stephensdottir
the confessional poets had a huge influence on me during my high school years. i and other girls at the girls school interpreted the works at forensics competitions we attended under our drama coach. at st. cecilia academy in nashville tennessee our drama director cathy stamps ran a tight ship. she was bleach blond about six foot five inches or more, dreaded, and yet critical to our education. i remember thinking math and science were a bit dodgy, computers scarce, but drama was our forte, largely due to her.
as others took the center stage, namely one impeccable christie collier, i drifted across the street into montgomery bell academy's bart weitman productions.
christie collier and i interpreted a duet acting piece lettice and lovage, our drunk british dramatic farce. we were fifteen.
at MBA, a first showing of samuel beckett's waiting for godot staring bill siesser and paul thompson had me enraptured. i proceeded to attend the next two performances for the one weekend showing.
Beckett was a revolution for Belle Meade, the catholics, the racists, the homophobes.
i remember bullying so severe from some of the MBA chaps one would suspect suicide the only natural reaction. Beau Tidwell was viciously called a "faggot" for working with the drama department. his face would turn beet red as the jocks ridiculed him.
chris kuhn lurked around. liam folan shared with me his art career, many years later.
the dreadfulness of the home life, gave way to super-dedication to after-school events. i remember attending the tennessee state museum with father as my brain tangled with the options. i was torn between a musical with cathy stamps---meet me in st. louis, or the obscure and off beat dramatic choices of bart weitman across the street at the boy's school. he had a small part for me in the imaginary invalid adapted from moliere.
my first role for him was as clara voiyante in his own work some kind of satire ala julius caesar---a roman forum thing.
i was the soothsayer who ran onto the stage crooning about the ides of march.
one flew over the cukoo's nest shaped me.
it was pre-revenge on the prozac nation to come.
bill siesser shuffled his feet as he chanted his chief bromden. it was slightly too "adult" for us. we were teenagers enacting a tragedy from the oregon state mental hospital, a tragedy from the MKultra years. then came Equus. Bill Siesser was dysart, the self-doubting psychiatrist interviewing the child who blinded horses. As hester soloman, i walked onto the stage, a solitary voice of reason, in a long velvet skirt and velvet coat, a coral print mottled blouse, disco vintage.
a court authority. nevermind that bill and i were fiercely in love. it was not until after the final curtain we would disclose our hearts in words, as it was clear our love, by our locked eyes, and my effusive letters.
none of this education would have been possible on a west coast. nashville, for all it's horrors, murderers and rapists, had a certain old-fashioned dignity that i would never find in portland or even los angeles. by moving back east, the folks returned to bygone eras, where the erasures of the west coast, were overwritten with the accretions of the past. victoriana prevailed in the gruesome southern social niceties. a convent of civil war nuns housed the nightmares of fantasy---st. cecilia girls dancing with confederate soldiers.
from the age of 10 or so, i was scolded about mortal sin by mother. one memorable event of scolding was "seventeen" magazine arriving by mail with a "how to french kiss" article. there, in the front righthand library full of grandfather's history books, and b-52 pilots over russia and khrushchev books, i was getting schooled on how i would "go to hell" if i ever kissed a boy outside of "marriage" or "wedlock."
some fortunate experience---was cathy stamps teaching our English Class "the scarlet letter" which i read some years earlier in the big CIA house aka 1501 Eastland Ave.
exposing us religious school girls to the severity of the puritanical adultress-bashing misogyny of the scarlet letter had quite a seed of wisdom in it. then later we read the crucible.
i was keen enough to read the nietzsche "beyond good and evil' junior year from the st. cecilia library, prior to it being purged by the censors, who even threw away the gandhi my experiments with truth, or some such.
the school librarian hosted the "banned books" month, complete with a list of radical books banned from stalin to the pontiff. she was fired, or resigned, in the summer purge. i loved to speak with her. it was a shame to return senior year to find her missing along with the nietzsche.
i spent lunch periods alone in the library either reading or taking a nap, as i did not like eating or the noise of the rowdy dirty lunchroom.
i knew which books were missing, and it revolted me.
i remember where i read tale of two cities.
war and peace occupied the fall of 1994. proudly i carried abound the mammoth paperback.
many lovely afternoons were spent hungrily in the ben west downtown nashville library with father.
i would puzzle over the differences between newton and leibnitz and first found kiekegaard there.
i had a certain pride of my life as father's daughter. he treated me as a colleague. he was looked at a certain way. life was grand in the regions of his mind. he was the perfect anti-dote to all the religious fanaticism at the religious schools or with mother.
under father, freedom of thought was celebrated, and every radical text emerged worthy of exploration. proudly i told him of all my recent discoveries: voltaire, shelley, keats.
