Lest some of you think that I’ve been cherry picking the various stories I’ve been posting, I’ve decided to write about a particularly ugly situation of which I know. The main players in this tragic tale are George and Barbara. The tragedy isn’t the mess that George and Barbara have made of their lives. No, the tragedy is the mess they are making of their children’s lives. Their son Andy is a sensitive, likable boy of 13 who I expect will follow in his father’s footsteps. Their daughter Destiny (obviously names have been changed, but they really did give their daughter a stripper name similar to this one) is a budding psychopath. When I say that, I mean it. She exhibits the un-holy trinity of behaviors: cruelty to animals, bed wetting, and a fascination with fire.
George grew up in a dysfunctional home. His father was an alcoholic and abusive. Most nights, his mother used to leave the home when George’s father got home from work and not come back until the middle of the night. This left George and his sister at the mercy of their binge drinking father. George was his mother’s favorite. Everything he did was spectacular in his mother’s eyes, everything he wanted his mother supplied. According to George’s mother (a spiteful, mean old bitch, who poisons all she touches), George was the perfect son. Other than defending himself from his father, George didn’t have to work for anything.
By the time George surpassed his father in size and muscle, he decided to go toe to toe with his father in a battle that would have make the UFC proud. After that, George’s father never laid a hand on him again, but I can’t say the same for George’s sister. At about this time George found alcohol and women and dove in head first. As you might suspect, George was a mean drunk and could get quite violent in the depths of his own binge drinking. Alcohol was to be George’s only friend and constant companion. The women were drawn to George and the rage that always was just beneath the surface ready to erupt.
I don’t want to paint Barbara as a one dimensional character, but I really don’t know anything about her background. By the time I met her she was an adult approaching 30. She seemed to be drawn to George like a moth to a flame. She knew about his drinking, but I believe she thought she could change him. She did believe that things would be different once they were married. Barbara wasn’t college educated. Oh, she’d gone to beauty school and was a hairdresser when she met George. Think big hair and way too much makeup on an otherwise cute and thin woman. What Barbara lacked, through no fault of her own, was a backbone. She’d make an ultimatum or set conditions regarding her relationship with George, and once George failed to follow through or meet her demands, she’d make an excuse for his behavior. Her demands were lines drawn in the sand too close to the rising tide.
Neither George nor Barbara should ever have had kids. They were into all kinds of recreational activities, usually with copious amouts of alcohol involved, and kids just tied them down. I recall one time when their daughter Destiny was a toddler, she had come up to Barbara asking for a diaper change because she’d had an accident. Barbara flew into a rage, picked her daughter up and slammed her butt down into a chair and made her sit in her own filth until Barbara was done with her conversation. During family visits, George and Barbara would dump their kids on George’s sister and brother-in-law and take off for the day to go shopping, free of their children.
There’s more, but I’m starting to feel the wrong kind of misanthropic feelings. As I said at the beginning Andy looks like he’ll be an alcoholic like his father and grandfather. Destiny is a beautiful ice queen who likes to hurt people and animals. She shows no remorse or even any kind of empathy. George tried to quit drinking and had the delirium tremens so bad that he almost died. George is probably a borderline diabetic now with open sores on all his extremities. I figure he’s only got a year, maybe two to live. Doctors have told him his liver has almost shut down. He’s barely past 40 years old. He won’t see 50. Barbara tried to leave George a few months ago. She had the car packed and the kids in the car and then lost her nerve.
So. There it is I guess. A story of a man broken by his parents who perpetuates the cycle and breaks his own children. A guy I know used to work as a parole officer for a state penitentiary system. He once looked at the records going back into the late 1800’s. Many of his ‘clients’ were the 4th or 5th generation of the same family to come through the system. Bad apples don’t fall far from the tree.
