Blog Party 4/6/13

I was adopted several times as a child, starting about the time of my birth. I was also passed around households as an unruly child and youth.

One of the early homes environments involved raging alcoholism, a lot of abuse - physical, sexual and obviously mental - that included being locked in closets, several attempts on my life - alcohol poisoning and a rolling pen to the head - and ended in the 3rd of my mother's attempts to rid her failing marriage to the 2nd of my fathers, by kidnapping me, and leaving me in a motel closet in a strange town. Clarrification: My 3rd mother & 2nd father.

I remember walking into the closet, and being engulfed in darkness. I don't know how long I was gone, I just know that weeks or months later, when the darkness started lifting, I was living in the Lear house.

The mother in that family spent a lot of time and patience, extracting me from the huddled-in-the-corner-rocking existence I was in. This included many hours setting in her lap, with her fingers guiding my eyes into contact with hers. For a 4 1/2 year old of my life to date experiences, this resulted in my discovering my safe place: in the lap of a wonderful person.

When I was 6-years-old, in addressing my erratic behavior, the psychiatrist explained to her that my setting in her lap was unhealthy, and had to be stopped.

I remember times after that instruction, of crying while trying to climb in her lap, and she is crying while physically impeding me, telling me I can't.

For years after - until they sent me back to the ones she adopted me from - it was constantly thrown in my face: "Why do you hate me? Ever since I stopped letting you set in my lap, you've been nothing but hateful to me. It wasn't my fault!"

For me, a young child with pre-existing abandonment issues, I believed I processed that lap banishment as another abandonment by another mother.

I spent the majority of my life using sex as a means of gaining a sense of intimacy, both appropriately and inappropriately. I went from one-night-stand to one-night-stand, some of them lasting months, but never going beyond superficialities. I was damaged, and couldn't - didn't know how - to be intimate.

This isn't really a Pity Party. You see, after a very heart-wrenching end of the line blow to my existence, I made a decision to do life differently, in a live-in substance abuse program. Actually, it was a lock-down on-unit-therapy program. I began tearing myself down, and in the process of rebuilding myself, I fell in love.

Honest to God, higher than any substance could get me, love. And God, was she beautiful. Her eyes, her smile, her personality. Her everything inspired me to become something better. Something that could deserve the love of someone as beautiful.

Unfortunately, I was in my 14th year of prison, and she was a Sergeant, working for the prison.

Maybe I was just manipulating her for my own selfish desires - as her fellow officers went to describe to me why they had to "protect" their Sergeant. I didn't think so; but, I felt as if she was on my team, and as such, I was obligated to keep her out of any question of her being inappropriate.

I took all the blame, all the heat, and rode the wave to now. Years later when I saw her, I just couldn't face her when I saw her passing. She is now out of the prison industry, but I still think of her, in song:

"When you walk away" by Nicholas Lear

V1:
When I see you come around now days,
and you don't look down, or you just don't look away,
your eyes tell me all those things, that your lips won't say.

Interlude:
Things like: no love lost, no feelings there
you don't know if you ever really did care.

V2:
And when you walk away, you don't see my dying,
don't hear the tear drops fall I'm crying
or late at night, when I'm all alone, crying Lord Jesus just take me

Interlude
home, away from the pain. Take me home...
I can't face another day

Chorus
Was it ever anything but a game, all you did was give me a heart full of pain....
Burning deep within my soul, you sunk your laws in now the pain won't go.
Will I ever learn to love again, will I ever trust another friend....
Don't you see what you're doing to me, when you drop me off in the middle of the big black sea?

End
When you walk away you don't see me dying.
You don't hear the tear drops fall I'm crying.