I’ve been reading a new-to-me blog (Fluttercrafts). Some of her posts gut me and her journey through therapy keeps poking me in the back of the head. One of the things that comes up when I start down that lonely road is something I don’t know how to classify. Until recently, I couldn’t think about it for very long. My mind would skitter away to something else. Anything else.
But for the past few days, my mind has been drawn to it. And for whatever reason this time (I’m sure the psychiatrists/psychologist/therapists out there could explain that one), I’m not backing away from it.
Since I don’t know how to classify it, what box it belongs in, I’m just going to tell the story. Although I will intersperse some lyrics to this song because they seem to fit. (It’s a gut thing, no intellectual idea why.)
I try to stay on top of you
To hold your body down
Your shaking seems to hinder
Every grasp that I had found
My parents have never had many friends outside of my mother’s siblings. When I was young, my dad had one good friend that he’d spend time with. I’ll call him D to try and preserve some anonymity. D lived across the street from us with his wife and young son. When Dad spent time with D, well I could tell there was a joy there that was missing when he spent time with any of my uncles. And before you derail, D was a wonderful guy. He was sweet and thoughtful and kind to everyone.
D’s son J though, he was a different story. He is four years older than me, and was odd even as a small kid. I think I was around 4 or 5 when it started, but I’m not all that sure. I was pretty young and I’ve never asked my parents about the dates.
The first memories are of J holding me down. He’d pretend he was tickling me whenever anyone came running at my calls for help. But eventually, people stopped coming. I think at first, when we were very young, J was content with just holding me powerless until something outside of us would force him to stop.
I’m sure that to the adults, we just looked like typical kids doing the normal fight thing. The other kids near J’s age though, they knew something wasn’t right. But you can only safeguard the little girl next door for so long before you get distracted.
I cut myself to shame
To get to know this masochist
Who’s stolen my first name
I don’t think I knew enough back then to go to an adult about what was happening. And when it changed, well by then I’d realized that D was Dad’s only friend. I had this idea. I felt like I had to protect that friendship by not making a big deal of anything.
Luckily for me, D and his family got some sort of windfall that let them move up a little. They traded our semi-ghetto (okay, just lower class tract housing, but folks in our semi-small town considered it the second worse neighborhood in town) for the new money neighborhood in another school area.
Holding all my weight at ease
But the teacher seems to split in two
Destroying both his knees
After they moved, I only saw J maybe once a month. That was the good news. But that meant that when I saw him, it was at their house. Inside the house. I tried my best to stay in the living room adjacent to the adults, but we were kids – the folks eventually got tired and shooed us away. Back in those days, who would have thought something was going on that needed to be watched? J would have been tempting me with toys in his room the whole time I was in the living room, and eventually, either Mom or Dad would tell me to go play there.
Below your broken wings
I lift your feathered left arm
Where you hide your heart from me
J would turn the music on really loud which meant that the adults would tell us to shut the door. I did my best to turn it down before they did, but that always prompted a “wrestling” session. He always won, and eventually the door would close.
I’m not sure I can even tell you what happened, because it’s mostly still blanked out. It’s odd. I know that it’s all still there, but it’s like it’s behind a closed door. I do know that the worst did not happen. I know that because of how/when it ended.
Or to rub away the dirt
Myself & I we share
This barely beating heart of hurt
In his bedroom, J was somewhat contained in that one of the adults could/would come in every once in a while to check on us. And they could still hear me yelling for him to get off me or stop between the songs. He wasn’t dumb/smart enough to lock the door, so things had to be mostly inconspicuous. Or at the least, explainable. I think he went with the wrestling excuse as we got older.
That was the way things went until I was around 12-13. That’s about the time J got his driver’s license and bought a junked out car with his paper route money. I remember that day like it was yesterday. We were out one weekend and dropped by D’s house. It had been a few weeks or even a few months since we’d seen them. The big news was J’s new license and car. We’d only stopped by for a few minutes while they made plans for a real night.
A fight to save a smile
A small attack on human tears
To dry them for a while
J was so very excited about everything. He kept inviting me for a drive to show off the car. I tried to beg off by saying we weren’t going to be long. But Dad and D kept pushing. I think Dad thought I was being rude, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. All I do know is that I got very upset, told them all I wouldn’t go, and got into the back seat of our car. Dad looked embarrassed and was trying to smooth things over with D and his family by saying I’d go for a ride next time. Mom though, she got it. When she got in the car with me, she asked if I was afraid of being alone with J. Just that, nothing more. She was very careful in how she asked the question, and I answered just as carefully, “Yes.” Nothing more, because I don’t think she wanted to know.
I was terrified. I knew that all the holding measures I had managed up to that point would be swept away in that car. I knew that I’d be at J’s mercy and that I couldn’t do anything to stop him once I was there. I still believe that the measure of his excitement was for exactly that reason.
Yeah a vision I believe
And where confidence is found
Attached to wires on a sleeve
I’m not sure what Mom said to Dad, but I didn’t have to go for a ride. That was pretty much the last time we spent any time over there. D would stop by our house every once in a while to catch up, but even that stopped after a year or two. I have always blamed myself for the ending of that friendship, but as an adult, I can see that things were tapering off before I drove the final nail in the coffin.
After I graduated, Mom told me a little about what was happening to J. He’d graduated with bad grades and no trade, so he eventually went to work as a janitor at a local mental hospital. (See where this is going? Yeah.) The last that I heard, he’d gotten one of the severely mentally handicapped young girls pregnant. Her parents were furious. His parents were humiliated. And J was losing his job.
Told to pack his shit and leave
And where guidance is a fortune
Told to help in time of need
As for me? Well, I can’t handle being tickled. I tend to freak out a little bit whenever I’m constrained by someone or something. WhatsHisFace is somewhat perturbed that he can’t tickle me at all, and lifting me off the ground makes me pretty much spaz.
It’s the art of how we grieve
And lessons are the key
To every goal I will achieve, I will achieve
I don’t blame either my parents or D and his wife. By the time I was old enough to know that something was wrong, I was steeped in the idea that you didn’t talk about things like that. You endured and you minimized and you tried to contain things as best you could. But I’m thinking now that blaming myself is probably not healthy. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
PS – I fought with what to title this one, because several of the lines speak to me. In the end, I chose the one that seems to fit the best. I picked the one that sums me up exactly. I sometimes win the fight, but sometimes….
