The Story of My Life: What Led Me to the Final Decision to Throw in the Towel for Good

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

Like a previous poster, I have quite a lengthy story to tell. I decided to tell my story in its entirety. I hope I do not bore you with the accounts of my life as I go through the events from my childhood to my late adult life. With that being said, let’s get started.

 

    I was born in 1977 weighing only 2 pounds, 9 ounces, having been born three months early. The oxygen that they had given me while in the newborn ICU left me with retinal detachment, a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. Before I go any farther, I must say that I am not a pity pity me sort of guy. I have other health issues, but I don’t let them get me down. I am living!!!!!!!!!!

    My stay in the hospital was lengthy, and during that time, I had several apneic episodes during which I stopped breathing. I was discharged in March 1978. I give many thanks to my deceased mother and my aunt, both of whom watched over me as I thrived. my start was quite rocky, and because of that, my mother and my aunt both took turns staying up and watching over me in two-hour shifts to make sure I kept breathing.

    My mother discovered my blindness when I was about three months old. At the time, we had moved to an apartment that was carpeted. She would come in to take me out of my bassinet, and I would stiffen up and shake all over, totally scared to death because I didn’t see her coming.  She took me to the hospital, and test revealed that I had retinopathy of prematurity. Today, I can see light and shadow in my left eye. My right eye is artificial.

    My childhood wasn’t like any other. I came from a family of nine siblings – eight boys and one girl. One baby brother, died of crib death as it was called back then, but is now known as SIDS or sudden infant death syndrome. To keep names, private, I have decided to refer to my siblings by other names. There was myself, my sister, who I will call Ingrid, and my brother, who I will call Trent. At the time on my birth, Trent was 12 and Ingrid was six. My other siblings lived far from home.

    My mom was a strong woman. In fact, I believe she did more than she should have. She was a single mom, though, and she worked hard to make life good for us kids. She had two marriages that had gone to hell, but she was bound and determined to make life good for us. She had to be mom and dad, and yes, we got our butts paddled when we needed it. We had to be doing something drastic though in order for that to happen.

    Like all of you ex-Christians, I attended church on Sunday, and I sang, said my prayers, etc. In early summer of  1983, Mom, my big brother Trent, sister, Ingrid, and I packed and moved to Colorado. The reason was because I had a brother I knew nothing about. I found out much older that our father had an affair with another woman. I will refer to our dad as Henry. I will refer to my little brother as Paul. our stay in Denver Colorado was rocky. My father was a full-time drunk. He devoted himself to the booze and chasing other women. He did not care about us kids. My memories of daddy Henry are of him passed out on the couch or fighting with mom. Mom would beg him to play games with Paul and me, but he wouldn’t. She would beg him to take us on rides, but he wouldn’t.  Meanwhile, Paul was bounced around from Foster home to Foster home and he stayed with us on the weekends. God only knows what happened to him at those foster homes.

    I remember late one night when all Hellbrook loosen our house. I woke up to a rip roaring commotion. Dad, or if that’s what I should call him, because he was anything but, came into the room Paul and I shared, and he slammed our twin beds together, hurting Paul’s hand. At the time, Paul was 3 years of age. Mom was not happy at all. She ripped into him when he left our room. I remember it clearly to this day. The argument I heard from Paul’s and my room dragged on for hours. That was how it seemed anyway. I lied in my bed and listened as mom and dad argued in the living room. Finally, things reached a climax when Mom told dad to take his booze and his bar and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine. A couple of days later, dad picked another fight with Mom, and Ingrid took me and hid at the neighbors house. Trent was visiting his dad in Ohio. Keep in mind that I was only 5 1/2 years old when all of this took place. As we hid in the neighbors’ basement, dad took Mom down in our kitchen floor and choked her. Sometime later, Paul’s and my father in a drunken rage, called the police and tried to say that the neighbors were holding us kids hostage. I don’t know where Paul was at the time, but I was hiding with Ingrid in the neighbors basement. Meanwhile, mom was shouting in the background that dad was full of it, and that he was lying. Suddenly, the dispatcher asked dad what he tried to do to our mother, and he said that he tried to kill her. Needless to say, the cops came and arrested him.

    That night, we were supposed to go to a shelter for battered women and children, but instead, we ended up in the county poor farm. Why? Because of a discrepancy. Something happened and we were not allowed in to the shelter. The cab driver we had was extremely nice, and he told mom that she did not have to pay a thing. He drove us to a police station, where a snarky cop told him to take us to the county poor farm. Mom was hurt by this. All of her life, my grandfather told her no matter what she did, to never end up in the county poor farm, and that’s where we were headed.

    To make a long story short, we ended up in Manitou Springs, at the McLaughlin family Lodge. It was against the rules, but mom felt she had no other choice then to take Paul with us. By sheer luck, she was granted the OK. Since then, Paul was a part of our lives. He didn’t have to stay in the foster homes anymore. I could best describe the winter of 1983 as brutally hard. To start things off, my father came to visit us in Manitou Springs. He told mom that she should put water in the radiator instead of antifreeze. He said it wouldn’t hurt a thing. Mom had planned on taking us to spend Christmas in Omaha at our grandmother and grandfather‘s house. This was her parents house, not my father‘s mother‘s place. My grandpa on my dad‘s side had passed away sometime ago. I didn’t know him at all. Well, we started off on our way to grandma and grandpa’s. We reach the Kansas border and the car froze up. A police officer came sometime later and took us to a police station, where we stayed for hours.     I remember getting tired and lying down on the cold tile floor with just coats under me to keep me from freezing my butt off. Finally, a caseworker came and drove us to a hotel, where we stayed for several days until the Pinto was fixed. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to grandma and grandpa‘s place and we just had to spend Christmas with my drunken granny in Denver and listen to her breathe down our necks. I will never forget the night when she threw me out on the balcony because she was mad at me. Ingrid and Trent went to my father’s sister’s house to hang out with my cousins. Where dad was, I could only guess. He was probably at the bar, getting drunk. Mom had gone to the store or someplace, and the only ones that were there besides grandma if that’s what I should call her, were Paul and myself. We weren’t making that much noise at all. We were lying in her waterbed, talking softly, and she got mad. She made Paul stay in the room by himself and she threw me out on the cold balcony, and I stayed out there for at least a couple of minutes before she let me in, but it felt like a long time being that I was only six years old. My biggest regret is that I didn’t come out and tell Mom about what had transpired while she was gone. My reason for doing so was because grandma threatened that if I told her, I would get into big trouble. So I kept my mouth shut. Boy, do I regret it now!

    That Christmas was lousy. Oh, Paul and I got gifts, but we were not allowed to play with them. We weren’t allowed to touch them at all, and shortly after that, they disappeared.

   All my life, I was taught that the Bible says thou shoal honor thy father and thy mother. How can I honor the drunk who choked my mother, slammed us two boys beds together and Hurt Paul, lied on the neighbors, ruined our Christmas vacation, and so much more?  as I grew older, I began to have serious doubts about what I was taught.
    In early summer of 1984, when school was let out, mom had had enough, and she moved us back to the Midwest.
 

major Changes

 

    I prayed, and I prayed for things to get better, but it seemed that they only got worse starting when Ingrid grew distant and cold. When she turned 13 years old, she was bound and determined to do what she wanted to do. She started hanging around the wrong crowd and running wild. Mom had to chase her down and wrangle her back home. there were even times when she treated me badly.

    When I was almost 9 years old, and the summer of 1986, we took a trip to Ohio, and that’s where my big brother, who I will call darrell, entered our lives. He was a bully to state at best. He stayed with us for a while and then went back to Ohio. We moved to Indiana in the summer of 1987, and we rented a large farmhouse on the edge of a small town. Guess who moved in with us again. At the time, his wife, who I will call Carmen, was pregnant with her and Darrell‘s first child. darrell thought he could lay claims to everything I had. Even my interest came under scrutiny by king Darrell. One day and early fall, my uncle Leonard, who came to visit us from New York, gave me an old antique wind up fire alarm. It was a red bell with a disk in the center that would pop off if it got too hot. If there was a fire, this was how the alarm worked. It had a small knob that you turned on the back to wind it up.  at the time, another brother, his wife, and three kids were living with us. I will call him Lewis. I will refer to his wife as Betty. The kids, I will refer to as James, Jordan, and Kelly. At the time, Kelly was two years old. 

    Paul, James, Jordan, and I used to play without old antique fire alarm, as if it were a school bell. It wasn’t like we played with it all the time, and besides, we were having harmless fun. The closest neighbor to us was over a mile away. Yeah, the bell was quite loud when we set it off, but we were having fun. We would give it a quarter of a turn to mark the end of one make belief class and the start of another. For fire drills, we wound the thing up all the way, set it on a tree stump, and let her go.  Then we had fun racing each other down the mile long driveway. It wasn’t like we played with the bell all the time, but Darrell will say otherwise. One day, I went to look for the bell because Paul, Jordan, James, and I wanted to play.  I found the bell missing. When I asked where it was, darrell got up in my face and had a rip roaring conniption fit, telling me how I did not need that damn fire alarm by God, and that it was stupid and ignorant. Come to find out, he destroyed in his words, “the son of a bitch.’ oh, how ignorant it was for me to play with a harmless fire alarm, but sometime later, Darrell and our big brother Lewis had fun detonating a pipe bomb that Lewis built. They detonated it in the backyard and it was powerful enough to shake the house. Oh, but that fire alarm was so ignorant. Today, Darrell insisted that I wanted to set that thing off at 10:30 at night. When was I ever out that late as a child? I don’t remember when. The cardinal rule was that we were to be in the house by sundown. The only time we were out later than we should’ve been was in the company of adults, especially when school was out.