i read everything i possibly could of his library, keenly aware of a condescending sexism of the arrogant boys at montgomery bell academy. they were both socially awkward from single sex education, and fantastically rudely sexist, in a southern, or 1950's way, in varying degrees of course.
i junked crates of journals and poems into a 2004 recycling bin.
writing was nothing i wanted to do. i did it to make time go away, in the great vast solitudes inflicted by my mother's 50-70 hour work weeks at the hospital.
as a three year old i cried as she left for work. i tried to find solace in Mr. Rogers neighborhood on public television. by age sixteen, i plainly explained to mother her path of destroying her children by working so much and neglecting us---could be partially reversed if she stopped neglecting the younger ones. i was so tired of hearing my sister wail in misery every lonely morning, with only me to be her teenaged mother-figure substitute. at least she had me, for i had no one but father and the clatter of his typewriter.
the brothers were unruly, but fun sometimes. i am haunted by outing my brother's violence to my other brother. why is it such secrets must lie? that i am given such horrific information in 2010, only to leak it now? why for three years have i carried this festering abhorrent fact in my heart, as i set scurrying about squandering money to relieve the despair of a broken home?
the fact is, we children were mere fruits of lust, to be cast off, in the capitalistic money-shuffle.
the arts and drama and literature i liked, were ridiculed by mother who wanted me to become a nurse or some other kind of hourly wage slave. it is amazing i ever enjoyed anything at all, with the chronic condemnation she cast on any of my interests. it is not until in the last year of so she spoke positively of anything i have written, but now has reverted to what is.
in a dream helen eng says "ta-ta"
the CIA wives book would really start with Anne Eng, who claims she did not know dad's early CIA jobs. did he tell me and not her? she literally knew nothing of the grandfolk due to dad's total information freeze in the 1970's.
the war nurse. all i heard about my whole childhood was alcoholic vietnam vets, emphysmatic vietnam vets. from her that is, and all about god, and a few stories of her folks.
one time i watched my mother chase my grandmother mary kangas around the room screaming at her in a very declasse way, as if she was trying to kill her with grief. indeed, maybe that's all she's doing to me, these days.
but i have to decide, what way it is for me to live my life: do i spend the next sixty years in the shadow of her anger, her religion, her imprecations, her curses?
sitting in the dock of her new home, on her new porch, i felt a bit of mr. smith goes to washington. but where does mr. smith go?
the warmth ends there, in the safe zone of the porch, the porch on which she lunged at me to strike me.
asked: are you going to hit me. she said i want to, proceeded to sit down beside me and continue to excoriate me.
the night before i had a fantastical dream of some kind of pan european adventure---huge architecture--and me then finding the body of a middle aged blonde woman---a valerie plame like character---or a nancy bergeson---who i understand in the dream-- to be dead and killed via assassination.
the nightmares one may have, in the safest room of the safe house, and yet . . .
in the dream i am processing the corpse, thinking: at least i am not dead yet. i think, what did she do to merit this?
upon waking, i am confronted with the realization of the terror i feel anywhere near my mother, her torture chambers, or her threats, or her religious condemnations.
one day she sat me down to explain how it it religiously offensive to live with me, against her principles.
i could feel that disdain.
the nightmares i had of her as a child were of her face screaming at me from the reflective shiny chandelier mirror-effect that hung over the bed ransom and helen eng left for me. i would dream these horrific dreams of being burnt alive---due to the arsonists burning many neighboring buildings---and of mother as a demonic screaming torturer, who had me chained to scream at me. this was partially inspired by a bell witch book i read in an antique store father took me to---but also from the many many occasions on which she "lost her temper" at us or my father.
sundays were always a dreadful day with screaming and chaos and panic prior to the church experience.
a huge contradiction of maniacal temper-losing with the mixed message of peace, etc at church.
mother had always worked the saturday night before and all sunday morning at the hospitals---and so then with her panicked rush to zoom in and get her kids to take to church---mixed with the extreme pain in her arthritus in her hip which she wore down under extreme overwork from 1983-1995---not to be replaced until 2005 when i was invited to be of caregiving assistance to my father's dementia as my mother underwent her hip surgeries 20 years late.
capitalism!
there was a dramatic shift in my teenaged years when mother became very mad at father---more than i ever remember besides the plate-throwing episode when i was three.
was it her hip-pain? my father's dissociative apathetic aloofness?
i always felt his loneliness. clearly they had very little time to be loving towards one another.
this plate throwing at the floor under steve's feet---i perceive now as the most dreadful child-abuse of little three-year old me.
of course at that age adults seem as big as monsters. to my father's credit---he never was abusive to her---except in allowing her to drive around town sleep-deprived and nearly half-dead from overwork.
