Good question Billy.
>From a writing perspective, I think you did a great job. But the subject >matter was hard to read without making me feel some sort of pain or anger or >similar emotion. I see dysfunction in my mediations and facilitations, but >that is easier to take because I can play a role in making things better. >With your story, I see how things go on a haywire trajectory. It is past >tense, and damage has been done. Chris From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Billy Rojas Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 10:39 AM To: [email protected] Cc: Billy Rojas <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) * Chris: Thanks for the reply. As a writer, your comment that it is "rough to read" is important to me. Could you explain something of what you mean? Were you referring to the writing itself or the subject matter? About the subject matter, self disclosure is more-or-less a genre. All kinds of books have taken this approach. Maybe the best known was "Mommy, dearest, " about Joan Crawford, written by her daughter. The famous actress, it seems, was worse than my mother in a lot of ways. And that is saying a great deal, indeed. I also tried to make the story compelling as writing. The risk is that non-writers may not get the idea. A writer tells a story. He does so to the best of his ability, in a way that will hopefully get the attention of the reader and raise questions, get thought processes flowing, and maybe inspire self reflection. So, yes, this is self-disclosure, but the larger issue is: As a story, is it good reading? Sort of like surgery. Yes, the process is a bloody mess. But I'm more interested in whether the patient survived and is still among the living. You can also look at it in terms of a psychological case study. What if you were called in to counsel a family like the one described in the story? Billy _____ From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > on behalf of Chris Hahn <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 7:25 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) * You are going deep into your family history Billy. It is kind of tough to read, but thanks for sharing. Chris From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Billy Rojas Sent: Friday, July 20, 2018 4:31 PM To: Centroids Discussions <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Cc: Billy Rojas <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) * Part # 1 (of 3 parts) Story of a Dysfunctional Family What happened to Baby Bob? In December of 2015 I wrote an essay about the dysfunctional family that I have endured during my life. The saga ended with a question about the youngest sibling, Robert, now in his sixties, "what will he do next?" Not everyone who reads this essay will have read that previous material so there will be some amount of repetition in this paper in order for new readers to make sense of the story. But, in brief, the narrative concerned the family I grew up with, starting in Chicago many years ago. It ended with mother's death in Eugene, Oregon, in July of 2015, three years ago. A number of salient facts were unknown to me in December of 2015; some of my comments at that time were based on facts that, had they been known to me at the time, would have been treated quite differently in that essay. I was still under the impression that my half-brother, Robert, whom I now regard as my former brother, was capable of somehow making a serious break with his past and starting his life over again, this time trying to be rational about what he was doing. Unfortunately my supposition could not have been more wrong. It was based on another supposition that has also proven to be painfully in error, that my sister Rita was as smart and moral as I had given her credit for. In fact, the paper presents Rita as the one "rock" of sanity and truthfulness in the family, someone always with good intentions at heart. Which, thinking about the years before 2015, especially before about 2012, was an altogether reasonable conclusion to reach. But, again, I had made a mistake. Rita turned out to be almost as dishonest as Robert , lacking a certain kind of integrity that makes respect possible. For I have lost respect for her, not just for Robert. Maybe I should have anticipated how things turned out. In December of 2015 my comments about the parasite she lived with for 30 years, a worthless piece of s___t (you can fill in the blank easily enough)named Richard, who had almost no talent of any kind, whose brainpower at maximum could not have powered a 15 watt light bulb, all of which alienated literally everyone else in the family. Everyone, even mother who, otherwise, gave Rita every possible benefit of doubt. This should have told me to expect the worst but, alas, it did not. Until 2015 when thinking about Rita I habitually remembered the good things she had done over the years, of which there were many. But that era had come and gone even if, three years ago, I was unaware of the fact. This paper is written to clarify some statements made in 2015. I no longer feel any debt of obligation to Rita. What she has done, which took me until well into 2016 to finally recognize for what it was, which took me until this year to come to terms with all of the implications, is inexcusable and quite literally is criminal in character. This does not rise to the level of the criminality perpetrated by Robert, but it was bad enough. This is also written to make it as clear as possible that anyone, in the future, who may think that one way to "get on my good side," might be through any members of my family, would be mistaken. With the exception of my niece, who has no responsibility for anything discussed here, I want nothing to do with any of them -in perpetuity. Whatever good things I once wanted to do for them in the past, should it happen that I might finally become financially