Now there’s no real way to describe well the level of work/chores that my parents put me through. If you’ve ever heard the Weird Al song “Amish Paradise”- you know you listen to it, don’t even lie- you know, “At four-thirty in the morning I’m milking cows” sounds about right. Sometimes it was just easier to stay awake because it was like an alarm had been implanted in my father and stepmother’s heads- if I laid down, even for a second at night, it was like they had sped up time and, poof, all of a sudden it was time to get up. I was probably one of the only kids in my graduating class who didn’t look at you funny and ask what you were talking about when you described a sunrise.
I guess if there had been any reasoning behind the chores that I was assigned it would have been different, but with the house in the condition that it was in (and it was in terrible condition- I have seen and heard of houses that had been demolished for less than the condition that house was in) there was absolutely no point. Besides that there was no rhyme or reason behind the chores that I was given- at one point they had me wash the walls with a scrubbie sponge. Have you ever seen those movies about the Army where the Privates get into trouble and have to wash the floor with a toothbrush? My parents must have seen that and gone “Hey! That’s a great idea!”
There is one thing that I think should be common sense to everyone: be nice to your family because, when they are old and sick in the hospital on life support, you don’t want them “accidently” pulling the plug. Be assured that when either my father or my stepmother are in the hospital on life support, no one will allow me into the room with them. They won’t allow my brother in either, come to think of it.
For as long as I lived with them, I was always the whore of the school. Lesley and John would take away my phone, read my text messages, listen to my voicemails, read my emails and go into my facebook and myspace accounts, and anything that could be taken in the slightest crude way often was. Prime example was one time that I was at South Alabama for college. I’d met a guy a couple of years older than my named Gabe. He was the typical weird, pasty kid that was a bit of a nerd and didn’t really know how to interact with girls- in other words, the type that I always seem to attract. We would always joke and talk and hang out. He showed me his comic strips and I gave him smart-ass comments to use in them. He was working on a corny comic strip for which he needed a girl who could fake a French accent. Even though I had a terrible fake accent (it’s like Pepe LePuew meets Scarlett O’Hara and had a love child “Parle voux Frances, yall!”) I was about the only girl that he knew and was willing to do the voice because it sounded like fun. One day he texted me, asking if I wanted to come over to his house to do the comic strip because it would be quiet with his parent’s not at home. Can’t you see how badly that could be interpreted by someone who always had sex and on the brain and yet wasn’t getting any?
My mother says that I should have the best constitution of anyone in the entire planet because of all of the shit that was in the air. My stepmother would cook for my father’s men (since he was a Lt. in the Mobile Sherriff’s Office) for all of the holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, huge trays of corn casserole, turkey, stuffing, cornbread, all of the stuff that you would expect of a holiday dinner. Now, since they were both on crack and didn’t eat at all in the last year and a half that I remembered, the fridge (that they kept locked, which will be discussed later) was fully stocked. For the next three or four decades. So, of course, there was no room for the huge aluminum catering trays of food that was left after all of my father’s men had eaten all that they could. So, not knowing where else to put these trays (and not thinking that maybe smaller containers would be a good idea) Lesley would keep them in the laundry room. I guess that she thought that since it was always ten or fifteen degrees colder in there than it was in the rest of the house, that the food would be ok. What she didn’t get was that this was food that had eggs, and milk, and meat in it. And, as if this was not bad enough, she would have me eat it until it was gone. Looking back now, I’m surprised that I didn’t get sick.
At nineteen, I have given myself a diagnoses as ADD, since both my mother and father are ADD. My father, though, was worse at it than my mother was. We commonly refer to it as the “blinky lights”, the small things that make you go off on a tangent and never come back to what you were originally doing. My father was horrible at it. The summer that I turned eighteen, he decided that he was going to be the next Lance Armstrong. He bought himself the bike shorts, (which he did not look good in) the helmet, the socks, the shoes, the special bike that had pegs instead of pedals. He got a subscription to “Biker’s Weekly” and started one of his weird diets of protein powder and Muscle Milk. When I was a freshman in college, he went on a running jag, wearing the running shorts and no shirt, the “gorilla feet” shoes (that were for “barefoot running”) and all of the accoutrements.
