Chapter 20
I had my 21st birthday in September 1969. I was now officially an adult and I had done pretty well, I thought, in navigating the process of growing up. However, I began falling down a deep dark hole of depression. I would get up and feed the kids, do my housework and then shut myself in the utility room with a box of tissues and cry. After awhile I would suck it up, dry my eyes and come out, make lunch, put Summer and Jesse down for a nap and then cry some more.
I was barely functioning and did only what had to be done to keep the house going. I read my Bile every day and prayed. And I cried a lot. I didn’t want the kids to see me cry like that so I would continue to hide in the utility room or lock myself in the bedroom.
Summer started school the next fall and I pulled myself together and made her school clothes. I discovered if I stayed busy enough, I wouldn’t have time to cry. I sewed her a complete wardrobe for the school year and made one special red, white and blue outfit to wear on the first day of school. Jesse went to a church pre school program so I had some alone time every weekday from 9:00 to noon.
Now I didn’t have to hide to cry. I would get the kids off to school, do what needed to be done and then sit in the living room with a box of tissues and listen to Simon and Garfunkel sing Bridge Over Troubled Water – over and over and over.
When the kids were home, I cleaned like a crazy lady. I became obsessed with clean. We only had carpet in two rooms of the house and the rest was vinyl tiles. I was constantly working on those floors trying to make them shine until I totally ruined them. I used so much wax stripper that the flooring turned sticky and rubbery. Jesse came home that day to a horrible mess! Thankfully, we had the money to put down some new flooring but we chose indoor/outdoor carpet. Floors that needed to shine weren’t safe around me.
I scaled back on the cleaning and decided I weighed too much. 120 pounds and I thought I was fat. It really wasn’t the weight but control I was seeking. I had control over what I ate so I starved myself becoming anorexic in the process, adding yet one more self-destructive habit.
For breakfast I would have half of a small Dixie cup of cereal with a little bit of milk. Lunch was a graham cracker with a thin smear of peanut butter on it. I fed the kids and cooked dinner at night but I would barely eat any. By this time, I weighed 89 pounds.
My unhealthy mental state was affecting my children. I was still taking heavy tranquilizers as well as anything else I could get my hands on. I would insist on taking Summer and Jesse, Jr. somewhere even though I was in no condition to drive. Summer knew this and one time she called her Granny and told her what was going on. Mother advised her to hide my car keys and then she drove over from Fort Worth to talk to me.
We talked about my childhood and things that had happened. I described a recurring dream I had been dreaming for years. There was a big braided oval rug and on the rug was a couch, chairs and a table. The rug swirled around and around in the air and as it was lifted higher and higher, the furniture would lift up and spin off the rug and into space and then the rug would spin faster and faster unraveling as it spun until it was just a rope spinning up out of sight.
Another dream I had repeatedly was where I had a knife in my hand and I was stabbing things.
I could feel in my dream the way the blade felt as it went through whatever I was stabbing. Sometimes softly like the knife was cutting a tomato. Other times I had to push harder as if I was cutting into a potato. This dream Mother could help me with. She told me about the time Clayton was supposed to be at home with us and he wasn’t. She came home early and hid in the bedroom closet and when he opened the closet door, she jumped out with the knife in her hand and stabbed him. I had totally repressed that memory, but after we talked, I never dreamt that one again. However, I continued to dream the one about the rug for long, long years to come. I was able to function and live a more normal life but still suffered with depression.
Jesse was a good provider but he didn’t seem to like us. He was not an affectionate husband or father. This may have been because he didn’t know how since he had no good role model. His mother was not a good mother by anyone’s standards and left Jesse in charge of his two younger sisters. He learned to control by fear and that’s the way he was with his own children as well.
He was heavy on discipline that crossed the lines into physical, mental and emotional abuse. We were all afraid of him and what he would do. Even small behavior problems were dealt with extreme punishments. When Summer made a mark in Citizenship, she got a whipping every night for weeks.
When she made a C in a class, she was required to bring every book in her desk home every single night and then have to take them back and forth for the entire grading period.
He didn’t play catch with Jr. or do anything with the kids other than take them with him on Saturday mornings to visit kids in the lower income apartment houses and invite them to ride the church bus to Sunday School. It's strange that he showed more concern, love and compassion for them than he did for his own flesh and blood.
There was a man in church that I thought of as a brother. He was part of the children’s ministry and had started a Christian magician class. Summer showed an interest in that and started going with him to the different classes and then he would spend extra time working with her teaching her the ‘magic’ tricks. I encouraged this, thinking that at least she had a father figure paying attention to her when her own father wouldn’t. After a while I noticed she didn’t seem to want to go with him anymore and yet I continued to encourage her in the classes. She steadily lost interest in the whole thing and insisted she didn’t want to go. It was more than 10 years later I found out this man whom I had admired so much and loved like a brother had been molesting her all this time.
Vacations were the bright spot in our lives. For some reason, Jesse treated us better on vacations than any other time of the year. It was like a miracle. The first real vacation was in 1971 when we went to Colorado, which became our very favorite destination. It was the first and the last place we visited together in our 41 years of marriage. Summer was eight years old and Jesse, Jr. was five.
I had carefully planned our trip using Triple A and the travel guides and maps. We budgeted carefully, making sure our bills were paid, we had money for the trip and a job waiting for us when we came home. Since Jesse was a masonry contractor, we saved what we could and paid up our bills ahead of time plus filled the pantry and freezer for when we didn’t have jobs and money coming in.
We were involved in Vacation Bible School and that year it was scheduled for the week immediately after school was out, so we left that Friday night after the closing service. We were all so excited and I had a calendar that I was marking off the days. So many days and a ‘wake up.’ One of our friends at church counted time this way as her husband was in the service and she looked forward to the ‘wake up’ day when she would see him!
I have a photo Jesse took of us standing in from of our cream-colored Pontiac to document our first family vacation. We drove late into the night before we stopped at a small motel in New Mexico not far from the Colorado state line. We unloaded a few things and were getting ready to go to bed when we discovered that we had left the kids’ suitcases in the living room at home. They were so upset but I assured them that once we got to Manitou Springs, Colorado, we would find some Goodwill stores and buy them enough clothes to last for our trip. Their main concern was the fact they didn’t have swimming suits. They didn’t mind sleeping in their clothes that night.
We drove right on in the next morning and found some great Goodwill stores where we were about to get complete wardrobes for both children, including swimming suits. Our motel was right on Manitou Avenue and the first thing they wanted to do was get in the pool. There was a big slide you could go straight down and into the water. Summer could swim a little bit but Jesse, Jr. could not. That didn’t stop him from going down that slide, though. He would slide down, hit the bottom of the pool, and simply sit there until his dad dove under and picked him up. They played like that all afternoon.
We would get up early and go out to see all the sights and then drive up into the mountains to eat a picnic lunch. We could not get over the beauty of being in those majestic mountains. For breakfast and lunch, we ‘ate out of our ice chest.’ I had packed a cardboard box with bread, chips, cereal, pickles, peanut butter and jelly, fruit and snacks and we would spread a tablecloth and eat outdoors. We chose one meal a day to eat in a restaurant. That could be breakfast, lunch or dinner and we varied which meal from day to day.
Once the vacation was over and we were back at home, life returned to what we considered normal and we would start yearning for the next year’s vacation.
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