May 19, 2008

Draw the Arthur Murray Patterns

They say (you know, the infamous "they" who do and say everything) that things come to you when you're ready for them. I've often found that axiom particularly annoying and not altogether true. I was certain I was ready to read Joyce's Ulysses the instant my eighth grade English teacher said it was not to be read by anyone under about 20-25, because you had to be older to understand it. I was livid when I discovered that our junior high library did not, in fact, have a copy. Somehow, to this day, I still haven't actually read that book. I think now, perhaps, I'm afraid that I will not understand it - at 13 I was positive I would.

The first research project I did as a junior in high school, liked to kill me. I wanted absolutely all of the information about my issue - did Atlantis ever really exist or not - on the table before me. How could I possibly write the definitive answer of Atlantis without having EVERYTHING in front of me? Thank goodness for Mrs. Critzer's schedules. She knew, through years of teaching privileged suburban honours students, that many of us earnestly tried to be thorough, to do it all. She declared a date whereafter we were to turn in our notecards and STOP research. She made a little mark on each notecard - lord, she must have been blindly making marks late into the night to get through all of our research - and handed them back to us a day or two later. Now, she said, we absolutely had to begin writing if we had not already. She'd marked our notecards. No more research allowed. Later, I tried to help my students learn the same lesson when I taught writing.

You make do with what you have, you see. You never have all the facts or stories or theories.

It was the same when I tried to work through childhood issues - I wanted everything laid out on the table for me to pick through, to rail over, to mourn over, and to laugh over.

Would you like to learn to dance?
Well I can show you how
Gotta book here, all you need to know
We can draw the Arthur Murray patterns right here on the floor.
All you have to do is follow.
And then well dance around the room a while
You can lead now if you want to, I don't mind.
Nothing I wouldn't do to see your smile
Go dancin cross your face in perfect time
Go dancin cross your face in perfect time.

My mother and I were both very alike and very, very different and it caused us no end of sorrows whilst I grew up. She wanted a Leave It To Beaver life ... and she got something closer to Married ... With Children, I think, at least in the disparity between the two shows, if not the reality.

The husband she left secretarial college for turned out to be a drunk who was addicted to "nighttime activities." She was a devout Catholic who'd seriously contemplated the contemplative life. Several years after their wedding - and much trying - I finally came along. The "perfect" baby girl. She was terrified and yet determined to do everything exactly right.

Naturally, I was most emphatically NOT the perfect baby girl. By all accounts, I was a relatively quiet and happy toddler - but I had a distinct personality, stubbornness, independence and penchant for climbing everything. I was in a hurry to grow up and do it myself.

My mother thought she was getting a docile child she could dress in fancy dresses, teach to sew and cook (even though Mom was not particularly fond of those things herself).

I was interested in airplanes (particularly F-16s and F-15s and the Air Force Thunderbird team), in toy cars, in being outdoors and getting dirty.

Mom and I were really, really not ready for each other.

There were fights over hair, over clothes, over toys, over activities - neither of us understanding the other at all. She did not understand why I was so stubborn - I did not understand how she could say "you can be anything you want to be" except for all the things I loved most. It was definitely a dilemma of the 70s.

In addition to that, my mom fought depression and battered wife syndrome - not that I ever saw any physical battery, nor bruises or sunglasses later. But I heard how he belittled her and undermined her confidence. You could sense the threat of physical violence in his tightly coiled muscles some days, barely under the surface, like a gator ready to strike - that sudden, violent surge out of the water and at the prey perhaps more terrifying than the actual bite.

It must have seemed to her like nothing in her life could go right.

Her second daughter, however, was more pliable - the girly-girl she'd wanted to begin with. They bonded over the shared things that many mothers and daughters bonded over - and rightly so. They had shared interests and commonalities that I did not share with them. But it also meant that I became an outsider without any of us really realizing it or understanding what had happened.

My mom and my sister shared a love for music and singing - I also shared that, but given the extent of my allergies, my sinuses were always so clogged that I often couldn't hear myself accurately, which meant I was off-key without knowing it. None of us thought that through, and eventually, I stopped sharing my music with them - I couldn't take being made fun of for something I couldn't hear, couldn't help.

Would you like to learn to sing?
Well I can teach you how
Here's an old tune thats good for a start
I can sing all the high parts if I really try
And you can play along on your guitar
And well sing together for a little while
Let the harmonies go ringin in your mind
And we sing so much better when we sing with a smile
All the notes come out so sweet and high.
All the notes come out so sweet and high.

My mom and my sister shared a love of clothes (although I'm not sure anyone can spend as much time looking at clothes as my mother). I could, for the most part, care less. Jeans and a t-shirt and I'm good to go. I want my clothes to fit. I want them clean. I want them presentable. But I don't really care what I wear.

We all shared a love of reading, but I left Phyllis Whitney and Nancy Drew behind for the Hardy Boys and then biographies and manuals on electronics ... and finally science fiction and sometimes horror. My mother was puzzled and tried to interest me in beloved classics - Roller Skates, a 1937 Newbery winner. That was only the second book in my life up to that point that I could not force myself to finish. (The first was either Emil and the Detectives which I found terribly yawn-o-riffic or Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.)

We were not always polar opposites, but there was, nonetheless, a sense of puzzlement, frustration and sadness that shaped our relationship.

But the real mystery to me was always: why had she not divorced Dad?

The answer was that she was simply not ready. It was a terrifying thought to be on your own with no college degree, no "real" skills, no self-confidence, and know that you had to raise two girls on your own. She had grown quite used to the middle-class lifestyle and even while she abhorred "keeping up with the Joneses" (one of the worst sins in her personal catechism), she enjoyed the amenities she allowed herself.