successful, I no longer have the least interest in doing. Each of them, Rita, Robert, and Ramona, can go to hell. Should it happen that I do not make it to the finish line, so to speak, I do not want any of them to have any of my belongings, and none have any valid claim to my estate -to my art or my writings or game designs or anything else of economic value. That all came to and end no later than some time in 2017 when I finally figured out the criminality involved in what Rita did acting on behalf of Robert, starting in January of 2016. In the case of Ramona, we are in fundamental disagreement on all social issues that matter and I am vehemently opposed to her sick and dysfunctional homosexual 'lifestyle.' She is a huge embarrassment to me and I wish it was possible to completely forget her. Basically she is a disgrace to the family name. --------------------------------- About mother, several matters should be made totally clear. Among them is the fact that she wasn't always the mess she became during the last years of her life, her late 80s and her 90s -she died at age 95. Evangeline, who knew mother more-or-less well, and who volunteered to help her with a number of basic life needs like getting her medications and the like, once said that mother ended up as a demented old woman. That, is seems to me, is completely accurate. The only thing to add is that mother was in denial about all (all) of her shortcomings and medical woes. She had close to zero comprehension of what others thought of her, she had a totally unjustified puffed up opinion of herself and the value of her worthless ideas, and was unconcerned about the impression she might make on others through her often horribly ill-chosen comments. She was a maze of contradictions as well, but that feature of her personality, contradicting herself, was a habit of long standing. She never gave a hoot about consistency, and that was true when she was still in her 20s and 30s. Its just that this became even worse in those final years. She was always totally oblivious to her self-contradictions. A handy-man whom mother employed for a while back in the early 2000s, Jerry, once said that mother always followed a "logic of the moment." That was a precise way to characterize things. --------------------- Mother had the capacity to be smart as hell. She had been a successful businesswoman in Chicago at one time. But with very little by way of a sense of limits, that is, with very little that could be called healthy self-criticism in her character, she never questioned her values, how she arrived at them, or whether they served her well or could be dysfunctional. She was an establishment Democrat all the years of her life and never wavered from the "cause." For her, Richard Daley was pure good, JFK was the Savior, or at least he was until the arrival of Barack Hussein Obama, whom she came to regard as the return of Christ. Mother had been an avid Hillary supported in 2008 and felt helpless when Obama won the nomination. I talked with her at the time and can report her expression of deep dismay when Hillary's chances came to an end. Not that it meant much to me in 2008; I was not about to vote for Obama and before that had no interest at all in voting for Hillary. Not because of any passion for the Republican Party, which I regarded as a nearly hopeless mess after eight years of George W. Bush, but because it seemed essential as far as I was concerned to stop Obama. The man was -and is- dishonest, has depraved values, and is basically a phony. Be that as it may. But before too long mother had been won over to that charlatan and he became the focus of her newfound 'faith.' All of which made me ill. It was by this time that the thought became fully formed in my mind that all of the sicknesses of the Democratic Party were incarnate in mother. All of the diseased values that Democrats were espousing at that time were mother's values, and it did not bother her in the least that those values were the opposite of just about everything the party had once stood for. Like a committed Pentecostal or fervent Catholic, the party was mother's real religion. Formally a Catholic, it had been at least a decade, maybe more like 20 years, since that Church had meant much of anything to her beyond some kind of marker for her identity. She had no use for most Catholic teachings, never studied her own religion, never read the Bible, never read books by Christian authors of any stripe, and felt she had no need of any such thing. She might be a Catholic in terms of sentimentality, but functionally she was an Atheist. And you don't need to guess that mother's hypocrisy grated on me considerably, indeed, thinking back to that period of time, that was the start of my losing respect for her although this did not become some sort of absolute judgment about her until after her death. There was too much to sort out in 2015, including thinking through the good things she had done for me in the past, including much appreciated helpfulness following my heart attack in 1998. Indeed, from mid 1999, the time I returned to Oregon following bypass surgery in Arizona that April. my feelings of gratitude overshadowed everything else. That would remain true until 2006 when truths about her could no longer be overlooked. Instead of 1999-2000 etc being the start of a new kind of healthy relationship mother began to lapse into her old ways in which defense of her ego dominated all other considerations. Then came 2008, and, late that Summer, my participation in Pacifica Forum at the University of Oregon. For those who do not know the story, Pacifica was a free speech group that met on the U of O campus. As a rough estimate about a third of its membership consisted of free speech types, like myself, another third of right-wingers of various persuasions who were frustrated at being shut out of all other groups because, not a big