When little demon babies are produced, they get put into human meat suits & infiltrate the ranks of Earthlings. There are no instruction manuals. Only the fittest survive or else are absorbed by humanity. This is the story (or part of the story) of one such demon baby, dropped into the human world, & learned, vicariously, how to navigate it.
Did you ever wonder what the face of evil would look like? Well, here it is. A Baby Demon… in the flesh, the human meat suit that is.
One could say that I’m a very damaged girl who had Christianity shoved down her throat. And you’d be correct. However, I have known other girls who had this happen. They either wear skimpy clothing & sleep with a lot of men or else they simper & hide away. I’m neither of those. I’m not knockin’ it (I mean, I am for the actual abuse, but not that outcomes), it’s just not me. Never was.
I was watching a home movie recently. It was the only one we kept. First I had to get through my mom saying “Merry Ho Ho” a fuck ton in this simperingly sweet fake voice while recording people on the bear phone family friends had given us that Christmas (1987?). And well, I had to get through all of the people we called.
To say I was bored to tears would be a huge understatement. I did fast-forward.
Lil’ Small has watched this video recently. Apparently my Aunt Jan will call me her little kiddie porn at some point, because she relayed that to me while laughing. But she also said that there is a portion where I’m showing off my gifts to our maternal grandmother (because the video camera was new, a gift from her, & she was on holiday somewhere that Christmas, so it seemed like a good idea I suppose) & she said, & I quote, “You were SO cute! You weren’t fat at all! And you’re voice was so sweet!”.
So, I stopped fast-forwarding at this point. I’m wearing pink sweatpants & a pink t-shirt with the cutest cartoon duck on it that said, “Just Duckie”, which apparently was a gift from Lil’ Small that year.
Though the above picture is the year before, I pretty much look the same. My hair is slightly darker & slightly shorter, but looks the same . The major difference? My two front teeth are gone. But I’m the same size.
Anyway, while that is (the statement about my weight) what led me to stop & take a look at this section, it’s not the point of it. The point was that I received quite a few… religiousy gifts that Christmas… & you could just feel my disdain for the items as well as see it all over my face. I’m surprised I didn’t hiss & throw the objects or simply go up in flames.
It made me LAUGH!
“It’s a drawing pad & you’re supposed to (eye roll) draw these things” (as I point to the pictures of crosses & Jesus on the cover, rolling my eyes again, & grimacing before tossing it aside quickly.)
“This is an angel…” & I’m clearly grimacing & holding the figurine away from me. It’s not that I just thought they were tacky or didn’t like the gifts. I didn’t act so… repulsed or that it was all so… beneath me with any other objects, even if it was an item I didn’t care too much for.
Because I did not like the hope chest I received. For one, Lil’ Smalls’ was so awesome. It was unstained, unpainted wood, but looked very Scandinavian. And it was huge. I got this tiny, dark stained one with fucking bears on it. Not bears fuc… just I wasn’t that into bears, but my mom felt that I should be, so I got teddy bear everything. They were wearing old time-y clothes & it said, “Love is the & thee”. What the fuck does that even mean?!? No wait, they just like creepy potato children. Even worse than teddy bears. Ugh…moving on.
Even painting the whole goddamn thing as a teenager couldn’t make it any better. I swear it was either made out of haunted wood or the crafter was possessed. Even though I hated it with a seething passion, it was just… wrong. On all levels wrong. It’s long gone. But back to the story.
Obviously I hated that gift. It felt like a slap in the face. Like I wasn’t as good as my older sister, which is true. (She was only a year or two older than I currently was when she received her hope chest, so it’s not a ten year difference). I don’t think that, but that was how my mother felt about things. It had teddy bears in stupid clothes which my mother knew I detested. And that fucking line? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
There was also a Christmas themed windsock that said “Joy” & had Christmas teddy bears on it. Again with the teddy bears that I think are stupid & I’m not a fan of Christmas themed things.
Or the purple dance bag with three teddy bear ballerina’s on it.
The reaction on video is completely different for these items. I just didn’t want to really show them off. I wanted to skip over them. They weren’t worth my time because it was a perfectly good object ruined by who my mother felt that I should be, which really was a kid who was never heard or valued.
Ya know, it’s not like I needed ALL the cool things, but it would have meant the world to me if my mother had heard that I didn’t really like teddy bears & instead heard that I liked hippos & cats & ducks. But that’s not what she wanted to hear or have her daughter be, so she disregarded it. Disregarded my words because she didn’t care.
