I'm Sorry, I forgot

**This post jumps in time a bit, and picks up on an ongoing story of manipulation, counseling, and outright narcissism. It begins in February, 2016, following the infamous Barnes family trip to Florida.**

Feb. 16, 2016 - Blame is being handed out in abundance; to every sibling, a father, relations to in-laws, and I’m sure Obama has something to do with it as well. It’s been 43 days since “the Florida incident” occurred, but it continues to be dredged up anew. Flurries of texts, emails, snide voicemails, quick “whatever”-like responses, and threats have been poured onto my wife and her 2 closest sisters like the slime from Nickelodeon’s old show You can’t do that on Television. 

The problem here isn’t that Vanessa was blunt when asking her mother to stand down while she was diffusing the situation with our oldest daughter; the problem is that her mother requires every decision have her input and/or approval. In this instance, it was neither warranted nor requested. That was when the teapot began to shout. 

For my part in the story, it started when I asked Vanessa to move in with me a little more than 10 years ago. As a matter of fact, I believe it was mid-January, so 10 years and a month now. I looked back and found an old email I had written to her parents when she “ran away” to move in with me (Vanessa was 22 at the time). It talked then of how her mother was too controlling, and didn’t give her any options for where her life was going to lead. A common theme in this family. 

As happens with young couples after moving in together, in October that year (yes, 9 months later) we had Sophia, or first daughter. We were married in July that same year in Latham Park, a pretty rose-garden in Sioux City, by my uncle Judge John Ackerman with my Mom and step-dad, Dennis, and my grandfather and his wife Kathy. We had invited Vanessa’s family, but even after 6 months, her mother did not approve; and being a devout Catholic family, they also disapproved of it being held outside of the church. Their excuse, however, was one of the lamest I’ve ever heard. Rather than address their dissent, Tina told Vanessa “Theresa has a dentist appointment that day, and you know how hard it is to get those”. When losing control of another person, I suppose a slight is the most political method of showing your malcontent. 

Regardless, this toxic pattern of stomping her feet when not getting her way and attempting to lord money over our heads continued for several years. Tina would help financially when it suited her will for Vanessa (like when paying for textbooks, Vanessa’s car payments, or later when she agreed to compensate Vanessa for her loss of salary when she wanted to go to school), but would inevitably use it as leverage to try and make Vanessa feel guilty for disagreeing with her or not visiting enough. More recently, it’s been about not calling her adult siblings enough, who by the way still live with her and don’t have their own transportation or cell phones. 

Aug. 14, 2017 - Fast-forward now, 18 months into the future, and the blame continues to be served up in both large and small portions. Professional psychology services are getting their share, helping the sisters cope and make sense out of apparent madness. She acts like a siren from the Odyssey, sending notes of love, stories of family, and occasional glimpses of sanity. Then, without warning or a notion of causality, her poisonous words lash out, reminding everyone why diplomacy keeps failing and the battle rages on. 

Vanessa came to terms long ago (last year seems like a lifetime) with the knowledge that her mother is an unhealthy influence on our lives. All communication lines were severed, people were "unfriended" and blocked, and sides began to be taken. Tina chose to rally what sides of the family might listen to her rants against her insubordinate daughters, whom she saw as being disrespectful and out of line. The three oldest siblings, each of whom has a professional career, obviously were out of control and must be dealt with and saved from themselves. 

July 30, 2019 - Access to Tumblr restored after hacks and things. I can now finish this extensive post. Generally speaking, the three oldest sisters in the family have all come to terms that their mother is poison, won’t change, doesn’t want to apologize, and also cannot be completely eradicated from their lives. Packages of junk from Wal-Mart are sent periodically to the grandkids, some of it useful, most of it unwanted crap. 

With all of the greed of business, the technology that gets wasted, the noise and politics aimed at the masses, what are we as a species striving for in our future? Is Idiocracy really what we’re heading for?

True, it’s along those same lines of what you might ask god if he were real and you met him: “why are we here?”. But the question, to me, seems one that is no longer addressed (if it ever was). I mean to ask, what drives us as a collective people to improve ourselves, our society, and our overall well-being?

It feels to me like the long-term is being replaced by the short-term. The screen or project or carrot that gets placed in front of people today leaves us distracted and unable to try and figure out what we wish to accomplish for the world to make it better for those who follow after us. 

