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[thetowninlouisiana]

My Aunt Annie

My aunt, who I’ll call Annie, was my mother’s younger sister (and the younger sister of my uncle from my previous post, the father of my cousin Izzy).

Most of my mother’s siblings are a bit off, but Aunt Annie probably became “off” sooner than her other siblings. When she was a young teenager (probably only thirteen or fourteen) she met an older man, who she would marry and I would refer to as another one of my uncles. He was probably too old for her. Old enough to have a child from a previous relationship.

He was also into drugs, and hung out with the people from our town parents wouldn’t want their kid hanging out with. So rightfully, my grandparents banned her from seeing this older man.

Aunt Annie, from my mother’s memory, often threw these wild tantrums that would last hours. Even as an older child, in which she would scream and destroy things. When my mother talks about them, I can see that there’s still trauma in her face when she remembers them. My second sister would throw similar fits. Fits that would horrify my mother, no doubt because it would take her back to the years of living in the same house as my aunt.

Anyway, Aunt Annie’s fits were so bad that my grandparents were forced to send her to a convent. We’re not even catholic, we’re very much southern Baptist (I don’t know, maybe there are Baptist ones?) However, my grandmother could hardly stand it when my aunt would call, crying that she wanted to come home and that she would be better, and so they brought her home within just a few weeks of sending her away.

It wasn’t too long after that, when Aunt Annie was fourteen, that she purposefully got pregnant with my cousin (of course the father was the older man).

This was the 80s in the south, and from what I’ve been told, if you got pregnant, you got married. There wasn’t much choice in the matter, even if you ended up getting divorced a few years in…At least you tried. My Aunt Annie knew this, and so purposefully getting pregnant allowed her to marry my “uncle” and behold, she got exactly what she wanted. My grandparents bought them a home on their own property so they could keep an eye on them (knowing very well my aunt and “uncle” were using drugs on a regular basis) and instead of getting my cousin out of there, they felt it was better just to monitor and hope for the best.

A few years after having my cousin, they had another child. Two of my first cousins grew up in this sort of household and both had very different outcomes in their lives. But this post if about Aunt Annie, so I’ll stay on topic. I didn’t grow up in this house, but I visited often to play with them. There were holes in the walls, the floor, one cousin’s door had been knocked off the hinges. Their television had been broken for months because someone threw something at it (I was told a table stool, but could have been anything). As a child, I never witnessed these brawls, but my cousin would often laugh about it and so my sister and I laughed too. Because who throws something into their television with the intention to break it, knowing you’ll have to buy a new one!? It seemed insane to us, but our parents rarely even raised their voices. So yes…It was funny.

Somehow, Aunt Annie got an associates degree and she worked small jobs here and there. But her drug use affected her epilepsy (a condition my mother and eldest uncle also have, so it runs in their family). Theirs were fairly mild, but Aunt Annie’s were exacerbated by the drug use. She was eventually able to file for disability.

My “uncle” (again, her husband) went to jail numerous times over the years for drug use. Why he didn’t go to jail for knocking up a fourteen-year-old? I dunno. He was in jail more often than he was out of it. But when he did work, it was at automobile shops, and supposedly he was pretty good at it. He always had cars in his front yard that he was “fixing up”. I don’t know how many of them actually got fixed up though.

To no surprise, they divorced eventually. I don’t know when. It was like, suddenly he no longer lived there. I liked him enough. He was always nice to me, but now that I’m older I realize that entire situation was problematic. But you don’t know these things when you’re a child. You see your aunt and uncle, and you love them. They seemed fun. They seemed more fun than my parents, and they were always staying up super late and sleeping late. Playing video games and they were so cool because they would cuss in front of us like we were grownups. Not to say any of this is bad if you do it. It’s just, knowing what was happening behind the scenes now as an adult explains why this wasn’t just fun. It was sad for my mother to see her sister that way. It was sad for my cousins to grow up that way. It’s sad what it turned out to be.

