3: A Mother's Unraveling
Reading time: 14 minutes
Thanks for joining me! This email contains the third chapter of my “Dreaming In the Real” manuscript, a work in progress. Bi-weekly episodes reveal how immersing myself in the natural world while preparing vibrational essences helped me gain insight and healing after my adult life crumbled due to unaddressed trauma and childhood adversity.
PLEASE START HERE to access the episode list and preceding chapters.
CONTENT GUIDANCE: This manuscript tackles sensitive themes of parental neglect, abuse, drugs, and domestic violence. Reader discretion is advised.
“Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive.”
~ Danielle Bernock, Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals
THE FOLLOWING SPRING, my dad bought and refurbished a twenty-five-foot moving truck. We drove to California right before David Bowie released Space Oddity, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. We turned our midwestern lives upside down as 800 young men returned home from Vietnam in the first troop withdrawal, and 400,000 young people attended a music festival with musical artists who would influence my musical tastes for decades to come.
My dad drove the big truck filled with our belongings, while my sister Nancy and her husband drove a red Rambler station wagon overflowing with luggage and three kids. My mom drove a baby-blue Chrysler New Yorker, a fancy car with a push-button transmission and windows. I shared the wide back seat with three Siamese cats as she navigated the frightening labyrinth of long-haul truckers on I-80.
Our destination was Auburn, a small gold rush town in Northern California. My mom reconnected with her stepmom, half-sister, and youngest brother, whom she hadn't seen in over forty years. My mom's family now filled the space my dad's family once held. However, my dad seemed unable to bridge the differences between his conservative values and California's more liberal perspectives. He opposed anyone who didn't think, act, or look like him. When my mom offered her thoughts or opinions, he often called her stupid and told her to shut up. Since those who disagreed with him were against him, we became a house divided.
We rented a house in Auburn until my dad bought a three-bedroom house south of town, one of five single-story homes on one-acre lots in a lone cul-de-sac two miles outside the city limits. After moving, my parents had separate bedrooms, and my dad wasn't happy. Feeling responsible for my parents’ emotional well-being, I showed him even more love that he didn't acknowledge. Little did I know, I was developing patterns—unconscious thoughts that would define my future.
Our destination was Auburn, a small gold rush town in Northern California. My mom reconnected with her stepmom, half-sister, and youngest brother, whom she hadn't seen in over forty years. My mom's family now filled the space my dad's family once held. However, my dad seemed unable to bridge the differences between his conservative values and California's more liberal perspectives. He opposed anyone who didn't think, act, or look like him. When my mom offered her thoughts or opinions, he often called her stupid and told her to shut up. Since those who disagreed with him were against him, we became a house divided.
We rented a house in Auburn until my dad bought a three-bedroom house south of town, one of five single-story homes on one-acre lots in a lone cul-de-sac two miles outside the city limits. After moving, my parents had separate bedrooms, and my dad wasn't happy. Feeling responsible for my parent's emotional well-being, I showed him even more love that he didn't acknowledge. Little did I know, I was developing patterns—unconscious thinking that would define my future.
ORVILLE WAS CONSERVATIVE and Lutheran. He sported a flat-top haircut and black brow line wire-rimmed bifocals and always carried a small spiral-bound notebook and a pencil he sharpened with a pocketknife in the breast pocket of his button-down shirts. I rarely saw him without his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his hands were always busy repairing household items and vehicles or working with wood. He wore self-reliance like a badge of honor, primarily because he didn’t consider anyone else as capable as he was. He was good at almost anything he decided to do, but he excelled at making hardwood reproduction antique furniture. I thought he could do anything.
Katherine was liberal and Catholic. Curly, graying brunette hair framed her full arching eyebrows, big brown eyes, and high cheekbones. She was tall and slender, almost ethereal, like she wasn't fully committed to being in her body. She typically wore slacks, turtlenecks, stylish glasses, and costume jewelry. Every day, she sat at the kitchen table and read the Auburn Journal and the Sacramento Bee from front to back. She chain-smoked, drank iced coffee, and read mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction unless she was working on something beautiful. Inspired by nature, she enjoyed painting landscapes with oils. She also crafted decorative coffee tables from old disc harrows and the clawed feet of antique bathtubs, refinishing antique trunks, dipping elegant beeswax tapers, and making elaborate candles from handmade molds. Creativity oozed from her pores like honey.
Our home was a delightful collection of original art, painstakingly restored antique furniture, and various antique and modern collectibles. My mom applied a popular 1970s antiqued finish on our kitchen cabinets and turn-of-the-century oak spindle back dining room chairs. She painted whimsical flowers on the chairs and fruits and vegetables on the cabinets. When the colorful chairs filled with visitors enjoying her witty humor, I sat on an antique oak hutch just behind her, basking in her light. I still have the cabinet, with the worn finish on the corner where I sat as her protector and admirer.
