Hardwired “Neglect of the Heart”

HARDWIRED

"Neglect of the Heart"

Ramona Pedròn

Brighton Publishing LLC

435 N. Harris Drive

Mesa, AZ 85203

www.BrightonPublishing.com

ISBN13: 978-1-62183-231-7

Copyright © 2013

eBook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover Design: Tom Rodriguez

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction based upon real life experiences. The characters in this book are fictitious and the creation of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to other characters or to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Acknowledgements

To Joyce Combs for taking the time to lift the veil through which I perceived the world early on when my days at Lyman were numbered.

To Lulu Fernandez Arias for teaching me that success is love for oneself and family rather than the things that I could achieve.

To Chris Rosenthal for having patience with me while I learned to become a master of my own blueprint.

To Jennifer Cole for encouraging me to keep pecking at the keyboard when I just wanted to give up.

To Mami for making me strong, courageous and compassionate before I realized these were qualities that were worth striving for.

Dedication

For Maria and Carmelina.

Continuing the Love.

Reviews

Hard Wired is a beautiful account of a child desperately trying to survive life with a mother severely affected by mental illness. Ramona Pedron paints a picture of pain, abuse and survival techniques, yet includes forgiveness, restoration and love. Ramona shows us that determination to create the life you want is possible when you take the steps to change how you think about yourself and circumstances in your life. A great read!

Katharine White, MSW, LCSW

Psychotherapist

***

In her soul-bearing memoir, author Ramona Pedron reveals not only a life of hardship and suffering, but also a resolute quest for grace, peace, and forgiveness. Hardwired reveals the personal history of a survivor—one woman’s determined effort to seek answers to one of life’s most difficult questions—is there a place for vengeance?

Publisher

Chapter One

Tony was well on my ass, and I was giving it all I had. My feet were pounding the hot asphalt just as fast as I could get them to. At first, all I could hear was the sound of my feet drumming the street and the change in sound once I hit the grass. Then it was my heartbeat pounding in my ears. It was at least a half mile to Rose Avenue—I’d chased my school bus farther than that. I had it in sight, yet there didn’t seem to be any way of outrunning him. Fear was slowing me down to the point that I thought I would stall out, so I reached out with my arms and then pulled them in a little harder, as if I could grasp the air. My breath was heavy now, and my side was beginning to burn. My right rib was sending me a sharp pain that was telling me to stop.

My choices as I ran for my life that afternoon were now narrowed down to death from the pain in my side, or whatever Tony had in mind once he caught up to me. When I slowed down and turned to look for him, I saw he was gaining on me. It only took him a couple of leaps from there; he extended his right arm as far as he could to grab hold of my shirt. I arched my back in an attempt to give myself at least a fragment of an inch more distance. He managed to catch a piece of my shirt with the tips of his fingers, and they tangled up enough to pull me down to the ground with him as we both lost our balance. My first reaction was to coil up with my back on the ground. As a girl, I knew one fact to be true: I had greater power in my legs than in my arms. If I could get him in the nuts, I could get away from him.

Tony and I struggled on the ground for what seemed like a split second. Before I knew it, we were on our feet again and facing one another, holding tight to each other by the fronts of our shirts. His dark hair was soaked with sweat; his green eyes pierced through pieces of his hair, which draped across his face. His eyes were exactly like mine. He was my older brother and, as much as I never wanted to believe that, for the first time in my life I saw myself in his eyes. His nose had the sprinkling of freckles as did mine. His face was bursting red and his lips were opened just enough to show me his clenched teeth. He had the same cleft in his chin as my mother.

I was so lost in observing him that he got his shot at me. Before I had a chance to resume the fight, he punched me right in the stomach. The blow folded me over and all I could do was pull both hands into my abdomen. I rolled my head up and watched Tony standing there, satisfied with his offensive move. He placed his hands on his knees as he bent over to catch his breath. I fell to the ground in the same folded position, and I could see his chest expand and constrict heavily as he caught his breath again.

I’m not done with you yet, he said, huffing for air. I couldn’t find enough air to fill my lungs so I could insult him. I wanted to so bad, but words weren’t leaving my lips. I wanted to remind him what a fag he was. Instead, I watched him silently as he eventually straightened up, turned around, and walked away. He broke into a run, and I watched his Converse sneakers streak back across Pond Ave. I rolled over and turned my back to him with the confidence that he wasn’t coming back. I just needed a new position to heal myself.

While I lay there, I watched cars whiz by and waited for an opportunity to inhale air again. I counted as the colors changed. Blue, green, green, white—I looked for a pattern in the colors going past. I closed my eyes tight and imagined going deep into my stomach again in an attempt to push out the blow I had just received. Then I opened my eyes, looking up at the trees and all the air that was blowing through their leaves and none in my chest. I rolled over onto my back and attempted to straighten out, but I found more comfort with my knees to my chest.

