here i am...posting about my parents and a little about me

Well, I think my long hiatus is over.  I had such a mental block, because I needed to write Seth, but needed to blog first, so I could print it off for Seth, along with his regular letter.  Then I thought I'd just write another letter to Seth on here, or just write everything in a letter, in longhand, to Seth.  And then Mark was going to type a letter or post for me, dictated by me.  Then I was just going to start with a post of Tut pictures.  You see how confusing it became?  Anyway, I just couldn't think, and I developed a guilty attitude towards blogging and writing letters and sending visiting teaching cards, and so on.  I couldn't even read your posts.

Tonight, I suddenly felt like I could write.  Then my blog wouldn't accept my password.  I tried everything, and was just about to give up when I noticed the caps light was on.   So here I am at last, a minute before midnite, writing my post.

Since I've last posted, Mark has turned 59!  Lots of you called him, and he ordered a cool holster for his gun, for his birthday, on ebay.  We also went to see Oz the Great and Powerful, which we really liked.  You must see it in 3D, cause it's great that way, especially the opening credits.  James Franco has hat hair throughout, so you must forgive him that.  A little china doll stole the show, perhaps.  You'll have to see.  I thought the actors did a great job, especially after I understood Franco's character better.  Took me till the end to really get it, as often happens for me.

Anyway, I also went to the Eugene Ballet's production of Swan Lake with Melinda, as I posted before.    We were kind of dressed up, but in slacks, like most of the audience.  There was that special excitement in the air, that comes when you know you are going to see something special.
I mentioned how I remember that feeling when I was growing up and my parents (usually one or the other) took me to performances at Milikin University, in my home town.  We saw operas, opera singers, plays, ballets, orchestral performances, and concerts.  Since Sandy, Dad, and I took operatic-style voice lessons, we also performed in small concerts.
We had a great theater in a town nearby, The Little Theater, founded by Guy Little.  It had a wonderful reputation for hosting Off-Broadway productions featuring famous performers.  My favorite was Fiddler on the Roof, with Tom Poston as Tevye.  It may sound unlikely, but he was fantastic in the role.  We would never have thought of attending, except our favorite radio announcer said that it was the best evening's entertainment she'd ever had; high praise that could not be ignored.  My mother bought the tickets immediately.

These excursions into the fine arts make me think of The Glass Castle.  Jeanette Walls grew up with an intelligent, literate, cultured mother and an extremely intelligent, imaginative father (my parents were very similar).  Her mom was also quite unaware, dissociated, and neglectful in her parenting, and her father was an alcoholic who drank away what money they earned.  It was such an ironic upbringing.

My dad, I believe, had Asperger's Syndrome, before it was a diagnosis, compulsive hoarding, and biochemically-caused depression (as well as just regular depression, I imagine - the biochemical kind runs in the family; thankfully, it's treatable now).  That affected our lives in many ways, especially in being isolated and feeling like we were weird.
And my father had a hard time with his superiors at the post office where he worked.  I'm sure he insisted on doing things his way, no matter what their ideas were.  I know he carried Puppy Chow in the mail truck, for feeding the animals on his route (he wasn't averse to snacking on it himself, either), and he picked up some of the things people were throwing away sometimes (he came back for it).  (They were worthy finds, like boxes of brand new children's books and a nice, nice couch.)

The people on his route loved him, and he even saved the lives of some of their pets:  I know of one case where a depressed dog wouldn't eat except when my dad fed him (his mate had died).  And of one case where he found a lost dog.  I'm sure there were many instances where he rendered help to others - he was just like that.  He wouldn't hesitate to help others anonymously.  He used to help old ladies move, carrying a huge stove on his back for one - up three flights of stairs.  He shopped for them and helped them in their gardens and took them where they needed to go.  My folks were both like that.

