, but there was always food on the table.  When there was nothing else, we loved the adventure of cobbling together submarine sandwiches from sliced American cheese and cold cuts on hot dog buns, and constructing personal pizzas from hamburger buns with a bit of tomato sauce and parmesan cheese on top.  On the other hand, I hated it when my step-mother bought cheap ground lamb to stretch the hamburger meat out – which she then lied about, of course, as if we were too stupid to know the difference – and when she cooked liver.  The very smell of liver still makes me nauseated, and to this day I don’t like lamb.

Shopping malls were foreign wonderlands.  My parents generally did not have money to spend on toys, and we got new clothes only when hand-me-downs and second-hands were not available and we truly needed something.  Other than the few clothes I got at Christmas and at the start of the school year and those I bought myself, I wore hand-me-downs and rummage sale clothes.  When we did go shopping for new clothes, we went to department stores where clothes were invariably cheaper than in the malls (even before the days of Walmart).  We had very little discretionary income, and less still that could be spent frivolously.  Big ticket items required months if not years of planning and saving.  Nevertheless, my step-mother was a budgetary whiz and, between their income and mine, I did not feel deprived.

We didn’t have foster children in the home strictly out of the goodness of our hearts.  It was also a way for my step-mother to contribute to the household bottom line.  Doing daycare for neighborhood working moms was another way for her to make a contribution.  We benefited handsomely from her management of the annual church rummage sale, and I’m sure she had other tricks up her sleeve, the details of which escape me at the moment.  In short, she did whatever she could to make money here and there and to stretch our funds as far as humanly possible.  Fortunately, she did it incredibly well. 

She came from simple, working class folk.  Along with her parents and siblings, many of my cousins on that side of the family didn’t finish high school either, because they got pregnant and got married or dropped out or because they didn’t feel like it and went straight to work:  blue collar jobs, of course.  There was a rudimentary yet pleasant resort area for the working class about an hour from where we lived.  My step-mother’s family had a history of going up there to camp and while away the summers, and we entered into that tradition.  At some point we moved to a suburb of the state capital about another hour away, but it remained within easy driving distance.

At first we would go out into the boondocks with a tent, no electricity and no running water, and build our own outhouse for the excursion.  Those were the days of using lanterns for light after dark, kerosene stoves and campfires for cooking, carrying in our own drinking water, bathing in the river, and huddling around the campfire for conversation and camaraderie during the cool Midwestern summer evenings.  We would be two or three or four families, in our own little woodsy world.

After a few years my parents and aunts and uncles decided to make it a more structured thing.  There was a campground nearby where one could rent campsites by the week, and the rent was cheap, maybe $5.00 per week.  We took the big tent we had and moved it over there.  I don’t know how everyone fit in the tent, really.  Do ten-person tents exist?  I know that each time we bought something new, we kept the old accommodations as a separate bedroom.  We shortly added a pup-tent to the mix.  Then we upgraded to a rudimentary camper consisting of a metal shell, plywood boards that folded out to become the wings, and a canvas top to cover it.  Then we upgraded to a fancier camper, and so on, while always hanging on to the “spare bedrooms”.

Eventually we had several options for sleeping which easily accommodated us.  To a pre-pubescent or pubescent teenager, some were more desirable than others.  For example, the camper was more comfortable but one would have to sleep in the same room as Mom and Dad, and would probably not be able to sleep in late.  The pup-tent afforded more privacy, but was small.  In short, each option had its advantages and disadvantages.  Henry, referred to by my father as “my Golden Boy”, always slept in the main quarters, the fanciest, with Mom and Dad.

We each had a beer box in which to pack our belongings for the weekend.  These were the slightly rectangular boxes in which a case of bottled beer was sold in those days.  They were sturdy and compact and readily stackable, so they were perfect for our weekend jaunts.  Virtually every Friday afternoon of every summer, we boys would pack the van that was the family car, back before mini-vans and before many people thought of using vans in this manner, though we had no choice.  We timed our departure from the house so that we arrived at my father’s office just as he walked out the door, and then we continued the drive northward.  Depending upon where we lived and traffic and weather conditions, our final destination was between an hour or two and a half hours away.

At some point on the journey, someone would call his or her space, and our weekly ritual began.  There were no rules for when the process should start, except that it couldn’t begin before we were in the car and on the way.  Another rule was that whoever was in the process of staking their claim could not be interrupted, so we would gear up to jump in with our preference as soon as the words were out of the speaker’s mouth.  Otherwise it was completely spontaneous, with different kids starting it different weeks and everyone claiming a different space each week, depending on what else had already been called.

