CHAPTER 17, Part 2: Escape from Accountability
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother
“Escape from Accountability” is Chapter 17 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother. [This chapter was too long for a newsletter so the first part was posted last week.]
In the second part of this chapter, Legion muses how psychological theories may help explain Herry’s lazy, greedy, addictive, narcissistic behavior, but should not excuse it. She fears her sons have been poisoned by him modeling this entitled conduct just as he had been by his own autocratic father. She is irked at how husbands and fathers escape accountability for their selfish, neglectful, and abusive behavior, especially in Family Court where similarly empowered judges give them custody despite their terrible parenting history.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page: Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
CHAPTER 17, Part 2
Escape from Accountability
…I do not now recall what words came to me to tell Zane, Jesse and Mirzah that Herry was not expected for supper that next night to celebrate school being out or that he wouldn’t, very soon, be joining us all at any other meal either. Something as supposedly ‘earth‑shattering’ some certain folks’ld purport as having to tell one’s children that their dad needed to leave in order to change himself so that he could come back to them healed—and I don’t remember giving the Boys this information nor any of their immediate responses to it. Partly from the haze then of my sleeplessness still I am sure; but also I think I don’t remember because, in reality, a mating man’s and a biological father’s leaving, his more‑or‑less permanent absence, is not such an astoundingly horrendous event. Over many millennia’s worth of the existence—of the evolution … of us all on the Planet Earth … it’s a truly, truly common one!
School did recess, of course, and the Boys’ and my respite that was Little League began right away in earnest. Practices and games and chauffeuring and gathering around for soda while going over the plays after and the whole team out sometimes for pizza afterwards and hauling the equipment and keeping score. And then, doing it all over again times three Boys and two teams the next week!
I loved being asked to keep the teammates’ scorings. It compelled me to learn a lot more that I wouldn’t have known about the game of baseball—which I totally adore. Even now. Even when it is so controlled and often so sadly and utterly spoiled by a few angry, nearly always warring, superrich men who are notorious for hating and hurting women and sometimes their children. I do love the game nevertheless. I loathed trying to explain to Mirzah, however, that although he at age eight was hit square on in the face by a thrown ball during fly‑catching relays at the Little Minors’ very first practice and had a parent/team manager who was an outright, known alcoholic and domestic abuser and whose elder of two sons went on some five years later to hang himself as an 18‑year‑old and who actually yelled practice in and practice out at all of the team’s eight‑ and nine‑year‑old players, this was not going to be the end of the World as he knew it. Besides, Jesse and Mirzah and I did become fast friends with the Little Minors coach, Kincaid, an unattached and free‑spirited 20 something on‑and‑off‑again college student, and his very slight‑framed gray‑haired and vocal mama who showed up to cheer every game, both of whom just loved baseball, too. And little kids.
I kept back just behind the third‑to‑home fence line in my webbed lawn chair and in ideal view of the action proudly positioning on my lap the score pad for Kincaid and the players as I crafted the proper markings on the little icons of each inning on the sheet that signified what each batter and runner had accomplished. Mine was the perfect place at which to keep from bumping face to face into Herry anyhow. Dr. Herry Edinsmaier would come to the actual game, never to just the practice sessions though and could nearly always, all of his time there, be found reading the Des Moines Register, a paperback novel or a newsweekly or in rapt conversation with another little player’s brunette or blond mama on, usually, the top bleacher or on one closer to the ground level and always, always he would sit near the very end of the bench so as to be easily off it and gone in a rush if he wanted to be.
Why Herry used this alleged quality time with the Truemaier Boys to read in front of them and their endeavors I just could not fathom. He had always done this. That behavior had not simply just begun that summer. I saw other parents once in a very great while do the same thing, especially fathers or a few mothers, too, who brought their crocheting project or both genders visiting with each other while watching the game. But … Herry? Herry was not watching the game. Then it’d conclude after six, super‑high scoring innings, and he was out to the parking lot, pronto, and gone. How he justified this behavior besides his being gone so much of the time for work or for AA or for god knows what other activities of his, too, is merely mystifying to me; but this blatant absenteeism of the Lord of the Manor, even while physically present in corporal form, was nothing new.
