Beware the Moon

I don’t know if these old stories of my uh, FORMATIVE years are great reading. But I also wonder if they HAVE to be great.  Maybe all they have to do is BE.  Because, I have a theory about all of us, all of us who are writing about our narcs.  And here it is:

 

Maybe we are paving the way, like putting big orange cones and caution flashing yellow lights along a road – maybe we’re doing that for the next generation of kids raised with narcs, or people who date/marry narcs.  They will be searching searching, all over the interwebs, just like we did – just like we found each other.  And now, because of us, they will have road maps and signs – they will be able to recognize this bullshit.  SEE it sooner in their lives.  For most of us, it takes till we are in our 50’s and beyond.  But what if people start seeing this and LEAVING it (because there seems to be no other way – there is no cure) sooner?  So their exposure is much abbreviated.  And therefore the likelihood of them contracting any fleas or ticks and becoming a narc themselves is lessened.

Because sometimes it happens that way.  Sometimes, being around a narc makes you act like THEM.  You begin to think that up is really down – that wrong is right and wrong is MIGHT.  You never grow your empathy bone.  You start to believe the little narcissistic megalomaniac who is training you (not raising you).  It almost happened to me.  I almost tried to un-man my son.  I ALMOST TRIED.  There’s the difference and the difference was ALL OF YOU.  Anna Valerious and Upsi and Q and Mulderfan and Tundra Woman(<--where is your blog I can't find it!!) and Charity and Jonsi and a SLEW of others who came before me.  Who made me stop and realize that a 21-year old MAN doesn’t have to want to live with his mama anymore.  That a 21-year old MARINE can buy a motorcycle and it has nothing to do with his mama JEEBUS I ALMOST DID IT.  I almost cried and sobbed and begged him to come home and live with me.  I'm ashamed.  I was telling him ‘you used to want to be my best friend’ and ‘remember when you were 9??’ and OH MY CHRIST ON A CRACKER.  I shudder.  And I wasn’t even living with and haven't been with a narc in over 15 years.  But I stopped it, and I found pride in my son for being a grown adult making grown adult decisions and making FINE DECISIONS and it was because of all of you. (He owes you.  I’d collect from him and soon because MOTORCYCLE)

Imagine if someone finds us and doesn’t marry the narc to begin with?!  Or finds us and leaves home at 18, instead of 30, or 40?!?  That’s why I’m here.  Telling my stories isn’t fun – it’s gross and disgusting to sift through all of that bullshit from 50 years ago.  Nobody loves talking about the abuse we suffered as kids and teens and adults.  I’m (mostly) over it.  Definitely past it.  But I go back to light some warning flares and – as I told Q on a comment on his entry – to leave picks and shovels and tarps.  And maybe some antibacterial wipes.  HEED THE WARNING.  Beware the moon.  Stick to the roads.

Karma

My ex-husband and I - we were fighting. So it was a normal weekend. We were at my apartment in Buena Park – I don’t think we had the kids that weekend, so it was just the two of us. Sunny and hot - probably 90-degrees. And he was out in the parking/garage area, working on his truck. It was a 1963-or-so Chevy truck, and he was trying to restore it one piece at a time. He didn’t know what in the hell he was doing and we had no real tools. This was an ‘on the fly’ operation, and smooth as sand in butter. The part about how we were arguing – we were always arguing. I married him anyway. I used to be retarded.

The truck looked something like this:

And it had a steering wheel that looked kinda like this:

Now, these old steering wheels – they were plastic and skinny and could be slippery. They often had little tiny ridges molded into the plastic on the side facing you – to help you keep your grip on the wheel.
It looked like this ---> (IIIIIIIIII).

So, with this old truck – there were problems with the steering. He needed to take apart the whole steering column to replace a part and re-pack it with grease and blah blah car repair stuff blah. In order to get to all of the column, the steering wheel would have to come off. As you can imagine, 30 years of rust and dirt and grime had created an almost impenetrable force field around this thing. All the bolty-things had been removed, screwy things un-screwed, and yet there was something wedged down in the steering column against the blah-dee blah steering wheel party thingy, and everything was stuck. Where once there were many, now all was one. Fused, as it were. To put it in a nutshell, he struggled.