It was in relation to this ritual, on a summer Friday evening after our eventual arrival “Up North”, that my brother got what was for me his most memorable beating.

My half-sister, Pyur – supposedly some kind of exotic Asian name, but I have never been able to find any record of it and, with our last name, I find that hard to believe – is a year and a half older than my step-sister, Aurora, and seven years older than I am.  She is a bookworm to beat all bookworms.  She wanted to do nothing but read and read and read some more, was a kind of quirky, square peg type in high school and, outwardly at least, was not much interested in socializing with her peers, whom she surely found to be largely boring, petty and trite.  She is undoubtedly at the genius level on the intelligence scale.  Aurora, in contrast, was not much into academics and wanted nothing more than to be popular.  I don’t mean that she was the brainless Barbie type, only that like most high school students it was important for her to be accepted by her fellow students and have a crowd of her peers with whom she could hang out and have fun.

My parents put constant pressure on Aurora to include Pyur in her social activities and to invite her to hang out.  Aurora resisted.  Although they had been close when my parents first married, as they grew older and came into their own personalities Aurora simply didn’t particularly enjoy Pyur’s company and didn’t like feeling as if she had to watch out for or babysit her, socially speaking.  I’m sure the feeling between the two was mutual, but I suspect that Pyur was more open to hanging out with Aurora than vice versa.

One afternoon I overheard Aurora complaining to her mother about something Pyur had done or said, or not done or said, and how she was tired of bearing the cross of her step-sister’s social awkwardness, how it embarrassed her, blah, blah, blah, blah.  I can’t recall the specifics of the conversation now, but you get the idea.  It was standard fare.  I made the grave mistake of repeating it to Pyur.  I didn’t do it to be malicious.  I felt she had a right to know.  I also had a foolish desire to protect Pyur from a lack of awareness of Aurora’s true attitude toward her and the unpleasant consequences that might thereby result.  The dynamic struggle between my half-sister and my step-sister – how to still be sisters, one grade apart and sharing the same school and same bedroom while being as different as night and day – was apparent to anyone who had eyes and ears and a brain.  It is highly improbable that Pyur was unaware of it and for me to have thought that she was must have been wholly a product of my imagination – or wishful thinking.

Pyur naively confronted Aurora about it.  Naively in the sense that she must have known on some level that Aurora would deny it, and that it would do nothing to change the situation, and that no positive outcome could come out of doing so.  Aurora did deny it, nothing changed, and what happened is that I got one of the worst beatings of my life.

My step-mother was absolutely livid.  My revelation threatened the image that she cultivated and in which Aurora actively colluded, that all was well and good between the girls and that they were the best of friends.  One didn’t expose her pretenses without paying a heavy, heavy price.  Of course, this was a sub-charade of the principal family charade, so my father was equally insulted and incensed.  This time my step-mother didn’t even have to work her magic act to set my father off.  My parents came downstairs to my room and confronted me, asserting that I had misinterpreted what I heard, or made it up, or had no business repeating it, or all of the above.  They quickly commenced the true task at hand.  I don’t know who threw the first punch.  Or was it a kick?  I was dragged by whatever hair or limb they could grab and pulled up the stairs and into the kitchen, with them beating me all the while.  I’m not sure why the kitchen was our destination.  Were they looking for more room to maneuver?  Were they concerned that if they stopped in the living room they might end up with blood on the carpet?  Or had their sick minds already plotted their next move?  I’ll never know.

As previously noted, my father was good at this monstrous business, ever the creative disciplinarian.  He decided to grab the hose from the kitchen sink, turn on the water, and add some liquid fun.  He kept the device trained on my face.  I honestly thought that they were going to drown me, that I was going to die right then and there.  I was yelling at the top of my lungs, with what I thought would be my last breaths, “I can’t breathe!  I can’t breathe!”.  I heard my father’s voice, calm, collected and cold as ice, say, “If you couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be screaming”.