After all, Favorite Babysitter Rosemarie from the early 1980s? She knew of it, too. When I had been away to my evening shift at the Palm Animal Hospital and all of the other pathology residents including especially the ones with little kids were home with their families at night, Herry went back ‘to work’. Dr. Shark, the performance‑evaluating boss of his then, also knew him to be that insecure procrastinator. What else was Dr. Edinsmaier up to as well these five evenings per week? It certainly had had nothing to do with fathering. And being present. That is, with Herry‑Daddee’s being truly ‘there’.
Treats for after the games? Forget about it. If more was expected than ready‑bought, cold soda in cans that one could quickly and easily snatch up at the corner Amoco convenience store when he gassed up, why, it didn’t come from Herry. And clean‑up duty? No. You didn’t see Dr. Herod Edinsmaier on clean‑up duty either. Treats or an effort of some other kind such as baking something up for the school carnival sales booth—even if just a dozen brownies—or chaperoning an afternoon for anything back at Kate Mitchell or Manhattan or Columbia? Such parents’ help is standard. And most definitely needed for activities on the ecology bus field trips, ECO they were called, a very, very big deal several times each year at Kate Mitchell, or for the Races’ Field Day at the end of the school year or the Writing Books’ Workshop or the theatrical productions put on in conjunction with the Ames community’s ACTORS studio or the band’s fundraiser events. Just as is true in any public school system. That parent for the Truemaier Boys at any of these events in any of their three public school systems, the parent helping, accountable and … present … was me, Legion. Herry? Dr. Herod Edinsmaier? Never—not ever—was the primary caregiving parent … the Truemaier Boys’ father.
If a big cash outlay was in any way possible instead, say, such as in springing for the entire team’s pizzas after the game or for purchasing all of the raffle tickets Mirzah, Zane and Jesse were assigned to sell for the annual March Ridgeway School Carnival back in Columbia or for buying up all of the unsold, partial boxes of chocolate bars for Mirzah’s Montessori bread‑cutting or playground equipment or Zane’s Ames Middle School band uniforms, then, of course, Herry produced The Wallet and from out of it freely and grandiosely wielded wealth in stunning amounts. Even when we were still both college students and actually had no plethora of pecuniary paper, Herry spent. But contribute his time or his labor? His fully attentive presence? Go door to door with the Boys selling bars and tickets and taking orders for freshly prepared frozen pizzas? Then actually fulfill those requests for pre‑cooked pies by helping to shop for their ingredients and putting them together with fresh seals in someone’s kitchen? No. Dr. Edinsmaier did not. Herry‑Daddee was never … ‘there’.
In addition to the works that are those of John Stoltenberg and Gerry Spence, Grace teaches the poetry of Philip Larkin and the maxims of Publilus Syrus in Listening College: “With your integrity and honor gone, you have nothing left to leave your children but money.” Bard Larkin may have been supposing that these words of his wisdom applied to angry old men, gray and dying. Grace and I both well know that this aphorism pertained to Herry … to Herry languishing perhaps in his 30s and 40s, just a wee bit graying but not at all yet considering lying down and dying. And the Iraqi slave of 42 BCE Italians’ Maxim #265, “What is left when honor is lost?” In the cases of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, current American ‘courts’ of family law judges and, O JYeah, bill w, apparently and hypocritically what is left “… are better husbands and fathers than ever before.”
I respect the science of psychology and the profession that is that of psychologists and psychiatrists and do not at all presume to be one myself. Furthermore, I certainly do not accede that persons escape accountability for their destructive behaviors just because a psychological explanation may exist for someone’s bad actions performed, of course, after their own already‑known‑to‑be‑wrong choices to do these. I think that Herry may have willed or anointed or considered himself, even though he knew it a falsehood, entitled to not have to do any work because he’d just spent an entire childhood in a family situation where Breathing itself was work, there having been such a horde of Edinsmaier siblings continuously horning in on a youngster’s personal space. Without lifting a finger to labor at something, he would most certainly make the impression that he had and that it was he who had, indeed, been responsible for the work of the project and, ultimately, usurp the praise others gave it, the honoring that should’ve gone to the ones who had actually done the work. Behold his coaching the little girls’ and little boys’ soccer team of Mirzah’s as just one of so, so many examples.
