09/30/2021

I often hear people talking about their childhood as a means to explain why they do fucked up shit as adults. Not that that’s not a perfectly valid excuse it’s just one that I’m never going to let you get away with. And here’s why: I come from a long line of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. A bunch of people who should’ve never been parents to begin with. But I also know love like nobody’s business. I have been both victim and victor, sinner and saint, right and wrong, and giver and taker.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and always TRY my damndest to put myself in their shoes without judgment. I think it has resulted in me being a lot more “normal” than I should’ve ever had the chance to have been.

Shit is weird, but it’s true- David Goggins said it best: “When you’re 6, 7 or 8 years old you know what feels right, and what feels way the fuck off. And when you are born into a cyclone of terror and pain: you know it doesn’t have to be that way. And that truth nags at you. Like a splinter in your jacked up mind.”

I know a lot of people in my shoes who never developed that mental toughness he always talks about. The shit that I have. I mean I have relatives who have faked cancer, attempted suicide, continued the toxic ways that they were taught as children into their children’s lives and much much worse. Abuse is a cycle as we all well know. I have slapped the shit out of my fair share of exes during arguments even though I have domestic abuse memories that stick out in my mind that I should have never seen. 

Anyway, I’ve documented some stories I know about my loved ones below because my life is actually stranger than fiction and I know it will make a great movie one day. I don’t care who is offended by this brief history – save it for your therapist.

I guess this is as good as any other place to start with. As a matter of fact, it will probably explain a lot about who came after.

I remember a vivid story my grandfather would tell me about him being in the Italian Navy as a chef. This story always went into the story about how he followed my grandmother to America when they were teenagers. As an adult I question the first story and know that the second is all lies. My grandfather was my grandmother’s fourth husband. Yes you read that correctly: fourth husband. She already had four children before he met her. He was also four years younger than her when he signed up to raise her kids.

Four four four.

Anyway by the time they had my mother and my uncle Charlie, my family was properly piss poor. After quite a few apartments that were much too small for the eight of them, the eldest were kicked out or left to fend for themselves and the youngest were more or less ignored. 

We’ll get back to that later.

My grandfather was a full down drunk for many years. He once woke up with a bumped and bleeding head after a night long out. He had no idea what had happened to him. My grandmother’s recollection of that story is that he came home so drunk that he forgot to remove the lipstick from his mouth and collar. Her response to this was throwing a 15 lbs. marble ashtray directly at his head.

The injuries that he sustained on that evening were no comparison to the ones he received the night he crashed his big body Pontiac into a lamp post up the street from our house on 26th street.

He sounds horrible at this point in the story, however, this man was not without positive attributes. He let me walk to school “by myself” by hanging back half a block and walking at half my speed as though I couldn’t see him until I was 12. He always made sure I had hot soup waiting for me every rain day and read the paper while I swam every sunny day. He taught me to play scopa and gin and would play with me for hours. He believed those games are “good for your brain” and he snuck me sips of homemade sangria at holiday dinner because it’s “good for your soul”. His name was Calogero and he was sold a house in the wee hours of the night for just $1 from a man on his way to jail, and pulled a shot gun on my father when he found out his daughter was with an older man. I’ll explain that later. Notice how it’s listed as a positive memory. I remember visiting him in jail as a child and I think it is because he shot the mechanic for revving his engine too loud across the street from our house. 

Cut to 25 years later, on his deathbed, with tears in my eyes. He kept calling me Bebe (my mothers nickname). He told me that I shouldn’t cry. “Sweet girl, I should’ve been dead 100 times over many years ago.”

That’s how I remember my grandfather. A mostly good man, astounded to have actually lasted long enough to see 83 years old and thankful for all of the opportunities he had been given at life.

Anyway, after many years of Tit for tat cheating: they decided that they hated each other too much to live together. My grandmother took the second floor, my grandfather the first. They didn’t divorce, just lived together and separated for life. Celebrating holidays together for decades.

Where to even begin. My mother had a rough childhood. Spoiled as she could be by the poor parents she had, she was sexually abused by a friend of the family as a kid. My uncle blamed himself, though he was only 10 months older than she was, probably still does. 

My father was my mother’s sensei. He dated my aunt briefly before setting his eyes on my 14 year old mother. He claims nothing happened until she was 16. He was 13 years her senior. Now that may not sound like a huge age difference, until you put the numbers to it. To be clear- my mother was 16 and my father was a 29 year old man. Back then you didn’t call it child abuse- my 16 year old mother was just obviously seducing a married older man. I hope at this point in the blog you can sense my sarcasm? Good.

Anyway, my father was already married to an age appropriate lovely woman named Evelyn who was quite pregnant with my older sister. That stopped no one. He divorced Evelyn and married my mother a few years later – she was 17 I think. My grandmother is smiling ear to ear in the photos and I can’t help but wonder – is everyone insane? They had already traveled on a solo trip together. On an airplane. To another country. I am looking at the super creepy photos of my pubescent mother in a bikini thinking: “What could these two have in common?”

Now, Bebe is pregnant in 1984 and it didn’t take long for my father to find something younger and shinier. Though, ill never know my stepmothers age because she had 4 legal documents all with different years of birth on them, I know she was younger than my mother. My mother caught Isidor and Boobie together when she was 8 months pregnant with me. What are these names even?

