I feel like I must have told this story a thousand times in my life. And often, in my younger years, in a fast-paced comic style as though I were recounting a freak show that I had the amusement of watching.
Indeed, it is probably the first of many life stories that take on an almost rehearsed recounting of the highlights of this day, evening and the many days, months and years that would follow and be influenced (in my mind and responses) by my experiences of this event, in one way or another.
This was an event which, for the first time in my young mind, opened the door to new possibilities of surviving or trying to “fix” my mother.
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I only wish I knew for certain if I went to school the following day, and what details I told my closest school friends. While I might at first assume that yes, I showed up at Wilmer E. Shue Middle School bright and early the next day (as I often showed up at school following late nights of peculiar home happenings), the more I remember this event in my mind’s eye, the more certain I am that I stayed home from school the following day and my father called out from work.
I simply cannot imagine the alternate scenario, but of course, anything is possible.
It is possible that with (at best) five or six hours of broken sleep and the highly irregular and emotionally-charged situation, that my father showed up for work the next day and I showed up for school, and that he and I first communicated and processed the events of the night before (that went into the late hours of early a.m.) when I got home from school and he from work.
Or, perhaps, maybe both he and I did half-days. Maybe he took me to school late, and he went into the office some.
I will never know for certain, nor does this exact point really matter, per se.
Yet, in some sense, the very real need and expectation upon both my father and I to fully and well-function in our own realms while dealing with this sort of stuff after hours, so-to-speak, is certainly a relevant part of our story.
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I tend to remember things spatially (as in location of memory and glimpses in my mind’s eye of where I’m standing or positioned, and the lighting, in particular). Secondly, there is the specific and/or vague verbal recollection of events.
And it is for this reason I’m really thinking right now that I was home from school with my father on the “day after.”
In my mind’s eye I am seeing afternoon sun streaming into the little hallway – I am almost smelling the smell of my newfound ability and license to clean the bathroom with proper cleansers and methods, using dusting sprays on furniture perhaps and my father helping me lift some piece of furniture into another room where I thought it better belonged.
In my mind’s eye, I might best articulate my non-verbal feelings as being the same that people held hostage might feel upon liberation from their captor and some dungeon and the aftermath of the cleanup – a sort of celebratory sense of excitement.
According to a 1976 calendar and my mother’s medical records I have, these events began on a Tuesday, February 24th.
While part of me wants to say that it began with an emotionally charged shopping trip with my mother during the daytime, likely she took me on the shopping trip upon my return from school that afternoon.
I can’t think of any particular holiday or reason I would have been home from school that Tuesday.
It was common for my mother to take me on various shopping excursions.
Among her favorite stores were John Wannemaker’s on Augustine cut-off in Wilmington, Delaware; Woolworth’s, Sears and JC Penny’s at Price’s Corner in Wilmington, Delaware; Almart’s on Kirkwood Highway; and Woolco in the University Plaza on Salem Church Road.
I am not sure where all we went the afternoon of February 24, 1976 but I recall my mother being upset, vague in her reasons for trying to find and purchase certain items, and in a general state of agitation with her mental wheels spinning. I am certain I sensed that she was planning something…surely my radar was tuned to when something big was in the air.
Like a hurricane or stormfront about to move in, surely I had the sense that something wasn’t right.
As a typical seventh grade girl, these trips could seem long and frustratingly overwhelming to me in a number of ways.
The older I got the more I asserted my own ability to wander through the stores and look at things which actually interested me – typically snazzy clothing for young girls, women’s shoes (clogs and platform heels, to be specific) and, of course, the vinyl record department.
She would increasingly allow me to go to another department unsupervised for specified amounts of time and I was to meet back with her in some agreed place.
That afternoon, I have a sense that we visited two or more stores before she located the items she intended to purchase. We likely got home around typical dinner time, and the days in February would have been dark around that hour.
She had purchased a bright spotlight and some sort of gold bell on a black handle, and she seemed secretive (and somewhat excited) over the acquisitions.
Likely my dad got home from work somewhere around this dinner-time hour.
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What I next recall is that my mother had gone into the front, corner bedroom of our small house in Harmony Hills (Newark, Delaware). It was not at all uncommon for her to be consumed and pre-occupied by activities (both very real, actually, and also, very imagined and woven into some narrative that was quite convoluted and otherwise “crazy” and definitely, crazy-making, to my father and to me).
My mother had installed metal, venetian blinds in every room of the house and kept them tightly closed and drawn. For a period of time that likely started around 1968 or so (there was a specific neighbor family that had moved in on one side of us that she had become very hostile and suspicious over…and like the Hatfield-McCoy feud that started (somewhat) over a hog, this neighborhood feud with this family started over a particular thing (as I understand it, they built a carport that my mother insisted was six inches closer to the “party line”, a term I must have heard twenty-thousand times growing up – than survey marker and regulations allowed), and interactions with them, but, that is a rabbit hole for now I won’t fully follow…just mention.
