Not Your Typical Family/Losing Donny

I have two sisters and a brother. Well, half anyway. They have a different father than me. My mom divorced their dad a few years before she met mine. They are much older than me, my closest sister is 18 years older than me. I have 13 nieces and nephews, two of which are older than me. I mostly just think of it as having 13 more siblings.

One of my favorite people in the world was my sister's late husband, Donny.

Donny had always had health issues, but never let on that he wasn't feeling well. I remember him letting us shoot him in the leg with his insulin. He never even winced. We thought he was invincible until one night, a few months after our trip to Texas, we received a phone call at 4:00 AM. It was my sister telling us that Donny had passed away during the night. She said that he had had pneumonia and had been very ill for the past few days. She had decided to wait until the next morning to take him to the ER if he wasn't better, and woke up to find him not breathing. What had actually happened was that while he was sleeping he lost consciousness and threw up, he wasn't awake to sit up so it stayed in his mouth and eventually suffocated him. Apologies if this is graphic, but it's true. My sister tried to give him CPR but there was nothing left to be done. My nephews, ages 11, 4, and 2, woke up to see their father carried out in a body bag at age 37.

Fights to Remember

Like most parents, mine fought. Not all the time, and not so much as I got older, but I can still remember a few particularly bad ones. They usually revolved around my dad's habits. Mind you, he was never into anything stronger than whisky or cigarettes...but my mom was not okay with it. First of all, you have to understand my parents were LDS, or Mormon. My mom was raised in the church and my dad was converted in his late thirties. Now my dad had smoked cigarettes all of his life, and when he married my mom he promised to try to quit, especially since they eventually wanted to get married in an LDS temple, which you cannot have habits like smoking in order to be worthy to go to one. When I was born he definitely made strides toward quitting. He'd make it anywhere from few months, to even a year or two. If and when he got caught sneaking a smoke though, my mom was absolutely furious. Then, there was drinking. My dad was not a 'drunk', not even a little. But, on occasion, if he did drink he would get drunk and my mom hated that too. 

My dad is also manic depressive, which is a serious mental illness that borders schizophrenia. Drinking made this much worse. It would make my dad go manic and that made him say and do funny things that put himself and those around him in danger.

----New Years Eve, approx. 1997

Tonight started out very fun. We played games and drank sparkling cider, we watched the ball drop on TV, and then my favorite part- we went outside and banged on our pots and pans and shouted "HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!" The neighbors don't even get mad because everyone makes noise tonight. Now, I'm laying in my bed with my mom. Daddy is out in the hall way and he's been walking and talking funny because of what he drank, my mom says. He just fell down but my mom says she doesn't want to help him because it's his own fault. She says he ruined the holiday and she is crying. I don't know why she is upset, I think he is kind of funny even though I liked it better before he got this way. But she is very mad at him and says he has to sleep on the couch for a while. I'm tired and I just want to sleep and want mommy to stop crying.

----Approx. 1997

Mom found more of daddy's drinks in the cupboard tonight. He has been drinking them without telling her and she is screaming at him. He is screaming back because she took all of his bottles and dumped them in the sink. He says she is pouring money down the drain. She is calling him names that I'm not allowed to say and telling him he needs to leave our house. I start crying because I don't want daddy to leave, I want him to stay and tuck me in tonight. I really hate it when they fight and I don't like it when they scream so loud at each other. My mom says he is drunk and if he doesn't leave she will call the police. She pushes him too the door and I try to tug on her shirt to tell her to stop it but they aren't listening to me. My dad is shoving my mom back and hits her on the head. I think it was an accident because he is saying he is sorry and he didn't mean to but now my mom is even more upset and she is walking out of the house. I tell her to stop and not to leave me but she is already gone. Now I am crying even more and daddy is trying to calm me down. He says not to worry and we will find mommy and bring her back home. Daddy calls the police and says that his wife is missing. After the police come and they are about to leave in their cars with the lights to look for her, my mom comes back into our driveway and tells the policemen she just went out to sit in the car and that they can leave and everything is fine. We go to sleep in my bed and daddy is sleeping on the couch again.

