I've always said (Well at least for the last few months anyway...)that "Lifes like a roller coaster. Somedays you don't know whether to scream, or throw up... ( I am rather proud that I thought that one up.:p)Someone said a minute ago on facebook (Since I posted it there a bit ago that "Sometimes you throw your hands in the air and just enjoy the ride"! :) How true is THAT?
I have decided I am going to be like a sponge. I am going to absorb all the "water" out of my moms journal and let it flow through my fingers. It may add weight and weigh me down sometimes, but in the end it disappates and I'm ok again. Heck, I may have to get the sponge wet over and over for a while, but thats the beauty of a sponge. No matter how much water you put into it, it always dissapates after a while. Thank God I'm a sponge.
My parents had a rule (One of many...imagine that?!;p)
If we weren't up before 10 am, we weren't allowed to eat breakfast. (What is THAT? I didn't know that I lived in a resteraunt?) My mom sais that with 7 people, it WAS like a resteraunt.Meals being served forever,dirty dishes, cold food, dirty table. She acts like she has no choice in the matter.
SHE DOES.
Here is what I do at my house...We have breakfast lunch and dinner whenever we want and if someone doesn't show up, Guess what? I PUT IT IN THE FRIDGE. The person who didn't show up can come and get it whenever they want, whatever TIME they want as they want it. Why does everything have to be so set in stone? How anal can a person be?
At my house everyone who eats there puts their dish they've eaten off of into the dishwasher. Did my mom have to make herself a martyr? I remember her complaining all the time about it, putting away food, getting out food. Doing the dishes .Why did she have to be the one to do all of it? Couldn't we just be allowed to get our own food? She didn't have to act like such a victim. SHE WASN'T.
A person can be PROACTIVE. She was never helpless. Yeah, its hard to get kids to help, but it would have worked better than making us starve. I see entrys about me being told not to eat. And then after she told me not to I would go to the fridge and try to sneak something, ANYTHING because I was starving. No child should have to starve.
This was not the only entry where I wasn't allowed to eat. I got punished once because I had talked to my sisters friend in church, supposably going in the middle of church class and interupting, talking to this friend of Lillians. I don't know that thats what even really happened.I don't remember even interupting her class. I think my sister was jealous that her friend showed any attention to me. I was starving for attention. You know...the GOOD kind.
I know that I started swearing...I had no other weapon, nobody was listening to what I said. They sure listened when I swore at them!.So Lillian and my mom went and told my dad about it and he came up and started whaling on me, (After he""told me to be quiet". Riiiiiiiiiight mom, riiiight.. What, after he started hitting me? When he had what she called "A tight grip" on me? There was no such thing as a tight grip, only punching hitting, backing me up against a wall. BOUNCING my head off the wall.
EVERYTHING with them was "tight grip". Literally!
Everything with me is that "I am violent, that "I hit with my fists" (Gee, who did I learn that from? My dad ALWAYS used his fists. Thats what would bloody my nose, EVERY TIME. his fists, he hit my nose, HARD, like it was a punching bag.) What was my father doing??? politely backing me in a corner?I don't think so!
When he "Had a tight grip on me" I fought back when he started beating me. This happened all the time, I was hoping that I would stop him from beating me and after a moment or two of desperation I would end up going limp and giving up any hope that I was going to get out of it, this time, or any time. )
Its like a dream when your running but your going so slow your not going anywhere and your desperate to escape. Or like a movie...maybe "Rocky" If you've seen it...(Cmon..everybodys seen Rocky:p"Yo Adrian"!!lol ) where the fighter tries to fight, but realizes he's not winning and you see all the light go out of their eyes and they just give up. )
Sooo after all of this,I got grounded and on top of everything else, when I decided that I was going to go do things with my friends anyway becasue WHY in the HELL would I want to be home???I got beaten up when I was home.
Not only did I get beaten up for talking to my sisters friend by my father, I ended up having my lunch money taken away not for not just 1 week, but for 2 for leaving without permission. All because I talked to Lillians friend.. (At the time, the only friends I had were in Jr high, so I couldn't even BEG food off of anybody. This was my Sophmore year in high school.)
