BAD MEMORIES FROM A GOOD CHILDHOOD

In scientific terms, you might say that I am an abortion survivor. I wouldn't be here telling this story today had the chemicals in the pills my mother took back in 1953, worked as they were designed to. In many ways, I see this as the starting point in my life. When I was just a little zygote, I had no way of knowing what sort of future, if any, was in store for me. At that point in time, whether I lived or died had no effect on me emotionally. It had nothing to do with Jesus or God or praying.  This story is told from one person's memory, which could be sharp as a tack, or may be truly faulty and flawed. Either way, I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is a story of my very own childhood. Don't get me wrong--I had a very good childhood growing up in Eastern Ontario Canada. Here in this story I will mostly deal with the bad parts of that childhood, hence the name of this blog--Bad Memories from a Good Childhood.

Have any of you ever done First Memories Exercises?  It is a good way of finding out what was going on around you in your very early years as a child.  I didn't have to do any exercises because I have a pretty good photographic memory starting as early as one year old.  At 11 months of age I was speaking and walking.  The doctor told my mother that I was a very advanced and exceptional child.  My mother herself would recount stories about how surprised people were when the baby would start speaking in complete sentences.  Apparently this was freaky for my mother and for the people around her. My very first memory is that of wanting to be big and tall.  I was not yet tall enough for the top of my head to reach the bottom of an open kitchen drawer even while stretching.  I remember that I kept measuring the space between my head and the drawer with my fingers. The next vivid memory I have is at the age of two years.  I had a toy fishing rod and was fishing off a dock with my fath

In the early years our family lived in one unit of a 4 unit apartment building owned by my grandmother.  The units were mostly occupied by family members, ie., my mother's sisters and their husbands and children.  One bad memory from this time is of my uncle Paul who was married to my mother's older sister.  Maybe I was 4 or 5 years old and my 2 cousins, Ricky and Jan were a bit younger.  We were playing at their apartment when something one of the cousins did made uncle Paul furiously angry.  He yelled at the boy to go upstairs and take off all his clothes.  I knew what this meant because my cousin had previously shown me the red and raised welts across his flesh from the leather belt his father used to beat him.  The cousin left and uncle Paul just stood there like a big buffoon as I proceeded to tell him how wrong and bad this punishment was and how I was not in agreement with it.  I forget the words I used, but I didn't pull any punches.  When I finished he told me to g

It was a backyard playtime afternoon when I was about 6 years old that I learned where babies came from.  I was playing with a neighborhood friend who was maybe two years older than I.  She seemed to think she knew everything.  She explained to me her own unbelievable theory about how babies come into the world.  Something involving the belly button and not the vagina at all.  I had witnessed my cousin's dog giving birth to a litter of pups and was not to be conned. My guess was that the belly button version, just like the stork, was her mother's cleaned up version of a baby's entry into the world.  At the first opportunity I got myself to the library and confirmed what I already knew.  The library, unlike my neighbor friends, was something I could always trust and rely on.

My father was always very kind to me, but he shouldn't get too much credit in this story as he allowed my mother's abuse to continue unchecked.  Her abusive ways were so barbaric and violent that I began to play games in my head rewriting my story where she was not my real mother.  This helped me to cope with all the mental and physical torture she heaped upon me.  I was 3 years old when I realized that I would never love my mother and I certainly wasn't going to wait around for her to love me.  Just the thought of her physical presence could make me very ill.  If she came too close to me, her scent was so foreign and disgusting to me that I wanted to vomit.  I was thoroughly repulsed by her and with that I became more and more withdrawn.  I remember when I went to kindergarten the teacher told my mother that I was "a funny little monkey".  Well, that's probably because I never spoke.  And I never spoke because my speeches were always met with violence and abu

