Tij, thank you for sharing your experience, and please never apologize for long posts... (look at mine!). I am glad we all found each other and help each other through the muck of the past.
Here's part 4. (I'm writing this as I go, part 5 isn't written yet... I post a bit to you, then go write more, that's why it's taking so long). Thank you all for your warm comments, hugs, and, yes, sympathy. I love you all.
Part IV
While living at home, I found solace in music, reading, computer work (step-Grandpa gave me his old TI-99/4A when he upgraded to a Commodore 128 and Amiga). With it, I taught myself to program. It saved programs on cassette tape, and used a small B&W television as the monitor. Without it, I would have never been permitted to have a TV in the bedroom. Still, we were forbidden to watch TV on it... but my brother and I used to get up at night and turn it on, and we loved catching episodes of Airwolfe when we could.
Dad played the guitar (he couldn't hold a tune or play very well either, Step-monster was better at it than he), so I picked up a bit of that as well, and wrote my own music and songs. I had a crush on a sister in the hall – Wendy – and my brother had a crush on her sister. I enjoyed visiting with her at the hall, and imagined one day we might get married (I was 15 or 16 at the time). I'd write poetry and 'love letters' to her, none of which I gave her, just my own writings in my room while sitting on my bed... it was one of my 'escapes' to a better place.
I came home from school one day and Step-monster had found evidence of sneaked-in-food in my room. She proceeded to make me take off most all my clothes and emptied my backpack... and of course she found the food I'd brought home from the trash can at school, which disgusted her, but she also found my 'love letters' to Wendy. What she did next, though, began a long pattern of meddling with any relationship I tried to establish with other people.
She picked up the phone, with me standing there in the kitchen, and called Wendy's mom... I dearly loved her family, even her parents... they treated me and my siblings like 'real kids', and loved us as their own... I was just beside myself with embarrassment as Step-monster stood there and read all my love letters to Wendy's mother. Wendy looked at me a little differently after that—not in a bad way, either—I think she was tickled that I wrote love letters and poems about her. We never got together; she went on to be a need-greater in Guatamala or something like that.
This interfering with relationships is something that would continue through numerous relationships, not just with girlfriends, but relatives, other families in the hall, and so on.
It wasn't until many years after all this passed that I found out why so many of my aunts and uncles and cousins stopped talking to me. Dad and Step-monster had told them that I had been diagnosed with a mental disorder (scizophrenia) and had been given a prescription to deal with it, but refused to take it, and that I'd proven to be a danger to people, so they should be careful. NONE of that was true... not one word of it. But they believed it, and stayed away, not returning calls or seeking to talk to me.
They even would send letters to the body of elders at new congregations they'd learned I moved to, warning them about me, stifling progress and new opportunities, unbeknownst to me. Some progress was made when, at one new hall I moved to without their knowledge, the brothers got to know me for some months before my folks sent their introduction letter. Then, when their letter did arrive and it didn't 'jive' with what and who they knew me to be, the PO called me into the back room and read me their letter. NOW I finally understood what was going on... I didn't understand WHY they were doing this, but I understood at least what was going on behind my back with my name and reputation. I've since come to believe that by keeping my integrity and sanity in question, they protected themselves from anybody giving serious credence to any charges or accusations I or my siblings might bring against them.
Funny thing... I never ran away, though I wanted to. I just couldn't leave my younger siblings alone with them. I felt I'd be abandoning them. My eldest step-sister, however, did try to run away once, jumping from the second-story window and breaking her wrist. I always thought that odd, as she didn't get the kind of discipline and abuse we did, but in light of events that came to the fore recently, I wonder now if there was more plaguing that poor girl than I knew at the time.
Beatings were common, too, not just the emotional turmoil I've mentioned so far. Dad would use his belt, Step-mom a metal pancake turner (spatula) with slots in it (which would leave little pill-sized welts on the back of our legs), or they would hand us a knife and make us go cut a switch off the tree or bush in the yard, with the warning that 'it better be a good one, too, and you better not cut all the knobby things off it or I'll go and get a REALLY good one!!' The spankings weren't across the buttocks, either, but around the back of the knees, six inches higher or lower, which left nasty little cuts and welts that would swell up, blister and bleed.
I remember my baby sister (probably 8-10 at this time) getting in trouble once, and Step-monster wailing on her with the switch in the dining room. I was standing on the stairs, watching this happening, wanting to intercede but paralized with fear, for which I'm truly sorry and ashamed. My baby sister was so brave... and defiant. As Step-monster whipped away, my sister refused to cry. The lashes came more severely, as Step-monster yelled "YOU BETTER CRY!!" My baby sister yelled back "NO! I WON'T!" I remember thinking "Oh, sis, please PLEASE CRY!" But she didn't, and I learned a bit there about how to stand up to the monster.
