A Sia song spoke of a one way ticket to a place where you’re taught to cry in your pillow. Hearing that song set me on a course last night of insomniac mania that just snowballed. I was moving from one end of the room to the other in the darkness trying to scurry from the visions hitting me like cannonballs. I’m usually so good at blocking it all out.
Men want to hear about Prison stories. They expect sex and more sex. They don’t want to hear about the lump that forms permanently in your chest from learning to hold in tears, wails, grief, and crying in your State issued pillow. Women who are in prison for life don’t want to hear your Bitch ass whining about a few years. You will get your ass kicked, or in my case, my bed was set on fire my first night in general population. I only have a few scars on my left arm to show from it, little white circles where the wool blanket melted and left hard black burnt crust on my arm as I dove off the top bunk and hit the ground, my senses knocked out of me and dislocation my right shoulder.
Doesn’t matter why you’re crying. You better not let yourself be heard. Grief is contagious. You turn to stone in order to get through to the other side of your sentence alive. If some one comes along and cries, the sound itself creates a rage.
I’m guilty of becoming just such a monster.
I remember the pressure in the chest, the pain in the throat, and the incredible headache that accompanies silent crying. Eventually your face becomes a desert
For some reason I remembered the shake down shack after thinking of silent tears. Before visits and after visits, and after work detail if you worked in a building outside the main prison walls (I worked in the Georgia lottery print shop and ran a printing press) you have to strip naked, spread your fingers and toes, show behind your ears, open your mouth and lift your tongue, turn around, spread your ass cheeks, squat, and cough. This is so if you shoved contraband up your vagina or ass it will fall out. If the officer has cause to believe you still may have something inside of you you can be cuffed and led to medical and be put through a ‘body cavity’ search. My first strip search I was mortified. I was on my period. I was humiliated, ashamed, scared, and I followed the officers instructions, with a lump the size of Texas in my throat, my eyes on fire with tears that I refused to let fall, my vision blurring with them. My nose running. Just fucking naked, raw, choking back tears. I went from 20 to 120 that day. A rage was born, and frankly, it’s never left.
Thinking of that made me clench my teeth, which I try to not do. My teeth are FUCKED from a student surgery when I needed my wisdom teeth cut out. I was shipped to Central State Hospital, the criminally insane hospital which served also as the dental surgery hospital in the early 90s. I did not know dental students would be doing my surgery but it’s not like we had a choice. I woke up with my jaw broken and wired shut, and a man standing in my window with his cock in his hand, jacking off. He had a hospital gown on. He was jacking off watching me. I started vomiting from the anesthesia, and from being startled, which was a horrific ordeal with my jaw being wired shut, so I start choking and flailing, which makes him so excited he ejaculated on the window. And no one did a fucking thing. Once my mouth healed I come to find half…Yes, HALF my teeth were broken. All my back teeth are broke off at the root. A pain I simply.learned to deal with. I try to avoid clenching my teeth because it aggravated the roots and my.jawline will get inflamed. Like now, because I heard a song last night which spoke of crying in pillows which led me to remember being set on fire in my own bed, and almost choking on my own puke while some sleeze ball jacked off on my.hospital window. Fucking criminals. I tell ya.
Can’t live with them, can’t kill them.
So, I’m mad at my.mother because I have a toothache. If she were living well after I shot her drug dealer the pain would be almost welcome…but she relapsed this year…last week to be exact. I told no one. The rage of all the wasted time for this junkie that cares for no one.
These are words men don’t want to hear. They get a hard on thinking of women having orgies, or at the very least of being a man in power over helpless prisoners.
They don’t think of UnHye sharp or the many others who hung themselves by the door so when abusive officers opened the door they are welcomed with the smell of piss and the sight of
bloated purple faces.
Nope. It’s all about the prison orgies.
And ok. God damnit. I did have my share of threesomes in there. I did. Rofl. And it was good, and I deserved it. I paid half my teeth, my right shoulder, and my twenties for it. I had TONS of sex, with so many women I stopped counting when I hit 100. And it doesn’t matter. None of it mattered. It made for good poetry and something to think about and fixate on so you don’t cry.
I have not been on this site in a long time. It seems I’ve lived an entire lifetime since I last posted.
I had a bit of a nervous breakdown with mom being there with me.
I packed whatever I could get into my Nissan cube and I just left.
I tired starting my business up in the next county over but mom found out where I lived so I moved again.
