Siblings

My husband is an only child. He says that growing up he felt the lack of siblings. He lived in the country so he played army by himself in the barn; he played with the chickens in the chicken coop. He devised endless ways to enjoy his own company. He still has that talent and a couple times a day comes up to the library where I’m either reading or on the Internet to say he’s going “shopping.” In his world that means he’s going down to his thousand square foot woodworking shop, contemplate repairing some things he knows I’m waiting for, but more likely browsing through “car and motorcycle” magazines by the hour, lost in his own little world. He is not a social animal unless you count Facebook or Flickr where he has a huge audience that wait for his world famous wit to emerge so they can add their own world famous wit.

Me? I’m one of five children who grew up in a happy Catholic family. First, my two brothers were born within 15 months of each other. Next came me. I adored growing up with my brothers. They took me to my first day at school. They allowed me to play trucks in the dirt with them, walk across fences with their buddies (one of who, Jerry Bennett, became my first boyfriend) and later on go shooting with them with our 22s for prairie dogs or rabbits (I never remember shooting any so I don’t think our heart was in it). Another sister was born 14 months after me (good Catholic family) but we never got along and in my memory, I blacked her out of any happy experiences I had. Then eight years later came my baby sister, Jeanne. (They must have gone without sex for eight years and then one night slipped. My guess is they never had any after that). I was fortunate. Mom gave Jeanne to me to raise. She grew up thinking I was her mother. She slept in a crib next to my bed. I got up in the middle of the night to give her her bottle, change her pants and rock her back to sleep while I sang lullabies.

Many childhood sexual abuse victims had a sibling for a perpetrator. My heart goes out to them as, again, I was fortunate. My only memory of sex with my siblings was when I was about three years old and me, my siblings and a bunch of neighborhood little kids all met behind a bush. We made a group decision to check out each others privates. We swiftly yanked our pants and panties down to our ankles and stared at each of the others. “Yours is missing, one of the boys hissed at me.” “No, it’s not. It’s just inside. You have to walk around with yours hanging down all the time. Too bad.” After several other smart aleck remarks we pulled our pants up and wandered off, having just lived through our first sexual experience. Years later, as adults, my sister told me she’d been gang raped by our brothers and a bunch of other little kids. Since she described the setting for the experience (behind a bush in North Dakota), the ages of the kids (all pre-schoolers) and the various children involved I assumed she was talking about the same experience I went through which I certainly don’t remember as a gang rape.

When I was 13 and my father came into our bedroom where I lay on the bottom bunk with my rosary under my pillow and raped me, she was in the top bunk. While I was in recovery she told me she witnessed it (which certainly explains her galloping paranoia). My baby sister, three years old witnessed it as well. From that time on until she was ten she spoke in a strange, lispy language no one understood but me.  I was to find out many years later that most people thought she was retarded.  At the age of four, she still wet the bed on a nightly basis and, like me, startled easily, her limbs trembling at any unexpected noise.

Our family descended into a pit of hell, one where we wandered around like zombies, withdrawn and pale faces terrified of something but we didn’t know what. My family life reminded me of a camp of mutilated and injured soldiers from some obsolete war, indescribable in its agony.  All the figures were shadowy and disoriented, as if only half-alive and that half living in a well of misery.  We moved in and out of our days appearing to wait for some catastrophic happening, all of us knowing that once it did, we were ill prepared to handle it. We avoided each other as if each of us carried a deadly disease. My relationship with my beloved brothers ruptured, our chain broken, the links irreparable. Despair at losing my brothers, who never spoke to me except with derision, plunged me into deep despair. My father found a new job an hour’s drive away and only came home on weekends.

My mother had discovered my father’s middle of the night raids. The following is an excerpt from my memoir, I Never Heard A Robin Sing.

No longer did she get out of bed and fix us hot cereal and chocolate in the morning.  No more did she avidly question me on how my day went when I returned home.  Now, she was asleep when I went off to school.  We fixed our own breakfast, stumbling through burnt toast and soggy cold cereal.  When I came home, the house was dark, Marine Corps blankets covering the windows and the breakfast dishes sitting on the table in an accusatory manner.  There was no dinner happily cooking in the oven and no cheerful sight of Mom listening to her soap operas, shushing me until they finished their fifteen-minute segments.  Instead, she lay in bed in an emotional stupor, depressed and withdrawn.

The change in Mom slipped into our lives almost as if programmed.  Was this just another stage in mothers?  I wondered if she were ill.  With little or no communication amongst my siblings and me, we didn’t dare discuss it.  As time passed, I realized that Mom had indeed changed for good.  My heart was frightened and hollow when I approached our home and saw the Marine Corp blankets, signaling that mom was still in bed.  I tried to waken her, to get her to eat, oftentimes grooming her as I would a pet.  She’d lie in a state of apathy and sorrow, and have me shave her legs, wash her face, or comb her hair.  I felt someone had taken my mother from me and left this strange lady in her place.  What had I done?  Was she angry with me?  Didn’t she love me anymore?  There was no more affection, no more interest, no more my mother.  I grieved deeply.  As time went on, my sorrow and bewilderment, planted seeds of a neurosis that only grew with the passage of time.

Our happy Catholic family was dead.

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