It was nice of them to help me clean up the kitchen afterwards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We were used to being bounced around, either because of my father’s career trajectory or because of their marital problems.  The world was a very uncertain place.  When we found ourselves in the home of another woman, whom we initially called Mrs. Street – her name at the time – at first it did not seem anything about which we should be unduly concerned.  It fit right in with the life we had been living, in some ways, except that suddenly my father appeared on the scene more frequently.  As time went on, however, it was obvious that this was not to be like any ordinary climb or dip of the roller-coaster ride we were on.  One afternoon shortly after we took up residence there, I asked Mrs. Street if I could have a cookie and she said, nicely but matter-of-factly, “Yes.  You can call me ‘Mom’ now.  Your father and I are married.”  In a life where change was a constant, it was just one more.

It quickly became apparent that something was seriously wrong:  our past life was to be completely erased.  In the world according to Dad, our lives began when he married my step-mother.  We were immersed into her extended family while our previous families faded away and eventually disappeared.  My mother visited a few times after we went to live with Dad, and then stopped coming around altogether.  By default, my father and step-mother became “my parents” while my mother became an increasingly distant memory.

My father never again mentioned my mother in our presence, and never again acknowledged the existence of any relatives on my mother’s side of the family, and neither did my step-mother.  We got the message loudly and clearly, so neither did we, except in secretive conversations among ourselves out of their earshot.  It was the same with my other assorted step-siblings and half-siblings, with the exception of my oldest step-sister:  their previous families also ceased to exist.  Although they forced my step-sister to use my father’s last name for several years, her father would have none of the charade and could not be chased away.  By the time she graduated from high school, she was using her proper birth name.

Shortly after they got married we moved to the suburbs.  Ironically enough, my oldest half-sister looked more like my step-mother than her own daughter did, and if ever there was a comment about that, my parents simply smiled and nodded.  They told everyone that I was named after my step-mother, since our names were similar:  Christopher and Christine.  They would avoid conversations about exact birth dates, as there was no way to explain away the fact that my step-brother, who was adopted by my father and carried his last name, was only five months younger than my sister.  Or perhaps when it could not be avoided they would tell people that he was adopted, since that would have fit right in with the family profile that they methodically cultivated, of a large and loving family which could always find room for more youth in need.  Fortunately for them, his birthday fell in December, so he was not in the same grade as she was in school.  I’m not sure how they finessed the comings and goings of my step-sister and her father within our small community, but they did.  They were extremely skillful tricksters and charlatans, and it is hard to imagine all of the lies that they perpetrated in order to maintain the family image.

My sister and I used to sit on the side of our beds and bounce up and down, rhythmically chanting, “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama … “.  It was a spontaneous and uncoordinated expression of grief and longing.  Where was our mother?  Why didn’t she come to visit any more?  Would she ever be coming back?  Somewhere inside we hoped that in calling for her we might ease our pain, or conjure her up out of thin air.  We never saw her again.

Imagine the result.  I grew up in a household that included his daughter from his first marriage, my step-mother’s daughter from her first marriage, the four children my father had with his second wife – my mother – my step-mother’s son from her second marriage squeezed in among us, and the child they had together.  My step-mother was also a licensed foster parent, so we always had at least two and often a couple more foster brothers and sisters in the house.  These children who lived with us the longest were what in those days we called handicapped:  confined to wheelchairs with cerebral palsy, unable to communicate verbally and often dealing with cognitive disabilities as well.  The others were developmentally disabled or emotionally troubled.  Besides that, my step-mother provided daycare services to a few of the neighborhood working women, so there were usually two or more miscellaneous children hanging around for the large part of each weekday.  And no, it was not like “The Brady Bunch”.

My father somehow managed to get custody of his entire brood.  In the 1950’s and 1960’s, this was unheard of.  I’m not sure how he did it, and whether or not it says more about him or more about the women he married.  After his first divorce he even had custody of his first step-son for a while, a boy who happened to share his initials in reverse and whom he tried to convince was named after him, although the child’s name was in fact completely different.  I read somewhere that it was once predicted that in the future, men would marry three times.  The first marriage would be for lust, the second would be for breeding purposes, and the third would be for companionship.  That seems to be what my father did.  His first marriage was to an attractive woman who was married to her first husband when they met, and was apparently passionate and intense like a flash in the pan.  Some time later he turned his affections toward my mother, who could more than hold her own with him intellectually.  Based on the babies that popped out one right after the other, he clearly wanted to make babies with her.  His last wife was the more dutiful, subservient woman that his fragile ego could handle, and they are still together to this day.

