Racism and Bigotry

Let's proceed with the current trend of destroying the proof that America was built by racist bigots. Let's destroy every monument and burn every book referring to it. Let the black children later question why their ancestors were so upset about things there is no proof ever happened. Let's forget this country was stolen from the Native Americans.  Let's create a generation of Slavery Deniers.  They can hang out with the Holocaust Deniers who exist even though we haven't yet destroyed that history at all. Let's stop teaching about any president who ever owned slaves or even sexually harassed a woman. History class will be much shorter and won't we shine bright.
Yes,  Little House on the Prairie speaks of native Americans in a negative way. So does Caddie Woodlawn and hundreds of other books.  It's not pretty in our "enlightened" society so lets erase it. None of these books in any way tell anyone to think that way Now. They are the language of that time, they show how far America has grown and we can take pride in that. When we try to deny it existed we learn nothing.  We end up with a picture of America growing up out of the ground flawlessly like a city built by angels.
No, I am not white. In fact, my ancestors were rounded up and locked in concentration camps right here in America. I find it offensive how few people know about it. I went all through school without ever being taught about it. Many people wouldn't be able to guess my race from these clues.
I have no desire to desecrate statues of Truman for Hiroshima. The decision to nuke Japan was so horrific that no one has done that to another country since. Why? Because we remember it. There are still documentaries being made about the resulting devastation. I was personally affected by the bombing, my mother was trying to flee Hiroshima when the bomb fell and the American government asked to study my family to study second generation radiation effects. If we erase what happened we erase my family history.
We wish America had not been built by racist bigots. Yes, all lingering prejudice should be eliminated. But to deny it happened turns Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks into nobodies fighting a nonexistent battle.
We don't need to and shouldn't destroy out statues and flags representing the states who fought to keep slavery. All we need to do is label them correctly. Let future generations see and remember the battles for equality. Don't try to Deny but instead to Teach.
Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it in the future.

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Childishness

Odd, I was on my forties when I started this yet I find a lot of the writing seems very immature!!
Would what I write today seem childish to me in 20 years?? Do we ever finish growing up??
Or is it just me??

Years later

The vomiting dreams did end ter writing about them.  I believe in the power of the written word.  There are many writings that prove how powerful writing is.  Not only does it purge the mind of thoughts,  it sends them out of the min where the collective can absorb them, maybe even purify them,  when we alone cannot.
I am an old woman now.  I no longer even look like the photo with my old blogs. I seldom even feel anything like that woman.
I believe I am nearing the end of my life on earth.  No,  I have not had a medical diagnosis like terminal cancer that has numbered my days.  Yes,  I have several diagnosises that could lead to death soon,  COPD,  pre-diabeties  heart problems,  and a myriad of little 'thing to watch". I'm sure the feeling of death approaching is enhanced by fear,  fear of what will happen to those I take care of more than fear of what death is,  what it will be for me personally. But it is the second fear that I want to explore,  need to understand and prepare for.
Somewhere in the last 20 years I have lost most of my fundamental beliefs.  Faith.  God.  I have not worked to teach my grandchildren as I did to teach my children  about God.  Maybe because it appears that I taught my daughters little or nothing that had any effect.  They seem closer to atheism than Christianity.
If I die today,  I will die believing I have failed at everything I ever believed was important to me.  Hopefully some would disagree, hopefully my attempts to teach and lead haven't been as futile as I see them.  And of course there is always that thing where people glorify the dead,  I'll need a lot of that to leave a mark anywhere near the one I once intended!
If there is time,  I want to try to fix this.

