30 days of night- part 3
Sep. 9th, 2010 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thejunipertree01 - Introduction
02 – Your first love
Your parents
A very good friend of mine once said, after meeting my father for the first time, that my family may be summed up in the following way: "It's like the Beverly Hillbillies meets the Munsters, with the dialogue written by Kevin Smith."
This is my father (with me and Middle Brother, about twelve years ago):
I honestly couldn't tell you very much about him. Being a long-winded story teller in meatspace, sure, I have a thousand and one "Tara's dad" stories that leave my friends in hysterics. I'll usually only tell them at the Engineer's prompting. They're full of raunchy language, snippets of the inappropriate comments which fly from his mouth or strange nuggets of redneck wisdom he's prone to accidentally bestowing. But, they're all from my life time. My father is thirty-two years older than me, that's an entire life time of experiences. I think of all the life I've been living in my brief turn on the planet so far and am struck cold at the idea of what my parents were like around my age. I know these stories exist, everyone's parents have them. I've just never heard them about my father.
He's not a cold man, by any means. He has always made it abundantly clear just how much he loves me. He's just...stoic. And quiet, strangely. I know he was in the Air Force during Vietnam and I've seen a handful of black and white photographs of his time stationed in Okinawa, my father young and thin and Marlon Brando-brooding in his white t-shirt and fatigues, cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. A heartbreaker. He was a survival expert and his enlistment ran out right before the draft made everything so tense in this country, so he beat it out of there.
That's about it, for Air Force stories.
I know that his parents split up when he was fairly young and he lived with his mother, the great and grand Dorothea I've talked about in the past, but she left him with his aunt and moved to Florida to tend bar. Why? Haven't the faintest. Why didn't he move back with his father? Not a clue. I also don't know where his older brother fits into this either.
I know that he was married once before my mother, to a woman named Margot who he bought an ocelot capelet for. They had no children. I don't know how they met, or how he and my mother met for that matter.
There's only two childhood stories he's ever relayed to me. One being the time his father caught him smoking cigarettes and punished him for it by making him smoke an entire pack, one right after the other, until he got sick and passed out. The other being how he lost the pinky finger on his right hand. Him, his brother, and a bicycle chain being fixed. When I was little, I thought all daddies didn't have a pinky finger. It was just the natural order of things. That was a terrible shock, the day I figured out the truth.
What little I know about the rest of his family could sleep in a walnut shell. The few times we talked of family recently grew out of my deciding to just research the family tree. With my maiden name, the one I really wanted to look into because no one knows where the fuck it comes from, I got as far back as my great-grandparents. They immigrated here from Russia, John and Bertha. That's where the Roma blood comes into the family, from Bertha. After John and Bertha, the line disappears. My father knows nothing of them and only vaguely remembers John.
I am my father's only child, though he considers Middle Brother to be his spawn as well. My parents split up when I was two, so I have zero memory of my parents being together. I've seen a lot of photos of that time, old Polaroids and age-tinted snapshots of boating and waterskiing and drinking parties. Middle brother standing on a beach in a diaper. My mother in pigtailed braids and a bikini. It's so picture perfect late 60s Americana, it makes my teeth hurt in my skull.
But, then a little blue-eyed girl enters the photographed time line and everything changed. There's not many pictures from after I was born, but there is a small amount that show Christmases of past. Me with crazy kitchen sets, my brothers in butterfly collared Easter suits. I can't physically remember any of it; I was far too young. But, I have the photos to go on.
And then, they suddenly stop.
My father was a weekend dad. Every Friday night he would pick me up and bring me back to his house. Around when I was seven, he moved. And the house he moved to, there were never any other kids around. It was rural as all get out, nothing but farmland and woods for miles. When video cassette recorders debuted, he bought one and whenever he picked me up, we would stop at this video store a friend of his owned. Rocky's. It was one small room in a strip mall. Boxes lined the walls on either side of you and you brought the box of what you'd chosen up to the counter, where Rocky waited to go in the back to retrieve your selection.
