I was finally out of my mother's reach, but I was traumatized and still inconsolable over my father's death. Most of what happened in my life between 1981 through 1995 was ugly. It would take too long to relate everything that happened, so I'll be as brief as I am able.
In 1982, I married the kid who took me to California. We eventually made our way back to Brooklyn and then to Western Massachusetts. We separated in 1984 and divorced in 1985. Why? I was screwing his brother behind his back.
In 1984, I started dating a guy who was even more mentally and physically abusive to me than my mother had been. When we first started seeing each other and I told him how my marriage ended, he laughed and said, "I'm your punishment." And I was so demoralized that I fucking bought it and let him terrorize me for a long time. I finally got out of the relationship, but I still have physical scars to this day. I never took legal action against him because I was too frightened to do so.
After this, I was with an absolute gem of a man whom I married in 1990. He treated me kindly and with love. He had first been a friend to me and had seen me through the horrific end of the previous relationship. By this time I was becoming someone I recognized very clearly---I began to verbally and physically abuse this man. It enraged me when he just stood there and took the abuse, or when he grabbed my wrists to stop me, just as my father used to grab my mother's wrists to get her to quit punching. However, unlike my mother, I was always horrified over the abuse I doled out; that's when it occurred to me that I wasn't quite as far gone as I thought I was. I started counseling, but I never was able to admit to my psychologist what I was doing to my husband or to myself. As if I hadn't already fucked things up enough, I decided I wanted an open marriage, and brought another man into the house to live with us for a time. I watched myself destroy my marriage, and I didn't know how to stop doing so. I felt cut off from everyone and everything. I also felt ashamed of myself for hurting my husband, and incapable of knowing what a real relationship was like.
In early 1995, my husband bought a computer and we both joined America Online. I started making Internet friends with whom I had a lot in common: we had shared interests in music, books, cooking and many other things. It occurred to me that meeting people in this way could be a new beginning for me. Very gradually at first, I began to build friendships with others. I liked hearing about people's everyday lives because they seemed so normal to me. Even though they most likely had skeletons in their closets, these friends had more stability in their day-to-day existence than I had ever had in mine.
One of these friends was a musician like me; we also had matching tastes in music. We would spend hours chatting via private messages and comparing our CD, tape, and vinyl collections. At one point, my husband watched the interaction between me and this friend, and said, "You're going to marry this guy." I laughed.
Damn if he wasn't right.
Over the next year, "this guy" Matt and I fell in love. Right then, I swore that I would be a different person---that I would never abuse anyone again. I have kept that promise.
My husband and I split up.
I moved back to California again so I could be with Matt. We were married in 1998, surrounded by many of our online friends.
From that year to this, there have been so many different challenges: miscarriages, the loss of a pregnancy at five months' gestation, chronic illnesses, misunderstandings, the passing away of friends and family, growing apart, and then growing closer again. We both sought therapy to help us with these issues, as well as with Matt's chronic depression and my anxiety and PTSD. I felt myself becoming...normal. Boring. No longer on the rollercoaster. I loved it. I still do.
My mother was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson's disease in 2005. We spoke very rarely in the last five years; I really didn't want to have anything to do with her. The last words I ever heard her say---in 2007, or thereabouts---was that I had been a total disappointment to her. I shrugged and hung up the phone. My family kept begging me to call her, but I politely refused.
So she died (presumably badly) in a nursing home in Florida this past May. My brother Joel was the successor trustee of her living trust. He called to let me know she had "left me something". Fine. After the estate was settled, her lawyer sent me a copy of my mother's trust documents--Anne had left me ten percent of her estate and Joel received ninety percent--along with a letter stating that all assets were depleted because of my mother's healthcare and maintenance costs. No surprise there; at least not to me. However, I think Joel was pissed off about this. We don't speak very much; he and I have had many disagreements over the years, but I believe he thought there would have been something left for him. Consequently, what happened next was something I should have expected.
I had always been told that when my mother died, I would receive the jewelry my father had given her. Now, she was completely paranoid about her jewelry, as its value was extremely high. She would have new hiding places for it in the house every two days or so, and she always knew where it was. As part of the residue of her estate (along with any other tangible personal property), Joel and I would have had the right to divide it 90 - 10.
