I was 8 years old in 1983.
So, it was me, my mother and my two brothers, Joe and Pat, who were left. Both of my brothers 7 years older than me. My brother Pat, was adopted into the family before I was born, is also mentally handicapped, the term, “mentally retarded” is how it was spoken of back then.
Around the beginning of this story my adopted brother Pat was just becoming too difficult for my mother to take care of, as Pat was a very high functioning mentally handicapped person and also very strong. Also, I suffered some sexual abuse from Pat about 4 years prior while living in Chicago, before the family moved to Salt Lake City in 1981. Which to this day no one in my family knows about.
The Training schools.
I could never figure out why my mother brought me to this scary place almost every weekend to visit Pat. It was basically an insane asylum, all mentally damaged men, mentally retarded. And the smell of a mentally handicapped persons breath is something I’ll never forget.
One time.
My mom and I went to visit Pat. I was so scared of the place, I told my mother once that “this place is like Dracula”, naked men walking out to greet my mother peeing on the floor in front of her, and she seemed totally, completely unfazed by the whole ordeal. She never seemed to care how it might affect me, though I do have one memory of her saying that it was “terrible” I think it was around this time that I stopped trusting my mother, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
So being dragged to this place, and others like it. almost every Sunday throughout my childhood was a drag- or so the memory of it is.
So fast forward through years of alcoholism and rumination of false memory and fear, believing that there was always something wrong with me I fell to my knees and couldn’t die, but surrendered.
And it’s so incredibly unbelievable to me that, 16 years sober today, but 12 years ago I was
actually, shown how to work all the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which to this day has completely eradicated my fears of the past unmanageably happening now.
SEAMUS