The time that scared me the most, and also taught me the most about who these people who were supposed to be my parents really were, occurred after this as I decided to take the same sort of stand as my sister did. Step-monster was trying to get me to cry with her whipping on something I did wrong, and I wouldn't. I didn't SAY anything to her, I just didn't cry. And it DIDN'T HURT, EITHER! I thought at the time maybe Jehovah was protecting me... but I didn't FEEL her whipping me at all. It was GREAT! She was getting so mad that I wasn't crying, and I felt GOOD about that.
So, when I wouldn't cry for her beating, she called Dad in. He got up in my face and picked me up by the neck, put me up against the wall, and started screaming at me. My siblings were saying "DAD, NO!" but he told them to shut up and get out of the room. He dropped me off the wall, grabbed me by the back of the shirt and dragged me down the hallway, from the kitchen all the way to his room, and closed the door. I was petrified now, as he NEVER had taken me to their room before. I didn't know WHAT was about to happen.
He told me to drop my drawers as he took off his belt, and then he made me lean over and grab the top surface of Step-monster's makeup desk. Before he spanked me, he reminded me that this hurt him more than it hurt me, and that he was only doing this because he loved me. He asked if I understood that, and I nodded. Then he started to spank me, repeatedly. Again, I didn't cry, I refused to grant him the satisfaction of a single whimper. If my baby sister could do this, so could I. He told me, "You better cry, boy!" He kept repeating that phrase, with more and more intensity in his voice, as he continued to spank me. I could hear my siblings crying elsewhere in the house.
And then it arrived; the moment that provided clarity to me. I happened to tilt my head up and I saw his face in the mirror as he "lovingly spanked me"... and I saw the anger, the twisted lips, the demon eyes, as he BEAT ME. This was NOT a man who was loving me and disciplining in love. And I KNEW THAT RIGHT THEN AND THERE. His face told it all.
That's about enough of 'growing up'; let me tell you how I got OUT of the house, and then I'll pick up the rest in another story.
After graduating early, in December, I stayed at home and started working for my Dad's new janitorial business, cleaning floors and polishing tile at grocery stores. I regular pioneered, the goal (along with Bethel service) that the folks had held out for all of us once we graduated. Dad sold me the 12-person van he'd bought from Grandpa, so I'd have wheels to get out in service. They told me I could continue to live at home as long as I regular pioneered, until I was ready to move out. I was READY, but didn't have funds to do so! :-)
I was responsible for my own schedule when it came to service, though I had to plan out my week and post the schedule on the family information board so they'd know when I intended to go out. I woke up very sick one morning, the following February, and Step-monster came in my room at 8:45 to tell me I was going to miss the meeting for field service. I told her I was sick, that I'd go out another day. She said I needed to stick to my schedule, and I told her "LOOK! I said I'll go out later this week—can't you see I'm SICK?!"
She shut the door, then a few minutes later Dad came in, with a suitcase, and started emptying my drawers. He told me to get up, put on my clothes and shoes, and get OUT... I wasn't sure what was happening. I thought he was making me go out in service, at first, but it was more than that. For "being disrespectful to my mother and not keeping my word" about my service schedule, he was terminating the lodging and employment agreement, and kicking me out, then and there.
I protested that I didn't have a place to live, or an income. His reply was that was MY problem, not his, and that I should have thought about that before 'lipping off' to his wife.
And thus it was that I was out... living, in the middle of winter in Washington State, in a van, with no job, no money, no food, and no family. I didn't even get to say goodbye to my siblings—and I just realized that I still don't know what story they were told when they got home from school that day. I'll have to ask my sibs.
I expected they'd ask me home after a few hours or days... that it was just a "shock treatment". I parked my van in the parking lot where Dad was doing his floor accounts... I was the only other vehicle in the lighted lot at night, he had to have seen me, with the big 12-passenger blue van with windows was unmistakably mine. He'd walk out of the hardware store he was cleaning, down to the grocery store, get a pie and a milk or coffee and go sit outside the hardware store and eat it while he waited for the wax to dry... I used to sit with him and eat those pies too. Now, he sat facing the van I was in, hungry, as he sat and ate it alone.
I'll admit to some wrongdoing here... several nights later, when it was obvious he wasn't going to invite me back home, and when he went back into the store to buff out the wax, I went up to his truck and pulled the valve stems out of all his tires, ran back to the van, fired it up, and drove away... god, that felt good!
To be continued....
