Memory: pt. 4

What disturbed me, and still does, is how you basically needed to get into a pissing contest with her about whose pain was worse. There are only a few times where I didn't get the rant about how her childhood was worse then mine will ever be. One was when I was sick in the hospital with chicken pocks. The other was when my great-grandmother Hazel died. That crushed me, I loved her so much and it was awful to watch as the Alzheimer's disease ate her mind and then her body. Strangely, I do remember the viewing quite clearly. People were telling me how sorry they were for our loss and that they regretted that she died. I kept getting told about how she was at a better place and no longer suffering.

I just nodded sagely, as a child could only attempt to, and didn't say anything. It wasn't that I couldn't believe that she was dead. I knew she was dead. I didn't have great-grandma to tell me stories about how her uncle was mad about the new contraptions called cars scaring the horses or help me steal butter scotch from grandma. But she wasn't gone. From that day forward, I've felt my great-grandmother's presence with me. And, oddly enough, at that time, I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone that great-grandma was still with me. Years later, I said something to my mother, but I was told how it was wishful thinking on my part.

It was all just a wretched joke, in her eyes, because my two wicked aunts were trying to get me to believe in magic. Mom didn't like the idea of my learning about witchcraft or magic. She especially didn't like the idea of my learning it from those two women. I suppose the reason why I went to visit them is because they showered me with affection more frequently then my mother ever did. Of course, with that affection came their efforts to manipulate me into being the tool by which they destroyed my parent's marriage. They hated my father, and probably still do today. As a result, my aunts (one was my aunt and the other is her lover) did things like tell me that I wasn't really my parent's child.

I was told how my mother's real baby had died in the hospital and that I was actually some one else's child. I was told that my mother kept me because she didn't want to make my father angry by getting rid of the kid that she didn't want to begin with. I was encouraged to believe that my mother didn't really want to have a daughter and that she wished I was born male. And then there was the whole concept of how my brothers were loved more then me by one parent or the other.

It's all an accursed mess and I still have a hard time sorting out what I recall and what I don't. The period of time that I'm looking at now is what some people define as middle childhood. Those years between when you start kindergarten and when you go to junior high/middle school. I regularly got jumped by other students at school and beaten up at that age. I fought back a few times but it became clear very quickly that if you defended yourself you were in as much if not more trouble then the bully.

I'm tired but yet I must write. I need to purge this .. boiling hell that's writhing beneath my skin in my blood and brain before I become violently ill or completely useless to the world... or at least useless to myself. It's a hellish muse that lashes at me. I really don't want to commit these atrocities to paper. Who would want to recollect the horrors to have them stare back at them on the clean page? It sullies the paper in ways that no words were ever intended to. And I can't even use this to get some meager measure of restitution. I can't help the terrors that I feel.