It wasn't until she knew I was leaving that she finally had what she needed to act as well. She'd been building herself up for this for several years prior and while she didn't think she was ready - she was ready.

And that only solidified my bitterness. What can I say? I was 19 and while I didn't think I knew it all, I thought that I did understand our family.

It has taken me another 20 years now to realize that I only now understand something of the depth and scope of our family ...

... but you work with what you have.

At 19, I simply wanted my mother to take some responsibility for her actions. I wanted to hear her admit - and mean it - that she had made mistakes. I wanted to hear her say she was sorry for some of the stupid stuff - for telling me we didn't have the money for me to go on a school trip to Washington, D.C. For telling me that taking Band class was too expensive and we couldn't afford it. The bald-faced lies. I wanted her to own up to those.

At 19, did I think she had ruined my life? No. I was not that arrogant. In my early-to-mid 20s, I wrote Mom a letter, telling her that I was tired of playing the games we'd always played, of dancing around truths. With the bluntness of youth, I attempted to get her to understand that her actions had had a profound effect on me.

It was arrogant of me to think she had not realized that. And yet, she'd never given me any indication that she had. How was I supposed to know? You write your papers based on the research you have at the time.

Of course, she over-reacted. I was blaming everything that was wrong or bad in my life on her. I thought she was evil, a Mommy Dearest.

Faced with her self-flagellating tirade that flogged me as much as it did her, I stared at the words I'd written and tried to figure out how I could have screwed them up so badly that she would think these things that I had not said, had not meant.

You see, she wasn't ready to hear those things. Sometimes we do receive things before we are ready for them.

We stammered along for years, trying to get the other one to understand our point of view - instead of trying to open ourselves up to the other person's point of view.

It's been a steep learning curve for both of us. Took my not telling her things in an immediate fashion for her to realize how far apart we'd traveled. (Apparently if you get put in the hospital with some unknown something the day before Thanksgiving and your mom lives 1000 miles away, you're supposed to call her instantly and "ruin" the Thanksgiving weekend with worry over the unknown instead of waiting until you get out of the hospital Monday and finally have a diagnosis. Apparently mothers don't like that. Who knew?) But now she knows she cannot control my every move and if she tries too hard to continue controlling me, I could simply ... fade away.

Would you like to learn to love?
Well, thats something else again
I can show you how to sing and how to dance
I have no keys to open your heart
And no way I can make you take the chance.
And so well dance around the room again
And well sing a tune or two to pass the time
And smile a while and by the time the dance is through
There might be some love for us to find
There might be some love for you and me to find.

For me, it's taken a long time to understand the battered wife syndrome and apply that to my mother. To really begin to understand the paralyzing fear and lack of confidence which caused her to stay in an intolerable situation when she should have left.

They say (you know, the infamous "they" who do and say everything) that things come to you when you're ready for them.

This past week, our church prepared for an incredibly busy week. We had a rummage and plant sale scheduled for Saturday. A wedding rehearsal Friday and the wedding itself Saturday. A huge congregational meeting Sunday and a big mission trip meeting as well. Our rummage sales take us a full week to get ready - get all the rummage sorted, out in the appropriate areas and priced. There's electronics (generally that's my room) to test and verify prices on. The rummage spans all four meeting rooms at one end of the church, the circular "hallway" which connects to all of those classrooms, the long, narrow hallway which connects that area to the sanctuary, the sanctuary itself gets filled with clothes AND the large item stuff outside. It's a BIG deal. We had to get that all prepped, then do a rehearsal for a wedding with all those tables of clothes in the sanctuary - which, of course, freaked out the poor couple despite our protestations that the church would be all nice and neat and ready for them by their 4 p.m. wedding. (And it was. Was a beautiful wedding, too!)

As I stood around waiting for the wedding party to show up for rehearsal on Friday, one of the older women saw me staring idly at the rows of books. Her eyes lit on a book and seized it. Thrust it at me. Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells. A book I'd been meaning to read for a few years now. Sheila couldn't recommend it enough. And there was a fire in her eyes - she'd made an important connection here and she knew it. Somehow, she knew that I needed this book and was ready for it now. I doled out my quarter for the paperback. A little while later I saw the sequel: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. And I doled out another quarter. The movie was excellent and I'd meant to read both books years ago.

But I found them this past weekend and finally bought them ... because I was ready for them. Finally ready for them. The movie is largely about the second book (from which the movie took its name), but it's a movie in some ways primarily about the Ya-Yas themselves and their friendship and support for each other. It's also a book about the relationship between a mother and daughter - a relationship spanning love, abuse and downright craziness. But it's also a book about reconciliation and not trying so damn hard to get the other person to understand you and just let each other be. Sometimes trying to get the other person to understand you just messes everything up ...

... there's a deeper understanding that comes with letting go of it all and just being.

It doesn't mean that you don't wanna wring the other person's neck when they go back to an old pattern of dancing, that self-indulgent habitual ritual movement across time and events ...

... it doesn't mean you take the same crap you took as a kid ...

... but you don't try to control the patterns any more. Stand back and let the other person dance. When it gets too frenetic, point out that there are alternatives, but quietly, gently, reminding them that it's really their idea.

And be ready for them. Because they'll find it - whatever it is - when they're ready.

.

.

(lyrics are Peter Paul & Mary's "Would You Like to Learn to Dance")

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:03 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles | Stumble

May 15, 2008

Bloggers Unite - Human Rights

Bloggers Unite is an initiative designed to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By challenging bloggers to blog about a particular social cause on a single day, a single voice can be joined with thousands of others to help make a real positive difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or support 3rd world countries. Read More

I wasn't even sure I was going to participate in Bloggers Unite - I write often enough about various human rights issues as the muse - or the news - strikes me. However, when I read SSB's post at My Thoughts, I knew I was going to have to chime in.

