Some relief

I'm now at the nursing home most days. I'm glad to say my brother seems to be recovering and in better spirits. He doesn't talk, or sign, or communicate in any way but inarticulate drones and bleats, and rudimentary body language, so it's hard to tell. Nevertheless, I'm encouraged by his smiling again. He even laughs occasionally. I'm guessing his pain pills are effective. He's eating again. He swore that off over the weekend giving everybody a scare.

I'm through second guessing certain of my siblings in this matter, though. Anything is possible after he recovers. I'm certain he'll recover, at least to the point of walking with assistance.

New Year's Resolution

I don't generally go in for New Year's resolutions, but I will make one this time: I will post on this blog at least twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday by 6 p.m.

I don't have a wife or GF. As an atheist, my "solstice" holiday is called Humbug. I've kept my family at arm's length this holiday season, and I've been happy. I'll still go over and help my Dad if he calls, but my sister and her husband are living there now, and so I'm not needed very often anymore. Socially, I don't have much in common with my Dad or siblings. I've felt disconnected for so long when I've been there, and it would trigger depressions.

Almost the entire time over these holidays has been spent writing, reading and critiquing.  Every day I've been exercising, and I've done some cleaning up, with plenty more to do, I'm afraid.

I celebrate New Year's with my writer's group tonight. The party also acts as our weekly meeting/reading. This group is dedicated. They've met every week for seventeen years, never missing a one. We almost missed last week because our usual venue was closed and almost everyone was with family, until one guy put together a small party, including me, who did readings. I wish I had joined them when they started out in the mid-90s. Of course, this thing called the Internet was just getting started then. It was only by the Internet that I found them. Because their website made them appear inactive, at first I passed them over for another group that didn't work out so well. They would only read somebody's works once a month, and only about 1/6th of the words.

In the current group, half the people have been published, one of them has sold a novel, one has received the interest of an agent in the last year. It's a good group. It has purpose.

I have to get my installment prepared for them tonight. Maybe I should practice reading with vodka this time . . .

Mood: happy.

Thanksgiving

For an atheist, Thanksgiving is an odd time. For one thing, who are we being "thankful" too? I guess I can think of people I am thankful too. But thinking of fortunate events, or the lack of misfortune during the year, the feeling about that expresses happiness or relief rather than thanks.

The Pilgrims, of course, had someone they could be thankful to. Squanto, the Native American who had earlier been abducted to Europe in slavery, whose village had died off from diseases, but who chose to save the settlers who would have died without his help. That's rare a form of heroism and compassion that needs to be celebrated when it happens.

Being an atheist means, however, does come with a certain principles: one is, if someone gives you a day off with pay, take it. I don't care what they call it. Take it. The other is, never miss an excuse to party and celebrate, no matter what the bullshit behind it is.  Life should include fun, and even in the midst of recalling misery, you still have that need.

I'm severely out of step with my family when it comes to Thanksgiving, but not because of the principle. As you can see, I can reinterpret the holiday to my liking, or even come up with an alternate that just happens to correspond. (Thankwansi anyone?)

Remember first, I've never been married. I don't have children. So, my family includes my dad, my siblings, and their children. I realized in October how little I have in common with them. For my dad and siblings, I've just realize how little I have in common with them. Their Catholic, extremely so. I'm atheist. I'm socially liberal, they're socially very conservative. So, in politics and religion, they're not interested in hearing my side. Besides that, they're not interested in anything I'm interested in. They never ask me what's going on, engage me in conversation. They're not interested in my writing, they won't read it, and that tells me something.

Then I asked myself: when was the last time they gave any emotional support? My first sister helped me when my life collapsed. She set me up in my parent's house. So, yes, she helped me materially. But that was material support without emotional support. In fact, it was under extreme emotional tension between us. I am thankful to her, though.

They've all given me help materially when I needed it. For that I'm thankful. I've paid it back. I bailed Dad's house out of foreclosure.


The nephews and nieces, I wish I had more contact with them, but we've mostly drifted apart despite my wishes.

And, of course, because I'm the opposed to them religiously, socially and politically, that means I'm more or less, disdained, or at least, ostracized. The message is unconscious, and I've always had that feeling from them.

When Mom was alive, I had a different sort of tension with her, and I'll treat that in another post. But I never had a reconciliation with her. I waited for the conversation that never came.

I don't want to wait like that with them. There's no point in going to a place where I'm going to be bored with people who send every unconscious message, and few conscious ones, that I'm not welcome; people who consider my interests to be frivolous and wastes of their time. This hurts, especially when they're supposed to be my closest ties. It drains me and depresses me.