surprise, the university and the town of Eugene are Leftist in orientation and regard all other views as anathema deserving opprobrium and attack. The other third of Pacifica consisted of onlookers, the curious, people attracted by interesting lectures by educated people with unconventional views. Eventually I gave 13 lectures at Pacifica on the university campus, ending in early 2010. All proceedings were telecast via CTV, community television, including my talks. There was increasing controversy in the local press because, by late 2009, several Rightist speakers had held the podium and for whatever reason, since this had been true in the past without much commotion, by that time a major controversy had erupted. The way the story was covered was not that Pacifica's speakers were about evenly divided between Right-wingers and "independents" like myself, but that everyone associated with the group was a Fascist. This is how the political Left in modern-day America looks at all of its opposition, of course, and even though I was able to publish a lengthy article in the Eugene Register-Guard in defense of the free speech dimension of the Forum, mother soaked up every word of the local Leftists. My essay did not count, what did count was being called a Fascist by "respected" members of the community. After all, the establishment is never wrong (as long as the people in it are Democrats) and any opposition to that establishment is a mortal sin. It did not matter that I was anti-Fascist, what mattered was being called a Fascist. This was also true generally in this city. To give one example of how this works, in early 2010 I was scheduled to take part in a debate with Jimmy Marr an outspoken neo-Nazi. There was a large crowd present in the auditorium, maybe 500 people. Marr walked out before the debate even began, just as it was about to commence. I was supposed to be his opponent, and I was fully prepared to discuss the evils of Nazism and related matters like Nazi distortion of the historical meaning of the swastika symbol. I am, to repeat the point, anti-Nazi. I had made this clear by openly challenging Marr back in December not long after he had he first appeared on campus spouting Nazi propaganda. This was reported on by a local journalist with the name (this is not made up) Joe Lieberman. He reported on my public opposition to Marr in a story he wrote for the local alternative newspaper, the Eugene Weekly. But none of that mattered when the debate came to a crashing halt, leaving me at the front of the stage, prepared to dispute everything Marr might have said. This did not matter, the crowd treated me as if I surely approved of Marr and was in his political camp. There was much yelling and various obnoxious goings-on in he crowd. Nothing I tried to say changed anyone's mind. I was part of Pacifica and therefore everything the Right-wingers in the group believed in necessarily rubbed off on everyone else. Including me. I did not realize at the time the impact this had on mother. And I'm still unsure of how she "processed" all the information, but it should also be reported that one of my lectures was highly critical of homosexuality. Mother was mortified, not so much at the actual contents of most of what I said in my various lectures, although she must have been aghast at my comments about sodomy, but by the fact that I was in the middle of a public controversy. For her there never should be social controversy, after all, the Democratic Party promulgates all truth and is the voice of God. What is there to be controversial about? Besides, and this is, I think, the crux if things, what will everyone think of her as a result of a controversy? Actually most people did not care at all, but that was not how mother saw the world -which she necessarily was the center of. About homosexuality, I can tell you that until some time in the late 1980s, possibly the early 1990s, she was opposed to sodomy. In the early 1970s, while I was never any kind of supporter of homosexual causes, I nonetheless was in favor of toleration. This remained true until 1975, when I first became highly skeptical and then in 1976-1977 when a tipping point was reached and I became adamantly opposed. The "last straw" took place when, in Arizona at the time, I was the editor of a small magazine called "Sex Guide," which was a strictly heterosexual publication about normal relationships, and the publisher asked me to look over a sexual encyclopedia as preparation for the assignment. But in it were photographs of homosexuals in action and what I saw made me sick. Finally understanding sodomy for what it is, not a civil rights issue wrapped up in appeals to 'liberty,' my view of the matter has become more and more antagonistic. At any rate, mother was opposed to homosexuality for as long as I can remember. This started some time in the mid 1950s when we were watching an interview on television featuring a member of the Mattachine society and a psychoanalyst. Mother made her views quite clear that homosexuality was a grave moral wrong. We seldom discussed the topic but at one point in about 1983 she offered the opinion that homosexuality is isn't normal and that homosexuals, her actual words, "all look like they came out of the oven too soon." You know the type. I'm sure you do, even if political correctness does not allow you to say so openly. The next time the subject came up was some time after my return to Oregon, either in late 1999 or early 2000. Now mother was a big supporter of homosexual causes and spewed forth the Democratic Party line on the issue. What had happened to change her mind? It was some time in the 1980s that Ramona told mother about her sexual preferences. Still, even then Ramona and mother were anything but on the best of terms, and things got much worse. The problem was that, to her credit, Ramona had no use at all for how mother treated Robert, virtually