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Skeletons (Choices Part 3)

March 23, 2014 By Susan B 19 Comments

Royal Canadian Air Force silver baby cup

When I was nine and got my new mother I had ideas about what she would be like. She was always nice when Dad had taken me and my sister along when they went to supper. For as long as I could remember my friend’s mothers had patted me on the head, and said, “You poor child who doesn’t have a mother,” and gave me a cookie. That seemed to be what mothers did. Now, I was going to have one of my own.

She was a lovely, pretty lady who had never been married before. My Dad asked her to marry him three times before she accepted. She was nervous, and she had good reason to be. My youngest sister was now four years old and called the aunt and uncle she lived with “Mom” and “Dad.” It would have been cruel to remove her from the home she knew. My father’s new wife became a mother for the first time with two daughters, ages seven and nine.

She had become a registered nurse out of high school. She left Canada and worked for years in public health in beautiful coastal cities such as San Francisco. She told a story of fog so thick while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge that she just stopped her little VW beetle because she couldn’t see the hood outside the wind shield. She’d had her own apartment with white furniture and pretty things and her own space to live how she wished.

My new mother came with a long history of alcoholism. She hid it so well that people who were close never knew. I remember her mother, my nana, kept a bottle of red wine under the kitchen sink. She would spend her time leaning an elbow on the kitchen counter with a glass of wine perched beside her. When it became close to empty she would just reach down, swing open the cupboard door, grab the bottle, refill her glass and then tuck the bottle back under the sink. Nana never seemed any different from day to day, possibly a constant state of pickledness.

Me in the dress I wore as a flower girl for my parent’s wedding 1970. Notice the golden yellow shag rug?

Our first home as a new family was in a trailer park six miles from Nelson on the north shore of the Kootenay Lake. We could see the water from the windows. Our trailer smelled clean because it was brand new. It had a golden yellow shag carpet in the living room that I raked the footprints out of, making all the golden strands stand up, on Saturday morning as part of my chores. My sister and I loved our tiny bedrooms. They were identical with room enough for a bed, a built in dresser and small closet. For the first time ever I could shut the door and be completely alone.

My mother nursed at a long term care facility a short distance from home. She hated her job. The nursing she had done in public health was nothing like the grind she experienced caring for heavy, old people who couldn’t wipe their own butts. She would work two day shifts and then two night shifts. The walls of our trailer were thin, and I was impulsive and found it impossible to remember to tip toe when mom was sleeping. My dad often spanked me for waking her up.

My mother could remain sober for months. Eventually though, and I’m not sure if something set her off, or she tried really hard not to drink because her drinking incised my father, or she just couldn’t help it, and I’m inclined to believe that was it, she would begin to drink. Dad drank socially, and once in a while he had a buzz, but he was funny and told stories and he didn’t fall down. Mom and dad would go out, or have people in, and there would be beer and wine. But sometimes mom didn’t stop when everyone went home and the party was over. A bout of drinking would go into the next day. After I moved out, my little sister told me that when she got home from school and if mom was drinking Dad said she had to go to a friend’s house and not come back until he was home from work. He didn’t like my sister to see mom in a stupor.

She drank until her cheeks flushed, her words slurred and she stumbled against the walls down the long hallway of our trailer. Her drinking frustrated the hell out of my father and maybe he would yell, but he would watch so that she wouldn’t hurt herself, and then he would tenderly nurse her through horrific hangovers when the binge was over.

Mom’s drinking was a problem that never went away, and my Dad never gave up trying to help her. While my parents worked on their relationship I went from wild child (remember ADHD) straight into unruly teenager. I smoked pot, and drank until I got drunk. I butted heads with my mother, but I drove my father insane.

I was a gawky, clumsy girl who was growing so fast I was teased about the hem of my pants above my ankles. “Waiting for a flood? Afraid you’re gonna get your pants wet?” I bawled buckets of tears over the torment I went through concerning the “coke bottles” that were my glasses. Grades four to seven were torture at the elementary school on the north shore in the Kootenays. I was overjoyed when I finally got to ride the school bus into town to the junior high. There were so many more people for me to make friends with.

