The name I was born to already had some bad mileage to it.
I was named Raymond William Ho**** III.
My father and my grandfather (Jr. and Sr. respectively) were alcoholics. In fact much of the Ho**** clan were alcoholic.
I learned to hate my father.
He was (and still is) abusive and abandoning. A sociopath is the best way to describe him. I understand he is sick, his soul twisted. But that does not change the fact that I am still feeling the pain of his treatment of me, my brother and sister and the fact that his choices had much to do with the fact that our lives and my childhood were painful wrecks.
The wreckage was bad enough that my brother chose to end his life before fully reaching adulthood and my sister’s life is still in controlled shambles.
I have tried to make amends with him several times. Even though he is in AA, and supposedly sober 20 some years, he has never been open, honest or even willing to face and deal with our past.
In fact the last time we were together was when I was dealing with the death of my grandmother, who had adopted me and tried to be my mother through most of my life. I hoped, as I had so many times in the past, that somehow this event would bring us together and somehow we would heal the wounds between us. Instead he took the attitude that I was to give him everything but the responsibility for the estate, tried to demean the efforts my wife and I had made for my grandmother and, once more, used the pretence of our relationship to rip me off and then walk away.
I try not to hate him. But the pain of it still stings.
There have been times that hate of him and many other parts of my life, has turned into self loathing, seeing myself as weak, ignorant, gullible… a victim.
I have tried so many times in the past to prove (at least to myself) that I am not that weakling, that victim. I have done crazy, dangerous things. I volunteered to do things that might have killed me, possible as a way of committing suicide, possible to make me look invincible to myself. And when doing those things was not good enough, I made up stories of even bigger and bolder things and tried to convince others and myself that they were true. So that I could feel invulnerable.
When that was not enough I drank, drugged, hid out in work, relationships …
I have sunk into deep depressions because of the pain, the fear and so much more.
My grandfather, Raymond Sr. was a workaholic, alcoholic who was mildly abusive, but accepted a massive amount of abuse himself. All he was interested in was work, not having enough money, how bad life was, and, eventually, in just wanting to die.
He was a heavy-duty whiskey drinker, smoker and lived on a diet filled with bacon fat and salt. He lived to the age 75 but the last 25 years he struggled with cancer.
From him I learned that the only thing that mattered was working hard and being a victim.
No wonder why, at the age of 30, with two sons about the age I was when I was abused, in a marriage to a woman who had bee raised to spend money faster than it came in and to be incapable of doing anything other than be taken care of, working a high stress job that demanded always more than I could give, striving to always be more than I was… all of this I chose because it was what I thought was the right thing… I had a breakdown.
The only coping tools I had were booze, escape though work and fantasy, and rage.
Raymond William Ho**** III could not live. He was not born to it. He was not raised to it.
So now I must divest myself of the parts of him that set me up to die a failure.
I must work to heal the wounds of my past, embrace the pain, fill the emptiness, and grieve the loss…
I must choose to amend who I am so that I might live to succeed.
So I choose to leave behind that name and the legacy that comes with it.
I chose to become Hobie Ray Eldritch.
I chose to become what God has enabled me to become.
Hobie