But, he had a weapon – a professional tool. He had one of these:

A great beast of a rubber mallet. And he was using the crap out if it. He was – people. He was sitting in the driver’s seat. And he was hitting the back of the steering wheel, hitting towards himself, you see. Towards his own face. He needed that thing OFF and it was good and STUCK and we had been arguing and he was MAD. So what he did was, he would BANG BANG BANG that steering wheel on the back side with that great big rubber mallet, and then JERK and TUG that steering wheel, and YANK it around to the side, and then grab that big mallet and WHACK BANK WHACK the thing, and then JERK and TUG, and this was with all his might, and he was angry – did I mention? So his ‘might’ was FUELED. And this went on, and on. He was out in the hot sun, in a gigantic 1963 tin can, pissed as a wet cat, and – well, he was sorta stupid.

I went out there at one point for some reason, and just stood watching this Poseidon Adventure of a disaster unfolding in a sort of horrified awe. There is no way, on any kind of dare or bet, that you could ever. I mean EVER. Get me to swing a gigantic rubber mallet as hard as I could at a skinny little curved bar right in front of my own face. Even an infant could have seen that this was not a good plan. And this story is not going to end the way you think it is.

I had been back in the house for about a half an hour. It must have happened right after I walked away, and he stayed out there that long hoping against hope that it wasn’t as bad as he thought. But there were mirrors in that truck. He could see the damage. He came in the house, still mad as hell. And across his forehead was a huge red welt. About 2 inches across. And neatly, primly lined up like stitches on a dainty vintage hanky, were the clear, beautiful imprints of those ridges I told you about that were on that steering wheel.

He had yanked. And it had answered. That steering wheel had loosed its grip and he had *yoinked* it right into his own face.  And I almost died right on the spot from an aneurism, trying not to laugh. He had to walk around with that red badge of honor shining in the middle of his forehead (and if you think it didn’t swell up as big as an un-canned biscuit, you are crazy) for over a week. And people, there aren’t many ways to get that kind of injury – there was no way to cover that up. The story had to be told. He had to go to work like that. It was awesome.

He and I never, EVER spoke of it. We divorced years ago and I have never seen him again.  But to this day, yea, even unto this very minute, this story gives me a small, bright, mean spot of GLAD, right in my soul.

Miracle Grow

I was consistently given expectations and experiences and told to be successful – and yet never given tools to undertake the task.  I was expected to do good, to do right – yet never shown what the end result should be, or even what the possible pitfalls would be.  I was never shown ‘if you do this first, then this second, soon you will reach a goal’.  It was always ‘take this rock and jump in that lake.  It’s too heavy and you can’t swim, but we expect you for dinner on the other side.  And be dry.’ 

Get good grades but I will never look at or ask about your homework.  I will however beat you with a belt and tell you a monkey could do what you obviously cannot, when your grades are C’s and D’s.  I will never read you a book or tell you a story.  I will NOT play any games with you, although I will buy Risk and expect you girls to make heads or tails out of it.  I do not care what school activities you belong to, but do not ask for money for uniforms.  You can sew it yourself (7^th grade band uniform). 

We were dressed up like dolls (out of my normal tomboy filth) and taken to see operas.  I was six, maybe seven years old.  Had never head an operatic aria.  We were never told the romantic stories, never given a frame of reference for this event – the tickets must have been purchased months in advance and yet we found out the day of the event.  We would be shoved into dress-up clothes and fancy shoes.  Piled into the station wagon, taken to the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in Los Angeles (possibly another venue OH the Shrine Auditorium) to see oh, what – La Traviata and Madam Butterfly, the internet assures me.  These performances started at – again, what – 7:30 PM?  We lived at least two hours away from the venues, not to mention getting there on the 5-freeway in time to find our seats and get settled.  These performances ended at about 9:30 or 10:00 PM – two more hours at least home (once dad was collected from the bar where he went to watch the entire performance on the closed circuit TV, as his “legs are too long for the seats” - once the crush of people inside and in the parking area dispersed) so home by midnight?  1:00 am?  A 9-hour marathon.  And afterwards, we were sometimes treated (!?) to dinner or desert at dad’s insistence – we were good little dancing monkeys, brought out to be shown.  BUT NOT HEARD.  There were possibly Crêpe Suzettes at some fussy French restaurant

(Chez Cary (pronounced shay ka'ree' – was on Main Street in Orange, Ca). 

 

Or perhaps Peking Duck at some obscure crazy Chinese restaurant.  Always it was food I didn’t know, didn’t want to eat.  Always it came after an exhausting day of being ‘on guard’ because we were out with the narcs in public.  Always it came LATE when my childish internal clock vehemently had begun requesting food at about 6:00 pm.  (probably earlier, there was no lunch unless you remembered it yourself)  Always I was near faint from hunger and exhaustion – due to lifelong undiagnosed hypoglycemia.  Always we could not enjoy the meal we DID get, as dad would go into a narcissistic rage at a waiter or water person for some infraction.  ALWAYS. 

