I doubt it was Mom's however. While there I was in the hospital twice, once with life-threatening rheumatic fever, and Oliver was born, with life-threatening pulmonary problems. While still an infant, Mom had to rush him into some emergency hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. Recall Mom had all six of us kids when she was 25 years old. Between two sickies and an a husband with alcohol & adultery issues, she didn't have a great life. Dad was chinchy with the money, too. You ever read Erma Bombeck's piece on “When God Created Mothers"? (click on the link) Our Mom fit this scenario all too much. I recall when she fed the eight of us on a pound of hamburger.
Because our household was in such stress with aforementioned sick chilluns, Dad's active alcoholism, we kids reacted like what kids do when a household is under such duress. Our house was a tall box like structure...with white paint and dirt pathway on one side of the house. Perfect! ...for...we mixed water into the dirt and have at it!!...plastering the white painted house with mud pies! What a MESS! Talk about a great stress reliever! But all fun must come to an end. When Mom got home, we heard the oft spoken threat "Just wait till your father gets home!!!!!!"
Not sure what my siblings recall, but if Dad ever whooped us, I don't recall him doing it often, nor were his spankings particularly hard.
There was such "awe" and respect for fathers in our days, in our culture, that just to have Dad mad at us was painful enough, at least for me. I don't know if any of us got spankings. Not sure Dad came home from the bar before our bedtime. Poor Mom. How I wish she had known a personal relationship with G-d during those difficult days for her, for Dad, too. At least now Mom is receiving her reward and is with our Father in Paradise.
Dad surely suffered, too. Torturing a wife who loved him dearly surely had to weigh on his conscience. Two deathly ill children. There was probably economic stressors with Oly & I racking up huge hospital bills that weighed on Dad, too.
Alcoholism is like drug addiction, whether they be street drugs or legal mind-altering prescription drugs or pot in that they are a desperate, albeit, selfish attempt to relieve oneself of emotional pain one cannot see another way to do so. Once I myself learned that my heart, according to The Father in His Word, is deceitful, above all things, and that emotions were not to be trusted, but were to be DISCIPLINED, I set about to relearn how to deal with stresses which were not always under my direct control. I also learned to "compartmentalize" problems. I knew from The Psalms that talking to The Father, pouring out my heart...oops...soul, as did Hannah in the Book of Samuel, and as did David in The Psalms, as did Esther, Moses, and others, was one way of dealing with stress, drug free, too :D
Over the years I constantly battle with emotional eating, a learned skill from my growing up years in the LDS faith. Even in Judaism, food is used as an emotional coping device. Fortunately, the congregation we ended up attending in Bremerton Washington, Beth HaTikvah, nearly everyone was on a health eating kick. We'd also experienced this at our Tacoma congregation. Still, I struggle with disciplining this area of my life, to this day. Paul helps. He saw me take butter out of the fridge for my baked yam & expressed concern. I'm too bullheaded, stubborn, offering my explanation "Well, it's better than eating all those chemicals mixed in with butter in your 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter'." We are both correct. I guess I coulda alleviated some of his stress about my health by mentioning that while he was gone, I started eating my potatoes without anything on them. I'll do that tomorrow. He worries so about me that it's not fair to cause him more worry than I do.
My health is not the worst, not the best. I've tried to regulate my health with diet, water, but not exercise. I've started exercising moderately because I don't want to take Rx's. Went to the doctor on the 1st. In fifteen years I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to the doctor. The govt regulates medicine to the point doctors have become drug pushers. If people knew what I know about meds, they'd be fearful too of taking them.
The bad news is that now that Paully knows I've been to a doctor, rec'd Rx for the 160/100 blood pressure, today he made me go to the car to get the Rx and take it in his presence. How can I buck him after all he's done for me???
He only means me well. He also told me not to give Dr. Grudzien a hard time. "Too late for that honey." I am bad. I think it's funny....but it's not.
Before I told Dr. Grudzien on Thursday that I'd been given a D.O. by My Love, not to give the doctor a hard time, he knew from my three previous visits, that I was definitely going to argue and counter everything he said, so he just sat looking at all my test data (ekg, blood work, blood pressure, etc.)...just sat looking at it, not saying anything, just having a look of consternation on his face, probably wondering how was he ever going to impress upon me the seriousness of my symptoms. We did get into an argument early in the visit, about the side effects of Losartin. In fact, he learned forward over his desk to get "in my face' as it were, to stop me from my arguing. He's a very tall, medium built man, imposing in stature. After that argument, with his office door open, and I'm sure everyone heard us, he just got quiet.
