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I am the fourth child of four, the youngest, the
'baby' of the family. We are spaced on a three year, three year, five
year pattern (some would say I was born two years late). When I was
born, my sister (the oldest) was eleven. She was as you might expect
'Mother's helper' and, I am told, took an immediate shine to me. I
have been told that she enjoyed walking me in my stroller and giving
me baths. I remember that my crib was set up in her room, and we
moved from that house when I was still two years old. My oldest
brother was eight, and already in the fourth grade. He seemed to take
little notice of my appearance. He was already comfortable with his
position in the middle of the family. He was a rival with his older
sister, and a rival with his younger brother, but I seemed to be just
a minor curiosity in the grand sceme of things. But poor Rod! He was
five at the time of my birth. To hear him talk about it as an adult,
each story bears the thread of total devistation from transforming
from 'the youngest' to just another one 'in the middle'. It is
amazing to listen to these stories, and I repeat one for you here.
As I was growing up my mom would sometimes pull
out picture albums from 'the trunk' on a rainy summer day. The photo
album for Fran had pictures all the way until her seventh birthday.
Mom would tell me the names of each of the children seated around the
table. Ted's picture album was noticably smaller, ending with him
just starting to walk. Lots of pictures in white baby shoes, learning
to walk at Fran's side. Rod's picture book was empty, with his
hospital birth picture and several others of him wrapped in a
delivery blanket stuffed between the cover and the first page. As you
can already guess, my book was empty. Of course, there were loose
pictures, each with a story, my favorite being of Grandpa and Grandma
(my mothers parents) balancing a baby on their lap. Mom was always
certain it was me, but would then stop and have to recalculate when
Grandma died and when I was born and if the baby was actually Rod.
These pictures were in the sleeves from the developer, and not
arranged in any particular way or even stored in one particular
place. We are not the kind of family that took a lot of pictures, and
we certainly did not ever write down any of these stories, so they
are already on their way into the white fog of forgotten history.
Mom did not tell stories to me of my childhood. Nothing about how
much I weighed or whether I cried or slept well. Nothing about my
favorite toys or taking my first steps. My favorite stuffed animals
were the ones that Ted and Rod were done with. And I rode in the same
peddle car, the same tricycle, the same two-wheeler. Years later,
after Ted was through college and Rod was living in a flop house,
smoking and staying out all night and working as a short order cook,
times were very different. I was the only child to be 'given' a
ten-speed bicycle and then a car without any expectation that I would
somehow 'earn it' or 'pay for it' with 'my own money'. Some would
view this as a decent thing, wishing that it had been available for
themselves. Others would be torn apart with jealousy, using terms
like 'favorite' to describe me. It is, of course, nothing more than
the fact that each child in a family grows up in different times,
with parents that have different income, different expenses,
different worries, and different priorities. It happens in all
families. But in ours, it evolved to an insurmountable point of contention.
So my earliest childhood story was not told by my mom, but rather
delivered by my next older brother Rod. Mom did not spend any time
telling details of my birth, my coming home from the hospital,
teething, or my favorite childhood toys. I've heard often of how Fran
as baby cried and cried and cried while she cut four molars all on
one night. Each of us kids, as new parents, were the recipient of the
unending retelling of the story where baby Fran lost her pacifier on
a trip to Grandpa's farm. I know of how Ted won a stuffed animal for
being named "pudgiest baby" on a local TV show and how he
and "orangey" were inseparable. I heard how the difficult
delivery of baby Rod lead the doctor to tell Mom and Dad that he
should be their last child. I was told how Mom refused to accept that
advice and, after waiting an extra two years, brought me into the
world (literally, against doctors orders).
So the responsibility fell to Rod to recall the
time when I stood in my playpen, too young to speak and certainly too
young to remember the events of the day. Rod would have been five
possibly six years old. Ted would have been eight possibly nine. But
this particular story would wait a quarter century to be retold. Rod
would be 30 possibly 35, and I would be 25 possibly 30 when the story
was first recalled after a holiday family dinner. But the telling of
this story grew to fascinate Rod, and he was sure to bring it out
annually, back in the days when we used to have family events (nobody
understands why we don't anymore).
At the story's first telling my ears perked up
and Rod smiled to see that I had made eye contact with him. It is not
often that a story from before my memory would be unearthed, and it
was unlikely that Dad or Mom would be its source. With everyone's
attention, Rod recalled that long ago day for our family members
gathered in his dining room at our holiday afterglow.
As a child whose age was still measured in months, mom regularly
placed me in a playpen surrounded by toys and went about the business
of running a home with four young children and very few modern
conveniences. When I was a new parent, Mom often advised Lyn and I to
care for our new baby in this same manner. This became advice we
acknowledged but neglected to take.
Rod recounted, then reenacted his distraction of his baby brother
that day by wiggling his fingers or just waiting for me to look away.
He performed a dramatic rendition of his actions for us, wiggling his
fingers and reaching into an imaginary playpen to stealthily extract
an imaginary stuffed animal and then hiding it from my sight. Then he
laughingly told us how he methodically repeated this process, over a
period lasting dozens of minutes, that day two plus decades previous.
He methodically extracted one toy after another while engaging an
imaginary baby (that was me) visually or distracting him in some
manner. Finally, success was achieved, the last toy was removed from
his defenseless three month old baby brother's playpen.
