my life
Many people have spoken out about their childhood years. We hear about it on TV shows, radio shows, in the newspapers and in books. I think this has been good for many of us who never knew realized abuse was happening to others or who thought abuse was and is just a way of life and is acceptable. I am another one.
I start with the foundation of my life. I do this because I personally feel that the foundation of life each of us has can push out in our adult direction.
Who I am:
I was born the seventh and last child of my parents in 1959. They separated before I was born and when I was born I went to live with my grandparents. However, I knew my grandparents as my parents until I was four. I will explain that later.
Both of my grandparents worked. My grandfather worked to support my grandmother, seven of their grandkids and himself. My grandmother worked to support her daughter, my mother. My mother has left and was living her life nearby but never came to visit.
I was watched by a great uncle of mine. One day my grandmother came home and found me at the bottom of the stairs all wet and unconscious. My grandfather was called and when he came home, I was laid out on the kitchen table with the doctor there giving me some type of shot. As a result I went into a coma and was placed in the hospital. I was in a coma for three days. I ran a fever of 103/104. When I came out of it my eyes were not straight. Each of my eyes went to the wall. Eventually my right eye straightened out but my left eye remained affected.
As a result of this when I was 3.5 to almost 4, a cousin of mine who was around 8 years old decided he was going to make my right eye look like my left eye. So this cousin of mine (a son of my great uncle) took a broken broomstick and stabbed it into my right eye. I had to get stitches and wear a patch over my right eye for two weeks. I remember being led around because my left eye did not have good eyesight. When someone was not around to lead me, I hugged the walk or used the dog to walk and guide me. The day the patch came off and I went outside to play. This cousin of mine took another broken broomstick and did it again, exactly the same way to my right eye. I remember lots of kids being around and watching him do this to me. No one stopped him. I again had stitches. I remember the doctor going to give me a needle in the cut at my right eye and I started screaming because I remembered the pain from the last time. So this doctor put me out and then stitched me up and put another patch on me. Two weeks after that, the patch came off, my cousin again went to put another broken broomstick into my eye and I ran screaming into my house. My grandfather told me to go outside and beat my cousin's ass or my grandfather was going to beat my ass. So that is what I did. I took a kid two times bigger then me and whipped him. I left him bloody from his head to his feet. Every bit of him I could touch I ripped into with my nails. I wouldn't let people cut my nails. Every time they did, they cut too far down and it would hurt for days afterwards. So that became my defense. I remember kids saying 'look at that white boy fight' and I stopped and looked up. Then my cousin hit me and I went back to beating him. He never touched me again.
My grandmother around this time took ill. One day when I wanted to see her I wasn't allowed to come inside the house. I kept yelling for her and she woke up telling whoever it was that was there to let me come and see her. My grandmother was lying on the couch and she had me come to her. She told me how sick she was and needed to sleep but that she loved me and wanted me to go outside to play so she would sleep. I went away happy knowing I had talked to her and she had talked to me.
Every Saturday my siblings would go to the matinee. One day my grandfather told my oldest brother to take me. He didn't want to because it was the scary movies playing at the time, such as King Kong. But I cried and wanted to go. So I went. While doing the movie I started crying because of King Kong. So my youngest sister said she would take me home. On the walk back home, there was a candy machine across the street. I wanted to get candy and my sister was holding my hand. My sister was 8 and I was 4. She told me to wait until the light turned green so we could cross. I didn't want to wait and I broke away from her. When I had gone out into traffic, a car hit me and run over me. The car did not stop. I had a tooth knocked out and my head hurt. A couple in a vw stopped to offer help. We heard an ambulance and I was crying to take me home to my grandmother. My sister was pleading with them to listen to me. So this couple took me home and then my grandfather took me to the hospital. I survived.
My grandmother never got better. She was in the hospital. My grandmother was dying of liver problems. One Saturday my grandfather took a brother of mine and me to my mother's house for us to stay with my mother while my grandfather visited my grandmother. I did not know who this woman was. My grandfather stood in my mother's apartment telling me this was my mother. I was telling him that my mother was in the hospital. My grandfather finally looked at my brother and told him to tell me who the woman was. My brother told me the woman was my mother. I still shocked remembering this.
My mother had two boys playing in front of the TV. She told me these were my younger brothers and when I asked her why her stomach was big, my mother told me she was having a baby. My mother spent time in the kitchen. I wanted to be in there with my mother. I was asking her questions. My mother would take me out to my brothers and tell me to stay there and play with them or watch TV. My grandfather came and picked my older brother and me up.
The next Saturday this brother and I went back to my mother's place. This time I had many questions to ask my mother and she kept telling me to stay in the living room. She then told my brother to watch me and keep me in the living room. When my grandfather came to pick us up, my mother pointed at my brother and said my grandfather could bring him back and then she pointed to me and told my grandfather not to bring me back because I did not listen to her. That was the last time I saw my mother. I met her the Saturday before and saw her the following Saturday. This was about 2 hours each time. My mother died when I was seven. She used to always send a box of chocolates to my brother Chuck on his birthday. We knew the year when the chocolates did not come that our mother really was dead.
When my grandfather would take my brother to my mother's place, I stayed in the car. Then we would go to the hospital. I never got to see my grandmother. On the day my grandmother died I was at the hospital. That day I tried to sneak down the hall to see my grandmother but the nurse caught me. This nurse put me in a chair to watch me. But soon the nurse got up and went to do something. I immediately ran down the hallway to my grandmother's room. I burst into the door and my grandfather was standing there crying. My grandmother had passed away. She was in the bed with the blanket pulled over her. My grandfather took me and told me my grandmother was dead. I don't remember what happened after that. I remember the doctors and nurses being in the room. The one nurse looking for me, but I don't remember leaving the hospital or the next couple of weeks. This was in August of 1963.
After my grandmother died, I remember seeing a woman walking down the sidewalk two blocks away from us and this woman was with two women walking on either side of her. She was talking and laughing and looking at me. As far as I remember, the woman was my grandmother. I went running to my house to tell my grandfather that my grandmother was alive and was coming home. He kept telling me no, no. I finally got him to come outside and to the place where I had seen my grandmother and the two women. No one was there. Years later, looking at my family album, I would see those two ladies who I saw with my grandmother. I cannot explain this. Perhaps I had seen the picture before? I really don't know. Except I remember the woman in the middle being my grandmother. This is the grandmother who took me to church and taught me to pray and to believe in God. I spent nights crying for her. I cried for her up into my teens.
Shortly after my grandmother died, most of us kids played down at the railroad tracks. We were white kids and black kids playing together. This one kid who was 12 and everyone called him Burger. He wanted to have sex with me and I was telling him no. So then he got two of my brothers to insist I let him have anal sex with me. I remember the pain and how he cupped his hand over my mouth to make me stop screaming. I remember my brothers and his brothers being on the other side of this table so they wouldn't see what was happening. But they heard it. This went on for the next year and half in many places around were we lived. I just got use to it and accepted it.
One time my 2nd brother urininated into a soda bottle and talked everyone into making me believe it was a new type of soda. Even though I kept saying that it was urine (we used another word) everyone disagreed, they kept telling me to try it. So I did and spit it out. Everyone was laughing at me.
I remember Burger having sex with me up in a barn while his father and my grandfather were looking for me. I had to be quiet or else.
I remember being in my bedroom and Burger being on top of me, when one of my sisters came into the room and she starting screaming so he run out of my room, jumping onto the outside roof and got away.
I remember my grandfather and Burger's mother having huge arguments over her son and me.
I was a little kid. When the kids would chase me I would run and roll down into the storm drains. The fire truck would come and get me out and take me home. This happened a few times until my grandfather told me to run back to the house. One Friday night I did this. I know it was a Friday, because that was fight night and the night my grandfather would drink his beer, Black Label Beer.
This night I was outside playing and the neighbor kids started chasing me. I ran into my house. My grandfather had not taken off the glass storm door and the glass fell out of the storm door and broke. My grandfather told my oldest brother to clean up the glass. My brother cut his arm while cleaning up the glass and at the time he was cleaning up the glass, my father drove up with his second wife. I had never met my father before. I remember everyone saying it was Dad. My father asked my brother what happened and my brother told him. My father asked where my grandfather was and my brother told him. I was behind my father as he walked into the house. My grandfather was sitting down, drinking his beer and watching the fights when he saw my father. My grandfather said called out my father’s name in surprise, my father yelled back his name to my grandfather and said ‘hell' while picking up the coffee table, throwing it across the room and against the wall, then my grandfather stood up, but Pop had too much to drink. He could not defend himself against my father. My father was hitting my grandfather and I was screaming. My stepmother ran into the house to tell my father that his kids had called the police. My father said his kids wouldn't call the police. But the sirens could be heard, so my father took off with my stepmother.
After that us kids were split. Two sisters went to live with my mother, my oldest brother went to live with my father, a brother and sister went to live with a couple who never had a daughter although they had three sons and my brother one up from me and I went to live with a black couple who lived across the street from us. This couple never did anything wrong to us. We were not allowed to go outside the yard.
One day I was in the back of the yard by myself. This kid was on the other side of the fence telling me to come outside and play with him. I kept telling him I couldn't go outside the yard and that he can come inside the yard to play. But he kept telling me to come outside the yard with him. I then looked directly at him and told him I knew what he wanted from me and I was not coming outside the yard for him to do that! So this kid took a huge rock and busted it against my left temple. I remember turning around to face the house and screaming. Arness (the lady of the house) and my brother came running out of the house. I remember seeing them and Arness screaming. Then the blood coming over my head and down into my eyes. I think I passed out after that because I don't remember being stitched up or going to the hospital. But I have the scar to this day. Every time I look in the mirror I see it and I remember what happened.
Every once in a while someone I know who I work with or meet will notice that scar and ask me what happened. I still find it hard to explain and I normally just say it was a childhood accident. But inside I relive that day.
In 1965 we moved in with my father during the summer. His 2nd wife had died and he had met someone else. He never married that woman but she stayed for a couple of years. Just before school was to start we moved to
My father and I had never bonded. I suddenly had to listen to him as my father and my grandfather although living with us, was not around much because he both worked and went out every night drinking with a friend of his. When my grandfather would come home, us kids would get behind him and push as he walked up the stairs so he would not fall back. But he got up everyday, went to work, gave my father money for us and provided for us. One day my grandfather had a heart attack. My father refused to let us call the police or call anyone for help. My father said if my grandfather lives, he lives and if he dies, he dies. I went up the stairs and looked down the hallway into the bedroom and watch as my grandfather had tears rolling down his cheeks and as he was holding his heart. My father then told me to get downstairs. I slept in the same bed as my grandfather. I would hear him breathe and listen to his snore. It was how I slept. Otherwise I did not sleep well. I knew if he was in bed then my father wasn't going to come in the bedroom and get me. My father was a beater. He would use a black belt and make us younger boys pull our pants down. We had to lay beside each other with our butts in the air and my father would take turns hitting us with that belt. He would do this until our butts turned red and then he would leave the bedroom. I remember once seeing the smile on his face as he left the bedroom. Today being an adult, I look back and know my father had an enjoyment out of it.
The day after my grandfather had his heart attack, my father made him walk down the stairs. Then he told one of my sisters to get my grandfather some soup. Later that week when my grandfather went to the doctors, they confirmed he had a heart attack.
It was my oldest sister and my three older brothers and I living with my father, his girlfriend and my grandfather. In early 1966 my youngest sister came to live with us and later that year my middle sister ran away from our mother’s house and came to live with us. Two weeks later my mother was dead. She had six kids with her second husband. Four who lived and twins who died after she died soon after giving birth. My mother was 32.
Because two of my older brothers and I did not cry over my mother dying, my father punished us. Said we had no heart and didn’t care. We were not allowed to attend my mother’s funeral. I was in the third grade and we had to go to school that day. I remember telling the teacher and she did not believe me. So she went and got my two brothers out of their classes. They said the same thing. The teachers still did not believe it. So the principal got involved. Someone checked the papers and found my mother’s obituary. It had our names in the paper. It listed all of my mother’s kids. The teachers pulled us out of class for the day. They could not believe my father did that to us.
My father gave great Christmas’s. He made the day special. But it never made up for the fear he instilled in us. For instance, when my father watched TV and he laughed at something, then you had to be laughing too. If he did not laugh at something on TV, then you had better not laugh. So we spent much of our time watching TV and watching his reaction to what was on. Then we would respond the way he did. It was all formal sitting on the couch in the living room. My father’s floor was kept spotless. His house was spotless. Everything was extremely clean. Our beds were made military style. If we did not make the bed to my father’s specs, then he would tear it up and we had to remake our beds until we got it right.
We had 20 minutes to study for our homework. That was it. Then we had chores. Bedtime was
I would lose myself in shows we could watch. Lucy, Bewitched, Jeannie, Hazel, all of these were my pretend mothers. I would imagine myself as their child. It was my escape.
Besides living with my father, there was the problem of kids who called me high yellow because of my hair and my skin when out in the summer sun. One of my brothers who had blonde hair and green eyes never had an issue with it. I remember coming into the house and asking what it meant to be high yellow and being called mulatto. My father and grandfather would get mad and ask who called me that. Then my grandfather would tell me I was not high yellow or a mulatto.
The white kids didn’t want to play with me and the black kids would tell me I was passing. So I got into fights with both races. Plus beside my eye being like it was, people would accuse me of looking at them and I would explain to them that I was not looking at them, but it resulted in a fight. In fourth grade a kid stabbed me with a pencil because he said I was looking at him. It took two teachers to get me off of the kid and I was expelled from school.
My father would hate every year when the school would send home a notice to take me to an eye doctor about my eye and it was the same every year that nothing could be done. So my father would get mad at me every year about it.
I had a problem living with my father. I would soil my underwear and my father would put my face up to it. He would threaten me, telling me that he was going to rub my face into it. So I took to hiding my underwear. Two of my brothers would wait until I hid enough of them and then when they were about to get into trouble about something, would tell my father and my father would then beat me. Have my face put into my soiled underwear.
In 1968 my father married a woman he had been dating. As a result of this, my grandfather moved out, three of us boys moved to the basement as our bedroom. I now had my own bed. It was there that my 3rd brother having sex with me. This happened for two years. In 1970 we were living in western
My father married his third wife in April of 1968. During the summer of 1968, my stepmother went on a visit to the south with her sisters. She was gone for two weeks. During that time my father moved this lady in and threatened us not to tell the neighbors that this woman was not his wife and not our stepmother. We had to pretend like he had married her in April and live this lie for two weeks. Before my stepmother was due to come back, my father took this woman and threw her out of the house. He threw her down a hill and as a result the woman called the police. The police came and my father dared them to come into his house without a warrant. The police left. The woman never filed charges. We were sworn to keep this secret from our stepmother.
When my stepmother was back, my youngest sister let it slip what my father had done. My stepmother went up into the bedroom directly over the living room. My father went upstairs and demanded my stepmother open the bedroom door. She refused. My father wore cowboy boots and he started kicking the door until it opened. As us kids sit in the living hearing them fight, they broke every piece of furniture in the bedroom. The mirror, the dressers, the bed frame, the mattress, everything was torn apart. Then my father left. I should say, my father would drink two fifths of old granddad every Saturday. A shot of whiskey and a drink of water until the whiskey was gone. During the week he would drink beer.
I got lost in Dark Shadows on TV. My father wasn’t home from work until late and I would rush home from school just to watch it. I escaped in the fantasy of the show. I would pretend to put a spell on my father to die, but it never happened. I would wish to be the main character on the show, but it was not real. I had to beg to watch it and promise to complete my homework afterwards. Although we still had the twenty minute rule for homework.
I would spend weekends with my grandfather. While with my grandfather I never had an accident or wet the bed. We would drive and talk and I was able to relax. I would sleep too. I always hated Sunday to come. Then I would have to go back to my father’s house.
My grandfather’s girlfriend did not like my grandfather bringing me around. But Pop still came and got me. He would give my father money every week to continue supporting us kids too. This was after my father married and my grandfather moved out. Pop still helped out.
One weekend while I was visiting my grandfather, my father was over and the two of them were working on this 1956 hotrod Chevy my grandfather brought. My brothers were calling and they were mad because I was over there and they were not with us. So they called and told me they found my soiled underwear and were going to tell our father. Then I would be in trouble when I got home. That night I wet the bed at my grandfather’s house. It was the only time I did that at my grandfather’s house and I realized then why I wet the bed or soiled my underwear. Yet there was no escape.