That’s not the only reason but it’s one of many.
I have been living with some friends, renting a room and grooming in the garage.
I miss privacy
I miss being naked
I miss red bean buns
I miss my life
I do have a nice friend whom I see very regularly now. Didn’t think I’d ever date on a regular basis again and he’s BLONDE with BLUE eyes, if you can believe that.
I’ve got 6 months to save up to get us a place. It’s rained non stop in Georgia. Every day it rains I loose three hundred dollars. Cold hard truth. I have not paid a car payment in two months but the insurance and everything else is up to date. I am short on money. So very very short. But I am away from that crazy pill popping mother of mine even though I had to pretty much run for my life.
My sister is having her labor induced Sunday and mom will be there. I am too much of a coward to go up there. Or I am too wise. Either way, I stay off facebook and it’s been quite a relief, not being at my family’s beck and call when it comes to mother. I gave her the better part of my life. I have done enough.
Its time for me to focus on MY daughter now and making sure she does not end up like mom. She needs my focus and support and a healthy place to live. I don’t know where that will be yet but I have faith something will come together. I get up every day, I wash my face and get dressed, and I go to work. That’s all a woman can do.
I was awoken by the phone at 5:30 in the morning yesterday by mom.
She asked if I’d come pick her up that morning when I did my puppy pickup in town.
One would think I would come up with an excuse, but I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say but ok.
I assumed she’d spend the day and want to go home by evening but she had three bags packed and waiting.
Taking everything in stride I accept the situation. DBT calls it radical acceptance, lol.
I’ve cooked for her and she’s pretty much been alright. It’s not easy watching someone go through detox cold turkey from opiates and psychotropics. She kept overdosing on her pain pills because she takes an entire monts worth in one week and then buys more off the street. Her clinic found out and cut her off, violation of narcotic agreement it’s called.
Yesterday I took the broth from the neckbones I’d been cooking and put some ginseng root in it, some thinly sliced radish, nappa cabbage, garlic, pieces of pork, and baby oyster mushroom. This morning I made porridge and had her drink some Odwalla superfood green juice. Some coconut and chai kiefer. She cant really take in solids yet but so far there’s color to her cheeks and she slept 7 hours last night.
I’m quite floored at what she’s taking herself through without an exact plan or goal. She’s just decided she should take the opportunity to clean out entirely so they can start her out with a fresh slate.
I don’t know if she will stay clean and stick only to what the doctors prescribe when she finds a new pain clinic to treat her. I know we have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at 2. That’s all I can go on now.
I dont’ have anything eloquent to say this afternoon. There’s no pretty words to describe being numb so as to be in a state of radical acceptance. It is what it is. Don’t you hate that expression? But sometimes that expression is all one has in order to get by.
In the end we have to accept that the parents we have are simply humans who happened to give birth. I am sure my children feel the same way.
I had the best morning. I woke up next to a warm fuzzy guy for the first time in months.
Yep guys, I went out with someone. I’ve seen him before, and being a glutton for punishment, he kept trying even after I said I wasn’t into it.
I’m glad I gave it a second go.
It went pretty damn well until I jumped up from a hot making out scene and went tearing through his room looking for his pants. He said “Why do you need my pants?” And I said “I’m looking for your belt” and he sat up and exclaimed “What? No!” and I laughed and explained to him I didn’t want to hit him, silly, I just wanted to wrap it around his wrists. This brought even more of a reaction “No! I’m good. No belt, ok?” And it was ok. I found out that I could have perfectly hot sex without tying someone up, down, or upside down.
NOT my ideal, but I took what was given, right? And I am grateful.
He has 3 jobs, is way to busy to just show up at my door, and he excuses pretty much everything I do or say because he thinks I’m crazy. It’s great. And he didn’t call me today. I LOVE that shit. He sent a video tonight via text of a band I’d never heard of. I love that kind of lack of communication that says so much more than a boring annoying phone call. I did not have time for romantic revisits of the previous night via phone.
I had to go get Mom out of the hospital. Her pain clinic cut her off because she was taking too much of her Roxi’s.
