Norma Druid’s blog

Here are some ancestor photos I´ve dug up.  Almira Peay Kirkpatrick was my great-grandfather Zack´s older sister.  This photo was taken in California in her old age.  She was wearing, rather unbelievably for such a strict woman, a bathing costume.  She and her husband Dr. Samuel Tolbert Fanning Kirkpatrick had gone to visit relatives.  I have a few letters from that time.
Blanche Peay Lillie was Zack Peay´s surviving daughter.  She was into middle age when she divorced her husband, but for her that was just a beginning.  She began nurse´s training and eventually became head nurse at a large hospital.  I remember her as an old woman and never realized she was as beautiful as in this picture.
Admiral Carlton Benton Jones is the grandson of Samuela Peay Jones, Almira´s younger sister.  Almire didn´t approve of her marriage to Henry Jones and wouldn´t come into the parlor for the wedding.  Admiral Jones is retired and , to the best of my knowledge, living in Denver.  We were able to send him his grandmother´s Bible.

This picture was taken for the 150th anniversary of First Lutheran Church in Nashville, a church my great-grandparents attended from the 1880s throughout their lives.  The photographers invited us to express ourselves, so I did and got an amazingly good portrait.
Right now I am working all I can on Health Care Reforn.  A government option is needed to provide GROUP rates for people who can´t get into a group at work.  Group rates are the key. Individual health policies are hardly worth the paper they are written on because one little claim can wipe out your year´s premium.  That´s no way to make money, and these companies want to make plenty of it.
I implore everyone not to listen to the scare ads.  Yes, you will pay for health care - but you´re doing that right now and sometimes not even getting the health care!  The government will NOT tell you what doctor to see, when you can see one, or what tests or operations you can have.  Private health insurers are doing just that - they don´t precisely say you can´t have a test; they just say they won´t pay for it.  According to a recent article in FORBES magazine, these companies work to sign up healthy people and drop those who really need medical care.  They don´t care about our health - it´s about making money.
   A good part of my concern is that PatrickXFCE, Fightingale, and their children have good health care throughout their lives.  I´m nearing the age for medicare, but I plan to work as long as possible.  For one thing, I know I have glaucoma drops in my future, and that´s expensive medicine.  Please check out the health care stories the President has gathered on the site ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA.

I´m mighty irritated you went and shot yourself that way.  Not all the way mad, mind, because I know you have carried heavy burdens for a lont time.  Jerry and I both (yes, I called him and was the one to give him the news) felt you were finally turning a corner after a year that had been full of emotional hardship and danger.  Mama and Daddy were both concerned you would do this when Gary Bird died, and I was proud of how you managed to overcome that and several other pet deaths, plus continual discouraging circumstances.

How do I know you´re in heaven?  Not like I could prove on your favorite science shows, of course, because nobody really understands the afterlife.  I don´t think we´re supposed to.  But I know how you worked out a personal relationship with God despite the fact that many who call themselves God´s people denounce you for being gay.  I know about your Bible and historical study, the rock pile in your yard that is really a pile of prayers, and the tenderness and concern you´ve shown for your friends and for all animals.  It is a trait of our family to find close personal friendships with animals because human relationships have been so cruel and hard on us all.

I would never have thought about the animal friendship thing if Mama´s psychologist hadn´t written about it in a book for which she was one of the models.  It´s true, though.  You have both the best and the worst of the Allison family in you - the great creativity, fine humor, and caring for animals and also the hot, touchy temper and tendency to rant - plus the suicide, of course.

You wound yourself thoroughly into my heart and my parents´ too, once we met you and began to correspond.  You changed their thinking, you know.  Mama had always been sort of passively negative about gays and had never thought of them as real people.  Daddy had always been aware of the gay men in the work force and had worked with them normally.  His thing was always ¨so long as you don´t do it with my wife you can do it with frogs for all I care¨.  You made him see the reality of discrimination against GLBT people, and he was a member of PFLAG for several years.  Both of them enjoyed your letter tapes and cartoons, and both were greatly concerned about the hard life you´ve had.