Rocky got tired of continually having to tell me whatever movie I wanted was out, so he just let me go back and wander the stacks on my own. I'd collect movie boxes from out front, climb under the counter, and then drift through the ordered lines looking for what I wanted as my father and Rocky shot the shit and smoked cigarettes. When I was eight, I became fascinated with the lurid and curious covers of various late 70s/early 80s horror flicks. A horrorhound was born. My dad never minded what I picked out and always seemed to enjoy it (except for Videodrome, he made me turn that off during the scene with Debbie Harry sticking needles into James Woods' back during sex). He's strangely adverse to them now, looking a little green about the gills when I'm doing THANKSGIVING ZOMBIE FEST A-GO-GO at my apartment while I cook for the holidays, but I've always looked back at that time as my father and I bonding.
He's an unrepentant hillbilly. He's ill-mannered, cigarette-stealing, and booze-swilling (Black Bush whiskey with a Budweiser chaser, I don't get it either). But, he'd do anything humanly possible for me. I try not to abuse that love, though I was accused of it by one of his drunken shit-heel friends who has issues with his own children because they are like that, and will go to great lengths to avoid asking him for any sort of favor because I'm so self-conscious about it. I think he realizes this, and appreciates it.
My mother? I've written so extensively about my mother in this journal, that I'm not even sure I could rehash it succinctly. Even though I just spent the better part of an hour writing about my father, right? Hah.
Her tag here, Miss American Pie, is largely about her struggle (and my emotional reactions, as I was her primary caretaker) with the colon cancer that eventually killed her. When I recently embarked on tagging my entire journal, from 2001 to 2010, I re-read through that entire time. It was difficult, even with the slight scab of time covering its surface. So, those of you who weren't on my friends list during that time, if you decide to go back and read any of that, I warn you: it gets rough. I was extremely open and candid about everything going on. I didn't talk about it in person to almost anyone, so journaling it all was my coping mechanism.
Beyond that time period, my mother was a beautiful woman who had a great many disappointments in her life that embittered her to life in general. She wanted to be a paleontologist, back when she was young, but she got pregnant with Eldest Brother by some stupid man-child (my brothers' father) and married him. His parents were off the boat from Calabria and his mother taught my mother how to cook, since her own mother was so terrible at it. And my mother taught me, though she admitted in her later years that I had surpassed her by leaps and bounds. This was a double-edged sword of a compliment because 1. hee! my mother said I was a better cook than her! and 2. fuck. Now she's making me cook for her all the goddamn time.
The stupid man-child turned out to be an abusive bag of dicks, so she screwed her courage to the sticking place and fucked off back home. Shortly thereafter, she met my father. Being a single mother, at that time, with no job and no prospects, it was recommended to her by her mother and her lawyer that she get married. Like yesterday. At that moment, she had been dating my father. So, they got married.
That is some Jackie-O shit right there.
It never should have happened. Despite the fact that he loved her fervently, and continued to do so up until the day she died, she did not love him back. At least, not in the same way. The women in my mother's family, myself included, are known for being a bit chilly. It's like our version of a precious heirloom to be squirreled away in a hope chest and passed down from generation to generation. She didn't love him and she was thirty-two. She'd lived through the sixties, but didn't get to experience it. She didn't get to do the same things teenaged girls did because she got married at 17. And she barely had a childhood, from having to raise her younger brother while their own mother was passed out drunk on vodka, Rolling Rock, and despair. (My grandmother, by the way and even though you didn't ask, came from a very large family and always wanted to have many children. She only had two. After her second pregnancy, she got sepsis and had to have a hysterectomy. She was never the same. That's when she got mean and started drinking.)
Essentially, my mother felt she hadn't lived and goddamn it, she was still young! So, she left my father. My father was pretty unhappy about this, understandably so, but the two of them always made sure to never fight in front of me or Middle Brother. My mother didn't trash talk my father to me or within earshot, like what can happen so easily amongst the unhappily divorced with children. She always let my dad see me whenever he or I wanted.
She went out a lot when I was growing up. Every Friday night, sometimes even Saturday as well. She'd wear her tightest jeans that she had to lie on her bed to zipper and scarlet paint her lips. She liked to wear Yves Saint Laurent's Opium, when she could afford it, and that is one of the strongest scent memories I carry to this day. She worked as a secretary in an endless string of faceless jobs. Terminal Vending, Yellow Lighting Company, Albo Appliances. Later on, she picked up second and third jobs, on top of her day job, to support us. Things got really hard and it lasted a long, long time. We were shit-ass trash poor. The school nurse bought me sneakers for PE one year and I remember one of my mother's friends pretending to ring her groceries up at the store she worked at.
Both of my brothers could be classified as "bad kids", if you wanted to be unfair. But, they caused her a lot of grief. With little structure and discipline in our lives, we ran wild. Eldest and Middle brother went the way of juvenile delinquents who got brought home by the cops and played switchblade Chicken with their friends, impregnating girlfriends and doing hard drugs. I just went weird and spent a lot of time in the woods by myself.
She had her hands full and we didn't make it easier for her. I can see that; I understand it. She wasn't a perfect mother, by any stretch of the imagination. Who is? But, she honestly tried to reach beyond her stunted emotional psyche. She was just as damaged as we were, if not more so, with her own crazypants mother. When I got older, not so many years before she died, I recognized this in her and tried my best to not be resentful or treat her badly.
I miss her a lot, but at the same time, I don't. If that makes any sense? I hate saying things like that, but when you get down to the icky core of it, it's essentially true. My mother frequently made my life harder, even before she got sick, with the foul and changing winds of her moods and irrational judgments. I loved her dearly, and she loved me, but we were just too much alike to ever be truly at peace with one another. I always wanted her to sheathe her claws and she was also just a little disappointed I didn't turn out like other girls, normal girls. There was so much love in-between, though.
I know I've come through my upbringing by the skin of my teeth, but I also know an intense gratitude for not having to go through what some of my friends have endured with their own parental troubles. I had it easy, compared to some.
Indeed, I count those blessings. Trust me. But, I count the scars as well.
04 – What you ate today
05 – Your definition of love
06 – Your day
07 – Your best friend
08 – A moment
09 – Your beliefs
10 – What you wore today
11 – Your siblings
12 – What’s in your bag
13 – This week
14 – What you wore today
15 – Your dreams
16 – Your first kiss
17 – Your favorite memory
18 – Your favorite birthday
19 – Something you regret
20 – This month
21 – Another moment
22 – Something that upsets you
23 – Something that makes you feel better
24 – Something that makes you cry
25 – A first
26 – Your fears
27 – Your favorite place
28 – Something that you miss
29 – Your aspirations
30 – One last moment
02 – Your first love
Your parents
A very good friend of mine once said, after meeting my father for the first time, that my family may be summed up in the following way: "It's like the Beverly Hillbillies meets the Munsters, with the dialogue written by Kevin Smith."
This is my father (with me and Middle Brother, about twelve years ago):
I honestly couldn't tell you very much about him. Being a long-winded story teller in meatspace, sure, I have a thousand and one "Tara's dad" stories that leave my friends in hysterics. I'll usually only tell them at the Engineer's prompting. They're full of raunchy language, snippets of the inappropriate comments which fly from his mouth or strange nuggets of redneck wisdom he's prone to accidentally bestowing. But, they're all from my life time. My father is thirty-two years older than me, that's an entire life time of experiences. I think of all the life I've been living in my brief turn on the planet so far and am struck cold at the idea of what my parents were like around my age. I know these stories exist, everyone's parents have them. I've just never heard them about my father.
He's not a cold man, by any means. He has always made it abundantly clear just how much he loves me. He's just...stoic. And quiet, strangely. I know he was in the Air Force during Vietnam and I've seen a handful of black and white photographs of his time stationed in Okinawa, my father young and thin and Marlon Brando-brooding in his white t-shirt and fatigues, cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. A heartbreaker. He was a survival expert and his enlistment ran out right before the draft made everything so tense in this country, so he beat it out of there.
That's about it, for Air Force stories.
I know that his parents split up when he was fairly young and he lived with his mother, the great and grand Dorothea I've talked about in the past, but she left him with his aunt and moved to Florida to tend bar. Why? Haven't the faintest. Why didn't he move back with his father? Not a clue. I also don't know where his older brother fits into this either.
I know that he was married once before my mother, to a woman named Margot who he bought an ocelot capelet for. They had no children. I don't know how they met, or how he and my mother met for that matter.
There's only two childhood stories he's ever relayed to me. One being the time his father caught him smoking cigarettes and punished him for it by making him smoke an entire pack, one right after the other, until he got sick and passed out. The other being how he lost the pinky finger on his right hand. Him, his brother, and a bicycle chain being fixed. When I was little, I thought all daddies didn't have a pinky finger. It was just the natural order of things. That was a terrible shock, the day I figured out the truth.