My father collected job titles like he collected women.  He was steadily climbing the career ladder, and that resulted in his having a new job every year or two.  My older brother is fifteen months older than I am, my sister is thirteen months younger, and my other brother is sixteen months younger than she is, and only my sister and I were born in the same city.  It was a city that we kept coming back to, because there were more opportunities and my father kept getting recruited to come back to a better job there after taking promotions to go elsewhere.  That city was also where he met my step-mother, and where we continued to live after he married her, until I was ten years old.

I have one memory of my father from when he and my mother were together.  It must have been a weekend morning and both of them were still in bed, sleeping or trying to sleep, each with their back turned toward the other and facing outward, lying close to the edge of the bed.  I must have been two or three years old, and I was running back and forth between them, kissing each in turn on the cheek and then running around the bed to kiss the other.  I have few more memories of my father from when they were separated and divorcing.

There was the time that we suddenly found ourselves at my uncle’s house, after my father had kidnapped us and deposited us all there.  I vaguely remember his being around during that trip, but I mostly remember the excitement of hanging out with my cousins since we hardly ever saw them.  There was also the time when my mother got into a car accident with us in the car.  I was probably four years old at the time.  My father came to visit us in the hospital, and arrived right at the moment that I was lying there on my back, having developed an erection from having to urinate very, very badly (as males sometimes do) and I had, in the absence of an attendant to let me out of the bed to use the bathroom, pulled up my hospital gown and shot pee up like a fountain and out into the middle of the floor.  My last clear memory is of my father arriving at our house with another man.  My three siblings and I were on beds that were barely made, two bunk beds in one room, one single uncovered light bulb shining down its ugly yellow light from the center of the ceiling.  I don’t remember my mother being there.  It was as if my father and the other man had broken into the house and found us there, alone.  Maybe they had.

My oldest sister is the type of dog and cat lover that other people make fun of, the kind that seems to like them better than she likes other human beings.  One of my brothers risked his life one time to save the family dog, who had fallen through river ice and could not get out and would have otherwise frozen to death or drowned.  Out of all of my siblings, I was the one who was least interested in interacting with them.  Don’t get me wrong:  I was a sensitive kid and was horrified by the situation, which I witnessed, but I would have probably watched helplessly while he died; not my brother, that is, but the dog, for sure.

I was also quite reserved as a kid, shy you might say, timid even.  I was fine interacting with my siblings, but in social situations I was known as the quiet charmer, since I wasn’t loud or rowdy and was imminently polite.  It was exactly the same way that I was with the animals in the house.  I was never mean to them or abusive to them.  I just didn’t care much for or about them.

As I grew up, though, I realized that it wasn’t really indifference at all that I felt.  In fact, I was afraid of animals and figured it was better to keep my distance from them.  Cats could jump on you or scratch you, seemingly without provocation or justification.  Dogs would bark and bite at a moment’s notice, with no ability for us humans to control them.  Beyond the confines of the house, horses might buck or take off at a run or throw you to the ground, and again you may have no idea what you did wrong or why their behavior suddenly changed.  Raccoons would approach the campsite looking for food, and apparently nothing would scare them away.

It was later that I realized this was why I preferred to stay away from other people:  they were just too unpredictable.  They could do and say anything, shifting emotional gears at the drop of a hat.  At least that was what I had seen from the adults in my world.  That was scary to me, and I was afraid of them.  Better to keep my distance, lest I suffer even more at the hands of these people who were supposed to be caring for me.  People were not to be trusted.

i have never seen democrats play to people's fears and baser selves to win elections the way that republicans routinely do.  all you have to do is watch fox so-called news ONE evening to see evidence of this, or read ONE republican fund-raising letter - and compare those to a more rational and reliable news program (like npr, for example) and a democratic fund-raising letter.  pick one, any one, on either side, and if you are able to look at these things objectively, you would see exactly what i mean.
 
i'm so sick and tired of white people being so unbelievably ignorant and defensive on issues of race – and i'm white, btw!  it is extremely difficult to get real about this issue and it's pervasive impact throughout our society because everybody's so worried about upsetting the white people (yes, i mean white AND black people) and no one wants to be labeled a trouble-maker (yes, i mean white AND black people).  why can't the poor, put-upon white people acknowledge what "our" people did historically, and continue doing to this day in a myriad of ways, and the impact of that history on today's society, without getting totally defensive and acting like it's all about "those angry black people"?  and in doing so, implying that that anger is somehow unjustified.  give me a break!  we will never be able to address these issues - and incidentally, get past them - until WHITE PEOPLE learn how to handle talking about these incredibly difficult issues with objectivity and maturity.
 