My new sister arrived when I was almost 2 years old.  I felt so much love for her and have loved her ever since. My manipulative mother tried to get me to hate my sister but it didn't work.  My mother would constantly praise my sister as being such a good baby, who ate well and slept well.  Unlike myself who had been a very big complainer, crying all the time and not sleeping.  Abortion pill side effects?  Very possible. As my sister grew I could see that both my parents were physically abusive to her and I would try to love and protect her till the day I died.  My father never hit me once in my life.  I always wondered why he hit my sister on a regular basis.  My mother's idea was that my sister just wanted attention and would push his buttons for that reason.  In my mother's world, even negative attention was good.  We are talking about one of the biggest attention seekers that I have ever known, after all. My sister was a very active and curious toddler.  She was n

In the late 50's and early 60's my parents were young, in love and carefree.  Just kidding! Many nights as a young child I stayed awake into the wee hours of the morning listening to my parents, aunts and uncles screaming and pounding their fists on the table if the card game wasn't going their way, then singing in loud drunken voices. ALL I WISHED FOR WAS SOME PROPER SLEEP.  I don't know how my sister slept through this, but as I said before she was a very good sleeper.  Our apartment was filled with noise and cigarette smoke during these soirees.  To this day I cannot play cards and I cannot stand even the sight of a card game. On other nights, my parents would dress up and my mother would put on makeup, announcing that they were "going dancing".  There would be inevitable fights when my parents returned late in the night, keeping me awake once again.  My mother was so very jealous of my father.  That is what all the fights were about.  The joke in the

When I was about 5 years old there was a murder/suicide in our extended family on my mother's side.  The murderer was related to us only by marriage to my mother's older sister.  At the time, there was much discussion and conversation about this event between my parents and aunts and uncles.  They were so wrapped up in themselves and this unseemly family crime drama that they never tried to hide the gory details from me and spoke very openly about it within my hearing range. Basically a drunken hillbilly who was married to my maternal aunt was looking for his wife because he wanted to kill her.  The wife was hiding from her abusive drunken hillbilly husband at her daughter and son-in-law's house.  Of course, that was the first place the drunken hillbilly husband looked for her.  He drove to their house and got out of his vehicle brandishing a shotgun and calling loudly for his wife to come out.  The son-in-law, Billy Merriman, came outside and confronted the agitated drun

My maternal grandparents lived on a large dairy farm out in the country and they raised nine children there.  One of my uncles who visited from Toronto happened to be the "funny uncle".  My mother must have known he was a rapist perhaps by firsthand experience or maybe from the warnings of an older sister.  In any case, my mother always strictly supervised us when this uncle was visiting the farm and she would never allow us near him or alone with him when we were visiting my grandparents. My young female cousin, daughter of uncle Paul, who was 5 or 6 years old at the time, was not so lucky.  She was raped by her mother's brother in our grandparents' barn.  Once again I overheard bits of adult conversations to gain this knowledge.  They never got any help or medical attention for the little girl, nor did they ever again talk about it, like it never happened. A few years later, when the rapist was killed in Toronto under suspicious circumstances, I overheard my fat

Chi Chi was my after school friend who lived a couple of blocks down from our apartment building.  We would sit on her front porch and have snacks and sodas in the late afternoon.  Her brother was Dickie and he was a teenager in high school.  He always made a fuss over his little sister and she looked up to him.  And he was so handsome and polite.  I always wished I had a big brother like him, but that could never happen because I was the eldest. One day after school my parents told me that there had been a bad accide nt.  Four teenagers in a car were hit by a train at a level crossing.  They were all killed and Dickie was one of them.  I went to Chi Chi's house and we sat on the front porch and sobbed and cried for a long time that afternoon.

Sister #2 arrived about three and a half years after sister #1.  This baby was my mother's mini me.  Almost looked like a clone of my mother and still does.  This child was never tortured nor beaten although the torture and beatings continued for me and my closest sister #1. When my sister #2 was a baby of 18 months or so, she became suddenly mysteriously ill.  Viral meningitis was the diagnosis.  Kids were dying from it back then and our baby sister went into a coma in hospital for 4 days!  Of course, I learned all the details, as usual, from the uncensored household chatter of my mother and the aunts.  The biggest impact on me was when I went to school one day and a student announced to me:  "Your sister is in a coma!  She will either die or come out retarded!" How could this be???  When I returned home from school my mother assured me that my sister would not die or come out retarded.  My mother spent the 4 days at hospital at the bedside of our baby sister and tal