    After school was out in the summer of 1989, Mom, our family friend Byron, Paul, and I moved back to the Midwest. By then, Ingrid married her first husband, a man I will refer to as John. It felt good to get away from Darrell and his tyranny for a while, but our time of peace only lasted for what, a year and a half? I turned 13 in the winter of 1990, and I had plans to compete in the fifth grade science fair. At the time, mom, Paul, and I lived in Onawa, Iowa.

    Before I continue with the story, I must backtrack and talk about my fascination with electricity and power transformers, and where it all began. Back when I was 6 1/2, mom, Trent, Ingrid, Paul, and I lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Sergeant Bluff. One day, Paul and I were playing in the yard. Across the road from our trailer was a power pole on top of which was an electrical transformer and some high voltage lines. The pole was base. I touched the pole and noticed that it was vibrating. That sparked my curiosity, and when I stuck my ear against the pole, I heard a telltale hum.  I was fascinated by that, and I remember running into the house, excitedly, telling mom how the pole was humming! She explained to me that it was because of the power going through the lines and transformer. Since that day, I had been interested in electricity and power transformers. I wanted to inquire more about them.    Fast-forward to 1991 I was 13 years old that spring, and I competed in the fifth grade science fair at Central Elementary, which is now defunct. My now deceased paraeducator at the time, Nancy, works hard to compile the things I needed, and thus, we busted our butts to make that project all it was. I had a nice display of electrical transformers, small ones, which were pulled from old appliances and other things. We stripped their coils of their paper insulation so they could be seen. One of my transformers had red copper coils. It looked sharp. Using a variety of resources, I wrote the following report. The text is written below:

 

“a transformer is a device used by power companies to increase or decrease voltage from high voltage and low amperage to low voltage and high amperage through powerlines without having to increase or decrease the size of the wires. The typical transformer consist of an iron core with two copper coils. the first copper coil, the primary coil, receives electricity from the source of power, such as a power plant. The second coil, the secondary coil, as it is called, receives an electromagnetic field from the primary coil and converts this to either higher voltage or lower voltage, depending on how many windings are in the secondary coil. The secondary coil is not connected to the primary coil. Instead, both coils sit so close to each other that one receives an electromagnetic field from the other. The two ends of the primary coil are connected to the source of power, whereas the two ends of the secondary are connected to the circuit which uses the power such as a home or an appliance. The number of turns in the secondary coil is proportional to that in the primary. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is less than the number in the primary coil. The voltage is lower. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is higher than that in the primary, the voltage is higher. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is equal to that in the primary coil, the voltage is the same.’

    I was proud when I found out my project one first place, and yes, I talked about it a lot. What boy wouldn’t? That was a big achievement for me at the time. I took the display and the report home and set them up on a card table in the bedroom I shared with my brother Paul in our mobile home. Later that summer, while I was at the Iowa brail school, attending summer school, Darrell, his wife, Carmen, and their two kids, whom I will refer to as Logan and Whitney, move back from Indiana. I don’t blame Mom for letting him and Carmen move in for a while. He was her son.  He’s just as much her son as Paul and I are. I didn’t understand though how she could put up with all the crap. I was at my wits end.

    I remember it like it was yesterday. At the time, I had been keeping audio journals and written journals. I started when I was 12 years old. I realize that life was going by faster than I wanted it to, and I wanted to capture precious moments; However, I wanted to document some of the ugly things as well because I wanted proof because some family members are such big phony liars and they will stop at nothing to discredit me and disprove me. The date was Thursday, July 4, 1991, when all hell broke loose and our trailer, which was supposed to be Mom’s, Paul’s, and my house, but Darrell thought it was his. At the time, my big brother Trent, who had himself a girlfriend at the time and an infant daughter, were going to come down to spend Fourth of July weekend with us. Mom and Carmen had gone to the store to buy some things for tacos. the only ones there at the house were Darrell, Logan, Whitney, and myself. Paul had gone off with his friend and they were out somewhere riding bikes or doing whatever. Keep in mind that all of the windows were closed and the central air conditioner was running.  If the windows had been opened, I’m pretty sure the whole neighborhood would’ve heard the way. I screamed and cried as Darrell wailed me for what seemed like hours.

    The moment mom‘s car pulled out of the driveway, Darrell started in on me about my “stupid interests’ and how that transformer project I had done was so ignorant. He cussed the people who helped me with the project and he really had a fit. Now keep in mind that his son Logan was 3 1/2 years old and his daughter Whitney was a year and a half. here, this grown man sat on our couch, belittling me about my project that I loved so much. Ignoring him, I went to the room that Paul and I shared. It was located at the end of an L-shaped hallway. I shut the door, and right now, Darrell burst through the door and chewed me out, telling me that I had no right walking away from him when he was telling me something. He then shoved me aside and grabbed my display from the card table.  I gave pursuit. ‘Wait, darrell!’ I said. ‘I worked my butt off on this thing!’ Darrell elbowed me and knocked me against the wall so hard that he knocked the wind out of me. When I told him that I was going to tell Mom, he made mockery of me as he went out the back door with my project in hand. I heard him outside as he threw my things into the back of his truck. He then came back in and started toward our living room. Seeing my opportunity, I was going toward the back door to get my things. I opened the door and just stepped out when Darrell came right up behind me, grab me by the hair of my head, pulled me back in the house, shoved me against the wall with his hand on my chest, and said, ‘don’t even think about it,’ and followed that with a vulgar slang for a particular bodily orifice and the word, ‘baby.’ That is his favorite thing to call people when he’s mad at them. They are nothing but a**hole babies.

    Hurt and angry, I called him exactly what I thought he was acting like, a spoiled pig. I then ran to the room I shared with Paul. Darrell came bursting through the door and slapped me in the head. ‘Do you want to talk back to adults some more?’ he said, and he shoved me to the floor, pin me down, and beat and beat and beat my butt for what seemed like hours. There I was, faced down, screaming, and crying as the big bully beat a tom-tom on my rear end. After the beating, he stood over me and ridiculed me for what seemed like forever.

 

    That winter, he, Carmen, and the kids were living in a two-story house. Mom, Paul and I went there to spend Thanksgiving. We have always been modest, and thus, we had to share one bed upstairs. The house had no heat upstairs, and thus, mom came up and slept with us two boys. We all had our clothes on for Christ sake, but Darrell thought that we were being perverted. In his warped, mind of holiness, everything we did was wrong. it was, the next morning, he came up the stairs and yanked Paul and me out of bed. He then told us in a quiet voice us to keep from waking our mother up that we were too old to sleep with mommy, and we were acting like weirdos. I got it the worse.

    Darrell claims to be a Christian, but he is so hell-bent on making others lives miserable. He will preach to me about not judging others, but he will sit in judgment of others. This is the type of man he is. If you are Mexican, black, or LGBTQ, look out because the walls are coming down.  I am neither of these things, but I am not going to ridicule somebody who is. I have Mexican friends. There is nothing wrong with being Hispanic. There is nothing wrong with being black. I was raised that being gay is unacceptable according to the Bible. However, I am not going to worry about who is gay, and who isn’t. If, indeed, there is a maker, I leave it up to the maker to decide.

To make a long story short, it got worse as I got older. in 2018, my and darrell, we’re having a heated argument about me, and to see what he would say, Mom said she knew something about me. Right away, Darrell asked the assumptive question if I were gay. It couldn’t have been anything else. It couldn’t have been the question of me having money, finding a good girl to marry, whatever. It had to be the first thing that he has constantly worrying about and griping about. “what, he’s gay?’

    After our mother’s untimely death in 2021, I decided once and for all to distance myself from my brother and his teachings. The reason for this was because he said something very crude to me. We were in an argument, and he said to me, “Mom‘s not here, and you can’t prove it one way or the other. Can ya?’

    Darrell wasn’t the only reason why I have decided to walk away from religion, but there are other things as well. One of these is the whole notion that I don’t have the right to be angry when somebody is backing me into a corner and wailing away on me? I don’t buy it. I’m supposed to turn the other cheek and let somebody beat on me? Since when? Why is it OK for David to throw a stone at Goliath but I have to turn the other cheek? I don’t buy it. Then, there is the whole thing with hell fire and all that nonsense. I had a preacher tell me that a baby who had not sent at all and who had only spent a month outside. The womb could be roasting in a place called hell to this very day. That made me think of my infant brother who died of SIDS. another preacher, having not received enough in the offering plate, thought it was best to rip the congregation to shreds, saying ‘Looks like a lot of people aren’t being all they could be in the army of God on this Sunday morning.’ There are other things that I just don’t get either. For instance, the Bible, or at least our version, states that we are hellbound if we masturbate; however there is ultrasound imagery of babies doing it in utero. Not to gross anybody out, but I  have fond memories of myself as a one year-old baby boy in the middle of the living room floor humping with both fists between my legs and a hot load of poop, or as I referred to it when I was around 2 years of age, ‘gurr,’ in the seat of my diaper, lol. So how and why is it so taboo when babies do it? Not to gross people out, but every now and then, I relive these early toddler memories and use them as a coping outlet for dealing with the fact that I am bowel incontinent and must wear diapers. I feel completely innocent when I am all alone in the privacy of my own home and I am doing my thing. Why is this a hell-worthy sin when I am not thinking a single nasty thought, but instead, reliving the very moments during which I was overjoyed as a baby boy?