Do children have a voice? If you saw a child being abused would you do anything or nothing? If a child told you things at home would get worse would you listen?

I've spoken about childhood abuse issues before, most recently with the story of the Fritzls in Austria. I've written and illustrated one person's story at Mud-Walker in comic book form. I've talked about some of my own story here and continued it here.

Every year a local radio station does a "roof-sit" against child abuse. The first few years I heard the program, I applauded their ideals - but I could not listen to any of it. Not because the stories were too difficult for me to hear - but because hearing the stories filled me with, to be perfectly candid, rage and jealousy. Very misplaced rage, but rage nonetheless.

No one had saved me and it took me until I was 19 to save myself. I was so incredibly jealous of these kids who had been beaten, belittled, raped, neglected and treated like dirt - because someone had stepped in and tried to prevent those things from happening to them anymore.

Abuse by a master manipulator is something that is incredibly difficult for someone who has not experienced it to understand. It starts very slowly and insidiously with comments that all of us have made at some time or another. "Oh, you're not going to wear that are you?" It's a subtle picking at your core self, undermining your decision-making ability. And when you get to the point where you're doubting yourself, the isolation begins. At first it might be because the abuser doesn't like your friends. It might be because your friends think there's something wrong with your abuser - and you feel like you have to defend that person. After all, that person is your "other half" and only wants what's best for you, for both of you.

Think for a moment about those days when you want to please your other half. Not do something totally out of character for yourself - but if wearing the green shirt instead of the red one makes him or her happier, and it doesn't really matter to you, why not do it? It's just a nice gesture, no big deal.

And the problem is this is exactly how it can start. With those little things which aren't a big deal - taking advantage of your kind and nice nature. Soon, these requests will turn into bigger requests and a pouty face or sad face -- or outright anger and accusation that you don't want your other half to be happy.

It's so easy to see through the manipulation when it's written down like these pixels on the screen. It's so very easy to tell yourself you could never fall for that.

In my case, my father used these methods on my mother for years. She was sure she could not be anything other than a housewife. She is Catholic and divorce was not much of an option anyway. She struggled to keep her head above water ....

... and at the same time began the survivor's lies. It's not so bad. Other people have it worse. But he provides well for us. All women/men are like this.

And most damaging to everyone: "my spouse may hurt me, but would never hurt the children. The children are loved."

You see, when you feel trapped by your circumstances and you are in an intolerable situation - the brain "fixes" the situation for you. In other words, if you can't or won't act - your brain will do the acting for you. If you have been so manipulated as to believe that you cannot leave (or, in Elisabeth Fritzl's case as well as others, you literally cannot leave), your brain begins to lie to you, weaving a fantasy cloak of denial which will render virtually invisible all those tell-tale clues you should have noticed and acted upon.

In cases of father-daughter incest, often the mother has been sexually assaulted by the husband. Often she has been manipulated and her self-esteem slowly ground away to nothing. Her brain begins weaving the invisibility cloak and she may very honestly have no idea what he is doing to their children.

It is easy to explain the blood on the sheets as yet another in a long series of intense night-time nosebleeds. It is easy to explain the child's suddenly quieter nature as a product of growing up and learning how to behave properly. It is easy to simply be grateful to wake up in the middle of the night and find that he is not in bed with you. After all, if you go looking for him, he might just find you. Remember, your spouse loves the children - there's no way he'd harm them.

Of course, there are a myriad of other ways that childhood - and spousal - abuse play out, but so often I hear "How could the mother not know" and even sometimes, "How could the father have no idea?"

The truth is that it's easy to get away with it if you know how to manipulate your family. If you start slowly enough with the spouse and slowly enough with the child. Starting young helps, too. The younger they are, the easier they are to manipulate. After all, their parents are their whole world, the shapers of everything they know.

In situations like this, children have no voice. Depending on how they were manipulated, what threats and methodologies were used, they may literally not be able to speak or write down what has happened. Thinking about speaking may very well cause a kind of paralysis and selective mutism where they literally can't speak about the topic.

And if by some miracle, they do find a physical voice to speak - who will believe them? Nearly all abused children are told that "no one will believe you, even if you do tell." So if they do manage to utter the words, the slightest look or sound of doubt on another's face can cause them to quickly recant everything.

It's far easier to compartmentalize everything, storing all the details in different areas of the brain, splitting a single memory into a series of fragments, running them through a mental shredder and then storing the shredded pieces in different areas.

It's been popular since the early 90s at least to disbelieve tales of abuse and nearly every reason is a good reason to disbelieve those stories. We don't wish to confront evil like that. Children sometimes tell wild stories. Parents sometimes plant harmful stories in their kids' heads about the other parent in order to gain custody of their kids.

The problem is that if we do not openly and honestly investigate these stories, we're denying children their voice. We know the system sometimes takes kids wrongly. The system is far from perfect. But by not attempting to better that system, to pay the social workers enough to keep them from burning out - to pay the social services enough so they can hire more social workers - we are closing our ears to the children who need us most.

In my particular case, honestly, the manipulation began so early and I was such a good li'l actor, I'm not sure that there were enough clues for the adults around my family to hear what I could not say.

To this day, I've no idea how to give voice to kids who are like I was.

But I no longer feel the rage and jealousy - quite so much anyway - when I hear the roof-sit program against child abuse. I've spent the last few years working quite hard at looking at just how the abusive family dynamic plays out. I've absolved myself and my mother of a lot of responsibility for "causing" the abuse and for not stopping it.

