a Nanny for braingarbage?

so mother told me that when we were attending catholic school in nashville tennessee, someone there told her that it would be very easy to arrange a live-in nanny from the philippines. the philippines are very catholic, and many of our school friends were from the philippines.

mother told me she did not want to become involved in any kind of problems with visa or wages regarding a nanny.

mother was told all she needed to do was provide a place for someone to live.

mother's sense of ethics got in the way of me having a nanny.

in the meantime, i as the oldest daughter did the work a nanny would do in the absence of a mother.

our mother was absent. my brothers also did work relating to the childcare operation.

father would absent-mindedly let the boys play with his gunpowder and create explosions in the back yard.  father was not competent to be the sole parental authority, he was however the only adult present for most of my childhood.

there was a time at the big CIA house when mother invited a woman called debbie with her children raymond et al to live in the attic where i had interrogated grandfather about his atheism.

this was the first year of my sister's infancy, and debbie took care of my sister while my mom worked nights at the hospital.  she smoked cigarettes near the window, which i now realize to be strange around children.

i myself am shocked how i smoked cigarettes in the same home as my sister when she was a teen and view my actions as wrong and stupid and selfish. i was not as aware of air pollution at the time @y2k.

at the big CIA house another family moved into the unfinished basement. the father was called tony and he decorated with saved alcohol bottles. the little girl perhaps carrie smelled bad from sleeping in the car. they had been a homeless family, and mother had taken them in. i remember the painful jealousy carrie expressed about me getting to sleep upstairs in the beautiful antique bed left by helen and ransom for me. carrie would not take a bath and the smell grew worse. she was jealous also of the flashy trinkets helen left: costume jewelry and such, left for me i understood.

i was scared of her father. his children spoke of being beaten by a belt. my father was antispanking, even if mother did it sometimes.

once in DC helen asked do you prefer a nighttime shower or a morning shower?
to myself i thought: mother has not taught us to bathe daily, but rather every few days. what a wild thing to take a shower every day!!!!

my grandmother also told me she fed unwanted food to the puppy under the table, which was a very rebellious thing to teach us in a family where we were forced to eat disgusting meat and burnt food.

grandmother helen eng's proganda of influence was immense.
she missed the symphony and her friends.  she loved my brother's long kurt cobain hairstyle, as ransom had lost his fifty years before.

worst was the switch beatings of my littlest brother who bit dogs and other children.
what would have been better that beatings, would be a nanny, or even a mother.
in the absence of care, his behavior was animalistic.
we are bulldogs we engs. we sink our teeth in sometimes, and won't let go.
but the terrorizing of the neighbor children had to stop. he was gaining a mouth infection from biting our doberman pincher.

beating him with a switch was the method to cure him of his biting. i don' agree with beating ever.  it made me upset to see the switches mother picked from the tree to beat and intimidate my brother with.

later when she would be screaming at me, this same brother tried to save me, telling me to flee, that she was calling police on me, in 1998.

i sat in ransom eng's car, now i realize freshly shaken into a PTSD response from her screaming.
her suicide threats of slitting her own throat in a bathtub used against her minor children a few years before.

this was the same car which was saluted into langley time and time again.
i realize, ransom's last protection for me, held me in safety, albeit momentarily.

ransom eng's grandchildren should never have been screamed at, nor his son.


it was uncomfortable to live in a big house with a family in the attic and a family in the basement.
and then mother invited a paraplegic to live in the front room where Ransom Eng's fabulous CIA books were left for father----books on krushchev and B-52 and surveillance and reconnaissance.
books i loved to read before and after age 10.

i know they were the senior eng's books due to a coy letter written by helen eng about leaving many books of their library for their son stephen who loved books.

the paraplegic woman would moan and wail through the night, as mother took care of other patients at the hospitals.
she spoke of eating sweets in terms of "guilty"  with such extreme language.

i missed the grandparents.
as my sister grew, i would feed her peaches from a can, and mayo on bread, her favorite sandwich.

i was too young to be a teen mother.
i was nine when she was born.

by age fourteen or fifteen mother sold the big CIA house, which was supposed to be distributed into four pieces of equity for the children's education.

the equity was converted into a lesser house in a worse neighborhood, where gunshots were the norm. but thankfully we escaped the arsonists who were torching the houses in east nashville.

my sister was uncommonly tearful in the absence of a mother. i began to call mother at work and tell her she needed to attend to her lost children.

it was the least i could do.
in the meantime, i had taught sister to read, and had her read a midsummer night's dream at age three or four which sounds impossible, other than she is a genius.
brother read hamlet and 1984 at his wise 11 or 12.
we made many movies in childhood, mostly comedic parody, but also action home movies under my other brother's direction.

i fell out of love one day with meat eating culture as a surveyed the carcass of a turkey and came to know it's anatomy. the smell of it nauseated me, so i sat on the porch swing as the meat cooked. deviled eggs gave us all food poisoning that thanksgiving.

i was dressed as a pilgrim in all black.

it came to pass that i preferred processed cheese sandwiches with mustard to turkey sandwiches. but mother would encourage me to eat double slices of turkey.
i would throw away the decomposing sandwich for distaste for the meat which had warmed in my locker at st. cecilia academy.

