whatever, family weirdness, history, etc.
Life just cycles around and around the same old bullshit without end and that is why I fear that after death we get stuck repeating shit we didn’t learn from and that just sounds like hell to me.
Once a long time ago I had a step-mother and I didn’t like her very much. My parents split when I was 12 and when I was 13 I got deathly ill. My father remarried in the middle of that illness and my newly minted step-mother was a disaster of a woman who immediately wanted me to call her ‘mom’ and she got all bent out of shape when I wouldn’t. (To be fair, I never called my step-father ‘dad’ until decades after my biological father was dead. If I had it to do over I would very likely have changed my name as soon as my father was dead and divorced myself from what remained of my father’s family but hindsight is always better than fore, is it not? Oh well.)
Did I mention that I was deathly ill when my father remarried? Oh yeah, ok, so I spent that Christmas Eve in the ER and slept most of Christmas Day and when I did wake up my grandmother fixed me a paper plate of Christmas Dinner Leftovers and I joked that I couldn’t find the food because it blended in with the plate it was all so bland, it was a small slice of white turkey, a half a unbuttered roll, and mashed potatoes with no gravy. I had been throwing up for days and so no excitement was allowed. In the middle of this boring dinner I am groggy and trying to stay awake long enough to eat anything, and my father calls me. I tell him Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday (his birthday was December 25) and he announces that for Christmas he got married. I was surprised, certainly, and not really awake enough to get the drift of the conversation so I said something along the lines of ‘nice joke, dad’ and handed the phone to my mother. My mother confirmed that he had gotten married (to some woman he had known about three weeks) and that he wanted me to come visit for New Year’s. My mother agreed, reluctantly. My parents’ divorce agreement gave him visitation for two weeks in the Summer and alternate Thanksgivings. It had not been his year for Thanksgiving but since he had just gotten married my mom relaxed the rule and let me go see him with strict instructions regarding my health condition. If this, that, or the other thing happened he was to call her and if any combination of two of the three things happened he was to take me to the ER and THEN call her. My father and his new wife left me with her niece (and the niece’s two toddlers) for New Year’s Eve and went off to another town overnight. Things hadn’t gone well to start with because I refused to call this woman ‘mom’, I was sick so couldn’t go out shopping or whatever and napped frequently, and I was dismayed at the rather alarming religion my step-mother practiced. She was a member of an evangelical church with a lot of hand waving and amening in the middle of sermons, and there was some near-speaking in tongues going on, stuff that I was not familiar with in my Episcopalian upbringing, and even though I had become a bit of a bible-thumper as a result of bible camps in the Summers of my early childhood, at 13 I was really not ready for this sort of crazy. My father was not a terribly demonstrative person so when we were forced to attend church with his wacko new wife we both sat quietly and somewhat dismayed at the behavior of not only her but most of the congregation. So yeah, that was a whole lot of not fun to start the New Year. Then they fucking left town and I was alone with some poor sap who was stuck with a sick kid she didn’t even know. I got sicker. I was pretty ill by the time my father and his new bride returned from their overnight stay out of town and the niece was beside herself because I had become so sick so fast and I kept begging her to call my mom (she wouldn’t call long distance and without my father’s permission, oh the days before cell phones sucked) or to take me to the ER, anything to make the pain and barfing stop because I was miserable. I am pretty sure that my step-mother had not actually believed I was ill and had told her niece I was lying, but the niece could see I was genuinely ill and was upset by the entire experience. My father took one look at me, realized my mother was going to kill him because I had hit all the markers she had warned him about and quite literally packed me and all my things up and started to drive me home. My step-mother was peeved because I was not due home until the next day and she didn’t want to be driving at night and whatever. Thankfully, my father ignored her and off we went. I have no idea what conversation might have transpired upon our arrival at my home with my mother (and not yet step-father, we were living in sin after all, my mom and step-father were not married) because I walked in, went to my room, and literally passed out from pain and not eating. The next morning I was no better, and off to the ER we went where I was admitted to the hospital and then I was in a coma so have no idea what went on from there except what I was told later.
