A Soul Murder

I want to write today for my cousin who is in a mental institution.  He has lost his voice perhaps forever.   I want to tell his story, for his sake, to the best of my knowledge.  I don't know all of the details, I'm sure more horrible stuff happened outside of my knowledge.   It always does.  I never lived in their house.  I'll tell you everything I can remember, some detailed, some in pieces.  I'll call my cousin Thomas.

I have pondered for days about writing this.  I realize that an ACON had to be strong.  We didn't get here by giving in.  The attempts at soul murder happened to all of us, Thomas just lost the battle is all.

I just find so much value in telling his story.  I got to witness his life.  Not fully, but with everything I had learned from the ACON community, I had so many a-ha moments.  The value is in seeing how other narcissists are besides my mother.  I also have a very distinct clue that narcs are not necessarily abuse survivors.  Maybe not at all abuse survivors.  I have knowledge of three generations in Thomas' family.

Thomas sometimes gets let out of the institution but then he lives on the streets picking up cigarette butts. I used to see him all the time when I was living in the city.  I could never talk to him though. He is never able to talk to anyone, he has lost that ability.  I don't think he even remembers me, I think he is gone.  One time I saw him sitting in a bus shelter talking to himself.  I stood by there for the longest time, hoping he would see me and recognize me.  I'm rather unafraid of him because I remember when he was lucid.  I did keep my distance because I don't know what is going on with him anymore.  I don't know why they just keep letting him out on the streets.  The streets can't be doing anything good for his body and mind.  It is not long before he is back in the institution, which I'm glad for, for at least he is looked after.

I remember when Thomas was very vocal.  Looking back, I feel I can tell a better story of his life than I can of mine, I was not caught up in his direct tornado.  He was a boy then a man who had no skills to ever survive.  So much was expected of him, yet he was fed upon, and it was almost a guarantee he would be left with what he has now.

It wasn't until we were older kids that we started to go to my aunt's house, it was a very depressing place.  Even when we would play with firecrackers, or make up a baseball game, they still made me feel rather melancholy.  They were a very poor family, they went for considerable amounts of times with absolutely no food in the house. No dinner being cooked, nothing.  I still can't figure that one out.  Unemployed for years, the father was my mother's younger brother.  Of course my uncle could never work, his alcoholism basically make him unemployable.  He was not a functional alcoholic as most of the men in my FOO.

And their house was in a constant state of disrepair.  It was freezing in there.  The house wasn't insulated.  It wasn't too messy, there wasn't anything there to mess up the place.  The furniture was old, the television wasn't working well either.

So the feeling of going over there was difficult.  I remember a time when someone had caught them some catfish, and that is all they had to eat for a long time.  When we got home my FOO would talk about it in a very callous way, putting them down for being so poor.  But there was no bad talk about mother's brother.  Lots of times mother would bring them over some chickens or vegetables from the farm, but this would bring disputes from my father so she stopped doing it.

Thomas' father was my mother's brother.  His mother was my father's niece.  So she was my cousin/aunt.  There was a time I went there and there was this game we kids all would play.  It was called Pick Up Sticks.  You drop a bunch of sticks, they land and you took turns to try to pick them up without causing the other sticks to move. It was a rather fun and intense game.

I used to want to play that game all the time.  So did the rest of the kids.  One time I was visiting by myself, just so that I could play that game.  I went into the house thinking I was going to get to play. One of the girls said, "Mother took the sticks and broke them up and threw them away."

I asked, "Why?"

She answered, "She didn't want us to play them anymore."

Thomas said, "She was jealous."  Now I remember that coming from his mouth with this smile, almost a laugh.  Like he was looking down on his mother for being foolish.  I can place his facial expression in my mind now.  As I remember him saying that I remember her walking up the stairs. I'm not sure if she was angry or if she felt like a fool.  For one split second in time I could see this idiot go up the stairs, and it all looked so stupid of her.

She was a fool.  There was no food in the house, and here she was all upset over this game.  Welcome to the disgusting mind of a narcissist.