After the divorce, my aunt continued living like she always did. She did the drugs, abused prescription pills. Started fights with her children and other family members. This isn’t to attack her or to hate on the memory of someone who can’t defend themselves. It’s what happened, these were things I saw myself. One time I cried because I was at my grandmother’s house as Aunt Annie started talking bad about my mother to my grandmother. It hurt my feelings, because to me my mother is the most wonderful person to have ever existed.

But she was not all bad, just like no one is all bad or good. She struggled and she had pain, and in turn it hurt my family and it hurt her. I loved her.

When I was about fifteen or sixteen, we got a phone call in the middle of the night…Right after Christmas. I picked up the phone at the same time that my mother picked up the downstairs phone and all I heard was my grandmother calmly tell my mom, “Your sister is dead.”

We had both been awake. Me, because I was playing Sims on my computer. My mother, because she had seen the police lights across the road at Aunt Annie’s home. She thought someone was being arrested (which wouldn’t have surprised us). But instead, my aunt had been found dead in the bathtub by her then-boyfriend.

It was a crazy whirling and surreal moment, when I went downstairs and my mom hugged me…Crying. I remember she said, “She was stupid, but she was my sister.” I held her until Dad got in there and took over. My parents never cried in front of us. To this day, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen my mother cry. And nearly all of them were after she lost her sister.

What they told us was strange. At first, the police told my cousin they thought she had been strangled. But you know, my town has backwoods cops that know next to nothing about that sort of thing. Her boyfriend told the police he had been in bed and she had gone to take a bath. He woke up several hours later (still in the middle of the night) and went to check on her. He found her in the bathtub. He said he then dressed her and instead of calling 911, he drove to the substation.

It's weird, but it seemed like the truth. He wasn’t the smartest man, so we weren’t super surprised to hear the story. It was only after the autopsy that it was revealed it had been drugs that had killed her. Well, a mixture of drugs and alcohol had caused a massive heart attack. Almost like an instant death.

If you ask my southern Baptist grandmother, she’ll tell you it was a heart attack. It makes my mom angry. My grandparents spent all those years being enablers. Paying my aunt’s bills for her, taking care of her children but never really rescuing them. It’s bizarre. And yet, they cannot cope with the fact that yes…Enabling addicts can kill them. I’m not saying they killed her…I’m not saying addiction is something we always choose. Yes, people choose at first, but then it turns into something else. It turns into a lot of choices. A lot of bad things.

I thought my aunt dying was going to kill my mother. It has almost killed my grandmother, and my cousins. It was like it was a rot in our family, that addiction, that we ignored, and we just let happen and then one day she died, and the rot exploded. And we still let it fester, to this day. Years later, we are still sitting in this rot that destroyed so many pieces of us.

I cried while writing this. I find I mostly cry thinking about Aunt Annie because I think about my mother. How much it hurt her to lose her sister. I think about how it hurt my cousins to lose their mother, and how so many other families have been afflicted by these things. How there is very little we can do for our loved one if they cannot escape on their own. How we give up on people, but if we don’t, sometimes we’re labeled as enablers and there’s such a fine line between those things.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if she had not died. Our holidays stopped being holidays when she did. My grandparents were never the same. People try to say good things come from these things, but I’ve never felt anything good come from her dying.

I still hope that someday I’ll have some kind of epiphany, but as of yet…I haven’t.

As for my “uncle”, at my aunt’s funeral – even after they had been divorced for several years at this point…He probably cried the hardest of anyone. I remember looking at him, and being a teenager, I had never seen a grown man cry like that. Especially him, who was over six feet tall. A giant. Crumbled in a pew.

He died a few years later. A heart attack. My cousins live with this. And I’m sure the thought of “why couldn’t they choose me over that”? I’ve never asked how they feel. I don’t know if I could ever ask that.

[thetowninlouisiana]

My Cousin Izzy

I’m not sure how to tell this story.

I thought the first story I should tell should probably be somewhat lighthearted. This is lighthearted to me, because it in no way – shape or form – caused me (personally) any sort of pain. If you’re reading this, when you’re finished you might think to yourself, “That wasn’t funny at all. In fact it’s horrible and tragic.” Well…There’s a reason this is being shared this way. It’s easier to be transparent.

