PRELUDE
You know how when you look back on something and you’re not quite sure if it’s your memory or a memory from photographs or stories told to you? Well, rest assured here, I speak of what I know from my heart and soul. There were no photographs and people didn’t speak of the things that happened around me.
I can’t say I was ever physically abused, but I was neglected. I didn’t know the difference then, nor do I really care now. What is past is in the past. I am letting dead dogs lie. Or am I lying? The only thing is, I want this for posterity.
People always wonder when they can remember their first incident or thoughts. I do remember. I was 5 years old. It was a warm and sunny day. My grandfather and I were walking down the road. He was always trying to tell me some sort of story or another that would scare the bejesus out of me. He wasn’t mean, just always playing practical jokes. As we are walking this road hand in hand he asked me a question, very seriously of course. “Delissca, do you know what those spots in the road are?” He was speaking of tar patch. I replied, “No, gramps I don’t”. He said, “Those spots are of little girls and boys who were run over by cars because they weren’t watching where they were going..... and squish!” Well, do you think I ever forgot that? Do you think I ever went out into the street without looking about 5 times? These things are very impressionable on a young mind. I still look at the spots in the road today and remember him. Little did I know at that time, he would turn out to me my savior from a lot of rough times that lay ahead for me as a child. It is also a story that shows you how a young mind can be formulated and molded for later years to come. Some of it you can never forget.
I was brought up in a very small Native American Indian Fishing Village. My great-grandparents had immigrated from Quebec, Canada to Fayette, Michigan to mark our move to the United States. It was a Company Town. You worked your butt off for the Company and did not get paid in money, but instead you received bankable credits. You could use your credits at the Company store, or town physician etc. Through the years, and as time moved on, the generations that came later found themselves in Naubinway, Michigan. It is the largest fishing port in Michigan. Population was 250 people and I think that included the dogs. We were mostly all family or connected as family in one way or another. Don’t ask! I led a very sheltered life. I lived with Lake Michigan as my backdoor playground and never once enjoyed the beauty of it all. It was taken for granted every day. It was just there and I don’t think I thought of it once in the thirteen years I lived in that town, as being as beautiful as it was. When I return to it today, it remains almost the same, with some of the older buildings torn down.
My parents, Harold and Bonnie, were madly and passionately in love with each other, that usually makes for a very stormy relationship. They had grown up with one another. They went to the same school in Gould City, Michigan. Of course, there is always a kicker to every love story. My mother had started dating my Uncle. Yes, my father’s brother. She was very much in love with him. My mother was a very proper woman and kept to her beliefs that sex was saved for marriage. Well, my Uncle didn’t abide by those rules, so he was seeking that sort of entertainment elsewhere. He got another woman pregnant and married her. That of course broke my mother’s heart. Then awhile later, my father came sniffing around. He was so handsome. I mean movie star handsome. Not many of you will remember the young version of Tony Curtis, but my father looked a lot like him, only better. He fell in love with my mother and she him. They were married with my Uncle and Aunt, the same Uncle my mother had been in love with, as their best man and maid of honor. So, my mother’s life in this town was not off to a good start. It is my belief that she still carried a torch for my Uncle for some time to come.
My parents had me a year after they were married. Much too soon. They were not ready for a child. I learned many years later, from my mother that she had never really wanted any children, or so she told me to my face. Even though they were old enough in age to have children, their maturity was not quite up to par. My mother was 23 and my father was 25. They both liked to party. By that, I mean they like to make the rounds at the local pubs, ....... quite often and drink.
Any earlier than the age of 5 I have no recollection of what they did with or to me. When I turned 5 that is when my choices began. I elude to choices because that is how they were laid out to me. We can call them forks in the road of my empty life. I could either go to the bar with them and spend the night there with all the local drunks or I could stay home alone. I can give a whole new meaning to the movie “Home Alone”. Keep in mind, I was 5 years old. At the time, we lived out in the woods and there were bear. Television was pretty new at that time and if you were lucky enough to have one, it was so snowy you couldn’t hardly make out the figures on it anyway. So, what was a 5 year old to do with herself alone in the woods at night? I will tell you. Sit, cry, and be very frightened. Wish you were anywhere but there. You imagined yourself anyplace but where you were. You let your mind wander. Will it to be so that you had another family, anyone except the one you had. I did a lot of daydreaming about living with another family and having another life. In the end....... I caved in and most of time, I will say, I went to the pubs with them. When I didn’t and if I could see our little 9" screen tv I watch Donna Reed or Father Knows Best. I just knew that when I grew up, my life was going to be like that. Not like the one I had now. My children would be perfect like that and so would my husband. Then came the Beaver and Ward Cleaver. What magic. After that we had the Nelsons. Such happy faces and families. Well I lost myself in them. I just knew I was one of them. It was all a matter of time.