In 1969 things were suddenly changing again and fast. My oldest sister married a guy in the military. My middle sister ran away, met a man on Friday and married him on Monday and my youngest sister went to live with a cousin on my mother’s side of the family. We boys were now getting into so many fights, more then two or three a day. We were defending ourselves and who we were. My father told us we were moving and we were moving to western
We went from living in the suburbs to living in the country. But it wasn't like moving from one area to another. We had to learn how to plant a garden, carry water from the creek to water the garden, dig the rocks out of the soil, and clean up the land where the house sat on a hill by itself. We had to walk a mile to the school bus stop and then ride into town for school. The nearest neighbor was a half mile down the road and not within eyesight of where we lived. My brothers and I worked bailing hay for one dollar a day which my father took from us. My grandfather was still sending my father money. My father was working in a nearby rock quarry. All of us had chores. I remember always working. Something always needed to be done. Tending to the garden, canning food, cleaning the house, cleaning the chicken coop which didn't work out anyway, cleaning out the barn, putting up hay in the barn, my skin itching from the hay. My brother coming into my room and having sex with me whenever he wanted.
We got to play when and if our chores were finished. I remember a few of the times but mostly I remember work. To get wood, we had to take our sleds out into the woods, bundle wood on the sled and tie the wood down to the sled then bring the wood to the house to be stacked. We had to have a specific amount of wood and we had to keep it filled.
The next few chapters are a breakdown of things that happened and how we lived. It may seem I am repeating myself, however I am expanding on what I have already written.
Work:
As a child I remember being in the basement of our house in the burbs and my father having us wash clothes on a washboard. I had to use the rough side of the washboard and I remember my fingers bleeding. The only thing I could do was cry and being told by my father to stop crying or he would give me something to cry about.
My father had us wash the walls every 6 months or so. My father would buff the floors every six months. Johnson paste wax. I can say those floors were shining and polished. We were not allowed to wear shoes in the house. Guests had to leave their shoes off at the door.
Our clothes had to be folded and put away in proper order. If not, then you got into trouble.
The bathtub had to be cleaned when you were finished using it. My father only allowed us to take one bath a week which was Sunday night and we only had 20 minutes from the time we closed the bathroom door until the time we had to open the door. We were allowed two inches of water and we had to be sure we did not leave a ring around the tub. So the tub had to be cleaned when we left the bathroom. You had to wash yourself, use only a little bit of water and you had to be sure the bathroom was spotless when you opened the door and walked out. My father would be there ready to check until he was sure you did everything just right. Then he would sit in his chair and call out to you with the time you had left. Even when we moved to the country, we followed the same procedure. There we had a claw foot bathtub. I remember taking a bath when my father and stepmother were not around. If I were alone in the house, I took a bath. I would fill the bathtub up and lay under the water. Once my father caught me. I wasn't beaten but he had me do more chores. The price for a good bath.
We had to hang out clothes to dry. We had to know how to properly fold clothes. Once we had freezing rain and two of my brothers and I had to go outside to get the clothes in. I had no gloves and my stepmother was in the kitchen when we lived in the burbs, looking out watching us. My two brothers kept telling me to stop crying because it only made it worse. Just to hurry up and get the clothes. My tears froze on my face. I was left outside to finish my row of clothes, getting wet frozen clothes off the clothes line.
There was more time to play when we lived in the suburbs but living in the country, our chores were many and there was very little time to play as kids. Once I was sent to clean out the chicken coop and it hadn’t been clean in decades. There weren’t any chickens, just filth. When I started cleaning out the place, I felt my legs burning. When I looked down I had red ants on my ankles and legs. Those ants were biting me and when I raised the broom into the air, I hit the ceiling and hit a hornet’s nest. Suddenly I had hornets buzzing around me and I had to start running out of the chicken coop. Because of the biting from the ants, it made me pick up my speed. Then hornets were coming at me and I outran them into the house. I only ran that fast because of the sting from the ants.
My father brought a push lawn mower and that was terrible to use. It was because of all the grass that had to be cut, first with a sickle and then the lawnmower. Of course, bailing hay, working in the hay fields, working in the barn, cleaning the old mansion, planting the garden, watering it everyday and we did not by walking down to the creek and getting water to carry back to the garden.
More sexual abuse:
When I was eleven I was waking up with my clothes off. I slept in my own room and I thought I was taking off my clothes during the night. So one night I put on tight clothes and layered them five shorts deep. In the middle of the night, I woke to find someone taking my clothes off. I thought it was one of my brothers because his bedroom was beside mine and we had a connecting door between our rooms as well as doors to the hallway. I went to turn around to tell my brother to get out of my bed and I smelt my father’s hair. I suddenly froze. I was looking at him in the dark with the light of the moon coming into my room and I knew it was him. I couldn’t speak. My father attempted to try to have me to have an erection but it wasn’t happening. He touched my penis and then took my hand and with his hand over mine, rubbed his penis so that I could feel his penis. My father then took and rolled me on top of him while he was lying on his stomach but I remained frozen. It was as if I was looking down on the whole ordeal. Then my father had me on my stomach and was pulling me up to my knees and putting my hands on my butt to hold myself open. He then would attempt to enter me and in doing this, he pushed me down back onto my stomach. Eventually, he finished what he was doing. I felt him release onto me and in me. I then watched him get up and pick up his shorts. I watched him tiptoe out of my room. I remember feeling the wetness on my butt and wondering what had just happened. I was in shock. I fell asleep watching my bedroom door and watching the moon.
The next morning my 2nd brother came to wake me. He asked me why I had no clothes on and I sat up in bed telling him our father was in my bed that night. Suddenly my brother took off across the top of the house running to tell our stepmother. By then I had clothes on and I went after him to stop him. He was faster then me and as he turned the corner into the kitchen downstairs I was behind him. My stepmother was standing at the sink and my brother blurted out that ‘dad was in Michael’s bed last night’ my stepmother immediately looked at me and said ‘he was not’ I shot back to her that yes my father was in my bed. So I was told to go back to my room, where I stayed until I was called for dinner.
When I was called for dinner I came downstairs into the kitchen. My father was sitting at the table and I had to walk by him to sit down. My stepmother was watching my father watching me. My three brothers were sitting down watching this scene. My father was looking at me like a man looks at a woman so as to think of having sex with her. My stepmother saw this. She was standing at the stove and hit the spatula in her hand down on the stove to break the silence of the moment. I think she knew then I had told the truth.
Religion:
Growing up I was exposed to different Christian based religions. My grandmother took me to a Methodist church. I remember slipping under the pews and being on my stomach, crawling up until I was in front of all the pews and then running to the pulpit. My grandmother would be so upset and it became a regular thing.
I remembered the preacher always saying that if a person drank liquor, then that person was going to hell. So when my grandmother died, this same preacher said she had gone to heaven. The problem with this is my grandmother kept a flask of whiskey under her pillow and would take a drink from it every night. So I was confused and upset by what this preacher said. It was in conflict. I did not know how this would affect me years later.
My father was a Baptist. Not that he went to the church all the time or had us go to Sunday school. But after drinking his liquor on a Saturday, my father was up on a Sunday listening to the Riverdale Baptist hour on the radio. Sundays was spent listening to that for our religion and then watching movies until Dinner which was served at
When my father married his third wife, he converted to her religion. That was being a Mormon. We had to take study in being a Mormon. We went to Sunday school, etc. Two of the people would come over once a week to show us slides and speak to us of the religion’s founding. Once we were told how God had been talking to the religions founder and I asked how this could be because I was always told no one could see God and live. The explanation was that God and Jesus were there. God had his back to the man (Joseph Smith) and Jesus was facing the man. God would talk to Jesus and Jesus would talk to the man. My father finally told me to stop asking so many questions and to shut up. I never asked questions again with them or about the religion. I remember getting a headache whenever I attempted to read the book of Mormon and as an adult I find it easier to read a Stephen King novel then the book of Mormon.
The only other thing I remember that made my father angry at me was when he told us how in the resurrection he would have the three women he had married as his wives. I asked my father if my mother would have two husbands since she was married to two men during her life. My father told me no. I asked him how he knew my mother would want to be married to him since she divorced him, married another man and had children by him. My father only got angry with me and I was again told not to question him.
Before we left the suburbs of DC to move to the country, my grandfather gave me this blue book he had got when he answered his door one Saturday. I liked the book and was glad to have something my grandfather gave me. Anyway, it was that book I begin reading lots of when I was 15 and living back with my grandfather. I called the people up who had put out the book and they visited me. I was baptized 6 months later at the age of 16. The one thing the religion did for me is that I stopped crying for my grandmother. The religion taught that a person when dead is simply dead and nothing else. This belief helped me not to think my grandmother was burning in a hellfire somewhere because of drinking alcohol.
I had met this girl in the religion who I liked. She was three years older then me and we got along together. I wanted to get married. I know I was young and foolish but that is how it was. One day my 2nd brother was visiting. That night I woke up to find he had taken my clothes off and was on top of me having sex with me. I again froze like I did with my father and when my brother finished, I got up, put my clothes on and woke up my grandfather up and told him. My grandfather started yelling at me and asking me why? I went to two of the elders of the religion I had joined and told them. It was not a good feeling to have to admit and I can’t help but even feel today that somehow I was made to share in the blame. Although these two men tried to help me by telling me to hide it, they really were not qualified to deal with such a thing. I stopped seeing the girl I liked and basically stopped seeing a lot of people. I stayed to myself and sometimes took the kids in my area out to the movies or for a drive. Sometimes my grandfather and I went to the beach. I remember going before it was time to swim and just getting into the cold water and how it felt to me. The cold helped to numb the pain I was feeling. All the emotional pain I felt.
When I was around 20 I found myself crying again for my grandmother. I knew then that what I had learned in the religion was leaving me. The thought that my grandmother was alive somewhere suffering like that preacher had said years before from the pulpit. That is when I returned back to the religion. I knew someone who had always spoke to me about coming back and I started coming over to his house. He was good to me. He wife was nice to me too.
So at 21 started dating the same person I had met years earlier. We married when I was 22. I had wanted to leave my past exactly where it was, in the past. My wife had known some about my past before we married.
Being a husband and being a father was all I really wanted. We had three kids. My grandfather lived with us. We attended religious meetings on Sunday, on Tuesday and on Thursday. There were special meetings three times a year. Most every Saturday we were out as a family with others from the same religion talking to people about God and living a proper life, a better life, a better hope.
But the religion wanted more out of a person then only being a husband and being a father. It was never enough. Always had to be more and more and something better or else you were stagnating. As a man, I was considered the spiritual head of my family, the person who made all the decisions and my word was final. It wasn’t exactly my way of viewing how things should be. My wife and I battled during the years of my being in the religion over my advancing in the religion. I didn’t like having to play a game of being in subjection to people in the religion that I didn’t know and yet I liked just living my own life which really wasn’t possible because we were always busy doing something in the religion. There was scriptural study on a daily basis which I think keeps a person from thinking about other things or rather from dealing with them because those things from a person’s past are always there.
I advanced in the religion. I became an assistant to the ones having oversight in the local meeting location and later I became one of the ones called an elder.
I had run ins with some of the men in the religion over the years. Not a whole lot, but one involving my first child and I should have walked out but I didn’t. Another when I had to open the meeting and one of the elders thought I was a minute late and he was having a fit in front of people so I responded in kind.
But what happened after I had become an elder is what was the beginning of my leaving it. It wasn’t just one thing, it was a combination of things. Some of them didn’t involve the religion but the things involving the religion is what hit me hard.
One day while we were out on a Saturday, I was told a woman who had been put out of the religion and a person none of us knew, wanted to talk to an elder. I was that elder that day. This woman was helped to come back to the religion. Her story of abuse sounded so much like mine that my heart just went out to her. She had a child and they were in need of help. We would pick her up and bring her to the meetings. After she was accepted back into the religion, she began acting up, calling herself the person who spoke for Christ and then accusing me of wanting to usurp the other elders. The wakeup call came to me when I was called into a meeting one night and was read a diatribe from this lady to the body of elders stating I had been abusing my children and I was causing problems with people in the congregation. Around this time, my oldest child had broken his arm while out in the playground at the babysitter’s and my daughter broke her arm shortly after that playing outside. This woman felt it was my fault, that I really had broken the arms of my kids. I knew it was a lie about what she was saying but to hear these accusations and to see other elders who knew me and had known me for years ask me about these charges, I was in shock and disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and I couldn’t believe that someone who knew me and had known of my relationship with my kids would actually think that there might be some truth to the diatribe from this woman. This coupled with other things going on at the time was something that just broke me spiritually. Although I tried the next couple of years to recover, I really couldn’t. I felt too hurt and it felt like I had been exposed to something on an emotional level that had happened to me on a physical level when I was a child.
We moved out of the area and started going to another congregation, but it did not work out. There was a man there that I was not going to let intimidate me. I tried to follow the rules and would reference everything. I wouldn’t make a move unless I could back myself up with the writings from the religion I had become a member of. So when we had moved I followed the same thing. With this man, it became a tit for tat between us. It was as if I had done something wrong to him and he was going to make me pay. When something like that had happened before to me I would back off and walk away from it, but this time I refused. Needless to say it only caused problems. So I left. It caused problems in my marriage too. Or rather just made the situation in my marriage worse then it was.
Beatings:
Shortly after my father had sex with me, my grandfather came up to visit. Pop had been sending my father money every week to support my three brothers and me. My grandfather came to tell my father the money was going to stop. My father was upset. After my grandfather left, my father took out his anger on me. I think it was partly that and partly the fact that I spoke up about my father being in my bed and what he did. Nothing was ever mentioned about it until after I had left my father’s house but while there the sex never was spoken of again. But the beatings that started were worse then my father had ever done to me before.
I started being beat after dinner. My father would take his fists and hit me until I fell to the floor and then he would kick me until I would get up and stand in front of me. Then he would beat me again with his fist until I fell down kick me again until I got up. This would repeat until I lay in a fetal position crying. My father would always say something that I never heard as he walked away. Years later my oldest brother told me what our father said. My father would say ‘good, now lay there boy’ and he would leave the room. I stayed there on a cold floor until I could get up again. But the next day after dinner, my father would begin this beating again on me. This went on until I left in June of my 12th year, after school.
Once when we lived in the burbs, my oldest brother was 16 at the time. This brother of mine was considered the good brother by us and was the favored brother by my father, but that wasn’t enough to stop my father from what he did to my brother. While the rest of us stayed in the living room, my father took my oldest brother down to the basement and started hitting him. My father was taking his fists and repeatedly hitting my brother. We could hear each hit my brother took from our father. My father was saying things to my brother and my father didn’t stop until he was exhausted. My father was good at what he did because he never left a visible mark on us. We may have been in pain and we may have been hurting but we were not to show it or mention it.
Another time, when we lived in the country, my two middle brothers ran away for a weekend. My father was furious. My stepmother was trying to calm my father in order to get my brothers to come back home. We lived in two places in the country, the first house was the mansion and the second house was an old rehabbed tenant house my father brought. The time my brothers ran away, this tenant house was still falling apart. It was as if the people had left the house some 40 years before and the house started having creatures take over living there. There was an old outhouse and I needed to go to the bathroom. So I went there and I had the eerie feeling I was being watched. The only person who could have been watching me through the boards of the outhouse was my father. He was the only one there with me and we were taking old boards back to the mansion. My father was being really nice to me that weekend. It was strange because my father was never nice to me before.
My stepmother got my brothers to come back under the promise my father would not bother them. The day my father asked me to go with him to the tenant house, my brothers had come back home and they were in my room. The walls were plaster walls. My father took one of my brothers and bounced his head against the wall in my bedroom like a person bounces a basketball. My brother fell down to the floor crying and holding his head. When my father turned to my 2nd brother, that brother of mine fell to his knees and pleaded with my father not to hit him and to remember what he had promised our stepmother. My father said something to my brother and looking at me, told me to be ready in a few minutes downstairs. So going to the tenant house with my father was strange to me. Here two of my brothers were in my room having just gone through that with my father and my father was being nice to me. I felt it was at the expense of my brothers. I did not feel right about it, just strange. It did not take long for my father to return to treating me like he always did, which felt normal to me. Actually it was normal between my father and me. I would find out years later why our relationship was like that between my father and me.
