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.
