Goodness

Inspirational stories that will motivate You to be good

Soap Opera

MY SO-CALLED FAMILY, WHICH is second to none in treachery and hatefulness, has betrayed me once more, and as a consequence, I will not be returning to East Tennessee this summer after all or for that matter ever again. In truth and it is a bitter truth I have avoided for most of my 64 years I have had no family at all since 1945. In that year, my mother's intended post-partum abortion was interrupted by my father, which saved my life. But shortly thereafter, following the inevitable divorce, my father married his secretary and attempted to abandon me in a Virginia orphanage, but was forbidden to do so by the court. Since that time I have lived with the bitter knowledge that I am quite literally the human equivalent of a dog no one wanted. To my father I was never more than an object of embarrassment and contempt, while to my stepmother I was a despised burden. My mother hated me too her attempt at ending my life on Midsummer's Eve demonstrated her true feelings beyond any scintilla of doubt and most of her family regarded me as an unwelcome reminder of an episode best forgotten.

But stupidly like the dog who returns to an abusive owner out of the desperate fantasy that the next time it will somehow be better I allowed myself to be victimized (or at the very least betrayed) by these people again and again, fantasizing that it didn't really matter I was only a half brother or a half nephew or worse someone who had witnessed the infinite viciousness in my own mother's heart and thus could not ever be trusted by any of her siblings and kin. Like an abused dog, I believed if I but tried just a bit harder, I would be accepted, perhaps even loved -- and like an abused dog, I was only kicked again.

That will not happen any more. After the events of yesterday, I have banished nearly all these people from my life. I will not let any of them -- even the ones I have not formally rejected -- into my life ever again. And if that means I spend the remainder of my years alone save for my two canine friends friends who sense my emotions and thus were uncommonly solicitous all day -- so be it.

I post a summary of this wretched matter because it will undoubtedly affect the future of my participation in this blog. As I promised Linda, I will continue posting for as long as I can and as often as I can. But at some point at most in about a year I will be ousted from the house in which I now live, the plug will be pulled on my Internet connection, and whether there will be anything in the way of writing from me beyond that moment is profoundly unlikely. To continue blogging would mandate that I find income at least double my tiny pension and for a long-unemployed 64-year-old man, no matter what the degree of his talents, that is simply not realistically possible anywhere in today's America. Indeed it would require a miracle: something that happens only to others, never to me. Once again, I am a dog no one wants or needs or has any use for, and probably the very best I dare hope is merely to remain at large and out of the pound for however many more months or years fate allows me to live.

Even so, I post on this miserable topic not to whine and whimper and practice self-humiliation (though I recognize there are many who will take it as all of that and worse) but rather in the hope someone somewhere might offer a useful, perhaps even life-saving suggestion.