Ethel

Ethel is my trauma. She is also my mother. She passed away in June two years ago. I don’t know if I miss her or if I am relieved that I no longer have to accommodate a relationship that was toxic for me and my wife. My kids loved her – she was a colorful grandmother that swore like a sailor and bought them whatever they wanted, which was mainly high sugar content snacks. My wife and I were against high sugar snacks and provided them in very limited quantities at our home, but when we dropped the kids off for our first trip away from them when they were little, my mother had went to Sam’s Club and bought enough sugar to give an elephant diabetes. This made us feel great about leaving our children alone with a grandmother who blatantly disregarded our desire to feed our children healthy food. Oh, and she also cut my daughters hair with kitchen scissors while we were celebrating our tenth anniversary which made my wife gasp when we connected with our kids on a video call while we were away. My mom was the antithesis of what we wanted from a grandparent, but she was the most willing to be a grandparent, so there was that.

When I was a small child my mother had an affair with the man that ended up raising me, but at the time it was a scandal in a very small town of 2500 in northern Idaho. My real father wasn’t very supportive of this affair and ended up with a restraining order keeping him away from our new scandalous house. The town ended up being too small from such a thing, so we moved across state line to a medium sized community in eastern Washington. I am not sure how traumatic this event was to my young psyche, but the most damaging part that I do remember was how mad my real father was and how he made me promise not to call my stepfather, Dad. This turned out to be a little unfair as my father passed away when I was eight and the man that my mother had had an affair with was my stepfather at the time and is still the man that I consider my father to this day – he was a good dad that I never called Dad. I do call him Pop today, but it took me to well into my twenties to start calling him that even though he had adopted me when I was twelve. I am a hard headed dude.

Ethel was diagnosed with bipolar disorder with a bit of maniac depression thrown in at some point during my childhood, but she dismissed these diagnosis and continued the behavior that gave the therapist the fuel for such a diagnosis. She would throw things at my stepfather and scream profane expletives while driving home the fact that he was selfish because he cared about the three children he had before he bent her over the desk in their real estate office in Idaho. I think they loved each other, but I did not want to duplicate that kind of love and I began run from these outbursts. I ran out into the neighborhood to create my own adventures that didn’t involve adult problems. It seemed to me that adults had lots of problems, mostly self-created, and I wanted to avoid such pitfalls and live in a softer world. I found very early that drugs and alcohol softened those edges.

When I turned sixteen, Ethel went off her rocker again. She had an affair with a man in Florida that, in my opinion, was a scumbag but I had not met him yet. She told me that I would have to move in with said scumbag and go with her to Florida. At this point, I had lived with my stepfather for twelve years and my real father had passed eight of those years ago, so he was all I knew. He was a great father and he did not want me to go and he probably had just as much right to have me stay with him as she had to make me leave. I left, not because I loved my mother more, but because I was having a very hard time in high school and wanted a reset. I broke my father’s heart and my mother didn’t even move to Florida for months – she left me with the scumbag. I disliked the drunk scumbag so much that I moved into my Aunt’s house not far away. She was away in the Northeast selling miniature donuts at fairs and carnivals for at least another two months. So, here I was a sixteen-year-old wanderer living alone in a shitty town in Florida. I walked out on the football field before school started and took out my anger on a bunch of unsuspecting teammates that would become the best thing that happened to me in Florida.

Ethel wrapped up her life in Washington at some point and came to move in with the drunken scumbag. I had made myself clear that I would never join her in his home. She had left a man that was a wonderful, sober father to me, and even though I wasn’t a flawless teenager I was unwilling to put up with a scumbag when I knew what a grown man was supposed to act like. My stepfather drove my truck all the way to Florida for me – he probably should have demanded that I go back with him, but I wouldn’t have. I had this little window of freedom and it looked sexy to me. I wanted to make adult decisions as I believed the adults in my life had fucked theirs up. I did not make good ones either.

Ethel moved into my Aunt’s house as well after a couple weeks with him made her come to the same conclusion that I had. My Aunt had arrived back by then – I had spent two months by myself having parties with my new classmates. My Aunt’s house was an alcoholic house, so when she did come home, my parties continued as she loved having all the youth around drinking with her. At this point in my life, I became the parent of my mother – she leaned on me for everything and all of her decisions were bad. She just chased men looking for a savior – looking for another man that would take care of her like my stepfather had. There were none in Florida. I drank and smoked pot every day to soften the edges. Ethel was sharp, crying all the time, trying to figure out how to put her life back together and I did not want to be her emotional crutch. I played football with fury and I reveled in my new kid status at the high school – the chicks dug the new kid – and not only did I hide from all my feelings in a bottle, but I became as sexually active I was allowed – another addiction to make me feel better. Dopamine became my daily adventure.

