My mother's bad decisions in her subsequent life did not account for the beginning of her ruination. We lived in the south, although she tried to leave once. In a tiny southern town of about 400 people, a saw mill, a Purina factory, and a sewing factory, in 1957, my mother got pregnant. She was 16 years old. And I think that she was raped. She wanted to spare her daughter that, so she never said it. But I am sure she was raped. Perhaps not the brutal beating and pounding to exhaustion that people think of, but that's not the only kind of rape.
It was 1957, she was white, her parents were married, her mother was a midwife and a wet nurse. Her father worked for the city maintenance department. She was among 11 children and had much older sisters who went through birth before her and who had also had some unfortunate pregnancies resulting in bastard children given away, as was the custom at the time. So she knew the consequences of sex. She was brilliant. Everyone that knew her remarked on how vivacious and bright and clever she was, funny and quick. A local Ava Gardner. A woman like that doesn't just get knocked up.
This didn't occur to me until about a month ago. I was jogging in the water in the pool, trying to get back into fitness, an ex-runner who will never run on land again due to back surgery in just the wrong spot. I started thinking about my life and how it had turned out compared to hers. I am married, I am mentally sound and I am a good mother to my only child, a son. I have been married for 18 years with no sign of misery leading to divorce, but enough misery that we know it is not because we have been unchallenged, a sweet spot in a marriage. I have had a brilliant career, highlighted by notoriety, fame, and respect from my peers. And on the second leg of life, I am coasting on the career and raising the sudden late life kid, a sweet spot in life. All is good. So why was I thinking about my mother and her crazy decision to have 5 kids off 5 different men between the years of 1957-1967?
I had just met a person, the husband of my exercise friend in the small town I had emigrated to with my husband for his work. He worked "off" and had spent a lot of time in my home county. He knew everything about my life growing up, the people, the places, the way the county was, the racial demographics and customs. He was the same age as me. He knew my story and knew exactly how it was for us. And I was ashamed that someone I had just met knew all of the details that had ruined her life and mine.
He didn't know her, didn't know me, didn't know my family. But he did know the archetype, the whole situation in a nutshell. "So ya'll was white trash?" was how he put it. And I think that about summed it up. I asked him, in the hot tub after the swim that morning, "Do you think it was worse to be black there or to be us there?" And he said, "Oh...it would be worse to be you." This kind man, as black as jet, thought it would be worse to be me than it would be to be black in klan country in the south in a backwoods tobacco fire district. And I had to agree, although it broke my heart and crushed me inside. Because it was. I knew because I had lived it both ways.
And I had blamed her for this for my whole life. I had thought that she was the stupidest person on the planet, irresponsible and foolish and selfish and dumb. I had been angry at her for the entirety of my life. I was sad for a few days, kind of moping about having met some nice people and then having them find out that I was not the kind of person you would want to know, not "nice" people. His story was very similar to my own, only his mother had been raped. And my mother had just been a white whore in a small town, worse in every way. And as I stood there, stopped in my jogging, I was looking at three little birds that had landed on the lightpost outside the window of the gym pool. And I thought of my son and him singing when he was about three. "Woke up this morning, before the sun, three little bids, outside my doorstep....this is my message to you... don't worry about a thing....every little thing's gonna be alright."
It all hit me in a wave of heartrending emotion. My mother was too smart to do what I had accused her of all these years. Her getting pregnant at 16 was very possibly not her fault. She was most likely raped. Not by some intruder in the night, but by her boyfriend, my oldest sister's father. And the rest of us were just small town collateral damage.
As a lifelong feminist, I have given more compassion and credit to inner city junkies. I have assumed that a hard life and hard living was the reason they fail at life and fail their kids. I have made excuses for women that stay with losers that beat them and cheat on them. I have had more empathy for women who allow sexual abuse in order to save themselves economically.
But for a 16 year old girl in 1957 in a small town with no birth control, no access or right to abortion, and no way to fix it...I blamed her for not having the foresight to avoid the bad decision of getting raped or knocked up. It was one or the other. The fine upstanding young man that was the son of the local feed and grain distributor didn't do what young men in love did at the time, early marriage. He abandoned her, left her to the wind to handle it on her own. And in a family that couldn't afford to send her away for a while, she had to suffer the humiliation, ostracization, shaming, and shunning that white society demanded at the time from girls who got themselves in trouble. And I had bought right into their idea of appropriate punishment for her, taking away her "whiteness".
