Since my mother’s death, one surviving daughter, Lisa, has taken to reciting her tally, describing a person’s worth, for each member of the family when she stands and speaks at funerals. Her tally is based on the last 20% of her life, and everyone else’s. The worth of each individual member of ‘the family’ is determined by how much they did for ‘the elders.’ By ‘the elders’, she is referring to our mother and step-father.
I’ve decided to do my best to fill in the blanks and contribute to the family tally, if there is to be one. Please bear with me as i didn’t spend my life counting up favors, and who benefited from whom, or who exploited whom, as mindfully as others apparently did.
This is why I’ve been compelled to turn my processing notes into a form of a book, that those who are open and fair minded will consider, if judgment of our family, or any member of it, has been taken on as their prerogative.
I am the only one still living in this picture. Each one of my siblings pictured here had painful lives in a number of ways and I write the stories they are unable to tell. My little brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, lifelong epilepsy and extremely poor eye-hand coordination which prevented him from being able to write legibly throughout his life, despite that his reading, speaking abilities, i.e., cognitive abilities, were above average.
He was a very intelligent man who lived in terror of the world.
I witnessed a brutal beating when my brother was in diapers, and have always believed that may have caused some brain damage.
Whatever the case, my father would periodically become a raging man behind closed doors and his only son was one of his primary victims. My brother lived in fear of him, along with all of the other crippling disabilities he spent his life dealing with, mostly alone.
When my brother was placed in special ed in junior high, the school children who had formerly been his friends, began to call him retardo and monkey man, harassing him and taunting him and running down the halls in fear of him, once they had finally provoked him. In those days he would come home from school every day and collapse on the bed in tears, while my sisters and I watched helplessly, begging our mother to find another situation. I witnessed this when I came home for a visit, after a few years in foster homes..
The baby in that picture is Marilyn. At the same time that my brother was being harassed, our little sister, Marilyn, was in grade school. She, too, had groups of children bullying her. The school bullies had given her the name of Myrtle the Turtle. They made her a target because she went to school in wrinkled, dirty clothes, with unclean face and teeth and unbrushed hair. They said she had cooties and no one would sit where she had been sitting, or drink from the same fountain where she had been drinking.
“Don’t drink from that one!” someone would yell, “Myrtle the Turtle drank there. “ and the kids would line up behind the other fountains, no one touching the one that she had touched. Marilyn would giggle and pretend it did not hurt her deeply. I did not learn of this until a few years after the fact, and it was not Marilyn who shared it with me. She kept it to herself, but I found the evidence of its deep effects in her letters to Generals and President Carter when she asked them why they were experimenting with her and causing voices in her head, she signed her name as Myrtle the Turtle.
After studying her therapy notes in the final months of her life, she doesn’t even share this experience with her therapist, although she does share with them her concerns about a babysitter that Mom used to use to watch the three younger children. He was a single, elderly man, who made them take off their shirts when they stayed with him. Marilyn was just beginning to delve into these memories when she took her life.
Marilyn was a lifelong victim of extreme neglect, despite that there were maids at the house five days a week, from breakfast to supper time. When our mother was at home, she never left the bed.
My oldest sister, Nancy, lost her real mother when she was five and suffered a life with a jealous step-mother and cruel step-sister, and a father who sometimes betrayed her, along with a cousin who joined in on the bullying the rare times that she was around.
Nancy was the most loving and giving person you could ever have known. She was my Cinderella, doing all of the chores, taking care of the babies, telling us stories, grooming us all and even disciplining. She became a perfect mother as well, but she never made it to age fifty. The stem cell transplant claimed her life. She never got the life she deserved, nor did Marilyn or Johnny.
Ronny, in fact, did not get the years he deserved on this planet.
And yet Lisa claims the sum total of a person’s value is how they served the wishes of the unself-made wealthy class of Mom and Ray, who enjoyed more than 80 years of secure existence, as if that were the measure of my siblings’ worth.
Oh, the superficiality that capitalism breeds.
Oikos 