That’s what I mean. I’m not a spoiled brat kid, fussing because my parents didn’t spend loads of money to get the IT item that I really wanted, but got me the off-brand instead. No, it’s just that my mother didn’t listen to me & also pushed me away & brushed me aside because I wasn’t my sister.
Anyway, it was not an easy video segment to watch. I didn’t want to show off the items anyway, but was having to preform like a dancing monkey. But even if they told me to hold still or hold the item up, I would do it, but would get chastised like I was stupid because I didn’t do it like they felt I should, but I didn’t understand what they meant. Her & Lil’ Small.
They’d tell me to show off an item & I would & then they’d get upset because I was showing it off for longer than they felt was necessary.
And you can hear my mom constantly saying, “Say who gave it to you.” though I’d already said or said what it was. At one point I mouth to her “Stop asking who gave it to me.”. That made me laugh.
However, when Lil’ Small was showing off her things she could neglect to say who it was from or take entirely too long to discuss the item & was never once chastised. That was really the tipping point. The marked differences in treatment. Like I was the ugly troll baby they took in off the streets & regretted it, compared to their favourite daughter.
It’s not like I was Harry Potter & she Dudley Dursley, but seriously, tone that dynamic down a bit, & well you wouldn’t be too far off.
But that was not the purpose of this post. It was that not liking an item versus my entire demeanor over a religious item were completely different & it did make me laugh. A lot.
Which leads me here. Obviously I was too old for a Beauty & The Beast Colouring book & I’m not the daughter in question, however, this is totally me. As a kid, my mom was constantly being called to meetings because of what I drew or coloured in Sunday school or regular school.
It seems that everything I did was somehow inappropriate. Colouring sheets of angels & I’d colour them black (ya know, like Reaper-Belle up there, not actual people) or green, sometimes they had red eyes.
They felt… nice to me & I didn’t understand why I was in trouble of this colouring scheme. The “pretty” angels that all the other kids were colouring did creep me out. Like, yeah, they might look “pretty”, but do not trust them. I’m four & thinking “trust no one”. Man, how is that even me?!
I’d end up drawing creepy scenes at regular school, which my mom was called in about. I know that there were several incidents, but I only remember one drawing & that’s only because it got shoved into a pile of other things I’d created at school that weren’t… weird.
It was called The Volunteer. Some really tall man thing with sparse white hair leading me & my friends into a creepy, dark basement. While seeing it as an adult, yeah it’s fucking weird, what the hell was I drawing? But I remember not being creeped out by anything that I drew as a kid & really, while the subject matter was questionable, it also really wasn’t creepy. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it wasn’t. At least to me.
I was also constantly questioning things learned in Sunday school.
“The devil doesn’t seem like such a bad guy…”
“John the Baptist seems more like The Messiah…”
“Why is Jesus throwin’ temper tantrums?”
“I don’t understand how you’re telling me they are separate, & then the same thing… I don’t think I believe that God, Jesus, & The Holy Spirit are the same thing at all…”
I’ll remind you that I was ages four through seven & this was always met with horrified faces & sputtering. I felt like they wanted to point crosses at me; the teachers and the other students & shout “Get thee behind me Satan!” or some other such bullshit.
Of course this embarrassed my mother to no end, because things were all about her & how people in the church saw her? Was it because she was abused as a kid? Was it because she was a relatively new convert? Was it just because she’s that shallow? I really don’t know & it could be a combination of all three (& possible other reasons).
I mean, I probably wasn’t going to change my mind about these things, because I was pretty firm in my feelings on these matters, but I might have if someone hadn’t of belittled me or beat me for it. Or if others hadn’t of treated me like I was some heretic worthy of the fucking Spanish Inquisition! Who knows if the adults had been calmer, & didn’t treat me like something horrid, I might be a good God-fearing Catholic today.
(OK, I can’t help laugh over that prospect. Yeah, I don’t think, no matter who things went down, that I’d have ended up that way. I’m just not seeing it. I was just too questioning & apparently no amount of anything could beat that outta me.)