So, I hung away this Thanksgiving. I stayed in, read and wrote. I was happy. I didn't even miss the turkey. I do okay with my own food.

Since this was so successful, I'm going to do the same Christmas, New Year's, and in fact, every week. If I had been well enough thirty years ago, I would have done it then. In fact, I tried, but wasn't able to make any connections outside of the family. But that's the subject of a different post, too.

No, definitely not my family. Not pilgrims either.

About My Past, Part I

I wanted to avoid writing about my background when I started this blog, partially because I didn't want to make excuses but also out of fear thinking my past would weigh me down, unnecessarily. Social pressure alone made me wish to evade the topic. People want to hear about happy childhoods or none.

Since then, I've learned avoiding my history is actually what's harmful. I'm writing this not to play the victim, or make excuses; I'm telling this story because denial is a prison. No matter how much I want to hide or forget my childhood, without a past, I can't navigate the present and have no material with which to build a future. Therefore, I'm looking back, like Lot's wife. Unless you can turn me into a pillar of salt, you have no right to judge.

 In perspective, my childhood wasn't horrid compared with other ordeals children get subjected to. It's not comparable to a war zone or a concentration camp. Many times, however, the weaker blow at a vulnerable point can do as much damage as a harder one elsewhere. After all, The Titanic sank with light hull damage, but the widespread internal effect was deadly.

People have trouble identifying with my early life because two weird, horrifying medical tragedies burdened my family. Together they made growing up in my parents' house like a David Lynch movie.

First, my mother had bipolar illness. Not so unusual, you think, but hers was a rare syndrome that acted a lot like energetic paranoid schizophrenia. Psychiatrists call this-maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn't kind of illness NOS, or Not Otherwise Specified. To make this even more odd, my father apparently married her without realizing there was anything amiss, which says enough about his childhood.

And he suffered for it. Her insanity included paranoid delusions toward him and his family. She would do things like teach us a sacred dance to ward off Dad's evil. (I couldn't make that up.) Angels and saints visited her to give her advice and orders.

One night, her most reliable hallucination told her the world was ending. In a frenzy, she roused me and my siblings out of bed and herded us into the basement. (I wondered at the time how being down there was supposed to save us. Noah had an ark, my mother had a basement.)

She'd laugh and cry simultaneously, and would have shouting matches with people who weren't there. (I think she won.) Playing music, usually opera, at ear-splitting volume was not unusual for her during severe episodes; neither was her role-playing biblical characters. That experience was the most traumatic for her children. Later, after being medicated, she'd laughingly call her more outlandish companions pucas. From Irish folklore, that's a whimsical spirit. I'd sometimes see her look almost straight down next to me, and she mouth words, giggling. For those who were there to witness what pucas commanded her to do, however, there was nothing amusing about them.

If you could refer to Stephen King's book, Carrie, my mom was a more bizarre, more Catholic version of Carrie's mother, Margaret White. I immediately recognized that character, played by Piper Laurie, when I saw the 1976 movie, but never admitted it until now.

You never knew what was going to set Mom off, and once her temper was out, it would rage from one thing to another for hours. I lived in fear of her. I won't go into any detail about abuse, because my family would never forgive me. Like the rest of her behavior, it was mind-bending.

Sleep was difficult in the house, partly because my Dad would reliably arrive home from work drunk at 2 a.m., resulting in a loud, scary fight. None of this was crazy, any wife would do that. The chilling she'd shout to him, we're crazy. Not only would her children get no sleep, but she would be set for a horrible mood in the morning.

My father was really out of touch with his family. He and Mom fought so much, he avoided home at all costs. (On the other hand, he also made a lot of money doing it.)

Up until the age of nine, I wasn't informed that she was mentally ill. I thought it was normal and every kid lived under the same stress. This was one thing that put a wall up between me and my peers. All the relatives on her side of the family did a great job of acting like there was nothing wrong. I don't know if it was from a conspiracy to keep my Dad from realizing it, or what. The possibility of insanity was not even in his world, nor in mine. I kept trying to understand her and thought her over-the-top temper had some reason behind it.

After a huge family blow-up over one dark Christmas, she ended up in the hospital “for rest.” So, did Dad, in fact. He came home in two weeks, she stayed in for months. He was simply exhausted and had begun to believe what she told him. Psychotics can bend your mind. Doctors hit him over the head with the fact that there was something seriously wrong with her.