    The other thing I don’t buy is that we are not supposed to find things that satisfy us continuously. We cannot reach for new Heights. We cannot have anything else. We have to have nothing at all because that is continual satisfaction. Some will even preach that having any earthly possessions is utterly evil and wrong. Again, I don’t buy this. There are many many reasons why I have stepped away from all religion. I will never be mean or spiteful toward anyone else, but I am not a part of any cult. my brother Darrell wants told me that if somebody is gay, well, in his eyes, they are automatically deemed pedophiles. Says who since win? That is jumping the gun. This is another slap in the face, and I don’t buy it. I have friends who are gay, and they speak out against pedophilia. They think children should be entitled to their own innocence. They think that anyone who touches a child should be hurt severely. So how can all gays be pedophiles?  That would be like someone saying all Kentuckians are incestial or all people who come from Waco Texas must be like David Koresh. How about this question all Mormons are like Warren Jeffs? Now that is an unfair statement. How can somebody preach about judging other people and then stand up and speak in judgment of people themselves? I just don’t get it. I found peace when I walked away and struck out on my own, declaring myself my own man for the first time ever, a single independent individual not bound by any indoctrination, domination, etc. I am who I am and I will always be. I don’t set out to hurt others, I don’t hate, I am compassionate, and I stand for what is right. If somebody else is being hurt by another individual, I will speak loudly. I stand for the underdog in our society. I stand for the kid who has hurt by somebody bigger than him or her. I stand for , love, truth, honesty, compassion, and everything else that is good and right in this world. Will not, however, be pushed around or bullied because of my beliefs, fascinations, etc. Like I said, in the beginning of this text, I am living  despite everything that has been thrown at me over the years. I must close by saying I love you all.  

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

34 minutes ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

Like a previous poster, I have quite a lengthy story to tell. I decided to tell my story in its entirety. I hope I do not bore you with the accounts of my life as I go through the events from my childhood to my late adult life. With that being said, let’s get started.

 

    I was born in 1977 weighing only 2 pounds, 9 ounces, having been born three months early. The oxygen that they had given me while in the newborn ICU left me with retinal detachment, a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. Before I go any farther, I must say that I am not a pity pity me sort of guy. I have other health issues, but I don’t let them get me down. I am living!!!!!!!!!!

    My stay in the hospital was lengthy, and during that time, I had several apneic episodes during which I stopped breathing. I was discharged in March 1978. I give many thanks to my deceased mother and my aunt, both of whom watched over me as I thrived. my start was quite rocky, and because of that, my mother and my aunt both took turns staying up and watching over me in two-hour shifts to make sure I kept breathing.

    My mother discovered my blindness when I was about three months old. At the time, we had moved to an apartment that was carpeted. She would come in to take me out of my bassinet, and I would stiffen up and shake all over, totally scared to death because I didn’t see her coming.  She took me to the hospital, and test revealed that I had retinopathy of prematurity. Today, I can see light and shadow in my left eye. My right eye is artificial.

    My childhood wasn’t like any other. I came from a family of nine siblings – eight boys and one girl. One baby brother, died of crib death as it was called back then, but is now known as SIDS or sudden infant death syndrome. To keep names, private, I have decided to refer to my siblings by other names. There was myself, my sister, who I will call Ingrid, and my brother, who I will call Trent. At the time on my birth, Trent was 12 and Ingrid was six. My other siblings lived far from home.

    My mom was a strong woman. In fact, I believe she did more than she should have. She was a single mom, though, and she worked hard to make life good for us kids. She had two marriages that had gone to hell, but she was bound and determined to make life good for us. She had to be mom and dad, and yes, we got our butts paddled when we needed it. We had to be doing something drastic though in order for that to happen.

    Like all of you ex-Christians, I attended church on Sunday, and I sang, said my prayers, etc. In early summer of  1983, Mom, my big brother Trent, sister, Ingrid, and I packed and moved to Colorado. The reason was because I had a brother I knew nothing about. I found out much older that our father had an affair with another woman. I will refer to our dad as Henry. I will refer to my little brother as Paul. our stay in Denver Colorado was rocky. My father was a full-time drunk. He devoted himself to the booze and chasing other women. He did not care about us kids. My memories of daddy Henry are of him passed out on the couch or fighting with mom. Mom would beg him to play games with Paul and me, but he wouldn’t. She would beg him to take us on rides, but he wouldn’t.  Meanwhile, Paul was bounced around from Foster home to Foster home and he stayed with us on the weekends. God only knows what happened to him at those foster homes.

    I remember late one night when all Hellbrook loosen our house. I woke up to a rip roaring commotion. Dad, or if that’s what I should call him, because he was anything but, came into the room Paul and I shared, and he slammed our twin beds together, hurting Paul’s hand. At the time, Paul was 3 years of age. Mom was not happy at all. She ripped into him when he left our room. I remember it clearly to this day. The argument I heard from Paul’s and my room dragged on for hours. That was how it seemed anyway. I lied in my bed and listened as mom and dad argued in the living room. Finally, things reached a climax when Mom told dad to take his booze and his bar and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine. A couple of days later, dad picked another fight with Mom, and Ingrid took me and hid at the neighbors house. Trent was visiting his dad in Ohio. Keep in mind that I was only 5 1/2 years old when all of this took place. As we hid in the neighbors’ basement, dad took Mom down in our kitchen floor and choked her. Sometime later, Paul’s and my father in a drunken rage, called the police and tried to say that the neighbors were holding us kids hostage. I don’t know where Paul was at the time, but I was hiding with Ingrid in the neighbors basement. Meanwhile, mom was shouting in the background that dad was full of it, and that he was lying. Suddenly, the dispatcher asked dad what he tried to do to our mother, and he said that he tried to kill her. Needless to say, the cops came and arrested him.

    That night, we were supposed to go to a shelter for battered women and children, but instead, we ended up in the county poor farm. Why? Because of a discrepancy. Something happened and we were not allowed in to the shelter. The cab driver we had was extremely nice, and he told mom that she did not have to pay a thing. He drove us to a police station, where a snarky cop told him to take us to the county poor farm. Mom was hurt by this. All of her life, my grandfather told her no matter what she did, to never end up in the county poor farm, and that’s where we were headed.

    To make a long story short, we ended up in Manitou Springs, at the McLaughlin family Lodge. It was against the rules, but mom felt she had no other choice then to take Paul with us. By sheer luck, she was granted the OK. Since then, Paul was a part of our lives. He didn’t have to stay in the foster homes anymore. I could best describe the winter of 1983 as brutally hard. To start things off, my father came to visit us in Manitou Springs. He told mom that she should put water in the radiator instead of antifreeze. He said it wouldn’t hurt a thing. Mom had planned on taking us to spend Christmas in Omaha at our grandmother and grandfather‘s house. This was her parents house, not my father‘s mother‘s place. My grandpa on my dad‘s side had passed away sometime ago. I didn’t know him at all. Well, we started off on our way to grandma and grandpa’s. We reach the Kansas border and the car froze up. A police officer came sometime later and took us to a police station, where we stayed for hours.     I remember getting tired and lying down on the cold tile floor with just coats under me to keep me from freezing my butt off. Finally, a caseworker came and drove us to a hotel, where we stayed for several days until the Pinto was fixed. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to grandma and grandpa‘s place and we just had to spend Christmas with my drunken granny in Denver and listen to her breathe down our necks. I will never forget the night when she threw me out on the balcony because she was mad at me. Ingrid and Trent went to my father’s sister’s house to hang out with my cousins. Where dad was, I could only guess. He was probably at the bar, getting drunk. Mom had gone to the store or someplace, and the only ones that were there besides grandma if that’s what I should call her, were Paul and myself. We weren’t making that much noise at all. We were lying in her waterbed, talking softly, and she got mad. She made Paul stay in the room by himself and she threw me out on the cold balcony, and I stayed out there for at least a couple of minutes before she let me in, but it felt like a long time being that I was only six years old. My biggest regret is that I didn’t come out and tell Mom about what had transpired while she was gone. My reason for doing so was because grandma threatened that if I told her, I would get into big trouble. So I kept my mouth shut. Boy, do I regret it now!

    That Christmas was lousy. Oh, Paul and I got gifts, but we were not allowed to play with them. We weren’t allowed to touch them at all, and shortly after that, they disappeared.

   All my life, I was taught that the Bible says thou shoal honor thy father and thy mother. How can I honor the drunk who choked my mother, slammed us two boys beds together and Hurt Paul, lied on the neighbors, ruined our Christmas vacation, and so much more?  as I grew older, I began to have serious doubts about what I was taught.
    In early summer of 1984, when school was let out, mom had had enough, and she moved us back to the Midwest.
 

major Changes

 

    I prayed, and I prayed for things to get better, but it seemed that they only got worse starting when Ingrid grew distant and cold. When she turned 13 years old, she was bound and determined to do what she wanted to do. She started hanging around the wrong crowd and running wild. Mom had to chase her down and wrangle her back home. there were even times when she treated me badly.

