Twisted – The Early Years

 

You’ll notice, in the picture above, how happy I am next to my father.  I love the sight of his face & large hands around me.  I only wish it had lasted longer, since my parents were divorced when I was 6 & he died when I was 10.  Suddenly, there was no more happy.

I used to completely blame my mother for the events of my childhood, but then I realized that the death of my father was actually the worst thing that happened; that part I can’t blame her for, just everything else.  And you can take your comments about forgiveness and hopefully choke on them.

Mom was the oldest in her family and quite possibly just born a natural bitch, although I search for an explanation to her psychotic tendencies.  Her little sister remembers having to run & hide when they were left alone or when her big sis was in a mood.  To this day they are such opposites it’s hard to imagine the same genetics could have produced them both. 

Their baby brother, Butchie, drowned on his 2nd birthday after following his puppy to a creek which ran through their farm.  It was so traumatic for my grandmother that she suffered a minor stroke and the side of her mouth always drooped afterwards.  My Auntie Jo was born in the aftermath.

I’ve always thought that much of what happened later must have been somehow linked to this horrible trauma: my mother’s insanity, my grandfather’s alcoholism, my grandmother’s OCD & my aunt’s perfectionistic drive to succeed wonderfully at everything.  The yin and the yang.

My parents, Floyd & Mary Lou, were married on Friday the 13th of November 1959 and my mother wore her best black dress, an auspicious and telling beginning.  I was born in June of 1960 on Father’s Day.

As my mother prepared to attend a party planned to celebrate her elopement, she learned that her favorite cousin had died in a corn elevator accident.  Corn elevators are enormous metal bins filled with dry shelled corn, two or three times as tall as a house.  Cousin Bill tried to walk across the middle of the thing while cleaning at the top, fell in and suffocated.  Another possible sign that did not bode well for a happy marriage?  Who knows.

My sister Penny arrived in August of ‘61.  We are named after twins in a set of Mom’s favorite teen novels written by Rosemary Du Jardin.  I was always very glad that I got the name Pam.  Perhaps Penny feels the same way, but I’ve never asked.  Dad wanted to name me Tina, but Mom figured I’d be really fat and they’d call me Tiny Tina.  Thanks, Mom, for your unending high expectations.

Penny’s claim to fame was smearing the contents of her diaper onto the walls near her crib for entertainment.  She was quiet, sweet and round, and obviously very bored. 

My brother Jim came along in February of ‘64.  He’s the reason Mom is holding her coat closed in the picture above.  Jim is the famous one.  I loved him, and still do, because he tortured my mother and never let up.

Jim threw kittens into the yard and the dog ate them.  Jim made Kool-Aid in the toilet and oatmeal on the kitchen floor.  He broke my mother’s favorite set of porcelain chickens by slamming them to the ground (he had to climb on top the refrigerator to get to them).  He flushed my Avon pink sundae perfume bottle down the toilet and we had to pee at the neighbor’s house. 

He was thrown out of pre-school the very first day for hitting another child over the head with a chair.  He somehow locked himself out of the house in his underwear on a freezing morning and the neighbor had to make a call.  He opened up all the Christmas presents before Christmas arrived.  He was a really big boy who rocked himself incessantly, something I now know is an indication that children are attempting to soothe themselves.  No one else was doing it, so he taught himself.

* * * * *

Fortunately for me, I began having extended visits with my grandparents before I was even a full week old.  Grandma never spoke badly of anyone, but once told me that my collar bone was broken when Mom threw me out of the highchair.  I don’t think she’d have said it if she wasn’t pretty certain.

I will acknowledge that my mother was very young, only 19 when I was born, but that was pretty common then.  We lived in a tiny little house in Fisher, Illinois and I was too young to remember much. 

Dad worked hard but was a simple guy.  He was not fantastic with money.  My first memory is waking up in bed alone with him when my mother was in the hospital having my sister.  I was 14 months old, he said “Penny” and I said ”Money?”  He had his ring finger chopped off in a cement mixer.  I adored him. 

So why did Mom go on to have two more children?  A lack of good birth control?  That’s probably the correct answer.  She does not like children, never did.  She has been very blunt in telling me that “my dogs have done more for me than my children ever will.”  Because of course the point of having children is what they do for you?

We had a spot in the wall behind the kitchen table where Mom had thrown the sugar bowl at my father’s head and missed.  She hung school artwork over the jagged hole.  She also stayed out late and had affairs with other men.

Dad was notified of the upcoming divorce when the Sheriff appeared at the door with a signed complaint during dinner one night.

There was nothing simple about Mom.  She began working at K-Mart and I remember my great-grandmother saying she would like to “blow that place up.”  She knew Mom was messing around with some guy from work.  I remember wondering why my little brother was playing with a strange man on the floor. 