I have this cousin who is several years older than me. Twelve or thirteen probably. She was very close with my eldest sister, who is very much my senior because my parents had a nice southern teen pregnancy followed by a shotgun wedding. I’m not sure if my cousin is the product of that, but she is the product of my uncle who has always been a bit unstable (my mother thinks he has a tumor) and his first wife, who lives in a commune and enjoys the recreational use of drugs that are less than harmless. Their divorce wasn’t very amicable. My uncle’s ex claimed he ran her and her mother over with a car. Is this true? I wouldn’t know, but it sounds like both he and her were telling their own lies.

This cousin (I’ll refer to as Izzy) has by no means had an easy life and I won’t pretend that’s funny. It’s kind of tragic, but I’m thinking a lot of us in the town I grew up in didn’t have super easy lives. It’s a poor town, in parts, if you ask me, but middle class has sprouted up through the years. Mostly due to racism, because the rich people don’t want their kids going to school in the big-town because there are black people there. So they come to our town’s school that is primarily white but chances are, it’s far stupider.

Anyway, (this post isn’t for exposing the racism in our town but that’ll come eventually) this cousin would spend nearly every weekend with my eldest sister, my mom, and my father since she and my sister were so close (this was way I was born). Until my sister kept getting lice and my mother eventually deduced it was Izzy who was bringing it around. The ‘commune’ she was growing up in was known for their neglect towards their children. Not to say your kid getting lice is neglectful, but I’m guessing if your child has it weekly, that’s a little suspect. And if there’s anything my mom hates, it’s treating kids for lice. So then every weekend that my cousin would come over, before my mom would let her do anything, my mom would treat Izzy’s hair and wash all the clothes she had packed for the weekend.

All this just to give you a slight idea of how my cousin grew up. Maybe it shaped her into who she is today and maybe it didn’t. Who’s to know. But she was definitely shaped into an interesting character, nonetheless.

In her early 20s, Izzy married a pretty wealthy guy from big-town. His family owned some kind of business, but being that I was probably about 10 at her wedding, I couldn’t tell you anything about him. The two of them moved into a house on my grandparents’ property, and now I kind of question why ol’ boy couldn’t use some of that cash to get them a place of their own. I don’t know, maybe they wanted to make their own way without his parents’ money. Not something I would do, but eh, to each his own.

It was a shotgun wedding, because Izzy was already pregnant with their kid. As Katara would say “They all lived together in harmony”…Until, her family got wind that she had a place of her own and the commune pretty much became squatters in their house. Izzy’s husband didn’t like that and packed his bag, and eventually my grandparents evicted Izzy because her commune was trashing the place. I’ll never forget spending that summer helping my grandma clean up that house. It was pretty appalling, but I’ll never forget her purposely writing on the walls in marker, insults towards my grandparents for kicking her out.

This was probably around the time that the hard drug use started. Because I remember the next time I saw her, she had forgiven my grandparents I guess and came to some holiday. She was missing some of her front teeth, and I don’t really care if this makes me an awful kid, but that lisp was funny.

She officially divorced the rich guy and he sued for full custody of their kid and he got it. Probably deserved, because it was clear Izzy was going off the deep end. Maybe she needed help, or support, or something but drug addiction wasn’t exactly new to my family. In other stories I’ll talk all about how drugs have run rampant in both my extended and immediate family. I guess there’s just nothing else to do in small towns.

Izzy got pregnant again. It was the big talk of our little town because *gasp* the supposed father was a black man. I told you, my town has never been covert in their racism. And they weren’t in this situation either. But by this point I had a facebook, and I was friends with her so I kept up with how excited her and the father were. They looked pretty happy to me, though she still looked like she was losing more teeth by the day.

Soon she gave birth and in an unfortunate twist, that baby came out blond headed and blue eyed. And I know what you’re thinking. Mixed kids sometimes are blond too! But rightfully, her man was a little suspect and they got a DNA test done. Turned out, it wasn’t his baby. I feel bad for the guy, he had his whole family up at the hospital waiting for this baby to be born and that was a whole white man’s baby right there.

