A memory is at best a slippery thing. At its worst it’s an untrustworthy one, meriting no waste of words or the time it takes to viscerally process this thing that may never have actually happened. But might there not, at least, be a kernel of truth in something that sits so heavily on one’s mind? Another question I ponder is: can’t memory be a true representation of perceived experiences even though that perception has been colored by emotion, environment, and even the ability to recall facts?

I remember that Carrie, my older sister, lived in a different world from the one I inhabited. I perceived her most important concerns to be boyfriends and proms, hairdos, stylish clothes and worrying about obtaining a summer tan. She looks back at the same time and remembers things I was too young to even imagine including the pain and humiliation of bearing a child out of wedlock. She remembers hiding her brutalized psych and hemorrhaging soul as she struggled to begin anew in a different school, acting as if teenage angst was the most important thing in the world?

Robbie, my younger brother, hurt and at times physically threatened the life of our sister who was two years younger. My memory suggests he felt she was a bothersome brat. He incessantly picked on her without cause. He has no memory of the specific events I recall and says relationships between young siblings hold no meaning in terms of the persons each of us grows up to become.

I don’t think a memory can tell me why something happened or even how someone felt if they did not reveal their feelings at the time. I look back now and wonder if maybe my brother tried to wound my little sister because he was hurting. Was stabbing her with a fork or throwing rocks at her head his only ways of releasing pent-up anger and frustration? Have I gained insight with maturity? Do I use it to color the memories of my youth?

My youngest sister, Becky was in my charge. I was a caretaker, not a mother and once I became absorbed in my own emerging teenage angst of struggling to ‘belong’, to succeed, and to rise above the mud where my feet were mired, I might have abandoned her. Looking back I realize that memories of daily interaction with my younger sister fizzle over time and disappear. Might it not have been the same for my older sister with me?

Becky remembers being a non-entity, always alone.

Memories can be painful. Perceptions of the past, emotions that have sent tendrils deep into the soul and colored the lens with which we perceive the world throughout life can be so very painful. I wonder if it isn’t easier at times to wipe a memory clean and pretend the ugliness, the uncomfortable, and the inconceivable never happened.

But, memories can also bring joy. I remember spring lambs on the farm. My memories include cuddling their wooly, curly, slight little bodies and laughing as they jumped and cavorted about in the damp, spring air. I remember kittens and dressing them up with my brother. Who would ever guess the accomplished scientist of today dressed kittens in doll’s clothing with his big sister?

While my mother was still at home, before she was taken away from us, she took us to a lake to swim. It was some distance away over back roads. Today the lake is a dirty puddle, infested with shoreline weeds and surrounded solidly with people’s homes. When I was young it impressed me with its clean, blue water and sandy beach. It had a playground and a slide that was so tall that sliding down it meant going very fast and hitting the water hard. I was afraid of it.

Behind the fenced children’s swimming area, and beyond the canteen that sold beer, pop and ice cream and played rock and roll music constantly was an access to the rest of the lake. An old wooden walkway lined the rear of this concrete cantina. The water at the walkway’s edge was over my head. When I slipped into the water, I could swim all the way to the floating raft where the girls in bikini’s and older boys lay in the sun. My oldest sister was always there. I went out by myself as soon as I could dog paddle my way safely through the deep water, but when I reached the raft a boy reached down and pushed my head under the water saying, ‘Kids’ didn’t belong on the raft.

By the time I was wearing a two-piece suit and might have been welcome on the raft, my mother was gone. There was no one to take us to the lake. My father, feeling sorry for us alone at home during the hot summer bought us one of those above the ground, plastic liner pools with metal sides. We three younger kids used and enjoyed it but it never felt the same as I dreamed it would feel to be welcomed on the raft wearing a bikini.

