The Importance of Being Earnest

There was a time when I did not believe in anything. I did not believe in the the promises made by a boy who said he would call the next day. I did not believe in the possibility of miracles so fervently prayed for. I did not believe that tomorrow would make much of a difference in the conditions under which I lived. And I did not believe that "fairness" was a word that I could ever apply to the circumstances of my life. My goal now is to try and be positive in thought, word, and deed. I would also like to say that one of my other goals is to forgive those who took it upon themselves to attempt to execute my spirit. It took years but the instinct to keep my head above the raging waves won out, and I am here to bring to light the evil done in the dark. We never know what we have truly escaped until in hindsight, we look to see the destruction left behind.

I have spent many years coming to terms with the past. It does not go away or become less terrible over time. In my case it has made me mad as hell, and this is part of my way of not taking it anymore or keeping the secrets that held us as prisoners. The past is there to remind us that it can and will happen again in the future, perhaps not to us, but to another innocent whose life is up for grabs. I continue to wonder what I could have possibly done to recieve such treatment at the hands of my own mother. She did not think about the future. That I would remember and count every single moment until I was free of her, and that when I was, I would never never forget. Never.

My mother will tell you she did nothing of the sort. I will tell you she did. And I believe that you will find that my words echo those of others whose mothers or fathers said and did the same. Today I am going to believe that my tomorrow will be better. I will believe that some good will come out of the badness. And I believe that we must learn to never let the light go out. I will keep my goal of forgiveness on the back burner, and tend to it when ready. But not today.

Pillow Talk

This is my most favorite time of the evening: the time when my husband and I lie in bed and talk before he drops off into a dead sleep. Tonight he has me laughing, because on Animal Planet they are capturing an 11 foot alligator in Florida. We are due to leave in five days for vacation in the Sunshine State and based on the program, he believes we are due to find ourselves an appetizer one late night for this prehistoric creature. My husband is many things but brave is not among them. My heart opens and I laugh uproariously because when God made my husband, he broke the mold, which is why I love him so. He is truly one of a kind and we were blessed to find each other when we did. I was walking through Lincoln Center Library and he was watching me through the stacks. The short story is that 21 months later we were married at a church in Brooklyn. The long story is that I never dreamed that I had that kind of luck.

His one lament is that we did not meet each other sooner, so that we could populate our home with six or seven kids. We are blessed to have one. I am in a way the brains of the operation, and I tell him that it was the plan of the guy upstairs that we meet when we were ready for each other. Three or four years earlier and it would not have worked because we were not ready for each other.

I am pleased to get what I got when I got it. My only regret is that we did not have more children. A basketball team would have been more to my liking, but I am immensely happy with the one I have. We were given a once in a lifetime chance, and it all fell into place.

My daughter is well beyond that stage where she waits to be tucked in, and her stuffed animals to sing good-night to her. Right now, even though it is late, she is probably IM ing her friends before she calls it a night. I am still on duty, as mommies always
are, and it is my duty to make sure the teeth are brushed, the doors locked before I can lay my head on the pillow and call it a night. I am always on the case. I like that.

Thank You

I want to thank those of you out there who have recently discovered my blog. Thank you for the reading, the sharing, comments and support. I want you to know that I write because I have to, and I write for those who won't or can't face the hell that engulfed them at a time in their lives. The physical, mental, and emotional trauma that is associated with an abusive childhood never goes away and affects your actions for the rest of your life. You may be an abuser yourself, or care so little about your own existence that you sell your body for a puff on the crack pipe. It was foretold by my mother and one of my brothers that my destiny lay somewhere between the crack-whore and your average run-of-the mill money for sex whore. I became neither. The abuse led me to years of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and physical and emotional ailments that plague me to this day. I never thought much of myself, and like many, looked for love in all the wrong places. However, I was fortunate enough to find therapy, prayer, and myself at the bottom of the ashes. In two days my husband and I will celebrate 15 years of wedded bliss.

It has not been easy and many times we surely drove each other to the brink of insanity. Our blessing was that we loved each other enough not to take the easy way out, and more importantly, we had God on our side.

My daughter will be twelve in a few months, and I will tell you my greatest accomplishment has been loving and nurturing her. The day I brought her home from the hospital, I wondered how I had lived my life all those years without her. Her birth was like winning a special prize. Now I was complete. I would have a childhood after all with her. My pleasure came from being the best mother I could be. I am grateful that in spite of everything, I chose to live in the light.

For those of you out there who have been down this road, I want you to know that you are not alone. I shudder to think how many of us there are out there. I am not a doctor nor do I profess to know what steps to take to acknowledge what happened to you. The best I can offer is this blog, to begin at the beginning, and do what is best for you to heal your soul and life.

I have been there. And I am still.....here.

Family Ties

It would be wonderful to be a part of a real family. I have brothers older and younger than myself, spread out over several states, and hardly is there any effort on any of our parts to get together or see one another. Even though we are well into adulthood, when we do speak, it is as if we were small children again. Even as adults, we remain in the hierarchy that we were placed in as kids. My mother's love for her youngest son knew no bounds. Whatever was his pleasure, it was my duty to provide. Today, he has a flourishing profession, yet he communicates with no one. He did with me for awhile until last year when he kept telling me he had sent my daughter a birthday gift two months late. When I told him I still had not received it, he deduced that is was irrevocably lost in the mail and that he would have to go out and buy another gift card, since it was impossible to trace. I told him not to bother. That was the last I heard from him.

His success he keeps to himself. His greatest fear is that we may ask something of him that he has made abundantly clear that he is unwilling to give. To that, he remains anonymous, hidden from everyone except his wide circle of friends. I do not blame him for his distaste of us.

