Around the holiday season, one tends to think of one’s FOO, whether one wants to or not.  It happens less and less as the years pass, but it still happens sometimes.  In my case, I think I ruminate on all the bullshit that happened because I am reminding myself exactly WHY they are not in my life any longer.

One phrase I learned while shoveling through it all was this:

And so it was with this year.

My sister has four kids, two girls and two boys.  The first boy was a handful.  I happen to think a lot of what he pulled off was because he was smarter than her – or at least, more creative.  The best one I know about was when he used the attic access in the boys’ bedroom to create a pot-smoking den in the attic.  Freakin’ genius.  The kid only got caught when one day he thought the house was empty, but one of my older brothers was visiting, and the uncle was still in the house and heard him overhead in the attic.

Anyway.  So by the time he was a teen, my sister was at her wits’ end I suppose, but her proposed solution was that she wanted her husband to teach the kid a lesson – a physical lesson.  I don’t know the exact details, as of course I heard all this second-hand.  But she definitely wanted her husband to physically attack the boy in some way, in order to discipline him.

God, that is so cringey even to type out.

Well, my BIL wouldn’t do it.

So my sister’s next idea was to BRING IN HER TWO BROTHERS TO DO THE JOB.

Again, this is all second-hand, but I guess she was ready to have our two oldest brothers fly in for the express purpose of doing some kind of physical discipline to the kid.

I don’t know what else they might have tried before this idea showed up.
I do know that this idea is not going to work.

I have a suspicion that family therapy, or anything like that, even if they tried it, would not be too effective, because CLEARLY the problem here is the KID, and CERTAINLY NOT MY SISTER.

Just like when I went to therapists, some think that “proves” I was the problem, and everyone expected it to “fix” me.  Which is often the case, that the people who need to do the changing don’t think they can possibly be the problem.

Well, my sister’s plan never came to fruition, AFAIK.  I think my BIL found out about it and put the kibosh on it.

But in revisiting it this year, I realized that this story is another confirmation that my sister is my mother all over again.

Because remember how, when my dad used to be gone all week, traveling for work — my mother used to keep a tally of what the boys had done wrong all week, and when Dad got home on Friday he had to physically punish them?

No, actually, because I’ve only alluded to this a couple of times here and there, and never really spelled it out. Well, I can remember Mom doing this to the two younger boys, and I have no doubt she did it with the older ones too.

I can remember standing in my parents’ bedroom, near the closet, watching the proceedings.  I probably had to be in the room because I was certainly no more than 5, if my mom was still there, and presumably I was not to be left alone in another room.  (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense coming from a parent who let me sit outside on the sidewalk for hours, and sent me to walk to school by myself, so maybe I just wanted to be near my Dad when he returned from being gone all week.  Or maybe Dad was the one who realized I should not be left unsupervised.  I don’t know.  But I do know I was in the room.)

The punishing involved both parents:  Mom reading from her scribbled list on the back of an envelope, or something, and Dad swatting the boys on the behind with a belt as they lay on the bed.

This is straight authoritarian parenting, the “strict father” family model.

I now wonder if maybe Mom was angry at Dad because he DIDN’T PLAY HIS ROLE PROPERLY.  He was supposed to be the head of the household and make all the decisions (and therefore take all the blame).  With him gone all week (to earn the money, but that apparently isn’t a good enough excuse) — those responsibilities fell on her and she couldn’t deal with them.

Further, since she had to do HIS job, maybe she decided, consciously or unconsciously, therefore she wouldn’t do HER job — which was to cook and clean and launder and maybe even nurture.  She passed most of THOSE responsibilities to her oldest daughter.

Who in turn, years later, decided that physical punishment from a man (preferably a relative of some kind, after all this is FAMILY) was the thing that had to be done to a kid.  Like mother, like daughter.

Ugh.

What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic’

Notes from here

I have to assume that the reason my father hospitalized my mother twice during my first year was also a catastrophic one.  I sure as hell hope so.  My sister insists that there is no proof of such a thing, and my older siblings suggest that it was something Dad did out of — oh, spite or maliciousness or something, because of course he was a bastard, and of course there could not possibly be ANYTHING wrong with Mom…

This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.

Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit mes­sages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.

“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma…”

For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children… the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.

At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking…”  As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.

Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.

The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a lightbulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”

The children…had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life… Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken… What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.

The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.

From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Fortuna said.

A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.