Shall I discuss my behavior at the pubs, when I decided to go? My father and I would sometimes dance for money. He had taught me how to jitterbug. We would do that together and everyone just thought I was so adorable. Well, I did like the attention. I was also the only child in the bar at that time of night. So music became my soul. I also became very good at shuffleboard. Rock and roll music was everything to me in those days. Some of it told the story of my empty life. Then I learned the mood and power of lyrics. I wanted to sing so bad. I just didn’t have the voice for it. I wanted to play piano, I just didn’t have long enough fingers. Music wasn’t to be my forte. Dancing I did well and I still do to this day.
After awhile when everyone started to get really drunk and the arguments began over politics or whatever and I would get ‘nervous’. My hands would go numb as well as my teeth. I now know that as ‘hyperventilation’. As a child, my parents not only didn’t know what it was, but were so drunk, they just told me to go into the back room (my Aunt lived in the backroom of her bar) and lay down. That is when I started to bite around my fingers very badly. I would bite my fingernails, but also bite the skin around the nails until they bled. I wouldn’t just go down one layer of skin, I’d go down two of three layers. I now know this as ‘self injuring’. Back then we didn’t know anything about psychiatrics let alone ‘self injuring’. There are all kinds of ways people will hurt themselves and that is just one of them. I was doing that right up until I found out about it just a few months ago. I would do it without even being conscious about it. I would get nervous and just start picking until I bled somewhere and then sometimes, if it were on my feet, I couldn’t walk right for days. My heels would be so wounded, I’d have to limp around. People would tell me to just “quit picking at yourself”. There again thinking I was just the ‘nervous’ sort.
Being at the bar until it closed was particularly hard on me for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had school the next day. The second reason being that after we got home, the ‘fighting’ would begin. You could count on it like clockwork. They just fought until they were too tired to fight anymore. Then the next day, no one was allowed to mention it. It was as if it didn’t happen. I remember being very tired going to school. I do not have any memory of being physically abused by my parents. I do remember them hitting each other from time to time, but not often and not badly. Just a swipe here and there. I do have a recollection of one time, they were having an awful fight in the car and my mother insisted my father stop the car in the parking lot that she was going to get out. Well I didn’t want her to go, so I started to come after her. I don’t think she knew I was coming after her and she slammed the car door on my head really hard. Anyway, I saw stars from that, but the fight just carried on and I should have been a good girl and just sat still.
Ahhhhh the fights, how did I feel when they were fighting? Is this when I really should have known I was ill and there was something basically different about me? We were living in a 20' trailer at the time. I slept on the sofa pullout in the ‘living room’, so I’m afraid there was no where to go to escape the fighting and yelling. I heard and saw it all, every other night as if it were my family ritual. Like other people may pray every night before supper, well we fought every other night before sunrise. At 5 years old, exactly what is appropriate for a 5 year old to be hearing and seeing? What is healthy? I can remember a lot of it, but I can’t ever talk about it even to this day. How late should a child of that age stay up before she has to get up for school at 7:30 am? Should she be awake until 5 am? Is that acceptable in anyone’s world? I guess in 1958 as long as it’s all behind doors, it’s ok in everyone’s world. Do I have any scars from that? None you can see.
Did my illness begin then? Everything seems so complicated as I try to put this into words. We have so much at stake here. There is their consumption of alcohol and yet my own mother’s apparent Bipolar. I also know that there is mental illness on my father’s side of the family as well as alcoholism. You have to understand that back in those pre days of psychiatrics that is how people dealt with mental health issues. They drowned themselves in the bottom of a bottle of something. It was commonplace.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself and yet I don’t want to drag this out for you. I feel it so important to report it as it happened or you will miss an important factor. It all must come together like ABC.
