Masonic stuff has taken up a good amount of my time and energy the past few days, so forgive me for not posting for a few days. I doubt anyone out there was thinking, “If That Asperger Dude doesn’t write a new post soon, I’m going into withdrawls.”
Last night at my Lodge meeting I gave a devotional about the pointlessness of being angry at God but the inevitability that we all get that way at some point in our lives. I gave it the way I prefer to give my devotionals, go in there with a general idea and stand up and speak from the top of my head and the depth of my heart. No note cards, no prepackaged platitudes. I think it went over well with the men who bothered to listen. It is an ongoing source of frustration to me to look out and see less than half of the members paying attention. Yet when talk of barbecues, or small town Hee Haw joking begins, they all are completely focused on the subject matter.
It’s the older members that are generally the ones not paying attention. They don’t care what some damn young liberal fool like myself has to say. They still want to operate in the reality of 1940, and they want to connect invisible strings to the backs of the younger Masons so they can make us dance when they want. The whole situation with my Masonic life fills me with bitterness and heartbreak, because when I first became a Mason, I really wanted to make it more than a twice a month visit to Lodge. I wanted it to be what I spent my days doing, and certain people filled my head with promises that this could happen. But I’m still waiting, and I’m enough of a realist to know that it will never happen. The depression and disappointment of my Masonic life is an electric blanket that I can’t throw off in the middle of July.
Every spring, the local council on child abuse awareness places a number of pinwheels on the corner of a middle school’s property in downtown. You know, those cheap little dollar pinwheels places like drugstores put up near the register in hopes that whiny brats can talk their moms into a hasty last minute purchase. Each of the pinwheels represents a reported case of child abuse and/or neglect in my home county, which isn’t small but is far from one of Georgia’s most populous counties. There were just under 1,100 reported cases in 2007. It’s one thing to see the number 1,100, but it’s quite a powerful visual image to see that many pinwheels, glistening cheerily in the springtime sun, as if to hide their own dark symbolism.
The council does this every spring, and although I applaud them for their efforts, I have little faith it makes much difference. Here in the deep South, there is still very much an attitude of, “It’s their kid, and it’s nobody’s business how they raise them.” It’s not an attitude that’s going away any time soon. God knows how much the council would have to spend on pinwheels if every incident of child abuse/neglect was actually reported.
Every time I drive by Pinwheel Corner, as I have come to think of it, I feel an enormous swell of sadness for the little boy in me who painfully earned a pinwheel that was never displayed in his honor. And I think of how the memories of all of us pinwheel children will forever be stained, even damned.
When I was in eleventh grade, I conducted what I thought of as a psychology experiment. I have often done this sort of thing over the years, and I have to admit it can be manipulative on my part. I shouldn’t do it, but sometimes my intense intellectual curiosity gets the better of me. It involved my mother, and my curiosity about what she thought of me.
The “in crowd” at my school were all members of the Key Club (guys) and Keywannettes (girls). I knew this was the kind of crap that impressed my mother. She was constantly on my case about making friends, fitting in, that kind of thing. So I lied and told her a member of the Key Club had asked me to be his “Little Brother”, which meant that he would encourage the rest of the Key Club dudes to take me as a member. She lit up. She talked to me more that afternoon than she had in weeks. She asked questions, and beamed that she was pleased I was “finally coming around”. She even smiled while she did it. I had my answer. That experiment shaped a lot of my attitude towards my mother, and to an extent, my sister as well.
When I told my mother I wanted to be a Mason, she was happy about it. Her happiness had more to do with the fact that I would be socially involved with something than my intense interest in the archaic roots of modern Masonry, but at least she was happy for me. When I was going through the grunt work of becoming a Mason, learning catechisms and so forth, I would sometimes complain to her about the way the older Masons hazed the new members. Some of it was just good fun, but oftentimes their teasing was excessive, and even borderline cruel. When I mentioned how I was frustrated with the neverending hazing, my mother said, “They’re testing you to see how much you want it.” This really burned my ass because I felt like when someone tells their parent that people are being unbearably obnoxious to their kid, the parent’s first thought should be their kid’s well-being, regardless of his or her age. Unbelievably, she encouraged me not to rock the boat and to continue to tolerate my tormentors. It was childhood all over again. No one was beating me up like my father did, but they were verbally abusing me plenty. My mother was convinced it wasn’t that big of a deal. If people like my mother and sister are willing to let other people beat their ass with a paddle or whatever so they can be members of the cool sorority, that’s fine for them. But although I can enjoy a good joke, I don’t want to be picked on over and over. Had my fill of that a long time ago. It was quite a revelation to me to know my mother’s instinct was to be concerned that my inability to deal with verbal abuse could be harmful to the group, not her kid.
