A New Year

My grandmother painted.  She never made money from it or took the time to create many of her own works, but it was apparently something she longed to do and probably sacrificed the dream for family.  I have one of the three paintings that she did, that we know of - my sister and brother each have the others.  It is a quaint farmhouse scene - one where a little road meanders its way through a field to the farmhouse in the distance.  I am sure that she would have been happy if that could have been her real  life and not the one that she lived.  After the death of my grandfather in a vehicle accident in the late forties she did what she had to do and became a teacher to support herself and my mother, who was 16 at the time.  Then of course, she moved away from her beloved Texas when my parents divorced so that she could be closer to her grandchildren and protect us if needed from what my mother was capable of.  

My sister also took painting lessons and I believe she could have been very good if she had stayed with it.  Unfortunately, drugs became a priority at that time in her life and as far as I know she never painted again.

My mother sang.  That was her talent and her art, but I never heard her sing solo myself.  She won a lot of talent shows with her voice, but I suppose everyday life - school, a job, pursuit of marriage - marked the end of following it any further.  The only time I saw my mother put her name to a piece of art was when she forged her name onto a small painting that she was giving to someone as a birthday present.  I am still ashamed of seeing that to this day.

So this year I will start to paint.  I have wanted to paint in watercolors for many, many years and dabbled with it, but never taking the time to really learn techniques or the proper way to go about it.  I began a couple of days ago, picking out a book to get me started, getting the basic supplies I need and sketching out the first project.  Then, yesterday I did it!  I completed my first project - a monocolor (burnt umber) painting of a brick farmhouse with trees behind it.  While in my minds' eye I had hoped it would come out better than it did, I can't say that I am unhappy with my first attempt.  I see what I need to improve on and will practice on them before moving to the next project.  So we will see.  And maybe I will also try oils one day and use my grandmother's painting as my first project.  

Life's Uncertainties

Monday we will move some of our belongings into a new house in Pacific Grove.  I am trying to be excited, but I only find myself plagued with unhappiness over the choices I am being forced to make.  I know that either way I choose I will never be truly happy again, because either way I am giving up something that I love.

Sometimes people's dreams change.  Mine have stayed the same - a home of my own with my own space, where I could decorate as I wanted, putter around as I wanted, with unlimited views.  A home where my kids and grandkids might one day gather whenever we wanted, without having to figure out days off, travel times, costs of tickets, etc.  But my husband's dreams have changed - he has no wish for our own place, or the space that I long for.  He wants to pursue his passions, no matter where that takes him.  And, at least for now, he wants me to be a part of it.  But as our shared dreams become more and more different I know that the day will come that our love for each other will diminish as we begin to feel more and more the differences between our desires.  So do I go along for the ride or do I bow out gracefully while there is still love?  I do not want to wait until the day that the sad acknowledgement comes along that it is gone.

Now I start the process of trying to accept having strangers ten feet away from my bedroom window, of not being able to look out my windows and seeing the sunrise or sunset again, of having to get into a car and fight with traffic to get to a place where no one is around and I can wander with my own thoughts while the dogs can finally get off of their leashes and run as they wish.  I wish I could find something to be excited about in this move besides being with my husband, but I can't.  It takes me away from everything else about my life that I loved.  He is all that is left, and I don't feel that I will be able to keep him happy for long since what he wants and what I want have become so different.

Leaving Part of My Heart Behind

I am not sure where this falls.  It is not a story from my past but a story of today.  Today I found that even when it seems your dreams are falling into place that they are in fact falling apart.  As I have gotten older I have wanted a place to settle, a place of my own, and hopefully one where I could have at least some of my kids close by, and possibly their kids as well.  I thought I was here.  I looked forward to days when maybe my daughter would call and ask if she could drop the kids off for a while so that she could go shopping.  Or nights where they would spend the night so that mom and dad could have a date night.  But what started out as a mutual dream with my husband is no longer his, and he no longer wants to be here.  In order to have him I must give up everything else that I loved about my life.  So I will follow the man that I love to places that he dreams of and leave most of mine here, in the desert, and hope that I can return and that, unlike the grandchildren I have who live far away, that these others yet to be born will know me well and not see me as a stranger that they only see once a year.  My heart had to break into two pieces - otherwise I could not bear what I know I need to do, so I will leave a part of me behind.

 

My Mother's Writings

Today I am cleaning out the spare bedroom and getting it ready for the visitors that I hope to have this summer - my oldest son and my granddaughters.  I came across an old appointment book from 1942 that my mother used for her journal.  If she began writing in it that year then she would have been about nine years old.  She, like I did when I was that age, obviously loved dogs and horses.  The first pages is a table of contents, followed by a number of pages of kennel names that she imagined and then the stories that she wrote about beloved pets.  There must be over 100 names that she came up with - names such as "Sunny Ridge", "Dardendale", "Broadlawn" and Wolveshampton". 

Then comes her first short writing.  Entitled "Gray Dawn" it reads as follows:

"Gray Dawn died on Memorial Day, 1929, falling quietly asleep on his rug close beside the desk in my study here in Sunnybank and forgetting to awaken.

Gray Dawn's color was a soft blue merle."

Further on is the story of Lad:

"Greatest of all Sunnybank collies was Lad.  he was the palaces first collie.  He was a great and gallant dog.  Sunnybank Lad died one September day in 1918 when, the sixteen year old collie should fall asleep in the cool angle under the back veranda hammock and should fail to awake again."