No discussion the following day around a cozy scene, reliving the story and the costumes, the gorgeous sets, and handsome leading men – nope, it was over and done.  Except the punishment for whatever infraction I had committed during the event – wiggling too much, asking too many questions, knocking over a water glass, getting lost in the lobby…  to this day opera and ballet mean nothing to me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see any performance.  These excursions (and the Christmas trips to Saks Fifth Avenue, another story) happened more than 4 times.  Enough to learn, after the first, to dread them.  Certainly not to enjoy and appreciate them!  No, not even to understand them.

Here are clothes for you to wear.  But we will not check the fit.  Once very six months we will go through all hand-me-downs from all 5 older sisters and do an all-day torture session of trying on ALL THE CLOTHES.  We do not care HOW you wear them, so you will be made fun of all of your life (but will not know why).  We will never help you put your clothes away so you will never learn that perhaps socks have a place, pants have a place.  In turn, you will never be able to find anything.  We will never help you by EVER suggesting that you learn about outfits, that we have play fashion shows or sessions to show you what pants go with what shirt, that you don’t wear a long sleeved sweater with shorts, that underpants should USUALLY be clean…  that perhaps you and your hair and your etc should be washed once or twice a week.  But we will point at you and laugh at you for doing such things.  You will be bullied at home and at school.  Items will not be helpfully sorted to ‘winter’ and ‘summer’ piles.  Red corduroy and blue cotton flowers and plaid jumpers and yellow tank tops all live in a pile.  OH BUT, if you do declare one outfit to be ‘ugly’, we will be certain that you will be forced to wear that outfit every Tuesday (swear!) no matter what.  Which in turn taught me how to change my clothes at the gas station bathroom next to Fairhaven Elementary School.

Here are books, tons of books (thank god, something good finally) here in the living room.  Your sister, (one of 5 sisters) who is 9-years older, is in college and she has fiction books in her room too.  Go ahead and read them all!  Read Alice in Wonderland, read Hemmingway, read Richard Brautigan.  We are glad to see you so interested in reading!  Read them all, expand your brain.  Read about abortion and war and time travel, you are 7!  8!  But we will not discuss these with you.  We in NO WAY will make any effort to pre-screen them, to audit your reading selections.  We will not approve or disapprove.  We barely notice your existence.  This then, is how I found myself reading ‘The Story of O’ in a grocery store (Satellite Market in Orange, Ca), and one of the ladies had to yank it from my hand.  It is quite the graphic S&M novel, and I was um…  still riding my banana seat bike, so 8?  9?  Huh.  It took me a lot of my life to UNlearn what my little brain taught me about life and sex and death.  We also give you no real credit for your incredible reading abilities, until we want to turn on you for the bad grades we don’t help you with and then we talk about your wasted ‘POTENTIAL’.  I can’t imagine living to 10.  You want to talk potential.  God.

Go to college.  You graduated high school, we didn’t go to the ceremony, but great.  We have no idea what classes you took in high school, or if you liked any of them.  Now go to college.  But we won’t discuss what ‘college’ even means.  We won’t tell you about professors or classes, or take you to the campus to walk around.  Also – here is an ancient brown 10-speed bicycle. 

(like this, but shit-brown.  And more used.)

 

This is your transportation to go to college.  Go register, go figure out the campus, figure out how and where to buy and haul your books, find and get to class on time, with this bike.  From La Veta avenue in Orange, to the Santa Ana college campus – miles and miles of extremely busy 4-lane roads.  Rain or shine.  Show up at college sweaty or wet or worn the fuck out with the stress of dodging trucks and cars.  Looking like hot hell while everyone else STILL looks like someone cared, someone washed clothes, someone bought them conditioner – so college is even worse than high school, and you thought that was going to be impossible!!  HAHAHA.  Shyeah, I quit.  QUIT.  How (not) odd for me  – another failure.  Again, they gave me a rock, told me to swim, and pushed me in.  *blub*  And then mocked me for YEARS because I didn’t go to college.  The other sisters?  Went to Cal State Fullerton.  Graduated with degrees.  One went to hair school (which is harder than you would think) and graduated that.  Masters degrees in English or Dance.  AA degrees in Finance etc.  One had a Volkswagon bug.  Three of them had Pintos that dad bought new for them.  I had a used bike.  Much like Charlie Brown and the rock in his trick-or-treat bag.  How sad for that girl I was.