Hard Choices

I didn’t mind not having electricity. Hauling water was the bitch. I cooked and heated our bath water with propane in my little camp trailer.

The problem with living on the same property with Guitar Man’s Dad B was that B not only constantly contradicted or belittled everything GM said, he also seemed to like to argue just to have conflict. He thrived on it.

Then B started making inappropriate comments to me. If I had stayed late at my mother’s house or had to run errands after work and didn’t get home until after dinner, B would ask me if I had been “out tomcatting around.” implying that I had been out picking up men. He always acted as if this were some joke, but there was an underlying seriousness about it that pissed me off. Of course, I always had a ‘fuck you’ sort of reply, but it was constant and wearing.

Because of the twisted family dynamic of “Daddy can do no wrong“, Guitar Man never told him to knock it off. Guitar Man never, then or now, defended me to his father. Like living with a pack of starving wolves, if you were under any sort of attack, you’re on your own.

Guitar Man and I started to argue more. Constantly, it seemed. I knew B was saying things to GM about me, what I had no idea. Making nit picking comments, niggling away at GM about how he should ‘handle’ me, no doubt. Nothing good. Nothing positive ever came from that man’s mouth. B is at once extremely controlling and totally harmless to anyone not family. Outsiders seem to think he is so funny and nice. His family has been taught that ’Dad is just Dad’ and that all of B’s behaviors are acceptable and should just be tolerated. Outsiders never saw him beating his wife when he was drunk. There was a rumor in their small town that for $25 he would let you sleep with his wife. S told me that wasn’t accurate. He’d let them have sex with her for free if he could watch. She told me there were a lot worse things too, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t ask.

So, things were rough at times between Guitar Man and me. There were still many good times though I know these blogs seemed focused all on the negative. I am purging here.

So we lived there, the five of us. That is, until Guitar Man’s youngest sister and her husband left their eastern Montana town and moved out there to stay with B. The whole family went over to help N and T and their three kids move. It was soon clear that neglect was what their parenting was all about. Not glaringly obvious at first. Soon enough.

Two boys and a girl, ages 4, 3 and almost 2. The kids were constantly wearing soaked diapers. On the few occasions I changed them, their little bottoms were covered in rashes and small, bloody sores. Laundry wasn’t a priority for GM’s sister. The kids slept on white sheets gone black with the dirt of the place. I heated water at the very least every other night, mostly every night with the dirt of summer at it’s height to bath myself and my kids. In the three months she was out there N borrowed my plastic tote tub twice to clean her kids up. Three meals a day seemed to be too much effort. Mostly the kids were given things to snack on constantly. Dry cereal. Crackers. Whatever was easy. they were constantly coming to my trailer to ask for food because they were hungry. I washed their hands and faces and fed them.

N’s oldest child was already exhibiting some severe signs of lasting emotional and mental trauma from early abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents . When you looked into his big blue eyes, you saw a child who was so turned inward he could barely see you looking back. Like he was trapped in his own head. (There is no doubt in my mind of some mental genetic disorder as well. Our own son exhibits some of the same symptoms, and so does one of GM’s other sister’s boys. N is the one girl of the family that has exhibited signs of mental illness. Neither her daughter nor mine have yet, but they are also still very young.)

N tuned her kids out with an ability that was rather spooky to watch. As if she didn’t even see or hear them though they could be screaming and fighting right beside her. T was there off and on. I can’t remember now if she was trying to leave him or what had been the deciding factor in the move. He was supposed to be looking for a job but managed to find booze instead.

Their daughter was still in a walker at the time. N seemed to think that the best way to feed a 1 1/2 year old was to give her mostly formula to drink and very little solid food. Later on, after all this, the WIC department turned her in for underfeeding the baby. I came up one time when N wasn’t there and Baby K was in her walker as usual. She was crying so hard and T was trying to give her probably her 5th bottle of formula that day while everyone else ate dinner. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. The baby was yelling and making grabbing motions at the plates of food. The solids N deigned to feed her would equal maybe a tablespoon or two. T was agitated that she wouldn’t be quiet. I took a scoop of mixed veggies and potatoes out of the pot on the stove and put them on her tray. Immediately she started shoveling the food into her little mouth. T seemed amazed. I was furious.

“She just keeps eating!” he said in amazement as I gave her a large second helping.

“She’s hungry, T!” I said, trying to keep my temper. “She’s old enough to be eating solid food EVERY meal! She wants to eat! She needs to eat solid food and not just be fed formula all day! She’s HUNGRY!” I said again as I gave her third helping. “You guys need to feed her!”

Baby K probably ate a whole cup or more of veggies and potatoes. She was finally satisfied and cooing happily in her seat.

Later I tried to have a discussion with Guitar Man about his sister and her husband’s neglect of their children. He took the, ” I can’t do anything to change them.” bullshit stance. Well, it’s not bullshit, you CAN’T change people unwilling to change. But there was an obligation to those kids to see that they were taken care of. I told him as much. He insisted they were taken care of. He also admitted they were not being cared for as they should be. Then I told him what it meant for me to be a mandatory reporter.

Since I worked as a case manager for a childcare assistance agency that was under government funding, I was, by law, obliged to report to the proper authorities any and all abuse and neglect that I observed in any children I had contact with. By law, I told GM, it was my duty to report his sister to Child Protective Services. Not only that, but I felt it was necessary.

The explosion that followed was un-fucking-believable. A lot of it was all just a raging blur of utter shit coming out of his mouth. Veiled threats, how I didn’t want to see what his Dad would do if someone tried to take HIS grandkids away. How it was nobody’s fucking business how they decided to take care of those kids.

I don’t believe, a this time, I had ever seen quite this level of insane fury coming out of Guitar Man’s mouth. It was insane and irrational. The furthest thing from his mind was the health and well being of those kids. Their father had grown up in foster homes, he raged. Look at how criminal and fucked up T was for it. All foster homes were places of neglect and abuse in his eyes. Where every child was raped.

That was the first time I think that I ever felt afraid of him. Afraid of his anger. He turned nothing but his verbal assault on me, yet the rage and vehemence and irrationality of it was terrifying. There was absolutely no reasoning with him.

Against my better judgment, I backed off. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t going to turn his sister in to Child Protective Services, but I needed to find the right time, after things had cooled. Why? Because he had put fear into me. And it infuriates me how he had. Still is in some ways. Fear is insidious. It can crawl inside you and poison the well of your being without you even knowing it.

Then it all came to a head. T spent more time out getting drunk than ever. N ignored her kids as usual and I tried to lessen that by being attentive to them. The older two boys, anyway. The baby was at the constant mercy of her mother and I didn’t go up to B’s cabin if I could help it. I never saw N beat the kids. That would have given them far too much attention. She is the type of abusive parent that tunes them out as completely as she can.

Seeing her behavior and the feel I get from her, there is something mentally unstable in N as well. GM and S put it down to the two times she had, as an infant and a c child, gotten head injuries. One, when her four year old sister, whom S had put in charge of her, ‘allowed’ N as an infant to roll off the Laundromat folding table onto the concrete floor as S was rotating laundry or something. They still blame M, who was FOUR for that accident. Not S, who was the idiot mother who put the baby on a high table then but a distractible toddler in charge of her. On that occasion, a circular portion of N’s skull was fractured and depressed and S had to take her to the hospital. S was outraged when the doctor questioned her about abuse. The other time, N fell from a horse and hit her head on a rock, getting knocked unconscious. To this day, Guitar Man claims N will tell you stories about her life that never happened. N has talked to me about dealing with stress in her life by “just focusing in on my own fantasy world!”. This fantasy world does not include her children. N has told me on two separate occasions that she has just ‘been so distracted’ she ‘completely forgot who those kids were’ and tells me of looking up a them and thinking ‘whose kids are these and where did they come from?’

I have had an interest in psychology and personality disorders though I am in no way a psychologist or able to diagnose personality disorders, I have often wondered about N’s ability to so disassociate from her children as well as her obsessive list taking and note leaving if more than one personality doesn’t exist in her little vapid head.

When N still lived over east of the mountains, she was turned into CPS. She and S both claim it was because the case worker wanted N’s son because he looked like her own little boy. They claimed she stalked N, trying to get Little JJ. N fled to Idaho to stay with an Aunt.

S and B both have conditioned their children in the ‘victim mentality’ system of belief. This means there is an ingrained and deeply held belief that they are and always will be the victims in any situation. That they have done nothing wrong and it is always someone else’s fault or someone else’s actions that have caused the negative repercussions. To admit wrong doing or fault on their part is impossible because to admit fault or even just admit to making a mistake means that they would have to take responsibility for consequence of actions and that is the last thing this family wants.

One night, I got my wake-up slap. Guitar Man and I were in his trailer. It was a Sunday night and we were up late, my two kids were sleeping soundly across the yard in our own trailer. It was June. Suddenly B was at the door with an ax handle in his hand.

“GM, get up there, T is trying to kill N and he’s gonna take the kids!”

At first, we were a bit confused. We hadn’t heard any yelling, but then again, we may not have.