In later years through other sources, it seemed there were additional components to my mother’s suspicions and narrative of them, and she had an increasing sense that various children and adults in the neighborhood were harassing her and our home and family in various ways.
Eventually that family had moved out of the house that was on the side next to this front bedroom window, and a new family had been living there for (possibly) a short time. I can’t recall if it was just a number of months, or perhaps they had been there a year or two.
The truth of the matter was that there were, indeed, forms of harassing and tormenting behaviors (in my mother’s world and condition), that various neighborhood children and teenagers engaged in with my mother. They knew they could provoke her and they found it (understandably, given the nature of children) amusing that they could set off such bizarre reactions and behavior.
At one point, my mother made my father dig and line flat cinder markers along the property line (my mother had it re-surveyed) and the kids would tease me that there were tombstones in our yard. I remember they would sometimes walk near the line and perhaps step their foot over an inch, and by the time my mother ran out (she peeked through the blinds, and they could see her moving them) with her camera and paper to document (or whatever she did) they would have run off or stepped further back.
When I mention neighborhood children, I say this collectively. While there are various people and names I recall my mother being obsessed over, it really wasn’t any individual(s) at fault, per se. Ultimately, I view it as some collective neighborhood sociological phenomenon.
My mother was simply known as the neighborhood’s “old hag” of sorts. The old crazy-lady, and I, her daughter. I can recall the taunts of the children as I got off the bus. At many points, my mother insisted escorting me to and from the bus stop, or, at one point managed to have the bus stop moved in front of our house.
Mocking and somewhat aggressive sing-songy shouts of “Slaaafer….Slaaafer” (imitating my mother’s West Virginia twang) and “Old lady Slaafer!” and “Old lady Slifer’s daughter!!!” and “Ah-ul-eeen…Ah-ul-leen!” (mimicking shouts of my slurred name in mocking accent, shouted at me as the bus pulled away and I walked home, with or without my mother) are still accessible in my mental reservoir of sights and sounds of that lifetime. Actually, I now recall boys rolling down the bus windows and spitting toward me…vaguely…not that anything ever reached me. It was simply the sights and sounds of it all.
It was quite damaging to my self-image and self-esteem and contributed, in some small part, to some of my social development and awkwardness, I suppose.
The extent of my mother’s notorious nature is portrayed in this somewhat humorous short story I wrote last year.
Also, I’m sure that a number of other adults in the neighborhood were aware of various happenings and my mother’s bizarre behaviors and like most people, including my father and me, were at a loss how to deal with her.
As I share from inside account some of what went on in our home, I hope that no reader ever feels I am leveling any type of condemnation at any others in the neighborhood. It is all truly understandable to me – all the various ways and responses to the situation. All of it falls within the spectrum of how others view and deal with situations and people that are difficult, non-sensical, and somewhat bizarre or unusual.
People will be people, and that encompasses the full range of human behaviors.
This was not only a deeply psychological situation,
but a deeply sociological one, overall, as well.
Sociology teaches us that we adapt in various ways as we find ourselves in life situations and that humans in relationship with others tend to respond within certain patterns. For me, from a young age, I was regularly and increasingly teased by my young peers as “Crazy old lady Slifer’s daughter.”
The slurring epithet of being somehow associated with my mother – Margaret – sadly became an easy form of word violence not only slung toward me at a tender age of six, seven, eight years old, but beyond. Some of those whom we dare to divulge our lifestories, struggles and other sacred wounds to, sometimes, and often do, eventually find opportunities to re-purpose our confidences and our wounds into weapons. I have another draft in progress regarding my mother’s name being used by several during my lifetime, as the ultimate slurring epithet.
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I cannot begin to explain how or at what point this sociological response to me, my mother and even my father (at times, I remember him being called “Old man Slifer”), unfolded within the neighborhood, and beyond.
The young children who taunted my mother (and me) in various ways and at times were also being formed by something, but that is beyond the scope of my writings. I learned from an early age to resist various things with my mother, before I even entered school. And this resistance also seemed to involve an amount of my own angry, hateful or mocking words to her, at times. It was just all so hard, and too much.
My resistance to abnormal interactions with her was, though imperfectly and also carrying its own forms of personal damage to my developing self, a sign of health. I was able to recognize and discern from a young age, ways in which my mother differed from other mothers. Throughout our life, the mark of being human is to react and respond in negative (or differentiating) ways when encountering things that go against that which makes sense and feel humanly acceptable.
While I am nearly sixty now and continue to explore and understand my mother and the things that formed her, to some better degree – and I am finding the narrative I and others held of her may be filled with (some) actual plot twists – it doesn’t change the truths of how I felt, perceived, reacted and responded to things at that time.
I do believe my mother loved me, and loved my father, within her own capacity. But this does not negate how very damaging life with her was for me, and for my father, in particular. And, I would not trade who I am and what God permitted in my life, since it is what formed me into who I am today.