Kindergarten, 1974/75  (5YO)

One day when walking to kindergarten, I had dawdled along the way, and I was late to school.  We were supposed to arrive during lunch recess, and play in the kindergarten playground until the bell rang for everyone to come in.

This time, when I got there, the bell had already rung and the playground was deserted.  So I knew I was late.  I didn’t know what happened to people who were late but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.  I was terrified of having to walk in there in front of everyone, so I turned around, walked back home, sneaked into the house via the side door, and hid in the basement.  My “plan” was to hide down there until it was time to come home, at which point I’d come out and pretend that I’d been at kindergarten all day.

Mom found me down in the basement at some point – I have a hazy idea that I had come out of the “fruit room” to see what time it was, and had not closed the door fully, which she noticed.  (Knowing how paranoid she was about checking that all the basement windows were locked every single night, I expect there was a lot more fuss when she suspected an intruder in the house, but I don’t remember much about being found out.)

She took me back to school, or possibly walked me there the next day, and they tried to tell me that the bell didn’t always ring at the same time — so that if it ever happened again I’d go inside the school, I guess.

I’ve already written about the day I “ran away from home”, when I was around 4YO.

I “ran away” by going up the sidewalk until I couldn’t see my house any more. Once I was out of sight of our house, I plonked myself down in front of the second house from ours, maybe 300 feet up the hill.

I don’t know how long I sat out there, but I eventually got tired of being a runaway and went home. I found out much later that the neighbor had seen me sitting on the sidewalk in front of their house and called my mom, WHO JUST LET ME STAY OUT THERE. Where I wasn’t a bother to her.

Her excuse was that well, once the neighbor called, then she knew where I was, so that was OK.

Neither of these stories were ever told as cute little kid stories.  You know, the kind that get told when you bring a date home to meet the family.

I suspect this is because there is something really off about them:  the lack of concern shown by my mother for her younger daughter is disturbing.

It might not be as obvious in the school story — it’s easy to miss (or deliberately ignore) if you don’t know that my elementary school was 3/4 of a mile away from our house and my mother sent me, a 5YO little girl,  to walk there every day by myself.

Easy prey for anyone who just might have noticed a little redheaded girl walking alone, at the same time, day after day.

(And let me tell you, after a lifetime of living it, people notice redheads in situations when everyone else is just part of the crowd.)

Her not being inconvenienced was more important than the fact that something horrible might happen to me.

It’s even more appalling when you add in that there was a known or suspected child predator in the area.  This man lived alone, a few doors down from one of my best friends in elementary school.  Every kid who walked home after school in that direction knew that if you climbed the steps and rang his doorbell, he would give you a few pieces of candy.  Decades later, my friend told me that her mom had once cautioned her, “If he ever asks you to take the candy out of his pocket, don’t do it.”

[In contrast, with my sister there was once an elaborate chain of walking, a bus ride, and someone’s mother driving, in order that she attend a Catholic school.  Maybe that’s the “excuse” that was made for my mother’s lack of care — that if it wasn’t a Catholic school, she wasn’t concerned about me getting there.  Of course, that makes her a fine Catholic — but still a neglectful mother.]

Then there was the time one winter I was signed up for after-school ice skating lessons.  This was not long post-divorce, possibly the very first year post-divorce, so I was about 8 or 9YO at most.

The lessons were Mom’s idea.  It wasn’t time for us to spend together — she didn’t participate in or even come to the lessons to watch me skate — but the agreement was that she was supposed to come down to the Auditorium after work, and make sure I got home.

One night she forgot me.  The lesson was long over, everyone else was gone, and my mother hadn’t come to get me.  It was dark, and I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do.

I waited and waited in the lobby, alone and worried, hoping that Dad would come and get me.  There was a pay phone in the lobby, but I didn’t have any money to use it.

Finally, an older gentleman came into the building, and although I was scared to do it, I also knew I had to — I asked him for a dime so I could make a phone call. He took me up to the office area, and they called the house.  I don’t remember much else, but Dad was furious.

And then there was the continual problem of me walking the 4 blocks home from her apartment — by myself, in the dark.

This cropped up over and over again through the years.  Mom didn’t see why she should walk me home, because then SHE would have to walk back in the dark by HER self.

I clearly remember her and Dad arguing about it once, at the front door, after Mom and I had walked home from church one Sunday.  There was a clause in the divorce decree that said that visitation with Mom had to be “reasonable times and reasonable places” — a phrase that resonated throughout my childhood — and that she had to be responsible for our safe transportation to and from.

