Guest Blog

“are you crying?”

“who are you texting?”

My sister. Sometimes I cry when I text my sister. I know sometimes she cries too.

A typical COVID-19 date-night with my wife Celeste. Date-nights these days consist of playing old records, making a nice dinner, and having some wine or drinks of some kind. I suppose the booze doesn’t help the crying, but it does dull the pain a bit. 99.9% of the time, these are joyous occasions for us. Sometimes my sister and I talk about our childhood.

I don’t have a problem with alcohol… but… admittedly, I am more truthful and emotional after a few drinks. This night was no exception. My sister Kelley and I text almost every day. This might not seem unusual until you consider that we didn’t talk at all for nearly 10 years. Before that, we had barely talked in the previous 20 years, and never about anything of any depth.

I wasn’t looking for this feeling. It wasn’t a planned conversation. Sometimes they just happen. I also think they are cathartic in an odd sort of way. She doesn’t remember everything. She’s 4 years younger. When we talk about our childhood she often has blank spaces or gaps in her memories. I remember everything. It’s the curse of being the older brother.

The Moment

Everyone has a moment or event in their childhood that defines them… at least I like to think so. My moment was on the playground of Woodland Elementary School in inner-city Canton, Ohio. 6th grade, 1982-ish.

My best friend Alvah was getting his daily pummeling from the neighborhood bully Frank. Alvah was a small kid. The sight of him getting pounded against the chain-link fence on the basketball court set something off in me. I snapped. I stepped in and gave Frank the beating of his life. A beating worthy of a person much older. An inappropriate level of violence for an 11 year-old kid. I wonder if that was Frank’s defining moment too? I’d like to think so.

I managed to knock out both of his front teeth and bloody his nose before being hauled off to the principals office. Back then, they didn’t call your parents. No emails. No letter. You got whacked or you got suspended.


The school principal gave us two choices:

1. 5 days suspension from recess.
2. 5 whacks with a wooden paddle (yes, they hit kids back then).

Frank took the suspension.

I took the 5 whacks.

Why? .. because, fuck you Frank, that’s why.

This was the beginning of a behavioral trend that would last well into my 30s (and even somewhat today.) It is also my first recollection of what I now recognize as a serious anger problem. It is an incident that people who know me best would say; “that sounds like you. I
can totally see you doing that”.

Nearly 40 years later, I now realize that I wasn’t beating up poor Frank, I was beating up my step-dad, George.

What Frank, Alvah, and the Principal didn’t know…. what nobody knew…. Was that the previous day I had come home from school and found the next-door neighbor babysitter, Diane, crying on our couch. She mumbled something about my Mom being taken to the
hospital. She didn’t know what happened. I knew immediately.

The kitchen floor was covered in blood. It was like a horror movie. The back window of our apartment smashed, fresh blood dripping from the broken pieces of glass. The curtain torn, bloody, and lying on the floor in another pool of our mother’s blood. There were two distinct sets of bloody foot-prints on the cheap linoleum floor.

My sister was upstairs in her room crying. She doesn’t remember it.
I’m glad she doesn’t remember it.

George had put my Mom through the kitchen window… well, at least part of her.

The rest is a little blurry, but I remember some of it. I remember grabbing my Wayne Gretzky model hockey stick and sitting on the couch next to Diane. Waiting. I remember helping her clean up the blood in the kitchen. I remember the phone ringing and Diane saying they were on their way home from the hospital…

She had a cast on her arm, a black eye, and around 30 stitches. I remember a story so absurd and ridiculous, even for my 11 year-old mind.

Mom was washing the dishes, slipped, and put her arm through the window. A window that was easily 10 ft. away from the sink. There were no dishes in the sink… or blood for that
matter. How did she get the black eye? Who the fuck slips through a window? Bullshit.

I lit into George with the hockey stick in a violent flurry that to this day gives me chills. I was outside of myself. Was this me? I finished the job by breaking a heavy ceramic lamp over his head.

The cops came. The ambulance came. I never saw George again. The next day I continued my 2-day streak of violence on the Woodland Elementary School playground. This was the end of
my childhood.

This wasn’t the first incident with George, but it was the last.

There are 1000 other reasons and 1000 other incidents which contribute to me not having a relationship with my mother. It all started with this one when I was 11. She lied again. She was
going to stay with him. She was willing to put my sister and I in danger, again. She was willing to gamble with our lives (and her own), again. She’s lied to both of us all of our lives, even as adults.