She had a whole month to find a new doctor but instead she decided to go through her months worth of Roxi’s and (I wont spell these right probably) nurontin, colonipin, soma and something else I forgot the name of. She partied like a rock star and two weeks later was out of everything. She was then left with the ordeal of having to explain to a new doctor why her blood would be so elevated with drugs and how she’s out of meds already. So she just hid under her covers and puked and shit on herself for a week. I was out of town visiting my daughter when my sister called asking me to take mom to the hospital. Thank God. And then I decided to spend the night with my friend. I could not face going back to my home town and having to choose whether to help Mom or not. So I went and got my Fuck on. Bad daughter, yes.
But I had a good time.
And he didn’t ask questions
And I was able to come home, unload my bags, go pick up Mom from the hospital and take her home without him calling me 10 times like some guys do.
I bought all the ingredients to make Black Bean Noodles tonight but by the time I got home and got things sorted out there was only time for Bean Sprout Soup. Quick, filling, easy, and cheap too.
My 13 year old has been in residential treatment since July.
She has been labeled with a string of various acronyms. Three doctors have tested her and all results have come back with Sociopathic tendencies which refrain them from allowing her to return to me or society. Her being separated from family only makes her more manic so she’s acting out there, which only perpetuates their decision.
My little girl was the only one of my children that was completely discipline resistant. While a baby, if she wanted something and I would not let her have it, she would have violent fits, and although I still would NOT give in, she would keep it up for days, Unlike most babies that forget as soon as you offer a distraction, she would fixate on being told no. As she got older her hitting and shoving children resulted in being suspended various times and her tendency to get off the bus and run away trying to get back home resulted in her being placed in special ed. By the middle of first grade I started homeschooling her. Trying to do what’s right, I got her a therapist and she’s been in treatment her entire life.
Labeled as severe ADHD she was on adderall until she was about 10, then she was diagnosed as BPD. The bipolar drugs made her see and hear things that were not there and she start cutting. I took her to the psychiatric hospital three times in hopes they would keep her long enough to have medication regulated, but she would be sent home in a week or less with a new drug. Deciding her life was not worth the risk, I pulled her off the drugs and kept her regulated through an all natural diet in which she detested me for, but it kept life tolerable for months at a time. In 6th grade I put her in public school because I did not feel confidant progressing any further. She was able to control herself for longer periods by this age. School was going so well, she was far above her level. I felt I would be robbing her if I tried teaching her high school lessons so the only thing to do was put her in public school and have her tested. I let them know her issues but they did not take me seriously as she looks like such an angel. She met a bad boy and things went straight to hell. Within a few months events unfolded that landed her where she is today and there is nothing I can do. I’ve had to swallow this pill of truth in the past months. The Grief has taken me though a hell I did not know existed outside loosing my husband, she is alive yet I grieve her childhood. I see children playing and laughing and it fills me with such a profound sense of loss.
My sister called me crying one day asking me to watch the video chandelier by Sia. She told me to wait until I was done working for the day, but I really needed to see it. She didn’t tell me why but I figured it was really important. I’d heard the song and didn’t see how it was relevent to me, but I watched anyway. Tears poured down my face. There was my child. In all her beautiful blonde rage, rampaging through the house trying to rid herself of something she can’t see. It was her, there on the screen, and for the first time I felt like I understood my baby. And I wanted to hold her, but I couldn’t and I wanted to talk to her, but I can’t. The pain was unbearable. I was suddenly so immensely lonely, the ghosts of my husband and my daughter’s voices and faces everywhere. I got on OK cupid, created a profile, and proceeded to fuck the pain away. It worked for about three months. Every stranger’s skin made for forget for a few hours who I was, where I’d been, what was happening. It became an addiction. I did not realize this was a form of self harm until the day I heard Johnny Cash on the radio.
My breakdown hit me quite unexpectedly. I’d been driving along happy as a clam after getting my booty call fix and Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” comes on the radio. The lyrics cut through my walls like hot steel. My vision was blurred by tears. I tried to choke it back because i was driving, but nothing I could do would stop the hysteria building inside me. I was passing by my sisters street. I call her screaming I need her she tells me come on, come now, hurry. I am pretty sure in all my sisters years, she has never seen me cry. I hide it well. Not that night. I pull in almost hitting her mailbox. I fall out of the car into her arms and sob the tears of four decades.
Years in my sisters arms pass. She is silent as she has never ever seen the interior of the fortress walls. She does not know what to say. I said “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. This song came on and I just fell apart. They may take her for good. What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to her?” She tells me we can fight this. We will get lawyers. I say thank you thank you and I hug her.
