Aynetal3
Readers' Digest Version I was abused as a child. My grandfather sexually abused me, my mother and father physically abused me and the family in its entirety was psychology, emotionally, and spiritually destructive. It was very bad.
That being said, you might guess that I have some issues. Our first suicidal attempt took place when we were about 11 years old. We received some help with that through a counselor, but we got through most of it by paying attention to what was going on in school and in scouting. Although, our early years we struggled trying to keep caught up, by the time we got to high school we came out of the fog decided to try applying ourselves to school seriously. We received mostly straight “As” and was in band, doing office work, and participating in volleyball, cross country skiing, and softball. We were captain of the team in two of the sports. We lived for doing well for the coaches where we couldn’t do well in our family. We were still getting hit and kicked there at 17 years of age.
By the end of my senior year something amazing happened. First, my father was hospitalized for being depressed and suicidal, and then after that my mother and father decided to get a divorce. My brother was away at school, so there was a meeting with my mother, father, sister and myself. Our parents gave the two of us a choice of which we would be living with … my sister bawled. It was one of those times in life you know you are setting precedent for the rest of your life. I saw three things … my father was stating a new view on life, where he admitted errors in bringing us up, he was on the road 3 ½ days a week, and I didn’t like the thought of moving in with my mother’s new boyfriend. So that being said, we stayed with my father and since he had my sister and us, we got the house.
That didn’t last long, because by fall of the next year, I was going to be attending college in Winona, MN 2 ½ hours south of the city. It was the most beautiful campus I ever saw, was small, and they seemed to want me. There was a lot of work in between. My father had told us my senior year that he didn’t have a penny to go toward school, but the good news was that I should be able to get a loan, because he was very poor. Was like ok. That’s not really fair, but he also said that from that point on, we would be on our own, and it wasn’t as if he had anything to say about my future, my grades, my nothing. That was excellent incentive to be moving on. I couldn’t stand the house, my family, nor anything that had happened.
I can’t say at that point I really understood the abuse. I had blocked out a lot of the sexual stuff, but not the overtones, made at every family gathering the abuse with my grandfather had stopped one Christmas when he reached around to grab my breast and I knocked him down. Well, not really that way, but close. I swung around at him, and because he was drunk, it didn’t take much to topple him. That was enough of all that. He apologized on his death bed. Hmm, that happened when I was 17 too. It was a big year.
I met the brothers – Christian before I started my actual classes at the St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. There were 3 … one was Brother Julius, Brother Jerome, and BJ for Brother John. I was in the human development program that Brother Julius taught, and I knew the other two through cross country skiing. It was a small school and the recruiter had told them about me. The brothers had groomed a trail through the bluffs around the school and they invited me to ski with them the Birkebeiner. Believe me … it’s a very long race.
I met my future husband a couple months into my freshman year. He was a senior who had taken a good handful of psychology classes. I was on the volleyball team and had met him through some of the other players who were doing intramurals. Patty had gotten me out to a basketball game with him and had said, Maury … you will like Ann, she asks lots of questions, and then turned to me and said, Ann … you will like Maury, he has all the answers. We were pretty much swept off our feet. We’d had a light romance our senior year, but it wasn’t like this. This was much more. We met in October, and by about December we were umm “messin around.”
We had talked and because of his Catholic background and me not knowing about anything serious in that nature … we tried to hold back and I never used contraception or birth control. This worked for about 3 years. For my junior year, Maury went north 6 hours to do an internship, and we decided to go to Norway because we could. My “good” grandmother was Norwegian and it was a sense of connecting – doing something important all on my own. When we got back though and he’d come down for a big intramural game, we were umm together, and got pregnant.
We were married at about 5 months pregnancy – June of 1980. My son Maury was born in November, 1980, my second son was born April 1982, and my third son was born February 1984. Umm, then we had our tubes tided. It had been ok though, because during school I was taking courses in Human development, and I thought this was a natural pause in developing some humans. Eh, it was “our line.” We lived near his parents in Chicago and Oak Park. There were many stories there. Mostly though, he was a Victorian House Painter, we helped him with the business, and we bought and sold houses that we’d live in, fix-up, and then sell.
We lived in two Oak Park houses and two Elgin houses and had 3 apartment buildings before we divorced. I can’t tell you all the reasons why … I remember that was about the time we were really going crazy and his mother was pushing him to get out of the marriage. He had also been going out without my knowledge and fallen for another woman. They moved in-together in a house bought also without my knowledge before the divorce was final.