if any of them had a brain cell or two they would realize that watching my mother work herself half to death my entire childhood was child abuse. riding in a car with a chronically sleep-deprived mother---was child abuse and child endangerment.
watching my mother destroy her body was like watching a slow-suicide.
it was dreadful to know she was in extreme pain and would not stop her workaholic life.
it was dreadful to see her blame it all on father as though he was a puppetmaster and she a puppet.
throwing the plates and shattering them at my father's feet is a moment i can't forgive. i am sad that i know and remember this and my siblings were not born to know it. i feel it is my duty that they know this earliest memory.
father smashed his guitar on the patio in front of me--i was two or three. he was dreadfully unhappy---and quite oblivious to the need to demonstrate safety and calm for the sake of the children.
the first time mother asked father to spank us, he refused, making a mockery of the whole exercise of demonic anger. he slapped his own leg to make a noise and laughed it off. it was clear then and there who was to be trusted, and who was most reasonable.
he fed us pink penicillin and called himself Dr. Eng in his spooky dracula voice.
when father smashed the guitar on the pavement, i knew it was not meant for me, but that he didn't know i was watching him as he wept and cried and sobbed out.
i lurked behind watching his misery.
brother looked at me so painfully--and cried out to my friend---do you read her blogs---and he said--what you wrote on your blog---presumably about his drunk tirade in which he ridiculed my "shitty" clothes and threw my beads across the floor---
he looked afraid to ever do such a thing again. if the truth comes around via the internet or any other way---
i was reading the sun also rises, drinking tea, painfully aware of his misery in 1994 or so. what could i do.
being a big sister was such a job.
when ransom died, anne eng found a former prisoner to soak out some cash to. michael gave me the main scoop that mom was being conned out of big bucks by this con-artist guy. we sensed the sexual undertone of this hot construction worker sponging off all the CIA money as father faded into his dementia.
i had the sudden realization today that it was painfully wrong for mother to invite a man with a severe criminal history to do construction work on her home in the presence of my teenaged sister.
how reckless.
my level of understanding her dealings was faded---as i spent most of the time i could far away---at various apartments, boyfriend's house, or head in books.
i had not the maturity to see so clearly the wrong done unto my little sister there.
but now i think about it, i find it extremely creepy this man had mom buy him a $30,000 truck with ransom eng's money and punted at least 100K towards this absurdly ugly construction project on her house.
it was all for naught.
as the canonized "mentally ill" person of mother's mythology-making she negated my ideas, opinions. advice, or any collective decision-making process.
dehumanizing me was the first step to stealing ransom's stupid cash.
michael admits he'd be dead of some alcohol-drug thing like a regular rich kid if mom had not creamed it off to the stock market and her con artist job.
i do know the first house ransom eng bought worth $100, 000 in 1985 was bought to be left in trust with equal parts for the education of the children.
when mother mortgaged it to shreds and converted the value into a lesser quality house, i was aware by age 14 of her propensity to steal from the children and steal from ransom eng.
that she would then now work herself to death at the veteran's hospital now in her seventieth year holds little hope.
as if money solves everything.
i gave up trying to explain that money is not it. that she had a chance to be a friend, a human, to listen. i liked it better when she lived in a small apartment and took her pension humbly and didn't lord it over us how rich she is. the whole american dream thing becomes oppressive as it becomes a whip to prove and reprove your children's unlovability via poverty.
the depths of despair and isolation---watching over unloved father---and feeling the loneliness of his lonely nights---
doesn't match with the demonization some like to situate his way.
mother admitted on october 1st---part of why she seldom visits father in his hospital bed is that she still hates him. now this hurts me to hear this. how could she say this?
michael---on our second to last phone conversation---explained a disgusting level of humiliating derogatory talk about father, and about me, by virtue of being like father.
he called him many offensive things most notably "douchebag" a nasty hipster word i find extremely guttery and distasteful---in addition to it's misogynistic vaginaphobic obsessionalism.
at any rate---i never really wanted to speak to michael after that. i was torn by feeling like a patient big sister who is giving my brother a free range to try out all his curse-word vocabulary because alcoholism has pillaged his basic high IQ---and wanting to tell him he was a trashy potty-mouth and should respect himself more than that, to talk such trash.
i called him again, after mother's friend invited her domestic violence abuser strangler to mom's home.
i wanted him to know that a crime victim and domestic violence abuser were congregating near mother's bad judgement.
so if anything happens---maybe he could talk sense into her.
that was May 2013.
my lease in my downtown portland apartment was up the second i found out about the jaime larson murder.
i simply could not face the fact that i lived between killer and killed, and had inquired about living at each of their apartment buildings and had settled on the one in the middle of killer and killed---complete with the screaming vietnam vet who screamed at 4am in psychotic flashbacks.