    When I was almost 9 years old, and the summer of 1986, we took a trip to Ohio, and that’s where my big brother, who I will call darrell, entered our lives. He was a bully to state at best. He stayed with us for a while and then went back to Ohio. We moved to Indiana in the summer of 1987, and we rented a large farmhouse on the edge of a small town. Guess who moved in with us again. At the time, his wife, who I will call Carmen, was pregnant with her and Darrell‘s first child. darrell thought he could lay claims to everything I had. Even my interest came under scrutiny by king Darrell. One day and early fall, my uncle Leonard, who came to visit us from New York, gave me an old antique wind up fire alarm. It was a red bell with a disk in the center that would pop off if it got too hot. If there was a fire, this was how the alarm worked. It had a small knob that you turned on the back to wind it up.  at the time, another brother, his wife, and three kids were living with us. I will call him Lewis. I will refer to his wife as Betty. The kids, I will refer to as James, Jordan, and Kelly. At the time, Kelly was two years old. 

    Paul, James, Jordan, and I used to play without old antique fire alarm, as if it were a school bell. It wasn’t like we played with it all the time, and besides, we were having harmless fun. The closest neighbor to us was over a mile away. Yeah, the bell was quite loud when we set it off, but we were having fun. We would give it a quarter of a turn to mark the end of one make belief class and the start of another. For fire drills, we wound the thing up all the way, set it on a tree stump, and let her go.  Then we had fun racing each other down the mile long driveway. It wasn’t like we played with the bell all the time, but Darrell will say otherwise. One day, I went to look for the bell because Paul, Jordan, James, and I wanted to play.  I found the bell missing. When I asked where it was, darrell got up in my face and had a rip roaring conniption fit, telling me how I did not need that damn fire alarm by God, and that it was stupid and ignorant. Come to find out, he destroyed in his words, “the son of a bitch.’ oh, how ignorant it was for me to play with a harmless fire alarm, but sometime later, Darrell and our big brother Lewis had fun detonating a pipe bomb that Lewis built. They detonated it in the backyard and it was powerful enough to shake the house. Oh, but that fire alarm was so ignorant. Today, Darrell insisted that I wanted to set that thing off at 10:30 at night. When was I ever out that late as a child? I don’t remember when. The cardinal rule was that we were to be in the house by sundown. The only time we were out later than we should’ve been was in the company of adults, especially when school was out.

    After school was out in the summer of 1989, Mom, our family friend Byron, Paul, and I moved back to the Midwest. By then, Ingrid married her first husband, a man I will refer to as John. It felt good to get away from Darrell and his tyranny for a while, but our time of peace only lasted for what, a year and a half? I turned 13 in the winter of 1990, and I had plans to compete in the fifth grade science fair. At the time, mom, Paul, and I lived in Onawa, Iowa.

    Before I continue with the story, I must backtrack and talk about my fascination with electricity and power transformers, and where it all began. Back when I was 6 1/2, mom, Trent, Ingrid, Paul, and I lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Sergeant Bluff. One day, Paul and I were playing in the yard. Across the road from our trailer was a power pole on top of which was an electrical transformer and some high voltage lines. The pole was base. I touched the pole and noticed that it was vibrating. That sparked my curiosity, and when I stuck my ear against the pole, I heard a telltale hum.  I was fascinated by that, and I remember running into the house, excitedly, telling mom how the pole was humming! She explained to me that it was because of the power going through the lines and transformer. Since that day, I had been interested in electricity and power transformers. I wanted to inquire more about them.    Fast-forward to 1991 I was 13 years old that spring, and I competed in the fifth grade science fair at Central Elementary, which is now defunct. My now deceased paraeducator at the time, Nancy, works hard to compile the things I needed, and thus, we busted our butts to make that project all it was. I had a nice display of electrical transformers, small ones, which were pulled from old appliances and other things. We stripped their coils of their paper insulation so they could be seen. One of my transformers had red copper coils. It looked sharp. Using a variety of resources, I wrote the following report. The text is written below:

 

“a transformer is a device used by power companies to increase or decrease voltage from high voltage and low amperage to low voltage and high amperage through powerlines without having to increase or decrease the size of the wires. The typical transformer consist of an iron core with two copper coils. the first copper coil, the primary coil, receives electricity from the source of power, such as a power plant. The second coil, the secondary coil, as it is called, receives an electromagnetic field from the primary coil and converts this to either higher voltage or lower voltage, depending on how many windings are in the secondary coil. The secondary coil is not connected to the primary coil. Instead, both coils sit so close to each other that one receives an electromagnetic field from the other. The two ends of the primary coil are connected to the source of power, whereas the two ends of the secondary are connected to the circuit which uses the power such as a home or an appliance. The number of turns in the secondary coil is proportional to that in the primary. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is less than the number in the primary coil. The voltage is lower. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is higher than that in the primary, the voltage is higher. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is equal to that in the primary coil, the voltage is the same.’

    I was proud when I found out my project one first place, and yes, I talked about it a lot. What boy wouldn’t? That was a big achievement for me at the time. I took the display and the report home and set them up on a card table in the bedroom I shared with my brother Paul in our mobile home. Later that summer, while I was at the Iowa brail school, attending summer school, Darrell, his wife, Carmen, and their two kids, whom I will refer to as Logan and Whitney, move back from Indiana. I don’t blame Mom for letting him and Carmen move in for a while. He was her son.  He’s just as much her son as Paul and I are. I didn’t understand though how she could put up with all the crap. I was at my wits end.

    I remember it like it was yesterday. At the time, I had been keeping audio journals and written journals. I started when I was 12 years old. I realize that life was going by faster than I wanted it to, and I wanted to capture precious moments; However, I wanted to document some of the ugly things as well because I wanted proof because some family members are such big phony liars and they will stop at nothing to discredit me and disprove me. The date was Thursday, July 4, 1991, when all hell broke loose and our trailer, which was supposed to be Mom’s, Paul’s, and my house, but Darrell thought it was his. At the time, my big brother Trent, who had himself a girlfriend at the time and an infant daughter, were going to come down to spend Fourth of July weekend with us. Mom and Carmen had gone to the store to buy some things for tacos. the only ones there at the house were Darrell, Logan, Whitney, and myself. Paul had gone off with his friend and they were out somewhere riding bikes or doing whatever. Keep in mind that all of the windows were closed and the central air conditioner was running.  If the windows had been opened, I’m pretty sure the whole neighborhood would’ve heard the way. I screamed and cried as Darrell wailed me for what seemed like hours.

    The moment mom‘s car pulled out of the driveway, Darrell started in on me about my “stupid interests’ and how that transformer project I had done was so ignorant. He cussed the people who helped me with the project and he really had a fit. Now keep in mind that his son Logan was 3 1/2 years old and his daughter Whitney was a year and a half. here, this grown man sat on our couch, belittling me about my project that I loved so much. Ignoring him, I went to the room that Paul and I shared. It was located at the end of an L-shaped hallway. I shut the door, and right now, Darrell burst through the door and chewed me out, telling me that I had no right walking away from him when he was telling me something. He then shoved me aside and grabbed my display from the card table.  I gave pursuit. ‘Wait, darrell!’ I said. ‘I worked my butt off on this thing!’ Darrell elbowed me and knocked me against the wall so hard that he knocked the wind out of me. When I told him that I was going to tell Mom, he made mockery of me as he went out the back door with my project in hand. I heard him outside as he threw my things into the back of his truck. He then came back in and started toward our living room. Seeing my opportunity, I was going toward the back door to get my things. I opened the door and just stepped out when Darrell came right up behind me, grab me by the hair of my head, pulled me back in the house, shoved me against the wall with his hand on my chest, and said, ‘don’t even think about it,’ and followed that with a vulgar slang for a particular bodily orifice and the word, ‘baby.’ That is his favorite thing to call people when he’s mad at them. They are nothing but a**hole babies.

    Hurt and angry, I called him exactly what I thought he was acting like, a spoiled pig. I then ran to the room I shared with Paul. Darrell came bursting through the door and slapped me in the head. ‘Do you want to talk back to adults some more?’ he said, and he shoved me to the floor, pin me down, and beat and beat and beat my butt for what seemed like hours. There I was, faced down, screaming, and crying as the big bully beat a tom-tom on my rear end. After the beating, he stood over me and ridiculed me for what seemed like forever.

 

    That winter, he, Carmen, and the kids were living in a two-story house. Mom, Paul and I went there to spend Thanksgiving. We have always been modest, and thus, we had to share one bed upstairs. The house had no heat upstairs, and thus, mom came up and slept with us two boys. We all had our clothes on for Christ sake, but Darrell thought that we were being perverted. In his warped, mind of holiness, everything we did was wrong. it was, the next morning, he came up the stairs and yanked Paul and me out of bed. He then told us in a quiet voice us to keep from waking our mother up that we were too old to sleep with mommy, and we were acting like weirdos. I got it the worse.