Then, he broke the news to me. It was presented as, “You must now be strong and brave, and help your mother.” He lacked any empathy for what his children had been through. He made sure to tell me that, as the oldest, he was entrusting me with a great responsibility to help my mother and siblings. Meanwhile, he continued to be absent, coming home drunk at 2 a.m. after working so hard. That might be attributed the fact that he was a Madman, and as you could see from the show, they did business like that.

I have mixed feelings about my dad. He never divorced my mom; No, he saw love as duty first. He made a lot of money, and I hate to imagine how much worse things might have been if we were in poverty. To explain my Dad's ignorance, or put it into context, he was medically the most inept person imaginable. I once saw him turn athlete's foot into a life-threatening illness. He grew up instilled with certain beliefs: 1) God was supposed to be responsible for health, not you; 2) The almighty would forgive ignorance if you prayed and went to Mass enough; 3) There was no mental illness that couldn't be diagnosed as sin and treated by priests, and 4) psychiatry was a scam. Not that these were actual teachings of the Catholic Church, mind you, but that was the way he practiced them.

If there was one thing he admired in Mom, it was her devout faith. I imagine it stunned him to have to face the fact that she was mentally ill, but it got to where he couldn't deny it anymore.

From the time I was nine until I was fifteen, she went into the psychiatric wards for three to six months at a time. Upon discharge, she went off her medications, and within two months was back in the ward for another stint. Rinse and repeat many times and that was my late childhood and early teen years. Things reached a peak when, with my sister's friends in the house, she fired a shotgun into the kitchen floor. To be fair, she was trying unload it, and shooting it was accidental, but it should have never been out and loaded to begin with. She was hospitalized for a longer time after that.

They finally put her on Prolixin, a medication injected every two weeks rather than taken by mouth daily. With that, her insanity took a long hiatus; and everyone in the family, but her, spent months taking sighs of relief. Her psychosis remained under control close to 25 years, before she was allowed to relapse with tragic results.

While she was medicated, I could see she how bored and disappointed she was with the real world. She had been hallucinating since grade school. I could imagine how it must have been: having saints and angels visit and give you assignments; being a player in a great battle of good vs. evil; having all kinds of beautiful, talking pucas helping you. Then you take some medicine, and it's all gone.

She had always thought the hallucinations to be her connection with God. When they were gone, it baffled and saddened her. I think it also made her lonely.

When she was medicated and purportedly well, she either dismissed her behavior as funny, refused to talk about it, or didn't remember. The last is pretty common with mania. The memory stops working. Taken together with what she did otherwise, however, it made me an angry child.

In hindsight, I also had some impulse control issues due to Attention Deficit Disorder, diagnosed in adulthood. I overheard my mother talking to relatives about it. She didn't believe in getting it treated, didn't like medicating children, and thought it was a normal phase I'd get over. She reassured me. I didn't think about it again until decades later when my diagnosis came through. With that action, she determined I would never thrive academically nor socially. Worse, I did things throughout childhood that made me feel horrible about myself. I went into adolescence with a lot of rage and crushing guilt.

As a Catholic, I was commanded to honor my parents. I think I fulfilled the letter of that, even if I'm now an atheist. It was fair to do so. My mother was mentally ill and wasn't responsible for her actions, but that's a judgment a child can't make. I waited for her to ask me questions about what I experienced, but always when it got uncomfortable for her, she would chuckle― in surprise, I think― and the conversation stopped. I waited patiently for the discussion that never came. At the end, her health was so poor, and she was insane again, so I wasn't going to press her on it. I never had a reconciliation with her.

I know what they say about forgiving and forgetting. The latter is impossible: I wish I could forget. The former misses the point. I did forgive my mother, but it did nothing for the pain I felt, nor for the damage that was done to what I feel and what I can feel. Only she could have done something about those when she was medicated and purportedly well, but she didn't. She never faced up to the responsibility of what she did.

My mother did love me, about that I have no doubt, but that just made it even worse. When you've experienced love going that wrong in your most intimate childhood relationship, it shatters your reverence for love and leaves you suspicious, cynical, and numb. You feel corrupt and soiled. From there, it's very difficult to get anywhere good in just a lifetime.

It was a blow at a vulnerable point, and I was taking water. My brothers and sisters were a little better off. They were younger and didn't experience so much time alone with her.

But another chronic illness would rock my family even worse. This one suffered by one of my siblings, and even stranger and rarer than my mother's.

Respite, sort of.

Had to stop writing and do something else for a while. So, I went over and helped my Dad around his house. He's too feeble to do a lot of things now, so I do mostly cleaning. It's hard seeing his slide, and it was hard seeing it with my mother, or anyone.