When a person flies into a rage and bites their fist psychologists call this attention seeking behavior.  When a person bites their fist in anger in front of a child it is a terrorist tactic.  My mother was an attention seeking terrorist, plain and simple. If an adult were to slap a child across the face really hard, that would be abuse.  Child abuse is terror inducing soul assassination. I was more like my father than my two sisters and mother.  While those three were chatty and noisy, we were quiet and reserved.  While they would fly into rages and fits of anger, we would silently smoke and avoid conflict, resorting to sarcasm and passive aggressiveness.  I believe passive aggressive behavior to be a form of self protection.  In my later adult years I have become more objectively confrontational and I have even given other people lessons on setting boundaries, etc. My mother slapped me hard in the face two or three times that I remember.  Each time she slapped me when I made an

My parents bought a shitty fixer upper house out in the middle of nowhere when I was 9 years old.   The year was 1962.  The house had electricity but no running water or indoor plumbing.  We were expecting the FOURTH child, my brother.  The house had only two bedrooms and was heated by an oil space heater in the middle of the living room. The entire area of the "bungalow" was about 550 sq ft.  I guess we were poor, but I had a reel to reel tape recorder and heard The Beatles on the radio for the first time.  I recorded the music from the radio and could listen whenever I wanted.  We had a very long driveway at that country house and my father taught me how to drive when I was 10 years old.  I had a burning desire to drive a car and he couldn't say no.  I already knew how to drive from watching my father quite closely when we were in the car.  When I became proficient at driving, he let me take the car up and down the driveway all by myself.  That was an excellent boost to

Our family moved back into the city when I was 13 years old and ready to start high school.  We lived in a housing project of townhouses and I had my own room.  This made my life better.  My sister and I were now bathing ourselves and combing and brushing our own hair since quite some time and there was obviously some relief there. My mother took to beating me and my sister with a rubber fly swatter over our bare legs and arms and it hurt like hell!  Sometimes the rubber would fly off and my mother would continue to beat us with the wire.  These beatings took place out of the blue and we never knew why or when the next beating would happen.  One day when my sister and I arrived at our house, out came the fly swatter and my sister was on the receiving end.  Something snapped inside me.  I HAD HAD ENOUGH!  I remember becoming enraged by this abusive action from my mother--by this time I was almost the same height as she was.  I quickly grabbed her by the wrist with a one-handed grip an

My mother's sister, my aunt Genie, when I turned 14 got me hired on to work at the department store catalog office where she worked as a manager.  This was done at my mother's request.  They must have lied on the job application because I was only 14 and you had to be 16 to work at the time.  Every Saturday I went to the Sears catalog store and worked all day on the phones and customer order desk.  When I came home with a paycheck every two weeks my mother took half the money as "room and board". Secretly I wished or fantasized that my mother was saving up this money and later would present it to me for my college fund.  No such thing ever happened.  In reality she supplied herself with booze and cigarettes.  As far as I know my mother was never able to collect "room and board" from any of my siblings when they worked part time as students and still lived at home.  Siblings, correct me if I am wrong. This was just another form of abuse, an adult benefiti

When I was 16 years old, my sister of 14 years became pregnant.  The circumstances of how she became pregnant are best told by my sister herself because I wasn't there.  Of course, I would have stopped the rape if I had been there.  She never told anyone, not even me and I had no clue what she was going through.  My sister later told me that she saw me riding my bicycle on the main street of our town as she was leaving on the bus headed for New York City to obtain the abortion.  Abortion was still illegal in the US and Canada at that time.  She told me that I seemed so happy and carefree on my bike and she really wanted to get off the bus at that moment and tell me.  But she did not. Because my sister left and stayed away from home overnight, my parents went into a complete uproar.  I didn't know what was happening but it seemed like something terrible.  I am confused on the exact circumstances, but I believe that my parents received information that my sister had gone to NYC