Chapter Seventeen Escape from Accountability

Chapter Seventeen

 

Escape from Accountability

 

“ … they understood our men as we did not!” and

“Today most of our men are better husbands and fathers than ever before.”

--- bill wilson on pages 105 and 108 in chapter eight’s “to wives” of the big book regarding an alcoholic’s other women, mr. wilson presenting that chapter as if his wife, Ms. Lois Wilson, had actually scripted it – all the while himself, during and after ending alcohol consumption, having countless sexual liaisons 

 

Monday nights and Friday nights, not unlike every other night of the week most weeks it seemed, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had, for the past year, reserved for himself.  Alone.  Those two nights and Sunday mornings at 10 am as well Herry liked to procrastinate and bullshit his way through a couple to three more hours on each of those days by attending the local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and talking, talking, talking afterward.  Plenty of vulnerable women at these with whom to attempt to 13^th – Step and folks like Jim Cornball, the realtor, and many other so – called  ‘respectable’ town drunks all patting themselves and each other on the back over their … let’s say it all together now … “… just not taking another drink today.”  All for the love of bill w, the glorious and so hyped and ballyhooed “12 Steps,” some manly written blue – covered book other than Herry’s own Creighton University journal and each other’s strokes and hugs.

 

Certainly not for the love of nor the strokes and hugs of their families this excuse of insecure and lazy men for attending AA meetings is – it turns out.  For this new Ames year of 1986 to 1987, for our household and without his drinking even one sip of booze since 1977 when Zane was about a year old and both Jesse and Mirzah not even yet conceived, Herry was, by his concerted and deliberate choice, actually missing to our entire family at least eight to ten hours more out of any 168 – hour week.  About ¼ - time, that is, of prime husbanding and fathering periods.  Herry was gone off simply schmoozing at all these AA meetings and at their social situations after – which actually for most of the folks there, instead of promoting individual health, community sustenance, family healing and the responsibilities thereof, turned out to be all about congratulating each other and celebrating his and the others’ freedom and escape from their accountability of the work that it is to being a spouse and to raising up a family. 

 

Laziness and procrastination was more the character of not only those nights and the first – of – the – week morning time but of all of the hours in between each meeting, too, – for Herry was either on the telephone or at a coffee shop at the various hospitals or around Ames and the other small, rural towns … hustling.  ‘Sponsoring’ he much preferred to term it as though. 

 

As much as Herry liked the ladies, insecure Herry also loved the elitist spotlight of How I Can Teach You, Too, Because I Know So Much More Than You Do.  This kind of a weekly agenda for a man who not only was a supposedly heavily scheduled medical doctor but also the father of three schoolboys who allegedly needed his time and attention.  Then, too, there was me, the man’s spouse – to whom, of course so far to date, my first name – Legion – just hadn’t by Herod Edinsmaier’s use of it, … yet … managed to come up whatsoever at all.  Let alone, his being present in attendance and … ah, therefore, … attentive to me.  No wonder that, besides the washouts that were its members’ mothers, Herry just hadn’t any time to actually perform the work of coaching his soccer team of six – and seven – year – olds and couldn’t be bothered with remembering to even be awake, not to mention, expertly mindful of any given weekday morning's surgery schedule and, then, physically tableside to unconscious and anesthetized women with their possibly cancerous, and therefore quite unimportant, breasts bared. 

 

I can make this analysis and – O jyeah, criticism – of the functioning – er, of the dysfunctioning that it truly is! and which underlies Alcoholics Anonymous because i) I believe all of what it is that I say about it and ii) I myself went to Al – Anon meetings where we almost all, there, did the very same damn thing.   Not for very long did I go.  After all … I had three kids to take care of and to raise up. 

 

I saw going on at this particular 12 – Step Bullshitting and Let’s – All – Get – Out – Of – Truly – Working Society the very same thing as at open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – and at full speed.  Most there squandering away incredible quantities of time and, in like measure, a monumental amount of money on AA’s and Al – Anon’s gargantuan industry of trifling and trivial trinketry, inanimate objects all of them:  palm – sized prompts of daily feel – goodisms, pictures, other motivational books, mugs, medallions, bumper stickers, posters,  yada, yada, as well as bookoo bucks on local restaurant menu items whilst socializing after, not to mention, the major dollars lost to families because folks there were … not at work working!   Aaaah, JYeah! – They were soooo not at work … working!  Including – most of all – so not at that which is the work of … the home! 

 

All of us were, instead, busy blaming an inanimate liquid – Step #1, ya’ know –  that is inside an inanimate glass bottle or metal can in order for all of us to get clean, slick away with all of this (non – alcoholic, of course) toasting and boasting and procrastinating and wasting and good times talking and hugging – and whatever else.  The perfect excuse for escaping the accountability of really going ahead and doing the actual, reasoned work necessary that is that of being an adult member of a family.  Herod Edinsmaier believed his to be the perfectly planned excuse each week, one that would permit him to knowingly and purposefully shun the undertaking it was to face me, quite animate instead, square on, to be my husband and to be of the coupledness that was our union the other, most animate parent to Mirzah, Jesse and Zane with me!      

 

Alcoholics Anonymous is perfect both in its doctrine preached and in its physical format of meetings and sponsorship for covering up and for escaping the real work and the real time that is required to be a true husband to one wife and equally with her, their mother, to co – parent their children.  It is waaaaay too un – fun and unattractive and requires sacrificing almost all of that   I’m – such – a – great – guy – for – not – takin’ – a – drink attention for an alcoholic to make the genuine decision to confront and relinquish his real addiction:  that of sex and behaviors and things sexual – – and, instead, to be intimate and animate with one’s spouse or partner only. 

 

There are many, many persons who formerly attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous but are instead inside several other groups today including inside 12 – Step ones where they struggle to stop their sexual addictive behaviors – and who now make no bones whatsoever about their previous excusing and escaping.  And there were even quite a few groups of such wholly and long – time dry drunks back some ten to 12 years ago already.  “We admitted we were powerless over our real addiction, that is, powerless over our sexual behaviors which destroyed us and harmed our families” or something similar are the words of such a group’s First Step.  Instead.  Over our … animate … behaviors.

 

The group that is Al – Anon?  Her support group, not her husband, is advising the wife, the girlfriend, the mother, the daughter to do this and to think that – – so, so surely it – the collective, altogether – mostly – female (of course) – brain knows what is best for her and the alcoholic's kids and grandchildren.  Even if Herry is an all – out fuck of a drunk, why, … my support group wouldn’t be steering me in the wrong direction now, would it?!

