Storm Clouds Gather

When we first moved to Alabama things didn't seem so bad.  We moved into the big gray house that my father had rented for us.  I remember it almost down to the last detail - the rooms, the furniture that we had, the yard.  My brother and I had the two downstairs bedrooms, while my sister and parents had the two upstairs rooms.  Now that I think about it it seems strange that my brother slept that far from my parents since my mother was so protective of him, but I guess it was due to the fact that my sister may have been starting to get in trouble, even though she was only about 12 or 13 when we moved there, and maybe that was a way to try to keep an eye on her.  

At first I loved my room - it was painted in pastels and I had chiffon curtains on the windows.  That changed shortly.  Our backyard was fairly large, with lots of skinny pine trees and bushes along the back, and someone had installed a street light in the back corner.  One night as I was preparing to go to sleep I looked out my window - and saw the very clear silhouette of a body hanging outside, even down to the detail of a rope extending from around the neck up and out of my line of sight at the top of the window sill.   I promptly got completely under my covers - and slept that way for years.  I have tried to think if what I saw could have been caused by a bush or tree, and even now I cannot figure out anything that it could have been.  After that night, I was so scared of the dark that I would sleep under my covers whenever I was alone and it continued nearly into adulthood.  I am not a big believer in ghosts, just for the record.

During this time my mother was very active in the neighborhood.  She was a member of the garden club and I can remember the hostess gowns that she wore to some of the events.  One was a gold lame', and one night I fell asleep on her lap, thinking how pretty my mother was in her gold gown.  We had a boat, but she didn't like them very much and rarely went with us when we took it out on the water.  We had friends in the house "next door" - we were separated by two or three vacant lots - and across the street that we played with, and my parents were good friends with their parents as well.   Unfortunately my arrival broke up the friendship of the girls of these families - since I was "new" they both vied for my time I guess, and after a while they disliked each other intensely.  

Eventually the family across the street moved away and I played mostly with Scarlett, who lived down the hill.  My mother and hers got along well - they both enjoyed social activities, and were very much the picture of what a proper Southern lady should be for that time.  At the time, both families had housekeepers that came in a couple of times a week.  Scarlett was scared of hers, while on the other hand ours was scared of my mother.   She must have been getting a good dose of my mother's powerful personality.

It was during our first years in Alabama that my sister started getting in trouble.  One of the first incidences was on Halloween.  I remember my dad going out on the front porch and firing a pistol into the air - teenagers were rolling our yard with toilet paper.  They had already succeeded in making a huge mess.  As it turns out, my sister was part of the group and she carried a large part of the burden of cleaning up the next morning.  Then she broke into a neighbor's house and painted a lampshade in the son's room - he was a couple of years older and she had a crush on him if I remember correctly.  She was already smoking pot at this time, and was dabbling in other, stronger stuff too.  She ran away twice during those years.  The second time was when she stole my mother's car.

My parents started having horrible fights too.  My mother would have a few drinks and the rages would begin.  Usually my dad kept his voice level while hers rose more and more and she called him really nasty names.  My siblings and I would cower in a bedroom sometimes while she went on - my sister and I knew what she could do when she was mad.  One night when I was five or so I was awakened in the middle of the night by my bedroom light coming on.  I opened my eyes to see her coming at me with a belt and rage flashing in her cold eyes.  I still don't know what I had done that she had stewed over while she drank, but at some point she decided I needed to be punished.   It must have been while my dad was traveling - in the earlier years he was gone quite a bit.   My dad did get fed up one of those nights.  Strangely enough I saw it - he had returned from a trip and brought me a set of small porcelain dogs, which I realized I had left on the coffee table when the fighting started.  As I stood there my mother reached out with her foot and knocked the table over.  It landed upside down on my new gifts and I finally braved it and went over to see if they were broken.  Miraculously they weren't and I picked them up and started to go to my room when my mother picked up a very heavy book - it may have been our family bible - and hurled it across the space between her and my father, who managed to move enough that it only glanced off of him, knocking his glasses askew.  I had stopped dead in my tracks and watched as my father sat, perfectly still, for a few moments, then reached down, picked up the book and threw it back at her.  It hit her in the leg.  I don't know if it shocked her so much that she got quiet, but I cannot remember what happened after that.  The next day her leg was bruised so badly that my dad took her to the doctor.

There was a night when she got so bad that my father loaded the three of us in the car and drove around for a while.  When we pulled into the driveway a bit later he saw flames in the front window.  I remember him exclaiming, "My God, she's set the house on fire!"  He instructed us to wait in the car.  Soon the fire trucks showed up, and the cause of the fire was put down to a cigarette being left in an ashtray that was too close to the curtains.  