“What the fuck?” was GM’s articulate reply.

“He threw her into the toy box and he says he’s gonna kill her and take the kids come help me!” B wheezed.

GM grabbed his 9mm pistol, checked the clip, then jacked a round into the chamber.

Aw, mother FUCK! I thought as I followed him out the door.

Before we got up the hill, T had torn out of the driveway in their red van. I breathed a sigh of relief. Guitar Man went into B’s house and proceeded to verbally cut loose on his sister, ironically enough, using the very same terms on her I had used to describe to him her treatment of her children. “Neglect”, “endangering the welfare of…” and then a general harangue about even letting her husband come out there or even marrying him in the first place.

I stood outside the cabin, not wanting to be part of this newest drama and knew that there had to be a stop put to this. It was then I heard the van coming back up the road. I met him on the path a few yards form the cabin.

“Leave, T.” I told him. “You need to get the hell out of here.” T wavered at first, he and I had never had any sort of confrontation. He came up the path and I could smell the booze breath before we stood toe to toe.

“I ain’t leaving without my kids!” the drunk asshole said. I heard GM come out of the house behind me.

Dear Lord, fucking help! I prayed. I don’t figure God’s a real stickler for propriety in a pinch.

“You’re not going anywhere with those kids, you’re fucking drunk. GM, is in there and you need to leave.” At this point I had my hands on his chest because he was beginning to do one of those twitchy dog-ready-to-attack maneuvers that guys in the height of insulted testosterone do in the presence of another male.

“He’s got a GUN you FUCKING MORON!” I yelled as T shoved me out of the way, yelling, “A gun? Oh YEAH? You gonna fucking shoot me?” as he stepped up toward the porch.

Guitar Man answered by pointing the 9mm point blank, right between T’s eyes. The muzzle was about a foot from in front of his face. In the brief pause of disbelief the hammer cocking made a statement all it’s own.

“If you try and come in this house or touch those kids or my sister I will fucking kill you.” Guitar Man told him. I could tell by the tight and focused fury that he meant every word he said. But I didn’t want him going to jail for blowing away this stupid piece of shit.

I began to walk up the path behind T, then realized if GM did pull the trigger I could very well take the bullet as it went through his skull as I had no doubt it would do at suck close range. I stepped more to the right of T so GM could see where I was as I walked up behind him.

In the meantime, GM and T were engaged in a verbal exchange bordering on potentially fatal for at least one of them. T claiming his lack of fear at dying, GM informing him he would get that if he chose to try and get in the house again. I could barely hear it for the screaming going on in my own head, most of which was just a blatant none-stop prayer.

Dear-Lord-Jesus-help-me-get-this-drunk-motherfucking-bastard-out-of-here-before-he-gets-his-dumb-ass-killed!

I stepped up on the porch beside them as they stood face to face, Guitar Man about six inches higher than T as T stood on the dirt. I put my arm across the doorframe in between the gun muzzle and T’s face. GM stayed in his frozen stance and I felt a flood of relief. Prayer answered. Things were still touchy but GM wasn’t determined to take this shitheel’s life.

“You need to get the fuck out of here, T, NOW.” I told him between the exchange he and GM were continuing to have. “If you try and get in this house, he will kill you. I know he will. You know it. Now leave. Just fucking go!”

Abruptly, T turned on his heel, stomped to the car and burned out of the driveway. I collapsed against the wall of the house and put my head in my hands, waiting for the nausea to pass. Somewhere in there I may have hugged Guitar Man, glad that we wouldn’t have to explain domestic defense killing to the Sheriff.

Guitar Man went into B’s cabin again, telling his sister to get her shit on, that they were driving to the police station in town to report it. He later told me that the officer he reported to shook his hand. Both for the willingness to defend his sister and her children, but also for having the clear headedness of NOT pulling the trigger as the first response. GM later told me he never would have shot T because he couldn’t see me behind him at all and didn’t want to risk shooting me as well. I knew he wouldn’t risk shooting me and that is why I never feared for my own safety.

I spoke to N and told her she needed to contact the Violence Free Crisis line and arrange to get into a shelter. GM and I weren’t always up there and with the place being so isolated with no phone should T decide to come out when we weren’t there she and the kids could be in serious danger. On a selfish note, I also just wanted her and all her bullshit the fuck off my mountain. I hoped they yanked those kids and got them into some semblance of a sane home.

I went to work Monday morning. Then I made the call I should have made earlier. I filled the CPS case worker in on all the details, up to and including the incident the night before. Because of the whole domestic aspect, they got right on thecae. Since N had pulled her head out of her ass long enough to take my advice and get into the shelter, they told her they would not remove the kids from her custody, but she needed to stay off her Dad’s property and find a place in town where she was capable of better caring for her children. To this day the family thinks it was T that reported her in an effort to get back at her. They don’t know it was me and I won’t be telling them.

While N was in the Safe House, whose location was to remain secret, she had GM and I pick her up at the church near it when she needed a ride somewhere. However, the church was right at the end of the alley and we were able to watch her walk out of the back yard of the second house up the alley, plain as anything.

N not only compromised the location of the Safe House by doing this, she also negated any chance I would ever have of being able to use should I need to.

 

 

Repeat Mistakes

I started going out with my husband in 2000. My eldest son lives primarily with his Dad, and stays with me summers. By 2001 I had purchased a small camp trailer and decided to try living out on the property with Guitar Man and his father, B. My eldest son, eight, being a deeply rooted town kid, hated it. My daughter, a nature lover like her Mom and three at the time loved being there. I wanted to get an idea of what it was like living out there full time. Things were going good between us and I wanted to take it to the next level. He had his trailer, I had mine, but we were right next to each other.

 

Guitar Man didn’t have a job, outside of the odd jobs he would occasionally pick up. At this time he wasn’t even playing music. It was this time that I began to see the bazaar relationship between GM and his father. I have previously mentioned the paranoia and obsessive behaviors of GM’s father, but here I saw the depth at which he had molded his son with them. Guitar Man’s mother, S was living over the mountains with F at this time and had been for years. Guitar Man lived with B to help ‘take care’ of B. he had been doing this for the past ten years, since his Mom, S had sold her property, and to get away from B, moved over to the east side of the mountains.

 

At this time, B had no health problems. He hadn’t had any. Sometimes, if there was Caterpillar work to do, Guitar Man would help his Dad out, and they would earn money this way. There were other odd job things they would occasionally do to earn cash but mostly, they both just lived off B’s social security. B furnished them both with cigarettes and Gm with his every other day twelve pack of Mountain Dew.

 

How did this come to pass? Why would a grown man end up living with his father, after only having held one steady job, years earlier?

 

Roll back the years to the time when Guitar Man was seventeen. After a day of recreational shooting with some friends, Guitar Man and Elmo were getting ready to head home. Big Bubba was up on the hill trying to unload his twenty-two pistol and somehow, in trying to jack a shell out of the chamber the gun discharged. Unfortunately, Big Bubba, not being the brightest of weapons owners had not been paying attention to where the muzzle was pointing. The bullet pierced Guitar Man’s right side, wreaked merry havoc on his intestines, spleen and kidney before lodging itself between two vertebra on his spine.

 

That was discovered in surgery, what happened then was Guitar Man collapsed with a yell and Elmo went running to call an ambulance.

A five or six week stay in the hospital left Guitar Man healed up, but with a constant reminder; the bullet was wedged in such a way between the vertebra that the doctor’s left it in place rather than risk permanent and possibly crippling damage to the spinal cord.

 

Picture then, being raised by a mother whose emotional bonding with her children was sketchy at best, a paranoid delusional father with obsessive and controlling personality traits. Mother is more than willing to push you out to be independent and self caring at as early an age as possible (my husband was responsible for babysitting his two younger sisters, four and one at age eight while his parents worked in the nearby post yard. The whole family sees nothing wrong with this because he could have ‘run out to get Mom’ while dodging large post trucks and heavy equipment if anything went wrong.) while Father tells you constantly that nothing you are doing works, everything you try is wrong, and the whole world is looking down on you. Top it off with the real kicker, “Guitar Man can’t take care of himself.” as the family belief. Then throw in a nearly disabling injury and actual doctors telling you if you fell wrong you could become paralyzed from the waist down for life.

 

The twist however, if a vehicle broke down, the family called Guitar Man. If the sister’s needed a babysitter, they called Guitar Man. If somebody had to travel miles to help one of the immediate family members out of some preventable crises, the called Guitar Man.

 

This is not what Guitar Man has told me, this is what I have observed in his family dynamics. What Guitar Man does has been labeled as ‘helping out’. In reality what happens, is no matter the severity, when shit hits the fan, Guitar Man is the one that is expected to right it for everyone.

 

Through his immediate family’s world views and integral belief system, they turned Guitar Man into the resident caretaker, fix everything guy, rescue everyone guy, meanwhile keeping his self esteem and personal belief system so low, reinforcing the belief that he could not take care of himself, never nurturing ideas such as personal growth, health well-being and soundness of mind, that what they produced was an adult dependant. Co-dependant.

