I found out who bought my childhood home. The county finally uploaded the sale paperwork to their database, and I looked up the guy who bought it. He is a registered sex offender (child pornography) who was previously in prison but is currently out on parole. When you Google his name, the first hits are all about his crimes and subsequent sentencing. It seems fitting. He sounds like an appropriate owner for the home that is still the setting for most of my nightmares.
It would feel weirder if a family with young children lived there. That wouldn't feel good.
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Saturday, April 28, 2018
Tips for Keeping Your Sperm Donations Secret
Step 1: STOP DOING IT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU'RE GOING TO GET CAUGHT!
A few months ago I crossed paths on Facebook with one of the many, many men
who advertise online to donate their sperm to strangers. He said he was married and had a daughter. He said his wife knew he donates sperm and is
okay with it but wants him to keep it discreet.
He used a very common fake name, as well as photographs of other people
instead of his own. He used a fake birthday, fake age, and fake place of employment.
He seemed to use his sperm donor user names exclusively on sperm donor websites. This guy knew what he was doing.
He posted on a lot of sperm donor websites though, and little bits of
information started to come out. For one thing, he
uses photos of himself with his daughter on some of the sites. There are several photos – too many of them
both to be stock photos -- and it seems like the people who had actually met him
for sperm might say something if they weren’t him. Reverse Google image search unfortunately yielded
nothing.
On another site he listed an actual small town name for his location
instead of the local metropolitan area like he had on all the others. Someone who had availed him of his services
for “natural insemination” (sexual intercourse) gave him a glowing online
review that called him by a different and presumably real first name. Other ladies told him happy birthday on Facebook
when his account said it was still months away.
That’s still not a lot of information for a person to go on. But apparently it’s enough for Google. I had been entering everything I knew about
him – first name, date of birth, town, user names – and it finally yielded the MyLife
listing for someone with his first name, date of birth, and small town. Maybe he used his sperm donor user names or email alongside
his actual name too; I’m not sure. I
looked up the full name MyLife listed and suddenly I was looking at the man
from the photos with his daughter. Suddenly
I was looking at his wedding announcement, his wife’s Facebook page, his
Pinterest, his LinkedIn, his father’s YouTube page. He had deleted most of his social media accounts
that weren’t about donating sperm under fake names, but it didn’t matter.
I wonder if his wife really knows about
his donations. And if so, I
wonder how she feels about it. I wonder
if his 5-year-old daughter knows about her half-siblings yet. She already has seven according to the sperm donor profile with her sweet little girl face all over it.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Spending My Childhood on Antibiotics
I complained of stomach aches a lot as a child, from as early as I can remember until I was in high school. As much as I loved seeing my friends at school and socializing, the idea of inadvertently doing something wrong or getting in trouble terrified me. I approached almost every school day terrified that I'd forgotten to do some piece of homework, or that something had been assigned during one of the many hours I'd spent zoned out and daydreaming without even realizing it, or that I might get scolded for something I didn't mean to do wrong. In hindsight, my stomach aches were probably a combination of stress and my looking for any excuse to get out of school. In most cases, my mother wouldn't let me stay home unless I could produce physical evidence that I was ill -- either a fever, which I ran only a few times in my life, or vomiting.
My mother took my temperature rectally until I was at least six. When I asked why I couldn't use the oral thermometer like everyone else in the house, she said I would bite down on it. I promised I wouldn't. I don't even know what the problem would have been if I had -- it was a plastic digital thermometer, not one of the old style ones made of glass and mercury. When I asked why we couldn't get one of the digital thermometers they stick in your ear at the doctor's office then, she told me they aren't accurate enough. I wonder now how much of her insistence on using a rectal thermometer was as a punishment for my daring to ask to stay home. I think it was at least a little bit punishment.
On the rare occasions that I was allowed to miss school, my mother took me to the doctor without fail. I remember her saying something along the lines of how, if she let me miss school, I wouldn't be allowed to just stay home and lie on the couch watching TV all day like she did in my absence. If I didn't go to school, by god, we would spend the day at the doctor's office. She wasn't going to incentivize my sicknesses by letting me lie around at home all day.
No doctor ever found a source for my stomach aches or proposed that they might be stress related. With few exceptions they told us instead that I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed antibiotics. I also had strep throat a lot, for which they injected me with penicillin and I was allowed to rest at home for 24 hours without being treated like someone who was trying to get out of something. Getting a positive strep test was like winning a small lottery to me and always made me happy.