----Approx. 1998

My mom tells me she needs to have a talk with me. She says that some of our neighbors have heard her and daddy fighting and they have called the police and told on them. She says that a social lady is coming to talk to me to see if I am being well taken care of. I think this is silly because I am the best taken care of girl in the world. My mom and dad fight a lot lately, but they still love me and they always make up in a couple of days. Mom says if the lady thinks that her and dad fight too much that they will take me away to live with someone else, she says the lady will ask me questions about them and if I am happy. She says that I need to be careful what I say. I tell her not to worry because I love her and I am happy and I don't want to leave her and daddy. She says she is sorry. I don't know why she says this. The lady comes, she is nice and we talk and she leaves. We never hear from her again and I get to stay with mom and dad.

----Approx. 2001

I'm walking home from school. I have just turned into my circle when I see my dad sitting in his usual spot on our porch. He is disabled so he can't work. I don't mind because it means he is always home when I come home from school. He doesn't see me when I turn the corner into our circle and when I see him my stomach drops. I think I see him bring something to his lips but I'm not sure. He finally sees me and stands up sort of quick. He waves as I walk through our gate. I walk over to give him a hug and kiss and yep...there it is. The smell of cigarette smoke. I don't say anything as I walk in the house but I have tears in my eyes as I walk up the stairs to my room. I can't believe it. It's been, what? Two years now? I thought he was done...he promised. I try to forget about it, maybe I smelled wrong. And saw wrong. Maybe he wasn't, maybe the smell is from the neighbors. When my mom comes home, I can't help it, I mention what happened earlier, but tell her I'm not sure. Her face turns to stone and she calls my dad to come upstairs. "Robert. Tell me the truth. Have you been smoking?" My dad looks like a deer in the headlights. "Damn it Robert, have you been smoking?" Silence. "No..." "Tell me the truth! Don't you dare lie to me!" Pause. "Yes." All hell breaks loose. In an instant my mom is on a rampage, searching every nook and cranny until she finally finds two Camel packs buried underneath some towels in the laundry room. First things first, she's flushing those suckers down the toilet. Next comes the screaming. I go to my room because I want no part in what's about to go down. She is packing up all my dad's expensive cologne and tossing out off the balcony. I hear the glass shatter. She is storming through the house screaming about how selfish my dad is and how could he and she can't trust him and he doesn't love us...he is trying to defend himself saying today really was the first day he broke down, that he hadn't been lying to her and he was going to stop after he finished the packs. Obviously this is no consolation to my mom. A few hours later my mom has calmed down. She and I are watching Diagnosis Murder on TV and my dad is downstairs listening to the radio. I want to go down and tell him I still love him even though I'm hurt, but then my mom will be upset at me. It's going to be a long week.

----

For the record, my dad has been smoke free for about ten years now. He also doesn't drink anymore, though he still attends regular A.A. meetings. I think he does it more for the company rather than the actual support. My dad says the reason he stopped smoking was because I had told him, probably shortly after that last cheery memoir, that if he smoked again I wouldn't talk to him until I was 21. Well, I'm 21 now, I can't remember saying that to him and I probably wouldn't have stuck to it (I just felt so bad for him and my mom always got angry enough for the both of us). Anyway, fights like those happened semi often as a child, and though it could have been much worse, I'll never forget them. Though my mom often threatened divorce, I don't think she would have ever left my dad. They loved each other so much. He was just dumb sometimes, men do dumb things, and she was easily angry with him. I don't think they could have lived without one another though, and I know he misses her more than he lets on.

The Need to Provide

On September 7th of 2008 my mom died. A few years prior she had been diagnosed with severe diabetes and later breast cancer. She had been undergoing chemotherapy for two years and had actually been getting progressively sicker over the span of about six or seven years prior to that. When I was little, my mom was the hardest worker I knew. It seems like she jobbed hopped a lot from what I can remember. She never finished college and said that was why she was always stuck at some mediocre office job, working long hours for minimal pay. My dad has various mental and physical disorders and he was unable to work any job for longer than a few months, so my mom had to take on much of the bread winning alone. 

