FEAST OF MEN Read online

  Dustin saw through my family dynamics, immediately noticing their negation of me and warned, “Don’t let them know when you’re happy, or desiring anything because your family likes to take away your joy.” His perceptions felt too good to be true because he saw clearly what I’d always suspected. At last, I had an ally. So, I fell head over-heels in love and into his dysfunction.

  My parents didn’t like him. Therefore, we didn’t spend much time with them which was wonderful after what I’d experienced with Terry. In that marriage, Dad had totally controlled our life. With Dustin for the first time, I felt loved, safe and independent as he encouraged me in my interior design business. “You can do anything you set out to do.” Seeing how hard I was on myself, he knew I needed praise instead of criticism—understanding this because his father was just as critical as mine.

  We partied and sailed with his wealthy drinking and drugging friends. While dating, I became pregnant and made the heart-wrenching decision to have an abortion because my divorce from Terry wasn’t yet final. Terry stalled the divorce for years in his greedy attempt to take everything—even my wedding ring. He forced the divorce to court, but he lost. I was awarded the house, its belongings, my car and the debt on them. The divorce was awarded to me on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty and set a precedent in a ‘no-fault’ divorce state.

  The delayed divorce created the atmosphere for Dustin and me to make the decision to kill our unborn child to save societal face. A devastating decision, but at the time—I thought it the best choice. I couldn’t embarrass my family by having a child so soon after a divorce and while not able to remarry.

  I felt free from being under my oppressive parents, but soon woke up to realize that I had married every weekend drunken sailor who began to spend more time with his buddies than me. In my pain, I wondered if people who drink themselves into oblivion, might know something that I don’t. So, I joined in, but in a few short months, I detested living in an alcoholic blur of denial. It made me physically ill. So, aching for truth and a fulfilling intimate relationship, I pulled away from Dustin’s lifestyle to work constantly in my interior design business. Hoping, if I continued to be good, plus make a lot of money, my life would work out after all.

  I was a married career woman before most the rest of the women in the world were into this concept. I hyphenated my last name to maintain my identity. Only success didn’t matter as everyone still criticized me for my independence. I wasn’t fulfilled in anyway, except that I was able to purchase lots of clothes. Married and supporting myself pretty much financially and completely emotionally—was more than lonely. Dustin was a drunk dabbling in real-estate, waiting for his one big deal. I craved a fulfilling relationship and possibly a child. The emotional trauma of the abortion weighed heavily on me, but Dustin wouldn’t talk about it and became sullen and angry whenever I’d bring it up.

  My dreams of emotional closeness weren’t happening in this marriage either. I wouldn’t bring a child into the same unhappiness and alcoholism in which I was raised. After all I’d experienced in my childhood, I knew children to be precious commodities, instead of replicas used as ego trips, or instruments trying to save a bad marriage. Once again denial and drinking were in control of my life as the two years of that marriage were spent in constant emotional torment as our love drowned in alcohol and emotions were smothered in smoke. The comforting good that I’d once felt in Dustin’s safety became the evil of his abandonment. His addictions destroyed any joy. I found I was married to my parents once again and became devastated. My feminine health was also deteriorating as I began having incapacitating menstrual cramps. Gathering self-preservation while still loving Dustin, I filed for divorce to save myself and to become conscious again.

  Geez, why’d this keep happening? I tried so desperately to play by honorable rules, wanting love, a nice house, children and to attend an occasional ballet. I enjoy classical music and the theater instead of smoky bars. Why did I become so blinded in my choices of a husband? Why was I attracting exactly what I didn’t want?

  Looking down the quaint street to the ocean, the sun blinds into my eyes as I wonder why, while walking in all this beauty, I am reminiscing about such painful memories? Why should I be tortured because I hate alcoholism, affairs, drugs, smoking, believe love and sex go together and lovers should be true to one another? Seems everything about me is different from my parents and even from most of the world. Why was I put into this family? Why am I even on earth? Is it only to feel pain? It must’ve been some terrible mistake because it makes no sense. How do I get away from alcoholics, smokers, addictions, abuse and men who ignore me after they win me over? Will I ever be able to get away from what I don’t want?