So I called Joel and asked him about the jewelry. He denied any existence of it and hung up on me.
I was utterly pissed off. I saw the jewelry as all that was left of my father. I knew she never appreciated what he'd given her and, if I had some of it, I'd value it much more than she ever did. And I also wanted something that would symbolize restitution for all she had done to me. I knew Joel was lying to me---he had the goods and wasn't about to give them up. So I decided to retain an attorney in an effort to get Joel to relinquish ten percent of the jewelry. I prepared an outline for the consultation, and then....
(here it is, kids---that which you've been waiting for for the last three days!)
How would I be any happier with that ten percent? Would I be any better or worse off with or without it? How could it make up for all the abuse I experienced? Who the fuck was I kidding, that I wanted it in memory of my father? It would just serve as a reminder of things best left behind.
If I was given that share of the jewelry, I would never have real closure in my life. I would never truly leave my past behind me.
And, after all, it was just...stuff...a pile of things to which society and economics have ascribed some sort of value and importance which has nothing to do with me getting on with my life.
I tore up the outline.
She's dead.
It's over; it's really, finally over, after forty-eight years.
That is a bequest far more valuable, much more important, than any tangible inheritance.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Setting The Scene, Part Two
Because I want to keep the worst elements of this story private, I am going to try to be as succinct as I'm able in this entry.
I can't remember the exact year this happened, but I think it was in 1970 when my brother Johnny was arrested in Florida and was sentenced to ten years in Starke Prison. This was the event that sent my mother completely over the edge. As the years went by, she became even more abusive to me, and to my father as well. When she was enraged, anything immediately at hand was a weapon with which she could lash out at us: a heavy ashtray, knives, broomsticks, hairbrushes. The worst in my eyes was the time in which during one of her screaming rages she broke an antique Chinese urn that my father had bought her as a gift, and used a shard of it to carve up his forearm as he physically struggled to grab her wrists to stop the attack. In my eyes, my father was sacrosanct, and for her to go after him was worse than her stabbing me in the hip with a steak knife.
I believe that in the 70s, it was virtually impossible for a man to admit to abuse at a partner's hands. The term "emasculation" comes to mind. I know my father felt trapped by his love for my mother---she was an absolutely beautiful woman, and he was not willing to give her up---and he must have also felt that if he had admitted to the physical abuse she dealt him, he would have been ridiculed. In addition, when he tried to intercede for me, he suffered more of her abuse. Later, during therapy sessions, I tried to hold my father accountable for not doing anything to help me, but I simply could not fault him for it. He was caught in the cycle and could not see how to escape, just as I could not get out because kids didn't just go call Social Services at the time.
When I was fourteen years old, I ran up a $200 phone bill in one month. My mother went berserk and started beating the hell out of me. What's memorable about this event is that it was the first time I decided to defend myself. I threw my mother down on my bed held her down, and began to hit her hard. My father, hearing her yells for help, tore into the room and pulled me off her. My mother went for me again with her fists, and my father---who before then had never raised his hands to me---also started beating me.
It was a betrayal, of course...but as I said earlier, I couldn't really blame him. I still can't. I know he was horrified at what he had done, and I wasn't going to push him for an apology.
My brother Johnny got out of jail in 1977, presumably for good behavior. However, this didn't help my mother in the least. Her abuse took on a new dimension for me when she began to sharpen her skills at mental and verbal demoralization, which were in some ways even more horrifying to me than the physical maltreatment. You can duck a blow---you can see the windup happen and at least try to get out of the way, but you can't look in someone's head to see what their next words will be. She once forced me to sit at the kitchen table to eat dinner while holding me down in the chair and hissing in my ear that the food was laced with arsenic and that I was to eat it all so that my father would come home and finally see me dying. When I would come home from a date, she would force me to take off my underwear so she could check it for "suspect stains".
Five months before high school graduation, the bottom truly fell out. In January of 1980 my father was hospitalized. A week later I confirmed with his doctor---who was also our family friend---that my father had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. However, he also told me that my father had had it for ten years but had been in remission until then, and that he had sworn the doctor to secrecy so that no one would know but them.