 

Sexual addicts’ enablers all.  That I have seen.  Maybe not all Al – Anons everywhere – but definitely all of them that I have ever seen.  Since early on in the formal organizing of Alcoholics Anonymous chapters and meetings when most identified alcoholics were male at the time misogynist bill w and his patriarchal compadre, dr bob, were setting down ‘rules’, ‘rules’ all bootlegged and plagiarized from all of the ages – old, man – made religions’ commandments! into that similarly blue book of theirs, why, keeping the little woman pacified and assuaged in another male – mandated and male – identified organization, that is in Al – Anon, just made very, very good opportunistic sense for them.  They could continue their real and much – desired addiction right under the truly proximal noses of their wives who were being unbendingly and quite blindingly advised to forgive while continuing to love and to remain servile, soft and, of course, utterly deferent to them, their dryly drunk yet nonetheless veritably addicted husbands. 

 

Witness the androcentric and sickening “chapter eight” of ‘the big book’.  In the 20^th and  

21^st Centuries.  Pornography.  Smut this chapter is for which men everywhere – from or by

their wives’ counseling them of its contents changed instead into advice “to husbands” and whether they be actively alcoholic or stone cold and free from hooch for decades (not, of course, equaling … sober) – would not themselves – ever – stand a second still!  Flip / Reverse. 

 

Then, too, Step #4 it is that insists that no one else be taking stock of any drunk or of any addict.             O o o o, and just how convenient is that canon to have workin’ for your side of matters?!  No one else, Alcoholics Anonymous’ and Al – Anon’s ‘rules’ declare, no one else can police you and your other endeavors or own an opinion, much less, voice it about what behaviors you’re up to.  Just you yourself. 

 

So.  Just staying away from swallowing beguiling, fermented, inanimate liquids gives you carte blanche and laissez – faire license to get clean, slick away from and out of doing the mundane, daily routine of home chores and duties including the ones as minor as spousal respect, loyalty  and fidelity – emotional or physical.  And you get to waste a whale of a lot of time and money  and then two to three hours later that night you swaggeringly sashay back out into The Real World where someone else has, because, well, because … these actually had to get done, … where someone else has already performed your share of the day – to – day labors of life and living — that you should have done for that day.  Like give the kids their evening baths or sanitize the toilet bowl since you shit in it just as much … and more … than anyone else in the household does.     Or grocery – shop.  Completely.  Or, O say … cook something up other than the extraordinarily rare supper of spaghetti!  You get to do whatever the hell ya’ habitually wanna – including all of your sexually addictive activities.  You’re, overall, scott free and off the hook from having to do the work of life and living and, O god, of relating to only one, very animate spouse!  Much less,  of raising up three boys to their … accountable adulthoods.  Except for the not drinking of alcoholic liquids, Step #4 sets an AAer up with complete freedom, free rein and – very, very androcentrically, … with full authority – to continue everything – – including being granted organizationally and patriarchally backed approval and entire, yet so discretely and perfectly concealed, permission to act out all of those sexually addicting behaviors of his or hers … unabated. 

 

Former AAers in genuine sexual addiction treatment are the first ones to admit this Truth about Alcoholics Anonymous and its equally and deferringly collusive group, Al – Anon.  They will tell you straight up:  that while all manner of machinations are recited long and loudly in AA and in Al – Anon to the effect that accountability in matters of life, living and relating is what “Working The Program” is all about, in fact and in Truth, accountability is not at all the objective – nor the result!  Instead, just the opposite is.

 

Now.  Instead of Herry ever gathering any Willingness to Listen to anyone describe and confirm for him what he deep or, as a matter of fact, … not – so – deep … down has always known, that is, how he perfectly fits this moldy picture, much less, his ever reading and studying up on the cessation of sexually addicting behaviors on his own, Herod Edinsmaier executed that which he dazzlingly perpetuates:  he denied and denied and denied.  And quite does so I’m sure, that is, dwells in that brain of his along the banks of that soooo, so smooth – flowing River D’Nial, today.  Dr. Edinsmaier continues those so – sanctioned, freely unaccountable hours of heaping aggrandizing attention upon himself as he 13^th – Steppingly ‘teaches’ others, especially those weak and vulnerable women who are themselves newcomers to AA, just how much it is he really, really knows!     

 

*     *     *     *  

 

Herry loved to say, probably still does, “Anything serious needs to be laughed at.”  That was the base essence of Dr. Edinsmaier’s ‘great humor’ of which more than one judge, as I have stated before, was privy to hear him give testimony, er I mean, provide ‘evidence’.   That is, of the type of raillery and jokes that Dr. Edinsmaier and another one of The Stash, his next wife, Fannie Issicran McLive, liked to teach to my Sons.  Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, for nearly the entire time I was his wife, amused himself by fixing up old and used bicycles so that they could be ridden again.  He owned many old frames, a repair stand with a grip for securing them, a truing machine for wheels and spokes and various American – and European – sized tools and wrenches specific for the repair of whole bikes or bike parts.  This was not at all an ignoble avocation I should think; and, with three boys riding in the household, more or less handy it was to have someone around who knew how to keep their wheels trued and rolling accurately.  When … he was actually there to do so. 

 

One of Herry’s favorite pieces of pornographic prose, the one we’ve read through in its entirety earlier and entitled “Why Bicycles Are Better Than Women,” he taught to others repetitively and most especially to Mirzah, Jesse and Zane, two of whom in their adulthoods themselves I have since overheard repeat snippets from to their friends.  Right in lock step this is with Herry’s and Juggern’s map for making men into husbands and fathers, especially fathers of more men as well as and apparently much less importantly, o’ course, fathers of or fathers – in – law of or grandfathers of … women.  Exalted Juggern Edinsmaier provided the similarly exalted Edinsmaier spermatozoa for five live daughters and one dead one born at term, and no one I know knows what gender the two were that were the conceptus products of Mrs. Edinsmaier’s abortions early on in her gestations of them. 

 

AmTaham sired three daughters, half the Edinsmaier number.  And none of us, … I know Endys, Ardys and I never heard the likes of this fuckful prose out of AmTaham’s lips nor from his son Sterling’s nor his brother Wilbert’s nor his brother – in – law Rowland’s nor from those of his nephews Arthur and Wyman.  Some of these True men did indeed,  I know for a fact, think like this but to my ear I never once heard anything at all, not ever, the ilk of the smutty “Why Bicycles Are Better Than Women” – type mockery, diminution, ridicule, beration – the quite literal DEhumanization into inanimate objects – of girls and women. 

 

I remember also that none of the rarities of any humorous comparison or contrast of boys and    men is of the same level of nor anywhere nearly equal to the vitriol and filthy vituperation and objectification as is that of girls and women in this jocular essay.  None in this piece, for god’s sake, is actually … honoring … to us.  For just eons females have been ‘the Other’, ‘the Lesser Than,’ ‘the (AB)normal.’  Even in joking and deprecating humor, females have been taken to a standard and to a degree to which boys and men have themselves never been lowered.  And the True men, all of them fathers, husbands, boyfriends or brothers that I ever heard, did not participate in perpetuating, much less, promoting – our lessening – by enthusiastically teaching it … any further.  Flip / Reverse.

