Part 6
During kindergarten and first grade, we were lucky enough to live only two buildings away from the elementary school. It was a great place to live because I could walk to school easily and it created a cozy environment. Our block was mostly middle-class homes mixed with apartments. About a block and a half from our building was a tiny store where I bought ice cream and popsicles. I learned to jump rope and ride a two-wheeler when we lived there. When everyone had gone home for the day and the parking lot was empty I would go and hit tennis balls off the school building. I got pretty good at returning the ball with my huge adult man-size tennis racquet. Even at the age of 5, I was already a free-range kid. I played by myself and most of the milestones of that age like getting the chickenpox or learning to ride a two-wheeler I experienced alone. Jerome was my one friend. He lived next door and would often come over to play in the backyard. He was kind of an odd duck and he was bullied at school. We got along ok even though he would never let me play Spock when we played Star Trek. Spock was a boy and I was a girl so that was a no go for Jerome. I always admired Spock because to me he seemed to be the most intelligent. He is still my favorite.
My parents bought me a red bicycle. It came with training wheels and I kept asking my dad to put them on for me. Of course he did not do it and one day I got tired of waiting. I drug my bike out to the driveway/parking lot of our building determined to teach myself to ride. Because it was the middle of a work day there were no cars in the lot, thank goodness for small blessings. I hopped on my bike and attempted to balance and move the pedals at the same time. I spent the whole afternoon trying to bike up and down the long driveway. I fell often and my pants now had holes in the knees. By the end of the day both of my knees were skinned and blood ran down my chins and into my socks but on the other hand I was riding my bike! I was so excited to show my mom and dad when they returned home at the end of the day. My mom was really upset when she saw my knees and her and my father started to argue about how he was supposed to put the training wheels on my bike. On this day their fighting could not dampen my spirits. I could ride my bike and I learned all by myself. For many years, really up until young adulthood, riding my bike was an escape for me. I loved the speed of it all and how far it could take me from home and my everyday hell.
Before I learned to ride my bike I wanted a Big Wheel! Other kids had them and I was glued to the commercial every time it came on the television. My parents eventually bought me one, but not really. They purchased a knock off version that was actually better made and more sturdy but it was just not the same. It was rusty brown in color and had real tires. It left me longing for the red, yellow, and blue plastic that the other kids had. Fitting in was hard. I just wanted what the other kids in my neighborhood had.
My father is Mexican and that created some hurdles. We did not know any other Mexicans and no one really looked like me. Poverty and religion did nothing to help. We were dirt poor for much of the time we lived there. The cracks in my parent’s marriage were already starting to show. I have always wondered why at times we had no money but then at other times we seemed to be doing pretty well. I can remember times when we would go out to dinner on Friday nights and my mother would take crafting classes. Neither of my parents could really manage money but the swings in our fortune seems to swing too wildly for money management to be the only cause.
My father came home one day with a brand new red Firebird with black leather seats. I have no idea how he was able to afford this car. When he first brought it home my mother was not pleased but eventually she made peace with it. Once in a while, my mother would drive his car when we would travel to see my grandparents. She learned to love the car and received many speeding tickets while driving it. I know there were times living in that apartment when we had no food, so I’m not sure where the money came from. After infidelity, money was always the hot topic of my parents’ disagreements. We were often one bad week away from having our lights turned off or having no food. At this point, my dad was still mostly living with us at home but before long that would all change. My father was a bit like a feral cat. He wanted to be able to come and go with the assurance that he would be welcomed back with open arms when he needed a place to come home to. Even in his happiest relationships he cheated. He couldn’t bear to live the sedate life of a middle class married man. He wanted to mix it up with different people. He craved novelty and despised feeling caged. I think he had a deep hole inside of him that he could never fill. He was always seeking women and praise and no matter how much he received it was never enough. He was always on the make and I’m sure his red Firebird helped him feel more confident when out looking for women. I have no doubt that my father loved my mother, I’m sure he loved me too in his own twisted way, but he loved himself more. He felt entitled to be unfaithful and resented being questioned. He led two lives, one where he was married and had a child and then another where he was single and had no responsibilities. When he was feeling beat up by the world he would come crawling home to my mother but when he was feeling high on life we were on our own.
After he and my mother split I took her place. I would see him when he was between women and then not when he was dating someone. I grew up resenting this and always seeing myself as second place in his affections. I felt disposable. I have always believed that one of the biggest issues between myself and parents is the fact that I could really see them from an early age. I think I made them uneasy. They never hid anything from me so I couldn’t help but see it all. I tried to hide from what I saw. I wanted to believe the best about them. I needed to be able to trust them. It was easy to see that they did not understand each other. At this point I still wanted them to stay together, but it would not be long before that opinion changed.