I realized I was being stubborn, again, and acquiesced, telling him My Love gave me the D.O. to obey the doctor's instructions. He gave me THREE MORE RX's! to 'protect your heart,' including nitroglycerin. G-d bless my kidney and liver PLEASE. These are the hardest hit organs of prescriptive medicines and the reason kidney dialysis is epidemic!!! ARGH@#$%&*(%^!!!
What I have I gotten myself into?! But I couldn't keep keeping the truth from Paul that I'd finally procured a doctor. It would hurt him.
I told him long ago he needs to get rid of his Mormon doctor because they don't think for themselves. If govt tells them poison is good for their patients, they'll obey govt. He needs to get a free thinking, older doctor, like me. Mine is foreign born & trained! American medicine...blech!...with apologies to Drs. Rubenstein, Garvin, and Bernstein, of our former congregation, all good doctors. I did go to Dr. Garvin. He was the nearest my age. Older doctors aren't as indoctrinated as the younger ones, and being Jewish, they don't give up the G-d given ability and right to THINK CRITICALLY.
Wow! This blog was to be about my growing up years in Sherwood, Oregon, on "The Farm!"
Here is a little taste of what is to come:
Being the oldest of six kids, and 12 years old when we moved back to Ashland, Oregon in 1960, information on our years living in the farmhouse across the dirt road from the Stahlneckers has been hard to come by.
I used to, sometimes, when not in the hospital with rheumatic fever, get up early before school, and after school, help Jimmy Stahlnecker milk their cows by machine. I recall an older gentleman in the Stahlnecker household who would pay us for crawdads we caught in the creek, opposite direction of the Jost's. I don't recall ever being in the Stahlnecker home, though we did buy our milk from them. I barely recall Phyllis as she was older. Jimmy was too, maybe a year older? I graduated 1966, Ashland Senior HS, Ashland, Oregon. I'm told our house across from the Stahlneckers was used as a barn & eventually razed. We had 20 acres, mostly fir trees. My dad was not a farmer. He was a "floor layer."
I recall Jerry Jost, and the Snyder family who lived further up the road. Delmer Snyder was "understood" to be my boyfriend for awhile. When I find it, I'll post a fifth grade class picture with both of us in it.
My siblings old enough to recall our very few years "on the farm" all agree, it was the best place of our growing up years. We loved being able to walk barefoot on the dirt road down to the creek, play in the old hay in our barn that no longer housed animals, and we even found a swamp with stinky skunk cabbage where we pretended to fish with stick poles, safety pins, and worms. It was quite a ways beyond the creek where we caught crawdads.
Our place also had an old, unused chicken coop, smoke house, and well house. Our farmhouse originally did not have a connecting bathroom. One had to go outside via a two-sided wrap around, open porch, either through a kitchen door or a door that led to a foyer to our upstairs. Dad made quick work of chainsawing a door from the walk-in-kitchen-pantry into the adjacent bathroom, much to our relief.
Since I was only 8 or 9 years old at the time, my younger siblings always wanted big sister to escort them to the bathroom at night before bedtime. I loved that old farm. We all did. Too bad Dad wasn't a farmer.
Oh, the Stahlneckers also had sheep, but I don't recall Jimmy & I doing anything with them. He called them stupid, I believe. After school, we would change into grubbies and head out to find where the cows were & herd them into the barn, into the stocks, and Jimmy would feed them hay, and we would set about milking them. I enjoyed his company as he was a quiet fella, and I appreciated his allowing me to tag along on his errands. I was very quiet, too, and that's probably why I don't recall any conversations between us. In those days, there were very definite divisions between the sexes, and how one aught to behave around the opposite sex. My parents were very protective of us, especially me because I was pretty, quiet, and physically weak, so they must have trusted Jimmy implicitly, to allow me to tag along with him out into the pastures away from our parents. Those were good times. Stahlneckers were good people.
I still enjoy the smells of cow manure, pastures, barns. Good times indeed.
That's all of that for now because I just remembered something more important! This week was Giovanni & Desiree's birthdays and I need to do something on here for each of them.
"Oy vey! I'm losing my head! and one of these days a horse is going to come along and KICK IT IN THE MUD and then it's goodbye Yenta"! Yenta in Fiddler On The Roof :) Yenta The Matchmaker in Fiddler On The Roof (another link) (May all my precious bubeleh's have "matches" made in heaven!)
So! Gio! ...how much of this movie can you still recite, verbatim? Of course you'll no longer be able to sing the "Matchmaker Song" in your pre-pubescent high pitched voice, hee hee!!
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