Pendulum

Copyright © 2011 by Loren Ogin.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4568-0397-1

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-0398-8

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Contents

Chapter One The Beginning

Chapter Two The Marriage

Chapter Three The Awakening

Chapter Four The Relationship

Chapter Five Implosion

Chapter Six A Second Chance

Chapter Seven Another Implosion

Chapter Eight The Medical Boarding

Chapter Nine Being On Leave

Chapter Ten The Phoenix Arises

Chapter Eleven The Barmitzvah

Chapter Twelve Back To Work

Chapter Thirteen A Third Chance

To the reader:

Pendulum is a true account of the life of the author. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals in the book. It is a detailed account of the writers life, from childhood, adolescence and finally Adulthood where the writer develops Bi Polar mood disorder amongst the other Issues she has to struggle with, substance abuse, homosexuality and an abusive marriage amongst others.

This book is dedicated to all those who society considers different and the stigma and discrimination they face.

This book is dedicated to my family who love and accept me as I am.

I love you all.

To all the square pegs in round holes—there will always be a place for us!

To my beautiful wife, thank you for all the support and understanding you have given me. I love you very much.

Life it seems will fade away                      Hello darkness my old friend

Drifting further everyday                          I’ve come to talk to you again

Getting lost within myself                       because a vision softly creeping left

Nothing matters no one else                    it’s seeds as I was sleeping and the vision

I have lost the will to live                        that was planted in my brain still remains

Simply nothing more to give                   within the sounds of silence . . . .

There is nothing more for me

Need the end to set me free                    Simon and Garfunkel.

Things are not what they used to be

Missing one inside of me

Deathly lost, this can’t be real

Can’t stand this hell I feel

Emptiness is filling me

To the point of agony

Growing darkness taking dawn

I was me, but now He’s gone

No one but me can save myself, but it’s too late

Now I can’t think, think why I should even try

Yesterday seems as though it never existed

Death greets me warm, now I will just say good—bye . . . . and die.

Metallica—Ride the Lightening. 1984.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNING

I had a difficult entry into this world. I was born six weeks premature and required two blood transfusions due to jaundice. I was in an incubator for another four weeks before I could join my family.

I was so tiny that my mother was scared to bath me, fearing I would break. My step grandfather used to come over to the house every day to bath me. My father told me that I could fit in a shoe box, I was so tiny.

I had a normal happy, carefree childhood. Two and a half years later I had a sister, Terri. Just before I was due to start primary school, my family moved into a bigger house. A year later, my mother was pregnant again. My mother’s brother and his wife had just had a baby around the same time—Susan. When Susan was just six months old, her mother died. She was only twenty one when she contracted Hepatitis.

My family took Susan and her father into our home as he was devastated and could not look after a baby. My mother who was very pregnant at the time looked after Susan. When my baby sister Ashleigh arrived, my mother was looking after two babies. She even wanted to adopt Susan, but her brother married when Susan was not even a year old and Susan went with her father and step mother. Terri and I used to climb trees and ride their bikes around the neighbourhood. Both of us were tomboys, while Ashleigh was content to sit quietly and play with her dolls and doing girly things. She always felt left out because she was so different to her older sisters as well as the age difference between them.

When I was thirteen years old, my parents got divorced and my mother almost immediately remarried her high school sweetheart. They wanted to get married when they were much younger but because they were of different religions persuasions, her parents would not allow it. He married and she married and they went their separate ways, had children, until years later when they met up again. They used to meet at a friend of my mother. This carried on for years.

My mother moved out of the house to be with him. The night before all of us were due to leave to go live with our mother who had been granted custody, my father came into my room and held me while he cried bitterly. This was scary for me as I had never seen my father express much emotion.

Adolescence was an absolute horrid time for me. Not only did I have to deal with the hormonal war raging inside my body, making me Jekyll and Hyde within the space of ten minutes, I also hated school. I was a morose teenager, listened to Heavy metal music and bands like Pink Floyd. I spent a lot of time on my own in my room. I had also become a surrogate mother to my younger sibling who absolutely idolised me.

As is typical of most adolescents, they become clumsy. Their limbs seem to grow at different times, making them gangly. My feet grew before the rest of me caught up. My mother had three Yorkshire terriers. She had an annoying habit of moving the dog’s water and food bowl to different spots in the kitchen as it was so small. I came home from school the one day with my size six feet and went into the kitchen to make myself lunch. I did not see the dog’s water bowl and got my foot stuck in it. As the floor was tiled, the water made it slippery. I skated out of the back door with my foot still stuck in the bowl.

If there was anything to fall over, step into or walk into, I was bound to do just that. I earned the deserving title of klutz. I never grew out of it. As an adult, I went to the gym and got onto a moving treadmill and promptly flew right off, water bottle one way and towel the other way! I broke my foot when I was in my final year at University by falling up stairs.

The only time the three of us felt safe and secure was when we spent weekends with our father. There was no fighting and screaming as there was at our mothers’ house. My mother’s household was characterised by shouting, physical and verbal abuse of all that lived in the house, particularly Terri and my mother. On one occasion, my mother had her ribs badly bruised by my step father throwing a shoe at her back. I had a glass thrown at me while I was trying to run away from my step father who was in a rage. It broke and cut my hand. Terri however for whatever reason had the worst of it. When she was about twelve, she was going to a braai at a friend so she went to the freezer and took a piece of meat out. To this day it is unclear why this should have provoked their step father into the rage it did. He hit Terri with a shambuk (a leather whip) luckily she was incredibly fast and able to get to the front door and run for safety. She ran to their aunt with whom they had a good relationship.

My father was livid. He called our mother to meet him at his sister’s house (the aunt Terri had run to).I was not present at the time but learned later that my mother had said that there were times that she wished she could shoot my step father. Terri had to go back home even though she wanted to go live with my father. He would be unable to get her to school and fetch her so she had to return home and apologise! Terri swore that day that she would never let anyone ever dominate her again in her life. She stuck to her word!

We were not exactly angels either. When I was sixteen, Terri and two of our cousins got very drunk on Vin Coco and Coco Rico. We all got very ill, except for Terri who cleaned up all the mess. I never had anything with coconut in it ever again and would never use suntan cream that smelled like coconut!

I often walked down to Local Park and lay on the grass looking at the clouds, wishing I could drift up to those clouds and stay there forever in the soft embracing arms of the cloud formations. This was better than the way I used to let out my rage and frustration. I would punch the wall until my knuckles bled and dislocated them a few times. Feeling the pain physically was comforting. It was easier to deal with physical pain than emotional pain.

I immersed myself in reading books as a way of escape, often wishing I could be the protagonist in the books I read. By the age of eleven years old I had read all children’s books and had started reading adult books.

I turned to the religion of my birth (Judaism) when I was around fifteen. It was another escape and search for answers to which I had none. I also did it to annoy my step-father by refusing to eat what the family ate.

I of course did not find answers, rather more questions but continued to follow the traditions of the religion, hoping to find some solace.

I was at school during the height of the Apartheid era and was subjected to the syllabus of the time. I was suspended for two weeks from school when I was in Grade ten because I told a teacher she was talking rubbish during a discussion in class about Steve Biko (she called him a terrorist). I begrudgingly had to write a letter of apology to the teacher on return from my suspension. In the same year, the whole group of Standard eights had to attend veld school where we camped in tents and did obstacle courses. The teachers were looking for those that showed leadership skills so they could become prefects. This experience was nothing more than an indoctrination camp where we were told of the Black danger to white people and how we would have to fight to keep Apartheid alive. This of course incensed me. During these lectures, I would go off into