On March 23, 1980, my father died. I remember screaming to God in front of my entire family, asking why He didn't take my mother instead. She heard me, but did nothing, and I think that was when she started to fear me a little. She avoided me throughout the wake and the funeral. I was inconsolable and felt completely unsafe, totally vulnerable.
She sent me to college in September. I wasn't ready, even though it meant getting away from her. I sat in my dorm room and looked at the walls and did absolutely nothing. I failed the first semester. I was failing the next semester. I had no idea what to do, and a slow, quiet panic built in me. Near the end of second semester, we were called into the dean's office for counseling. The dean told her I had not attended a single class. I can't even recall if I was expelled or not, because what happened next pretty much erased the memory of that meeting.
My mother and I left the counseling session and walked to the lot where she'd parked. She got in her car, but wouldn't unlock the door for me. I watched her hit the gas hard and begin to drive out of the lot.
Fine, I thought. Later, bitch.
And then she spun the car around and drove straight at me. I stood there, shocked. I remember thinking, "Fuck! She's going to hit me if she's not careful. Wait a sec...she wants to hit me. Holy shit, she wants to KILL me!"
As she got closer, I saw she was smiling maniacally. I turned and ran to get out of the way, and I fell on the ground. She missed me, but not by much. I got up and started pelting down the lot, and she came for me again. I dodged the car. I fell down again, she tried to hit me again, I ran, she followed. Finally I tripped and fell just as I was getting out of the way one last time, and her tire grazed my foot.
I don't remember what happened next, or if I was really expelled. Then the semester was over and I was back home for the summer, making plans.
I'd met a boy the previous summer at Rockaway Beach and he had moved to California to work for a large company. He had come back to New York six months later for additional training and was planning to return to work in early August. He asked me to go with him. I agreed. Much of the summer was spent in tossing various personal items out of my window at three AM while he stood below, catching them, putting them in his car, and taking them to his house so they could be packed for the trip to California.
Somehow, my mother got wind of the plan and called the cops to assist her in kicking me out of the house. My boyfriend met me outside and we drove to his place. I had been saving my clothes to pack last, I had nothing to wear but what I was already wearing, and had no money. His family kindly donated some clothes, and he bought me some sneakers.
A week later, my mother called my boyfriend's house. She had found his phone number in my phone book. His mom answered the phone to my mother's yelling, and she immediately read my mother the riot act for being rude and abusive. I got on the phone, and my mother demanded that I come back to her house because my uncles--her brothers--wanted to talk to me and my boyfriend. Today. Now.
I don't know why I decided to go, but my boyfriend and I got in his car and drove over there. We were met by my uncles, who started grilling my boyfriend. My mother just stood by, hurling irrelevant abuse. My uncles asked what did he think he was doing, told him how they were going to stop him from taking me, etc. He answered them very respectfully, and when they found out what he did for a living, they paused and told my mother that he seemed nice and that he appeared to have a promising career. My mother was shocked, and began screaming at them to kill me and my boyfriend. They ignored her and took my boyfriend with them to talk outside the house on the stoop.
I was alone with my mother and I knew what was coming. She turned to me and lunged---and I was so tired of this, so goddamned tired. I decided I'd finally had enough and I didn't really give a shit about what I was going to do. I caught her wrists and threw her down to the slate kitchen floor. It was like wrestling a rabid dog; I literally saw her foam at the mouth. She bit my arm, and I just beat the hell out of her. I finally got up off her; she was crying, cursing, and spitting at me. She rolled over on her side and vomited. I felt completely detached as I watched her retching. Although shaky from adrenaline, I made it to the front door. My hands and arm hurt badly. I kissed my uncles goodbye and walked with my boyfriend to the car. He and I left for California about two weeks later.
More tomorrow.