To make matters even worse, Boobie was already married when she became pregnant with my brother. In a drunken stupor she told my 14 year old seld how she tried to pretend the baby was her husband’s but he eventually figured it out and kicked her out. Where did she land? Haunting my mother. My mother, the absolute saint, a better and dumber woman than I could ever be. Bebe tried to help Boobie every step of the way.

I’ll tell the truth. This woman should have her own damned book the way she tried to fuck me up. I endured 7 years of mental, physical and emotional abuse under this sociopaths regime. She started planting seeds against my mother when I was a child: you could live here, I bought you this, don’t you want to live with your brother .. with your brother and sister… with your brothers and your sister. Seemed like every year she had another kid.

Eventually it worked, and I wrote a letter to a judge begging that I stay with my father and my stepmother and my brothers and sister. My mother was completely devastated. As soon as Boobie got her claws in me and I was in her house, everything changed. 

I was starved. I accepted starvation as a 180 pound 11-year-old. I thought that my mother had been sabotaging me my whole life and my stepmother was here to save me. There were some times that I passed out, but that was cool because then I got icees and a little bit of sugar goes a long way.

Once I lost the weight then I was competition. Walking in the street with her was no longer fun. If anyone so much has looked at me I would get a fist in my side.

What was the craziest is the way that I was spoken to at 12 years old. My stepmother would regularly tell me “stay with the kids I’m going to have sex with your father now “. You remember being 12 right? The last thing that you wanted to think about with your parents having sex. That wasn’t even the worst of the details that I got about my father and stepmother’s sex life. She even offered to “allow” me to watch their sex tape.

I declined.

Who can relate? Literally no one I would bet.

Sometimes the emotional and physical abuse intertwined.

Once when I was 14, my stepmother accused me of having sex with my cousin. She said I was trying to seduce him because I had shorts on. He was 18/19 and my cousin, did I mention my cousin? For her this was totally feasible because by 14 she’d already been used and abused by older men. For me, it was ridiculous because:

A. My COUSIN.

B. I had just put down my Barbie’s. Literally was the most innocent child.

I tried to communicate this. As you can imagine I was equally as lippy as a teenager as I am now. I told her she must’ve done a lot of terrible things as a teenager that she would think so much of me. She punched me in the face. This was regular. One time she punched me in the face so hard that my lip got stuck under my braces. I tried to pull my lip out with the braces kept tearing at my lip. I was panicking and sobbing as she laughed. I mean, its not like I never got hit before. My mom used to beat my ass all the time. Sometimes my grandmother too. If I blocked my grandmothers blows, she would tell the whole family how I tried to fight her. It was actually hilarious. My stepmother didn’t even hit that hard she just always caught me off guard. Sleeping or not looking. With a handful of scrub brush on hands and knees in the bathroom, she’d kick me right in the vagina. Not normal at all. She’d rip the curtain back while I was in the shower to see what I had shaved, take away my clothes, make me wear sneakers 3 sizes too small that smelled like mildew.

I hate even talking about her because it makes me wish I had fought her worse and more often. I only fought back once at 18 years old, the night she told me I “was going to be a whore like my dead mother.” I blacked the fuck out. I beat her bad. At one point I was straddling her just beating her face in and it felt like I could just not hit her hard enough. Like why wasn’t she bleeding yet. She was screaming and my father came in and held me in a Full Nelson. She started hitting me while he was holding me and that’s when I got that sick feeling in my stomach  and thought in slow motion:

“This can’t even be real. This weak bitch hitting me while my father holds me. Why the fuck is my life like this? This is bullshit. I gotta get out of here even if it means sleeping in the park tonight”. It was February 18, 2013. And that’s where I slept.

Over the course of the next few months of being homeless I tried to finish my freshman year of college and failed out. I was homeless for 2 years, friends and family giving me room and board. At some point I decided I was better than this and wanted more for myself. Like David Goggins: “I should have been a statistic”. Of course I struggled more, trying to make money, living paycheck to paycheck, going back to school, getting better jobs, making more money. Reading. So much reading. And writing- whenever I can.

A lot of my knowledge and understanding about life is from literature, which is why I think a lot of my emotional processing comes from writing.

I also read that we all have lessons to learn to make ourselves whole. I believe that we come into a physical existence for these lessons, choosing when and where to enter. When there’s nothing left to learn you accept your death peacefully. Our time here is just a series of our best attempts at learning these lessons. The people around us will be obstacles or enablers on our path. This is why I don’t blame anyone for their abuses. It was all they knew. Of course I swing back and forth between anger and hatred and acceptance because I am human, but ultimately I don’t hold any hatred in my heart (except for my wicked step monster- she can suck it) or blame anyone for the way I am.

The idea that this is my journey makes me responsible for what I do and how I act. What I choose is to be a stronger and better version of myself day in and day out until my death comes. I am sure I will edit this blog hundreds of times before I ever get published but the bottom line and the lesson I hope that you will take away is that no one has it easy. Peoples lives may be harder or easier than yours.

Stop making excuses for yourself.