I stared off into the sky for a moment, wondering why everything seems so random. Why isn’t there order? Wouldn’t the trees look neater if they were lined up in a row? What about the clouds—couldn’t they form some significant figures to entertain us when we’re down on the ground looking up? Air was beginning to return to my lungs, so I took in shallow breaths for fear that my lungs would explode due to taking in too much air at once.

Is there a God up there? I asked out loud, barely opening my mouth so the words were only a whisper. Are you up there? I asked a little louder. Watching us beat the crap out of each other down here? I closed my eyes, rolled over on my side, and began my usual prayer. Please God if you exist help me. Get me out of this hellhole. I opened my eyes and watched the traffic a little longer. What does God see? Is he really observing us and doing nothing? It felt to me that everything around me was just a prop. None of this is real. They are all actors and I’ve been set up to suffer so that God can watch from above and… What? And what? Are you watching, God? Well now, I’m going to watch you. I was not whispering a prayer to him.

I watched the cars again, trying to find a pattern. I was attempting to catch God fooling me with the distractions of cars and trees and clouds. I counted in between the white cars, seeking desperately to find a pattern that would allow me to crack some sort of code to the almighty one’s randomness. It was perfect randomness. I occasionally caught a pattern but found no consistency in it. Good job, God, it almost all looks real. Am I alone here on this earth and everything is just placed here to fool me into believing that I am not alone but I really am? Is this an experiment of some sort? The thoughts didn’t make sense to me, but somehow I felt alone and separated. Is this a test? I hated tests. The results always had insight to who I was and yet I never thought it was an accurate account of me. What do I reflect? Are all these things that are happening to me done with a purpose? Does something or someone control everything? Is that what God is? Is he the something that controls everything?

Hey—are you okay? I saw a stranger’s face above me. It was the face of an older man with salt-and-pepper hair that matched his mustache, which looked freshly combed and neatly trimmed just at the center of his lips, hiding his upper lip. I tried to maintain some sort of composure.

Yeah, I’m okay, I answered as I got up.

Who was that? he asked me with authority in his tone as all adults in the seventies did when encountering young people—even twelve-year-old girls who’d been roughed up. His voice was high-pitched and soft to the ears.

That was my brother. I’m okay. We fight like that all the time, I mumbled, brushing the grass off my shirt, an action that allowed me to keep from having any further eye contact with the stranger.

I saw what happened to you, but I got caught down the street and it took me a while to get back here. Can I offer you a ride home? He pointed to his white car as he spoke to me.

Really, I’m fine. I live close. I began to walk in the direction I was pointing as I replied to his offer. He backed away with a questioning look on his face and finally turned his back and got into his car. He continued to watch me; I could feel him behind me until he reversed his car and returned to the pattern of traffic that he had left just a few moments ago to check on me.

I turned around and watched the traffic again in an attempt to hear my own argument that I might find a pattern that meant something. I realized right then that the pattern I had been looking for earlier was affected. The very fight between brother and sister changed a very random blueprint of something as effortless to any of us as the pattern of traffic.

I thought about the great women I admired, the ones who had the power to fight evil. The Bionic Woman could hear a conspiracy being planned from far away. She had power. Wonder Woman could shield herself from gunfire with her shiny wristbands. She had power too. Today something I did was powerful enough to interrupt a pattern. That was what I wanted: the power to change things. Patterns could be changed, as I was witnessing, but I wasn’t sure how to execute the weapon that could make that happen. I wondered if this could explain why it was random. Was it due to interruptions by us?

I counted again between the white cars for the new pattern. I used the white cars as clean slate markers to count in between them as colors appeared. The statistics that I gathered from the count didn’t tell me much about the world, but I did find a correlation between something I had done and the world out there. I realized that if anyone had been counting cars down the street from me, he would not understand why the interruption took place. He only saw that the pattern of traffic he watched had changed, or experienced an interruption. Did this mean that I was somehow in control? Could I have some power? I didn’t feel like I had any control until this point in my life. Could the things that I did actually affect the world out there?

I learned that afternoon that the answer was yes.

***

I began my walk home with the crazy thoughts that were plaguing me about the order of things and a God and being watched. I wondered if this was meant to happen. Do I require such dramatic effects on behalf of this God I kept hearing about who was in charge and in control in order to learn something? Is that all it is? Dramatic effects to lure me into some sort of programming that makes me behave well or to comply with what this God had planned for me?

I crossed Pond Avenue and made my way around the corner of our street, stopping only to peek down the road with my eyes peeled for our driveway. I had to know what was going on there before I opened the door. I saw my parents’ cars and suddenly felt a mixture of relief and regret. Tony and I were not going to finish this tonight, but who the hell knew what kind of mood my mother was in that afternoon. You never knew what you would be walking into, so I learned to try and gauge it before stepping on the property. Sometimes you could feel it before walking in. An eerie feeling came over me every time I went home, and I wondered sometimes who I was kidding about my ability to feel from a distance what the tone was inside.

