October 2007
“OWNERSHIP”
A few days ago I had a phone conversation with my mother who resides in the state of Virginia, which left me a bit resentful towards her. It started out like any other phone call but ended with me amiably ripping her a new one.
Please allow me to back-track here a bit so this weeks column isn’t completely confusing. I recently had an Instant Message conversation with a friend of mine from my home town. Now Brenda and I have been the best of friends for the better part of 25 years, I trust and love her with all of my heart and she has never lied to me, so when she tells me something I tend to believe her because she is very “Stead-fast” and up front.
In 1982 I met my ex husband Scott through Brenda, her boyfriend at the time was Scott’s best friend and we all hung out together. I definitely was not interested in men at all but his persistence paid off for him and we ended up getting married in 1984.
We all have a tendency to do things to make other people happy and this was mine. I believed it would be an easier life “pretending to be straight” than just being honest with myself and the other’s around me so I went through with the huge “White Wedding” and whilst walking down that rose pedal covered aisle I can vividly remember my mind racing and screaming at me…”What the hell are YOU doing, YOU know damned well that you are not straight!!”
As marriages go, it was almost perfect. I wanted for nothing, I had two beautiful daughters a nice home, new cars every couple of years, money in the bank, a faithful husband who came home every Thursday and handed over his un-cashed paycheck…yet I was lost and miserable and for fifteen years I walked the walk and talked the talk until one day I just couldn’t do it anymore so I packed up my youngest and with the clothes on our back we left the state of Pennsylvania and moved to Ohio. My oldest made the choice to stay with her father because she had been at the same school since kindergarten and I respected her decision.
For years he and I got along fine, even though he was crushed, he said he understood and respected my decision because he loved me and always would, I loved him, after all, he is the father of my children and we would always have that connection. Every week like a fine tuned clock he would drive to Warren Ohio and pick up Jenna and hand me $90.00 cash for child support.
Then he started dating a woman named Mary Ann, or “Mary Drunk” as my oldest refers to her and allowed her to snow-ball his life into a complete avalanche. She was a regular at the bars and Scott willingly followed her around from club to club like a lost puppy.
Along with this came one DUI after another, the nice home was gone, the new cars were repossessed, he eventually lost his job as a Union Painter, then the child support stopped. I never stopped him from picking up his daughter for the weekend. I did however, listen to one dumb-ass excuse after another about why he didn’t have any money to give me, I just took on extra hours at work and made “do” with what I had to keep a roof over Jenna’s head and food in her belly, after all, that is what a parent does…make sacrifices.
Gradually he stopped coming to get our daughter all together, it has been well over a year and a half since we have seen or heard from him. Her birthday, Christmas…no contact.
Last October I received a phone call from my aunt who still resides in the same town he does, she and my uncle were on their way home one afternoon and saw Scott and his crumpled Jeep involved in an accident. It seems that he was driving on a suspended license while intoxicated and ran a stop sign hence slamming into the side of a car which carried an elderly couple. Robert O’Brien was pinned in his car and had to be extricated with the Jaws of Life and was then life flight ed to Pittsburgh’s Allegheny hospital in serious condition.
Now back to my conversation with Brenda, supposedly Mr. O’Brien passed away recently and Brenda “heard” that Scott will be sentenced to 8-12 years in prison for his actions.
My mother feels bad for him, she goes on to say that he was always a great guy and she always liked him a lot and…”He never got over you Cee Cee and that is why he drinks”. And of course that statement rubbed me the wrong way and all I could say to her was…”How dare you, make his mistakes my responsibility!”
Not for anything but we are all adults here, we make our own conscience decisions and those decisions have consequences. We all have done things in our lives which we regret and wish we could take back and I am no exception. If I do something wrong, I “own” it, it is on me because I made the choice to do it, and I do not expect anyone to take responsibility for my own actions simply because I am not adult enough to take the blame.
His actions have affected so many lives, it affected the O’Brien family, he took away a father, a husband a grandfather and a friend. He took away a son and a brother from his own family because when he became an alcoholic in their eyes he himself died. And he took a father away from his own daughters, so now eventually the day will come when I will have to sit Jenna down and try to explain to her where her father is and why because he is a coward who would rather “run” from his problems rather than face them head on and “fix” what little bit of normalcy he has left.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, including my mother but I do not have to agree with her and for the most part I do not, especially when it comes to this. I do not feel bad for him, he did this to himself. I do however, feel for my daughters and my granddaughter as well as the O’Brien family. Life is short and precious, what he has done will always affect those of us left behind to pick up the pieces.