When Thomas said she was jealous, and thinking back about it now, it was a very, very, confident thing for him to say.  From my own experience from my own freak mother, we never do those things. We keep it quiet, we agree, we get along.  A scapegoat is something we don't want to be.  But try as I might I could never avoid being the scapegoat, for I too, have let the cat out of the bag once in a while.

But for Thomas to say this with such confidence, he was beyond the little scapegoat.  He was actually the vocal one.  But it would come at such a great cost.  I don't know what happened after I left that day, but I'm sure he paid through the nose.

I went over there to play the game, but there was no happy moods in the family that night. Everyone sat around scared to even look at their mother.  There was no reason or justifying it other than what Thomas had said.  No one said anything after that, and she did not even try to tell me what was going on.  Thomas quieted down but looked at me.  He knew the truth.  She was jealous.

I had lots of thoughts running through my head about it.  Like why would she even care if we played with the sticks, the mind tries to justify, but Thomas had the real answer.  I remember it clearly.

Even when we still had the game she would grump and growl over us playing it.  I didn't understand. In a way I felt responsible for the game getting destroyed for I was the one always wanting to play it.

So the girls were quiet and withdrawn, but Thomas was angry and knew the truth.  Thomas didn't feel guilty over anything, the girls did.    Apparently she was not speaking, she was giving everyone the silent treatment.  Even when I got there, she didn't act like I was even there.  When my mother did the silent treatment you would beg for her attention, when Thomas' mother did it, everyone was quiet and giving her space.  Not saying anything, you can just tell by the looks on everyone's faces.  It was like they knew their mother was nuts.  I clung to my mother when she did the silent treatment, and so did the rest of my siblings.  All we wanted was to make things better and for her to talk to us again.

The next time we went over there, everything was fine and she was back to talking.  My mother was with us and we were happy.  When I asked my mother later what was going on, mother told me that she was just crazy.

I don't remember even my own MN mother doing such things as destroying toys.

Here's the thing.  And I don't remember who told me this.  "Those sticks caused so much trouble, they are better off gone."  We could never mention the sticks again around my aunt.  Its like they were bad sticks.  Blame it all on the sticks.

I don't even remember Christmastime with them.  I don't remember them having any toys or much of anything.  At their house the firecrackers went missing, so did the baseball bats and the balls and mitts.  If I tried to bring that up, they just looked at me.

I do remember a time one of the daughters, Ann, got this huge makeup kit as a present one year.  It was massive, there must have been 20 shades of lipgloss, plus eyeshadow, etc.  We were both around 13. Ann kept this makeup kit away from her mother.  She kept it hidden when we were at her house. She would only bring it out when she got to go babysitting.  I went babysitting with her one time, I was dying to try on that makeup.and we were sitting on the step of the house trying on some of the eyeshadow.  Her mother came walking down the street passing by to go home and when she saw the makeup kit, she said it was improper to have that around the young children we were babysitting. Ann put down the eyeshadow brush and looked at her mother, and told me that her mother was going to wreck her makeup kit when she got home.  Not throw it out, but wreck it.  I don't remember anything else of that story.  I never saw the makeup again.

But my mother would have tea and talks with her all the time.  You would have thought they were the best of friends.  Every time we went into town, we would make a stop over there.  Well, almost.

Behind her back, mother would call her crazy.  They got along so well together but stopped talking a few years before my aunt died.  Mother was angry with her.  Mother said, "All she wants to do is pick fights.  She's crazy."

But my mother would never have broken those sticks.  She would have let us continue playing with them forever.  She wouldn't have cared at all about the makeup.  I might have great respect for mother for that but my mother would have complained steadily for us wanting to play games all the time.  And the makeup, well, mother was quite verbal when I wore any makeup at all, even as I got older.  I don't think mother knew anything at all about Ann's big makeup kit. I used to like to read a lot, and mother didn't mind that, but she would rub it in my face, that I would be useless person for all the reading I do.  But she would never physically destroy the books. It was just the constant agitation. The breaking down of the morality.  Mother would just treat me like dirt until I relented with the reading.

