I Wish I Had Become A Scientist

If I could begin all over, I'd be a scientist. I always wanted to be a scientist, from the earliest times I can remember. My hero as a child was Jacques Cousteau. He was one of them. We had no TV when we were growing up, but later, my father gave in and we got one, but our consumption of TV was extremely controlled and limited. We were very controlled children.

Appearance was everything to my father. It was demanded of me that I have perfect grades and behave submissively. My father was so mean if I missed even one question on a quiz in grade school, he would make my young life miserable. I began to have extreme "test" anxiety.

I had no friends as a child. This was because our family belonged to a little cultish isolationist church. I went to a church grade school. At most, there were five other children in my class, two of them girls, one of whom lived in another town and the other, a pastor's daughter who lived in our town for a few years. I did not get to play with other kids. The neighbor kids wouldn't play with us because of the religion we were in.

We belonged to a group similar to boy and girl scouts, exclusive to the church we were in. But these once monthly meetings were so competitive it was not much fun. Competitive I should say in regards to the parents. Once a year or maybe it was more often there were district meets and the clubs from each area participated in events. The preparation for these events would last months, and it was almost like Olympic training you'd think, for the parents, who were obsessed with our club winning every event. Took a lot of the fun out of it, although it was enjoyable to learn a lot of the skills. Some parents were far worse than others.

I entertained myself reading books. My parents never talked to us. We were told by mother to shut up when father would come home. He'd come home angry. He seemed always angry, seemed to hate everyone, put down everyone and was into extreme right wing politics.

The one thing we were surrounded by, as children, were forests and animals. Once, some guy, handed us a baby fox. I can't remember the details of why he had them, maybe the mother had been killed. I don't know. I named him Peter and we made him a pen. Peter escaped the pen when he got older. I began making visits into the forest then, at night, to follow him around and take him food. I did this for a year at least. Then we got another fox pup, from an exotic pet store. I was too young to know this was wrong. It was wrong.

His plight haunted me for years then, him pacing that pen. I began communicating with a physician in WA who ran a place called Northwest Trek, I believe it was called. I wanted them to take Kelly. They never did and Kelly finally died. He very very old for a fox. Ten I believe. Maybe older. I took him on walks on a leash like a dog, but most of his life was spent in that kennel run, which was wrong and it haunted me as a kid and even now, to think of it. I'd put some of our cats in with him, sometimes, whom he enjoyed playing with. I became adamantly opposed to keeping wildlife as pets as a result of that childhood experience.

We also had a couple of pet skunks as kids. That was my older brother's thing. And then I took in four orphaned skunks once, after their mother was hit on the road. Raised them, collecting beetles and grasshoppers for them to catch and hunt, but I bet they didn't live after we released them together as young adults on a sympathetic soul's farm.

In regard to having forests above our house, we had a good childhood, roaming the woods, building forts. I knew every tree, every nook and cranny of the forest, clear up to the city reservoir.

We went to the beach a lot. We used to stand on the very end of the jetty in storms and let waves break over us. We went camping a lot, usually very stressful times. Mother was tired out, all the packing of the old canvas tent, sleeping bags, stove.

Every year, we'd go on some vacation. Once we took the train to Montreal, only my parents could not afford any sleeper cars, so we dozed in the regular train chairs. We were going to Expo 67 in Montreal. We stayed with a French family. The accomodations were rugged. One bathroom, but they were very nice for all our family and theirs. Same church we belonged to.

I don't remember much about Expo 67. Not much at all. I was 11. That was the biggest longest trip we ever went on. Outside of a trip to Mexico City. That trip was hard on me. First time I ever flew anywhere.

I'd broken my tailbone right before we went in an ice skating accident on a trip from the boarding school. I didn't know how to skate, had never done it before, and a guy came around the rink skating low and very fast and hit me at my waist. I flipped up and over his back, landing on my butt on the hard ice. I couldn't sit without pain and had to carry around a plastic donut. So the whole trip, which I believe lasted a week, was hazed over in pain. It's all I remember about the trip.

We went to Yellowstone once, but I was so young all I recall about it is from pictures taken. We went to Lake Shasta once, after my father got a boat, to water ski, something I only pretended to like. I didn't like water skiing. He sold the boat in the early days of the gas crisis of the early 70's, when there was odd/even rationing. What I remember about that trip was my older brother, who was into music by then, telling me the rock group "Chicago" was camped next to us. He went over there and talked to them often. He took some souvenirs from their camp after they left, stuff they left behind. I also remember mother screaming when we found scorpions in our tent. And the wasp problem, bees everywhere, after us, if we opened any food.

