Another piece of the puzzle

As I’ve said in earlier posts I have always felt between unattractive and downright ugly. Realistically, it’s not really ALWAYS. When I think back on my younger life I don’t remember feeling that way. I had lots of friends and a pretty happy childhood. My Dad wasn’t overly affectionate. He was from the Doctor Spock generation and used reverse psychology a lot. Any time any of us fell and skinned our knees his reaction was “did you break the sidewalk?” If I got upset about something it was “go to your room until you can stop crying.”  A few years ago my brother made a joke about if you broke your leg Dad would tell you to “walk it off.”

I do remember one time when I decided to try to sell some birthday candles out on a table in the front of our apartment complex. I was probably seven or so. It was an absolutely ridiculous idea and of course I had no buyers. But I was standing there about a half a block from the entrance to our apartment building when I saw a large group of boys walking down the street toward me. They were pretty far away and I have no idea why I knew they were trouble, but I just knew. I immediately started getting my stuff together to bring it back inside and as they got closer I started walking quickly toward the doorway. I don’t remember if they yelled or said something, but I just started running because I knew I had to get inside the foyer of my apartment building. I would have to buzz my Dad to let me upstairs and I knew that would take time so I ran into the foyer and started pounding on the landlady’s door. The boys all piled into the foyer with me and started hitting me and pulling my hair and terrorizing me. The landlady was an old German woman and I don’t know if it was my pounding on the door or the noise the boys were making but she opened the door with a broom in her hand and started whacking away at the boys. They ran out the doorway and disappeared. The landlady called my Dad and told him what happened. I was crying and scared. My Dad came down and got me and brought me up to the apartment. He didn’t tell me that I needed to stop crying. He just sat me on the couch next to him and cuddled me. I can still remember how good that made me feel. It was almost worth the terror to have that much attention from my Dad.

I’m making it sound like my Dad wasn’t a nice guy, but he was. I idolized my Dad. He was a high school teacher in inner city Chicago in the 1960s at the height of the racial tension of the civil rights movement and his students, black and white alike loved him. He and my mother did janitorial and other work at the Montessori school so they could afford to send us there. He spent a lot of time learning things that would make him a good Dad. I think it was because he hadn’t had a great upbringing. But in his attempt to make us self sufficient and to keep us well behaved, I also learned that it wasn’t okay to cry and showing strong emotion was  frowned upon.

I didn’t realize how much I’d internalized this lesson until several years ago when I started seeing a therapist about unresolved childhood issues. She asked me when I started getting upset, where I felt it in my body. And I told her that I always got a sore throat. I began talking about something upsetting and each time I would get teary-eyed I would choke it off because it wasn’t okay to cry. I had to be strong and self-sufficient. The therapist told me it was okay to cry and so I did, but I was very silent as if I didn’t want to disturb anyone. Then she said, “you know it’s okay to make noise when you cry.” Suddenly I was sobbing as if every horrible thing in my life was trying to make its way out of my throat and I was almost wailing. The pain in my throat disappeared almost immediately. I realized that the throat pain was because I was clamping my muscles in my throat in an effort to keep from showing emotions that were frowned upon.

Fast forward about a year from the incident with the boys. When I was eight one day my mother told me that Grammie was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. I was thrilled because I loved Grammie and I loved visiting her. She told me that we were all going to come to her house to stay with her for a while. We lived in Chicago and her house was in Rockford, about ninety miles away. I thought that was really cool and talked about all of us, including Daddy, coming to visit. She told me my father wasn’t coming. It was just us kids and my Mom. I don’t think I was too worried about it, I just figured Daddy had to work.

So we moved to my grandmother’s house. My Dad stayed in Chicago. We’d been in Rockford for a while when I said something about Daddy coming to be with us and Mom and my older brother said, “Mom and Dad aren’t getting back together stupid, they’re getting a divorce.” I don’t know if I even knew what a divorce was. I just knew that Mom was unhappy a lot and there was a lot of tension surrounding the issue of her and Daddy. But I needed to be strong and self-sufficient and not cry and not create problems by asking questions.

Over the two-three years since we’d moved to Rockford my Dad had gotten remarried and moved to Connecticut. Then one day we got a letter from my Dad saying we had a new younger brother named Ted. (I’ve edited this since the first time I posted it because I was made aware that my timeline wasn’t really accurate. We had visited my Dad in his new home in Connecticut prior to word that my brother had been born. I think the reason I jumbled it all up in my head is because that letter saying that my brother had been born was to my subconscious proof that my Dad had chosen his new family over us and so it took on greater importance, making other things shrink into the background in my memory. ) When we met Ted we thought he was pretty cool. He was a beautiful baby.