Anyway, the regs at the post office used to be much, much stricter than they are now.  I don't think they made sense to Dad, and he finally had a "nervous breakdown" when I was a kid.   He did odd jobs for people then, like landscaping work (that turned out very well).   We eventually lost our nice house in the country, near Harristown.  We were going to move back into our old house, on Hillshire Road in Decatur (the earliest one I can remember), but it burned down to almost nothing before we could move in.  The firemen thought it was started by neighborhood kids hanging out in back of it and smoking.

  We didn't know about it until Sis. Weatherbee called us.  We drove out there immediately.  That was pretty devastating to us, to see it destroyed in that way.  Don's picture was in the newspaper, looking at our burned up house, with that expression on his face:  the one you see on people's face after a tornado or a hurricane destroys their house.  The firemen said the fire was so hot that it scorched the tops of tall trees in the yard.   I found a cracked jar of peanut butter and tasted it.  It was delicious, after being roasted like that.  I also found a large rock in the front yard, that just crumbled when I touched it.

We had been going out there to fix it up, and all the paint cans had exploded and shot paint everywhere.

My parents couldn't reach the insurance company, until finally they found out that it had gone out of business.  They said they had tried to call, to inform us.  Yeah, right...
 So we weren't moving there anymore.

Maybe Sandy or Roger can shed more light on the chronology, but that's what I recall about it.

Continuing with my point, my mom had problems too, in that she was dissociative.  That runs in her descendants now, just like Dad's depression and Asperger's tendencies.  Often that kept her unaware of things that were going on around us in different environments. ( I was extremely dissociative, and always wondering what was going on.  I felt like I was wrapped in cotton wool most of the time.)

The combination of my parents' traits made for an unusual upbringing, with the mixed culture and learning and service and great senses of humor, mixed with my dad being in emotional distress most of the time, yelling with his opera-singer's lung-power, my mom being happily unaware of many things, with my parents being so in love, and my mom also having terrible auto-immune type health problems, which meant us being farmed out to stay with various relatives and friends from church.  We also were isolated and living in some crazy conditions, with my parents filling up every space in our homes (once buying out a whole drug store and another time buying huge stainless steel hoods from a restaurant that was selling out).  Our homes weren't filled with garbage, at least.

I wasn't told what was going on, with myself or my siblings or parents.  I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but was told it was growing pains, to spare me.  I went to the doctors' offices and the hospital (for labs) a lot.  My sister was in the hospital for a year, when I was five, because of Crohn's Disease - called ileitis back then.  She was on a diet at home, then, that excluded practically everything.   I didn't know what was going on with her, either.  I only saw things in glimpses.  Later, she was in the hospital a lot more, but my parents never mentioned it - we just went to see her sometimes, but I didn't know what in the heck was going on.  We children didn't ask questions back then!

(Our health problems were auto-immune related also, as is Type 1 diabetes.)

So you can see why The Glass Castle reminds me a little bit of my growing up years.  There is so much more to tell, about the wonderful things, too.  I'll have to work on writing about those.

Here are some pictures of my parents and me, at various ages, plus some of the kids, Sandy, Jessie, and two of Dad's sisters, Evelyn and Mildred.  In the last picture, I'm laughing, not crying.
Pretty funny.  Usually, I just looked confused, plus I squinted so much when I was in the light.
(Btw, the cat in the picture with me was Sylvester, the best pet we ever had!  The strawberry roan horse is Stoney, a horse we got from Missouri.  The other horse is one in New Salem State Park, and we are on a school trip.  In the bandanna picture, I'm wearing a dark wig and have on tan makeup on my face and arms.  That was during my Little Big Man period.   I love that book.)
My hair color varied, depending on if I went out in the sun.  You can see, in some pics, why they called me Frizz Bomb at school.  Curly hair was out, and mine was sooo curly!

Hope you enjoyed seeing these and hearing a little about my childhood.
I have so many memories, even though there is a lot missing, too.
When I wasn't feeling lost, though, my memories are crystal clear.
Especially when I was out in nature.
Love that.
And love you!
xoxoxo