* * * *
Mrs. Edinsmaier herself described for me one sunny afternoon in late 1976, the mightily absolute and lengthy nightmare that had been the two decades of Detanimod’s and her older daughters’ work of changing the four youngest toddlers or infants—and sometimes more—who were, on any given day of that near quarter‑century’s worth, still in diapers and then … laundering them. I remember the year exactly, probably Thanksgiving time or maybe even December’s end, because Mrs. Edinsmaier passed by the door of her fine farmhouse bathroom done up in burgundy. Burgundy and pink print shower curtain, burgundy pile throw rug, plush burgundy, pink and white terry towels in their places on the racks neatly folded and the faux furry burgundy cover atop the toilet seat. She spied me dunking, bare hands of course, a long, white rag in the toilet bowl water up and down, up and down. The three of us, Zane three to four months old, Herry and I, had come to join the kindred throng swarming about the paternal grandparents’ country home for a holiday visit. “Ever lose one of those down the toilet?” she asked leaning on the door frame somewhat nervously watching me (‘f course never, ever Herry‑Daddee) carry out this nasty chore.
“Actually, no.” I looked up in reply. “I just about did, though. It was the very first soiled diaper that Zane’ad had after he came home from the hospital.” We three were residents of Pammel Court’s o‑so cold, metal WWII‑constructed Quonset huts and, for married students while I commenced my third year of veterinary medical classes when Zane was just a 2½‑week‑old newborn, unequivocally the cheapest housing available at $49.00 a month rent. Why, I had a half dozen friends in that junior class, without spouses or kids of their own of course, who, just so they could have their pet equines close by their sides while they attended vet school, paid nearly twice as much a month to board their horses in stables just outside of town!
At Zane’s 22nd hour of life outside of me, he and I were released from the itty bitty Storm County General Hospital maternity ward in that same town where the district ‘court’ convened every weekday morning just up the street three blocks and about a dozen miles east of Othello Drive. We were discharged home to Pammel Court on Wednesday around 2:15 in the afternoon; and although Zane had had the first after‑birth meconium stools, about two of them very soon after delivery, he politely declined as a breastfeeding baby to have another bowel movement whatsoever until I got so concerned that I telephoned Dr. Starbenz at his home on Saturday afternoon. “Noooot to worry, Legion!” the doctor was smiling I could tell—on the other end of the line.
I truly liked this man. He and his incredibly skinny wife who’ad altogether gained a grand total of only 8 pounds with her second pregnancy, a set of twin boys, and who managed his front office, had taken me on as a Title XIX patient no questions asked. In doing so, he had also agreed, because I had not a penny of supplemental maternity insurance coverage, to discharge me just as soon as he deemed both Zane and me fit enough to go—and that was apparently at around Zane’s 22nd hour. Why, the uproar and outrage from the nursing staff was near deafening: never before in the history of Storm County General had a new mama gone home with her new babe so bloody damn early. And they were all most vociferous in letting the conscientious and rather new‑to‑the‑community Dr. Starbenz know of their disgust and distrust of his early‑out plan for Zane and me. But I was so grateful.
“You're breastfeeding, Legion; and as you already know from all of your reading on this, Zane may have up to around 15 little stools a day or he may have only one big one all week long! I tell ya’ what: if he hasn’t moved his bowels by tomorrow evening at 9 pm, try stimulating his rectum with a thermometer a couple times and waiting 15 to 20 minutes, then doing it again. If he hasn’t had a diaperful by news time, then give me another call.”
I, indeed, planned to do as instructed. Dr. Starbenz, a family practice physician, was so correct, of course. It was just that I was a brand‑new mama and, well, even with all of my studying up and knowing from my former nursing career and from my being a life‑long learner of things biological about this possible phenomenon in breastfed infants, I just never figured that I’d be soooo blessed, that is, one bowel movement a week so only one dirty diaper a week. Yet, that was exactly true. For the ensuing first six weeks of Zane’s entire life on this Planet, there was only one such diaper change per week for me to manage. What an incredible piece of good fortune this was actually.
As I stated, I intended to do the probing thermometer technique, but I did not have to. Zane let loose the very next day, just about 8 pm, with the likes of which I had never in my whole life seen a Guernsey on the richest ration mix of clover leaves and blooms and ground corn let loose with! Dr. Starbenz had been so right on the money and damn near right on the exact hour! Week after week I joked with Zane’s first babysitter, Ms. Lime in her Old Garden Trailer Court home adjacent to the veterinary college, that she should offer me discounted childcare fees since she, with Zane who started there on his 16th day of age, never once had to change a sullied nappy of his that first month and a half! Only on Sundays when I did after finding him pushing and grunting to beat all and always just right around 8 in the evening. It was nigh unto uncanny!