what i find ironic about most anti-abortionists is that they call themselves "pro-life" but are usually 100% in favor of the death penalty, are anti-birth control for all women, do nothing to work with unwanted, abused or neglected children, do nothing to assist the foster care system, do not adopt as often as those who are pro-choice, etc, etc, etc.  it is all talk and knee-jerk reaction on one aspect of a complex issue.  i would be willing to bet you any amount of money that more pro-choice people are involved as foster parents and volunteers in battered women's shelters, working for justice in the legal system to prevent innocent people from being put to death, and so on - i could go on forever listing the ways in which these people are ANTI-LIFE - than these so-called christians (and others) who are rabidly anti-abortion.  (btw, my comments should NOT be construed in any way to assume that i am pro-abortion.)
 
according to people intimately familiar with them, the memos that cheney has claimed justify the torturing of prisoners do not contain the kind of information cheney claims that they contain.  never mind that nothing else, released or unreleased, based on all of the reports that have come out (including statements of people other than cheney who were directly involved in the actual torture and virtually every independent analysis, both within the government - even in bush's own administration - and outside of it) supports his statements either.  just because cheney says it's so, don't make it so.  heaven help us if that were the case!
part of the reason the memos have not been released is due to an executive order that bush issued, saying that such information cannot be released if it may be relevant to a legal proceeding - although obama could make an exception, or rescind the executive order.  he is apparently considering exactly that.

bush ran up record deficits, while cutting taxes for the weathiest americans (his friends and family, that is), thereby ensuring that the financial burdens for the current administration, and for future administrations and generations, would worsen tremendously instead of improve.  this was after he inherited the first balanced budgets produced by our country in years of both democratic and republican administrations.  and what about the unjust and immoral war that he started under false pretenses, and which is probably in the end what is contributing more to our national "bankruptcy" than anything else?  second to that might be medicare/medicaid, which wouldn't be such a problem if wealthy senior citizens used their private insurance or paid out-of-pocket instead of sucking off of government welfare that they don't really need.  same goes for social security:  how about reserving it for people who really need it, instead of people like john mccain, who has been collecting it for years and is wealthier than most of us could ever hope to be?
 
progressive to me indicates someone who wants to move forward instead of backward, socially, politically, culturally, spiritually, and in all other ways.  frankly, what i have seen in my many years on this planet is that so-called conservatives are basically people who are not interested in actual information about the issues and care more about money than people, and liberals are basically people willing to take a look at all the hard and ugly facts and find a workable solution that acknowledges that people are not made from cookie cutters, and are more concerned with people than money.
 
yes, obama is increasing the deficit in a frankly scary way, but i also hold out hope and continue to believe that when we start doing what we should have been doing all along - for the last few decades, at least - from an economic, financial and business point of view, such as investing in PROGRESSIVE technologies and the markets of the future as obama is ensuring that we will do (i.e., PROGRESSING instead of remaining stagnant and relying on outdated, CONSERVATIVE economic and energy policies), our economy will grow in a way and at a rate that will put a much larger dent in those deficits and will likely do so much more rapidly than anything a republican administration would have done.
 
we can all find something on youtube that proves our points.  the important thing, i think, is to be able to take in all information that comes our way, analyze it critically, be open to other perspectives and to hearing about the lived realities of people different from us, to focus on solutions that work instead of what fits neatly into our preconceived notions and ideologies, and to be willing to change our minds when the data doesn't fit or the solution we pursued seems not to be working.  sadly and unfortunately, what i have observed in my many years is that the OVERWHELMING majority of republicans and "conservatives", are not able to look at our society and at these important issues unblinkingly, with objectivity, and without fitting everything neatly into a box that they have already packed and sealed.

by way of background, i have both bachelor's and master's degrees in social work, with ten years of job experience in between the time i finished my bachelor's and started my master's degree and now almost fifteen years since being awarded my second degree.

as a person who thinks and feels deeply and has had a number of interesting and challenging life experiences (beginning from the time i popped out of my mother's womb, i might add), i found much of the study material required to earn my bachelor's degree to be "common sense" and stuff that i could learn from independent reading and attending professional and personal growth workshops, and just plain living.

then after getting my bachelor's degree i worked on treatment teams in a myriad of settings with a tremendous variety of clients and patients who brought diverse problems and diagnoses to the table.  members of these teams included psychiatric nurses, master's level professionals, doctoral level psychologists as well as psychiatrists, all of whom were licensed and/or certified.  i found that the piece of paper and credentials that one holds do not necessarily mean anything in terms of one's ability to effectively and empathically engage with and treat clients/patients.  frankly, i was often appalled at the conduct of my colleagues, vis-a-vis each other and toward those same clients/patients.