My response to them was classic Heidi...."I need to lose weight anyway.":p (These days health and welfare would have taken me away if they would have gotten wind of something like that!)
.My mom tries to make all of this ridiculous behavior sound rational (I'm thinking especially because she got it on paper for my councilor) But I am writing this and the more I look through the journal, the crazier it sounds.
All of us would sneak food, when we could get away with it. All of us kids were so desperate that we would go downstairs and sneak food from her "food storage" .Canned hams, beef stew, peaches, whatever we could get out hands on. We were hungry! Why should we have been denied food??And not only was 10 the cut off time for eating every morning, but after 10 at night nobody would be allowed get anything to eat either.
I almost lost my life over trying to get spagetti out of the fridge because I was hungry.
That is UNREAL.
And yet the excuses keep coming.
I never knew till recently my sisters used to sneak food from storage,(My sister Lillian loved the canned hams:p) but I think we were kept so at odds against each other that we would have told on each other.
When I left home I told myself that I would never starve again...
Years later I was at a friends moms house for her wedding and my friend told me that I couldn't eat anything out of her moms fridge. There was nowhere to get food,the food places were far away,and I didn't have a car. It was TORTURE. I was SO hungry. I think my friend was SO preoccupied by her wedding that she just didn't think about how her friend needed to eat.
I had flown a LONG way and spent a LOT of money to get to her wedding. but...I starved.
I remember eating stale chips I had gotten from a store we stopped at. Ug...I still am not that much into chips anymore.:p
When we drove somewhere I grabbed whatever I could with the money I had. We had stopped at a store to get her fingernail polish for the wedding and it wasn't even a food place. Thats where I got the stale chips. (actually, I can't remember , I think my friend may have given t hem to me,now that I think about it. We both were chomping on them that night. But I was there for more than a day.) At her reception I finally ate real food. I remember greedily staring at all the food she had at her wedding party when they were getting it ready. I finally asked if I could have some and someone told me yes, I could have 1. Later when we were allowed to have more of the food I'm sure I ate a ton. Maybe I should have stuck some food in the pocket of my coat...:p I still am friends with that person. I know her and love her, I always will, I just think she was preoccupied and didn't realize.
WIth that said I can relate to a favorite character of mine in a book:p
I know exactly what Scarlett O'Hara means when she said "I'll never go hungry again!:p lol (Recognize that quote? I LOVE " Gone With The Wind". What a great book:)
When people come to my house, I tell people about being at my friends moms house and how I starved. I tell them about my family and how my parents wouldn't let me eat after 10 and my promise to myself that I'll never go hungry again. That I'll never let anyone who sets foot in my house go hungry, I promised myself I would NEVER make anyone go through that. I make sure that they know that any time they are hungry that anything inside or outside the fridge is fair game. They can eat whatever they want. I make sure when they come to visit that I have everything made up and put in lil serving bowls to stick in the microwave so they don't have to worry about eating anything that I'm saving, because in my house we don't ration food , we EAT it.
DUH!.
Interesting that your mother had to make things so hard on herself. Enforcing people cleaning up after themselves, instead of set eating times would have been much easier. Consider two things: Was she OCD at all? If so, a dirty table with a crumb or two might have made her nuts. Also, was her life out of control in a much larger way? if so, this may have been one of the smaller things that she felt she did have control over. No excuses, just trying to understand where the being so uptight about food and having things orderly came from. And yes, you should not have been allowed to remain in that home, had Health and Welfare had the slightest notion that they were withholding meals from you. That is in the category of neglect. But I think you were born into the wrong family, anyway. Luckily nowadays you get to choose who you call family.
ReplyDeleteI'm a lil OCD, and somehow I managed. I LOVE my house clean. I mean, I get up at 3 or 4 in the mornings to clean the house once a week. I like the house clean and everything in its place. I had to tell my daughter a LOT to clean up after herself, but I did it. I agree, I think I WAS born into the wrong family, my huz sais that all the time. Yeah, glad I have a new family. I have found out there is something better out there.:)Thank God!
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