I only considered her position in society after the damage was done, when "nice" people couldn't associate with her. After she had made the decision that if they wanted to cast her out, then she would do as she pleased. The jig was up. There is no coming back from this in 1957 small town time. The sexual revolution was a good 15 years away. Birth control was a matter of whether you could control your boyfriend enough to make him use a rubber. I once asked her, as a teenage girl trying desperately to sort through our situation in society, why she had all of us kids. She said, "Bay, I know I'm going to hell for the way I've lived my life, but when I get there, I'm not going to spend eternity tormented by the arms and legs of babies I killed." And so I never had an abortion, never got knocked up, got on the pill at 16 when I became sexually active, and was sexually responsible my whole life. Because that seemed like the least I could do to honor what was the only thing she ever told me about what was left of her mother's baptism in religious belief. A weird legacy of reproductive responsibility is all of it left in me.
Her mother was a Baptist. She had 11 kids and wet-nursed any kid in town whose mother couldn't do it. She had a goat for the rare occasion that she didn't have any milk. She helped bring a lot of children into the world, and my mother watched and helped, too. My mother loved babies and young children. She made more money out in the world, though, and so she worked and Ma took care of us. My mother would have her kids and get back to work. She had five in all. I was the last. Ma lived until I was about 6 years old and then died of cervical cancer, leaving my mother with 5 kids to provide for, no fathers in sight. She did the best she could, working in a sewing factory and attending to my grandfather .
Her friend, June Bug, had a daughter my age and we were best friends. The white women in town would not allow their children, born in marriage to men who had obvious bastard children, to associate with trash like us. Sociologically, maybe it was an incest taboo, not wanting their offspring to mate or date people that may or may not have been their half-siblings or cousins. It was most likely spite.
The girl my age, my friend, was black. And for the most part, socially, so were we. This was what my new gym friend was saying, calling us what we had been relegated to by the socially conforming whites in my hometown. We weren't socially acceptable to whites, but in the black community, we were acceptable as is. She worked and took care of her kids. The fathers were missing but everyone knew who they were. This wasn't ideal or normal in the black community, but it wasn't unheard of. We would never be black, we didn't have the same social problems, but we had more in common with the local black community than the bitter white church ladies and gentlemen who would never forgive my mother for having sex with five of their upstanding lodge-worthy husbands.
My Aunt Gert and Miss Nettie took care of me alongside their own grandkids who were too young for school. My older siblings, the next up 4 years older than me, were all in school and had been raised to school age by Ma. But she was gone and I was too young to stay with my grandpa, who tended to drink and had only one leg, a character but not a qualified care giver. So I stayed with my Aunt Gert during the school day, listening to her play Gospel on the piano and singing, playing underneath the train tracks by her house. I loved her and did not know she wasn't really my aunt. I did not recognize her race. I didn't realize I was different from my friend. I found that out when we finally went to school and I was not allowed to play with her any more.
Which was when it all started to hurt. My mother decided that the run down old house we lived in was too hard to maintain and she sold it and bought a trailer. A three bedroom trailer with new appliances, a modern washer and dryer, 2 bathrooms, furniture included and installed in a small clean trailer park with a ball field, kids, and other people, country people who didn't care about her story. But they were all white. And lived in trailers. And so trailer trash got added to the whore, bad influence, not-"nice" people stigma. It spiralled down from there.
Which brings me to something horrible that I did when I was about 22.
I was still angry about a lot of things and twenty years away from my realization that her first step into the madness that became our lives may not have been her decision. I was in therapy and dealing with a diagnosis of diabetes. I was watching it kill her back in the day of pig insulin and no meters and common salami surgery and guaranteed nasty brutish death for non-geriatric diabetics. Today is a fantasy land of treatment and options compared to then. All I saw ahead was death as my only inheritance from a woman that in her pain and inability to cope had beaten me when she had no one else to take it out on. It was most every day, randomly applied, vicious, and savage. Predicting how and when it would come was impossible. A good day was when I got to eat, it wasn't cold, and I got to sleep through the night without her coming in during the night and beating me with her fists until she tired out and went back to her room. I didn't imagine it. I have a sister that was still at home that cried immediately when she wailed on her. That made her stop. I was too dumb to pick up on this and didn't cry. So it lasted until she fell off me in exhaustion, which usually took a while. I can still smell her sweet breath and stale sweat as she lay across me.
I wanted to marry a wonderful man that loved me. Only, when he would come home from his job, I would wake up screaming if I heard him come down the hall to our room in our long, skinny apartment. This made me very confused and we decided that I needed some help before we took the next step. I had diabetes but it was manageable and she hadn't started to spiral out yet. The first question I had for the therapist was why, now that I was safe and happy, finished with my degree, gainfully employed, and in love...why did the nightmares start up again, now? I thought that as I got my life together, it would go away. He said, "We can only deal with things too bad to deal with once we are out of crisis mode. It is precisely because you are settled and calm that it is coming up." This was just not fair.
