The Weird and The Wacky Meet

Where YouBetIAm comes to write….

Gnawing on Kitties:  The First Year without My Parents

                 “Hi Dad.  Can I speak to Jon or Liz?”

                 “No.  I think not.”

                 *click*

                 I hold my cell phone in my hand.  All I see is a short message on the small color screen, telling me the call has been disconnected.  I drop the phone onto the bed among the opened boxes.  They still have little bits of ripped gold, green and red paper clinging to the sides, hanging on with tape, though most of the wrapping paper is crumpled up and in the trash.

                 Earlier that morning, my husband, Steve, and I pulled ourselves out of bed and decided that it would be better to just have Christmas upstairs.  There was a box of freshly wrapped presents that neither of us wanted to carry down just to carry back up.  Since everything in our house seems to wind up in our bedroom anyway, we curled under blankets and passed each other packages without cards.

                 Milky sweetness drifted to my nose from the bottle of vanilla eggnog sugar scrub that Steve had surprised me with.  Even sealed, the container continued to send cheery smells and feelings into my nostrils, and it was uncomfortably comfortable.  I shouldn’t be feeling something so homey when my father had just hung up on me on Christmas day.

All I wanted to do was wish my siblings a good holiday and find out if they were enjoying the X-Box I had sent them.  I knew I was overcompensating for my own flaws as a sister by giving them extravagant gifts.  I was the one who had always come home for Christmas, and now that I was on the outs with my parents, I was the one who was staying away.

My life had taken me on a different path.  I grew up in Utah, but wound up calling myself a proud resident of Connecticut, leaving behind my parents and three siblings to be with my husband.

The oldest, 24 year-old Nic, is politically conservative, runs ten miles a day and had recently returned from a two-year mission in Chile where he used his thickly accented Spanish to try to convert the natives to Mormonism.  He was never the smartest of the bunch, he never participated in family conversations, and we did not get along.  Since he had turned 18, we had settled into a cordial but carefully distant relationship that kept us from being at each other’s throats.

Jon is a sweet 18 year-old high school senior with a very intelligent disposition and a penchant for politics, history, and biology.  He never applied himself at schoolwork, didn’t have many friends, and could be very angry at times.  He reminds me so much of myself each time I look at him.  While I sometimes wondered how Nic had wound up in my family, there was never any question about Jon being my brother.

The baby of the family is my 17 year-old sister, Liz.  She’s tough and vulnerable at the same time.  She’s constantly surrounded by at least four of her closest friends, but she would never call herself popular.  The worst thing about Liz is that she hides every emotion behind an almost impermeable exterior.  Somehow, I managed to be very close to her and Jon, despite the vast mileage between us.  Even as they got older, and our relationships changed into deeper adult roles, we talked constantly.

 

 

                 The reality was that it had been almost a full year since I had a relatively normal relationship with my parents.  In January they sent Jon away to Utah Boy’s Ranch, a boarding school for boys with discipline and drug problems.  Really, it was just a Mormon prison camp owned by one of my dad’s political cronies.  It was run along the lines of a real prison, complete with different levels of privileges depending on how cooperative the prisoner was.

                 Having been extremely close with Jon, I knew he had never touched drugs.  When he finally got out of the “ranch,” it was months before he talked about the experience.  When he did, he mentioned that he was offered marijuana for the first time by his roommate, who knew which prisoners had the best stashes.

                 No, drugs weren’t the problem, so that left discipline.  My parents were very unhappy with his grades and harassed him over his academic failure constantly.  This caused quite a bit of friction between them, which led to arguing.  It was the bad grades and arguing that they considered a disciplinary problem, and they couldn’t think of any better way to handle it than send him where they didn’t have to deal with him anymore.

                 To me, it seemed that the main reason Jon was having trouble in school was that he wasn’t getting much sleep.   He’d been suffering from chronic insomnia, which made it hard to focus on boring schoolwork and also made him a bit irritable.

                 Coincidentally, my dad had checked himself into a sleep clinic, where they monitored him electronically while he snoozed, and diagnosed him with sleep apnea.  It was treated successfully, allowing him to go home and sleep the easy sleep of people who enjoy the privileges of full medical workups.

                 Jon didn’t get to see a specialist.  A general practitioner, not even a psychiatrist, prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants and sleeping pills.  When those didn’t help, instead of being given proper medical care for his medical problem, he was just sent away to be punished for his failure to live up to my parents’ expectations.

                 The first week he was at the Boy’s Ranch, he was shaken awake by his roommate.

                 “Jon!  Jon!  Wake up!  Are you okay?  Wake up!”

                 Jon must have mumbled something.  I’ve seen him do it hundreds of times; he doesn’t know where he’s at when he first wakes up.

                 “I’m up, I’m up.  What’s the problem?”

                 “You just had a seizure.  No one told me you had seizures.  Why did you have a seizure?”

                 “I what?  I don’t have seizures.”

                 The doctor told my parents that Jon must have been having some sort of “cerebral event” that was causing the insomnia.  No one had noticed the seizures before because they only happened at night.   When he was taken off the antidepressants and sleep aids, and put on seizure medication, he started to feel better and slept through the night.

