Five Chicks in a Top Hat
2000-08-14 - 23:49:20
You can be my monk,
I will be your key.
We'll put ourselves together,
And go wild in a tree...
Today I learned why my Father married my Step-mother, and vice versa. For a long time, my older sister (Sarah) and I had speculated that it had something to do with money. But we found no evidence to back this fact up, because neither of the aforementioned persons really had any money to get from the other. Today our speculations were confirmed, and more besides. But to realize exactly why, one has to take several steps back, to Father's first marriage. He was 20, Mother was 17. They first met when he came back from the army, having runn away from home shortly after his 17th birthday. I've heard several things about him possibly being in an intoxicated state when he met her, but I am not sure if there's any fact in such statements. Meanwhile, in another part of the country, another person's mother dies from an overdose. Her brother goes scizophrenic, and her father draws back to a small bubble of sanity. Roughly nine months later, Mother drops out of her senior year at high school and squirts out her first kid, which lives for one day in the hospital before keeling over, because she smoked profusely during the pregnancy. They chose to get married before the second child popped out, and they called her Sarah. This one survived, and was soon followed by another, a boy named Jason. Two years after his birth, the 'accidental' child was born. Evidently, abortion wasn't in full force at that time, was too expensive, or the child somehow 'beat the odds'. This is Sister. The child who supposedly slipped and fell into a trash can at the end of the birthing table, where her head landed on a syringe that sucked most of her brain mass out. Then we return to this other person, who will eventually become Step-mother, who has gone to college and received a couple master's degrees, one in speech therapy, and one in theology. She marries for the second time, and has a second child, Step-sister. Jason is baptized about the time of his second birthday, by a Methodist minister. Mother stopped being Methodist, for reasons unknown, and became unaffiliated. Father was Baptist, but switched to Methodist several years afterward. Time passes. Jason and Sarah get along well, but alienate Sister. Mother and Father get into several arguments, and the children hide in makeshift blanket-tents. Sister sinks into the television to avoid the divorce that follows. Sister is four, Jason is six, Sarah is eight. Court gives the children to the mother, as is customary in most cases. Father goes back to living with his dad, and goes back to college for a short time. But he's low on cash. He's paying for child support and tuition with a very tight bank account. Step-mother-to-be takes a short vacation around the world with her kids, using the money she has made from several divorces. Father misses several payments on the child support. Due to this lack of money, Mother starts to go nuts. Her children are starving, because she doesn't have a job. She gets a boyfriend in hopes that he will provide for the children. Instead, her children are abused, she is threatened with a gun, and her house is trashed. Then she screws her boyfriend's brother. She eventually marries her old boyfriend's brother, when her boyfriend is dragged off to prison after one particularly hellish night. And Court decides to move the children in with Father. By this time, Father has set himself up in a decent house, farr away from his own abusive and drunk dad (which is why he left home in the first place). He has married Step-mother, who gets four times the amount of child support he was giving to Mother. Step-mother helps him pay his bills, all the while keeping track of how much money he owes her. Father gets a well-paying job, and eventually pays his new wife back. Then they start sharing cash, even though Father gets an allowance rather then being able to actually deal with the money. But there is one stipulation. Step-mother decides that because she helped him though his financial difficulty, her children are to be treated better than his. Meaning that her children go out to eat while his stay home, and sometimes they do little vacations without Father or his children. Mother moves out of the unfinished and spray-painted house she used to live in, and moves into a new house in the same town. Her new husband gets a job at a local horse farm as a stablehand. She and her cats live off money she gets from the government. She becomes addicted to cigarettes and tea, as she slowly spirals into insanity. A decade goes by, and she still sits at her kitchen table, drinking cigarettes and smoking tea. She misses her children. She hears voices. She 'visits' BMHI (a state asylum) several times. Several cats and a few wrists later, we find her in her present state. Meanwhile, Step-mother becomes a speech therapist while she is on family leave from ministry. After raking in cash for several years, she goes back into the ministry, which is where she is now. And still there is something more. Because there is one last twist to the story. Step-mother isn't just a step-mother, she is also a minister, and long long ago, she baptized three small children...
And still I question, but the only answers I hear are questions.