My first coherent memories are of growing up on a farm in central Michigan farm. I loved that farm! To this day I have a deep appreciation for animals, growing things and the land. Caring for livestock; planting, weeding and harvesting a garden; playing in the fields with younger siblings; and being able to escape to nature saved me when troubles became too heavy to bear. My memories of the farm itself and the work it took to maintain it are happy ones. Today, forty years later, I look back and remember throwing down hay in the winter for lowing red and white cattle and walking the fields in late spring looking for new calves.

I felt an affinity for the huge herd of relatively stupid and simple, yet content, sheep. I enjoyed bundling their wool during shearing time. Catching and worming them while I rode their bodies, their heads tucked between my legs as I inserted the worming syringe between clenched jaws. I enjoyed bottle raising the orphan lambs. Robbie, Becky and I skated on swamp ice in the winter and waded into berry thickets gathering just enough berries to stuff our bellies and to take back home to make jam or a pie. We played for hours in deep patches of deciduous woods and wondrous places that bore our made-up names of Blueberry Hill and Strawberry Meadow.

We swung on ropes in the haymow. Robbie fell and cracked his head open. I almost put a pitchfork through his foot while we were mucking out one of the cowsheds. All three of us rode the sheep in the barn and laughed when we fell off. None of us were brave enough to ride the calves. We didn’t want to die.

Farming was hard work. I mowed acres of grass in big yards with a push mower and planted and weeded acres of garden. I rose early each morning, even on school days to feed big herds of cattle and sheep and a flock of chickens. In the fifties, as an adolescent, I wished I didn’t have to work so hard. I look back now and know it was the constant sense of responsibility that helped me through the difficult times, growing up without a mom, trying to please a very demanding father, and trying to raise my younger brother and sister without a clue as to how to do it right. I can’t say I was perfect at any of those endeavors, but I did the work, raised the kids and grew into an adult the best I could.

These things I’ve put down are my memories. Dad and mom are both dead now, but if I’d shared any of these recollections with them, I’m sure they would have remembered the times and instances differently. Does this change them? Not for me.

One memory of an incident that took place on a hot steamy July day in the hay field keeps playing at the edges of my mind. I’ve renamed my sisters and brother in this account but keep my own name, Jeanne, since this is my story. Carrie was gone the day of this incident, Becky was in the house and dad sent Robbie away stating he wanted to talk to me alone. Probably only my father would be able to recall our actual words or what his feelings or intentions were on that hot day when he had such an important discussion with me about my mother. I have never forgotten. How could I? But, even now as I look back and search my mind in an effort to capture the incident as accurately as possible, I know my child’s feelings may have colored my memories of the day my father told me I had to hurt my mother.

We produced all of the food for the animals on our farm. This meant tons of time spent planting and cultivating fields, harvesting oats, corn and wheat, and cutting, raking and baling hay. Dad did most of this work after his 8 to 5 white-collar job in the capital city an hour away or on weekends. As soon as we were old enough, Robbie and I helped.

July was haying time. As a child I would have said, “Don’t ask me why such a hot, dirty, hard, thankless job had to be done during the hottest and most humid time of the year under the boiling sun, while wearing long pants and sleeves to protect one’s skin from the abuse it was given while haying.” Probably, I really said something less thought provoking and more off-color, but now that I am older, I still think putting up hay in July in hot, humid Michigan as perverse.

We didn’t have a hay baler of our own so didn’t get to do things the easy way of having the baler shoot the bales out its rear onto a following hay wagon. We hired a neighbor to bale our hay and had to hope he could come when we needed him. My father watched the weather carefully, trying to find several days of good hot, drying weather coming up. Once he did, always in early July, he would cut the alfalfa-grass mix field for the sheep or the pure clover for the cattle and then call the neighbor. “It’ll be ready to bale in three days,” he would say. “Can I count on you having a forty acre field done for me by Friday night?” By Friday morning when the dew left the ground, the hay was waiting and ready. Any longer and it would be too dry, losing its delicate, nutritional leaves to the ground when baled. Any earlier and it would still be damp and green. It might mold in the bale or even start a fire due to built-up internal heat. The neighbor and his equipment worked while dad was at his day job. Once he had returned to the farm, we spent Friday evening and the following weekend haying.

