It All Adds Up, But I Wish It Didn't

(Sheldon's note: Reader discretion advised for this post, especially for abuse survivors)

I made the call was I was dreading making to my sister, but I had to know. Several weeks ago, she had made a vague reference to our "mother"  who I prefer not to refer to her as, (usually I just say her or she, or call her Mrs. Psycho, I can't even bring myself to say her name or refer to her as a mother), trying to protect her from her warped family, but said she hadn't protected her from who she needed to protect her from, our father. She made some vague reference that he had done some things when she was a teen that she found disturbing, she acted like she didn't want me to push it any further, so I didn't.

Even before she had said that, since I had broken free from them after The Confrontation, I began to realize a lot of things that I hadn't noticed before, I spent so much time during my years as the Undercover Agnostic just spending so much time and energy trying to survive that I had no sense of self reflection.

In recent months, some things started to add up, to make sense, that I wish didn't. I didn't want to believe it was possible, not because I had any illusions that she wasn't capable of it, but it felt so disturbing, so violating to even think about it.

So much made sense, the way I was simultaneously the favorite of the family in her eyes, but also hated, and she seemed to resent my very existence as a human being.

 I remembered the way she always seemed jealous of girlfriends and female friends as I was a teen, and would come up with bizarre excuses of why I shouldn't around them, and why they didn't measure up to her ridiculous standards of "godliness", and I could tell she was grasping at straws in trying to come up with excuses, even for her delusional mind, but at the time I couldn't piece together her agenda was. I remembered her delusions about the mother of my best friend Rose supposedly hitting on me when I turned 18 (she was doing no such thing).

I remembered the disturbing way she used to hug me, even though she knew I couldn't stand her hugging me, that always left me feeling violated, and my father, ever her enabler, would chew me out later for making it damn clear that I did not approve (and she would always get annoyed by it), "she just wants to show you that she loves you", etc. (she kept this up until I was about 19/20 years old by the way).

No, no, it just couldn't be possible, I don't want to think about this, I can't remember much of anything before I turned about 12, so it's possible it didn't happen, it probably didn't, you're probably just seeing patterns where they don't exist, I mean, she's pure evil, but that? ...shit, it probably did happen.

Changed Locks and Violent Parents (Part 1) The Confrontation

I have noticed that in recent weeks, I have been neglecting the blog, and my fans on Google + and Twitter. There have been a lot of reasons for that, this week specifically. I had been spending a lot of time working on my house, including helping my dad install a water heater, which turned out to be an amazing disastrous project, though it was finished in the end (albeit with a lot of hassle and cost overruns due to several pipes breaking or leaking).

In fact, that incident in part, is what leads to this big announcement/disclosure:

I had to disown my parents this week, and get law enforcement involved in the process, because I had many reasons to be concerned for my life and safety. My mother tried to force her way into my home, and my father nearly assaulted me in front of a police officer.

Let me start from the beginning of what led up to this point.

I have discussed at length how abusive my mother has been, both now/in recent years, and when I was a child. If everyone in her life is willing to go along with all of her demands without questioning, without criticism, and act as though she owns them, that they are her property, she is fine, she can seem, at least on the surface, to be an OK mother.

If you don’t, however, she can become hostile, violent, or threaten to become violent, as I talked about in a major post about what happened when I tried to leave her home 4 years ago.

This argument, which led to this incident, had to do with my mom and dad trying to help me rebuild this house. It’s done in reality, a few things, it wouldn’t hurt to change, like that old water heater I had. I may take out a small mortgage on the house to get the air conditioner in working order or replace it if necessary, I don’t think getting extra window units is going to work very well, in recent years it has been getting up to 102 degrees at time in the St. Louis area.

My issue was not with what they were doing, but the how and the why of it. First of all, there was the major issue that since my mom was trying to help me, she felt even more like she owned me as a piece of property than at any point in life. Then, there was her complete lack of respect for my time and my health issues, the fatigue that I still deal with, despite being on medication (though it has helped greatly with the pain and fatigue).

Of course, however, she doesn't even believe that my depression exists, so I couldn’t expect any sense or consideration for her on that front. It had been rather normal for them to spend almost every day that I was off of work at my house, spending long hours there, sometimes from 9 am to 8 pm or later, even when it wasn’t necessary (I could understand why they did that this week, when the water heater was causing all those plumbing problems, that was an urgent situation).

 It was wearing me into the ground, as well as them. It was especially running me into the ground when she would do this on days before I had to start my workweek, or even force me to spend all evening after work going around, helping them, since I have to wake up at 3 am in the morning, and work a 12 hour shift most days.

I’ve talked before about my dad’s mental health issues, and about how obsessive and energetic he is, he will start on something and keep going until it’s finished, no matter how long it takes, or if he completely wears himself out in the process. I knew this was taking a toll on me, and on him, the long hours, so I had been making comments to this effect to him, since I knew she wouldn’t listen to me.

He ends up telling her, as I expected he would, and the response was so horribly out of proportion, it was beyond belief. She became as angry with me as if I had accused her of murder. She was insisting that I didn’t want to help them at all, and was protesting that they were asking me to help. She knew damn well, just as much as I did that this was a lie, and she was cussing me out, calling me an “ungrateful brat”, hoping it would work into guilting me, or scaring me into submission.

She never expected that it wouldn’t work, and that I would tell her that if she was going to act like this, then I want nothing from her from now on, no help on the house, and no financial help at all from her, period (I still owe her over $5,000 for the cost of supplies for rebuilding the house going far beyond what we expected it to go).

I told her I would return the tools that they had over at the house by the end of the week, and that would be it, we are done, you are not welcome at the house anymore. I hung up on her, because there’s no such thing as reasoning with her, I assumed something would happen, knowing her past history, so I had went out immediately after this and bought new locks for the house, since they had keys to the house, both for working on the house, and to help take care of “Happy Horse”, my 85 pound Black Lab/hound mix.

I didn’t expect what would happen next.

While I was in the middle of replacing the locks, she shows up. I knew nothing good would come of this, so I slammed the door shut, even though the lock was only half finished (breaking a screw that in the door in the process), and it turns out that it was a fortunate coincidence that this had happened, because the door would not open, because of this. I later had to take the door handle apart from the inside and start all over again just to finish the job, and to get the door open.

She was actually trying to turn the door knob and slamming herself against the door in a feeble attempt to get it open, and force her way inside the house, when she already knew that she was not allowed on my property at all, for any reason.

She was screaming at the door, demanding that I open it (which as it turned out, I couldn’t have done if I wanted to). I had enough, this was crossing the line of acceptable behavior by anyone’s measure, and was a threat to me and my safety, I wasn’t going to tolerate this, so I called the dispatch line for Granite City’s police department, and told them that a relative that I had banned from my home is trying to force their way into my front door (looking back at it now, I’m kind of baffled as to why I hadn’t called 911 instead).

The dispatcher told me that there would be an officer there immediately. I hung up, wondering if there was a way she could get inside, what I would do, certainly if someone, even a relative, breaks into your home, you have the right to defend yourself.

I kept hearing plenty of noise at the door several minutes after I had stopped talking to the dispatcher, so I called again, the dispatcher told me it was probably the officer knocking on the door, since he was already at the scene. I couldn’t get out the front door, so I went out the back door to the front yard. The officer wanted to know what was going on, and my mom did her best to put on her fake martyr act, repeating the lies she was stating earlier about me not wanting to help them at all on the house to the officer, and trying to act all pathetic, I’m just this poor, longsuffering mother, who can do no wrong.

She is one of the world’s greatest fans of the DARVO routine when cornered, and confronted with consequences of her abuse. When I wouldn’t back down, and tell the officer to leave, she kept harassing me, and keeping up the victim act, and then, apparently at her urging beforehand, or her implied consent my father stepped forward, and charged at me, and it was clear that his intent was to assault me right in front of the police officer. (She did nothing to stop him, or call him off, even though she has that level of control over him).

My Family and Mental Illness (Part 3): The Diagnosis

Sheldon's note: This is a continuing series about my family's struggles surrounding my father's mental health issues when I was a teen. If you haven't already read the previous posts in this series, please read (post 1) and (post 2) before preceding any farther in reading this post.

Several weeks had passed since the day that my father had walked off the premises off the job that he loved as a mechanic, the next day, my mom in desperation, had set up an appointment with the doctor who was treated my father for sleep apnea. This doctor, in addition to running an office where he ran sleep studies that are necessary to be done before someone is fitted with a CPAP or BPAP machine to treat sleep apnea, was also a neurologist.

Because of both the fact that he was a neurologist, and out of all of the doctors they had, he was the one who would listen to her the most. If anyone could help find out what's going, and what to do, he would be the man. Even though she didn't enjoy traffic in St. Louis, she drove us out to his office inside the historic Chase Park Plaza building.

She frantically tried to explain to him what had been happening recently, and she tearfully told him that she was scared that he was starting to develop Alzheimer's. She had taken care of her father for nearly 7 years until his death from complications of Alzheimer's

She was convinced that she was seeing many of the same signs as when her father was in the early stages. This really got the doctor's attention, and he said that he was doubtful that anything would likely show up on brain scans such as MRI's, but there was an extensive physiological test that could be done that would show the effects of most mental disorders as well as brain injury/damage from a stroke (I have long since forgotten what the name of it was).

My Family and Mental Illness (Part 2): The Father I No Longer Knew

Sheldon's note: This is part two in a continuing series about my father's struggles with mental illness, and how it affected my family as a teen, for part 1 (click here). Please read that post, if you haven't already, before continuing to read this post.

After receiving the phone call from the owner of my dad's company that he had went missing from work, my mom tried to regain her composure, but she knew she was still too shaken up to drive, she didn't necessarily like driving from the Illinois suburb we lived in across one of the bridges across the Mississippi River in the first place, fighting all the traffic, and she knew she was definitely in no shape to try it at this point.

A longtime neighbor who lived across the street at the time drove us across the river to my dad's company in St. Louis, about 15 miles away, the building was about two blocks from of the buildings on the campus of St. Louis University.

We went across the Poplar Street bridge, down Highway 40 into St. Louis, and as we pulled up to the building, my mom sternly told me to stay in the neighbor's truck, she would handle this.

She went into the building, not knowing what to do from there, she had already called St. Louis' police department on her cell phone, she was transferred to a detective who said that unless there was proof that he was in immediate danger, had been taken somewhere against his will, etc, that there was nothing they could do for us but let us file a missing person's report 24 hours from that time. My mom tried to explain the circumstances to him to no avail.

She went into the building, and came out about 15 minutes later with my father. She had told me that she had found him the break room with a co-worker of his who was waiting for her to show up, they were just as surprised and confused about what was going on as we were. They had all known him for most of their adult lives, since he had worked there for so long (25 years), it was a small company (at most would have around a dozen people on staff at any given time), and there was a core group of men that had been there almost as long as him.

My Family and Mental Illness (Part 1): The Phone Call that Would Change My Life Forever

Sheldon's note: This will be a long story, and one that is very difficult for me to write, so I will be splitting it into a series. I have alluded before to my father's struggles with mental illness in past posts, but I have never gone into detail as to what his health conditions are, or how it profoundly changed my life as a teen. This series will change all that. 

This series will probably be as hard for me to write, so please, bear with me as write this. It's been over 10 years now since my father had to quit his job due to his health conditions, but beginning to write this is dredging it all up again, and my emotions feel almost as raw as when it happened.

I was 14 years old when one day, there was a call from the owner of my dad's company. I was busy working on my ACE coursework, as a hard working home school kid, the same ACE coursework that I had in the fundamentalist private school I was in until the 4th grade.

My dad worked as an industrial mechanic for a small family owned company in St. Louis for 25 years, but I still had never spoken to the owner of his company before, he refused to say why he was calling, since he knew I was only a teen at the time, and the fact that he would make this kind of call, and refuse to say what it was about meant that something wasn't right.

I was full of dread of finding out what this call was about, but I didn't know if my mom would be happy with me leaving my coursework for a moment, (she was at the house of an elderly neighbor of ours, and this neighbor could tend to talk for quite a while). After my father's boss called several times, about once every 30 minutes, to see if he could talk to my mom, I knew it couldn't wait. I walked down to the neighbor's house, and as I thought she would react, she wasn't happy at first, and was demanding to know why I had stepped out of the house.

I had told her about my father's boss repeatedly calling, and that it apparently was important, because he refused to tell me what was going on, and was insisting to talk to her only. She tried to hide her fear, and pull herself together, because just like me, she knew something wasn't right.

You see, there had been a lot of strange occurrences and patterns in his behavior leading up to this time. For about a year before this day, his normally good memory had been failing him at times, and he wasn't able to understand some things that he had been very good at figuring out. All his life, he was the problem solver, his mind could think through any problem, large or small, and he could react with ease, figuring out the best course of action, whether it was a major decision in life, or how to put something back together that had come apart.

It was a life skill that had served him well over the years, especially in his professional life, in his days as a young man in the construction industry, or at the job he had at the time as a mechanic, working on parts for buses, construction equipment, larger trucks, and even large generators (his company had even worked on generators for the massive Midwestern utility company, Ameren).

Those skills were failing, however, and his personality was rapidly changing. He was growing increasingly more frustrated with himself, and with everyone around him, when normally, he was a happy, easy going man (other then when my mother would be constantly trying to pick fights with him for no good reason, she loved drama). He would get very confused sometimes, and then several hours later, be back to his normal self again.