 

“Bicycles don’t get pregnant.”  So.  Herry’s wife did.  And grew and gave out of her body the three most perfect Aryan – blond, blue – eyed, white boy children when she did.  When Herod Edinsmaier chose to come at me in ‘court’… by going after them, I guess it didn’t matter much to him nor to his papist and hyperdulical family that Herry mocks the fact that he’d had to put up with an animate object, Dr. Legion True, who’d gone and gotten herself preggers on him.  Not just once even – but three times I had been parturient, for christ’s sake! 

 

This first one of the entire composition contrasting and comparing a two – wheeled, inanimate object to two – legged, female animate ones, however, is probably the most telling, that is, that females, and definitely not males, stock and subsequently can supply the capacity to carry on the human race.  Males want to control every aspect of this supreme ultimate power of ours and everything about our reproductive systems beginning with the thinking done by us women ourselves.   Speaks again to Gerry Spence's Chapter 9 of From Freedom to Slavery:  The Rebirth of Tyranny in America … this does.

If I were a mean – spirited, hard – hearted, hating person it would be so easy for me to rewrite

the litany as, instead, a list of “Why Books Are Better Than Men” or “Why Cats” or “Why Texaco – sponsored Radio Opera on Saturday Afternoons,” or “Why Blue Long Smooth Wine Bottle Necks Are Better Than Men,” but I have never seen nor heard ones such as these.  Nor written one myself.  Nor will I.  The verbal mêlée from those three adult sons of mine and from other males that this would kick up were I to do so?  Why, I grew to birthing them boy babies, I adore AmTaham, my most esteemed Ancestor, and almost all other males and have from my age of       at least three years!  I simply would not do this.  Let alone, pass it on.  Because … because I do not think this way, this hardly – humor – at – all way.  This hateful, loathing way.  Nor do any of the feminists I know – almost all of them themselves mothers of men.  We simply … love … men and do not think this way.  At all.

 

*     *     *     *

 

So.  This 6^th of June being a Monday night, ordinarily Herry would’ve most likely been headed on over to the McKenzie Avenue building only about six, seven minutes down 13^th Street where several meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous were held weekly.  There he would’ve been able to hook up with the only guy in attendance at AA or anywhere else, for that matter, to whom I ever figured Herry to give an ear once in awhile.  And that was only because Mr. Varry Wussamai told him – to Herry’s ears and doctor brain – only whatever it was Herry wanted to hear and, only then, whenever Herry wanted to hear it.  Kinda like of what I, according to Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, had not been doing nearly enough with Herry myself lately!

 

Now this was rather easy for Varry to do, too, that is, to have a sort – of fledgling like Herry under his wing.  A starter cuz although Dr. Herod Edinsmaier didn’t drink alcohol, he also had not attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but two times in the past decade – so a fledgling AAer was he.  In Truth.  (As, o’ course, opposed to what a judge’d be reading just a short bit later than this – in sworn … ‘court’ … documents!) 

 

If one were to equivalently match up Varry W to the bicycles’ analogies, there would be no contrast, only comparison:  Varry W had no wife, Varry W had no kids and never has had,     Varry W was even littler than Herry is and Varry W had a lot of things that Herry wanted to have … such as unlimited freedom of his physical movements at any time.  Varry W could blithely glide through any day without so much as a phone call returned if he didn’t want to.  Varry W also took other people’s inventory, at least that is, Herry’s wife’s, yeah, mine – Legion’s.  At the same time, however, he never spoke of Herry’s since, of course, that would go against Alcoholics Anonymous members’ own written rule of Step #4 – that is, of keeping quiet about each others’ sans – drinking activities! 

 

This taking of my stock, of course, pleased Herry to no end and, most especially, when Varry W showed up in ‘court’ a little bit later on as Herry’s witness and, actually under oath no less, pulled off that same little coup d’état right there in front of da’ judge!  A man who was a total stranger to me personally and has only ever known me through whatever it was that Dr. Edinsmaier, Community Pillar, moaned to him about, gets up in open ‘court’ and reels off a laundry list of everything he, Wussamai, swears to be dirty about me.  So help him, god.  Step #4 be damned as far as I was concerned!  And no matter that Wussamai himself claimed, O, about 20 years total of … ‘workin’ the Alcoholics Anonymous Program’ …  Yeah, riiiiight … Besides hearsay and an  abomination of Step #4, Wussamai’s testimony was pure heresy.

 

Varry Wussamai was Herry’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and had himself already been performing this procrastinating, wasting, squandering and spending routine of slackers for at least five, and maybe as long as, ten years before Herry showed up on its central Iowa scene of at least three AA meetings per week.  Herry, too, had been to AA before his beginning the Ames area meetings.  Only thing is, though, Herry managed to not let any of those 25 or so judges in on one certain little itty bitty “finding of fact” about this past AA attendance of his:  Herry had gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting twice in 1977 – and, then ah well, oopsy, … never once again …  … until … Herry’s showing up at one fairly soon after he, alone, moved to Ames those four July and August 1987 weeks in which Zane and Jesse had finished up their Junior Zookeeper positions at the Manhattan Sunset Zoo, and they and Mirzah and I didn't arrive in Ames until their birthdays.  By the time Dr. Herod Edinsmaier as Herry – Daddee appeared before district ‘court’ judges in 1989, and 1990, and 1992, and not including the times before appellate judges in 1991, and 1994, … to hear him tell it – all, of course, in sworn testimonial ‘evidence’, why, Dr. Edinsmaier had racked up a grand total of 12!, then 13!, and finally then 15 years! of sobriety and clean, familial living through alleged and apparently ‘bona fide’ Alcoholics Anonymous meetings’ attendance!

 

JYeah, riiiiight … Accountability for what was reality?  And Truth?  Something altogether different.  Attending meetings regularly?  Truth was two, three and five years and all but one of those years conveniently and ostentatiously during the concurrent ones of Herry’s custody litigation and court appearances.  As far as genuinely sober and living clean, let alone, living clean within our family!?  Herry had not drunk alcohol for 11, then 13, then 15 years.  But that was all. 

 

When I learned what a sponsor is meant to be, I learned, too, what a sponsor is not.  The position is supposed to provide leadership and counsel – and both … within reality.  Ha.  As far as Varry Wussamai being a well of reality for Herry, hhmmm, suffice it to say, there could not have been a more opposite function for Varry W within Herry’s true life.  Herry E loved BSing with Varry W because when he did, Herry E too, could escape accountability and act as if he hadn’t a care in the World.  Just like Varry W.

