The summer that changed the direction of 6 peoples' lives. I was 14 years old with 2 months of summer fun ahead of me that only a kid can look forward to! It was 1972 - which seems a life time ago and yet seems like yesterday. My youngest sister was 4 years old and had beautiful long blonde hair. From the moment we started summer vacation there seemed to be a huge shift of "normalcy" in our world.
My mother disappeared for the summer. No, she did not go far away - just down the hall to her bedroom where she took to her bed for the summer. At the time it was just understood that she was not feeling well. As the oldest it fell upon me to look after the household, cook, clean, can the fruit that my mother always had in previous summers, make the jams and jellies to be stored along side the quarts and quarts of fruit and look after my 4 year old sister as best I could. My other siblings were 8 and 12 at the time and they just floated along somewhere in between the silent chaos and the turbulent flareups. Our grandparents lived in a house right next door to us on our farm and once a week my grandmother would take me to town so that I could do the grocery shopping. One day my mother called me into the bedroom and handed me some money. Her request - that I take my 4 year old sister and have her long beautiful hair cut. It seems that I had not been able to keep it braided and tidy as my mom had done for all of her girls when we were young. French braids that were so tight they pulled your eyes back to the side of your head! Done every Sunday night after bathtime and then the bottoms undone every morning and rebraided. Once a week the entire braids came out and our heads hurt like crazy! My mother was very upset about having my sister's hair cut - at 14 I didn't understand the deep underlying meaning of this request - now, to me it seems like she knew she was losing a battle with her "illness". The summer went on and soon it was time to go back to school. The fall of Grade 9 - my last year of junior high. One day, off we 3 went to school on the bus and when we came home my Grandmother met us at the door and told us that our mother was in the hospital. According to my Grandmother, my father had come in from outside and been unable to rouse my mother and called an ambulance. Very frightening times for 4 children who really had no idea just what demons were lurking in our home.
Today, I now recognize that my mother was severely depressed. It is my belief that once she saw her children off to school that she attempted suicide. I have no proof of that but having battled depression, anxiety, PTSD and panic disorder myself I see the undeniable symptoms of a woman in deep deep depression. A subject that the medical community did not really understand or talk about 40 years ago. My mother was deemed to have had a nervous breakdown and one day when I was visiting her in the hospital she told me that our doctor had told her that he would not release her from the hospital until she agreed to seperate from my father. She was a patient in the hospital for over 2 weeks. By this time my father was a full fledged member of the Drinking and Driving club and more than once was told by a judge to join AA.
I have another memory of Hallowe'en that year where my mother was not present. I can't recall where she was but I just know that she wasn't home and Hallowe'en costumes and trick or treating were not the happy memories of years prior. I wish I could remember more of this time but it's gone or tucked away somewhere deep inside my head.
The fundamental explosion in our family occured the weekend of Nov 11th. My birthday is Nov 8 and that year I turned 15. It was so obvious that our parents were headed for a seperation and the mood in our home had become very tense and a bit of a battlefield. My father was very drunk that night and had issued the threat that he was going to go downstairs and shoot himself. With that he staggered downstairs to his office where he had some of his hunting rifles. I followed in hot pursuit to try to "talk" to him and ended up wrestling a rifle out of his hands. Now, in hindsight he was probably too drunk to even load the damn thing never mind shoot straight but when you are 15 years old you don't have that kind of foresight. And that night......was the beginning of the formal end to my parents' marriage and our home broke apart. My mother took me with her to see a lawyer - an act that my father never forgot or forgave me for - and in short order had rented a house, spoke to all of our teachers to advise them of what was transpiring and ordered a moving van. The day the moving van arrived we were at school however my father had one last hurrah - he took the keys to the car away from my mother and she and my little sister rode to town with the movers who then took her to a car rental agency where she rented a cute dark blue Volkswagon bug! And thus began our new life - single parent kids in a dual parent society living in a rental home in one of the less than desireable areas and with no money. Happy 15th birthday to me.
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