Tag alcoholism

“Birthing” The Death of Big Butch

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

This one is important to me. It came to me during a difficult patch of my life, the saga that leads to this manuscript ending up in my lap starts a few months after my father’s death.

The project description and the photos of Steve’s Café don’t address how this story spoke to me and captured some sensory moments of my Generation X childhood better than I can at this time.

I encourage you to check out this discussion of The Death of Big Butch. In the story, Jimmy Washburn has to face his responsibility as a father and his role in his small town life. The year is 1974, almost one year to the day before I was born. The town is a fictionalized version of a town a county away from my hometown.

Jimmy works primarily in auto body restoration. My dad, Jimmy, was a diesel mechanic for most of my my childhood. Jimmy likes to “have a couple” with the guys in the local quiet barroom. So did my dad, Jimmy.

Jimmy has a son, Little Jimmy. My older brother was Little Jimmy until he aged into “Junior.” Jimmy has a baby girl born during the course of the story, like I said, a year before me.

Jimmy has a good friend, Butch. My mom has a Butch in her life that my daughter treasures as a grandfather figure. Jimmy has a friend, Cheesy. My childhood dog was Cheezie.

I see a lot of my dad in Jimmy. I think some of Jimmy’s struggles my dad probably shared. And like Jimmy, my dad was raised and lived in a Blue Collar version of America that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not where we are geographically. Maybe it does in pockets somewhere.

And we don’t talk about this, but I’m going to say it. In America, of my parents generation, men didn’t show feelings. You didn’t do that. Together, in the bar, that’s where men went to hide or quell or ignore their feelings. You could be a sloppy drunk, but you couldn’t be a sensitive man.

People didn’t go to therapy then. Especially not in Blue Collar America. People didn’t get treatment for depression or anxiety. That meant you were weak. So they drank. Everybody drank to their issues, and many people still do.

But this story is about escaping that, about making change, about what inspires people to change.

The core staff of Parisian Phoenix— Publisher Angel Ackerman, Art Director Gayle Hendricks and photographer Joan Zachary— met today with author and …

“Birthing” The Death of Big Butch

Invisible: At the intersection of disability and childhood trauma

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Author’s Note: This is the next in a series I tend to run indefinitely on my quest to understand my mind, body and disability and how they interact as I age.

Also: This post is merely me pondering “out loud” and based on my experience. I might be completely wrong with some of my ideas. That is why I consider this a quest and not something I can answer with a quick internet search or “Hey, Siri” request.

Finally, please understand that I am hesitate to discuss this topic as I don’t want my family members to be hurt or feel responsible. Especially my parents. My parents have some wonderful qualities and their flaws because they are, after all, human beings. My parents experienced their own hardships and traumas and they have both dealt with issues with their own parents, alcoholism, etc. Plus, my childhood encompassed much of the 1980s and they were young adults in the seventies. The world, as they say, was different.

As I have mentioned in early posts, disabled children of my generation and the one prior were the first to escape institutionalization or being kept hidden away at home.

Many parents of disabled children (like Marie Killilea of the Karen books) focused on raising their children to master independence and to “pass” as normal when possible. This can lead to a desire to not call attention to oneself and in many cases avoiding (instead of attempting) activities where our difficulties become obvious.

Instead of talking about our ailment(s), we try to fit in and not be a burden. We want to seem worthy of our place in a society where if the conversation turns to eugenics, we’ll, we’d be the first people edited out of existence.

But add childhood trauma to this mix and I wonder, do disabled people with this type of trauma exponentially feel more of a need to be invisible?

Mommy and Daddy have trouble getting along and sometimes hit each other when Daddy gets home from the bar— I don’t want to be another problem for them.

Am I a victim of sexual misconduct because I was a good kid who would listen to her elders or because I was already broken?

No one wants to see me cry. They get upset when I fall down and cry. Mommy teaches me to laugh when I fall. Does this cheapen the legitimacy of the pain, the bumps and bruises.

None of my childhood trauma happened because I have a disability, but it’s another truth no one wants to talk about.

All good thoughts to ponder.

Unlearning Dysfunction

Angel Ackerman 2 Comments

One of the strange parts of growing up in a dysfunctional family, and I resist using that term, is, in my case, you don’t have any other idea of how things should be. My parents struggled with alcoholism, and they were usually functioning alcoholics. But, because they were busy drinking, they surrounded themselves with other people who drank. Most of my extended family drank, too. I didn’t learn until much later that drinking too much alcohol was a problem.

Even though I was the one who had to find my father’s false teeth when he passed out in the car after a binge and lost them. Even though I had to pick the stones and black top from my mother’s back when my father and uncle decided to race their Harleys and my mother fell off. [As we like to tell with a raucous laugh, my dad was almost home before he noticed she wasn’t there.]

Such stuff isn’t funny. But when it’s your “normal” and you’re talking about it years later, it’s not your life any more but more like a movie you saw. And because I have this detached way of looking at it, it seems funny. Until I see the horrified faces of the poor victims of my storytelling.

If your mind is already reeling, grappling with this idea that it’s hard to realize that your normal is someone else’s version of screwed up, let me present a different example. Reality is what we perceive and what we are exposed to.

When I was in middle school, the corn fields in my rural township morphed into housing developments practically overnight. I grew up in a place where bus stops were a mile or more apart and only had one child (unless they were siblings). We never trick-or-treated. There was no where to go. So to suddenly have bus stops with many children, this fascinated me.

The mom of one of these newcomers volunteered to lead our Girl Scout troop. One night we were there for a meeting and the dad came home from work. It was the first time I ever saw a man in a suit. He came home from work in a suit. My dad came home from work in grease-covered brown uniforms.

The locals, we were mechanics, farmers, waitresses, bartenders, truck drivers, quarry laborers, garment factory workers. Some people worked in mythical factories in towns 20 or 30 miles away. I was impressed if someone I knew had a nurse in the family or a teacher. The doctors were all really old white men. We were a blue collar community.

So I remember the day I saw my first white collar worker.

The community I live in now is far more urban and diverse than where I was raised. But my experiences give me the opportunity to empathize with a lot of the different situations I see. And I wonder, for those who grew up in a more traditional home, do you realize how your neighbors or children’s friends view you?

I often think about this. I was raised an only child and my daughter is an only child. I know she loves to experience the chaos of multiple child households. She also likes to come home and be the center of attention. She’s had friends of different religious backgrounds, and some friends with difficult home lives.

Whenever the children are here to play, I wonder, am I showing them something they might be seeing for the first time?

A more contemporary issue of this might be the day I invited a neighbor child to preserve pickles with us. He lost patience with the canning process and didn’t understand why we would go to all the trouble to grow cucumbers and do all this work, when you could simply go to the store and buy pickles.