the previous post on control provoked a day long reflection on the unresolved stress lingering from my pre-conscious years with my family of origin. reflecting on that also led to a sequence of thought links leading me to reflect on the unresolved stress that still lingers from the experience of my brother's death.
it was quite enough to have been brought into the situation that i was born into at the time. our house was always super stressed out, and i can only imagine that that was the case from day one. indubitably, things only got worse as my mother's chores increased yearly, as she was pregnant 12 times in the first 13 years of her marriage.
so she had my older brother [my perp], then immediately got pregnant again, and carried that child to term, but lost it along the way. stress. of course she still had her first born....nothing could change that. then next thing you know, another year later, i was born. sorry mom, you wanted a girl, but you got me. you already had a boy. and he was your golden child. i wonder how you handled your disappointment. how did you keep from subtly transmitting it thru your touch to my skin when you bathed me, fed me, dressed me?
never mind, 1 year and 10 days later, you gave birth to my sister....finally, the girl you had been waiting for. well, i guess you didn't get very much time to spend doting on her until my next brother was born a year and two months later. but at least, you had that year........
where did the time go? 10 years later, your family was complete. even though you lost 3 more. i still can't help but wonder.....what did you do with all the stress you were under during that 13 year time span. making and having babies, clothing feeding, cooking, cleaning. why don't i remember any fun? could it be because there was none? could it be because our life was so regimented, that the only way to stay sane was to control our behavior by ruling with violence? was that the only way you knew to keep us 'in line'.
of course, dad was no help. he had his own stress to deal with, working 2 and 3 jobs throughout the child rearing days. then shortly after the youngest was born, and the doctor told you that if you had any more children, you would die? yet you felt extremely guilty about having to have your tubes tied, good catholic woman that you were.
how would all these mouths be fed? of course, the family income had to be supplemented and so you went to work fulltime, leaving us to fend for ourselves. and you put 'the captain' in charge of us, the oldest brother, your golden child, who would, away from the watchful eye of any adult monitoring the situation, go on to sexually abuse no less than 4 of his younger siblings, the youngest being 3 years old.
what a mad existence. then on your days 'off' from work, you would make us all catch up on the chores that did not get done during the week, and you would have us all scrubbing walls, doing laundry, cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning. and only after the work was all done, would we be allowed to go outdoors and 'play' for a couple of hours, until the dinner hour.
i thought mom about how when i was 16, and i started working part time at the college cafeteria. you got a job there when dad worked there on the maintenance staff. after he left there and got a job working for the port authority, you and the supervisor got close. i remember discovering his love letters to you underneath your clothes once when i was tidying up your dresser drawers. i know how neat you liked everything to be, and so i would always be trying to please you by ridding up whenever i could. i was devastated when i found those cards. i confronted the supervisor, and he could not deny it, but he did say it was totally 'pure'.
fast forward to bill's death. i'll never forget the night we found out he had died in his apartment from a cerebral hemorrhage, and how you collapsed. we all needed someone to comfort us, but you were inconsolable, and so our needs got no attention.
then there was my pain. i'll never forget the smell of that apartment. the reeking odor of death, from bill who laid up in there for two days before the smell alerted his landlady that something was amiss. when me and a few of the sibs went with dad to claim bill's belongings, it was an experience that i will never forget. but i never thought about the impact of that experience until today. my last memory of him, my perp and first lover, was of him rejecting the relationship that i held in such high regard for almost 8 years.
it just dawns on me now, that was the beginning of the end of my life. the night after his death, i am sure i never slept the same again. i am sure, i lost my heart and soul when he died, i died.
i tried to reach out and share my pain. i told about what he had done. something i could never do as long as he was alive. and when i disclosed it, i sealed my own fate. because on top of the trauma of losing a first born son, now shame would become the hallmark of our family history. and i would be blamed for bringing the terrible secret to light.
where do the accumulated unresolved feelings of a life time go? they don't go anywhere. they just get buried, piling up like a huge composte heap, silently doing their toxic damage, poisoning the soul from the inside out. all the years of unresolved fear, rejection, anger, abandonment, deceit, guilt and shame. what have they wrought?
pain and suffering. ah, the legacy of poverty and abuse. *sigh*
No comments:
Post a Comment