I can't remember the exact year this happened, but I think it was in 1970 when my brother Johnny was arrested in Florida and was sentenced to ten years in Starke Prison. This was the event that sent my mother completely over the edge. As the years went by, she became even more abusive to me, and to my father as well. When she was enraged, anything immediately at hand was a weapon with which she could lash out at us: a heavy ashtray, knives, broomsticks, hairbrushes. The worst in my eyes was the time in which during one of her screaming rages she broke an antique Chinese urn that my father had bought her as a gift, and used a shard of it to carve up his forearm as he physically struggled to grab her wrists to stop the attack. In my eyes, my father was sacrosanct, and for her to go after him was worse than her stabbing me in the hip with a steak knife.
I believe that in the 70s, it was virtually impossible for a man to admit to abuse at a partner's hands. The term "emasculation" comes to mind. I know my father felt trapped by his love for my mother---she was an absolutely beautiful woman, and he was not willing to give her up---and he must have also felt that if he had admitted to the physical abuse she dealt him, he would have been ridiculed. In addition, when he tried to intercede for me, he suffered more of her abuse. Later, during therapy sessions, I tried to hold my father accountable for not doing anything to help me, but I simply could not fault him for it. He was caught in the cycle and could not see how to escape, just as I could not get out because kids didn't just go call Social Services at the time.
When I was fourteen years old, I ran up a $200 phone bill in one month. My mother went berserk and started beating the hell out of me. What's memorable about this event is that it was the first time I decided to defend myself. I threw my mother down on my bed held her down, and began to hit her hard. My father, hearing her yells for help, tore into the room and pulled me off her. My mother went for me again with her fists, and my father---who before then had never raised his hands to me---also started beating me.
It was a betrayal, of course...but as I said earlier, I couldn't really blame him. I still can't. I know he was horrified at what he had done, and I wasn't going to push him for an apology.
My brother Johnny got out of jail in 1977, presumably for good behavior. However, this didn't help my mother in the least. Her abuse took on a new dimension for me when she began to sharpen her skills at mental and verbal demoralization, which were in some ways even more horrifying to me than the physical maltreatment. You can duck a blow---you can see the windup happen and at least try to get out of the way, but you can't look in someone's head to see what their next words will be. She once forced me to sit at the kitchen table to eat dinner while holding me down in the chair and hissing in my ear that the food was laced with arsenic and that I was to eat it all so that my father would come home and finally see me dying. When I would come home from a date, she would force me to take off my underwear so she could check it for "suspect stains".
Five months before high school graduation, the bottom truly fell out. In January of 1980 my father was hospitalized. A week later I confirmed with his doctor---who was also our family friend---that my father had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. However, he also told me that my father had had it for ten years but had been in remission until then, and that he had sworn the doctor to secrecy so that no one would know but them.
On March 23, 1980, my father died. I remember screaming to God in front of my entire family, asking why He didn't take my mother instead. She heard me, but did nothing, and I think that was when she started to fear me a little. She avoided me throughout the wake and the funeral. I was inconsolable and felt completely unsafe, totally vulnerable.
She sent me to college in September. I wasn't ready, even though it meant getting away from her. I sat in my dorm room and looked at the walls and did absolutely nothing. I failed the first semester. I was failing the next semester. I had no idea what to do, and a slow, quiet panic built in me. Near the end of second semester, we were called into the dean's office for counseling. The dean told her I had not attended a single class. I can't even recall if I was expelled or not, because what happened next pretty much erased the memory of that meeting.
My mother and I left the counseling session and walked to the lot where she'd parked. She got in her car, but wouldn't unlock the door for me. I watched her hit the gas hard and begin to drive out of the lot.
Fine, I thought. Later, bitch.
And then she spun the car around and drove straight at me. I stood there, shocked. I remember thinking, "Fuck! She's going to hit me if she's not careful. Wait a sec...she wants to hit me. Holy shit, she wants to KILL me!"
As she got closer, I saw she was smiling maniacally. I turned and ran to get out of the way, and I fell on the ground. She missed me, but not by much. I got up and started pelting down the lot, and she came for me again. I dodged the car. I fell down again, she tried to hit me again, I ran, she followed. Finally I tripped and fell just as I was getting out of the way one last time, and her tire grazed my foot.
I don't remember what happened next, or if I was really expelled. Then the semester was over and I was back home for the summer, making plans.