I feel like my mom always had this irrational need to provide with means she really didn't have. She always wanted us to have the nicest things and never wanted to hear that we couldn't afford to have what other families had. Just because my dad couldn't work and we lived in a trailer park didn't mean we had to live without. See, I also have to explain that before my mom met and married my dad, she was married to another guy whom she had my very much older brother and two sisters with. Back then, she and her ex husband had great jobs, a nice home, took nice vacations, and didn't ever have to penny pinch. I don't think my mom ever got used to going without everything she had before, so she was always trying to make up for us not having the bigger stuff by buying me lots of clothes and toys and other things I really didn't need. She liked to go out to eat and would get so angry with my dad if he ever tried to tell her that we couldn't afford something. 

She'd say, "Are YOU the one working 10 hour days to make this money? Then why shouldn't I be able to spend it on something nice for us or Karllen?! Why shouldn't I be able to go shopping or out to eat without thinking about the bill?"

My mom just wanted to badly to give me what she was able to give her other kids, and I think she felt so guilty, especially when she got sick and couldn't work anymore, that she couldn't pay for things other kids had. I didn't need really nice clothes or dance lessons or summer trips out of state, but she couldn't forgive herself or my dad for not having those options. What made it worse was that her other children, now all grown up with their own families, were far better off than we were, which really hurt her pride.

One particularly painful memory, not an easy one to talk about, is when my mom was arrested for stealing a pair of pants from a store. I was in fifth grade or so and I had been talking for weeks about these certain kind of pants that apparently every girl at school had. They were carpenter pants, the baggy ones with the different pockets on the sides. I wanted them so badly but my parents didn't have the money to take me shopping for any new clothes. One night my dad and I were waiting for my mom to come home and we got a phone call from her saying my dad needed to pick her up from the police station because she was caught stealing. She came home sobbing saying she just wanted to get me the pants. She knew how much I wanted them and she just happened to see them as she was picking something else up (it was at Walmart or Target or some other super market that it took place). She couldn't stand not being able to afford a pair of pants so she decided to take them. I felt awful, she felt worse. She had never stolen before and she just wanted to make me happy. It was such a silly thing to get arrested for which is what was so tragic about the whole ordeal. 

She was always trying to do more, never believing her time or love was enough. She was definitely not a bad person, which is why I hate sharing this story, she wasn't a criminal, she just wanted to give and have more than what was realistic for our situation.

So...Why Am I Starting a Blog?

So this is it. My first attempt at blogging. I'm sorry to say most of what I'm about to write about offers no firmly stated opinions of politics or global warming or profound insight on other interesting and debatable topics. It's just a story. Maybe not even that, maybe it's just a collection of some of my most fond and not so fond upbringings and childhood recollections. I don't want to write about this to pretend that my life is worth reading about or to assume that I have had more life experience than any other young adult, but I believe life is worth writing about, even if it is just so I can go back and learn from myself, for myself. What I've been through may seem completely insignificant to some and maybe more consequential to others; nevertheless I have never taken the time to really talk about what experiences I've had in the short amount of time I've been living and I think it might be at least beneficial to me to go back and examine my own story and maybe come back understanding myself a little more.

I guess I'll start with the present, a little about myself....

Currently I'm 21 years old. I have terrible vision, I love the smell of gasoline and I have trouble with the consistency of scrambled eggs...I love music and art and the theatre. I attend a community college and will soon be transferring to get my music degree, I'm thinking music education, and perhaps a second major in who the heck knows what else...maybe finance...or physical therapy. (Because they're so closely related.) I love to cook and read and listen to classic rock. I'm a huge Lord of the Rings nerd. I loooooove to sing and I do A LOT of community theatre.:) Sure, I'd love to be on Broadway, but I'm realistic and will be perfectly content if the biggest stage I ever perform on is Hale Center Theatre's...hey, at least I get paid to do what I love, if not as consistently as I'd like! I work as a bank teller and between school and work and rehearsal, I probably spend a total of 40 hours a week at home. I like being busy though. What else...? I am a member of the LDS church, I've been inactive until recently, but I'll talk about that later. Oh, and as for family which I will also go into depth about at a later post, I have two half sisters and a half brother who are all at least 18 years older than me, so I did grow up as an only child and already had a niece and nephew before I was born. I think that is quite enough for my first post so I'll leave it at that.:)