My parents divorced in 1966 and my great-grandmother bought mom a house to live in, gave her a job at the car dealership she owned, and hoped to control her.   

There were actual physical altercations my aunt can remember, when my grandma and great-grandma tried to stop Mom’s carousing ways.  They could not.

Mom began taking diet pills and became very thin after the divorce.  I remember she wore a sparkly sequined short-short dress on New Year’s Eve 1967 and she was hot.  What I did not know was that she had begun dating my eventual step-father, Donnie, a boyfriend from years before.

* * * * *

Mom hooked my soon-to-be step-father in like a big fish.  In all fairness he was a decent guy, just not too smart when it came to his choice of women.  His most noticeable physical attributes were a kind smile and large ears.  Later I would accidentally discover they were not his only over-sized feature.

Mom’s real love was sex.  When Don died in 1979 she sat at our kitchen table and said, “Who will ever satisfy me sexually now?”  She’s a fucking idiot.

I found out a wedding was to occur when my soon-to-be step-sister, Jodi, a year older than I and in the same school, informed me of it in the school bathroom: “Hey, I know who you are.  My dad is marrying your mom.”  I had no idea who she was and I couldn’t imagine the words coming from her mouth could possibly be true.  She & I would spend the next 7 years sleeping in the same bed.

Don had three children who lived with him in his mother’s house.  They came to live with us: Jodi (8), Scott (7) and Shannon (3).  Jim and Scott roomed together, Penny and Shannon, me and Jodi.  Jodi managed an ingenious escape when she became pregnant at 16 during a summer trip to her mother’s in Kentucky.  How bizarre that I never saw her again until my brother’s funeral 32 years later. 

I found out last year that Scott and Penny were much closer than most step-siblings, unbeknownst to me at the time.  We were all looking for some kind of emotional grounding & support, often inappropriately.  During high school, if I was home, there was usually some boy or another in my room with the door locked.  That’s a whole other story . . .

As a little girl I would visit my father on weekends and cry before I went, then cry before I came home.  I did not like living with a man I didn’t know, had never even met before the wedding.  And when my mom would get drunk and sit on his lap, sticking her tongue in his ear, I wanted to puke.

At first it seemed like a big party, new kids to play with, lots of wild unsupervised time while the parents were newly into each other.  But then mom began gaining weight, lots of weight, and she was miserable. 

I’m sure her husband was miserable too, as he had married a fat, screaming wildebeast whose desire it was to ruin the lives of all around her.  She was mean to us, but so much meaner to his children.  It was a true Cinderella story times three & a nightmare all around.

And then my dad died and was rarely mentioned any more, since he had been replaced long before in my mother’s mind.  The funeral was a nightmare, the casket closed in front of everyone.  My step-sister told me afterwards that I didn’t really love my father, since I didn’t cry in public like my sister did.

My mom was probably downstairs making out with my step-father while that was going on. 

I wish I was more forgiving, but I’m not.

* * * * *

Grandma died just before Christmas my freshman year of college.  My step-father died that following March.  It was unbelievable.  I’d only been away from home for six months and the entire structure of my family, shaky as it was, had fallen apart.

My mother had a nervous breakdown and her best friend’s son moved in as Mom’s lover.  I was in college & my mother’s boyfriend had worse acne than I did.

Mom let my sister’s boyfriend move in and two of my siblings were not even out of high school yet.  Since Don, a clean freak, was dead, Mom let the house completely go organic.  There was enough mold growing in the shower to convince me to get out a scrub brush when I was home for a visit.  Let me tell you, that is absolutely incredible.  I had never cleaned anything before without being forced to do so by a screaming lunatic.

For a while I moved to Oregon, eating ice cream and smoking pot.  That was the year mom told all my siblings she thought it would be funny to put a dildo in my Christmas stocking since I was becoming so incredibly uptight, in her opinion.

I believe it was also the same year that Mom got so smashed at a party she was shaved in the pubic region by a bunch of young guys I knew.  She was unconscious at the time.

I compared myself to the girls I lived with in the dorm at school and felt so unbelievably inferior and out of place, but there was nowhere to go.  I began gaining weight.  I had discovered that losing myself in men was not a good solution.  Mom had systematically trained me to be just like her, but I began to realize that I didn’t want to play the role. 

Pretty incredibly, I did graduate from college.  I moved around a lot and had so many crazy relationships.  I had been programmed to stay in school, but never taught how to live a healthy life. 

At 25 I was living in San Francisco, got pregnant, and sent my mother a cryptogram to let her know.  I still think that’s just funny as hell. 

My childhood was over and from that point on I became the mother, the cause of any and all future therapy needed by my own children.

My Childhood – Totally Fucked Up