This was the first year eleven-year-old Robbie was allowed to drive the tractor. I can’t say he was a natural at it. I was on the wagon stacking bales five rows high while dad walked the rows and threw the bales up to me. Even though only five feet tall, I was still stronger than my younger brother. At one hundred pounds, I weighed forty pounds more than the average bale. Dad had waited patiently for his only son to add a few more pounds and another inch or two to his skinny frame so he could take a place in the fields. During those waiting years I drove the tractor and a hired neighborhood boy stacked the wagon. Now that Robbie was on the tractor I had graduated to bale handling and the hired boy was stacking the haymow.

The tractor was a green and yellow Model B. John Deere; the kind sometimes called the Johnny Popper. It was equipped with an electric starter, a godsend. I had tried cranking the flywheel on a neighbor’s machine and almost broke my arm when the engine turned over sending the crank flying free to whack anything within striking distance. I knew several kids on neighboring farms who sported casts due to flying crank arms.

Our tractor, built in 1947 and called the ‘late styled B’ because of its improvements over earlier models had a hand clutch, a feature that made it possible for a lightweight kid to drive it. As it was, every time Robbie stopped I could see his little body standing ramrod straight in front of the seat, both feet crammed down on the brake trying to hold the 4000 pound, smoke breathing, pulsing monster beneath him in one place. If it had been necessary to push a clutch petal with one foot while he tried to hold the brake down with his other we never would have stopped. Dad would have had to run beside the wagon, desperately throwing bales up to me as we passed by.

“Easy when you take off there,” dad hollered at Robbie. He had let up on the brake too fast and jerked the wagon forward almost pitching me off the back, into the field. “Head between those two rows up ahead,” he continued yelling while the John Deere putt-putted in place.
With both feet still pressing down on the brake pedal, Robbie lowered his rear to the edge of the seat, grabbed the clutch lever with both hands and squeezed its handles together, pushing it forward out of its locked position thus disengaging it. He clutched the chest high steering wheel firmly as he let up on the brake and stood with both feet firmly planted on the floor’s steel decking. The tractor crept forward in low gear.

“Good job, Robbie,” I yelled over the tractor’s noise. He’d managed the clutch, brake and shifting it into gear as well as I could have done. I didn’t miss driving. It was always a challenge to shift, start, stop and manage all the complicated gears and throttle smoothly and then steer exactly where dad wanted without experiencing a panic attack or mental breakdown.

As the shadows of trees surrounding the field lengthened and evening crept over the fields I finally shoved the last bale in this section into place. Every inch of my body was sweaty and itching from the prickly hay stems. The washcloths I had pinned over my knees inside my pants were showing through holes worn by lifting hundreds of bales with my thighs. Dad always wondered how I wore a pair of jeans out during haying season. Lifting with strong arms and back he couldn’t relate to how a much shorter and weaker person had to manage the same bale. I grabbed the strings with my hands as he did but then I hoisted it up against my thigh and used my leg and hip to thrust the heavy bale onto the stack.

Throughout my entire teenage and adult life I would berate myself for not possessing the long slim legs and tiny ankles most women showed to advantage with a nice pair of hose, a short hemline and high heeled shoes. I won every leg-wrestling match with boys in school. I held sheep between my short, sturdy legs to keep them captive for worming or sheering. In later years I would hike all day without tiring and run behind search dogs up and down the craggy Black Hills of South Dakota. Maybe my muscular thighs developed while hoisting thousands of hay bales up onto the stack each summer during my teenage years. I often wonder if I could have been skinnier or more delicate if I hadn’t grown up working on a farm.

Whatever the reason for my sturdy, strong legs I used them to my advantage while haying and didn’t give them a thought on this long, hot day in 1963. The last bale was on the wagon. Yeehaw! Dinnertime!