I look up and my mother is on my sisters Porch. She is looking down on us with the most heartbroken look on her face.
And the crazy bitch says
“I just can’t believe Kimberly is who you’d call if you got upset. I guess this is what I get. My daughters don’t need me.”
Now folks, I may like Human Puppy Dogs, I might like dressing up in latex and tipping ashes in a willing subs mouth, I might like brushing a guys teeth and washing him in the tub. But if I were truly crazy, I would have acted upon my instinct to go up on that porch and punch my mother square in her 300,000 dollar face.
But instead I say, “Aw mom, Kims was the closest place to go”
There’s a woman I don’t know in my living room. It’s 12:06 am.
I’m exhausted from grooming all day. I’ve got 4 boarding dogs here also, which added extra activity to the day.
All week I’ve looked forward to my last grooming dog going home tonight so I could start cleaning. It’s been a super busy week so I’ve been unable to clean other than to just shop vac hair up and keep going. There is dog food everywhere from the dogs kicking their bowls over in their kennels. I need to do two sinks full of dishes. I need to clean the toilet and swiffer the entire bathroom free of dog hair which is in the cracks of the walls, on the light fixtures, etc. I was looking forward to doing all this and then taking a wonderful shower in my clean tub free of dog hair. And then someone knocked on my door at 9pm tonight about 10 minutes after my last grooming dog went home.
The guy next door asked a girl to come over but he was not home when she got there. She’s from another county about an hour away. She has no car and no phone. She paid her last 10 bucks to have someone bring her out here. It’s raining, and the neighbor is not home. She asked to use my phone to call him. I’ve met her once before so I decided to let her in. She called him and texted him and about an hour later he responded. He’s at a party high off his ass and is making no sense.
She’s upset and she’s crying and finally I calm her down. I tell her everything happens for a reason and sometimes our higher self intervenes and prevents us from being in a place where something might happen. She is rational now, yet obsessed with why he did what he did, what is he going to do now, when is he going to get someone to bring him back, how can she get a ride to where he is at…thank god my son has my car.
The guy next door is a jerk. That is an understatement. He’s a fucking asshole who beats dogs. I’ve been over at his place in the last three days doing reiki on his Pitt Bull and administering doses of tart cherry juice. The dog tore through the door screen and ran after someone walking up the street so my neighbor caught him and apparently held him down and punched him so hard in his back hip that it tore the muscle. The rear thigh muscle is so swollen and tender the dog can barely walk. Today his ankle swole up as well. He doesn’t have money to take the dog to the vet. The dog is mean and needs training but no matter what advice I give the guy he doesn’t take it, he just takes my free reiki and holistic medicine. This guy is the type of guy that makes a killer out of a puppy. Poor dog. The day I went over there to check him out for broken bones the dog was growling at me and showing a bit of fang. I claimed his territory by staring him down and slowly backing him into the corner, then stood there talking calmly to his owner about the ‘accident’. Finally I was able to squat down next to the dog. His tail started wagging. After about 20 minutes I had checked him over and got him to open his big jaws for me to squirt a medicine dropper of tart cherry juice down his gullet and that’s all I could do. I left feeling helpless. I can’t call the cops or the pound because the dog is fear aggressive and once he bites he will be put down. Maybe it’s for the best? It’s not my call.
I worry for this girl. She is angry the guy isn’t here. I find a gentle way to suggest she may want to calm down before she talks to him because she does not know the circumstances of why he got stuck at that party. I can’t tell her I’m afraid he may hit her if she gets demanding and loud due to him letting her down. I can’t tell her that his punch is so hard it ripped the thick powerful muscle of a PittBull and I’m afraid of what that punch could do to her face. I can’t tell her that I can’t get involved in domestic situations because it hits too close to home. All I could do was ask her if she was hungry. She was. Desperately. I told her I all I had ready was Kimchi and rice and she said she did not know what that was but it sounded awesome. So I fed her, and she loved it. We had sliced Asian Pear and she took a picture of it with her phone for some reason. She told me alot about her life. Her mother killed herself when the girl was 17 and her life has been a downward spiral since then. She’s 21 and does not know what she is going to do. I tell her I did not start my life until I was 30 and she can do anything she wants to do. I don’t have cable but I put on “The Host” DVD and came in here to smoke a cigarette and gather myself.