 

*     *     *     *

 

I have no idea if Herry E caught up that particular Monday night with the McKenzie Avenue Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and Mr. Varry Wussamai or not.  What Dr. Edinsmaier had, indeed however, caught up with by late the very next afternoon was an apartment with a garage even, an address, a telephone and … demands.  I heard later that certain folks had put the Good and Pillared Doctor in touch with certain other folks who knew certain realtors with certain rental complexes and whatever else Herry needed to immediately get started living on his own –  and all the while at the very same time, not skip beat one down at the pathology laboratory.  Wasn’t like he had Child One to look after the care and placement of either.  Let alone … three of them to whom to administer … himself.  Alone.  Everyone in the Good Doctor’s circle knew that Herry drove an ol’ white Toyota wagon clunker; but they knew, too, that he did that by choice.  Because he liked old jalopies.  Not because he wasn’t a parvenu or didn’t possess the panacean pesos for one better.

 

So.  When Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, Community Pillar and who loved to think of and actually verbally referred to himself as the Doctors’ Doctor, wanted to have things hop – and hop now, like chop – chop ––, why, he just pulled out the big bucks or the appearance of same through the credit card, said a few words to a couple of utility agencies or some such – mostly over the telephone or by way of ordering one of those numerous subordinate women who worked for him to do the calling around for him instead, authorized the dollars to begin flying and flowing and, voila, he had pretty much all of what it was he needed to have.  Right then. 

 

No little kids to get up, dress, feed, find quality daycare for … so that he could apartment – hunt and utility – shop.  None.  None in the way of all of that … that accountability, that is.  Much      as if on the order of a business tycoon or soap opera mogul and the likes of which, before this hindering hiatal marriage of his, had most impressed Mehitable.  Mighty ‘soft’ – spoken along with the charade of the slightest timidity and helplessness to it all, this sham of Herry’s was his usual flashy choreography that I had seen him brandish around as often as he could find reason             to flaunt it.  Witness, after all, how it’d been with Realtor Cornball just a short 11 months earlier when Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had strolled into the Othello Drive woodland manse in the first place and been sold on buying it because of its massive living room picture window.  Signing a purchase agreement right then and there.  Not a word in consultation or ponderance with the little woman on this life – altering, that is, this house – buying – for – the – entire – family matter whatsoever.   Just Do It.  Just Did It. 

 

That, in less than 24 hours, is what happened for Herry this time, too.  Marital separation did not appear to me to be any big deal at all for Herry.  He immediately took up where he’d left off in December 1976.  Being single.  Not uncoupled, mind you.  Just definitely unmarried.

 

His demands were another story and a very big deal for me.  I was deluded completely.  Operating under my so, so stupid assumption that Herry was living up on 24^th Street now as a way to heal, to mend, to step back, to inventory himself and, most of all, to change that which was mightily in need of it so that he could hurry back to us all still there in that feral manor of his as soon as possible, I believed in marital separation as most of the answer to accomplishing this repair and restoration.  Some time physically apart would allow Dr. Herod Edinsmaier the space needed to think through where changes needed to be effected, not?  Huh.  I myself tried learning, too, from these fiascoes that were Al – Anon and open AA meetings – when Herry physically had the Boys.  We women were all just throwing spit to the wind for all the talking done at these that meant anything real – – we women who were so subserviently and so dangerously entrenched, sunk deeeep in to the swampy swill that is bill w’s chapter eight.

 

Herry demanded up at his one – bedroom rental there on 24^th Street that he have custody of Zane, Jesse and Mirzah, every single weekend.  I made my second incredibly grave mistake.  Not only

had I, long, long ago it now seemed to me, shared to Herry about my two five – day sleeplessness episodes when shit had happened to hit my relationship fan with John, but I also now assented to Herry’s having the Boys go stay with him overnight at his apartment, indeed, every single Friday night and Saturday night.  Summertime was just starting.  Mirzah, Jesse and Zane, now 8½, 9½ and 11½, needed their daddy, didn’t they?  What could it hurt?  Magnanimous, too, wasn’t I? 

 

Not!  What I was was an imbecile. 

 

*     *     *     *

 

I do not now recall what words came to me to tell Zane, Jesse and Mirzah that Herry was not expected for supper that next night to celebrate school being out or that he wouldn’t, very soon,   be joining us all at any other meal either.  Something as supposedly ‘earth – shattering’ some certain folks’d purport as having to tell one’s children that their dad needed to leave in order to change himself so that he could come back to them healed – and I don’t remember giving the  Boys this information nor any of their immediate responses to it.  Partly from the haze then of my sleeplessness still I am sure; but also I think I don’t remember because, in reality, a mating man’s and a biological father’s leaving, his more – or – less permanent absence, is not such an astoundingly horrendous event.  Over many millennia’s worth of the existence – of the evolution … of us all on the Planet Earth … it’s a truly, truly common one!

 

School did recess, of course, and the Boys’ and my respite that was Little League began right away in earnest.  Practices and games and chauffeuring and gathering around for soda while going over the plays after and the whole team out sometimes for pizza afterwards and hauling the equipment and keeping score.  And then, doing it all over again times three Boys and two teams the next week! 

 

I loved being asked to keep the teammates’ scorings.  It compelled me to learn a lot more that        I wouldn’t have known about the game of baseball – which I totally adore.  Even now.  Even when it is so controlled and often so sadly and utterly spoiled by a few angry, nearly always warring, superrich men who are notorious for hating and hurting women and sometimes their children.        I do love the game nevertheless.  I loathed trying to explain to Mirzah, however, that although he at age eight was hit square on in the face by a thrown ball during fly – catching relays at the Little Minors’ very first practice and had a parent / team manager who was an outright, known alcoholic and domestic abuser and whose elder of two sons went on some five years later to hang himself as an 18 – year – old and who actually yelled practice in and practice out at all of the team’s eight – and nine – year – old players, this was not going to be the end of the World as he knew it.  Besides, Jesse and Mirzah and I did become fast friends with the Little Minors coach, Kincaid,    an unattached and free – spirited 20 – something on – and off – again college student, and his very slight – framed gray – haired and vocal mama who showed up to cheer every game, both of whom just loved baseball, too.  And little kids.

 

I kept back just behind the third – to – home fence line in my webbed lawn chair and in ideal view of the action proudly positioning on my lap the score pad for Kincaid and the players as I crafted the proper markings on the little icons of each inning on the sheet that signified what each batter and runner had accomplished.  Mine was the perfect place at which to keep from bumping face to face into Herry anyhow.  Dr. Herry Edinsmaier would come to the actual game, never to just the practice sessions though and could nearly always, all of his time there, be found reading the Des Moines Register, a paperback novel or a newsweekly or in rapt conversation with another little player’s brunette or blond mama on, usually, the top bleacher or on one closer to the ground level and always, always he would sit near the very end of the bench so as to be easily off it and gone in a rush if he wanted to be. 

