My Dear Cousin - That Third Kid

1st May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

Well, in my first letter I told you about my parents and in my second I recapped the last time I saw you or what I remember of it. So, after that tangent it’s time to talk about that whole business of being born. I believe I have no cognitive memories before the age of three. I could be wrong on that, but I’m also told all that shuts down until you have a child of your own.

Now, my old man said it was then that the marriage fell apart. He said ‘when we had that third kid it all went south. It was fine when there was one kid for each of us, but three was just too much.’ Mom never talked about this, but then I have to conclude that my old man was something of an unreasonable person.

In any case, he got a vasectomy, and then they found the cancer that would eventually take my mother’s life. (Pickle) said they did a lot of fighting back then and my neighbors would tell me this was true some thirty years after the fact. I think this is why (Pickle) has mental problems. It can’t be good to have your parents fight all the time. Then again, we are all screwed up aren’t we?

I do believe that at the age of three I wanted to sleep in my parent’s bed. Why? (Pony Girl) honestly suggested it, and I was a dumb child. I’ve always been considered the dumb one, and I imagine you can ask (Pony Girl) about that. I wet the bed, it was a common problem for me, and the old man was furious. He refused to sleep in bed with my mother after that.

Mind you that mom thought she would have been dead by this time. The doctors had told her she had three years to live when they found the cancer, but she was recovering. To hear the old man tell it, mom wanted to get intimate one night and he couldn’t manage. The next day she called him at work, or so he says, and said “Don’t bother coming home.”

Twenty three years after this the old man was still complaining about how I wet the bed. I wasn’t even speaking to him at the time, but he would get into earshot and start flapping his gums over it. In modern speech he was what we would call a “man-child”. You kind of need to be immature to blame your marriage falling apart on a three year old.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal