I was thrilled when I landed my job as ad manager at the Des Plaines Journal. I was in charge of the word processing machines and the couple of part-time employees who pasted together ads with me. This would be my third newspaper job, but so much more than just that.
The owner’s family was becoming my family. The man had two daughters, slightly younger than I, who came to visit me in the back shop on a regular basis, took me on family outings with them sometimes. The owner had at least 4 children, maybe more.
One of them adopted me, or should I say, we adopted each other. It’s funny, I can no longer remember his name. I knew his name for years and now it’s escaped me. Ive been surrogate big sister to more than one young man, surrogate family member to many.
This youngest son was from eight to ten years old and came to the back shop every day after school, where I kept him entertained. There was a railroad out back and I showed him how to put pennies and bobby pins on the railroad tracks. We both looked forward to our daily time together, finding artsy-craftsy things to do in the back-shop. I was beginning to feel like a nanny/family member to this family who seemed to need me. I guess I needed a family at the time and didn’t know it.
There was an older brother who worked in the print shop, grease stained face, stayed in the last room in the very back, in the dark, hunched over, never spoke with anyone that I witnessed and didn’t seem to care for anyone. He would simply frown as his little brother and I would waltz through, looking for things to do. I barely noticed him until my last day of working there.
I lived in a basement apartment, 4 Chicago-style neighborhoods away. Franklin Park. And when I say basement, I mean that you had to walk through a laundry room in the basement to get to my front door. It was more than a little bit spooky. The kitchen was a stove, sink and table stuck in a narrow hallway with no windows, where my sister and I learned to make crepes for the first time.
The only other room was the bedroom where the two windows were small slits of light, just six inches tall and two foot wide each. I caught a window peeper looking through them one night and I screamed at him so he ran away. That was before my sister got there.
The bathroom was so small, with only a tiny shower, there was barely enough room to fit into the bathroom and shut the door.
But this was an adventure for me. I was 23 years old and had escaped what seemed like an endless loop of crises back home.
I’d finally graduated with a GED, after six high schools and more foster homes than I could count.
After one semester of college, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I got knocked off my path, at age 20, when my big sister, who spent her lifetime bullying me, mailed a shit ton of drugs to herself from Germany and tricked me into picking them up for her.
She left me to go to jail, and court, and trial, and possible 10 year jail sentence and a lifetime record that I have to report at every job…. this is the older sister who says I didn’t sacrifice enough for the family. She took off for Germany when I got arrested and never asked again what it was like, never even knew I’ve had to deal with it my entire life. Never asked about the jail or probation, lashes out at me to tell me I’m the worst sister ever, the worst daughter ever.
After that I became a carhop at The Superdawg Drive In because it was difficult to get a decent job while serving probation.
The following year I got my second newspaper job in Carlsbad, New Mexico where I worked a full two years, an accomplishment for someone like me. The Carlsbad Current Argus was a well run newspaper. Organized, smooth, a very good manager.
My second year, while working at the Current Argus, my mother and step-father rented a home for my 15 year old sister, just a few blocks away from me. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t ask and I wasn’t consulted. One early morning she came banging on my door, trembling and terrified, and she told me a horrifying story.
She had woken in the night by the sound of her clock radio blasting and thought she’d accidentally set her alarm when she looked up and saw a dark shadow standing over her. The man put his hand over her mouth so that she could not scream and he raped her. When he was done he turned her over face down and put a pillow over her head. She lay there waiting to be killed for a long time. He didn’t touch her after that, he walked out. I don’t know how long she lay there.
She and I held on to each other and shook with fear for days. She finally moved back home, never telling the parents about the rape. We didn’t report it because, just the year before, my sister had been incarcerated for 45 days, charged with “minor in need of supervision”. I was on probation in another state, and unable to help her. They were cruel to her while she was in jail and we didn’t want that again.
