Coming of Age

I had a pretty good childhood.  I did have a bone disease that left me wheelchair bound for a few years, but by the time I turned 13 I was walking.  That was when my mother had her first nervous breakdown as they called it in the 60's.  Actually, she had a full psychotic break because she was schizophrenic.  Nice to find out when you are 13 that your mother is really crazy.

I won't go into the details, but after a lengthy hospitalization my mother did come home and go back to work.  Part of her hospitalization time was spent at a private hospital that did nothing to help her but weekly reminded me, a 13 year old, that my mother had neglected herself to take care of me.  When her insurance ran out, Mother was transferred to the state hospital.  "Horrors!" everyone told us.  Yet it was in the state hospital that Mother received the treatment and the medication that let her function normally and subdued her illness.

Mother's siblings had initially helped us, but when my mother was transferred to the State Hospital and her insurance ran out, they offered no assistance. They did seek to have me made a ward of the state and removed from the only home I had known and the care of my paternal grandmother.  My paternal grandmother refused to go along with their scheme.  She held firmly to the belief that my mother would recover.  Luckily for me, Mom did.  My father lived in Michigan with his second wife and wanted nothing to do with his only child.  One aunt told me I could live with her family, clean, cook and care for the children and she would keep me from becoming a ward of the state.  Those were some scary times.

Mom came home and I expected life to return to normal.  It did not.  My grandmother continued to care for the house and cook, her favorite pastime.  Mother went back to work.   Yet, I suddenly was making all my own decisions as well as many for my mother.  My grandmother had gone to work when she was thirteen, she saw no reason to supervise me.  Mother no longer could or would.

I did not recognize the change for a while.  I remember my first dental visit after my mother's hospitalization.  My grandmother gave me a signed blank check and told me when the appointment was.  I rode my bike there, got my teeth checked and cleaned, and wrote the check.  I was a little nervous, but I had been to the dentist before.   What had changed hit home when it came time for me to choose courses for the next semester in junior high.  I brought home the materials but both my grandmother and mother told me to do what I wanted.  I did.  From that day forward, I never asked them about school matters.  My mom would sign my report card happily, but she did not meet with my teachers or discuss my schoolwork.  Years later, she told me she knew I was much harder on myself than she would ever be.

I stopped attending church soon after my mother's hospitalization.  The church had completely abandoned us during mother's illness.  The only ones that helped us at all were members of my grandfather's Masonic lodge who sent a little money and some school clothes for me.  By that time, too,  I had decided I was going to be a scientist. ( I had read too much science fiction.)  I was full of questions, especially questions about our Sunday School lessons.  The teacher usually ignored me, but finally I was told that I should not ask questions because that showed a lack of faith.  I left the church with no plans ever to return.  Mother did not like that I had stopped going to church, but she never returned to church after her illness.  There was too much stigma attached to mental illness for her to feel comfortable in that church.  Again, leaving the Baptist church was totally my decision.   In the sixteen years that followed, I became a deist.  I saw Christianity as incompatible with intellectual pursuits and certainly with science.

My grandmother gradually ceded decision making about the household to me.  We bought a car the summer I turned sixteen, and I learned to drive.  The agreement was that it was my car, but I must put taking my grandmother and mother where they needed to go first.  I drove it to school and anywhere else I wanted to.  Neither my grandmother or mother ever checked on where I went.

You would think that with all this freedom, I would have been a wild teenager,  After all, my teenage years were in the 1960's.  I knew about drugs, smoking and alcohol.  I never smoked.  I did not drink nor do drugs.  I simply was afraid of losing control of my mind.   As I told a friend, I never thought about misbehaving.  I focused on school and taking care of my mother.   Finances helped keep me on the straight and narrow.  Mother was a telephone operator.  We just barely made it month to month.  My grandmother's tiny Social Security check made the difference.   The one thing my mother put her foot down on was my working.  She would not let me do it.  Looking back, I see she was right.  I had my hands full with school and home responsibilities.

I came of age at thirteen in 1960.   I have made my own decisions since then.  I have taken care of both my grandmothers through their last years and final illnesses.  I took care of my mother until her death from complications of Parkinson's disease.  I made it through college and worked all the while.  I possess a Bachelor of Science degree, a doctorate in chemistry and a law degree.   I would make some different choices for myself, but not the one's that pertain to my grandmothers and mother.  I do wish I could have enjoyed being a teenager more.

Therapist Request

photo by rikki's refuge

My therapist wants me to write my memoir.  I think it would be a waste of time.  I have spent my life making mistakes.  I do not want to memorialize them.  As a fall back, he suggested I write about episodes in my life.   He has managed to pull me back from planning my demise constantly to just occasionally thinking about how nice it would be to be dead..  The problem is I am not sure I agree that is progress, but he does.  I did make him one promise: the next time I do implement a suicide plan it will be successful.  I won't go through the last few years again.