How crazy? Pretty crazy. When Maury Pat was 4 years old I had been angry for the two older kids for terrorizing their bedroom, and I picked him up and shook him. I went downstairs and was so distraught by my behavior I opened the yellow pages and called a counselor. I started sessions immediately and have never stopped since. Another was added later who could do medications. At first they thought that I was bi-polar and depressed. I loved my kids like the dickens and was protective of them, but our energy seemed often zapped. It was better about the time of moving into the big 18 room Victorian in Elgin, because I’d gotten involved in the Boys schools and education. But, with the marriage I was being stressed because of the amount of time he was out of the house.
In 1990 I ended up in the hospital on the mental ward. I had scheduled ourselves to go back to finish school, but was going up against my husband a lot. I just remember there was a lot of anger. After about 7 weeks in the hospital, the insurance money had worn off. Money from extra apartments we’d owned were quit deeded over to other family members and my husband put me on disability with the state. The hospital said I couldn’t stay without insurance, and she said I think you are still suicidal and my best bet would be that you get out of the house by going to school. So, I left. But, things didn’t get better. I was hospitalized while at school in the hospital in Winona, and then again after my husband told me that if I went back to school he’d make sure there was a divorce, I would never see my kids, and the doors to the house would be locked.
That was the thing keeping me in the marriage. I couldn’t see how I could get out with my kids … I had no means to support them. I was afraid of my husband and he had told me and the doctors that he had wanted to kill me. I couldn’t and never did understand why. I’d never hurt my kids after that first time. I was a doting mother, and I had been his best friend.
Things got really crazy the second time hospitalized in Winona. I was put in a locked room with only a mattress. The only visitors were the two brothers Jerome and BJ. BJ brought me my slippers to protect my feet. When they visited they sat near the cold floor with me. The hospital didn’t know what to do with me. We were strange and we were suicidal. A favored brother-in-law was egged on by my sister-in-law to come up and get me. If he hadn’t come up they were going to release me to the State insane asylum. The promise he made them was that I be brought immediately to another psych ward in Chicago. He found the University of Illinois because they were reputed to be good and they accepted the Medicaid and medicare funding I was on now.
That stay was 2 months long. They had made a new diagnosis of me after meeting in a very large room with about 30 staff present. Dr. Philip Woollcott had presided and I found out from one of the male nurses I’d started relating to that I had depression and I had chronic suicidality, and I was had dissociative identity disorder. I asked Joe the nurse what that was and he said I had multiple personality disorder. He helped me piece together some of my behavior changes. I think I’d seen Sybil, but at that time I had no real knowledge that I could be like that – given a psychiatric title. I didn’t remember the story. I could handle depression – hell almost everyone has that, right? But, MPD … that was different.
The hospital was going to release me under the care of Dr. Woollcott, who I would initially see three times a week, but the condition was that I couldn’t move back in with my husband. It was decided financially the only way to do it was to move into one of the lower floor apartments on our Victorian. So my husband lived upstairs, and the kids slept up there, but would go back and forth from one household to another. For the second time in my marriage I got a job. I was a cashier at a large hardware store. That lasted, and my marriage lasted for 1 ½ years. We did the marriage counseling thing, but he’d started going to AA meetings and that’s where he met his future wife. The divorce took about 2 ½ years to finalize … I ended up with the house, which was enough to put money down on another and enough to pay for the divorce lawyer. He was crooked and took from us $18,000.
Much to the Judges dismay, Maury finally gave up the custody battle and let me have the three boys. That lasted for 3 years. I had tried to be a court reporter, and had ended up under the guidance of the state. When the court reporting didn’t work, they decided to put me in a program in Chicago – JVS. I was pretty high level, but their highest level was to teach people computers so we could become a secretary. I learned how to do word processing and was assisting the staff when I got the calling for my first REAL job. The same agency had needed someone to do payroll for the workshop portion of the program. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. I was recommended to Rich by Sean, who got the recommendation through Dianne the typing instructor.