I want to take a shower and clean my house. I want to get naked and look at the library in Oyster. I want to write my daughter and pre address 10 envelopes so I’ll have them ready to rush the letters out to the mailbox. But I’m in here with this girl, and for whatever reason, I know in my heart this is where both of us are supposed to be.
I imagine I’ll loose half my followers in this post. When I decided to write a blog it was to write my story. I will not sugar coat things and I will not do anything to make myself look like a saint because I’ve been the opposite. This subject is a focal point in my childhood and there may be people out there who had the same issues but are too scared to talk about it. It’s totally cool. I’ll be the scapegoat. These things need to be said because there are warning signs that just possibly could save your child from becoming a monster. Put the dirty books and DVD’s in a lockbox people. Your kids are finding them and looking!
In the 70’s children were to be seen but not heard. I was good with that. If I was very quiet in a corner somewhere the adults would forget I was in the room and they would go about their conversations and pot smoking and record playing as if I were not really there at all. This was a very powerful feeling. I could listen in to all of the grown up secrets right there in plain sight. I could hear who was screwing over who when my mother got on the phone as I hid behind the towering stereo speakers that were so popular then. I knew way too much for a elementary aged child, but I didn’t understand what it was I was hearing. I knew things that got me into trouble when I would decide to join the world for playtime. I didn’t go seeking it though, it would come seeking me. And when it found me I blew that neighborhood out of the water.
Little girls would come to my house and ask if I could come play. I would hide so my mother would not make me go. She’d feel sorry for the kids and shove me out the door. While out there among them I was a stranger in a strange land. I had a difficult time playing childish games. I liked to ride bikes, to skate, to play basketball or jumprope, but I was never good at just sitting on the sidewalk with the gang and shooting the shit. I’d inevitably repeat something I’d heard my parents say and someone would go home and tell their mother. The neighborhood kids wouldn’t be allowed over to my house for a few days but by weeks end someone would wind up at my door again, crying because I would not go out to play. I would lie and say someone was already in my room and that my mom didnt want more than one child over at a time. My not wanting them made them so want me. Not much has changed.
I was a perverse little thing and there is no damn good excuse for it. I wish there were. I wish there was a big human drooly monster in my closet I could point a finger at and say it’s his fault. But I was not molested. In the end it came down to the fact my grandmother taught me to read before I was 5 and by the time I was 8 I was reading hustler.
While my parents argued in the next room I decided to hide. That day it was under their bed. Low and behold there was an awesome magazine with a bunny on it. But wait. How weird! The bunny is on a cross! I open it up and …nothing. There were naked women making stupid faces. I didnt feel bad looking at it. I didnt feel like I needed to hide the fact I was looking at it. I didn’t know it was supposedly wrong. I found out it was wrong when my mother walked in and caught me looking at it and beat me with the magazine, then went and screamed at my dad for not keeping his dirty books hid better.
The dawning of my sexual self began with the Easter Bunny on a Cross
If you are so much as two years younger than me you would not understand how it was to be 8 and that innocent. Television back then was so innocent. There were not even tampon commercials. When I would repeat things to neighborhood kids that got me in trouble my mom just whipped me, but she didnt tell me what exactly was wrong. The moment my mother freaked out on me for looking at that book a monster was born. All of a sudden the puzzle pieces came together and I realized THIS was screwing, THIS is what freaked the kids out. I was not sure what was happening here but I knew I’d NEVER gotten mom’s FULL attention in such a manner. I realized now EXACTLY what my words to those kids meant. My dad’s embarrassed reaction by barely being able to look me in the eye made me feel so powerful I knew I had to have more of what those dirty books contained. And thus my porn and sex addiction began.
Apparently my dad was a porn addict because there were Hustlers and Penthouse hidden all over the house. I was home alone all the time, dad worked all the time and mom was running the roads. The minute she walked out that door the search was on. I always found what I was looking for and there was always new material to look at. I felt no sexual thrill at all. Instead it felt as though I were gaining ammunition, or that I was gathering information that made me powerful.