  During this time, a psychologist brought to my attention that perhaps, there wasn’t anything wrong with me, but with the people in my life. Attending Al-Anon meetings helped me to understand that I was creating the same pattern shown by my family, which seemed obvious on some levels, but not all. Can imprints from childhood really be so insidious—continually guiding me to create exactly what I don’t want?

  Looking towards the sky, I take a long deep breath and come back to the present, but still continue my questioning. As I am seemingly being forced to recall my past in this moment—so I’ll just flow into it as the memories flood in. How did I survive the loss and pain and where am I going now? Looking back, it feels as if it must’ve been some other woman’s life or some movie, instead of mine, but the torture continued.

  In the middle of the divorce from Dustin, I had emergency surgery for an ovary threatening to rupture. I asked my mother if she’d drive me to the hospital, her reply, “I have an appointment with my hairdresser.” Her response sliced my heart in half, but I let no one know because who’d have cared? If they knew how hurt I was, they’d have won. Besides in my family emotions were to be drowned in alcohol not confronted.

  I was terribly frightened that I’d need a hysterectomy, forever denying me the ability to have children. I felt it must be punishment from God for the abortion, or some other horrible thing that I’d done. Combined with the stress of the divorce, the ordeal was emotionally and physically shattering. Thankfully, I needed only one ovary removed, but the surgeon cut an artery resulting in the loss of too much blood. I became so anemic that even walking across a room became exhausting. At thirty-six, I became a tired shell of my former self. Now along with my emotional spirit, my physical body was beaten-up. All I could do was rest with little energy to put into my interior design business. More than ever, I needed my family’s nurturing, but as usual what I got was abandonment.

  Too weak to cook and ravenously hungry, I was told I must eat protein to build back my stamina. Only days out of the hospital, I asked mother to prepare some chicken that I’d thawed. I had hopes that she wouldn’t mind putting it in the oven, since she didn’t need to go to the grocery store, which was one of the things she disliked. Her response, “I don’t have the time. I need to get dressed because your father and I are going out to dinner. Anyway, you know how I hate to cook so why would you even ask me?”

  All these recollections bring so much pain into my heart that tears run down my face. I was so alone that year with all hope seemingly lost. I look up to the sky and silently ask, ‘God, what’s wrong with me that my parents hate me and love always goes so wrong?’

  I was a failure after two divorces and no children. I gave my parents no ego satisfaction. Mother’s only concern is where my father took her to dinner. Interesting thing being, my mother doesn’t even enjoy eating.

  Making my life more surreal, is that being their first born, I’d once received an overabundance of attention especially from my father. He’d brag that when I was a newborn that I had colic and the only way, I’d fall asleep was lying on his chest. He took an abundance of home movies of me as a toddler, an outgoing tan little girl with dark curls. My first two years, they took pride in dressing me up and showing me off. At that time, I was a doll to adorn—a
positive extension of their ego to be put on display and totally under their control.

  When I was twelve, Dad picked me up from ballet class to inform me that when I was a one-year-old mother suffered a nervous breakdown. I was taken to live with my grandmother for a year. He gave me strict instructions to treat my mother with special care making sure not to anger her because she’d been in different mental institutions and was fragile. He warned that I must be very good and never upset her because a doctor in Washington DC had performed an operation that cut into her brain to make her well. I didn’t really comprehend all that he was saying, but heard clearly that I must be good.

  As a young adult, I researched to find out that this surgery was a barbaric procedure performed on the hopelessly insane in the forties and fifties. Finding this out, I wondered what might I had lived through up until the time I was one. What really had happened in our home while mother and I were in the house alone? I must’ve been scared experiencing her depression and possibly demented behavior before her breakdown. I wonder is that why I cried all the time and needed Daddy’s chest to sleep on for comfort?

  What caused mother to have a breakdown? My father never really said. Only that the doctor told him mother would be fine as long as she did simple tasks, had no stress in her life and that she’d probably get worse and more withdrawn with age. After telling me all this, Dad adamantly warned that I must never tell anyone. It’s our family’s secret.