 

I saw a lot of this. I didn’t have the idea of coming in and ‘rescuing’ him from anything, but perhaps somewhere in the back of my mind was the desire to bring positive change, hence my own egotistical and self-serving desires come through.

 

There was one screaming fight I got into with B. While living up on the mountain in the summer, and Guitar Man spent his days getting wood or puttering around doing God knows what, I was working full time, driving 80 miles a day to get there and back. It was during this time I purchased a 1977 Dodge step side pickup for $500 from a friend of mine. The engine needed major work, but I have a passion for step-side pickups and had wanted one for years. It was my own money, I was debt free, I wanted one, I got it.

 

Guitar Man and I were sitting up at B’s cabin(shack) having dinner. B started in on me about buying my truck. Told me I needed to quit buying old junk trucks, otherwise I would be just like him with a bunch of junk cars all over (Ha! NOT!), and what came out of his mouth next, if it hadn’t stunned me so completely, would have landed a punch right in his mouth.

“Besides!” B ranted at me, “You have to save your money so you can take care of Guitar Man!”

My temper snapped. I roared, “GUITAR MAN CAN TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF!!!” to which B yelled vehemently, “No he can’t!”

“YES HE CAN!” I bellowed and left the house.

 

I was furious. Here was B’s belief system, verifying things S had told me. B, when they were married refused to work. S said it was because he was afraid she wouldn’t come home if he went to work. But also, in the area where we live where poverty, domestic violence and joblessness are rampant, there seems to be this character trait of a lot of abusive men to let the women work, then use all their money. This is essentially what B was telling me I was supposed to do. Work my ass off while his son reaped the benefits. Take care of his son, whom he fully believed to be incapable of taking care of himself, and at that time who hadn’t learned how, no thanks to the parenting he received growing up. The weird thing is, B doesn’t really thing he is capable taking care of his own self and he seems to have this desperate desire, some driven by his mental illness, no doubt, that his ex-wife and children need to take care of him.

 

I am not talking about your typical elder care of a sick family member, but something way more co-dependant and unhealthy. B wants his family around so he can ‘watch’ them. even if no words are exchanged. It brings him security and comfort and he cannot be left alone because he will panic and have anxiety attacks. I don’t know how often I have heard the phrase, “Dad gets frantic.” when describing B. So these deep psychological and emotional issues go on, untreated and passed down. I saw this clearly after Guitar Man’s sister, whom I will call Vap moved herself, her abusive husband and their three physically and deeply emotionally abused kids over to live with B and I got to see family neglect up close and personal.

 

Not only was this deeply disturbing to witness first hand, just on basic principle, but I had a major conflict at the time. My job, at this time was as a case manager for a State assisted child care agency. As a government employee, there were certain rules and regulations that I had to follow regarding witnessing abuse and neglect. By law, I was a mandated reporter.

Interlude: The Dream That Lead

Originally Titled A View From the Outhouse, this is the blog I had to remove from my MySpace page because of the conflict it caused with my husband.  I put it hear because it is pertinent to what lead me to where we are now.

A View From the Outhouse

The title of this blog is what I have in my future.  I am trying to have a more positive outlook but I am stuck in the middle of moving and I am finding it very difficult.  Likewise, I am trying to find the humor in it, but honestly I have been spread so thin I don’t laugh much at anything at this moment.  I know I wrote of the whole CPS thing, but there have been a lot of other things going on as well that I have not been writing about, it has all been just so damned overwhelming I have been walking through life in a fog.

 

It was the Murphy’s Law of months was March, 2008. My van was in constant breakdown and with over $700 in repairs complete and it still needing more I want to junk it but can’t. We don’t have the resources to buy a new vehicle. My Mom had a scare and an overnight stay in the hospital for pains in her head. My Mom is 77 and getting old lady brain so pains in her head are to be taken very seriously. I didn’t even know she was in the ER until she was out the following day because my bonehead sister, instead of picking up the fucking phone and calling me (a local call, mind you) decided to power up her computer, connect to the internet and send me a fucking email about it which I didn’t even get until AFTER Mom had gotten home from the hospital and talked to me. There are days my sister is in sore need of a serious bitch slapping. We’re close that way. Can you bitch slap someone in an email?

 

Then there are my wonderful landlords. They are the caretakers of the property, taking care of it for their son who bought the place last summer and who works out of state to make more money. My lease was due to be up this month of April. They sent me a letter ‘addressing’ some ‘issues’ they had and a new rental agreement for me to sign.

 

When they bought the place last summer, they decided to ‘fix it up by power washing and painting it. Real professionals they were, too, moving the couch I had on the porch onto the deck right under the eaves BEFORE power washing the roof so that all the debris on the roof ended up on the couch. Granted, mostly it was a couch for Fat Dog who lives outside and loved that couch. But please. Use some sense. Then of course, washing out the fucking paint bucket IN THE LAWN after they were done. There is still green paint in the grass. Oh. New house color? Shiny brown with green trim. Yes, SHINY. They chose a glossy paint for the exterior. And it is a dark brown. And they painted it this color last summer when it was almost 100 degrees outside. They also showed up at 8:00 every morning and not consistently. I never got a phone call when they were going to come over and also happened to be sitting on the toilet buck naked when the grandson helping him decided to paint around the bathroom window. I had the blinds drawn, but the top of the window is arched and has glass so it is only the lower windows that have blinds. He was on a ladder. Luckily there is a bit of a partition but I had to duck and cover then streak for safety once the guys head was not in sight.

 

I tolerated that. They wanted to get it done, it was hot. I wanted them the hell gone A.S.A.P. Then the owner remodeled the apartment connected to the garage to rent it out. Fine, ok. I had enjoyed having no neighbor since the previous owner had moved on but whatever, they gotta make the mortgage.

 

Then I found out the owner was renting it to his nephew. One of the Grandson’s that had helped the owners father, whom I call That Old Bastard, do some of the painting. (Though not the one who had caught me au natural on the shitter.)

 

I started to get that uneasy feeling twinking at my gut strings. Why would they have a nephew rent the place? Why, to help ‘keep an eye’ on the premises for James, the owner and uncle. That and now That Old Bastard began to drop by often and unexpectedly to ‘visit’ the grandson. Which may have been legitimate. However, he would then find a reason to knock on my door and make inquiries about things.

 

Now, I we are a low income family and my reality is that if I didn’t have housing assistance we would have no home. The job market sucks and even though I have been registered with two temp agencies even the temp work has been next to non-existent. I did have a job before Christmas with a building company, but got laid off that because of the wonderful housing market crash. I have to report all income changes and there are yearly inspections to deal with from the housing people. Checking the place out once a year makes sure that I am not harboring illegal aliens, growing a pot farm or cooking up a meth lab. It also lets them track needed repairs, make sure we aren’t kicking out all the walls and forces the landlord to do needed repairs. Fine. I know how to jump through the hoops. Hate it, but have found it necessary.

 

After inspection, That Old Bastard came back to the property, unannounced, the next day to ‘check up’ on a vent plate I told him I would have to take off the back of the house because when I put it on I locked cats under the house. Now, I have been in violation of the whole pet thing. I have outside animals and feeding outside has snowballed into other cats coming over and one cat I had got knocked up before I got her, then her two remaining children fixed, etc. And two dogs, one outside couch potato, one inside small dog. The previous owner had no beef with it even if the rental agreement stated only one dog and one cat. Anyway, they had been under the house because every vent in the plywood foundation had been kicked out when I moved in. Then James boarded it up without telling me, trapping cats underneath the house. Expecting me to let them starve and die under there I guess. Anyway, I took the back plate off out of sheer laziness didn’t replace it all winter until the day of inspection. But I told him as I replaced it I would have to take it off but would be sure to feed them and put it on when they were all present and accounted for.

 

That Old Bastard decided to come back, as if catching me in an evil act, but chose to start yelling at Lew for it as I wasn’t home. He also screamed about a door that was damaged when we moved in, trying to say it wasn’t damaged last summer and informed Lew he would be back on Monday to do repairs.

 

He never showed Monday and didn’t call. Tuesday he showed up at 9 in the morning. This is after I had repeatedly told him repairs needed to be done after 11 because Lew works graveyards and that is like waking him at 3 in the morning.

 

Not only did he show up in the morning, he WALKED IN TO MY HOUSE without waiting for Lew to answer and was in fact, in the bedroom doorway and walking into the bathroom in this bedroom while Lew was still in bed after yelling. “I’m yellin’ here!” before he walked in. Lew was left to scramble to get his pants on with That Old Bastard standing in uncomfortable proximity.

 

Lew went in the bathroom to help him, heard a noise and looked up and lo’ and behold here comes the grandson, my neighbor WALKING UNINVITED INTO MY HOUSE without knocking or calling out!

 

These are just a few of the more blatant things. There are more. Combine that with a rental agreement they wanted me to sign that wanted us to power wash the OUTSIDE of the house when we moved out. Told me to ’talk to my children’ about ’bothering’ the other tenant (their grandson) if he were outside his apartment. Stated that there would be no outside noise allowed that might disturb their grandson.

