Tackabery Chronicle

19: Donuts

<![CDATA[Connie came into my life at nine. He was a school system psychologist in Bradenton, Florida, and responsible for setting up testing and therapy for me while I was in elementary school. Rosharch ink blots, speech therapy, California Achievement Tests, math trials. My mother told him secrets about me. He took my mother to dinner. He came to our tiny trailer and left doughnuts for us before he drove my mother away in a white Continental. He was the first man I knew who wore suits, ties and wingtips to work. He said he was going to fix me. He said he was going to protect all of us. I remember my two sisters and me sitting on a battered couch in a cheap trailer living room covered with a vinyl floor, and him, kneeling with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in his hands, making promises.

What I did not know then, but learned some twenty-odd years later, was that my stepfather came into my life after what might have been my first post-traumatic break. It must have happened after my great-grandfather died, in 1975, when I was 9. When my father came to visit us and tell us what happened. I had not seen my father for over three years, and the last time I had seen him, he had been driving away in a taxi, forced to leave after trying to take me from my mother’s home. My father remembers the day he visited me as a pleasant homecoming, with me staring lovingly into his eyes begging him to take me away from there. I don’t really remember what happened that day, even now; when I found my father many years later, I asked him when I could see my grandfather, and he had to tell me again that he was dead.

Whatever reaction I had, I believe it started the time in my life that is a series of fuzzy events. I remember eye surgery, trying to sleep all alone in the hospital and failing, terrified in the dark alone with the instruments, and vomiting all over the bed, forcing a midnight bedclothes change because a nurse fed me ginger ale while I was still on a drip. I remember a young woman teaching me to look up phonetic spellings in the dictionary, and trying to get me to stop reading when I encountered new words, which I never did, because I would manage to puzzle out the meanings, yet not later be able to explain how I did it. Today I can still puzzle meanings out of new words from context, a talent for words that has always been with me. An old friend that sometimes seemed my only friend. And I remember numerous discussions about me when I wasn’t supposed to be listening; about fixing me. About my problem and about what happened and about what to do about it and about it’s getting worse. I remember many nights of not sleeping, because I was afraid of the nightmares, and trying numerous tricks to stay awake. I remember my mother’s father giving me an am/fm radio with a headphone jack, and listening to FM rock all night long, trying to keep the nightmares at bay, staring at the starred sky through my tiny, screened-in trailer window.

Two years later Connie took my mother away for a week, and then my mother came back with a green station wagon and boxes. We moved to St. Petersburg. They had decided I was not going to skip any more grades because I needed social development, even though some experts had suggested I get bussed to a special arts high school in Sarasota. My mother had gotten married, like some kind of secret she was ashamed of; a second marriage by a divorcee was somehow something children didn’t attend, as if we didn’t belong, or it had nothing to do with us, a separation between him and us that caused huge problems right from the very beginning. Connie had a family with her, and she had a family with us. His relations with us were far from familial, and to this day I cannot forget for a moment how much damage he caused with his lies and his behavior. And I don’t think I have gotten any closer to forgiveness. I have just managed distance and time. I ran away from him after all, but that may have been all that I have ever really accomplished.

Photo by Byron Solomon of Lakeland, FL, courtesy stock.xchng

tags: ptsd, child abuse, verbal abuse, stepfather, stepdaughter

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