Years later after my father was dead (car crash) I found out my mother never knew that he had left me alone that New Year’s with some girl who didn’t know me and that is why he didn’t call her when I got sick. She was pissed at him all over again, not that I blame her, but in reality I have always blamed my step-mother. She was the one that insisted they leave overnight, that after my father negotiated for me to stay with him she was the reason I got left with a stranger who had no idea how to deal with a teenager who was sick and missing her parents and so ill she was praying to die. After that my father never asked for special visitation and when we were having our usual visits he made sure to spend every minute he could with me. My step-mother was jealous and made no secret of it and considering she had him to herself for 50 of the 52 weeks of the year, I never could understand her viewpoint. I was as resentful of her as she was of me, so it was a no win for everyone.
When my father died she was a complete bitch. She gave away or sold all of my father’s things before he was even buried. I asked politely if I could have a shirt of his that we used to joke about, it was a pattern that didn’t match any of his sport coats but he would put them on together and ask me if they matched. I would complain that he was colour-blind not pattern blind and we would laugh and he would change. It was an old joke, but funny to us in the way in-jokes are. She had given it away and I was sad but stayed quiet after that. I told my brother Chuck about that and after the funeral he snuck me into the apartment where our father had lived and we scavenged for things to keep of our father’s. He found a shaving mug in the bathroom and gave it to me, I have no idea what he might have found and kept himself. Years later he found a box in storage that our dad had asked him to keep and in it was the teddy bear my father had as a child and my brother gave that to me as well. I did have things that had been my father’s, no thanks to the bitch he married.
I became a Pagan around age sixteen. After my father’s death he visited me, my dead father. My bible-thumpery couldn’t explain that in any way except a negative one. I went in search of some way to reconcile that experience that wasn’t ugly and scary. My father died the January after I turned 15, two years after my own near-death illness. I never noticed until writing it down just now that he died two years to the day after my coma. Weird timing. I read a LOT of books from the library trying to explain his visit to me. No amount of religious books or psychology books could explain that incident away. Many years later I found out that he had visited my mother as well. By that time I was full on Pagan and a professional Tarot reader as well, and visits from the dead were no longer frightening or a problem for my belief system.
After my brother Chuck died I was not surprised that he visited me, it was comforting and welcome. He only visited once, but that was enough for me to know that he was well and with family on the other side of this life.
My sister-in-law has just sent me a book and letter begging me to read it in hopes that I am not ‘doing or believing things’ that will cause me ill. It is the bible my step-mother supposedly gave my father, but I know he isn’t the one who yellow-highlighted the passages in it because he was not overly religious. I own three bibles already and don’t need another, most certainly not one that my father’s last wife ever touched.
It is not the bible itself that bothers me, I have no objection to bibles. It is the reminder of her, of someone who stained my childhood with bad memories and often prevented me from having a halfway normal relationship with my father that is painful and troublesome. I am sure my sister-in-law is trying in her own way to be helpful or something but instead has only opened old wounds and reminded me of painful times and memories I would have rather forgotten. Judy was an evil self-serving bitch and I would prefer to have her existence erased from my memory, sadly I have no way to choose what memories get scrubbed from my brain by the illness that often loses my memory for me. That she gave it to my father takes away any good association that my brother kept it all these years or that it had been my father’s. She taints it by ever having touched it and all I can see when I look at it is her influence.
After receiving this in the mail I was exhausted and had a nap. And dreamed weird dreams. Of course I did.
I dreamed that I was packing my mother’s things after her death and her sister was helping, or trying to help. I was trying to find something in particular and her sister kept putting it somewhere I couldn’t find it, whatever it was. The wind came up and a tornado started to form and I walked out into a field to meet it. My aunt was trying to get me to come inside and I refused. I stood there in the wind watching the funnel come down towards me and I could hear the voice of the Goddess calling me, telling me it wasn’t yet time. I was disappointed, of course. My aunt was scared and confused and it was the voice of my mother in the clouds.
