One of the things I learned while attending a Criminal Justice class in college had to do with individual perception. Upon investigating a crime scene with witnesses, a good investigator will always take statements from each individual, then later put them together to create an entire story. No one single witness can give the entire story because as individuals, we all have our own unique perception of what we see, hear and feel, and it will not be a carbon copy of what the persons standing next to us sees, hears and feels.
The same can be said about family, particularly siblings within a family.
I was born in 1963, the oldest of four children and the only daughter. In 1965 my first brother was born. In 1968 my second brother was born and finally, in 1975, my third brother was born.
In the fall of 1969, I started first grade. Before long, my mother begin allowing me to visit the homes of school friends and soon I was allowed to spend the night with them. I did not have frequent 'play dates' or overnight visits, and perhaps this is why I treasured those I did have and those visits became branded within my mind.
One friend lived just down the road from us, as was the case of most of my friends who I was allowed to visit. She lived in a house that was at the end of a washed out lane that ran alongside her grandmother's house. Her grandmother's house was a tiny thing that was not in good repair, but the grandmother kept it up as best she could. My friend's house, on the other hand, was large and very pretty...from the outside. But once inside, things changed. The living room was well done, with sheetrock and flooring and it presented itself beautifully, though stacked high with boxes and tools. Off of that ws the kitchen that had the sheetrock up and a few base cabinets sitting in the middle of the floor, along with the clutter and tools. But as you opened the door that led into the hallway towards the bedrooms, everything changed.
The bedroom part of the house was simply dried in with the exception of her parent's bedroom. It did have sheetrock and a door, but the walls had not been finished, and the floors were bare plywood. The bedrooms of my friend and her little brother were framed with 2x4's, and cardboard from boxes had been tacked on the walls for separation and privacy. There were two wood heaters for warmth in the winter, and I can well remember just how cold that house was! The bathroom was nothing more than an empty room. They had no running water, no septic system, no toilet, no bathtub and no lavatory. Behind the house, and only about ten feet away from the house, was a two-seater outhouse with a door that wouldn't stay securely closed. At night, my friend and her brother used a coffee can without a lid as their 'slop jar'. The first few times I stayed overnight, they did not have electric, either.
My friend's father supposedly worked in Houston and might come home on the weekends. Then again, he might not. When he did, everyone walked on eggshells in his presence because he was not a nice man. My friend didn't tell me this, but her brother and her cousins did. My friend's mother worked at a hospital and most times she worked nights. My friend and her brother pretty much lived with their grandmother, which is also where they ate and took baths. My friend, however, was always better than me and she told me so repeatedly. She never missed an opportunity to tell me how much smarter she was than I, how much better her parents were than mine, how much nicer her home was than mine and so on. Sometimes I'd get mad and hit her. One thing I was better at than her was fighting. But, we never stayed mad at each other past a few minutes. She really didn't have many friends that visited and I wasn't invited to visit friends very often, so we made it work. She would make me giggle and she would make me wonder why she was so intent on creating an illusion about her life that was nothing like her reality. Even then, I had compassion for her, even if she did sometimes get on my last nerve!
Because of her, I joined Missionettes at her church and she and I would spend hours memorizing scripture and trying to work on badges. We also enjoyed Vacation Bible School together...Back in the 70's, Hi-way Tabernacle had the best VBS one could ever hope to attend!
She only came to my house to spend the night two times in five years.
The first time she came over she was about 9. Mother had fried t-bone steaks for dinner. We had a calf butchered at least every year and we ate well. My friend sat down at the table and as we were filling our plates, she got finicky and pointing to a beautiful t-bone asked, "What is that?" Momma said it was a t-bone steak. My friend asked, "But what kind of meat is it?" Momma said, "It's beef." My friend withdrew her pointed finger, stuck her nose in the air and said, "I don't eat beef. I only eat hamburger. Do you have any hamburger?" My mother's green eyes flashed in what I can only call amused anger and she said, "Hamburger IS beef, young lady! Hamburger is ground up STEAK, just like the steak that is sitting on that plate in front of you. We are having STEAK for dinner. NOT hamburger." Well, my friend refused to touch the steak and played with her potatoes while the rest of us ate as if we hadn't eaten all week. She continued to pout after dinner and when bedtime finally came, we went to bed only to have her start screaming around midnight and crying that she was scared and wanted to go home. Momma got up and drove her to her grandmother's house. The friend was mad at me for weeks after, for God only knows what. I, in turn, was mad at her for being such a rude titty baby! At her house, the only food to eat was bologna and peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At my house we had steak, potatoes, peas, cornbread, iced tea or Koolaide, and anything else we wanted, yet she wanted hamburger! Then she cried like a baby and messed my sleep up!