My dad opened an art gallery and framing shop in town called Orville and Kay’s. He framed art during the day and my mom taught oil painting lessons a few nights each week. Dinner was the only thing we shared as a family. My dad and I sat at each end of the table, with my mom between us. I quickly said grace before my dad began his nightly rant about difficult vendors and customers—they were all difficult. My mom ate in silence, nodding in acquiescence at the proper times.
She avoided the slow drip of my dad’s emotional poison by sleeping in each day and staying up late to watch Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. At some point, she started drinking wine and beer in the middle of the afternoon, but she was a functional drinker. Dinner was always on time, and she continued to manage the household duties.
GRANDMA CRAIG, my mom’s stepmom Agnes, was shorter and rounder than us. She wore custom-made dresses and pillbox hats perched on blue-tinted hair. One night, during dinner at her apartment, my mom insisted I eat the mushy canned peas I was pushing around my plate with a fork. My dad’s jaw tightened when Agnes spoke.
“Katherine, don’t force her to eat something she doesn’t like. Next time, I’ll be sure to make something Marnie likes.”
It was a small thing, but I think I felt the earth shake just a bit.
I attended third grade at Lincoln Way Elementary, across from St. Joseph Catholic School, where Agnes taught third grade. She and I walked home to her apartment each day after school that year. Carrying her groceries and homework that needed grading, I learned the slow and deliberate steps of the elderly. My grandma gave me several gifts under the tree that Christmas, but my favorite was a rock tumbler. I still have a few of the polished stones I made into necklaces as a child.
In South Dakota, I attended Lutheran Sunday School. We didn’t attend church in California, but sometimes, I joined my grandma at her Catholic services. I liked the songs, rituals, incense, crossing myself with holy water, and kneeling to pray. I didn’t understand much, but I prayed each night.
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless my mommy and daddy. Jesus, please protect my mommy. Amen.”
MY MOM RESPONDED to my dad’s perpetual growl with an empty, distant gaze. My constant worry for her well-being and the stress of being overly careful not to offend, upset, or anger my dad took a toll on my immune system. I had strep throat and tonsillitis so often that my mom stopped believing me when I told her my throat hurt. It was inconvenient if my dad needed her help at the frame shop, and the never-ending medical bills became a financial hardship.
My parents couldn’t manage the inconvenience and expense of after-school activities, so while my friends participated in sports, the school band, or 4-H, I explored the surrounding foothills, read books, and listened to music in my bedroom.
The weekends spent with my friends from school were the best. Linda and I explored the foothills of Newcastle, drew pictures of horses, and giggled ourselves to sleep even after her mom and dad asked us multiple times to be quiet. I can still taste the heaping dish of family-style chow mein her mom sometimes made for dinner. Mary and I explored their small ranch, listened to music in her bedroom, and avoided her younger brother. Her parents provided me with adult interactions and perspectives I didn't have at home, and occasionally, we delighted in her grandmother's homemade ice cream.
In the summers, my neighbor friends and I occasionally convinced a parent to give us a ride to the recreation park's pool. Laughter and camaraderie filled the days as we made cannonballs off the diving boards and when we had enough kids to play the occasional pick-up softball game in a neighboring horse pasture or hide-and-seek outside after dark.
MY MOM DID her best to provide sunshine and nurture at home by making everything beautiful. She even taught me how to use oil paints and watercolors. After pulling an acre’s worth of star thistles, we planted grass, built flower beds, and planted daisies, roses, cosmos, zinnias, and tomatoes. We hung colorful bottles of sugar water for the hummingbirds. Exploring the rolling hills dividing California’s Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains, we collected chunks of white quartz for the flower beds, dug for crystals, and gathered dried grasses to accent our flower arrangements. We never came home empty-handed because everything was a treasure.
Some of my fondest memories include coming home from school to find the house smelling fresh and clean with cut flowers on the dining room table, open windows and shutters, rearranged furniture, and Aretha Franklin albums playing on the stereo. The smell of stale cigarette smoke and feelings of doom were temporarily erased in moments that felt like love. But my mom didn’t have that kind of energy very often.
Our beautiful home was full of contradictions: conservative and liberal, Protestant and Catholic, powerful and powerless. My dad wasn't a large man, but a lifetime of unexpressed emotions took up a lot of space, and everything belonged to him. My mom had to ask permission to drive a car or buy groceries. She had a checkbook and was a signer on the account, but it was his money. She asked how much she could spend on groceries each week, and according to my dad, it was always too much.
I was born late in their lives, and the world had changed so dramatically since they grew up that it was like our family skipped a cycle of generational evolution. They raised me as if it were the 1940s, not the 1970s, prioritizing obedience, manners, and not being seen or heard. I understand now that my parents' unaddressed emotional pain and stress were affecting their ability to parent, love, and grow, feeding our real struggle—loving ourselves.