I had to work for dear old dad, starting when I was 13 years old. He was not fun to be around. I had to go down to his office before he went, to clean it and I was often still there late into the evening. It was hell, actually. He yelled all the time, especially at mother, but at me, also. Nothing was ever right.

I never got any money for working for him, but I was not allowed to get a job elsewhere. It was tough in a small town anyhow, for a girl to get a summer job, outside of babysitting.

My brothers got good jobs summers, in construction or at the mill, and got good pay. My younger brother's summer jobs worked into a full time job, after he dropped out of college and later he formed his own company, doing the same thing. So he learned his life long profession starting with a summer job. My older brother liked to travel a lot and did so, even travelling to Europe when just out of high school. I don't know where he got the money to do that, probably from those good summer jobs he had. And he ended up going into the travel industry, as a result.

Because of their good jobs, they then got themselves things, like clothes and even cars. I never had any money because I worked in that office and he never paid me. He thought it was funny. It was a control thing. Once, he said he'd pay me by giving me one of his old cameras, for a photography class at high school I wanted to take. By this time, I was in a boarding high school, again a church school for the church my family went to. Then he renigged on that promise too and took the camera back after I'd had it three months. I don't think it was just generational that I was treated so badly. Some people tell me that's just how young girls were treated in the 60's and 70's. I don't think so.

He thought women were made only for men to use. He began fondling me nightly when I was a preteen. Mother defended his actions when i appealed to her for help. She'd say, "It's ok. He's your father."

These actions formed the basis of problems I would have the rest of my life. You get no self-esteem when you're treated like an object from the moment you're born til you finally escape.

My brothers bought into his treatment of myself and my mother, too, to some extent, and discounted me and my life as whatever happened to me, no big deal.

He made mother cry just about every night and then would laugh about it. She'd retreat to the bathroom to cry. This was a nightly occurrence. I'd sit there at the dinner table and not know what to do. I'd go and try to comfort my mother but she was inconsolable and even she, at that point, had also adopted the attitude women, even her girl child, was unimportant.

I begged her to leave him and take me with her. He called her fat, made fun of her, called her stupid, until she believed him. I guess in the end, I thought every little girl went through this same thing. I was ill prepared for life by my father's actions and because of growing up extremely isolated in that church. The church also taught the human body was evil. Dancing was banned as were all manner of other activities considered sinful.

And yet, I would sit in church and hear the message preached and see the actions of the often very self-righteous members of that church, including my own father. At a young age, I began questioning, privately, the sanity of religion. And I wanted to be a scientist.

I watched the Cousteau specials, when they began to air and was enamored. But when I went to boarding school, I had no access to television. It was forbidden to students, although the faculty members all had televisions. So I asked the science teacher, and there was just one, if I could watch the specials at his house. He agreed. But then, he wandered into the den where I was watching, and heard the word "evolution". He shut off the TV and gave me a stern lecture about the fate of my soul. He contacted my parents, too, and claimed these were not good influences on me and they should not allow me to entertain such a focus.

The next week, in rebellion, I cut the TV antenna cable for the Dean of Women's television. It ran from her dorm apartment suite to the roof of the dorm. I did so in a spot I figured it would take forever to find.

I ended up working for an insane biology teacher there, who for some reason, had me experiment in his office lab mixing different gunpowder formulas. His wife had to follow him three to four feet behind, when they walked. Everyone had to work so many hours per week at that boarding school, towards your tuition. The biology teacher and the guidance counselor, another insane man who was also the campus preacher, locked themselves away for three days, after predicting, allegedly from the Bible, that the west coast was going to crack off the rest of the continent and sink on a specific day one year. They finally re-emerged, after it didn't happen.

He also told us once, in Bible class, which he taught, that his grandmother could tie several knots in a single eyelash. Why that statement has stuck with me, I don't know. Probably because it was ludicrous. He also said it was our own minds that prevented us from breathing water. Yup. Breathing water. He said he himself could be underwater 15 minutes without air.

In other words, we got no real education at that boarding school.

I went to college briefly. But I was messed up. I'd hit the real world, away from the total isolation I'd experienced within that religion and reeling inside from the child abuse I'd endured my whole life. I was sent to an OSU shrink. In five minutes, he decided I was schizophrenic and my life was over. He was a father type figure. You don't disagree with a male authority. That had been drilled into me for almost two decades. Psychiatry is too stupid to recognize basic human behavior tenets. My life was sacrificed then to psychiatry's ego and incompetence.

I suppose I still am in shock sometimes, when I think about all the things that have happened to me. I think to myself, "How can this be? How did this happen to me?" I always wanted, when I was little and then even beyond, when I got abused in the psyche system, someone to defend me, to stand beside me. Mother needed someone to defend her, too, from his constant emotional abuse.

