Ring My Bell

Picture it: Christmas break, probably 1994 maybe ‘95.

It all started innocently enough. My mother’s youngest sister and her husband who were pastors in the Salvation Army and were in Kansas City at the time and I was in college a couple hours south in Missouri. As most anyone who goes near any retail or downtown area between Thanksgiving and Christmas knows, the Salvation Army posts people with handbells and buckets to collect money. My mother’s youngest sister and her husband were in charge of that. 

The words “It seemed like a good idea at the time” have bitten me in the ass so many times I’m surprised I have any ass left. But I digress. 

When the idea of me being a bell ringer for about a week before flying home to Chicago was initially proposed I was told that I would be inside a fancy mall so I should pack nice clothes to make a good impression on the shoppers whose ears I would be accosting with my handbell. However, when I got there I was told that for some reason I would be outside in the elements. 

I had not packed for that. 

I did it one day and nearly got frostbite and no that is not hyperbolic. Kansas City can get hella cold in the winter. 

I called my mother to update her on the situation and got no support. Instead I got a double whammy of guilt and shame with some religious guilt thrown in for good measure. Another example of my mother taking the other side and one of many times her youngest sister and her husband fucked me over. 

NOTE: Karma has come around for them, probably more than once if I had to guess so it all evens out in the end. 

Back to the story: They begrudgingly allowed me to not freeze as long as I did other physical labor. The next few days were spent painting various rooms of their house. They weren’t home during the day and it was before I started smoking (a bad habit I picked up at bible college, go figure) so the days I had left were bearable. 

I was only there one weekend and was graciously allowed to stay home from church so I could keep working on the projects I had left before heading to Chicago. They had left for church with their kids so I waited until I was sure they were gone to go upstairs to grab coffee and some sort of breakfast. I was staying in the guest room which was in the finished basement with a half bath. That will be relevant in a moment. 

I got to the top of the stairs and the door standing between me and coffee was locked. 

They fucking locked me in the fucking basement. 

I was furious but trapped so I decided to write about it in whatever journal I was using at the time and then go back to sleep since there was nothing else to do. 

They got home from church a few hours later and claimed it was a force of habit to lock the basement door before they left but I call bullshit on that. I think they didn’t like me (and it’s probably still the same) and did some harmless micro aggression that would be nothing more than an inconvenience. Now you see why the half bath in the basement was important. 

Another call to my mother and the same thing. It was somehow my fault. No matter what happened it was ultimately my fault. I made the same mistake of doing work for them over Christmas break a year or two later. That was the last time. 

I’ve seen them a couple times over the last ten years or so and not much more than a hello and “I’m fine, thanks” and that’s probably all it will ever be. I have no reason to see or speak to them. Especially now. 

None of them are vaccinated and these are the people my unvaccinated mother chooses to live near and spend her time with. There’s some weird beholden-ness with them too where she’s spending her time taking care of her youngest sister’s grandson and hasn’t seen her only grandchild in almost three years and has no plans to. 

People make choices and have to live with the consequences of their choices. 

I choose to stay away from people with a track record of fucking me over and then trying to gaslight me into thinking it’s somehow my fault. 

For the mental and physical health and well-being of my own family I am making choices too and my choices do not include allowing actively toxic people into my life or my family. 

This has been a portion of my Festivus Airing of Grievances.

Birthdays are for Other People

Birthdays. 

Everyone has one and some people even like theirs. 

There are those who go all out and insist on a month long celebration.

There are those who prefer a quiet time at home with family and maybe a couple friends.

Then there are those like me who prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist, only share it under duress, and banish those who go against my wishes to ignore it. 

I’ve gotten better about acknowledging and even celebrating my birthday in the last few years but there was a good couple decade stretch where I was one of those who went from Halloween to Christmas to avoid that whole Thanksgiving thing. 

I am one of the lucky ones  that has a birthday that falls on Thanksgiving week (that’s sarcasm, people). Growing up, this meant it was difficult to have a birthday party because of it’s proximity to a major holiday. There are pictures of me at exactly one birthday party. I was probably 3 (I’m terrible with estimating age in pictures - even my own) and it didn’t look terrible. Since there are no pictures of birthday parties for me after that I can only assume that that’s when things started to change. 

Even around 4 or 5 I knew Grandma was “sick” but I didn’t fully understand. By age 9 I had a much better grasp of the situation and knew (in my limited understanding) that Grandma lost it from about two weeks before Thanksgiving until about mid-January every year. Some years were better than others but it wasn’t something that could be accurately predicted beforehand and the severity could only be judged after the season was over. 