At some point here it is important for me to let the reader know that I was raised up as a very strict Catholic girl. This is a very important certainty that are the ties that bind me. I was taught by Dominican Nuns back in the 50's. To give you background on the Dominican Order, they were of the most zealous order out at the time. They came to our hometown in the summers only and we went to Catechism every summer for 6 weeks everyday all day. We had to memorize the entire Catechism or else. There really was no choice. It was a brainwashing on a very high level, do not be mistaken about that. No one will admit to that now. I was one of those that was brainwashed. I do not believe that the Catholic’s do that anymore. It was back when the Mass was still in Latin, women wore headdress to church, we didn’t eat meat on Fridays and Confession every Saturday was a must before communion on Sunday. Times have changed significantly and a lot of people have forgotten the old ways. I have not, being one of the brainwashed.
I do know that my morals and values basically came from Catholicism. Here within lies my two edged sword. I’m not saying that was all bad, as my parents didn’t have a lot to teach in that department. I’m just saying that when I do any therapy today, there is a major conflict between today’s thoughts on living and the way I was taught by the nuns. Briefly, any therapist I go to, tells me I don’t have any grey matter in my life. I only see things in black and white which causes a lot of turmoil in my life. That makes me opinionated, argumentative, stubborn etc. All of that is true. I do not straddle the fence on any issue. Things are either right or they are wrong. That is the black and white issues. That is Catholicism. That is years of brainwashing. That is 13 years of training. I can’t be undone. Therapy can’t undo me. I hate therapy. It attempts to undo who I am. The therapists cannot imagine the turmoil they cause within me when they start with mumbo jumbo that is in direct conflict with 13 years of knowledge that is implanted in my brain.
There is also something inherent in me that will not allow me to say NO or to maintain an anger at people for any length of time, no matter how badly these people may have hurt me. That is also religious but comes more from my own beliefs as an adult about Jesus and forgiveness. The bible says, A man comes to Jesus and asks him, Jesus, my brother has betrayed me, and I have forgiven him seven time, how many times do I have to forgive him? Jesus looks at the man and answers, I tell you, you must forgive him seven times seventy! What, as a mere mortal am I to do?
I guess it’s not just as an adult. As a child I was taught to love my fellow man above all. I am beginning to believe that these two things in my life are holding me back from being a ‘regular’ person. Between the Catholic brainwashing in my very early and formative years and my bible training in my later years, I have clung to beliefs that I owe the entire world forgiveness, second chances, love, acceptance, understanding, my nurturing, I owe them! I am starting to see that maybe my world is upside down or inside out. Maybe there is a big huge joke being played on me, like when I was a child and it’s just never really stopped. Where is the love in return for me?
My sister’s have not spoken to me in 3 years. I gave them all the love I had inside and more. My father, is in such denial and never comes to see me, knowing I live a life of a leper. The husband who vowed to stand by me through all of this, no matter what. The children, that I gave it all to. I sacrificed all my youth to them. I literally bled from my eyes for these children. Where are they now? No, I’m not Jesus hanging on the cross saying “My God, My God, why have thou forsaken me?” I know I must be far more humble than that. No I can’t turn to Job, and say, how did you do it? How did you lose it all and still survive? I’ve lost nothing in comparison. I know where I rate in all of this. I also know what my shoulder’s can handle.
Back to the story. When I was a child, growing up in a one room schoolhouse, there were no secrets. There were 7 children in my grade and 5 of them were boys. So, guess what that left for me? One very mean little girl to play with. It also appears her mother and my mother didn’t get along, due to the fact my mother believed her mother was having an affair with my father. This girl made my life a living hell. She was even able to turn my own cousins against me. Do you know the kind of person I speak of? She was just one of those bullies that everyone clung to. She had that charisma to draw people to her. I was the poor little skinny kid with the ‘banana nose’ (still have the nose) and the weird drunken parents. I was very quickly ostracized. As I said, not even my own cousins would play with me in school, or be seen with me. I finally started staying in at recess and the teacher would give me things to help her out with. I’m sure her heart broke for me, now as I look back on it. Every once in a blue moon this bullie would decide it was ok for everyone to play with me, and she’d tell everyone they could. So...... I’d be accepted for a month or so. I thought I was in heaven, until she’d get mad at me again, and then it just started all over again. To say the least my childhood was not the greatest. The one room schoolhouse was Kindergarten thru third grade. A long time, it was.