father had a song: the vietnam way ain't over yet, it takes a long long time.
so i wasn't really so keen to stand on the corner with the guantanamo protesters as all that.
i was just a place i felt safe---in the protective hippy ambiance of portland activisms--a place i had known since 2005 animal rights, or the glories of the california anti-war marches.
i wasn't there on the prowl, except i was---looking for a way out.
so of course, the original byline, is that law school might eventually wend it's way to me. paralegal school and all my fisticuff litgations inspired a joy for fighting crime.
but i know as well as law.com how hard up the industry is. the theoretical aspects were what interest me more---how tech and media intervene, to make up for the missing fairness in the system.
so from january 10 to about may 18th 2013 i endured a "money-saving" sojourn with mother.
she brought up abortion many times, and religion many times.
i told her i was not interested in talking about these things. i was amazed at how she chronically obsessively brought them up---as if to hurt me.
she then suggested i go stay at a hotel, or go away.
what with 6-8 spare rooms it seemed silly to pay 95% of my income on rent---but the fact was that so miserable i became saving money by living with her that i spent at least most all of every penny on shopping sprees for household goods, or clothes i gave away to the homeless, or flooring for her, or expensive health foods or housepaints and plants for her garden and such.
i wanted to make an impression not to be defeated: that no matter how much trash she talks about me, or how much she accuses me of anger, or generalized sinfulness, insanity, etc---it would be clearly felt---a large impression on her house---so that should my siblings reappear---they would not be confronted by a total squalor, a filth, a poverty in which we frequently dwelled.
as my model---i imagined the clean efficiency of the Chesapeake house and my memories there---of a clean furnished place in the style of my grandparents eng.
in springtime, i took chinese history, western civilization and european history, reveling in ideas, amidst the filth of the sex industry in southeast portland.
"nude girls here" signs i explained to mother would constitute sexual harassment and child abuse thusly in my opinion the crime-infested neighborhood was uninhabitable and completely shattered the value of her house.
i read up on the meth house raid and drug dealer suicide when the FBI found the man barricaded in the garage nearby.
the knifings.
the drive-by shootings.
america--what a wreck.
it's not like i didn't survive car-jacking in LA, or an occasional trip through south central, or shots fired as i made my way into my hollywood apartment.
there is just so little reward for portland gangland nonsense. at least LA has a few good museums, or some fashionable people, or interesting cultures to embrace.
portland trashy crime culture is so vapid---
where would i have----i am constantly plagued by regret that i didn't beg my way into a DC home with ransom and helen eng, who would never abuse me, for sure.
so i found my ticket out and am on the out again. these struggles will be for another time to speak of, these struggles are fresh and harsh, but these past struggles have clarity, where the present is an ambient confusion.
i do miss blackheath most of all.
i miss my old friend, to whom i muttered: i'm avoiding my mother, dreading her.
my swedish friend said: it seems like you are running from something.
it was all this braingarbage piled up in my mind so thick i could i could hardly think or negotiate north south east west.
i am expecting an apology, but it never arrives.
perhaps she doesn't know how much she has hurt me, and how it eats at me every day.
i never clear my mind and heart of it, i never move on, i never lose myself in a moment anymore.
i think cruelty can really kill a person. enough cruelty torture and negativity can really kill someone.
so i left, only to hear everone else's own horror stories.
the human condition it was called, to put it nicely, so much misery, toil and tears.
the coldness i feel from my siblings i imagine is a chronic asperger's type aloofness we all inherited from father. we are all equally unable to express love or caring for each-other.
i was supposed to be the one to bother with mother's estate but now that she wants to threaten me with violence she might need to find another victim.
so---is it death she wants to strike?
i often imagine that mother's internalized misogyny finds an exterior target in me---or that her own self-hatred extends to me.
why have a child, only to heap it with hatred and scorn and neglect?
i'll never understand.
"runt" that i am.
sometimes i know now i just have to let go.
i can't immerse myself in any one's anger, cruelty, accusations.
all i feel now is generalized confusion, over why would anyone be so mean.
what is worse than fear of death, is the fear of the truth. not any truth but also the supreme truth of the other's subjectivity.
no one wants to admit i have feelings. that when mother called dreadful american police to smash me to the ground in 1998, i would never be the same.
the utilization of police as proxy bullies to administer domestic violence, when her screaming was not sufficient torture enough---
what a curious way of living, most surely distasteful to father.
i can hear him muttering to himself in 2001 "anne doesn't understand me"
she doesn't understand me either.
that's two of us.
now my sister, she spoke the shibboleth into my heart, lamenting what mother did to me---trying to drug away my creativity, bisexuality, atheism, vegetarianism, cornering me like the school bully with drugs and gurneys and police and chronic demoralizing imprecations and incarcerations.
it was torture for her to watch it.
the fact that they suffered as i was crucified, is what i am most concerned for: the way they suffered.
as others took the center stage, namely one impeccable christie collier, i drifted across the street into montgomery bell academy's bart weitman productions.
christie collier and i interpreted a duet acting piece lettice and lovage, our drunk british dramatic farce. we were fifteen.
at MBA, a first showing of samuel beckett's waiting for godot staring bill siesser and paul thompson had me enraptured. i proceeded to attend the next two performances for the one weekend showing.