I have my flaws, but I think I’m an okay person – more than okay actually, I’m kind of interesting, and more!
For one to wish their whole formation might have never occurred is like wishing we were some other person. And I don’t find that I have ever really experienced this in my life.
While I wanted things to be different in real-time and as a child likely fantasized what it might be like to have what I considered normal, this didn’t involve a deep or frequent wishing to be someone else. It simply motivated me to pursue normal.
Therefore, all my tellings of life-stories though refined in my ever-evolving understandings through many years, must remain authentic to my experiences at that time. The use of dark humor and sarcasm has been a good coping tool for me during the years, as is expressing of anger and other negative views of my mother and her behavior, at times. It is what allows me to tell and re-frame stories in captivating ways.
And, I am quite enjoying the little illustrations and giving of titles to pieces!
As a young child, I found I needed to differentiate from my mother through forms of agreement with peers that thought she was “crazy.” It is easy to understand this as a survival tool, sociologically and psychologically, that helped me cope with it all. Yet as I continue to discover a number of sad and heart-breaking parts of my mother’s young life, my deeper understanding of her pain produces regret that I didn’t have the skills I might now possess to have interacted with her any differently.
I find that the space of creative imagination seems to be a territory where I can continue to retroactively process and resolve aspects of my relationship with my mother, through writing, art, and even intentionally imaginative conversations in my mind with her…long after her death.
But, back to this story from 1976.
It is huge, and unwieldy to form without
wandering in and out of the weeds…
As I resume giving the account of that Tuesday evening in February 1976, I pick up with my recollection that my mother kept going in and out of that front bedroom and was quite agitated. She often stood at the blinds during the day or nighttime peeking through to watch for harassments and she kept detailed notes, but this evening seemed to hold some escalation in that common process.
As I said earlier, she had a sense of being persecuted (and actually, our yard was subject to rotten tomatoes being thrown at it, toilet paper strewn, windows occasionally broken or soaped on Halloween mischief night and other times, eggs thrown onto cars or elsewhere requiring clean-up, rocks thrown, children hanging out in the street near our house making taunting remarks or sounds, crank phone calls, and the like) by children and teens in the neighborhood.
Her sense of conspiracy between neighborhood families was high and extended to various adults. Her sense of being wronged, also, was quite high. Often, I found myself being some type of pawn in the situation with seemingly random decisions/whims as to whom I could play with (“associate with” as she would say) and which properties I could be at, depending on whatever the state of affairs were between her and others, or whatever she perceived was beneficial to whatever was in her mind on any given day.
My mother seemed to be constantly documenting various, atypical things and often threatened legal actions.
My mother seemed to believe that various higher powers could somehow put a stop to it all.
If she saw a boy on a bike in front of her house, for example, she often would call the operator and request “time, please.” Since in that day there was no easy way to obtain exact eastern standard clock time (through cell phone, internet, for example) the operator could give the exact time and put a small charge (maybe ten cents) on one’s phone bill showing the specifics and the date.
I mention this, because my father’s receipt of our phone bill within days of this February 1976 event, will need the reader to understand this act, and its costs. Spoiler alert – but my father suffered his first heart attack one week later. I intend to continue writing of these events in more detail, in future segments.
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In my mother’s mind, these calls would serve to somehow document the neighborhood harassment. Even though even in my young, twelve-year-old mind I recognized the absurdity and that it proved nothing other than my mother kept calling the operator, often, and requesting “time, please.”
The sound of my mother’s repeated, agitated voice doing this day and night, in waves of upset, still resounds fairly clearly in tambre, pace and pitch in my mind’s ears. It had a quality of determined vengeance is the way I might best describe.
Of course, when the neighborhood children and teens, especially, could see the little gaps in the blinds where they knew she was peeking out. Doing things like, for example, knocking-and-running on the front door (and maybe even truly leaving a frog – or possibly plastic explosives in her mailbox, as she refers to on one of her recordings and I actually believe her) and then watching her come out and respond…this truly must have been some terrible form of entertainment and clearly, added to my mother’s mental torment.
By this time in February of 1976, my mother was to the point that pretty much all of her waking energies were consumed by her obsessions and perceptions. And for my father and I, it was quite tragic to be held captive to her powerful control.
My father did all cooking and laundry and a number of things relating to providing as much stability for me as possible. He would get me up in time for school, for example. And, he would help with homework and dialogue with me concerning my mother, at times. He took me to church and Sunday School, and I tended to follow him most everywhere when I was not playing with friends.
I went grocery shopping with him, spent hours with him in his workshop at night as he restored hunting rifles and did a variety of relaxing things, helped in the garden and watched TV with him.
The house was quite full with all kinds of papers – newspapers and magazines my mother planned to read, seemingly months and years worth she bought and piled up. True Detective was one of her favorites, along with The National Enquirer. And of course, the endless documents she created piled everywhere. I remember how disgusted my father was that our little kitchen table was always so piled full of stuff that every night little areas had to be cleared to set plates.