I finished the account to Mrs. Edinsmaier's inquiry, “The very first dirty diaper Zane had was so mammoth that I left it to soak in the toilet bowl at Pammel, of course, after first flushing down the big stuff. It was Sunday night and I must’ve forgotten it in there ‘cause Zane and I and Herry all fell off to sleep. About midnight or so Herry got up to go to the bathroom and I’m still asleep, of course, with Zane between us when I suddenly sit straight up in bed. I’d heard Herry fumbling in the dark for the flusher handle and I came wide awake and bolt upright faster than all get out remembering that I hadn’t finished with the diaper in the bowl and put it in the pail. I yelled, ‘Don’t flush it! Don’t flush it!’ And was lucky enough to stop him. ’Course Zane waked up with that ruckus and wanted to nurse. So right there in the middle of the night after Zane was back to sleep, I took care of that first dirty diaper. It scared me so much I resolved to not ever come that close to screwing up the toilet again. So … so far I’ve been really lucky. I guess we’ve both just gotten into the habit now of looking down into the bowl before starting to even use it.”
Mrs. Edinsmaier nodded, “Uummm. I just could never trust that that wouldn’t happen.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t do the dirty ones in the toilet?”
“No, I didn’t. Not ever. We didn’t get an indoor bathroom until 1954, the year Murielle was born.” Murielle was that last, 14th gestation of Detanimod’s, her sixth Edinsmaier daughter whom she had been pushed out midwinter. Mrs. Edinsmaier continued, “So when we got all this fine plumbing and new pipes, why, I was so afraid of clogging it up with one lost down the drain that, well, I just never did.” Finally after a rather ho‑hum pause during which I suppose I was staring at her with a look of some level of disbelief, she spoke of what was really at the basis for her not using this ‘convenience’ for diapers with bowel movement soiling them, “I was really afraid that if I left one unattended in the stool to soak just like you’d done, why, someone else’d come along before I had gotten back to take care of it and not be nearly as concerned for our new waterworks as I was.”
Well, I certainly could understand and empathize with her feeling about those wonderful new pipes of hers. But to have gone through 12 live birthings and raised up and out of cloth diapers until they were all finally toilet‑trained 11 kids in that rural, back‑roads countryside without the use of the toilet bowl and sewage system to rinse out the feculent diaper initially and flush down the gross, organic stuff? What had she done?!
What Detanimod told me next was the nightmare of our fecund Ancestors. For centuries and millennia. One that I had never, ever heard of before that day, “You see,” Mrs. Edinsmaier calmly began, “in my day of having babies, there was a practice with diapers among housewives that was quite common. In families of good reputation, I’m talking about. Not just in the families that were, well, thought of as, well, less than clean, you know. And that was to take the diapers that only had had just urine in them and hang ‘em out on the clothesline to dry – and sort of sanitize—in the sunshine like that—without, ah, … without washing them first … mind you. You know, to use the sunlight and the air to freshen them up a little. Then they’d take them down off the line and put them back on the babies’ bottoms just that way. Like from March to November. Then after that second use on the baby’s bottom is when they’d all get washed with hot water and detergent and hung out to dry again—actually clean this time. This was the practice, you know, because laundry was so hard to do. The wash machines weren’t at all like they are today, what with the scrub tubs and wringers and all.”
“And, … ‘n’ – the dirty diapers?” I was sure I was just going to dread the disgust she was going to regale me with next. I was right.
“Yeah, the dirty ones were really hard. They, of course, had to be laundered in the machine with detergent and hot water. But when they first came off the baby, though, they went out to the back stoop and were rinsed out—out there in the back in a five‑gallon slop bucket if you had the time right then. If you didn’t have the time right then, well, you just threw ‘em in the bucket water and came back later to do it. The flies and the stench in the summertime, though, O, that was just awful. Just awful. But now if it was wintertime, by the time you got time enough free to launder a load in the machine, those diapers and the messes in ’em ’course, inside that slop bucket out on the back porch were probably frozen solid. So you had to boil water on the stove. Enough so that you could thaw out the ice in the bucket back there in that cold and free up the diapers and get ‘em rinsed, throw out the slop and finally get ‘em all down to the wash machine in the basement and actually do the load properly. Yeah, it was pretty hard, I guess.”
