One of Sixteen

By C. M. Robitaille

Born in a small railroad city in the far corner of Northern Vermont on a bitter cold January day, Cora and her twin sister were births number twelve and thirteen to an already over populated family that was suffering from poverty, mental, verbal, manipulation and incest abuse.

At a very young age Cora learned how to become extremely loyal to disloyalpeople in herlife. Feeling like she was always a shadow behind her twin sister, Cora grew up feeling like she did not exist even though she knew she was very much alive.

Even when she had doubt, she knew she was alive by placing her hand on her chest to feel her heart beat just to reassure herself.

After years of humilation Cora decides to head into Canada to escape,only to find herself so conditioned to a disloyal and abusivelife that she returns back to Vermont and marries right into the life she struggled so hard to get away from.

After thirty years of living with a replica of her father, Cora finally with the help of Alanon and several counselors learns that she has been addicted to addicts her whole entire life. finally breaking free she removes herself from the only life she ever knew.

Today Cora still lives in that small railroad city that is once again in ression and isin a shockingly state of prescription drugabuseand is still home to some families who suffer from the same unfortunate fate as she did.

Even though she does not feel like a shadow any longer, she struggles every day to stay focused in her own recovery while she fights anexity and heart ache over watching her own sibblings and loved ones who struggle tofight their own addictions and recovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452049793

C. M. Robitaille

Born and raised in Vermont within a large family, i found myself struggling through out most of my life with some sort of nervousness. Even though i had escaped the courageous struggle of being born into an alcoholic family, i still felt my life was not complete. I had lived with the disease and disloyalty of alcoholics long enough to create and mold my life for me, bringing me back to Vermont and falling in love with the same disloyalty and the disease. It took the tragic suicide death of my son at a young age of fifteen before i realized just how trapped and addicted i was to this disease. For the past seventeen years i have survived what i believe to be the most horrific verbal and mental abuse i have encountered since childhood, with none of this being possible with out the help of Alanon and counseling. Several days out of a week i would feel like the only sane thing i did was go to work. As a beautician, i would loose all my fears and anxieties when i had a client in my chair. Their stories were always different and took me away from my own fears, such as the D.S. books i would read. As luck would have it, i would always have to return home at the end of my working day. Some where in the past seventeen years the fears and anxieties that i was once able to conceal were now becoming stronger then i and began to control me. I found myself no longer able to hide in a clients story or a book. Like the alcoholics in my life, i too was now in a situation where i had no control over my own life until the day i finally told myself, " you are in control". Finally breaking free, i now live in confidence but i struggle everyday in recovery to stay clean of the abuse and the mental strain it takes to keep me there.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Introduction

It has taken me most of the past two years of my life to realize that after twenty nine years of struggling with a dysfunctional relationship, marriage and several years of mental and verbal abuse, even with several attempts at counseling, alanon and being in denial, that the alcoholic and drug abuse inflicted life I was living in had already had its hold on me in my childhood and adolescent life and conditioned me for the life I am living today.

Through out my adult life for the past ten years, there has been many, many times when I had thought about my life as a child and thought I hadn’t really accomplished much more in my life as an adult. As a child I lived to please others and looked for love and recognition which I never received. Especially from my parents.

Older siblings, neighbors or friends would befriend you long enough to get what ever it was they were seeking. This would be a time in my young life that I would actually feel like I was someone. More so feeling like I was liked. With no known knowledge, only early learned behaviors from my childhood, I took both those thoughts and feeling right with me into my adult life and marriage and have been unsuccessfully still trying to find and feel them.

Being born into and growing up in an alcoholic generation and family even though I had no idea and it took years for me to realize this fact, I was already molded to continue to live the fear, stress, anxiety, verbal and mental abuse of the dysfunctional alcoholic family I had been born and raised into.

Remembering as a child, it always seemed that the alcoholics had no control over what they were doing. It seemed like they were always out of sorts. They were either happy with laughter, crying with saddens, or ugly with fighting.

What seemed the strangest from this alcohol life for me was I was the one that was being controlled by the actions of these alcoholics, not the active alcoholics themselves. Even when I did not want to do something, it appeared I did it anyway. For me to have had to live by these actions as a child I also lived by the same actions as an adult. Every day I lived for the alcoholic not for me. Everything I did was done with the alcoholic in mind. Never did I think of how I felt about anything, just what the alcoholic thought, needed or wanted. My feelings were never a part of what I did for many years in my childhood, adolescent or adult life.

