My Dear Cousin - The Sick Young Boy

2^nd May 2021

My dear cousin,

In my last letter I talked about how my parents broke up. The sad truth about that is that you know what comes next. There are still a few surprises in store for you, but I can guarantee you’ll wish they weren’t true.

I started having health problems at this point. I kept puking after seeing my old man. People said I was “throwing up my feelings” but I think he just gave me so much candy that I couldn’t take it. We would go to Pick and Save and buy all the candy we wanted, and I being young ate too much.

Then there was the fact that mom had some trouble finding a babysitter, and my two siblings were rather rough playmates. They had a game where they would ambush me on the couch, strip me naked, and than pull me off onto the floor. This happened over and over, and the part of me that tended to hit the floor was the back of my head.

As a result I have what doctors now call transient brain damage. It impacts my ability to see words. Even now I couldn’t write this coherently without programs to read it back to me. I also lost the ability to see faces for a few years. From kindergarten until high school most people were just lumps of clay to me. I couldn’t see a face on top of a head, and so I would often need to wait for someone to speak before knowing who they were.

I still have trouble with faces to be honest. It’s not as bad, but I’ve adapted. Then part of this may be that (Pickle) and I slept in the same bed, and he would keep me up all night. I’ve never slept well and that can really impact a man’s brain development.

Two years after the divorce the old man remarried to a woman who he knew had been a prostitute in Nigeria. She came with a small army of children older than us and all kinds of problems.

About a year before she died mom had me in therapy for my brain injuries. She never knew how I got them, but to be honest she had her own problems. She enrolled us in music classes and the world was good. Then we went on one last vacation. We canoed the Colorado River. When we got home she had a massive bruise where she had been sitting in the canoe. She went to the hospital where she stayed until she died some months later. 

 

My life just isn’t all that cheery,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

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