 

Why Herry used this alleged quality time with the Truemaier Boys to read in front of them and their endeavors I just could not fathom.  He had always done this.  That behavior had not simply just begun that summer.  I saw other parents once in a very great while do the same thing, especially fathers or a few mothers, too, who brought their crocheting project or both genders visiting with each other while watching the game.  But, … Herry?  Herry was not watching the game.  Then it’d conclude after six, super – high scoring innings, and he was out to the parking lot, pronto, and gone.  How he justified this behavior besides his being gone so much of the time for work or for AA or for god knows what other activities of his, too, is merely mystifying to me; but this blatant absenteeism of the Lord of the Manor, even while physically present in corporal form, was nothing new. 

 

After all, Favorite Babysitter Rosemarie from the early 1980s?  She knew of it, too.  When I had been away to my evening shift at the Palm Animal Hospital and all of the other pathology residents including especially the ones with little kids were home with their families at night, Herry went back ‘to work’.  Dr. Shark, the performance – evaluating boss of his then, also knew him to be that insecure procrastinator.  What else was Dr. Edinsmaier up to as well these five evenings per week?  It certainly had had nothing to do with fathering.  And being present.  That is, with Herry – Daddee’s being truly ‘there’.

 

Treats for after the games?  Forget about it.  If more was expected than ready – bought, cold

soda in cans that one could quickly and easily snatch up at the corner Amoco convenience store when he gassed up, why, it didn’t come from Herry.  And clean – up duty?  No.  You didn’t see

Dr. Herod Edinsmaier on clean – up duty either.  Treats or an effort of some other kind such as baking something up for the school carnival sales booth – even if just a dozen brownies – or chaperoning an afternoon for anything back at Kate Mitchell or Manhattan or Columbia?  Such parents’ help is standard.  And most definitely needed for activities on the ecology bus field trips, ECO they were called, a very, very big deal several times each year at Kate Mitchell, or for the Races’ Field Day at the end of the school year or the Writing Books’ Workshop or the theatrical productions put on in conjunction with the Ames community’s ACTORS studio or the band’s fundraiser events.  Just as is true in any public school system.  That parent for the Truemaier Boys at any of these events in any of their three public school systems, the parent helping, accountable and … present … was me, Legion.  Herry?  Dr. Herod Edinsmaier?  Never – not ever – was the primary caregiving parent …  the Truemaier Boys’ father.

 

If a big cash outlay was in any way possible instead, say, such as in springing for the entire team’s pizzas after the game or for purchasing all of the raffle tickets Mirzah, Zane and Jesse were assigned to sell for the annual March Ridgeway School Carnival back in Columbia or for buying up all of the unsold, partial boxes of chocolate bars for Mirzah’s Montessori bread – cutting or playground equipment or Zane’s Ames Middle School band uniforms, then, of course, Herry produced The Wallet and from out of it freely and grandiosely wielded wealth in stunning amounts.  Even when we were still both college students and actually had no plethora of pecuniary paper, Herry spent.  But contribute his time or his labor?  His fully attentive presence?  Go door to door with the Boys selling bars and tickets and taking orders for freshly prepared frozen pizzas?  Then actually fulfill those requests for pre – cooked pies by helping to shop for their ingredients and putting them together with fresh seals in someone’s kitchen?  No.  Dr. Edinsmaier did not.  Herry – Daddee was never … ‘there’.

 

In addition to the works that are those of John Stoltenberg and Gerry Spence, Grace teaches the poetry of Philip Larkin and the maxims of Publilus Syrus in Listening College, “With your integrity and honor gone, you have nothing left to leave your children but money.”  Bard Larkin may have been supposing that these words of his wisdom applied to angry old men, gray and dying.  Grace and I both well know that this aphorism pertained to Herry … to Herry languishing perhaps in his 30s and 40s, just a wee bit graying but not at all yet considering lying down and dying.  And the Iraqi slave of 42 BCE Italians’ Maxim #265, “What is left when honor is lost?”    In the cases of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, current American ‘courts’ of family law judges and,           O JYeah, bill w, apparently and hypocritically what is left “ … are better husbands and fathers than ever before.”

 

I respect the science of psychology and the profession that is that of psychologists and psychiatrists and do not at all presume to be one myself.  Furthermore, I certainly do not accede that persons escape accountability for their destructive behaviors just because a psychological explanation may exist for someone’s bad actions performed, of course, after their own already – known – to – be – wrong choices to do these.  I think that Herry may have willed or anointed or considered himself, even though he knew it a falsehood, entitled to not have to do any work because he’d just spent an entire childhood in a family situation where Breathing itself was work, there having been such a horde of Edinsmaier siblings continuously horning in on a youngster’s personal space.  Without lifting a finger to labor at something, he would most certainly make the impression that he had and that it was he who had, indeed, been responsible for the work of the project and, ultimately, usurp the praise others gave it, the honoring that should’ve gone to the ones who had actually done the work.  Behold his coaching the little girls’ and little boys’ soccer team of Mirzah’s as just one of so, so many examples.

 

*     *     *     *

 

Mrs. Edinsmaier herself described for me one sunny afternoon in late 1976, the mightily absolute and lengthy nightmare that had been the two decades of Detanimod’s and her older daughters’ work of changing the four youngest toddlers or infants – and sometimes more – who were, on any given day of that near quarter – century’s worth, still in diapers and then … laundering them.         I remember the year exactly, probably Thanksgiving time or maybe even December’s end, because Mrs. Edinsmaier passed by the door of her fine farmhouse bathroom done up in burgundy.  Burgundy and pink print shower curtain, burgundy pile throw rug, plush burgundy, pink and white terry towels in their places on the racks neatly folded and the faux furry burgundy cover atop the toilet seat.  She spied me dunking, bare hands of course, a long, white rag in the toilet bowl water up and down, up and down.  The three of us, Zane three to four months old, Herry and I, had come to join the kindred throng swarming about the paternal grandparents’ country home for a holiday visit.  “Ever lose one of those down the toilet?” she asked leaning on the door frame somewhat nervously watching me (‘f course never, ever Herry – Daddee) carry out this nasty chore.   

 

“Actually, no.” I looked up in reply.  “I just about did, though.  It was the very first soiled diaper that Zane’d had after he came home from the hospital.”  We three were residents of Pammel Court’s o – so cold, metal WWII – constructed Quonset huts and, for married students while          I commenced my third year of veterinary medical classes when Zane was just a 2½ – week – old newborn, unequivocally the cheapest housing available at $49.00 a month rent.  Why, I had a half dozen friends in that junior class, without spouses or kids of their own of course, who, just so they could have their pet equines close by their sides while they attended vet school, paid nearly twice as much a month to board their horses in stables just outside of town!

 

At Zane’s 22^nd hour of life outside of me, he and I were released from the itty bitty Storm County General Hospital maternity ward in that same town where the district ‘court’ convened every weekday morning just up the street three blocks and about a dozen miles east of Othello Drive.         We were discharged home to Pammel Court on Wednesday around 2:15 in the afternoon; and although Zane had had the first after – birth meconium stools, about two of them very soon after delivery, he politely declined as a breastfeeding baby to have another bowel movement whatsoever until I got so concerned that I telephoned Dr. Starbenz at his home on Saturday afternoon.  “Noooot to worry, Legion!” the doctor was smiling I could tell – on the other end of the line. 