I'd met a boy the previous summer at Rockaway Beach and he had moved to California to work for a large company. He had come back to New York six months later for additional training and was planning to return to work in early August. He asked me to go with him. I agreed. Much of the summer was spent in tossing various personal items out of my window at three AM while he stood below, catching them, putting them in his car, and taking them to his house so they could be packed for the trip to California.
Somehow, my mother got wind of the plan and called the cops to assist her in kicking me out of the house. My boyfriend met me outside and we drove to his place. I had been saving my clothes to pack last, I had nothing to wear but what I was already wearing, and had no money. His family kindly donated some clothes, and he bought me some sneakers.
A week later, my mother called my boyfriend's house. She had found his phone number in my phone book. His mom answered the phone to my mother's yelling, and she immediately read my mother the riot act for being rude and abusive. I got on the phone, and my mother demanded that I come back to her house because my uncles--her brothers--wanted to talk to me and my boyfriend. Today. Now.
I don't know why I decided to go, but my boyfriend and I got in his car and drove over there. We were met by my uncles, who started grilling my boyfriend. My mother just stood by, hurling irrelevant abuse. My uncles asked what did he think he was doing, told him how they were going to stop him from taking me, etc. He answered them very respectfully, and when they found out what he did for a living, they paused and told my mother that he seemed nice and that he appeared to have a promising career. My mother was shocked, and began screaming at them to kill me and my boyfriend. They ignored her and took my boyfriend with them to talk outside the house on the stoop.
I was alone with my mother and I knew what was coming. She turned to me and lunged---and I was so tired of this, so goddamned tired. I decided I'd finally had enough and I didn't really give a shit about what I was going to do. I caught her wrists and threw her down to the slate kitchen floor. It was like wrestling a rabid dog; I literally saw her foam at the mouth. She bit my arm, and I just beat the hell out of her. I finally got up off her; she was crying, cursing, and spitting at me. She rolled over on her side and vomited. I felt completely detached as I watched her retching. Although shaky from adrenaline, I made it to the front door. My hands and arm hurt badly. I kissed my uncles goodbye and walked with my boyfriend to the car. He and I left for California about two weeks later.
More tomorrow.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Setting The Scene, Part One
My mother, Anne Radosti Calkins Carosone Sasowski Redington, died on May 11, 2010 at the age of eighty-three, from complications of dementia and Parkinson's disease. I was at work when I got the news via Facebook. Before I could stop myself, I grinned and exclaimed, "Holy shit! My mother's dead!" My co-workers turn to stare at me, aghast. I quickly packed up my purse, told my supervisor what happened, and took off for five days of bereavement leave.
Bereavement, my ass. How do you mourn a parent who tried to kill you?
Anne was born in 1926 on the Lower East Side of New York. She was a very private person---but also notoriously prone to lying---so I could never be certain that whatever she told me was true. She claimed that when she was a baby, her parents gave her away to her Aunt Giuseppina (Josie), who operated a neighborhood numbers racket. Anne said she became a numbers runner before she turned six years old, and that Josie would often hand her twenty dollars as pay, telling her to "go buy candy".
When Anne was eighteen, she married a man named Johnnie Calkins. She said he died of renal failure on their honeymoon, and soon after that, she married a Mr. Carosone. She had two children from that marriage: my half-brothers Joel (Joseph) and John. She told me that Mr. Carosone was an alcoholic, was physically and verbally abusive to her, and had thrown her out of a second-story window; some of her ribs were broken in the fall. She decided to divorce him, and took the kids.
She insisted that she scrubbed toilets to keep a roof over my half-brothers' heads, but I find this unlikely. She had once mentioned that she'd been employed at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn for a time, but I can't verify whether this is true or not. What I do know for certain is that during the time she was raising Joel and John, she met my father, Stanley Sasowski.
My father was born on New Jersey Avenue, Brooklyn, in 1915. His family was very poor. When Stenley was a young man, he worked for the CCC in Tennessee and sent money back home to his family. He then came back home and lived in his car to save money to purchase what was to be a series of body and fender shops in Brooklyn. He married, and a few years later divorced his wife because she was mentally ill. He had a son of his own from that marriage: my other half-brother, Stanley Junior, of whom he had custody.