 

Basically, it sounded as if they wanted us out and I was mad enough to oblige. After writing a highly incensed eleven page response letter not only outlining all the bullshit they had pulled but giving them direct quotes from Montana’s Landlord Tenant Act of 1977 law that clearly states what they were doing were in direct violation of my tenant rights. I also demanded that all harassing behavior stop immediately or I would seek injunctive relief as was my right by that very law. I gave my 30 day notice on the last page.

 

The Monday they would be receiving the letter from me That Old Bastard called and wondered when I would be signing the new rental agreement and mailing it to them. The Old Bitch, That Old Bastard’s wife had put a sticky note on the rental agreement saying parts that didn’t apply to me would be taken out of the agreement I was to sign. Every time I had spoken to That Old Bastard about anything rental related he told me to talk to The Old Bitch because she was in charge of all things rental related. Which made me wonder why the hell he was calling me about a rental issue. It was also before they got to read the part in the letter where I told them I wouldn’t speak to That Old Bastard about any rental issues anymore due to the fact he kept telling me to deal with The Old Bitch instead.

 

I know I sound a bit bitter and more than a little angry. I think most people could understand the anger. I have had it with the invasions. I told them in my letter I would rather live out of my camp trailer than put up with landlords who felt it was their right to be in constant violation of their tenants legal right.

 

And I would. I have had to move two years in a row now. First because of mold in the basement apartment under the funeral home where we lived. Now because I refuse to subjugate myself and my family to the whim of landlord tyrants. I am tired of moving.

 

I could have curled to their will, signed their questionable and possibly illegal rental agreement. But I know they want us gone. We’re poor people, you see, so we must be scum of the earth and criminals.

 

We have the mixed fortune of living in one of the most beautiful, and highly sought after places in Montana. The rich have discovered the Flathead Valley and even with the housing market crashing everywhere else, here you can’t find land on acreage with a home for anything under $200,000.

 

So Lew’s Dad owns five acres on the backside of Teakettle Mountain. They lived there about ten years, the two of them. There is an amazing collection of vehicles on the property. No well. The closest running water is a seasonal creek about three miles down the road. No electricity. Of the two I will miss the water the most. I will miss my huge tub here that was big enough for all three of my girls and I to fit in.

 

Why this route? I know people wonder. When my father was alive he told me I was crazy. Just plain crazy to go out there. I lived there for a summer but drove out there every weekend the whole winter when Lew and I were first together. With my then three year old daughter. I got stuck. A LOT. I learned how to put tire chains on. I had a beat to shit pick-up then. I went out there because I had loved the guy that lived out there since I was sixteen. He just didn’t know it until I was 29. I didn’t mind the summer, but I swore I would never live out there during the winter as ill equipped vehicle-wise as I was. The snow can get damned deep out there.

 

When it was just Lew and I up on that mountain, things were good. I could see the way to make the dream I had of having an organic farmlet a reality. There was solitude and beauty, even though you could always hear the highway noise across the river. You could walk over to our makeshift shooting range and blow the hell out of stuff and no one would call the cops. You didn’t have neighbors to worry about. No landlords to tell you to polish all the rocks before you moved out. No landlord to drive you out in the first place.

 

This is where it’s at I suppose. I am tired of being homeless. I am paying people for the privilege of living in their places until they decide they don’t want us there anymore. Or until my Fuck You attitude kicks in and I shake the dust of the place from my boots. These dwellings are NOT my home. They are shelter over my head until circumstances change. That’s why I have never tried very hard to get rid of my pathetically tiny 15 foot camp trailer cause by damned that thing is my HOME. Mine! I own it. Free and Clear. No one can take it away from me.

 

I have long known Lew would be happier out in the sticks again. He grew up there. It is important to me that he is happy and I want to make a home he is happy to come home to. He has made a lot of sacrifices for me and the kids. But living that rustic with a pack of small children is going to suck ASS until we get the water situation designed. Even if we have to haul water, little kids are grubby individuals on days when you have all you can run water. I bought a generator. So we can use occasional power. Thank God it’s warming time and not autumn.

 

I know a few people will think I am crazy, even me at times. I have prayed long and hard about the direction our lives are supposed to take. Faith sometimes requires just that. Faith that all is as it should be and all in the Great Spirit’s design.

 

I have misgivings. The largest is that the land is not in our names and Lew’s father is not in the best of health. There is no will. I am balking at building any permanent structure. Lew and I have been fighting about it regularly in fact. He sees the necessity of a permanent structure. Which is a real necessity. Especially living wall to wall with six people in a small camper. But I can’t get past the knowing that unless there is land in our name we are just tenants again who own nothing and can lose our home. Then wee really would be homeless. There would be no last resort and all we would have would be that damned camper.

 

There are days, like today, when I want to leave this valley. I want to leave what it is becoming. I want to go live where the majority of people don’t. Realtors and wealthy people have already discovered the land adjacent to Lew’s Dad’s. I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before we would be pushed out of there as well.

 

That’s it, I suppose. It’s not ours. Not really. No matter what we built. So it would never feel like my home, even though to Lew it is home. I would just be another resident tenant. Until circumstances changed and I was left a nomad once more, children in tow.

 

There is too much division in this for me. I do not feel like we are standing on solid or unified ground at all. I don’t like this quicksand footing. Perhaps it is because my faith is being tested. I don’t know. I feel there is no place in this valley for my family and I. Nothing I will be able to say is ours. We are just living off of someone else. I HATE that! I have wanted to get off public assistance and can’t. I have wanted to finish school but can’t seem to do that either. Right now I have no hope of a happy future.

 

I know I am tired. Beyond tired. I took the week long temp job that I was requested for this week and it has thrown me a week behind my packing. Stress and more stress. I keep waiting for my arrhythmic heart to just explode. Some days I wish it would. I am into mind numbing exhaustion now, lack of sleep, headaches.

 

We were supposed to be getting married in May. Finally. After 8 years. Nothing has been planned for that either. I feel like it is the least of our worries and now just another added stress. I had been looking forward to it, but now. Well. I feel like there’s no point. I really, really wanted to have a wedding. We could go over to Idaho and have it over and done in an afternoon. But if one of the most important days in my life will be relegated to a side trip why fucking bother? It’s supposed to be a time of celebration. I think Lew would rather not even bother with any of that stuff and just blow the gas money to drive over to Idaho. Besides, what do I put as my bridal registry? Western Building Center for lumber or the Army Navy for winter survival gear.

 

My pessimism is reaching an all time high. I may even be out doing my late Father, Heaven forbid. I just want the fucking moving OVER with and I want my children sent off to boarding school so I can pack a fucking box without someone unpacking it right behind me because ohmygawdthat’smyfavoritetoyandwhereHASitbeen!!

Ah well. At least I have my camp trailer. Maybe I can set up along a highway and offer palm readings to stupid tourists while my children pick their pockets. Now I just need a trailer hitch on my pice of shit van so I don’t have to borrow a vehicle to pull the trailer…

Poverty to Live: Of Thine Own Self Speak True

I have learned, from experience, and the experience of friends that abuse can be categorized.

 

As girls growing up, we would compare our domestic war stories and in our own minds rate each others experience. Madonna Wannabe claimed severe abuse from her step-father in early childhood but often came to school to brag about the new waterbed or big screen television or monstrously large satellite her family had just purchased. We never took her abuse claims too seriously because she was usually full of shit for the most part and her hobby was causing conflict among our group of friends, all for the sake of attention.

 

Mouse never said much, only that her Dad was an asshole but she hated him with a passion that was terrifying for such a tiny person. She never came to school with visible bruises but the little troll that was her father was always drunk. I lay awake in her bed one night at a sleepover, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep, overhearing the porn movie sounds coming from the living room television down the hall. I felt dirty, tainted, horrified and fascinated, even though Mouse had told me that’s what he was going to do later that night. I finally hid my head under the pillow and wondered if that was part of why her house never quite felt safe.

 

Crazy V, who was eleven when we met. My parents appalled when she said she didn’t have to be home until 9 pm even on school nights. Big blue eyes, blonde haired little pixie initiated into the world of sex at the age of twelve by someone who thought it would be fun to tell the whole school what a slut she was. She pretty much wore the mantle after that, but she remained and still is one of the friends that would stick by me through anything. And she still makes me want to slap her because she is having the same type of boy problems now as she did twenty-two years ago. I tell her she needs me to come bitch slap the crap out of her often, only now she lives in another state. Besides, we’d probably only end up getting drunk with each other and making public asses of ourselves. That would be ok too. Nothing is going to change my Crazy V and I’ll love the vain little shit anyway.

 

Tops, who finally let the world know her father had been molesting her since she was three our Freshman year of high school. She did it after he came after her younger sister and she did it to protect her. The bastard only spent two years behind bars, less time than a rapist who rapes a stranger would spend behind bars here in Montana. He spent two years behind bars and is on the Montana violent and sexual predator database for life. Tops got an abortion at age 15 because she didn’t know if the baby was her boyfriend’s or her father’s.