 

I truly liked this man.  He and his incredibly skinny wife who’d altogether gained a grand total of only 8 pounds with her second pregnancy, a set of twin boys, and who managed his front office, had taken me on as a Title XIX patient no questions asked.  In doing so, he had also agreed, because I had not a penny of supplemental maternity insurance coverage, to discharge me just as soon as he deemed both Zane and me fit enough to go – and that was apparently at around Zane’s 22^nd hour.  Why, the uproar and outrage from the nursing staff was near deafening:  never before in the history of Storm County General had a new mama gone home with her new babe so bloody damn early.  And they were all most vociferous in letting the conscientious and rather new – to – the – community Dr. Starbenz know of their disgust and distrust of his early – out plan for Zane and me.  But I was so grateful. 

 

“You're breastfeeding, Legion; and as you already know from all of your reading on this, Zane may have up to around 15 little stools a day or he may have only one big one all week long!  I tell ya’ what:  if he hasn’t moved his bowels by tomorrow evening at 9 pm, try stimulating his rectum with a thermometer a couple times and waiting 15 to 20 minutes, then doing it again.  If he hasn’t had a diaperful by news time, then give me another call.”

 

I, indeed, planned to do as instructed.  Dr. Starbenz, a family practice physician, was so correct,  of course.  It was just that I was a brand – new mama and, well, even with all of my studying up and knowing from my former nursing career and from my being a life – long learner of things biological about this possible phenomenon in breastfed infants, I just never figured that I’d be soooo blessed, that is, one bowel movement a week so only one dirty diaper a week.  Yet, that was exactly true.  For the ensuing first six weeks of Zane’s entire life on this Planet, there was only one such diaper change per week for me to manage.  What an incredible piece of good fortune this was actually.  

 

As I stated, I intended to do the probing thermometer technique, but I did not have to.  Zane let loose the very next day, just about 8 pm, with the likes of which I had never in my whole life seen a Guernsey on the richest ration mix of clover leaves and blooms and ground corn let loose with!  Dr. Starbenz had been so right on the money and damn near right on the exact hour!  Week after week I joked with Zane’s first babysitter, Ms. Lime in her Old Garden Trailer Court home adjacent to the veterinary college, that she should offer me discounted childcare fees since she, with Zane who started there on his 16^th day of age, never once had to change a sullied nappy of his that first month and a half!  Only on Sundays when I did after finding him pushing and grunting to beat all and always just right around 8 in the evening.  It was nigh unto uncanny!

 

I finished the account to Mrs. Edinsmaier's inquiry, “The very first dirty diaper Zane had was so mammoth that I left it to soak in the toilet bowl at Pammel, of course, after first flushing down the big stuff.  It was Sunday night and I must’ve forgotten it in there ‘cause Zane and I and Herry all fell off to sleep.  About midnight or so Herry got up to go to the bathroom and I’m still asleep, of course, with Zane between us when I suddenly sit straight up in bed.  I’d heard Herry fumbling in the dark for the flusher handle and I came wide awake and bolt upright faster than all get out remembering that I hadn’t finished with the diaper in the bowl and put it in the pail.  I yelled, ‘Don’t flush it!  Don’t flush it!’  And was lucky enough to stop him.  ‘Course Zane waked up with that ruckus and wanted to nurse.  So right there in the middle of the night after Zane was back to sleep, I took care of that first dirty diaper.  It scared me so much I resolved to not ever come that close to screwing up the toilet again.  So … so far I’ve been really lucky.  I guess we’ve both just gotten into the habit now of looking down into the bowl before starting to even use it.”

 

Mrs. Edinsmaier nodded, “Uummm.  I just could never trust that that wouldn’t happen.”

 

“So you’re saying you didn’t do the dirty ones in the toilet?”

 

“No, I didn’t.  Not ever.  We didn’t get an indoor bathroom until 1954, the year Murielle was born.”  Murielle was that last, 14^th gestation of Detanimod’s, her sixth Edinsmaier daughter whom she had been pushed out midwinter.  Mrs. Edinsmaier continued, “So when we got all this fine plumbing and new pipes, why, I was so afraid of clogging it up with one lost down the drain that, well, I just never did.”  Finally after a rather ho – hum pause during which I suppose I was staring at her with a look of some level of disbelief, she spoke of what was really at the basis for her not using this ‘convenience’ for diapers with bowel movement soiling them, “I was really afraid that  if I left one unattended in the stool to soak just like you’d done, why, someone else’d come along before I had gotten back to take care of it and not be nearly as concerned for our new waterworks as I was.”

 

Well, I certainly could understand and empathize with her feeling about those wonderful new pipes of hers.  But to have gone through 12 live birthings and raised up and out of cloth diapers until they were all finally toilet – trained 11 kids in that rural, back – roads countryside without the use of the toilet bowl and sewage system to rinse out the feculent diaper initially and flush down the gross, organic stuff?  What had she done?! 

 

What Detanimod told me next was the nightmare of our fecund Ancestors.  For centuries and millennia.  One that I had never, ever heard of before that day, “You see,” Mrs. Edinsmaier calmly began, “in my day of having babies, there was a practice with diapers among housewives that was quite common.  In families of good reputation, I’m talking about.  Not just in the families that were, well, thought of as, well, less than clean, you know.  And that was to take the diapers that only had had just urine in them and hang ‘em out on the clothesline to dry – and sort of sanitize – in the sunshine like that – without, ah, … without washing them first … mind you.  You know, to use the sunlight and the air to freshen them up a little.  Then they’d take them down off the line and put them back on the babies’ bottoms just that way.  Like from March to November.  Then after that second use on the baby’s bottom is when they’d all get washed with hot water and detergent and hung out to dry again actually clean this time.  This was the practice, you know, because laundry was so hard to do.  The wash machines weren’t at all like they are today, what with the scrub tubs and wringers and all.”

 

“And, … ‘n’ – the dirty diapers?”  I was sure I was just going to dread the disgust she was going to regale me with next.  I was right.

 

“Yeah, the dirty ones were really hard.  They, of course, had to be laundered in the machine with detergent and hot water.  But when they first came off the baby, though, they went out to the back stoop and were rinsed out – out there in the back in a five – gallon slop bucket if you had the time right then.  If you didn’t have the time right then, well, you just threw ‘em in the bucket water and came back later to do it.  The flies and the stench in the summertime, though, O, that was just awful.  Just awful.  But now if it was wintertime, by the time you got time enough free to launder a load in the machine, those diapers and the messes in ‘em ‘course, inside that slop bucket out on the back porch were probably frozen solid.  So you had to boil water on the stove.  Enough so that you could thaw out the ice in the bucket back there in that cold and free up the diapers and get ‘em rinsed, throw out the slop and finally get ‘em all down to the wash machine in the basement and actually do the load properly.  Yeah, it was pretty hard, I guess.”