As I read some of these I began to wonder if they weren't stories that were told to her by her father, who was killed in a car wreck when she was 16, and if some of them aren't actually a legacy of dogs that he had before she was born, since some of the stories talk about sires and dams and are pretty factual for a nine year old girls imaginings.  I won't ever know.

Then there are what seem to be actual journal writings - descriptions of days - cold, gray days, stormy days and once she wrote of an "apple green day": "Today was an apple green day.  The sun was shining brightly as if ashamed of the way the weather has been for the past days.  The shadows were just beginning to settle when I took Mickey and went exploring in the old orchard.  The shadows fell though and we had to leave."

And as I thumb through the dry, yellow pages I start finding dates, so this journal encompasses a number of years and shows that my mother wrote in it sporadically (another trait I seem to have inherited!).  Now I find an entry dated January 1947, followed by one dated December 1946.  Both of these entries are dedicated to dogs.

And now, I find an entry written after she lost her father.  She was barely sixteen years old.  It is titled, simply, "My Dad" and is dated January 20, 1950.  It reads:  
    "It's been a long, long time since I've written, almost three years now.  My life has changed so much that I feel as though the Jeddy of yesterday, carefree, happy, dreamy little Jeddy was just a dream.  Maybe a can put down on paper what I feel and ease the pain in my head. 
    Dad is gone now.  Gone to a better land than this, I know.  But I'll never, never forget my dad, for to me he was the greatest man in the world.  I can still see him about 12:00 on Saturday afternoons, packing up the "old car" to go on one of his hunting or fishing trips.  The old khaki pants on, a brown shirt, and an old straw hat.  On these days, he was always happy for he was doing the thing he loved most in the world.  Going on his beloved trips into the country.  Maybe he was by himself, maybe not.  Either way he was happy.  It was his life and the life he loved most."

This is it - and it leaves me with questions.  Does this answer some of the questions surrounding my mother's later problems?  It sounds as if my grandfather left every weekend without his wife and daughter.   I know that even back in those days families went on camping trips together, but it doesn't seem to have been the case here.  I know that there were times when my grandmother had to warn my mother to stay away from him when he was out on the porch - days when he would sit out with a gun across his knees, obviously suffering from some mental disorder that he may have passed on to my mother.  Did his passing leave her idolizing a man who was disappointed that he didn't have a son, scarring her in the process? I could go on and on coming up with more questions that will never be answered, but there are days when I wish that somewhere, part of the mystery would unlock.

Moving On

After a few years in Lake Forest I guess Daddy's latest job switch affected our income, so we moved to Fairhope.  This house was much smaller - I am guessing that the place in Lake Forest was somewhere in the 3000 square foot range, while the new place on Morphy Ave. was definitely under 2000.  It was a small ranch-style brick house with a separate garage, which served as our laundry and storage area instead of a place for our cars.

My favorite part about the new house were the woods and the gulley that ran behind it.  The schoolyard for the public school was also nearby, which meant we had a playground at our disposal when school wasn't in session.  What fun we had here in those first years!  The gulley occupied a lot of our time when we were kids - the explorations and adventures that we had!  It's walls were about 35 or 40 feet high, and there was a large drainage pipe jutting out of its far wall.  The sides were deep, dark red Alabama clay, and when it rained they would get oh, so slick!  We ruined who knows how many items of clothing sliding down those sides after a rain shower.  One time Daddy brought home some telephone cable on a large spool.  The spool became a table under our treehouse, which stood at the top of the gulley, and the cable became a zip line that Daddy attached to a branch and ran to the bottom of the gulley.  We had a blast.  

We also had a small empty sand lot on the property on the other side of the garage.  My brother and I would build roads with his Tonka trucks, and then drive his Hot Wheels on them.  I still played with Barbie dolls too, but driving cars was more fun.  

We had some good neighbors here.  The people next door used to smoke mullet in the back yard and would always give us one of the fish.  I loved it!  There was an elderly lady across the street who had the same name as Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun.  She was very sweet to us and had a cat and a old Lab mix.  I still remember her out in the yard with her pets following her around as she tended to her plants.  Sadly, she collapsed one day and went to the hospital.  She passed away a few days later.  Her cat went to live with a sister but the dog stopped eating and followed its owner to doggy heaven shortly after.  I remember how incredibly sad it made me.

At some point I guess Daddy began looking for another job.  He found one in Birmingham and went up to get started and find us a house.  When he called my mother to tell her that he had a place for us to live she informed him that she wanted a divorce.  I must have been about 11 years old.  My father told me years later that he was devastated - despite the fighting and her indiscretions, he still loved her and had no idea that she was contemplating a divorce.  We weren't told right away - so since we had been used to his traveling when we were young and just thought he was away working maybe it didn't have the same impact that it does on children whose little worlds are torn apart so badly when their parents split.

It was also about this time that my grandmother moved from San Antonio to Fairhope.  During my mother's trial I was told that she had done it to protect us from our mother - with my father out of the house permanently she apparently feared for her grandchildren.  I was so happy when Grandma moved to town!  I spent so many happy hours at her house - I think I probably spent more time at Grandma's then I did at home.  Thinking back this probably suited my mother - and if I got sick during that time she usually dropped me off.  I can remember running a high fever and being in my bed at Grandma's house while she tended to me patiently - singing "You Are My Sunshine" and laying her wonderful hands on my burning forehead, making sure I was tucked in and constantly at my side.  

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.