Diary of My Dysfunctional Family

So Many Weird Things Happened!

 I never blamed alcohol for the problems and I don’t believe that alcohol was the problem but I do believe it was what my parents used so they could get drunk and not deal with the horrible crimes that they had committed to the innocent children in their lives as well as to themselves and each other. Alcohol was always present in my life, I never thought of it as a problem until I got older, because my stepfather always worked and was never unable to function because of alcohol and my mother only drank in the evenings with my stepfather and with the exception of a couple of memories I have of their being drunk when I was living at home their drinking never seemed to be a big factor.

 I remember one evening when I think my sister and I were around 11 and 13, and we were left alone for the evening (we lived on an acre lot and my mother’s father lived in a trailer house on the acre so we were not that alone, there was a special phone hooked up that ran from our house to Grandpa’s trailer) which we thought was really cool and we would be left with a treat (because we never got them otherwise) of getting to make our own TV dinners and we were also allowed to have a small glass of wine with tit which we really felt like we were “big” girls for getting to cook our own TV dinner and eat it with a glass of wine like we were at our own private restaurant. My stepfather drove a backhoe for a living and worked at the “Elk’s” club as a bartender on Friday nights and frequently mother and he went to the Elks club on Saturday night to socialize with a married couple that went there also. My mother thought the Elk’s club’s ritual of standing up at the hour of 11:00 PM to honor the “fallen elk” (or dead people as most of us would say) and I remember hearing her and my stepfather arguing because my mother would giggle when they rang the gong and asked the member to bow their heads because it embarrassed my stepfather when mother would laugh. I do remember one time some friends of my parents son’s wedding reception was held at that “Elk’s club” and I got to experience the “Hour of Recollection” that caused my mother to laugh and me as well once I got to witness this silly serious ceremony, it wasn’t that they were honoring the dead that was silly it the way they said it, referring to their members as elk and the dead people as fallen elk on top of the fact that the head people had titles that sounded like they belonged to the Klu Klux Clan, like the “exalted ruler” and it did sound pretty silly when they talked about the kingdom of “elkdom” and bowing your heads for the “fallen elk”. This is a direct quote from Wikipedia about this phenomena of “The Hour of Recollection”. Deceased and otherwise absent lodge members are recalled each evening at 11 p.m. Chimes or sometimes a bell will be rung 11 times and the Lodge Esquire intones, "It is the Hour of Recollection." The Exalted Ruler or a member designated by him gives the 11 o'clock toast, of which this version is the most common: You have heard the tolling of eleven strokes. This is to remind you that with Elks, the hour of eleven has a tender significance. Wherever Elks may roam, whatever their lot in life may be, when this hour falls upon the dial of night, the great heart of Elkdom swells and throbs. It is the golden hour of recollection, the homecoming of those who wander, the mystic roll call of those who will come no more. Living or dead, an Elk is never forgotten, never forsaken. Morning and noon may pass them by, the light of day sink heedlessly into the west. But ere the shadows of midnight shall fall, the chimes of memory will be pealing forth the friendly message: To our absent members. That is the end of the Wikipedia quote. I’m not trying offend anyone but how could you not laugh after someone says this with a straight face? One evening after my parents had been at the elks club they came home in the early hours of the morning, my sister and I were sleeping in the trundle bed in her room that night and there was a full length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door that when it was left open you could see inside of the bathroom from my sister’s bedroom and we could see everything my parents were doing in the bathroom. My father basically carried my mother into the bathroom and put her in the shower and she could barely stand up. We didn’t realize at that time it was because she had gotten drunk and had gotten sick on herself and our stepfather was trying to wash her off. At the time in the middle of the night my sister and I just giggled to ourselves and watched the show. The next day when we brought it up we were told that our mother had gotten really drunk and sick which we didn’t totally understand for several years.  The next memorable drunken experience that we saw our parents' exhibit was when I was 15 and my sister was 12 and we had recently moved to the country and my parents had just come home after spending the evening at a local tavern. We were sleeping in our own beds but since our parents were gone when we went to sleep we had fallen asleep with our bedroom doors slightly cracked open so we could hear them when they came home. Boy could we. I remember them driving into the garage and coming into the house and then we could hear them in their bedroom, which was on the other side of the hall from my sister and I’s bedroom. We both compared what we had heard the next day and we both heard the same thing. We heard them enter their bedroom and not too long after that we heard a loud thump and then “what the hell are you doing, I thought you were helping me take my pants off?” and the answer from our mother was “that was what I was trying to do, you weren’t supposed to come off of the bed with your pants!” We both independently laughed and the next morning told our mother and stepfather what we had heard. They were a little embarrassed but we were old enough it was no big deal.

