From Cradle To Coffin. . .

Diary - Entry 17

My charm came in yesterday for my Tiffany bracelet.  The coffin was so real.  It even opens. Guess what, inside is a skeleton. . . so I had it sent to the shop, and soldered on.  They are engraving his birth and death date on the bottom.  Next time we go to Arkansas, I will take a sample of the earth that lays on top of his grave and sprinkle it over the skeleton, then have it solder shut.

Angels and Demons or Devils and Spawn. . .Is one really worse than the other?

Diary - Entry 16

My husband is mad at me because I am not going out to the farm for Christmas.  I am only putting up a tree the night before, for our son and  I will be working over time so I do not have to face the first Christmas without Todd.

I had a customer come in to by a ring for his girlfriend who lived in Peru.  When we got to the  register, and I asked him all the information. . .name, address (you know, the usual bullshit that nobody really wants to mailed crap from) .  Anyway, when he said his name was Todd, I was not only taken aback, but I had to excuse myself and have my boss finish ringing up the sale.  In the four years I have been with Kays, I have never had a customer by that name. . .so naturally, I started crying (although technically I am on enough Prozac to dry out the state of Washington) and had to pull myself together to go back on the floor.

While people say "he's in a better place". . .how do they know that?  What makes them an authority on where his soul landed?  When they say "I am so sorry for your loss" . . .how truly sorry are they? Did they really know him or what he was like underneath it all or how much I loved him?

I and religion have never seen eye to eye.  My grandparents baptised me Assembly of God, my mother baptised me Baptist, my first longterm relation made me a Jehovah Witness, and my husband is Protestant although, he is a Jew by birth. 

All of these religions are lead by "men of God'. . .supposedly.  Does a man of God beat his grandchildren, allow sexual abuse by the greatgrandfather, and inflict mental cruelty?  I think not.  Hence, my own course of religious interrogation has lead me to look down the road to that of a Messianic Jew.  To me, they are the closet thing to what and how the Bible is meant to be interpreted.  Currently we attend Advent where our son plays sports and attends summer camps.

But I do not attend service because they shout, sing and raise their hands and say 'hallalujah'.  . .only in a milder form.  They have  a folk singing trio (why I am not sure) and the service is somewhat not really specific, so I would rather sleep in on my day off.  I think everyone needs a spiritual core, I just don't think that mine is as readily identifiable as others.

Obviously, people who have conviction of faith, attend services and accept the jargan that is pumped into them each Sunday.  Yet, how do you know for sure that you are not like a bunch of drones in a bee-hive, being told what to do by the Queen (preacher).

Don't get me wrong, I believe in God and Jesus, but the interpretations of every religion leaves something missing, it isn't whole, too many unanswered questions.

Yes, my mood is dark tonight and I am somewhat in a thinking mood.  But I worked 14 hours today and it will only get worse, so I will write, when I can.

When The Circle Fails To Completes Itself. . .

Diary - Entry 15

Someone once said that "you can never go home again', unfortunately, having experienced the statement, I can say that it is true, especially when your entire family is completely and utterly dysfunctional. . .

I thought that in the twenty years I was gone, the changing climate in New Jersey and wanting our son to know his 'family' was a good idea.  I thought he would like visiting the farm, since now, it was a realatively safe place.  Spending more time with his grammy and grandpa so forth and so on. Although it is convient to so many destinations with an easy airport (Memphis International), I feel in my heart of hearts, we should have stayed either up North, where our real family is or someplace that did not have such heartache and misery associated with it.

My step mother and I are not speaking at the moment, for reasons that she fails to comprehend.  She is very good at making one feel stupid, enept and she has a very bad habit of rushing ahead and not letting you get you thought process out before she has jumped to the wrong forgone conclusion.  I think in some weird way, after being married to my father for so long, she thinks it is her due to become the matriarch of the family, when my grandmother is still very much alive.  Apparently, nobody cares.

My grandmother told me while I was growing up, that one day all her jewelry would be mine, but I must take good care of it and hand it down at the proper time. . .mysteriously . . .I think the cuboard is bare.
Both my grandparents offered me $150,000.00 in cash , if we would move back down south.  Yeah, that materialized as well. . .(somehow the farm is in financial difficulty, which I find odd, because my grandparents had always been conservative. . .)

Jewelry, money and promises aside, the bitterness, anger, hurt and resentment I feel toward my father, step-mother and ex-sister-in-law is unparalled to any thing that I have ever known and it sickens me to realize that they could probably care less, because to them I am a constant reminder of my fathers love for my mother, my step-mothers admitted jealousy and the fact that I knew my brother better than his wife did.