When we were living in the tenant house, my father took my 3rd brother outside. My father was going to beat him like he had beaten our oldest brother. My brother was 13. My father had my brother outside the front door of the house which faces the woods. He told my brother to take his first hit and my brother knew what was going to happen if he took that hit at my father. So my brother said to my father ‘I can’t hit you, you’re my father’, suddenly my father was laughing and looking at my brother with caring. My father hugged my brother. I was watching through the window. I felt sick to my stomach. It was just sickening to watch how my brother had to think quickly and respond to my father. It worked for him. He had to think fast and he knew what was going to happen if he didn’t. It worked for him. This was good for him, but sad because he had to think fast and he was only a child.
Firearms:
My father had rifles. He kept them in a rifle rack and kept them chained together and locked. My father would check this rifle rack for fingerprints and if he found one, we got into trouble. We were never allowed to touch the rifle rack let alone the rifles. The only time we could touch that area was if my father was there. In the society we live today where kids have gone to school and shot other people I think adults would say my father did a good thing with that. I would agree. However, it was how my father was with the guns that is wrong.
I shot my first rifle when I was 8 years old. We would go to an area where people lived and shoot the back of a billboard. That was dangerous because someone could have gotten hurt and yet it is what we did. No one ever stopped us.
My grandfather was a hunter and my father was a hunter. My grandfather would use the proper time of the year to hunt and the proper gear. My father would hunt when he felt like hunting. But when my father was drinking which was every week and when we lived in the country, then he would take his rifles outside and target practice with them. He wanted his sons practicing with him too. I chose not to do this. My father did not like it that I refused to shoot. This just caused further problems between us. There was the shooting into the woods outside the back of our house. When we lived in the tenant house the back door faced the road. My father would use the area outside the back door to target practice. He would just have those practicing with him put the guns down when a car was approaching. Then he would pick up a rifle and start shooting into the woods or at something he had set up to shoot at.
One day my father was shooting. My stepmother was taking a nap on this Saturday. My father was drinking and having my two older brothers out back with him shooting. My father was acting crazy with the rifles and just shooting. Every few moments you would hear the rifles going off. How my stepmother slept through this is hard to say. Perhaps she had enough of it. But what happened that day was scary. My 3rd brother was coming around the side of the house and my father had a rifle which he was shooting. My brother came around when my father was firing. The bullet came just in front of my brother’s nose. I was inside the house but knew something was wrong. When I went downstairs my 2nd brother told me what happened. My 3rd brother was outside shaking and crying and extremely upset. He had seen this bullet pass in front of his nose and my father had pulled the trigger. My father was trying to get my brother to calm down. My father was telling my brother how my brother knew they were firing the rifles and should have been careful. I don’t recall my father ever saying he was sorry. What my father did was to tell us we were not to tell our stepmother. We were to keep quiet about it and simply not mention it.
Later that day during Saturday’s spaghetti dinner, my brother was still upset and trying not to show it. He was not eating like he would and my stepmother noticed this. She asked my brother what was wrong with him and my brother couldn’t control his emotions anymore and started crying saying what had happened. My father got mad at my brother and at us for not hiding it any longer. My father and my stepmother got into an argument over this. My stepmother always told my father how the guns were dangerous in the hands of my father. But my father wouldn’t listen to her about it.
Years later when my stepmother was staying at her dying sister’s house and my father was visiting, my father was outside shooting his rifles. My aunt had retired from the military and she was not a dumb woman. She had a healthy view of rifles. My aunt was tired of my father shooting his rifles and asked my stepmother to tell my father to stop shooting his rifles. My father got mad and left. He took his rifles and went home. To stress how difficult this was, I can tell you it was a 5 hour drive from my aunt’s house to my father’s house. We thought we were in the country but where my aunt lived, made our house seem like it was living in the suburbs. Although I was not living with my father at the time this happened and I was grown. My stepmother told me about it. I could tell my father’s view of his rifles never changed. They were still toys to him.
I don’t like rifles or guns even now. I do not oppose those who are responsible with firearms but I will not allow them into my house. Too many things can go wrong and I think most people become stupid with their firearms. But that is because of my personal experience with them growing up.
My grandfather when living with us had a gun and I made him get rid of it. When I started having children, I did not want a gun in my house because I knew what could happen when a child finds a gun. Although it never happened to us, we came close enough in my family to cause me to decide not to have a gun in my home. I think this has been a 50/50 split with my siblings. Although with the siblings I have who my have firearms in their homes, they have acted with reason and have not acted the way my father did with his rifles. I know my father kept a gun too. He carried it on him but didn’t shoot it around us that often. An uncle told me once how my father pulled this out on a black man when my uncle and my father were out one night.
Race:
The first time I recall being different in skin color is around the time I was three. I remember running to a water fountain for a drink of water and being pulled away from it. The person telling me I was not to drink from that water fountain because it was for coloreds only. He then asked me if I knew how to read. I remember looking at the man and then being asked where my parents were. Someone spelled out the words to me of ‘colored only’ and when I asked where I was to get water I was pointed to a ‘white only’ water fountain.
The second time I was faced with race that I recall was when I was fighting my cousin. While tearing into my cousin, someone said, ‘hey, look at the white boy fight’ and I stopped to look up and see who said that. That is the only time my cousin got a hit into me.
Of course Burger was black and I use to go over to his house in the morning before school to watch his mother put the grease from the morning bacon that she had cooked and work it into the kid’s hair in order to fix their hair for the day. I would sit there watching this woman work the hot grease through the hair of her kids and was always in amazement of how this worked.
We were living in
When we moved out to the suburbs, it was mostly working class white people. There were a few black families and I would get into fights with the white kids because they thought I was mixed and I got into fight with the black kids because they accused me of passing. My eye problem didn’t help and I got into fights over my eye too. The kid who stabbed me in the fourth grade was a light skin black kid.
When the riots began in 1968, we were afraid of what was going to happen. Watching the nightly news and hearing of the fights going at in the high schools where my oldest siblings were. My father and grandfather drove trucks in DC and were told by their companies to keep driving and not to stop if they were confronted by anyone.
The times I really remember race are the following:
It was after my grandmother had died. There was a black lady that my grandfather knew and worked with in the early 1950s and she was related somehow to the people who lived next door. One time she came for a visit and my grandfather and her recognized each other. So my grandfather and this woman took to drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and talking. Burger’s mother sent each of her kids over each hour until
There was the couple my 3rd brother and I lived with. They never did anything wrong to us as I have mentioned them before. There was the time Arness had us sit on the front step of her house. She had brought herself a new pair of pantyhose. I think they were just out for people to buy. So my brother and I sat out front with her and we were complaining about sitting there when we wanted to play. Arness was asking us to just sit there with her and enjoy the sun and to talk to her. Right then she was hiking up her dress to show us how shiny those pantyhose made her legs look and a bird was flying overhead. This bird was able to release his business right onto Arness’s new pantyhose. My brother and I could not help but roll off the steps laughing. Arness was yelling at us not to laugh because her pantyhose were ruined. Later she laughed about it. It was a funny moment.
Living with my father, we were introduced to the ‘N’ word. I hate that word and refuse to ever use it. I never taught that word to my kids although they learned it at school and I had to explain to them why people use it. My father use to open the front door of our house in the suburbs and tell us to watch the black people walking on the sidewalk. He would tell us to watch their arms and how black people carried themselves. Then my father would say how black people looked and walked like apes. This was why bad stuff happened to them and why the white race was better because the white race did not come from apes. When my father converted to his new found beliefs after marrying my stepmother, he told us how God had cursed the black race and turned their skin black. When God lifted the curse, then the black race would turn white. I remember years later hearing how black people were allowed into that church and I wondered how they remained black and did not turn white like my father said would happen.
One of my sisters asked me once why I was not prejudiced because of the things that had happened to me as a kid, such as my rape and the black kid who put the rock on my head, the janitor who molested me in school, the black kids who would fight me, etc., and I told my sister how my own brothers forced sex on me, my own father beat me and hit me, called me names, raped me and they were white. How worse could it get. If my own race mistreated me, how could I blame the black race? So it never made sense to me, this hatred of a person because of their skin color.
I am a person who never could sit down and watch Roots because of the pain they showed happening to people. I never could sit through a watching of Jewish concentration camps because of the horror they endured. I only wish everyone in the world would be bothered and hurt by the hatred of a person just because of their skin color. I wish words applied to a race simply die out of usage. But for now it’s only a wish.
Name Calling:
My father gave my 2nd brother, my 3rd brother and me what I call pet names. One was basketball head, another baseball head and my own pet name was football head. My father gave me another name, shithead. After my father gave me that name, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and started crying. My father told me my head was shaped like a football. So even now when I touch my head and feel where my head comes to a center on top, I recall my father’s words. The other name was because of the problem I had of not making it to the bathroom in time.
My father would cut our hair. I don’t know if he was ever a barber, but he would cut our hair. He had all the equipment for cutting hair. We knew we had to make sure our ears were clean because my father would check while cutting our hair and yes we would get into trouble for having dirt behind our ears.
Once, three of us boys were going to camp for a week. We had to qualify for this camp and go through a physical for it. We had to strip down to our underwear for the physical and line up so a doctor could take a look at us. I was wearing boxers at the time. My brothers wore jockey shorts. My 3rd brother was telling me to be sure my underwear were clean and when it was my turn to go behind the curtain to see this doctor I had to drop my shorts. So to cover up my underwear I pushed my underwear all the way down to my angles and folded them over so the doctor would not see. The doctor poked my body and asked me how I felt. It was over quickly and I made sure to pull my underwear back up when he wasn’t looking. The room was full of boys going to camp and I was able to hide this.
My father decided to give us crew cuts. I did not want this type of haircut. My father’s words kept coming back to me that I am a football head and I did not want to see my hair cut that short. So my father enlisted my brothers to talk me into it. I was the last one to have his hair cut. I don’t recall my brothers have their hair cut so short but my father cut my hair extra short. I went upstairs to the bathroom, closed the door, looked at myself and cried. I kept touching my head and seeing where my football point was.
Whenever my father would yell for football head or shithead I had to answer because those were my personal names. I hate those names as an adult. I don’t know if my two brothers remember being called the names he had for them. We don’t talk about it as adults.
However, once as an adult in a meeting, this man called another person who was not in the meeting shithead. I felt such a sudden rush of anger that I promptly got up from this meeting and walked out. I went outside the building and kept walking around the grounds in a circle around the building. My boss at the time finally came out and asked me what was wrong. I told my boss how this man called another person shithead and how I did not like the use of such words and if that man ever called me that name to my face I would attack the man. It never happened and I was never in another meeting with the guy. Years later I heard a man call another person that name and it upset me but I was able to remain in my seat and just look at him with silence. It only took a moment for the man to switch to another subject.
Music:
My father liked mostly country music with some Rock & Roll. When we moved to the suburbs of
When we had moved from the apartment and to the house my father had a stereo system that was broken in the move. My father tore up the rest of the stereo system and destroyed some other things too. That is how he dealt with the move.
With these neighbors my father went out and brought the best stereo system he could find and afford and put the stereo against the wall that connected the two houses. My father then put on Marty Robbins and Ray Price albums and turned up the music as loud as it would go without breaking the speakers. The neighbors came over asking my father to turn the music down. My father told them they did not listen to his request for their music and he was not going to listen to their request to turn his music down. These neighbors moved the next month. The two neighbors who lived in the house next to ours after that were always quiet. My father still played his music although it wasn’t as loud. It was mostly Ray Price, Marty Robbins, Elvis Presley and perhaps a few others every now and then. He enjoyed the Porter Waggoner show and we had to sit with him watching it. Years later it was Hee Haw.
After the fight with my stepmother where the both of them had tore their bedroom apart, my father came back to the house several hours later. My stepmother refused to talk to him. The house was quiet with that pins and needles feeling. My stepmother had two of her sisters over that day comforting her over what had happened. I remember one of her sisters staying in the kitchen after my father came back to the house and the other one left.
My father put on his music. It was Marty Robbins ‘this time you gave me a mountain’ and the boys had to sit on the couch while he had this song playing over and over and over again. My father had brought two chairs and put a floor ashtray between the chairs. My stepmother always sat in the left chair and my father always sat in the right chair which was close to the front door. My father had this western style hat that he wore and he would place it on the footstool in front of my stepmother’s chair as she sat there. My stepmother would throw the hat off the footstool. And the song played on. I don’t know how long this went on but we sat there watching this without saying a word. We were still, motionless and quiet. My father would sing the Marty Robbins song and just kept placing that hat on her footstool. After what seemed hours my stepmother finally let the hat stay on the footstool and then my father moved kneeled in front of my stepmother and was asking her to forgive him while still singing that song. My stepmother and father finally went somewhere to talk and they replaced the bedroom furniture with new furniture.
On foot:
When we were living in the suburbs, as kids, we would walk to the tunnels going into the sewers and then go underground around the area where we lived. It was easier then walking the streets and faster. Most of the sewers went under the highways and we were able to go from one town to another town quickly without being seen by anyone. For instance, when my grandfather moved out of our house and to another town, I learned how to walk above our house, into the woods, find the tunnel into the sewer and drop down into it. I would then walk under the highway and come out down the street from where my grandfather lived.
Another time we found the sewer a couple of blocks below us lead to the same river we would fish in. This sewer came out to an area where we would go swimming. By the time we got back to our house we would be dry and no one ever knew what we had done. The only time we came to the house wet was when we were caught in a downpour of rain and we were able to explain it away by saying we got wet in the downpour of rain.
FOOD:
Eating at my father’s house was simple. There were three meals each day. Breakfast was a bowl of cereal, lunch was two peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and dinner was normally spam, hotdogs, bean soup or spaghetti. Sunday dinner was at
The other thing we had when we lived in the burbs and during the summertime were on a Saturday when we went fishing. My father taught us one time how to gut fish and clean them. We would fish in the
When we lived in the country and we had moved to the tenant house, we had a huge garden. There was a creek below the house and across the street. Each of us boys would take two containers to carry water and have to water the garden everyday carrying water from the creek to the garden until the garden had been fully watered. I learned how to can food by watching my stepmother and assisting her wherever we were told to. But it was hard work. My stepmother would scrape the bottom of a bowl in order to get every drop or every bit of food. Even when baking a cake, nothing was wasted. Everything was scraped out of any bowl that was used, nothing was wasted.
While living in the country we started drinking powdered milk. We had to water it down and use half the amount the instructions said to use in order to make the powdered milk last longer. Since my 2nd and 3rd brother and I had to take turns washing dishes every night, we would make ourselves an extra glass of powdered milk and put extra powder in it. While we knew what each of us was doing when we had to wash the dishes alone while the rest of us stayed upstairs in the living room, whoever was upstairs with our father had to be sure he did not get up to come downstairs. We had 20 minutes to wash the dishes. They would check to make sure the dishes were washed properly.
Everything seems to have been 20 minutes. Eating was to be completed in 20 minutes, homework had to be completed in 20 minutes, washing, etc., all in 20 minutes.
Homework:
Since we only had 20 minutes a day during school days for homework, I started getting up at 1am when we lived in the tenant house do finish and rework my homework. I would sit at the light coming in from the outside and do my homework. Once my oldest brother caught me when he came out of his room and asked me what I was doing. We had a radio and I would listen to music very low while I finished my homework. My brother made me get back to bed and told me not to be getting up during the night. I don’t think my brother ever told our father because I never heard anything about it. But I continued to get up at
Books:
My father never read to us. As far as reading goes I enjoyed reading. I learned to enjoy reading by attending school. When we lived in the suburbs, I remember reading what they called the SRA’s and one would have to read a subject and then have to answer questions regarding it. The teacher would then go over it with me and I could not read another one unless I got everything correct. I would hide books at home. When we lived in the country someone had given me a series of books from the Reader’s Digest that had condensed versions of the classics and some modern day books. I kept these under my bed. I would read by the light of the moon that came into my room. Bedtime was
My father brought a set of encyclopedias which my stepmother had wanted. We were not allowed to touch these books. My father told me I could only touch them if I washed my hands and he was there with me. But that never happened. So on Saturdays when he and my stepmother went to the grocery store I would wash my hands and then read one of the encyclopedias. I would watch for my father’s car and then put the book back being careful to make sure there weren’t any marks left on the books.
Other things:
Once when I did the dishes, I put the ice cube trays away and forgot to fill them with water. In the middle of the night I felt something freezing on my back. I woke up to find my father sitting on my bed and placing the empty frozen ice cube trays on my back and placing them until I woke up. He then proceeded to quietly yell at me how I had messed up and I had better never ever do this again or the next time he would do something worse to me then just put frozen ice cube trays on my back while I slept.
