Soft Arts

Foreword

This is almost certainly the most self-indulgent blog entry I think that I’ve ever written. It’s all about me. This is not the feel good story of the year. It is about abuse, unhappiness, death, and neglect.

I am writing this because I have a emotional block around the first half of my life. I rarely discuss it and this sucks, because there was a ton of cool stuff that came up during that time that I find I can’t talk about because of a few other things that happened along the way.

There are a lot of things that happen to people in life that they move beyond and never talk about again. This is healthy if they’ve gotten over the past, because defining the totality of your life on previous grievances doesn’t allow you to heal.

As my friend Mike Lee pointed out, much of who we are is shaped by what we do in the now, not our past. Clearly our life experience is a path dependent integral, but who we are should be based in the present. We are not here to shake our grievances in other people’s faces and say “this ruined my life” or “I could be successful if this didn’t happen to me.”

Unfortunately, a consequence of moving beyond the past is that it frequently gets lost. Few people besides my wife and my parents and some very old friends have any idea of my background, or my roots. When people find out about my step-brother Rod, or that I grew up in Alaska, they are frequently surprised.

I knew that my clam-up was getting a bit pathological when my wife found out about Rod after dating me for several months. It just isn’t stuff that I talk about. I think that much of my life has been spent redefining myself since I moved to Seattle and I deliberately severed my connection to my past in doing so.

Now I’d like to be a little more integrated. It’d be nice to mention some detail in passing without having to run through a lot of background, so I think it’s time to just try and articulate some of these things.

I know that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if it weren’t for the fact that other people in my life have eventually started talking about their lives in ways that really changed how I saw them for the better. I became distressed that I didn’t know that part of their lives and felt like I would have missed out if they’d never shared it.

So…here goes…damn, this is already harder than I thought, and I don’t really know if it’s all that big of a deal.

Roots

I was born in Seattle, Washington on December 1st, 1968 to Jeff and Dellarae. My father was a jazz drummer and University of Washington student from Renton and my mother was a student at Seattle Pacific University (a Methodist school) from Concrete, Washington.

My dad was 20 and my mom was 19 when they got married. As a 39 year old man, this sounds completely insane to me, however, the Vietnam War was going on strong and they were trying to keep my dad out of the draft. Consequently, I was born when my mom was 20 years old and my dad was 21.

My father’s parents were almost polar opposites. My grandmother totally indulged my dad, whereas my grandfather, an old navy man, did a passable imitation of General Patton. George controlled almost ever aspect of my dad’s life growing up and continued to do so once he was out of their house.

My father and my grandfather shared a love of football, jazz, and hunting and fishing, and high stakes card games, but saw eye-to-eye on almost nothing else.

My grandfather was relentless in his pressure and ridicule of my dad and eventually fled his father, wife, and baby to move to Alaska with some friends and work on the new pipeline.

My mom pursued him to Anchorage shortly thereafter and we lived together briefly in a ramshackle dive together. My dad drank heavily and mostly wanted to go out and party with his friends. Things got ugly and they were divorced shortly thereafter.

Richard and Rod

Rod

My mom started dating Richard when I was about three years old. Richard had been married previously and had a son named Roderick (*not* Rodney…it made me nuts when people called him that).

Rod had profound cerebral palsy: he had been a breech birth, and his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. He was severely asphyxiated during delivery and suffered irreparable brain damage.

Rod was a pretty normal kid mentally, who was cursed with the motor control of a two month old infant for his entire life. He was never able to walk, talk, write, sit upright, or feed himself. He was eventually able to make use of an electric wheelchair controlled by moving his head in different directions.

Rod’s mother was unable or unwilling to cope with the situation and left Rod and his dad shortly after he was born.

Richard

Richard, my step father, was a big man (huge, to a child). He didn’t like children and was jealous of me for being normal. He was curt with me, but my mother evidently thought that things would go more smoothly if they got married, which they did. I was sent off to Seattle to visit my cousins and grandparents and Rod spent time with his grandparents in Anchorage. Richard and my mom got married, bought a condominium next to Spenard Lake in Anchorage, and went on a honeymoon.

Life with the Towns

I came back from Seattle to our new home. My mom was happy and glad to see me, and the place was nice, and right across the street from a small public beach on the lake.

Reign of Terror

The timbre of things changed dramatically, however, on day 1.

“Get him off of there.” Richard told my mom.

My mom looked in at Rod and I. I was in the living room watching television on the couch

“What are you talking about?” my mom asked

“Get him off the couch! Children do not belong on the furniture.”

There was an argument, but it didn’t last long. For the rest of my life with Richard there would be entire rooms that I was not allowed in. Rod and I were shut away together in “the playroom,” where it was my job to entertain Rod. We were able to come out for dinner, then watch a little television. We were sent to bed by about 7:30.

Richard terrified me. I wasn’t allowed to get up to go to the bathroom without asking, even in the middle of the night. I wasn’t allowed to get up in the morning until he came in and told me I could get up, which was usually around 9am on weekends. Later on, I wasn’t even allowed to read in bed before 8 am (he checked in on me frequently to enforce this).

When I was older I used to have friends over to spend the night. No one would believe me, when I freaked out when someone got up to use the bathroom, but every time, Richard would come up stairs and demand to know what the hell was going on. I had forgotten about that, but received a letter from a boyhood friend about 20 years later. He cited the sleepover experiences and confided in me that Richard was the example he kept in mind when telling people about abusive control freaks.

Once, when I was about twelve years old, Richard came back to Anchorage from a business trip (he was gone a lot by then). I opened the door to sneak out to the bathroom next door and stopped in terror.