Now at least you are whole.  That severe dyslexia - especially at a time when it was not diagnosed or understood - was a horrible thing to happen to someone of your ability and temperament.  I was proud to type up your varied stories and get them out to a modest audience.  I know you´ve never considered being gay a disability and enjoyed your life in ¨the fruit bowl¨, as you called it.  Still, it was something that made you even more of an unacceptable outsider in many circles.  You found some sort of peace or at least tolerance with both parents before they died, and I´m glad of that.  It says something that the son they most rejected came back into the desert to look after them.

I´m glad you had Pat listed somewhere as your next of kin to contact.  She was on vacation, you know, when the coroner contacted her office.  It wasn´t until the next night she found time to call me; she had already arranged the cremation and scattering of ashes just like you wanted.  Jerry was lamenting to me that he and Caltha never got out to see you.  They were fully meaning to until that rotator cuff injury got him down.  I´ve no idea how we are going to contact all the people who cared for you - Vi, and Morning Wolf, and AJ and Ken.

Yes, I´m going to work to stay in touch with Pat and Jerry.  I´m working to preserve the storehouse of memories in my care and pass it on down.  I´ve told Larry just how much you were concerned about Josh´s Asberger´s and how he could get a good education and get on in life.  I´ll sure miss talking politics with you - and European royalty, and world history, and my own writing and drawing.  You were a Best Friend to me at a time when I needed one.  Now be happy and rejoin old friends.

 Andrew M. Weiss suggests that childhood mental disorders are largely a fabrication of Big Pharma, since the first diagnostic manual published by American psychiatrists in 1952 lists only one childhood disorder. - To hell with the 1952 manual.  I was one of those disturbed kids.  I was there.

In fact, mental or emotional disorders have a long history in my family.  My mother, born in 1920, suffered what we now know as Clinical Depression while in her teens.  She also had an impossible to please mother and a drunken father.  Several older members of my grandmother´s family had either been carted off to an institution or committed suicide.  Mama knew she needed help by the time I was born in 1945, but institutionalization or shock treatments (remember those?) were the only treatment available.

Like any child, I was upset by my mother´s emotional problems and sometimes irrational behavior.  What really put the tin lid on things was the birth of my brother in 1952.  Childlike, I realized rather early something was ¨wrong¨ with him without understanding what or why.  Gradually, my feelings of frustration, anger, and downright hatred made me almost suicidal.  Luckily, my pediatrician recognized my condition and arranged affordable care with one of the practicing psychologists in the area.  He prescribed a sedative until my condition stabilized.

Meanwhile, there was nothing available for my haggard mother and increasingly out of control brother, who had hallucinations among other things.  Finally a UGF funded mental health center with a sliding fee scale was established in my area.  My parents attended parent groups, and my brother finally at age 7 got a diagnosis - childhood schizophrenia.  We all had various types of individual and group therapy to help us handle the situation, but only common or garden variety tranquilizers were readily available then.

One thing we all quickly discovered was that we were by no means the only desperate family.  My folks met college professors and people from the projects to discuss their troubled kids.  My teenage therapy group never lacked for members of all social conditions.  Oh, yes, the troubles were there alright.

In the late sixties, my brother spent 18 months in the adolescent unit of the local mental hospital.  With this treatment and some medication, he became able to live in the community and graduate from high school.

Now, about all those side effects like tardive diskinesia - my brother took Mellaril for 35 years and did have some mild symptoms.  Our family doctor, operating from a clinic allergic to possible liability, cut back his dosage.  This resulted in my brother driving to another state, throwing his identification in the trash, and deliberately shop lifting to get himself arrested.  I took off from work and drove Mama over there to get him out.  Yeah, worked out great, didn´t it?

 No, I don´t trust Big Pharma, but they didn´t invent emotional illnesses in children.  Some, like schizophrenia and autism, are physically based.  Autism IS on the rise, quite possibly because of industrial pollutants known to affect the nervous system.

Children suffered mental disorders in the fifties.  I was there.  I was one of them.

 A significant school population will be adversely affected by the proposed education policy of rigid standards.  This group is autistic children, now one in every 150 births, most of them male.  Judging by the public reaction to Michael Savage´s radio rant about autism, most people now believe in the validity of the illness - they just don´t want to deal with it.