We try for immortality and instead we end up extending age a decade or two with diminishing physical and mental capacities. Yet, when faced with that or death, despite what they says when they're young, people choose overwhelming to fade away.

I read a blog by an acquaintance about my age. He said (paraphrasing) unlike people he sees languishing in nursing homes, he's going to kill himself first. My response, which I kept to myself, was, "Don't you think the people you see in nursing homes thought of that?" When it came to pulling the trigger, though, or the switch, or taking those pills or that cyanide, they procrastinated. Until they reached the nursing home level, and still they either procrastinate, or, as horrifying as it is to anybody younger, they find that they're happy enough living that way. They can deal with it.

Fact is, your brain changes as you grow older. Previously boring things become entertaining.  You go from punk rock to Mozart. Ultimate Frisbee to Sudoku.

I'm not young. I'm finally happy with what I'm doing and where I'm at, with a caveat: I wish I had been doing it when I was twenty. I don't have as much time to accomplish what I wish to. I hope I'm blessed with staying healthy and sharp in old age, because apparently, I'm not be able to retire, and never, ever wanted to retire anyway.

However, sometimes your body and mind insist. Having ruined my previous years, I don't have a choice but to gamble, or to continue to live sad.  

Anyway, my real rest comes tomorrow. Yesterday, even with helping my Dad I wrote 300 words nonfiction and edited another 600.

Moving Hell 2: Injury and Delay

The apartment manager told me that they were likely going to replace the range. Despite the fact that it would mean having wasted my time cleaning it, I hope that they do. I wouldn't doubt if this one goes back to '70s or even the '60s. The range isn't why I chose the apartment, but a newer one (I'm thinking they might buy used) would be a plus.

Let me be clear, it was clean on the surface. Under the top, though, it was filthy. When I saw all the old grease, I wondered if you put two cockroaches in there, how many more cockroaches would it create from that food source alone? I'd give it a ballpark of 5,000, but you might as well stop counting after 800. Considering one or two are enough to make me twitch when I see them, hundreds are seizure-inducing.

Last night, I twisted my ankle, an injury unconnected to the move. I was taking out the trash at Dad's house and stepped on a gumball from one of those trees. It hurts, but I've been elevating it, putting ice on it, been taking massive amounts of aspirin and have been walking with a cane. I've been rewarded that it hasn't swollen. Damage from the internal swelling, I'm told, can be worse than the initial sprain.

The truly heavy work of the move is days away. Sunday, I hope.  Then I'll actually be living in the place, of course. But I'll be packing up, sorting and moving smaller items for days or weeks. The good thing is, I have time to do it like this.

The bad thing is, of course, that even by the standards of taking my time and keeping it orderly, it's taking forever. I mean, the apartment wasn't extraordinarily dirty, far from it, but the cleaning is taking forever.

But that's part of me and part of my troubles on the job. It seems that everything I do takes longer than anyone else. I'm not saying that as just a gripe. It's true. Every boss, every coworker I've had has noted it. It's what led me to abuse amphetamine and caffeine and part of the reason I'm on disability now. It's not that I'm lazy about it either. I tend to space, my mind wanders or I overthink things. And it's one thing if you're doing it on the job, you might be accused of being lazy. It's quite another if you're moving into a place and it's taking forever because you're cleaning things too slowly.

What happens if I just go faster? I panic. I begin to abuse stimulants because I constantly fear that I'm not fast enough. In fact, I tend to panic and freeze up if anybody watches what I'm doing. I joined theater just to try to get over that, but it was a disaster. I have that problem, but then I also have marginal speech deafness. My hearing has been tested perfect, but I if there are any distractions in public, I can't understand people.  For most the time in my life, I wasn't able to hear music lyrics. ADD medications helped with that. I changed my music collection as it totally changed the way I appreciated music. As a child and adolescent, I had a terrible problem recognizing faces. That did begin to get better in my twenties, thank goodness.

That, and the fact that I preferred to play alone as a child makes me wonder about Asperger's Syndrome. But I didn't have parents who gave any credence to psychiatry or neurology, or medicine in general, and my next brother had profound retardation. It was a great irony of my parent's that they and their family were beset most by medical problems that they found dubious, for religious reasons. The upshot was, any problems I had were dwarfed by my brother's. He needed my parent's attention more. Their couldn't deny his problems, but they could they could deny mine.

I rambled. Yes because I'm up late, but I went to bed early and got up in the middle of the night. I'll get an early start tomorrow. Soon, I'll be moved, and soon after that, I'll be settled.