Time For A Story

Or, at least, the start of one...

All right, guys, it’s finally time for the saga. I have been writing on this story for several days and have hardly scratched the surface of the entirety of the event, so it will be broken up into different posts.

Have you ever gone to a family event as an adult, and no matter how much you have done, or what you have accomplished, they still see you as a ten-year-old? Frustrating, right? You would think that they would see you for who you are, not who you were a very long time ago. Sometimes it’s sweet that they still see you that way. It might make you feel protected, or bring you the comfort of home. Sometimes, however, they see you as the black sheep, the screwup because you made mistakes when you were younger, but you can never escape that shroud that permanently surrounds you in their eyes.

Now you understand how Jessica, who we will call Jess, was feeling as she stepped out to greet her two aunts that she hadn’t seen for many years. First, there was Aunt Leanne. Leanne is a tiny woman. She is as petite as she is slender, with her long hair twisted into a knot atop her head. When she wrapped her arms around Jess, Jess couldn’t help but notice how frail seeming she was. Leanne is nearly eighty, and this is her first time seeing her niece in over twenty years. A smile spreads across her face. She could hardly believe that she was seeing her now. She had been told not to come, by Aunt Joan.

Aunt Joan is also short, but stout instead of slight. Her entire person said, severe. Her face was fixed in an angry scowl, and there was no hint of happiness seeing her niece, or the friend that accompanied her. She stalked off away from the happy reunion, and Jess hurried to catch up, greeting her Aunt warmly. The gesture was not returned with anything other than annoyance. Jess wasn’t surprised. Despite her dogged effort to have a relationship with Aunt Joan, it was clear that it meant nothing to her.

In Aunt Leanne’s eyes, Jess was her beloved niece that had sacrificed a great deal in order to take care of her ailing mother until the end of her life. Leanne’s sister, Judy, had lived with Jess until it was impossible for Jess to continue caring for her. She had several heart attacks, a stroke, and was deep into dementia. Jess had kept her at her home for three years after rescuing her from being evicted from her apartment that she had lived in for decades. She couldn’t care for herself, and the management could no longer carry the insurance risk of her living there.

Despite being estranged from her mother most of her life, Jess took her in and made sure that she was as happy and healthy as possible until it was obvious that she needed much more involved care. It was then that Aunt Leanne stepped in with financial help. After all, Judy was the oldest of her four sisters. The youngest, Suzanne, had already passed. The second oldest, Joan, wanted nothing to do with the entire family, leaving just Leanne, and Judy. As sisters, they weren’t close. In fact, they had a terrible falling out years earlier that had cost Leanne a significant amount of money. However, seeing Jess’s willingness, she felt compelled to help, even offering the two of them a place in her home, but that didn’t come to pass for reasons that you will understand later.

Leanne has been independent her entire life. She moved out as a teenager, she has never been married, she hasn’t any children. She dedicated her life to working at a public utilities company for nearly thirty years, and built up two retirement accounts to provide for her in these later years, as well as owning her own home outright, paying it off in a third of the time allotted for her mortgage. She is a kind and generous woman, and she enjoys gardening.

Joan has lived a very different life. She was spoiled when they were younger, being their father’s favorite child. She was given gifts that the other girls would only be able to gaze at longingly. Instead of sharing what she was given, she flaunted her new dresses, her shiny shoes, and her special toys. The others were criticized and ignored.

The family was terribly toxic.

When Joan got older, she decided on a wild life, frequenting gentleman’s clubs to earn a living, and finding partners that treated her terribly, running back to her sisters’ protection when the violence got to be too much. Deciding that something needed to change, Joan found a job at a firm, and quickly set her sights on her married boss. Whether Joan actually loved this man is unknown. What is known, however, was how thrilled she was with his bank account. She had no care for the existing marriage, that was simply an inconvenient obstacle that needed to be dealt with, and dealt with it, she did.

Once married to her pilfered husband, Joan systematically removed herself from her family. She made it clear to them that she was on a higher plane than they were, and they should leave her be. She was ferociously protective of her newfound wealth, and social status, and of course, her roots were something she was ashamed of. Her sisters obliged and remained distant.

As time went by, Joan and her husband adopted a baby boy, Terry. Finding a newfound interest in family, Joan reacquainted herself with her sisters, and her five-year-old niece, Jess. Jess adored the little boy, and thought of him as her new baby brother. They were close, and played together often.