Once when I was eight or so, my mother found an open packet of Sweet Tarts candies on a file cabinet in the family room. I don't know how long it had been there -- it was a hoard house after all -- but she mistook them for antibiotics and got very upset at me for not taking them. "Those are candy," I explained. They weren't even mine. Dante might have left them there, but they were from one of the communal baskets of candy my mother left scattered around the house, so it's anybody's guess. I always took all my medicine though. It never would have occurred to me not to take a dose of the medicine she gave me, let alone leave them scattered on top of a file cabinet. To this day, I have never stopped taking a course of antibiotics before they ran out.
I was also about eight when I got my first vaginal yeast infection as a result of the antibiotics. My entire vulva felt like an inflamed mosquito bite, and it itched so badly I writhed on my bed and cried. I didn't know what was happening, but my mother did. When she took me to the pediatrician and announced that I had an yeast infection, the nurse asked, "Oral yeast infection, I assume?" When my mother said, "No, vaginal," the nurse raised in eyebrows in surprise. When she left the room, I asked my mother why she had done that. "Vaginal yeast infections are normally just from having too much sex," my mother told me. "But yours is from all the antibiotics."
She bought me Monistat antifungal treatment from the drug store later that day. I didn't need the vaginal suppositories, she said, just the cream, but she insisted on applying it herself. When I asked uncomfortably why I couldn't just do it myself, she argued that I wouldn't be able to see where to apply it. "I don't need to be able to see it," I told her. "I can feel where it itches." She denied my request and rubbed in the cream with her fingers while I laid on my back on my bed hoping she would stop soon. Not knowing how to explain the creepy, skin crawly feeling that was upsetting me, I told her, "I don't like it. It doesn't feel good." "It's not SUPPOSED to feel good!" she barked. "If you liked this, there would be something wrong with you!"
My mother took my temperature rectally until I was at least six. When I asked why I couldn't use the oral thermometer like everyone else in the house, she said I would bite down on it. I promised I wouldn't. I don't even know what the problem would have been if I had -- it was a plastic digital thermometer, not one of the old style ones made of glass and mercury. When I asked why we couldn't get one of the digital thermometers they stick in your ear at the doctor's office then, she told me they aren't accurate enough. I wonder now how much of her insistence on using a rectal thermometer was as a punishment for my daring to ask to stay home. I think it was at least a little bit punishment.
On the rare occasions that I was allowed to miss school, my mother took me to the doctor without fail. I remember her saying something along the lines of how, if she let me miss school, I wouldn't be allowed to just stay home and lie on the couch watching TV all day like she did in my absence. If I didn't go to school, by god, we would spend the day at the doctor's office. She wasn't going to incentivize my sicknesses by letting me lie around at home all day.
No doctor ever found a source for my stomach aches or proposed that they might be stress related. With few exceptions they told us instead that I had an upper respiratory infection and prescribed antibiotics. I also had strep throat a lot, for which they injected me with penicillin and I was allowed to rest at home for 24 hours without being treated like someone who was trying to get out of something. Getting a positive strep test was like winning a small lottery to me and always made me happy.
Once when I was eight or so, my mother found an open packet of Sweet Tarts candies on a file cabinet in the family room. I don't know how long it had been there -- it was a hoard house after all -- but she mistook them for antibiotics and got very upset at me for not taking them. "Those are candy," I explained. They weren't even mine. Dante might have left them there, but they were from one of the communal baskets of candy my mother left scattered around the house, so it's anybody's guess. I always took all my medicine though. It never would have occurred to me not to take a dose of the medicine she gave me, let alone leave them scattered on top of a file cabinet. To this day, I have never stopped taking a course of antibiotics before they ran out.
I was also about eight when I got my first vaginal yeast infection as a result of the antibiotics. My entire vulva felt like an inflamed mosquito bite, and it itched so badly I writhed on my bed and cried. I didn't know what was happening, but my mother did. When she took me to the pediatrician and announced that I had an yeast infection, the nurse asked, "Oral yeast infection, I assume?" When my mother said, "No, vaginal," the nurse raised in eyebrows in surprise. When she left the room, I asked my mother why she had done that. "Vaginal yeast infections are normally just from having too much sex," my mother told me. "But yours is from all the antibiotics."
