My mom was one of the original working mothers. She had a variety of jobs all through her life and kids or no kids she was still working outside the home. When I was very little she did some time running an in-home childcare service and working for my father as a bookkeeper. My dad managed a gas station so my mom would pack me up and go spend time there doing the books while he took care of customers. I spent good chunks of my day there. I napped in the store room, I had books and toys to keep me busy as well. As I got a little older I started helping out around the station as well. I learned how to wash windshields and clean bathrooms and stick the tanks. Men's bathrooms at gas stations must be a circle of hell.
Sticking the tanks was my favorite job. You would take a measuring stick (8 feet long or so) and put it straight down into the holding tank for the gas and then pull it out to see how much gas was left by where the gas mark came up to on the stick. Can you even imagine someone doing that today? Pulling up to a gas station and seeing a 6 year old out there working, let alone working with gasoline? But it was a different time and people didn't think of kids as being as fragile as we tend to today. My parents had both worked with farm equipment at that age and that is much more dangerous than anything I was doing...well maybe except for cleaning those bathrooms...seriously guys, pee in the toilet not on the floor!
I wonder sometimes what my life would have turned out like if that had stayed the same. Mom working part time, dad working, me tagging along at jobs. My older brothers and sister were in school or doing homework or living their lives and I don't really remember interacting with them much when I was really little, which isn't unusual, I was MUCH younger than they were and they wouldn't have wanted me tagging along. I can remember waiting up for my oldest brother to get home from the stock car races one night, he was so mad at me that I never did it again(if mom had found out how late I was up and how late he was coming in we both would have been in trouble). I remember my sister chasing down some bullies that had stolen my brother's boots and getting them back. I remember playing in the golf course when we shouldn't have been and a few other things but mostly it was me on my own at the gas station or me working with my parents.
One of the things that happens in bigger families where the older kids are much older than the younger is that they start filling in to take care of the kids. I had croup when I was a baby, very sick, high fevers, deep cough, hospital visits, the whole deal. Though I don't remember it my oldest brother was the one that would end up taking care of me in the middle of the night. He would be woken by the coughing starting and he would go start the shower and sit with me in the steam until my parents woke up. When I started pre-first (kind of like kindergarten but more school less play) he was on child pick up duty for half of the week due to my mom's work schedule. So he would get off of work come pick me up and we would go for donuts. I liked it best when he picked me up. :-) He also was the one that took me to the hospital with mom when I chopped the top of my finger off, but that is another side story for another day.
The piece that changed the story from The Walton's, poor family helping each other out to My Story is my sister's story. I don't know when it started, I don't know why it started and I wasn't even aware of what was going on during the worst of it, but my sister started doing drugs. By this point I was 7 and in second grade, my mother was working full time, my oldest brother had married and moved out, my middle brother was a senior in high school and getting ready for early graduation and then on to (was it TVI's program?) nursing school. Because everyone was busy my sister became my primary caretaker.
I don't believe at this point that my parents knew my sister was more than just a rebellious teen. She had always been headstrong. My mom used to tell a story about when she was very little and she was climbing the kitchen cabinets. She would be punished and then go right back to it. Finally my mom spanked her and put her down for a nap. She slept for an hour, got up and went right back to the cabinets. So being headstrong and a little rebellious was her nature. We also had a good dose of sibling rivalry built in from the start. My sister was the only girl in my family (my other two older sisters had died shortly after birth) and she was the only girl of that generation on both sides of the family. So only daughter and only granddaughter for 7 years before I was born. Then along came another. Not only did she lose being the baby of the family but she lost being the only girl and she had to share her room to boot. I was not a popular addition in her mind. The family had a cat when I was born and as cats can sometimes do Suzy started peeing on things to show she wasn't happy with the new addition to the family. My mother got rid of the cat which made my sister quite unhappy, after all they had the cat first!
So this is where the first of the disclaimers starts. I know things now that I didn't know then. I have talked with my sister about her drug use and about some of the things that happened while she was using. Not surprisingly I have a better memory of things that happened than she does. She was impaired. Stoned or speeding out neither of which is great for the memory. She just doesn't remember what happened for the most part. But she did give me some answers for some of the bizarre rules she would make and I will include those reasons in here, but know that at the time I didn't have a clue as to why she was doing what she was doing. It wasn't until she was getting clean that I even knew she had been using and it wasn't until years later when we talked about some of this stuff that I found out why she did what she did.
My parent's philosophy was who ever was watching you got to make the rules. Which is fair, to a point. If I had broken rules (not being where I was supposed to be, talking back, being a brat) and my sister hadn't had any power to stop me then I would have kept doing it. So the first time I was punished for something I felt was unfair and I took it to my parents they told me no dice I was punished and then when my sister found out I had complained to my parents she tacked another week onto the grounding. Again, I don't think my parents knew at this point that my sister was using and I think by the time they realized it they didn't know what to do at all. But the ground work for me had already been laid. Going to my parents with a complaint was not only not going to change anything it was going to make it worse.
I don't really have a nice linear process for the next few years. They all blend together for me. I know there was a building up on her use. I know that her behavior became more and more erratic. And I know the effect on me was cumulative and I wouldn't understand just exactly how deeply it had all affected me until well into my 20s. But the one thing that is still the hardest for me to fully grasp is that we are only talking about a few years here. The peak of the problems were in my 4th and 5th grade years in school. There were bits and pieces later, but really it was from 7-11 for me that most everything happened with the bulk being at 9-10. Such a small pocket of time for such a shift in personality to happen. And honestly I think that is why I could shift back later. But I am getting ahead of myself. Tomorrow I will cover those years. It will be random and disjointed I am afraid, but that is how those memories are now. They all blend in and around themselves. I will do my best to separate them out and put them in the right order, but I know there is some mixing in there of time lines. So let's end this today and tackle the next piece tomorrow.
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