There were good memories here too.  In the fall our back yard would be full of leaves that Daddy would rake up - but first he would rake bike trails through the yard for us, looping the trail around trees before finally making huge piles that he allowed us to jump into before finishing the job.  I also remember the Easter morning when I awoke at dawn and thought I would look out my window and see if I could spot any eggs and get a jump on my sister, who usually got the lion's share.  Instead I saw the "Easter bunny" - my dad, walking around with cartons of eggs.  I never said a word until just a few years ago, when I told him about it.

There is so much to remember and tell.  There are also apologies I wish I could make to the people who were hurt, but I think most of all I wish someone could have understood what was happening to my mother before she destroyed not only herself but others around her.

The Ugliness

I have been thinking about my grandmother a lot, and I realized that I have evaded the most shameful part of my story:  my mother's past and her time in prison.  This is what I alluded to when I said that my story would not always be chronological, because so many years made up what my mother became and the destruction of our family that resulted.

After hearing hidden stories from relatives and putting together what happened around me when I was younger I realized that my mother was a very hungry woman.  She also had a willpower that was hard to stand up to or overcome.  My older sister, who I no longer speak to, fought against it.  She ran away from home in her very early teens - at the age of twelve she stole my mother's car while we were living in Lake Forest, Alabama and made it all the way to Oklahoma before she was apprehended and my mother went to pick her up.  I am sure that the car ride home was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my sister's life.  I was the mouse - I didn't talk back and tried to do what was expected of me without making waves.  My brother?  He was probably the most victimized since my mother made him her "sympathy card" - after brain surgery as an infant she coddled him and protected him, refusing to let up on the reins even when he was in his twenties.  Her influence on him is still evident to this day.

I suppose it is best to lay out the facts of the events that led to my mother's imprisonment and then go backwards in subsequent posts.  

My grandmother developed Alzheimer's Disease in her 70's, but we were not aware of its insidious creep into her life until later.  Unfortunately for all of us, by the time it began to clearly show it's ugliness, my grandmother had moved into my mother's household to ease the financial burdens on both she and my mother.  

I left home on the night of Christmas Day, sneaking out in the middle of the night after a horrible fight with my mother.   My boyfriend (who I was not supposed to be seeing anymore...his "sin"?  Not leaving his parents high and dry after a hurricane to come help MY mother clean up HER yard - literally) had braved her hatred to call and ask if he could come by with a small gift for me and she allowed it.  This made him brave enough to call me later during her "awake" hours, and then to do it again a bit later.  Needless to say I had begun saying it was other friends, but she got suspicious.  It got very ugly.  At one point she tried to push me down the stairs, and when my grandmother tried to intervene I watched as my mother forced her back into her room and slammed her arm in the door two or three times until Grandma gave up.  When I left later I went to her and told her I was going and she didn't try to stop me.  Just told me that she loved me very much.  Then I snuck down and said goodbye to my brother. 

It didn't last long.  When my mother called my father (I guess she didn't want the embarrassment of the town knowing she had TWO runaway daughters so didn't call the police) he knew where I was and drove to Jody's parents house from where he lived in Birmingham.  They had allowed me to stay there that night, but they all explained that we had no choice.  So I "moved" to live with my father and stepmother. 

Those were my last days under my mother's roof.  I never went back, but the rest will come in another post.  I wonder if things would have been different for my grandmother and my brother if I had stayed.  Maybe not, because I am sure I would still have moved out and away before the worst of what was to come. 

Early Years

I imagine that when I was small my mother was almost content.  My father had a good position with a large company and the income was probably decent.  As the years went by though she began to want more and more and pushed my father to find better paying jobs - which of course backfired after a number of years because no one wanted to hire someone who only stayed at his job for two or three years.  My father went from being the regional vice president of sales for an aircraft corporation to a man who years later had to sell his furniture in order to buy groceries.