Today I am still struggling to make my feelings part of my everyday life. It has taken me most of my adult life to realize as a person I never really existed to myself. I never mattered. I have finally learned to become selfish in a good way. It was the only way for me to survive. I am still making sacrifices in my life for other people, However I now include my thoughts, feeling and self before I make any.

Prior to living the past thirty years of my life in love with and loyal to a disloyal alcoholic who also with my enabling became a substance abuse user, I failed twice at trying to find love and acceptance. Failing to believe what I was being told about my husband using street drugs and over the counter drugs, I too failed to believe his addictions by enabling him to receive and take prescription pain medications that I myself had received.

Having several attacks from kidney stones early in our relationship, pain medication was available to him. Learning over the years how I did not agree with taking pain medication, he would tell me before I went to any doctor or dentist appointment take the prescription if they give you one This way I will have something for my back if I need it. For years he had me convinced his back would bother him from time to time. I was more then delighted to give him any pain medication I had in order to help him feel better. I really and truly felt like an important piece of his life when I did. My failure or denial to believe what I was hearing allowed me to enable him when I had the opportunity. Even now when I look back at those years I can still feel the strength of being liked enough to feel like an important part of his life not knowing I was only important because I was an accessible way for pain medication.

In high school I was still just a blocker with a tainted last name. Every day of every week I was taunted, bullied and reminded of it. One night while attending a high school dance, which was a rare occasion. One of my classmates had an older brother in town from Montreal. Not wanting to stay at home, he talked her into bringing him along. Hesitantly, she brought him along to the dance with her. It was his long hair that caught my attention. Everyone was wearing long hair at this time but no one had hair as long as his. His was straight and right to the middle of his back. He looked more like an Indian then my classmates brother. I just had to meet him. I let his sister know it. I was introduced to him and we spent the night talking and dancing.

The next school day, he was waiting at the post office across from the high school for his sister. He then approached me when I walked by the post office and again we began to talk. Every weekday after that he would be waiting for me at the post office when I got out of school and he would walk me to the top of Maple Street. I did not dare have him walk me entirely home for fear of my parents reaction if they would have seen me walking with a male.

Because I wasn’t allowed out and away from my home I would call him on the phone when I could. He too would call me but our calls were cut short as soon as my mother found me on the phone. This angered me a lot as my other siblings were free to use the phone at any time. Even the ones younger then myself.

My mother had received the phone as a Christmas present four years prior in 1968 from my oldest brother. It was her very own and first phone. None of the kids could really use it at first. I did used to get to talk to my grandmother when she called from Massachusetts. Grammie as she was known to us, always made me feel special when she called. Besides my mother I was the only one she wanted to talk to as I recall.

I felt I finally had some thing no one else had that I did not have to share. A short phone conversation with my Grandmother. Over the years I have heard stories from older siblings and family members how Grammie Arpin did not like kids around her and I was the only one who she would allow to sit on her lap. Could she have been doing this knowing I was a shadow to my sister in my mothers eyes and one of the least favorite. Or could this have been the reason my own mother treated me different then my twin sister. Even though I do not remember ever sitting on my grandmothers lap I get a strong sense of belonging when I think of it. I feel someone did know I was alive and existed.

The newness of having the phone for my mother had worn off by the time I met my first boyfriend five years later so my siblings were not on it as much. My twin sister was also at this time talking to a male friend she found interesting. She would be allowed out for freedom and actives with her friends after school and in the evenings. After what seemed like years of having no freedom from my yard, street or with friends, somehow my twin sister had convinced our mother to allow me out with her and her friends. Finally at the age of sixteen I was going away from home for pleasure for myself only. I finally felt like I had some control over what I was doing and did. But I had no control, I was still being controlled.

The adrenalin I felt just from being free of the control of my mother was stronger then the rule I was to follow while being allowed out with my twin sister and caused me to disregard our plans of separating and going our own ways with our male friends and meeting back up later to go home together.

Starving for love and acceptance I allowed my boyfriend who was five years older then myself to do what he said was to show me what love feels like. I finally felt like a real person. I do not ever remember feeling that it was wrong. I do remember feeling like I was so alive with feelings that I never had before. Even though our time together was spent in the dark in an old, musty and dusty railroad building using small birthday cake candles for light and a sleeping bag. I finally felt like I mattered to someone. Even after all these years the only way I can explain it is, I felt like I had instantly got new life into me and I was reborn again. It certainly was a strange experience. I finally found someone who loved me and no one was going to take that away, not even my mother who found out about him and I as I became pregnant. She never took any sort of action against him for having sexual contact with me. She just tried to keep me home again and away from him.