He will do his time and will eventually be released and hopefully will have learned from his past mistakes…only time will tell…time will not however heal the pain he has put his children through and the pain they will continue to feel, that will always remain.
I hope you all have a wonderfully prosperous week.
~Cee~
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What now?
Ever wonder why life passes us by so fast? I do, every minute of everyday sometimes. This past Monday night after being completely fed up with all of the chaotic bullshit at my job I decided to sit down and write a letter of resignation, which I turned in early Tuesday morning. It wasn’t one particular reason but a bunch of little snow balls that eventually avalanched into a major land slide.
I am going to be 43 years old on January the 18th and I still do not know what I want to be when I “grow up”. My reasoning’s had nothing to do with my home life or my relationship, those area’s are absolutely perfect. I have never gotten along with someone so well as I do her, we have been together for 7 months now and in my eyes she is the perfect woman.
She is sweet, loving, compassionate. She is my partner, my lover, my absolute best friend. And, although I know she is concerned about our financial well being, she is supportive of my decision to leave my job.
If a small child is asked the question “What do you want to be when you grow up” ordinarily they come up with, doctor, lawyer, police officer, and so on. When I was asked that question when I was a child, I had no clue and still do not.
October has been a bad month for me for quite some time and I will explain why. October 20th would have been my oldest brother Chuckie’s 48th birthday, he died of a massive heart attack while out on New Years eve. He was out at a bar called “Ghost Riders” in Butler Pa and the place was full of paramedics bringing in the new year and there wasn’t anything they could do for him, the autopsy said his heart had basically exploded, he was 37 years old, this coming New Years will be the 11th anniversary of his passing.
Chuck and I had “met” New Years week in 1990 after I had relocated back to PA from Newport News VA, we had the same father. We both grew up and lived in the same small town of New Castle Pa but had never met. Our father was an extreme womanizer and because both of our mothers had such animosity towards our father they lost touch with one another. My Mother told me that the last time Chuck and I were together, I was a baby and he was holding me, he was five years older than myself.
After watching an Oprah show about lost siblings I decided to reach out and contact him and to my surprise he called me. I will never forget the first time we spoke, I cried like a baby and I didn’t feel like part of me was missing anymore. I idolized my brother, he was sweet, handsome, intelligent and we had just started getting close and I was 3 months pregnant with my youngest daughter when he passed away and it literally crushed me.
When I gave birth to Jenna and I held her in my arms for the first time and again I cried like a baby. She looked so much like he and I. She had the blue/gray eyes, the small and dimpled nose, the petite lips, she was definitely a “Cline”, and for some odd reason I felt as if he was with us again and to this day I still feel that way when I look into her eyes. She never knew him but has asked me questions about him constantly.
For years I would go to visit his mother “Parlee” but I stopped because she would always tell me that he and I looked so much alike then she would sob on my shoulder and that broke my heart so my visits got fewer and fewer. A few weeks ago my aunt informed that she too had passed (from cancer).
I was just telling Terry yesterday that I don’t understand how I could have allowed my life to go the direction it has, I am far from being an idiot but when it comes to myself I make idiotic decisions.
In 1983 I won a $5,000 art scholarship to Clarion university but declined to accept it, now back then that would have paid for at least two years of my education. It was more fun hanging out with my friends partying don’t yha know.
So here I am enrolling back into college at the age of 42 majoring in Criminal Justice but not so sure if that is the road that will lead me to “Career happiness”. Currently I am on a hiatus because of my ex sabotaging my lap top, I have to pay back a student loan before I can continue, which I am determined to rectify this week.
Since I am being honest and bearing my soul to you all I must also confess that I am not sure if I will continue to write for the “West Virginia Queer News”. Journalism is in fact my first love, I love to write and always have. Being a part of this paper has given me so much happiness and I have felt so very proud being a part of it.
But it seems that lately I have had to struggle to come up with a topic every week. I told Terry that my biggest fear is ‘replicating” myself and boring you all. I haven’t made a concrete decision obviously, because here I am again this week.
How do we as adults find that “niche” in life? How do we know if we are making the right decisions? And why are we only aware that the decisions we make are the wrong ones after the fact?
Sometimes I think that my life is flashing before my eyes at an alarming rate and my brakes have gone out, God it was so easy being a kid. I think a huge part of us all miss being a child, it was so easy then. Decisions were made for us and if we screwed up we suffered the consequences at the hands of our parents, after all, they guided us to the right direction but then when we are adults we lose all common sense when it comes to doing what is right for us.
