Arlene And Richard T.

20 April 2024

Arlene and Richard Oliveira

25 Shannon Avenue

Tiverton, RI  02878

Dear Mom and Dad:

I hope this message finds you well.  Then again mom, you’re already in paradise, so that’s already a guarantee.  Please say hi to everybody, especially Vavoo Oliveira, for me.

I’m writing to you today as both part of the sobriety and self-healing process.  I spent most of the last 6 months achieving closure.  I even met my birth mom’s husband.  Sheila had a tough life after being raped by her brother at 13 but tried to correct the path as she grew up.

Had I known a lot of this, I would have thought differently growing up.  Growing up, I thought you didn’t support my dreams and instead would just throw money at me to keep my attention somewhere else.  I had no idea you were far less creepy than the crew that made up my immediate family.  Thankfully, one half sister and many of the cousins have been much more normal.

Of course, this got worse in 2011 when I stayed awake for 7 days straight, and you wouldn’t take my calls.  Now I know that you were probably trying to avoid enabling an addict.  That took a little while to learn too.

Of course, if you had done something for me while helpful in the situation, I might have sent the rest of my progress backwards.  I didn’t learn I was bipolar 1 until a year and a half after I got sober.  Destroying a charitable effort via “means of process” is technically not illegal, but when you do it in 3 hours on a Wednesday, Police Officers do wonder if any mental illnesses are playing hide and seek.

Compared to that, my birth family was a total joke.  My dad especially.  He was non-sober, non-managing his mental health on a daily basis, like I was for a long time.  Turns out, between mom and dad, I am one of 8 kids.  Well, it’s 8 because we don’t know if dad was able to produce any kids when he ran away to Oregon.  Did I mention on my last trip, I got to go to the courthouse where he was prosecuted for raping mom??  Talk about shudder worthy and full of “visions”.  Going there while in hypomania would be freaking amazing.

Thanks to being in recovery and managing my mental health, I finally get to take advantage of the opportunities you provided me.  You let me see the world.  Those connections, even if they were provided in order to not engage in supporting my dreams or something else emotional, benefit me to this day.  Just the social lessons have made me a lot of money – most of which I wasted before getting sober back in 2002.  Who is kidding??  Before I found out I was Bipolar 1 in 2012, I’d wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Now I get it.  I should have looked at the bright side of what you were doing and been patient.  I should have realized that the universe’s timing and my timing don’t always match up.  In those cases, the universe tends to be right.

So now, I’m a twice published author because of you.  I’m starting to live the 6th month in Florida, 6 months up north dream because of you.  I achieved political success, outside getting arrested 34 times, over and over because of you.  The motto of Fall River is Scholarship City because of you and Dr. Fradkin.  He asked for the change; you gave me the tools to make it happen.

What I didn’t know you were doing was you were making me ready for any situation.  You created a person who thrives on pressure instead of being scared of it.  You raised one of the few timeshare sales representatives who sold out an entire resort by himself just by standing behind a table that had a sign on it that said, “Directions”.  The worldliness you provided me with made those things possible.

Think of all the things having my connections to the Jesuits made possible for me.  You did that.  I wouldn’t know 1/10th of the “secrets” I do without knowing them.  Bishop Connolly wasn’t about “in the classroom”.  It was about the Chaplain’s Office and running my little operations out of there.  When that wasn’t happening, I learned how to take apart the Bible, so Evangelicals couldn’t hurt women and gay folks with it, and how politics really worked.  That served me in Fall River in a number of Mayoral campaigns very well.

I just wanted to thank you for all you did.  I never did as a kid because I was always hung up on the “you don’t support my dreams” thing.  I had no idea so much else in my favor was going on.  The more closure I get, the more appreciated what you did.

I have no doubt as I discover more, it will get better.  I have dreams of someday having the Oliveira’s, the Gabriel’s, the Fernandes’, the Mello’s, the O’Brien’s, and the Roche’s. Yeah, I’m connected to them, which is why I’m like the 33rd cousin of Joe Biden, all in the same space.  I always try to match up pictures from different eras to see what everybody looked like at the time certain highlights in my early life were going on.

Unfortunately, when mom died in 1996, I was still an addict and an alcoholic, so I never got to tell her any of this.  She can read it from that happy place now.  The really weird part is I almost had this closure in 1987 but had no idea how next to it I was.  That year, on Spring Break, I went to the dog track my family ran back then.  I probably met everybody, including Sheila, and had no clue.  I look like a couple of uncles, so I wonder if they said anything when they saw me??  Would it have been weird if one of them walked up and said “Timothy, is that you??”

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I will always try to do better going forward.

Have a great day and love you always

Your son