Perhaps it does not need to be said that a woman who had five children to replace her fantasized siblings might have gotten off on the wrong foot as a parent. But that is the least of it. In her pain—from her childhood, certainly, and from other causes—my mother grabbed at many salves for her misery.
My father’s family had been poor, and he went to work at fourteen years old to support his six brothers and sisters. In their marriage, my father’s childhood poverty and large family ran headlong into my mother’s childhood loneliness.
My mother, fighting her childhood ghosts, was determined to have her large family. My father, recalling the crowded rooms his family had shared and the pain of real hunger, dreamed only of financial security. He worked constantly, rising in his career as an industrial engineer. My parents’ pasts were dueling with each other. As my mother got more insistent on a big family, my father withdrew into his work and worry about money.
I was born when my mother was thirty-eight years old, and her frustration peaked soon after as it became clear that making more babies was time limited, and these five faux siblings could not soothe her loneliness.
On a visit to our family doctor when she was fifty years old, she complained that she was feeling sad and tired. Dr. Heck, who had treated all of us for chicken pox and measles, wrote my mother a prescription to boost her energy. She began taking the amphetamine Dexedrine when I was ten years old. Before my eleventh birthday, she was a full-blown drug addict.
My father was traveling during those years. He was an engineer in the corrugated box industry. He left home at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday nights to drive to Ohio, New Jersey, or New York, and he’d return on Friday night in time for supper and to attend choir practice at our United Methodist Church.
Life with a speed-addicted mother was unpredictable, to say the least. The Dexedrine ran our household. My mother was full of false energy all day, and then she crashed horribly at night.
Each morning she’d wake groggy and disoriented, and it would take her an hour to get her bearings. I learned to be careful in those morning hours, waiting to see what my mother could remember of the night before. It could go one of two ways. She might, on seeing the damage she had done—clothing and dishes strewn about the house—be remorseful and ashamed. If this was the case it was sad to watch her, but that was the safer scenario for my brother Larry and me—we were the only two left at home. We would let her cry and then leave for school.
The other possibility was that she might become upset again, and her anger of the night before would be rekindled. I would wait and watch and try to feel out the situation. I was prepared to shift gears quickly. I learned to assess my mother’s mental state by watching her face, and I’d predict, sometimes before she was conscious of it, which way her emotional tide was moving. It could be the slightest change in her eyes or a small movement of her jaw.
I also learned, through repeated practice, how to assume a totally passive stance even when I was very frightened. On one occasion, when I was twelve years old, I tried to put blonde streaks in my hair using a bottle of peroxide; it was a disaster. I remember trying to wash it away, not really understanding how bleach works. But when my mother saw the orangey stripes in my hair, she began screaming, dragged me to the dining room, and shoved me in front of the large mirror over the buffet. She grabbed a sharp knife and began to saw at my hair. I was crying but I kept my eyes open, not daring to even blink as the knife flashed around my face.
Years later, while taking an Outward Bound course, I learned this is exactly what you should do if you come across a bear in the woods. The instructor said if you encounter an angry bear, you must do the opposite of what your body wants to do. He explained that if a mother bear spots a human, she will scan the person for any sign of agitation. He added that you should bring your arms to your sides, move slowly to the ground, and remain passive and immobile. “Hopefully,” he said, “the bear will read that submissive posture and walk on.”
As a child, that’s what I did with my mother. If I could stay small—moving carefully and quietly, and never making eye contact—she often would move through her anger and then become distracted by something else, which allowed me to—very slowly—gather my things and get away.
Part of my mother’s morning routine was “taking her pills.” This meant some vitamins, her Dexedrine, and black coffee. On most weekday mornings, we’d head to school. But sometimes, after we’d leave, my mother’s acute loneliness would kick in and in her distorted emotional scenario there were two possible villains: the lazy children who had left the house or the husband who had “abandoned” her by going to work.
If her anger swelled before the drugs kicked in, she would use the phone to punish those who had left her. There were many days when she called my school and had me sent back home. On other days my father got the calls at his office.
By nine o’clock in the morning, with the Dexedrine hitting her bloodstream, my mother transformed. I came to know this changeover quite well, witnessing it on weekends and on days when she kept me home from school. It was like superimposing another being on my mother’s body.
With Dexedrine in her system, my mother became manic. She would do her hair and makeup, clean the kitchen, begin some craft projects, maybe start reading a book, and then decide to redecorate a room. She could read three newspapers, hang out several loads of laundry, and watch her soap operas while ironing baskets of clothes.
When I spent a day at home with her, my mother was full of ideas and projects. We played with makeup, sorted clothes, and sewed for my dolls. Sometimes we’d take the bus into downtown Pittsburgh to shop or see a movie—sometimes two—and have a ladies’ lunch at Kaufmann’s Department Store. I loved those days. She was fascinating, interesting, and fun.
But by nine o’clock at night, the Dexedrine would begin to wear off. On a good night, Larry and I would be in bed, but we’d hear my mother wandering through the house, winding down from her high-energy expenditures. She would watch television and talk to herself, and sometimes she’d cry. On bad nights, she would work herself into a rage.
When my mother began to rant about “he” and “him,” I knew Larry and I were probably safe for the night, and her anger was focused on my father. She felt abandoned when he was out of town. But if she was mumbling about those “ungrateful bastards,” then I knew Larry and I would need to right some perceived wrong. Often I would be dragged out of bed to clean the floor, sew on coat buttons that had been left dangling, or write a forgotten thank-you note.
There were also nights when my mother lost her grasp on reality. She might, on those nights, work herself into a fury and threaten to cut off my chubby brother’s “pig flesh” or bring scissors to cut up the clothes she determined I was not sufficiently grateful for.
There were some nights when she woke us to come sit with her. Those nights were less scary but more tiring. On those nights, my mother was lonely rather than angry, and she’d talk about her childhood. She’d cry about the cold house she came home to as a girl, and her grief at her own mother’s death when she was a young teenager. I didn’t understand “abandonment” or “delayed grief” then, but on those nights I did understand that I could hate a person and love her at the same time.
In those years my mother and I had a relationship that fit between 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. As a kid, I thought you could set a clock by it. But as an adult, I realized you could ruin a life by it. There was little conversation in our family about my mother’s addiction. We worked around her and suffered with it.
I made it to age eighteen and then moved out of the house. That same year my father died suddenly from a stroke, and six months later I married a man whom I barely knew. Looking back, I see the marriage as a straightforward escape. That husband was a man I had met at the Pittsburgh Explorers Club—a large group that made weekend trips to West Virginia