The night of the honeymoon the newlyweds stayed in a room on the ocean waiting for their trip around the world to begin the next morning when they would board the plane with passports in hand. That first night Charles just fell asleep on the bed and when Nancy Jo exited the powder room dressed beautifully and ready for a newlywed night of splendor, Charles lay there unconscious to the world. The next morning he told Nancy Jo, “I knew what I had to do to get you and now I have you”. Simple as that, what inspiring, loving words to build your life on. Nancy Jo was speechless for the next upcoming years.
The honeymoon produced a pregnancy and then the newlywed fun really began. Nancy Jo’s doctor was furious because she became pregnant with a surgically implanted IUD in and it threw off the numbers in the doctor’s study. What a nice “congratulations” from the doctor for Nancy Jo. While she was pregnant, Charles began to resume his philandering ways with other women, and that never stopped. In 1968, I was born, the product of a beauty queen and a sociopath. I will get to the diagnosis a little later.
I grew up under the guise that we had money, when the truth was that my father’s parents had money and he wanted to live the life of leisure and live off of them. The evidence of this manifested itself when my father would leave town for days and days, leaving with the keys of the vehicle in our driveway in his pocket while he drove off in his car. He left without leaving my mother any money, not paying the bills, and she would not have any mode of transportation. Beautiful, this is what every woman dreams of when they marry and have children. Since his parents always provided a financial safety net beneath him he never really had the drive or the need to truly pursue an income. He did have business after business; he would never actually “work” for someone else as in “become employed”.
I grew up with confusion about money and no clue about the value of a dollar. I knew that my grandparents had accounts at the finest stores around town and so I would help myself to shopping and sign off on the ticket with the family name. My father never had an interest in paying the bills and the lights would get turned off, the cars would get repossessed and that further confused me as we lived in a nice home and had nice vehicles when they were in my parents’ possession. I thought we had money, but apparently it was not in my parent’s bank account, but the bank accounts of my grandparents. I only understand this in retrospect as an adult, as a child, things just seemed incongruent and strange. My parents never seemed as though they were together and little did I know about how they became married, the tragedy of their honeymoon and the cheating ways of my father. Just like Nan, Nancy Jo also carried a wounded heart. When your heart is wounded you are distracted from the things in life that could bring you joy or that might need your attention, like children. I recall my mother being a loving mother, but I also recall that she seemed absent, literally and figuratively.
My father was horribly abusive physically, verbally, mentally, and sexually. He was the devil personified. I wanted desperately to kill him. I used to dream of ways to do it but none seemed to carry enough pain and torture to do the deed justice to repay him for the life I was trapped to live.
Today, I am in a good place. I have forgiven him for myself and don’t spend time thinking of him or what I endured at his hands. I am happy and I am glad to have it behind me and to have worked through the pain to reach the other side where I have pleasure and joy in my life. It has been a very long road to get to this place in my journey, I spent most of my life wandering in the wilderness of life, stumbling and falling down, and making bad choices out of desperation, pain, and ignorance.
The beauty queen discovers the sociopath: insanity exposed
When I was younger, Ted Bundy came to visit my town to do what he did. I was out on the Seminole Reservation with a neighbor girl from my neighborhood. I think her father might have dropped us off out there, it was really far away from where we lived, it was the opposite side of town. We were out there sunbathing and hanging out. When we were ready to come home the friend decided that it would be alright to hitchhike home. I have no idea where my parents were. The girl I was with was older and I remember her being beautiful, I don’t recall her name. Anyway, we rode home with some guy driving a pick-up. He wanted her to ride in the front of the truck with him and I rode in the back of the truck like a dog in the wind. I had no idea who Ted Bundy was and what we did that day was potentially deadly. We obviously made it home but what we told our parents I have no idea. I have such blotchy memory about much of my childhood. I remember I got a pony for Christmas one year. That is my best memory. The pony was half Shetland and half Welch and was the most stubborn creature you would ever encounter. He would do anything to get me off his back. Reminds me of my relationship with my father. Lovely, what a father-daughter relationship should be…….in hell perhaps.
So back to the insanity, because Ted Bundy, the sociopath, was on a killing spree at the sorority houses of Florida State University, his personality profile was published in the Tallahassee Democrat and horror of horrors, my mother read the profile and determined that it matched up identically with that of my father Charles. After this arm-chair diagnosis by my mother, somehow Charles agreed to go to several psychiatrists, two to be exact, and they came to the same diagnostic conclusion, Charles was a sociopath. Perfect information if you were a resident in……..hell perhaps.
Sociopaths have no remorse for their actions because they have no conscience. They know how to act normally, carry on in society, be smart, witty, charming or evil, deadly, and disgusting. You never know what you will get. Not like the box of chocolates, more like the insanity grab bag.
So I grew up with patchy memories at best, remembering completely nauseating things at the worst possible moments. As children, we store our memories in our imaginations because we do not yet have the ability to process memory or experiences like an adult because our brain has not yet fully developed or matured. As a result of children storing memories in the mental folder of imagination, it is difficult to determine the actual event with crystal clear clarity. As we mature and we get to places in our life where our brain can transfer and share space we sometimes have a mental feed that comes from one area of the brain and feeds into another place where we can better process the experience and the information now that we are better equipped to be able to make peace with a particular memory.