The second time she came over was to my one and only slumber party when we were ten and right before we moved away. She was better then, but I think it was only because she was scared of looking bad in front of the other girls.
Years later I would hear that her parent's divorced and that her father had another wife and kids in Houston...the entire time he had a wife and kids on the Prairie. I don't know if this was true or not, but it made sense as I remembered things about him and how he treated my friend, her brother and their mother.
I've tried to find her many times since, I've even enlisted the help of friends, but it is as if she vanished. After Jr. High, no one knows what ever become of her.
I think I will always miss her.
Another friend was almost a relative, though not quiet. We were probably closer than cousins and she was, for a long time, my best friend, even though she was younger. There were six kids in that house, four boys and two girls with my friend being the prettiest of the bunch. They were poor, but not as poor as the friend above. Her dad worked Monday thru Friday, and her mom worked cleaning houses whenever she could. They lived in a two bedroom house, little more than a shack, but they made do. In one bedroom the two girls shared a bed and three of the bigger boys shared another bed. The baby boy slept with the parents in the other bedroom.
Her mom was the best cook I've ever known, hands down! She could make the most appetizing of meals out of nothing and those meals could feed her army and still have leftovers for the next day's lunch!
They also had electric, running water, indoor plumbing and propane. Their house wasn't spotless, as no house with six wild kids can be, but every day those kids swept the floors, did the laundry and washed dishes. That is, when they were allowed inside the house. The rule was, "Go outside and play and don't kill each other". They never did, though it was touch and go on many occasions.
Her parents? Well, I loved them both! Many people called them 'trash', but they were good to me and they were fun to be around. Her parents enjoyed their kids and there was a lot of laughter way back then in that little shack.
Of course, there was a lot of fighting between the kids, especially my friend and the oldest boy. I never understood the hatred she had for her oldest brother until I was thirty years old. Unbeknownst to me at the time, her oldest brother was sexually abusing her and he would go on to molest others as well. When I heard this terrible news, though the puzzle pieces fell into place, my heart was broken for her. Thankfully, the most he ever did to me was pull my hair. I bit him and drew blood, and he never touched me or my hair again!
Last time I saw her was at the funeral of someone we both loved deeply; someone we did not know the other knew, someone that did not know we knew each other, and someone we thought loved only us. We hugged and we held each other for a long time, our tears wetting each others shoulders. We needed no words. She was my dearest friend and we'd loved the same young man that we stood there mourning. I told her to come see me. She said she would, but I knew then that I would never see her again. I think she knew it, too.
That was 29 years ago.
Another friend was an only child, though her father had been married previously and she had half siblings. Those half siblings rarely, if ever, acknowledged her or her mother. This friend was always whining about something from the first time I met her until the last time I spoke her her, forty plus years later. As a kid, she had a weight problem that would follow her through her adult life. I don't know what the problem was when she was a kid, but as an adult it had a whole lot to do with laziness. Anyway, she and I were always fighting about something, most usually because she was a whiner. I spent the night with her one time when I was about eight or nine, and that was enough for me to never want to do that again!
I can't describe the way I felt at her house, other than to call it something akin to terror. The very presence of her parents scared the hell out of me! It didn't take anyone telling me for me to realize just how mean and cruel her parents were. Through the years I've heard what great people they were, but I'm telling you, behind the closed doors of their home they were NOT great people. The entire time I was at her house her parents seemed to dare me to do anything out of line and my friend advised I walk a very tight rope or else her daddy would beat us both. She made a believer out of me when she showed me the dark stripes on her back. He even pulled off his belt and showed it to me, shaking it in my face for good measure, if I did ANYTHING out of line. Problem with this was...I had only been at her home an hour and all we'd done since I got there was look through her books and giggle!
I never was so glad to leave a place as I was to leave her house the very next day!