Files and files and random spy notes (as I called them) or weirdly written checks, correspondence, bills, IRS stuff permeated the entire house and everywhere seemed full of disorganized stuff. It was a mess and already a moderate-level hoarder’s situation. My father and I were not “permitted” to touch these types of things to truly clean up, throw junk away, sweep, vacuum, dust and more…
My mother often went to the library and made endless photocopies of everything while my dad and I sat in the car, or I perused the children’s and young adult book selections, encyclopedias and more until we were the last people out, with lights being shut down at the Kirkwood Highway Public Library.
She would be asking them for a few more minutes as she had what seemed like slews of papers and copies laying everywhere, trying to sort them. I think this primarily occurred during what she called “tax season.” Believe me, my mother doing taxes was quite an ordeal.
Likely I was taking one dollar bills to the counter asking for more dimes for the ten cent copies, while hearing the sounds of vacuum cleaners (and encountering various kind and observant employees smiling or chatting with me as I wandered the aisles of books or kept going to the water fountain for a drink or to use the bathroom), and observing the place slowly close down and the people leave.
Likely it was a school night and my homework got done at one of the library tables, and I left with my books and my mother with bags of photocopies and my father, left with huge disgust and exhaustion. Likely he needed to be at work the next day, and was unwillingly conscripted as chauffeur on these frequent excursions. Likely he probably had to clean up dirty dishes and help get me to bed, on top of it all, after these long and pointless nights.
Sometimes my father would come inside the library and read; other times he would sit in the car and periodically come in and out, trying to figure out how much longer she would be at it. Sometimes I would go out to the car with him for awhile, and then head back in to get a report on the status of things.
I’m smiling a bit as I write this. The thought of me in grade school or middle school going in and out of the library at night and telling my father that she has most of her bags packed up and says “it will only be five more minutes” is a somewhat endearing image of my own little self! This type of situation was not simply an occasional thing. It felt like several nights a week (at least in certain waves of times) would be regularly consumed with trips to the library, stores or other places and it was routine for my father and I to bond together during these times.
I think the proper word is reconnaissance.
Yes, my Daddy and I were on the same team, and passed each other various survivability information.
I can also envision us playing tick-tack-toe on paper or hangman (the word game). Looking back, my father was clearly depressed, withdrawn – definitely angry and under immense pressures– and I think that while he did initiate some of our interactions, that from my young years, I quite initiated interactions, conversations and pass-time games as we sat in the car together, waiting on her. I was a child and I was full of energy, inquisitiveness and more. I think I made my dad laugh, likely.
I mean, I had a way about me I guess! One of the most treasured secret recordings I have that my mother was making of mid-70’s phone calls is one between my father and I. Somehow she put me on the phone with him during some argument they were having and you hear my tone immediately change. I had been upset and talking in the background and then when I heard my Daddy’s voice I asked him, “What do you want me to do?”
He says, slowly and deliberately with passive tone…“I don’t know.”
Then, one hears my child-like frustration and I say, “You don’t know NOTHING, do you!!!?” (Someone once said my voice then sounds like the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird).
I can hear my dad chuckle at my statement. He says to me, in a matter-of-fact and somewhat sing-songy, passive-aggressive sarcastic voice, “Well, I have to do whatever she tells me to do!”
To which one can again hear my exasperation (I was around eleven or twelve) as I say to him with usage of grammar I cannot figure out the basis of (whether I normally spoke this way or was just flustered!), “Here. Here’s HER!!!” apparently handing the phone back.
And then my mother gets on and she and my dad continue arguing. Yes, I have all this on recorded tape! My mother had a device to “bug” the telephones and record conversations! And, those tapes survived and I transferred a number to computer audio files back in 2005-2006. Fascinating.
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I can recall how much I enjoyed grocery trips with my dad on Saturdays when she wasn’t along, and him taking me to the library without her. Those trips felt so fun and normal. I cannot overstate how much I depended on my father to navigate my early life. Without siblings nor geographically close family, I really believe he is the reason that I survived so well.
There was a type of commiseration that went on between us that while definitely not healthy in terms of wiring me to shoulder heavy loads and adult things, equally was the thing that formed me to carry such things later in life, so well, in many ways.
After he died in 1979, I carried these things quite differently than my father had.
After all, I also had my mother’s DNA which meant I was smart, assertive, stubborn and combative to the degree the situation seemed to require of me, and pro-active. Surely my father maintained status quo, to a large degree, as he perceived it was the only real option in the situation and likely the best thing for my sake.
No amount of social work theory, family opinion or otherwise will ever convince me that he was not correct, in fact, in his overall assessment of the scenario. Any other majorly different option I imagine, leads me to believe my personal outcome would have exponentially worsened.
