I Killed JFK

You probably never knew this about me, but I killed John Kennedy.

Don't feel too bad because you were kept out of the loop. Not many people know. But it's absolutely true. I killed JFK.

How, you ask, is it possible that I could have done this when I was only eleven days old when it happened? Well, I was born eleven days before he died.

Whew. That's a load off my mind. I've been carrying that around most of my life. Probably I just rang the bells on the screen of a computer in some dark little room where some tired, disillusioned agent sits and waits for the phrase 'I killed JFK' to show up on web sites, and I can expect to finally be held accountable, but it feels good to get it off my chest.

Weird, the things we take responsibility for in our lives, isn't it? I mean, yeah, I'm joking. I didn't REALLY kill JFK, you know. But I have REALLY felt responsible for his death ever since I found out how close it was to my birth. Why is it, do you think? What weird part of my make up makes me do that?

When my mother told me I was responsible for her having to marry my father, something she would not have had to do if she had aborted me as planned, when she told me she had another child so I would have someone to play with, when she told me I asked to be raped and molested and wanted my father to fuck me, I believed it. After all, I was also the reason why she had no life, no friends, no job from time to time and a host of ills suffered by my brothers and sisters, because she had to pay more attention to me than them, and for the problems of any relatives we might have in Somalia. I was, in fact, the reason some cells crawled from the primordial ooze and not others, the BETTER ones. Given that, it is easy to see why I bought into it all.

I'm the kind of woman who, if a lamp falls, or if a toe is stubbed, or if dinner is late, or someone tells a lie about me, or if a child is born with a terrible, incapacitating chemical disorder, I immediately start looking for something I did to deserve this karmic revenge. Was I born with the feeling that everyone really hated me and wished I hadn't been born, that I was only told they thought I was bright or pretty or talented to make me feel better and that, in essence, I was a useless piece of dead weight that had no right to be here, or was it drilled into me?

I honestly don't know. But something tells me the answer is important, because I don't want to explore it any further this evening. Somewhere in there is the answer to 'when do I get to come out of my room, now?', when can I be forgiven, now. And I'm not quite sure I'm ready to stop flogging myself yet. After all, irrespective of the evils I committed in the womb, there is all this OTHER stuff I have to atone for. All kinds of nasty shit, like the fat gene I passed down, or the ADHD gene, or....other stuff.

We had a bad night, tonight. IT visited again. We are currently being told that IT is IED, a disorder that turns one of my lovely beautiful children into a raving psychotic for a spate of time before leaving us both emotional wrecks feeling responsible for the ills of the world and, incidentally, any relatives we might have in Somalia. I could give you the details, clinical and detached as they are in the DSM IV, but it would be so much more fun to let you use your imagination, eh? And she has a right to her privacy.

So IT was here tonight. IT happens to my child, and we just have to ride it out. But it's hard....she ends up feeling responsible no matter how many times I tell her it isn't her fault, no matter how careful we are to tell her we love her, and that this isn't something she is doing but rather something that happens to her...but she's 12, man. You can't give your mother a roundhouse punch to the face and tell her she will never be anything more than someone else's dirty whore and feel good about yourself afterward. Not a kid. They can't intellectualize it, you know? They can't seperate themselves from the disorder.

So my child too feels responsible for things that are out of her control, things she never did wrong, things she could never help. And guess what? It's genetic! So guess what that makes me?

You got it. I killed JFK. And she thinks she helped me.

I don't know about anyone else, but if this fucking wheel turns one more time I'm going to set the fucker on fire.

(She rails, in the ever increasing impotent fury she is becoming so accustomed to these days....)