She bought me Monistat antifungal treatment from the drug store later that day. I didn't need the vaginal suppositories, she said, just the cream, but she insisted on applying it herself. When I asked uncomfortably why I couldn't just do it myself, she argued that I wouldn't be able to see where to apply it. "I don't need to be able to see it," I told her. "I can feel where it itches." She denied my request and rubbed in the cream with her fingers while I laid on my back on my bed hoping she would stop soon. Not knowing how to explain the creepy, skin crawly feeling that was upsetting me, I told her, "I don't like it. It doesn't feel good." "It's not SUPPOSED to feel good!" she barked. "If you liked this, there would be something wrong with you!"
Friday, October 16, 2015
We Need to Talk About Dante
Trigger warning. There is some physical violence and some what would probably be termed low-grade sexual abuse of a child in this post. No touching, just inappropriateness. I had planned to write a series of shorter posts about life with Dante, but it all sort of came vomiting out.
Dante was our household's "problem child." He was my hero in a lot of ways. He was good at drawing, and he was seven years my senior and very "cool," as far as I could tell. He seemed fearless when it came to troublemaking, which was the opposite of me. He got detentions and failing grades in school ("He's too smart, he's not challenged enough, he just doesn't apply himself," our mother explained), while I got mostly A's and was terrified of doing anything that might lead to getting in trouble. I relished any attention he paid to me. When he let me have a picture he'd drawn, I kept it on the wall of my bedroom or -- when I was old enough for school -- as the decoration on my Trapper Keeper so that I could tell people, "My brother drew that."
Dante is a scary person. I knew that as a child, and I know it better as an adult. He is volatile and violent, and I have never seen evidence that he has a conscience or sees other people as people. Maybe things are different with his friends, I've always thought. Maybe it's just because he hated me and our parents. Maybe that's why he didn't treat me like a person. Maybe that's why he didn't bond with anyone in our family. He was so charming and likable. Most people really liked him. Maybe I deserved the way he treated me. Maybe I was asking for it and provoked him, like she said. But I can't think those things for long because I strongly disagree with them. I've always strongly disagreed with them. No child deserved that. Then a little voice that sounds something like my mother's whispers snidely, What makes you think you're soooo good?
We lived together in our parents' house until I moved out for college. Mom took Dante to a child psychologist when I was fairly young. I remember being enthralled with a particular toy in the waiting room -- one of those little tables with beaded wires on it that I always pretended were roller coasters -- and I think I must've been somewhere between five and seven, which means Dante was 12 or in his early teens. I remember my mother afterward telling me with what I could only interpret as pride that the psychologist had said Dante had "the makings of a criminal mastermind." I was jealous. "Mastermind" was impressive. I assumed she was proud because it was yet another way Dante was exceptional, just like with his art and his being too smart to do well in school. In hindsight, I think she might have felt vindicated in the hard time she had had parenting Dante, and maybe that was what I was reading as pride in her face and voice. She was proud of herself -- Dante's behavior wasn't her fault. She only took Dante to that psychologist one or two more times before they abruptly stopped going. When I asked to be allowed to see a psychologist myself a few years later, she told me it would be a waste of money because all they do is get you to blame your mother for everything. Based on that conversation -- as well as what I think any psychologist worth his salt would have advised -- I think the child psychologist might have suggested my mother receive therapy herself, prompting my mother to stop seeking any professional help for Dante. I think she had been looking less for help to improve things than for someone to diagnose Dante as a "bad seed" and absolve her of all blame.
One of the most irritating things Dante did was the stealing. As a small child, I habitually saved up any birthday money that came my way so that I could buy my family "real" gifts for Christmas and birthdays. One year I managed to save up $80 in my Hello Kitty lock box before I noticed the money was gone. The same day Dante bragged to our mom and me about how easy it is to break through cheap little locks, but our mother refused to believe he had stolen the money. "You lost it," she said. "Don't blame Dante for your carelessness." When she found my electronic pocket translator in the back of his closet on one of her regular bedroom searches, she told me to take better care of my things. I confronted Dante about it later that day and he laughed and admitted he had planned to pawn it like he had already pawned my stereo. He even cut open a large piggy bank I had filled exclusively with pennies -- over 3000 pennies -- and emptied it. My mother told me if I was going to complain so much about something so minor she'd give me the money herself to shut me up.