OMG
I just read "By His Own Mother".  I have no memory of writing it but I know that I did.  It is a horrifying story.  It is, as far as I know,  a True Story.  My brother died in that garage.  The story that he committed suicide that night had never made sense.  When my older brother and I tried to reenact her story if how Herbert died and how she found his body it was impossible to have happened the way she said.  She said she went in the garage from the side door,  saw him slumped in the car and ran to him. When we opened the side door there was a pile of lumber blocking anyone's entrance there.  When we looked at the car the key was in the off position and there was still a quarter tank of gas left.  Someone killing them self wouldn't turn the car off.  What we saw was Herbert shutting it off after he  felt the battery was recharged. Mom said she did not touch the key in the ignition.
The peanut butter sandwich comes from her,  her last conversation with him given to us without realizing what it told us of his life with her. I remember the little row of freshly planted beans.  The chair with the empty beer can,  he was not a drinker normally,  and the self rolled cigarette butt.  I don't know how I looked into his mind for his last thoughts that night but reading it I am sure that I did.
My mother went insane in the years she survived him.  She saw his ghost walking through her house daily,  was so frightened by it that she started getting dogs.  LOTS of dogs.  At one point she had over 20 dogs living in her house.  Her once beautiful home literally became a pile of shit.  As she aged and grew weaker she just laid carpet pieces over all the excrement over and over. We called the humane society but they did nothing.
She eventually lost that house.  Got rid of the dogs.  Moved to a little apartment where someone broke in and beat and robbed her.  Then my brother moved her to a trailer park near him. 
She was dying the first time I went to that trailer to see her. Her trailer was piled with junk,  trash, vermin,  cockroaches,  just paths through it all from room to room.  Her Japanese dolls were still there,  standing beautiful on top of the mess around her bed and couch.  I was filled with pity for the woman who loved beautiful things.  She had COPD and was on oxygen.  She did not smoke except very briefly to look American around when she met my father,  an American soldier. We  believe the COPD might have been caused from the years living in a house full of dogs especially if she was allergic to dogs. I know that I am.
I moved back to Texas to take care of her during her last days with Mike's help. I only remember feeling pity,  grief, guilt and love taking care of her.  The glorification of death.  I remember taking her a finger bowl to wash her hands before serving her a snack and she looked at me in surprised wonder and said,  "I never knew you were nice". I remember feeling pleased that she noticed.  I didn't think how odd her words or my reaction was.
I'm sure some part of me knew she had killed my beloved brother,  Herbert.  Knew how she had damaged all of us.  I have convinced myself that killing Herbert was an accident.  It really could have been.  I believe my depiction of her closing the garage door in rage was probably accurate.  Even though she was a highly educated pharmacist,  I don't think she thought of the carbon monoxide killing him when she shut that door.
I don't hold her innocent in the damage she did to us,  her children,  but I do believe that she never felt she was doing wrong or evil.  OK,  here's the whopper: I believe she loved us.
Mike fought to keep her alive later when she was on life support to the point of cruelty in my mind and the minds of her doctors.  He told me it was in the hope she was somehow finding redemption to enter Heaven.
I do believe she is in Heaven if Heaven exists but not because Mike gave her that extra time to suffer and beg forgiveness.
I believe she was insane.  She wore many faces through her life , she did many evil and few good things.  I think her insanity started after WWII. She was 200 miles from the Hiroshima bomb,  alone, at school.  We know almost nothing for sure of what happened to her during this time.  And even before,  she once told me that when she was a child her father took her to a doctor for a twitch in her face that wouldn't go away,  possible neurological damage even younger.
The cruelty and oddness we grew up with was clearly growing insanity.  Her IQ was likely near genius which would make it not only more likely but harder to see coming.
I firmly believe the insane are not accountable as the "sane". Like the person born paraplegic,  they are here to judge how we react to them.  It is just more complicated when they raise children.  Damage children.
Mike and I are considered "sane" but we both have insanities that we deal with and that we have inflicted on the next generation by having our own children.
I remember being terrified that I would be like my mother when I started having children.  I also remember when my youngest was 3 my husband sitting me down and saying, " You are NOTHING like your mother!!  You are loving and kind and beautiful inside and out. My children are lucky to have you! "
I don't remember the conversation before him saying that,  obviously I was voicing this fear,  but I do know that I believed him,  that him getting that through to me saved me.
I don't share the insanity of my mother with her decendants. My daughters know some but not all,  so they can remember her with love.  It will be the same for their children unless one of them along the way sees something like this. I'm not even sure why I do this. Maybe it is for the part of me that loves her and because I forgive her. Maybe it is rooted in us to speak kindly of the dead.