By the time I was in grade eight I ached to be in town where the action was, not out on the sleepy north shore where there were no streetlights. I would skip school and go to the beach. I was walking with a group of friends and my father drove by and saw me. I was grounded for weeks. It didn’t matter. I sneaked out at night and hitchhiked six miles into Nelson along the dark north shore of the Kootenay Lake. Even my dad’s wicked temper and heavy hand didn’t deter my ambition to get into town to hang out with my buddies. I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time my mother said to my father, “Gerry calm down! Your heart!”

I was 14 years old when my sister, parents and I were driving to Spokane for the weekend. My dad pulled over and said, “I feel sick.” Mom looked at his grey face. “You’re having a heart attack!” We were almost to Salmo when she turned the car around. My sister and I held hands in the back seat while she drove that mountain pass like Mario Andretti.

My father and I persistently grated on each other. I was afraid of his fist but couldn’t seem to conform to his rules. We lived in a house with the strain of constant strife between us. My sister told me years later she was so relieved when I begged my father to allow me to visit two girlfriends who had moved to Calgary and he let me go. “This goes against everything I believe in,” he said with a grim face as I boarded a Greyhound bus. I promised to come back at the end of August before school started. It was early October when I returned, skinny, my hair bleached blonde, refusing to wear my bulky glasses regardless of not being able to see. My family barely recognized me.

I was given a bit more freedom then what I’d had before I left. Best of all, my Dad bought me contact lenses! Most weekends my friends could pick me up after church on Saturday night and my curfew was extended, although I often came home late, and Dad would ground me. One school night that winter after Calgary, I was in grade eleven, leaving the bathroom after my shower and wrapped in a towel I bumped into my father. Later, my parents called me into the living room. My mother spoke while my dad sat, his lips a pale thin line. “Susan, did you have sex while in Calgary?” I began to cry because I’d wanted to tell someone that pale white liquid had been dripping from my breasts. Tests showed I was seven months pregnant.

During the next few weeks I wasn’t allowed to go to school and was kept hidden inside the house so that no one might guess my “shameful” condition. The father of my baby was in Calgary and I had no continued contact with him, our tryst had been a fleeting thing, I was naïve and stupid. My parents allowed my current boyfriend and my friends to pick me up in the evenings and go for drives. I didn’t have the maturity to understand what was happening and I felt like a visitor to my own body, but I was careful and didn’t drink or smoke anything that might hurt the baby.

My father didn’t know what to do with me. The wounded look in his eyes made me squirm. I’d never before been more aware of his acute disappointment in me. He was the most patient and never once lost his temper. My advanced pregnancy had been hidden partly because I came back from Calgary underweight and swam inside most of my clothes. Now, that my secret was out and my father hadn’t murdered me I relaxed and my belly expanded to a more suitable size. The doctor said there was no reason why I wouldn’t deliver a healthy baby.

As soon as a bed became available I was moved to a group home for unwed mothers in Kamloops. Most of my relatives living there turned away and ignored me, but a few visited showing me my teenage pregnancy didn’t matter and I was still loved. When I went into labor I was taken to the hospital and my mother began the eight hour drive from Nelson. I labored alone with an occasional check by a cold and judgmental nurse; I was one of “those girls” from the unwed mother’s home. We had been taught breathing techniques at the home but there was no one to help me, so I thrashed with the pain. My cries brought the screwed face nurse who shoved into my hands a mask like the hard rubber of a toilet plunger. I fumbled with it, it seems dispensing most of the gas into the room because that same nurse on one of her cursory checks was overcome, dizzy and collapsed outside my door, while I clenched my teeth and fought the cramps. It seems my poor treatment was punishment for allowing myself to get pregnant in the first place. Choices baby

At sixteen years old I gave birth to an eight pound baby girl. My parents had made it clear that I would give this baby up for adoption. Hospital staff and my mother alike told me I could not see her, it wasn’t a good idea. I presented myself to the nursery window and insisted I be allowed to see my daughter, and I wouldn’t leave until I did, after all she was mine until I signed the papers. I was sat down on a chair and given a tiny pink blanket – wrapped bundle. Clumsily I held her; I was never much of a babysitter and had no experience with babies. Pushing away the blanket with one big finger I stroked her tiny cheek. Her face was a dusky rose and she had a cap of dark hair that stood on end. The hospital staff had the decency to leave us alone. The little person I had made looked at me steadily.