There was a time when we were near adults and my cousin Thomas told me that when he was little he was forced to wear a dress to school.  A box of clothes they received from a neighbour had only dresses.  Now, I know that there were three girls in the family.  There would have been a lot of use for those dresses, but Thomas told me that he was forced to wear the dresses too, because some were in his size.

Ok, I know they were poor and all, but I still think that is horrible.  Take the dresses and sew them into pants for heaven's sake.  There was a way to fix this.  Was Thomas so out of clothes that he had to wear the dresses?

Thomas' mother had no consideration.  And she used poverty as a way of tormenting him.  But I used to think that his mother had no way to understand that he would be in torment over wearing a dress. It was just something to wear is all, it covered your body.  It doesn't matter what it was.

But Thomas was angry when he told me he had to wear dresses.  And my feeling was that he was right. Everything about him was normal and not so with the girls.  Thomas spoke up and the girls didn't.

I remember also Thomas would be angry all the time.  He was fine, but apparently, now this was told to me, I never saw it, he used to beat up his mother and his sisters.  Apparently, he got into a huge fistfight during a driving lesson with his driving instructor, so he never got his driver's license.  I was told he was terribly violent, that he would stab you, that he was that crazy.

Thomas has never been in jail.  He has no actual history with violence.  I personally, have never known Thomas to be ever violent.  I have never seen him hurt anyone.  I never asked him about it. All I saw in him was this angry look he would give his parents when they weren't looking.  I thought he just hated them.  Thomas was always lucid and always telling you the reasons why certain bizarre events were occurring.  He never held anything back.  He was always open and easy to talk to.

There was a time he was talking dirty about a girlfriend he had once.  He was in his early twenties, maybe late teens.  It was the only time he was rather gross.  Other than that he never gave me the impression that he was ever disrespectful.  But when he told the story of what he did to his girlfriend, his father was listening, and I think lots of times Thomas did fall for the bad fleas.  He was trying to fit in with his family.

But alone and with me, he always spoke with respect and honor.  And with his rumored violent tendencies even, I know for a fact that Thomas was never in jail in his whole life.  He never had problems with booze or anything.  I remember he is a smoker and he made these cute O's with the cigarette smoke.

In high school, I used to walk to their house at lunchtime.  My school was only a 10 minute walk, and for a whole year I was being bullied by someone at school, who was threatening to beat me up, so I went over there to avoid it.

Thomas was always there.  He was a happy go lucky guy and could make all the pain go away.  He was in his early twenties and trying to figure out what to do with his life.  Despite everything he kept up the positive speeches.

In high school, I always felt horrible.  No friends even.  I wanted to dye my hair black as a way of coping I guess.  It would be a change.  My mother didn't like it.  She didn't freak out like a normal mother would.  Looking back now, I can see she found it quite useful to use it as another avenue of torment.  As usual I didn't see the torment coming, I had trained myself to not feel anything.  But every chance she got she took a stab at insulting me over making stupid decisions.  And how dumb black hair would make me look.  That I would look like a tramp.

Of course mother talked about it at Thomas' house to his mother.  That I was going to go out tramping  He spoke loudly, in front of a bunch of people, that black hair is not going to make me a bad person.  That I could change my mind after and just dye brown back over it.  No big deal.  I know, you can't dye over dyed black hair, but he didn't know that. So our families got a chance to take emotional stabs at him too.   Thomas got quiet.  Oh I hate that happened to him for defending me.

The last time I saw Thomas as normal, he was renting a single room with a hot plate.  He was somewhere in his mid twenties, I think.  He told me, "It's ok, this is just for now.  I will make it great someday soon."  He was looking for a job.  Everyone was against him.   Everyone in the family made fun of him as being stupid.  He was violent, he would come after you with a butcher knife,  he was.....I don't know what to say, he was railroaded to accept his fate as a very bad guy.  The rumors were so bad, you would have thought someone like that would have been in prison in chains.  But actually, everything he tried to do, he was defeated at.  He couldn't ever stand up for himself.