I can only hope that by talking about the issues and complications, some person will read this and discover their own voice. That they will suddenly feel a portion of their brain stir and re-assemble some memories and help them to speak and to escape into the light.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:13 AM | Comments (4) | Struggles | Stumble

May 10, 2008

Balcezak

I am both grateful that I checked my blog stats and looked at the Search Terms stats - and profoundly sad at the same time.

While I have heard some people put forth the claim that the internet is not truly growing larger anymore, but instead, is fragmenting off into specialist areas, today I was forcibly reminded that the internet is still growing larger and that it has shrunk our world considerably.

One hundred years ago, if you moved some thousand or more miles from your home town, you would be hard pressed to hear any news of anyone you didn't personally correspond with.

Yesterday, as I logged into StatCounter for a fast look at the statistics for my websites, I discovered a chilling blast from the past. The search term was pretty simple: "christopher balcezak suicide." I was instantly catapulted back in time.

My family lived in Austin, Texas for all of about five years. I started kindergarten there. By the time I was 10, I had lived in Austin far longer than any other city we'd lived in. It was and has always been the town I think of as home.

My first Halloween in Austin, I had to wear the damn pumpkin costume. I hated it. It had to be stuffed with pillows and my mother teased me constantly about being fat whilst I worse it. It felt like torture to me. But it was wear the pumpkin or miss out on trick-or-treating and this would be my first "real" time going out with a big group of neighborhood kids. I mustered all my bravado - and bolstered that by running to my room at the last minute and grabbing my beloved "baby pillow" (travel-sized pillow) and shoving that in the very front of the costume - a kind of hidden security thing.
(Note: ignore the smile. I was NOT a happy camper that evening.)

Mom walked me out to the group of kids with chaperones and dropped me off. Instantly, the troublemaker boy who lived around the corner from us started teasing me about being fat. I retorted with something about being well-protected and bet that I would not feel it if anyone tried to punch me in the stomach.

Yeah, I guess you could say I was baiting him.

Being a tough guy, he was sure he could make me feel it. I thought I was pretty slick. There was no way I was gonna feel his punch through two or three pillows right in front of my stomach - and I have a high pain tolerance anyway. Even if it hurt a little bit, I was not going to show it and his rep as a tuff guy would be shattered. With any luck, he'd stop picking on kids.

He hauled back, punched me in the gut - and one of the chaperones turned around just at that minute. Of course, to the adults, it looked like unprovoked aggression. They ignored the fact that I laughed at the punch (I really didn't feel it) and they sent him home.

That was my first memorable experience with Chris Balcezak.

While we lived in Austin, we went to St. Theresa's Catholic Church. This would have been the mid to late 70s - the church was opened in 1968, the same year that I and most of my friends were born.

I remember the long drives from our house through my beloved Texas hill country to get to church. Up and down the hills, trees and grass all shades of vibrant greens - bits of granite and limestone jutting out from the earth like the bones or teeth of some tremendous creature. The church was tucked in at the top of a hill, nestled into the trees. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been and I loved it. CCD (kind of like Sunday school for Catholic kids) was sometimes held in small classrooms, but was sometimes held outdoors - and I admit on those days I was far more entranced with the splendour of the world around me than I was the intricacies of catechism.

I remember the day at CCD when we were doing some stupid exercise outside and we were supposed to freeze when the teacher said some special freeze phrase or another. We did, but shortly thereafter Chris started wiggling and finally stood up. The teacher yelled at him - he was always in trouble for something - until he got her to realize that he'd laid down in a fire ant mound. If you know anything about fire ants, you know that to say this was "unpleasant" is a distinct understatement - those suckers HURT.

Being bratty children and tired of being bullied by Chris, one of us (probably me, to be honest) began giggling and pointing out that Chris had ants in his pants. This is the height of childhood chuckles, you know. Ants in the pants. I mean, it damages the rep of the neighborhood quasi-bully and it rhymes and it's something adults used to tell us when we couldn't be still. And Chris couldn't be still with all those fire ants biting him all over. Poor guy was in tears before he was rushed off to have the ants hosed off of him.

And, of course, we were all in trouble for not being empathetic to Chris' pain. Actually, I think our teacher was rather horrified by our callousness, but the truth of the matter was I don't think any of us truly understood the level of pain that Chris was in.

My last memory of this boy who lived around the corner from me for five years was when we finally, finally got a bus to come pick us up for school. Balcones Woods was some five or ten miles from Pillow Elementary school and our parents were tired of driving us - they wanted the school to provide a bus. Naturally, my bus stop was shared with Chris - and that was the impetus for my often leaving the house early and traveling up the neighborhood to other bus stops closer to the entrance of our subdivision. Our vice principal sometimes rode the buses in the afternoon - partly to mix more with the students, and partly to help keep the drivers keep better control over all of us young hooligans.

The first time he rode our bus, he sat next to Chris, which made all of us laugh (and sigh with relief). Chris was well-known for singing all of the mangled song lyrics like the schoolyard version of "On Top of Old Smokey." Sure enough, one of the kids from the back, called out for Chris to start us on that song. Red faced, staring at the floor and trying not to look at the vice principal, Chris stammered a refusal. To our surprise, however, the old fogey adult vice principal got the song started for us.

I remember looking back in shock - along with all of the rest of the bus - and seeing the stunned gratitude on Chris' face.

It hadn't occurred to me until then that Chris was something of a pariah at our school. To be sure, with his penchant for mercilessly teasing the rest of us and for beating the crap out of smaller kids, there was good reason most of us ignored him. But it didn't occur to me until that moment that Chris might be lonely as well.