But this leads me back to that video… & I still haven’t finished it, I just keep thinking on it, trying not to. This morning it got to me. The way everyone was treating me. Like my cousin, OK, so all three of us are sitting on the couch; Lil’ Small, then our cousin, then me. We each have our own couch cushion basically & are opening up our Christmas gifts. I get up because I’m the one handing out gifts (though this wasn’t a thing, I think it was just delegated to me… why? Anyway), I sit back down & he is clearly upset, “Sarah! My knife!!”, because I’d sad down on his open pocket knife, which he casually tossed onto my couch cushion & then reached under me & slid his open pocket knife out from under me because it was apparently his most prized possession.
Now, normally I’d have called myself out on being a whiney snitch, because you can clearly hear me exclaim, “Mom, Dad! Martin tried to cut me with his knife!”, but I wasn’t wrong. As I said, it was open, it was in my space, he just yanked it out from under me, open. If he’d cared whether or not he was going to cut me, he A] wouldn’t have put it there in the first place, B] would have told me to jump up so he could retrieve it, or C] yanked it out & then asked, “I didn’t cut you did I?”
None of that took place.
What a fucking schmuck! Yeah, I’m seven & he’s ten, but why the fuck is he going to throw ALL of his stuff into my seat like the idea of me having a seat isn’t worth anything? He kept doing it too. Random wrapping & packaging just tossed into my seat because I’m being worked to death doling out people’s gifts. He didn’t toss things towards Lil’ Small or even on the floor in front of him. He’d even throw shit on me while I was sitting there & it was totally not in a sneaky I’m going to be a pestery ten year old boy & this is fun.
If I’d seen that I’d have let it slide. No, he acted like I wasn’t even there… when I was fucking sitting right there?!
Or my aunt, while she was nice enough to explain things to me, you could tell she really just wanted to me to fuck off. But she’d engage in conversation with Lil’ Small like she was some rock star. Hanging on her every word & from snatches of the conversation I could hear it wasn’t anything remotely interesting. I think it was just because Lil’ Small was cute & pretty & my aunt wanted to be excepted by the “coolest” person in the room.
It’s not the first time this happened. Some friend of ours, used to be thin & popular, but gained weight (much like my aunt, she was thin & popular before getting married & then wasn’t) & this friend practically worshiped Lil’ Small because she was thin & it’s like if she could get the OK approval from her, she’d be back into the cool kids club or something else stupid. Me? She treated like fucking dirt, because I wasn’t thin. Yeah, same scenario basically.
It is not my fault that my parents tried for another baby, got it, thought it was adorable… until it wasn’t (about age six) & really started distancing themselves from me. I didn’t force them to do all this. Or to ignore me & have the sun rise & set with my older siblings; Meine Bruder & Lil’ Small.
I remember what it felt like being a kid & growing up in all of this, but it’s an entirely different thing to be slapped in the face with it while watching a video, that is inadvertently capturing things that the lens wasn’t focusing on.
This morning, lying there in bed, I was tearing up about it. Then I stopped myself. “Well this is just fucking ridiculous. This is like if Hellboy was crying over ‘Why don’t people like me?!’“
Which didn’t make me laugh, but did get me to stop being verklempt & get up outta bed.
The only interesting thing so far is dad was talking to his family on the bear phone saying we’d be there the next day (the day after Christmas), then him saying he wasn’t going to drive on Christmas Day so it’d have to be the next day. He said the word like & it made me laugh. ‘That’s where I get that from!’.
It was real drawn out & that I was real high. I’ve heard it described as how Texas say words like this (life, knife, night, ya know any “eye” word), but I don’t know many Texans. (Any?) What I know is every time I try to sing “tonight” in I Just Wanna Have Something To Do by The Ramones, I say night the same way. I’ll laugh & try to sing it normal, but can’t & laugh some more & wonder where the hell it came from. Now I know. Besides the fact that just simply talking, sometimes, these “eye” words come out soundin’ like that.
Actually I took some (pertinent) video of the video, so you can see.
I’m not a big grimacer, unless it’s something I really can’t stand. That’s the biggest grimace you’ll ever see on my face!
I’m not overly excited because as I stated at the beginning of this, I didn’t want to be doing this. But I do state that it’s my favourite & you can tell it’s a gift a really like, even though I just throw it aside.
I captured this one for several reasons. One, it clearly shows who I’ve always been. Not very graceful, a little manish (boyish) in my lifting heavy objects, grunting, & how I say “Heidi”, & that I say “Man” even as a seven year old.
The other is because in between holding up the last book & holding up Heidi, that hard whirring sound you hear? That’s my dad using his electric juicer in the kitchen to make orange juice. It was a sound I instinctively knew & made me smile & well… it’s kind of important to me now that dad is no longer here.
