Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Moo Foo Slut Pappy

I am enraged right now.  Probably not the best time to write on the blog or, perhaps the perfect time.

My mom's in the hospital.  She'll be eighty next month and has had health problems since I've known her.  At the moment, she's laid up with pneumonia and dangerously low hemoglobin and oxygen counts.  They've pumped two units of blood into her five foot nothing frame and she can't talk on the phone because her oxygen goes even lower when she tries to speak.  For anybody who'd read Freak, you know she wasn't the best of mothers at the best of times, but these health problems, although exacerbated by her own addictions to alcohol and pills, are caused in no small part by my dad.  My mutherfucking, slut fucker father.

Way back, almost sixty years ago, when Mom was pregnant with my brother Frank, it was found that she had chlamydia, a nasty little std that really screws up your immune system.  When she was in labor, they scraped her out and poured an entire bottle of rubbing alcohol into her vagina, holding her down while she screamed in agony and labor pains.  This was to prevent the baby from contracting the disease on its way out.  She'd gotten it from Dad.  During their catastrophic thirty years of marriage, he fucked every female he could get his sweaty hands on, including thirteen-year-old me.  When I was so ill in my twenties and thirties, the doctors tested me for everything, including AIDS and chlamydia, on the chance that my incestuous pedophile pappy might have given it to adolescent me.  The tests were negative.  I was lucky.  Not so my mom.

Ever since I was a little girl, Mom's had something wrong with her.  Breast problems, gastro-intestinal problems, arthritis, easy bruising, lung problems, female trouble and, like me, a hysterectomy at the age of thirty-five.  She'd get pneumonia at the drop of a hat. Add all that together with her heavy drinking and Valium affection and it's a wonder she's still alive.  As I've said before, we're impossible to kill.  We get sick, we get horrifically ill, but we don't die.  That's Mom.  I remember her having her "cyst baths" as she called them, telling me as a child that she had a "very dry female area" and the doctor had recommended these baths every once in a while.  It wasn't until four years ago that she admitted the truth.  I saw red then and I'm seeing red again today. 

It's so strange to feel love, hatred and pity for a person at the same time, but that's the curse of the abused child.  I'm sure Dad and Mom both feel the same for their shit kicker parents.  They were both abused far more than I ever was, but it's not a contest and abuse is always painful.  That's its definition.  I love both my parents but right now, I wish my father would just drop dead.  Who knows how many hapless women and girls he's infected in the "sixty year hard on" he likes to reminisce about nowadays.  Who knows how many unknown brothers and sisters I might have out there, diseased or not, but all victims.  My dad is a victim as well but abuse does strange things to a person, so often easily categorized but also as individual as a fingerprint.  People either learn from it, become crushed and bitter from it, grow to need it, learn to carry on the tradition, or an amalgam of some or all of the above.  Mom became a sort of sado-masochist but Dad really took the ball and ran with it.  He was a vicious, sadistic pig who dreamt of being punished for being such a bad, bad boy.  He told me, when I was around fourteen, that he was in love with me because I "didn't let him get away with shit."  Ugh. 

When stuff like this happens to Mom, I immediately think of Dad and the disease he spread because he couldn't keep it in his pants.  I usually have little anger toward either parent but when it wells up like this, I know it's just waiting down in the cellar, lurking.  It'll always be there.  I can't get rid of it any more than my mom can get rid of the std her husband gave her.  But I can live with it.  That's the real triumph in us nutball insecurity addicts; to recognize that the feelings will never go away but we can sure as hell pull that stinger out of the wasp.  An abusive parent passes that legacy to the child they brutalize.  We all go to school and learn to be just as cruel to ourselves as anybody on the outside could ever be.  That's why we stay in horrible relationships, keep choosing carbon copies of our maniac pasts, pat ourselves on the back for being loyal, loving, forgiving to somebody that no one in their right mind would ever stay with.  That's the secret we keep from ourselves.  We're not in our right mind.  We're clueless, self-abusive idiots until we take ourselves in hand.  And I don't mean backhand.  Been there, done that.  Literally.  I took myself in hand when my son was in rehab.  I looked without the shit-colored glasses and saw with clear eyes everything I'd done to myself and I made a concerted effort to clean up my own mess.  And it was hard.  Sometimes it's still really, really hard.  To love myself.  So many years of self abuse, so many bad relationships and ghastly childhood memories, so many terrible thoughts forever ingrained in my beat up brain.  But I do.  I love myself.  Who'd have thought it?  Who'd believe that somebody so low could climb this high?  And I'll never stop climbing.  Poor little abused and miserable Becky O'Donnell has, at long last, a strong and loving protector: Big old tough loving adult Rebecca O'Donnell.  I'll always be here for her, that little crushed girl and her bleeding broken self. 

Still want to drop my father down a mine shaft but that's okay.  Small steps.

Love, R

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