What little I know about the rest of his family could sleep in a walnut shell. The few times we talked of family recently grew out of my deciding to just research the family tree. With my maiden name, the one I really wanted to look into because no one knows where the fuck it comes from, I got as far back as my great-grandparents. They immigrated here from Russia, John and Bertha. That's where the Roma blood comes into the family, from Bertha. After John and Bertha, the line disappears. My father knows nothing of them and only vaguely remembers John.
I am my father's only child, though he considers Middle Brother to be his spawn as well. My parents split up when I was two, so I have zero memory of my parents being together. I've seen a lot of photos of that time, old Polaroids and age-tinted snapshots of boating and waterskiing and drinking parties. Middle brother standing on a beach in a diaper. My mother in pigtailed braids and a bikini. It's so picture perfect late 60s Americana, it makes my teeth hurt in my skull.
But, then a little blue-eyed girl enters the photographed time line and everything changed. There's not many pictures from after I was born, but there is a small amount that show Christmases of past. Me with crazy kitchen sets, my brothers in butterfly collared Easter suits. I can't physically remember any of it; I was far too young. But, I have the photos to go on.
And then, they suddenly stop.
My father was a weekend dad. Every Friday night he would pick me up and bring me back to his house. Around when I was seven, he moved. And the house he moved to, there were never any other kids around. It was rural as all get out, nothing but farmland and woods for miles. When video cassette recorders debuted, he bought one and whenever he picked me up, we would stop at this video store a friend of his owned. Rocky's. It was one small room in a strip mall. Boxes lined the walls on either side of you and you brought the box of what you'd chosen up to the counter, where Rocky waited to go in the back to retrieve your selection.
Rocky got tired of continually having to tell me whatever movie I wanted was out, so he just let me go back and wander the stacks on my own. I'd collect movie boxes from out front, climb under the counter, and then drift through the ordered lines looking for what I wanted as my father and Rocky shot the shit and smoked cigarettes. When I was eight, I became fascinated with the lurid and curious covers of various late 70s/early 80s horror flicks. A horrorhound was born. My dad never minded what I picked out and always seemed to enjoy it (except for Videodrome, he made me turn that off during the scene with Debbie Harry sticking needles into James Woods' back during sex). He's strangely adverse to them now, looking a little green about the gills when I'm doing THANKSGIVING ZOMBIE FEST A-GO-GO at my apartment while I cook for the holidays, but I've always looked back at that time as my father and I bonding.
He's an unrepentant hillbilly. He's ill-mannered, cigarette-stealing, and booze-swilling (Black Bush whiskey with a Budweiser chaser, I don't get it either). But, he'd do anything humanly possible for me. I try not to abuse that love, though I was accused of it by one of his drunken shit-heel friends who has issues with his own children because they are like that, and will go to great lengths to avoid asking him for any sort of favor because I'm so self-conscious about it. I think he realizes this, and appreciates it.
My mother? I've written so extensively about my mother in this journal, that I'm not even sure I could rehash it succinctly. Even though I just spent the better part of an hour writing about my father, right? Hah.
Her tag here, Miss American Pie, is largely about her struggle (and my emotional reactions, as I was her primary caretaker) with the colon cancer that eventually killed her. When I recently embarked on tagging my entire journal, from 2001 to 2010, I re-read through that entire time. It was difficult, even with the slight scab of time covering its surface. So, those of you who weren't on my friends list during that time, if you decide to go back and read any of that, I warn you: it gets rough. I was extremely open and candid about everything going on. I didn't talk about it in person to almost anyone, so journaling it all was my coping mechanism.
Beyond that time period, my mother was a beautiful woman who had a great many disappointments in her life that embittered her to life in general. She wanted to be a paleontologist, back when she was young, but she got pregnant with Eldest Brother by some stupid man-child (my brothers' father) and married him. His parents were off the boat from Calabria and his mother taught my mother how to cook, since her own mother was so terrible at it. And my mother taught me, though she admitted in her later years that I had surpassed her by leaps and bounds. This was a double-edged sword of a compliment because 1. hee! my mother said I was a better cook than her! and 2. fuck. Now she's making me cook for her all the goddamn time.
