Part 1, Part 2 is here https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/11/my-mom.html
I used to feel sorry for myself every holiday season, as my family is so fractured. I'd watch neighbors greet and celebrate with children and relatives from miles away, hugs reminiscences, try not to hear their laughter. I'd be jealous of everyone in the world who was better off than I am and spend days, weeks, binge watching things like Twilight Zone reruns, even before there was an internet. NOW everyone is having to experience lonely holidays. I'm used to it and all around me people are trying to learn how to do it. Once again I'm grateful my life was so awful because it prepared me for what we are all going through now. Some of my worst memories are Thanksgivings in my parents home, feelings I need to force down to keep from reliving, honest. So I have my tricks for surviving lonely holidays, it took me years to develop them… Trust, the FX series, I keep watching it over and over to remind myself family is not always wonderful.
1981 was So Bad that I returned to Houston to work and could not function, was such an emotional wreck I ended up leaving my job, not able to do it, at NASA. that's how bad family can be. I'm fine alone, I have to remind myself, alone is not worst thing there is.
At one point we lived in a huge house. It must have been a mansion, it even had a ballroom. It was deep in the woods west of Chicago on Route 20, and my sisters went to school in Elgin about 20 minutes to the west. So I'd be at home alone on this 20 acre lot with no one else but mom- sheep next door. Until I was six we lived there. It also had a tower and my "playroom" was at the top of the tower. A circular narrow stairway off the kitchen took you to this isolated bright round room. So I actually spent much of my early development years alone in a tower looking out over a span of Illinois woods. For years I was in there with my puppets.
my parents threw cocktail parties in the ballroom, or if a smaller crowd in a smaller parlor between it and the kitchen...
Father Horne came to the parties.
Chicago area, early 1950s.
My dad was a lawyer, corporate law, not criminal. Perhaps my dad pioneered in white collar crime.
One Thanksgiving I got
thrown out of Brownies. In nearby Bartlett in the community building in the park, it
was a dark November Illinois evening. In a meeting room girls in brown scout
dresses glued autumn-colored construction paper on cardboard to make turkeys. I
said something and had that reaction I got so often. Everyone stopped what they
were doing to stare at me, when I thought I'd made a funny joke and expected
laughter. I think I said something about putting the feather between the
turkey's legs, but I really don’t remember. I started babbling as soon as the
leader showed us how to cut the feathers in that shape.
No other girl saw the
similarity between the shape we were cutting for feathers and a … what, I guess
penis. But I did, and I think I was trying to get a laugh out of the others
even as we began the project. But no one got my whispered jokes. So I said
something funnier and more extreme because I wanted them to laugh and instead-
I was picked up and taken into another room, mom was called. I waited in a
lobby area while the rest of the girls continued cutting and gluing turkeys
from construction paper. I remember at one point getting up and peering in the
door window at them. I did not know what I had done wrong. I was just me, from
my home, where Father Horne came often for cocktails, and I had learned already
about sex, at age 7. My mom arrived then, always a brand new car, hair, jewels,
perfect pretty face, and I rode off with her back then to the woods, or maybe
by then to the house we built in town, but… removed from the group and made to
go back home with my mom.*
It's amazing how a pedophile priest can destroy the family dynamic, even among members who agree with you that it happened and was wrong, even after a lawsuit is settled. Somehow just having the issue in the family is like a cancer, a virus, that grows and destroys everything with which it comes in contact. At least that's what happened in my life. (Me: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2015 at CofA 15)
Hardest thing about being a
strange human is you think you're normal. Until age thirty or so I thought
everyone went through what I went through, so often inappropriate things would
pop out of my mouth and people around me would be shocked, inhale loudly, and
sometimes I'd even be removed.
In
2012 when I went to Chicago looking for answers, I wrote about it here https://cityofangels15.blogspot.com/2012/09/molested-by-priest-thrown-out-of.html
I did not finish what I
was doing in Chicago, I got ... interrupted. I need to go back, after the
pandemic
Once while in Austin, Texas, I invented a way to survive a holiday alone that some may find kind of strange. I was living in “family student housing” with a son who had gone to be with his father for Christmas. The university was empty of humans, most buildings locked, nice landscaping and so I walked. Walked and walked. I’d go up to a building and, okay here’s the kind of weird part- I talked to buildings. I absorbed architecture. I made up this game, I’d feel the geometry that started as blueprints and ended up in these structures. I’d talk to buildings, not in English, in their language. At the time the LBJ presidential library was brand new, slick clean glass-steel with such satisfying angles, I had a great conversation with the whole empty complex… there was no one around, but still I did not talk out loud to the buildings, it was more ethereal than that. I imagined the experience as a unique genius sense I had and probably no one else had because how many people are walking around empty places in America on Christmas. . . that's one example of a thing I invented to survive lonely holidays, don’t know if that gives anyone else suggestions but. . .
* My Mom https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/11/my-mom.html