Years later, as an adult, I renewed the friendship and managed to hang on to it for a couple of years. Her father had died, as had her first husband. She remarried a man that was the same age as my father and not worth two cents. They moved away from her old home place and left her mother. Once her little family was settled, her husband went back down to the old home place and lived with her mother for months before her mother sold out and followed her daughter, with her daughter's husband in tow. I tried to keep the friendship alive, but I just got so tired of her whining, blaming, hypochondria, holier-than-thou bullshit that I went off on her one day. A few days later she wrote me a letter and in it she said that she never wanted to speak to me again and if she saw me in heaven, she still wasn't going to speak to me or even acknowledge my presence there. This was completed with a sentence, written in big letters and punctuated with a row of exclamation points: "AND I MEAN IT!!!!!!!"
She always could make me laugh!
Later, I had another friend who lived on the opposite side of the river in one of those trashy subdivisions that made greedy land developers rich by selling flood prone bottom lots to unsuspecting people who either hoped for a better life for their kids, or needed to escape the trappings of the big cities for legal or illegal reasons. I'm not really sure if her parents worked or not, I honestly can't remember. I do remember that they lived in an unfinished and shabbily built house in a low draw and on pilings that lifted it about five or six feet, not nearly high enough for the draw it was in or the proximity to the river. (Even at thirteen I knew this.) The interior consisted of an open concept living room, dining area and kitchen, and these rooms had plywood on the walls instead of sheet rock. The kitchen was a half-assed attempt at cabinets and counter tops, also constructed with half-assed skill. There was a hole, about two inches by four inches, that was in the corner of the dining area. This hole was covered with a piece of 2x4 lying flat and nailed into the floor on one end. When it came time to sweep the floor, the 2x4 piece was moved away from the hole and everything was swept into the hole. This included emptying ashtrays on the floor and sweeping the butts into the hole.
A sheet covered the opening into the hallways and bedrooms, and upon entering this area, you discovered that you could see through the framing from room to room, including the bathroom. While a sheet covered the bathroom door, as well as the doors leading into the three bedrooms, the only things that kept you from seeing through to the exterior walls were the strategic placement of dressers and chest of drawers, cardboard boxes and clothing on hangers that were placed on nails in 2x4's. The parents bedroom did have a couple of small tarps hanging from the walls to give privacy, but that didn't cut down on the sounds.
Her parents were heavy drinkers, heavy smokers and heavy filth talkers. The fact that they had two teenaged daughters did nothing to stop their sexual appetites, which were heard clearly through the tarp covered walls at night. The two times I spent the night with her, I went to sleep with a pillow covering my ears and praying I didn't smother in my sleep!
Her parents had a male friend who lived in Houston, but on weekends he came to their house to see their oldest daughter. (My friend was the youngest.) The girl was about fifteen and had for all intents and purposes, quit school. She went just enough to say she was a student, but that was about it. She was allowed to smoke, drink, cuss and date whomever, whenever she chose. On weekends, she chose the male friend, who at the time was in his thirties. Later I would be told by my friend that he had a wife and kids in Houston, but the wife was a bitch and my friend's older sister 'understood' him. Even then, I wasn't stupid. The two times I was there, the sister hung all over this man with her parents approval. They smoked and drank and talked about trashy, filthy things, and my friend and I would get out of the house and their company just as soon as we possibly could.
She and I did a lot of walking on those visits and she did a lot of talking about her family. From these talks I figured out that her sister was a prostitute and her parents were her pimps. They liked the male friends coming in on weekends to spend time with her sister because the men always gave them money before they left. I also remember the last visit where we loaded up and went to the drive in movies. The sister was dolled up and once there, she went off 'to work'. When the movie was over, she came back to the car and pulled a wad of cash out of her short shorts and handed it to her mother. She slid in next to the male friend and said, "Now I'm yours." and all the adults in the car were happy.
Not long after, we moved and I never saw this friend again. To this day I feel an ache in my heart for my friend. She wasn't like them when I knew her and I wonder if she ever got away from them, or if they eventually ruined her as they had her older sister?
Another friend lived on a property that had once been a working farm. Her parents had gotten 'down on their luck' and needed a place to live, so they moved in to a falling down trailer house that had been backed in to the edge of a forest and dropped. When I say dropped, I mean just that. There wasn't a single block under that house; just the tires underneath, that had eventually lost air, and the jack in the front. The front door wouldn't close properly and waking up to possums and raccoons in the house, as well as snakes and rats, was a common occurrence. The first morning I was there, they all laughed at me because I yelled out when I stepped into the kitchen and found a possum on the table! Making this one and only visit even more uncomfortable was that there were no beds. My friend and her sibling slept on the floor on salvaged sofa cushions.