As a father, I’ve been contemplating this more and more. I see the “news” programs of today who are no longer concerned with informing as much as they are with entertaining, and they lack the “let’s find the real story” mentality that made news something worth watching for your betterment. I also see the religions of the world who say they teach “love” on the surface, but then have other required courses of “judgement”, “martyrdom”, and “self-righteousness” for their students. Some students do follow the teachings of love and work to keep up with mankind’s shortcomings by helping others fill the emotional needs we all have with a spiritual purpose. However, the more popular beliefs still have an “end-game” in mind of sorts that doesn’t promote stewardship of earth and fellow man, but rather preparation like those in popular doomsday reality TV. 

Last night as I was laying in bed thinking about the past couple weeks, I realized my temper has flared more often than usual. I’m not sure why. Stress hasn’t been as high as it was earlier this year when my IT job forced deadlines and put much more pressure on me. I just lost focus I guess. That’s sort of a theme here isn’t it? 

Impulse drives a lot of my emotions, my direction, and my thoughts. What causes me to suddenly get involved with something such as an impromptu vocal performance to a song, or a sudden bout of organizational file-consolidation or cleaning frenzy, can also cause my fire-cracker temper to lash out at someone or something. Inhibitions are mere speedbumps along the quarter-mile that my emotions race down. My calmer, reasonable side races to catch up to my quick hot-headedness, but loses nearly every time. It inevitably makes me regret and harms my relationships sometimes. 

That’s a lot of poetic explanation, but it’s really how it feels sometimes as my brain tries to keep up with my emotion. I hate it. Typically within minutes I’m apologetic, remorseful, and know that whether justified or not I was in the wrong for the way I handled things. 

I’ve been this way for years. I always just reasoned with myself that it was my “Italian temper” that I got from Dad; or maybe it was my need for a smoke because I hadn’t had one in 15 minutes. Whatever reason I had, or excuse I could come up with, I had trouble managing it to stop myself from getting so angry. I was Lewis Black 24/7. I’d get in a yelling match with a classmate, a coworker, my mom, whoever happened to get my blood boiling at the time. It’s embarrassing to think about now. I’ve broken game controllers in the past, smashed keyboards because something made me mad in an online game, or even punched a hole in a door once or twice. There was one instance that my friend Randy would remember well where during an online game I slammed my computer keyboard on the floor and the keys flew everywhere in the room; then, just a quickly as I had thrown it, I got up from my seat and calmly gathered the keys and started putting them back on my keyboard. My senses caught up to my temper that fast, but it proves the point of our quick it takes over. It is undeniably childish and unnecessary to get that angry, but it seemed I had no control over myself. 

Under normal circumstances, I’m significantly calmer now and have a clear head to be able to stop and think through situations without the emotion jumping in front to take charge. I’m not perfect, and the medication isn’t either. Sometimes my body can burn through the med faster than others, and its suppression isn’t able to stop the overwhelming desire to yell and overreact, such as in the past month. However, one of the things the medication has taught me is that I can control it. I need some help now and then, but I can manage it better now. I know it’s not me that gets this angry. This isn’t just the way things and it’s not a part of me that I just have to get used to. There is hope to be a better person to my family and those around me. It’s given me confidence to know that I don’t have to listen to the emotions, I can handle this and when I feel the flames starting to flare in my cranium I can just stop and say what I’ve been telling my daughter who also inherited my ADHD: 

I have not been to a chiropractor in a few years, primarily because I didn’t feel like they helped. Sure I get temporary relief, but I’d have to go back over and over again, and in the long run my pain never went away. Recently I returned to a new “minimal-impact” spine and headache clinic just because my shoulders hurt, the middle of my back was sore, and my lower back was aching; and it’s been this way for years. I could speculate and say I have these problems because of the accident I had as a toddler, but regardless of the cause, I’ve never been able to find a way to fix the problem. The doctor I went to see yesterday did sort of a visual analysis of my posture, took a couple of tests, and determined the areas of my back that were cause for concern. He saw that my left shoulder sat naturally high, my right hip sank lower than the left, and I sort of leaned my head and torso in opposing directions to compensate my balance. 

This is significant only because of the next words he told me, that sort of rang around in my head for the next few days: “You keep having little issues that you then adapt to in order to continue working. You’ll feel pain for a short while, and then eventually through adaptation, your pain indicators just sort of shut down and you ignore the pain.” I think the primary reason this stuck with me is that it sort of explains much of my life post-high-school; not only in regard to my spine, but also my emotions, my social life, and my family life. Allow me to explain (as briefly as a talkative ADHD person can). 