My father and stepmother kept aspirin in the kitchen. When I would do the dishes, which was every three days, I would take off the bottle of the aspirin and take them. No one ever asked me about it. I remember once my stepmother wondering what happened to the aspirin but I was never accused of taking them. It dulled the pain I felt.
Leaving my father’s house:
The farmer who owned the land and buildings in the area we were living at in the country decided to sell his property. My father tried to buy the old mansion we were living in but the person who brought the land and buildings from the farmer did not want to sell the mansion to my father. So this man remodeled the tenant house and sold it to my father for what I think was $20,000 dollars in 1970. The house had three floors with two rooms on each floor. The middle floor was the main floor and an enclosed porch was put on the front of the house which went onto the hill. The porch had a bathroom put just off of it.
There were two bedrooms on the top floor, a living and bedroom on the middle floor and the ground floor had the kitchen and dining room. It was outside the door of this dining room my father would shoot his rifles or at this door he would beat me until I lay on the floor crying and not moving.
I had been growing tall but not putting on weight. I was 5’9 and 120 pounds. My stepmother was watching me eat to make sure I was eating. She would ask me how come I was not gaining weight and why I was losing weight. My brothers were not losing weight but I was.
To this day I think my stepmother put my father up to calling my grandfather. My father called my grandfather and told my grandfather to come and get me because one of us was going to kill the other. This was because I was standing up to my father even though I was beat even worse for standing up to him. My grandfather came and took me from my father’s house after school finished when I was 12 years old.
The day I was leaving my father’s house, my father came upstairs to talk to me. It was the second time in my life that my father talked to me as a father and it was because I was leaving. I sat there listening to him and thinking to myself how nice he could be when he wanted to be nice but there was nothing there to make me want to stay.
12 years old and living with my grandfather:
When I went to live with my grandfather, I was 5’9 and 120 pounds and it was the end of my school year. I have to mention this because of what happened to me just before my school year was to begin for the 6th grade.
My grandfather was living with a woman and renting out two rooms from her. This woman lived across the street from her daughter. That daughter had a grown son who was married to my 2nd sister. This was the man who my sister had met on a Friday and married on a Monday. They had a son, my nephew who people said looked so much like me that the boy could have been my kid. My brother-in-law beat my sister because he believed my sister and I had a relationship where she had my child. Even though this is sick and was not true, somehow my brother-in-law believed it enough to beat my sister and tell her not to have a relationship with me. I don’t know how he came to be convinced he was wrong, but he was finally convinced all of what he was told by the buddies he was running away with were wrong.
One night I was sitting in my sister’s room and watching her as she put on her makeup and we were talking. My sister was telling me about the things that happened with our father, with her and with our other two sisters.
I learned from my sister that night that my father had a sexual relationship with our youngest sister and that was the reason why our family broke up again and we had to leave the area where we were living because he had become known in the neighborhood.
My sister was telling me that she slept with a pair of scissors when living with us because my father had came to her one night wanting sex and my sister threatened my father with the scissors that she would kill him if he ever tried again.
Once my sister had been late coming home when living with my father and when she walked into the house my father beat her right in front of all of us. This was not a whipping but a beating. He hit her wherever he could touch her. My stepmother was yelling at my father and my father continued to hit my sister no matter how much my stepmother screamed. As boys, all we did was watch.
The second time my sister was late coming in, she came in crying and looking like someone had jumped her and beat her. Her finger was messed up. My father was ready to beat her again and when he saw how she looked he was mad that someone had done something to her.
But here in my sister’s house, she was telling me what really happened that night. She knew she was late coming home, so my sister roughed herself up and made it look like someone had jumped her. This was so our father would not beat her. Then she faked it that someone had hurt her finger. It worked for her that night.
My sister knew she had to get away from our father. So when we left the house on a Friday night and met a guy she liked, she married him. My grandfather signed the marriage papers because in 1960 in
But it was the sexual abuse my sister told me about regarding our youngest sister that I was shocked to hear about. My oldest brother knew about it but my other brothers did not know at the time. This was the first time I had heard about it. There was so much that my sister was telling me that started to make sense regarding our father.
My sister told me that she had come home and our stepmother was in the living room with her suitcases packed. My stepmother was going to left our father because of what had come out regarding the sexual abuse between my father and my youngest sister. My 2nd sister and my oldest sister had already discussed this and decided to lie about the sexual abuse. My two oldest sisters had figured we had been split apart so much and if the truth came out regarding what was going with our father that four boys would be removed from each other. So they felt it was best to lie and keep us together. My youngest sister had moved out to live with our cousin and my oldest sister was married. My middle sister knew she was leaving, so with just the sons in my father’s house my two oldest sisters felt we would be together and better off then being in foster homes. My stepmother decided to stay and support my father.
As I sat there listening to my sister, she was looking at the expressions on my face and asking me what was wrong with me. Suddenly my sister asked me if our father did that to me. She was saying “He did it to you didn’t he?” and I was denying it. After repeating that question to me several times I finally admitted what our father had done. My sister could see it on my face. She was upset and I was telling her not to tell anyone. I made her promise not to say anything to anyone. But the next day I heard my grandfather yelling and cussing. My sister had told our grandfather about what our father had done to me.
Over the summertime I had put on 40 pounds. It was hardly noticeable. Just before school was due to start I woke up one morning and could not move. My grandfather stood me up and put my day clothes on. I could take very small steps and my grandfather walked me to his car. He then took me to the hospital. While in the hospital they gave me something to loosen my muscles. I remember it being around
This doctor took me to another room where there were two police officers who had my grandfather in handcuffs. The doctor told the police officers to take the handcuffs off of my grandfather because ‘he never touched the boy’, it was after this my grandfather had to go to court to get custody of me in the state of
There was a warrant put out for my father but in those days they would not serve them across county lines. So I was told if my father ever came around me before my eighteenth birthday I could call the police in the county where I lived and tell them about the warrant.
Going to school, I had to get my shots again because all of my records regarding the shots I had were missing. That was not a nice thing to go through and to remember.
Just as I was beginning to get use to where we lived and I was attending school, I came went to school on a Monday morning and when I came home that day we were moving to another town. It happened that quickly and without warning. I was in the 6th grade and it wasn’t Christmas yet. But we moved to a place most of use called ‘cockroach haven’ where we moved into a huge one bedroom apartment that was built in the 1950s. I transferred schools and was now back in the school I attended in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades and was living near the river where we use to fish. The only difference was we were living in an apartment and not a house. My grandfather was working the second shift, so I was left alone during the evenings.
Apartment living:
It was the 1970’s and I grew my hair long, wore bell bottoms, my favorite coat was an East German military one and I wore French ruffled shirts. All of these my grandfather brought me. I was listening to Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight, Carol King, Carly Simon and whoever else I found I liked. I could watch whatever I wanted on TV and found myself watching either old rerun of Perry Mason or PBS shows. Everything my father would never watch or listen too.
From the hospital I had been found to have a kidney infection and other health problems. I was sent to a doctor who put me on antibiotics and on valium for my nerves. In school, I was taking wood shop for the first time and I enjoyed what I was learning. It felt good to be free. The only problem I had was not having my grandfather home during the evenings. Pop would always call at
I never got involved in drugs but I did other things. I got involved in sex with a boy who lived in the same apartment complex as I did. He would come over during the evenings and do whatever he wanted. This was something I was use too. It was something I knew. He did teach me how to iron clothes correctly and he protected me from others. He was company for me. His stepfather was an idiot and was controlling. Because his mother insisted he be allowed to come over to my apartment and because they could see him leave his apartment and walk to my apartment, they let him come over.
I was able to take showers and a bath whenever I wanted. I went to bed when I wanted and ate what I wanted. I was 13 years old.
Once when walking out on the street a car starting following me and kept trying to run over me. It was because of the clothes I wore and the coat I wore. The guy who was driving the car started yelling at me about how I was dressed, but I didn’t care.
I was able to get a puppy and my grandfather did not want me to have that puppy. So I pleaded and begged to keep it. The puppy lived only a week and I decided not to try that again.
My grandfather was drinking when he wasn’t working and complaining about the cost of everything. With my grandfather, he had dated a woman before we moved to the country and this woman did not want me around. She tried to get my grandfather to send me to her relatives who lived in
With the drinking my grandfather was doing, he was never mean to me, but he would drink whisky and beer. Doing his drinking he would write letters to these two women and he would tell them off in the letters. I would take his liquor and pour it out in the drink and then replace it with water. When he was drunk he didn’t know the difference.
When we had a phone, my grandfather would call these two women on the phone and proceed to tell them off.
Here I wanted to be with my grandfather and yet I was being a burden to him. It was because of me these two women rejected my grandfather. The one who got married, divorced her husband after a year and wanted to see my grandfather again, but he refused to ever see her again. He never wrote her or called her after that. Pop told me she made a mistake and he was not going to be someone she could dump again. But he did continue to bother the other woman for a few years.
My 2nd sister moves in:
Around the time when I was 14 my 2nd sister moved in with her husband and their son. They took the bedroom, my grandfather slept on the couch and I slept on the floor in the living room. This way my sister was around me during the evenings when my grandfather was working, and they helped pay the rent.
It was nice to have my sister and my nephew around but having my brother-in-law around was awful. Now my grandfather had someone to drink with and both of them would get drunk together. My brother-in-laws had a buddy he hung around with a lot and the two of them were trouble together.
One night while my brother-in-law, my sister and my nephew were in the bedroom, my sister was screaming for help. Her cries were really loud and she needed help. When I went to go back to the bedroom, my grandfather stopped me. He told me to leave them alone because it was their argument. I needed asked to call the police and my grandfather told me I could not call the police. So I sat in the living while my grandfather was drinking his beer that my brother-in-law had brought him and listened to my sister’s screams. My nephew cries didn’t help either. My nephew was too young to remember what happened, but as the years went by this nephew of mine would sit in front of a TV and watch it while his parents argued and his mother was beat by his father. So my nephew got conditioned to his parents being this way and would remain quiet.
That night my brother-in-law came out to sleep on the floor. He always wore silk boxers. When he came out, he laid with his penis hanging out of his boxers and in front of my face. So I fell asleep watching him and having anger at him. But I could not to anything about it.
The next day when both my brother-in-law and my grandfather left, my sister and I were able to talk. My sister told me how her husband was raping her and using a broomstick to rape her in every possible way he could. She was hoping and wanting someone to help her and couldn’t understand why no one bothered. So I told her what happened with our grandfather.
They were there a few months and then moved out.
My sister and her first husband were married for nine years. When my nephew was five years old my sister had her second child with her first husband, even though their marriage was a terrible one.
My brother-in-law had a child with another woman while married to my sister and he married this woman while married to my sister. The child died as an infant.
When my sister left my brother-in-law she had to have the police escort her back into her apartment the get her personal belongings. My brother-in-law took some of the items my sister had out of her hand saying they belonged to him. The police took only made sure he did not physically hurt my sister. What was in her hands he could touch.
Once he broke a chair over my sister’s back and deflated her left lung. This man got away with harming her. Another time I had picked my sister up from work late at night and my brother-in-law was following us. He was trying to get to my sister so I started weaving in and out of traffic attempting to get away from him. When I found this was not going to happen, I drove to the nearest police station. My brother-in-law figured it out and drove pass us screaming at me that I thought I was smart but he was going to get me anyway and my sister. When we went into the police station, there was nothing they could too because none of us were hurt.
Later at another apartment house we lived in that was not roach infested, my sister lived on an upper floor and my grandfather and I lived on a lower floor. I had my nephew with me and had just driven into my apartment complex. There was a rifle shot and my sister was yelling out the window that our grandfather had just shot my brother-in-law. It was the only time I said something wrong about my brother-in-law to my nephew. The police came and insisted on looking at my brother-in-law. The spray of pellets from the 21 gauge my grandfather had used to stop my brother-in-law from breaking into our apartment had passed through my brother-in-law’s right knee. The pellets traveled down the hallway and no one was in the hallway at the time. All of the pellets were against the wall that was at the end of the hallway. My brother refused to press charges and he never bothered my grandfather again.
He did continue to bother my sister. By then they were divorced and yet he was still coming around. My sister was dating this man who my brother-in-law thought he could fool with. This man warned my now ex brother-in-law to leave my sister alone and my ex brother-in-law didn’t listen. So the last time my ex brother-in-law came around, my sister’s boyfriend was waiting in the woods. After my sister’s ex-husband attempted to get into her apartment and failed, he was taking off on his motorcycle. My sister’s boyfriend came out of the woods and pulled my sister’s ex-husband off of his motorcycle and broke his ribs. This stopped my ex brother-in-law from coming around to my sister’s place. My sister married her boyfriend and has been married for over 20 years with two now grown kids of their own.
At the time the last incident happened I freaked out over it and started screaming at my sister asking her why she allowed this to happen. I apologized years ago about it. My sister and I have a very nice relationship with each other.
I should add that before the motorcycle incident my ex brother-in-law had gone after my sister when I was outside and I went to go after him. My sister yelled at me to stop because her ex-husband had a pistol in his back pocket. Turns out he wanted me to charge him so he could claim self-defense when he shot me. This was after my grandfather had shot him and he had recovered.
So why did I freak out over his ribs being broken? I don’t have an answer. Perhaps it was just another cycle of violence that I was sick of. I certainly didn’t have a whole lot of love for him and I didn’t waste my hate on him either.
My 3rd sister moves in:
My youngest sister was living with a cousin of ours. This cousin had three kids of her own and knew how to be a parent to kids. However, my sister had to deal with her own desires and wants. She wanted to move out of our cousin’s house. At first my grandfather did not want my sister moving in. I begged him to let my youngest sister move in with us. So my sister moved in. She was going to cosmetic school.
Around this time a lady moved in next door to us with three boys. A month later a motorcycle group moved in with the woman. The woman had left her husband and he found her. So she allowed him to move in and he brought his motorcycle gang with him.
My sister made friends with the whole gang. My sister would cook the gang dinner. She would make these big pots of spaghetti for the whole group. They would party until the morning and people slept everywhere. They slept on top of their dining room table, under the table, in the closets, one the beds, on the floor, in the bathtub. It was a one bedroom apartment like ours but had over 40 people living there.
My grandfather was always complaining about my sister feeding this whole group. My sister never stopped while she lived with us. She even dated a guy who was in the gang. Another girl who lived across the street and was about my sister’s age dated one of the adults in the group called Big Daddy. He was old enough to be our father. The man was nice, but really too old to be dating a girl 16 or 17 years old.
One time I looked out my bedroom window and saw this group initiating a member into their motorcycle gang. The method was for all the guys to urinate on him and he had to roll himself in it. Then he was a full member of the gang.
The one thing this gang would do is protect my grandfather, my sister and me from someone who might want to harm us. They were there for a few months and let it be known for people not to touch my grandfather’s car and if we had problems with anyone to tell them about it.
One night I heard a loud noise outside our living room window which faced the woods. When I looked out I saw police surrounding the apartment where this motorcycle gang lived. Suddenly the police were banging on the door of this gang and people started jumping out of the windows of the apartment. The drop down was about a one floor drop and the police caught all of them. Then the group was gone.
My grandfather always kept old dollar bills and silver dollars. From time to time I would get the old money out and look at it and then I would put it back. One night I went to a nearby store called High’s and the people there were telling me that my sister had came into the store and brought stuff with old paper money and old silver dollars. I asked to see them and it was the money my grandfather had. I ran home and found the money gone. My sister had spent it.
I remember my sister standing in the kitchen and we were arguing. So I took the dish towel and put it around my sister’s throat. She was telling me to squeeze it harder and to kill her. I had it tight around her neck and then I just let go and walked out of the kitchen. My sister moved out. She did not go back to live with our cousin.
This sister of mine and I get along fine as adults. She is a good person and has raised two children.
Off pills:
I was still taking medication for my kidneys and seeing a doctor who was checking my insides every time I came to see him to see how I was recovering. The valium I was on was affecting me and I found out because this neighbor I came to know who had three daughters of her own and was divorced told me how I had come over to their place and was talking up a storm. I don’t remember ever doing that. I remember having 25 valium pills left in a bottle that I took and flushed down the toilet. I just stopped taking the pills because it scared me to think I did something I knew nothing about.