Dante started showing me pornography when I was about six and he was 13. He invited me into his room in hushed tones and said he had something he wanted to show me. He pulled out some magazines and said a friend had stolen them from his father and let him take them home. I was thrilled at the idea of being part of Dante's inner circle. I knew Playboy wasn't appropriate for a six-year-old, but I thought, He's so excited, and he has no one else to share this with, so he's letting me be his friend. I sat down and looked at pictures of naked ladies with him, excited both by being treated as an equal and also the fact that I knew we were doing something we weren't supposed to be doing. Partners in crime! Then he pulled out Penthouse and showed me a picture of a woman fellatiating a man. He asked me if I liked it. I said no, it looked disgusting and I didn't understand why anyone would do that. He said we didn't have to look at that one if I didn't like it. We could go back to the Playboy -- he'd look at any porn his six-year-old sister wanted.
He called me into his room a few more times in the following months, whenever he brought home new magazines. It never went farther than looking at magazines. He didn't try to touch me or make me do anything, and it didn't occur to me he might have any idea what he was doing was inappropriate. He was seven years older than me, but I didn't see him as more emotionally mature than me or someone capable of controlling his impulses. He has no one else to talk to, I'd thought because that was me. I had no confidantes. Then I got older and realized he had friends, including the friend who had given him the magazines in the first place. Now, giving him the benefit of the doubt just means remembering that he didn't see me as a person, that maybe he just wanted to see what kind of reaction he could get from showing pornography to a small child. I don't assume he was grooming me for something more. If he had, in hindsight, I don't think anyone would have prevented him.
Dante did eventually get yelled at for having pornographic magazines. One of our parents found them somehow -- I think it was Mom on one of her regular bedroom searches -- and Dad lost his mind while Mom insisted that boys will be boys. It was a really big deal for the rest of the day, and I don't remember anyone mentioning it ever again. After that, Dante stopped bothering to hide his porn and it took over the cabinet under the bathroom sink where normal people might keep cleaning supplies and extra toilet paper.
I remember a family gathering at my dad's parents' house a couple years later. My grandmother had made a lot of the fancy picnic dishes that I so hated as a child but probably would have loved as an adult, and my few paternal cousins were there with their parents. I rarely saw my dad's family, despite them all living nearby and Eric being my closest family member in age at just a few weeks my junior. Eric and Dante and I were wandering the large yard after lunch and, out of the sight of parents, Eric unexpectedly shoved me hard to the ground and walked away. I don't know why. He was always kind of a prick as far as I could tell. Dante looked down at me lying on grass for a few seconds. Then he stepped over my body wordlessly and followed Eric. I cried. I was heartbroken. I knew Dante would sell me out for older kids any day of the week, but Eric wasn't even older. Eric wasn't even cool. Dante was high school aged, and he wouldn't even tell him, "Hey, that's my sister," or help me up.
I went crying to my mother and told her what had happened. She told me that couldn't be what had happened. Older brothers stick up for their sisters, she said. She'd had an older brother in Uncle Charles, so she knew. Once when she had come home from school and said that a car full of boys had threatened to rape her on the way home, Uncle Charles had been so enraged he had sworn he would find and kill them all. He hadn't actually done anything, but he'd sure been mad! That's what big brothers do, she said. What I had described couldn't be accurate, so I needed to stop lying and trying to get Dante in trouble.
When I was about 12 and Dante was 19, I was sitting on the living room couch with my mother when a woman called our house. She told my mother to keep Dante away from her 13-year-old daughter. "Who is this?" my mother asked. The woman introduced herself and said Dante and his friend Darrin had been calling her home and coming over and hanging around her daughter, who was far too young for them, and she wanted them to stop. My mother replied, "I've never even heard of your daughter, and I'm sure my son hasn't either," and she promptly hung up. She ignored the fact that the woman had known the name of Dante's best friend and also that we rarely knew where Dante was when he wasn't at home. After all -- he was an adult.
Dante had some minor trouble with the law when he was around the same age. I remember my mother saying that he and a friend had been arrested and hauled to jail in a paddy wagon for disturbing the peace. It was another occasion when I thought I heard pride in her voice. "A paddy wagon!" she kept saying. "Can you believe it?" She'd had to go to my grandparents' house to ask for enough money in cash to post his bail because it was late at night and the bank was closed and, if ATMs existed, we didn't know about them. As an adult, I understand that "disturbing the peace" usually means the police come to your house and ask you to keep down the noise. Dante had been at a friend's parents' house in a particularly affluent neighborhood. Affluent white adults don't typically go to jail for disturbing the peace, nor do their adult children when the parents are standing right there as his friends' supposedly were, so I wonder now what he and his friend had actually done. I don't think this was the only time he got arrested and my mother had to post bail, but I can't remember the other times.
