A memoir--the morning of my awakening

As far back as I could remember, my mother and father had fought verbally with each other. Sometimes these arguments would break out in public places, like restaurants, where I wanted to crawl under the table. Most often though these fights took place at night after we had gone to bed.

Unfortunately, my bedroom was next to my parents. When the fighting would wake me, I would lie sleeplessly in my bed for what seemed like hours, hearing their raised, muffled voices. My father’s voice was always the loudest and most rageful as it responded to my mother’s barely mumbled words.

The next morning at breakfast, their fighting would not be mentioned as if it had never happened, which made me feel a little crazy, but I was a “good girl” who had learned early not to tell anyone about the fighting in our house. It was one of our family secrets, and one of the family rules was to be loyal to the family by keeping its secrets. Hush, hush, don’t tell, even if my heart was too full with the aching.

So I blamed my tall, light-haired father for the fighting and felt compassionate toward my curly, dark-haired, petite mother. But mostly, I learned to feel ashamed and guilty about what was going on at home and to pretend that things at home were normal. I also thought that I was somehow supposed to fix their fighting--somehow felt responsible for it--even though what they fought about had nothing to do with me.

By the autumn of my sixteenth year, my only sibling Lynda, four years older than I, was away at college. My sister and I had never been close, nor had we talked about what was going on at home. After Lynda had left, the fighting escalated. Just as my older sister had escaped to college, I took to escaping my home life by spending as much time away as I could. Time away at school, in after-school clubs, with boyfriends, or with friends--anything to avoid going home.

Besides the big hair, what strikes me most about these last two pictures is the frown on my face. I know that unhappy expression to be more than just teenage angst.

One family in particular that I relished being with was the Gillilands. In contrast to my family, they were a fun-loving, large, and warm family with seven children from ages eighteen down to seven, and the parents treated me as lovingly as one of their own children. Linda, the second child in the family, was my best friend. We were both just beginning our junior year in high school where we were good students, well-liked by our classmates.

We had gotten a new puppy that year for Christmas. I have always loved dogs. But even she could not make me smile.

On this particular Sunday morning, I had spent another Saturday night with Linda and had attended early mass with her family. Later that morning, I wanted to take Linda to the little Presbyterian church that I had been attending by myself for a few months. Because the late September weather had turned chilly, I told Linda, “We need to stop by my house to get a sweater.” Thus began my ascent into a maelstrom.

As soon as Linda and I entered the kitchen from the back door, I could feel the thick tension still present in the house and knew there had been fighting the night before. A haze of stale cigarette smoke and the smell of booze hung in the room. My mother sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hand, nursing a cup of coffee and dejectedly flipping through the pages of the thick Sunday newspaper. From the ever-present cigarette dangling from her pale lips, a curl of smoke wafted above her disheveled dark curls.

Instinct told me to turn back around and run, but I had learned not to trust myself. The constant, secretive fighting had deadened my senses--most of all my intuition. So I cheerfully greeted my mother, giving her a kiss on the cheek. I explained that we had come in to get a sweater for me before church. She barely grunted a hello to me or Linda. She just sat there.

Linda and I headed down the long hallway of our brick ranch house to my bedroom at its very end. As I walked down the hall, Linda was a few steps behind me, so perhaps she didn’t see. When I neared my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom door loomed up into my peripheral vision to the left. I gasped ever so slightly as I noticed that the door had been brutally bashed in. Turning suddenly, I practically pushed Linda back down the hall toward the kitchen, mumbling something about not needing that sweater after all. Passing my stone-still mother, we made it out of the house and into the car without speaking a word.

I never mentioned to Linda or to anyone else what I had seen. Later that morning, as she and I sat in church, my mind spun in all directions, trying unsuccessfully to settle itself into a church-like serenity. But my questions to God that day went unanswered, “Why didn’t my mother try to protect me from the violent scene which had unfurled as I approached their bedroom door? Didn’t she care about me anymore? Didn’t she know that I kept the family secrets? Didn't my mother love me?”

My father’s breaking through their bedroom door was never mentioned. In my house, we did not talk about unpleasant things. When I returned home that evening as late as possible, there was a new door on their bedroom, and a few days later, I saw my father burning the old door in the backyard.

It’s been almost fifty years since that incident, but I know now that my mother’s betrayal and my father’s brutality and my sensitivity to both started me down a path that I could not avoid. That incident signaled for me an intuitive knowing that I could no longer trust my parents, something that colored the rest of  my young years. From that point onward, I felt lost and alone and unloved--set adrift on a sea that I didn't have the boat to navigate. I set about on my decades-long journey that eventually led me back to myself.