as a serf commanded to obey her every whim. What Ramona never fully grasped was how complicit Robert was in his own humiliation. He was a classic masochist, wanting to be put down, belittled, and treated like garbage. Yet Ramona was right in insisting that mother had the greatest responsibility for the arrangement she had with Robert. What the hell is a grown man (or substitute for an actual man) doing living with his mother? Mother should have sent him packing years before, so that he might finally live in the real world and grow up. That was not about to happen. Mother was addicted to Robert's unpaid labor around the house, she didn't care if she humiliated him in the process, and, besides, long before 1999 she was way out of shape and becoming more and more out of shape. Her excessive weight was part of the problem -and her unwillingness to take any kind of exercise led to an inevitable outcome, inability to walk normally, deteriorating muscle tone, and the start of a series of falls, which became more frequent each year such that, before the end, she might fall down every day, or nearly every day; sometimes she was unable to get back up by herself, her arms were just as atrophied as her legs. Through it all mother became increasing abusive -toward whomever might be around at the time, but especially toward Robert, her loyal flunky, always ready to pick her up, always willing to endure extreme verbal abuse, because, you see, mother was the, uhhh, 'love of his life.' Ramona thought this situation was totally sick and as a result she walked out of mother's life, as much as she could, anyway. Not that I had a "good" opinion of the arrangement but, at least until 2006 or even 2007 I still felt a debt of gratitude toward mother and toward Robert. But some time after 2009 I began to walk out on her myself. Ramona lived in the San Francisco bay area and was not on the scene at all, while I continued to reside in Eugene. But there were several episodes where mother and I did not speak to each other for months at a time, on one occasion most of a year. Each time I initiated the break because of conduct by mother that I regarded as totally unjustifiable and usually something she did to Robert, like the time she gave his expensive roll top desk to Goodwill charities while Robert was at work. Mother had decided that the desk did not suit her image as a high status woman of leisure, and, besides, Rita might move to Eugene from San Francisco, where she also lived, and there needed to be plenty of room for Rita's things and Bobby's furniture could easily be sacrificed for the greater good. Besides, mother had no real respect for Robert and if he objected, so what? As it was, when Robert went home that day his reaction wasn't to walk out but to swallow his pride and sulk. His demeanor began its final erosion starting from that time, about which more, anon..... Not that Rita ever had the intention to move to Oregon, not after her favorite worthless parasite said that he would not relocate. But for mother this was always her great hope, Hence, or so I take it, her decision to clean out everything from the basement that was in storage there and moving it to a large storage locker that cost about $120 per month, Despite, it should be added, how tough financially life became for her after 2009, with the economy in shreds and Rita no longer able to pay mother about $1,000 per month to maintain her lifestyle. How long Rita had been subsidizing mother is unknown to me, but it may have been for approximately 10 years. The story is quite complicated, and there is even more... You could create a terrific Alfred Hitchcock horror movie from the story of my family, it was that bad. Not that I take any pleasure in writing this story. Quite the opposite, until a few days ago I was undecided whether or not to put it all into words. then Alan Alda intervened. In a television interview he admitted that his mother had her own problems and probably was a clinical schizophrenic. The fact is that some families are unfit for human habitation and it would do much good to make matters public so that other people who live in dysfunctional families realize that they are not alone and that when a situation has deteriorated beyond a certain point the only sane thing to do is to institutionalize a mentally incapacitated parent. Actually it had dawned on me no later than 2010 or 2011 that mother needed to be placed in an intensive care home for the elderly. Robert could not always be at home when mother fell down, he worked as a medical assistant at a senior home which gave old people intensive care, and he knew better than anyone else in the family just how far gone mother was as she reached her 90s, but he would not hear of it. You tell me why, I do not have an answer, In that period of time mother was becoming more and more demanding as her condition worsened. Already by 2012, certainly by 2013, Robert was being run ragged by mother's incessant demands for assistance and because of her accumulating medical problems. But it was impossible to talk with him about such things, Or anything personal. I have never known anyone as insecure about himself as Robert in my entire life. He was defensive about virtually everything and any kind of candor was out of the question. His reaction to mother's increasing demands was to take all the abuse she dished out and become more sullen and quick to anger as time progressed. He got less and less sleep and that added to his misery. You would think that mama's boy would finally have had enough and rebel move out but that was not what he did, he doubled down on his dysfunctional behavior. There were exceptions. Most notably when Rita visited Eugene, which was about once per year. Then Robert behaved at his best, for him, and if you didn't know better you might have thought that he was more-or-less 'normal." Within a day of two of Rita's