I never asked to see her again.

Three days later I left the hospital and she was gone at one week of age with her new family. There had been stacks of prospective parents, their names covered in heavy felt pen, for me to choose from, but I chose quickly, a couple who had been waiting seven years. I liked that they lived on an acreage, maybe she would love horses like I did and they would get her one, in northern British Columbia, 50 miles from the nearest hospital. I asked that she be named Holly Elizabeth. The first name I had always liked, and the second name was my step mother’s middle name.

Years later when the registry opened and I could search for my daughter I discovered that they named her Nicole. I registered myself in the adoption registry so that if she looks for me she will find me, but I’ve never searched for her. I’m afraid that if I do I might find out that she has died. I don’t know; it’s just a feeling I have. I like to think of her as well and happy and not needing to know about her mother who gave her away.

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Choices Part 2: This Might Explain Some Things

February 10, 2014 By Susan B 7 Comments

My father’s RCAF dog tags

When I was a child it’s possible I was just a tiny bit ADHD because I only stopped moving when I was sleeping. There was so much to do: climb trees until the trunks thinned and swayed with my weight, and walk barefoot on the rocks in tumbling creeks among spawning salmon. Proudly wearing a white straw cowboy hat rimmed with a pink sash and a plastic gold star and sitting on a red saddle I rode a mighty black Welsh pony. In the thick of summer when at night the air hasn’t cooled I played hide and go seek with my cousins at my grandmother’s while my Dad, aunts and uncles visited and laughed in the yard.

I’m the second child of four children, three girls and one boy. My brother was born first, in Germany, at home and delivered by a midwife, a usual occurrence in 1959. With the umbilical cord tightly wrapped around his neck he entered the world a “blue baby.” Growing up I heard the story of Jimmy’s birth and pictured my brother the color of a Smurf. Jimmy was beautiful, blonde and completely aloof, a baby who pulled away from touch. He spent his time most content when left alone, gazing off into space while rhythmically rocking his body. My brother is autistic.

That’s me with my mother. Born on Christmas Day 1961 and christened Susan Rose (after the Christmas Rose) Loehr.

My Dad joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and met my mother while stationed in Europe after the war. I have a favorite picture of my German and French speaking mother on a beach beside the Mediterranean Sea in Monaco. Her hair is ear length, beach day wavy, a natural auburn color; she’s curvy in a moss green, 1960s style two piece bathing suit. She’s on her knees, resting her forearms on her thighs, and showing a generous bosom. She wears sunglasses of that era, a little bit movie star, she’s completely in the moment, relaxed and happy. One of my father’s sisters had also been stationed in Europe. She told me my mother was European through and through, uninhibited, quick to laugh, her full lips turned up in a smile and easy to be friends with. My mother’s name was Ursula, and she was 30 years old when she died. I was five years old and remember very little about her.

My hospital bracelet as a newborn.

My father was left a widower with four children, one autistic and one a newborn. I grew up knowing very little about my mother. There came into my possession years after my father’s death letters written in German from my mother’s family. The letters were translated for me. They asked, “Gerry, we miss you and the kinder (children). Why do you not contact us?”

There were no pictures of my mother in my childhood home. Most of what I know about my mother and any pictures I have was gleaned from relatives on my father’s side. During an unusually frank conversation with my father over 20 years after my mother’s death he told me his grief had been so great at the time of her death that if it wasn’t for his children being in the car with him he would have driven in front of a big truck and ended his own life.

