My god this is going to be a lot to read…
This has to be multi-part. I’ll split it up somehow.
My story starts before my conception. Basically, my mother was p~~~ed off and headstrong to the point she, at 17, married my father to spite her own father and quickly became pregnant with me. The marriage lasted something like six months. As near as I can tell, she was paranoid that my father was out of eyeshot for long periods of time and “could” be cheating on her. He was in the Navy, on a boat, and was ultimately medically discharged due to an inability to sleep that was attributed to claustrophobia. With his Navy career gone and him entering the less-prestigious field of Electronics, my mother bolted back home.
Ultimately, a year later, she married the boy-through-the-block, who is the only Dad I’ve ever known and I mean that in the best way possible. I have a s~~~-ton of respect my Dad for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason, aside from my not being his bio-child, is for the “Purple Hearts” we each earned due to how my mother treated us.
The biggest fault in the chain? I thought that s~~~ was normal.
I don’t like leaving out crucial stuff until the end of a story so I’ll outline some important things now. My god I’ve walked a road. Even this is going to take time.
I have two brothers-from-the-same-mother. To keep things partially anonymous, call them Rocko and Kevin. Rocko was never really around to put up with our mother’s bulls~~~. To this very day, he’s often on adventures, local or otherwise (we live in a very outdoor-oriented state in the USA, and that’s putting it lightly. Well, can’t hide that part. Utah.). Kevin was pudding. His primary defense to the way he was manipulated was to have zero reaction. It worked.
Me? HailEris, I can’t summarize it. There’s no f~~~ing way.
In addition to the two brothers I mentioned, I also have two more brothers and a sister who my father raised. My sister turned out to be a NAWALT, mostly because she told her f~~~ing-retard mother to p~~~ off. My own mother had no interaction with these siblings of mine. Well… almost. One brother, call him Craig, tried to contact me in 2002 and she told me partial info about it. Since my parents had Caller ID, I checked the ID box memory log and learned that it had been cleared shortly after the call. I couldn’t call him back. At the time, he was the only sibling, other than the two I grew up with, I knew of. Later, I was so desperate I called a TV station to help me get in touch and they couldn’t help, either. I don’t blame them. The info was hard to find and my mother told me the wrong city in Idaho to search.
It would be 3 more years before I would connect with that part of my family and 5 more years before I would meet this same brother for the first time. Ultimately, 11 years before we would spend any real time together. The other two siblings? I met them only a month later, the day after Xmas in 2005. Call them Seth and Stacy.
Incidentally, it was my then-wife who reconnected me with my paternal family in 2005 and the irony is palpable. It backfired on her pretty badly, but that’s a later piece of this story. The reason she did it was she hated my mother, who was (past-tense nature because, spoiler alert, she’s dead.) insanely manipulative. Our relationship was somewhat built upon that fact. That’s a red flag. No woman I ever dated liked my mother. The wife was just more active in her hatred. The only girls/women my mother liked for any amount of time? Far-Overweight. If the girl I was dating was slim, she was labeled a whore, especially if she knew anything about fashion.
Fashion… that’s ironic. My mother was a seamstress, firmly entrenched in fashion by necessity. I won’t deny that fact. Not the attention-whoring runway bulls~~~ we see today, but the stuff people actually buy. She made Prom and wedding dresses, for f~~~sake. And really good ones, too. To her credit, she’s part of why I can sew/upholster; her mother, my grandma, is the other part. More to her credit, when MC Hammer was huge and everyone wanted “Hammer Pants”, she altered a pattern, found massive amounts of bright fabric, and made same for my brothers and I. Billboarding. Kids asked about our clothes and we had, I s~~~ you not, business cards we’d give out. They worked. Orders were called in and became so intense my brothers and I had to sit in the sun-baked family Suburban while our mother ran into a fabric place for a “mom-minute” (“Oh god not this s~~~ again…”).
To lay out the age sequence with the siblings:
caffeine, Rocko, Kevin, Craig, Seth, Stacy.
Stacy is 9 years younger than myself. I first met her when she was 15. Less than a year later, living in the same place, we bonded hard and it turned out her friends were of a similar NAWALT nature. Somehow, that’s a thing there. Population allows such a social gathering, I guess. That doesn’t happen in my small city.
If I hadn’t been married when I spent a lot of time with my sister, damn straight I would have married one of the four Unicorns in her social circle. They were so entirely unlike my then-wife.
caffeine 3 years, 9 months ago.