At about 10 years old I started befriending some of the kids who would come over to ask me to play and I let them in on my little secret. I showed them the books. They were horrified, yet fascinated, and my possession of these adult things made me the holder of the golden goose. . They were putty in my hands. I decided it would be great fun if we took our clothes off and pose like the models in the magazines. We would do that, feeling very powerful and grown up. I was ALWAYS the man. Mom came home one day and caught us and beat me sensless, sending the little girl crying out of the house. I’d be furious during those beatings, but take them silently. I never felt shame nor did I feel guilt. Perhaps if I’d felt a sexual spark during these encounters I may have felt shame, but it was all a game. A game that made me feel like the ruler of the neighborhood. Everyone wanted to play with me but no one talked about what they’d do over there. The one who was allowed in my house that day was the winner, but what they thought they’d won I don’t understand because I would torment the shit out of them. The fact that they even came back for more disgusted me and made me determined to amp it up a notch each time.
I became more bold as months went by. I’d read so many of my dad’s penthouse forums apparently it had corrupted my young mind. I had a girl take her clothes off and tied her to my desk leg with a shoe string. Then I got dressed and just left her there and went to the kitchen. I could hear her screaming and crying and I was just laughing my ass off. I got ketchup and mustard and poured it all over her, I poked her with my baton saying something like “but you love to play with me and it’s my turn to decide what we play. You’re a dog and you made a mess on the floor and you have to be tied up” I remember telling her she was always crying at my door wanting in and this is what happens when you come in. I made her promise to leave me alone and never come back. She promised! I wanted to let her go but I’d tied the knots tight and her pulling made it worse so mom came home and found me there with a naked girl tied to my desk and ketchup and mustard all in the cream-colored carpet. I got beat with a vacuum cleaner so badly mom sent her best friend in to make sure I was still breathing. I could hear her screaming on the phone that she thought she’d killed me. I was not dead. I just layed there with my eyes closed and let her hit me with that vacuum vowing that no matter what she did, I was going to keep doing what I was doing. I did not care.
It had been about a year since I’d acted out because mom wouldnt allow kids over anymore. So instead I was over at someone’s house and they wanted to play house. There were three of us and I was voted the baby, which I was mad about. I was always the daddy. Not fair! So when she went to change me “into my pajamas” for naptime, I peed all over her. The thrill at the horror across her face was classic. That thrill was soon replaced with shame and fear because she jumped up and ran to tell her teenage sister, who locked me in the bathroom to wait until the parents got home. I remember taking everything out from under the cabinet and putting it in the tub and hiding under the cabinet. But they found me, of course. I dont remember what happened after that. For some reason my memory of those insane times just vanishes after that moment.
My next memory involving sex or relationship is when I was 12. I played with the boy across the street because the girls were no longer allowed to play with me but none of the girls would tell the others what I’d done for their parents to have me off limits. Me and Jeremy (lots of jeremys in my life) were best friends. He was a year older than me and he just seemed to get me in a way the girls didnt. He didnt care that I didnt talk. He did all the talking. We biked, we went to the school playground, we went to the junkyard. And one day on his swingset he bent over and kissed me, and I punched him square in the face and knocked him off the swing. I was furious! But I didnt know why! I ran home crying my eyes out and refused to ever play with him again. I was so upset, because he’d taken my power away in that one kiss. I liked him and was so mad that he’d ruined everything by liking me “like that”. After school I’d want to go over so bad but would not even look his way. He sent me letters through other kids telling me he wanted to go with me. I liked him and didn’t want to. I had weird butterflies down there when I thought about him kissing me and that made me want to punch him more. Boys ruin everything.
When I turned 13 my parents moved to another city and then the year after that they divorced and we moved to the country. I was a punk rock girl in a hick hillbilly school and got the hell beat out of me all the time for my smart ass remarks and anti social attitude. It was in high school that I met the love of my life. I was walking through the halls with my head down so as to not make eye contact with anyone and I heard from way up high “Hey blondie, nice leather” I looked up into the most beautiful slanted black eyes I’d ever seen. All my reserve went right out the window. He was the most amazing thing I’d ever laid eyes on, with a tall black mohawk and eyeliner on his already slanted eyes, piercings everywhere and the thickest juiciest lips. I’d never punch this one for kissing me, I knew that immediately. He said “What’s up, I’m Ed” and just like that, I was his. Still, to this day, I am still his. He’s dead though, so there’s that.
Wrapping up I want to state that later in my 20’s I realized how horrible I was to those poor kids. Someone should have reported me. Maybe they did. Things like this just were not investigated back then. It was embarrassing so it was not talked about. And all the beatings my mom gave me just made the situation much worse and psychological than it needed to be because no one bothered to find out what was wrong with me.