Probably the most physically aggressive thing Dante did to me that I can remember was the time he wrapped his hands around my throat and choked me while simultaneously lifting me off the ground. I was in my early teens, and he was in his early twenties. I don't remember what prompted this action from him, but I do remember our parents were in another room and, when one of them called for us, I was able to regain my footing with minimal physical damage. I don't remember if I "told on him." I usually did, endlessly optimistic as I somehow was that someone would help me, and depending on which parent heard, either our dad would scream at Dante, our mom would scream at me, or both. There was often a circle of screaming at our house.
There is a splintered area in the door of my childhood bedroom from the time Dante tried to knee or kick it in. I had said something mocking to him, knowing full well it would piss him off the way he liked to piss me off, he had given chase, and I had only been safe because I was fast enough, my bedroom was close enough, and he couldn't pick the shitty locks on our interior doors with his fingernail like I could.
When I was in high school and he was in his twenties, Dante started stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his stack of "Barely Legal" and other assorted pornographic magazines under the bathroom sink. I went to my mother outraged and said, "Tell your son to stop stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his porn!" She acted shocked and told me I was never to use such a bad word as "porn" ever again, she said nothing to Dante, and Dante kept stealing my yearbooks, even after I took them back and told him to stop doing that. They are probably under that same bathroom sink right now.
Dante was our household's "problem child." He was my hero in a lot of ways. He was good at drawing, and he was seven years my senior and very "cool," as far as I could tell. He seemed fearless when it came to troublemaking, which was the opposite of me. He got detentions and failing grades in school ("He's too smart, he's not challenged enough, he just doesn't apply himself," our mother explained), while I got mostly A's and was terrified of doing anything that might lead to getting in trouble. I relished any attention he paid to me. When he let me have a picture he'd drawn, I kept it on the wall of my bedroom or -- when I was old enough for school -- as the decoration on my Trapper Keeper so that I could tell people, "My brother drew that."
Dante is a scary person. I knew that as a child, and I know it better as an adult. He is volatile and violent, and I have never seen evidence that he has a conscience or sees other people as people. Maybe things are different with his friends, I've always thought. Maybe it's just because he hated me and our parents. Maybe that's why he didn't treat me like a person. Maybe that's why he didn't bond with anyone in our family. He was so charming and likable. Most people really liked him. Maybe I deserved the way he treated me. Maybe I was asking for it and provoked him, like she said. But I can't think those things for long because I strongly disagree with them. I've always strongly disagreed with them. No child deserved that. Then a little voice that sounds something like my mother's whispers snidely, What makes you think you're soooo good?
We lived together in our parents' house until I moved out for college. Mom took Dante to a child psychologist when I was fairly young. I remember being enthralled with a particular toy in the waiting room -- one of those little tables with beaded wires on it that I always pretended were roller coasters -- and I think I must've been somewhere between five and seven, which means Dante was 12 or in his early teens. I remember my mother afterward telling me with what I could only interpret as pride that the psychologist had said Dante had "the makings of a criminal mastermind." I was jealous. "Mastermind" was impressive. I assumed she was proud because it was yet another way Dante was exceptional, just like with his art and his being too smart to do well in school. In hindsight, I think she might have felt vindicated in the hard time she had had parenting Dante, and maybe that was what I was reading as pride in her face and voice. She was proud of herself -- Dante's behavior wasn't her fault. She only took Dante to that psychologist one or two more times before they abruptly stopped going. When I asked to be allowed to see a psychologist myself a few years later, she told me it would be a waste of money because all they do is get you to blame your mother for everything. Based on that conversation -- as well as what I think any psychologist worth his salt would have advised -- I think the child psychologist might have suggested my mother receive therapy herself, prompting my mother to stop seeking any professional help for Dante. I think she had been looking less for help to improve things than for someone to diagnose Dante as a "bad seed" and absolve her of all blame.