“Hard?! You guess?! Ya’ think?!!!!” I am dazed. I am left thinking … with all of my expletive adjectives only to myself, “It must’ve been pure mother‑fucking Hell! All the goddamn time. Four babies at any one time in diapers for more than 20 years?! It was Hell! M’god, what had the babies’ bottoms looked like most of the time. Ya’ know, even with the airing out in the sunshine. They must’ve just been red and raw almost all the damn time! Plus the smell of urine, of that horrid ammonia, all around the house all the damn time, I would imagine, not?! Even with the outside clothesline airing and the sunshine, wouldn’t there be that odor? Yuuuuk! Not to mention the slop bucket thing. Eeeew! What the mother‑fucking Sam Hell must’ve that been like for over 20 years of summers and winters?! O, m’god!! Parents these days haven’t a damn thing to complain about with regard to diapering babies and yet they do! We have it soooo damn easy. Even those of us who don’t use disposables! Even I do. I do use cloth diapers; but for god’s sake, I have a diaper service for Zane! We have it so easy today even with so many mamas working outside the home.”
Questions about which Mrs. Edinsmaier must have been fairly reading my mind because, just before she passed back to her holiday dishes which were cooking in the kitchen, she uncrossed her arms and to her hips placed both her hands akimbo while most matter‑of‑factly stating, “But I never did that. Ya’ know? I never did that. All of my babies had completely freshly laundered diapers on their bottoms all the time. I never put them on the line to dry first like it was okay to do. I, umm, I didn’t do that. I always washed ‘em in hot water and detergent properly every single time they came off of a baby.” She left the bathroom doorway. I gagged.
Then I finished that diaper of Zane’s in her toilet bowl—still stunned at what I’d just heard. I didn’t, right off then, realize it for the abuse and the violence this was to her and to her kids; but I certainly did a little itty bit later on. What a Hell all right. And thousands and millions of women had gone through this labor of so many, many pregnancies, birthings and launderings for decades and for centuries before Detanimod or me. Only to receive not one word of thanks for it, let alone, to receive from the men who made the women pregnant their willingness and their offerings to do the work of it all themselves for any of the total number of years of raising up the babies. Over and over and over. The men who then went on as if entitled simply because they were male … to claim from these slave mothers, their own wives, these DEhumans all, to claim her babies and her children as their own … property. Through millennium after millennium.
* * * *
Then there’s the psychological phenomenon known as the Scarcity Mode so sickly operating inside Herry, too, I believe. When I was still an Edinsmaier insider, I saw it as well in every last one of his sisters and brothers as the adults they long are. None of the eleven that I could see delayed personal gratification. For a thing. When they wanted something, they acquired it. Simple as that. Whether it was a tangible object or a concept fulfilled or an idea expressed or a dream desired or a mouth opened. Or a behavior … chosen. And the sooner the thing or the deal or the behavior could be secured and obtained or expressed or chosen, the faster the brother or sister or Herry could move on to acquiring the next wanted thing or asseverating their next judgment on any matter.
Psychology with its Scarcity Mode holds that since during these family members’ childhoods they had to share absolutely everything from pillow space to the skillet of American fries at suppertime to lap space in the family car on an outing to church, they developed the notion that they would never, at any one time or event, have as much of something as they could possibly want of it. I do remember that when all or nearly all of the 11 adult Edinsmaier siblings were back at the country home at any one time and all of us spouses married to one of them and all of our children sat down to any birthday or holiday dinner and passed around the bowl of creamed corn, there would actually be kernels left over. After it had passed by everyone and all of those people had taken some, there’d be more than a helping left in the bottom of the bowl. When what was real should have been: if everyone, at the first pass, had taken as much of a serving as they really had wanted and as much of a portion as what would have really sated their hunger for maize that day, then there wouldn’t have been any corn left at all past the eighth or ninth person!
This then in turn, psychology study teaches, led each Edinsmaier child to arrogate that as adults with their own jobs and their own positions and their own money they were simply in their own spaces finally fully entitled to owning the crotchet that they could comport all they liked as insatiate human beings. And they did—as we have seen with Herod’s contribution proclivities. That is, big money, sure. Even as poor college students Herry was. And big ideas to express. Always big opinions Herry had. But. But. Big time and big effort and big actual work commitment to a project or an endeavor, why, uummm, no, … no, that Herry Edinsmaier didn’t have so much of—well, any of—to donate.