So, who was the father? Turned out to be my other cousin’s best friend’s baby. Dude was in jail, and I think he still is. From what I understand, he sold a guy drugs and the guy had a heart attack and died.

Izzy ended up having two more kids. Her third actually was mixed, and I have a feeling she’s one of those weird white people who fetishizes about having mixed children because she apparently tried really hard to get someone to get her pregnant with one.

She had a fourth kid, who I never met. At that point, she had moved to big-town and didn’t come to holidays anymore. From what I understand, she never saw her eldest son anymore since his father had full custody and they moved to a different state with their business. I wonder if she even cared sometimes. She probably did, and it’s hateful of me to assume she didn’t.

It was only a few years later that the three remaining kids were taken by CPS. I don’t know what led up to this, but supposedly she was living in a crack house with them or a car or something. It’s weird, because our family was never asked to house them or anything. They kind of just disappeared straight into the system. I’m thinking my uncle might have been asked to care of them, but there is no way in hades he’d ever say yes.

As for Izzy…Her facebook posts are the only glimpse into her life I get.

Apparently she is “right with God” and no one else can judge her. I think this is a typical facebook post we see from people who have made some bad decisions. Not to put all the blame on her though, no one really saved her from the upbringing she had, my other family members included. No one seemed to care about her and it was weird, because my grandparents invested a lot of energy into protecting my aunt’s children (my aunt had a drug problem too) but they never paid much mind to Izzy or the fact that my uncle was crazy as well as her mom.

Hindsight. I know I said this was a funnier or lighter story. In some ways it is and isn’t. It’s pretty tragic, but I think it’s something I’ve become desensitized to and the only reason I even know it’s a “tragic” thing is from reading the perspectives of people who grew up outside of this sort of thing. Some of my family members still laugh about her getting her kids taken – and isn’t that horrible? Isn’t it sick? And still, I never say anything. Still, even I catch myself laughing at her nonsensical facebook rants because it feels funny when I don’t think it should.

I read once our initial thought it what we were taught to think, and our second thought is what we’re learning to think. What I’m learning is that it’s not funny the way Izzy’s life turned out. It’s not all her fault, but it’s not all everyone else’s fault either. I think it just sucks and no one did anything.

Hope you guys enjoyed my first real entry here. I plan to share more. And hey, if you’ve got stuff to share with me go ahead, I know I can’t be the only one who grew up like this.

[thetowninlouisiana]

What is "The Town in Louisiana"?

I think the difficulty of the first post lies with trying to describe why and how this blog exists. Well, maybe not the ‘how’, because I’m utilizing the free version of this platform since I’m not exactly rolling in the ‘doe’ at the moment (though I’m not above saying I wish I was). The ‘why’ is a little harder to describe. I think people who grew up in small, dysfunctional towns with their family members practically shoved up their butt might understand the ‘why’ to this blog. It’s something that was normalized in my childhood but now that I’m older, I’ve begun to question whether that existence was what molded the good or bad parts of me. Maybe both. I often blame it for the bad parts of me though, all the bits that I’ve tried to beat out of my psyche and have been unable to do so. It’s a little sick.

The Town in Louisiana, to put it simply, is a way for the town in which most of this happened to remain anonymous. Along with the characters in the stories I intend to tell. Some of these experiences both simultaneously make me laugh and cry. Really, they make me crazy – because I don’t know how to think of it in any other way. You start to wish no one knows your parents, your aunts and uncles, or that your cat died last week. If I told my mother how much I hate it, she wouldn’t cry but she might try to convince me it didn’t happen the way I think it did. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t, because I remember it this way. But that’s important to remember as I tell these stories to all of you, or the non-existent ‘all of you’. That this is how I remember it, and if it’s a lie, it’s not an intentional one.

Honestly, I think that’s any ‘real-life’ story we share with others. We’re incredibly unreliable, but it’s fun nonetheless.