Please don’t assume that I have given up because that is the furthest thing from the truth, I am not a quitter although, quitting sounds very appealing at times.
The law of physics states that for every action there is an equal re-action, so maybe I needed to make the irrational decision to quit my job, maybe it was the right decision, then again, maybe not.
All that I do know is I just want to be happy in all area’s of my life. And if I am not happy at my job that is going to cause an irreparable cause and effect on my personal life and my relationship which I will not allow to happen.
I hope you all have a wonderfully prosperous week!
~Cee~
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“Triggers”
I wanted to discuss “Trigger’s” this week and for those of you old enough to remember I am not talking about Roy Rogers and his trusty steed riding off into the sunset through the Oklahoma prairies.
You know how you can look at a situation all different ways, but then someone puts just the right combination of words together to trigger an emotional response?
It’s pretty crazy.
After encountering the word in writing or conversation our brain retranslates it back to it’s corresponding image and we get the picture, so to speak. Now, this process is so automatic for us to such an extent that we really do not pay much attention to it. We are so used to it in our fluency as communicators that we can process thousands of words in intricate sequences and never think of the actual work our brains do.
Our brains are absolutely amazing, they never sleep. Even when our hearts cease to keep our bodies alive our brain is the last thing that dies.
Images communicate information in a more direct way. Unlike with words, when we see a familiar image we don’t need to translate it in our brains. We already know what the image is as we have a ready match of it in our memory. The process I’m talking about here is so incredibly fast, that it is difficult to comprehend.
Now for me personally, I have a few (bad) “Trigger’s”. Like “Old Spice Cologne”, because that was what my abuser wore, the color “powder blue” because that was the color of the room where he abused me when I was nine years old. And for years I was unable to watch “The Drew Carey” show because that is what he looked like, almost identically in fact.
And then there is “Felix the Cat” cartoons because when I was in first grade I came home for lunch everyday to watch that, but on one particular day I walked into the house to see my mother laying on the couch and my brother’s father on top of her pummeling her to a bloody pulp and I can vividly remember the only white on her face was where her tears had been falling. I recall my eyes shifting back and forth from the television then back to my mother as if my brain was searching for a safe haven for me, an “escape” if you will.
He almost killed her and she spent nearly three months in the hospital recovering physically, but emotionally she never did, my mother has huge trust issues regarding men and she probably always will which is completely understandable ,given the situation.
“Trigger’s” affect us all whether we want to admit it or not, they are a part of our lives every minute of everyday, and we have our brains to thank for that.
If we are trying to quit smoking we refrain from being around people who do because once we smell the aroma of that cigarette burning, our brain triggers an immediate response, and the same scenario is true of alcoholics trying to stay sober, we want it and we want it now.
Storytellers are natural “button pushers”, the focus of their craft being to manipulate emotional responses in others.
A good storyteller has a special vision, he or she is able to see the human emotional “control panel” with all its ware. This “control panel” is visible only to the most perceptive storyteller.
In a sense, only the storyteller who is truly aware of the human emotional makeup can reach us on a deeper level. We have all picked up a book and read it from front to back in one sitting because we were so very emotionally drawn to it, we felt that connection, it “triggered” something in our brains.
And then there is deja vu, you know what I mean because again this is something we have all experienced. You are going about your daily routine then all of the sudden without warning you feel the familiarity of something, is it a forewarning of things to come in minutes, hours? A feeling of already done this? So is it a way to stop or cause you to pause, in whatever you are doing at the moment? That then possibly prevented something or made you pay attention closer?
A lot of people consider it to be of the paranormal nature, past life transgressions and so on, I am not really sure how I interpret deja vu, but the feeling I have is the “been there, done that”. Maybe trigger words fall into the deja vu category.
What I do know for fact is that I am thankful that most trigger word for me bring back good memories and it seems as if the older I become and the more I “talk about” the bad, the more I am able to heal and see the good in people.
I have learned to manipulate the bad triggers into helping me become a better mother, a better partner, a better friend. Everything in life happens for a reason and sadly enough we seem to learn more from the bad than we do the good, but maybe it is supposed to be that way, maybe it is our brains way of protecting us from repetitive mistakes.
So, maybe “bad triggers” are not necessarily all that bad. What are your triggers and what are they saying to you? And, are you listening?
I hope you all have a wonderfully prosperous week!
~Cee~
What The "L" 