I only remember bits and pieces of my childhood.  I was born in San Antonio, Texas but I don't particularly remember the years that we lived there.  You have to understand that by the time we moved to Alabama when I was in second grade that we had moved from Texas to Oklahoma, back to Texas and back to Oklahoma again, so my time in those places only comes back in fragments.  I remember visiting my grandmother and our great-uncle Johnny and great-aunt Charlene when we lived in Texas.  Oddly, we had no cousins or aunts or uncles - both of my parents were single children.  I remember that my grandmother had a mid-sixties Chevy Bel-Air four door sedan, beige colored, that she would take me to the store in.  I remember living in a Spanish style two story home in Harlingen, Texas because it had blue ceramic roof tiles, and because that is where I defied my daddy's instruction not to try to roller skate alone when he took a phone call and gave myself what I believe was my first concussion...or it could have been the time my sister pushed me too hard in the swing so that I fell out and hit my head.  And I remember the park in Oklahoma City that Daddy used to take my brother and I to - it was at a hotel, but they opened it to the public.  Our favorite part of this park was a rocket ship - it was red and yellow and had a ladder that you climbed up to the top where the cockpit was.  From here we captained our ship to the moon.  This is also the time when I had my first boyfriend - a blond- haired, brown- eyed boy named Bobby who held hands with me on the playground and even kissed me on the cheek once!  I remember saying goodbye to him on my last day at school before our move to Alabama - odd that I can still see him standing there after all of these years.  I also had chickenpox during those years - I think we lived in Oklahoma then, but I'm not sure.  I remember chickenpox because 1) they were so bad that I couldn't even wear pajamas - they irritated my skin too  much and 2) I had chickenpox on my birthday.  All of the kids in my class made me a book of birthday cake pictures, which I still have to this day...and instead of a party a friend who had already had chickenpox was appointed to bring me my book, while some other children stood outside my room and wished me a happy birthday.

Our move to Alabama must have coincided with my advance to an age where I would retain more memories.  I remember flying into Mobile in the spring when the azaleas were in bloom.  The old Southern homes lining the streets, the oaks and the Spanish moss and the vibrant colors of the azaleas made a lasting impression on my young mind.  We stayed in the Holiday Inn on the old causeway until we could move into the house that Daddy had rented.  That first night he came "home" from work and wanted to go right away to show us where we would be living.  We had dinner and by the time we got to the house it was dark.  This was the second oldest home in the area.  The power was not yet turned on, the brick was painted dark gray and a storm was moving in when we got out of the car.  As we looked up at this forbidding house lightning struck in the distance behind the house, giving a certain six year old girl a very scary first impression of the place that we would be living in.  Maybe it was a premonition since, to me, this is where our lives started taking a turn for the worse.

My Grandmother

My grandmother. She is one of the few truly good people I have known, and she was also a good Christian-not a hypocrite like so many others who use it for their own purposes. And I know that if I can ask myself at the end of any given day if she would be proud of me and answer "yes" then I have done well. That is what I strive for.

She was born Olive Beauchamp Dry on January 8, 1901, in Stephenville, Texas. Our family descends from the Beauchamps of English royalty but we also had a pirate, which I always thought was more exciting. There is almost no mention of this obvious black sheep of the family, but since I have long felt like our branch were the black sheep of the line, this pirate appeals to me - maybe he is as misunderstood as I am by the family that shut my brother and I out after what our mother did. Maybe they never gave him a chance.

Before we moved to Alabama we spent so many happy days visiting Grandma! Then, I remember my happiness when she left Texas to be nearer to us. My visits with her were spent helping make oatmeal raisin cookies, enchiladas and hamburgers. Those were my favorites, and to this day my kids all love her enchiladas. She would line the the ingredients up on the counter and my brother and I would work a little assembly line. And the hours I spent playing in her yard, making up imaginary games - I now look back and laugh as I can imagine what I looked like as I "galloped" on my racehorse across her yard.

As I got older she was my defense against all that was bad in our lives - my parents' divorce, my mother's rages, her drinking and the parties that she threw for my sister's older friends as she gathered information to feed to the police department. My brother and I were constantly sent to Grandma's house during this time, but I didn't know everything that was going on then, and Grandma's was my favorite place to be anyway.

She only ever cursed once, at least in front of us. My brother and I were picking at each other and bickering. She must have been so tired. She finally uttered, "Oh, hell!", which stopped us both in our tracks and shut us up.

My favorite story about her is one that to this day I can't quite fathom. Thinking of her disobeying even to this day is almost unbelievable. I guess a lot of people feel that way about their grandmothers. But when she was a young girl, about ten, her parents had strictly forbade she and her siblings (she had nine!) from climbing on the roof of the shed. Not only did she climb up on it, but she also slid down its wood shingles. In the process she managed to get a four inch long splinter in her bottom, which she was scared to tell anyone about. After a couple of weeks it was infected and she had to tell her mother what she had done. After they got the splinter out and she healed she got a spanking.

Every night I was at her house she would come in and stroke my hair and sing "You Are My Sunshine". I was the only one she sang it to...

I miss her and I hope I make her proud.