 

After Tops came out with that, the shit that I went through with my own Dad didn’t seem to be anything. At least from the outside. On an outside scale of judgment it didn’t even rank.

 

I didn’t’ live it from the outside, though. My heart told me my own experiences were the worst, even though my mind knew I was getting off pretty lucky.

 

My parents were most affectionate when I was small. Tiny ones are always easier to love. They are cute and don’t issue demands in quite the same way as the bigger ones do. I have two sisters who are ten and thirteen years older than me. When I was small, they were big into the party scene and making Mom and Dad’s life hell. I couldn’t quite understand what was going on. Mom ranted and cried a lot, worried about them getting high and Dad just ranted. During the year I was four back in 1975 I was awakened from dead sleep in the middle of the night by people screaming. Mom, Dad and someone really literally screaming their ever loving guts out. It was my eldest sister, in the living room floor being held down by my father who was sitting on her and pinning her arms to the floor as she was in some drug induced freak out episode. The local doctor and friend of the family came in to put a needle in my sisters arm that made her quiet down. I thought they had killed her. I had started screaming and jumping up and down at first sight and watched in wide eyed terror. Mom held on to me and eventually put me back to bed, no explanations. The second time it happened I remember jerking awake thinking, ” I will have to go out there and scream again too.” That is the last I remember of that incident.

 

I became the somewhat overprotected nestling watching and observing the puzzling goings on between my parent’s and sisters. I learned early to blend into the background and listen. You can learn a lot that way. I also learned to question. I remember my mother pouring out her grief and frustration about my older sisters and their drug use. I saw the hurt it caused and didn’t ever want to do that. So I saved my own experimentation for later.

 

My sister’s let me know whenever it suited them how spoiled they thought I was. The only kid at home after age five, my middle sister having moved out at age 15. In one respect I was raised as an only child. My mother claims to have been more lenient with me, but I still felt caged. I was only allowed to go over to certain friends houses, only after it was made clear we would go nowhere else, and only if my father was in a mood to let me. If my friends came over we were pretty much restricted to coffee marathons at the local greasy spoon for entertainment purposes, or holed up in my bedroom recording ourselves having belching contests. My Dad was consistently a rude, mean asshole to my friends. In high school I had only two friends that would brave staying over at my house. With friends whose parents were much more permissive than my own, I was soon not really invited anywhere. Why? They knew I wouldn’t be able to go.

 

In my childish mind I didn’t get to do a whole hell of a lot. Considering what some of my friends went through, I had it pretty easy. Too easy in some respects. My biggest responsibility at home was to do dishes. I had no motive to challenge myself or to even expand myself in the ways of eventual adult responsibility. I hated school. I felt directionless. never an athlete (unless you count spitting for distance and accuracy as a sport) I was more interested in writing, drama, dance and singing. I did these to some extent on my own but never felt accomplishment because I was flunking out of high school.

 

Then there was the fact of my father.

 

I once looked up our horoscopes in a book titled the Secret Language of Relationships. It listed Best and Worst for combinations of our personalities. Our worst combination was ‘Family’.

 

My father and I hated each other. If we were in the same room with one another there were one of three scenarios. 1) Complete and stony silence. 2) Terse word exchange with thinly veiled hostility, or most commonly 3) War.

 

When I say war, it doesn’t even cover the level of vitriolic seething fury that my father and I exchanged. No matter the issue, insignificant or not, we were out to bait, stab, gut and wound each other in any verbal way possible. I got better at it as I got older because there were times that, through the exchange, I would provoke him enough to attack me.

My father had a hand that had been severely burned as a child and made a very bony fist.

 

Trying to write this, bringing up these memories, because they are my own and even though I know there is so much worse things that have happened, are happening now, I am still, even after all these years so agitated by the memory of the whole dynamic between Dad and I that I have to keep getting up from the computer chair to pace, rub my aching head, grind my teeth. Go find something to eat even though I know I am feeding my body out of fury not out of love or the desire to maintain and I am only adding to my weight problem even though I don’t want to. Tears keep springing up and it is a combination of distant memory and recent domestic arguments that race in my head, my husband’s and father’s voices commingling to wipe away all sense of time and place. That was then and this is now and now is then as well.

 

This is always a major problem. I can see so clearly and judge so well the lives of others, but have such a hard time turning that eye inward.

Perhaps it is because, when I turn that eye inward, it burns into my soul with the same merciless rage and anger that was burned into me by my father when I was growing up. Somehow, somewhere along the way as a child I lost all possible compassion for myself. As I grew up I tried to find it, pieces of me to put back together and re-create as something I felt worthy of, well, of anything. Love, I suppose? Compassion? Mercy? There is little mercy in me for myself or my husband. Sometimes this bleeds through to encompass my children and the War continues even more inside me when I am weak enough to allow that to happen.

 

Though my fathers fist would land in my face, on those handful of occasions it did, the legacy that man left me was one of feeling as if I could never accomplish or be successful at anything. His litany runs through my mind; lazy shitass, knuckleheaded, slut, mean streak, pig, selfish, why can’t you…you’re never gonna amount to anything…you always gotta be so stubborn…never gonna do nothin’…

 

Somewhere, in my developing mind and belief system, I picked up that litany and at 37 years old am still at war with him. Shitty thing is the old bastard’s been dead for six years.

 

I know it is my relationship with my father that has seriously influenced my choice of relationships with my male partners, as Freudian as that may sound. I have either picked men who were total emotional vampires, totally emotionally unavailable, and every one of them has exhibited some kind of abusive characteristic.

 

Most shamefully, I have exhibited abusive characteristics myself. Toward my own children. If provoked enough, toward my own partners. Most days I am a passable parent, other days I am a worthless bastard, like father, like daughter. I can’t even rate my own degree because it is all unforgivable in my own mind. I don’t hold my kids down and punch them in the face but I have slapped them. In anger. I hate myself for losing control like that. I struggle not to then slip up again. Some days it seems I just scream at them for everything.

Why is it we always hurt the ones we love? I am no better than my father, yet I have gone back and told my children it was wrong of me to do that, or to have said something, though I fight most of all with myself on using belittling language with them. I try to tell them how angry I am feeling instead of using that anger as a mode of verbal or physical striking out at them. I make myself sit down to snuggle or read or sing to them or just be silly. I do this especially on the days I want to push them away and tell them to go do something, not to bother me. I have had to apologize to them. I don’t ever promise that it will never happen again because I don’t want to be a liar.

 

I feel like a complete failure as a parent and most days as a member of society. I don’t feel like I have anything to offer that is worthwhile. Sometimes the despair is depressive enough to turn to suicidal thoughts, especially if I don’t watch my nutritional intake or take my vitamins regularly. I don’t know how many times I have pictured suicide by pistol, or train.

 

The only thing that keeps me from taking that route is also being able to envision my kids faces, their bewilderment and grief and knowing I would be abandoning them to a life with a father who was even more emotionally fucked up than me. Knowing, then, that their futures would have no hope for betterment, only more of the long, unbroken chain of neglect, abuse, denial, co-dependence and alienation from society that his family has taught him as family values.

 

These post of mine really are too long. I have tried other blog sites, but this one was the easiest to use. I have a blog on MySpace at

www.myspace.com/hipiichyk

that actually shows the lighter side of my personality. Anyone reading these posts would never know I had a sense of humor. But I cannot post anything on MySpace that could deal with the deep turmoil and unearthing of the domestic strife between myself and my husband because he has access to the MySpace page. I once posted a blog entitled A View From the Outhouse (which I think I will post here, out of pure spite if nothing else, damnit!) that I ended up removing later because he threw a huge fit about it ‘making him look like an ignorant hillbilly asshole’ because I made a reference to us living like the Clampett’s before their oil strike. I think I have seen two episodes of Beverly Hillbillies in my entire life and was using that as a well known reference only. But Guitar Man thinks the world is out to get him because of his shitty, downtrodden childhood and I think he’s a pathetic whiner so I told him I would write where he would never see it. I have to. Because if I can’t open this abscess and drain some of the poison it is going to eat me alive.

 

Poverty to Live: Histories

My first two posts have disgorged a lot of fairly recent events. I suppose I should back up a little and explain the history of how I met my husband, as well as some of our personal history that has shaped who we are.  Perhaps this can help me figure out why we do what we do.

I was sixteen and going out with a guy six years older than myself. Young and ignorant, desperately wanting to be loved by someone, never interested in boys my own age who only wanted a piece of ass first. At least in an older man I found a degree of intellectual foreplay, not realizing how much I was manipulated at the time.

I met Guitar Man outside my boyfriends apartment. My best friend, Crazy V and I were sitting on the curb striking lit matches and extinguishing them by putting them between our teeth and closing our lips over the paper sticks. This was one of those pathetically defiant tough girl stunts I used to pull. I always had to act the Amazon Warrior. That act was the only armor I felt I had to conceal a surprisingly sensitive and easily hurt nature. That and outrageous humor.