Richard was sitting at the top of the stairs, just a few feet away, wearing his parka. I couldn’t see his face, but he looked like he was brooding. I was terrified of drawing his attention to me and quietly closed the door to a crack.

I figured if I waited long enough, he’d eventually either turn and face me or get up and go downstairs to bed. He did neither.

I have no idea how long that endless standoff went, but I finally had to just get out there and face him before I wet my pants. I opened the door and stepped forward, cringing.

Richard had hung his parka by its hood on the railing at the top of the stairs. I’d been petrified by his empty jacket. Overwhelmed with relief, I darted into the bathroom and then raced back to bed before I could attract his attention for real.

In addition to his sterling sense of discipline, Richard belittled most of my accomplishments. A man like Richard, particularly one with a son as profoundly disabled as Rod, has no room to praise a healthy, gifted child for anything.

My own father was largely absent at this time of my life and drinking heavily. At the time, particularly in his mid twenties, he spent most of his time closing bars and hunting with his friends. Getting saddled down with a small boy for the weekend irritated him and I picked up a lot of resentment from him during this period. Most of the time that I spent with him was either fishing or in bars.

Rod

Rod was a sweet kid, but everything was against him. He had a devastating handicap. His mother had left him. His father remarried and, once he had a new wife and stepson to take care of Rod, left frequently on business trips or hunting trips.

Rod correctly viewed us as impostors. He wanted his real mother and father together, and he wanted us out of his life. Unfortunately, his real parents wanted nothing to do with him, and he was stuck with us. Although we did have some good times, his justifiable rage and misery impacted us all. Quite frankly, having a step brother that didn’t like me, let alone one that I was required to take care of, sucked.

A few years ago my wife bought me a copy of The Normal One, a psychological study of healthy children that grow up with children like Rod in their family. The book was empowering and terrible. Children in this experience often end up with premature maturity, survivor guilt, compulsion to achieve, and the secret conviction that normality is tenuous or a sham discussed, and the book discusses this in great detail.

Rod had to be fed by hand. Part of his condition made him drool and his tongue pushed out spastically, which meant that a lot of food meant to go into Rod ended up on his clothing. Dinner was an extremely noisy, grotesque affair. My friends took it in stride, usually more weirded out by my mom’s exotic cooking than Rod’s eating, basically because they were really good friends. Pretty much everyone else in Anchorage just gawked at us, to the point that I would hug Rod protectively and scowlingly offer to let them take a photograph so that they could continue to stare at him at their leisure.

One of many side effects of growing up with Rod is that I become physically distressed around sloppy eaters. The sight of a normal person grunting, smacking their lips, and chewing with their mouths open transforms them immediately into a slackjawed, blank-stared parody of my brother. I want to shake them for being well and looking like such animals when they have complete control over what they are doing.

Because CP can be caused by asphyxiation at any point in life, I sometimes have nightmarish visions in which I see the people I’m talking to transformed into ghoulish versions of themselves, with spastic, flailing arms and legs, jutting tongues, and lolling heads. There is a scene in Charly in which the protagonist, now a recognized genius, sees his former moronic self looking back at him where ever he looks. The scene chills me to my core.

I know personally that if something like that happened to me I would most likely do everything in my power to take my own life.

How we got from there to here

When I was sixteen, Rod moved to a Cerebral Palsy center in Seattle, which he was hugely excited about. Instead of being an outsider, here he would be a first class citizen, surrounded by a peer group. My mom helped move him in. While she was there she met another man and decided not to come back.

I’m going to gloss over a lot here, but I will say that my mom and Richard divorced, and I moved to Seattle to be with her in 1986. My mom made a point of checking up on Rod at the center and openly worried about him. She also became very upset because Rod’s mother, who lived nearby, did little to help him and Richard did even less.

I eventually begged her to stop being a tool for Rod’s parents. “We took care of Rod for 13 years,” I told her. “Now we’re not even part of the family. Let them handle it. He’s not thrilled to see us and it isn’t our job to do.” I felt heartless, but I also felt like we needed to have boundaries.

I saw Rod a few times after I moved here, but by and large I avoided him. After a childhood of abuse and caregiving of someone that openly resented me most of the time, revisiting a major character from a period I wanted to unlive was not something that I could easily face.

Rod continued to be neglected by his biological parents. He caught pneumonia in his 30s and almost died, and made it clear that if it was to happen again that he didn’t not want anyone to intervene.

A few years later he had a relapse and died. I have never forgiven his parents for allowing this to happen to him. Rod’s life was a tragic, pathetic thing, and he deserved better than my mom and I. If he hadn’t been so totally thrown in our own laps when I was a boy, we might have been willing to be more involved ourselves, but I know that my mom was already burned out and used up by the time she divorced Richard. There just wasn’t any way that she could keep championing a cause that wasn’t hers.

Epilogue

I finished this article a few hours ago and I keep asking myself “is there any message to this?” And I really can’t say for certain. I miss Rod a lot and and I think that my stepdad was an incredible prick. I feel like I failed Rod and that I never should have been put in a caregiver position in the first place.

My relationship with my father improved dramatically as I grew up. I feel a strong connection with him and I’ve been overjoyed to see him interact with our own children, Isaac and Sam. I love my kids and I make an effort to make sure that they know it.

I’ll probably tell the kids about Rod when they’re older. I remember learning that my maternal grandfather had been married and had other children before he married my grandmother, and about my mom’s foster sister, Penny. Learning about these things was significant to me and it changed my picture of our family’s life and history. I feel like, when the time comes, I’d like to just be able to sketch out the details and not get choked up trying to process all of the crap that came along with it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.