    Darrell claims to be a Christian, but he is so hell-bent on making others lives miserable. He will preach to me about not judging others, but he will sit in judgment of others. This is the type of man he is. If you are Mexican, black, or LGBTQ, look out because the walls are coming down.  I am neither of these things, but I am not going to ridicule somebody who is. I have Mexican friends. There is nothing wrong with being Hispanic. There is nothing wrong with being black. I was raised that being gay is unacceptable according to the Bible. However, I am not going to worry about who is gay, and who isn’t. If, indeed, there is a maker, I leave it up to the maker to decide.

To make a long story short, it got worse as I got older. in 2018, my and darrell, we’re having a heated argument about me, and to see what he would say, Mom said she knew something about me. Right away, Darrell asked the assumptive question if I were gay. It couldn’t have been anything else. It couldn’t have been the question of me having money, finding a good girl to marry, whatever. It had to be the first thing that he has constantly worrying about and griping about. “what, he’s gay?’

    After our mother’s untimely death in 2021, I decided once and for all to distance myself from my brother and his teachings. The reason for this was because he said something very crude to me. We were in an argument, and he said to me, “Mom‘s not here, and you can’t prove it one way or the other. Can ya?’

    Darrell wasn’t the only reason why I have decided to walk away from religion, but there are other things as well. One of these is the whole notion that I don’t have the right to be angry when somebody is backing me into a corner and wailing away on me? I don’t buy it. I’m supposed to turn the other cheek and let somebody beat on me? Since when? Why is it OK for David to throw a stone at Goliath but I have to turn the other cheek? I don’t buy it. Then, there is the whole thing with hell fire and all that nonsense. I had a preacher tell me that a baby who had not sent at all and who had only spent a month outside. The womb could be roasting in a place called hell to this very day. That made me think of my infant brother who died of SIDS. another preacher, having not received enough in the offering plate, thought it was best to rip the congregation to shreds, saying ‘Looks like a lot of people aren’t being all they could be in the army of God on this Sunday morning.’ There are other things that I just don’t get either. For instance, the Bible, or at least our version, states that we are hellbound if we masturbate; however there is ultrasound imagery of babies doing it in utero. Not to gross anybody out, but I  have fond memories of myself as a one year-old baby boy in the middle of the living room floor humping with both fists between my legs and a hot load of poop, or as I referred to it when I was around 2 years of age, ‘gurr,’ in the seat of my diaper, lol. So how and why is it so taboo when babies do it? Not to gross people out, but every now and then, I relive these early toddler memories and use them as a coping outlet for dealing with the fact that I am bowel incontinent and must wear diapers. I feel completely innocent when I am all alone in the privacy of my own home and I am doing my thing. Why is this a hell-worthy sin when I am not thinking a single nasty thought, but instead, reliving the very moments during which I was overjoyed as a baby boy?

    The other thing I don’t buy is that we are not supposed to find things that satisfy us continuously. We cannot reach for new Heights. We cannot have anything else. We have to have nothing at all because that is continual satisfaction. Some will even preach that having any earthly possessions is utterly evil and wrong. Again, I don’t buy this. There are many many reasons why I have stepped away from all religion. I will never be mean or spiteful toward anyone else, but I am not a part of any cult. my brother Darrell wants told me that if somebody is gay, well, in his eyes, they are automatically deemed pedophiles. Says who since win? That is jumping the gun. This is another slap in the face, and I don’t buy it. I have friends who are gay, and they speak out against pedophilia. They think children should be entitled to their own innocence. They think that anyone who touches a child should be hurt severely. So how can all gays be pedophiles?  That would be like someone saying all Kentuckians are incestial or all people who come from Waco Texas must be like David Koresh. How about this question all Mormons are like Warren Jeffs? Now that is an unfair statement. How can somebody preach about judging other people and then stand up and speak in judgment of people themselves? I just don’t get it. I found peace when I walked away and struck out on my own, declaring myself my own man for the first time ever, a single independent individual not bound by any indoctrination, domination, etc. I am who I am and I will always be. I don’t set out to hurt others, I don’t hate, I am compassionate, and I stand for what is right. If somebody else is being hurt by another individual, I will speak loudly. I stand for the underdog in our society. I stand for the kid who has hurt by somebody bigger than him or her. I stand for , love, truth, honesty, compassion, and everything else that is good and right in this world. Will not, however, be pushed around or bullied because of my beliefs, fascinations, etc. Like I said, in the beginning of this text, I am living  despite everything that has been thrown at me over the years. I must close by saying I love you all.  

I have to make a correction to something in the original text, I wrote. When I was talking about the preacher who told me a baby who hasn’t seen could be roasting in hell, my phone auto corrected and put sent. It is supposed to be sinned.

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

Let me try this again. It should read sinned, not sent.

[TABA]

Wow, what a story.  The fact that you’re around at all, let alone thriving, is such a tribute to your spirit and resilience.  Your story contains some of the best and worst aspects of humanity, but far too much of the worst.  
 

Welcome to our community!  You have come to the right place.  We come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, but we all share the experience of emerging from religious dogma, much of which is toxic at worst and merely nonsensical at best.  
 

I hope to hear more about you and your life today.  Welcome again!

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

5 hours ago, TABA said:

Wow, what a story.  The fact that you’re around at all, let alone thriving, is such a tribute to your spirit and resilience.  Your story contains some of the best and worst aspects of humanity, but far too much of the worst.  
 

Welcome to our community!  You have come to the right place.  We come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, but we all share the experience of emerging from religious dogma, much of which is toxic at worst and merely nonsensical at best.  
 

I hope to hear more about you and your life today.  Welcome again!

I am glad to be part of your wonderful family. I feel welcome. For once, I feel totally unafraid and unashamed.

    A little bit more about me: I have synesthesia. I don’t know if anyone on this site knows what that is, but I will explain it this way. It is an overlapping of the senses. There are lots of people who have synesthesia. Famous people like Billy Joel have it. It’s pretty wild when you can hear a sound and feel like you’re touching something when that sound is going on. How I figured out that I had it was simple. It was back in 2020 when we were in Covid lockdown. I had the radio on and was listening to Steve Miller’s Fly like an Eagle.  at the end of the song, there is a high synthesizer note. That note is accompanied with soft white noise. I got the physical sensation as if I was touching a layer of thick freshly fallen snow. I was reluctant to find out what it was because I learned in my teenage years that my uncle had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Reluctantly, I walked over to my computer and sat down and typed a search for , sense of sound triggering sense of feel, and behold, synesthesia was the first word that popped out at me, and I had to read from there. Boy, what a relief it was to find out that I’m not crazy! Had anyone in the religious circle known of my synesthesia, they probably would’ve said that I was possessed or inhabited by demons or some other malarkey.

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

    I have known of my synesthetic experiences since my early toddlerhood; however, I didn’t know them as synesthesia back then. I didn’t speak of them because I assumed everybody must have it if I do.

    I am an ordinary, Joe with ordinary interest. I like science, medicine, sports, walks, fishing, tandem, bike, riding, and so much more. You can find me hanging out at the club with friends and having a couple drinks every now and then, and if I’m not doing that, I usually chilling out here at home. I love music, and my favorite rock group of all has to be REO Speedwagon. They rock. 
    Every day is beautiful and my life is peaches and cream because no matter how rough it may get, I have found my true inner peace.

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

    It’s so funny how I had so much to fear af a kid. Perhaps you all can remember when Y2K craze swept across the United States and around the world. I sure do. A lot of people (including myself) were petrified especially when the TV and radio preachers like Jimmy Swaggart and Co spoke of end times prophecies. My brother Darrell, who you read about in the earlier post, and his wife Carmen were so quick to jump, and they pulled their kids out of public school and had them all brainwashed. They now have four kids, and they had them all scared to death that the world was going to end when the clock struck zero and the calendar rolled over to 2000. Was I scared question yes, but I wasn’t scared to the point they were scared. Now I admit that I was foolish because when the clock struck zero and the year rolled over, the lights stayed on, we’re still here, and nothing happened. Keep in mind that by this time, I was living down south, and I was hanging out with my brother who I will call Ray, who is much older than I, at a lounge in his town. I had a party whistle in one hand and a Bud Light in the other, and when the lights stayed on, we all cheered. That was the day when I realized the truth. Quacks speak loudly, and those who sit in their fancy radio and TV studios delight in scaring the dumb and the gullible so they can make a buck. How many of them have you heard? They sit on their asses and tell you this is going to happen at such and such time and that’s going to happen at such and such time, but oh, you will be protected if you use my promo name to get a product. Just go to www.Johndoe.com and use the promo code, Johnny Fuck-You-Silly Jones., and you can get a discount while I get rich. That’s right. You will be screwed royally and Sir Johnnie Fuck-You-Silly Jones will be basking in the pleasure. I don’t have time or patience for any of it. In fact, the only talk radio I will listen to will be coast to coast a.m. with George Nori or something along those lines. I realized that it’s all mind control, and they know how to make you feel guilty and to make you submit to their crap.

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

I have to clarify something. There are some typos as I am doing this, and I just caught one. I use the dictate function on my iPhone when I have a lot of text to write, and sometimes, when I say, question mark, it doesn’t insert a question mark. Instead, it puts the word question in there. My apologies.

[pantheory]

15 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

Like a previous poster, I have quite a lengthy story to tell. I decided to tell my story in its entirety. I hope I do not bore you with the accounts of my life as I go through the events from my childhood to my late adult life. With that being said, let’s get started.