He was wearing a booney hat and midcalf army trench coat. Naturally wavy shoulder length dark hair. His features were catlike and what stood out most about him were his almond shaped brown eyes. He looked quite serious, but when he smiled his face transformed. For someone who would later exhibit explosive temper, you could see his natural kindness in that smile. This is the duality of the man that is my husband. I did not know it then, of course. I had only just met him. A friend of my then-boyfriends best friend, he started to come around quite often and I got to know him.

Physically I always found him attractive, even though he was slight of frame. Five children later has done nothing to assist my own stocky frame, but I liked him and we got along well because we played well together. He would flip me shit and I would flip him shit and we would laugh.

Back then there were times that, though I never witnessed his more destructive smash-everything temper explosions, there would be times when he would not be his usual playful self, and if someone said something that he perceived to be directed at him, even if it was not, he would get angry and leave. This always confused me and made me sad. I didn’t want to see him go. I actually enjoyed spending time with him more than with my boyfriend. One time, Guitar Man, the boyfriend and Guitar Man’s best friend Elmo had come to visit me. I ran around a lot with Guitar and Elmo. We’d bomb all around town in that beat to shit Dodge Dart of Elmo’s. The whole time I had this huge secret crush on Guitar Man but never let on. I haven’t ever been the cheating type so I just held on to it all as an unattainable longing and left it at that.

Years passed and we lost touch. There were times I would think about him, sometimes often. Wonder how he was. If and when I saw Elmo I would always inquire about him. Yes, he was still playing jam night at the Bullet. Yes he was still around. He had spent some month in Oregon working on a friends cattle ranch.

Ten years and two kids later, single I began thinking about trying to contact him again. But I had no idea how. At least a year passed. It happened I was working for my landlords in their construction business. We had a meeting with all employees one day.  At this meeting was a young man named Isaac.  Isaac said he had grown up in my home town but I had never seen him in school.  He had been home schooled.  Lived up the line where I knew Guitar Man had grown up.  Not only that, but his family lived on the same mountain road Guitar Man and his father currently lived on.  He told me Guitar Man spent a lot of time at his sister’s place babysitting her kids while she worked.  He told me where it was and I even drove by.  I was reluctant to go to the door, though.  Would Guitar Man want to see me after all these years? I had always enjoyed our friendship, did he?

Six months again passed. I thought about Guitar Man off and on, wondering, praying. T hen I ran into Isaac again at Wal-Mart and figured it was a definite sign that I should contact him.  I arranged for Isaac to drive out and show me where on this mountain Guitar Man and his Dad lived. The day I followed him was a warm June day.  He drove me to the very end of a winding, rutted goat track of a mountain road.  There, at the bottom of the driveway parked in his blue Subaru was Guitar Man’s Dad, dozing in the summer sun.  I thought this was a bit odd.  He wasn’t drunk and hadn’t been drinking, but he was fast asleep.  I later came to find that things like this were what was considered ‘normal’ for this man to do.  In time I came to find out there were a lot of things what were considered ‘normal’ behavior for this man that really was not.

I was told where to locate Guitar Man’s sister’s house as that was where he was.  I was nervous driving back to town, but had wanted to see him for so long…

When I knocked on the door and his sister, who had been in my grade answered I asked if he was there, and there he was.  Ever the smartass, when I came in he was making the sign of the cross to ward me off, smiling ear to ear as I came in.  When I went over to hug him, his hug was so all encompassing and sincere I could tell he was really happy to see me too. He smelled clean and wonderful.

Over the next two weeks we got to re-familiarize ourselves with one another. He was more reserved, not as quick to laugh. Darker, maybe somehow. I chose to overlook this and focused on finding my old playmate.  He was still there, but felt different.  More calloused.

I have a girlfriend who has told me that I need to quit picking up strays. Maybe that’s what it was. I seem to have a knack for picking men who at the very least are emotionally stunted in some way.  With my husband, and seeing the relationship he had with his parents and family, it went deeper than that.  It seemed to be a family trait.

For the past ten years my now-husband and his father had lived on the five acres his father had purchased after his Mom had finally left them. They had no electricity, no running water. The place looked like a damned junkyard/garbage dump. Standing on the steps of Guitar Man’s trailer I once counted twenty-three junk cars. Those were only the ones I could see. There were many more I couldn’t.  Some date as far back as the 40s. Others are more modern. What struck me in this bacheloristic hellhole was the total disregard for the ground they were living on. Where they could have had vegetable gardens to feed themselves were scrap iron piles. Instead of working to have even a hand pump well put in, they drove to the nearest town twelve miles away to haul water.

I can’t lie that there weren’t warning signs of Bad Shit To Come. My own stubborn egotism at being able to ‘help’ him to improve his life and my arrogance at assuming he would want help or change of any kind. What I did was bring more forced change to this man’s life than he would ever want. We have spoken about it since and he claims no regrets but I often wonder.

The relationship I saw between Guitar Man and his father was very psychologically abusive. I would later learn the history of it from Guitar Man’s mom, but at this time all I could see was that any idea Guitar Man came up with for anything, no matter how small, his father had to jump in and tell him how it wouldn’t work, it was wrong, how dumb that was. There was no let up and this man never told his son he did a good job, at anything!

Guitar Man’s father grew up in Idaho and had left school in the eighth grade and possibly even earlier. I want to say third grade but that may not be correct. Regardless, he is illiterate and never went beyond manual labor. But there is also something mentally wrong with Guitar Man’s father. He is paranoid and suffers at times from anxiety attacks so severe he has in the past collapsed. Guitar Man’s grandmother went into the hospital when his father was twelve and died from something gynecological. His father refuses to go to a hospital or doctor. His health began to deteriorate severely two years ago and we would have driven him to the hospital. He adamantly refused to go until his daughter came to take him. He is obsessive about one of his daughters to a point which makes me uncomfortable. He is the same about Guitar Man’s mother who divorced him years ago but is still tied to him in a way that seems deeply psychological and co-dependant. She has told me herself that she doesn’t like him touching or hugging her and doesn’t like being around him, yet she is, constantly.

For a deeper understanding of the way Guitar Man’s family dynamics work…and honestly, I really don’t understand it, it is sick, twisted and just all ’round fucked up, even coming from a dysfunctional family such as my own, this is the history of Guitar Man’s parents as told to me by his mother.

His mother, S grew up in the same Idaho town as his father, B. S told me that she grew up in a family with a very chauvinistic father who didn’t’ believe women should go to college or do anything other than get married. S was molested for years by her own brother who was a born criminal that ruined the family name. In the era this happened of course, the ’40s and ’50s, you ‘kept it in the family’ and didn’t let anyone know about incestual sexual abuse. Besides, if it was happening, it was probably the girls fault for asking for it, because that’s the way the backwards bastards thought back then.

S told me she had gone out with B a few times, but he made her uncomfortable. As we talked she told me, “Every time I would go somewhere he was he would just sit there and stare at me the whole time. He would show up wherever I was if he knew I was going to be there. I think they have a name for it now…”

“You mean ’stalking’?” I asked her incredulously.

“Yeah! That’s it.”

Lovely. So, after awhile of this, I am not sure of what approach was taken, S wanted to go to school, her parents told her she needed to marry, S’s father told her she would be marrying B. S told me her parents made all the arrangements, including setting the wedding date. I don’t know if B went to her father to ask for her hand or not, but I would assume so. Frankly I was so blown away by someone’s parents telling them who they would marry and then making the arrangements that I didn’t think to ask.

Perhaps it was to marry off their ’soiled’ daughter to the first taker, thereby releasing themselves of the reminder her own brother had perpetrated on her, if they even were aware of it.

So S and B were married. They had one daughter, then Guitar Man seven years later. B was furious S had a boy. He only wanted daughters, he told her and B even went so far as to talk to the other woman that had just given birth in that ward to a baby girl. B tried to get this woman to trade her daughter for his son. He was serious about it. He pestered this woman to trade her daughter for his son. She told him she had five boys at home, there was no way she would trade because she had worked too hard for her daughter. Guitar Man’s family seems to treat this story as something quaint and humorous. They don’t seem to know or care how this would make Guitar Man feel.

S told me that B began pestering her about wanting to watch her have sex with other men. That’s his thing. He’s a voyeur. She told me he couldn’t get off unless he was seeing her having sex with another man. She resisted for a long time but then told me she gave in so he would just leave her alone. So the predator preys on the one who had been a victim. I firmly believe she gave in because she had already suffered at the hands of her brother and her conditioning permitted it.

Of course, he didn’t’ leave her alone. Why should he? His pestering had gotten him his sick and twisted reward. She told me he would get mad if any one guy came around too much and take it out on her.

I don’t know if the voyeuristic crap was going on before or after this major tragic incident, but I think perhaps it came after.

S and B had to take a day trip down to one of our larger Montana cities for something to do with the line of work they were in. Getting a chainsaw or something. S’s mother was going to watch Guitar Man and his older sister for them when they went. She was also caring for S’s sister’s two girls as well.