One of the most irritating things Dante did was the stealing. As a small child, I habitually saved up any birthday money that came my way so that I could buy my family "real" gifts for Christmas and birthdays. One year I managed to save up $80 in my Hello Kitty lock box before I noticed the money was gone. The same day Dante bragged to our mom and me about how easy it is to break through cheap little locks, but our mother refused to believe he had stolen the money. "You lost it," she said. "Don't blame Dante for your carelessness." When she found my electronic pocket translator in the back of his closet on one of her regular bedroom searches, she told me to take better care of my things. I confronted Dante about it later that day and he laughed and admitted he had planned to pawn it like he had already pawned my stereo. He even cut open a large piggy bank I had filled exclusively with pennies -- over 3000 pennies -- and emptied it. My mother told me if I was going to complain so much about something so minor she'd give me the money herself to shut me up.
Dante started showing me pornography when I was about six and he was 13. He invited me into his room in hushed tones and said he had something he wanted to show me. He pulled out some magazines and said a friend had stolen them from his father and let him take them home. I was thrilled at the idea of being part of Dante's inner circle. I knew Playboy wasn't appropriate for a six-year-old, but I thought, He's so excited, and he has no one else to share this with, so he's letting me be his friend. I sat down and looked at pictures of naked ladies with him, excited both by being treated as an equal and also the fact that I knew we were doing something we weren't supposed to be doing. Partners in crime! Then he pulled out Penthouse and showed me a picture of a woman fellatiating a man. He asked me if I liked it. I said no, it looked disgusting and I didn't understand why anyone would do that. He said we didn't have to look at that one if I didn't like it. We could go back to the Playboy -- he'd look at any porn his six-year-old sister wanted.
He called me into his room a few more times in the following months, whenever he brought home new magazines. It never went farther than looking at magazines. He didn't try to touch me or make me do anything, and it didn't occur to me he might have any idea what he was doing was inappropriate. He was seven years older than me, but I didn't see him as more emotionally mature than me or someone capable of controlling his impulses. He has no one else to talk to, I'd thought because that was me. I had no confidantes. Then I got older and realized he had friends, including the friend who had given him the magazines in the first place. Now, giving him the benefit of the doubt just means remembering that he didn't see me as a person, that maybe he just wanted to see what kind of reaction he could get from showing pornography to a small child. I don't assume he was grooming me for something more. If he had, in hindsight, I don't think anyone would have prevented him.
Dante did eventually get yelled at for having pornographic magazines. One of our parents found them somehow -- I think it was Mom on one of her regular bedroom searches -- and Dad lost his mind while Mom insisted that boys will be boys. It was a really big deal for the rest of the day, and I don't remember anyone mentioning it ever again. After that, Dante stopped bothering to hide his porn and it took over the cabinet under the bathroom sink where normal people might keep cleaning supplies and extra toilet paper.
I remember a family gathering at my dad's parents' house a couple years later. My grandmother had made a lot of the fancy picnic dishes that I so hated as a child but probably would have loved as an adult, and my few paternal cousins were there with their parents. I rarely saw my dad's family, despite them all living nearby and Eric being my closest family member in age at just a few weeks my junior. Eric and Dante and I were wandering the large yard after lunch and, out of the sight of parents, Eric unexpectedly shoved me hard to the ground and walked away. I don't know why. He was always kind of a prick as far as I could tell. Dante looked down at me lying on grass for a few seconds. Then he stepped over my body wordlessly and followed Eric. I cried. I was heartbroken. I knew Dante would sell me out for older kids any day of the week, but Eric wasn't even older. Eric wasn't even cool. Dante was high school aged, and he wouldn't even tell him, "Hey, that's my sister," or help me up.
I went crying to my mother and told her what had happened. She told me that couldn't be what had happened. Older brothers stick up for their sisters, she said. She'd had an older brother in Uncle Charles, so she knew. Once when she had come home from school and said that a car full of boys had threatened to rape her on the way home, Uncle Charles had been so enraged he had sworn he would find and kill them all. He hadn't actually done anything, but he'd sure been mad! That's what big brothers do, she said. What I had described couldn't be accurate, so I needed to stop lying and trying to get Dante in trouble.
When I was about 12 and Dante was 19, I was sitting on the living room couch with my mother when a woman called our house. She told my mother to keep Dante away from her 13-year-old daughter. "Who is this?" my mother asked. The woman introduced herself and said Dante and his friend Darrin had been calling her home and coming over and hanging around her daughter, who was far too young for them, and she wanted them to stop. My mother replied, "I've never even heard of your daughter, and I'm sure my son hasn't either," and she promptly hung up. She ignored the fact that the woman had known the name of Dante's best friend and also that we rarely knew where Dante was when he wasn't at home. After all -- he was an adult.