 

    I was born in 1977 weighing only 2 pounds, 9 ounces, having been born three months early. The oxygen that they had given me while in the newborn ICU left me with retinal detachment, a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. Before I go any farther, I must say that I am not a pity pity me sort of guy. I have other health issues, but I don’t let them get me down. I am living!!!!!!!!!!

    My stay in the hospital was lengthy, and during that time, I had several apneic episodes during which I stopped breathing. I was discharged in March 1978. I give many thanks to my deceased mother and my aunt, both of whom watched over me as I thrived. my start was quite rocky, and because of that, my mother and my aunt both took turns staying up and watching over me in two-hour shifts to make sure I kept breathing.

    My mother discovered my blindness when I was about three months old. At the time, we had moved to an apartment that was carpeted. She would come in to take me out of my bassinet, and I would stiffen up and shake all over, totally scared to death because I didn’t see her coming.  She took me to the hospital, and test revealed that I had retinopathy of prematurity. Today, I can see light and shadow in my left eye. My right eye is artificial.

    My childhood wasn’t like any other. I came from a family of nine siblings – eight boys and one girl. One baby brother, died of crib death as it was called back then, but is now known as SIDS or sudden infant death syndrome. To keep names, private, I have decided to refer to my siblings by other names. There was myself, my sister, who I will call Ingrid, and my brother, who I will call Trent. At the time on my birth, Trent was 12 and Ingrid was six. My other siblings lived far from home.

    My mom was a strong woman. In fact, I believe she did more than she should have. She was a single mom, though, and she worked hard to make life good for us kids. She had two marriages that had gone to hell, but she was bound and determined to make life good for us. She had to be mom and dad, and yes, we got our butts paddled when we needed it. We had to be doing something drastic though in order for that to happen.

    Like all of you ex-Christians, I attended church on Sunday, and I sang, said my prayers, etc. In early summer of  1983, Mom, my big brother Trent, sister, Ingrid, and I packed and moved to Colorado. The reason was because I had a brother I knew nothing about. I found out much older that our father had an affair with another woman. I will refer to our dad as Henry. I will refer to my little brother as Paul. our stay in Denver Colorado was rocky. My father was a full-time drunk. He devoted himself to the booze and chasing other women. He did not care about us kids. My memories of daddy Henry are of him passed out on the couch or fighting with mom. Mom would beg him to play games with Paul and me, but he wouldn’t. She would beg him to take us on rides, but he wouldn’t.  Meanwhile, Paul was bounced around from Foster home to Foster home and he stayed with us on the weekends. God only knows what happened to him at those foster homes.

    I remember late one night when all Hellbrook loosen our house. I woke up to a rip roaring commotion. Dad, or if that’s what I should call him, because he was anything but, came into the room Paul and I shared, and he slammed our twin beds together, hurting Paul’s hand. At the time, Paul was 3 years of age. Mom was not happy at all. She ripped into him when he left our room. I remember it clearly to this day. The argument I heard from Paul’s and my room dragged on for hours. That was how it seemed anyway. I lied in my bed and listened as mom and dad argued in the living room. Finally, things reached a climax when Mom told dad to take his booze and his bar and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine. A couple of days later, dad picked another fight with Mom, and Ingrid took me and hid at the neighbors house. Trent was visiting his dad in Ohio. Keep in mind that I was only 5 1/2 years old when all of this took place. As we hid in the neighbors’ basement, dad took Mom down in our kitchen floor and choked her. Sometime later, Paul’s and my father in a drunken rage, called the police and tried to say that the neighbors were holding us kids hostage. I don’t know where Paul was at the time, but I was hiding with Ingrid in the neighbors basement. Meanwhile, mom was shouting in the background that dad was full of it, and that he was lying. Suddenly, the dispatcher asked dad what he tried to do to our mother, and he said that he tried to kill her. Needless to say, the cops came and arrested him.

    That night, we were supposed to go to a shelter for battered women and children, but instead, we ended up in the county poor farm. Why? Because of a discrepancy. Something happened and we were not allowed in to the shelter. The cab driver we had was extremely nice, and he told mom that she did not have to pay a thing. He drove us to a police station, where a snarky cop told him to take us to the county poor farm. Mom was hurt by this. All of her life, my grandfather told her no matter what she did, to never end up in the county poor farm, and that’s where we were headed.

    To make a long story short, we ended up in Manitou Springs, at the McLaughlin family Lodge. It was against the rules, but mom felt she had no other choice then to take Paul with us. By sheer luck, she was granted the OK. Since then, Paul was a part of our lives. He didn’t have to stay in the foster homes anymore. I could best describe the winter of 1983 as brutally hard. To start things off, my father came to visit us in Manitou Springs. He told mom that she should put water in the radiator instead of antifreeze. He said it wouldn’t hurt a thing. Mom had planned on taking us to spend Christmas in Omaha at our grandmother and grandfather‘s house. This was her parents house, not my father‘s mother‘s place. My grandpa on my dad‘s side had passed away sometime ago. I didn’t know him at all. Well, we started off on our way to grandma and grandpa’s. We reach the Kansas border and the car froze up. A police officer came sometime later and took us to a police station, where we stayed for hours.     I remember getting tired and lying down on the cold tile floor with just coats under me to keep me from freezing my butt off. Finally, a caseworker came and drove us to a hotel, where we stayed for several days until the Pinto was fixed. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to grandma and grandpa‘s place and we just had to spend Christmas with my drunken granny in Denver and listen to her breathe down our necks. I will never forget the night when she threw me out on the balcony because she was mad at me. Ingrid and Trent went to my father’s sister’s house to hang out with my cousins. Where dad was, I could only guess. He was probably at the bar, getting drunk. Mom had gone to the store or someplace, and the only ones that were there besides grandma if that’s what I should call her, were Paul and myself. We weren’t making that much noise at all. We were lying in her waterbed, talking softly, and she got mad. She made Paul stay in the room by himself and she threw me out on the cold balcony, and I stayed out there for at least a couple of minutes before she let me in, but it felt like a long time being that I was only six years old. My biggest regret is that I didn’t come out and tell Mom about what had transpired while she was gone. My reason for doing so was because grandma threatened that if I told her, I would get into big trouble. So I kept my mouth shut. Boy, do I regret it now!

    That Christmas was lousy. Oh, Paul and I got gifts, but we were not allowed to play with them. We weren’t allowed to touch them at all, and shortly after that, they disappeared.

   All my life, I was taught that the Bible says thou shoal honor thy father and thy mother. How can I honor the drunk who choked my mother, slammed us two boys beds together and Hurt Paul, lied on the neighbors, ruined our Christmas vacation, and so much more?  as I grew older, I began to have serious doubts about what I was taught.
    In early summer of 1984, when school was let out, mom had had enough, and she moved us back to the Midwest.
 

major Changes

 

    I prayed, and I prayed for things to get better, but it seemed that they only got worse starting when Ingrid grew distant and cold. When she turned 13 years old, she was bound and determined to do what she wanted to do. She started hanging around the wrong crowd and running wild. Mom had to chase her down and wrangle her back home. there were even times when she treated me badly.

    When I was almost 9 years old, and the summer of 1986, we took a trip to Ohio, and that’s where my big brother, who I will call darrell, entered our lives. He was a bully to state at best. He stayed with us for a while and then went back to Ohio. We moved to Indiana in the summer of 1987, and we rented a large farmhouse on the edge of a small town. Guess who moved in with us again. At the time, his wife, who I will call Carmen, was pregnant with her and Darrell‘s first child. darrell thought he could lay claims to everything I had. Even my interest came under scrutiny by king Darrell. One day and early fall, my uncle Leonard, who came to visit us from New York, gave me an old antique wind up fire alarm. It was a red bell with a disk in the center that would pop off if it got too hot. If there was a fire, this was how the alarm worked. It had a small knob that you turned on the back to wind it up.  at the time, another brother, his wife, and three kids were living with us. I will call him Lewis. I will refer to his wife as Betty. The kids, I will refer to as James, Jordan, and Kelly. At the time, Kelly was two years old. 

    Paul, James, Jordan, and I used to play without old antique fire alarm, as if it were a school bell. It wasn’t like we played with it all the time, and besides, we were having harmless fun. The closest neighbor to us was over a mile away. Yeah, the bell was quite loud when we set it off, but we were having fun. We would give it a quarter of a turn to mark the end of one make belief class and the start of another. For fire drills, we wound the thing up all the way, set it on a tree stump, and let her go.  Then we had fun racing each other down the mile long driveway. It wasn’t like we played with the bell all the time, but Darrell will say otherwise. One day, I went to look for the bell because Paul, Jordan, James, and I wanted to play.  I found the bell missing. When I asked where it was, darrell got up in my face and had a rip roaring conniption fit, telling me how I did not need that damn fire alarm by God, and that it was stupid and ignorant. Come to find out, he destroyed in his words, “the son of a bitch.’ oh, how ignorant it was for me to play with a harmless fire alarm, but sometime later, Darrell and our big brother Lewis had fun detonating a pipe bomb that Lewis built. They detonated it in the backyard and it was powerful enough to shake the house. Oh, but that fire alarm was so ignorant. Today, Darrell insisted that I wanted to set that thing off at 10:30 at night. When was I ever out that late as a child? I don’t remember when. The cardinal rule was that we were to be in the house by sundown. The only time we were out later than we should’ve been was in the company of adults, especially when school was out.