Her parents were drinkers, heavy smokers and hell-raisers. There were piles of beer cans and liquor bottles all over what could be considered their 'yard'. The two nights I was there, they had friends over and they would still be sitting outside under the pines stirring a fire, laughing, cutting up and getting drunk when us kids finally fell asleep. They also liked for their kids to be outside and as soon as we woke up, we had to quietly make ourselves a bowl of cereal, quietly eat it, quietly clean up after ourselves, quietly get out of the house, quietly stumble over passed out people in lawn chairs and on logs throughout the yard, quietly get a few hundred yards away from the trailer and then...run and scream like banshees escaping a prison!
We climbed trees, rode horses, caught pollywogs on earthworms, played in the old barn, beat her boy cousins up and played in the old farmhouse. We had a blast! Sometimes after noon on both days, some adult would call us to the house where we had hot dogs or Spam sandwiches with chips, cookies and Koolaide. We'd eat, then clean up as the adults started drinking again, including Sunday afternoon.
I never got to spend another night with her after that weekend. Her dad got a job somewhere and they left the old farm. I never saw her again.
I hope her life has been nothing even close to her name: Stormy.
So, I am sure that you are asking what these friends have to do with the gratitude I have for my parents? And, what any of this has to do with a siblings perception?
There are lots of reasons...
My father has always been a hard and dedicated worker, whether for himself or for someone else. The only time he wasn't at home every single night was when his job required him to be out of town. Aside from that, every night Daddy came home to Momma and us kids.
In turn, Momma always had a good hot meal waiting when he got home. Just about every morning, as my brothers and I ate breakfast before school, she would get meat out of the freezer to thaw for supper, and every afternoon she would start cooking not long after we got home from school. We might not have what we liked, but we always had what she and Daddy liked. We learned to eat it and go to bed full, or not eat it and go to bed on an empty stomach and sometimes, with a very sore behind!
Daddy never was a drinker to much extent. A beer or mixed drink now and then, but never every day and not once in my life have I ever witnessed my Daddy drunk. Truth is, I do not think my daddy has ever actually been drunk! Mother hated alcohol in any form from the time I was a baby until I was twelve and she started drinking heavily. But up until I was twelve, she would not even allow beer on her property and would throw a fit if she found any.
Daddy was never a heavy smoker, either. A cigarette now and then, but he preferred cigars and pipes, and you'd be more apt to see him without either than you would with them. Mother started smoking at the same time she started drinking, when I was about twelve. But before then, one did not smoke in her house.
Now Daddy can cuss like a sailor, but I was almost fifty-one years old before I heard him use the 'F' word and that was a slip in a moment of hurt and anger.
Daddy didn't tell crude, vulgar or off-color jokes around us kids when we were little. He was raised better and he knew it! He never talked about sex stuff around me, either. Even living on a farm and having animals mate was embarrassing to him if there was a female around.
Mother did not cuss at all until about the time she started drinking. Before then, she was not afraid to drag us to the bathroom, kicking and screaming, and stick a bar of Lava or Safeguard soap in our mouths. After we were done spitting and gagging, she'd take a keen switch to our bottoms. I learned early to make sure she wasn't around before I uttered a cuss word!
And, though we were far from rich, we always had decent houses to live in. We always had electric, running water, indoor plumbing and not once did we live in a house that wasn't finished. Later, Daddy and Momma did buy land with a hundred year old house in bad repair. They did the best they could making it livable, and my baby brother did live there during his high school years, but for the first twenty years of my life, they chose better houses and sacrificed land. The one time we had a snake in the house, Daddy got out of bed, grabbed his belt and while in his underwear, beat that snake to death with his belt. Later, he got dressed and put that same belt on.
When I was a young adult, I opened a drawer in Momma's kitchen and discovered a possum. There was a hole under the kitchen sink that we didn't know about, and as soon as my brothers got that wretched thing chased out, they sealed the hole and later killed the possum.
We just didn't put up with nasty critters in any house we lived in.
My Daddy did not beat on us kids. Not ever. And while he could be scary to my boyfriends, mine and my brothers friends loved him. (They still do!) He has always been a joker and a teaser, and just because you were a friend of one of his kids and he didn't know you well, that didn't stop him. Truth is, Daddy has always loved kids.