“Get on the wagon,” dad yelled at Robbie over the noise of the engine. “I’ll drive to the barn. Once we get there you head up to the house and tell Becky we’ll be in for supper in about twenty minutes. I’ve got to talk to Jeanne alone before we come in.”

“You think Becky can heat it up without burning it,” I yelled. I had made a thick beef stew yesterday and did not want my nine-year-old sister wrecking it. I was irritable, hot, and filthy. My arms and legs itched horribly. I didn’t want to stay outside and talk to dad. “I can do it quickly,” I added before he could answer, “I need to wash anyway.”

“I want to talk to you alone for a few minutes,” he said. His jaw set firmly as he turned to climb onto the tractor thus breaking eye contact with me. Robbie barely had time to climb onto the wagon before dad threw the tractor into a high, road speed gear and started moving up the lane.

Normally Robbie was immersed in his own little world. He didn’t speak to me much and didn’t become involved in conversations unless required to do so but dad’s wanting to speak to me alone was an unusual event. Robbie must have been curious because he asked, “What’s he want to talk to you about?”

“I don’t know,” I whined, “I have no idea.” Dad never talked to just me. He always addressed us kids as a group unless he was instructing an unlucky individual on a topic obviously too complicated for a dimwit kid’s brain to handle. Then he might sit one of us down and lecture the poor singled-out individual until we acted like we understood whatever information he was trying to impart – for our sake - so we’d understand how whatever it was worked. Either that or he was yelling at one of us. Yelling was normally performed for the benefit of one child at a time. I studied my father and his moods carefully. My entire childhood when I wasn’t working or escaping or loving my moments with the animals was spent watching him and anticipating what he was going to do or say. It was how I survived. I was good at keeping my head down and, if possible, keeping out of the way. I did not want to be singled out. I did not want him to talk to me alone. I knew that whatever the topic, it could not be anything good.

Robbie jumped down and ran for the house as soon as the tractor and hay wagon entered the red, wood-sided barn. “Chicken,” I groused under my breath while Robbie ran as fast as his short, skinny legs would carry him. Of course, I wanted to bolt for the house too.

Dad motioned for me to get down so I did and went to stand near where he was sitting on a hay bale. “I need to talk to you about something important,” he said. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this but want your opinion before I make a decision.” Oh no, I thought. Dad never asks my opinion on anything. What is he really setting me up for? What’d I do? Why me?

My hands grew damp; in fact I realized my entire body was sweating like some ol’ overweight dude, puffing up a hill on a hot day. It felt awful, adding slick, sticky skin to the itching and the bits of hay abrading my delicate flesh with my every movement. I so did not want to have a discussion with dad. Why now? Couldn’t he at least wait for me to clean up and change clothes? That way I’d only have to deal with my nervous sweat causing the millions of tiny cuts all over my body to smart.

But, dad always did things his way, in his own time, and that was obviously now, like it or not! I’d like to say I spoke up here and explained to my father how miserable I felt. Maybe told him I was hurting and asked for a little sympathy. Nope. Neither did I whine out loud. Life was often hard on the farm but, even so, I liked living and I didn’t think I would be long for this world if I complained to my father.

“You know Evelyn is never going to be able to come home,” he said. Oh God this is about mom, I thought. She had been in the mental hospital for two years and had come home just one time to visit. By the end of her week with us, she was locked in her bedroom, refusing to come out for any reason. This behavior is what had caused her being taken away and committed to the hospital in the first place. We had all known she was not better and hadn’t been surprised when the police came, just like they had the first time, to remove her from the room and take her back to Traverse City.

We’d been told to go to our rooms where we’d listened to them forcing the lock on mom’s door. I’d put my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear her anguish. She accused my father of taking her children from her. She beat him with her fists until the police took hold of her arms and led her out of the house. Carrie had sat on the edge of the bed looking at the floor. Becky hadn’t even cried this time. Robbie was in his bedroom alone. I don’t know how he reacted.