 

“Hard?!  You guess?!  Ya’ think?!!!” I am dazed.  I am left thinking … with all of my expletive adjectives only to myself, “It must’ve been pure mother – fucking Hell!  All the goddam time.  Four babies at any one time in diapers for more than 20 years?!  It was Hell!  M’god, what had the babies’ bottoms looked like most of the time.  Ya’ know, even with the airing out in the sunshine.  They must’ve just been red and raw almost all the damn time!  Plus the smell of urine, of that horrid ammonia, all around the house all the damn time, I would imagine, not?!  Even with the outside clothesline airing and the sunshine, wouldn’t there be that odor?  Yuuuk!  Not to mention the slop bucket thing.  Eeeeew!  What the mother – fucking Sam Hell must’ve that been like for over 20 years of summers and winters?!  O, m’god!!  Parents these days haven’t a damn thing to complain about with regard to diapering babies and yet they do!  We have it soooo damn easy.  Even those of us who don’t use disposables!  Even I do.  I do use cloth diapers; but for god’s sake, I have a diaper service for Zane!  We have it so easy today even with so many mamas working outside the home.”

 

Questions about which Mrs. Edinsmaier must have been fairly reading my mind because, just before she passed back to her holiday dishes which were cooking in the kitchen, she uncrossed  her arms and to her hips placed both her hands akimbo while most matter – of – factly stating, “But I never did that.  Ya’ know?  I never did that.  All of my babies had completely freshly laundered diapers on their bottoms all the time.  I never put them on the line to dry first like it was okay to do.  I, umm, I didn’t do that.  I always washed ‘em in hot water and detergent properly every single time they came off of a baby.”  She left the bathroom doorway.   I gagged. 

 

Then I finished that diaper of Zane’s in her toilet bowl – still stunned at what I’d just heard.           I didn’t, right off then, realize it for the abuse and the violence this was to her and to her kids;    but I certainly did a little itty bit later on.  What a Hell all right.  And thousands and millions of women had gone through this labor of so many, many pregnancies, birthings and launderings for decades and for centuries before Detanimod or me.  Only to receive not one word of thanks for it, let alone, to receive from the men who made the women pregnant their willingness and their offerings to do the work of it all themselves for any of the total number of years of raising up the babies.  Over and over and over.  The men who then went on as if entitled simply because they were male … to claim from these slave mothers, their own wives, these DEhumans all, to claim her babies and her children as their own … property.  Through millennium after millennium. 

 

*     *     *     *

 

Then there’s the psychological phenomenon known as the Scarcity Mode so sickly operating inside Herry, too, I believe.  When I was still an Edinsmaier insider, I saw it as well in every last one of his sisters and brothers as the adults they long are.  None of the eleven that I could see delayed personal gratification.  For a thing.  When they wanted something, they acquired it.  Simple as that.  Whether it was a tangible object or a concept fulfilled or an idea expressed or a dream desired or a mouth opened.  Or a behavior … chosen.  And the sooner the thing or the deal or the behavior could be secured and obtained or expressed or chosen, the faster the brother or sister or Herry could move on to acquiring the next wanted thing or asseverating their next judgment on any matter. 

 

Psychology with its Scarcity Mode holds that since during these family members’ childhoods they had to share absolutely everything from pillow space to the skillet of American fries at suppertime to lap space in the family car on an outing to church, they developed the notion that they would never, at any one time or event, have as much of something as they could possibly want of it.  I do remember that when all or nearly all of the 11 adult Edinsmaier siblings were back at the country home at any one time and all of us spouses married to one of them and all of our children sat down to any birthday or holiday dinner and passed around the bowl of creamed corn, there would actually be kernels left over.  After it had passed by everyone and all of those people had taken some, there’d be more than a helping left in the bottom of the bowl.  When what was real should have been:  if everyone, at the first pass, had taken as much of a serving as they really had wanted and as much of a portion as what would have really sated their hunger for maize that day, then there wouldn’t have been any corn left at all past the eighth or ninth person! 

 

This then in turn, psychology study teaches, led each Edinsmaier child to arrogate that as adults with their own jobs and their own positions and their own money they were simply in their own spaces finally fully entitled to owning the crotchet that they could comport all they liked as insatiate human beings.  And they did – as we have seen with Herod’s contribution proclivities.  That is, big money, sure.  Even as poor college students Herry was.  And big ideas to express.  Always big opinions Herry had.  But.  But.  Big time and big effort and big actual work commitment to a project or an endeavor, why, uummm, no, … no, that Herry Edinsmaier didn’t have so much of – well, any of – to donate. 

 

Not even of a little effort to contribute either.  I have actually known Herry, all of the years I was married to him, to not lift one finger in that rural kitchen of his parents’ to help prepare something for a holiday or a special affair or just an ordinary time.  Most literally, all of the Edinsmaier males congregated in the living room right next door and in plain view of all of the Edinsmaier daughters and female spouses laboring there in the kitchen.  But the guys, the men?  The young boys even?  They were all either chatting it up or with the screen on viewing some televised sports event or right outside underneath the kitchen window having a tall drink of something cool while hanging.  Simply hanging.  It wasn’t as though they couldn’t see the work to be done.  It was right there under their hungry noses, and the fruits of some woman’s labor certainly slid down their several scores of gullets most easily enough at mealtime.  That was for sure.

 

Yet.  None of the males at any time went to the kitchen as a matter of course and did a thing there. 

I actually saw Herry as well as his Stash’s next inhabitant, Fannie Issicran McLive, conduct themselves in this very same lazy, entitled, aprovechar – like and elitist you – serve – me – and – be – my – slave way as recently as just ten months ago at the very end of the last millennium when Jesse, yes, my Jesse, married!  Jesse’s wife’s Mexican parents, both her mother and her father, labored so long and so hard and so hosted to beat the band to make their occasion the superbly special one that it, indeed, did turn out to be.  And throughout all of the days and days and days that was this traditionally long celebration, Herry and Fannie had to, quite literally, be begged to actually help out on doing any of it.  It was truly bizarre!  

 

This was Mehitable – approved behavior as well, of course.  But coming only from Dr. Herod Edinsmaier.  Not coming from Dr. Legion True, her kid.  No.  Because Herry, for the very, very few times that he ever consented to grace his actual physicality over to AmTaham’s and her home in Williamsburg, carried himself off while there with this exact same comportment and countenance.  And as you can imagine, AmTaham, the First Farmer of Long Labor who was also the self – appointed chief bottle – washer inside Mehitable’s and his kitchen, could scarcely bring himself, in acquiescence to his wife’s desires, to tolerate this slothful, slacker demeanor of Herry’s for even just one evening.  And as I ashamedly have stated before, our closest colleagues in parenting, Abby and Devin with their two little girls, also witnessed as well as suffered at their various residences over our first years of marriage from Herry’s entitled and aprovechar manner  of usurpation and plain ol’ … taking.

