When Mom Left Dad
When Mom Left Dad
Susie Bell, Midway KY
When Mom finally got it together to leave Dad, after 12 failed attempts and 12 years of marriage, it was in a high speed chase involving a handgun, a pickup truck, and some old Chevy, the latter of which I was made to “get down in the floor! get in the floor now!!” with my sisters. I could not see what was happening, but I learned some 50 years later that Dad had a gun and was chasing us in the pickup and Mom had pulled the Chevy into a repair bay at a gas station, the kind of place where they pumped the gas and you could get your car fixed. She jumped out of the car screaming, “close the door, he’s got a gun, close the door!” and they closed the door, and Dad drove on by not being able to find us and we then drove to Somerset.
At least, Mom says that that was the time that she left Dad, but I think it was another time. The time I remember was when I was in school and instead of going to class after lunch or getting on the bus; I can’t remember which, maybe both two different times, but I was pulled off of my routine by Mom, who was picking me up at school, and I was surprised because I didn’t know that she was going to do this because we always rode the bus except when Mom was leaving Dad, but I hadn’t figured that out. And I was not allowed to tell my friends good-bye, because nobody knew we were leaving, which was a strange feeling as we pulled away from the school driveway.
Not that it mattered a whole lot. I was so shy that I did not know the name of a single person in my class except my teacher. Truth is, I was something beyond shy; I was living in a world inside my head by that age, fourth or fifth grade, and was sometimes aware that other children had appeared in the classroom around me. So as we pulled away in the car, the only friend that I could think of to not say good-bye to was Agnes, the girl who sometimes sat next to me on the bus and who I thought of as sort of my friend.
The other time that I think that Mom finally left Dad was the day that I got into the pickup truck at school, where Mom had again picked us up instead of our getting on the bus, and all of our stuff that would fit in the truck was in it. The most colorful stuff was on top; the Barbie Dream House, other toys and games, like they were just going to be so much confetti driving down 27 to Granny and Granddaddy’s. They did not look secured. I think this must be the real time, because we did not go home again. We went to live at Granny and Granddaddy’s. Mom said the word “divorce” on the way to Somerset and I remember the woozy, weird feeling I got when she said it. The only people I knew who got divorced were in soap operas. I did not know of a single real incidence of real divorce. Were we still real?
A lot of our stuff did not make it on that initial trip to Granny’s. A lot of stuff that made it then did not make it to the apartment, where we went sometime during the next year. A lot of stuff was left behind when we left the apartment two years later, so I was always losing some favorite toys, beloved doll, or some other things that identified my life as “mine”, that told me that I belonged in this place because my doll or my book or some thing that I knew was there. Because I did not know my mother. I did not know who this new person was. Not that I was aware of this. And I soon did not know my older sister, Jennie, who developed rages. In fact, I was not at all sure of myself or my younger sister, Beth, who had been Beppie until the move.
When we first got to Granny and Granddaddy’s, people otherwise known as “Ruby” and “Charlie”, and “Mother” and “Daddy”, we were situated in their upstairs rooms and spent the first few days like we were on our usual visit. We sat on laps and hugged and got the Granny and Granddaddy treatment. If you are really lucky, you know what I mean. Then we kids were sent outside a lot while Mom and her parents “talked”. They talked a lot. After a time, my sisters and I were scheduled for doctor and dentist visits. This was the first time I had been to the dentist. My previous doctor visits had been limited to a shot of penicillin or a battery of immunizations. In those days, you got some of your immunizations at school. The Polio vaccine was administered to whole communities at the public schools. It has to have been cheaper than a visit to the doctor for each round of immunity.
On my first visit to a dentist, at the age of 10 years and 6 months, I had in the bottom of my left side jaw, right where the tip of my tongue could reach, a hole that would on occasion close over and then burst open and ooze pus. It had been there as long as I could remember. I thought everyone had one of those, in fact. I could put my tongue through it to the other, or out, side of my jaw. When it was open, it did not hurt. Poking my tongue through there helped to keep it open. But if I forgot, it would close up and throb and be so painful that I could not touch it and could not let anything, food or drink touch it. It would have to open up again by itself. It was in this condition that the dentist, who was the first adult to become aware of this phenomena occurring in my mouth, and who decided that I would have to have two teeth pulled. I was having to hold my mouth open for my second-ever dentist visit for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, when the dentist announced that it would be easier to pull the two teeth involved if he pulled the one in front of them. So just like that, I got three teeth pulled on one sitting. Years later, I would not have those adult teeth for more than a few years, their development having been compromised by the chronic absess in my jaw.