We couldn’t really talk about Ted or Florrie though in front of Mom or Grammie. I wasn’t told not to talk about it, I just understood that it was a topic that was off limits. And there was a lot of anger toward my Dad. My mother had a nervous breakdown and signed herself into a sanitarium for a while to deal with it. We stayed with Grammie and my Aunt and were told not to mention it to our Dad. Apparently, my Mom was afraid if my Dad found out about it he would take us away from her. Every once in a while we would hear little snippets of information. I don’t know when I learned that my Dad had married Florrie, a woman he had met when he was still married to my Mom. A lot of it is a blur of confusion and I felt like no one ever told me what was going on. I seemed to spend a lot of those three years we lived in Rockford figuring things out after the fact.

Eventually we moved out of my grandmother’s house and into an apartment in Downtown Rockford. But my mom had never finished college. She’d married my Dad instead. I heard many times from my grandmother how my mom had been accepted at the Sorbonne in Paris and she hadn’t taken it, she’d married my dad instead. My mom couldn’t afford an apartment for us because (I was told) she’d refused alimony out of pride, she only took child support. Our apartment had almost nothing in it except our beds. I just knew that we were living on the edge of losing the apartment and I constantly tried to protect my Mom from stuff. After all I had to be strong, self-sufficient and not cry. I would go to the door and lie to the landlord and tell him that my Mom wasn’t home even though I burned with shame for lying. But I had to protect my mother.

In 1972 my mother signed me up for summer school. After the first few days I refused to go because I wanted to go visit my Dad. It was one of the few times I completely melted down with my mother. Eventually she said we could go. My mother was getting more and more confident. She’d always hated her looks because she’d broken her nose when she was a kid and it had never been fixed. That summer she got it fixed. She had gone back to school to finish and had started going out on a couple of dates. She was more confident and I remember her dropping us off at the airport in a new outfit that was very modern and hip. She seemed more carefree as well.

We spent a couple weeks in Connecticut visiting my Dad and my step-mom and my new brother. On July 19th we were just three days from heading home to Rockford. My mother had told us in one of our phone conversations that we’d been evicted from our apartment and that we would be moving back into my grandmother’s house. But she sounded comfortable with the decision and still confident. And I was happy that we’d be moving out of the apartment. My Dad and step-mom Florrie and all of us kids went out to a local department store. We took two cars because Florrie was going to leave before us to put Ted down for his nap. We got home from the store and Florrie came out and told us to go inside because she had to talk to my Dad. My Dad came in and told us to sit down because he had to talk to us. He said, “I don’t know how to tell you this so I’m just going to say it. Your mother was in a car accident and she was killed.” My younger brother laughed because he thought my Dad was joking. I still remember how surreal that day was. I went outside to visit the rabbits in their cages because I wouldn’t cry in front of anyone. When my younger brother came outside to talk to me I stopped crying because I had to be strong for him. He said, “when Mom gets better we’ll have to get a new car.” I said, “Mom is not getting better, she’s dead.” He said, “then we’ll have to get a new Mom.” It was such a bizarre conversation. But all of us were frozen in this almost dream state where nothing had really sunk in. We spoke with such detachment.

We asked my Dad where we were going to live and he said of course we were going to live with him. He mentioned that my grandmother had seemed unsure of whether or not he was going to take us and he was upset that there was ever a question. There was apparently a contingent of my aunts and uncles that thought my dad should not be allowed to come to the funeral because  of the divorce. But my grandmother put her foot down and said of course he would come. He had been married to my mother and he was our father.

We flew back to Rockford to attend the funeral. We saw all of our aunts and uncles and cousins that we loved so much. But nothing was ever the same again. It was as if they couldn’t separate us from our mother’s death and we always felt as if we were a reminder of bad things. Years later my older brother said every time he saw any of our mother’s relatives he always felt like he was wearing a sign on his forehead that said “Patty’s death.” I know exactly how he felt.

Things were pretty tense between my mother’s family and my Dad at first. But after the funeral they all ended up having a big crying session where they decided to let bygones be bygones. Some of the tension dissipated and it started to feel a bit more like old times. We were only there for a few days. We got to go to our old apartment complex to say goodbye to our friends there. One of my friends had kept the newspaper article about the crash complete with a picture of my mother’s mangled Volkswagen Beetle. My dad was furious later when he found out she’d shown it to me. But I needed to see it. I needed information to make it more real to me. We’d gotten so little information about what had actually happened.

But the truce was not to last. The continuation of the saga will be in my next post as this one has already gone on too long.