 

Furthermore AmTaham, as well as I, knew Herod Edinsmaier to be teaching all three Truemaier Boys this same mien of torpor, acquisition and immediate gratification of one’s wants.  From their earliest ages on.  More than one time I recall a certain event occurring which Herry never, not even one time, stopped executing.  And probably has not to this day.  It was, every time it happened, made snidely and sarcastically clear to me and very much out loud in front of Zane, Mirzah and Jesse, that I was all wrong and should just shut the complete fuck up. 

 

Herry never denied the Boys soda pop when they wanted some.  Now I was not in favor of denying them soda then either, that is, especially when they’d already consumed for that day what a good diet of liquids dictates they should have, that is, they’d already drunk up plenty enough water, milk or juices.

Rub was, though, Herry would not have them wait even just five or ten minutes.  If they wanted   it right then and there, well then, right then and there they should have it as far as Herry was concerned.  He absolutely delighted, smirking as he recounted it about four years later, in telling the account of his behavior in this matter to Judge Harley Butcher.  

 

As you can imagine the entire back passenger bench seat of either his Toyota Crown or my Shitbox Dodge wagon was for many a year filled with wall – to – wall youngsters belted into their respective car seats.  Because morning schedules and commutes collectively together were fairly hectic, most of the times that we stopped for gasoline we did so after work on the way home from the daycare or from the Boys’ after – school activities.  And at the gas station or outside the convenience store there would be, of course, a vending machine or cooler with 12 – ounce cans   or plastic bottles cold and just waiting for young Boys’ thirsty throats. 

 

It was about 5:15 or 5:20 in the afternoon.  Without exception.  No matter that in just five to ten minutes’ worth of waiting we all would be at our home where there were 16 – ounce, full bottles of soda waiting chilled in the refrigerator or in the pantry, bottles I’d earlier purchased at the grocery store, and ice cubes in those provincially blue plastic trays in the freezer compartment that took a little mining but not too much to retrieve.  If Zane or if Mirzah or if Jesse stated to the thin air from those wagons’ back seats that they wanted soda pop, why then Herry upbraided me over and over and over in front of them that he was always going to be able to reach right down into his little pants pocket and to, right then and right now, haul out of it whatever quarters it took to slake his Boys’ wants.  Right then and right now.  No waiting whatsoever for our getting home to where four ounces more soda pop than the cans held and at approximately half or less than half the vending cost awaited them, too, in the closet.  None of that.  No.  Patience within reason?  No!

 

Herod Edinsmaier himself didn’t wait either.  Not at any time, and, of course, the Boys learned this behavior like, right now, so it was very, very often, any time any one of them wanted a can of soda, they knew Herry would never, never tell them no, that he would never tell them … to wait … ‘til we all got home to the closet pantry’s supply there.  Judge Butcher smiled ingratiatingly and compliantly while nodding ever so slightly.  The Look.  The Look of one all – knowing and pillared man to … another.

 

This evil, of course, is well – known to be the responsibility of exalted Juggern who, in full knowledge of what he was doing when he recklessly demanded to fuck and to fecundate Detanimod time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again to create this gargantuan, messy mass of Edinsmaiers in the first place, only served by doing so to perpetuate these sicknesses.  Isn’t it nearly uncanny and certainly most bizarre and damned crazy … that, today, having come from a family that crowded … only one out of the five female Edinsmaier daughters that are Herry’s living and adult blood sisters, has children of her own?!  Only one.  In the Year 2000, only one! 

 

Now some are barren, you say.  JYeah, that could be true.  That a couple of the Edinsmaier women would be unable to have natural children of their own.  But.  All four of them or their several mates over the years sterile?  No.  Not all four and not all four eventually married couples either.  The odds of that being biologically so are just astronomical and too staggering to warrant any time wasted on giving credence to that concept.  Besides, two of those four childless women delayed their marriages to men until long into their 30s and one did not marry a man until after she was over 40 years of age. 

 

Not that marriage is needed to put children into your adult lives.  It isn’t. 

 

And there’s the point of this:  You don’t need marriage or a union to the same gender as yourself to put little kids into your life on a very regular basis, even daily.  And you, as a single adult female or a single adult male and uncoupled, haven’t had need of another bonded or integrated person in your life to do this absolutely most respectful honoring – the – future thing and Ancestoring deal for quite some time now. 

 

But while all six of the Edinsmaier male children, married all of them early on in their 20s or 30s, and their wives have at least two and often three children each between them with one of them having four! over all of their adult years singly or coupled, four out of the five Edinsmaier female children had zero children born to or … or … or … raised up by any one of them.  One of those four, the sister that married after she was 40, acquired in that alliance two nearly grown stepchildren who do not live on a daily basis with her and her husband. 

 

Clearly.  The craziness is there … is visible here.  Why did these four adult women, without receiving wages or a salary or being paid to do so in some other way, choose to specifically not put little children into their lives at all by some possible means available?!  No adoptions, no mentoring, no fostering, no coaching!  Not even cuddling nor rocking down at an AIDS hospice or a homeless shelter.  Not even substituting on a regular basis as the aunts they were for the care and nurturance of their own nieces and nephews, mind you!  For their own brothers’ children!  Including never, not one time ever in 12½ years of Herry’s and my marriage, offers of childcare for any one, two or all three of the Truemaier Boys!  Why not?!  Not even for an hour’s worth so that their mama, Dr. Legion True, could soak a decent spell inside the burgundy and pink bubbles of the Truemaier Boys’ grandparents’ bathtub!

 

Is the explanation for this selfishness, greed and preposterousness as ‘simple’ as the Scarcity Mode?  So much doing without and so much work heaped on them when they themselves were little girls that they evidently just couldn’t bear up under any more at all as adult women?  Or, is it even more pernicious, virulent and deadly than this?

 

Neither psychological theory that may clarify why members of supersized American families possess the characteristics and conduct that they oftentimes do excuses this chosen behavior, of course.  The facts of Herry’s passive aggressive laziness, his hoggish and narcissistic compulsion for so much attention, sexual and otherwise, and his cumbersome material acquisition poisoned his own Boys.  As far as the accountability for this toxin in them that is his, non – alcoholic though it has been for nearly as many years as they all are old?  To this day, he simply, because he can …    denies it, avoids it, justifies it, rationalizes it, seeks collusion in it especially from females or from Mirzah, Jesse and Zane, or he goes out and buys or boinks something else with which to numb it.  And, so far successfully and long into his sixth decade of life as so many, many similarly pillared men do, escapes all accountability.