The stupid man-child turned out to be an abusive bag of dicks, so she screwed her courage to the sticking place and fucked off back home. Shortly thereafter, she met my father. Being a single mother, at that time, with no job and no prospects, it was recommended to her by her mother and her lawyer that she get married. Like yesterday. At that moment, she had been dating my father. So, they got married.
That is some Jackie-O shit right there.
It never should have happened. Despite the fact that he loved her fervently, and continued to do so up until the day she died, she did not love him back. At least, not in the same way. The women in my mother's family, myself included, are known for being a bit chilly. It's like our version of a precious heirloom to be squirreled away in a hope chest and passed down from generation to generation. She didn't love him and she was thirty-two. She'd lived through the sixties, but didn't get to experience it. She didn't get to do the same things teenaged girls did because she got married at 17. And she barely had a childhood, from having to raise her younger brother while their own mother was passed out drunk on vodka, Rolling Rock, and despair. (My grandmother, by the way and even though you didn't ask, came from a very large family and always wanted to have many children. She only had two. After her second pregnancy, she got sepsis and had to have a hysterectomy. She was never the same. That's when she got mean and started drinking.)
Essentially, my mother felt she hadn't lived and goddamn it, she was still young! So, she left my father. My father was pretty unhappy about this, understandably so, but the two of them always made sure to never fight in front of me or Middle Brother. My mother didn't trash talk my father to me or within earshot, like what can happen so easily amongst the unhappily divorced with children. She always let my dad see me whenever he or I wanted.
She went out a lot when I was growing up. Every Friday night, sometimes even Saturday as well. She'd wear her tightest jeans that she had to lie on her bed to zipper and scarlet paint her lips. She liked to wear Yves Saint Laurent's Opium, when she could afford it, and that is one of the strongest scent memories I carry to this day. She worked as a secretary in an endless string of faceless jobs. Terminal Vending, Yellow Lighting Company, Albo Appliances. Later on, she picked up second and third jobs, on top of her day job, to support us. Things got really hard and it lasted a long, long time. We were shit-ass trash poor. The school nurse bought me sneakers for PE one year and I remember one of my mother's friends pretending to ring her groceries up at the store she worked at.
Both of my brothers could be classified as "bad kids", if you wanted to be unfair. But, they caused her a lot of grief. With little structure and discipline in our lives, we ran wild. Eldest and Middle brother went the way of juvenile delinquents who got brought home by the cops and played switchblade Chicken with their friends, impregnating girlfriends and doing hard drugs. I just went weird and spent a lot of time in the woods by myself.
She had her hands full and we didn't make it easier for her. I can see that; I understand it. She wasn't a perfect mother, by any stretch of the imagination. Who is? But, she honestly tried to reach beyond her stunted emotional psyche. She was just as damaged as we were, if not more so, with her own crazypants mother. When I got older, not so many years before she died, I recognized this in her and tried my best to not be resentful or treat her badly.
I miss her a lot, but at the same time, I don't. If that makes any sense? I hate saying things like that, but when you get down to the icky core of it, it's essentially true. My mother frequently made my life harder, even before she got sick, with the foul and changing winds of her moods and irrational judgments. I loved her dearly, and she loved me, but we were just too much alike to ever be truly at peace with one another. I always wanted her to sheathe her claws and she was also just a little disappointed I didn't turn out like other girls, normal girls. There was so much love in-between, though.
I know I've come through my upbringing by the skin of my teeth, but I also know an intense gratitude for not having to go through what some of my friends have endured with their own parental troubles. I had it easy, compared to some.
Indeed, I count those blessings. Trust me. But, I count the scars as well.
04 – What you ate today
05 – Your definition of love
06 – Your day
07 – Your best friend
08 – A moment
09 – Your beliefs
10 – What you wore today
11 – Your siblings
12 – What’s in your bag
13 – This week
14 – What you wore today
15 – Your dreams
16 – Your first kiss
17 – Your favorite memory
18 – Your favorite birthday
19 – Something you regret
20 – This month
21 – Another moment
22 – Something that upsets you
23 – Something that makes you feel better
24 – Something that makes you cry
25 – A first
26 – Your fears
27 – Your favorite place
28 – Something that you miss
29 – Your aspirations
30 – One last moment