After the rape, Carlsbad became a dark place for me and I couldn’t wait to leave. I jumped in my car and ended up in Chicago, a fantasy I’d dreamed about since my teens.
I received a letter from my sister, Marilyn. I had no phone during those days, far too expensive. I remember she sounded high in spirit but she mentioned “the voices” and I had no idea what she was talking about. I felt troubled, but I wasn’t sure why.
When my mother asked me if she could send Marilyn to me to live, I was delighted at the idea, so they sent my 16 year old sister to me on a train or a bus. I honestly cannot remember which transportation was used except that I picked her up at Union Station.
She wasn’t where I’d expected her to be and I was about to become frantic when, coming down an escalator, I spotted her on the floor below, in the middle of a massive crowd of people, moving along with the flow, a blank stare on her face, mouth hanging open, blouse disheveled. I called out to her and finally caught up with her, shocked at the absence of life that I saw in her eyes. Something had happened. Something was terribly wrong. This was not the bright eyed younger sister that I had always known.
By the time we drove home to the basement apartment together, Marilyn had explained to me that she’d been hearing voices. She was certain that these were actual invisible people. I spent many nights and days trying to convince her otherwise. We took the corners of a sheet, stretched it across the bedroom from end to end, and walked across the room to catch the invisible people. I did this to prove to her there were no invisible people. She was convinced that they were either jumping over or crawling under the sheet, so it was never really helpful.
I was always determined to talk her out of her mental illness. If I could just convince her that the voices were not real she would stop listening to them.
I pointed out to her that the voices mispronounced some words the same way that she did. This never helped either.
I had to leave her every day while I went to work. With no phone in the home, I never knew what went on while I was away, but I lived sick with worry.
She actually got herself hired at White Castle and had a cute little uniform. We were both so excited and proud. A few days later she told me the job was over, with a sad look on her face. She didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. I don’t know why I didn’t ask. I didn’t want her to feel bad.
The family that I worked for then, and was becoming close to, at the Des Plaines Journal, went on vacation and while they were away they left their older son in charge. One evening, he brought a basket of work for me that had been hidden for some strange reason. He dumped it on my desk in front of me at quitting time and I worked late with a colleague until it started getting dark outside. I was worried sick about leaving my sister for so long and burst into tears when my colleague offered to finish up and I walked out on my job. On top of that, the turtle that I was given to care for while the family was away, went and died and the boss was angry by the time he got back. I was so humiliated and hurt that I never returned to the job.
I got a job at Zenith after that, separating invoices into stacks of colored paper, pink, yellow, blue, white… all day long. I sat with many other friendly women, rows and rows of identical desks, doing exactly what I was doing.
I got home one day and Marilyn said she was afraid and the voices were telling her to kill me. She was blank faced with no emotion. I wanted to beg her to snap out of it but it frightened me, so I took her at her word. I had to seek outside help, from a distant relative who helped me get her back to New Mexico.
I got rheumatic fever soon after that and returned home to New Mexico. Marilyn was in an institution by then. They would send Marilyn to me to take care of, one more time, when she was in between institutions and they went on vacation, the following year, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when she was in much worse condition, and so was I.
Again, it was a grueling experience for both of us. I went to work all day long while she stayed alone in a tiny little box of a house in the South Valley. There was a mattress on the floor, a couple of wooden chairs. She was there in that box with nothing but demons to deal with alone. She didnt’ speak much. She was deep in her world. I was nearly a vegetable then myself, by then. Traumatized. It would take 40 years for me to see it and realize it.
Sour grapes::::::::::: the rest of this is really a message to 2 sisters that I am furious with, now that I realize fully what they pulled off scape goating me 10 years ago, because they trusted me to remain silent about the horrors that everyone keeps secret.
Yet my two remaining sisters say I didn’t sacrifice enough for the family. I was cruel, so my little sister said, although I never mentioned any of this to any of the parents while they were alive. I never mentioned the profound neglect of my younger siblings, the burden that they put on me when I was far too young, the many times they knocked me to my knees in life, without even a thank you, and did nothing to help me get back up. I never mentioned any of it to them, not once.
