The Truth is in the Middle

A very close friend recently said to me, "You've had a lot of bad things happen to you."

Yes, I have.

I have also had a lot of good things happen to me. They are happening right now.

Sometimes with such great joy comes the opposite - fear.

Is it the fear of the worst happening? That life can't really be as good as it seems? Prepare myself for the worst - then I won't get hurt.

How about preparing myself for the best?

Think of the best. Think of the worst. The truth lies somewhere in between.

And no one knows what will happen. No one knows.

Carpe Diem!

A Big Responsibility

Watch very carefully, Jenny. If you make a mistake Daddy could die.

Mommy is showing me the two insulin bottles. She is normally the one to "draw" his insulin each morning and leave it sitting next to his breakfast.

This summer she will be at work and I will be staying home with Daddy to work on the cars. It will be my job to draw his insulin in the mornings.

It's very important to tap the bubbles out of the syringe. If there are air bubbles in there and he injects them he could die.

Why is she telling me this (it turns out it's not even true)?

Why is she making such a big deal about this? Is she really worried he will die?

Or does she want me to kill him?

I would do it if she wanted me to. I'm not afraid. I wouldn't even feel bad.

What am I thinking? It's not normal to think about killing your Father is it?

I'm only 8. Other 8 year olds don't have to think about this stuff. I can't tell anyone how I feel.

No one.

Do I ask Mom if she wants me to kill him? Do I tell any of my friends that I think about killing my father? How about a teacher? Family?

No. Just file it away. Accept that you are different. That no one can understand.

Why would they give me this responsibility for my Father's life? I'm only 8.

Weakness

"Jenny, are you sure you don't have any money? Check your pockets again."

I check again even though I know for sure there is nothing there.

We're walking to Des Moines right now. That's what Mommy told me when she finally arrived at the nursing home two hours late. I knew something was wrong as soon as she was late. This morning she dropped me off to visit Lily, the 94 year old neighbor who used to babysit me until she moved to the nursing home.

I was waiting in the lobby for her when she arrived on foot to get me. All I could think of was to get out of the building and away from the worried and pitying stares of the staff. I hate them.

She didn't tell me what happened but I can put things together pretty well by now.

There was a small incident that set him off. He escalated to the point where she had to run out the door - afraid. There was no chance to get her purse or the keys to the car. She just had to run.

Did you check all the way deep in your front pockets, Jenny? Are you sure you don't have a dime?

I check again for her. She has already walked across town to get me and now she tells me we are walking all the way to her work in Des Moines. I am skeptical of this from the start. I don't see how we can possibly walk this far. It takes a long time to get there by car. She wants to make a phone call but neither of us has even a dime for a payphone.

We've been walking along the highway for quite awhile now.

"Jenny. This isn't going to work. You can't walk fast enough - we won't get there before dark."

So now we've turned back towards Norwalk. I don't know where we're going. I'm not sure if she knows.

"If I could just borrow a car for the night. It's really no big deal - just a disagreement."

The phone rings at the Waltzes house. It is Daddy asking if they have seen us. We don't know the Waltzes that well - their daughter has babysat me, the husband likes to tinker with engines. They say, "No." they haven't seen us. I think they realize the urgency now and they are going to let us borrow their son's VW bug for the night.

Sitting now in the VW I am filled with a sense of physical relief. I don't think I've ever walked so far in my life. My legs hurt.

I'm excited now, too. It feels like an adventure now. It is just the two of us. We are going to spend the night at the pre-school my Mom directs. She says we will sleep in the cubbies with big pillows and I will be able to play with any of the toys I want - that we will play together.

There is also a sense of hope. Maybe we won't be going back this time. This time seems like it was really bad. Maybe it will be just the two of us from now on.

"Glenn. It's me. We're in Des Moines."

Stupid! No! Why is she calling him?? Why?

I can see what's coming.

"I know. Okay. I'm sorry. Okay, we'll come home tonight. We'll be leaving in a few minutes"

So that's it. We're not spending the night. We're not sleeping in the cubbies and playing with the toys together. We're going home to him again.

We walked all that way for nothing. We went through all this for nothing.

She didn't even teach him a lesson.

We're driving in the little Bug that seemed so exciting before and we're going home.

I am so angry.

She is weak.

I hate weak.

I am not weak.

Alone

I spent a good portion of my childhood in my bedroom. I never lacked for toys or books due to my Mom's willingness to overspend to feel better about our situation. What I lacked was anyone to talk to. My Mother and I didn't discuss my father's volatility other than whispers about what we would do to protect ourselves as each situation arose.