I woke up groggy and sad.
Once a long time ago I had a step-mother and I didn’t like her very much. My parents split when I was 12 and when I was 13 I got deathly ill. My father remarried in the middle of that illness and my newly minted step-mother was a disaster of a woman who immediately wanted me to call her ‘mom’ and she got all bent out of shape when I wouldn’t. (To be fair, I never called my step-father ‘dad’ until decades after my biological father was dead. If I had it to do over I would very likely have changed my name as soon as my father was dead and divorced myself from what remained of my father’s family but hindsight is always better than fore, is it not? Oh well.)
Did I mention that I was deathly ill when my father remarried? Oh yeah, ok, so I spent that Christmas Eve in the ER and slept most of Christmas Day and when I did wake up my grandmother fixed me a paper plate of Christmas Dinner Leftovers and I joked that I couldn’t find the food because it blended in with the plate it was all so bland, it was a small slice of white turkey, a half a unbuttered roll, and mashed potatoes with no gravy. I had been throwing up for days and so no excitement was allowed. In the middle of this boring dinner I am groggy and trying to stay awake long enough to eat anything, and my father calls me. I tell him Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday (his birthday was December 25) and he announces that for Christmas he got married. I was surprised, certainly, and not really awake enough to get the drift of the conversation so I said something along the lines of ‘nice joke, dad’ and handed the phone to my mother. My mother confirmed that he had gotten married (to some woman he had known about three weeks) and that he wanted me to come visit for New Year’s. My mother agreed, reluctantly. My parents’ divorce agreement gave him visitation for two weeks in the Summer and alternate Thanksgivings. It had not been his year for Thanksgiving but since he had just gotten married my mom relaxed the rule and let me go see him with strict instructions regarding my health condition. If this, that, or the other thing happened he was to call her and if any combination of two of the three things happened he was to take me to the ER and THEN call her. My father and his new wife left me with her niece (and the niece’s two toddlers) for New Year’s Eve and went off to another town overnight. Things hadn’t gone well to start with because I refused to call this woman ‘mom’, I was sick so couldn’t go out shopping or whatever and napped frequently, and I was dismayed at the rather alarming religion my step-mother practiced. She was a member of an evangelical church with a lot of hand waving and amening in the middle of sermons, and there was some near-speaking in tongues going on, stuff that I was not familiar with in my Episcopalian upbringing, and even though I had become a bit of a bible-thumper as a result of bible camps in the Summers of my early childhood, at 13 I was really not ready for this sort of crazy. My father was not a terribly demonstrative person so when we were forced to attend church with his wacko new wife we both sat quietly and somewhat dismayed at the behavior of not only her but most of the congregation. So yeah, that was a whole lot of not fun to start the New Year. Then they fucking left town and I was alone with some poor sap who was stuck with a sick kid she didn’t even know. I got sicker. I was pretty ill by the time my father and his new bride returned from their overnight stay out of town and the niece was beside herself because I had become so sick so fast and I kept begging her to call my mom (she wouldn’t call long distance and without my father’s permission, oh the days before cell phones sucked) or to take me to the ER, anything to make the pain and barfing stop because I was miserable. I am pretty sure that my step-mother had not actually believed I was ill and had told her niece I was lying, but the niece could see I was genuinely ill and was upset by the entire experience. My father took one look at me, realized my mother was going to kill him because I had hit all the markers she had warned him about and quite literally packed me and all my things up and started to drive me home. My step-mother was peeved because I was not due home until the next day and she didn’t want to be driving at night and whatever. Thankfully, my father ignored her and off we went. I have no idea what conversation might have transpired upon our arrival at my home with my mother (and not yet step-father, we were living in sin after all, my mom and step-father were not married) because I walked in, went to my room, and literally passed out from pain and not eating. The next morning I was no better, and off to the ER we went where I was admitted to the hospital and then I was in a coma so have no idea what went on from there except what I was told later.