Beckett was a revolution for Belle Meade, the catholics, the racists, the homophobes.
i remember bullying so severe from some of the MBA chaps one would suspect suicide the only natural reaction. Beau Tidwell was viciously called a "faggot" for working with the drama department. his face would turn beet red as the jocks ridiculed him.
chris kuhn lurked around. liam folan shared with me his art career, many years later.
the dreadfulness of the home life, gave way to super-dedication to after-school events. i remember attending the tennessee state museum with father as my brain tangled with the options. i was torn between a musical with cathy stamps---meet me in st. louis, or the obscure and off beat dramatic choices of bart weitman across the street at the boy's school. he had a small part for me in the imaginary invalid adapted from moliere.
my first role for him was as clara voiyante in his own work some kind of satire ala julius caesar---a roman forum thing.
i was the soothsayer who ran onto the stage crooning about the ides of march.
one flew over the cukoo's nest shaped me.
it was pre-revenge on the prozac nation to come.
bill siesser shuffled his feet as he chanted his chief bromden. it was slightly too "adult" for us. we were teenagers enacting a tragedy from the oregon state mental hospital, a tragedy from the MKultra years. then came Equus. Bill Siesser was dysart, the self-doubting psychiatrist interviewing the child who blinded horses. As hester soloman, i walked onto the stage, a solitary voice of reason, in a long velvet skirt and velvet coat, a coral print mottled blouse, disco vintage.
a court authority. nevermind that bill and i were fiercely in love. it was not until after the final curtain we would disclose our hearts in words, as it was clear our love, by our locked eyes, and my effusive letters.
none of this education would have been possible on a west coast. nashville, for all it's horrors, murderers and rapists, had a certain old-fashioned dignity that i would never find in portland or even los angeles. by moving back east, the folks returned to bygone eras, where the erasures of the west coast, were overwritten with the accretions of the past. victoriana prevailed in the gruesome southern social niceties. a convent of civil war nuns housed the nightmares of fantasy---st. cecilia girls dancing with confederate soldiers.
from the age of 10 or so, i was scolded about mortal sin by mother. one memorable event of scolding was "seventeen" magazine arriving by mail with a "how to french kiss" article. there, in the front righthand library full of grandfather's history books, and b-52 pilots over russia and khrushchev books, i was getting schooled on how i would "go to hell" if i ever kissed a boy outside of "marriage" or "wedlock."
some fortunate experience---was cathy stamps teaching our English Class "the scarlet letter" which i read some years earlier in the big CIA house aka 1501 Eastland Ave.
exposing us religious school girls to the severity of the puritanical adultress-bashing misogyny of the scarlet letter had quite a seed of wisdom in it. then later we read the crucible.
i was keen enough to read the nietzsche "beyond good and evil' junior year from the st. cecilia library, prior to it being purged by the censors, who even threw away the gandhi my experiments with truth, or some such.
the school librarian hosted the "banned books" month, complete with a list of radical books banned from stalin to the pontiff. she was fired, or resigned, in the summer purge. i loved to speak with her. it was a shame to return senior year to find her missing along with the nietzsche.
i spent lunch periods alone in the library either reading or taking a nap, as i did not like eating or the noise of the rowdy dirty lunchroom.
i knew which books were missing, and it revolted me.
i remember where i read tale of two cities.
war and peace occupied the fall of 1994. proudly i carried abound the mammoth paperback.
many lovely afternoons were spent hungrily in the ben west downtown nashville library with father.
i would puzzle over the differences between newton and leibnitz and first found kiekegaard there.
i had a certain pride of my life as father's daughter. he treated me as a colleague. he was looked at a certain way. life was grand in the regions of his mind. he was the perfect anti-dote to all the religious fanaticism at the religious schools or with mother.
under father, freedom of thought was celebrated, and every radical text emerged worthy of exploration. proudly i told him of all my recent discoveries: voltaire, shelley, keats.
i read everything i possibly could of his library, keenly aware of a condescending sexism of the arrogant boys at montgomery bell academy. they were both socially awkward from single sex education, and fantastically rudely sexist, in a southern, or 1950's way, in varying degrees of course.