In the mid 90's, I was in a psyche hospital when mother went into grand mal seizures. Why? It was never clear. She had extreme sleep apnea and I know deprivation of oxygen to the brain can cause seizures. She'd had a sleep study done finally and her apnea was so bad, it was recommended she use one of those machines. It didn't happen because he said he couldn't sleep beside that loud machine. It was the only seizure she ever had, but it lasted over four hours. Her beloved husband didn't call an ambulance. His pathetic claim later was that he didn't think they'd come. And that was bullshit. The only reason she lived was because my brother got up to go to work and saw lights on over at their house across the street. He gets up early for work. Lights on at that hour were not normal. He went over and rushed her to the hospital.

When I found out dear old dad had behaved in such a manner, I was furious, wanted him charged with neglect, abuse, but my brothers would have none of it. It was as if her life didn't matter, only his. She sustained brain damage from enduring seizures for that long. After that, her memory and brain problems were referred to as "Alzheimers". It was a nice easy escape from the truth of what had actually occurred. Just like labeling me crazy was a nice easy escape for my family from the truth of what went on for me in childhood.

My dear mother had no one to defend her and I had been discredited so badly by being labeled crazy, no one paid any attention to anything I said in her defense. It is one of my most difficult memories.

Later on, she had hip replacement surgery. In the hospital, she was incoherent and making strange movements with her hands, reaching up for things, talking nonsense. My father seemed to love this. He cried on the shoulders of nurses and said she wasn't acting like the wife he'd known. He got lots of sympathy. I walked in and right there, in front of her, my dear old dad and the doctor were talking about her, right in front of her, like she didn't exist. This had happened to me over and over in the psyche system.

I told them, "She's overdosed on morphine". I told them to cut the dose, that she'd always been super sensitive to drugs and needed only a quarter of the amount most people get. I also told them to stop talking about her like that in front of her. It was overdosing on morphine. I finally convinced my older brother of that who then appealed to the doctor to lower the dose, which he did, and she immediately improved. But, after she was transferred to a nursing home, for rehab, my father made sure the dose was increased again. When I came down to visit, on my birthday, I found him in a nurse's lounge being "comforted" by a nurse, as he went into the same old spiel, about how she wasn't acting like his wife anymore.

I confronted him angrily about raising her morphine dose. The nurse turned on me, saying "your father is a medical professional and knows how much morphine his wife needs, and who are you?" I was with an area cat person on that visit, who, understanding immediately what was going on, came to my defense in the only manner she could think of on the spot. She said to the nurse, "You have a big butt."

She did, too.

I went in to my mother's room. Of my entire family, my mother, was the only one who remembered my birthday. She sang me happy birthday while clutching my hand. I left then. I didn't want anything to do with the men of my family.

It was so frustrating to see her suffer so, and have no power to help her. As she deteriorated, father would pour orange juice down her throat even though it was poison to her because she had very bad acid reflux. I would beg him to stop giving her acidic juices and coffee. She died and nobody even knows what she died of. She could have had cancer. She was briefly in a nursing home. He'd go over to eat dinner with her and end up eating most of her dinner, too. I'd try to stop him, when I'd see him doing that, tell him he could eat what he wanted at home. She was losing weight. He'd done that all his life, eaten what he wanted off her plate. Everything was always about him and what he wanted and needed.

The nursing home was evil. The residents were fed awful food in very small amounts. Mother was tied into a chair and ignored most of the day and not taken to the bathroom when she needed to go. I wanted to bring her home with me.

She was transferred by my brothers to a small privately owned assisted living home. She wasn't there long before she died. I got a call from my brother that she was about to die. My back had failed. I was scheduled for surgery in a week. I was in horrible pain. I drove down. My brother had said there would be a place for me to sleep, somewhere I wouldn't have to climb stairs.

When I arrived at his place, nobody was there. They knew I was coming, too. I didn't know what to do. Finally, his wife showed up. She wasn't there to see if I had arrived, but rather to get something my father had forgotten. She told me I could follow her to the restaurant where they were all eating.

Once there, I ordered something and for some reason the topic of conversation drifted to my housing situation, which was very bad in Corvallis. My brother announced he was going to create an apartment in his contractors shop and that I would live there and work for him--all without ever consulting me. I was taken aback, shocked, and said "no". This set him off and he began yelling at me. I didn't know what to do. It was horrible. He was making a big public scene. I retreated to my car. He followed me out yelling at me. I rolled up the window and said I hadn't come down there to take more abuse but to see my mother before she died.

He screamed at me that he didn't know what I wanted of him. I was angry by now. I rolled down the window a crack and said, "How about you two boys (both brothers were at my car window by then) go over there, and tell that man, and I pointed to my father, sitting outside the restaurant being comforted by my brother's wives, that what he did to me and my mother was wrong."