I can remember Dad clearly making the point that if I was sent to walk home from her apartment by myself, “something” could happen to me.

My mother’s literal, actual, word-for-word response to this was,
“But what if something happens to ME?”

So.  Clearly she was keenly aware of the potential danger — when it pertained to her.  And just as clearly, she was absolutely unconcerned about exactly those same dangers threatening her daughter.

While she was entirely aware of the hazards of a woman walking alone in the dark, she was perfectly fine with me doing it — apparently the idea that something might happen to me didn’t bother her at all, as long as it didn’t happen to her.

In the beginning, she would walk me to the front of the house and then wait for me to go in.  She was supposed to stay until I turned off the light that was left on in the foyer, which would mean that I was safely inside.

At some point, my mother came up with the compromise that she would stand on the uphill corner, safe under the streetlight, and watch me walk the long downhill block to our house, past the wide open, empty park.  This required a new “signal”, which was that I was supposed to flash the porch light on and off a couple of times once I got inside.

God only knows what the plan was if someone nefarious jumped out of the bushes and grabbed me as I walked the rest of the way alone to the house.  (Well, of course there was no fucking plan, other than to keep herself safe at the top of the hill.)

I know that at some point Dad found out about the “compromise”, and he was mad about that too, but I don’t remember what might have been done about it.

My older siblings — who were of course not living at home during this period —  while defending my mother’s loss of custody in The Divorce, once claimed that she couldn’t possibly have been neglectful, saying that she’d have had to be “leaving us in a car to go drink in a bar”, in order to REALLY be neglectful.

Now read this, and look at this little girl’s picture.

April Tinsley: DNA snares man in Indiana girl’s 1988 murder

DNA evidence links an Indiana man to the murder 30 years ago of an eight-year-old girl, police say.

John D Miller, 59, has appeared in court facing charges for the 1988 abduction, rape and murder of April Tinsley in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Police matched his DNA from used condoms to evidence found on the girl’s underwear, an affidavit says.

It also states he has confessed. The killer apparently taunted police and threatened other little girls.

The murder

On 1 April 1988, April was abducted while walking to a friend’s home.

Three days later, her body was found in a ditch 20 miles (32km) from her neighbourhood. She had been assaulted and strangled.

Despite finding DNA evidence on April’s underwear during the initial investigation, police failed to narrow down a suspect.

This story literally nauseates me.  It makes my stomach heave.

This could have been me.  And my mother would not have given a shit.

In fact, it’s taken me over a week to write this post, since I first read the news story — because it makes me so sick and appalled.  Because what I realized — with the force of a punch to the gut — was that for my mother, me getting abducted would basically have been a huge positive for her.

• She would have gotten a ton of sympathy, and she always loved being a martyr and having people feel sorry for her.
• Me being gone would have eliminated a whole lot of work for her — especially since I was the youngest, which meant that I was the only thing keeping her from being able to do as she pleased all day.
• Finally, it would have been a “get out of jail free” card for absolutely anything the whole rest of her life.

Given all that, and all the times this issue cropped up over and over again in my childhood — when I read this news story the other day, it suddenly became very clear to me that my mother would have loved for me to disappear.  It would have been great for her, just as it would have been great for her if Dad had died:

I have wondered just what would have made my mother happy at this point in the narrative. She needed and wanted Dad’s income, and refused to give up being provided for in the manner to which she had become accustomed — but she hated Dad, and living in the same house with him, as his wife, made her miserable, and by extension, everyone else too.

The only thing I can think of that would have “fixed” the situation would have been if Dad had conveniently died, and left her with all “her” kids and a big beautiful house, and a big insurance policy, so she would never have to work.

The really sickening part of it is that Mom had to be completely aware of what would have been likely to happen to me if I had been abducted on my way to school, or after the ice skating, or any one of hundreds of times I walked home alone.  She was able to sexualize my father’s love for me and my brother’s pre-teen erection – she got both of those out of thin air, on her own.  So the idea of someone sexualizing a little girl was not something she couldn’t comprehend.  And again, she was obviously aware of the dangers of a woman walking alone.

Yet she let it happen, again and again, over years and years.  And I heard from her own mouth how her safety was more important than mine.

Look back at April’s picture.  Read what happened to her.  And see if you can still claim that my mother was not neglectful.