I began to push myself down the street. The closer I got to the house, the stronger I felt an invisible shield push against me. It was a sort of magnetic field you can’t see, and yet you would have to work against it to get closer to the destination that you dread. A lot like jumping out of a plane: you’re so scared, but then you get sucked into the action and surviving is the only thing you are thinking about until you hit the ground again. This force pushes against you and makes whatever your mission happens to be a difficult and treacherous journey. That was the very experience of going home every day.

I reached the front door and pushed it in. I heard screams coming from my younger sister’s room. I went back outside and ran around to her patio slider door, where I found Tony holding the door closed so she couldn’t get out. He still had on the shirt that I had mangled in our confrontation. Through the glass, I could see my mother ripping Carmen’s arms and legs open with a belt buckle, holding the belt on the holed side and swinging the buckle across my sister’s back. I ran back inside the house and down the hall to her bedroom door, trying to decide my next move in the event the door was locked. I decided I would kick the door down if I had to. That was my plan as I headed for her room, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw my stepfather holding her door shut, preventing her escape through that route.

Hey, the police just pulled up! I hollered at him. He let go of the doorknob and ran for the front room window. I scrambled for the door and got inside. Carmen had backed into a corner of her closet. My mother was standing over her, swinging the belt. Carmen had fallen on her butt and was holding a defensive position with her arms across her face and her knees pulled in so her legs protected her torso. I could see tiny drops of blood on all her extremities.

I jumped between my mother and my sister, hoping to interrupt them. Just like the traffic earlier. The belt came down one last time and landed on my head. Everything seemed to freeze at that moment. Time itself seemed to stop. I saw my mother drop her belt. She appeared to surrender—something I had never seen before in her eyes. My brother dropped his arms to his sides, his shoulders slumped and his eyes projecting fear. My sister stopped crying and relaxed her arms and legs a little.

My stepfather strode through the threshold of my sister’s room. I felt the warm thick liquid run down the front of my face, but the room, which had been spinning a second ago, had come to a stop. It still hadn’t occurred to me what had happened until I reached up to my head and brought my hand back where I could see it. My hand was covered in blood. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as I struggled to put it all together.

I saw my mother run out of the room, my stepfather trailing behind her. My sister got up and handed me a dirty towel off the floor. I just looked at her. She reached with the towel to cover my wound and then hesitated. I grabbed the towel from her and pressed it to my head with both hands. Tony was watching us through the sliding glass door, a look of disbelief on his face.

My knees buckled under me, and I allowed myself to fall with them. I permitted the side of the bed to bear the weight of my back while I remained in a squatting position. I was becoming frightened by all this. In the past when my mother had beaten us, the most we’d ever walk away with was some bruises and belt burns. She never broke the skin. There was a new line crossed here today. Things were definitely getting worse. How was I ever going to explain this?

I could hear my parents arguing. My stepfather was trying to convince my mother that we needed to go to a hospital. She offended his manhood and begged him to let her think. Finally, my stepfather quit pleading with my mother, and my brother left the sliding glass door. I focused on Carmen, who was attending to her own wounds. She would occasionally reach up to her jet-black hair and twist it up slowly, as if she were twisting out a thought. Pulling the twist out tightly to straighten it again, she would glance at me with her huge black eyes every once in a while. When I caught her, she would look quickly away. Carmen had the most beautiful olive complexion. She looked more Cuban than anyone else in the family. She was the spitting image of our father, with her perfect nose, long black lashes that outlined her eyes, and articulately expressive eyebrows that gave away her every emotion.

I got up and wandered off to my room. Come here, my mother demanded as I made my way past her perch on the couch. I walked over to her slowly, still holding the towel to my head. I got close to her and bent down to where she could see. As she reached for the towel, I flinched. Come here and let me look at that! she yelled. The vibration of my mother’s voice had a manipulative effect on all of us. I came back to her, and she pulled my hands away before peeking under the towel. She pushed the towel back down quickly and instructed me to keep pressure on it because it was still bleeding.

Please can I go to my room? I asked under my breath.

Yeah, just keep that towel on it and don’t go to sleep, she said.

Don’t go to sleep? I thought. What the hell? How am I supposed to keep myself from falling asleep for crying out loud? I headed for my private haven of the house and closed the door behind me. I leaned my back against the wall and slid my way down to the floor until I landed on my ass. I released one hand from the towel as I reached over to my nightstand and turned the radio on, then I used both hands to keep pressure on my wound. I could feel the blood on my face dry up like a mud mask I had once tried that made your face feel like a cracking statue.

The volume on the radio was low enough that I could still hear if anything else broke out. It didn’t matter what song was playing or what the station was today—any noise would comfort me. I heard my mother’s thighs rubbing as she made her way down the hall. It had a special rhythm to it. She’d had polio as a kid, and one of her legs was shorter than the other, so the rustle of her thighs had a unique pattern that distinguished her from anyone else coming down the hall. She was overweight for a five-foot woman, but that didn’t slow her down. I turned the music off, and she entered my room. She shut the door