visits, however, the real "normal" reasserted itself. Mother's demands would resume, worse than before, and Robert would act as her houseboy as his sour disposition returned and grew worse. The other notable exception concerned Evangeline, who lived across the street and who was as good a Christian as anyone can get, and who took it upon herself to try and help mother. At least 4 or 5 days a week Evangeline visited mother and did what she could to be useful. This was also the period when, for most of a year, I gave her granddaughter, Grace, free art lessons; I also paid for as many of Grace's art supplies as I could afford. These lessons were held in mother's home. About once per month I was at the house and Evangeline would be there along with Grace. Robert was on the scene most of these occasions. One afternoon, Robert decided for reasons of his own, that he was going to show Evangeline what a "man" he was. I could not believe my eyes. The best way to put it is to say that if Evangeline had pigtails he would have been pulling them as a way to have "fun." Robert's humor was immature and, I thought, a major embarrassment. His actions, which might be described as horseplay, were childish, the kind of stunts that you would expect from a kid still in grammar school. Evangeline was expected to reciprocate, which she did in a clearly half-hearted manner, just enough to not cause a scene in someone else's family home. This has led me to speculate that Robert might best be explained as a case of arrested development, as if, when he was in 8th grade long ago, he fell for a girl who then humiliated him in some way which traumatized him. Something very painful. Instead of picking himself up off the floor he internalized the pain and decided that the only safe relationship with a female would be with his mother. Which fits the profile of causation for a good percentage of mama's boys. Which is also pathetic. How many men can relate stories about getting dumped by a female along life's highway? Just about all of them, myself included. Women can be quite cruel to a man, hardly a news flash, and virtually all men learn to live with this reality.. Besides, when a woman returns a man's affections it is all worth while; life takes on new meaning and becomes worth every effort and any sacrifices that must be made. But this was not how Robert saw things. Instead, to carry my diagnosis one step further, he decided that the best thing to do was not to study psychology in order to better understand the opposite sex and one's own feelings and options, he decided to take an interest in the military. After all, what better way to build defensive walls around one's self? His entire military experience consisted of a stint with the National Guard but he became obsessed with the Army and with combat from early on in his life and that has always been his default frame of reference for nearly all situations involving human interaction. Its always some aspect of war. And no-one had better get close to him because that would be a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Try and get close, even if this is only to talk about honesty about mother, and expect a heated reaction, snarling, in other words, and obvious indications of barely controlled anger. Many men are somewhat like this, to be sure, possibly 10% of the male population as a guess. But no man that I have ever met has been nearly as defensive and, in a word, crappy about it. Hence his social skills, to call them that, are almost non-existent, and his understanding of the female sex is close to zero. He did this all to himself, is how I look at it. Why? Ultimately because, while he isn't stupid about everything, something important within him is a psychological disaster which generates stupidity in abundance on a frequent basis. He should be all-too-aware of exactly this, but instead of doing something useful like reading books about overcoming feelings of inferiority, or about inability to be honest with anyone at all, he always turned inward, taking refuge behind the thick walls of Fort Robert. He certainly has never read the Bible and its wisdom literature, which could also be a great help. If he has cracked the covers of the "holy book," or so I think is the case, it has only been to reinforce his belief in a few myths of tradition, or to read about the wars of ancient Israel. And it does not help that his religion, that form of Catholicism that went out of style with the end of the Spanish Inquisition, is about as dysfunctional as any religion can get. Forget about St Francis of Assisi, forget St. Augustine, forget Clement of Alexandria, forget Thomas Aquinas, for that matter, forget Andrew Greeley or John Dominic Crossan. For Robert the one exemplar of Catholic faith who really matters in his life is Torquemada. That is what it amounts to. He also is horrible at lying. Not that it is some kind of "good" to be a believable liar, but it is necessary to admit that this skill is rather common in the world and few people don't lie, at least when they need to, with a certain aplomb. Not Robert. In the years that I knew him he lied about as adroitly as an he did as a child. He never studied psychology (psych is for sissies, is his opinion), he never became aware of what a simpleton he was, hopelessly naive about so many things. Mother once related an incident from Robert's early life to me. It seems that Robert had developed a taste for butter. How to have more butter than mother might approve? Easy. There was an open stick of butter in the refrigerator. So he nibbled all the edges of it and put it back where he found it, Who would notice? That is about how well he lied to me in 2015 even if at the time I was unaware of why he was saying a number of foolish things that made no sense to me. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> . 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