    After school was out in the summer of 1989, Mom, our family friend Byron, Paul, and I moved back to the Midwest. By then, Ingrid married her first husband, a man I will refer to as John. It felt good to get away from Darrell and his tyranny for a while, but our time of peace only lasted for what, a year and a half? I turned 13 in the winter of 1990, and I had plans to compete in the fifth grade science fair. At the time, mom, Paul, and I lived in Onawa, Iowa.

    Before I continue with the story, I must backtrack and talk about my fascination with electricity and power transformers, and where it all began. Back when I was 6 1/2, mom, Trent, Ingrid, Paul, and I lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Sergeant Bluff. One day, Paul and I were playing in the yard. Across the road from our trailer was a power pole on top of which was an electrical transformer and some high voltage lines. The pole was base. I touched the pole and noticed that it was vibrating. That sparked my curiosity, and when I stuck my ear against the pole, I heard a telltale hum.  I was fascinated by that, and I remember running into the house, excitedly, telling mom how the pole was humming! She explained to me that it was because of the power going through the lines and transformer. Since that day, I had been interested in electricity and power transformers. I wanted to inquire more about them.    Fast-forward to 1991 I was 13 years old that spring, and I competed in the fifth grade science fair at Central Elementary, which is now defunct. My now deceased paraeducator at the time, Nancy, works hard to compile the things I needed, and thus, we busted our butts to make that project all it was. I had a nice display of electrical transformers, small ones, which were pulled from old appliances and other things. We stripped their coils of their paper insulation so they could be seen. One of my transformers had red copper coils. It looked sharp. Using a variety of resources, I wrote the following report. The text is written below:

 

“a transformer is a device used by power companies to increase or decrease voltage from high voltage and low amperage to low voltage and high amperage through powerlines without having to increase or decrease the size of the wires. The typical transformer consist of an iron core with two copper coils. the first copper coil, the primary coil, receives electricity from the source of power, such as a power plant. The second coil, the secondary coil, as it is called, receives an electromagnetic field from the primary coil and converts this to either higher voltage or lower voltage, depending on how many windings are in the secondary coil. The secondary coil is not connected to the primary coil. Instead, both coils sit so close to each other that one receives an electromagnetic field from the other. The two ends of the primary coil are connected to the source of power, whereas the two ends of the secondary are connected to the circuit which uses the power such as a home or an appliance. The number of turns in the secondary coil is proportional to that in the primary. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is less than the number in the primary coil. The voltage is lower. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is higher than that in the primary, the voltage is higher. If the number of turns in the secondary coil is equal to that in the primary coil, the voltage is the same.’

    I was proud when I found out my project one first place, and yes, I talked about it a lot. What boy wouldn’t? That was a big achievement for me at the time. I took the display and the report home and set them up on a card table in the bedroom I shared with my brother Paul in our mobile home. Later that summer, while I was at the Iowa brail school, attending summer school, Darrell, his wife, Carmen, and their two kids, whom I will refer to as Logan and Whitney, move back from Indiana. I don’t blame Mom for letting him and Carmen move in for a while. He was her son.  He’s just as much her son as Paul and I are. I didn’t understand though how she could put up with all the crap. I was at my wits end.

    I remember it like it was yesterday. At the time, I had been keeping audio journals and written journals. I started when I was 12 years old. I realize that life was going by faster than I wanted it to, and I wanted to capture precious moments; However, I wanted to document some of the ugly things as well because I wanted proof because some family members are such big phony liars and they will stop at nothing to discredit me and disprove me. The date was Thursday, July 4, 1991, when all hell broke loose and our trailer, which was supposed to be Mom’s, Paul’s, and my house, but Darrell thought it was his. At the time, my big brother Trent, who had himself a girlfriend at the time and an infant daughter, were going to come down to spend Fourth of July weekend with us. Mom and Carmen had gone to the store to buy some things for tacos. the only ones there at the house were Darrell, Logan, Whitney, and myself. Paul had gone off with his friend and they were out somewhere riding bikes or doing whatever. Keep in mind that all of the windows were closed and the central air conditioner was running.  If the windows had been opened, I’m pretty sure the whole neighborhood would’ve heard the way. I screamed and cried as Darrell wailed me for what seemed like hours.

    The moment mom‘s car pulled out of the driveway, Darrell started in on me about my “stupid interests’ and how that transformer project I had done was so ignorant. He cussed the people who helped me with the project and he really had a fit. Now keep in mind that his son Logan was 3 1/2 years old and his daughter Whitney was a year and a half. here, this grown man sat on our couch, belittling me about my project that I loved so much. Ignoring him, I went to the room that Paul and I shared. It was located at the end of an L-shaped hallway. I shut the door, and right now, Darrell burst through the door and chewed me out, telling me that I had no right walking away from him when he was telling me something. He then shoved me aside and grabbed my display from the card table.  I gave pursuit. ‘Wait, darrell!’ I said. ‘I worked my butt off on this thing!’ Darrell elbowed me and knocked me against the wall so hard that he knocked the wind out of me. When I told him that I was going to tell Mom, he made mockery of me as he went out the back door with my project in hand. I heard him outside as he threw my things into the back of his truck. He then came back in and started toward our living room. Seeing my opportunity, I was going toward the back door to get my things. I opened the door and just stepped out when Darrell came right up behind me, grab me by the hair of my head, pulled me back in the house, shoved me against the wall with his hand on my chest, and said, ‘don’t even think about it,’ and followed that with a vulgar slang for a particular bodily orifice and the word, ‘baby.’ That is his favorite thing to call people when he’s mad at them. They are nothing but a**hole babies.

    Hurt and angry, I called him exactly what I thought he was acting like, a spoiled pig. I then ran to the room I shared with Paul. Darrell came bursting through the door and slapped me in the head. ‘Do you want to talk back to adults some more?’ he said, and he shoved me to the floor, pin me down, and beat and beat and beat my butt for what seemed like hours. There I was, faced down, screaming, and crying as the big bully beat a tom-tom on my rear end. After the beating, he stood over me and ridiculed me for what seemed like forever.

 

    That winter, he, Carmen, and the kids were living in a two-story house. Mom, Paul and I went there to spend Thanksgiving. We have always been modest, and thus, we had to share one bed upstairs. The house had no heat upstairs, and thus, mom came up and slept with us two boys. We all had our clothes on for Christ sake, but Darrell thought that we were being perverted. In his warped, mind of holiness, everything we did was wrong. it was, the next morning, he came up the stairs and yanked Paul and me out of bed. He then told us in a quiet voice us to keep from waking our mother up that we were too old to sleep with mommy, and we were acting like weirdos. I got it the worse.

    Darrell claims to be a Christian, but he is so hell-bent on making others lives miserable. He will preach to me about not judging others, but he will sit in judgment of others. This is the type of man he is. If you are Mexican, black, or LGBTQ, look out because the walls are coming down.  I am neither of these things, but I am not going to ridicule somebody who is. I have Mexican friends. There is nothing wrong with being Hispanic. There is nothing wrong with being black. I was raised that being gay is unacceptable according to the Bible. However, I am not going to worry about who is gay, and who isn’t. If, indeed, there is a maker, I leave it up to the maker to decide.

To make a long story short, it got worse as I got older. in 2018, my and darrell, we’re having a heated argument about me, and to see what he would say, Mom said she knew something about me. Right away, Darrell asked the assumptive question if I were gay. It couldn’t have been anything else. It couldn’t have been the question of me having money, finding a good girl to marry, whatever. It had to be the first thing that he has constantly worrying about and griping about. “what, he’s gay?’

    After our mother’s untimely death in 2021, I decided once and for all to distance myself from my brother and his teachings. The reason for this was because he said something very crude to me. We were in an argument, and he said to me, “Mom‘s not here, and you can’t prove it one way or the other. Can ya?’

    Darrell wasn’t the only reason why I have decided to walk away from religion, but there are other things as well. One of these is the whole notion that I don’t have the right to be angry when somebody is backing me into a corner and wailing away on me? I don’t buy it. I’m supposed to turn the other cheek and let somebody beat on me? Since when? Why is it OK for David to throw a stone at Goliath but I have to turn the other cheek? I don’t buy it. Then, there is the whole thing with hell fire and all that nonsense. I had a preacher tell me that a baby who had not sent at all and who had only spent a month outside. The womb could be roasting in a place called hell to this very day. That made me think of my infant brother who died of SIDS. another preacher, having not received enough in the offering plate, thought it was best to rip the congregation to shreds, saying ‘Looks like a lot of people aren’t being all they could be in the army of God on this Sunday morning.’ There are other things that I just don’t get either. For instance, the Bible, or at least our version, states that we are hellbound if we masturbate; however there is ultrasound imagery of babies doing it in utero. Not to gross anybody out, but I  have fond memories of myself as a one year-old baby boy in the middle of the living room floor humping with both fists between my legs and a hot load of poop, or as I referred to it when I was around 2 years of age, ‘gurr,’ in the seat of my diaper, lol. So how and why is it so taboo when babies do it? Not to gross people out, but every now and then, I relive these early toddler memories and use them as a coping outlet for dealing with the fact that I am bowel incontinent and must wear diapers. I feel completely innocent when I am all alone in the privacy of my own home and I am doing my thing. Why is this a hell-worthy sin when I am not thinking a single nasty thought, but instead, reliving the very moments during which I was overjoyed as a baby boy?