i junked crates of journals and poems into a 2004 recycling bin.
writing was nothing i wanted to do. i did it to make time go away, in the great vast solitudes inflicted by my mother's 50-70 hour work weeks at the hospital.
as a three year old i cried as she left for work. i tried to find solace in Mr. Rogers neighborhood on public television. by age sixteen, i plainly explained to mother her path of destroying her children by working so much and neglecting us---could be partially reversed if she stopped neglecting the younger ones. i was so tired of hearing my sister wail in misery every lonely morning, with only me to be her teenaged mother-figure substitute. at least she had me, for i had no one but father and the clatter of his typewriter.
the brothers were unruly, but fun sometimes. i am haunted by outing my brother's violence to my other brother. why is it such secrets must lie? that i am given such horrific information in 2010, only to leak it now? why for three years have i carried this festering abhorrent fact in my heart, as i set scurrying about squandering money to relieve the despair of a broken home?
the fact is, we children were mere fruits of lust, to be cast off, in the capitalistic money-shuffle.
the arts and drama and literature i liked, were ridiculed by mother who wanted me to become a nurse or some other kind of hourly wage slave. it is amazing i ever enjoyed anything at all, with the chronic condemnation she cast on any of my interests. it is not until in the last year of so she spoke positively of anything i have written, but now has reverted to what is.
in a dream helen eng says "ta-ta"
the CIA wives book would really start with Anne Eng, who claims she did not know dad's early CIA jobs. did he tell me and not her? she literally knew nothing of the grandfolk due to dad's total information freeze in the 1970's.
the war nurse. all i heard about my whole childhood was alcoholic vietnam vets, emphysmatic vietnam vets. from her that is, and all about god, and a few stories of her folks.
one time i watched my mother chase my grandmother mary kangas around the room screaming at her in a very declasse way, as if she was trying to kill her with grief. indeed, maybe that's all she's doing to me, these days.
but i have to decide, what way it is for me to live my life: do i spend the next sixty years in the shadow of her anger, her religion, her imprecations, her curses?
sitting in the dock of her new home, on her new porch, i felt a bit of mr. smith goes to washington. but where does mr. smith go?
the warmth ends there, in the safe zone of the porch, the porch on which she lunged at me to strike me.
asked: are you going to hit me. she said i want to, proceeded to sit down beside me and continue to excoriate me.
the night before i had a fantastical dream of some kind of pan european adventure---huge architecture--and me then finding the body of a middle aged blonde woman---a valerie plame like character---or a nancy bergeson---who i understand in the dream-- to be dead and killed via assassination.
the nightmares one may have, in the safest room of the safe house, and yet . . .
in the dream i am processing the corpse, thinking: at least i am not dead yet. i think, what did she do to merit this?
upon waking, i am confronted with the realization of the terror i feel anywhere near my mother, her torture chambers, or her threats, or her religious condemnations.
one day she sat me down to explain how it it religiously offensive to live with me, against her principles.
i could feel that disdain.
the nightmares i had of her as a child were of her face screaming at me from the reflective shiny chandelier mirror-effect that hung over the bed ransom and helen eng left for me. i would dream these horrific dreams of being burnt alive---due to the arsonists burning many neighboring buildings---and of mother as a demonic screaming torturer, who had me chained to scream at me. this was partially inspired by a bell witch book i read in an antique store father took me to---but also from the many many occasions on which she "lost her temper" at us or my father.
sundays were always a dreadful day with screaming and chaos and panic prior to the church experience.
a huge contradiction of maniacal temper-losing with the mixed message of peace, etc at church.
mother had always worked the saturday night before and all sunday morning at the hospitals---and so then with her panicked rush to zoom in and get her kids to take to church---mixed with the extreme pain in her arthritus in her hip which she wore down under extreme overwork from 1983-1995---not to be replaced until 2005 when i was invited to be of caregiving assistance to my father's dementia as my mother underwent her hip surgeries 20 years late.
capitalism!
there was a dramatic shift in my teenaged years when mother became very mad at father---more than i ever remember besides the plate-throwing episode when i was three.
was it her hip-pain? my father's dissociative apathetic aloofness?
i always felt his loneliness. clearly they had very little time to be loving towards one another.
this plate throwing at the floor under steve's feet---i perceive now as the most dreadful child-abuse of little three-year old me.
of course at that age adults seem as big as monsters. to my father's credit---he never was abusive to her---except in allowing her to drive around town sleep-deprived and nearly half-dead from overwork.
if any of them had a brain cell or two they would realize that watching my mother work herself half to death my entire childhood was child abuse. riding in a car with a chronically sleep-deprived mother---was child abuse and child endangerment.
watching my mother destroy her body was like watching a slow-suicide.