I have to kind of laugh a little when I hear friends or family talking about mild parenting struggles. Getting the kids to clean their room, doing their homework, stuff like that… By the age of 12 I felt like a combat veteran of several wars. Wars fought in my own home, with grown men twice my size.

Which home? I count us moving 11 times before I graduated from high-school. There is no going home for Christmas. No rooting through the attic, reminiscing through old photo albums. I can’t even remember what some of the places I lived in looked like. My Facebook profile has 2 high-schools listed. I have trouble identifying with either of them. As a kid, I never had a friend longer than 2 years because we moved so much.

I’ve often told people, including my real father, (whom I have a fairly good relationship with now), that I think overall, we had a pretty good childhood. It is with the passage of time and adult experience that I now realize, our childhood was anything but normal… and not very
good.

There was another step-dad. He was an alcoholic but not physically abusive to us out of fear of our real Father, who threatened to kill him if he touched either of us. He never did. I have other horror stories, albeit, with less blood. Maybe I’ll write about some of those in the
future.

Our teenage years were tough. My wife Celeste makes fun of me because I can sleep through anything. Like a tornado or a freight train running through our house. I can sleep on a concrete slab. I can sleep with the lights on. On the floor. With the TV on. There are no limits to my sleeping super-powers. Why?

Every day for the better part of 7 years at around 7:00 A.M., the yelling would start. My Mom and sister argued, fought, and screamed at each other every single morning before school. Every. Single. Morning.

I wonder if my sister remembers that? I wonder if either of them remember what the hell they were screaming about every day. I wonder if my mother realizes the damage inflicted upon us
both by her behavior?

Every night the fighting would start between Mom and step-dad #2. Probably booze fueled. I eventually learned to sleep through that too. I can sleep through fucking anything now.

The last conversation I had with our mother a few years ago was kind of the final straw for me personally.

“You kids always had food and a roof over your head”.
“You kids were no angels”.
“You kids put us through hell too”

You kids. KIDS.

My mother’s idea of being a good parent was food and lodging. She takes no accountability while simultaneously criticizing even the most mundane things in our own adult lives. An evolved, adult form of the abuse we’ve come to recognize and have endured our whole lives.

I sometimes wonder if this is why I made a conscious decision, at a very young age, to never to have kids of my own. At 49, I suppose that ship has sailed. No regrets.

Dealing with this trauma (is it trauma? I guess so, right?) is something that I deal with as it comes up. Maybe it’s a late-nite text with my sister or something that triggers a memory.

Talking to my wife helps. She has her own horror stories. Talking to my sister helps, she was there.

The Healing

It’s taken years to repair the relationship between my sister and I. It’s taken us both years to realize the problem wasn’t between us, rather, it was a direct result of our trauma as children. It was at that moment of realization between us that we became closer than we have since we were young children. Talking about it helps. Admitting it happened… helps.

My sister is a wonderful mother and I’m so proud of her for it among other things. She has persevered and survived our mutual trauma. I hope I have too.

I remember that line from ‘The Shawshank Redemption’––“…travelled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side”. That’s us.

We still talk every day. Some days I feel like the ‘little brother’ because she has parenting challenges, experiences, and things in her own life I know nothing about.

I want to know what she had for dinner. I want to know what my brother-in-law Gary is working on. I want to know what my niece is up to. I want to know what’s going on in her life. She’s married to a great man who loves her (and my niece) and treats them wonderfully. I know she has problems, but I also know where these problems come from. We are survivors. I remember.

There is some irony in the fact that both my sister and I have only been married once; and from all I can see…for the rest of our lives, to the same people. I think most people want to do better than their parents. For some it may be financially or perhaps getting a better education. For Kelley and I it’s a simple survival instinct unique to people like us. Not repeating the horrors of our childhood is good enough.

I no longer place blame or scrutinize my own behavior (or Kelley’s) because, I remember. One text a few years ago on a late Sunday night, addressing our trauma and removing blame from each other repaired a relationship that some would say was inconceivable just a few years
prior.

These days I deal with my own issues as they arise. I try to learn from it. I always remember. I understand the mistakes and faults in our past, because–– I remember.

I remember.