My Bio - Part 3

James and Charlotte were good friends of my parents. I liked them, along with their daughter Shelley, who was a lesbian. Another couple close to our family was Goldie and Al, and I liked them as well.

Richard and Beatrice, who were beach friends of my folks, owned an ice skating rink in Windsor, Connecticut where I took some lessons. I didn’t see much of Dick, but I remember Bea as being one of the phoniest people I ever met, similar to my Aunt Ruth, though they didn’t look alike.

I rarely saw my cousins Norma and Milton. They seemed nice enough, though.

Cousins Max and Dorothy were a different story. I had mixed feelings about them. They were very generous, giving me money for my big cross-country move later on in life, but they had their faults, too. After I moved, I found out that they regularly visited Tammy, even though she lived over an hour away from them. Yet, when I lived just ten minutes away, they never came to see me. I understood why, though—it was due to the “crazy” label my mother had worked so hard to stick on me.

What really bothered me was how Dorothy, nicknamed Boo, reacted to something I once told her. She and Max were driving me home one day after visiting my father at his friends’ house in Brimfield, Massachusetts. When she asked how I was getting along with my mother, I told her the truth, which wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“I love my cousin Doe! She works so hard! How could you cut her down like that?” she demanded.

Hey, she asked!

Regarding my health, my physical challenges as of the very early 2000s include being deaf in my left ear which is deformed, ADHD, asthma, and allergies.

ADHD just means you’re hyper, often have trouble sleeping, and sometimes struggle to concentrate. That’s all it means. However, my mother tried to brainwash me into believing I had a severe chemical imbalance and needed medication for life simply because I was energetic, a bit eccentric, and saw the world differently. Maybe the doctors brainwashed her too; I’ll never know for sure. But this was a time when people preferred to label certain traits and prescribe pills, rather than accepting the person as they were or addressing the real root of the problem.

My mother nearly miscarried me, so she was given an estrogen drug (DES) which they believed back then would help. Later, they discovered it could cause cervical cancer in DES daughters and increase the risk of infertility. I don’t know if I’m sterile because of this drug or for another reason. I might not be sterile at all, just not meant to have kids (I possibly had an early miscarriage in the late ’90s). Despite deciding I didn’t want kids in the end, somehow I knew this would be the case since I was a little girl. This was part of my prominent sixth sense, which didn’t fully develop until I was in my twenties.

In the ’70s, I had fifteen plastic surgeries in Boston to build an outer ear. The results were disappointing; it never looked natural, and twenty years later, it brought me problems. Persistent sensitivity within the frame led me to a doctor, resulting in two surgeries to dismantle the frame and have a canal drilled. The hearing I gained in that ear is next to nothing.

I was amazed at how I could be in and out of the hospital on the same day for two operations in Arizona in 1994, yet had to stay for two days for each of the many reconstructive surgeries I had in Boston. In Phoenix, they just bandaged the area. Back in the ’70s, my entire head was covered in bandages, except for my face and a small area at the crown of my head where my hair was tied in a ponytail. The part under my neck was the worst—it itched terribly, and I had to wear the bandages for weeks.

The only other physical issues I can recall are being hospitalized for a couple of weeks with pneumonia when I was around nine, and falling off my bike and needing many stitches in my chin when I was about twelve.

They say our health declines with age, yet I’ve been much healthier in my thirties than I was in my twenties, especially considering how I struggled to breathe throughout most of my twenties. Luckily I quit smoking when I was 31.

I grew up in a small affluent town in Massachusetts, just outside Springfield. The Connecticut state line was only minutes away. We lived in a two-story, four-bedroom house with a large backyard, built while my mother was pregnant with me. I had a little playroom in the cellar until my paternal grandmother came to live with us. She had lived in California, but after her second husband died and she had a stroke, she moved in with us. She lived in the finished cellar since it had a bathroom and shower stall she could use. My new playroom became one of the bedrooms since Larry and Tammy were out of the house before I was even ten years old. For the most part, I felt like an only child, and believe me, there were plenty of times when I wished I truly was.

Next door, my maternal grandparents lived in a two-bedroom ranch.

I won’t sugarcoat my childhood. Sadly, the only fond memories I have are of birthdays and holidays, but even those could be shaky. Being with family was often stressful for me. It made me very uncomfortable—I always felt like an outcast, walking on eggshells, and unable to be myself, especially around my mother and sister.

When I was in grade school, Chanukah get-togethers could be fun. We’d go next door to Nana and Pa’s, and they’d dump a bunch of coins on the cellar floor for the youngest kids to gather up.

I looked forward to getting new records and was into TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman.

The most unpleasant preteen experiences were school-related, which would become mother-related. Yes, my mother’s wrath could be scary, and my dad didn’t do much to step in and defend us kids. Though there was physical abuse, there wasn’t as much of that as there was verbal and emotional abuse. She would strip my room of the things I treasured most (my little Victrola was always at the top of her list) when I’d do poorly in school, which usually left me thoroughly depressed. Sometimes just going home with a bad report card was quite a task. My heart would pound with anxiety every step of the way, knowing I was probably going to get hit or punished, or both.

Despite my father being more passive, he did most of the hitting. I remember waking up terrified one night as a child to the sounds of my father beating Larry or Tammy with his belt. Once, my mother even came in to comfort me while she allowed it to go on.

But they stuck together no matter what. If one of my parents had killed one of us, the other would still stand by them, never mentioning it, forever acting as if it never happened. In a town like Longmeadow in the ’70s, they’d have gotten away with it too.

My father once went to attack Larry during a Passover feast next door at Nana and Pa’s house when Pa jumped up and shouted, “Not in my house!”

“I’m going to call DYS!” should’ve been more like it.

A teacher hit me once as well. It was only on the rump, but it was still wrong. To me, violence is violence, whether it’s a little slap or a major beating. No one should hit anyone unless it’s in self-defense. I believe that hitting kids usually leads to aggressiveness. My mother brainwashed me into believing it was an act of love. She’d tell me she did it because she loved me. I thought it was normal for parents to hit their kids, so for a time, I believed that when I had a problem with someone, like a classmate, hitting them was the proper thing to do, and I usually did.

Because Tammy was eight years older than me, I was often left alone with her. That was rather terrible since she was so much like my mother. Tall and wide, it was often said that she was jealous of me. Not just because I was small, but because of the things I’d later be able to do that she couldn’t. She felt stupid and ugly compared to me, so I heard, but personally, I wouldn’t have cared what she looked like or what her IQ was if she had only been less of a monster. While her jealousy was frustrating to deal with and sometimes embarrassing when she’d pick on me in front of others, I felt more sorry for her than angry. This is because, while Tammy may have had nice eyes and wasn’t the dumbest person alive, she was still quite homely-looking and lacked any real skills or talent.