On Mental Illness

From the Pages of a Perpetual Pariah — The Inception of My Insanity

The Hidden Chapter, Page 5

WARNING: Childhood Abuse and Neglect

NOTE: This article is part of a series: “From the Pages of a Perpetual Pariah” within “The Hidden Chapter” of my life. Each Page is focused on a certain aspect of my mental illness, demonstrating that there IS life on the other side of your life. The Table of Contents for the Pariah series can be found HERE and at the bottom of this story. It may be helpful to take a look at the four other published Pages of the Series for context. This particular Page could not in good faith, with my own true voice, be written PG.

This is my first article for Read or Die! It is a pleasure to join the crew. (BTW, most of my stuff is NOT serious so you’re not signing up for depressive content when you SUBSCRIBE to my stories. I’ve included links for a couple of my other series below, also. They are FAR from serious.) Welcome to my life. Fasten your seatbelts.

He Beat Me for Everything

M y Mom met Jimmy at the poultry factory where she worked when I was eight. My brother was six. I found little love notes he had written her in her things while putting together his funeral in 2011. I remember she came home every night with a hairnet and smelled liked raw chicken. My brother and I spent a lot of time with her parents, my Grandma and Grandpa. Mom worked a lot since she left my dad. She didn’t want to be with him, so she took everything and left. I don’t know the full story. This would have been in the mid-80s.

It wasn’t long after they met that they got married. I came home from school one day and she told me. I was nine. She was wearing a tight pair of jeans. I don’t know why I remember that detail but one of them told me at some point. We all moved from our duplex in Lexington, with the hotplate and wooden floors. Didn’t see Grandma and Grandpa as much after that. We moved into a small gray house on the South side of Jackson. Within months, my seven-year-old brother and I suddenly became punching bags for a damaged Vietnam vet. Recovering alcoholic. I don’t remember Mom putting up much of a fight for us.

It started off minor? I don’t remember the first time he laid a hand on me. I most definitely remember the last. Our physical and psychological abuse took place regularly from the age of nine until I was 14, the last time he hit me. I never told anyone. If I did, no one ever did anything about it. This was the south. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

We got punished for virtually everything. Not cleaning our rooms well enough. Not saying sir or ma’am. Talking or arguing in the car on our way somewhere. Not sharing. My brother and I fought about everything. Me being almost two years older and slightly bigger until high school. When I say “fought,” I don’t just mean yelling. It was knock out full body wrestling. And I bit. Mom bit me once to show me what it felt like. I stopped biting.

He Set Traps

H e set traps for us. For example, when he and mom would leave the house, we were told to stay out of the fridge. He didn’t want us getting in there and rummaging around. Maybe drinking all the milk. The peanut butter. We were just little kids. Of course, we would wait for the car to pull out of the drive before we were immediately in the fridge. Doing whatever it was we did. By the end of the week, we were informed that he knew we had disobeyed. We would look at each other, wide-eyed. Terrified. How could he know that? He had put a piece of masking tape across the top of the refrigerator door before they left. That could have been on a Monday. We would be informed by Friday.

We had scheduled “spankings” every Friday. I woke up with dread every Friday morning that merely built throughout the day, turning into terror by the time I got on the bus to go home at the end of the school day. It was an almost 2-hour bus ride home. I had that entire time to mentally prepare myself for what would happen that night. Better yet, instead of Friday night, it might be Saturday night, or sometimes he would let things build up for two weeks instead of one. Sometimes, not at all. He knew we were scared, and he wanted it that way. He kept us prisoners that way, never knowing for sure when “it” might happen, leaving us in a constant state of fear.

Jimmy kept lists of our weekly infractions that had occurred during that week so we would know why we were being punished. My stomach would be queasy, knowing where things were going. He would read it off to us before he whipped out his belt. The one with the Indian head belt buckle and his initials: JAC. The initials I wore on my skin more than once. I discuss this is another post on my page: I Was Branded Like Cattle — His Initials Were Burned into My Soul.

I f we were outside and the matter had to be handled immediately, the weapon would be a switch and we would have to go find it and bring it back to him. Being whipped with a switch is a different kind of pain. The tip would wrap around my little legs leaving welts sometimes all the way around my thighs. One day, he found one on his own: a switch from a naked rose bush in our front yard. Thorns and all. That one brought more than welts. It broke the skin. I remember gently touching the swelling marks and getting blood on my fingers. It was purple, then red.

There Was No One to Protect Me

Mom would tattle on us for things we had done that day for which she didn’t feel her own lashes with the flyswatter were sufficient. By the time we had gotten to the flyswatter stage, we always did our best to scream and cry to make it convincing that nothing more would be necessary in the hopes that we would have paid our penance, and it would end there. We were terrified when he got home every evening.

She often instigated it and was even prescriptive of it. She would stand in the doorway to my small room and watch as he beat me with either his belt or a wooden paddle with holes that he himself had fashioned. Being Pentecostal, my legs were always bare. I would either be in a thin dress or a long denim skirt. If I were in the denim skirt, I had these handy little handles called belt loops that he would grab ahold of and keep me in place while he beat me, running around and around him screaming. The denim was thicker and provided a bit of padding. The thin cotton dresses were worse as it left him to chase me around my small room, screaming, trying to cover myself everywhere. His blows were less likely to land on my ass as much as my bare legs or my flailing arms. Eventually I would collapse.