In 1960, Stanley and Anne married. I was born in 1962. All of us lived in East New York in Brooklyn, right by the old Piels brewery. One of my earliest memories was sitting on my father's lap while my mother taught me to read out of the Dr. Seuss Dictionary. I was about two years old at the time.
When I was four years old, my father purchased the burned-out shell of a mansion in a residential area about a mile away from our home. The building was known as "The Haunted House", and my father restored it. Within a year, we had moved in.
Very early on, I remember my mother screaming for no apparent reason, and being brought along to evening doctor visits for which my mother had appointments. I also recall my father telling me that Mother was "talking to the doctor", so later on, I concluded that she was seeing a shrink.
When I was about six, everything seemed to go haywire. Stanley Junior was in the Marines and was serving in Vietnam. Johnny graduated from high school. Johnny and Joel kept getting into trouble. I learned a new word: heroin. I watched a drug dealer beat the shit out of Johnny in front of our house while the entire neighborhood watched. I saw the dealer try to beat up my father while my mother was hysterically crying and on the stoop. My father was covered in blood. Terrified, I hid in the broom closet---but then left the house and careened into the boulevard, nearly getting hit by the oncoming cars. As soon as I was across, I ran into my best friend's house and into her mother's arms.
I stayed there for a couple of hours and didn't want to go home that night, but my friend's mother coaxed me into it. She brought me home, and my mother started in on me with her fists. That was my first memory of being beaten severely.
I'll continue this tomorrow.
Bereavement, my ass. How do you mourn a parent who tried to kill you?
Anne was born in 1926 on the Lower East Side of New York. She was a very private person---but also notoriously prone to lying---so I could never be certain that whatever she told me was true. She claimed that when she was a baby, her parents gave her away to her Aunt Giuseppina (Josie), who operated a neighborhood numbers racket. Anne said she became a numbers runner before she turned six years old, and that Josie would often hand her twenty dollars as pay, telling her to "go buy candy".
When Anne was eighteen, she married a man named Johnnie Calkins. She said he died of renal failure on their honeymoon, and soon after that, she married a Mr. Carosone. She had two children from that marriage: my half-brothers Joel (Joseph) and John. She told me that Mr. Carosone was an alcoholic, was physically and verbally abusive to her, and had thrown her out of a second-story window; some of her ribs were broken in the fall. She decided to divorce him, and took the kids.
She insisted that she scrubbed toilets to keep a roof over my half-brothers' heads, but I find this unlikely. She had once mentioned that she'd been employed at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn for a time, but I can't verify whether this is true or not. What I do know for certain is that during the time she was raising Joel and John, she met my father, Stanley Sasowski.
My father was born on New Jersey Avenue, Brooklyn, in 1915. His family was very poor. When Stenley was a young man, he worked for the CCC in Tennessee and sent money back home to his family. He then came back home and lived in his car to save money to purchase what was to be a series of body and fender shops in Brooklyn. He married, and a few years later divorced his wife because she was mentally ill. He had a son of his own from that marriage: my other half-brother, Stanley Junior, of whom he had custody.
In 1960, Stanley and Anne married. I was born in 1962. All of us lived in East New York in Brooklyn, right by the old Piels brewery. One of my earliest memories was sitting on my father's lap while my mother taught me to read out of the Dr. Seuss Dictionary. I was about two years old at the time.
When I was four years old, my father purchased the burned-out shell of a mansion in a residential area about a mile away from our home. The building was known as "The Haunted House", and my father restored it. Within a year, we had moved in.
Very early on, I remember my mother screaming for no apparent reason, and being brought along to evening doctor visits for which my mother had appointments. I also recall my father telling me that Mother was "talking to the doctor", so later on, I concluded that she was seeing a shrink.