Guitar Man, however, at two years old, was being his typical rambunctious little shit self. S’s mother told her she didn’t want to take him that day, only his sister. It was in June of 1971. While crossing the tracks at train crossing with no lights or arms, the car was struck by a diesel train that was going 60-70 miles per hour. The engineer had been drinking. S’s mom, her 9 year old daughter and two nieces were killed instantly. They heard about the wreck on the radio coming back. S told me she told B, “That was Mother.”

Guitar Man remembers coming home and driving down the road seeing his favorite Aunt, mother to the two girls, walking down the road crying. He remembers, later, trying to talk to her, at two not understanding, and her screaming at him, “Get away from me you little shit!”

Guitar Man knew, at two years old that people were angry with him because he should have been in that car too. His father in particular.

S told me B refused to let her go see her daughter to identify her in the morgue because he was afraid she wouldn’t come back. She learned from her sister, who identified them that her daughter was not as mangled as the nieces. S told me it seemed very unreal and she never cried, not until twelve years later when it hit her and she cried for two days straight.

Guitar Man’s family seems to have been ruled by his father’s paranoia and phobias. Couple that with his mother’s own untreated issues and you have the perfect set up for abuse and neglect. There was domestic violence between B and S, S drank to get to sleep before B came home, B drank for his own reasons. Two more daughters followed Guitar Man in the family line. S did put her foot down with B about naming the next baby girl the same name as the big sister as he wanted to do.

All through his formative years, growing up in a home sewn with conflict and domestic strife, my husband was constantly told by his father how he couldn’t take care of himself. This seems to be B’s projection of his own life situation ever since his own mother had died when he was twelve.

By the time Guitar Man was 10 he had acquired his father’s porn mag collection. By the time he was 12 he had moved out of the house, tired of sharing a room with sisters four and eight years younger and moved into a camp trailer in the back of his mother’s house. His idea of home decor was wallpapering with nudie pics out of those magazines. Though that may have come later. That’s what it was like when I saw it when I was 16 and he was 19, anyway.

By the time I met him, Guitar Man’s mom had left B for a man, F. There is no real love lost between them, what S has alluded to was F was more for keeping B at bay than anything. F is an ex-Vietnam Green Beret who did two tours of duty on thing like night missions where the orders were to go into villages and slit throats. He has a steel plate in his head from a car accident and he is a fucking free-loading asshole because my mother-in-law enables him to be. He is also my next door neighbor on our mountain but I will get to that story later.

I grew up with a father that had no use for his daughters. I was a ‘nuisance’. I was not as valuable as a boy. This lent me a definite attitude of defiance. My father was a weaker personality than my mom yet belittled her whenever he could. My mother was a degreed college graduate, my father couldn’t pass high school. He always treated my mom like a second class citizen. He never beat her, he saved that for us girls, though the occasions weren’t often, they still stick out in my mind. Mostly it was severe emotional and verbal abuse. I grew up with a very ‘Fuck You!’ attitude toward men and authority. I have not been very successful in my life and struggle with not being my father or mother.

I cannot imagine what my husband has felt growing up. He is much more intelligent than his father, yet he cannot allow himself to feel that way. There is a bazaar and unhealthy clannishness about my husband’s mother, father and one of his sisters. The other sister married and moved to town and refuses to be part of the whole co-dependant weird bullshit my husband and his other sister get sucked into. Though his other sister recently left the state with her boyfriend, also another story I will get into later.

There is a truly fucked up habit in this family of either his mother or sister making decisions leading to a major crisis then calling my husband in to bail them out or fix it.

I know my husband doesn’t want to be part of this, yet the conditioning he grew up with is keeping him chained to it. This in turn is bringing out a nasty and volatile chemistry in our marriage. Not something I want my children to grow up with. But I also don’t want them growing up without their father.

I am looking with horror at the word count on this blog. So much to tell and no editor but myself! I needed to get this background and believe it or not I have only touched on the subject. There is a psychological dichotomy in any relationship and how we were raised has a huge impact on how we will not only raise our children, but react to our spouses.

Stresses are on the rise. My husband was laid off his job this week. Even when we had income we had ‘no money’ in his eyes. Now it’s ‘no money and no more comin’ even though he is eligible for unemployment and job retraining. I guess I should be grateful he isn’t a drinker and doesn’t do drugs. I may start to be though, with him home all the time!

Some days, more days than I would like, I think, “Is this worth it? Am I just fucking nuts? Will anything I have planned turn out? Will he support it?”

Sometimes I am afraid I know the answer.

 

 

 

Poverty to Live: Family Value

I was raised by Depression Era parents. My Father was 18 and sitting at the breakfast table eating hot cereal when news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor broke over the radio. My Mother’s parents ran a general store and post office in a very small rural town in southwest Montana. My Grandmother ran it after Grandpa dies up into the early 70s because as a child I remember my cousin Mark taking me into the store to buy nickel jerky and the mammoth sized cash register fascinated me.

My Dad was second eldest of ten children and his father worked all over trying to feed his family while his mother either stayed home with the kids or left the older ones to care for the younger while she walked to town. My father became an avid fisherman because, as he used to say, ” We could either have potatoes for dinner or potatoes and fish.” He learned to hunt for the same reasons. My Father was a hard worker.

My Mother came from a family more privileged in ways. During her younger years they lived in a mountain homestead in the Madison Valley and my Grandpa was a government trapper, in charge of taking out the roaming grizzlies and other predators that would prey on livestock. They later moved into town to run the store and post office. grandma was a small town society lady, and my Mother’s send of decorum and manners reflected this. father’s family was a rougher lot and their ways and humor reflected it. In my father’s family, then later in our own, obscene biological bodily noises were not only encouraged, but applauded, much to my Mother’s disgust as she would hightail it to the restroom at the least sign of abdominal discomfort.

I was also a late life surprise for my parents. Mom was 41 when she had me, and Dad, at 48, was sure he would be dead before he saw me graduate high school. In a way, I guess he did die before he saw that because I dropped out to get my GED, later took several years of college courses and never did really graduate high school. He was 80 when he died six years ago.

My parents knew poverty as children, to differing degrees. My mother never knew hunger. My father did. They both worked. Mother graduated college with a degree and later became a teacher. My father took five years of high school and could never pass the English class. His story is that the English teacher hated him, which very well may have been true. It is also quite possible my father suffered from the dyslexia that is so prevalent in his side of the family, but which went undiagnosed.

There is a two generational gap between my parents and I. I have two older sisters, and raising them in the 70s left my parents in a state of shock, I think. Because of my sisters drinking, drug using, sneaking out shenanigans my parents tried to overcompensate by keeping me as close to home as they possibly could. While I understand their desire to ‘protect’ me, it also, unfortunately taught me nothing about reality of day to day living and responsibilities. When I came along we had more money so I was spoiled more than my sisters. My parents were more tired when I came along. They did the best they could with the knowledge they had, a very unhappy marriage and their own views of life, which unfortunately conflicted 99% of the time.

We never want to marry our fathers or our mothers but we seem to end up following the courses we know.

My husbands family grew up poor as well. More than my parents ever were. He has in some respects I think, however unintentionally, held this against me. He has told me I am viewed by his family as standoffish. Uppity, in a way. Like I have an attitude that I am better than they are.

Every family has their dysfunction. My Dad was a bowling night drunk. He took my eldest sister on a car ride when she was three years old and told her he would kill her is she didn’t start behaving. He was constantly emotionally abusive and sometimes physically violent with us. My mother was emotionally distant and very involved in her own miseries. She and Dad never loved each other, they were merely doing what was expected of them for their generation. Marrying because that’s what you did.

My husband’s parents, as told to me by my mother-in-law were married because her parents set it up. Her father didn’t believe a woman should go to school as she wanted, to become a nurse. The arranged the marriage and set the date. She was to marry a man she not only didn’t love, but whom made her uncomfortable for the fact that he constantly watched her everywhere she went. You know, like a stalker. But she had been molested by her own brother for years. Perhaps it was her parents way of taking care of the problem. But the man they chose for her, though I do not know all the details of how that arrangement came to be, was not a very stable personality either. He has an obsessive personality. Anxiety attacks. Later on, alcoholism on both sides, physical abuse. Darker things kept from the kids. My husbands family believes in keeping secrets. ‘Family business’. Abuse. Neglect.

I was not raised that way. We have come to screaming disagreements. I have taken my final stand after this summers goings on, and I have made it clear to my husband, whether or not he completely understands;

I WILL NOT LONGER SUPPORT YOUR FAMILY IN THEIR CYCLES OF ABUSE AND NEGLECT.

I struggle with my own demons of abuse. Curse myself for allowing my father’s words to come out of my mouth. War with myself over reacting to my children with anger. Come back to them time and again when I screw up, apologize, tell them I was wrong to do or say something. try harder. Fail. At times, succeed. But I try. I try. I fuck up and try again. I play with my kids. Laugh with them. Force myself to hug and cuddle them when I am feeling like a depressed introvert, knowing that they need that more than I need my bookish escapism. I so desperately want my children to grow up happier and more successful than I have been.

