Saturday, September 29, 2012

Kindergarten


I started kindergarten a year younger than the rest. I passed their screening tests and my birthday was near the cutoff date or some such. The truth is she wanted me out of the house. At the time she was an at home baby sitter and having me in kindergarten meant one less kid in the house. No one was paying her to babysit me. I was a wild child after all. On the one hand she can't be completely to blame, but the issue then was the same it has always been; she wasn't making decisions in my best interest; she only ever made decisions that were for her own benefit.

As my brother will tell you, we were raised like animals; we were like livestock that had to be taken care of.  We were treated like burdens because to them that is exactly what we were; a burden on their life. They did not take care of us because they loved us, but because other people would shun them if they didn't, so they went to great lengths to cover up their bullshit. I cannot ever remember a single time when a decision was made that was actually in my best interest.   My mother was so good at covering up the bullshit she could even convince counselors that there was nothing wrong with her.  She would tell people was doing everything she could but no matter what she did I was still that wild child. 

You see, she was a high school dropout. She became pregnant with me when she was 16. My dad was 18 at the time, a drug addict and a drunk. She was barely 21 when I started kindergarten. My brother is three years younger than I, so she had a baby in the house too. I am sure she was quite excited to send me off to school, but boy was she ever wrong.

By the time I started kindergarten she was already living with the second husband. He was worse than my actual father because he was fully aware that my brother and I were not his children and he did not like me at all. They, just like me, did not understand the consequences of what was being done to me. You cannot beat a two year old and then expect that child to act like a ‘normal’ kid by the age of five, especially when the child is still being beat and ridiculed.

I was sent to the principal’s office the first day of school. I don't remember the exact details now. As I have said before I have spent a great deal of energy forgetting those early years, so my memory is limited. That is a peculiar characteristic of memory though. Our memory is never what actually happened, but because our memory is all we have, to us, it is what actually happened, because we base our understanding on that memory and not reality. Being in the past with no way to know what really did happen, our memory is the final say. What I do remember is that for some reason the teacher left the class room and when she returned I was on top of a table dancing away. Needless to say I was punished for this when I got home.

School only further reinforced that something was wrong with me; they actually made it much much worse. My young mind was not capable of understanding. I was already locked into an extremely dysfunctional state of being. I was like all the other children in that I thought the way my family was at home was the way everyone's family was, so I did not understand why when I would just be myself, like I thought everyone else was doing, it was a problem when I did it. The only answer I could come up with was the answer everyone gave me; there is something wrong with Ben. It took me a really long time to realize just how differently I had been raised than most. Like all children, deep in my heart, I just wanted to be loved; I just wanted people to like me.

You see, I know now what was up. When you are only two years old and a drunk man is already beating you, by the time you are five you are not like children who have not had the same experience. The school was not capable of dealing with a wild child as it was much less one who was raised in violence. My mother would bend over backwards to cover up the home life. Even to this day I cannot be made to do things just because someone tells me to. Matter of fact, just by being told to do something, I will not do it. As you will probably come to see I have a personality much like a cat. Have you ever spanked or tried to punish a cat? Speaking from personal experience, it does not go well.

Punishing me for being who I was, who I am now, only gets one that squinty eyed look, like I am going to get you, just like a cat does. Punishing me for being who I was only further deepened within me the belief that I was flawed and something was wrong, that somehow I was not like the rest. From my perspective it didn’t matter what I did, or how hard I might try, I was always wrong, always made to feel not good enough. My mother had her own issues, obviously, and one of them was projecting onto me that no matter what I did it was not good enough. No matter how hard I tried, she would not love me. This caused the deepest scar of all. Because of this belief holding true for so long in my life, it actually became true; I am not like the rest. My child mind was not aware of this fact about life, we become what we think, and we are what we believe.

If you were to take some time and watch the movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward you would have a better understanding of what it means to be raised violently. If you do not wish to watch the whole movie you can fast forward to the thirteen minute mark and watch till the researchers stop talking about children who were raised violently.  They will explain that while a child is in the womb and the mother is stressed it causes children to have addictive personality traits.  They will explain how exposing children to violence changes their DNA. They will explain to you that if you go to a prison with a death row ward, that all of those people in there were treated extremely violently as children.