Years later after my father was dead (car crash) I found out my mother never knew that he had left me alone that New Year’s with some girl who didn’t know me and that is why he didn’t call her when I got sick. She was pissed at him all over again, not that I blame her, but in reality I have always blamed my step-mother. She was the one that insisted they leave overnight, that after my father negotiated for me to stay with him she was the reason I got left with a stranger who had no idea how to deal with a teenager who was sick and missing her parents and so ill she was praying to die. After that my father never asked for special visitation and when we were having our usual visits he made sure to spend every minute he could with me. My step-mother was jealous and made no secret of it and considering she had him to herself for 50 of the 52 weeks of the year, I never could understand her viewpoint. I was as resentful of her as she was of me, so it was a no win for everyone.
When my father died she was a complete bitch. She gave away or sold all of my father’s things before he was even buried. I asked politely if I could have a shirt of his that we used to joke about, it was a pattern that didn’t match any of his sport coats but he would put them on together and ask me if they matched. I would complain that he was colour-blind not pattern blind and we would laugh and he would change. It was an old joke, but funny to us in the way in-jokes are. She had given it away and I was sad but stayed quiet after that. I told my brother Chuck about that and after the funeral he snuck me into the apartment where our father had lived and we scavenged for things to keep of our father’s. He found a shaving mug in the bathroom and gave it to me, I have no idea what he might have found and kept himself. Years later he found a box in storage that our dad had asked him to keep and in it was the teddy bear my father had as a child and my brother gave that to me as well. I did have things that had been my father’s, no thanks to the bitch he married.
I became a Pagan around age sixteen. After my father’s death he visited me, my dead father. My bible-thumpery couldn’t explain that in any way except a negative one. I went in search of some way to reconcile that experience that wasn’t ugly and scary. My father died the January after I turned 15, two years after my own near-death illness. I never noticed until writing it down just now that he died two years to the day after my coma. Weird timing. I read a LOT of books from the library trying to explain his visit to me. No amount of religious books or psychology books could explain that incident away. Many years later I found out that he had visited my mother as well. By that time I was full on Pagan and a professional Tarot reader as well, and visits from the dead were no longer frightening or a problem for my belief system.
After my brother Chuck died I was not surprised that he visited me, it was comforting and welcome. He only visited once, but that was enough for me to know that he was well and with family on the other side of this life.
My sister-in-law has just sent me a book and letter begging me to read it in hopes that I am not ‘doing or believing things’ that will cause me ill. It is the bible my step-mother supposedly gave my father, but I know he isn’t the one who yellow-highlighted the passages in it because he was not overly religious. I own three bibles already and don’t need another, most certainly not one that my father’s last wife ever touched.
It is not the bible itself that bothers me, I have no objection to bibles. It is the reminder of her, of someone who stained my childhood with bad memories and often prevented me from having a halfway normal relationship with my father that is painful and troublesome. I am sure my sister-in-law is trying in her own way to be helpful or something but instead has only opened old wounds and reminded me of painful times and memories I would have rather forgotten. Judy was an evil self-serving bitch and I would prefer to have her existence erased from my memory, sadly I have no way to choose what memories get scrubbed from my brain by the illness that often loses my memory for me. That she gave it to my father takes away any good association that my brother kept it all these years or that it had been my father’s. She taints it by ever having touched it and all I can see when I look at it is her influence.
After receiving this in the mail I was exhausted and had a nap. And dreamed weird dreams. Of course I did.
I dreamed that I was packing my mother’s things after her death and her sister was helping, or trying to help. I was trying to find something in particular and her sister kept putting it somewhere I couldn’t find it, whatever it was. The wind came up and a tornado started to form and I walked out into a field to meet it. My aunt was trying to get me to come inside and I refused. I stood there in the wind watching the funnel come down towards me and I could hear the voice of the Goddess calling me, telling me it wasn’t yet time. I was disappointed, of course. My aunt was scared and confused and it was the voice of my mother in the clouds.
I woke up groggy and sad.