For me, all through my life, Chris was a legend - the only neighborhood bully I really knew at all whilst growing up. He was not the quintessential evil bully. I don't recall him beating the utter shit out of any kid. I don't recall him doing any real damage - he was just a bit of a bully. He liked to get his way and he didn't really want to deal with anything else. He liked attention and he didn't mind too much how he got it. To this day, I can't think of my childhood in Austin without thinking of Chris.

So getting this search term hit on my blog was somewhat stunning. Surely this was not the same kid that I knew. I ran the search myself, only to find this snippet of text next to a Google search hit:

Dr. Christopher Balcezak, 34, died from an overdose of Amitriptyline.

That was from 2004. The right age. Still, surely this was another Christopher Balcezak. I clicked through.

Raised in Austin, Texas, Balcezak received his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame, then attended medical school at the University of Texas at Houston, where he graduated in 1995.

It all fits. Raised in Austin, went to a Catholic university ... this article was about the boy I once knew back in the 70s.

He disappeared on the way to making his rounds and was found two days later, in his pickup, in a grove of trees. Later, the coroner released that Chris had purchased a large quantity of Amitriptyline under assumed names all across town. He apparently drove his truck through a corn field and into the grove of trees where he downed a large quantity of the drug with a bottle of Boulevard beer. A Physician's Desk Reference with a place marker at the entry for Amitriptyline was found in the truck - along with a framed photo of his three children, aged 6, 3 and 1.

It's beyond strange, really, to realize that someone you knew some 30 years ago is now dead. It's jarring to realize that I don't know his story ... that I will never know why he chose to end his life just a few years into his participation in a good medical practice - when it looked like his life was just coming together. It was strange to read these articles and tease out bits of his life after I moved away.

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4

It's beyond bizarre to realize that Chris did his undergrad at Notre Dame - and I did my grad work there some four years or so after he'd left the place.

While I remember bits of trouble that Chris started or was involved in, while I called his pre-fourth grade self something of a bully - he was not, to my recollection, a bad kid. He was more the "classical" rough-n-tumble kid. He smarted off without thinking - he reacted to most of us by lashing out, but not utterly beating the crap out of anyone. A punch maybe. Two punches perhaps, but for the most part, he was all bluster and bellowing and not the truly violent type.

I've often wondered through the years where Chris wound up.

Thanks to someone hitting my blog via that search term, I now know a small slice of his story. Makes me wish I knew more - it makes me sad.

His oldest is now about the age I was when I moved away from Austin. And his youngest is about the age Chris and I were when we first met.

If I close my eyes or if I stare off into the distance and let my eyes unfocus, I can see past Keith's house and across the side street to the corner where we used to wait for the bus. If I concentrate, I can see Chris standing at the corner, waiting.

I have to wonder why he picked that grove of trees ... I wonder ... I wonder if it reminded him of Balcones Woods ... of a simpler time ... I wonder if he loved those woods as much as I did, if it reminded him of home.

Requiescat in pace.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:12 AM | Comments (7) | Struggles | Stumble

April 29, 2008

The Dark Side of Belief

Those of you who have read this blog for very long will not be surprised that the news story which has captured my full attention over the last few days is taking place in Austria right now.

A father, Josef, tricked his 18 year old daughter back in 1984, to enter the cellar, where he drugged her, handcuffed her and then confined her in the cellar. He forced his daughter, Elisabeth, to write a letter to her parents stating that she had run away and that they should not look for her. Somewhere between 1988 and 1989, Elisabeth gives birth to a daughter. Then, a son. Nearly 10 years after Elisabeth's "disappearance," she purportedly leaves an infant on the doorstep of her parents' home, with a note stating that she cannot care for the child. This happens again the following year.

The tally so far, a daughter and a son who live in the cellar with Elisabeth. Then 2 infants left on the doorstep for her parents to raise. Four children fathered by her own father. Two she was allowed to keep; two taken from her. All this in the first 10 years of her incarceration.

In 1996, she gives birth to twins, one of whom dies shortly thereafter and her father places the infant in the building's incinerator. The next year, she gives birth to another child who also is left on the parents' doorstep. Then, in 2003, she gives birth to a final son. (source)

Elisabeth and the three children who stayed with her lived in a tiny cellar, which was constantly enlarged over the 24 years that Elisabeth was condemned to the prison. There was a little kitchen, a little bedroom, a little bathroom ... and apparently, a small storeroom as well.

What finally gave Josef away and revealed the four people living in the cellar dungeon? The oldest child became deadly ill and he took her to hospital, claiming she'd collapsed in front of his building. A call went out for the girl's mother ... and eventually it all came to light, quite literally.

When we are confronted with an example of pure malice and evil, our first reaction is generally one of denial and disbelief. Even as we marvel at the evidence in front of us and know intellectually that the buildings at Auschwitz were used in the ways that they were used ... a portion of our mind finds the concept of such cruelty too large to hold and the first words uttered are generally, "no, this can't be."

I spoke last month of Merrily Melson who was faced with a similar situation on a personal level. A partner whom she trusted suddenly began attacking her with an ax. Think about this for a moment. Think about your partner suddenly hefting an ax and come running toward you. What would your first thought be? Would it be "Hey, you're not Jack Nicholson, put that damn ax down before you hurt yourself?" Would the time it took to realize this was NOT a joke mean the first stroke was fatal?

How do you cope with finding out that you are NOT safe?