Everyone will feel better knowing that in my years of Prison I received weekly psychotherapy and counseling. I revealed my childhood acts to my counselors who helped me realize why I did what I did, why it was wrong, and investigate things about myself that would make me act the way I did. It all revolved around power. The need for it, the addiction to it, and the desire to maintain it no matter the cost. It directly related to the violent fight my parents were in, and my mother walking in on me looking at a dirty magazine and the fight stopping immediately because I had done something so intense it trumped the fight.
I hope those girls can forgive me for being so cruel. I was the same age as them but I still was more mature and should not have done what I did. I would venture to suggest to them that they look into why they were willing to do whatever it took just to get me to play with them. What was going on with them at home or in their heads that they wanted so badly to be with someone who refused to open the door to them and once I did, allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do just so they could stay in my presence.
Despite all the years of therapy one thing has not changed, if you sit crying outside my proverbial door, and irritate me to the point that I open up and let you in, it’s my game, my rules, and you will be punished for being so weak as to need a monster like me.
My mother was born with severe cleft palate and underwent 13 major surgeries in order to design her face. My grandmother said it was the worst case her doctor had ever seen, she had no nose, no upper palate at all. Just a gaping hole. She had to be fed with an eye dropper. My grandfather would not hold her or look at her. He blamed my grandmother for the travesty. Certainly nothing like THAT came from HIM. It was 1952 and you just didn’t see this type of thing often. He was an old-fashioned man who worked with his hands, his father an Irish immigrant who spoke very little English, he’d had no one to teach him to read and no time for school so he was illiterate and frankly pretty closed-minded. Surgery was out of the question because he couldn’t wrap his head around spending a life’s savings on something that would take a miracle. So grandma, in 1952, seduced a wealthy department store owner and black mailed him into sponsoring my mother’s surgeries…and the other two girls as well. From the way the family tells it, my grandfather knew full well what she was doing and would even send her to the man’s store to borrow money for bills. I guess that’s when she fell out of love with him, if she’d ever loved him at all. My mom and her sisters have more memories of their mother’s boyfriend than they did of their father. When I was growing up mother would take me to visit with him and I swear to God he is the ONLY man I ever laid witness to my mother actually respecting. When I tried to understand who he was she just called him Uncle Pete.
Grandmother never loved the man who gave her daughter a face. She told me she could never respect a man who would let his own wife live with the shame of her husband doing what he was doing. She told me he had odd tastes in the bedroom. This was drunk talk and I was a little girl lying there silently listening so I thought she meant that she didn’t like how he decorated his bedroom, rofllmfao. When I was 12 during one of my mother’s visits to him I found a stack of magazines in the bathroom where women on the covers were always damsels in distress TIED to something, a tree, railroad tracks, etc. Grandma said she hated her husband even more, who could go to work and face those men who knew his wife was the kept woman of another man. How could a man live with himself knowing his wife was seeing another man, she wanted to know. I never gave her answers. I was her confessional. She could tell me these things knowing I didn’t understand and even if I did I would not tell a soul.
Edna’s girls wore the best clothes, carried the best handbags, were entered into Piano, Ballet, Basketball and Beauty Pagents. And my mother was slowly over the course of 15 years given a steel palate with a gorgeous set of dentures and a face that would for the net 40 years be the downfall of countless men despite how hard she was on her body with drug use. Until 8 she was a monster whose dad wouldn’t look at her or touch her, who kids stared at and pointed at in school, who made mother’s cry to look at her. She may have become a ribbon winning beauty queen, but inside she will always be that little monster with no face who became addicted to painkillers before the age of 10 because of countless surgeries. I don’t forgive her nor can I overlook the way she raised us…all I can say is I understand HOW she became an addict so young.
Edna Jackson with her three girls.