Years passed, and Joan’s husband was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and soon passed away, leaving Joan as a very wealthy woman, and also bringing her true nature back to the surface. It has been well hidden for the years she was with her wealthy husband, but with his passing, she became convinced that everyone was after the money that was finally entirely within her grasp. She even instructed her son, Terry, to have nothing to do with any of the rest of the family, lest he be cut out of any inheritance that may be left to him. He obliged, and the rest of the family were, once again, frozen out.

It stayed this way for a long time. Joan had no use for anyone in her family. She did nothing to keep up with them, and didn’t care in the slightest about what happened to them. Leanne did make attempts to bring her sister back into her life. She would call her and speak to her, but Joan never reciprocated. Undeterred, Leanne called her on a regular basis, and informed her that their sister Judy’s condition was deteriorating rapidly. Joan’s response?

“Take her to the worst nursing home in the state, dump her at the entrance, and drive like crazy.”

Judy had done an enormous amount of the raising of her sisters, and this was the thanks that was returned. Their mother was sick at an early age, and passed away young. Their father disappeared early on, and the saintly stepfather that stepped into their lives had to work every waking hour to make sure they all had enough to eat. He would fill his hole ridden shoes with cardboard to make sure the girls didn’t go without. Judy filled the role of mother and father during those years. This wasn’t to say that Judy didn’t have her own problems, remember what I said earlier, this is a toxic family. Sacrifice was never far from codependence and underhanded falsehoods.

Let’s get back to how people still see you regardless of how much you’ve changed, to Jess, and Aunt Joan. Aunt Joan’s opinion of Jess was formed through the perspective of projection. Jess had a difficult upbringing with her mother. Judy was married to her father briefly, and during that marriage he was an abusive racist to her. After their split, Judy’s self-image plummeted, and she was somewhat resentful of being a single parent, and at times a mother at all. Her ex refused to pay a dime in child support. She comforted herself by pursuing an image of herself that she couldn’t quite obtain. She lived vicariously through her daughter, while at the same time feeling inadequate as a parent.

Jess’s entire life was volatile. She was told her father was dead, only to find out he had abandoned her. Her mother put her in therapy, but then beat her when she told the truth. Judy didn’t want her lies exposed, both that she told the world, but also those she told her child. After being shipped off to various relatives, and finally to Japan in an attempt to offload Jess onto her father, and after her father attempted to be inappropriate with his daughter, Jess sought comfort in her teenage years with a man that belonged to a one-percenter biker gang. She was fourteen-years-old. She began a relationship with him, and her mother, of course, disapproved. Instead of stepping in and parenting her daughter, she packed all of Jess’s belongs into trash bags, and left them on the porch. She refused to answer the door, leaving Jess to fend for herself.

Jess retreated into the life of a woman in an outlaw biker gang. It was a hard and abusive life that she attempted to escape from again and again, only to be dragged back against her will. It took everything she had to finally free herself, and start from scratch. During this time, Jess suffered a severe injury to her neck and back, necessitating several surgeries and a lifetime of pain.

As the years went by, she married, only to be widowed when her husband succumbed to an illness she had begged the doctors to test him for, but they refused. She married again, but then went through a divorce after her husband refused to stop smoking in the middle of the night and dropping the lit cigarettes on the carpet, nearly burning the house down. Her third marriage was the last. She had no interest in pursuing another relationship after he totally changed his personality, going from a dedicated and loyal husband, to one that attempted to entrench her in polyamorous relationships and involving himself in a cult.

Despite all of these struggles, Jess rose above all of it. She cared for two of her husbands throughout long term illnesses, getting the training necessary to give injections, care for central line catheters, and be a full-time dedicated caregiver. She helped one of her husbands to go from living at his father’s house, to learn programming so he could become a computer engineer.

Aunt Joan hadn’t seen Jess since she was a teenager. Jess’s mother claimed that she had run away, hiding the fact that she had thrown her out on the street, forcing her to sleep in alleyways in the pouring rain. When Aunt Leanne had reconnected with Jess, she told Joan all of the things that Jess had done and been through. Joan’s response?

“She’s a liar!”

She didn’t believe a word of it, and still believed that Jess was a delinquent that was rightly disowned, even now being aware that Judy had lied about what had happened when she was younger. She saw her own past reflected in Jess’s eyes, and saw her own poor choices coming back to haunt her. She wanted nothing to do with her in general, but there was a much more insidious reason why she glared at Jess stepping out of the rental car in from of Leanne’s house.

And we will get to that. Now that you have the background, in the next post, the story can begin…