                 Even though they’d stumbled onto the source of Jon’s problem and corrected it, my parents didn’t want him back in the house, so he was locked up at the ranch for another eight months, until just before his eighteenth birthday.  Jon later explained that they never did cure him; he just told his counselor that, when he turned 18, he was going to walk away, and they had no legal way to stop him.  The Boy’s Ranch wanted another successful statistic, so he was freed.

                 I knew Jon needed help and understanding, not punishment and isolation.  I found my parents’ decision to send him away entirely unconscionable, and couldn’t just talk with them as if everything was normal while they had Jon locked up.  At first, I tried to reason with them, but I guess I couldn’t find the right words.  Eventually, I had to just turn the relationship off to cope.

 

 

                 It had been months since I’d even heard my father’s voice.  I think the last time, before that Christmas morning, was the previous June.  The conversation wasn’t any less harsh then.  I was upset about the ranch, and I was worried about Jon.  I wanted to reconnect with him and check in to make sure he was okay.

I made plans to go home for two weeks at the end of summer.  I rearranged my school schedule so I finished the summer session four weeks early and bought plane tickets.

                 One night, I got an unexpected message from both my parents on my voicemail, ominously saying nothing more than, “We need to talk to you.”  So I called them back.

                 “You give them ideas about Utah that make them unhappy to be here,” came my father’s brusque tone over 2,200 miles of telephone wire.

                 “You’re too negative,” my mother blurted out.  She took a deep breath and added, “You let Liz get her belly button pierced.”

                 “It’s your fault they both have all these problems, Amanda.  You encourage Jon and Liz to be different and difficult,” my father accused.

                 I couldn’t respond.  I didn’t respond.  Nervously mousy, my voice somehow whispered, “If that’s the way you feel… I have to go.”

                 I hung up quickly.

                 I paid the seventy-five dollar fee to cancel the plane ticket home.  Instead, I spent the summer throwing myself into my classes, video games, and an ill-planned vacation to Florida that was hot, sticky and generally bad.   Anything was better than actually thinking about my family.

                 Part of what ruined the vacation and made me distant from my friends is that I’d really wanted to go to Utah and catch up with my siblings, not hide in Florida.  I think on some level I was distant with everyone.

It was in that June that I started to realize Nic was also ostracized from my parents.  They didn’t like him very much.  Even though he was Utah society’s idea of a perfect child, my parents thought he was too Mormon.  They wanted him to be conservative, not fundamentalist, to avoid coffee, alcohol and pre-marital sex but to drink coke and see R-rated movies.  Of course, where Nic was too Mormon, I wasn’t Mormon enough.  I had left the church, lived with my husband before marriage, and sometimes had a big margarita when I had dinner at a fancy restaurant, followed by a large cup of cappuccino.

                 It never failed to amaze me how much our parents wanted us to be replicas of them.  It was as if unless we were exact copies, we were disappointments.  I think it’s hard for parents to recognize that we’re not duplicates of them; we’re individual people, with our own ideas and ways of doing things.  It’s harder still for them not to judge us as failures just because we don’t want the same things that they do.  For a long time, I thought it was entirely my fault until I realized that they treated Nic the same way they treated me, and for the same underlying reason: neither one of us wanted to be like our parents.

 

 

                 In September, school started again.  I kept pushing myself too hard.  Five classes, lots of extracurricular activities, and I started as an editor for the school paper.  I was doing well in school and remember wanting to call my parents and share the good news, but I couldn’t, of course.

In November, I had a little bit of a mental breakdown.  It was minor; really, I just started crying in the middle of school.  Still, I made an appointment with the school psychologist.

                 We talked about my overwhelming class load, my relationships with my teachers, my marriage, and my various activities.  It felt good to discuss all that stuff, but I somehow didn’t get around to my parents.

                 “I have to tell you, Amanda, I think you’re punishing yourself for something,” was Linda’s assessment.

                 I didn’t tell her why.  I just said probably.  I still need to make a second appointment with her.

 

 

                 Christmas night, I sat down with my laptop and wrote my parents a very long letter.  I went over what had happened the whole year.  It was angry and placed the blame squarely on them.  I couldn’t even call them mom and dad in the letter because I couldn’t bring myself to give them those endearments.

                 I never sent it.

                 Later that night, I was sitting around, enjoying a Christmas dinner of orange chicken and spinach dumplings with my husband.

“Why should we respect our parents if they don’t respect us?” Steve asked me.

“I don’t know.  I think I’ve always wanted to respect my parents.”

“Your parents don’t deserve your respect.  They’ve always wanted a clone.  It’s like in Austin Powers.  Is Dr. Evil happy with Scott?  No.  Scott is his own person.  Dr. Evil is much happier with a 1/8-scale clone of himself who gnaws on kitties.”

I couldn’t help it.  I laughed.

“Seriously, dear, think about it.  You’re your own person.  You’re not a clone and you don’t want to be one.  Don’t worry about what they think; they don’t deserve it.”

                 I knew he was right, and I knew that somehow I’d be all right.  But somewhere deep down, there is still a young woman who wants to pick up the phone and tell her mom about her day.

Copyright 2005

Jon at 16

By Amanda Evans

Date: 05/06/05

Liz at 15

Nic at 24