Fucked Up Love

    I am not a fan of memes. I find most of them annoying. They are usually over simplifications of very complex situations. But sometimes, they nail it.  This one might be my favorite:

It just makes me say "yep." The best thing I ever did to make myself happy is relocate. I rid my world of assholes and kept those that I had to maintain contact with at a distance, but the rest of them, I cut them out. My life has gotten better and better each time I've done this. I am happier, more successful and basically a different person. Depression comes sometimes, seldom now, but not like before. It is occasional and I know how to handle it. It was once an everyday thing. Medication didn't solve this. Ridding my life of assholes did. I can't imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't. 

    Love is an abstraction. Those of us who are lucky enough to grow up in a house full of love, have no problem recognizing it in relationships when we are adults. Those of us who grew up in household without love, fall in love easily because we cannot recognize love when we see it. This love can come in some very strange forms. Not knowing what it is nor what to expect, prevents us from recognizing it. I am unlike both of these examples because I grew up in a household with love, but with a special kinda of love. It was fucked-up love. 

    Fucked-up love is not a technical term. No doubt, there are clinical names for it. I lack the knowledge, education and imagination to come up with a better term. Dysfunctional might be the term, but I rather like fucked-up love, as a term not a thing, because it just fits. They are the best words I can think of to describe what I went through growing up. 

    What I am going to describe is not the only example of fucked-up love that I have experienced in my upbringing, but just one of the many examples. I am not going to use any names and I won't be sharing this on social media. Most of the people I know, only access my blog via social media. So this will post will be our secret, dear stranger, dear anonymous blog reader. Lets keep it that way. 
    My grandmother's house was a farmhouse with about five acres of land in Cumberland, Rhode Island near Sneech Pond. I call it her house, Meme's house (that's right we called her Meme - pronounced Meh-may which is French for grandmother), but I guess it was just as much Pepe’s house as well. It just always seemed to be her house. It had a huge wrap around porch with creaky boards that gave you slivers if you walked in stocking feet. The yard was a big grass field with a beautiful rustic stone well, boarded-up, so that the kids would not fall in. I was third youngest of a slew of grandchildren, something around twenty of us. Holidays were chaos. 

    Behind the field was a huge garden that the family used to grow all their food when my dad was small. They had eleven children, seven boys and four girls and they were young during the depression. My dad was the seventh. They grew vegetables in the warm months and filled the shelves of the basements with canned goods. When my extended family visited during the holidays in the early 1970’s, we’d sneak downstairs and the jars were still there now empty and covered with dust.  Some of the shelving had been removed and replaced by an old pool table that was also covered in dust. I remember once finding a long dead rodent in a corner pocket.

    Beside the field was a picnic table not often used in good weather due to mosquitoes. A hornet’s nest usually appeared during the summer months. For the holidays, it was probably covered in snow. It was here where the children spent our times during holidays running around in the snow. Among the younger cousins was myself, my older and younger sisters. The families of cousins who were local were there every year. One of the younger cousins, around my age, was a heavy young girl. Meme called her “La Gross” which meant the “fat one” in her native French. Three cousins came from Massachusetts, a boy younger than I and two girls older. One family who still lived in Cumberland. Some years, my cousins from New York came but didn’t every year because of the long drive. Even less often, the cousins from Maryland and Connecticut came but I really can’t remember because these cousins are so much older than I.  They wouldn’t be outside throwing snow with the rest of us kids, but inside playing cards with the adults. 

    I am sure the adults were grateful when we played outside. Of my ten aunts and uncles, all but one of them was still alive in the 1970’s. One of my uncles died in the Korean War. Of the remaining ten, all but one had children. My oldest cousin is just a few years younger than my youngest uncle which I guess is not uncommon in large families. My dad passed away five years ago and his last sibling passed away the year after that, so that entire generation of my family is gone. 

    The one sibling that didn’t reproduce was an uncle (lets call him B) who was mentally ill and was institutionalized most of his life. The story, the one that my family told but may-or-may-not-be-true, was that Meme heard his skull crack when he was born. In the 1920’s, most women still gave birth at home. When I was very young I used to go with my father to visit him at an institution in Cranston. For the longest time, the word “Cranston” was synonymous with the mentally ill for me. When I was a teenager and met people from Cranston, I used to laugh to the confusion to anyone around me. I never went inside the hospital but I used to wait in the car reading a book. This was the time before cell phones and electronic handheld games. I used to be terrified, hoping for his quick return. He used to take me out for a milkshake afterwards.