I missed mom but I hated going to visit her. She lived in a brick-walled room by herself with something like a cot for a bed, one chair, and a tiny, barred window so high up on the wall no one could look through it. I was told she had electric shock treatments. I couldn’t even understand how electric shocks could be good for someone. I had been shocked before, by accidentally touching a frayed cord. It had hurt and had not resulted in any beneficial side effects as far as I could tell. I couldn’t imagine how shocking someone on purpose could be a good thing.

Plus, when we kids walked down the hallway on the way to our mother’s room, other residents in the facility, or what we kids called other crazy women, reached out to touch us. They called us names that weren’t ours and said things that were embarrassing and made us feel very uncomfortable. Poor Becky sometimes didn’t talk for a day or two after one of these visits. None of us ever talked about them, not to each other, not to any of our friends or relatives and never, ever to our father. We all knew mom had problems. We had each experienced her problems first hand, but it was dad who had put her in the hospital. We knew she was sick but he had sent her away. It was hard to understand how her being gone could be better for any of us.

“I think it’s best for all of us, including her, if I were to get a divorce,” dad said, “and I want to know how you feel about that.”

Nonplussed, I sank to the hay bale beside him. What could I say? It had never occurred to me that mom might not ever come home. She was supposed to get better. I wanted her to come home. Becky needed a mom. I had to try and be a mother along with cleaning house, cooking meals, doing farm chores and doing my schoolwork. I wasn’t a mom. Taking care of Becky was nothing like caring for an orphan lamb until it was old enough to go out on grass with the rest of the flock. Becky needed someone to love her and care for her and teach her how to grow up right. Who was going to do that if dad divorced mom?

Every since Carrie had moved to the new high school and actually started having a life with kids her age, and then had started taking classes at MSU, all I did was work and act as a referee between Robbie and Becky. They hated each other. They fought horribly. Robbie had tried to hurt her more than once and would have succeeded if I hadn’t stood between them with a chair fending off my berserker brother. Once he’d shot her with a bee-bee gun, on purpose. I couldn’t make him quit trying to hurt her so I shot him with my bow and target arrow and pinned his leg to a tree trunk. Luckily I knew first aid. I got the arrow out of his leg, cleaned the wound and without speaking each of us knew we would never ever tell anyone about the arrow through the leg incident. We would take it to our graves.

Of course, I never told dad about any of their fight episodes. Even though I wished he’d know how badly we needed a mom, I knew he would use our failings as a reason to switch us. That was one time we three did stick together; when it came to not telling dad something so he could not make us go cut a switch to be used on our bottoms.

I didn’t tell him how lonely we were when he was working or traveling and we were home alone. I didn’t tell him I wanted to be a kid, just a kid and not responsible for everything a mother and partner to him should be. I didn’t tell him how much I cried or how I escaped my real life by making up a world in my head while sitting on the hay in the sheep barn watching the lambs play. I didn’t tell him Robbie stayed in his room all day reading and that Becky was so very alone.

I didn’t say anything to him at first. I sat looking at my feet. I was numb and voiceless. Sad. Worried. Anything I said might make him angry. How could I answer? He should tell Mom. She would be alone if he divorced her. How would she respond if asked if she wanted a divorce? Finally I said, “Do you have someone else you want to marry?”

I thought he might yell at me but I really wanted to know. If he married someone new, she could take over raising Robbie and Becky. I didn’t mind doing the chores. I liked the animals. I didn’t even mind the itchy hay. I just didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want to be a mom at fourteen. “No, I don’t,” he said, “but I might some day. I’ll have to work out her continued care with the hospital and talk to her relatives about legal representation for her. It’s not easy to divorce someone while they are in a mental institution. It seems I am responsible for her since I committed her. I can’t just walk away.”

That’s good, I thought. You shouldn’t just walk away from her. You’re part of the reason she’s there. To his face I said, “I guess divorce is a good idea. I don’t think she can ever come home again and be well. She’s unhappy and alone. Maybe she can have a life someday too, when she’s healed. Maybe she’ll get married again. Are you going to tell Robbie and Becky? Are you going to tell mom?”