That is his choice, to be sure. Our mother, who loved (as much as she was capable of) some and despised others, certainly is not counted among one of his chosen. Boys were for the most part, good. Girls, (I was the only one) were whores just waiting for an opportunity to shame the good name (ha!) of the family and to entice all males within whistling distance into lurid sexual encounters. It is interesting to note that when I was about sixteen that I learned that my mother had indeed, had her first child out of wedlock. Worst still, my father was not his father. My father himself told me that he had married my mother when he returned from the war in Europe. The man who had impregnated her was long gone. As awful as we were told my father was, she still managed to have five more children by him.

I never knew any uncles or aunts on my father's side. We were not allowed to know them. My mother told us that my father was deeply involved in a sexual relationship with his sisters and therefore any direct contact with them was forbidden. To say that my mother's preoccupation with the sex act in all it's unnatural forms was revolting is an understatement. It makes me wonder even more deeply about her upbringing, what she may have done or witnessed or worst, been forced to be a part of. I do know however that her mental illness must have been at it's peak by the time I reached puberty. A girl blooming into a woman sent her into neurotic fits of fury. She would make me pay for being young and innocent. Neither state lasted long.

My daughter is currently with her cousin and friend at her cousin's house. It is an opportunity for me to try and get some things done that I normally don't get to. In a few days we will pick her up and I will return to being the taxi available at a moment's notice, the ATM for the mall, the hostess of weekend slumber parties. Then we will all be off to Florida to stay with yet another cousin. We will spend time together, eat, play and most importantly have fun. That's what families do.

Andrew

As much as I deal mentally and emotionally with the tragedy that is my mother, I now and then find myself thinking about the man who was driven from his home and never got to know his children: my father. It is no secret that he drank, or even the fact that he had a girlfriend who I got to know in later years and was very kind to me. She was a simple woman and what attracted me to her was that she was soft-spoken and sweet. She never made me feel moronic, never called me names or made me feel ill at ease. I was actually glad for my father to have a companion who treated him well, washed his clothes and cooked his food. My mother never did those things for him.

My mother never had a pleasant word for my father. As far as she was concerned, he was the singular cause of all her troubles. We were taught to hate this man and so we did, to please her as children are wont to do. It was his fault, she would lament to us and my grandmother, that she had just missed winning the Exacta at the OTB because he was too cheap to give her enough money to bet with. That's where she would be camped out for weeks at a time, finally coming home with nothing to show for her time away except filthy shopping bags filled with marked up racing forms. Frustrated, she would take out her anger on me for the alleged sexual trysts she and my grandmother perceived that I had committed in her absence. It took so little.

In spite of all the animosity and all the times she drove him from the house, my father never said a unfavorable word about her. The sad fact is he truly loved this exceedingly crude woman; no matter what he did to please her, it was never enough.


In the years before he became ill, he would often stop by my apartment in the early morning hours and ring my doorbell. I would rouse myself from sleep and run down the five flights of stairs. We would sit in his cab and talk for hours. Sometimes he brought me food; chickens wrapped in rough brown paper, packages of Vienna Fingers cookies. If he could not nourish me as a child, he would do it now. He told me things that I knew my mother would vehemently deny.

One of the stories he told me made me realize all over again how fortunate I was to have survived life with her.

During what might have been called a brief period of prosperity, my father was able to take out a few loans to buy a washer and dryer ( the cord of which she used to beat me with) and a few other household items. I remember a time where there were new sheets and pillows and cases, and at least on the outside, there appeared a degree of normalcy. But it was short lived and my mother insisted that he return to the loan company and take out yet another loan. My father told her it would be too much of a burden to repay yet another loan so it was something he could not do. All she knew was that she needed the extra money for gambling so she gave him a choice. Find a way to get some money or she would disfigure me (her words) and make me swear in a court of law that he had beat and raped me. I could see how much it hurt him to know that my mother was capable of such an ungodly act. My father found the extra cash.

Three years after I was married and he knew he was dying of cancer, he wanted to leave New York and return to the mountains he always loved even though he rarely got to be there. My mother would not allow it. He paid a friend to move him to my brother's house in South Carolina and there he died. I got the news and cried for him and for the daughter that would not know him.

Although he was my father, I never called him "Daddy". That was too personal for my mother He was Andrew. And that is how I will always remember him.

The Bad Beginning

Ok. Here it is. This is for all you women out there like me. Stuck somewhere between 6 and 46. Or anywhere other than here. We are wives and mothers, executives and teachers. We go about our daily lives like everyone else. But we are not everyone else.

I decided to start this blog because I know you are out there. The ones who toss and turn at night because the dreams, memories and flashbacks never really go away. They are always there beneath the surface, ready to interrupt our stability and turn us back into what we were many years ago. As a child I was my mother's whipping post. I don't mean spankings and a slap on the wrist. I mean brutal, near coma beatings that I endured day in and day out from the time I can remember till I fled home at 18. Even after I ran for my life, the abuse continued in ways other than the physical. There was the emotional and mental abuse and I have the scars to prove it.

You see, there is much more to the story than the mere beatings. There was the abject poverty, the constant fear, the knowledge that there was no one to protect me except me, and I didn't know how to do that then. Years have passed and sometimes I am better than others. I have an 11 year-old daughter. As a sweet little baby, I gently rocked her to sleep and sang her songs that I made up myself. Her stuffed animals entertained her with dancing and conversations that came from my mouth but began deep in my soul. She would have a wonderful childhood even if I didn't. She would make it up to me. It was the only gift my mother ever gave me. She taught me what kind of mother NOT to be.

I will return to tell you much more. Perhaps you can tell me about your experiences and we will help each other to be complete.

Bye

Andy