Several major things happened while we lived on School Rd. First, a man broke into my bedroom while I was asleep and my dad had to chase him off. The man managed to get one whole leg and the top portion of his body through my window. I can still remember my dad standing in the doorway of my room holding a flashlight and yelling. He is wearing a white T-shirt and boxers. The wind was slightly blowing and the curtains on my window moved in the breeze. By the light of the flashlight, I could see a figure with one leg dangling over my windowsill. Before I could really register what was happening he was gone. My parents called the police and I remember the cops trying to get prints off my windowsill. They also looked for footprints outside but it was raining and so nothing could really be found. This event made my sleep issues even worse. I think it also fed into my mother’s fears and may have triggered her worries about locked doors and windows. It gave my father something to brag about. My dad was a golden gloves fighter in his youth and he always saw himself as tough. Now he could tell people how he scared this guy away and saved his little girl. Experiencing this made it even harder to be a kid home alone. There were periods when I had a sitter and then periods when I did not. Just like with the money issues I have no real grasp as to what caused the lack of childcare.
I started kindergarten when we lived on School Rd. As usual, something that should have been focused on me was focused on my parent’s drama. My mother couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take off work to take me. When I think of my own little ones going to kindergarten it fills me with bittersweet memories. As a mom, you are both proud and sad. I think I cried with all four of mine making sure to do it once I was in the car so they couldn’t see. I do not remember it being much of a big deal for my parents. My father had his own business and so it wasn’t hard for him to take me. I was so excited because he told me we were going to go out to breakfast beforehand! This was a big deal! I was such a daddy’s girl. He took me downtown to eat which was kinda far from my school and when we arrived at the restaurant my dad introduced me to a woman. She sat down and had breakfast with us and much to my surprise, she and my dad had a long conversation in a language I did not understand. I knew my father could speak Spanish but I had no idea he could speak French. So what I thought was going to be a special first day of school breakfast with my dad became the day I realized he was cheating on my mom. At this age I had heard them fight about his infidelity but I did not really understand what it all meant. I did not have the language for it but I knew something was off. After breakfast he took me to school very early, I was the first one there, and I had to sit there with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel some part of me thought I had done something wrong, somehow participated in his wrong simply by being there. After school, my mom and I talked about the highlights of the day. I finally broached the subject with my mom. She was mortified and more than that she was furious. I told her everything I knew, which wasn’t much. I did know the woman’s name, it was Jennifer and she was a French professor. Of course, my father tried to pass her off as just a friend but my mother wasn’t buying it. After that things were never the same, she always suspected him and he always gave her a reason to. Jennifer had an apartment on the lake and my father took me to visit with her. She was nice enough but I just couldn’t feel comfortable around her because I knew the pain my mother was going through. My mother would cry and tell me that men are dogs who cannot control themselves. It made it hard to love my father. I felt guilty for wanting to see and spend time with him. She would call him a “dirty Mexican” which made me feel bad about the part of me that was Mexican. I was old enough now to understand that my father and I were different from most of the people around us. Over time my mother would become more and more unstable when the topic of my father’s infidelity came up. Once she took me with her when she went out looking for him. At this time they both worked at the same place and mother suspected my father was carrying on with a co-worker. My mother drove over to her house with me in tow. Like Karen from Goodfellas, my mother called to my father’s mistress through the door. She banged on the apartment door and finally, the woman answered. She only opened the door a crack but that was all we needed to see my father sitting in a chair in his boxers. My mother did not have the foresight to leave me in the car so I bore witness to her calling to my father and him shaking his head refusing to come to the door. I don’t remember what happened after this. I have since learned that this often happens around traumatic memory. You remember the event but maybe not what happened just before or after. This is because when in a state of trauma your brain doesn’t make a memory in the same fashion as it does when just experiencing life normally. I only imagine how humiliated my mother must have been. When she was in that state of upset she would drive like a lunatic all the while crying and screaming. I can only imagine how scared I was. To this day I know exactly where that apartment building is and which unit she lived in. It remains a landmark representing pain and the ghosts of the past.