Not even of a little effort to contribute either. I have actually known Herry, all of the years I was married to him, to not lift one finger in that rural kitchen of his parents’ to help prepare something for a holiday or a special affair or just an ordinary time. Most literally, all of the Edinsmaier males congregated in the living room right next door and in plain view of all of the Edinsmaier daughters and female spouses laboring there in the kitchen. But the guys, the men? The young boys even? They were all either chatting it up or with the screen on viewing some televised sports event or right outside underneath the kitchen window having a tall drink of something cool while hanging. Simply hanging. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t see the work to be done. It was right there under their hungry noses, and the fruits of some woman’s labor certainly slid down their several scores of gullets most easily enough at mealtime. That was for sure.
Yet. None of the males at any time went to the kitchen as a matter of course and did a thing there.
I actually saw Herry as well as his Stash’s next inhabitant, Fannie Issicran McLive, conduct themselves in this very same lazy, entitled, aprovechar‑like and elitist you‑serve‑me‑and‑be‑my‑slave way as recently as just ten months ago at the very end of the last millennium when Jesse, yes, my Jesse, married! Jesse’s wife’s Mexican parents, both her mother and her father, labored so long and so hard and so hosted to beat the band to make their occasion the superbly special one that it, indeed, did turn out to be. And throughout all of the days and days and days that was this traditionally long celebration, Herry and Fannie had to, quite literally, be begged to actually help out on doing any of it. It was truly bizarre!
This was Mehitable‑approved behavior as well, of course. But coming only from Dr. Herod Edinsmaier. Not coming from Dr. Legion True, her kid. No. Because Herry, for the very, very few times that he ever consented to grace his actual physicality over to AmTaham’s and her home in Williamsburg, carried himself off while there with this exact same comportment and countenance. And as you can imagine, AmTaham, the First Farmer of Long Labor who was also the self‑appointed chief bottle‑washer inside Mehitable’s and his kitchen, could scarcely bring himself, in acquiescence to his wife’s desires, to tolerate this slothful, slacker demeanor of Herry’s for even just one evening. And as I ashamedly have stated before, our closest colleagues in parenting, Abby and Devin with their two little girls, also witnessed as well as suffered at their various residences over our first years of marriage from Herry’s entitled and aprovechar manner of usurpation and plain ol’ … taking.
Furthermore AmTaham, as well as I, knew Herod Edinsmaier to be teaching all three Truemaier Boys this same mien of torpor, acquisition and immediate gratification of one’s wants. From their earliest ages on. More than one time I recall a certain event occurring which Herry never, not even one time, stopped executing. And probably has not to this day. It was, every time it happened, made snidely and sarcastically clear to me and very much out loud in front of Zane, Mirzah and Jesse, that I was all wrong and should just shut the complete fuck up.
Herry never denied the Boys soda pop when they wanted some. Now I was not in favor of denying them soda then either, that is, especially when they’d already consumed for that day what a good diet of liquids dictates they should have, that is, they’d already drunk up plenty enough water, milk or juices.
Rub was, though, Herry would not have them wait even just five or ten minutes. If they wanted it right then and there, well then, right then and there they should have it as far as Herry was concerned. He absolutely delighted, smirking as he recounted it about four years later, in telling the account of his behavior in this matter to Judge Harley Butcher.
As you can imagine the entire back passenger bench seat of either his Toyota Crown or my Shitbox Dodge wagon was for many a year filled with wall‑to‑wall youngsters belted into their respective car seats. Because morning schedules and commutes collectively together were fairly hectic, most of the times that we stopped for gasoline we did so after work on the way home from the daycare or from the Boys’ after‑school activities. And at the gas station or outside the convenience store there would be, of course, a vending machine or cooler with 12‑ounce cans or plastic bottles cold and just waiting for young Boys’ thirsty throats.
It was about 5:15 or 5:20 in the afternoon. Without exception. No matter that in just five to ten minutes’ worth of waiting we all would be at our home where there were 16‑ounce, full bottles of soda waiting chilled in the refrigerator or in the pantry, bottles I’d earlier purchased at the grocery store, and ice cubes in those provincially blue plastic trays in the freezer compartment that took a little mining but not too much to retrieve. If Zane or if Mirzah or if Jesse stated to the thin air from those wagons’ back seats that they wanted soda pop, why then Herry upbraided me over and over and over in front of them that he was always going to be able to reach right down into his little pants pocket and to, right then and right now, haul out of it whatever quarters it took to slake his Boys’ wants. Right then and right now. No waiting whatsoever for our getting home to where four ounces more soda pop than the cans held and at approximately half or less than half the vending cost awaited them, too, in the closet. None of that. No. Patience within reason? No!