“I’ll tell your sister and brother,” he said. “The reason I wanted to talk to you, however, is I need someone to talk to Evelyn. She won’t listen to me. She and I cannot talk without fighting and that would accomplish nothing. I don’t want a lawyer to tell her. They say her condition is improving. Me filing for a divorce might cause her to backslide a little but I think it would be even worse if someone she doesn’t know breaks the news to her. I need you to talk to her, Jeanne. She’ll listen to you.”

“You’ve had a rapport with her even through her worst times,” he said. Oh boy, no I haven’t, I thought. Carrie has the rapport with mom, not me. I’m just good at keeping my head down and not causing trouble. I do not want to tell my mother he doesn’t want her any more. I can’t say she can never come home again. Oh god, what am I gonna do? Oh God. Oh God. If I thought it would’ve helped, I would have prayed at that moment, “Please God.”

I was quiet for a long time, thinking about telling mom, thinking about what I’d say, how she’d feel, how she might react. I thought about taking another trip to the mental institution. She’d been moved to a cottage on the grounds now. She told us she was better but I saw no difference. She was still there. We had to visit her in a room along with other patients visiting with their families. I didn’t like sharing our lives with other people in that manner. She didn’t feel like Mom any more. She was becoming just somebody we had to visit.

She needs to be away from him, I finally said to myself. They don’t belong together anymore. She’s not his wife and hasn’t been for a long time. She needs a fresh start. I guess he does too. Maybe if I approach it that way, she’ll listen. Maybe she’ll agree. “Ok,” I said, “I’ll tell her.” With that I got up off the hay bale and turned my back on dad. I’d never done that before but I didn’t want him to see my tears. “I itch bad,” I mumbled, “got to wash before dinner.

This memory is as strong as if that conversation with my father happened yesterday. Carrie drove the four of us to the hospital. Once I had told mom what dad wanted, Carrie talked with her and helped her accept the situation. They had been close during Carrie’s younger days and I think, what with Carrie’s continuing uncomfortable relationship with our father, they could commiserate as to what a mean, miserable bastard he was. It helped me to have Carrie there. I felt as if I had hurt my mother deeply and ruined her visit with her children. Carrie helped turn the focus away from me and back to the fact that it was my father creating the situation we were all faced with, not me.

Carrie’s memory of this situation is only of the trip to see mom, the divorce and the fact that mom’s relatives were very upset about the situation. By the time dad divorced mom, Carrie was an adult reaching out into the world and ready to start making a life and memories of her own. Robbie has no memory of that particular day in the hayfield. He has no recall of dad singling me out to talk to alone and he doesn’t remember the trip where he and two of his sisters sat in a visiting room and listened to me telling mom that dad was divorcing. Becky has good and bad memories of her life growing up on that farm. None of her memories include that trip to visit mom.

Later, after I was an adult, I asked dad why he had required that I tell my mother he wanted a divorce. He remembered the situation and stated he had felt it was the best thing to do. This was the next to last year I put up hay with my dad. The following year he suffered a serious illness and was forced to sell the livestock. By the time I graduated from high school, he had sold the farm and moved to Lansing.

Memory is a funny thing. I think even more than being slippery or untrustworthy, that it is a selective device the mind uses to help each person handle life. I think our experiences, personalities and emotional make-up color our perceptions of any situation and then our memories become what they have to be to support our well-being. I guess that’s if we’re lucky. Sometimes things go wrong and memories build into hurtful entities and become scourges that sour one’s life for all time. I have a few of those. Don’t we all? If we’re lucky, we remember the fun times of sun warmed hayfields, talks with dad that weren’t all about taking bad news to a mother, and lambs playing in damp fields on a spring day. Best of all we can remember our little brother’s shaking legs as he stood on the John Deere tractor’s brake and tried so hard to not jerk the wagon when he put it into gear and crept forward across the field.

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.01.2012

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To my siblings. We made it.