Unwanted Burden

Kimberly C. Vincent

Description

I was sent to school for six years without glasses and teachers would put me at the back of the class. People from the Health Department came to the school to check students vision and I finally got glasses in 5th grade.
My book tells a story about a mom who didn’t have time for me, didn’t want me, and didn’t teach me how to talk. Singers on the radio taught me.

Sujets

• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 24 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665734004
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Unwanted Burden
KIMBERLY C. VINCENT


Copyright © 2022 Kimberly C. Vincent.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.
 
 
Archway Publishing
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Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3399-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3400-4 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022921798
 
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/21/2022


H ow could a family be so wrong? I was so shy and timid, and I couldn’t stand up to some of the domineering and overbearing individuals in my family. Did they resent me because I spoiled their Christmas when I was born? You see, I was born exactly one week bef ore Christmas in 1946. My mother had to stay in the hospital for two weeks after I was born, so she missed Christmas at home with my siblings.
I grew up with crippling shyness, but my family thought I was stupid or intellectually disabled. Later on, my father also thought I didn’t have a brain in my head. I don’t think he came to that conclusion on his own, but nobody is talking or confessing. Because of their ignorance, my life was virtually destroyed. Were my constitutional rights violated? We are supposed to have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where were my rights?
In a sense, I was denied my station in life. I didn’t get the education I needed and wanted. I wasn’t allowed to marry the man I fell in love with and didn’t have the children I wanted. I never felt secure in life. I didn’t even have a safe place to live, nor did my son, because of Raymond, the monster I was forced into marrying. He threatened to kill me right in front of our son!
I wonder how many people’s lives have been destroyed because their families thought they were stupid or worse when they were in fact extremely shy and timid. It would be interesting to find out. Even more, I wonder if psychologists have done studies on it. In my case, it wasn’t just my life that was ruined but my son’s as well, since Raymond wasn’t husband or father material to say the least!
A week or so ago, there was a report on the evening news about children who start school and are judged to be suffering from one disorder or another—attention deficit disorder, for example—when in fact, the only thing wrong with them is that they have poor vision. Like me, they can’t see what the teacher is writing on the blackboard, and it hinders their ability to learn and keep up with their classmates. It also undermines their self-confidence. My parents sent me to school for six years without glasses. If it weren’t for the health department coming to the school to examine the students’ vision, I probably wouldn’t have gotten glasses at all. Of course, I was kept back in school, and that made me feel ashamed and gave me an inferiority complex. In other words, I was made to feel stupid!
My sister Roxanne said she couldn’t understand why Mom and Dad didn’t realize I needed glasses, since Mom wore glasses and I just about had to sit on top of the TV to watch it. What a great start to a good education. It wasn’t because my parents couldn’t afford to get me glasses. They could. They must just have believed the person who determined I was lacking mentally. My sister-in-law, Doreen, told me I was lacking mentally because my father was drunk when he produced me, and she evidently convinced my parents that I was incapable of learning.
What was wrong with my teachers at school that they didn’t pay attention to the way I was struggling in class and couldn’t keep up with my classmates? The teachers now seem to be more observant of children’s difficulties with their studies and give them additional help or have a classmate help them. In addition, children are screened for problems with their vision and concentration now and get help sooner to give them a better chance in school. Now there is the No Child Left Behind Act, and hopefully it is working. I was born too soon for that to help me. Teachers now are better trained, and some specialize in working with children who have disabilities. It is a shame that schools weren’t more advanced back in the fifties and sixties to give students a better chance or a more level playing field.
When I was in the third grade, my teacher sat down with me one day, I think to try to draw me out to determine what my problem was. But Mrs. Brubacher wasn’t trained in psychology or in a medical sense to be sensitive enough to make a judgment about what hindered my ability to learn. She evidently also didn’t realize that I couldn’t see well enough to grasp what was on the blackboard. Even more, she had me sitting near the back of the classroom when I should have been sitting up front. It would still be a few more years before the health department would come to the school to perform eye exams.
My family must have believed Doreen that I was mentally lacking, so none of my family tried to get to know me. I was shunned, ostracized, and ignored by my family. I was so shy and timid that I couldn’t stand or speak up for myself. I wanted to crawl into the woodwork. I often wondered why I was treated the way I was, and now it has all come to light.
My parents left me like a sitting duck for Doreen’s deceit and defamation of character. Doreen evidently convinced my parents that I was intellectually disabled, and I was raised like a brainless imbecile. She put the spotlight on me as being intellectually disabled to take the focus off of her and her mental derangement. Doreen is mentally deranged because she is the offspring of first cousins. Every medical professional I have spoken to has told me that people like her are mentally ill and that they can pass their illness down to their children and all of their descendants because it is in their blood from being inbred. There will be more on that later.
I loved and trusted everybody, but I found out the hard way that I didn’t have anyone to trust. My family didn’t want me and resented me to the point that they abused me in different ways. My siblings abused me, and then I wound up with an abusive husband and later a man who was a control freak and stalker. I was so shy and timid that I couldn’t stand up for myself, so I was thrown away like a piece of garbage by my family and treated like garbage by Raymond and the stalker. When I was growing up, I had a lot of family around me, but I was basically by myself, since my family didn’t want anything to do with me. I retreated further and further into my shell. A trauma therapist later told me that my family crippled me emotionally. I always had an inferiority complex because of the way I was treated and because I was short and chunky. Plus, I had a lazy eye that made me look funny. That was later corrected with eye exercises, but that still didn’t change the way my family treated me. In addition, people that my family knew seemed to shy away from me and didn’t give me the time of day. Maybe Doreen had spread her poison about me to others in our community to make them think I was mentally challenged.
One evening, my brother Warren came into Mom and Dad’s house three sheets in the wind. It was a day or two before Christmas, and he and the men had started celebrating the holiday. Warren had had a few too many to drink, and I guess he couldn’t make it home. Warren went into the living room, fell back in a chair, and passed out. Sometime later, Doreen came in there and found Warren. She struck him in the face so hard that I thought his head would go flying across the floor. This was just a year or two after they’d gotten married, and from the look on her face at the time, it seemed like Doreen hated Warren. No one but me and them was in the room at the time, so there weren’t any more witnesses to what she had done. Doreen could have broken his neck as hard as she’d hit him, but I don’t know if Warren ever said anything to her about hitting him or even if he realized what had happened. Doreen was surprised years later when she found out I remembered what she had done. She told me one time that when she gets mad, she can turn their house upside down. Doreen has a vile temper. Another time, Doreen jumped on Warren and broke two or three of his ribs. I think they wanted people to believe they had just been fooling around when that happened, but I think she jumped him because she found out he wasn’t going to inherit our father’s business and that made her extremely mad. I have often wondered whether she’d married my brother because she thought he was going to have that business one day and thought she would be rolling in money.
My father was a construction contractor. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, but she didn’t seem to have time for me. She had five other children at home, and it woul