It is easy for those looking into a situation from without to imagine what they might do or what might help, but the intricate complexities of so many things are just that: complicated.
I am not saying that my dad could not have done some things differently or better – surely all parents find themselves in predicaments and with their own limited capacities – but overall I think he did the best he could, given all things. Including, I now imagine even more clearly, his unarticulated heartbreak at the downward spiral of his bride’s eventual condition which seemed (in his mind) to have its onset around my birth.
They had been married nearly fifteen years prior to 1963, and his sense of losses of so many hopes and dreams must have been immense. Whatever nightmare he found himself in, after exchanging a number of beautiful love letters with my mother during WWII and afterward (which I have in a boxed collection), led him to once say to me, “And to think I survived World War II to come home to this.“
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Around this time in 1976 and prior, inside the house, my mother was given to blocking off views of our home using furniture which at one point I recall she placed in odd ways through our living room such that if the front door was open, others could not see her files or messes, and, my friends could be guided through (and only see various tables with piles of papers covered by sheets or colorful fabrics) from the front door to my bedroom.
I’m guessing (though much blurs together as general conditions) that around this time in 1976 was the height of this maze-like system to disguise conditions and so that my friends could come into my room (or use the bathroom, but never get into our kitchen or elsewhere) and not have any “information” (as she might say) that they could divulge to others in the neighborhood.
Sixth through eighth grade was prime time period for me and my three to five best neighborhood girl-friends to come into my room where we’d close the door and do what all typical girls do at that age. Except, that two of these girls were quite younger than me and I seemed to enjoy an extended play-period and interest in Barbie dolls. I remember this time quite well and quite fondly, actually. My relationship with my dolls was quite unique, perhaps, and warrants separate writing focus, perhaps!
I recall keeping my room quite tidy and wanting it to look “normal” – like the rooms of my friends. My walls were filled with KISS posters and other pop stars, alongside my elaborate self-directed and self-created Barbie Home, and of course I had a stereo and an Epiphone guitar. Although, I think the guitar was added around eighth grade.
I’ve had people tell me that if I had food and shelter, I was doing pretty well. Better than so many children who were subject to “real abuses” such as food insecurity, cigarette burns and much more. There’s a lot of truth in this, but it isn’t the entire truth, certainly. I could say that if someone had furniture to sit on and even a terrible meal served at around the same time daily, and easily had guests in and out of their home, normal family connections and basic furniture to sit on, they were doing better than me. But, early formative traumas are not some competition and sometimes it is hard to articulate what is abuse and what is simply repeatedly deeply damaging conditions, traumas and dysfunctions without some intent of overt abuse. Most things are a mixture.
Surely I believe insufficient consideration is given to the short and long-term effects of very young children being formed within ongoing traumatic and damaging family systems. It can be easier to alter the narrative(s) or take some easier streamlined, labeling approach (and treatments) that ultimately circumvent deeper healing, rather than do the more difficult work of authentically trudging through our woundings.
For so many, there is no easy way to articulate both the nature of damaging events and long-term impact.
Back to the night of February 24, 1976 – now that I think I’ve better set the stage for this spectacle and significant life event, I will attempt my best re-creation of the evening and time period which followed.
My mother was coming in and out of that front bedroom, likely angrily talking to my father who was likely also angry. It was dinner time. He was hungry, and I was hungry.
And my mother, likely was making multiple calls to the operator documenting “the time, please.” I remember after some angry discussion, my father leaving to drive a couple miles to the Gino’s near the corner of Harmony Road and Kirkwood Highway and to order food for dinner.
Of course, the exact sequence would be impossible to know, but I’m thinking that while he was gone is when my mother pulled out the spotlight and little gold bell she had purchased that afternoon. As I recall, she was shining the floodlight, as she called it, out into the yard and street. The window was now open and she was ringing the bell and calling out in a loud, confident and otherwise bizarre song-like voice:
“Hear ye, hear yeeeee….get off my proper-teeeeee….hear ye, hear ye…get off my property-eeeee!!!!”
I kind of recall that I went outside to see the spectacle from another vantage point and by then, she had drawn a small crowd of neighbors who were standing in the street, as I recall.
My mother ran after me, admonishing me to “stay inside the house.”
Around that time, my father came back from Gino’s with the fried chicken and I think there was nothing my mother could do to keep me inside. It was as though we were in some fortress under some attack in her mind and I remember sitting on the porch eating the KFC and watching it all. It was escalating, loud and quite unusual behavior, even for my mother.
It was 1976, the celebrated bicentennial year. I’m really thinking her use of the ringing bell and the accompanying word choices likely were connected in her thinking to some declaration of freedom, independence or war.
Who knows.
It’s the best I can come up with!
It was embarrassing, shocking and more, to hear my mother sounding like Paul Revere – or whomever might have sounded some alarm using that type of language.
The “hear ye…hear ye” part is un-mistakeable in my recollections. When I tell the story aloud, I always try to imitate (but not in the volume) the quality, pace and “tune” of her proclamation that night.