My father's blindness did make some things easier. He couldn't see the things she bought for me. He couldn't see that she had trimmed my hair despite his express orders not to let our hair be touched by scissors. The Old Wive's Tale about blind people having enhancement of their other senses is true, however. He could smell if someone had a piece of chocolate in the other room. He could hear a drawer opening. A footstep creeping.

I once had a therapist ask how my Mother and I could have been so brutalized by a blind person. She obviously had no idea about the control that an abuser exerts on your very being.

Sure, we could have dodged a fist, ran into another room but we still had to live with him. Avoid the punishment now and it would be that much more painful later.

My mother did try to get help. She called the police. In the '70's the police did not get involved in these types of things. She called her father who had no money to help her leave but did ask if she wanted him to, "come beat up Glenn". She turned to their church. When the Bishop told my father that God didn't want him to beat up his wife he forbid my mother to attend church any longer and didn't himself return until he found out he was dying. She turned to friends who were unable to help. My father was very insecure about her leaving him - he was afraid to be alone without anyone to help him with his illness or disability. He told my Mother many times that if she left him his parents would hire pricey lawyers and that she would never see me again. He was able to create enough fear, doubt, and guilt in her that she stayed.

So there was no choice for me but to take whatever punishments he decided to dole out. For me, many times, they were not physical. It was different - canceling my party the morning of my birthday because I went to the neighbors house without asking, requiring me to use the (scary) bathroom at the park across the street from our house because I had used too much TP, sending me to my room for entire days because I was in the way.

Ever since I was a little girl I have felt alienated from other humans. As if I don't really think the same way as them, that they had no way of understanding what it is like to be me. I felt different.

I lived in a 100 year old house filled with a large collection of fragile, inconvenient, and uncomfortable antiques. The other kids at school mostly lived in new housing developments with new furniture.

My father was blind and walked with a cane.

My father restored antique cars and had as many as a dozen in our specially built garage at any given time. He was always out in our driveway working on one of the cars.

On the weekends we usually either went to a horrible swap meet or auction out of town to look at car parts or, even worse, some weekends we had to dress up in clothing from the era of the particular car we were going to drive to a car show. The worst was when people would get so excited to see us all dressed up in the old car and wave excitedly. I was so embarrassed for their stupidness and I hated them.

My father was always being written up in one newspaper or another as a stellar example of what a blind person can achieve - a high school teacher, an old car collector, blah, blah, blah.

It seemed to me like anything that other people did, we had to do differently. Anything that other people owned, ours had to be different.

It's funny because as much as I hated all this differentness as a kid, it is something I prize in my adult life. I don't want to do the same things as everyone else. I don't want to look the same, have the same things. I want to express my individuality.

So maybe these "weird' things I could have accepted about my childhood if I had only had someone to talk to. Instead I have always felt as if I was an outsider. I like to be alone. It is easier to tolerate loneliness when you are not in the presence of others.

Ghosts, Witches & Mice

I was convinced that our house was haunted and this was reinforced by my Father.

A Victorian farmhouse is built of a collection of creaks, pops, and the sound of creatures inhabiting all corners.

Our Victorian farmhouse also had a small door into the crawl space of the house. It was about 3 feet square and was located in the wall at the foot of my bed. When my Father saw me peering around their shoulders the first time they opened the door (the same day I fell down the stairs) he turned to me and said, "That's where the witches live."

Whether he also planted the idea that the witches were going to open the door while I laid in my bed at night, pull me into the crawl space by my feet, and no one would know where to find me I can't say for sure. All I know was that I lived in mortal terror of the witches and practiced laying myself as flat as possible in my bed, feet turned completely in, head to the side so that it wouldn't look like anyone was under the covers.

Also in my large, but long and skinny, bedroom were the only "closets" in the entire house. I put the word in quotations because all they were was the frame of a closet - a wooden skeleton and two long rods interrupted only by a narrow passage to a narrow window. All of my parents clothing and coats hung from the one directly across from my bed. At night they became ghosts all lined up and watching me. Women and men all in a row mutely watching me.

I was afraid to get out of my bed. I would hallucinate that my Mom was standing in the doorway of my room and I would hoarsely whisper, "Mommy, I'm scared." but then I would look and she wasn't there.

My Father found these fears, along with my phobia of the mice that ran the house (despite my Father's best efforts to capture them in live traps and release them into the new housing subdivision where the rich folks lived) to be absolutely hilarious. He fed into them with his jokes, his sharing of my fears with friends and family as if it were a big joke.

How one could do this to a child? One of the hardest things for me as a parent is to see my children frightened of things that are either not real or can't possibly hurt them. It pains me because I know there are REAL things to be afraid of in this world and I can't decide if it is better to tell them about these other things now or let them find out the

Such an Angry Young Man

My father was a bitter man.