People have always asked me; what made you so different? Whenever someone takes the time to get to know me, they actually realize what I have been through. Surviving it was a miracle. There is no one answer, but I hope through these writings that I can express it. Maybe someone like me will read it someday and realize that they too can make it. Whenever I watch that part of the Zeitgeist movie I cannot keep from crying. It is one of the main reasons I have put off writing my story; it is painful to deal with. The types of wounds I received as a child heal of course, but the scars are forever.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Why?


It all began when I was a little boy. I assume like most little boys I was doing things that I was not aware of and some of those things saved my life. As you will come to see, I have kept a great many of those things with me to this day; I refused to grow up in the traditional sense. In so many ways I am still that little boy and that is exactly how it should be. This is where it all began.

When the woman who gave birth to me married for the second time she moved my brother and I to a small town on the Missouri river named Hermann. It's a hilly town, and old German town, old buildings with lots of history. The founder of the town has skulls on his grave stone. It is said they hated him for placing the town in such a hilly spot. Even as a child in art class, drawing sketches of his tomb I wonder why you would hate someone so much as to put skulls on their tombstone when one could have simply moved to another place. I am assuming that the hills made life hard before our modern technology came into being.

At the edge of this town is the bridge that crosses the river. It's a new bridge now, but the one that existed when I was a child was a very scary bridge. Whenever a semi or a big farm truck was coming from the opposite direction I was never sure if we were going to make it or not. I would always be afraid that we were going wreck and crash off the bridge into the river. When I was a child I was terribly afraid of heights.

Driving into Hermann, as soon as one gets off the bridge there was a gas station immediately to the left and across the street from it was a pure white Christian church. It is still there to this day. This is the church our mother chose to attend. I do not have any bad memories of the church itself. No priest or preacher ever molested me or picked on me. For all intents and purposes it was probably just a regular run of the mill Christian church; full of lies. It is hard to say looking back if those lies saved my life or not; all I know is it changed my life forever after.

I do not know how old I was when this occurred inside me. It was an ongoing process. I have never been able to know the days, months, or years. Still to this day I have to ask my girlfriend regularly what day it is. It is simply something I do not keep track of. I could have been seven or eight. It is hard for me to know because I have spent so much of my life attempting to forget those days. But the lie they told me in that church scarred me for a long time. It affected the path of my life. It was still haunting me in my twenties on the deeper levels of my heart as I was still searching for the truth.

You see, when I would go to church we would sing, "Jesus loves me! This I know, For the Bible tells me so; Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong," and then I would go home to be beat, ridiculed, abused, and neglected. I would lay in my bed at night and wonder what I had done wrong that god did not love me. As I got older this belief solidified into something different; hatred. But my little mind then could not understand. If he loved me, he would protect me right? That is what all of the adults told me, that is what the Bible says. During my childhood I was thoroughly convinced by my family and the church that something was wrong with me. Not even god loved me. It was bad enough that my mother did not love me, but god too? It was more than I could bare.

By the time I was thirteen I openly cussed at god, to god, about god to anyone that would listen. From my perspective that mother fucker through me under the bus. I was just a kid. What could I have possibly done to deserve what happened to me? My seven or eight year old mind was simply helpless, my thirteen year old mind was no longer willing to lie down and take it. Angst is not strong enough of a word. If you stick with me through these stories you will see like I did; it is amazing that I lived through my teens and twenties. Most people raised like I was are dead or in prison for life.

I was born a wild child. As Plato once said, some are cast in copper, some bronze, some silver, and some gold. Plato did not know about platinum back then I guess. Looking back on it now, it is clearer what was happening. A wild child was born to people who did not know how to take care of themselves let alone raise a wild child.

Somehow, a thought occurred to me, and I have stuck with it to this day. In my angst, in my hatred, I just wanted to know why? I wanted to know why it happened.

As they say, seek and you shall find, and find I did. I did find the truth. That question saved my life; why? Now I see that I was extremely lucky. I was forced to see it for what it was. So many people never do this because from their perspective it was just fine, but what they do not realize is that just because they were not abused and beaten; it was not just fine.