Memories Are Made Of This

Diary - Entry14

Many people have critized the way that I have lived my life, raise my son and so forth.  Every human being on the planet makes mistakes, I have spent the last 20 years making up for mine, but they never seem to be forgiven or forgetten.  I have learned that I forgave myself, and if others cannot, oh well!!!

While I have touched on this subject before, It is most prevelent in my mind at the moment, because my husband is away and at some point, our son crawled into bed, snuggled up and said "bad dream, can I stay here?" Yes, I replied  So I wrapped my arms around him and he fell back asleep..

When my great grand-father started making me take naps with him, he was in his seventies at the time, he had the weirdest smell.  Old tobacco, days without bathing and some kind of alcohol.  I hated him and that pink house, but loved my great-gandmother dearly, as she made most of my clothes, and made my life bearable in a sense.  Saturdays were my favorite, we would unbound her hair which was down to her waist and she would let it dry while we hung clothes on the line.  When it was almost dry, she would let me braid it again and we would re-wrap it around her head for church the next day.

Arkansas winters can be quite cold and bitter.  In those days, because I was Assembly of God, I could only wear dresses.  I would walk to the end of the gravel road, I would be shivering and have to go to the bathroom, but the thought of going to the pink house,where he lived, and was closest, so I wouldn't miss the bus, filled me with such dread and anxiety that I would I would just pee my pants, and go to school smelling like that. 

With my parents ledgendary battles, moving around and such, I eventually went to Missouri to my mothers grandparents.

Many years later, after I had taken all the craziness I could from my mentally ill mother. . . I too, went down to join my brother Todd and live with my father.  It wasnt' long before he had a new girlfriend and made her his wife.

One day,  I went to my step-mother Barb, and complained that Papa (my grandfather) would shove his tongue down my throat, while grabbing my ass and pinching my boobs.  The sage advice that she gave me: "We'll if you didn't go around dressed like a slut, he wouldn't be tempeted".  I was mortified.  As a teenager, in the summer, I did not think that shorts, sandals, tank tops and tee shirts was a justafiable cause to make not only such a statement, but to put in in such a manner that it felt as if she had slapped me across the face and filled with such bitterness you could feel it in the air.  I never talked to her about anything important while under their roof, again.

I never had a childhood, not in the real sense of the word,  I had not planned on every having children.  I wanted to live in New York, be a writer and never go back to the person I turned out to be.  I had children, loved them dearly,tried to make the best of a bad marriage the first go round and then waited 17 years before tying the knot and starting another family.  I have tried to be the mother to Hugh, that I , at the age of 19, was not able to be for my son, Hayden, who through no fault of his own, had parents that were desperately still in-love with other people.  Although we tried to make it work, the was just to many things and people involved in our marriage.

Hugh has a childhood, it is painfree, full of life, travel, collecting everything from coins for Cub Scouts to rescuing homeless pets from shelters and things.  He is tender of heart, loving and most of the time, very polite (although he does have his moments. . .unfortunately he is both McFarland and McDaniel and is prone to boughts of anger and tantrums, when he does not get his way. . .which, trust me, isn't very often). 

I never spanked him unless he truly did something wrong, because I just had been beaten so often, that I could not bear to inflict that on him, so I chose time outs, removal of favorite toys and the like.  Because of the abuse in my family, I guarded his person and his personal space with a zealousness of a mother bear protecting her cub.  Most people think, that at ten years old he should be allowed to walk to his friends house, alone.  Most people don't understand why I make my husband go the the rest room with him.  Or why he cannot spend the night at his friends, but they are welcome here.

I really don't care about most peoples opinions, especially in an age of prevelent pedophilia, child pornograhy, rape and murder of young children.  It is easy to stand on the outside of a family,  looking through the window;  make comments, judgements and assumptions, but is it really your business? 

The bond between a parent and a child can be, should be and would be unbreakable, if it were a perfect world. In that world, children are loved, cherished and put first, no matter what the personal sacrifice because the child had no choice in his/her parentage and should never be punished because of it.

However, we do not live in a perfect world.  Yet, as a parent it is our examples that light the way for change.

When The Past Meets The Present

Diary - Entry 13

Yes, once again it is the middle of the night or should I say, morning. . .I am sleepless again, even though the pills work for a few hours, I enevitabley end up.  The puppy, Knox, is sitting in my lap.  Wanting to play, but I do not, as I am not in the mood.