    Due to deinstitutionalization of the US mental health system in the 60’s and 70’s, he saw a lot more of B during the holidays than we used to. He terrified me. He was as much a fear to me as any boogie man or imaginary creature that lived under my bed or in the darkness of our basement. He mumbled and he ate things like cigarettes, anything small that he could find to put in his mouth. The most terrifying thing about this situation was that he always wanted to kiss me. I don’t know if it was all the kids or just me. The only thing I could see in my mind was Uncle B taking a huge rip out of my ear or my cheek like something from The Walking Dead, long before there was ever such a thing. I tried to spend all my time outside when he was at Meme’s.

    Inside was always loud. That is the thing I remember most from that house during the holiday, the noise. This was an old farmhouse with two main rooms downstairs. I can only guess that we had about twenty, maybe thirty, people there each Christmas. We usually didn’t get there until after the holiday meal at home so the kitchen table was used for card games or dominoes. Pepe was always impressed with how young I was when I could play dominoes. It is just matching tiles, not that hard. I played a good game for my age, as well.  This is one of the few things I remember about him because he died before I was about six or seven.

    I sat on a makeshift booster seat, perhaps a pillow, so that I could reach the table. I knew the rules of the games but I doubt if I knew any strategy. Eight or nine adults sat around the table, mostly uncles and my dad. Meme played sometimes but since she cheated, and cheated badly, she wasn’t always welcome. She kept extra cards on her lap that everyone could see. The room was hot because of the crowd and smoky from Pepe’s pipe. It was the same room where the cooking was done so the art of stepping around others was practiced, but not well.

    My need to flee started here. There was love in this room but it is difficult to see it as anything other than self love, lacking empathy or understanding of how one’s actions affects another, particularly a small child.  I remember, one day, playing in the living with the kids and being called into the kitchen where the adults were. “Uncle B wants to say 'Hi”.  These were the words I feared.

    I would pretend I didn’t hear them. They weren’t calling the other kids, only me. Why me? At least that is how I remember it. My mom would yell, she was angry with me, so I had to go. I would go slowly into the room, the card playing had stopped, I went to my dad. I saw B standing near the entrance with his coat on. Thoughts of him ripping my ear off is all that I could think of. The stories of him eating lye or cigarettes just filled my mind. The crowd pushed me away, toward him. “B wants to kiss you.” He clutched a rosary and had snot coming out of his nostrils. I’d kept saying NO. I imagine myself running on ice, being pushed into a hole. My mom was getting angry with her, embarrassed of me. He pulled me and held me in a cold iron-like grasp. He’d cover my head with wet snotty kisses much more like being gummed than kissed. I screamed and eventually pulled myself from his grasp. I ran and hid. Some laughed, my mother certainly wasn't and I remember my aunts being shocked. Not sure for whom. This wasn't the only time they did this, but the most memorable. Of course, all of this is remembered in through the fog of decades and my tainted perception. 

    In a large family, sometimes love can be a monster, all consuming and selfish, unthinking, crude and oblivious. No one consoled me to try to find out why I was terrified. If I mentioned it to anyone, I was shamed, making me feel like an awful person, bad boy, bad Catholic. Poor Uncle B., he just wanted a kiss. 

    This festered and grew within me, my constant companion. It manifested itself in many awful ways in my behavior as an adult. I have it under control now. I can't remember the last time I had a panic attack. Fucked-up love had done this to me. 

    While in elementary school, children in special education were segregated, and I would always fear sitting next to any of them in the cafeteria. A girl with down syndrome would always seem to find me and I’d do my best to run away. As a teenager, I had a friend with a beautiful old red convertible and we went for a ride one afternoon. He said he had to pick up his uncle and I freaked, quietly dying, when I realized that his uncle was an adult with down syndrome. I was so nervous. It helped me calm down when I saw how great he was with his uncle. I felt like an awful person. As an adult while living in Boston riding the subway daily, I’d sit in fear of an insane homeless person sitting on the side of me. I’d move far away or to another car if I had to. The irony is not lost on me, now, that I am married to a special education professional.

    How do you solve fucked-up love. You don't, you run away. I left for Boston in 1990. I experienced poverty, loneliness and lot of other uncomfortable situations. All of it was easier to take than fucked-up love. It was sometime in the mid-90's, while I was living alone in Boston only about an hour away from my old life, that I realize that I didn't have to go home for the holidays. The holidays were depressing as hell, but staying home in my shitty apartment with a good book and a bottle of wine, was better. I stayed home for Thanksgiving. After that, I realized staying home for all the holidays was probably the best. After a few years, I had friends in the area and I didn't have to spend them alone anymore. Now I even enjoy the holidays. My life currently has very little fucked-up love. Thanks to social media, I can maintain these relationships on my terms ... or not.