    The other thing I don’t buy is that we are not supposed to find things that satisfy us continuously. We cannot reach for new Heights. We cannot have anything else. We have to have nothing at all because that is continual satisfaction. Some will even preach that having any earthly possessions is utterly evil and wrong. Again, I don’t buy this. There are many many reasons why I have stepped away from all religion. I will never be mean or spiteful toward anyone else, but I am not a part of any cult. my brother Darrell wants told me that if somebody is gay, well, in his eyes, they are automatically deemed pedophiles. Says who since win? That is jumping the gun. This is another slap in the face, and I don’t buy it. I have friends who are gay, and they speak out against pedophilia. They think children should be entitled to their own innocence. They think that anyone who touches a child should be hurt severely. So how can all gays be pedophiles?  That would be like someone saying all Kentuckians are incestial or all people who come from Waco Texas must be like David Koresh. How about this question all Mormons are like Warren Jeffs? Now that is an unfair statement. How can somebody preach about judging other people and then stand up and speak in judgment of people themselves? I just don’t get it. I found peace when I walked away and struck out on my own, declaring myself my own man for the first time ever, a single independent individual not bound by any indoctrination, domination, etc. I am who I am and I will always be. I don’t set out to hurt others, I don’t hate, I am compassionate, and I stand for what is right. If somebody else is being hurt by another individual, I will speak loudly. I stand for the underdog in our society. I stand for the kid who has hurt by somebody bigger than him or her. I stand for , love, truth, honesty, compassion, and everything else that is good and right in this world. Will not, however, be pushed around or bullied because of my beliefs, fascinations, etc. Like I said, in the beginning of this text, I am living  despite everything that has been thrown at me over the years. I must close by saying I love you all.  

 

Wow, for having a vision handicap you write and type very well Many or most of us here have suffered via the trauma of religious preaching, persecution, related disciplines, etc, often religions with cult-like behaviors and "born-again" descriptions with strict behavior requirements.

 

Your life has been very difficult but not necessarily because of religious reasons.

 

Welcome to our Ex-Xtian forum BBoyAtHeart. You will probably find a lot to talk about and discuss here. Most of our topics relate to religious experiences, or conflict with Christian beliefs.

 

Hope you like it here and can benefit by your membership.

 

all the best, pantheory

[pantheory]

11 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

    I have known of my synesthetic experiences since my early toddlerhood; however, I didn’t know them as synesthesia back then. I didn’t speak of them because I assumed everybody must have it if I do.

    I am an ordinary, Joe with ordinary interest. I like science, medicine, sports, walks, fishing, tandem, bike, riding, and so much more. You can find me hanging out at the club with friends and having a couple drinks every now and then, and if I’m not doing that, I usually chilling out here at home. I love music, and my favorite rock group of all has to be REO Speedwagon. They rock. 
    Every day is beautiful and my life is peaches and cream because no matter how rough it may get, I have found my true inner peace.

 

We'll try to preserve it for you   best of luck and cheers, pantheory

 

[☆ moxieflux66 ☆]

22 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

I am living  despite everything that has been thrown at me over the years. I must close by saying I love you all.  

Hey ABBAH (is it ok to give you an abbreviation? Moxie is into brevity....sometimes ). 

 

As I'm sort of short on time but still want to let you know I read your testimony and at the end, I laughed and cried at the same time. The laugh was for 'he gets it in spite of it all' and the crying was for what you had to go through to get it. Your last line said it all: 

 

22 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

I am living  despite everything that has been thrown at me over the years. I must close by saying I love you all.  

As well as this line: 

 

13 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

Every day is beautiful and my life is peaches and cream because no matter how rough it may get, I have found my true inner peace.

And therein, I say lies that 'you get it' part. A lot of people can have a lot of trouble seeing that! 

 

My son was born in 1978. He was also 'early' according to a very fishy doctor I had at the time. He was five and a half pounds and had to be put under ultraviolet lights in an incubator when he was born by C-section. He is very thankfully not had to suffer the ills you have. 

 

I was surprised to see St. Bluff, Iowa in your post as one of the places you've lived. I lived there once too and it was corn fields forever! The state song says so! 

Then there were the stock yards outside Sioux City filled with cows aplenty! Plus their noxious odor. 

Warmest welcome to our community and thanks for your story. 

 

1 hour ago, pantheory said:

We'll try to preserve it for you   best of luck and cheers, pantheory

 

I second that! 

Moxie

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

19 hours ago, moxieflux66 said:

Hey ABBAH (is it ok to give you an abbreviation? Moxie is into brevity....sometimes ). 

 

As I'm sort of short on time but still want to let you know I read your testimony and at the end, I laughed and cried at the same time. The laugh was for 'he gets it in spite of it all' and the crying was for what you had to go through to get it. Your last line said it all: 

 

As well as this line: 

 

And therein, I say lies that 'you get it' part. A lot of people can have a lot of trouble seeing that! 

 

My son was born in 1978. He was also 'early' according to a very fishy doctor I had at the time. He was five and a half pounds and had to be put under ultraviolet lights in an incubator when he was born by C-section. He is very thankfully not had to suffer the ills you have. 

 

I was surprised to see St. Bluff, Iowa in your post as one of the places you've lived. I lived there once too and it was corn fields forever! The state song says so! 

Then there were the stock yards outside Sioux City filled with cows aplenty! Plus their noxious odor. 

Warmest welcome to our community and thanks for your story. 

 

I second that! 

Moxie

Thank you all for the kind comments. You all are wonderful. I know that I belong here. Thank you for making me feel at home. From the bottom of an ever-growing heart, many thanks. I had a wonderful day today. I hung out with friends, told stories, laughed, joke, eat breakfast at mom‘s café downtown, And rocked a few babies to sleep. So I accomplished quite a bit. Once again, many thanks.

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

20 hours ago, moxieflux66 said:

Hey ABBAH (is it ok to give you an abbreviation? Moxie is into brevity....sometimes ). 

 

As I'm sort of short on time but still want to let you know I read your testimony and at the end, I laughed and cried at the same time. The laugh was for 'he gets it in spite of it all' and the crying was for what you had to go through to get it. Your last line said it all: 

 

As well as this line: 

 

And therein, I say lies that 'you get it' part. A lot of people can have a lot of trouble seeing that! 

 

My son was born in 1978. He was also 'early' according to a very fishy doctor I had at the time. He was five and a half pounds and had to be put under ultraviolet lights in an incubator when he was born by C-section. He is very thankfully not had to suffer the ills you have. 

 

I was surprised to see St. Bluff, Iowa in your post as one of the places you've lived. I lived there once too and it was corn fields forever! The state song says so! 

Then there were the stock yards outside Sioux City filled with cows aplenty! Plus their noxious odor. 

Warmest welcome to our community and thanks for your story. 

 

I second that! 

Moxie

Hi, Moxie, I don’t mind if you abbreviate me. That is perfectly fine. Sorry I didn’t get back to you until now. I’ve had a lot going on this weekend. It was fun. Has mentioned earlier, I got to hang out with a lot of friends and hold a few babies. It’s funny, because every time I hold a baby, I think back to when I was a toddler and I say mentally, ‘I wish I were this kid now.’ I think back to a time when life was simple and we didn’t have all the trouble. Back then, I was free as a breeze. 

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

I still have an interest in electricity and power transformers. Nicola Tesla was a genius. It’s amazing how somebody like he came up with the idea that having two coils of wires sitting in close proximity to each other could do such thing. The transformer has no moving parts whatsoever, but it’s just two coils of wire. The two ends of the secondary coil are connected to the circuit that uses the power, and the two ends of the primary coil are connected to the source of power. The magnetic field given off by the primary coil is picked up by the secondary coil and converted to energy at a lower or higher voltage depending on how many windings there are in the secondary coil. That to me is ingenious. 

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

A question to the moderators of this site: is this website a place to hold casual conversations, or do we have to stick to one topic? Just wondering. I feel that you all are my friends, and I would love to just chat about anything and everything possible.

[TABA]

15 hours ago, ABabyBoyAtHeart1977 said:

A question to the moderators of this site: is this website a place to hold casual conversations, or do we have to stick to one topic? Just wondering. I feel that you all are my friends, and I would love to just chat about anything and everything possible.

Sure, this is a community for ex-Christians to feel at home in.  Not every topic needs to be pertinent to religion or deconversion.  Feel free to start a topic (call it Casual Chat or whatever…).  The Ex-Christian Life section would be a good place for that.  We do limit politics to The Opine Club though.  

[ABabyBoyAtHeart1977]

1 hour ago, TABA said:

Sure, this is a community for ex-Christians to feel at home in.  Not every topic needs to be pertinent to religion or deconversion.  Feel free to start a topic (call it Casual Chat or whatever…).  The Ex-Christian Life section would be a good place for that.  We do limit politics to The Opine Club though.  

You can rest assured that I will not discuss politics whatsoever. I will just keep it all cool for everybody.