When I was about six, everything seemed to go haywire. Stanley Junior was in the Marines and was serving in Vietnam. Johnny graduated from high school. Johnny and Joel kept getting into trouble. I learned a new word: heroin. I watched a drug dealer beat the shit out of Johnny in front of our house while the entire neighborhood watched. I saw the dealer try to beat up my father while my mother was hysterically crying and on the stoop. My father was covered in blood. Terrified, I hid in the broom closet---but then left the house and careened into the boulevard, nearly getting hit by the oncoming cars. As soon as I was across, I ran into my best friend's house and into her mother's arms.
I stayed there for a couple of hours and didn't want to go home that night, but my friend's mother coaxed me into it. She brought me home, and my mother started in on me with her fists. That was my first memory of being beaten severely.
I'll continue this tomorrow.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
I Got My Ass Kicked Today, And I Enjoyed It.
I've been holding out on you guys. Worse, I've been holding out on myself. Perhaps that's what needed to happen, but it ends here.
I need to post this for many reasons.
Yesterday, Matt and I took the day off to see Rush get their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were funny, humble, and charming (Neil Peart was not there because he was on his way to New Mexico to get ready for Rush's upcoming tour). Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins was one of the guest speakers, as was Donna Halper---the woman who, while working at WMMS in Cleveland, Ohio, put Rush's "Working Man" on her regular playlist. The blue-collar hard-rock fans of Cleveland loved the song, and their appreciation led to Rush's record contract with Mercury Records. The band, grateful to Donna for "getting the ball rolling" (in their own words), acknowledged her on their first and second albums.
In her speech yesterday, Donna referred to herself as Rush's "big sister". That statement stayed with me--and today it made its way into my life and touched me directly in a way that I never could have imagined. This is what happened.
When Matt and I got home yesterday after the festivities, I went online to check out a particular Rush fan site that I frequent. Some individuals had posted a few incendiary things about Neil not being at the event, that he was a dick for not going, and the like. One of the fans then posted a statement that Donna had made elsewhere in response to the bashing and in defense of Neil, who is a very shy individual. Donna mentioned her own issues with shyness and tried to convey what it is like to speak to a crowd when one is so patently uncomfortable in doing so.
Donna's defense of Neil and her compassion for him prompted me to send her a message and a friend request on Facebook. I thanked her for her words and support of Neil, and mentioned my own issues with shyness and the fact that I have PTSD (yeah, I know I never told you about this; more on that later), which makes me really uncomfortable around many people.
This morning, I went online and frequented the sites I usually visit daily. When I went to Facebook, I saw Donna had added me as a friend and that she was available to chat. I sent her a chatbox as follows:
Me: Thank you for EVERYTHING!!! Yesterday was so much fun. XOXO You don't have to respond to this if you don't wish to.
Donna: You're a silly goose. I wanted to respond. I sent my phone number. Call me.
...huh?!
At that moment, I realized that I had a couple of new messages in my Facebook inbox. I checked them, and they were from Donna; she had sent them about a half hour before I had sent her my chatbox. There it was: one of the messages was a request to give her a call.
I know that those of you who know me personally know that I'm the one who crawls into a corner and falls asleep at parties and that I'm not really good around people, for all that I'm a funny wiseass online. You're familiar with my intrinsic shyness, so you probably know what it took for me to pick up the phone and dial the number. And when Donna answered the phone, I panicked.
I don't remember when I started crying, but I do remember that Donna encouraged me to really look at myself, which is something that I've always been terrified to do. We talked about my shyness and diabetes and fibromyalgia and PTSD, and her shyness, and Judaism, and the both of us having had life experiences that would curl your hair. She asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to write. And the answer was really so simple that it almost sounds ridiculous: she said, "So, do what writers do."
POW.
I was reminded of one of my favorite Peanuts comics, in which Charlie Brown is at Lucy's psychiatry booth for the umpteenth time. And Lucy gives it to him straight:
Charlie Brown: What can you do when you don't fit in? What can you do when life seems to be passing you by?
Lucy: Follow me. I want to show you something. See the horizon over there? See how big this world is? See how much room there is for everybody? Have you ever seen any other worlds?
Charlie Brown: No.
Lucy: As far as you know, this is the only world there is, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: There are no other worlds for you to live in, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: You were born to live in this world, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: Well, LIVE IN IT, THEN!...Five cents, please.
