A few thousand years ago during a thawing epic in the ice age of my last marriage, when we were actively married (if you don’t know what active and passive mean in the context of a marriage, even though I might have just invented the usage, then you are a fortunate soul or never been married and most likely both) I was involved in one of the old family dramas with an actually speaking role (I should have demanded SAG wages). It weighed on my mind for a while and still, occasionally, does though more like one of those weights for the paw and dancing to a video.
Sunny suffered a lot of sexual abuse, so much so that it lacked in some credulity, and family members and old friends (her secret to keeping old friends looking fresh was to put them on a shelf for years) had this gallows humor joke that, depending upon whether they were on a shelf or active Sunny would get pissed off about (though honestly she was the only person who ever told it to me); I don’t know where knife point is, but I don’t want to go there, every time Sunny does she gets raped.
I believed more than half of them, the stories, and the other half, well, it didn’t matter; it’s as indicative of psychological trauma to make shit like that up as it is to have experienced it. My professional experience, too, suggests it’s rare that anyone makes molestation or rape up, it just is.
So, her earliest memories of such were her step brothers, the children of her father’s second wife. When her parents divorced the kids were split up, but it got pretty complicated and even if I remembered how that went I don’t know that I’d go into it all; I’m feeling a little crunchy writing this as it is.
So Sunny gets this wild hair and her and her sister spend a few hours on the phone jacking one another up and I find myself up in Bingen Washington in the Bar/restaurant with a plate of fish and chips and a pitcher of beer discussing war strategy. Although I’ve been there a hundred times at least I’m not sure if I could tell you where bingen ends, white salmon begins and where it turns into Snowden. I can tell you my fish and chips were walking distance from their father’s house.
The war strategy involved how to confront dad in front of his spouse, the mother of molesters. It started off with trial speeches and by the second pitcher it was a screwing up of courage. The sisters husband, a pig eyed bastard, was just stupid enough and full enough of himself to talk a mean fight.
When the actual event occurred pig eyes and SIL froze like deer in the headlights, Sunny went all weepy, dad was angry and mommy baby-raper was mock shocked. Dad was angry that aspersions were cast on his wife, wife shocked that her boys were brought into something so sordid (though that one was in the state pen for, I think, sodomizing his own kid, maybe it was someone else’s) and Sunny was crying because --- I don’t know exactly, she said it was because her dad didn’t believe her. I honestly don’t know what she had expected. So the dad, a pretty even tempered fellow most of the time, I suspect because he just didn’t like confrontation, decides that my opinion would straighten everything out, it did, at least, shut everyone up for a minute.
My initial reaction was to simply state that if my daughter came to me with all that I wouldn’t have gotten mad at her about it, that my reaction would have been to comfort her. There were plenty of good reasons to disregard that reaction, chief among them being the gaping canyon of difference in the relative family dynamics (for better or worse, if lines in the sand need be drawn I side with my children over any romantic love interest. I’m not saying that justice and fairness play second fiddle; I’m saying my kid’s emotional reactions are more important and needing of support to me than any wife or girlfriends. Don’t like that? Don’t marry me.).
What I did do, after a moment of letting the silence sink in, as though I was thinking, was to tell them a more or less true parable from my own life. To summarize, when I was about seventeen a dog ran in front my car on a back blue highway, I was doing seventy five, the speed limit. The dog died. I found the owner, well, the parents of the owner a ten year old kid. Case went to court, I told what happened; I was absolved. The point of the parable (and it’s better in full orchestration) was that being “right” neither brought me solace nor mitigated my empathy for the kid or guilt that I had destroyed a dog’s life. I think I even ended it with something like “and I didn’t even know the kid or the dog, not like they were my own family”.
Everyone went back to yelling, crying, being in shock or freezing like a deer in the headlights. Sunny, out in the cold getting into our respective cars, told SIL and Pig Eyed BIL with a flat affect that at least they tried and thank you. Me, I got shit the whole long drive home and, years later in arguments, shit again. I was supposed to back her up, say her story was true. Thing is I believe it was, however, I didn’t even meet her until seventeen years after the accident. Yes, of course, she always expected me to lie on her behalf, but I think that one would have been awfully transparent. She also thought I was making fun of her dad’s ability to think creatively. Honestly I have had and still have a lot of respect for her dads creative and rational thought process. She thought my parable was too opaque and implied her dad was obtuse.
What makes me tell this story today (I think I’ve never written this down before)? Not sure except some days I’m thankful that all that sort of drama is in my rearview. Sunny kept score, on her score sheet I was millions of points behind. You don’t want to go golfing or bowling with her. Oh, the wife died last year. I got twenty bucks says she hasn’t been to see her dad since. Oh, not that she hasn’t wailed and moaned and beat herself about the terrible loss and her poor fragile father all alone, I’m just betting she hasn’t gone to bingen, white salmon or snowden to do it.
EDIT
Ok, this is the edit for pettiness; not taking it out, putting it in. In fact the title will likely reflect such with some clever addendum such as EDIT; Pettiness.
There was all kinds of drama all the fucking time with Sunny and her friends and her family. A fair shit load of such (assuming the entirety of the drama were a flatbed three quarter ton brimming over with shit imagine a shit load as some fraction thereof; more than a handful, less than a brimming over three quarter ton flat bed) involved children and family court or attempts to avoid such.
This petty, but it never ceased to piss me off in a sort of awe consumed way (Imagine standing in your backyard peeing, squatting if that’s how you roll, and the sky is lit up by a spaceship. You can neither help from looking at it nor stop the stream. It’s not a great analogy but it does have pee and spaceships in it which is no small feat.) that not only would I not be consulted, but I’d be dismissed. Most of the family and friends had had at least one (many at most one) occasion to be sitting in the defendant’s seat. If we include hearings and citizen review boards I quite literally and conservatively sat in the plaintiffs seat thousands of times. Even more to the point; I never lost. Dramas past present and future in Sunnys constantly contracting and expanding circle of friends always seem to end badly in family court.
There was some guy Sunny touted as the ‘Best family law attorney on the West coast’. Huh. I was on a first name basis with all the partners in the top Family Law firms in Portland and for reasons to dull to go into I was on a first name basis with a shitload of LA barristers (imagine several train flat cars loaded with shit and do whatever math you need to to figure out that shit load). I’d never heard of the guy, but, except for her parents’ divorce I never heard a story where that guy won and I wouldn’t call that a success except that they were successfully divorced. A good divorce attorney tries hard not to make a divorce seem messy at all or even to go to court.
To be fair to the attorney I’ve never heard of the family and friend’s clients should not have won anything except three squares on the county. But what galled my bladder, made me piss at the starship. Was not so much that these people would talk in my living room and ignore my sound advice, but that they’d travel far and wide to seek Sunnys fucked up counsel.
If, for instance, you were to ask Sunny how to buy a candy bar, the answer, for instance, could take two hours involve a diversion, possibly a pregnancy or car bomb, three accusations and a script for pain killers and muscle relaxers and the exchange rate for chickens to US currency. I could use a sharpie and write on my chest “Take candy bar to Counter, offer clerk money receive change thank him and leave” and they’d still be asking how to wire the bomb and manage a third trimester showing.
I know a little bit about a lot of things, there are very few things I know a shit load about. Family law in Oregon? I know a shit load about, whatever you’re calling a shit load, double it. In general Sunnys methods eschewed Occam’s razor for a spork. Occam’s spork “the simplest answer is for squares”. Yes, I know, squares is an anachronism. I did that on purpose. I should get some credit for Occam’s spork though.
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