This journal entry is not so much about our childhood, but about step-parenting.  My mother had the uncanny ability to pick the wrong men for herself, as well as my father did for himself.  Case in point:  My fathers girlfriend at the time, Carolyn, had three children from a previous marriage, as did my father. 

While they were in the 'dating phase' everthing was great.   Then dad decided to marry her and build her a house at the the family 'compound' (which is what I refer to it as everyone that lived there was related).  Anyway, on one of my last visits to the farm, my father had my brothers and I going throught the space where the house was to be built and remove any big rocks and things.  Carolyn and her kids, did nothing.  Once the house was built, they did not include rooms for myself and my brothers. . .only rooms for her three children.  Terry had the largest bedroom with her own private bath.

I came down once more.  Carolyn was having her friends over for lunch and we were never allowed to eat in my fathers house, she would send us down the gravel road to my grandparents, yet, her own kids, could stay and have lunch with her friends.  Slowly the marriage deteriorated and my father came home to find the house stripped bare.  Carolyn thought she would get everything including the house, but my family has set things up that nobody, other than a blood McFarland can reside and own property within the family.  At least that is what my grandmother told me.

My mother, well, she married a man 10 years her junior. So Randy, in theory, was only 9 years older than me.  They had a baby, my brother Michael, whom I adored.  Life with my mother was not easy.  She expected me to get my brothers ready for school, daycare, cook the meals, do the laundry and keep the house clean (and I mean toothbrush clean), maintain my grades and still be on the cheerleading squad and do gymnastics.  I was 12 but felt like 40.  I had bleeding ulcers by the time I was 14.  Eventually my brother Todd could not take the pressure of living with her constant abuse for the smallest infraction and went to live with my dad, whom I had, at that point, not seen in several years.

Randy, my mothers husband, had no real parenting skills. . .he was barely out of high school and old enough to drink.  So, I continued.  I missed Todd terribly, Vic was 4 years younger and Michael was just a baby.
It was about this time when things changed for me as well.  I have always been an "old soul", so when I met 'him', I knew that we were two halves of the same whole.  When my mother tired of being married, she left the house, with us in tow and I suspect, it somehow devestated Randy for he was her first real love and he continued to love her till the day she died, just as my father had done.  Which is why he brought my mothers body back here to be buried, 'where she belonged' and where I suspect he could see her every day, although my father, by this time had been married to his third wife, Barb for nearly 30 years. 

Time dragged on and with that passage, it brought changes that still effect me to day.  It is sometimes hard letting go of the past, when the present is staring you in the face as a daily reminder of what should of, could of and never will be.

I became a step-mother myself and tried desperatly to not make the mistakes that had warped my sense of what a parents responsibilties are, no matter when and where they come from.  Children do not get to choose their parents. . .

Cold

Diary - Entry 12

I lay awake last night (till my sleeping pills took effect) thinking about the coming winter, how cold it was and how cold Todd's body must be by now. . .  I kept seeing him, laying there so still, quiet and probably at peace for the first time since his youth.

I have a sterling silver bracelet that Rich bought me for Christmas from Tiffanys the year Hugh was born, I have added only charms over the years that had special meaning to my life as a wife, mother, friend and so on.  Yesterday, I took out the Rembrant Charm book at work (lest we forget that I am still employed by Kay Jewelers) and I thumbed through the charms looking for something that I thought would represent him to me in the present tense, as that is where he is. . . so I ordered a small coffin, engraved with his monogram on the front, his birth and death dates on the back.  The coffin opens, so when it arrives, I will fill it with dirt from his gravesite.

Everyone at work, thought it was morbid. . . but I said, it is either the coffin or a can of beer - both represented death to me.

With the impending holidays, I just dread the fact that I won't see his face, listen to him complain about his NASCAR winners and loosers all the while desperatly trying to communicate with me without stuttering so bad.

It's funny, when our mother died last summer from cancer at the age of 62, I did not really feel anything for her passing.  We had not been close for many years since we tried to reconcile when Hugh was a baby.
Two days in my house and she got drunk and attacked me, ripping my shirt off, she hit the baby and tried shoving me down the stairs. She would not respect the fact that Hugh was born with many medical issues and therefore, smoking anything in the house was forbidden.  As a guest in my home, she ignored the few requests I made.   I left the house that night of the fight with Hugh and went to our new house, where I pulled out sleeping bags and lit a fire in the fireplace.  Hugh was sleeping beside me...  She was put back on the bus, the next day

Yet the grief and sadness I feel at Todd's death (I had a customer come in yesterday and his name was Todd) I cannot seem to get a handle on.  It is much like the weather outside. . .icy wind, blowing hollow through me and leaving me unable to shake the chill.