Jeremy

What I already wrote here wasn't really about Jeremy. My tendancy to waunder and ramble leads me astray.  

Jeremy is both a very simple and a very complicated person. 

First, Who He Is was altered by brain damage as a child. He had a head injury, possibly two head injuries,  that damaged his right frontal lobe causing epilepsy. Then there had likely been more damage from the grand mall seizures. On top of that, his mother did drugs including LSD during pregnancy and he was severely abused growing up. 

Jeremy, the Basic Person he is, is a beautiful soul. That was all my mother saw when she looked at him. When she chose him for me. Sadly you don't see it very often any more, but Jeremy's eyes are honest and full of heart. My family have pretty much beat that out of him for the last 19 years but I can still see it. That is terrible. From Jami and Mikey throwing him out while I was in the hospital, making him cry telling him he Wasn't Family to Jeanette spitting in his face to Jess and Jessalynn demanding I throw him out, he has been thoroughly abused by us. I've always been in the middle of this and too often protecting my daughters instead of him. 

Mom said he had true Loyalty and would take care of me forever. My promise to stay with him let her die in peace. 

Could she have possibly Known?? 

Jeremy has been so beaten down by us that I can barely see the man my mom left me with. But he is still Here. 

Jeremy was the Only person in my life when we met and for more than the first year. We were deliriously happy most of the time.  Every day was bright and shiny. An adventure. And we weren't living "easy". We were mostly broke living in either a broke down trailer or in a teepee Jeremy built on Barefoot's land. We collected junk and sold it along with houseplants I started and Jeremy dealt a little weed and sometimes he sold plasma for money. Life was very simple. Jeremy was like a genie in a bottle doing everything to grant my every wish. I took care of things like figuring out how to get the medication we needed, free medical care, and keeping up with anything legal and I did most of the cooking and cleaning although he helped with everything I did and he took care of Everything Else. I said I would love to live in a teepee and the next day he made an amazing one out of long metal rods and painter's canvas he found. I wished I had a pond for Mom's koi and he found a pond liner and dug once for me.  Everything felt magical. 

I was depressed and suicidal when we met.  My entire family had cast me out after my 22 year marriage ended except for Mom.  She was the only reason I was still alive when I met Jeremy and I had no intention of surviving her. 

My brother had me committed not long after I got to Houston. My mother said it was because of his long vendetta against me for suggesting his wife should take the kids and run when he was strung out on meth years and years ago. And she said it was also part of a plan to be sure I didn't inherit the 2 million dollar lawsuit she expected to collect from Dow Corning. Whatever. In Harris County Psyche I befriended a woman named Stacy. She had perfectly sculpted eyebrows and we were locked in a psych ward with all our belongings taken away. I knew she had tweezers!! We were both on a 10 day hold and we ruled the ward together after teaming up. 

Several of us agreed to meet when we got out. We were all homeless planning to be each other's support system. Stacy got out first and I went to our meeting place, Smiley Inn, when I got out. When she walked in with Jeremy I had the feeling of Destiny that I never experience anymore although I had no clue of what we would Be. A few of the others joined us but it narrowed down to Jeremy, Stacy and me and then just him and me. 

Jeremy was very young. 27? and in many ways he was even younger for his age. It was like no one had raised him to survive in this world beyond being a teenager,  and pretty much no one had.

Quickly, Jeremy had one positive influence in his life, his Nana, his father's mother. His father died in a traumatic car crash with Jeremy in the car when he was 4. He lived with his mother and who ever she was with until he was 12 and then she moved to Oklahoma leaving him with her last boyfriend,  who called himself Barefoot, an abusive small time drug dealer. Jeremy stayed with Barefoot until shortly before I met him when Barefoot threw him out. 

Jeremy had a big windfall inheriting $30,000 from his Nana when he turned 18. Barefoot and his mother talked him out of a few big chunks of it that he never saw again. 

Jeremy actually got his diploma from Sam Rayburn High School and was offered social security disability that he turned down. He lives as much as possible in denial of his epilepsy. The stigma of it left him deeply scarred. Even now, he hates for anyone to know that he is epileptic and refuses to acknowledge any limitations he has from it. 

I'm sure Barefoot made this worse. He referred to Jeremy by a slur nickname I won't dignify by naming here and he beat him severely until Jeremy beat him. I know he used to put Jeremy in a trash can for punishment so its easy to assume how degrading Barefoot was for him.

It really makes me sick to write that knowing that my girls have treated him even worse the last 20 years!!

When I decided that I had to return to Omaha and be Mom and Grandma again I begged Jeremy to let me go alone. I knew that I would no longer be able to be the person I had been with him. I knew that my daughters would probably be unwilling to accept him with me. I told him this over and over.

He had seen my pain over my family. 

Then my daughters decided they wanted to be part of my life again.