My mom took me to the county library every week, and we each brought home a bag full of adventure and escape. I immersed myself in horse fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. As a younger girl, Glinda, the Good Witch from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz inspired and comforted me, "Home is a place we all must find, child. It's not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we're always home, anywhere."
When I was twelve, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind introduced me to a headstrong Scarlet O'Hara. Unaware of the problematic narrative on slavery, Scarlett taught me to pack away the things I couldn't face safely and that, despite everything, I would persevere. "After all, tomorrow is another day."
As a young teen, the Bene Gesserit litany from Frank Herbert’s Dune taught me to overcome fear. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I read my favorite books repeatedly, and since there weren’t any adults in my life I wanted to emulate, characters in movies and books filled the void. Sir, from the movie To Sir with Love, modeled a man I longed to know but didn’t—tender, strong, and kind.
OVER TIME, my mom's strategies to cope with my dad's gaslighting and neglect took a toll on her health. Not only was she drinking more, but a lifetime of chain-smoking led to progressive emphysema, a frightening bout of pleurisy, and gum disease that led to having most of her teeth surgically removed.
As her energy faded, I took over cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming carpets, mopping floors, changing sheets, and doing laundry. As her health worsened, she lashed out at her pain by pointing out my weaknesses and ignoring my successes. When my friends received ice cream or silver dollars for report cards with As and Bs, she grounded me when I received my first B. She began to body-shame me, comparing me to other girls my age who were developing faster than I was.
On Saturdays, I worked for my dad at the frame shop, cutting mats and glass. It was precise work, and I did my best not to break glass or overcut the matting. At home, I helped care for his fruit trees and garden, washed his cars, and swept sawdust from his woodshop. I never earned his affection, but I earned an allowance to have vinyl albums delivered each month from the Columbia Record Club and to buy singles at Nancie’s Record Shop in town.
My bedroom was a little haven of dreams. Removing the doors from my closet to place the head of my double bed inside, I lined the walls of the tiny closet cave with blacklight posters and a blacklight I earned selling raffle tickets for school. My walls held faces and quotes of Albert Einstein, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and John Denver. Shelves hosted books, polished rocks, crystals, shells, dried flowers, and arrowheads. Lacking the personality to be bored. I always had something creative to do or somewhere to explore. I read, wrote stories, and drew pictures of the horses I yearned for as companions. I daydreamed of being the French explorer Jacques Cousteau, studying and protecting sea life, or the British country veterinarian James Herriot, healing and caring for farm animals.
With a turntable and a wooden crate filled with vinyl LPs, melody and meaningful lyrics flowed like blood through my veins. I followed Cat Stevens's spiritual evolution. His music and words became part and parcel of my mystical journey, a bit of holiness to help me understand the truth of myself.
AS MY CLASSMATES whooped and hollered in celebration of the last day of school, I felt empty and sick. I loved school. I was safe there, and I belonged. I had friends, and I was academically competitive, at least, until things got complicated. Mary Jo, a childhood neighbor friend, recently reminded me how my school experience began to change.
“Marnie, I have this vivid memory that I've thought about more than once over the years. When you were in seventh grade, you made a poster for the Newcastle Frolic. There was a poster contest each year. Your poster was of a frog sitting on a mushroom. It was hands down the best poster, and everyone said so. The school brought in outside judges to be impartial. You didn't win because they thought that there was no way that you made the poster on your own.
Not long after, you submitted an essay to an outside contest. Your essay should have won or at least come close. Again, they disqualified you because the judges didn't believe you wrote the paper. I don't remember why I know this. I just remember my mom and dad talking about it. They both knew how gifted you were, and they felt that it was actions like this that make a person stop believing in themselves and stop trying.”
In eighth grade, while playing softball during morning recess, I skipped back several feet from second base to catch a pop-fly and tripped, breaking the fall with my right arm. A painful bulge on the outside edge of my forearm began to grow, turning shades of red and purple. The principal called my mom, and I waited for her on the steps in front of the school. I waited through lunch, afternoon classes, and recesses. When school was over and the last yellow bus filled with kids drove away, my teacher, Mr. Huff, sat beside me. It was almost six o'clock when my mom showed up too late to take me to the doctor.
That night, I was nauseous and couldn't eat dinner. My arm hurt, and I stayed in my bedroom, crying. When I heard my mom walking down the hallway toward my room, I breathed easier momentarily, hoping for a comforting hug or anything comforting. Instead, she silently reached for the doorknob, closed the door, and walked away. At the time, I didn't understand that she couldn't cope with my pain in addition to her own, so I felt like I had done something terribly wrong.
NEXT: Chapter 4: Shame, Silence, and Neglect
Your comments really make my day! I write to connect with people, and hearing what you have to say inspires me to share more. If you can't comment right now, no worries—just drop your thoughts when you can!
Oh my goodness!... I love the line "Lacking the personality to be bored". YES! SO good! And I resonate with that too. I also loved reading about all of the books, authors and musicians that you read and listened to and who inspired you during those years! xo