My thoughts on ONE of the many ways the child abuse I experienced affected me in my adult life.
It now dawns on me, after I have written most of the stories for my book and am in the process of editing, the one theme that threads throughout the first seven years of my life is loss. I can now look back and see one of the ways that has played out in my adult life; I’ve hung on tight to people that I really should have let go.
One example of this is how I placed a terribly high value on a relationship with my mother’s youngest brother, my Uncle Jimmy. He joined the Merchant Marines while still a teen and remained until they forced his retirement in 1988 because of prescription drug abuse, which began in the early sixties with a doctor in the United States prescribing him Valium, a highly addictive tranquilizer. He discovered that he didn’t need a prescription in many of the countries his ship ported in and began medicating himself.
I talked to Uncle Jimmy on the phone daily. He didn’t have anything new to say to me really so I listened to the mundane details of what his life had been reduced to, what his latest meal consisted of and conversations of small talk with people such as his newspaper delivery guy. I can even tell you how much he tipped him. And that was the good part of our relationship. The bad part consisted of a series of crazy behaviors; having to be at his beckon call at all hours no matter how many times he called me in one day, the middle of the night phone calls when he was drunk and needed someone to talk to, the lies of cancer diagnosis in order to get my sympathy, the borrowing money to get him out of what ever jam he managed to get himself into, the requests to live with me and my family. But the one that emotionally drained me of everything was the calls from hotel rooms where he told me he had taken an overdose to kill himself. I talked to him for hours, feeling like I needed to hang on tight to his last dying words before he slipped away. He somehow always survived.
Like Momma, he kept me vigilant, careful with the use of my words, my tone of voice and facial expressions. And I see now I had no more control over his reactions than I did Momma’s. I could say something in a completely mono-toned voice and they would interpret it how ever their paranoid minds were thinking at that moment. I was in a no win situation.
High strung and nervous, he became irritated at any of life’s little daily challenges. He was abrasive, passive aggressive, abusive and sometimes explosive. He, like many people in my mother’s family, was diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic. The only reason that some weren’t diagnosed, like Momma, was because they never saw a psychiatrist. Once when I was hospitalized for depression, I picked up a brochure on schizophrenia and a light bulb went off as I read through the descriptions of symptoms. These symptoms described all of their behaviors to varying degrees. The fact that Momma’s symptoms were not as severe, and her lack of medical insurance was what kept her from seeking help.
The psychiatrist that Uncle Jimmy and I shared once told me I was the only person in Uncle Jimmy’s 60 plus years that he was able to keep a relationship with. That was because no one would put up with his antics. Every one else had either cut him out of their lives because of his shenanigans or he cut them out his. He was a manipulative, angry old man. And if he perceived you as crossing him, he would call every authority he could think of to get you in trouble, a response to hurt that was acted out by the whole family.
When I was 20 and entered college, my mother never offered one word of encouragement. Most of my life I felt like the dummy kids had called me. When I was little, and she tried so hard to teach me, I wonder if she was relating to me. Did she struggle like me academically?
After a lifetime of failing in school, I learned that if I showed up for class and did the homework I was capable of getting A’s and B’s, a feat I never dreamed possible. I thought college was for smart people and I did not consider myself smart. When I brought those grades to Momma, she was silent. I think she was intimidated by my intelligence. When I went back to college in my forties, Uncle Jimmy chided me for it, saying he had nothing but an 8th grade education and he did just fine in life. In fact, he had traveled all over the world. He continually asked me why I was bothering to go to school. I stopped bringing the subject into our conversations. I don’t think he or Momma ever had anyone’s approval and therefore they were incapable of giving it.
Towards the end, I did ask him about his childhood. That’s when he told me how his mother tried to get him to sell himself for her rent money. He told me how hurt he was that his parents would rather stay drunk than take care of him. In that moment, I saw him for the wounded and vulnerable child he remained on an emotional level.
In hindsight, I know I should have cut him out of my life as he brought nothing but burdens, problems, irritation and heartbreak. Like Momma, he went through life making messes of the relationships he had, and when it got too messy, he just disappeared. That was the MO of Momma and all her siblings.
Uncle Jimmy and I were never close until Momma died. My search for approval from both of them left me frustrated. It took their deaths for me to finally quit trying. It occurs to me now that I replaced my search for parental love from Momma with Uncle Jimmy. The abuse was over with her death, and I found another abusive person to take her place, in addition to filling my life with abusive men.
While I was at work one the evening in November of 2006 he called me and said, “I just want you to know, I never did like you,” hung up. I was busy with work and figured I’d call him in the morning to find out what “I had done now.” But the next morning it was me who got the phone call, from the Arizona police. Uncle Jimmy killed himself. In his wallet was a piece of paper that said in case of emergency, to call me. The suicide note in his pocket was not legible. And true to the nature of our relationship, he had used his dying words to hurt me.
Like Momma, I still feel love for him. I know that most of his behaviors had to do with his mental illness, which tormented him. I hope in death, he has found the peace that completely eluded him during his journey on this side of life.
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