Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 64-65 childhood

My mother clawed incessantly at my rat father. Our house was filled with this stony silence as each member of the family tried to fight through their own neglected upbringing.

I don’t have any pleasant memories of my childhood. Is this a product of the reality from which I came, or a product of my mind? Well, I can say the entire family at this moment remains totally splintered.

My mom once accused my father of not caring about his youngest child. My younger brother was born with a heart defect that caused a blood shortage to his brain rendering him incapable of accomplishing tasks. He was considered ‘stupid’ and my father never bonded with him.

So one day we were staying at a cheap motel next to a lake. Our family was moving to Indiana from Kansas and the place had a ‘pool’ roped off near the boat dock and the water was deep and filthy. We kids should never have been put in that pool … it was over our heads and we didn’t know how to swim … but our parents insisted all three kids go in the water.

We hung on the edge and our feet could touch a steep mossy-covered slope, and then with parental egging we worked our way to the far edge and back.

Oh my God, my younger brother lost his grip. He disappeared.

I was afraid of losing my grip, but it didn’t matter … he was just gone … and I never felt anything for him because we were rewarded for picking on him. We were rewarded for picking on my small brain-damaged brother. God damnit, I’m crying.

Both my parents were standing on the dock above us, and my father never made a move. Survival of the fittest and the weakest just disappeared.

My mom cried out and leapt-in fully-clothed, still carrying her purse, and I can still see that image burned into my mind today. I can still see that purse dangling loosely on her right forearm and somehow she pulled my brother up and saved him.

Afterwards there was no laughter or rejoicing. We just routinely dried off and continued our journey east because nobody was there to teach us about expressing emotions.

My mother openly accused my father of not acting to save my younger brother. My father denied it, but I believe it was true.

I know one thing for certain, if the number one son had slipped under the water, my father would’ve belly-flopped on that concrete to reach for him.

Later I learned my mom was a near-champion swimmer. She told us how she use to swim a quarter-mile across the lake every day, but she never filled us with stories about her childhood. Neither did our father. Between them, there can’t be more than a handful of stories.

I see it on TV. I see parents hugging their children and laughing and sharing, and kids having a good time with each other. But that’s not real. It doesn’t exist. They’re just selling a product.
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Chapter 65

Nobody got attention in our family, except for negative attention.

Certainly this says volumes about my parent’s upbringing.

My father seemed to gloat his success in life, and yet his parents never noticed. He never spoke about them except a snippet here or there.

He told us how his older brother disgraced the family by getting some ‘hottie’ pregnant and then ‘had’ to marry her. Why did we need to know that? Why was that the big story? Uncle Bob and Aunt Dorothy were fine people and raised four children. They weren’t rich or poor … they were just people.

We rarely saw our relatives. And once we moved ‘back east’ the visits became fewer and fewer.

When Uncle Bob got drunk one night and went out to the highway to ‘burn out the carburetor’ and killed several people including himself, it was just something that happened. My father was emotional when he got the phone call, and I avoided talking to him, but he handled it ‘like a man.’ He never spoke about it and he went alone to the funeral in Kansas. I never called my cousins and we never spoke about it in our family past the night it happened.

Bang gone. That’s the way business was handled in our family.

Same thing when my fraternal grandmother died. My grandmother lingered semi-comatose in an Emporia nursing home for three years and the grandchildren from my side never visited or called or wrote.

Aunt Dorothy and my cousins brought grandmother to their hometown after the stroke, and they looked after her for three years … they visited and spoon-fed her at the nursing home … but nobody from my side of the family except my father showed any interest.

When she died … it was … ok.

I still think about my reaction, and how it illuminates my father’s perception of his upbringing.

The same sequence took place when my maternal grandparents died. Mom handled her grief privately, and she went alone to the funerals.

Christ’s sake … no wonder there was no praise in our family.

If the number one son got praised, then that was okay. If however there was any praise for the other children, then my father would rush in and take over the conversation. At first there would be reinforcement of the praise, but quickly a little criticism would creep in, until finally the event became a rolling criticism of your total being.

We stopped talking. It was best.

My mom used her children to fill her own deficiencies, and that’s why nobody seemed to enter the real-world except my older brother. But he was damaged too. You can’t grow up isolated from your own siblings and expect to walk through the hail without a scratch or two.

I never envied my older brother. He was stupid in a lot of ways, but I never said anything to defy my parent’s wishes. He was an avid bike rider but when I became stronger, he stopped riding and diminished bike riding. He and I shared a group of friends, but when they started liking me more, he stopped going over there … and said they were ugly. LOL.

That’s why I never wanted to become a better runner than my brother. It was his success … it was his school involvement … and he was lavishly praised for it.

When my older brother started dating girls, he was looking for girls that would ‘put-out.’ He used girls and pretended to like them, and my mom told him that was wrong. Later my brother confided that my father said he should ‘go for it.’ I didn’t like using girls, I wanted shared feelings, and maybe that’s why my father said I should stop going to church ‘just because I like the daughter’ of that family in New Jersey. I liked her … so what?

What was this great ambition that my father held for his children that he couldn’t even encourage us for being who we were? Did he really think he escaped his empty childhood by becoming more successful than anyone else that came out of that little Kansas town? I dunno … but that was the formula that worked for him, and after all, we didn’t want to become like Uncle Bob did we?

When I became a contractor, my father disparaged that like it was a curse. You don’t want to be a contractor do you? That’s exactly what he said, despite that being my interest. He never noticed that I bought a power saw when I was fourteen.

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