This is included here because, in my memories, that visit to the dentist was all part of my parents’ divorce for me. Another part was that my Mommy, the mother who smiled so pretty and loved us and would help me hold the baby raccoon and other cool stuff, disappeared. We were in this new town where the kids did not say “Mommy” in the fifth grade. They said, “Mom”, so we said “Mom” pretty quickly. At the same time, my mother changed in radical ways. “Mom” was a woman who lied around crying and played sad Ray Charles records over and over again and cried. She was not able to see me or hear me much of the time. She had headaches in the middle of the night and I was asked to get up from my sleep and go to her bed and rub her back, get her cold wash cloths, and take care of her for what seemed like hours. My bed was a double shared with my two sisters. We had moved to a small shot-gun style duplex apartment on College St. Granny would have to come over and sit with Mom some nights for her headaches.
Everything was about the divorce and whether Dad loved anybody anymore. He did not keep any of the appointments to meet up with us in Lexington, it seemed. We had a Corvair at some point, unsafe at any speed, and it caught fire just about every time we drove up 27 toward Lexington. Mom would be out there in her beehive and a scarf pouring a jug of water on the motor. When the fire was out, she would jump back into the drivers seat and we would take off again. We would go to the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington and wait for him to not show up. I would go into the elevator and ride up and down all the floors. After too many tripe of this, I got bold. I would climb up on the brass handrails, and they were handsome against the wood paneled walls, and I would stick my head out of the little trap door on top of the elevator car and watch the mechanical workings of the elevator. It was fascinating. One time, I saw what I thought was lovely little china box shaped like a heart with a lid, white with pink flowers on it. I asked Mom if she thought that Dad might buy it for me. She said “maybe”. When he didn’t show up, she slipped off and bought the box for me herself. I still have it on my dresser. It is my reminder to remember who really loves you, and who does not.
Jennie was increasingly troubled during this era of our childhood. Being without a father to protect us, she fell prey to a pedifile, our paternal grandfather. She was 11 and a naive country child. There is an innocence about country children and children who grow up away from the world. It is particularly hurtful that such an innocent child would be so violated. It hurts of of us deeply, to this day, any time we must think of it. There is no shame on her part, but there is shame associated with it. I shouldn’t tell this part. Nobody should ever tell. The whole family will say that I should not.
But the fact that this happened to her blew our family apart. It completely altered our childhoods to a new level of nightmare. Understand here that she was a child, that through no fault of her own, she began to fly into rages with Beth and me, and nobody knew why or what to do. In those days, abuse was unthinkable. It just did not occur to anyone the possible underlying cause of her change in behavior. People blamed the divorce. They invented fiction about how close she had been to Dad, how she must have missed him. None of us were close to Dad.
The day that Beth and I read the love letters between our parents, which must have been letters that Mom wrote but did not send, in response to the letters in the box from him, Jennie had not come home from school. She had been beating us up every day, without mercy or warning. She threw a spatula at me and split my leg open. She seemed to have no limit as to what she would do to us.
When she did not come home that day, Beth and I did a strange thing. We tried to tell on Jennie without telling and without any awareness that we needed to tell or that we were telling or trying to tell. We went through the house and made it look like there had been a bloody struggle. We knocked over furniture, threw clothes on the floor and poured catsup through the mess, thinking that we wanted it to look like we had been killed. At the time, we thought we were being clever and funny. We said very little to one another about what we were doing together, and admitted very little to ourselves. Our emotions were so far from our awareness that we could not know the truth of what we were trying to say. What we could not say was that we were afraid that Jennie would kill us, or one of us, like we had been afraid that Dad would kill us. We made the house look like we had been killed, thinking that Mom would come home from work and find this. We crawled under the kitchen sink, a big old white enamel thing on metal legs with a curtain, and sat under there talking for some time, listening for anyone to come in. We got bored, so we went into Mom’s closet to look for something to do. We must have known that the letters were there because we got them down straight away and went back under the sink with the box of them.
We were under there when Mom came in, yelling for us and asking where was Jennie, why was the house such a mess and why hadn’t we cleaned it up, never noticing that it was supposed to be a murder scene. We were in big trouble for the mess and she never guessed our secret or heard our silent cry. To make matters worse, Jennie was late because she had decided to join the band. She came breezing in asking for five dollars for her band fee as though a person could ask for five dollars at any given time in our house. I was so shocked at her brazen request, and mad that I could not bring myself to ask for anything, that I just went back into my shell for another ten or twenty years.
Jennie is my hero. She has every right to every praise we can give her for remaining sane and being a good sister to me these 54 years. This is her story, too. Even when she was in her rages, I knew that it was not about me or Beth, that something had possessed her and that it was not even her. She was gone during that time, lost in the divorce, not to be found again for many years. I love her so, and hope that she can understand the need to stop keeping some of our childhood secrets, for ourselves and for each other.