At some point there was a move with the trailer to a place beside my grandfather’s house. He had a large piece of property that was not in the woods, but in town. The schoolhouse was right in front of it. I remember that my step-grandmother passed while we lived there. I remember thinking at the time that my grandfather’s house was huge, when indeed as I look back upon it as an adult it was run down and really quite small. As a child to me, it was grand tho. I had quite an imagination for playing games and would learn to do so in that house. He did not have indoor plumbing either. We had an outhouse that we had to venture out into. There was a ‘pot’ placed under our bed for the cold winter nights. It was emptied daily. We washed in the sink in the trailer and took ‘sponge-baths’. That would mean that you used pumped water out of a well, warmed up on a stove, placed into the sink and then you would scrub your body clean and rinse with the same water. Your hair was washed once a week. It was too difficult to do more than that.
All of my clothes were made from chicken ‘feedsacks’. I don’t know how many of you have ever been on a chicken farm or remember visiting one. The chicken feedsacks back then were made of cotton and they were colorful and usually of plaids or flowers. My mother, much to our blessings, was an excellent seamstress. She could make a dress or shorts for me from this material. She did this without a pattern. She was extremely talented. All that talent was lost. That was how I got my clothing.
There was never enough money, never. My father worked from odd job to odd job. He was excellent at everything he did, he just didn’t like doing much. He worked about 5 months a year and drew unemployment the other 7. Thank God my Uncle owned the local IGA store in town. We were allowed to run up a ‘tab’ at the store. My mother would get so embarrassed at how high our bill would be there, that she would send me to buy items we needed. Be assured that didn’t stop my father from being at the pub every night. And......I’m afraid her right along with him. Food was not on their list of priorities. I grew up on sandwiches without anything in between and the kids came to tease me about that too. I had condiment sandwiches. I had ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, or butter sandwiches. I still do sometimes to this day. Our syrup was made from sugar and water. We also got food from “the surplus”. They didn’t have food stamps back in those days. Surplus was spam, flour, peanut butter, dried milk, potatoes, lard and rice.
My mother had three miscarriages between myself and my middle sister. They suspected she could not carry the male fetus. She didn’t really believe she could have anymore children, after losing 3. Being Catholic, they did not use birth control. In 1960, my mother became pregnant with my sister, Angela. She was born on July 1, 1961. So, there it was to be, the four of us living in a 20' trailer on the dole. Can you imagine? People don’t even go camping now in a 20' trailer. We lived in one, winter, summer, spring and fall. I, of course was 9 years old by then and plenty old enough to take care of a baby. So.... after I had just learned to raise myself, I was to learn how to raise a baby. At the age of 9 years old, I dug right in and learned to love and care for this precious new infant. She was my sister and I was extremely lucky to have company in my life. I loved her and took care of her until she was 17 years old. Now that’s a story for a whole other book.
We then knew we needed to find larger dwellings. So a cousin of my father’s offered for us to live on an old farm outside of town, in a little town called Engadine, Michigan for $15/mo. It had 160 acres and was a huge farmhouse. So large in fact that they closed off the upstairs, which had 5 bedrooms because they couldn’t afford to heat them. Instead my bed was placed in a hallway, and Angela, my sisters was brought into their bedroom with them.
Living in this very empty solitude place is when my mother first showed her signs of great mental illness. She made her two suicide attempts while living there. Life was very lonely for her on the farm. She couldn’t handle it and she cracked many times. She was never taken to the doctor, as we had a family member that was a nurse and stitched my mother back up once and the other time, she vomited out all the pills. She couldn’t keep them down. I was the one, one time, to find her in the bathtub with blood everywhere. It was dripping down the sink the tub, the water was deep red and her head was just hung back. I don’t recall anything after that. People were not seen for such problems at that time. You really didn’t even talk about it. Things like that were kept in the ‘closet’. Bonnie was not really ‘crazy’!! Well maybe just a little for the time she took our kittens and put them in a sack and took them to the creek and drowned them and then came back and cried about it for 3 days. I was living with a very disturbed woman.