The last major thing I can recall from School Rd is hunger. I don’t think my father was around much at this point. He had a key and would come and go as he pleased. Home or not he couldn’t really be relied on for financial help. When I was in grade school we had the option to walk home during our lunch hour and have our lunch at home. I never made this choice unless I had no other option. It was a warm spring day when I dashed home over my school lunch break. Feeling for the key around my neck and using all of my strength to turn the deadbolt. I didn’t have much time and so I raced to the kitchen and found the peanut butter and a butter knife. I didn’t bother to sit down but instead scooped as much peanut butter as I could onto my knife. Grinning, I licked a huge chunk off and felt the emptiness of my stomach subside. I continued scraping and scooping the almost bare jar until it was time to go back to school. Hunger was with me for much of my childhood and the peanut butter was all we had on that day. No bread, no jelly, and no milk to wash it down. At this age I really loved peanut butter so at least I really enjoyed the one food we had available. There was some shame with this act. It felt wrong to only be eating this one thing for lunch and it felt wrong to be licking it off the butter knife. We had learned all about a balanced diet at school and I knew this wasn’t going to cut it. One day our next-door neighbor asked me why I was home in the middle of the day. When I told her I had nothing to take for lunch she took pity on us. She met my mother at the door later with groceries. My mother smiled tightly and said thank you. Once we were safely inside our unit she let me have it. I learned that day that I was never allowed to talk about being hungry or anything else with other adults. My mother warned me about this thing called social services and how they could take me away if I complained too much. She also talked about God and how we should always look to him and not the government for help. Very early on she instilled in me a fear, fear of other people, fear of the government, fear of the rapture, fear of God, and lastly she taught me to fear her. There were other times when we had enough food and I would end up in conflicts mostly with my father. It seemed to me I had no control over what I put in my body. Much of the time there was very little to choose from in our house. It wasn’t very often that my mother would let me pick things from the store because we were always on a budget. This meant there wasn’t much variety to choose from at home and then my father had very strong ideas about food. One night after sitting at the table taking too long to eat my peas my father decided he would force-feed me. I was about five years old. He held my mouth open and made me eat all of the peas on my plate. I was out of control sobbing and almost immediately ran to the bathroom and threw up all of my dinner including the peas. This involuntary action earned me a spanking. From then on I almost never felt good about food, either because we didn’t have enough or because I felt judged for what I did and didn’t like. My father liked to preach to me about eating and exercise. Every choice I made equaled me being good or bad, the stakes were always so high in my family. Both my parents were very judgemental but my father was more judgemental about food. I am much more relaxed about food now but I feel like it has taken me a lifetime to overcome my anxieties around food. I cannot bring myself to put a pea into my mouth.
As I grew older I questioned why God did not provide for us and then I would remember that to suffer was to be like Christ so I should be happy to have this struggle. When I would ask people at church about why bad things happened to us they would always say so that we can help others later on. They would remind me that God has a plan for all of us and his ways are not our ways. My child mind was too little to understand the ways of the almighty God. Through all of this, I developed the idea that money was bad and wanting it was worse. There were higher things to be concerned about. Focus on heaven and maybe you will forget being hungry or being bullied for being poor. I had one horrible tormentor who was worse than the rest. One day she and her lackey discovered me riding my bike after school. I was wearing a new off brand puffer vest my mother had purchased for me. It was ugly. Lime green and yellow. It wasn’t a cool color like the other kids had, but my mother had tried and so I wore it. My bully stepped out in front of my bike so I would have to stop or hit her. When I stopped she spit all over my vest. Then she and her lackey laughed and made fun of me as I cried. I biked home to clean up my vest. I felt terrible because my mother was home and she would see the mess. But yeah, focus on heaven and forget being worried about your off-brand clothes and no food.
“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20.
I was not moving any mountains which meant I did not even have faith the size of a mustard seed. My mind was failing me. I could not believe hard enough to save my family and I couldn’t control my doubts. Doubting God was a big no-no and I was failing big time in that department. At this point, I never put any blame on God but took all of the blame on myself. I must be doing something wrong if I could only figure out what it is! I wish that I understood why I took on so many adult ideas when I was so little. I suspect it was because I was never allowed to be a child and my parents always spoke to me like I was an adult. Oversharing caused me to consider things only an adult should worry about.
Around age five is when many of my worries and fears really kicked into high gear. I worried about my keys and setting my alarm and on top of that, I wasn’t really sleeping. I don’t think I was ready for this responsibility so it took a lot out of my 5-year-old brain. I would lay awake at night thinking about the rapture and the ticking of the clock would remind me of the beginning of “A Thief In The Night.” As a side note, to this day a ticking clock can trigger me. I will start to feel like I cannot catch my breath and my fight or flight reflex will kick in.