Christmas:
My oldest sister lived a few blocks from my grandfather and I. Around Christmas she invited us to her place for dinner. My sister had three kids and she had invited my father down to her place for dinner. I was standing outside the place where my sister lived when my father, stepmother and youngest brothers walked in. I said hello to them and my father looked at me with this weird look and just shook his head to acknowledge I said hello. While in my sister’s place my father asked where I was. Everyone told him he had passed me when they came into the building. I had changed that much since the last time my father saw me that he did not recognize me. One of my brothers came out to get me. So I was around my father for about 2 hours and then I left.
My grandfather did not like putting up a Christmas tree. It was too much for him and had too many memories. So he had this little porcelain tree with lights for the holiday. That was it for Christmas with my grandfather.
Junior High:
I failed the fourth grade. My 3rd brother and I were in the same grade until the year I failed fourth grade. So in seventh grade, I was there for two weeks and I tested out of the grade and into the eighth grade. This was good for me. I was back to the grade I wanted to be at for myself. In the morning most of the school kids stood at the top of the hill leading to the school and smoked cigarettes before going to school and then we smoke some cigarettes after school ended for the day.
Another boy:
When we were living in cockroach haven, I met his boy who was 3 years older then me. I was 13 at the time. Within a couple of months this boy and I got to know each other well. At first we would kid with each other. I got to know his mother who was a Cherokee Indian and was divorced from his Spanish father. She was living with a man in the apartment complex and her son was living with them.
I now had the bedroom to myself. So this boy would spend nights with me. Eventually I found out he had a twin brother and the two of them had a friend. So now the trees of them were sleeping at my place. One day I was in my underwear and the boy I had become close friends with asked me to stay in my room while the three of them talked outside my room. I agreed and waited for my bedroom door to open. My friend came in and lay beside me, telling me he wanted to have intercourse with me. He used a different word but I agree. While he was on top of me, the other two opened the door and told me they were going to have their turns after he was finished. Again, this felt all too familiar too me and felt normal to me at the time. I felt as if I found someone and more then one who wanted me.
Sex with them became a regular thing. The boy I had become friends with was the first person who ever kissed me. I went to calling his mother Mom and we grew close together. My grandfather was angry that I attached myself to this family and yet he drank with them too. We went fishing together in the same river I had fished with my father.
Then we moved and they moved. It was different apartments but we could walk to each other and I showed them how to walk under the roads and into the sewers to get around towns quicker then walking on the roads. This family even knew how to gather dandelion greens just like I had learned.
One night I was with the three of them in Queenstown, Md and we met two men who were a father and son. The son was in his early 30’s and the father was in his early 60’s. They wanted to pay us for sex and I refused to go to their place. We were out on the street. So the boy I liked asked me to stay down the road and keep quiet which is what I did. While I was waiting for them, this Father and Son paid them to come to their apartment in Queenstown and have sex. We were to meet them in a few minutes. Instead we dropped into the sewer and took off away from Queenstown. I did not go back to that town for a couple of years after this happened.
I was 14 and he was 17 when we were standing near a place called
The last time I was at his place, his mother and his mother’s boyfriend had a horrible fight. So this boy took a knife and pushed it into his mother’s boyfriend’s eye. There was blood coming out of his eye. The eyesight was not ruined but this man wore a patch for a few months. I was accused of saying for the boy to stab the man in his eye. The only thing I remember was watching the whole thing. The man insisted he heard me say to stab him, but I don’t remember that. Anyway, it was enough for me not to come back and although we saw each other a handful of times after that, we lost contact with each other.
Eye Operation:
The one thing I found out from this boy’s mother is that she told me about a doctor who could operate on my left eye and fix it. I told my grandfather about this and made an appointment with this doctor immediately.
The doctor had me in the hospital the day before Thanksgiving when I was 14. On Thanksgiving all I did was complain that I wanted to go home. The nurse came in at
The following week I was at the doctor’s office. When he took the bandage off, my left eye was straight. My eyesight wasn’t any better for another person could not tell and that is what counted to me. I finally had two straight eyes. I would not be accused of looking at another person when I wasn’t. I would not have to put up with the school every year saying I needed to see an eye doctor regarding my left eye. My father got angry over this every year that I lived with him because the school did this. My grandfather would just get a slip from an eye doctor who would say nothing could be done. But this doctor fixed it and I was so happy about it. It was worth the pain I had when I woke up in the hospital.
Years later when I was nineteen and was working, my 2nd sister told me my eye was returning back to how it had been before. I again made an appointment with the same man who had performed the operation on my eye before. When he saw me, he called me his friend and asked me how was I doing? The next month I was in the hospital again and had an operation on my right eye. The doctor tied the muscle of my right eye to my left eye. Although the eyesight in my left eye is not as strong as the eyesight in my right eye, no one has ever been able to tell. I am the only one who knows and the eye doctors I have seen over the years.
Gone have been the fights I got into. This was a wonderful thing that happened to me and I have the mother of this boy I met because no one and not even the eye doctors I saw before meeting her had ever told me this was possible.
Changing:
My grandfather and I were living in a new apartment and my grandfather was still working the evening shift. I now alone most of the time and my body was bigger, more manlike. I turned 15 in January and was missing lots of school. I was actually a ward of the state and my grandfather had to make a report to the courts every 6 months but he really did not keep up with this. One day a woman knocked at our door and was saying my grandfather’s last name but she had it so messed up in her pronunciation that I did not know she wanted my grandfather. I kept telling her she had the wrong apartment and wrong address. This woman asked who I was and I told her. She then left. Later I learned she was from Social Services and was checking up on me. But she never came back.
I was now turning to religion and looking for something to believe in. I went to a Buddhist meeting and I was not ready for it. I was surprised by the people who were telling me how their chanting helped them overcome whatever problems they had, such as the lady who showed me a picture of herself 300 pounds heavier and another person who showed me a picture of himself spaced out on whatever he use to take. But I did not feel comfortable because I wanted something else. I feel today I would be more open to attending something like I had attended when I was a teenager, but I have never bothered.
One of the guys I met there came by to talk to me a few times and we would sit in his car but because I never showed any interest other then wanting to learn about God and did not want to attend another Buddhist meeting, he stopped coming around.
So I found something that interested me as I was reading it and I called the phone number. We now did not have a phone and I had to walk out to the phone booth to make a call. Someone would come by and talk to my grandfather and to me. I wanted to talk about the Bible and what it had to say it in. I was now reading the bible and I was still crying for my grandmother.
This religious group that was visiting me was the same group that had given my grandfather a book in 1968 and that my grandfather gave to me. I never threw that book away.
So I started studying the bible with them. I had lots of questions and eventually I started walking to the place where they had meetings. I would have to leave my apartment an hour before and I enjoyed the walk.
I began working on a vegetable truck with a family who was part of the religion. They paid me in fruits and vegetables and some money. I enjoyed what I was doing with them and felt like I belonged to something wholesome and honest.
I was baptized in six months. By then I was 16 and was learning to legally drive. I had stopped during all the stuff I had done before and now read more bible related topics. It was around this time I met a girl in the religion that I liked and we were dating when my 2nd brother was in the area. That is when I woke up to find my brother on top of me having sex. As a result I withdraw from mostly everyone.
I do not remember it, but my 2nd sister’s new husband remembered me attempting suicide at the time. Years later he would remind my sister and my oldest sister of what happened when I was 16.
I stopped going to school and got a job working nights in a restaurant. My grandfather was telling me I was working illegally because of my age, but I didn’t care. By then he had retired from work and was always home.
Then the state government contacted my grandfather and told him I had to return to school or I was going to be removed from his home. I was able to join a school run program to get my high school diploma and then to get learn typing and filing. I was finished in 1977 before I turned 18.
I got involved in weight lifting. I taught myself and did not work out with anyone. When I went to see the doctor I would see every few months, the doctor had a fit because my legs were so muscular and he told me I would hurt myself. But I insisted I would continue my weight lifting.
Little pieces:
I think we tend to view life in compartments. While we remember the obvious things that never seem to go away such as in my case the sexual abuse, the physical abuse and the emotional abuse, there is the neglect too. But it’s the things we don’t mention everyday or think about until we have spoken of the parts of our life that has stood out. Those little things that have shaped us just as much as the major things that have shaped our life.
For instance, I was in primary school in DC and I did something wrong when the teacher came by and told me to put my hands on top of the desk. When I did this, the teacher took her ruler and racked my knuckles. After that I learned to slip out of the classroom and go across a major road to my house. My grandfather always came home for lunch. I would hide in outside in back of the house until I saw him and then would have lunch with him. Once when I was there Arness came over and I was hiding behind a chair in the living room. She heard me and started yelling at my grandfather how I needed to be in school. My grandfather stood between Arness and me and let her know he would take care of me.
Or living with Arness and her husband Bubba, since they were black and we were white, it was not considered proper for my brother and me to take a bath in their bathtub. They had a steel tub in the kitchen and we would take our bathes in a steel tub. Arness explained to us that was how it was.
Or the time when Arness told us not to get up in the middle of the night because the devil would pull us down to hell. My brother and I called her a liar so that night her husband started screaming and my brother and I were woke to find Arness pulling Bubba back into bed. My brother and I could see out of our bedroom from our bed into their bedroom. Arness was telling us to see how she was not lying, that Bubba got up during the night and the devil was trying to get him but she pulled him away. Arness even yelled at the devil to leave. As a result of this when I woke up later that night because I had to pee I was scared. So I went where I lay and in the morning when Arness woke us up she found my bed wet. When she asked me why I did that I told her that I did not want the devil to take me down to hell with him so Arness explained to me that if I called her during the night she would turn the light on and the devil would run away from the light because he is afraid of the light.
The time when I was in first grade and all of the kids would be lined up at a certain time for a bathroom break. After the break I had to go again and the teacher told me I could go where I sat. So that is exactly what I did. The kid sitting next to me had her hand raised and told the teacher I was going to the bathroom. When I was asked why I wet myself sitting at my desk, I told my teacher that she was the one who told me to go where I was sitting because I had already been to the bathroom. After that I could always go to the bathroom whenever I said I had to go. I remember this teacher telling my 2nd grade teacher to be sure and let me go whenever I raised my hand for the bathroom.
When we were living in the country and I was in the fourth grade and the fifth grade I would tell my teachers not to call my house because my father would beat me and how he beat me. All the teachers would say is ‘Really?’ and they took compassion on me. I would tell them what my father was like and I don’t think they believed someone could be like the way I described my father.
Although in the suburbs there was always talk about drugs, in the country we found we could order these little alcohol bottles in the morning on the way to school and get them on the way home from school. That is if a person had money. We never had money.
We did learn that instead of sewers to get around quickly in the country, we could find the nearest railroad track and that would take us into town. This was much faster then taking a country road.
My two youngest brothers and I found three cherry trees while living in the country and decided never to tell about those trees. We each picked our own tree and used that as our extra food. We figured if we mentioned those trees then we would be picking the cherries and we already were gardening and stopping by roadsides picking berries so those cherry trees were going to be only for us.
My stepmother was from
One of my stepmother’s sister let her son live in
Continuing to Grow:
When I was 17 I was invited to a party and it was the first time I got drunk. I did not get home until
One of the jobs I took when I was 18 was working outside. I was there for two weeks when one of the supervisors told me I was f*cking off because I had let fall a barrel of fertilizer. I quit the next day.
I had enrolled in college and was given grants to start college. When I enrolled the people where I lived starting telling my grandfather I was dumb and retarded because I was not working. My grandfather was telling me this and wanting me to find a job and go to work. We battled about this. Even my oldest sister’s husband told me I should work in a warehouse like he did and other people in my family because that was where the money was. I wanted to get a college degree and go into computers. At the time my family was telling me computers would never amount to anything and there would not be any jobs in computers.
I lasted one semester of college. I have found a person in college needs the support of family and friends. It is hard enough to attend college with the support of others that you value and horrible when you don’t have those close to you supporting college as an option.
I decided to start trying to get a job with the state government. I applied for and took a whole bunch of tests for different state jobs. One of them was for a college police officer in southern
I did get hired at a maximum security for juveniles close to where I lived. I looked older then the age I was and was told not to mention my age. The boys in this place ranged in age from 8 years old to 18 years old. I had just turned 19 and was required to work the evening shift plus an additional eight hours if the person on the next shift did not come in. Then I would be back in for the evening shift. Those who worked there had every other weekend off if possible and a day off between working 7 days. Actually the people I worked with were good people. Most of them were 10 years older or more then I was and yet I fit in with them. I did not know until I had worked there over a year that they thought I was a white looking black man. They said I had the features and hair texture of a mixed person but the skin of a white person. I had thought about this since I was a little kid and here I was faced with this again. I was able to shrug it off because I didn’t care about it. I found as an adult the black people I was around and who thought I was mixed were okay with me. It was the white people I found myself around and who thought I was mixed that gave me a problem. Not in words but in the way I was treated as if I was an afterthought or not thought of at all, just another second class citizen hanging around in their space. One day a coworker asked me to take him home. So when we were in front of his house he kept asking me to come inside. I had to keep telling him I had to get home and I used my grandfather as an excuse. This coworker liked to touch my hair. I had curly bushy hair and he would touch it. It didn’t bother me since I never had someone want to touch my hair before. That day in the car I realized what he wanted. Although I did not openly ask him, I had the feelings. I was off work that day and the next day when I came into work I was told he had quit. The next week I was working the night shift and the manager came back to the guard area to tell me that this man who liked to touch my hair had called for me. He did not leave a number for me to contact him. The guy thought I was working the evening shift and called at the wrong time to reach me. He never called again.
The people at work would tell me about their life history and the things they had seen in life. Most of them had moved to
Some of the kids who came into the place had serious problems and some were just troublemakers. I had to hold my anger back at times because of the crimes these kids had committed and would laugh about. The crimes were from rape of little girls to old women, a few of them had murdered people and most of them had stolen things. Sometimes a few would come in who had not eaten and decided to steal in order to be put away so they would have food, a shower and a place to have a bed.
Around the time I was 21 I started crying for my grandmother again. I knew I had mentally come away from the religion I got baptized into when I was 16. So I started going back. I had to study again and after a few months I started dating the same person I had met years earlier. We got married when I was 22 and she was 25.
My grandfather and I were living in an apartment and my wife and I wanted to have our own apartment with my grandfather living with us. The only problem with that is that my wife had a new car, my grandfather had two cars and I had a car that I brought by myself. It was not a special car, but a car that run well, was not good to look at and was the way I liked it. My grandfather enjoyed buying old cars and then putting glass mufflers and whatever else he could put on a car. My grandfather refused to give up his cars, I didn’t think it was right for my wife to give up her car, so I gave up my car.
Pop had to go on oxygen and I told him he could not smoke in our apartment. So my grandfather started smoking outside. My family was upset with me because I refused to allow anyone to smoke at my place. A brother-in-law told me he worked around oxygen tanks and the only thing the oxygen would cause is a cigarette to burn faster but that the oxygen would not explode. I held my ground and my family stayed upset with me.
My wife had a good friend of hers before we got married and after we were married my wife would visit this friend of hers. My wife was at this friend’s house every day of the week and weekends too. One day this friend’s husband asked me to tell my wife to stop coming over so much and keep it to a couple times a week. I told him I was not going to do this to my wife and if he wanted it that way for him or his wife to say something to my wife. My wife was very upset when they asked her to stop coming over so much. I knew at the time if I said something to her I would be the fall guy and get the blame.
After being married for 4 months my wife was pregnant and expecting in August of 1983. I knew I could not continue working where I was because of the hours and the shift work. I did not want to raise kids and work hours where I wasn’t with them as much as I wanted to be. So I enrolled in a business college for computer technology. I would work during the nightshift, come home, say hello and goodbye to my wife because she was getting up to leave for work and then my wife would called me after I slept for a couple of hours. I then went to school and would come home, we would eat dinner, I would take a nap, then on nights we had religious meetings, my wife got me up and we went to the meeting. Then she went to bed and I went to work. My grandfather was living with us and he gave fussed with me about doing this but I was determined and this time I had the support of someone close to me, my wife. I finished school and found a computer related job.
Working in the computer field was easy for me. Within a few months of where I was working I was made a supervisor. By the time two years had passed I was asked to change my job to the communications side of the company I was working for. The area had a job opening and had been watching me. I took the job since it was to be working a Monday through Friday late morning to early evening hours and I now had two children.