Grandmother’s behaviour taught the girls that if they want something, they must work hard to find a man to buy it for them. Mother was a master at her craft, one sideways look from her crystal green eyes as her platinum hair swayed with the swing of her hips would make a man drive into a phone pole. She acquired her first husband at 15, promptly left him in the first 3 months of marriage and he died on the way to her sister’s house to beg her to come home. After that it was one victim after another. My blood father is not the man she was married to but a married man 30 years her senior she met at the VFW while her husband was away in the Navy. My mom slept with so many men that I can’t keep count. They sniffed her out like bloodhound chasing a fo. I remember being woken up one night by her yanking me in the floor and putting her hand over my mouth and saying “Ssshhhh” as we hid behind the bed…and I hear my father’s boss at the window tapping “Pat, I know you’re in there. I know you have another man in there” While my father was away on a hunting trip she is cheating on his boss whom she is sleeping with, with yet ANOTHER man she has in the house. This is how I was raised. If I looked the slightest bit lonely or sad her answer was to take me shopping. We would get in the car and drive to the workplace of any number of sponsors she had and she would say “Be right back” and then come out with a big smile on her face about an hour later and take me to Davidson’s department store or Lionel Playworld. Men were playthings, yet dangerous. I blessedly have forgotten the faces of the men who would beat her in front of me for toying with them. She would drive each and EVERY single man she EVER slept with to hit her. My father must have had something pretty special because he held on to her longer than anyone else did, finding her and dragging her home countless times. But finally, when I was 13 years old, she found the one who made her leave my dad and stay gone. My stepfather Robbie. She wanted a house in the country, so he bought her one. He worked night and day to support this beautiful blonde queen he’d managed to acquire. He was a loving gentle man, a bit of an alcoholic, but even when shit faced drunk he was sweet to me…which is what made mom start hating me. When I was little I was just a nuisance but at least a cute one. When or how I’d grown up she wasnt sure but she didn’t like her admirers looking at anyone but her. And even though I have some pretty horrible memories and even scars from the days I went from moms baby girl to her rival and enemy, I understand the how and why she never had any girlfriends. Everyone was competition. Inside she was not the beauty queen but the girl without a face. She could not let any other female anywhere in her vicinity or her man may realize she is no beauty queen at all but a Black Widow spinning him in her cocoon.
I did, admittedly acquire some bad traits from the women in my family. After all, what is the first thing I thought of when I couldn’t get a job? Using men’s weaknesses to my benefit. What it does to you was whispered into my little ears from a tender age before I knew what they meant by the drunken ramblings of a woman trying to drown her shame. But how it is done was learned by watching my mother. I knew we were about to go somewhere before she even said a word. How? Baby Powder. Yes, Baby Powder. It was the 70’s and long hair was in. My moms platinum blonde hair was made even whiter by baby powder. She would come get me from playing and ask me to hold the blow dryer as she bent over and shook her head back and forth as it dried. And after, she would dust baby powder in it to whiten the roots and around her temples. She smelled like baby powder and suntan oil. She BAKED herself in the sun so the contrast of white hair against shining tanned skin and light green eyes was striking. And when she smelled like baby powder and had black mascara on her white eyelashes, I knew we were about to go shopping. We just had to stop to visit one of moms friends first. Luckily listening to my grandmother’s guilt and shame made more of an impact. Just because I know HOW to get money out of men doesn’t mean it’s the preferred method. It was an emergency go to. My dad taught me three very important lessons that influenced my life more than anyone.
Education is the single most important thing a woman can do for herself. He would drill me on my spelling words and test questions Thursday nights before Friday tests. A’s on my report card got me $10 each (A whopping amount in the 70’s) He didn’t get past the third grade, being one of 10 children, he left home before he was even a teenager to become a Golf Caddie in Atlanta. There he met the owner of a large landscaping company who took my dad under his wing. Eventually he bought my father a bulldozer and helped him start his own company. (He also was the man outside my bedroom window when mom had me in the floor trying to hush me. Bless his heart.) I learned by watching him that working for yourself means freedom.
No matter how strong a man is, his mind and heart are weak, and he will punish a woman for exposing that weakness if he has pride. So it is our choice, we can cater to their pride or we can challenge it. And only if we challenge it and get to their mind and fuck with it will we acquire their heart. If we cater to it we may be able to hold on to him as the motherly home maker, but he will go after the woman who can fuck with his mind no matter how hard he tries not to.
No matter how much a man worships the ground a woman walks on, once he has lost it to the point of hitting her he will always hit her.
Now we come to the part where I’m glad I don’t have an editor to bitch at me. This is why I can’t write a novel. I’ve got to go get ready to visit my daughter today. She lives in a residential facility in Atlanta, if I have not mentioned it already, and remembering it’s time to visit her made my other thoughts go right out the window. So I’ll just abruptly end this here. No witty ending or nothing. Plus I totally got off subject. Luckily I can cut out what I need and make another post some other time when I feel like editing this, or I may just leave it.
Sorry! LOL
Shears Tears and Rice 