My older sister, on the other hand, has been known to stand outside the doors of both our parents, in the dark of the night, as an adult, decade after decade, at their various homes and hotel rooms, screaming at them for hours what horrible parents they were.
My notoriously temperamental big sister, who beats people up after funerals, throws food in people’s faces in restaurants and private homes, and screams regularly at strangers, gets a pass for this behavior and for some reason I’m the one that my little sister wants to claim is cruel.
Why, my big sister will even tell you herself that our step-father, Ray, began to ask her, in the last few months of Mom’s life, why she kept coming to visit when all she wanted to do was berate her mother while she was there. She told me that she would always respond to Ray, “Because she’s my mother!”, and she was outraged that Ray didn’t understand that “being my mother” should make it self explanatory. ‘I abuse her because she’s my mother, duh.’ She’s always gotten away with it. She thinks it’s perfectly normal to be abusive. Oh, she’s always very sorry not long after she’s ground you into the dirt and left you a bloody pulp. She comes back a sobbing, slobbery mess of apologies and everyone accepts it. I don’t. Not ever again. She’s damaged so many people I love who are gone and her last words to me were as cruel as it gets. I’m so done.
The woman is notorious for her abuse and the rage she creates. She is chased by angry drivers on a regular basis, and she chases them as well. She threatens strangers in movie theaters to “watch your asses in the parking lot” when they shush her, screams at waitresses and other customer service workers, both over the phone and in person.
My little sister decided to use her when she became angry with me about one thing, and one thing only, having nothing to do with our mother.
I never said one word to my mother about how cruel she was to Nancy her entire life, never even inviting her for a holiday her entire adult life. Never said how i felt about her walking out on her as she struggled to breath, an hour before her death, after I begged her not to leave, leaving her to die alone in her room. I still don’t understand how my little sister can claim that i’m the one that was cruel. She thinks I was cruel for simply having feelings about it. She didn’t grow up with Nancy. She’s such a narcissist she’ll never get that the world didn’t begin and end with her.
I never felt the same about Mom after that, but I tried not to show it. I never said anything about all the profound neglect that I witnessed and experienced throughout our entire lives. If I ask my little sister to tell me how I was cruel in comparison to my abusive older sister or to my parents themselves, she cannot. I did nothing to compare to what was done by them over decades.
She thinks my thoughts are cruel, even though I never got the opportunity to express them, until now.
She really doesn’t care about cruelty, because she gives a pass to the person who was cruelest of all, so amoral that she will use whoever she can use to support her dishonest agenda. What a shame. What a sick family I have. I apologize for sharing it.
It feels necessary. I got muzzled ten years ago … in many ways muzzled all my damned life.
That part is over. My truth is out. I hate to have to admit that I have family members so sick and twisted and I swear the disease is capitalism. No one thought about, or planned around, or plotted and spent their whole lives counting coins, more than you know who. The other one is just plain nuts and has inherited 5 times more than I, so there’s no competition.
That’s why I’m far away from my roots, living in the middle of nowhere and at peace with it.
I missed my grandchildren growing up. I knew it would make me look bad as a grandma, but I’ve never spoken about any of the family drama to my grand kids and I learned years ago that the sisters and brother-in-law have been gossiping about me to my grand kids. If I had been nearby, it would have been far more damaging, because I’m sure they would have worked even harder at it and I probably would have participated. The horrors! All one has to do is read my both my sister’s damaging emails to understand the toxicity I had to stay away from. I regret not getting to know my grandkids as they grew up, but I don’t regret staying away from Texas. I tried to lure them to other states a number of times but it never worked.
I’m proud of who they both are right now and feel very hopeful for their future, so no regrets on my choice, just regrets on what I missed personally.
Oikos 