We went to work on it. Recovering information was the first step, luckily I had siblings who had witnessed it so I was not a victim of implanted memories or fantasy. It was all true, the reality of it being my first hurdle, as I had blocked out about 5 years or so of my life. I just didn't remember ages 9 to 14. It had been an excellent coping response. As I remembered it, I started to hate my therapist more than my mother, but I eventually realized why the dreams of her killing me had started. This is rich! I had feared that she would kill me when she came in and beat and hurt me. But with the diabetes, even though I had survived and gotten away, even though I had finished college and not gotten knocked up, even though I had friends of several races who knew and loved me for exactly who I am/was...she had still managed to come through it and kill me after all. My own sweet breath had triggered the memories. She had passed on a disease that could get to me through my blood, no matter how far or how fast I ran. After all of my efforts, in the end, I was back in that trailer, and she was finally going to finish the job she had started every night in her rage and depression and futility.
So, still wracked with doubt over the reality of what I remembered and the guilt of having brought it on myself somehow by being born, the last straw that apparently broke her mind, I asked the therapist what to do. He said I needed closure on the issue of whether it happened or not, that confronting a woman withered by dialysis, blind in one eye, weak, and dying in a nursing care facility was my only option. That I needed it to make the dreams stop and to be able to move on. And I trusted him. So, I went to see her for the first time in years and as she lay there and cried, unable to escape my verbal assault on her on her death bed, I demanded that she admit it happened. Not an apology, not remorse, not payback, just the admission that it happened so that I could not feel just as crazy as her.
I left and spent the next year talking to the therapist about why the event and its lack of satisfaction was sufficient, why it was all I needed for closure. Why her taking responsibility for her life didn't matter and never did. Why we were able to speak and deal with each other after that even though she was still never going to own up. Why she was at my eventual wedding and I wanted her there. People that hurt you mostly can't deal with what they have done any more than you can trust them again. Understanding doesn't fix anything. Confrontations rarely satisfy that hole you are trying to fill with knowledge or power. And revenge is bitter and foul and sickening, not sweet at all.
That morning, three little birds were trying to tell me something. I listened and I will stop being ashamed.
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fingerlakeswanderer
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Comments
*shudder*
I tried to shorten it, but each thing I left out made it make less sense.
So I left it back in.
Thank you for the support. This is all kind of raw for me. I am going to sleep on it.
There is so much truth and wisdom to that sentence and to this entire piece.
Wow, E. This writing and your eventual truth is complex and inspiring.
This piece is stunning. I am so glad you listened to the birds, because you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
Love to you.
So are you, never doubt that.
Your therapist was also right:
"We can only deal with things too bad to deal with once we are out of crisis mode. It is precisely because you are settled and calm that it is coming up." This was just not fair.
My first thoughts were that if there was ever a case for the validity of birth control and abortion, it was the control that women receive over events in their lives by which they can be cruelly judged through no real faults of their own. I could just picture the prissy church ladies and wonder if their husbands would be committing incest....anyway, this is a remarkable, engaging story and I feel you are an extremely talented and thoughtful writer.
The introduction of the diabetes component hit home for me too. Did you feel this disease was the cause of her irrational behavior? My own mother was probably undiagnosed for years and her behavior could be very irrational and I was wondering if there was a connection in how you felt about it and clinically if there was. This story really, really got me thinking. R
The idea of your getting out, overcoming it all, finding life and love and all of that... only to be haunted through your blood is just... perfectly stunning. Well done. Very well done.
I am overwhelmed by the support and kindness. I usually get my point across in 17 syllables or less, and this has 2,800 or so words.
I was afraid to post it for a lot of reasons. The feeling that people won't like me anymore if they know the truth is very persistent and loud. Thank you for quieting that roar in my ears. Steve's first comments bolstered my courage to leave it up and I am glad I did.
I will answer the questions anyone has this afternoon.
Thanks, again.
Thanks for sharing this story with the world.
There are people that I would like to confront, but I have mostly not been able.
You said so much, so well that I can't even get my thoughts together. I have seen the 'white trash' thrown away. I won't dare say that they usually have it as hard as other races, BUT even white liberals mock them. That is why my father was murdered, because someone decided that the murderer was cannon fodder when he was three.
I believe the birds were a sign. I am proud of what you have accomplished and hope you are, too.
This was a rivetting read. You're right, revenge is bitter and leaves a foul taste. We share some similarities, current sweet spots and all of that, a love of Bob Marley and even a birth date. Nice to meet you. I look forward to reading more.
"Dr" Laura jumped on it within 1.5 minutes. Amazing.
I am writing a follow-up post to this one that is a response to some of the very supportive and reinforcing comments. I have been talking with someone whose mother behaved a lot like mine and it has been a strange conversation to say the least!
I am writing it now and should have it up tomorrow. Thanks again for reading and commenting. I am very grateful for the support both of my writing and life decisions. More on this in the follow-up.