Dante had some minor trouble with the law when he was around the same age. I remember my mother saying that he and a friend had been arrested and hauled to jail in a paddy wagon for disturbing the peace. It was another occasion when I thought I heard pride in her voice. "A paddy wagon!" she kept saying. "Can you believe it?" She'd had to go to my grandparents' house to ask for enough money in cash to post his bail because it was late at night and the bank was closed and, if ATMs existed, we didn't know about them. As an adult, I understand that "disturbing the peace" usually means the police come to your house and ask you to keep down the noise. Dante had been at a friend's parents' house in a particularly affluent neighborhood. Affluent white adults don't typically go to jail for disturbing the peace, nor do their adult children when the parents are standing right there as his friends' supposedly were, so I wonder now what he and his friend had actually done. I don't think this was the only time he got arrested and my mother had to post bail, but I can't remember the other times.
Probably the most physically aggressive thing Dante did to me that I can remember was the time he wrapped his hands around my throat and choked me while simultaneously lifting me off the ground. I was in my early teens, and he was in his early twenties. I don't remember what prompted this action from him, but I do remember our parents were in another room and, when one of them called for us, I was able to regain my footing with minimal physical damage. I don't remember if I "told on him." I usually did, endlessly optimistic as I somehow was that someone would help me, and depending on which parent heard, either our dad would scream at Dante, our mom would scream at me, or both. There was often a circle of screaming at our house.
There is a splintered area in the door of my childhood bedroom from the time Dante tried to knee or kick it in. I had said something mocking to him, knowing full well it would piss him off the way he liked to piss me off, he had given chase, and I had only been safe because I was fast enough, my bedroom was close enough, and he couldn't pick the shitty locks on our interior doors with his fingernail like I could.
When I was in high school and he was in his twenties, Dante started stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his stack of "Barely Legal" and other assorted pornographic magazines under the bathroom sink. I went to my mother outraged and said, "Tell your son to stop stealing my yearbooks and keeping them with his porn!" She acted shocked and told me I was never to use such a bad word as "porn" ever again, she said nothing to Dante, and Dante kept stealing my yearbooks, even after I took them back and told him to stop doing that. They are probably under that same bathroom sink right now.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
My First Halloween Costume
My first Halloween costume I can remember -- quite possibly my first one at all since I've never heard stories or seen photographic evidence of my dressing up before the age of three -- was the negligee my mother wore on her wedding night. It was sheer polyester chiffon in Pepto-Bismol pink, trimmed in cheap lace of the same hue, and it comprised all the dress-up clothes I owned as a child. I cannot remember a time before it was in my possession.
I remember several preschool Halloweens for which I threw it on over my sweatpants and t-shirt and -- with the addition of some kind of accessory such as a toy wand -- claimed to be a fairy, a princess, or a fairy princess. It didn't occur to me until I was much older that this was strange. I am not remotely surprised that my hoarder mother would recycle her decade-old wedding night negligee by gifting it to a toddler, but it does seem a stretch that she took me out of the house dressed that way -- both for trick-or-treating and to preschool costume parades at our Methodist church. I always wore clothes underneath, but it was still very clearly sexy -- albeit heinously ugly -- lingerie. I also can't remember a time I didn't personally know it was from her wedding night. She made no secret of what it was, and it was the only piece of sexy anything she'd ever bought -- she made that fact well known too. Somehow as a child I thought that other people couldn't tell what it was. As far as I could tell, it was simply the most elegant article of clothing in the house.
I remember several preschool Halloweens for which I threw it on over my sweatpants and t-shirt and -- with the addition of some kind of accessory such as a toy wand -- claimed to be a fairy, a princess, or a fairy princess. It didn't occur to me until I was much older that this was strange. I am not remotely surprised that my hoarder mother would recycle her decade-old wedding night negligee by gifting it to a toddler, but it does seem a stretch that she took me out of the house dressed that way -- both for trick-or-treating and to preschool costume parades at our Methodist church. I always wore clothes underneath, but it was still very clearly sexy -- albeit heinously ugly -- lingerie. I also can't remember a time I didn't personally know it was from her wedding night. She made no secret of what it was, and it was the only piece of sexy anything she'd ever bought -- she made that fact well known too. Somehow as a child I thought that other people couldn't tell what it was. As far as I could tell, it was simply the most elegant article of clothing in the house.