Despite the gap in my genealogy my life has been full. But lately, in the last decade of my life, I’ve been feeling the hole, and I find myself more and more wondering how different my life would have been had my mother lived.

We were stationed in Ottawa when my mother died. My father was honorably discharged from the Royal Canadian Air Force. We relocated to Kamloops and with three children moved in with his mother, while an aunt and uncle took my new baby sister. My Dad went to work at the airport in Kamloops and took classes at night to become a radio technician. He was gone long hours. My grandmother was in her 70s and a tiny lady, I was already taller than her by the time I was nine years old, but she was a fierce disciplinarian. I once took my pogo stick to school when she told me I couldn’t. She was at the door with a stick when I got home. Yet, I remember sitting on her lap kneading the soft sag of skin that hung from the backs of her arms as she rocked me in her chair.

It became obvious from the way I parked myself close to the television set and put books inches from my nose that I needed my vision checked. Beginning in grade one school pictures show me wearing glasses. My life has been a love/hate relationship with them because my eyesight is so poor that the lenses, back then, were thick and chunky and made my nose sore from the weight. Then, the first time I put them on my world became clear and sharp and full of glorious detail, and now I’m useless without them.

I was six years old and it was my responsibility to take my brother and sister to the park so Grandma could rest. On one excursion my sister fell off and got her leg caught under the merry-go-round. With blood running down her leg from numerous scrapes, her tears and snot in my hair I carried her home on my back while chasing Jimmy as he deked this way and that, so prone was he to deviating from our route.

These were the few years of the ranch and my introduction to a lifelong passion: horses. My father and uncle ran a few horses and some cattle a couple hours of driving north of Kamloops. My beautiful black pony with the unique name of “Blackie” was purchased for $50 at a local auction. I spent more time on the ground than I did riding him. When I fell off my wildly bucking pony my father ordered me to get back on saying, “You can’t ride and cry at the same time.” There was no woman to soften some of my father’s lessons. I learned how to swim when he threw me off the end of a wharf. Ever seen babies swim? Swimming is instinctive. I’m fine in water until I take just one more step and I can’t touch bottom and it’s over my head, then I panic, but I can swim.

Not me on a pony called “Little Champion.”

I believe I had a great childhood. My mind has let sad memories fade, while the good times remain clear and bright. When I think of the bad times it is more a feeling I recall, not so much the event itself. I remember my father’s grief, and my 70 year old grandmother’s tiredness and impatience raising young children, and how she would yank my ears hard when I misbehaved. I remember my brother’s temper but also his beautiful smile. If he hit me I hit him back, and sometimes I was the one who started our boxing matches.

I went to a Catholic school where the nuns rapped my knuckles raw with a ruler because I could never sit still at my desk. I wasn’t that unlike my older brother but his behaviors were deemed “not suitable” for the “special” school he went to during the day, and he was expelled. He was nine years old when he was put inside an institution. It seems that my father was told his mother had already raised eight of her own children. He was told that segregating “retarded” (the term at the time) people was more common than keeping them at home. Institutionalizing my brother weighed heavy on my father’s heart.

Me and my siblings

We went often to visit Jimmy at the end of a road after a long drive on the north shore of the Kamloops River. He lived in one of many large brick buildings that had been built years before during the time of tuberculosis. The buildings had high ceilings and were drafty. Voices echoed in the hallways and we sometimes heard people screaming. My little sister held tight to Dad’s hand while we followed my brother as he wandered. Jimmy had disappeared even more into his other world, sometimes stopping in mid walk to rock his body with his hands clasped together in front of him and a vacant look upon his face. If we reached out to touch him he would slide away or tug loose from our grasp.

I was nine when my father told me and my sister that he needed to talk to us. My sister and I thought we were in big trouble because I had talked her into helping me open every bottle of pop in a case of 24 and taking one sip each. Instead, he asked us what we thought about a lady he had been seeing, and if it would be a good idea to marry her. We were greatly relieved, and since we had spent some time with this lady in question we told him she was soft and smelled good.