Time will come to tell of it, but the only reason I didn’t turn my husband’s sister into Child Protective Services once and for all was because his best friend, her new married boyfriend was leaving his wife to come and take her and her three very disturbed children out of state. What makes me sick about it is the whole family kept their mouths shut about his sister’s neglect and what it was doing. They would talk about it as if it were the kids fault they were so fucked up. The family wanted to be rid of their burden.

I don’t know that I did the right thing and in part I regret not turning her in. So I make up for it by crusading with Animal Control to try and liberate my mother-in-laws 16 unaltered, inbred and underfed dogs from her. So far I have only managed to steal one and get her to the basset rescue group. I am working on the sly with the director of my local animal shelter. But I have not yet had the courage, for fear of the World War III that with blow up between my husband and I when he finds out I breached his family’s backwater code of “It’s our business, no one else’s!” to call the Sheriff’s department on his mother and her ‘boyfriend’ for the neglect of these animals. We are snowed in and my rig is broken down. I did tell him I am getting rid of the dogs. I keep telling him I will no longer support his family’s habit of neglect. My husband doesn’t recognize neglect because he was raised by neglect. He remembers the child protective people making unwanted unannounced visits to them when he was growing up. His mother of course, holds that she was being victimized by the system and was doing nothing wrong. My husband, unfortunately, has the same kind of view. Everyone is out to get them and they are never at fault.

I do have to credit him in some areas for trying to improve. Mostly because I keep calling him on the bullshit. Not always in the most positive ways. But I will not be his victim. I will not subscribe to his belief in that way. I will not support him in neglect. I will overcome my fear. I will be a better parent, if not with him, them in spite of him. He is not completely unreasonable, though at times it seems he is. He has grown far more in these last nine years than he did in his previous thirty-two. I have required more from him. I have pissed some of his family off by coming into his life because he was supposed to be the one everyone dropped all their shit on to take care of. My husband is at once extremely self-sufficient and terribly handicapped within his family.

I am trying to understand it. I am trying here to write it out. Poverty plays a large part of it. And family history. I will do what I need to do.

We have dived into a lifestyle of poverty to escape poverty. I had been receiving housing assistance for a long time. With only his income since my job loss last year, we are still having to rely on food stamp assistance and Medicaid even though pays for health insurance. We want off that as well. But he doesn’t want me to work when we still would have to have childcare. Even with childcare assistance, our portion would be hundreds of dollars a month. I would be working to pay for childcare and gas. We did that before. Then we lost all assistance. Public assistance is an addiction cycle on its own.

He may be laid off this week. We will know tomorrow. Then what? We shall see.

I will not always live like this. Damnit, my kids deserve better. I will see that they get it. One way or another.

 

 

Poverty to Live

For over a year my husband spoke of nothing but how we could be saving so much money if only we would move out onto his Dad’s raw land. We can’t work on building anything if we are not out there! he would repeat. We’ll never save any money or be able to buy building materials living in town! he would lament time and again.

I prayed on it a lot. I tried to listen. I am not a Church going Christian. I try to shut up and listen to the Creator tell me what needs to be done. When shit hits the fan I wonder if I was deluding myself into thinking the Creator spoke to my heart and I was only following the path of my ever failing human design.

I felt I was supposed to go there. Support my husband in that way. But now there are ever more problems looming. My husband refuses to plan. Does not believe or cannot comprehend the idea of CYA (Cover Your Ass). Pre-planning is something he refuses to do because he holds the firm belief that none of his plans ever work out as expected. He makes no room for change. Often, if I step in with suggestions he explodes in a temper tantrum because now I am telling him he is incapable, useless, a failure. I have had to, at times, go ahead and do things as I knew they would work and this angers him. Whether it angers him because it works for me or just because I didn’t do it his way I don’t know. The arguments have become frighteningly domestic. Over three arguments he punched or kicked seven holes in the hollow core door we have between us and the cold. I have at him for attacking our children’s home. One time I took all the money from their piggy banks, packed our overnight bags and was going to head down to see if relatives could take us in until I got us on our feet again. But I don’t want to become a burden to them and I didn’t know if the women’s shelter could house me and four kids. I didn’t want to be in the damned shelter anyway. His sister was there once and she showed him where it was. I had nothing. I have nothing. Without someone to watch my kids I can get nothing. My Uncle has told me to contact him if I need help before, but his health is not good and I am a burden. I and my children are a burden. So I did not leave. I told him if he wanted me to stay he would agree to couples counseling. He bitched and moaned but said I had to find someone who would work around his graveyard work schedule. It has been three months and I never even bothered to make the call. Why? He doesn’t want it, it will do no good. I told him if he continued to smash things when we fought I would leave and take the kids to the shelter.

This makes me the evil one in his world, the bad person. That I would Take His Kids So He Could Never See Them Again. Fucking drama. I refuse to let him hold the power of terror over me. I will leave him before it erupts in war because there are days I think I could really hurt him when he gets like that but for the sake of my kids I can’t. And for the sake of our kids, he needs to grow the fuck up and stop throwing an infantile screaming temper-tantrum shit fit every time we disagree.

I worry that I will have to build the house and care for the kids while he works. I watched him build the addition onto the camp trailer we are living in. The roof isn’t even attached to the walls. There is plastic sheeting between us and the gusting winter snows that come in the gaps between the two by fours. The ceiling is only partially insulated and all the paper is still exposed because we ran out of money to buy plywood. He refuses to use sheetrock. He got angry with me because I insisted on building the floor on treated posts instead of right on the dirt. Threw his measurements off he said. The OSB board should have been covered in tarpaper at least to keep the moisture out but it’s not. Now the snow is piled against it and the rotting begins. Everything he builds is cobbled and slapped together, crooked, incomplete.

I had a dream of building my own home when we moved out there. But the home I had in mind and what my husband’s ideas are far different. I didn’t expect a palace, but a solid house with finished walls an ceilings isn’t exactly palatial. I had a vision of trying to eke out a miserable existence in these piece of shit falling downs shacks.

What is the lesson here? Right now we have no amenities. No electricity save what the generator can give us the rare times we have gas for it. No running water. Twelve miles to haul water unless we haul it in gallon jugs in backpacks across the train trestle. The trestle that is posted with No Trespassing signs.

After weeks and weeks of sleeping in her car on the property last summer his Mother acquired a two bedroom fully self sustaining trailer. Propane appliances and lights. Water tanks. Deep marine batteries for power. The guy she bought it from was supposed to pull it up the steep switchback driveway and get it set up for her. Instead, he got it stuck in the steep switchback driveway and because he had a guy coming to buy the tractor he was pulling it with, he left it, stuck in the mud in the driveway, totally blocking it. Before he left he re-opened the old back road coming in off the Forest Service property so we could drive up. It stayed there for about six weeks until my husband had time to get the old 50s era D8 Caterpillar started. He got that trailer pulled in. We had our driveway back.

But his Mother got another two bedroom trailer for free and wanted that up there too. For storage they said. Or maybe for us to live in. There was no room to put it anywhere with the plethora of junked cars, but they had to have it anyway. Save us all money on storage they said. His Mom paid a guy $150 to rent his heavy duty truck to pull it in from town and his cousin with the CDL to pull it.

The cousin with the CDL pulled it right into the hole the previous trailer had been stuck in and there it sat. When my husband got the Cat started to pull it out he threw the track off backing up and there it sat. There they both sit, actually. Though the Cat is fairing better in the three feet of snow than the trailer has. The trailer was pitched at a severe angle sideways downhill and with the snow weight on it’s walls has now folded over like a fucking cracker box. Flat.

With the track off the Cat we had no snowplow. His car was snowed in first then on Christmas Eve, coming home, I knew we were in trouble with the amount of snow when it began blowing up over the hood of the Ford Explorer to coat our windshield. We got over a foot of snow in one night. The hole my car got stuck in coming up the drive kept it there until we got someone to plow it out, but it may be the fuel pump is frozen because it won’t start. We have to walk the trestle any time we want out now until, well, spring maybe. Who knows. Our woodshed is emptying and his Mother’s boyfriend comes down and helps himself to our wood. Doesn’t get any for us, though my husband cuts all of his (I refuse to help him. It would be different if he helped us but he doesn’t). All of his Mothers too. When she’s there, which she hasn’t been for weeks and weeks.

So much is broken.  I don’t know if when or how it will be fixed or if it is fixable.  This is a small piece of what is going on there and all I have the energy to write about right now.  I feel I am failing.  Foundering.  Drowning.  The blessings are hard to see.  My faith is shaky.   I am so tired.  So damned tired.  Stranded right now, away from my home.  Have to make the trek in tomorrow, wanted to today but husband wouldn’t get us there.  I feel like I am suffocating.  Trapped in my home, trapped away from my home.  I am getting so damned angry.  I don’t know who to ask for help.  This I suppose is the most frustrating thing of all.