At this point my older brother said "what are you talking about, are you alleging abuse?" Thing is, my older brother and I had discussed my father's behavior over and over through the years and even the night before on the phone. I looked at him, disgusted, and said "I came to see my mother. Where is she?" They wouldn't tell me.

I drove the streets of that small southern Oregon town, finally going door to door, in the area where I figured that living center was and finally found it. I said my goodbyes to my comatose mother and drove off into the night. I sobbed most of the four hour painful exhausting drive back to Corvallis. My brothers later apologized. She died the day before I had back surgery. I didn't go to the funeral. I didn't want to hear the lies. I didn't want to see my brothers either. My father died less than a year later. I celebrated.

It's tough to realize there's nobody going to stick their neck out to defend me. Shouldn't be. I know there are many people who face such issues alone, too. I know the problems this causes a person. Society callously then just further labels a person and discredits their existence. I'll tell you, it's tough.

I love my brothers. My older brother was good to me when I was in the mental health system. In those decades, he took me to a couple of concerts and called me periodically. I heard little from my younger brother, sometimes for a decade or more.

I suppose the issues I have with my brothers are the rough ones, of them defending him to the end, when I suffered so because of dear old dad. I never got a chance at a normal life because of dear old dad. I might have, had the psyche system worked, rather than labeling me further with all sorts of diseases that were in their heads, but not in mine.

I suppose this is also why I stay clear of religion and regard it as a smokescreen, for the most part, for people to hide under. Well anyhow.

I never became a scientist. I still have a curious mind. I wanted to be a biologist. Chemistry was not my cup of tea, too micro. I was more a macro scientist wannabe. I knew even as a child, when I'd stare out my window into the stars, I did not have the patience or discipline for the teensy. I wanted to look at big pictures, big puzzles, things bigger than atoms or molecules.

I achieved nothing of my dreams. I suppose that's the way it goes for many. You want to take one path, but get blasted off the mountain by an avalanche and have to take another. My brothers went on to successful careers and families. I never had kids. I was in the mental health system and could not justify or even abide a thought about getting pregnant when I was on psyche drugs and not supporting myself. I already knew I was incapable of a relationship. I tried in college, but if I even tried to kiss a man, his face, when he got close, would turn into my father's face, even his smell, and I'd be repulsed. Also, I knew I had such low self-esteem, that I was in danger from men who look for low self-esteem women, to attach to, and to abuse. So I steered clear of all that.

When I left the mental health system seven years ago I found a little niche of my own, trapping cats. If I got paid for doing so, boy that would help, especially my self-esteem. Taking abuse off people whose cats I'm getting fixed isn't easy. But then, I suppose my whole life prepared me for doing just that and surviving it.

Maybe there is a god, and that god likes cats. And so, knowing the strays need so much help, he prepped a young girl for the very difficult and challenging job of helping out his strays. It's a nice thought.

So maybe it was all meant to be. You never know.

I think I"m lucky to just be still alive at this point. Most of those I knew in the mental health system, well they're all dead.

Well I keep coming back to this, adding more, bored I guess, recuperating from the tooth surgery. It will be this evening when I take Jack and Jimbo to their new home. I already have cats in line for tomorrow's fixing but haven't got any lined up beyond that. I need to get busy doing that. I usually locate cats either going door to door or online, when my list of unfixed cats, from word of mouth, is finished, which it currently is.

Seeing the quake devastation and horror, following the Myanmar horrors, just makes one feel lucky to even be alive. As for all that happened to me in my life, that's just the way it was for me and there's no going back and changing anything now, except in fantasyville. You work with what you have or have left.

I have it pretty good currently, I'd have to boast. This house is really excellent compared to anywhere else I've lived. Sure, I'd love it if it sat in Corvallis somewhere. I loved those Corvallis parks so much. But it isn't sitting in Corvallis and I still hope one day to make it back there some way. Maybe I will.

I'm struggling here to satisfy the neighbors who frown if a yard has any weeds or isn't mowed to a butch cut. It can be a struggle to not attract attention being extremely low income on a middle class cul de sac. Kind of like a big masquarade, I live here.

I stay to myself here and sure it's a lonely life. It's kind of like squeezing a big balloon into a bottle and screwing on the lid. That balloon wants to bust out and fly free. That's the way I feel sometimes.

I love going to concerts and dancing and joking and I just have had no luck over the years finding anyone to do anything with. I used to go out to Crystal Lake Boat Landing at night and play the battery powered tapedeck I hauled around in my old Fairmont for music, since the radio on it didn't work and it had no tape or CD player. I'd dance by myself under the stars.

I'm still dancing alone under the stars.