The summer after graduation, I wasn’t excited about moving. I didn’t celebrate finishing high school as it didn’t feel like I worked for it nor like I did as well as I felt I should have done. I had a ~3.2 GPA through my 4 years, but had hardly studied nor done any hard work. I had only a few friends that I could really call close, and none of them were going to college at Iowa State. I chose ISU because of their Engineering school that I had talked myself into pursuing and their distance from home, as a way to try and get away from the people I never felt all that close to at North High. All in all, my emotional investment was low, but it was a way to try and adapt from the life I’d known in Sioux City that really didn’t feel all that special, but I really wanted it to be. 

At college, I found I couldn’t keep up in classes the way I had in high school; but like the chiropractor, rather than seeking help to fix that, I adjusted my lifestyle to avoid the embarrassment of doing poorly, so I stopped going to class. Not going to class turned into more skipping lectures and assignments for fear of judgement passed from my instructors and classmates. Instead of studying or trying to get caught up, I just invited more people over to my room for weekday get-togethers, with promises of beer, music, and video games that I’d bought on credit. It was my way of adapting emotionally to the stress and strain of failure. I was becoming depressed, but didn’t know that about myself, so did whatever I could to try and make myself happy. This cycle of failing, drinking, trying to make friends, and inevitably moving away to somewhere that would be “better” went on for about 7 more years. I was adapting the only way I knew how; by ignoring the pain, and trying to find ways to distract myself from it. I was adapting by lying to myself that what I was doing was good for me. Hiding the pain.

Unfortunately, I’m not promoting a new fragrance from Chris Brown. My obsessions are some of the primary clues that I even had a problem growing up. Sure, all kids go through some phase or another, like wanting to be a firefighter or collecting rocks. I, however, have had tons of these phases. I continue to have them in my 30′s, which drives my wife crazy at times, though we both now understand that it’s expected ADHD behavior. Anyway, I’ve had so many, it’s hard to recall all of them. I had some of the standard collecting spurts kids have where I’d pocket various rocks or seashells, I built a respectable baseball card collection, picked up plenty of toy cars, and even had a jar full of snails at one point that I know Mom loathed (they smelled terrible and kept dying).

My uncle Scott, who was 8 years older than I, lived with my Grandma up the hill behind the house where I grew up. He also liked collecting Hot Wheels cars, and I remember he showed me how to “chrome” them. It started because some of my cars had gotten pretty worn and beaten up from playing with them so rough, and the paint was chipping off them. So we’d scratch them needlessly against the pavement to try and get the paint off. Then I believe we tried to use some sort of acrylic point used in those old paint by numbers kits to repaint them to near-original form. Of course, they looked god-awful afterward, but it was a thing we did for a while. Eventually all of my cars looked horrific and I’m pretty sure we threw them all away at some point. I won’t get into the conversation about Scott now, but he was like a big brother to me. He recently passed away after a year-long battle with cancer. 

A few years after my little Hot Wheel ‘chroming’ work, we moved to Sergeant Bluff in a lower-income duplex housing area. Mom and my stepdad, Dennis, were saving up to buy a house, so we lived there for a couple years in 3rd and 4th grade. I made several friends there, though I wouldn’t call them “good” friends looking back. We would go into the clay hills in town where there was a few larger groves of trees, some sewage drains we could fit into, and a small man-made pond behind Sioux City Brick. Not knowing any better, we kept trying to get further and further out into that pond, as disgusting as it was being a dumping area for the brick-makers nearby. I actually insisted we build a raft to float out to the middle of that cesspool to reach a lone branch that stuck up near the middle; all that was left of a felled tree that was rotting in that pond. 

Like many of my obsessions, I thought about that raft night and day, distracted by it in school, when I was at home, and even when I was hanging out with my friends. Eventually, we did get enough sticks piled on top of each other, bound by all the twine and fishing line we could steal from garages and even the local gas station (which is also how I obtained much of my baseball card collection...). Like I said, they weren’t “good” friends, but they were my buddies nonetheless. My memory is fuzzy here, but I think one of the kids was named something like Alfred, or Albert or something, but he took the raft out first. I rode it second but got scared when I was about halfway there because the raft started breaking up, and I turned around. And that was that, I was done with that raft. 