Once she felt the punishment doled out was sufficient, “That’s enough, Jimmy,” she would say. A few more lashes and he would stop once my knees had buckled, and I couldn’t stand up anymore. Crying so hard, my hair stuck to my face with tears and snot. And I cried and cried and cried. Sometimes, Jimmy would come back to the room and tell me to stop crying or there would be more. Sometimes, mom would even come in after to comfort me.

To make matters worse, I had a big, smart-ass mouth. I back-talked incessantly. I clearly remember doing it. I always had some underhanded comment. Always had to have the last word. Would just walk out of the room when being talked to. It infuriated both him and mom. I remember him grabbing me by my long ponytail, pulling me back into the room at least once as I attempted to stomp away.

Hatred, Rage, Disgust

M y brother’s room was across from mine in the small farmhouse. Jimmy always “spanked” him first because he knew I would be counting the licks. So, I would tell myself I could at least hold out for that many before collapsing. I don’t know why I didn’t just collapse sooner, while he would still hit me when I was down, it generally was over quicker. He wasn’t satisfied until I lay as a broken heap on the floor.

Jimmy hated me. I reminded him of my dad, whom he detested. During weekends in the summer, Jimmy would set me to some task, whether it be mowing our large yard, hoeing up vines, pulling weeds, or mowing brush that should have been bushhogged. Mind you, I was given no gloves, so my lovely little hands were blistered and calloused much of the time. I always had a tan because I was almost always doing yard work. Out in the hot sun. We had a small farm with a large garden in the back.

I Got Off Easy

H e thought something was wrong with my brother. Later turned out that he was autistic. I always thought he got the lesser of the punishment because he never got as many lashes as I did until I was 44 years old when he told me the real, very detailed story of his weekends that he worked the pigsties with Jimmy over the summer. As I remembered it, it was a job for which he was getting paid. He got to leave home while I was stuck outside in the summer heat, sweating, no gloves, drinking water from our hose.

I knew it was a shitty job (pun totally intended) as he had to clean pig shit out of the sties which was indeed hard and dirty and hot. Both him and Jimmy would return later in the evenings covered in pig shit. My little brother to this day is damaged in more ways than one for the brutality and hard labor he was forced to endure and participate in. It brings tears to my eyes to even think about the atrocious things he witnessed. And I selfishly thought he had been getting off easy all those years when he actually had it way worse than me.

I Wanted to Die

I begged to die at least once a week. I begged God to take me home. What exactly did an 11-year-old do to deserve such abuse? What was I doing that was that bad? I wanted to run away so many times but what would I do? Where would I go? If I got caught, I would suffer the consequences and that alone kept me a prisoner in my own home. I wanted to kill him in his sleep.

It wasn’t until I started writing my book, going down well overgrown trails, not understanding why. I forgave him a long time ago. Then I had a revelation. I had never been able to really place that look on his face from all those years. Humor. Amusement. It was funny to him. But when he hit us, it was with a fierce rage. I’m confident that he hit us with all the force he had.

He Was a Killer

H e killed at least two of our pets. A dog named Raven and a cat named Fannybell. Fannybell might have been an accident. Along with Midnight and Butterball. Sunshine. He was always telling us that cats like to get up in the wheelwells of cars, which is true. When they disappeared, it was always a convenient reason for something to have happened to them. Despite my grief, there was always that reasonable doubt. So, I never knew for sure.

There was no doubt about Raven, though. She was a solid black lab kept chained in the front yard. We didn’t have her for long. Not even long enough to grow attached to her. She barked incessantly which drove him mad. One day, she was barking loudly, as usual. He storms past us while we were watching TV in the living room, .22 in-hand. Without any warning at all, he flung open the front door, yelled to “shut the fuck up!” and he shot her.

Horrified, my brother and I ran past him as he came back inside. It was bad enough that he shot her. But it didn’t kill her so she ran down the gravel road yelping forever it seemed until we couldn’t hear her anymore. We cried the entire time. I assume she eventually bled out and died on the road or in the woods. I wondered if he had really later looked for her, found her, and put her out of her misery. Finished what he started. That was the only hopeful thing I could consider at that point. In some fucked up way, that would have made him more human to me.

And, he supposedly killed at least one man, other than those in Vietnam. He never hit mom, but he psychologically abused her, and she was stuck between a rock and a hard place. This is how I made excuses for her and how I later found out she had made excuses for her mother when she did the same to her growing up.

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. “— Jung

The Inception of My Insanity

Nature vs. nurture. Was it an environmental factor that brought out the cancer in me or was I born with it? I will never know for sure. What I do know is he definitely left me broken in so many ways, but I’ve always been a fighter. I forgave him well before he died. He wasn’t the same man that hurt me for so long by the time he came to his end. I essentially forgave a shell.

I am stubborn and determined. I cope with humor and compartmentalization. I simply put it in a box and put it away. Out of sight, out of mind.

According to Nietzsche, “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”

My book has turned into a memoir which has directed me down a painful path for which I didn’t believe I needed to go. There are rusted boxes down there that need not be opened. But it wasn’t until I started opening those boxes and began to face things head-on did I find peace. Clarity. But it took a long time to get where I am today. I developed an approach that not only saved my dying marriage but transformed me. A bit more on that to come, but I can’t give “it all” away.

I need you all to want to hear what all I have to say and that’s still a lot.

Hope

Hope is an amazingly powerful thing that you should never overlook. Even the glimmer of it. It will push and pull you through some hard places. PLEASE read about how hard I held onto that hope for my relationship here: Raising the Dead — Breathing Life Back into Our Love

Until the next page, my friend. To be continued…

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