Here's the thing.  His mother was never abused growing up.  I'm sure of it.  Her mother omg was my dad's oldest sister who was the one who helped picked up the pieces of the family of seven children that was left behind after her mother died when my father was only 3.  She cooked, she sewed, she was a quiet type.  I don't think I've ever heard her talk much.  She made a huge quilt for my sister's bed one time.  She made her quilts all from just rags.  Every piece was specially selected to make a beautiful pattern design. I can attest to the fact that quilting requires patience and much time.  I'm a quilter.  Well, I just started this year. I've been quilting all year and I still haven't made anything yet. I'm procrastinating on my quilting now.  There is endless repetitiveness, taking it apart, fixing mistakes. I personally have never seen a narc do anything that remotely comes close to this. Everything they do is lousy, because it is done so fast.  Their temperament would never allow for such skilled work.  So I think this was a lovely woman.  Her husband was sweet and chatty, and today the smell of pipe tobacco sure reminds me a lot of him.  I wish they were my parents.  I don't think Thomas' mother was ever abused.  I just can't see it.

Thomas' mother had two adopted younger brothers.  Those brother's visited the parents until the parents died.  I heard that mostly everything in the will was left to those brothers and their sister got very little.  One time, and this is a one time memory, my mother told me that their sister had caused too much trouble in the family.  She was not liked by her parents.  I don't know what trouble she was talking about.  I guess there is a slight chance that she was scapegoated, but the parents never were rumored or seen by me to be mean.  Even at a young age, I could tell narcissists.  And they were never scary.

Oh and come to think about it Thomas' mother was making quilts too.  However, I have seen her quilts, and the pieces never went together straight, the colors didn't work well, and there was no real pattern.  Just a mess of pieces of fabric basically.  I don't know why she didn't pick up this skill from her own mother.

She had a large collection of her mother's quilts given to her after her mother died. As far as I know they sat in a closet.  A few times she had said she was going to give us a quilt and we were all happy, but then she gave us a quilt that she made herself.  Happy went away, and my mother didn't know what to do with the garbage quilt.  I know, its the thought that counts right?  We should have been grateful.  But, I'm serious, her giving us a quilt that she made was like a bad joke.  She even sewed the pieces together with phentex yarn to make it go faster.  And the yarn never matched the fabric.

As far as Thomas father goes, there is not much to say about him.  He liked his booze, that's for sure. Even going as far as drinking shaving lotion.    As far as I could tell he was always saying something dirty to one of the kids.  Like really dirty.  I don't remember anything exactly now, but it usually referred to something very sexual and dirty.  Even to the young preteens.  I don't know if he was abusive to the kids other than that, I have only mothers word to say that he wasn't.  But, he was her brother afterall.  I could never say the dirty talk was bad to mother.  So the fact that he was a narc too was lost to me.

Mother's brother was revered by her. She couldn't really deny that his drinking brought on the downfall to the family.  But all this was blamed on the wife.  Mother never talked badly about certain siblings, except for 2 sisters that she called crazy.  Those two sisters were apparently mean to their daughters too, in what my aunt had told me in our meeting.

As far as Thomas' sisters goes, one can't hold down a job, forever in poverty.  Apparently she gets misunderstood alot and she picks fights.  One is extremely bipolar, with medications for life, disability pension for life.  She manages to keep a roof over her head and some food at home, but she went off and married some guy that no one knows about and she didn't know it herself, until she gets put back on her meds.  They divorced after 2 weeks.  No this isn't Hollywood.  This is my FOO. Well, the extended part of it.  One moved out of the city to marry rich, and that rich man left her in poverty with two kids.  And that rich man has even denied being the father of those kids, and maybe he's right.

I've thought so many times I want to go visit Thomas at the institution. I would even love to leave him a nice present, perhaps a quilt if I ever complete a project.  I don't know.  But I'm scared to.

When Thomas was happy, he was so bubbly and warm and sincere and real.  A gift to the world. That man is dead.  He is now the result of the fine art of soul murder by the hands of a narcissistic parent/parents.