My sister and I were flower girls at their wedding. We spent a long day in scratchy dresses, our long hair piled up on our heads and held with a net of hairspray and bobby pins, hard shoes that hurt our feet, and when the clock was close to a new day beginning and all we wanted to do was collapse into bed, the thing I remember when I look back, is Grandma insisting on pulling a comb through the snags and snarls in our hair. Then our new little family moved from Kamloops to Nelson, and I cried because I had to give up my pony.

It was nice to have a constant female presence we could call “Mom.” It showed in the feminine accents like doilies and candles, and pretty jars of nice smelling stuff in the bathroom next to Dad’s shaver and hairbrush. She cooked better than my grandmother who’d been on a sodium reduced diet, and didn’t use even a pinch of spice. My most tolerable meal at Grandma’s was boiled potatoes (every day…) speared with a bite of boiled salty wiener, one complimenting the other.

My Dad was the most happiest I’d seen him. But, quickly things changed as it sometimes happens in marriage, my new mother’s first, they began to argue. Within the first six months after the wedding, and now I was old enough to understand and remember, I saw my father cry. There began my earliest awareness of feeling fear and confusion, for both me and my sister, with parents who sometimes fought like cat and dog.

To be continued.

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Read Part One: Freaking Out & Choices Part One (click here)

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Freaking Out and Choices (Part One)

December 8, 2013 By Susan B 8 Comments

This is about that it isn’t about “being strong.” It’s about choosing, sometimes many times in an hour, to go on, to work with what there is, what is right in front of me, and stop sliding back and fretting over what I’ve lost or can’t have.

I was being pulled in every direction at work. There were a million things to do and I’d received very disappointing news in my personal life. Tears of frustration pushed from behind my eye balls. I really wanted to scream and throw something.

Help

I could fall apart. I’ve done it many times and I’m rather good at it. In the past I’ve been known to:

~throw something heavy

~cry

~scream

~spin around in circles and be of no use to anybody

I’m standing in the supply room not finding what I’m looking for. I’m physically affected by the yo yo of emotions. I could jump up and down, stomp my feet and punch something. My skin is actually crawling I’m sooooo damn FRUSTRATED! I’m going to bitch to the next person who walks in the room, on a soap box (literally because there are boxes of soap), and go on about what a joke it is that no two supply rooms in this whole freaking hospital is laid out the same way!

I know that if I do any of the aforementioned it doesn’t empty me of my angst. It does the opposite and fertilizes what bothers me. Exponentially it grows into a monster that eats me from the inside out. Yep, sure, I’ve known that for years. I heard it from my parents and many people who have witnessed my melt downs. I’ve read about it in self help books and watched it on Dr. Phil.Some of that good advice is sinking in.

At this moment there isn’t a God damn thing I can do about my personal issues. I need this job and I don’t want to look like an idiot and lose any credibility. What’s my choice?

I looked ahead only as far as my next move.

1) Find the F’n item in the supply room.

BREATH

Push away my thoughts about what had happened in my personal life. Reminder: nothing I can do about it now. I moved ahead one step at a time.

2) Go to the medication cart.

BIG BREATH!

3) Search the record

And so on.

Push away the thoughts of home. Take the problem apart. Nobody died. There are always options. Move ahead in my day just one step, one piece at a time.

I need to work with I have – what is. Push away the feelings of regret or anger over what I can’t have, or what doesn’t come easy. In the big picture, one piece of the task at hand isn’t so overwhelming. It’s easier to look only at the next step, the next moment, the next breath.

And I have to give myself these pep talks over and over, because I forget one minute to the next. My thoughts, as if there is an elastic band, are snapped backwards and I find myself, again and again and again, mulling over my issues.

It’s like when I quit smoking. I had to “quit” a zillion times in a day. Each and every freaking second the urge came over me to have a smoke, powerful urges. I had to wage a better argument for not ever having another cigarette – over and over again.

There is always a choice.

I’m only one second away from making the best one.

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Choices Part Two here