I can remember a cold day in hell, when we were standing on top of this colossal heating grate built into the floor from wood heat in the basement. That is the day she told me she hated me. I will never forget that day. She was shaking me violently and telling me “I hate you”. “Your father loves you more than he does me”. I remember not thinking or feeling anything about that at the time. It didn’t hurt me or anything. She was just having a tirade. I was still taking care of my sister. Life was becoming more unbearable for me also though. I was developing breasts by this time. How horrible for me. I could no longer go to the pubs with them. I had a young baby to stay home and take care of. It was very frightening to say the least. She would cry and cry and I didn’t know what to do. I would call them at the bar they said they would be at and they would just blow me off. I remember I would cry along with the Angela. I didn’t like living out of town at the farmhouse. It was very scary and oh so very alone.
After about a year and a half of that, we had an opportunity to move back into Naubinway.
By now my life had really deteriorated. You are probably asking why I’m not mentioning any of the good parts? This is as I remember it. As a family, we were living in a tar paper shack behind a pub my Aunt owned. Lake Michigan was literally at my back door. We still did not have indoor plumbing. Mother washed our clothes on a washboard. Her hands would be raw. In the winter her hands would freeze from drying the clothes on a clothesline outside. Her life was beyond being bearable. I have no idea how she did it. Then..... another accident. She became pregnant with my youngest sister, Phyllis. She cried and cried and cried. She really did not want to bring this child into the world. Angela was only about 1 ½ at the time. Money was very short. The tar paper shack had two bedrooms, but no doors on them. I mention that little fact, because I am growing older now and I have to listen to things happening between a man and a woman nightly that a young woman should not have to hear. Oh no, there was nothing innocent about me. The floors were all tilted sideways. To say the least, it was not a nice place. My mother did leave me with one legacy. She said, “Delissca, water is free (that was back when it was free), we may be poor, but we don’t have to be dirty”. By God, we weren’t. We cleaned all the time. Not that you could notice.
As destiny will have it another tragedy struck my parents two weeks before my sister was to be born. I broke my leg while tobogganing, very badly. I won’t go into all the gory details of that, but I had a cast on for 4 months and it was suppose to be 7, but they thought gangrene might have set in, so they removed the cast after 4 months. All this time, we are still living in the tar paper shack. Are you getting the feeling that God isn’t exactly following this family around with the good luck fairy?
Sister number three comes along and again as fate will have it, she is born with a staff infection. My mother has to wash and clean everything of hers daily, still with no washing machine or anything to help her. My sister is born in the cold cold month of January. For two weeks this goes on. Now, did things get better for me? You might say yes, that by now these two people that have 3 children and have been through, oh 13 years of marriage, would be settled down and ready to take care of their children. I hate to disappoint you. It gets worse. I am in a cast from my toes to my hip. The itching is beyond belief. The stench from my rotting leg is unendurable. I have a 2 ½ year old, Angela and a baby sister, Phyllis and my parents still figure they are entitled to their nights out. So I can walk on one crutch, why not? I can carry the baby in the other as she screams and I can still take care of the other child while I’m at it. I can’t really tell you in words what those days were like. There simply are no words I can find in the English dictionary to describe my living hell. I can tell you that those were the years when JFK died. I do remember hearing it in school and coming home and it was on a very poor tv reception for 3 days. Business was usual for my parents though.
Things remained the same for them until my youngest sister, Phyllis turned about 7 months or so. One foreboded night on the way home from the pub, they had a terrible fight. My father knocked my mother out of the car as they were pulling up the driveway. She slipped and fell in a rut and broke her ankle. Well, my father wouldn’t take her to a doctor. My Uncle, who was my mother’s brother, just happened to be up visiting at the time, and convinced my mother that she had to leave this man and give her children some kind of a life. I was 13 at the time. In the meantime, my father had put electrician’s tape around my mother’s ankle and expected her to take care of the two children and the house like that. I guess that was enough to convince her to finally leave him. I remember clearly my last bus ride home as I had a crush on a boy and I finally got up the nerve to wave to him and he waved back. I walked in the door from school and our bags were packed. My mother told me she was going to my grandfather’s and that we were leaving my father to move downstate with relatives and that I was to stay there and say goodbye to my father.
I stayed. When my father walked in the door, I ran to him and hugged him very hard. He began to cry. He held me tightly. I explained to him what we were going to do. He said he understood. I told him I would miss him and he told me the same thing. Little did I know it would be 9 months until I’d see my father again.
Do not pity me, cry for the little girl that never was!~