I was married once before, and it was a period of my life so wasteful and unfulfilling it really doesn’t even merit much mention. But during that time, I experienced something that would cast in bronze my beliefs that my mother vastly preferred my sister to me.
I had set up an online account with AOL before my first marriage began. I allowed my sister and mother to use it as guests. They never had to pay for their online usage. I paid for it for years. After I married my first wife, we decided to go with a different internet service to save money, and frankly, because we hated AOL. I had told my mother about our plans months in advance, and advised her that she and my sister would need to open new accounts because the new service we planned to use limited more strictly the number of guest accounts. Besides, I’d been married for a year or so, and it was time for a married couple to have its own internet stuff. After the agreed upon time arrived, I canceled the AOL account and opened the new one with Bellsouth. My sister freaked out. Seems she had not taken the simple steps to get AOL to forward her mail to a new account. She had not even bothered to set up a new email, even though her college would provide her a new email account. She and my mother went on the warpath against me. My mother called me in a state of panic over and over, which was ridiculous. There was a simple way to solve their problems, and I had given them time to do it. Yet again, their time was more important than mine. My mother told me to re-open the AOL account, which I refused to do, since AOL had been very snotty to me when I canceled it. I didn’t want to deal with those jerks again.
Apparently, the whole time, my sister was complaining to my mother how unfair it was. I guess she thought she was entitled to free internet service provided by her married older brother that her friends all made fun of. My mother, in turn, made my dad miserable, as is the usual course of misery. He drove over to my house, told me the situation was making his life unbearable (which I don’t blame him for thinking, at all), and told me to reactivate the account and have it put under his name and credit card. I relented, mostly because I knew he was stuck in a bad in-between area. I felt humiliated, having to sacrifice my principles, going back to AOL, because my mother and sister didn’t take advantage of what I thought was a very fair amount of time to make the adjustments for the changes I planned. Simply put, I lapsed into a state of full blown rage, and it lasted for weeks. Looking back, I guess it was only by the grace of God that I didn’t drop dead from a heart attack.
I shamefully admit that I said awful things to and about my mother. It was a terrible way to handle a bad situation, and I accept full responsibility for not expressing my displeasure in a non-abusive manner. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. I just want it to be known that I do feel a great sense of shame and regret about my reaction to the whole ordeal.
In the end, my temper tantrums blew any chance I had of people taking my side in the argument. If I had handled it more maturely, maybe someone would have listened to me. Maybe not.
I fought with my mother for weeks, and threatened to sever the relationship entirely. I had had enough. All my life, living in the shadow of someone six years my junior, had been a difficult burden. Knowing my mother and biological father both hitched their stars to my sister when I was very young had also been a difficult burden. But knowing that my mother would blame me for my sister’s irresponsibility was the straw that broke the Asperger’s back.
Finally, I cooled off some, and began the process of getting back to my facade of a marriage, trying not to think about the facade of a relationship I had with my mother and sister. A few weeks later, my cousin was getting married, and it would be the first time I would be in the same room with my mother and sister since the s*** hit the fan. I had committed to be an usher, and my sister was to be maid of honor. I snidely remarked my sister had been everyone’s maid of honor since July 13, 1980.
The events that unfolded on the day of my cousin’s wedding provided the toxic, festering cherry on the sundae of bulls**** that I was being force-fed. As maid of honor, my sister was responsible for hanging onto the groom’s wedding band. She forgot and left it in the room in which the bridesmaids had gotten ready for the service. When they arrived at the point of exchanging of rings, my sister simply left the room, got the ring, and returned to her spot. She was understandably embarrassed.
What happened then was nearly unbelievable to me. Because my sister was crying from embarrassment, everyone flocked to her to comfort her. The happy, newly married couple probably got one tenth the amount of attention that the distraught maid of honor did. I just stood there shaking my head in amazement. My grandfather walked up to me and sternly barked, “You oughtta go say something nice to your sister. She’s upset.”
Well, Goddammit, I was upset too. I was upset at having spent my life fending off my father’s physical and verbal assaults while everyone around me was too busy doting on my sister to help me. I was upset at the realization that it would always be that way. And I was just plain pissed off, knowing that if I had been the one who had forgotten the wedding band, people would have been lining up not to comfort me, but to make smartass comments and knee-jerk judgments.
“You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me,” I muttered, although I’m sure my grandfather didn’t hear me.
But it was no joke. It was real, it always was, it still is, and it always shall be very real.
I won’t apologize for the way I feel.
All I want is an admission.
Tags: america online, asperger, asperger's, autism, barbecue, bridesmaid, child abuse, deep South, Eastern Star, emotional abuse, family, family relationships, fighting siblings, Hee Haw, in crowd, key club, Keywannettes, Kiwanis, liberal, maid of honor, marriage, pinwheel, rage, temper tantrums, verbal abuse, wedding, wedding rings