Merrily Melson was lucky. She reacted to the situation quickly enough to escape with her life and that, trust me, is no small feat. When you are confronted with such an extreme act, your ability to think is essentially cut off. Your brain cooks up a batch of chemicals which rather locks the reasoning areas down and strips you to reflexes. So it's no surprise that in the heat of being attacked by her partner wielding an ax in some bizarre scenario, that it didn't immediately occur to her to grab her son (who was not being threatened at the time). This is an immediate fight or flight response. Had Melson's partner begun threatening their boy in front of her, her instincts would have been to snag him and run.

But without seeing that immediate threat ... we are programmed more toward denial than thought at such a time.

It is the same with child abuse and particularly true of abuse in its most extreme forms. As humans, we accept, intellectually, that some sick people force themselves on children or beat their children or neglect them.

But unless confronted with some concrete evidence or very compelling circumstantial evidence (behavioural clues from the child, perhaps) - we do not believe that it will happen to anyone we know ... to the person next door. To us. It happens to other people. Not people we know and care about. Other people.

It's one of the fictions we live with daily in order to not worry 24/7. Just as we trust that the walls of our homes will not be breached, that our health will not suddenly disappear, that the people we love will care for us. We trust that helicopters will not fall from the sky, that big brother is listening to someone else's phone conversations, that our bosses do not read our blogs.

We trust, essentially, that those around us are worthy of our trust because the world is far too big and dangerous if we have to go it completely alone.

But this trust also means that many people try to say that these cases of extreme abuse don't really happen. Or that they don't happen in the U.S. - and it makes me want to scream. We have an example in Austria where it really shows just how easy this can be. Is it common for abuse to happen at this type of level? No, I don't believe it is common. But I am convinced that it happens more often than we want to think.

What confuses people, I think, is the plethora of wild abuse stories told in the '80s. We had the Atlanta abductions in the news, then there were reports of mass abuse happening in day care centres, and people claiming multi-offender, satanic abuse rings were popping up all over the nation.

If you read very carefully the 1992 FBI report by Kenneth V. Lanning (read the report here), Lanning is pretty thorough and logical with his analysis of the phenomenon. He begins with the history of how the U.S. has handled everything from "stranger danger" to the claims of the 80s. By the fifth part of the report, entitled "MULTlDlMENSlONAL CHILD SEX RINGS," he gets to the core of what I believe has confused the American public.

Lanning, in 1992, had found no evidence supporting a large, multi-offender, multi-victim, multi-murder cult. Look at all the words there. Large. Multi-offender. Multi-victim. Multi-murder.

He states quite clearly that smaller groups are possible and it's possible that smaller groups could even evade the law, particularly (this is a bit more my interpretation, but I think his text indicates he might agree with this) particularly when the victim is a young child, under the six at the onset of the abuse.

An important quote from the report:

Most people would agree that just because a victim tells you one detail that turns out to be true, this does not mean that every detail is true. But many people seem to believe that if you can disprove one part of a victim's story, then the entire story is false. As previously stated, one of my main concerns in these cases is that people are getting away with sexually abusing children or committing other crimes because we cannot prove that they are members of organized cults that murder and eat people.

I think most people in the '80s looked at the extreme allegations made, read the FBI report and came to a sort of conclusion of denial - "he said these things don't happen," when, in fact, the most important part of his report is that the stories of murder and cannibalism and satanic ritual may be exaggerated stories used to conceal very real abuse or crimes.

What he said was, these things don't happen with large groups of offenders and victims.

We have evidence that they do happen on a much smaller scale.

Who would have thought that a father of seven children would kidnap one of his children, imprison her, father seven children on her and then raise three of them himself and imprison three of them (and burning the body of the infant who died)? How did he choose which of the children to raise and which to consign to life in the dungeon? Why did he choose to bring any of them out? Was it simple overcrowding?

The case in Austria simply brings to light all of the questions I have about how humanity treats humanity ... and how tenaciously we cling to the idea that the world is a safe place even as we mouth the words about how unsafe it is.

The dark side of our belief and our hope that such things do not happen ... is that those who perpetrate such things get away with their crimes.

It was unfathomable that any government would kill some six MILLION members of a single group of people and for that to be just one segment of the deaths. Intellectually, we seem to recognize this possibility now - but even as we do, there's a rising number of vocal people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen. Whether that is simple political expediency or not, I think it also demonstrates just how deeply our denial goes.

We do not wish to believe such evil occurs.

The dark side of our belief that evil does not happen is to allow that evil to continue happening.

How do we keep these things from happening? The short answer is that we cannot. Josef and his family were insular. But even if they had been outgoing people, the cellar dungeon would likely not have been detected. Josef was quite good at concealing it and concealing sound. And, not every shy person or introvert is hiding some deep, evil secret.

With the facts we have about Josef's case, I'm not sure that he made many mistakes ... that he gave much reason for investigation. It all sounds so plausible once the daughter was first tricked into her incarceration.

But what about another case where people in the neighborhood knew that dead animals were nailed to the fence and they were pretty sure from which house this was happening? Why did they choose to look the other way? Isn't this a neon sign that bad things are happening?

Or were they just grateful that strays and vermin were gone from their neighborhood? Did the dark side of their belief in humanity convince them to be grateful that's all it was? that what they saw was the worst of it?

How do we balance the need to believe we are safe ... with the evidence that we are not?

Why do we choose to believe some stories ... and not others?

Why do we often choose to believe in grand, large conspiracies ... and ignore the smaller contrivances around us?

Why do we hear so often "I knew how I was treated ... but I never thought 'Pat' would hurt the children"?

Our belief can be a very power and positive agent in our lives ... but it also has a darker side which can cause us to completely deny actions we should take or allegations we should investigate.