Momma? Well, Momma never was a great lover of children and she's said this herself many times. She didn't mind spanking us for the smallest of infractions, and sometimes she'd spank the neighbor kids, too! When it came to kids, Mother had no fear of them OR their parents. If she was going to tolerate them and watch out for them at her house, feed them her food, allow them to play with her children, then they had better be on their best behavior or she would remind them who was the boss at our house. She could be downright lovable and sugary sweet when we had visitors, and as long as the visitors behaved themselves, this is all they saw. But let them mess up and they discovered that nobody messed with Momma (or her kids) when they were at Momma's house.
While I was molested by a cousin, that kind of crap did not go on in our house and under Daddy and Momma's roof!
My parents never had 'drunken parties' until dawn with adult friends and relatives passed out all over the house and yard. We didn't have piles of beer cans and liquor bottles in our yard, and we'd better not have ANY trash in our yard, Period!
Daddy and Momma didn't sleep late, much to the constant aggravation of their children who wanted them to. Saturday mornings everyone in the house was up by 8am, 7am if Daddy was really pushy. Momma would make a big breakfast and then Daddy would have the boys outside working and I would be inside cleaning the house, and as soon as I was done inside, I went out and helped my brothers. Of course, once Daddy got the kids busy, he'd sneak back inside and take a nap, which angered everyone, but that didn't stop him. Looking back I think if a man is going to get up five or six days a week and work ten to twelve hours a day, he deserves a nap or three in the middle of the day on weekends. But when you're 8 or 10 or 16, you just don't see it that way.
Of course, Momma always took a nap after lunch. Seven days a week she took her nap, and if you didn't want your behind blistered, you would either take a nap, too, or be very, very quiet while she did. My second brother and I went through our childhood with very sore bottoms most days after lunch, but Momma rarely missed a nap.
Looking back now, I see that the first twelve years of my life were good. A move when I was almost eleven was very hard on me socially, but the home life remained good until a few months shy of my thirteenth birthday. Aside from the occasional visits with grandparents, aunts or friends, our parents raised us 100% of the time. Home meant Momma and Daddy. Vacations meant grandparents, aunts or friends.
They also knew where we were just about all the time and we didn't stray too far without notifying one of the other where we were going.
My parents made sure we had a decent and finished house, and to Daddy, anything else would have been an embarrassment.
Daddy worked hard to provide for us and Momma worked hard to cook for us, clean up after us and care for us. It wasn't easy for either of them. Sometimes Daddy would come home after a bad day and raise hell with everyone in the house. Sometimes he would go outside, slam doors and throw things, but he never hit any of us, nor did he ever spank us in anger or because his day was bad. Sometimes Momma wouldn't feel good or her nerves would be on edge, and on those days we probably got a few spankings and licks we didn't deserve. Many times she couldn't keep up with all of us kids and the house keeping, so she'd hire help to come in and get the place cleaned and organized.
But no one is perfect and no one is happy and carefree one hundred percent of the time. My parents were human, they remain so today, and I realize that this is just part of being married and raising kids.
My parents taught us how to work and how to care for each other, even if some relatives didn't agree with this. I do agree that kids need to be allowed the time and freedoms to be kids, but they also need to be taught responsibility and how to work. Regardless what my siblings or relatives remember, I remember a fair balance of both.
When my mother suffered a mental breakdown just a few months after my third brother was born, and then her having a total hysterectomy almost a year after he was born, had I not been taught earlier how to work and look after my brothers and take care of things around the house, things would have been a lot worse than they were.
My brothers don't remember, but I do. I remember making them breakfast and lunch and helping Momma with supper. I remember changing my baby brother's diapers, making him bottles, giving him baths and getting him to sleep. I remember watching my brothers while Momma slept or while she left the house to 'get away' for a little while. Aside from the couple of serious fights my brothers and I had, and knocking a bathroom door down, no one was ever injured on my watch, none of us starved to death, or did without baths or clean clothes, and we managed to not tear the house down...except for that door, of course.
Looking back at a handful of my childhood friends and the lives that I witnessed them living in their own homes with their parents and siblings, I am most grateful to God in Heaven for giving me the parents He did. The first twelve years of my life weren't perfect, but looking back I know without a doubt...they weren't very bad, either!
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