Son Of The Lost

As you know, one of my crazy uncles passed a month ago, and I was somewhat relieved because he was somewhat of a mooch on my mother.

This uncle had a son — well, there is a boy who from birth this uncle had claimed as a son though no one in the family thought the boy was his actual blood relative.  Mind you, there are probably about a dozen kids out there who probably are actually his, but he has denied their claims whenever they’ve contacted anyone in the family.  However, this boy who looks nothing like anyone in the family and looks every bit 1/2 Native American (his mother was as Norwegian as you can get and we are Scotch/Irish) has my mother’s brother’s name plus “junior”.

So, this son and my mother had a falling out about 15 years ago when my step-grandmother was murdered, which is an entire story unto itself.  Needless to say that when wills are read, often families suffer schisms.  He said some really horrible words to my mother which she felt were unforgivable at the time and they didn’t speak until he called her to notify her that her brother was dead.  I haven’t actually spoken to him since long before that, perhaps since my grandfather’s funeral.  I don’t know that we had a falling out or anything, but our lives simply diverged and I had heard that he was following in the footsteps of his drug-addicted father so I felt it was best to keep away.

Anyway, apparently since his father’s death he’s been calling my mother and talking to her.  He’s been telling her that he had this terrible childhood and that most of it was so horrible that he’s blacked out much of it.  My mother is very upset that he doesn’t even remember the Christmas that his mother abandoned him and we went to get him and he stayed with us.  She’s very hurt about that.  She had wanted to adopt him then.  I remember it very distinctly.  However, her brother had gotten wind of the adoption plan and had come and taken his son away.  Now my mother is upset that she didn’t fight harder to keep him and adopt him so his life would have been different.

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More About Sixth Grade: Holding onto the Hurt (Part II)

Originally I wrote yesterday’s post on the three sixth grades to lay some groundwork for my next post in my Holding onto the Hurt series, but it turns out that in thinking about sixth grade, especially that third year at the new Christian Private School, I opened a can of mental worms. Just like in the first post where I said:

Sometimes, months, even years later, after I think I’ve forgotten all about some wrong, someone or something will trigger a memory and the hurt will come rushing back just as if it had happened only a moment ago and usually the pain is just as sharp and disabling and twisting and there’s anger and sorrow and frustration and it’s all so fresh and it won’t subside.

I had intended to write about something that happened in 8th grade, referring only to one thing that had occurred in sixth grade as an example of a past history between myself and another girl. I didn’t want to have to explain in depth about the whole complexity of the three six grades in the middle of my exposition on The Great Betrayal. However, in writing about sixth grade, in remembering that one humiliating incident with that girl in sixth grade, the blocks in my memory began to unravel. Things long forgotten, long buried have come rushing to the surface.

And the hurt, as silly (and perhaps as petty) as it may be 25 years later, still feels fresh and traumatizing and hateful.

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The Thing About 6th Grade

Have I ever explained about 6th grade?

You see, I actually started kindergarten when I was 4 years old. My mother thought it was a good idea at the time because I was already reading. When I was six, we moved from Florida to New Orleans and I transferred into this fundamentalist private Christian school — not that the old school wasn’t the same; I mean, I don’t know because I was too young, but I do know it was a private Christian school then too.

Anyway, the new school was using this program called The Pace System where everyone is given workbooks and you are put in little tiny cubicles along the wall and you work at your own pace; if you have a question, you put a little flag up to signal the monitor to come to your cubicle to help you. If it’s a really tough problem, you put a different colored flag up to request to go up to the teacher’s desk. When you finish your assigned number of pages per workbook for the day, you take your workbook to the grading tables and use your own red pen to check your own work; then you go back to your desk and correct the wrong answers and go back to the grading tables, etc.

O.K. Here’s the deal.

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Feeling Frumpily Grumpy

I had a bit of a meltdown yesterday afternoon when my mother phoned. She practically started the conversation with “You know what you should do; you should take some classes at night at the local university.” Well, I’d pretty much had it with everyone in my life telling me what I should be doing with my time. For two weeks, all I’ve heard from doctors, therapists and parents is what I should be doing and I’m 36 years old and I’m feeling stressed out and overwhelmed and I feel like I’m barely treading water as it is. I can’t figure out how to do it all and afford it all and then have time to relax, which apparently I’m also supposed to be able to do.

I really would like my therapist and my doctors and my parents and my boss to all get together and figure out my schedule so I can go to work, go to therapy, exercise plus do aqua aerobics, go to doctors’ appointments, take night classes in something they approve of, clean my house, run errands including going to the dump, take care of the extra stuff that needs to be done with the house, keep up with the surprise things that come up, pay my bills, get 8 or more restful hours of sleep a night, and make new friends.

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The Things Our Parents Taught Us

I hate to play Monopoly. I’m just not fond of how the game ends. For me, it’s not fun whether I win or lose. There’s just something about the total destruction of everyone in the game so one person can have it all that sucks all the fun out of it for me.

Or it could have been that moment in my childhood when my mother pulled me aside and told me to stop trouncing my friend in Monopoly because “it’s just not fun for your friends to lose.”

I’ve been thinking lately about how I am the sum of my past experiences and how I am a product of my upbringing in many ways. Despite being 36 years old, I seem to be just now uncovering a lot of hidden gems from my childhood and youth that shaped who I am.

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State of Mind

Yesterday I met with the psychiatrist for a med check. This is the first time I’ve done so since 2003, which if anyone is paying attention, means is the first time since I moved to Maine. My GP increased my anti-depressant to the max dose in early 2005 when I complained that it wasn’t working any more and that boost helped for a little bit but I don’t think that they’ve been working well for the last 6 to 9 months again so she had me referred to a psychiatrist since my regular shrink is just a nurse practitioner and can’t prescribe meds.

I already like this guy better than the mild mannered Mr. Bean-look-a-like I saw once every 6 months for 15 minutes in New Orleans. He certainly asked me a lot more questions than Mr. Bean ever did about my childhood, which is when the depression started. He asked me questions about my behaviors then and now about how I think, about why I think the way I do, about my family, about my physical health, etc. Plus, because his office is associated with my GP’s office, he had access through the computer system to all of my medical records since 2004 and all the ones I’d brought from New Orleans and they’d uploaded so he could reference it all and ask me questions.

He had me fill out another one of those questionnaires about how the depression has been affecting my life the last two weeks. You know, how’s my sleep, do I want to hurt myself, do I have interest in my hobbies and interests, is it affecting my work, etc., etc. Apparently, I’ve improved just a tad from a month ago — it’s probably the clean house and light therapy, though I didn’t mention either. (We did discuss that I will need to use the light therapy consistently from September through April though.)

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