We cannot live in a constant state of suspicion ... but there are times when we need to take out the cloth of our beliefs and shake it, examine it carefully and analytically before once again cloaking ourselves in it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:55 AM | Comments (3) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 24, 2008

Why Is It Always Texas??

Recently, I've run across a fair number of people online who seem quite adamant that the disaster at the Koresh compound in Waco was somehow an unfair persecution of a religious sect. Of course, this conspiracy nonsense has been much fueled by the current issues with the break-off sect of the Church of the Latter Day Saints who have built a community for themselves in Texas.

Why, oh why does this crap only seem to happen in my home state??

(Okay, okay, so in Texas and California. Still. I do NOT want Texas equated with California!!) So let's look at some of the pertinent facts and laws which apply to one case or the other.

First, let's start with how works in Texas.

Upon receiving a report of possible abuse or neglect, CPS first goes to the home or school and must speak with the child and do a visual exam. The child will be removed by the case worker investigating only if one of four scenarios exist or there is sufficient reason to believe one of these four is true:

• immediate danger to physical health/safety
• the child has been sexually abused
• the custodial adult is using a controlled substance and that is causing an immediate danger
• the custodial adult allowed a child to remain on the site whilst meth was being cooked

Two, weapon laws at the time of the Koresh standoff with the ATF. Automatic weapons were considered illegal at the time of the Koresh standoff, including the following weaponry found at the compound:

• M-16 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• AK-47 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• Heckler & Koch SP-89, modified for automatic use


• M-11/Nine, modified for automatic use


• AR-15, modified for automatic use


• silencers


• live M-21 practice hand grenades

Three, current age of consent laws. The age of consent in Texas is 17. The legal age for marriage is 18. If under the age of 16, the law requires that the couple receives a court order before being allowed to marry. Marriage for ages 16 and 17 may occur with the written approval from a parent or legal guardian. (See the Texas Family Code 2.003 through 2.009)

Now, given these facts, I firmly maintain that there was sufficient cause to investigate the Branch Davidians. Accusations of child abuse had been made for years, but as is often the case, insufficient evidence was found. We know after the fact that while the Branch Davidians ran a legitimate arms business, they also had acquired illegal weaponry as well.

I do agree, as do most people, that the situation was botched and botched very, very badly. However, those people who think that the Davidians were a simple, innocent religious organization are simply wrong, if for no other reason than the illegal weaponry.

Those people who claim this was a violation of church and state are simply wrong. Churches still must comply with the laws of the land. They can work with their lawmakers to obtain exceptions and the like - as the Amish have done and done quite well - but there are some hard-and-fast rules. Physical safety of the members is one such rule, particularly in regards to children. Another is that gun laws must be obeyed.

(Side note - and it absolutely boggles my mind that any truly Christian organization would run an arms business and stockpile that inventory at the church. To me that goes against everything Christianity is - but, that's just my personal opinion.)

In the current example of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with their ranch in Texas, a similar set of circumstances has arisen which is drawing criticism from people who believe the group is being persecuted.

In this particular case, there is a documented history of statutory rape and illegal marriage. Their leader is in prison as an accomplice to rape after he forced a girl under legal age to marry her cousin. One of the group's tenets is that a man must marry at least three women in order to get to heaven. We can make all the lame jokes about how being married to three women sounds more like hell, but that simply neglects the real issue: polygamy is illegal in the United States. Marriage to a relative is illegal in Texas. Marriage to someone under the age of 16 without court-granted permission is illegal in Texas. In addition, sex with someone under the age of 17 is illegal.

The state of Texas allowed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to move into state because it was not illegal for them to do so. They changed a few laws (updating some antiquated marriage laws such as the marriage age). And they left the group alone to practice their religion.

Now, they have received a complaint that a 16 year old was sexually abused.

Whether that complaint is true or not, they must investigate it. Since they have not yet found the teen who made the complaint, they are left with an evaluation of the home life of the other children at the ranch as well as a deep concern for the originator of the call.

Let's look at this in a smaller scale. Two brothers are quite close. One forces his sister's child to marry another sister's brother-in-law. This brother is taken to jail for abetting the rape of a child. The other brother, who believes the same as the jailed one, continues on about his life. One of his five children call CPS and claims abuse. When CPS gets there, that child is missing.

This constitutes a reasonable concern for the safety of the other children and, in my opinion, necessitates their removal from the home until the situation can be better assessed.

Drastic? Yes. Traumatic? Most likely.

I see the same situation with the Yearning for Zion ranch.

This is not a "human rights violation," as I have seen some argue. Their right to practice their faith is no more being curtailed than any other faith. As a nation, we also don't allow practitioners of certain forms of Santeria to commit human sacrifice. Nor do we let the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints commit child abuse.

There are simply times when we have to step in and say, "We are not flexible about this law. You must obey it."

To call this persecution by the government is laughable.

Does it remind us of the failures at Waco? Of course it does. However, this has been handled in a different manner.

There is reasonable cause to think that laws have been broken. Investigation must occur.

Now, if we find out that the call from the 16 year old was in some way faked, we have a different kettle of fish. And the DNA testing? The assertation that this is to discover which child belongs to which adults seems reasonable to me given the Texas legal code. Legally they will need to place the children back with their biological parents when the investigation is over and since many of the adults aren't sure who is who's parent, they need the DNA tests. The Texas code is not set up for group families - they're set up for "traditional" families (meaning biological parents or legally adopted children). I suspect they also want some verification about incest and inbreeding, but that's just my suspicion and is probably only secondary to their legal directive to return the children to the biological parents after the investigation is concluded.