Like the alcoholic who finally discovered alcohol, I finally discover love or so I thought. But I was definitely addicted to him like an alcoholic would be addicted. He convinced me to run away to Montreal with him. He told me if I did not go with him I could not have the baby. He would destroy it by hitting me in the stomach. I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t if I did not go. Standing on a railroad bank one afternoon he made it very clear if he could not have me, I could not have his child. After a child and eighteen months of a marriage that my mother had to sign for, I was once again living back in Vermont and within six months he proved his words to be true by tricking my family and driving away with our son into Canada.

I did not miss the home life I had in Vermont. I did however miss my sister.

In fact even in my new found free world I kept to myself and stayed inside except for the days when I would ride a bus deep into the city of Montreal to spend time with our son who was born eleven weeks early. The sense of surviving that I had learned early in life was once again in full action as I found myself alone hopping from bus to bus in a huge French spoken city trying to discover how to get to where I had to go. The one and only time my twin sister came to visit us I realized I missed and needed her more then I needed my husband.

In January of 1975 I returned back to Vermont and found my twin sister living in her own apartment which had an extra bedroom. It was perfect, I was able to move in and stay with her. Before succeeding in taking our son back across the Canadian boarder by tricking me into going to get a wash cloth to wash his face, my twin sister had to literally pull him from my his fathers arms as he had attempted to take him from her home.

After he had taken our son and safely got back across the boarder there was nothing I could do but hope he would tire of him and bring him back. It never happened. Instead he took our son to live with his own mother and returned him to me at the age of thirteen.

In the late summer of 1975 my sister had introduced me to an old friend of hers.

He too like my husband, was five years older then I but was more mature and very settled. He had already owned two homes and a fine collection of older model corvettes. Out of my entire life I can honesty say the summer of 1975 has been the most memorable year of my entire life. He loved to travel and had taken me to so many places. I had no job, no money and he still took me. I remember always feeling so excited because I got to go to all these places for free. I went from living under the control of my parents, to the control of my first husband and now here I was living in what seemed like a dream. Everyday I wished my son was with me to experience the wealth I was feeling even though I knew it would have been impossible to take these trips with a young child of two. Sometimes we would drive for twenty four hours straight stopping along the road for two short hours of sleep. Not easy to do in a corvette.

Money was nothing to him. If he and I went into a store and he just saw me look and admire something he would go back and buy it for me the next day. I literally felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I had never for one split second in my life ever had anyone ever give me so much material things or food. He was the one who introduced me to so many, many different foods. Foods I had never had before. When ever I see ring dings I always remember him. He gave me my first one and even today my mouth will water when I think back to that day and that first bite. Until now those were just something I would admire and drool over in a store.

Besides living in Canada, I never ever had to worry or fight over what I was going to be able to wear on my back or have to eat. I did not have to find some thing to wear and hide it for fear my sister would get it before I got up. I never really had any clothes anyway except for the ones I had had on my back when I went into Canada. On a short visit back home for a sister in laws wedding, one of the older twins had given me a bag full of her old clothes. She too had a job now and was buying clothes for herself. I remember her always being nice to me.

Money is what tore him and I apart. His life style was to rich for me. He had a secure job, priories, respect, and extremely high morals. Some thing I knew nothing about. Having more then anyone could ask for at your finger tips daily was to confusing for me. Even though there was a vacuum and carpet shampooer, I still scrubbed floors on my hands and knees. Even an entire room of carpet. I had no idea how to relax and just enjoy what was there. Everyday I found myself scrubbing some thing. That’s all I knew.

Like the summer of 1975, I know now that I had found the real true love I so longed for and because of his richness and my poverty I threw it away with out knowing there were people and help for me out there.

Some times I get so angry. I have been so mentally and verbally abused I am now receiving professional help once again. It angers me because I knew nothing more then disloyalty and walked away from true loyalty with him. It really would have been against all odds for me to have lived in any other type of family life as an adult. Because of the alcoholic life I was born into, all odds of a healthy married life were already working against me. I was all ready preconditioned for a devastating life and if ever again a marriage.

To put it quite frankly, there has been fifteen siblings to marry with only four males of the fifteen still with there original wife’s. All other siblings have married more then once including myself who had married the same man twice. Like my parents who stayed in their marriage very unhappy, myself and some siblings have followed that path.

Unlike one of my younger siblings who lived a very short life and never married but lived in more then one very disloyal relationship. He struggled with a devastating life of alcoholism and drug abuse for over half of