My seventeen-year-old self believed that the world revolved around me and that other people’s problems were just that. I was making the decisions for myself and they weren’t any better than my mother’s emotionally destroyed ones – mine were based on how much success I thought that I could get out of life while having the most fun possible. I left out most of the hard work that is needed to excel. I decided to stay in Florida even when my mother went back to my stepfather after a year – this was a decision that ended up changing the direction of my life. A seventeen/eighteen year old boy still needs his parents to guide him, but I threw mine out because they couldn’t guide themselves. I have some serious regrets here and I have spent much of my adult life trying to forgive myself for them. My stepfather had raised me to be an athlete and our family, including my stepbrothers and sister (who treated me like there blood and still do to this day) all loved football. My two older brothers were very good at it and I idolized both of them so I followed in their footsteps. My staying in Florida deprived my father of my senior season of football as well as deprived my home high school in Washington of the quarterback that they had developed. I stayed because I loved my new team in Florida and I thought that we were going to be unstoppable. I lived in an unsavory environment during my senior year and became a drug addict during my senior season. I also brought three of my football friends with me on this journey and all of us sucked at football when high on speed. I made two seasons shit – one in Florida and one in Washington. Regrets are weird because who knows if I would have moved back to Washington if I could have improved the season for the kids that I grew up with, especially for my best friend who is no longer with us. I believe that living in a house with parents would have helped, but some of the kids back in Washington became addicted to meth at the same time that I was doing a much lighter version of over-the-counter pills. As I look back I blame my mom for everything, but it was me who popped the pills and rolled the joints and drank forty’s before school. I was a wrecking ball for whomever I was around and wherever I was.

I moved back to Washington after a very average football season, not one that would get me into college to play, I had to rely on the fury of my junior year to get me any consideration. Ethel and Ed, as I called my stepfather, were back in their happy home acting like nothing had happened and I got my life back into something more sane. My parents no longer parented me – they just let me be the wrecking ball that I was. I guess I put on a show from time to time that made it seem as if I was the all-American child that they described me to their friends as. I was snorting cocaine with their chosen caretaker from my childhood and eating LSD and mushrooms with my friends, which, I guess, is all-American. Ethel was not a lover of football like the rest of us, but she was very concerned about my academics and always demanded that I go college even if I didn’t play football. The only reason that I wanted to go to college was to play football, so we both had the same goal, just with different motivations. I do not know how I held it together enough to fulfill either one or our goals, but somehow I ended up walking on the football team at the University of Idaho the next year (the truth was that my older brother had connections, but I was good with that).

The next major life event that I remember being involved in my parents lives was their divorce which I was in the middle of trying to keep it from turning into a complete war. They made it a couple more years after I went to college, but Ethel still threw shit at Ed and called him selfish often. I never agreed with this opinion because my father raised me unselfishly and his demonstration of being a kind, upright man has been a beacon that has helped me steer my life back to the white hat side of things. Ethel spun out of control after the divorce – she cried for eight months while staying with a friend in Las Vegas and eventually had to move where I had ended up in Texas so she could fuck my life up good and soundly. She did too.

My mother had friends that were life long friends and only some of the time did she destroy those relationships, but when it came to family, she preferred to burn them all down. Dr. Phil was talking directly to my wife and I one day through the TV and he told us to limit contact with toxic relationships, so I didn’t speak to my mom for eight months after she told my wife that she was using me and that she was out to ruin my life. My wife does not use, she only loves and my mother attacked this sweet little thing because she was taking my attention away from the center of the world which was always Ethel.

There is a whole book to be written about Ethel, but for now I will leave it the attempt to break up my marriage as a picture of what kind of thoughts drove my mother and how our relationship was unhealthy, toxic. I carry anger and blame with me every day and I have tried to bury it in a sweat lodge and leave it on the carpet of the Mankind Project, but there is still a light film of it covering my insides, a rage that pokes its head into my life at all the wrong times. It is generational and has seeped into my relationship with my children just enough that Ethel lives a little bit in all of us. She was terrorized and abused for her entire childhood and her pain lives on. I believe that it is diluted with each generation, but we don’t get to ignore it – we have to break things sometimes to overcome it. Demons are real, but so are angels and we all have a choice of who we will sit with for eternity.