I liked this time of my life. We lived near my job, the kids were going to a babysitter who was related to my wife and who lived four houses up from us. I would take the kids before I left for work and my wife would pick them up when she got home. So my kids were at the babysitter’s for 6 hours a day. My grandfather lived with us.
My siblings did not visit often. They visited my house less then 5 times from the time I was married until the time my grandfather died. That is a total for all of my siblings. One of my sisters once told me that they did not feel comfortable in my home.
As far as my wife’s family, most of them would visit often. Her mother had problems not calling her first when our children were born. Her mother wrote two letters accusing me of being a trouble maker. One of the letters happened when my mother-in-law’s husband called to say that my wife’s mother may have had a heart attack and was lying on her bed moaning. My wife kept asking me to drive over to her mother’s house and I finally agreed but on the way I picked up my wife’s brother-in-law. When I bent over to talk to my mother-in-law as she lay on her bed, I got a whiff of her breathe and told my brother-in-law that she had been drinking and was drunk. So my brother-in-law and I left. By the time I got home my mother-in-law was calling my house to tell me off. It was shortly after that I got a letter in the mail from her telling me what a horrible person I am. The second letter was in 1995 while my wife’s family and our kids were away at a religious retreat. We went out to dinner the first night and instead of sitting with my kids as I always had done before, I wanted to sit with my wife. This meant that my mother-in-law, the grandmother of my children, had to sit with my kids rather then with the adults. The way the restaurant had the seating arrangements, this was the only way. Within 15 minutes, my mother-in-law was saying how she was not going to sit with brats even though my three kids and the two kids of my sister-in-law were behaving. So my mother-in-law got up from the table and walked out of the restaurant. Because of my being an elder, I went outside to talk to her and she did not want to talk about what had happened. Eventually my family came outside and my mother-in-law left with her other daughter. The next week I got a letter in the mail accusing me of being a troublemaker and various other things. I refused to open the letter, but my wife opened it and read it.
The other problem was there was always something to do in the religion and I had nightmares. The nightmares were made worse when my children were born. My wife would wake me up when I was having a nightmare. I always dreamed of someone trying to harm my kids or someone trying to take my kids away. I didn’t like going out all the time and dealing with people because I was suspect of people. Even in the religion I wasn’t sure of everyone and I wanted to trust the people in the religion too. There were a few people I came to trust. Two couples who were like surrogate parents to me but they had kids of their own and I couldn’t monopolize their time since that would have been wrong. They were there if I needed them, but I always felt it best if I didn’t bother with them as much as I felt inwardly I wanted to do.
My wife was raised in the religion and when she was her happiest as a child was when her father was an elder and they were fully engaged in the religion. So my wife felt that this was what was needed in order for us to be happy. We had many disagreements over this. Her father was killed in a car accident when she was 14 and her mother left the religion shortly afterwards and married some guy from her mother’s past without telling the kids.
My wife had known about my childhood but like she told me, she never knew the full impact of what my childhood was until we were married. Her childhood had affected her and mine affect me. So together we thought we could balance it all out.
I would read child raising techniques and how best to discipline a child. I liked the option of giving my little kids two choices with the one choice being what I wanted without their knowing and the other choice being something they never picked. The other thing was I would count to five. When my kids were older teens, one of them asked me what I was going to do when I reached five. I told him I didn’t know because I never got there.
I did lose it once with my oldest child when he was little and I spanked him. After that I hated myself for days. My son remembers that even now. I have apologized to him even though I still feel remorse over it.
When I was 27, I started losing the feeling in my legs, my arms and my face. I went to see a doctor and after a series of tests, this doctor told me I possibly could have MS. I would sit in a meeting had hit my legs because my legs would be numb. It was at this time my wife was pregnant with our daughter.
One night at the meeting I was called into a back room and asked if I would become an assistant to the elders and the religion. I wanted so much to tell them no. But I knew if I said no, my wife would be upset and blame herself because she was pregnant. So I say yes. My wife was happy, the elders were happy, other people in the congregation were happy. Everyone I knew outside of work and outside of my family because they knew nothing about the religion was happy except me.
Now I had to attend more meetings concerning how to improve as a ‘brother’ in the religion, meetings on money matters, meetings on cleaning matters and whatever else I was called upon to do. I could not say no. Saying no could be considered that a person wants to leave the religion.
I would teach my children religious teachings and I would teach my children how to read, spell, write, enrolled them in music lesions, I was assisting around the house and I enjoyed this. But the time I had to spend away from them outside of work was upsetting to me. So it is safe to say that when I was not working and I was at meetings without my children my thought was on them and my heart was missing them. So I was punishing myself for not being around my children. Yet when I did not want to attend a meeting, my wife and I would have an argument. There wasn’t an answer to be found with this.
In 1989 we had an opportunity to visit
So my grandfather would not be let alone, my 2nd sister and her husband said to have him come and stay with them. Also I think it was better that he stayed there, it was a mistake. Pop went down in health and never fully recovered from it. My sister took good care of him and tried her best but my grandfather did not like being there. So we never left him with anyone else again, when we would go on vacation, my wife’s cousin who watched our kids, kept an eye on my grandfather.
In 1992 I was asked to be an elder. Again, everyone was happy about this except for me. I now had to be available for people in crisis, give public talks, visit those having problems or not coming to the meetings, attend more meetings, come home late from meetings and spend more time away from my children.
In teaching my children, I brought a whiteboard with all the markers and I would have my kids draw on the whiteboard what we were learning. It was our fun time. One day my wife said to me she did not learn anything this way. So we went to reading what we had to learn for our next meeting. The yelling would start because little kids just don’t want to sit still at home to study something religious. I wanted to make it fun, but I lost.
It was after I became an elder when I met the woman who had left the religion, came back and then accused me of abusing my children. That was horrible for me. The worse part was being asked by other elders who I viewed as my spiritual brothers. I suddenly felt as if I had been raped and I had no choice in the matter.
It was Thanksgiving of that year that I heard my father was ill with cancer. We went to visit him. My brothers were there and there was part of me that wanted to confront my father. However, because my brothers were always around I did not feel it was right to confront my father. The following April, two weeks before my father died and I was visiting him in the hospital while my stepmother stood near him, my father told me he loved me. I did not know how to receive his words. I looked at him and said, ‘you love me’ and my father told me ‘yes, my son’. I was thinking did he love me as his son or as a lover or what? I still don’t know what he meant or perhaps I don’t feel what he meant.
At my father’s funeral a man was standing at the graveside. My oldest brother took me over to meet this man. He was my father’s brother. I had never met him and did not know about him. My father’s other children knew of this uncle. My uncle knew of my siblings but he did not know about me.
It a year or two afterwards at a family reunion of my father’s family that people whom I had never met were saying how I looked like them. I finally got tired of hearing this and asked my siblings and an aunt who was there why people were saying that to me. It was then I found out that my father had always told his family I was not his son.
My grandfather had lived with emphysema since he retired. He had oxygen in the house and had a nurse coming in to check on him twice a week. One day while I was at work my grandfather had a delivery of medication. The person who delivered the medication saw my grandfather needed to get to the hospital and called the paramedics. I was called and went to the hospital to be with my grandfather. My wife showed up later that afternoon and in the evening a doctor asked my wife and I to talk privately with him. This doctor told me that the person who had delivered my grandfather’s medicine had accused me of abusing and neglecting my grandfather. So the hospital had to watch the interaction of my grandfather and me with each other. They had checked my grandfather for marks on his body and found nothing. This was the same hospital where I had been years earlier when they found I had been internally bruised. The doctor said the hospital felt the charges were groundless and because they felt this they would not be calling the police. I was upset and the doctor took his time to calm me down. When I went back to see my grandfather I refused to tell him what the doctor had said. So my grandfather felt he was going to die that night and I had to confess what the doctor had said. My grandfather called the doctor over and told the doctor the charges were a lie and the doctor let my grandfather know the hospital felt the same way. As a result of this, my grandfather put himself in a nursing home. It was a hard decision for me to allow this. But I could not risk another charge happening again and as a result having my children taken away from me. My grandfather knew what I was thinking and said that to me. Pop lasted two years in the nursing home. I hated him being there.
The day after my grandfather had gone to the hospital, one of the nurses who would visit our house to check on my grandfather called us for an appointment. My wife explained to the nurse what had happened and the nurse reminded my wife that my grandfather had a visit the night before he went into the hospital and he was checked out as being fine. We had completely forgotten that the nurse had visited our home the night before.
That summer we brought a house in another town. We went on vacation to
During this time I decided to put myself into therapy. I would still have numbness in my legs and my arms from time to time and I was being told that I might not have MS. I had put on weight and my kidneys were acting up. I kept having blood in my urine. Besides seeing a therapist I went to a kidney specialist too.
The kidney specialist told me I had 15 years of living without kidney treatment and that I probably need a transplant when I was 50.
While in therapy, I learned that I cannot undo my past. Like the colorful sweater I wore, I cannot unravel a part of my past without unraveling everything. This therapist had to convince me I was raped by my brothers. He would ask me questions such as, if I enjoyed myself while my brothers were having sex with me; answer no. If I returned the favor; answer NO. If was I in fear; answer yes. I had to accept this reasoning since I could not refute it. My heart was telling me I was having someone care for me and desire me, but reality was telling me something different.
I never got to my teenage years with this therapist. Once I reached that point I stopped my therapy for a few months. This guy was married and had a child, but he told me in our conversion he saw nothing wrong with being homosexual and that there was a difference between being a homosexual and being a pedophile.
I was feeling more confused then ever before. While therapy helped in some ways, it caused more problems and questions for me in other ways. The religion did not look with approval on those who went to therapy even though they had changed their views for most of those who are part of the religion, it still is not something considered good to do because the thinking is that therapy will take a person away from the religion and from God.
My inner feeling was that I had been violated by people in the religion that I thought would protect me and I would protect them. I felt betrayed over what had happened in the religion and that I had given up myself and who I was. The problem is I did not know who I was. I began to say the no would to my wife and this started arguments after arguments. My two youngest kids would get in the middle of us and run to me asking me to stop fighting and just agree. Again I felt like a failure. I was being told I lost my faith in God and how I simply could not stop being an elder, that to stop being an elder would be wrong and show I did not love God. This only confused me.
I have always been a computer buff. Since my children were little they have been around computers. I worked in the computer field and I kept computers at home. It was nothing for me to try an internet service when one came out and I was using the service as an outlet for my emotions.
I felt emotionally wounded from my life and wanted to heal and to be released somehow. Each time I started getting better health wise I got sick again. I had bronchitis, pneumonia again, my kidneys were swelling up, my legs and arms were numb and I wasn’t overcoming all of this. So the computer was my outlet.
I found gay chat sites by accident. I went into them and watched the conversation. I was surprised at what I found. All during my marriage I had never considered an extra marital affair and yet here I was in these chat rooms and I found myself wondering.
In February of 1995 I had a business trip to
As a child my grandfather would take me around his family who were Italian. They would speak Italian and I never picked it up. But the day I was at the hospital there was a nurse who was being cruel to my grandfather and then decided to say something to my son that I did not like. My son needed to use the bathroom and this nurse blocked my son from using the bathroom in my grandfather’s room. Rather then explain why, she simply refused to allow my son to use the bathroom. My sister took my son to another floor for him to use the bathroom. Then the nurse said something to my grandfather and I snapped. I suddenly found myself yelling at her and something inside me was telling me to stand back from her. I wanted to put my hands around her neck and I knew better then to get close to her. When my sister and my son came back from the other floor my sister was grabbing my arm and yelling at me. She was telling me I was speaking in Italian and no one could understand what I was saying. The only person who understood me was my grandfather. By the time my sister had come back with my son, I had followed this nurse out to the hallway and was telling her off. My voice was so loud that my grandfather heard me.
My sister and her husband went home. My son and I stayed until
The next week was the funeral. My grandfather kept enough insurance on himself to bury him. I had brought the plot next to my grandmother years earlier when my oldest sister asked me about the plot, so we did not have to come up with any money. The funeral director told me it was the first time he ever had to give money back. It wasn’t much but more importantly everything was paid for. Because my grandfather was in WWII he had a 21 gun salute and the taps played at his funeral. I still have the flag that they draped over his casket. I never got to talk to my grandfather about what I was going through.
I suddenly felt like an orphan. I had no one to turn too that would listen and tell me everything was going to be okay. It all I needed to hear and there wasn’t anyone around to tell me that.
I decided it was time for me to lose weight. I joined a weight lost agency and in 9 months I lost 70 pounds. I looked better and I felt better. I had stopped working out when my kids were small and started working out again. Although I was still arguing with my wife who felt I was being selfish and that I had given up on God.
While online one night I started talking to this man in a chat room. We decided to meet each other. When we met and talked about things he told me I was worth something. I had not heard this and felt it being true in so long and I suddenly felt myself falling for this man.
Little did I know this man had just left a relationship and had moved from the state he was living in to be away from the person he was with in the other state. After we began our affair, I felt I could now tell my wife I wanted a divorce. In the religion the only grounds for a divorce is adultery. Since I did not want to be with another woman I felt I could easily be with another man. Once the deed was done, I told my wife. She did not believe me at first. Naturally we argued about it. I decided to leave and move in with the man I had met. I remember my kids standing at the door of my house with my wife saying to come back. But I didn’t want the arguing anymore and I wanted out. I forgot to see what I was doing to my children.
As a couple of months went by I found my new relationship was not all happy. This man was a nice man, but he was fresh out of a relationship and I was too dependent. I was back in therapy with a gay physiologist. This man sent me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist put me on medication to balance my mental issues I was dealing with. However, one morning I left the guy I was living with, checked into a motel and took the bottles of pills with a bottle of rum. In my drugged stated I called this guy and my wife. They figured where I was staying and my wife along with her sister found me. I woke up that night in the hospital where my grandfather died. I had tubes coming out of me. I remember the nurse who was watching me asking what side of my family was it. I told her I did not know she was talking about. The nurse told me I knew what she meant because she was mixed and so was I. I only told her I did not know.
Family:
Grandfather:
The person I knew as my grandfather and who was more like a father to me was in reality my mother’s stepfather. I did not learn about our non-biological relationship until my father and stepmother told me and I called them both a liar.
My grandfather was a first generation Italian and was born in
My grandfather met my grandmother in 1937 when my mother was two. My grandparents moved in together and told everyone they were married. I learned when I was in my early 20s that my grandparents never legally married. My grandmother never divorced her first husband. My mother’s biological father spent at least this last two decades of life in a mental institution.
My grandfather was drafted into WWII and saw action in the Pacific. He then went on to work for the railroad industry driving a truck, supervising others and retired with 33 years of service.
An aunt of mine once told me that my grandfather never adopted my mother. She was telling me this because she was making a point that my grandfather owed no responsibilities to us. It was at this time when I was 16 that my aunt told me what happened to my grandfather when he was 4. My grandfather had been missing for a day and he was found in a warehouse crying because an adult man had kidnapped him and raped him several times during the day, then left my grandfather alone in the warehouse. My grandfather spent several months in the hospital being treated for what happened to him. His father came to visit him only once and never came again. It was my aunt’s father who came on a regular basis to visit my grandfather. This aunt of mine was really the cousin of my grandfather. Her father and my grandfather’s father were brothers and my aunt’s mother and my grandfather’s mother were sisters. They called themselves tail end cousins because of this relationship between their both sets of parents and because they grew up living close to each other. Both families worked in the same area, lived in the same area, went to school in the same area and the kids viewed and treated each other like siblings instead of cousins. After what happened to my grandfather, it was his uncle who took care of him instead of his father. But it was my grandfather’s father who insisted my grandfather leave school and work in
My grandfather was raised a Catholic. Before he met my grandmother, my grandfather was a womanizer and ran liquor down from
Years later, when my grandfather was in the nursing home a Catholic priest would come in to talk to him. My grandfather was upset and told me to talk to the director of the home and request that no priest stop by to see him. When I spoke to the director, she got upset with me and kept insisting the Catholic priest was there to help and that the priest would continue stopping by. I had to insist on my grandfather’s rights and lastly I said I would file a complaint. When the mention of filing a complaint came up, then the director said she would stop the priest from talking to my grandfather.
My grandfather told me once that he kept a suitcase full of clothes in the trunk of his car. He planned on leaving when ever he felt too much pressure when my grandmother was sick and they would now taking care of seven grandchildren. But my grandfather reminded me, he never left. He was telling me this when I was going through a hard time and was feeling pressure as an adult. Without his asking me what was wrong, he simply saw my emotions and knew what to say to me.