Charter schools, even those run by charities, do not want to be bothered and can choose not to be bothered.  My autistic grandson was sent packing back to his zoned public school despite beyond grade level reading and math skills.  The No Child Left Behind provision that all test scores reflect on the whole school makes this situation infinitely worse.

Please find a way to fund one public school (or one section of a larger campus) to meet the needs of this unfortunately growing population and those with other mental health and cognitive problems.  Their test scores should not be counted with those of normal children.  Private groups would undoubtedly provide extra funds so long as they do not actually have to administer the program.

 Educating these children is a sound investment.  Some, like Temple Grandin who designed most of the cattle handling equipment in this country, are geniuses.  Most can become productive and taxpaying citizens at some level.  Above all, they are vulnerable human beings who shouldn´t be sacrificed on the altar of Standards.

I´ve been extremely distressed by the problems Fightingale and PatrickXFCE have been discussing in their blogs.  In some ways, it´s deja vu, since I was reared in a fundamentalist church and had a schizophrenic brother.  Ernie was born in 1952, and the whole family attended the same church until I married in 1967.  I´ve been thinking back on how we managed.

In the first place, it´s inaccurate to imply that Ernie was the only family member with problems.  Mama later told me she was aware at the time that she had extensive emotional problems, but back then hospitalization (and possibly shock treatments) was the only answer.  She hung on, not wanting me reared by either of my grandmothers.  Meanwhile, I was feeling frequent and inconsistent demands from most of the adults in my life, save only Daddy, who tried to keep a lid on things.  My natural emotions conflicted with the straightjacket of fundamentalist teaching, and I really went into a nose dive when I realized something was the matter with Ernie.  I was just seven years older than he and quicker to note unusual behavior than the already conflicted adults.  What was the matter?  Had I somehow caused it?

Thank God my Presbyterian pediatrician recommended an agnostic psychologist who would see me at a reasonable fee.  He also prescribed a sedative and advised Daddy that someone should sit with me until I went to sleep.  I saw Dr. Kirk for about 18 months or two years, I reckon, and of course she talked to my parents.

Of course, mental health problems weren´t even recognized by fundamentalists in those days.  Everything could be solved by prayer, and some even believed in faith healers.  I realized by the time I was in sixth grade that the fundamentalist religion I firmly believed in didn´t connect with real life.  Still, I believed - and was encouraged to believe - I needed a religion, imperfect or not.  I simply developed the habit of keeping quiet about things in my real life the church folks would deny had happened or tell me I mustn´t feel that way about.  A distance grew between me and the church folk, all the more so as my parents were social liberals who believed (and told people) some of the things taught by the church were wrong.

As Ernie´s schizophrenia really became manifest, there were complaints about his behavior by church members from time to time.  Their darling young ones delighted in picking on him; he might as well have had a ¨victim¨ sign painted on him.  I am happy to relate there were always two or three ladies in the church who would stick up for him.  Mama was a sharp-tongued fighter, and nobody wanted to tangle with her where Ernie was concerned.

We were blessed with the friendship of two couples who have always been on our side.  Both men were song leaders, and they and their wives were accepting of problem people.  They would sit around and talk unperturbed even when Ernie was thrusting stuffed animals into everyone´s laps and otherwise making things difficult.  One of the men even invited Daddy to teach Sunday School with him, an important turning point in his and several other people´s lives.

 The constant emotional stresses weighed heavily on me as a teen, and my attitudes toward church and everything else began to change.  I simply wasn´t in the same world as my contemporaries, dating and all that stuff.  I grabbed onto what I could do - piano lessons, singing, reading and scholarship, sewing and embroidering.  There were daytime friends at school, but not at church except among my parents´ contemporaries.  I didn´t care if people didn´t like me, so long as they realized I was smart and could sing.

An amazing thing happened as we went through the years toughing it out at church.  Gradually at first, but then in increasing numbers, people at church who found themselves with family problems came to my parents.  Mama was very socially active and often initiated contact when she realized there was a problem.  Daddy was the perfect, gentle listener who soothed and listened.  Once his friends at the office held the fort (and their peace) while he conversed for two hours with a lady from Sunday School whose son had a drug problem.  For a number of years, they actually made a difference within the confines of the fundamentalist church.