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.