As a child, when we were living in the suburbs, whenever my grandfather was leaving for work, I would run to the front door and brace myself against it. As I stood against the door I would start screaming for my grandfather not to leave me alone and to stay home with me or to take me with him. So my siblings learned to get my attention away from when my grandfather was leaving for work. When I would realize my grandfather had left, I would run to the door and cry.
When we were living in the country without my grandfather, I would wait on the weekends for him to visit. But he only same to see us about every six months, so I kept the book he had given me and I kept a picture of him in the book. I would study the picture and sleep with it whenever I felt lonely.
I went to live with my grandfather when I was 12 and until two years before he died at the age of 83, my grandfather and I were together. When he died, instead of wondering where he was, I suddenly felt that he continued on somewhere else. The belief system I had come to know that a dead person was simply dead suddenly felt unbelievable to me. That belief helped me with my grandmother and with my grandfather, it hurt me to believe it. So I rejected it outright.
My father’s father died when my father was a child. I was told my father was two years old when his father died. So that grandfather I never knew.
Although my father’s mother remarried two more times. Her last husband we would see perhaps once a year for a couple of hours and he would give us a silver dollar.
Grandmother:
My mother’s mother was someone I still view as my mother. Although she died when I was four, I remember her making apple pies, working at the A&P, taking a drink from her flask that she kept under her pillow.
I slept in my grandparent’s bedroom. One night I woke to see someone staring in the window where my bed was. This bedroom was on the first floor of the house that we lived in. I remember screaming and my grandmother screaming at my grandfather to get me.
Another time, I woke to find my grandmother lying over my grandfather’s lap and my grandfather was spanking my grandmother. My grandfather had olive skin and my grandmother had very white skin where she was being spanked. After that happened, they always made sure I was asleep. I know this because sometimes they woke me up asking me if I was asleep.
Another time my grandmother asked me to open the backdoor from the kitchen and a bat flew into the kitchen. My grandmother was screaming and covering her hair. I remember her yelling to watch out for the baby. She was referring to me. My grandfather told her to hold me back and my grandfather took a broom and kept striking at the bat until the bat hit the floor, then the collie my grandparents had jumped on the bat and killed it.
My grandfather would put us seven kids into his car and we would go to get my grandmother from the A&P where she worked. My youngest brother and I sat in the front with my grandfather. I remember my grandmother telling my grandfather to stop by the liquor store for whiskey. My grandfather telling her that she was not supposed to be drinking and my grandmother telling my grandfather that she had to have something to calm her nerves and help her sleep. That is when I learned about the flask she kept under her pillow and that she had been ill.
My grandmother was 45 when she died. It was in August of 1963. I remember John Kennedy dying in November of that year and have always related the two events closely together in my mind. For me they are linked together. When a person talks about John Kennedy being murdered, I feel the pain of my family with the events that happened to us that year and how my family suddenly changed.
My father’s mother all of us called Big Momma. She did not like to be called anything else. I remember seeing her once a year after I went to live with my father. She would give us a dollar and we saw her for 2 hours. Big Momma was not fat, but stood six feet and three inches which for a woman was tall in those days. I think it is considered tall nowadays too. My father would tell us stories of his mother and how strict his mother was. For instance, she would tell her children never to play outside without their shoes on. One time, my father was outside without his shoes on and he stepped on a nail. When he ran into the house crying, his mother pulled the nail out of his foot and did whatever she had to do in order to make sure my father’s foot did not get infected. My father said his mother even comforted him. But when my father was better, his mother took him by surprise and whipped him for being outside without his shoes on.
As I reflect on Big Momma, I realize I only saw her four times in my life. It was the summer 1966, the summer of 1967, April of 1968 when my father married his third wife and then the summer of 1970. Big Momma died in 1978 of cancer. The woman never knew how my father had treated his kids.
My parents:
I never saw my parents together because they separated before I was born. I never say my parents together in a picture until two years after my father died in 1993. I was at my stepmother’s house and she showed me a picture of this young couple and asked me if I knew who they were. I said my parents and I was right. I suddenly felt sorry and wanted to cry, yet I had to hide my feelings. My stepmother gave me that picture to copy for my siblings and I put the picture in a drawer when I got home. I still have that picture to copy and yet I still have mixed emotions over looking at it, so I leave the picture where I left it and I have not taken it out of the drawer.
As I have said before I met my mother when I was four and then she died when I was seven. My mother had seven children with my father and six children with her second husband. The last two children of my mother were twin boys and they lived less than an hour. My mother died after her twin boys were born. I have met those who knew my mother and they would tell me my mother would know before a telephone was going to ring and would tell someone to answer the phone.
This was a woman who would make up fake names and order utilities turned on and before moving would rent appliances and furniture under an assumed name. Her family would move and start over somewhere else in the Maryland D.C. area but they kept whatever she had under the assumed name without anyone tracing her. She would start over where she moved too.
My mother was 32 years old when she died. She is buried under a tree in
I met my father after my grandmother died. When I went to live with it and until I left the thing I saw as I looked at him was how he beat my grandfather up. Everyday I would see my father I would remember the first time I saw him. It wasn’t until I have been away from him for several years I stopped seeing that when I went back to visit him.
My 2nd brother married his first wife in 1978. When my father showed up all by himself, he was drunk. My father came to my brother’s wedding drunk. I did not marry until 1981 and I did not invite my father to my wedding. Besides the reason of the abuse he had inflicted on me I had the more recent memory of his coming to my brother’s wedding drunk and I did not want him attending my wedding in that state.
My father had two other sons with his 3rd wife. These brothers of mine say our father never abused them and they remember our father as a good person. Although most of my older siblings and I don’t believe our two youngest brothers, number 8 and 9, we hope they are being truthful in what they tell us.
My father was 59 when he died and he too died of cancer. He had been a smoker and I often wonder what else he did. The reason I say this is because as a kid, I remember seeing my father siphon gas from a car using a hose and sucking on the hose until the gas starting coming out of the car’s gas tank. My father was spitting the gas out of his mouth even though he got the gas he wanted, I still wonder how many times he did something like that and if it contributed to his early death of cancer.
My father is buried in
Older Siblings:
I have six older siblings. They are my sister, brother, sister, sister, brother and brother.
1ST Sister:
My 1st sister I remember being done as some navy guy’s house when she was 13 years old and someone telling our grandfather where my sister was. This guy was beat up by my grandfather. I remember my sister yelling and crying about it. When we were living with our father and my sister was 16, my father made her quit school in order to stay home and take care of the house.
My oldest sister got pregnant when she was 16. My mother had died around the time my sister found out she was pregnant. It was my 2nd sister who was told our oldest sister that our mother had a dream that my 1st or 2nd sister was pregnant and in the dream our mother died. My 2nd sister ran away from our mother’s house and came to live with us. Two weeks after being with us my 1st sister found out she was pregnant. My 2nd sister had said our mother had that dream and our mother had died around the same time.
My father made my 1st sister get a job after her baby girl was born. My father refused to let the father of the baby marry my sister. So my sister went to work, took care of the house, took care of her baby and paid my father rent. My sister met a man who was in the military and married him in 1969 a year after my father had married his third wife. My sister had three children with her first husband. This man adopted my sister’s first child. Although they divorced when their youngest as around 17, my sister was able to teach her children values different from our father. After working with her children with school and assisting her husband with his college work, this sister of mine went and took a high school diploma test which she passed on the first try without having to study for the test. She works in a restaurant and even though she makes very little money knows how to manage her funds. She walked away from her first husband and let him take everything. Now she is buying a house of her own and is married again. My sister is proud that all of her children know how to balance a checkbook and keep track of their funds. The only exception is her one son who is in prison. How four children can be raised in the same house and one turns our differently then the others, is confusing to a parent.
It was almost 15 years after my sister had married that she told us what our father had forced her to do. After my sister had her first child and was at my father’s house, my father forced her to submit to having sex with him or he would put my sister and her baby out on the street. My sister was 16 and almost 17 with a child to support and not knowing of anywhere to go for support.
She now has 12 grandchildren, 8 boys and 4 girls.
My 1st sister is my analytical sister.
2ND Sister:
My 2nd sister and my 3rd sister when they lived with our mother were forced to take care of the kids my mother was having with her second husband. My mother would force them to bathe the boys and clean the diapers, cook and attend school without being allowed to bathe themselves or keep their own clothes clean. My mother would force them cart clothes across a highway to a Laundromat and bring the clothes back plus other clothes they were told to take from the dryers that other people used. These two sisters of mine remember how they were caught once and had to tell our mother she had to give the clothes back to the people the clothes belonged too.
During my mother’s last pregnancy she was losing her eyesight and her hearing. After my youngest sister had runaway to our father’s house, my 2nd sister was left to take care of my mother’s house. One day my sister did not do something the way my mother wanted so my mother took a pair of scissors and caught my sister. My sister had waist length hair and my mother cut my sister’s hair like a boy. Besides not being allowed to bathe and wear clean clothes, my sister now had to put up with the kids at school telling her she looked like a boy. So my sister ran away from our mother’s house and hide under a bridge from the island they were living on in
I did not know who this sister of mine was. My oldest sister kept asking me if I knew who my 2nd sister was and I did not know. I had forgotten how she looked and how she spoke. My 1st sister had to tell me and then convince me of who I was talking too.
My 2nd sister is the one who stood up to our father. Although my father beat her down each time she stood up to him, she never backed away from our father. This is the sister who slept with a pair of scissors when living with our father.
This sister of mine ran away around the time our 1st sister was married. My 2nd had two children with her first husband. This is the sister I became close too and have kept in closer contact with over the years then my other two sisters. I can’t explain why but she is the one who is the communicator among my sisters.
Her first child, a son, at the age of five went to live with his father. The boy kept crying for his father and refused to listen to anything his mother would say. So my sister sent her son to live with his father and she kept their daughter. I know how difficult this was for her. It was not an easy choice for her to make. But my sister knew pain and knew her son. So she had to make a choice for her son and for herself. Now this son of hers has two sons of his own. My sister and her son on working on their relationship, even though it is not easy, they are working on it.
My sister married and had two more children with her second husband. Now that all four of her children are adults, she has six grandsons.
It is at my 2nd sister’s house we have been having a family reunion the last few years. It mainly involves the children of my father and my stepmother. Sometimes all of us are there and sometimes we are not. We may bring our children and/or grandchildren or we may come alone.
The issues all of us have with attending the reunion would be the childhood we had. Even though we attempt not to bring up the past we experienced it has been difficult for some of us at different times.
Yes, there is eating, drinking and some who smoke and yet it is something we enjoy because we get to see each other and know how each of us are doing.
3rd Sister:
My 3rd sister left my father’s house because of the sexual abuse our father forced on her. My sister went to live with a cousin of ours on my mother’s side and had to endure years of being thought of as a liar because my other two sisters said my 3rd sister lied about our father. My two oldest sisters told this lie because they felt all of the girls were out of our father’s house and that our father would not abuse his sons. My oldest sisters did not want to see the state take away their brothers and have us placed in foster homes and split again as a family.
But the damage it did to my sister was not seen by us at the time. It took years for my sister to get over the emotional damage of being thought of as a liar and a person who caused us to move from where we were living far enough away to a place where people did not know us and life had gone from bad to worse. My oldest brother had to switch schools in the middle of his senior year and he blamed our youngest sister for this. My brother did not know at the time our youngest sister was telling the truth.
When my sister left she was 14 years old and she was engaged to a man all of us knew. My cousin who was married and had three children of her own decided the engagement was not a good thing. Although my cousin did not call of the marriage she made it known my sister was not going to get married until my sister was of legal age.
My cousin was a nice lady. Someone I thought of has having class, I thought the same of her mother, my grandmother’s sister and so my great aunt. Her husband worked for the Park Police and she ran a hair salon business in her home.
But my cousin was being told my by two oldest sisters that the sexual abuse never happened and my cousin was being told by my youngest sister that the abuse did happen. My cousin took my sister in and lived many years not knowing who to believe. My youngest sister had to live knowing that people who knew her felt she may have been telling a lie.
Although my sister left our cousin’s home almost three years later when she came to live with our grandfather and me in our apartment, the affect it had on her relationship with our cousin was to cause my sister not to talk to our cousin for a few years. My sister eventually found herself pregnant and married. She had a second child.
Her first husband would lock the telephone so my sister could not dial out of her home. She could get incoming phone calls but make no outgoing phone calls. This was at the time when the phones were not able to be unplugged from a phone wall jack and my brother-in-law had a dial phone instead of a push button phone.
One day when I called my sister, she told me how they had very little food and her husband would not buy her any items she needed for herself. So I told my grandfather about it. Rather then bring money to my sister, my grandfather had me go with him to the grocery store and he brought food plus whatever else he felt my sister needed. I remember it being four bags full of groceries. We were gone when my sister’s husband came home. Her husband called my grandfather and apologized for being the way he was to his wife’s family. He felt it was better to protect her against us and against herself and he felt we did not really love my sister. My grandfather’s act made my brother-in-law see my grandfather loved my sister and cared about her family. Although my brother-in-law was a yeller with his family, he came to look forward to my grandfather and to me visiting.
My oldest brother reconciled with our youngest sister years after he got over the hurt he felt and the betraying that he felt was caused him. My brother had not known he was wrong, but when he was told by our oldest two sisters what had happened and my brother found out what had happened to me, this brother told our youngest sister he was sorry for what happened and how he felt. My youngest sister is the one who has the heart. I can say my other sister’s show emotion and caring, but our youngest sister has been the one who shows her heart. She is also the one who will come to your home and rearrange your furniture and I have learned over the years to just let her do it. Then when she leaves any of us will put the furniture back where we had it. This is just something we do. It doesn’t get to us like it did when we were younger. Now that we are older and more mature, all of us understand where each of us are coming from and what we need to help us cope.
My sister and her husband divorced once their children were grown. My sister remarried and her second husband built a house for her. She finally has a nice home, a good man and is happy with her life.
Her daughter is married and has a daughter herself.
My sister’s son is a huge man, very tall and very large. He married a woman small and tidy. They have no children together.
1st Brother:
I don’t recall my first brother ever doing something wrong to me on his own and without our father’s insistence. The time I do remember what he did was dealing with food.
After my father had married his third wife and we were still living in the suburbs, my oldest brother had his own bedroom, my other two brothers and I slept in the basement where we had thin see through blankets that our stepmother told us were so nice and would keep us warm, which they didn’t. I remember holding the blanket up to the light and being able to see through them. One night I was woke by my third brother who wanted me to come upstairs into the kitchen with him and my second brother. While in the kitchen my third brother started telling me that our second brother had woke him up a couple of nights before to come into the kitchen.
My second brother had started taking food out of the refrigerator and putting spoonfuls on a plate. A spoonful of spaghetti sauce become our meat, a spoonful of mayonnaise become our mashed potatoes, a spoonful of jelly was our desert, a spoonful of peanut butter would be something else, so that my brothers would ask me what I wanted and I want say I wanted mashed potatoes, desert, meat, etc. Then we would sit down together and eat. After we were finished we would put the food back and my second brother would clean the dishes. Everything was put back exactly the way my brother found it when he came into the kitchen. The dishes were dried, the jars of food put back in the refrigerator exactly the way it was found. All of us had become good at being able to return things back the way we found them. Even the inside of the jars would be made to look like the same scrape had been made. My brother would brush the insides of the jar up so that a glance one would think nothing had been touched.
We continued this for a few more times with my two youngest brothers waking me up for a kitchen run, until one Friday night when our caught us. My father made us put everything away. We had not eaten what was on our plate and my father made us put the plates in the refrigerator. That morning we had our usual bowl of cereal and then were told to go outside. We did not know what was going to happen. No one said anything to us about the pretend plates of food there were still in the refrigerator. Normally for lunch we had two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On this Saturday my oldest brother called us in to have lunch. This was a first for him calling us to lunch. Then my oldest brother started to ask us about what we had been doing in the middle of the night. After we finished telling him, he then asked us if we wanted the plates of food from the refrigerator and we were really excited that we were going to have our pretend plates of food. As my oldest brother took the plates of food out of the refrigerator, he started telling us what our father wanted done with the food. My brother had a fork in his hand and he was telling us that we had to eat every bit of food on the plates or we were going to be whipped by our father. My father was in the living room while my oldest brother was telling us this. My brother took the fork that he had in his hand and started mixing the meat sauce, mayonnaise, jelly, butter, peanut butter and whatever else each of us had on our plates. My brother mixed each plate and sat the plate in front of us. We were then told to eat and my brother stood there and watched us eat. We had twenty minutes to eat what now looked horrible to us. The mix of the food was terrible to taste and each of us had to force ourselves to quickly eat. All the while my oldest brother is telling us that we when we went to slept in the basement we were to stay there until the morning when we were called to get up unless we had to go to the bathroom which was in the upstairs house. After we had finished we had to go out to the living room and see our father. As we sat on the couch my father asked each of us if we would ever do this again. The answer from each of us was no.