This leads me to the assumption that my father was also a druggie. When I was a freshman in college, he started losing weight. I’m not talking about one or two pounds a week to look good “normal” dieting, I’m talking losing fifteen pounds in a week and looking like a refugee from a Nazi concentration camp dieting. He thought that he looked good; I thought that he looked gross and wouldn’t walk around the house with really short shorts the rode up his ass and down his hips and no shirt. This was like crack head skinny. This was like Nikki Sixx at his worst skinny. The summer that I was nineteen, he broke his toe running in his barefoot Gorilla feet. He came home limping and shrugged off the suggestion that he go to a doctor. For the next three or four days, he stayed hopped up on my Lortab that was left over from my wisdom teeth surgery (which I had when I was sixteen and he took away because he thought that I was going to become a druggie), laying in bed, incoherent, reading a book and staring at the pretty lights on the ceiling.
My father and stepmother were obsessed with appearance. For years, I struggled with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that causes you to starve yourself. This started after my kind, loving father who made a comment that a dress that I had bought for a school dance, being “a little bit tight” and that I might “want to watch it”. They got me a gym membership at thirteen, after they pulled me out of ballet classes, and made me go at least twice or three times a week. When he was going to the gym, he would work out, pulling three and four hundred pounds of weights to do “reps”. He would run five and six and seven miles a day. He would bike two or three times as much. He counted calories and went on all kinds of weird diets, he was, at one time or another, on the Atkins diet, a vegetarian, and a vegan. And it wasn’t just that he wanted to lose weight, it was that he wanted everyone else to lose weight, too. He was continuously on my ass about calories, asking if I knew how many calories were in something that I was eating. When I was a Junior in high school, he and Lesley decided that I had no self-control and they had to lock up all of the food in the house to help “control me”. This, of course, led to a battle between the three of us to see who could and would actually give me food. Lesley got incredibly pissed at this, but I knew that she was one of the two that wouldn’t give me food if I asked for it, so I began to ask just John for it. I can’t say that I hate John alone for this, though, because my paternal grandmother was the exact same way as he was. Anne, a licensed social worker who had worked for DHR for many years until she retired in the eighties, would keep a fully stocked freezer and pantry every time that the family came to visit. She would keep the gallon sized ice creams in the freezer, buy a four or five layer chocolate cake, have three or four huge bottles of Coke in the fridge, and always had five or six hundred packs of barbque. I swear, if there was ever a natural disaster that wiped out most of Alabama and somehow kept the small town of Ozark in tact, her house was where everyone within a thirty or fourty mile radius should go; they wouldn’t run out of food for at least four months. The only downfall of that plan would be that they would be forced to pray before every meal, to sing devotional songs every night, and have long in-depth talks about “feelings” and “emotions” every day that would make them cry, whether they wanted to or not. I swear, I think that the woman would have stomped on your feet or hands in a heartbeat if she wanted you to cry while she was talking to you. She must have put the kids of many, many Kleenex employees through college with all the tissues that she bought.
When I was a freshman in college, my father went off to the FBI Academy in Quantico, thus leaving my stepmother, the psycho, in charge. This woman, I am sure, is certifiable. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I saw the movie “Mommy Dearest”. Let’s just say that Lesley could have given them pointers. I am convinced that she was a masochist, getting off on the pain that she inflicted on me. She made me go to the gym every night, often for hours at a time, not letting me get off of the treadmill until I had gone a certain distance (like “Oh, you have to run five miles”. Excuse me, I’m not on crack like the two of you are.) One night, I was at school and had missed the bus. It was raining and she, being the benign wonderful ruler that she was (kind of like Hitler was a “kind, benign ruler”) she agreed to come pick me up. I ran out to the car in a pair of jeans that I had gone to school in wet that morning and a pair of Vans and was taken to the gym to run five miles….dressed in said jeans and Vans. One night, after I forgot a pair of tennis shoes at school, she made me wear a pair that were two sizes too small to the gym. My father, trying to help, let me borrow a pair of his shoes, but Lesley made me take them off since they “weren’t mine and I should show more respect for other people’s property” and wear the other pair. By the end of the night, as I was limping out to the car, I realized that the shoes were so small they had literally rubbed blisters in the back of my feet so badly that they had bled. Then, after we got home, not only did she not let me go inside to change into another pair of shoes, but she made me stay outside, in the fourty degree weather, raking up leaves because garbage day was the next day.
The last two years that I lived with them were my “rebellious” years. I snuck out of the house and snuck boys in, I did half of my chores, blowing the other half off because, honestly, how were they going to notice? I woke up when they told me to, sometimes, and then went back to sleep whenever they had gone to work. I bought my own food half the time because they didn’t buy me what I needed, or locked it up leaving me to starve until six or seven at night when they got home. I bought books that I wanted to read and planned midnight excursions out to the beach with my boyfriend. I wrote papers on what I wanted to write them on, and started smoking and drinking.
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