it was dreadful to know she was in extreme pain and would not stop her workaholic life.
it was dreadful to see her blame it all on father as though he was a puppetmaster and she a puppet.
throwing the plates and shattering them at my father's feet is a moment i can't forgive. i am sad that i know and remember this and my siblings were not born to know it. i feel it is my duty that they know this earliest memory.
father smashed his guitar on the patio in front of me--i was two or three. he was dreadfully unhappy---and quite oblivious to the need to demonstrate safety and calm for the sake of the children.
the first time mother asked father to spank us, he refused, making a mockery of the whole exercise of demonic anger. he slapped his own leg to make a noise and laughed it off. it was clear then and there who was to be trusted, and who was most reasonable.
he fed us pink penicillin and called himself Dr. Eng in his spooky dracula voice.
when father smashed the guitar on the pavement, i knew it was not meant for me, but that he didn't know i was watching him as he wept and cried and sobbed out.
i lurked behind watching his misery.
brother looked at me so painfully--and cried out to my friend---do you read her blogs---and he said--what you wrote on your blog---presumably about his drunk tirade in which he ridiculed my "shitty" clothes and threw my beads across the floor---
he looked afraid to ever do such a thing again. if the truth comes around via the internet or any other way---
i was reading the sun also rises, drinking tea, painfully aware of his misery in 1994 or so. what could i do.
being a big sister was such a job.
when ransom died, anne eng found a former prisoner to soak out some cash to. michael gave me the main scoop that mom was being conned out of big bucks by this con-artist guy. we sensed the sexual undertone of this hot construction worker sponging off all the CIA money as father faded into his dementia.
i had the sudden realization today that it was painfully wrong for mother to invite a man with a severe criminal history to do construction work on her home in the presence of my teenaged sister.
how reckless.
my level of understanding her dealings was faded---as i spent most of the time i could far away---at various apartments, boyfriend's house, or head in books.
i had not the maturity to see so clearly the wrong done unto my little sister there.
but now i think about it, i find it extremely creepy this man had mom buy him a $30,000 truck with ransom eng's money and punted at least 100K towards this absurdly ugly construction project on her house.
it was all for naught.
as the canonized "mentally ill" person of mother's mythology-making she negated my ideas, opinions. advice, or any collective decision-making process.
dehumanizing me was the first step to stealing ransom's stupid cash.
michael admits he'd be dead of some alcohol-drug thing like a regular rich kid if mom had not creamed it off to the stock market and her con artist job.
i do know the first house ransom eng bought worth $100, 000 in 1985 was bought to be left in trust with equal parts for the education of the children.
when mother mortgaged it to shreds and converted the value into a lesser quality house, i was aware by age 14 of her propensity to steal from the children and steal from ransom eng.
that she would then now work herself to death at the veteran's hospital now in her seventieth year holds little hope.
as if money solves everything.
i gave up trying to explain that money is not it. that she had a chance to be a friend, a human, to listen. i liked it better when she lived in a small apartment and took her pension humbly and didn't lord it over us how rich she is. the whole american dream thing becomes oppressive as it becomes a whip to prove and reprove your children's unlovability via poverty.
the depths of despair and isolation---watching over unloved father---and feeling the loneliness of his lonely nights---
doesn't match with the demonization some like to situate his way.
mother admitted on october 1st---part of why she seldom visits father in his hospital bed is that she still hates him. now this hurts me to hear this. how could she say this?
michael---on our second to last phone conversation---explained a disgusting level of humiliating derogatory talk about father, and about me, by virtue of being like father.
he called him many offensive things most notably "douchebag" a nasty hipster word i find extremely guttery and distasteful---in addition to it's misogynistic vaginaphobic obsessionalism.
at any rate---i never really wanted to speak to michael after that. i was torn by feeling like a patient big sister who is giving my brother a free range to try out all his curse-word vocabulary because alcoholism has pillaged his basic high IQ---and wanting to tell him he was a trashy potty-mouth and should respect himself more than that, to talk such trash.
i called him again, after mother's friend invited her domestic violence abuser strangler to mom's home.
i wanted him to know that a crime victim and domestic violence abuser were congregating near mother's bad judgement.
so if anything happens---maybe he could talk sense into her.
that was May 2013.
my lease in my downtown portland apartment was up the second i found out about the jaime larson murder.
i simply could not face the fact that i lived between killer and killed, and had inquired about living at each of their apartment buildings and had settled on the one in the middle of killer and killed---complete with the screaming vietnam vet who screamed at 4am in psychotic flashbacks.
father had a song: the vietnam way ain't over yet, it takes a long long time.
so i wasn't really so keen to stand on the corner with the guantanamo protesters as all that.
