My Inner World

This turned out to be such a long post, that I decided to post it in two parts, one today, one tomorrow.

My brother is two years younger than I am. He has always been a bit of a handful. We have an older foster brother, W., who ran with wrong crowd for a while and my brother, A., thought this was the coolest thing ever. He looked up to W. and wanted to be just like him. He thought criminals that were a bit higher up the crime food chain were the coolest dudes ever.
A. is a tall, strong lad, he impresses with his physique and he was quite the popular guy in our teenage years. He has lightning quick wit and is very intelligent. Thankfully, he never really made it in to a life of crime to the extent that we once feared he might but he didn't quite make it to the straight and narrow either. He was in and out of 5 Middle Schools (High Schools) and never finished one. The weird thing is though, that he would get in to trouble for beating up the big guys that would be picking on the "nerds".
He once bashed a guy over the head with a lunchbox that this guy had taken from a 12 year old first year. He hated to see injustice. And would loose the plot completely if he was accused of something that he didn't do.
He also cut class and eventually all the contacts my dad had, were used up and he had to quit school.

When I started ballroom dancing (It's very popular 'round our parts, all the cool kids do it! ;) ), he joined a year later, and I think that saved him from going down the wrong path too much. There was a different "vibe" there.
A. had an extremely bad temper. He has beaten me up twice. For incredibly stupid reasons. I ended up with bruises all over my body, a lump on my ankle the size of an egg where he pushed me down a step and muscles so sore that I couldn't go to work as a waitress because I couldn't lift my tray. Don't get me wrong, this is not a huge youth trauma to me. I know people that have been through much, much worse. It wasn't fun at the time but it pales in comparison to what some people have experienced.
Matt picked me up from work that second time because I just couldn't hack it and I stayed in his house. So my parents did not see me straight after.
My mam only found out about it three days later and she never told my dad, even though she said she had. She had asked me to leave it to her. My Dad only found out about those times recently and he was distraught about it. He says he didn't know and would have taken severe action had he known.
Our Dad worked allot, he was either at work, or at home behind the PC. There were no family outings as such and anything family-like would come from our mam. Then when our teenage years hit, accompanied by the usual turmoils, our Dad said and did some nasty things. He didn't lay a finger on us but the mental and emotional blows were pretty bad. Now, I know that this was because he just was not equipped for dealing with teenagers.
He had certain expectations of how we would turn out and when they weren't met..... He couldn't handle it.

Between that and losing my first love and best friend, Matt, I had to get the hell out of Dodge. A. stayed. He moved in with his girlfriend but was on welfare and just didn't pull his own weight. His girlfriend wised up and they split, sending A. back to our parents' house.
He would go out until all hours, stay in bed until the late afternoon and be off to the pool hall again. My dad organized work for him, which he botched up by not showing up or showing up hung over. He demanded money from my mother, stole from her. Got himself in to monumental debt and expected my parents to sort it out for him. He thought (and probably still thinks) the world owed him something. Especially my parents. He says it's their fault he is the way he is.
I grew up in the same house he did, was there for the same fights and the same lack of attention from our Dad. For the same mental and emotional nastiness. It wasn't fun and I find that some memories still sting a bit more than others BUT, I got over it already! Sh*t happens. It sucks, but our parents are human too and they are not the same people they were 10-15 years ago. It has been over a decade. Life goes on, deal with it. There comes a time that you have to take charge of your own life. Take responsibility for your own decisions. ( I will be the first one to say though, that had I stayed in that toxic environment, I would have taken a lot longer to "get there" too.... Paddy made me see things allot clearer.) ...............


(More Tomorrow)