Friday, April 10, 2015
My Mother the Virgin
[Warning: I do mention sex in this post. But as the title might indicate, it's rather limited.]
I want to write about how my parents created their family through adoption and donor conception, but I think I need to explain this part first. I've mentioned how my dad became paralyzed from the chest down. He could never walk again, but that was far from being the only side effect. He had no control over his muscles below his chest. He couldn't sit up without something to lean against. He had violent muscle spasms. He urinated through a catheter into a bag he wore tied to his leg under his pants, and he set aside an evening each week for "bowel training," when he sat on his toilet for hours, screaming curses and attempting to defecate. He also experienced "counter attacks" -- a clever phrase I imagine came from the VA hospital -- when he catastrophically shat himself without warning, often when we were out for dinner.
He also couldn't have sex. He'd been this way since he was 21. I didn't know that until my mother told me I was conceived via artificial insemination. Until then, I'd assumed I just didn't understand what my dad physiologically could and could not do.
I've mentioned that a major facet of my mother's identity seemed to be wrapped up in the fact that she was a virgin. She told me she had been saving herself for marriage because she knew if she got pregnant out of wedlock (like much of her family) it would "kill" her mother. I don't know if my grandmother ever told her anything of this nature, or if she intuited it or simply made it up. My mother has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the topic of sex, to put it mildly, so I can imagine one of the things that appealed to her about my dad might have been her ability to get married and have children -- as she'd always planned to do, either because she really wanted to or simply because it was expected -- without being expected to have sex.
My mother used to reminisce about her wedding night -- how she and my dad laid on their bed in their new apartment, fully clothed, eating takeout barbecue and watching the traffic out the window. She told it like it was her fondest memory of marriage. She really liked watching traffic go by. When I was a teenager she added a new part to the story: he had approached her with his flaccid penis in some attempt at intercourse, she had said something along the lines of, "Ew, gross," and he'd never tried to touch her that way again. It's not the sort of story a mother ought to tell her daughter, but I can't help but feel sorry for both of them. More rational or hope-filled people might have annulled their marriage after that, but my parents stuck it out for 35 years. Their misery compounded.
I want to write about how my parents created their family through adoption and donor conception, but I think I need to explain this part first. I've mentioned how my dad became paralyzed from the chest down. He could never walk again, but that was far from being the only side effect. He had no control over his muscles below his chest. He couldn't sit up without something to lean against. He had violent muscle spasms. He urinated through a catheter into a bag he wore tied to his leg under his pants, and he set aside an evening each week for "bowel training," when he sat on his toilet for hours, screaming curses and attempting to defecate. He also experienced "counter attacks" -- a clever phrase I imagine came from the VA hospital -- when he catastrophically shat himself without warning, often when we were out for dinner.
He also couldn't have sex. He'd been this way since he was 21. I didn't know that until my mother told me I was conceived via artificial insemination. Until then, I'd assumed I just didn't understand what my dad physiologically could and could not do.
I've mentioned that a major facet of my mother's identity seemed to be wrapped up in the fact that she was a virgin. She told me she had been saving herself for marriage because she knew if she got pregnant out of wedlock (like much of her family) it would "kill" her mother. I don't know if my grandmother ever told her anything of this nature, or if she intuited it or simply made it up. My mother has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the topic of sex, to put it mildly, so I can imagine one of the things that appealed to her about my dad might have been her ability to get married and have children -- as she'd always planned to do, either because she really wanted to or simply because it was expected -- without being expected to have sex.
My mother used to reminisce about her wedding night -- how she and my dad laid on their bed in their new apartment, fully clothed, eating takeout barbecue and watching the traffic out the window. She told it like it was her fondest memory of marriage. She really liked watching traffic go by. When I was a teenager she added a new part to the story: he had approached her with his flaccid penis in some attempt at intercourse, she had said something along the lines of, "Ew, gross," and he'd never tried to touch her that way again. It's not the sort of story a mother ought to tell her daughter, but I can't help but feel sorry for both of them. More rational or hope-filled people might have annulled their marriage after that, but my parents stuck it out for 35 years. Their misery compounded.
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