Trips Down Memory Lane

A few weeks ago Shawn and I made a trip to San Luis Obispo. Last April after Shawn's mother sold her house in Los Osos Shawn and his brother, Damian, helped her load all of her belongings into U-Hauls to take to her new home in Astoria, Oregon. What didn't fit went into a storage unit. The trip we made was possibly our only chance to get the items that she was giving Shawn until his current contract is finished. Along the way we also got to stop in Paso Robles at the home of some great people who have taken on the task of running a small family owned vineyard and are producing some fantastic wines while using some of the profits to help the Wounded EOD Warrior Foundation.

Shawn's father was such an amazing craftsman in so many ways. Not only was he a commercial fisherman, he was a potter and a woodworker as well. He had handcrafted a dining table out of redwood planks and carved out the base as well, and also built some wonderfully sturdy bookshelves. There were also some of his pottery pieces that will be displayed in our home with great pride. These are part of Shawn's memories of his father and he wanted very badly to clean up the bookshelves and put them to use in our office, so last weekend we turned our office into a disaster zone and moved everything out in order to rearrange it and get the bookshelves in.

Now I am working to get everything sorted out and put into its new place. To jump back to another story, when we moved my father to Nevada last January I tried to bring some of his belongings that would be familiar to him - a few of his wall hangings and some photos, and an old scrapbook and photo album. I had looked through the scrapbook, but somehow never looked at all of the memorabilia that he had tucked away into the photo album. As I dusted off his old photo album a handful of pictures and things fell out. One was a folded piece of paper. When I opened it I saw that it was a sign in sheet for visitors to Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, where Daddy was the regional vice president in charge of sales for Lear Siegler in the 70's. What made this sign in sheet so special is that it had the signature of then-governor of Alabama, George Wallace. As soon as I saw it I was transported back to the day when the whole family got dressed up to go to work with Daddy, and we watched from an executive office as my father walked out and greeted our governor and shook his hand. I was very young and only had a vague idea of what "governor" meant, but I knew this was an important person and that it was an honor for my Daddy to get to shake his hand.

Formations

I believe that everyone can make a choice in what they become, and that you make a lot of the choices based on what you learn from your parents. An example of this: Both of my parents smoked like chimneys, and I can remember sitting in the backseat of the car almost choking on the cigarette smoke that swirled around us like fog. When I was about 7 or 8 curiosity prodded me to pick up one of my dad's unfiltered Camel's that he had left in an ashtray and "give it a puff". COUGH! GAG! YUCK! I can still remember the taste of the unfiltered smoke and the way it made my throat feel to this day - and I have never picked up another cigarette again.

I feel that I take more after my father, who hardly ever spanked us, but could make us feel worse with his quietly spoken words than any belt ever could - but I was definitely more scared of my mother, who was the belt-wielder. Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe there is a difference between spanking a child and beating one, and my kids felt my hand across their bottoms more than once. Everyone I grew up with got spankings - and not one of us shot up our school, cut ourselves or committed a violent crime.

My mother wanted me to "marry rich". I couldn't have cared less. In my teenage years she even did her best to push me towards a boy in school who was a year or two older than me, whose dad had a very successful business - and who was obviously only after one thing that I am thankful I never gave to him. I am pretty sure that she would have encouraged me to give in to him if she had known if it might have secured that spot for me that she wanted, even though it probably would have meant being married to a man who would not have been faithful. To her it wouldn't have mattered. Once again, it was due largely to her ideas of what was important that I made the choices I did - I am not needy of expensive things, and the only flashy things I have any real desire to own are usually red, noisy and go very very fast. I was a puzzle to her, as her life was, and is, to me.

Why Did I Start This?

In the years since I married my husband, Shawn, he has led us to so many places we never would have gone and on adventures that we never would have imagined. Our time spent in those places and the adventures we had have given us reason to laugh and to cry, to appreciate what we have compared to others and to expand our imaginations outside of the limited existence we would have lived if he had never come into our lives.

As we have shared some of those stories with our friends they have encouraged me to write about them so that others could share in them with us. I have written some things in journals and will draw from those to help fill out some of what I write here.

Not all of them will be humorous or entertaining. I will try to start at the beginning and you will see that not everything in my life has been pleasant. Some people who already know some of my story have wondered how I can still laugh at some of the less fortunate things that happen to me - but there are two big lessons in life that everyone should remember. The biggest is that you always ALWAYS have to be able to laugh at yourself. I do a lot of that! The second is this: Usually, no matter how bad things may seem for most of us, there are people out there who are a lot worse off then we are and would love to trade with us anytime.

This blog will probably jump around different periods of my life, and for that I apologize. I hope that some of my stories will make you laugh, and that others will help you see what is around all of us and appreciate everything that you have, or seek something that you have wanted to do for yourself, but were afraid to do.

Thanks for reading,
KLM