Boys Will Be Boys: Weekend Freewrite

_{Photo Source Pixabay}

My brother was doing that thing he did. That thing with the rag in the sink. I watched him lift the rag to his face and sniff it, grimacing from what I assumed was a mildewy smell. It always drove him crazy to have that scent and once he smelled it, things just became obsessive. I knew he’d be standing there for at least he next 30 minutes, washing, rewashing and using half the bottle of soap on it, trying to get rid of the stench. SO much for spending time together.

I wandered away, deciding that it was time to go distract myself for a while. Chad would be busy with his OCD for a while and I had not desire to stand around and witness the crazy again. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t call him crazy, but I feel like our whole family is full of crazy, so we kind of just accept that it’s a label we have.

I walked out the front door into the stifling heat of the summer. The sun was pounding down on the black asphalt, leaving that weird visual in the air above it. It made me think that the world was melting before my eyes. It felt like the heat waves would grow and rise into the sky until the clouds melted like a Salvador Dali painting and start slipping down onto the earth.

I was a bit morbid, I suppose, but those are the kind of thoughts I always had. I walked to the edge of the street and watched my worn our cheap sneakers scuff along in the dirt alongside the curb as I walked. I wasn’t sure where I was going yet, just that I needed to move. The heat was making it hard to breathe, hard to even think and I just had this desperate urge to get away. GO somewhere, FEEL something. Anything other than the horribly stifling dead feelings I was having being here at home.

I was feeling sick of everything. Honestly, I’d been thinking about running away. More than “thinking about it” I suppose, since I’d been planning it pretty much every single night.

The problem wasn’t my mom, or the divorce, as everyone assumed. The problem was one I couldn’t talk about with anyone, really. Let’s just say that my uncle and my cousins… no, my entire family didn’t respect boundaries. One tiny instance I’ll give you that should keep it mostly appropriate was the things they found funny. Like tickling. Only uncle Bill thought that this was funny. No, that’s not true, either. Uncle Bill might have been the one verbally encouraging it and laughing about it, but it was obvious that my cousins thought it was great fun, too. They would get one of us girls trapped in a corner and start tickling us. They would get a weird, scary gleam in their eyes if you begged them to stop or if they made you cry.

Uncle Bill would be laughing and calling us names if we cried, “Don’t be such a pussy! It’s just tickling!” and the boys would take this as inspiration to take things further.

The last time Craig has straddled me on the living room floor and tickled me until I lost my breath. I wasn’t like the other girls and I refused to scream or beg them to stop, so I somehow became the one they targeted first. They hounded me relentlessly. Jumping out from behind things to scare me, to try and get a reaction. They’d gang up on me, with one of them holding me down so that the others could tickle me.

If I complained to my mom or the aunts that were there, they’d just say, “Oh, the boys are just playing” or “I know it’s annoying. Why don’t you just ignore them?

That seemed to be standard in my family. “Boys will be boys” and it was a common enough refrain, no matter what those boys were doing. If it was really bad, it was just talked about in hushed whispers, but even then, it was swept under the rug and left alone.

The tickling wasn’t the only thing those boys were doing, but we all knew that you just didn’t talk about the bad things. The buzzing of the lies grew louder in my head every time I was around my family. I couldn’t hear for the sound of it in my head. I became a recluse, made excuses not to go to family functions as often as I could.

When I did have to go, I spent my time on edge, trying to stay amongst the adults so that the boys couldn’t get to me. I still remember the abject fear and dread I’d feel when the adults would get annoyed by my presence and force me outside, “Why don’t you just go PLAY?” they’d say in frustrated tones. I imagine they didn’t want me to overhear their gossip and talk of their own weekend exploits. Maybe they were just sick of being around kids in general.

I still wonder sometimes, if they knew what they were sending me out to. Of course some part of them has to have known. They’d been raised in this family, with the ‘boys will be boys’ and they either accepted it as normal or they blocked it out so that they could carry on with life.

No one ever wants to hear it. No one wants to talk about it, because you know what? Dealing with this kind of bullshit is really fucking hard. It isn’t fun, it isn’t over quickly and it destroys you inside and out.

I can’t blame them for throwing me to the wolves. For throwing my other cousins to the wolves. Oh wait, yes I can.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that it was a different time, but I will never forget the feeling of being left alone with those boys, of being told to ‘go play’ or being told in so many words that “Boys will be Boys… just ignore them and they’ll leave you alone.”

I learned all right. I have ignored my family for a decade or so now… and they were right in some ways. They do leave me alone. If only the memories would leave me alone as well.

This is my freewrite for the Three Part Weekend Freewrite Challenge by @mariannewest

And some of my other more recent posts:

What Would You Do with One Million Dollars in 24 hours?

Sunday Funnies: When Cats Get Bored, Letters from a Boat Cat

Mommy Monday: Puppet Making, Part 4 (Making Poseable Hands)

Try Something NEW Tuesday: I did a Rap Karaoke Video!

Heartbroken "Saying Good-Bye" Freewrite

_{Photos are mine except where they are credited to their source under the photos}.