It was a bit hairy at times, but it seemed to be working for the most part. I would catch the metra 2 blocks away from my new place with the boys, and get out at Union Station and only have to walk two blocks to the JVS I was stationed at. I worked the full 6 months that my part-time status would allow, but they didn’t want to lose me. So, they gave me the title of shipping and receiving clerk. It was more money and it was full time. That was a pretty big deal. There was something else that had happened. Rich and us fell into a relationship by the end of October that year, 1994. He was my boss and had seen me affronted by several other male relations. I think he felt protective of me, but was also interested in me because of my intelligence, which was something I didn't believe in at the time. The thing with Rich was that he was married. He told me that I wasn’t to worry about that part, that that was his part. Well, naturally it wasn’t that clean, but it was the basics. 1 ½ years into employment I became the production coordinator. I was responsible for getting the work out to 100 clients – who would be trained by 3 specialists to do the work. I shared an office with Rich, his middle man, and the payroll computer. I kept doing payroll til I left.
Basically, the end had come after many attempts of my ex to come back and change up in that he wanted the boys. It got very bad, and very expensive. I put about $20,000 on one credit card and about $10,000 on another fighting for custody and trying to put groceries on the table. Finally, we saw our accountant and he told us convincingly how bad the situation was. He said that we were going to need looking for subsidized housing. But, I swore on that trip home, to my son Maury who had accompanied me that I wouldn’t make him and his brothers live through it. Several things then happened. The boys went to live with their father, I lost the kids, the animals, the house, and my life. I had seen Dr. Woollcott for 7 years, and we’d been back to the hospital for smaller spurts, but this was too much for us and we again were back to the hospital.
By good fortune Joe the nurse was still there. What he said was basically, we were at the bottom of our life, and that there was no where else to go, but up. He said this would be a good time to go back and get our education. So, we gave up the job and boyfriend and doctor and went back to Winona. Well, mostly. The boyfriend stuck it out with us. He’d come visit about every 3-4 weeks. We still went under. The biggest problem was that the relationship that we desparately needed with the brothers fell through. BJ our favorite Christian Brother over 20 years had turned our relationship sexual with one of our younger parts.
We had another major breakdown and ended up at the Mayo clinic where they did a ECT – six times. I couldn’t remember much after that. But, I got the assistance to finish school by the good Dr. and head of the psych department. He was the one that I told about BJ and he’d made sure I got the help I needed, even though things seemed at the time to be so extreme. I didn’t know a month from graduation what I was going to do. Rich had the biggest hand in that. He convinced me that the boys needed me to be in a relationship and I needed them and he needed me and maybe I needed him. He helped me find my job and he helped me find my apartment all within about 3 days. He had done some homework.
I’ve worked now at my job for 8 years. I am a cross between a councelor and a social worker for adults with developmental disabilities. I work at a small Catholic non-profit so I also do accreditation work, staff training and program development. There were a couple of hospitalizations, one when my dad and his wife died. But, things are going pretty good now. It’s been about 4 years since I was in. Dr. Woollcott was going to retire, but he hooked me up with Dr. Marvin, and we’ve been seeing him now for the last 8 years. Twice, then once a week he has given us his patient ear. I can’t stop the part about being a multiple and sometimes depressed, but he’s made life possible.
There are a couple of other things of importance. We haven’t been able to stop eating since the incidents with BJ and the shock treatment. We went in ten years time from 140 pounds to 330 pounds. We’ve picked up problems physically with the weight, such as diabetes, sleep apnea, cholesterol, and arthritis in our spine and knees. Because of all this, we can only walk or stand for about 3-5 minutes. This puts a serious dapper on most things that we could be doing with our life. As negative as this seems, something else happened this year. After 14 years of being Rich’s mistress, he finally broke free in April of this year. We’ve been living together since. I’ve got more reason to live than I ever have had. I love my boys and they love me. But, it is different when someone wants to live and be with you … To this I say God Bless.
Ok, if it’s weight surgery we need to survive, then that’s what’s going to happen … good luck to us, good luck to you …
... you do now see the part of living in the zoo though, right? Just things are better now.
I was born in Minneapolis, MN on Wednesday, July 18, 1959. I am now 48 years old. My mother was 18 years old and I was her second child. My sister soon followed. I was born on a hot, uncomfortable day and they had trouble crossing town because of a parade that is held every year in Minneapolis. My first house was a small two-flat. We lived on the second floor and when I was about 1 ½ years old, my brother about 3-4 years old fell out of the porch window. After that we moved to the NE suburb of Blaine, which was about 17 miles away. It was a new development and everyone had dirt in their yard. We were one of the first four families to move in on the block and had one of the only four 2 story houses. All the other places were ranch homes.