This incident happened not long after the previous one. One evening when I was 16 and my sister was 13, we were living a few miles out of the small town my family had been moved to a year before that, my stepfather’s real daughter and her husband were at the house visiting and after dinner they sat around in the living room drinking wine and talking. My sister and I were bored and asked if we could borrow the car and drive down to the local hangout in town until it got dark. It was summertime and it didn’t get dark until around 10:00 and it was only 7:00 when we asked to leave. They said yes so I drove us the four miles to the town and we hung out with the teenager that lived on the main street of the town that had just graduated from high school and had rented a trailer house to live and party in. We stayed and flirted with the guys until a bit longer than dark, it was probably about half an hour. When we got home the lights were out inside the house and everyone was in bed.  We were thinking we were lucky because then no one could get mad at us for being a little late. The only problem was is that we couldn’t see where we were going. We managed to go upstairs to where our bedrooms were, Brenda and Dennis were sleeping in the family room downstairs on the fold out couch. We first went in to the bathroom to brush our teeth and go to the bathroom before we went to bed. We were giggling because even though we were trying to be so quiet it seemed like we were making a lot of noise because it was so quiet in the house. Pretty soon mom yelled out for us to be quiet and we didn’t say anything but we did giggle a little more. Then in a few more minutes we heard “I told you guys to be quiet” and we turned to look and mom was standing at the bathroom door and her hair was all messed up from her being in bed. We looked at her at started laughing at her messy hair, she told us to go to bed. We told her we would. We finished brushing our teeth and looked over to see our stepfather standing at the door and he said “Your mother told you to be quiet and go to bed.” For some reason my sister, who was on standing by the bathroom door said “We will, good night” and then she shut the door. We heard a thump against the door and then another one and my sister quickly jumped away from the door and hid behind me. The third thump brought the door wide opened having been punched off of its hinges by our stepfather. We just stood there terrified and he just looked at us and said “you better do what your mother asked you to do” and then he turned and went back to bed. We got really quiet and went to bed immediately. The next morning when we got up they were at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Brenda and Dennis. Nobody said anything for a while. A little later when my sister and I got a chance to talk to Brenda and Dennis alone they asked us what happened. We told them. Later on in the day Brenda told us that her dad had told her that when he got mad at us for not doing what mom had said and knocked the door off the hinges that we had such terrified looks on our faces it was all he could do to keep from laughing. He was also mad at himself for doing it because he was going to have to out the door back on the hinges. She also said that she asked Dennis if she should go up and see if everything was alright and he said "hell no stay down here."  In a few years we would laugh about the event but not that day!

As the years went on saw so many odd incidences that they made me realize that they were always dependent on alcohol to live with themselves for the various reasons I have already disclosed in other stories. I used to always think that one of the reasons I was a responsible drinker of alcohol was because I was allowed to try it when I was fairly young so it held no mystery for me and I saw my parents try to escape their lives and their responsibility for having screwed up their children’s lives by drinking alcohol every evening. Because they weren’t such alcoholics that they couldn’t function I didn’t put the dots together until twenty years later that they were alcoholics in order to avoid dealing with how screwed up they were. The only favor I guess they did me was making me not want to get drunk and be like them. I would rather face life head on and be able to say I did the right thing!

There are so many strange incidents that have happened in my family that I will never be able to remember or record them all and that is probably a good thing. My stepfather is a very odd person and most of the strange stories in my family life revolve around him and most of them, but not all of them, happened when he was drinking. I in no way blame alcohol for the weirdness as I believe that my parents became alcoholics because as I have already said they drank to escape from all of the weird and awful things they inflicted on their children and to help them cope with their guilt. I think that the things that happened while they were drinking were because of their being uninhibited by what should have been the natural desire to hide how weird and inappropriate their behavior was when they reacted to tiny little things that my stepfather would lose it over. Things like someone not “thanking” him for bringing them a glass of something to drink at a party and an hour and a half later we would find out he had been sitting around being pissed off for that hour and a half and would blow up and have a cow about some tiny little thing because he had been stewing about the imagined slight for an hour and a half. So bizarre! My mother and my stepfather used to baby sit, I am absolutely sure it was her idea and not his, my nephews when they were young and they just loved to play with the hassock my parents had to place your feet on when sitting in my mother’s favorite chair. They beat it up pretty good over the few years they were young boys and because my stepfather always has to blame someone for something when it finally fell apart after 10 years he deemed it the fault of my sister’s kids. It really shouldn’t have mattered as it was probably a $30 piece of furniture to begin with but my stepfather had to find blame for everything even if it was free. So one Christmas after the hassock was so screwed up it could no longer be used my stepfather wrapped it up and let my sister open it as a Christmas present. I assume the reason was to let her know he blamed her for her children ruining it. How much more screwed up of a person could he be, after already molesting my sister and I as young teenagers and we forgave him and then he does this? Am I missing something? I don’t think so. I think my sister and I are lucky to even have something close to a normal life after growing with this freak for a stepfather and the freak for a mother we had that let him do the screwed things he did. I am left to wonder how we even got out alive sometimes! There are so many stupid incidents at all of our family occasions, Christmas, birthday parties and even times we all met for dinner at a restaurant.

I have been going through family photos and have found I have a lot of good memories as well as a lot of bad ones upon going through them. The good far outweighs the bad but I am amazed at how many strange events have gone on in my family. I hope this is not normal. When I started to buy a house together with my best friend in 1990 we started having Christmas at my house because after our Christmas experience in 1989 led to my stepfather calling me up on the phone a day after Christmas and telling me that my dog chewed some branches off of one the Rhododendron bushes they had and he was really pissed off about it. I first told him I couldn’t imagine why my dog would have done this as she was not a stick dog or particularly destructive, they live on 63 acres that she was free to roam on so why would she chew up a bush in their front yard? But I politely apologized anyway and said if she did it I was sorry.  My private thoughts were “It was only a bush and there were only a couple of branches ruined”, but I didn’t say that. Later on in the evening my stepfather called me back and told me he found out that my two nephews had destroyed the two branches on the stupid plant and he was sorry that he accused my dog. I told him that I never thought my dog did it but I also thought it was ridiculous that he was so upset by such a trivial thing. That was the reason I wanted Christmas to be held at my house because stupid incidents like this have no place in loving your family on Christmas.