And emphasize that she was literally ringing some type of personal “liberty bell.“
When your mother is shining a very blinding floodlight all over the property and street on a chilly February school night from an open window and is somehow loudly shouting and proclaiming such antiquated and non-sensical proclamation(s) to gathering attendees to this public spectacle, it certainly warrants the front row seat of an intelligent, young twelve-year-old who found herself nervously giggling while enjoying the deep-fried skins off the KFC.
I loved the drumsticks, especially. And I’d often want to just eat the crunchy skins off of other pieces.
And, the biscuits. Soooo good.
It was quite a meal and quite a show.
I hope that I had enough napkins, and can’t recall if I had my coat on or a sweater…but I was eating a late dinner (and surely guilty, likely over-hearing the cost of this feast…money we did not have but hey, it was healthier than eating a spotlight or swallowing a bell and ding-donging around rather than having a growling stomach…).
Surely I was taking in every part of this live TV-like drama in our front yard. I mean, I needed to take my own, journalistic mental notes to update my school friends.
Truly, I wonder what I told them when I returned to school, likely that Thursday. Pretty sure I stayed home that Wednesday, February 25. Because, this story is not over.
I understand this boring account really should be about ten blog pieces, and I apologize, in advance, that the events of February 25 to April 15, 1976 are about to be lumped into a huge run-on account of a paralyzing, eye-draining, ear-hurting number of sentences and paragraphs but hey…no one is forcing you to read this.
Unlike my father and I, who were pretty well forced to experience this!
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At some point and if I were to guess it would have been around 8 or 9 pm that evening, a police car showed up to the curb in front of our house. I do think I had come inside at that point since it was cold (and, I had finished my finger-licking-good fried chicken!).
I’m not sure where my father was or what he was doing but I recall my mother going outside and getting inside of the police car.
It was a fairly common thing for my mother to call the police to report or deal with what she considered “the neighborhood situation.” The other next door neighbor was a state trooper and when I was in my 20’s, he told me some stories.
He said my mother was known at “re-comm” (this is the word I recall and assume it was their switchboard) as Agent 99. That is because of her not only calling about the neighborhood kids but also, he said she would read the True Detective magazines and think she had solved the crime and call in with tips. I do recall as a child my mother endlessly flipping through the Wanted posters that were displayed in the post office lobby. I can recall being small enough for her to set me on the lobby’s high counter/desk at the post office that was on Kirkwood Highway between Prices’ Corner and Newark.
She wrote lots of letters and also, they had a photocopier as I recall. I can recall sitting on that counter and also flipping through the black-and-white photos of Wanted Criminals, studying their faces and reading details (including fingerprints I believe) of their crimes – and where they may have last been seen, etc. I must have been old enough to read, but young enough to enjoy either climbing onto the counter or being positioned there by my mother, to entertain myself on those summer days.
As I write this, I am wondering how far back my interest with faces and art goes. Sometimes when I am drawing caricatures, people ask (or suggest) whether I have ever (or might…or say I would be good at) doing police sketches!
Funny.
I do seem to study faces quite a lot, and my highest artistic aim (among the many) has been that of portrait artist.
But, back to the neighbor’s stories. Because, they relate to my mother’s relationship with the police that evening of February 25. And also, that neighbor and his family were about to play another huge role in my life at that time, stepping in to care for me for two weeks when my father had his first heart attack.
The neighbor also told me, in my 20’s, that my mother was calling the FBI (and I recall this) often, and the FBI was contacting the Delaware police and asking if they could “doing anything” to stop my mother’s calls.
He also told me a story that one time, my mother believed that someone was living in her attic and coming down during the night and stealing milk and butter from the refrigerator. This is my recollection of the story he told. My mother called out the police and it was hot – in July or so – and the entrance to the attic was one of those little openings in a bedroom closet
I never once saw our attic in Harmony Hills, and rarely thought about the fact that we had an attic.
This neighbor says that a somewhat heavy-set officer came out, and had to crawl up into the attic (or at least get in a position to peek in) to assure my mother that no one was living up there.
This is another tangent in the weeds here, but I will tuck here a third story that my father’s best work-hunting-buddy-friend told me around that time as well. He said one day my father came in to work and said to him, “You’ll never believe what that damned woman did last night.”
I don’t want to sanitize my memory of Herb’s words that he said my father spoke, and of course, this easily sounds like something my father would have said. He once told me that he “never swore before he knew my mother, and that he’d probably go to hell for it.”
Of course, surely my father informing me of this possibility added to the burgeoning sense of unease in my developing mind, and likely set the stage for the terrible anxiety I had around 4th grade when I was given Apocalyptic tracts by some church evangelists at the Cecil County Fair. I’m sure it was easy to envision being separated from my Daddy (“one will be taken, the other left behind”) in some event my Sunday School teacher had never mentioned!