So my first childhood story.  I don't know how much is my own memory and how much my mother and grandmother told me.

When I was three, our landlord owned an aggressive hound named Roland.  He had to be chained because he jumped for people's throats.  He loved our landlord and was not aggressive with him.

I loved Roland.  My mother did not think I was old enough for a pet, so all I had was Roland.   I was small, Roland was large for a hound.  Of course, no one knew I played with him regularly until my mother came home from class (she attended college on the GI bill) and saw me riding him around his yard.  I was told never to do that again, but of course, I did.

I was given a child's croquet set for my third birthday.  I was not impressed with croquet, but I did like hitting things with the small croquet mallet, a stick about a foot long with a small spool sized, balsa wood end.

Roland and I developed a new game.  I would pound him over the head with the mallet until he grew tired.  Roland then would seize the stick in his mouth to make me stop.  I would hang on to the mallet and he would hold on too.  We would stand for some time until Roland released the stick and I would pound him again.  He was free to move away at anytime, but he never did.  We always stood in the same place in his yard.  I don't know how often we played the game.  I just remembering standing with him holding my end of the mallet several times.

One day, my mother saw us.  I don't know what upset her more: the fact her child was beating an animal or that her child was aggravating a dog with a proven bite record.  She called to me.  I tugged on the mallet and Roland released it as I knew he would.   I went to her.  She scolded me for hitting Roland and took the mallet away.  I never saw it again.  I was told to stay away from Roland.  I did for the rest of that day.

We moved within that year to married student housing for the University of Texas.  My dad had divorced my mother and married another woman when I was one.  I do not remember seeing him ever.  My paternal grandmother had moved in with my mother to help her financially and care for me while mother went to college.  So the "we" is my paternal grandmother, my mother, and me..

Sometime after we moved, Roland bit someone quite badly and was put down.  I think he was simply shot.  I did not find out about his death until several years later.

I will always remember Roland, my first dog.

Bridges in the Past

I'm in the memoir mood. When I turned sixteen,  I learned to drive and became the only driver in the family.  My mother bought a car for me with the understanding that I was obligated to be the chauffeur for both grandmothers and her.

So one spring day, I drove both my grandmothers to visit my maternal grandmother's aunt.  My great aunt Margaret was the same age as my maternal grandmother.  The two had grown up together and been close companions.. My aunt( we never bothered with great) lived in a rural area in Caldwell County. In those days the roads were unpaved but coated with a gravel and clay mixture.  The less used stretches were covered with grass and weeds.  My aunt lived on one of those dusty tracks.

Once together, the three women (all in their seventies) decided they wanted to visit one of the local cemeteries. I, of course, as the chauffeur, had no say in the matter. My Aunt Margaret gave directions and soon I drove down a grassy road that showed very little sign of use. Aunt Margaret was unperturbed when I suggested that a paved county road might be a better choice.

"This is a short cut. Just the locals know about it, " she said.

"Keep going," chimed in the grandmothers.

I drove about five miles when a bridge over a creek loomed ahead. I stopped. This bridge looked on its last legs with a badly rusted superstructure and a wooden road bed. That road bed was no longer completely covered. Planks made two parallel strips about two feet wide each that stretched across four by four cross beams. The bridge did not look safe and I told my passengers that  There was a least a thirty foot drop to the creek bed below. The three matriarchs were unperturbed and ordered me to drive on. I considered disobeying, but I was young, my grandmothers and aunt adamant and totally sure of the safety of the bridge, I drove on.

The minute my front wheels rolled onto the bridge, it shuddered. If I had been a passenger, I would have closed my eyes.  I was the driver; I had to look. The bridge actually swayed as I inched forward. My heart pounded and I concentrated on tracking the two rows of planks which now seemed very narrow.. Some of the planks tipped upward when the car moved forward.  The weathered boards were not nailed down.  From the back seat, both grandmothers urged me to go faster.  I did speed up, but only by a couple of miles per hour. Creaks, metal groans and wooden thuds accompanied our movement forward.  After what seemed like an hour, but in reality was only a few minutes, I drove onto the grass on the other side of the creek, grass that looked undisturbed by any vehicle.

Relieved, I glanced in the rear view mirror. There was a sign. I stopped the car and looked back.

In bright red, block letters was the word "CONDEMNED." My stomach jumped. I pointed to the sign and told my passengers, "We could have been killed."

"Well, nothing happened," said my paternal grandmother..

"If you're so nervous, we can go back the long way," said my aunt.

The matter settled we proceeded to the cemetery, then back to my great aunt's home the "long way."

I have never felt the same about bridges after that excursion.  I always look back for the condemned sign.


Photo by accent on the eclectic.  Bridge in photo is not the one I drove across.