At the end of the day, there is no more persecution going on here than the Catholic Church was persecuted during all of the allegations of sexual abuse.

When the law is being broken ... it's not persecution, it's prosecution.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:44 AM | Comments (5) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 18, 2008

Balance and Loss

It is one of those days when nothing can go right, which is certainly not what I expected after my centering and balancing hike yesterday. Generally speaking, one hike out at a place like Potato Creek can ground me for weeks.

Growing up in Texas, you'd think that I was an outdoor kid. The reality isn't quite like that. My mother was very scared of anything involving the outdoors - animals, insects, reptiles, dirt ... and we generally lived in the 'burbs, not out on a ranch. There was a tension between us most of my childhood, because I did want to be the rancher kid (or thought I did) and Mom thought staying in the house was the safest course of action.

When we lived in Austin, I was at my most free. Our house was on the edge of Balcones Woods and a large quarry. If we went out the front door? We were in the 'burbs. If we went out the backdoor? We were in the woods.

Despite my mother's best efforts to instill fear of all the dangerous outside things - I learned to love nature whilst we lived in Austin, more than any other place I ever lived. I welcomed thunderstorms (even when they made me nervous) - I loved to watch as the winds whipped the leaves around on the trees turning the deep greens into something nearly white. I loved the drive into town when we passed through areas where the road had been dynamited out of granite. I adored looking at the layers and layers in the rock, the plants trying to cling to the sides. My favourite places and times were when we went out to "Bear Creek" park. (I've since tried to find that park but apparently my recollection of the name is not correct.) The mix of woods and creek and old-fashioned "swimmin' hole" simply called to me and relaxed me in a way nothing else could.

I suppose, for me, it was the relief of not having to pay attention to tone of voice or body language - or whether dad's eyes were bloodshot yet or not. I remained aware of my surroundings - there were still rattlers and cottonmouths and even loose rocks whilst climbing - plenty of stuff to cause damage. But I seemed to have an instinctual grasp of my surroundings when I was outside and it relaxed me in a way that being around people never did. The wind through the leaves and branches and underbrush ... the crickets ... the frogs ... the cicada song ... the water burbling through the narrow, shallow creek, gradually deepening and quieting as it got deeper and wider ....

The tensions would just fade away and I could feel my core self, my true self, come to the forefront and simply be. It was easy to shed the outer self which had to deal with all of the demands made on a small child throughout the day - that kid who tried to do everything exactly perfect for every adult.

Today, every time I feel overly stressed ... when life is simply getting to me and I find it more and more difficult to find balance on my own ... I retreat, preferably to a place which includes both woods and water - and is out of sight of the "modern world." When I worked at Notre Dame, I would simply go to one of the small lakes on the north end of campus and walk the circular path, eventually coming to a resting spot just barely south of the "beach." No matter how crazy things got, this always centered me.

After I left ND, that spot was no longer very relaxing for me and I had to find a new spot and Potato Creek State Park, with the long, meandering trails along Lake Worster was just the thing.

So after a few weeks of not getting any job interviews for any of my queries, and seeing very few (very very very few) jobs for which I'm qualified appear on any of the dozen or so job boards I haunt ... I needed a time to center.

The walk did me a world of good. It was good exercise and I could feel all the tension and worry beginning to melt away as I listened to the sounds of world around me. I "hunted" the frogs, hoping for a good photo op. I sat down on a boulder and watched one of the feeder creeks meandering along under a bridge. I had to marvel at the little bird who seemed as curious about me as I was of him ... hopping along in the underbrush, one eye cocked at me, and keeping pace with me. There was the swan who just knew I was taking pictures and he kept trying to pose so I'd snap - and then he'd move to try to keep me from getting the "classic" swan photo.

The crunch of the gravel is one thing that has mostly annoyed me about the park, but there were patches of hay and grass as well.

The wind, the water, the birds, frogs ... it all helped relax and center me.

And then this morning, after my other half left for work, I did nothing but dream about realistic catastrophe after realistic catastrophe.

It began with dreaming that our chimney - which has some issues up at its top where some critters have ripped at the masonry - I dreamed that the chimney finally fell to the ground, wreaking all sorts of havoc with the house in general. Chances are, this is whilst I was dozing in the living room - near the fireplace - and about the time of the earthquake which shook much of the midwest this morning.

The rest of my ill-fated "nap" this morning (from about 5 a.m. until about 8 - my other half leaves for work at 4:30 a.m.), was horrific. I have several types of bad dreams - semi-realistic ones in which things seem real even upon awakening, but which follow "dream-logic." These dreams usually involve real people and situations, but not necessarily people who look like what they actually look like and the places are generally different in some way. Other nightmares involve things from my childhood.

But the nightmares this morning were the worst of the lot. They were the kind that could be real. The people look and act exactly as they do in real life. The places look exactly as they do in real life. And, the scenarios are all too real fears rather than exaggerations or metaphors.

I won't bore you with a list of what those dreams were, only that they destroyed all of the balance I had so carefully nurtured yesterday. And I'm left with just one thought: I need a job. Badly. I'm a hard worker; I do what is asked of me and I ask for more. I'm detail-oriented and focused. I have no ego when it comes to work - I'm not the boss or creative director ... I'm a very happy worker, producing my product whether it's graphics (my favourite) or copy ... or reports or whatever is required of me.

I just beg ... do not make me go back to retail work. Not only is the pay abysmal, it is without a doubt not within my realm of talents - so much so to the point where working retail is honestly more depressing than not working at all. At least now I can freelance.

Something has to give soon.

It just has to.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:28 PM | Comments (3) | Struggles | Vacations and Photos | Stumble