That’s that damned stupid teddy bear phone. But it’s my paternal grandmother on the line asking when we’re coming to Vidalia, with dad using that long “eye” sound in “like”. Plus it’s just nice to hear his voice, even if this was 36 years ago.
Oh lord! My Aunt Jan. Mom insisted on video-ing her, though the entire time her & my grandmother were here, she did not want to be on video, but my mom wouldn’t listen. Then she just goes all whack-a-do. She’s funny. It was funny to watch. But this might be what abuse rearing it’s head looks like. As in she couldn’t handle the situation anymore & this is what you get? This is also where she calls me Kiddie Porn.
It’s weird to think about what’s happened since these videos were taken. Just with Aunt Jan, she was going through a messy divorce. Her son (Meine Bruder) was getting into trouble. It’s not easy to spend time with your mother who is crazy (that is where she would stay when she’d visit). She just wasn’t in the mood (though I do remember visits where she was in the mood to play around with her sister, but this was not one of them).
She’d go on to get that divorce, marry some new guy, lose her mother & then her son within a year of each other, leave Canada & move to Florida, & then basically drop off the face of the Earth.
Vidalia isn’t much better. My grandpa would be dead in six years. My cousin became Mormon & got married & had a bunch of kids. Archie (my cousins dad) would no longer come to visit his son in Vidalia, but did show up to both of my grandparents’ funerals. He’d marry a Jewish woman (him & Aunt Vicki had been divorced for about six years by this point), divorce her, marry his high school sweetheart & lose her to cancer last September. My grandmother died in 2012. My Aunt is a shut-in. My dad died in October.
You can see why video of his voice or him whirring oranges to make juice made it on the list. Even his cat Inky came to the basement where I watching this video looking for Pappy. He heard his voice on the tape from up in the kitchen & came down to investigate.
But I’m not ready to talk about my dad’s death. It wasn’t even horrid or traumatic, it’s just… too raw. I really liked my dad. He was cool.
Anyways, what was difficult (besides that)? Was that I’m still in the same fucking house as where the majority of this video was filmed. It was weird to see how it was on film & then stand in the den or the kitchen & see how it is now, then flashes of what it was & all the people no longer here.
I don’t know if it would be weirder if I wasn’t living in this house. But like my parents has sold it or it was demolished or I just lived on my own somewhere else. I think it wouldn’t be, because five minutes after stopping the tape, I wouldn’t have to stand in the same exact places & see the “ghosts” of what were.
It was also difficult to watch because… well… I was annoying. I have to cut myself some a lot of slack, because I know exactly what this was & it’s abuse. I’m coping with & dealing with abuse in the only what I know how. Remember I said that I was pushed aside & ignored? So severely that I tried desperately to get anyone to notice me… for just about anything. I was that starved for being seen. Probably to be loved.
And Lil’ Small, as I mentioned watched the tape just days before me, & while she relayed the “kiddie porn” bit, she also said that all three of us (our cousin & us) were sitting at the kitchen bar in Vidalia & hanging out together like it was no big deal. We were so polite & well-behaved & got along.
Was she fucking high? I saw that Lil’ Small was playing with Martin’s keyboard. The two of them are on one side of the bar & I’m on the other. Just like Rudolph (ya know the red-nosed reindeer) I am completely excluded. Completely. She’s hogging the keyboard, he’s eating pie. She’s hitting the record button on it to make noises or say things. He’s doing the same. He takes the keyboard from her & plays stuff (which is nothing) & gives it back. I mean, he’s reaching over & hitting buttons or keys. If I try to do this, Lil’ Small slaps my hand away & tells me to stop.
It’s like they’re their own little club & I’m not invited. It’s fine. It’s in the past. But seriously, what the fuck was she watching? Or else she has an entirely different definition of “everybody getting along & having fun.”
So, there were other parts where I saw things differently. As in I’m clearly watching the video & not imaginary butterflies & my take-away is not the same as hers. At all. And while that’s confusing & I can let Vidalia go. I never want to go back there. Not after this trip. I really just knew I’d never go back. That it was the end. It was the year before dad died.
But it’s this house. That was difficult to let go honestly. But I will, because I’m busy. I’ve got stuff to do. And because I might not even be human. Is this family even really mine?
Alien Tea Shoppe 