What this meant for me as a kid, tween, and teen was hiding as far from the yelling, fighting, and crazy as I could. 

As I got older I would get inexplicably twitchy around Halloween and then it was explicable. I knew and sensed what was coming and was already dreading it. 

I was the same in high school and college. Never telling friends when my birthday was even at the expense of free desserts at chain restaurants. 

When I moved back to Chicago after college a friend found out when it was and organized a small group to go out and sprung it on me after I admitted I didn’t have plans. It was a group that hung out at least a couple times a week so I wasn’t suspicious. I went and it wasn’t terrible. The fact I acknowledged and actually celebrated my birthday felt like growth. 

The following year things were already much crazier and more stressful and I begged the same friend who organized the previous year to drop it. She ignored my request and landed a much larger surprise party. We argued over the phone and after various unpleasantries were exchanged I went over to the party. Walked in the front door, said some hellos, walked out the back door, went home, and turned off my phone. 

We didn’t speak for months and our relationship was never the same after that. 

Since then, every few years I’ll decide to celebrate my birthday and let a few people know when it is. Then, some bullshit will happen and I’ll retreat back to my shell. 

A few years ago when I was turning 40 I was in a pretty good place. I was about a year past the end of a bad relationship and was in the beginnings of a much better relationship and decided to go to the Joshua Tree in the high desert of Southern California. I invited Jess to join me in the desert and it was an incredibly romantic and magical time. 

Since then I’ve been much more in control of my own situation and we would go for a meal or to a movie or something. Nothing big or flashy. I’m still not a big party person and I still don’t broadcast when it is. 

I believe that my experiences growing up are why I am all about making birthdays, half birthdays, and all holidays as peaceful and joyous as possible for my own Tiny Human. I absolutely do not want to pass on any generational bullshit to her. She deserves better than that and I will do everything I can to make sure she gets it. 

If you’ve read this far, thank you and I hope you understand  my specific neurosis a little better now and I’m still not telling when my birthday is. 

Spare the Rod

When I was growing up, Sundays were for two things: 

1. Church

2. The after church spanking. 

For the life of me I still cannot figure out what in the actual fuck I ever did at church that would have necessitated a spanking. I can still remember the ritual. We’d get home from church, I’d go up yo my room yo change out of my church clothes, and then I would hear it. My mother taking the first step up the stairs. 

Even 40 years later even thinking about it and every tiny bit  comes back in vivid detail. I have no idea what her thinking was. If there was some reason she thought validated it or if she just thought it was part of raising a child. 

Either way it was a pretty fucked up way to celebrate the lord’s day. 

We stopped going to church regularly when I was about seven and with that the weekly Sunday spankings stopped. That’s not to say everything was now perfect and normal. Normalcy was never achieved and to be honest, I don’t know that “normal” was even a concept that was understood. My family was very insular because there was always something to hide. Mental illness, weird relatives, and who knows what else. For a seven year old I picked up on a lot of what was going on in the house but I know there was a lot that either went over my head or I totally missed. 

There are times I am truly surprised I did not end up completely messed up. I know I’m not perfect but I’m not terrible. At least I don’t think I am.

Now that I am the parent of my own Tiny Human this is one of those things from my childhood that I look back at in horror and know that there is absolutely no way I would spank for any reason. 

For those of the “I was spanked and I turned out fine” crowd, great. Good for you. I’m glad you handled it in your own way. 

Childhood should never be a thing that has to be survived or endured until you’re old enough to get out and take care of yourself. No, it should be a time of feeling love and safety and security that you will be protected from harm not subjected to it. 

Some stories take much longer to tell but for this one I didn’t want to belabor it or go into irrelevant and unnecessary details just the big picture. The way I’m writing fiction projects some of this will probably make it into a novel or short story at some point. For now, that’s all I got.

What works

Like every writer and blogger I like to see what kind of traffic and response the stuff I post gets. What I’ve found didn’t completely surprise me but it did a little. 

What I found was that the deep dark childhood pain stuff gets way more readers than any short story or flash fiction I post. 

I get the draw of darkness and pain. Most of the podcasts I listen to are dark and mystery and  crime related. There’s a voyeuristic draw to looking at the shit someone else went through. Always has been and always will be. 

So I guess I’ll keep picking at my own scabs and scars and maybe the readers who come to my site for that will read the other less personal pain inspired stuff too.