Would it be my Daddy, for swearing at my Mommy?
Or would it be me, for not honoring my Mommy?
My Daddy and I were both breakers of at least one of the Ten Commandments.
Which one of us might be left behind…churning butter…while the other floated up to the clouds and the world got burned up?!
My little mind was obsessed with this possibility at that time, and shows what type of damaging effects a number of seemingly innocuous things can have – these little perfect storms of personalized, internal predicaments and traumas in the minds of impressionable children!
Anyway, Herb said that my father had awoken during the night and my mother was standing over him with a baseball bat. I was actually quite shocked to hear this story, as I had never witnessed any type of potential delusional violent capacity from my mother toward my father. I have no reason but to take that story at face value, along with the account of my mother thinking someone was living in our attic and stealing milk and butter.
But, I don’t have any recollections of this (possibly faintly of the attic thing) and I just file it away as some of the unknowns that existed. I mean, I certainly have enough very clear recollections to contemplate, from time to time, and to story-tell.
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All that was to say that I remember my father and I both retiring for the night likely around 9 or 10 pm. It was a school night for me, and a work day for him, the next morning. Other than the spectacle an hour or so before with the spotlight and bell, I don’t think either of us had any reason to believe that anything else unusual was taking place when the police came. And I suppose that in-and-of-itself says a lot.
It did seem like she sat in the car at the curb for a long time, but we likely thought she was giving them an earful of whatever she thought was happening. And, we made the assumption that she was the one who called the police.
What I recall next was my father coming into the room where I was sleeping (which was actually that front room even though my bedroom was in the back…I’m thinking it was a time when my bed and bedroom had become loaded down with boxes of spy stuff or whatever and I was told to sleep in the front room, and I think my dad (and mom) slept in the other back room.
I really don’t know. And, I hate to say this as it may sound terrible…but there is a possibility that the house was so very disordered with paper trash and hoarded stuff and whatnot that this time period was when my mother designated my father and I both to that front room and the double bed.
This is a tough thing to share because it might be hard for family, friends or readers to comprehend this type of situation. That my mother was this powerful and in control of every aspect of our life there, pretty much, and that my own separate bedroom could be piled so badly with stuff that it was “unsleepable” and that my mother (whom I recall slept on the double bed in the other back room and it was often piled high with dirty clothes and magazines and stuff) and father may not have slept together and she forced (by default I suppose) him and I to share a bed.
I recall this as a time period that may have lasted several months. Most of the time, I had my own, separate bedroom.
But, there was a time (I’m thinking maybe during 4th to 6th grade…really not sure) in which this dysfunction happened. I remember my father’s anger and disgust at her and him turning his back to me on the other side of the double bed and telling me not to tell my friends that we slept in the same bed. Clearly, my father knew how very messed up the situation was and how it would sound to others. I should probably not have to say this, but my own sense of embarrassment at this part of the story leads me to clarify that no, this was not some sexual thing. Not at all.
This is yet just one other little piece of the highly dysfunctional forms of survival both my father and I were (essentially or by default) forced into accepting.
As I write this and my next memory of that night in February 1976, perhaps I was sleeping in my own room (see, I have no clear idea…I do know I had my room fixed up at points…) and when the phone call came around 11 or 12 pm and I heard my father on the phone in the front room (oh and I recall, I think the phone he answered was inside of the closet) that maybe I simply was curious and came in that room and lay on the bed listening.
What I definitely remember in my mind’s eye is being in that same front room she had rung the bell from, and laying on that double bed, and hearing my father on the phone (eventually twice) that night, in that particular room.
Yes, maybe that is it. And, therefore my little excursion into some other time period of bedroom conditions didn’t apply. I will never know.
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The first late-night phone call was from the police station. My father had me get dressed and we got in the car to drive up Kirkwood Highway to Troop 6, as I recall. I “think.” Or, to some other police station near Price’s Corner. He then told me that my mother was not the one who called the police out that time, but it was another neighbor.
My mother had been arrested for disturbing the peace.
I can remember us going to the police station (I have vague glimpses in my mind’s eye…it is more the feel of it being late at night, cold out, and quite confusing, and I was tired…) and picking my mother up. She was furious.
She was raving against this neighbor and having been “falsely arrested.” We drove home and my mother was already planning to sue the neighbor for defamation of character, pain, suffering and damages, as I recall. What happened next was that likely around 1 am, she called an ambulance for herself. She indicated that it would somehow prove that this neighbor’s actions had cause some type of pain and suffering, and she needed it documented.
That’s my best guess at what she said.
I just remember there was commotion and likely arguing with my parents and I was likely captivated and confused at what was going on. It was a highly unusual situation and I think I felt like something really strange and terrible was unfolding before my very eyes!
My father and I went back to sleep, and likely, I heard some type of new commotion when the ambulance pulled into our driveway. I really can’t sequence this! How fast they came, whether I watched the lights through the window and her walk out and talk to them…whether my dad went back to bed first and then me. I don’t know!