  After her prefrontal lobotomy and home from the mental institution, mother had three more baby girls in rapid succession. Dad was hoping for a son. I was relegated to the background trying to be a really good girl and to not upset mother. It didn’t work because Mother was upset most all the time about everything and clearly, she didn’t like me.

  The ocean breeze whips around my body as I continue my reverie. I lost a piece of myself trying to love my mother and be good enough, so that hopefully she’d love me in return. While part of me pitied her, another part of me hated her distant coldness, while I also worried that I might become like her. If I did, would some doctor cut into my brain? I shiver at that thought.

  A good part of my childhood was spent terrified, out of my body, wasted in fear and afraid to breathe. Withdrawn, I almost stopped eating for months. I barely spoke at school and felt responsible for everything that went wrong. Mother had little emotion except that of a spoiled child with nothing to give as she robotic-like and complainingly went about her household duties. Even with a fulltime housekeeper, she grumbled about everything. I always felt guilt, especially when I laughed or smiled. Mostly I tried not to be noticed. The only time, I felt safe and some relief was in ballet class or dancing in my room while blasting music.

  Interestingly, my life began the same as in all my significant male relationships, on a high note, but soon fell flat with my being forced to deal with their dramas. My first two years in a relationship were usually okay. Then the man revealed his addictions, destructive behavior, began criticizing or perhaps—actually, was it that I became conscious of it? Then I clean up their mess and I’m the one left hurting and empty. Okay so, that’s one pattern consciously recognized. Laughing out loud in my pain as I think, wow—that’s a disgustingly accurate assessment. Is this pattern so set in my subconscious that I’ll never get past it?

  Geez, these memories are coming back so intensely today. It’s as if I can’t stop my past from being reeled before me like some horror movie. I laugh sarcastically. How charming—my mother is mental illness and alcoholism incarnate regurgitating so much pain onto me that I can barely breathe. Why can’t I forget about it and get away from my parents?

  Except now, my tormented memories, go back to the time after my ovarian surgery and how painfully clear it’d become. I was nothing to anyone. Not providing entertainment, or fodder for boasting and having emotional needs, I’d become too much trouble like an investment with no dividends. They must’ve thought I was put on this planet for their pleasure, instead of for them to nurture. If families are primarily for emotional protection, something was terribly wrong in mine because what I experienced was emotional annihilation and torture. Was I so terribly flawed somehow that no one would ever love me because my parents didn’t?

  After surgery, when I needed nurturing, my father’s tyrannical verbal assaults with his mocking alcohol-filled critical remarks hit me in continuous blows piercing my soul. “You sure do pick losers for husbands and no man will ever love you, unless it’s for my money! You’re such a pain in the butt. You’ve been out of the hospital a week—why are you still walking funny? You couldn’t be in that much pain!” Previous to the surgery, I was able to summon enough energy to brace against his tirades. Now weakened by life’s events, I could only surrender to my pain by pulling in like a turtle for self-protection. Weary, alone, feeling no one will ever love me, because now I wasn’t pretty anymore. So thin and weak, I’d lost my glow and my zest for life.

  Damn! These flashbacks are bringing home the cruel reality of betrayal to hit me hard again with a deeper sense of reality on this clear day in California. What amazing betrayal from my whole family. I have surgery then my father berates me and my mother ignores me. My sister screws around with my husband then shrewdly distances me by complaining that I am not nice to her. She tells my parents that I’m jealous of her and they believe her instead of me. What absurdity and why is it that no one will see the truth?

  I recall now, Tammy’s whiny pleas, “Please, let me come to Florida to live with you because I’ve nowhere to go after graduation. Can’t I, please, just until I get an apartment? It’ll be fun.” I succumbed only because I was trying to be the ‘good’ older sister, but was filled with an uneasiness recalling that my college boyfriend confided that while she was inebriated that she’d made advances to him.