i had an annual scholarship of 1000 a year to offset my highschool by some grant of the catholics or something due to good grades. i chose to go to the girls school because i did not like being teased by boys, namely a redheaded wesley at st. joseph's, and i had heard father ryan HS was a hotbed of drugs and party culture and i didn't want to waste my life or education. if i had had freedom to choose a school outside the two catholic options i would have liked to go to hume fogg the magnet school, or university school, the very most expensive cool private school far outside mother's strained budget.

she worked so many long hours to finance our schooling and father's writing career.
i watched oprah, my surrogate mother.

it may not have been right, and may have constituted neglect.  it appears she did it with a pure heart, which is all that matters before goddess.  i was far too rational for the operation, and recognized father's ineptitude, and mother's absence to unduly strain me as mother substitute for the mother in absentia.

a well paid and cared for nanny might have been the more humane choice.
i believe mother, so sensitive to racism and colonialism, did not like the sound of exploiting someone from a less developed nation to  care for her children.

but a well paid nanny, and well loved nanny, might have removed the burden of exploitation from me, a child minor and juvenile, which child labor is illegal after all----even if around the world the women children are used for all manner of domestic slavery, childcare, laundry, etc.

all this comes up, as i explained to kimberly saturday morning that my sister died in my arms when i was age seven. this is not exactly true, but she was dying for a week, and i, a little seven year old was left to try to comfort the writhing baby poisoned by a state mandated vaccine while mother worked.
in the actual moment of death, she was not in my arms.
father and i were in so much distress, and mother being gone at work, as the babe howled all night long, only made it worse.

it was painful to lose my sister, and my appetite, and my grandparents back to DC so quickly.

then another sister was on the way, and father confronted us on the porch saying, "why is she doing this to me? she is pregnant again. i can't bear to have another child and all the financial pressure." he explained that he didn't want children, he wanted to be a writer, but she had threatened to leave him if she could not have one, then another and so on, until there were four. then one died, and this other was on the way.


father was panicked and would sometimes have a meltdown where he would pace through the halls of the great house his parents bought for us, saying "i'm going to die in a gutter like dexter stephens."  dexter stephens was the father of helen stephens, kicked out by ruth balsey stephens.  he was a tailor. no good, i heard.

father would mutter about "failure" a word that made me wince.

but overall mostly, he was as cool as a cucumber, almost to an inhuman extent.

one day when i was about four, mother heard him say "son of a b_tch" over the phone as he talked about the Iran Contra Nicaragua thing and she explained he would not speak that way around the children ever again.

one day when i was about 5, she discovered pornography magazines which he alleged were purchased for the political undercover journalism.  she was outraged that he would stash them somewhere where the kids might find them.

i do remember him explaining the draft to me when i was four, in the entry room to the backdoor of 1406 eastland.  he wrote a poem about that and so might i.

father explains the draft to me at  four years old 

thank you for respecting me
and my intelligence
as no other human ever has
we may be this or that
to those and them
but to me we will always be

of perfect mind
and heart and order
if the oatmeal was salted
if you were running late

telling me of the draft at four, not three
when five dollars meant nothing to you
and you merely smiled
haunting the scary library
and the great escape

there was something wonderful
about my childhood
and that was you


the first time i was kissed by a boy, it was forcefully, about age 6, by a redheaded boy of an irish family in the back of the station wagon.

i did not like the force.

an issue does arise, in wondering over my father's demise, if air pollution from his moldy basement was giving neurotoxicity to him.

mother worked in the clinically clean antibacterial air of hospitals and is still alive, but father lived in a moldy basement in the nineties which he made his mome office.

it does occur to me, the mold and all the other environmental poisons may have hurt his brain.
the diet coke.
the nodoz caffeine pills.
the all meat and all tuna diets.
mercury.
london smog in the fifties.
smoking in his twenties.
DC smog.
whatever it was . . .

intergenerational CIA stress disorder

anxiously await autopsy results. it was so good of OHSU to remove his brain and suture his skull back together for the open casket.

i wonder what will result?
mother said 50 or some othr large number of tests will be done using his brain tissue.
viva science.
and viva braingarbage.

so i never had much of a nanny, until a beautiful redheaded girl Connie May Grande arrived in Hollywood. i asked her friend if she might be bisexual. instead of becoming lovers, we became friends. her beauty overwhelmed everyone in her presence, and her nanny job gave her nanny skills so profound, she would micromanage my food and such which was charming if overbearing.

vapidly we would dance to darkwave music.

another nanny might have been bianca kawecki, who i view more as my best governess, or the true gift of vanderbilt university.
bianca's tutelage of me led me to fashion, to buddhism, to yoga, to jogging, to pilates, to gemology, to vienna, to healthy eating, she told me about New York and belize, opera, collaging, beverly hills, and rich parents, and Poland.
i could not have a better teacher.  and were it so, that we might have had a gay marriage of convenience . . .
i wish that all my tuition went to her, because she was true teacher . . .
a kundalini yoga teacher now!

i do wish we had at least twenty years at least together . . .

i stood on the opposite wall
with my blue collar on, before her riches . . .
#yesallwomen

maybe it was our leo narcissism seeing ourselves in one another.

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