On a side note, the one cool thing about those guys I remember vividly was that we used to spend the night at each others’ houses and play video games and legos and whatnot. The final night I lived in Sergeant Bluff, before my parents and I moved back to Sioux City, the 4 of us told our parents we were staying at each others’ houses, and as a going-away party we camped out in this old rusted out Volkswagen Beetle chassis that we used as a sort-of fort. We put a bunch of sticks and leaves and a beat-up tarp over the windows to enclose it, and the doors were long-gone, but it was a cool hangout spot in the woods. One of the guys brought some cold hot dogs and s’mores components that we ate sans fire. It was a cool sentiment I won’t forget (though admittedly I could have embellished a little; but what’s a good story without some flare :)

So as I was saying, I’ve had several times in my life where I get infatuated with something and can’t seem to let go of it. A brief list of these that I’ve indulged in since I became a teenager would include: Car stereos in every car I’ve owned, Fosters beer (why I don’t know), collecting MP3s, genealogy research, writing poetry, Christianity, Building the several different computers I’ve had (I’ve built every PC I ever owned except my first Gateway), Having the perfect chemical balance in my above-ground pool, collecting CDs, collecting DVDs, having multiple fish tanks (that lasted like a year until I killed them all), many, many, many video game infatuations (Diablo and Starcraft got me kicked out of college on 2 occasions), buying and selling stocks, composing electronic music on my computer as ‘DJ Gravedigga’, opening a bar that never got off the ground, being a sound engineer, delivering pizzas and feeling entitled, being an on-air DJ (for both Morningside College and Iowa State radio stations), and the list goes on. You could say many of these things are just growing pains, but for me, I look at each one of these things and remember the deep, deep emotional tie I had to them. I literally obsessed over each and every one of these, some for longer than others. I poured everything I had into them in most cases. I would think about them, dream about them, my heart would flutter if I got a new idea or knew I could work on it. And then suddenly, without warning, my interest went from “all-in” to “why was I doing that?”, and I would move on to the next thing, or search for something else to give me that feeling of purpose. 

A memory that I find to be the earliest I can remember begins around age 2. We’re walking across the pavement, through a trailer park, Mom’s hand in mine, and I’m begging her for red licorice. I know I’ve gotten some from the laundromat we were heading to before; so as a 2 year old, I NEED it. The usual “if you’re good” gets said, and the excitement builds. Though unfortunately, this one’s anti-climactic, in that I don’t remember whether I was good enough to get some candy. Let’s just say I was good so it’s a pleasant memory and move on :)

My mind is full of these little snippets. Some points in my life stand out strong, but the details get fuzzy. I know it was something I should lock into the memory vault, so it stuck around there; but when I try to recall things most of it becomes blurry. I remember specific things certain people have taught me, that I latch onto; such as when my mom started correcting me because I said “prolly” too often. “It’s pro-bab-ly!” she would enunciate in correction of my lazy conjunction. 

Another odd snapshot I vaguely remember was our male Sheltie, aka Shetland Sheep dog, Mom had that she named “Jophes” to commemorate my cute, 3-year-old pronunciation of my middle-name, Joseph. The one thing that sticks out in my memory about this dog was when I stumbled on our other Sheltie Perdita and Jophes mating in the basement of the house I grew up in. I freaked out because I had no idea what they were doing; I think I yelled to mom that they were “stuck” together. Ha! I specifically remember Mom telling me to leave them alone or I might scare them and it would hurt them. I now realize what was going on obviously, but still find it funny that Mom would say scaring them would hurt them, since she knew I wouldn’t harm the puppies :)

I mainly discuss these little blips of video in my brain to address one of the topics in this blog: the ADHD that I’ve lived with all these years, and the discovery of it that has been starting to change my life. Digging up and sifting through my brain while I’m “medicated” is insightful, especially when I’m actually able to focus and think through them without distraction or the emotional blur I usually get from being frustrated with my inability to focus. 

Realistically, I’m not writing this blog to garner sympathy, or raise awareness per se. I’m jotting many of these things down as a sort of journal so my family, myself, or anyone who may want to understand me better might be able to look back on this and know my experiences and what made me who I am, and maybe explain why I do the things I do. I’m sure sometimes I’ll go too far and reveal a secret or a story I wasn’t supposed to tell; or maybe I’ll tell the story wrong and end up retracting things. That’s all a part of this experiment with understanding my reasoning for reacting as I do.