as sort of an aside, at one point i happened to be working in a company that paid licensed professionals much higher salaries than unlicensed professionals, and i happened to be living in a
jurisdiction that offered a license for bachelor's level social workers.  i discovered that i was eligible for this salary "benefit" at the company.  five years after getting my BSW, i skimmed through
my undergraduate textbooks over the course of two weeks, took the exam, passed in the 96th percentile, and got a salary increase of 40%, all in one fell swoop.  licensed or unlicensed, i was greatly respected by my coworkers and superiors for my clinical skills and although most of my master's level peers resented it, my work was frequently acknowledged over theirs.

i was in a financial position that enabled me to return to school to do my masters.  despite the fact that i had earned my bachelor's level license within the previous five years and had been working in
the real world for the past ten years, i was required to do the first year of the master's program, which is usually not required of bachelor's level social workers, simply because it had been more than five years since i had earned my bachelor's degree.  students with immeasurably less life, work and educational experience (i have always been a firm believer of continuing education and development) were allowed to skip the first year.  absolutely no exceptions were allowed; of course, i enquired.  talk about having to jump through (ridiculous, bureaucratic) hoops.

in graduate school, so much of the information presented by the professors - who in many cases had been out of the work world for years if not decades, if they had every been outside of academia at all - was slightly off or just plain wrong (for example:  the names and side effects of
psychotropic medications) that i often felt like i was co-teaching my courses when i spoke up in class presentations, especially during the first year.  although some of my professors undoubtedly found me annoying, my fellow students enjoyed being in class with me, feeling like they learned so
much more.  some professors would even call on me to help them address the questions of other students.

based on some of the comments and questions i heard in class from some of my student colleagues, particularly in reference to their internship (i.e, real world) experiences, i couldn't believe they were being graduated as master's level social workers.  for example, some of their comments revealed gross ignorance about other peoples, places, cultures, religions if not downright racism, as well as incredible naivite (or preconceptions and stereotypes) about what makes people tick (or not).  yet they were duly passed on through, because they technically made the grades, and most internship supervisors don't have the guts to flunk students.

incidently, one of my internships was so cushy and i was was given so little to do that i saw no legitimate reason to stick rigidly to the hard-and-fast 50-minute per session rule.  my supervisor, who would call it a stressful day if she saw more than two clients and would otherwise sit in front of the door to the corridor making fun of clients where anyone passing by in the hall could hear her, literally threatened to flunk me because of that, even going so far as to officially write me up.  how twisted is that?  of course, she was probably a lot more bothered by my relatively dismissive of her concerns about it than the fact that i didn't feel the need to stick to the 50-minute session; but i digress here.

ultimately i moved to california, where there was an ongoing controversy over the oral licensure exam.  after having said all that i have said so far, i must admit that i fully supported the existence of the second exam, much to the dismay of many of my colleagues.  i supported it because i had seen so much incompetence among my professional peers and those with supposedly "higher" education and credentials than i had, and heard so many of what i will call "horror stories" from clients about their past therapists (and i am referring to conduct that was clearly actionable by legal or other authorities, not stuff that "in my opinion ...") that i felt like one more hoop was the least we as a profession could require for potential new members to pass through in order to become licensed as psychotherapists.

ironically enough, by that time i was doing a lot of administrative work and didn't prioritize getting licensed for so long that the oral exam questions were incorporated into the written exam and the
separate oral portion was abolished by the board by the time i actually took the integrated licensure exam.  so, lucky for me, that was one less hoop that i personally had to pass through.

i hope that i haven't sounded arrogant or full of myself herein; that really isn't my style.  my intention is to simply report my lived experience, as it relates to these topics.  my apologies to all of the hard-working, ethical, qualified mental health professionals on the list; obviously, none of this is about you, and none of it was meant to be taken personally.  as far as i know, none of you were my professors, instructors, student colleagues, or coworkers.   :-)

my point in all this is:  i agree that we must have standards in the profession, and that we must hold people to those standards; and as proud as i am of my licensure and as dearly as i hold and uphold it, i also agree that licensing and credentialing are not necessarily the be-all and end-all, in the u.s. or in any other place in the world.

just my two-and-a-half cents.