Think Again

We've all seen it on TV if not in real life: The prostitute whose pimp controls her through her drug habit. We shudder and say, "That could never be me, I'm not a prostitute and I don't have a drug habit."
I'm a 57 year old great grandma and I can no longer honestly say that.
There are thousands of people in the world dealing with debilitating, chronic pain. I am one of them. I wake in the morning and my first involuntary thought is Pain. I give thanks for the day, take a morphine, and wait to be able to get out of bed, usually with a full bladder!
I have a Pain Management Doctor, the only one I know of left in Omaha who doesn't try to just put a bandaid on it, and, for all intents and purposes, I am his prostitute. When he says frog I jump because he controls the quality of my life. Without him I wouldn't get out of bed, play with my grandchildren, or have a life and he is one of the things I give thanks for morning and night. Hundreds of doctors have told me to quit smoking. This one only had to say it once because the order came with the threat of reduced pain medication if not its cessation altogether. A good thing, right?
Recently I had the misfortune to make him unhappy, and as I sat and listened to him berate me and even call me stupid, for the first time, I realized that I am now his Ho.
And I hate it. What can I do about it?? I'm researching it, suddenly willing to try anything with any risk that has any promise of ending my need for narcotics and Him.
I may have found an out, if it works I will definitely document it. But what happened to me is still just as wrong, and I started to wonder about all the other Legal Ho' s out there and about all the addicts on the streets who are self medicating and often dealing to support it. And research does back up my claim that they are out there. Right now, I would consider joining them if I weren't so scared of the legal repercussions, which is silly because I would probably be shot first, suspected of being some Granny Narc....
What happened to me was a misunderstanding from a miscommunication, or, at least, a lack of explanation from the doctor, on top of him totally forgetting what my treatment plan has been, compiled by a possible mistake he made that resulted in him calling Me stupid and reducing my pain medication dosage. The pimp  can do that when you displease him. I didn't get slapped around  though that might have been preferred over trying to adjust to living in more pain while in the middle of moving and trying to give the children in my care a Fun summer. I was silent before my accuser, afraid that speaking in my own defense would worsen the punishment.
My husband doesn't even have that kind of power over me!
If you, like me, say you would never prostitute yourself for drugs, pray you never need them! and Think Again.