But, the ambulance took her away.
I’m sure I didn’t just fall off to sleep. My mind must have been spinning and racing with thoughts about the situation.
Had it not…I would not have been…so normal!
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The next thing during this night, now February 25 around 4 am, as I recall, was that I was awoken again to my father taking a phone call. I am probably blurring these two calls together in my sound-memory of his calm, measured response and voice tone.
As I recall, again, I am laying on the double bed in that front room and listening with intent curiosity to my father on the phone (the one inside or near the closet) and he is saying along the lines of, “OK…yes…I see…hmm hmm…hmm..hmm…ok…yes…ok…thank you…yes, I can come in or call back tomorrow…”
I am fairly certain he told me then, upon hanging up, that they had taken my mother to a mental hospital.
Surely, I was urged to go back to sleep.
Surely, I didn’t just doze off…
This was something that never happened before.
A mental hospital?
Surely, I probably thought to myself, “What is THAT?” and, “Where is that?”
Maybe that night or surely the next day, I overheard words such as Farnhurst.
At this point, I think I should make a break here in my writings!
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I thought perhaps I could write out even the next day of February 25th…and the following week…or six weeks, in one sitting, as one monolithic story event.
But, I don’t think that is possible.
There will need to be a part two…and possibly a part three or even part four.
This was a major deal. And I remember a number of things.
For now, I will end with a redacted version of some of the notes made on hospital records which I possess copy of. I think this version/summary about my mother may be the most interesting to me from this first Delaware hospitalization forward, in its sense of unadulterated purity (as in, I her young daughter was not responsible for providing any sort of information).
I can only assume whatever information/description of my mother (including her family situation) came either from my mother herself or from my father.
Since I am now exploring my mother’s younger years as best possible through other means, part of me wonders how many things existed that I, my father, or others repeated about her came not only from direct personal experiences but from other grapevine sources. In the first page summary it is stated that my mother was pampered by her older siblings. I wonder if my father told the hospital this, or my mother.
And, on what basis that conclusion was made that she was pampered in her early life. I’m not convinced that being sent off your first three years of life to be raised elsewhere could be considering pampering. But, perhaps various guilt and/or basic Linger family dysfunction after my mother was returned to the nine older siblings and parents was somehow moderated by what might be perceived as “pampering.”
I’m really reserving my thoughts about this idea my mother was pampered until I can lay out my current understandings (with the inherent questions) in a finished manner.
Was this something that at that point, my father may have come to believe through interactions with other Linger family members and their input over the years? Or, was it his conclusion from things my mother may have intimately shared with her husband in one way or another?
Knowing parts of my mother’s early life, this statement may have contained some amount of truth. But I don’t believe it was the whole truth. Often understandings and conclusions get severed from actual context and facts and unfortunately keep being repeated, taking on a life of their own. Things that may not be facts, or may contain biased judgements and darker elements, if said often enough, somehow become facts.
Even diagnoses can be falsely passed on or some aspects emphasized while other possibilities minimized or even ignored.
As I read through this first account of my mother’s first hospitalization during my childhood (her very first was a singular and unfortunate event in 1946 in West Virginia that I am still researching), I think of what I was told about my mother and her condition within days of that night of February 25, 1976 and moreso, what I was told was the one, single thing that would fix her, if only she complied.
While I give myself grace and acknowledge, still, in retrospect, that my having to deal with my mother and her illness from my youngest years and especially, from the evening of May 10, 1979 until the day she died, November 26, 2001 was quite a lot for me to carry, the unresolvable tumultuous experiences over the years will always leave me with unanswered questions and even forms of guilt.
Being an only child, it fell upon me to make huge, important, adult-type decisions about her and her care, and about my own self. These decisions came, initially, within a tremendous situation of very raw and understandable grief and trauma over my father’s death during spring semester of my sophomore year of high school.
I think back now on some of the things I did, said and believed and can recognize they were not helpful to her, nor to myself, and likely worsened her pain and other aspects of her continued decline and outcome. Yet, I cannot be harsh with myself since the situation was more than other fully-formed adults could bear or deal with, at times.
I was sandwiched in, during my early adult years, between dealing with my own post-traumas and damaging things of many sorts, being a good wife and a good mother, and also, managing the relationship and care of my own mother, who had never seemed like a real mother to me in any real shape or form.
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I hope that my story will raise awareness of thought into these type of situations and the variety of impact.
I hope that readers will find my stories of interest, especially beyond considering it simply my story.
We all have a story to tell, and I believe that my story and my mother’s story are worthy of expression. Many people miss the forest for the trees and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If you have read to this point, thank you for your interest in this wild and peculiar journey of not only my own life story but, that of my mother: Margaret Ruth Linger Slifer
It’s a lot to tell, with a lot of twists and turns.
Stay tuned.
Thank You For Reading
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