Herod Edinsmaier himself didn’t wait either. Not at any time, and, of course, the Boys learned this behavior like, right now, so it was very, very often, any time any one of them wanted a can of soda, they knew Herry would never, never tell them no, that he would never tell them … to wait … ‘til we all got home to the closet pantry’s supply there. Judge Butcher smiled ingratiatingly and compliantly while nodding ever so slightly. The Look. The Look of one all‑knowing and pillared man to … another.
This evil, of course, is well‑known to be the responsibility of exalted Juggern who, in full knowledge of what he was doing when he recklessly demanded to fuck and to fecundate Detanimod time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again to create this gargantuan, messy mass of Edinsmaiers in the first place, only served by doing so to perpetuate these sicknesses. Isn’t it nearly uncanny and certainly most bizarre and damned crazy … that, today, having come from a family that crowded … only one out of the five female Edinsmaier daughters that are Herry’s living and adult blood sisters, has children of her own?! Only one. In the Year 2000, only one!
Now some are barren, you say. JYeah, that could be true. That a couple of the Edinsmaier women would be unable to have natural children of their own. But. All four of them or their several mates over the years sterile? No. Not all four and not all four eventually married couples either. The odds of that being biologically so are just astronomical and too staggering to warrant any time wasted on giving credence to that concept. Besides, two of those four childless women delayed their marriages to men until long into their 30s and one did not marry a man until after she was over 40 years of age.
Not that marriage is needed to put children into your adult lives. It isn’t.
And there’s the point of this: You don’t need marriage or a union to the same gender as yourself to put little kids into your life on a very regular basis, even daily. And you, as a single adult female or a single adult male and uncoupled, haven’t had need of another bonded or integrated person in your life to do this absolutely most respectful honoring‑the‑future thing and Ancestoring deal for quite some time now.
But while all six of the Edinsmaier male children, married all of them early on in their 20s or 30s, and their wives have at least two and often three children each between them with one of them having four! over all of their adult years singly or coupled, four out of the five Edinsmaier female children had zero children born to or … or … or … raised up by any one of them. One of those four, the sister that married after she was 40, acquired in that alliance two nearly grown stepchildren who do not live on a daily basis with her and her husband.
Clearly. The craziness is there … is visible here. Why did these four adult women, without receiving wages or a salary or being paid to do so in some other way, choose to specifically not put little children into their lives at all by some possible means available?! No adoptions, no mentoring, no fostering, no coaching! Not even cuddling nor rocking down at an AIDS hospice or a homeless shelter. Not even substituting on a regular basis as the aunts they were for the care and nurturance of their own nieces and nephews, mind you! For their own brothers’ children! Including never, not one time ever in 12½ years of Herry’s and my marriage, offers of childcare for any one, two or all three of the Truemaier Boys! Why not?! Not even for an hour’s worth so that their mama, Dr. Legion True, could soak a decent spell inside the burgundy and pink bubbles of the Truemaier Boys’ grandparents’ bathtub!
Is the explanation for this selfishness, greed and preposterousness as ‘simple’ as the Scarcity Mode? So much doing without and so much work heaped on them when they themselves were little girls that they evidently just couldn’t bear up under any more at all as adult women? Or, is it even more pernicious, virulent and deadly than this?
Neither psychological theory that may clarify why members of supersized American families possess the characteristics and conduct that they oftentimes do excuses this chosen behavior, of course. The facts of Herry’s passive-aggressive laziness, his hoggish and narcissistic compulsion for so much attention, sexual and otherwise, and his cumbersome material acquisition poisoned his own Boys. As far as the accountability for this toxin in them that is his, non‑alcoholic though it has been for nearly as many years as they all are old? To this day, he simply, because he can … denies it, avoids it, justifies it, rationalizes it, seeks collusion in it especially from females or from Mirzah, Jesse and Zane, or he goes out and buys or boinks something else with which to numb it. And, so far successfully and long into his sixth decade of life as so many, many similarly pillared men do, escapes all accountability.
* * * *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/ex/“Sperm Source” [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Legion’s Friends: Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s Family Court lawyer who sold her out
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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