ROBBED

It started last May. I decided to move in with my daughter to help pay the bills for a while and put my belongings in storage. I was going to rent a storage unit but, after my soon to be ex-son-in-law Rob Belk told me that he was broke and had just moved into a house with his girlfriend Tiffany Jones, I told him that I would pay him to store my things in his garage. Rob had confessed to me a few months before that he had been using Meth with Tiffany for a year but that they quit and were trying to start over. (Yea, I know.) I have always helped Rob since he was about 16. He moved in with us and we always let him use the basement for weekly band practice. I even loaned him $2,200.00 to buy a mixing board that he never even tried to pay back. But I wanted him to overcome and do well since he is the father of three of my grandchildren.
Pretty sure he never really stopped doing meth... A couple of weeks after I stored our things there I called him to talk to him about visitation with his kids. He just started screaming, yelling, cussing at me about not getting to see his children enough. I taped the conversation. You can hear me on the tape over and over trying to tell him he would get standard visitation but he keeps yelling over me all through it. At one point he says something about me not knowing how lucky I am that he let me rent his garage! That made me nervous. We rented a storage unit and a Uhaul and went to get out things. They wouldn't answer the door. I was sitting out side texting him and then Tiff called and said he wasn't there (but she knew everything I had texted him) and she refused to open the door. I called the police. They said that they couldn't d anything but they knocked on the door and got Tiff to answer. She told them she wouldn't let us get our things because she didn't know what was ours. The officers tried to reason with her but she was clearly tweeked out and just got more and  aggravated. The police told us that it was a civil matter unless we had proof that they were damaging or selling our belongings.
We gave up for the day but went back about a week later, this time without a Uhaul, and tried again. No one answered the door again so we gave up again and got pulled over as we were leaving.Rob had called the police. The officer said that Rob told them Jeremy was Tiff's ex and that she had a protection order and that he had tried to break into their house!!! We explained and the officers went back to the house and banged on the doors and windows, I don't think they were very happy about being lied to, but they got no response and ended up telling us the same thing the first officers had, that it was still a civil case.
We wait. His landlord tells us that they have never paid rent and are going to be evicted soon. We wait. Then one morning we found a  few boxes of our things on the porch here with a note from Rob. We all gather to read it, and it was a nauseating piece of work!! Jeanette has the same landlord as them, Mike
Royce. We had told him what was going on. He told us that they hadn't paid any rent since moving in and that he couldn't legally enter the house either. I did hope that he would be of some assistance, and he was, but he swure could have done more than he did!! right after Rob dropped of the few boxes Royce stopped by and told us that he had gone by the house the day before, or maybe the day before that, and that Rob was having a big moving sale. Royce had taken pictures and showed us that the garage had been empty in the pictures. Now, here is my beef with Mike Royce. IF he had bothered to tell us what was going on over there maybe we could have saved our belongings. Royce Knew we had stored everything there!!!! But he got his Karma in this, too... We went in a window and checked out the garage. It was a nightmare. All that was left were some toys in their bag still. what little else was there was strewn all over the place. Aside from years of files, I have kept the kids drawings and stories and school papers and reports since mine were in elementary. they had been packed in boxes. the paperers were wadded and scattered all over in a pool of oil on the floor soaked in what smelled a hellova lot like Piss. I had over a hundred hardback books, more paperbacks, all in the same oil and piss. Of course all of our furniture and appliances were gone, expected that before we got in, didn't hope to fined anything of value, but the hard thing was the senseless destruction of our personal things, our children's things. There was a pile of broken picture frames and the floor was thickly covered with broken, ground, glass from our picture frames. No pictures. Al of all of our winter clothes, gone. The little price tag stickers laying all over the place were a pisser but the real PISSER were the tags that we found that said "FREEE"!!! That isn't desperate for money. Like the destruction of our personal things,that is pure evil black hearted bullshit. Can't hit that period key hard enough!! What finally broke me was finding my dead mother's purse in a pile of trash. I kept everything in it just like it was when she died, including all of her ID, except I added my deceased brother's ID to it. It was empty. I've only heard the expression to "keen" in grief, now I have done it. And Keening turned into screaming, insane with grief and anger, and, I admit, pure hatred for Rob. I don't even remember Jeremy getting me out of there and home. I didn't sleep for days. I prayed for my soul and fought the deepest hatred I have ever felt in my life. And I have been through a lot in my 55 years!
It took a WHILE to be able to even think about anything else. Friends prayed for me and some prayed for Rob's death. So did I.
We went into the house with Mike Royce two days later when he had legal access to his house. Here was his comeuppance for not being decent enough to tell us Rob was having his sale. Not only was there plenty of damage to the house, but Rob had also sold the appliances that went with the house.
Now. Here is another big PISSER. We might have tried more forceful tactics to get our things before rob's sale, but we were relying on what the officers on call had all told us, That if Rob damaged, used, or stole our things that it would then become a criminal offence and we could press charges. NOT TRUE. We did our own detective work, found out where Rob went and where he had likely rented storage and might possibly still have  some of our things, but when I called to file the report the detective apologized that the officers on call had all misinformed us, that it was all still a civil suit!!!! Nothing like having someone steal everything you own and being able to do nothing to them for it. Oh, yea, we can file in civil court for money he will very likely never have. And even to do that, it will cost us about $80.00 to go through the process. I'll still do it some day if he lives long enough, which I am getting more and more doubtful that he will.
Royce did a little checking on Rob himself. found out who he sold his fridge to, for a whopping $10., and also ran into some bad, angry, people who are also hunting for him.
Then two days ago a little Karma for Rob and Tiff came in the form of a text from Tiff.
Rob's girlfriend sent Jeanette the following Text at 5:00 am yesterday:
"I want to apologize for everything u went thru when Rob and  I were dating. I am disgusted by who he really is but does great at hiding. I just caught him giving a blow job for dope apparently. I want to puke. No wonder he is so abusive, hes got some major issues inside. Eww. Again so sorry. So sorry.What is worse is of course I am knocked up & I don't even know who this man really is. He is lie upon lie..."
We all believe her, knowing how desperate Rob has been for dope money, knowing Rob. So glad I didn't dirty my hands trying to do them harm for doing me so wrong!! The life that led them to do it will lead them to all of their Karma. their hell.
I really have been so upset that I have felt like I was the evil one for harboring such hatred, anger, and disgust. But today I have hope for myself. Lat night when I bowed my head to pray, with no forethought, all that came out of my heart was, "Dear God! Please help them!" and as that poured out I finally felt purged of all the darkness.
Amen.
2020
Funny,Rob and Tiff are 2 of my favorite people in the world now! They have been clean for years. I'm more proud of them for that than I can say,they are better people than those whenever used drugs. Most people never really have to walk through fire but those who do and come out are one step ahead. Many steps ahead from the rest of us.

Long Time Since I Was Here

I have neglected this and all of my blogs for most of the last year while I played taxi driver for everyone around me but the load has lightened so maybe I can get back to this. I have kept up with my journal site off and on but have been censored there under threat of excommunication by a sort of family member for writing what I think about events in the past that belong her in My Little Shop Of Horrors so I will go back to writing stories about my life in here and leave the journal just an accounting of everyday life.
There are so many stories I want to put in here!!! I have several saved in my Scribe Fire that are waiting completion to be added here. I want to tell the stories about my children, my mother, my brother Herbert, and other family members I remember who are gone now but I want my children adn grandchildren to know. I also want to share the things I have been through dealing with my oldest daughter's addiction to drugs, Jeremy's battle with Epilepsy and the prejudices he faces, and just all the little tidbits that make up my life. My history.
Be back soon. :-) Rhoda

Darkness

for Rizzo
A man once was eating
figs in his dark tent,
Enjoying each one
Thinking his money well spent.
Then he lit his lamp
And looked at his loot,
And saw worms all over
His wonderful fruit.
He remembered how tasty
They were before he knew
So he blew out the lamp
Until he was through.