I wore two keys around my neck. One for the outside apartment building door and one for our unit lock. I can remember struggling hard at times to turn the key in the lock and I remember asking adults in the complex to help me if they were passing by. Not the safest plan. If my mother was running late for some reason I would worry. I would often get to school very early because I was worried about being late. Before leaving the house I would check my lunch box multiple times to be sure my lunch was in there. Through all of this I learned to be very responsible and also a little neurotic. When scary things happened, no matter how big or small, there was usually no adult around to help.
Sometimes when my parents fought it was just screaming and yelling. My mother would get in my father’s face and he would shut down. Often it felt like violence could break out at any moment. I know pushing and shoving happened between them. My mother would make some pretty scary threats and I believed she was capable of carrying them out. Now I am not saying that my dad was innocent. He was awful with money and his source of income was not always the most reliable. He left my mother to pay all of the bills and carry all of the stress of working and raising me. Add onto that all of the cheating and it is easy to understand why she would get upset. She would cry and rage and I would be in charge of comforting her and helping her to cope. This was a big job for a little girl. This job would often leave my stomach in knots. So much to be concerned about. Money, cheating, my mother’s mental health and then just regular kids stuff. I was made fun of throughout my young childhood. I never had the “right” clothing. My mother would shop for me at Prange Way and fashion was not the consideration. Her concern was getting the most bang for her buck. I begged for Garanimals when I was really small but I don’t recall her buying them often. She once bought me these knock off Nike’s and for the rest of the school year this one boy named Mike called me “Polish Nike’s.” My mother tried to get me what I wanted but it was always a little off and so I was often the butt of the joke at school. My mother was a very hard worker and I don’t fault her for not having money, at least not when I was young. Her work ethic was stellar, it was just her mothering that needed some work.
One fight I remember very clearly involved my mother raging at my father after finding evidence of his cheating in their car. I crouched in the lowest part of the hall closet and watched through the barely cracked door. She was pushing and shoving him and he was raising his arms to defend himself. Her words rang out through our apartment, “If you ever do this again I will string you like sausage from the trees!” At the time I couldn’t really understand what her words meant but once I became old enough to understand, her words chilled me to the bone. She even went so far as to grab a sharp kitchen knife. As she brandished it at him my father looked like a little boy. He never forgave her for those moments and would bring it up often as an excuse for why he left her. Hiding in the closet I cried and wished that they could figure out how to get along. In those moments I tried to make myself as small as possible, something I still do today when I’m confronted with very angry outbursts. They both seemed unaware of how their fights impacted me. They never attempted to hide any disagreements from me. My father would always leave and tell me to watch over mom. When I would go off to spend time with my father my mother would tell me to love him and be kind. No matter what they did to each other and no matter how they spoke about each other to me, at the end of it all would come the admonition to love the other parent. They both reminded me it was my duty to honor my father and my mother. It was like they could not love each other properly so they used me as a surrogate. My father knew my mother needed watching over so he tasked me with that. She knew he needed acceptance and love, so she tasked me with that. No thought was really given to what I needed. When he wasn’t staying with us he would arrange to see me. My mother would dress me up and I would wait by our big picture window for his car to pull up. Sometimes he wouldn’t show. He would later tell me they had been fighting and he did not want to risk my mother coming out and making a scene. This left me standing at the window for hours. Each hour washing more and more of my hope away. I needed a break from her and I missed him so much. She never pulled me away from the window. I remember one day he was supposed to come to get me at lunchtime and I waited for him by the window until my mother forced me into bed. I was in the second grade.
I could never understand how my father could leave me with her. He always claimed to be afraid of her and the violence she threatened but then felt fine not only leaving me with her but tasking me with caring for her. As I got older I would challenge him on this topic and he would always say he never believed she would hurt me, but how could he be so sure? In my father’s narrative everything was my mother’s fault. He cheated because she was mean and he left because she was violent. He couldn’t come around to help with finances because he did not want to fight with her. In other words, in his mind he bore no responsibility. I suspect my father was fighting demons no one knew about. He never wanted to talk about his past and when he did his stories never added up. I always felt like he was hiding something from me. They were just really bad for each other. While I was still in elementary school they both tried to commit suicide on the same day. I stayed with a family friend and then my aunt until my mother was able to leave the hospital. It was on that day I decided I just wanted them as far away from each other as possible.
Debbie McNulty 