i was just a place i felt safe---in the protective hippy ambiance of portland activisms--a place i had known since 2005 animal rights, or the glories of the california anti-war marches.
i wasn't there on the prowl, except i was---looking for a way out.
so of course, the original byline, is that law school might eventually wend it's way to me. paralegal school and all my fisticuff litgations inspired a joy for fighting crime.
but i know as well as law.com how hard up the industry is. the theoretical aspects were what interest me more---how tech and media intervene, to make up for the missing fairness in the system.
so from january 10 to about may 18th 2013 i endured a "money-saving" sojourn with mother.
she brought up abortion many times, and religion many times.
i told her i was not interested in talking about these things. i was amazed at how she chronically obsessively brought them up---as if to hurt me.
she then suggested i go stay at a hotel, or go away.
what with 6-8 spare rooms it seemed silly to pay 95% of my income on rent---but the fact was that so miserable i became saving money by living with her that i spent at least most all of every penny on shopping sprees for household goods, or clothes i gave away to the homeless, or flooring for her, or expensive health foods or housepaints and plants for her garden and such.
i wanted to make an impression not to be defeated: that no matter how much trash she talks about me, or how much she accuses me of anger, or generalized sinfulness, insanity, etc---it would be clearly felt---a large impression on her house---so that should my siblings reappear---they would not be confronted by a total squalor, a filth, a poverty in which we frequently dwelled.
as my model---i imagined the clean efficiency of the Chesapeake house and my memories there---of a clean furnished place in the style of my grandparents eng.
in springtime, i took chinese history, western civilization and european history, reveling in ideas, amidst the filth of the sex industry in southeast portland.
"nude girls here" signs i explained to mother would constitute sexual harassment and child abuse thusly in my opinion the crime-infested neighborhood was uninhabitable and completely shattered the value of her house.
i read up on the meth house raid and drug dealer suicide when the FBI found the man barricaded in the garage nearby.
the knifings.
the drive-by shootings.
america--what a wreck.
it's not like i didn't survive car-jacking in LA, or an occasional trip through south central, or shots fired as i made my way into my hollywood apartment.
there is just so little reward for portland gangland nonsense. at least LA has a few good museums, or some fashionable people, or interesting cultures to embrace.
portland trashy crime culture is so vapid---
where would i have----i am constantly plagued by regret that i didn't beg my way into a DC home with ransom and helen eng, who would never abuse me, for sure.
so i found my ticket out and am on the out again. these struggles will be for another time to speak of, these struggles are fresh and harsh, but these past struggles have clarity, where the present is an ambient confusion.
i do miss blackheath most of all.
i miss my old friend, to whom i muttered: i'm avoiding my mother, dreading her.
my swedish friend said: it seems like you are running from something.
it was all this braingarbage piled up in my mind so thick i could i could hardly think or negotiate north south east west.
i am expecting an apology, but it never arrives.
perhaps she doesn't know how much she has hurt me, and how it eats at me every day.
i never clear my mind and heart of it, i never move on, i never lose myself in a moment anymore.
i think cruelty can really kill a person. enough cruelty torture and negativity can really kill someone.
so i left, only to hear everone else's own horror stories.
the human condition it was called, to put it nicely, so much misery, toil and tears.
the coldness i feel from my siblings i imagine is a chronic asperger's type aloofness we all inherited from father. we are all equally unable to express love or caring for each-other.
i was supposed to be the one to bother with mother's estate but now that she wants to threaten me with violence she might need to find another victim.
so---is it death she wants to strike?
i often imagine that mother's internalized misogyny finds an exterior target in me---or that her own self-hatred extends to me.
why have a child, only to heap it with hatred and scorn and neglect?
i'll never understand.
"runt" that i am.
sometimes i know now i just have to let go.
i can't immerse myself in any one's anger, cruelty, accusations.
all i feel now is generalized confusion, over why would anyone be so mean.
what is worse than fear of death, is the fear of the truth. not any truth but also the supreme truth of the other's subjectivity.
no one wants to admit i have feelings. that when mother called dreadful american police to smash me to the ground in 1998, i would never be the same.
the utilization of police as proxy bullies to administer domestic violence, when her screaming was not sufficient torture enough---
what a curious way of living, most surely distasteful to father.
i can hear him muttering to himself in 2001 "anne doesn't understand me"
she doesn't understand me either.
that's two of us.
now my sister, she spoke the shibboleth into my heart, lamenting what mother did to me---trying to drug away my creativity, bisexuality, atheism, vegetarianism, cornering me like the school bully with drugs and gurneys and police and chronic demoralizing imprecations and incarcerations.
it was torture for her to watch it.
the fact that they suffered as i was crucified, is what i am most concerned for: the way they suffered.
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