When we were living in the country, my oldest brother had a red Ford Galaxy car and one day coming home from school, he got out of his car extremely angry. My brother had the habit of ribbing off his clothes when he was mad. On this day, when he got out of his car, he was wearing cowboy boots and started kicking his car. My stepmother came out of the house and asked him what was wrong, whatever my brother said to her, he just kept on kicking his car. My stepmother told my brother his father was going to be mad at him but it didn’t stop my brother. This kicking broke the cylinder in the car and that car never worked again.
In the country there was a day that the four of us boys were together. We have baled hay together and gardened together, but we really had not done time just spending it together as brothers. The day came when we had nothing else to do except explore our surroundings.
The area we lived in had several old mansions that were several miles apart with little tenant houses around that use to support the owners of the mansions. On a day we were walking through the woods we came upon a huge mansion that was three stories high, had a wrap around porch. We knocked on the door and there was no answer. We looked through the windows and saw a place that looked like it was the turn out of the Victorian age. My oldest brother wanted to leave but the other two brothers and I started talking our oldest brother into getting into the house. The more my brother kept resisting the more the other three of us kept begging. The only problem we had when my oldest brother agreed was how to get into the house. We had all agreed not to touch anything and to be careful as we walked through the house. My third brother was smaller than I was and so he was lifted up and passed through the top window we found open over one of the doors off of the porch. My brother fell to the floor and was able to open the door to let the rest of us into the house. As we walked around the house we would count the rooms. We found one bathroom directly off of a small kitchen with the rest of the house have velvet red drapes, china dishes, maple wood, huge rooms with high ceilings. The opposite side of the mansion had a marble staircase that went up three flights. Each floor landing had huge wood doors that were open with the exception of the third floor. We found the third floor doors locked and we were not able to open those doors. We found an old wind up 78 record player, a manual operated sewing machine, many beautiful well preserved items as if we had stepped back 70 years in time. When we came back to the first floor and where on the other side of the house walking back to where we begin our tour we came upon an alcove with huge curtains. When we pulled the curtains apart their in the alcove was a chair and an ashtray sitting in the window still with a half still lit cigar. That is when the four of us knew we were not alone. We started calling out but no one answered. We then decided to leave through the door we had used to come into the house. All of us had agreed never to mention what we had done.
About two months went by when my father decided he was going hunting. When my father would hunt, he was normally gone for a few hours. My father returned to our house within two hours and was red faced with anger. He hit my oldest brother in the face and then started asking us questions about the mansion we had gone into. As we confessed what we had gone, my father started telling us he had come upon the person who was in the house that day and the person had been waiting to see my father alone. The man told my father that we had been watched the whole time we were in the house and what we had done. The good thing was that we had touched nothing and left without disturbing anything. So the man decided we had met no harm and decided to have us watched. He made an agreement with my father not to bother us if my father made sure we did not come around his mansion again. So my father let it be known to us our boundaries while we were living in the country. My oldest brother was hit because my father felt he should have known better. My father did not hit the rest of us because he said he was way too bad and would not be able to control himself once he started hitting us.
I know what we did was wrong. All of my brothers knew that. Nothing can justify what we did as being right. The only thing I can say is it was the time in my life that I was with the rest of my brothers and we did something together that all of us enjoyed and yet is was completely wrong.
My brother graduated high school and was working. He was paying my father rent. The Vietnam War was still going on and my brother’s name came up on the draft. So my brother went and joined the Air Force. He served in
My brother returned to the Air Force as a non-commissioned officer while his wife was a commissioned officer. Apparently this is not a good thing in the military and it caused them problems as a military couple. When my brother’s term was up he decided not to stay in the Air
Force and took a job as a barber which made it easy for him to stay with his wife. The strain came when his wife was called to
After living in
One of my sisters recently told me that our oldest brother is remembering things that he hadn’t remembered in years. We brought agreed it is because our bother now has children and he is reflecting on his childhood when raising his kids. My brother is a good man and loves his family. I know his family struggles financially but they are not our parents.
2nd Brother:
My 2nd brother was a skinny baby. I saw a baby picture of him when I was a teenager and he was a skinny baby. I had never seen a skinny baby before and his picture was the first. This would make sense because my 2nd brother was always able to eat and never gain weight. He is average height and trim as an adult and he was this way as a kid. Only recently as he approaches his 50’s has he put on a few pounds which for him looks good. This brother has always had people attracted to him. It is his demeanor.
Once, when our grandfather was in the hospital, my brother came to visit. He met my wife’s male cousin and my brother introduced himself as ‘Bond, James Bond’ and this cousin of my wife believed my brother’s name was James Bond. That is the type of person my brother is. He could get people to believe him without much convincing. On the elevator that day in the hospital my brother and I were talking when a nurse started talking to my brother and completely cut me off in our conversation as if I was not in the elevator. Another nurse who saw my brother fell over the cart she was pushing and just stared at my brother and kept panting like she was out of breath. My brother use to tell us that people and especially women did that with him but none of us ever believed it, on this particular day I personally witnessed it and let my other siblings know our brother was telling the truth.
My 2nd brother started playing the guitar when he was little and has always kept up with his guitar playing. Even with the things that has happened to him and that he has caused, my brother has had his guitar. Perhaps this was the wife he really married, although he has been married three times and has a child with each of his wives, plus a child that surprised him when the child was 12 years old. A DNA test proved the boy was my brother’s son. When my brother was married to his 2nd wife, he put away his guitar for a year. After my brother felt he could not deal with his 2nd marriage anymore, he took his guitar out of the closet and his wife warned him if he started to play the guitar their marriage was over. So my brother plugged in his guitar and began playing. They divorced shortly after that happened.
My brother worked a couple of good jobs for himself. After his 3rd marriage failed, my brother began to draw back into himself. His work now is to just pay his bills and play his guitar. He is involved with three of his children. The one child he fathered with an African American woman my brother never bonded with since he met this son of his when his son was 12.
To speak about the sex my brother had with me I have already mentioned previously. My brother today will not spend more then five minutes in the same room with me. It just doesn’t happen. I do not know if he thinks about it or if it is something else with me or perhaps a combination of things.
He recently told our oldest sister about the beatings he saw our father do to me. My oldest sister was never sure if I was being truthful about the things I said and then she heard our 2nd brother telling her about it.
3rd Brother:
My third brother is 15 months older then I am. His hair is blonde and his eyes are green. This brother was always accepted around others as a white person without anything else in him. Where my oldest brother and I had problems with people wondering what race we were, our oldest brother never had this problem.
I remember my 3rd brother telling me who our mother was and I remember my 3rd brother telling me to let Burger sexually assault me along with our 2nd brother telling me to allow it to happen.
My two youngest brothers and I got into fights when we were taking a bus to school three times that I remember. The last fight my 2nd brother and I had was when I was in fifth grade and we were having the same lunch period together. My brother was in the sixth grade and had his group of friends sitting with him in the cafeteria. All the tables had been taken and one of the teachers was telling me to sit beside my brother. I looked at my brother and he was telling me with his eyes not to sit beside him or to sit at his table so I refused to sit there. I told the teacher my brother was sitting there and I could not sit with him. This teacher refused to listen to me and took my lunch tray away from me. She then placed it beside my brother and told me to sit there and eat my lunch. I knew after I ate and we were at recess my brother and I were going to get into a fight. So I had to mentally prepare myself for what was going to happen after I ate. It was like being at home and eating dinner. Since after dinner I knew my father was going to beat me until I could not stand up I figured my brother was going to do the same to me. This made sense because he had seen what our father would do to me, so he was only doing what he had seen done at our home.
At recess I tried to stay away from my brother but he came at me and I defended myself. This was the first time I had ever stood up to my brother and decided I would fight back. Although I had been in fights before when we lived in the suburbs I had never defended myself against my siblings. That day in recess my brother and I started hitting each other with our fists and I gave my brother a bloody nose. By then the teachers had separated us and had us at different areas of the blacktop outside the school. One of the teachers started telling me I had given my brother a bloody nose and to look at him, my brother was checking his nose and saw his blood. I knew my brother would come after me and he broke away from the teacher who was holding him. I broke away from the teacher holding me and we went at each other. I was against the brick wall of the school and my brother took my head and kept banging my head against the brick wall of the school. When the teachers pulled him off of me, I had blood running down from my hair, from my nose and from my mouth. I took off from the school property and went into town. Some of the people were looking at me as I was walking down the sidewalk crying and bleeding. The only one who asked me what happened was the school bus driver who picked us up for school. That old man told me to go back to the school which is what I did. One of the teachers in school cleaned me up and then my brother and I were brought to the principal. Where we lived at the time, the teachers had never seen siblings go at each other the way my brother and I went at each other. My brother explained to the principal and I explained to the principal how our father treated us and how we as brothers did not want to see each other when we were not at home. For the rest of the school year my brother and I were always kept apart from each other.
Since I left when I was 12, my 2nd and 3rd brother lived at our father’s house until they were 18. My 2nd brother finished high school and my 3rd brother joined the military and finished high school in the military.
My 2nd brother married while he was in the military and was living in
I have seen my 3rd brother 4 times since leaving my father’s house. I have spoken to him on the telephone no more then 5 times since leaving my father’s house. This has been over a 33 year period. Whenever we have been together he will stay in a room with me for a few minutes and then is goes into another room.
When TSA was formed my brother was looking for a job. I found a job for him that he was qualified for at the TSA. My brother was hired immediately and as he told me, because he looked like a pure white man. Although months later TSA found my brother had spent time in prison and we his siblings had never known about his prison time. As a result of this, he lost his TSA job and went back to trunk driving.
7th Child:
I am the seventh child of my parents and the last child. This has been my story of survival and how my siblings have turned out as adults. My three children are now young adults. They did well in school and have gone on to college. My oldest quit college after two years and he works.
Done of my siblings and I went on killing sprees or did what our parents did to us, although I feel that our children have been affected by what we went through as children.
If you are reading this and are in need of help, know you are not alone. There are many places you can turn to for help. You only have to search the help out and not quit asking for help until someone answers you.
I am told how sexual orientation is not a choice. That we are born whatever we are. Perhaps this is true. But in my own case, a large part of me feels like it was taken away from me because of the sexual abuse I went through.
I find in my adult relationships I surrender my choices or I don’t expect to have any and I have paid the price for being this way.
Looking back and reflecting on what I accepted with my personal relationships, I feel like I did things for other people. To make them happy and feel good.
For instance, with my two brothers who insisted I let another person rape me. Then to continue this. To let my own two brothers have sex with me. If I had told them no, then I would have been in trouble.
Apart from sex, in the religion I was in, I just wanted to be that husband and father. Yet it was expected of a man to continually advance. In my case, my wife wanted it too. If I was not an elder then we were not anything.
In my relationships with others after my wife, I found that I gave up my rights as a person. The person I had a relationship with after my wife, I put up with the ex of this person constantly coming around until I couldn’t deal with it anymore when they left for a weekend in
Then when I met a person I really liked and feel for, this person told me months into our relationship that he had a lifelong disease but by then I had already developed deep feelings. Even though we broke up a month later, I never got over those feelings of mine and eventually we got back together. Yet, I did not have a choice to know from the beginning what I was going to be faced with. It was after the fact and my feelings are turned off like a wall switch.
In working, I find it hard to deal with certain types of people. Those who attempt to make me feel as if I don’t know what I’m talking about. Those who demand I provide proof with things. So I have learned to always document myself and be ready to defend myself. Inside me, I loathe this. It should not have to be this way. People who work together need to have and show respect for each other and listen to one another.
Younger Siblings:
My mother had six sons with her second husband. The twins died shortly after she gave birth to them and then my mother died. My four half-brothers from my mother’s second marriage we did not see or know where they were until the mid to late 1970’s. They have their own stories of life and have to deal with losing a mother and after a father who although being there was never really a father to them. Because we never bonded with them, our finding each other did not last long. It was a traumatic time for everyone. At first we thought find each other was a wonderful thing, but in time we found we were had different values and each of us need too much that we were trying to get from each other and it was not possible. So we lost touch again and have not seen each other since that brief time period.
My father had two sons with his third wife. I never met my half-brothers from my father third marriage until my youngest half-brother was eight. My father died when his youngest son was 16. He now has three sons of his own. My father’s other son has no children and is divorced.
Both of my father’s youngest sons say they were not abused by our father. I would like to think they are telling the truth. What they remember of our father is a nice man who was a loving father to them. Some of my older siblings don’t believe this since we find it hard to believe our father would not have done to our younger brothers what he did to us. The only thing perhaps is that my youngest brother’s mother was there to prevent something awful from happening.
Final:
My siblings have more stories to tell. I don’t think I was perfect as a child and I know I did some things too. My youngest sister likes to remind me how I stood on the stairs in our house shortly after our father married his third wife and screamed at the top of my voice a four letter word to her and told her what to do with it. It was the first time my siblings had ever heard me utter a bad word.
I still have more to write, for example:
If you know where Dodge Plaza is in PG county, well, when I was 13 and was in a car of friends of mine, yeah the twins boys who were 16 were my lovers. I'm not writing this to turn anyone on. I was with the twins cousins and one of the cousins had her just of out bookcamp Marine bf driving us around in his new car. So we were over in Dodge Plaza.
Outside walking around was a group of about 25 late teens to early young white males. One of them threw a rock at the Marine's car and he stopped. There were seven of us in the car. Everyone got out except me. This crowd of white guys surrounded that car and had their belts out and started using them. One of them attempted to get me out of the car and I told him I was going and what he could do with himself.
There was a standoff with belts swinging in the air when a black paddy wagon appeared and out of that wagon came around 30 black men who surrounded the white guys. They told the white guys to let us know and the white guys refused. So the black men let it be known that if we were not released, then the white guys were going to get beat down. We were then told to get in the car and leave. I remember looking back and seeing the white guys surrounded by the black men, daring them to make a move.
More to come.
ANOTHER REFLECTION: After I got baptized in 1975 When I was 16, during the summer
(the end of man's rule was to come at the end
of 1975 in the current belief of the JWs at the time) ... about 3 months after I got baptized one
of my older brothers was visiting ..
I had fallen asleep on the living room floor and woke
up to find my brother screwing me and going to town on
top of me. He was high on pot and had taken my
clothes off. Yeah, I'm a heavy sleeper .. much more
then as a teen which is why I had three alarm clocks
back then.
Anyway, here I was a JW and trying to be a good JW and
my brother was having sex with me. I was 16 and was
engaged at the time to a JW girl. (another story
for another time)
So after my brother finished .. (I had frozen still)
... I got up and showered ... woke up my grandfather
to tell him (another story) .. but the worse was when
I went to an elder I knew and had studied the bible with.
This elder was so not prepared for what I was telling
him and he was so much in shock. The sex had happened
on a Saturday and I walked to the J.W. K.H. that Sunday
morning like I normally did, taking my hour walk.
Told him I needed to speak to him. I was so sweating
that day and so scared. Anyway, he told me he would
talk to me at the bible book study that Tuesday.
Come Tuesday I walked to the book study which was a
half hour walk. Met the elder about 20 mins before
the meeting and we spoke in the back yard of the house
where the book study was. While people were coming
in, they could see us talking. The elder was telling
me to forget the whole ordeal and not to mention what
happened to anyone, just to keep silent.
Which I did, but I was so full of guilt. About a
month later I quit going to the K.H., stopped the
engagement and kept to myself.
It was 3.5 years later before I went back.
That elder never spoke to me after that book study
night. He would talk to others around me, but never
me. The look of guilt over the knowledge he had. As
far as I knew he never told anyone and I even went to
his house with some others many years later as a MS
and and Elder myself, but by then he wasn't an elder
and wasn't going out knocking on doors, just walking his horse
around in the back of his house where he boarded some
horses.
posted by Unknown at 12:19 PM