Some people have described him as sadistic. But I disagree. I don't really believe he took actual pleasure from hurting others.

No, he was more about punishing others for not understanding what his life was like. It was just that his punishments were so cleverly angry.

After two years of significantly declining health, my father was diagnosed with Juvenille Diabetes at the age of 12. It seems amazing to many that it took so long to diagnose something so obvious but as my Grandmother always said, "They just didn't check those things back then".

Once he was diagnosed he spent over 2 months in the hospital, away from school and other children. After my Grandmother died I found a box containing a scrapbook she had made from his time in the hospital. It contained every single one of the menus from his stay in the hospital along with other trivial "mementos" of his time in the hospital. It also contained numerous letters from his classmates wishing him well. It seemed apparent that he was a "school project". You know, "Let's all practice our writing skills and send letters to the poor little sick boy".

Now I am simply projecting here, however I do share many aspects of my Father's temperament and I can assure you that I would have felt annoyed by the smothering love and constant fretting of my Mother and humiliated and angry to be the class project. Maybe he felt like this, maybe he didn't. Maybe I can understand this because this is how I felt after my Father's death.

As a result of the delay in early treatment and the general progression of the disease, my Father began to lose his eyesight when I was four. It was a slow process however by the time I started Kindergarten he had lost all of his vision except for the ability to perceive movement and shadows.

His anger over this disability was the source of such great bitterness that he was compelled to punish any person who he felt did not "know what it was like" to be blind.

During the time he was losing his sight his parents came from California for a springtime visit. They were attempting to be helpful around the house and had been helping my Mom take down the storm windows on the house. One of the windows was left laying on the porch when they went inside for lunch. Upon discovering this, my Father went full tilt. He ranted endlessly about how dangerous it was to leave something lying around like that where a blind person could not only step on it and fall but also cut their feet (diabetics have poor circulation and injuries to the foot can easily turn gangrenous).

Now one could easily understand his frustration up to this point. It was a hazardous situation and he was worried about what would happen to him once he was totally blind.

But his anger and bitterness wouldn't allow him to drop it. He decided as "punishment" that his parents must put on blindfolds and walk around the block using the white canes of blind people. My Grandparents obeyed out of fear of his anger. When they returned his anger had still not dissipated and he ordered them out of our home and insisted that they return to California early.

My Grandparents did leave the house but were forced to check into a hotel in Des Moines because the flights were too expensive to change. My Mother brought me to the hotel where they were staying to say a brief goodbye to them. They all admonished me not to tell my Dad that they were in a hotel. They had no need to worry.

I knew that the ability to lie, keep secrets, and be one step ahead of my Father was the key to my s

Experimentation

In case you haven't guessed...

I am experimenting with various writing voices.

I'm trying to find the right voice.

Tell me what you like. What is the most compelling? What makes you want to read more?

Don't Tell Me What To Do

I can do whatever I want.

Right now.

I have two hours before anyone can tell me what to do.

I wil not do anything right now.

I am doing nothing.

I love it.

I love doing NOTHING.

Oh, and riding my bike, too.

I do love that.

I had a ride yesterday that made me feel alive.

Alive!

Only outdoors can we seem to feel truly alive!

Finally

The call I've been waiting for came today.

Channon and I were sitting in Mrs. Zittergruen's class talking about the frogs we would be dissecting next week when the office runner came in with a slip of paper asking me to come to the office.

When I walked in the door and saw the look of pity on the Receptionist's face as she softly said my Mom was, "on her way to get me" I knew that it was only a short while before I would get the news.

I felt completely blank. How was I supposed to react when I heard the news? I forgot. I guess I should probably cry. It wasn't too long before Mommy pulled up in front of school.

She was crying when I got in and then she said it...

"Jenny. Daddy died this morning."

She cried more. I felt like a deer in headlights.

Act sad! Quick!

But I was supposed to spend the night at Lisa's house tonight! Do I dare ask if I can still go for the sleepover?

We walked in the door of the now even more haunted house just a little while ago. As soon as I saw all the crying people I knew...

Don't even bother asking. She'll NEVER let you spend the night at Lisa's house. If you ask she'll know you're not even sad.

I'm in my bedroom now. The place I've spent most of my past 12 years. My room is usually safe. I will stay here and let everyone think I am too sad to be around them.

If I stay here no one will know how mad I am. I'm so mad. I really wanted to spend the night at Lisa's house. Why did he have to ruin one last thing for me when he died??

It's not fair.

How long