Family Stuff

                PTSD

I’ve never had a clinical diagnosis,

and it’s only been since my mid-sixties

that compulsive reflection and self-analysis,

combined with serendipitous and targeted reading,

have led me to the conclusion

that the relentless abuse

I received more or less daily

from my maternal and fraternal units

as a child and an adolescent

and during subsequent encounters with them

until I was well into my forties

resulted in my being subject to

post-traumatic stress disorder.

It explains heaps.

Actually, if I didn’t have PTSD

it’d be a fucking miracle,

and I don’t believe in miracles.

            Dudi, the Numbers, & Lotto

One of my favourite people ever

was my maternal grandfather,

whom we grandchildren called Dudi.

A refugee from the Russian Empire,

he’d been born in a small village

near what’s now the Polish-Belarusian border,

and although he’d fled when he’d been 14,

he still had a heavy accent.

He always smelled strongly of tobacco,

as since he’d been ten

he’d smoked about two packs

of unfiltered cigarettes a day,

and did so until he died of a sudden aneurism

when he was 89 or 90 –

refugees without papers can be vague about birthdays.

He was a tough old unit, sure enough,

who loved and believed in hard work.

Once, when he was about 80,

the vehicle in which he was a passenger hit a stone wall.

With several cracked ribs,

he got out and walked a half an hour or more

in to his newsstand, where he worked all day

before getting medical help.

He told me naughty jokes,

much to my mother’s disapproval,

which endeared him to me more.

He taught me card games that I’ve taught my children.

He loved Groucho Marx and Jimmy Durante.

He also liked to play the Numbers,

which is what he called

the gangster-run lotteries that slurped up people’s money

before the state took the racket over.

Of course he never won.

I’d just won $25 before writing this – Lotto Division 6.

I hope Dudi would have been proud.

              Interesting Point

One of the many forms of abuse

to which my mother gleefully subjected me

was the use of enemas as punishment,

when I was still small enough

for her to get away with it,

from the dawn of my memory

through the preschool years,

and then until I guess I was about maybe seven.

The obvious psychological-emotional abuse, of course,

was in the threat itself,

the severity and grim inevitability in her manner,

and the way she prepared methodically

to carry it through, filling me with terror.

The actual pain and humiliation of the punishment

was definitely physical abuse.

I wonder, though,

whether it was actually sexual abuse,

or both.

To answer this, I’m afraid,

would mean going into that woman’s mind –

which is not a place I’d choose to go, thank you.

                      General Practice

I remember that when I was little

my daddy, the only GP in a small town,

used to make house calls regularly;

I remember how the black bag

that he took with him on these

absences from home

and its contents fascinated me.

I remember that one morning at breakfast

he was telling my mother,

with me sitting there with ears wide open,

about how the night before

the patient who had called him to see her at home

had been an old woman

with no acute medical problem

other than being too weak and fragile and broke to get out much,

lying there facing the human condition all by herself,

while still being afraid of dying.

He said that he’d sat by her bed,

just wordlessly holding her hand,

for a long time.

I don’t remember my mother’s reaction to this.

It seems unlikely that family doctors

can do things like that any more.

Maybe it’s the growing stresses

on the patients-to-resources ratio.

Maybe it’s the changes in our systems and culture.

Or maybe my daddy was a one-off even back then.

In a world characterised by horror and pain,

I suppose that comforting one lonely and frightened old woman

who isn’t even family

makes bloody little difference, anyway.

           A Nasty Personal Secret

I remember once when I was five or six

that my mother caught me

poking holes in my dry lips

with a pin.

She immediately launched into

the sort of violently and angrily

abusive, domineering,

control-at-any cost harangue

to which my self-harm

was a common psychological response.

I tried to explain that it was safe

because I’d sterilised the pinpoint with a match.

Searching for a knockout blow

in order to sort me out on the behaviour

once and for all,

she blustered, ‘You’re … you’re … you’re … you’re a masochist!’

as if that meant anything

to a child that small

other than being another reason

why I was bad, with no chance of ever pleasing her.

I never was a masochist, of course,

and have what I suppose

is a normal distaste for pain inflicted by others,

but I continued with self harm

when she wasn’t looking,

enjoying the sense of relief and empowerment that it provides,

and I suppose the mild endorphin burst, too.

I continue to do so from time to time into old age

– I’ve lately enjoyed using my fingernail

to scratch the inside of my ear until it bleeds

and to dig craters into my scalp –

and I aint dead yet.

                              Rugged

My stepfather, Howard,

owned his own civil engineering firm,

had served as a major in the occupation of Austria,

and was a life-long Republican.

When he heard in 1968 that I’d been drafted

he told me that he’d set me up in business in Canada, explaining,

“Goddamned army was the worst goddamned waste of time in my life!

I had to take a bunch of shit from people who were idiots,

and I didn’t make a goddamned cent!”

Yes, the military is indeed incompatible with rugged individualism,

with people, like Howard, who feel that life isn’t worth living

if they can’t tell anybody they think deserves it to go to Hell

whenever they want to.

I took a shitload of benzedrine tablets

and flunked my draft physical due to high blood pressure,

but I felt grateful to Howard for the offer – and the lesson,

anyway.

           Absence of Nostalgia

I knew my mother

for a few decades or so,

but I have no fond memories of her,

and almost no pleasant ones.

The only semi-pleasant one that I can recall,

comes from early childhood –

after I’d taken my first bath all by myself,

and she was interrogating me

about how thoroughly I’d washed myself.

When she got to the point

of asking me if I’d washed my ass,

her face took on a devilish,

almost-human, almost-pleased expression,

with raised eyebrows and a naughty smile,

and I almost felt a bond with her

and then it was gone

forever,

and her onslaught of heartlessness resumed

unabated.

                  Dickhead Perfection

               (A Real Person I Know)

Man, what a dickhead!

A perfect dickhead.

He can be dickheaded about anything, and is.

And not just dickheaded,

but as undeviatingly, purely dickheaded

as it’s humanly possible to be,

and humans being a species

with an overall tendency toward dickheadedness,

this is saying something.

On any given matter,

whether it be politics or social problems or ethnicity

or food choices or clothing styles or sport

or occupations or education or real estate or headphones

or any other of the hundreds of thousands

of big and small stuff in our lives,

he unerringly takes the most extremely dickheaded

position and point of view possible

and sticks with it loudly and aggressively

until and unless he can think of a more dickheaded one.

He makes prodigious effort

to seem effortlessly dickheaded

to his family and his colleagues,

and anyone else who comes along

— if he thinks he can get away with it.

He’s a type A dickhead

with a lust for dickhead perfection,

and, despite his age and social status,

he frequently giggles about it.