  Tammy was always hateful to me. So why all of a sudden did she desire and so desperately to live with me? Against my better instincts, I opened my heart to her and she stabbed me right in the middle of it. Horror rings through that reverberates into my soul, while still to this day, no one even acknowledges my pain.

  When Mother and Daddy visited in Florida, evenings were filled with liquor as Tammy manipulated with feigned sweetness and Terry kissed Daddy’s ass, while I saw their act and was exiled for not joining in.

  Tammy met her first husband, the father of her boys in Florida. A short wiry drug-addicted man with frizzy hair. Towering over him, as Tammy is tall and thin. Bringing his drug use to her attention, she laughed in my face. Defending, it was the best sex that she’d ever had. When I extricated myself from their overt sexual, drug and alcoholic behavior, my punishment was escalation of her poison behind my naïve back.

  Refusing to clean up her filthy apartment full of liquor, cigarettes and drug remnants when she ad a cold, she complained to our parents in her manipulative whiny way that I’d been cruel to her. Omitted in her story were her drug use and her interactions with my husband. Believing her, our parents came to their warped conclusion that I wasn’t being a ‘good’ older sister and scolded me.

  Tammy presented my parents with three grandsons fathered by the slimy, drug-infested guy. Cunningly, she named all of them in some form or another after our father. Doing so, she became my parents’ focus. Finally, my father had male airs to his ‘kingdom of facade.’

  Laughing now, in sarcastic awareness that my not being able to pretend everything’s all right in my bizarre family, I became the uninvited. In ways, this was fine, because I didn’t want to be around them, but in others, it left me aching in pain. After all, they are my family.

  My father makes a ton of money, lives in a big house, owns expensive cars, club memberships, yachts and ranches. So according to society’s standards everything is admirably enviable. The whole charade can still occasionally fool me into thinking that something must be wrong with me, because I don’t know how, can’t or won’t fit into their make-believe world.

  Doubly insane is that mother so preoccupied with high
standards and family image, she wouldn’t allow me to be a debutante in a town allowing for a girl to ‘come out’ while being pregnant. So, it was required that I was a ‘Deb’—not only in one, but two states to make sure my debut took without any stains of surrounding immorality. This same woman is able to turn her head to Tammy’s manipulative and immoral actions because she provided grandsons and drinks with them.

  Isn’t this more like some crazy made for TV movie or soap opera than my life? Makes me want to laugh as much as cry, because it’s all just too distortedly bizarre. I’m the good, honest, not chemically addicted one and am ridiculed for it.

  After the time of my ovarian surgery, lying desolate in my bed, one night full of pain and feeling that I can’t go on. Something magical happened. It felt as if a cool breeze swept directly through me. An eerie, but distinctly comforting sensation, not sure what it was, but I had no fear, only relief and comfort with a deep instinctual knowing that this was a message from God, my angels or someone of caring looking out for me and filling me with the knowing that I’d be fine. This ethereal message shifted me out of my desolate despair allowing for hope to emerge once again as it filled me with the feeling of incredible love along with the message that I was on earth for a purpose.

  So once again, I looked toward the future with faith. My profound spiritual connection was what always pulled me out of devastation. As I flipped the Bible open to a passage, Psalms 27—which stated ‘even if your parents forsake you, know I’m always with you’. This became my knowing as I held tight to the belief in my heart that God is always with me—guiding me.

  Then a love connection arrived so overwhelmingly wonderful, I was sure it must be what I’d been waiting for all my life. Richard and I had intense physical and intellectual chemistry. The strongest I’d ever felt. We had a knowing of one another the moment we met—as if connected by some ancient energy. I loved his body, the taste of his skin and the shape of all his parts. Being tall, thin and tan with gray hair, Cary Grant handsome in his mannerisms with deeply set brown eyes and an impeccable dresser—self-made, educated at Stanford and MIT. We enjoyed hours of talking, fun, laughing and playing as our intellects meshed. We delved into every possible topic concerning life and all things spiritual—past lives—extraterrestrials. You name it—we discussed it. We even had the uncanny ability to know when one of us needed one another across the miles.