Ignoring the actual story and its dangerous psychological overtones,
you must now instead simply imagine this 38 year old man standing is
his own dining room, surrounded by friends and family members
directly after a holiday dinner, performing a dramatic interpretation
of his terrorized three month old baby brother. First he made fists
bending his elbows holding them even with his chest, then he squinted
his eyes tight enough to force his cheeks and face to turn pinkish
red. Finally, while bending slightly forward, he stomped his feet
rapidly, left then right then left then right, then delightedly
mimicked the blood-curtling cry of a frightened three month-old baby.
This at a time in his own life when his son from his failed first
marriage was in high school (and watching) and the ones from his
second family were old enough to be the very victim in this cherished
playpen drama.
But the loud crying and stomping achieved Rod's desired result.
Everybody at the party, whether they had been listening to his story
with me or not, stopped their own conversations and turned to face
him. He stopped his baby-cries and opened his eyes, sheepishly
looking about the room to find to his delight that he was suddenly
the center of everyone's attention. To tell the story's conclusion,
he quoted Mom's off-stage voice, using the scratchy and nasally sound
reserved for older, stupid, women in his reoccurring dramatic
reenactments, with "what are you boys doing in there?" He
then told of quickly putting the toys back and of his three month old
baby brother becoming quiet again. Finished with the story, and with
everybody in the room affixing their attention on him, he crossed to
me, actually stroked under my 33 year old chin with his index finger
and address me in baby-talk, saying "dere, dere, dere little
one" or "you were sooooo cute when you were a little
boopskie, Dave".
Rod found this story hilarious and began to
repeat it at all family functions. While nobody actually praised him
for his five-year-old machismo, nobody within my birth family even
once chastised him or simply turned away in disgust. And Rod, to this
day, has no trouble switching between his relationship with me at age
40 and the one of an unsupervised tormentor available to him at my
age of three months. To Rod, it seems, the relationship between a
sadistic unsupervised five year old and his defenseless three month
old rival in a playpen constitutes the "good old days".
Nobody within my family found this story (or Rod's annual gleeful
holiday retelling of it) to be deranged or disgusting, or at least
they did not voice any such reasonable abhorrence at Rod telling it
the first, second, or third time. At the conclusion each time, Rod's
eyes twinkled and his smiled broadened until his dimples appeared.
Yet, as obvious as this repeated episode (his
gleeful retelling, not the actual event) should have been to me at
the time, decades elapsed while I still fully expected to have a
normal, rational, and reasonable, adult, peer to peer relationship
with my next older brother. It is embarrassing to admit that it took
me over TEN YEARS (and countless other insults delineated elsewhere)
to realize that, regardless of my own rational actions or
expectations, it was my birthright to have Rod as my proud,
delusional, self-absorbed personal tormentor. At his age 40, he could
fondly recall past violations of me, and on a whim willingly and
without remorse act out new ones whenever he wished. When questioned
or accused of errant or unsociable behavior, he can calmly describe
himself and his actions as normal and his accuser as crazy. I have
read, and now fully understand, that a true sociopath can easily pass
a lie-detector test, for they believe their own delusional thoughts.
And when I confront him with the facts and evidence, or lay out the
details of my hurt feelings, he is quick to repackage then retell
false versions of my opinions to my other family members; first
overstating my thoughts in extreme, then concluding for his listener
that his stated lies should be held as proof that I am lying or
crazy. First I was frustrated by his character attacks. Later I
decided to emotionally disown the lot of them. Now I have come to the
conclusion that nothing will change for them. That it is not the role
of the youngest to teach. It is the role of the youngest to cry in
his playpen and be stroked under the chin as an adult. You may be
thirsty, but the well is dry.
Such is the relationship I have today with Rod
and, I finally understand, the one he has chosen to have with me
since the day Mom first brought me home from the hospital over 40
years ago. How very, very sad for both of us. Needless to say, he has
expressed no remorse at his childhood behavior or its potential
impact to me and my development or my later adult life. Neither he
nor anybody else within my birth family has ever considered the
exercise of total power over a defenseless being as immoral.
Actually, it is obvious that he rather enjoys that very thought,
taking time to relive the addictive glow of the feeling of personal
power and control. For him to be either unwilling or unable to
differentiate between what happened then and now is bizarre. It is
reminiscent of a rapist or molester reliving the sexual frenzy of
their total power over their defenseless and traumatized victim. When
a normal person hears such a demented story, it naturally makes their
skin crawl. But not in my family.
While there are some stories I could tell of
similarly sadistic childhood acts performed upon me by Ted (like
pretending to flush me down the toilet during the middle of my
potty-training), the childhood act is not point. Adults
are not held accountable for what they do as children, only what they
do as adults. Ted has not taken time as an adult to relive and retell
his childhood acts as a form of adult self stimulation and
glorification. I rather presume that he, like me, has forgotten they
occured. It isn't necessary for Rod to apologize for the ages old and
very normal self-centered jealous and competitive actions of once
being a 5 year old rival. But he must not glory in those feelings and
try to relive their euphoria as an adult. Certainly not in front of
children. And certainly not in my presence.
But now, with so many deranged episodes from Rod's adult interaction
with me on the record (and more added to the list every day), it is
no longer enough for me to have him to promise to 'play nice' from
now on (like the snake says, 'you can trust me'). It has become
necessary that he admit that his behavior at the grown up family
party (not the behavior at the playpen) was wrong. The telling of
this story, the reveling as an adult in the total powerlessness of me
as a pre-toddler (and attempting to bridge between that time and the
current times by stroking under my chin) is sick and requires direct,
personal renunciation on his part. The fact that nobody in my family
except me is willing or able to point this out is a sad indictment on
them all. And it is the final proof to me that I must be responsible
for my own healing and empowerment.
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