It's in my hands. I can stew in my shyness and my fear of being ridiculed, and I can point a finger at everyone who's fucked me over...or I can point that finger at myself and take responsibility for me and my actions. I can do, I can live, I can be.
Donna kicked my ass today, and I love her for it. I am proud to call her my friend and big sister...and I am proud to have decided to do, and live, and be.
I need to post this for many reasons.
Yesterday, Matt and I took the day off to see Rush get their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were funny, humble, and charming (Neil Peart was not there because he was on his way to New Mexico to get ready for Rush's upcoming tour). Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins was one of the guest speakers, as was Donna Halper---the woman who, while working at WMMS in Cleveland, Ohio, put Rush's "Working Man" on her regular playlist. The blue-collar hard-rock fans of Cleveland loved the song, and their appreciation led to Rush's record contract with Mercury Records. The band, grateful to Donna for "getting the ball rolling" (in their own words), acknowledged her on their first and second albums.
In her speech yesterday, Donna referred to herself as Rush's "big sister". That statement stayed with me--and today it made its way into my life and touched me directly in a way that I never could have imagined. This is what happened.
When Matt and I got home yesterday after the festivities, I went online to check out a particular Rush fan site that I frequent. Some individuals had posted a few incendiary things about Neil not being at the event, that he was a dick for not going, and the like. One of the fans then posted a statement that Donna had made elsewhere in response to the bashing and in defense of Neil, who is a very shy individual. Donna mentioned her own issues with shyness and tried to convey what it is like to speak to a crowd when one is so patently uncomfortable in doing so.
Donna's defense of Neil and her compassion for him prompted me to send her a message and a friend request on Facebook. I thanked her for her words and support of Neil, and mentioned my own issues with shyness and the fact that I have PTSD (yeah, I know I never told you about this; more on that later), which makes me really uncomfortable around many people.
This morning, I went online and frequented the sites I usually visit daily. When I went to Facebook, I saw Donna had added me as a friend and that she was available to chat. I sent her a chatbox as follows:
Me: Thank you for EVERYTHING!!! Yesterday was so much fun. XOXO You don't have to respond to this if you don't wish to.
Donna: You're a silly goose. I wanted to respond. I sent my phone number. Call me.
...huh?!
At that moment, I realized that I had a couple of new messages in my Facebook inbox. I checked them, and they were from Donna; she had sent them about a half hour before I had sent her my chatbox. There it was: one of the messages was a request to give her a call.
I know that those of you who know me personally know that I'm the one who crawls into a corner and falls asleep at parties and that I'm not really good around people, for all that I'm a funny wiseass online. You're familiar with my intrinsic shyness, so you probably know what it took for me to pick up the phone and dial the number. And when Donna answered the phone, I panicked.
I don't remember when I started crying, but I do remember that Donna encouraged me to really look at myself, which is something that I've always been terrified to do. We talked about my shyness and diabetes and fibromyalgia and PTSD, and her shyness, and Judaism, and the both of us having had life experiences that would curl your hair. She asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to write. And the answer was really so simple that it almost sounds ridiculous: she said, "So, do what writers do."
POW.
I was reminded of one of my favorite Peanuts comics, in which Charlie Brown is at Lucy's psychiatry booth for the umpteenth time. And Lucy gives it to him straight:
Charlie Brown: What can you do when you don't fit in? What can you do when life seems to be passing you by?
Lucy: Follow me. I want to show you something. See the horizon over there? See how big this world is? See how much room there is for everybody? Have you ever seen any other worlds?
Charlie Brown: No.
Lucy: As far as you know, this is the only world there is, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: There are no other worlds for you to live in, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: You were born to live in this world, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: Well, LIVE IN IT, THEN!...Five cents, please.
It's in my hands. I can stew in my shyness and my fear of being ridiculed, and I can point a finger at everyone who's fucked me over...or I can point that finger at myself and take responsibility for me and my actions. I can do, I can live, I can be.
Donna kicked my ass today, and I love her for it. I am proud to call her my friend and big sister...and I am proud to have decided to do, and live, and be.
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