I was on my way to the Social Services office with no idea how things were going to turn out. I had never “rebelled” against my mother in any way, but from this rebellion; bringing other people into my story, there was no turning back. I was terrified. All I knew was how I had spent the previous night, sitting on a box in my mother’s room, and the realization that the madness had to stop; ill-equipped as I was to deal with what was next.
During the drive to Social Services I tried to recall what provoked my mother into inflicting this form of punishment upon me, but she had done it many times before. It would be late at night when most school age children would be in their pajamas snug in their beds. My mother would decide that I had done something that deserved severe punishment. This could happen even when I had done nothing. My mother’s mind worked to create things that I might have done wrong so that she could justify in her own eyes a suitable punishment. I would have to sit for hours on a box that was up against the wall at the foot of my mother’s bed. It was cool in the room and my thin pajamas offered little warmth from the press of the cold wall at my back. My mother would be warm in bed, reading with the light on as I sat for hours wondering when I could go to my bed. We wouldn’t speak; she would just occasionally look up and glare at me. The length of time that I had to endure this punishment was usually limited to an hour or so. Then my mother would look up from her book and shout at me, “You make me sick, now get out of my sight!” That meant that at last I could go and curl up in my own bed, closing my eyes against the sting of tears. When I sat on the box in mother’s room, I wasn’t permitted to close my eyes.
I remember the look of absolute hate that would ravish my mother’s face as she looked up from her book to me sitting on the box. It was a large box that put me at the same level as my reclining mother. I never knew where so much hatred could come from. But then all I really wanted to do was get out of her glare and into the relative peace of my own bedroom. It was only across the hallway but she couldn’t see me in my room as she lay in her bed, and I could fall asleep. Sleep became the only way I could escape her wrath and by morning everything could be different, but not that night.
I had gotten so tired after 3 hours on the box that I had started to slump sideways. My mother would shout across at me, “Don’t you fall asleep, you sit up properly!” I could only hope that if I complied she would release me from this punishment and allow me to sleep. I was afraid to ask to go to the bathroom because she was so unpredictable at these times. I would try to figure out what I had done to cause my mother to want to deprive me of my sleep like this. Is there anything that a child can do that would make a parent inflict sleep deprivation of this kind?
Some time in the early morning hours (6 hours of sitting on the box), my mother finally ‘allowed’ me to go to my room. I remember falling exhausted into my own bed and only then did I allow the tears to fall. I know that I didn’t get any sleep that night. My mother had gotten up, after I had mercifully been allowed to leave her room, and informed me that ‘she’ was leaving! She hadn’t gotten dressed; she had just put a coat on over her nightgown. I remember it was raining that night and she had taken an umbrella. I watched from my upstairs bedroom window as she started walking away from the house. The night of the Black Umbrella begins…..
After my mother returned home without another word to me, I must have fallen asleep for a few hours.
It was the next morning when my mother continued to inflict her wrath on me. Having spent a sleepless night confused and crying for most of it, my eyes were very puffy and I was the pale colour you get when you haven’t had any rest. I had gone into the bathroom to try and disguise with the little bit of make-up that I owned, the sorrow that had enveloped my features. But my mother was not going to allow me this attempt to salvage my dignity. “And you are not wearing any of that on your face! You let them see who you really are!” as she snatched the small cosmetic bag out of my hands. I crumbled into tears once again as I realized how far she had taken her anger this time.
I wasn’t a bad child, but I did find myself questioning the moods that my mother fell into. There didn’t seem to be one particular thing that set her off, she would just turn into this raving creature that assumed that I was plotting against her in some way. She would conjure up these fantastic plots whereby the Mafia, or the Order of the Masons were trying to get at her. She became convinced that I was plotting along with these various groups although my attempts to reason with her went unheeded. What would the Mafia want with a 14-year old German-American, living with her mother and brother? I remember, day after day when the blinds in the house were never opened because my mother was convinced that “they could see us then”. I would have girlfriends over after school and we would just play into this plotting game by pretending that we were part of the whole scheme. That way it didn’t seem so weird to me, and because these friends never mentioned that this was strange behavior, I continued to assume that all parents did this sort of thing. We would be enjoying an after-school snack and would pretend that we were talking to our spoons. Like something you would see in a James Bond movie, certainly nothing that would happen on the projects! My mother would be in the other room saying, “you laugh and make fun if you want to but they are out there I know it!”
No anger.
She didn’t always take things this well though. There were times when just walking by a window would cause her to grab me by the hair (always by the hair!) and bring me to the floor, “stop signaling them!” she would scream at me, “I know that you are in on this”. There was some safety in knowing that when my friends were there she wasn’t likely to fly off the handle like she did when we were alone.
Why the difference?
After being thrown out of the house that morning and told to get to school, I had found my way to the park. That is when Carol had found me. I had been sitting on the swing, sobbing quietly to myself not knowing what I should do. The Morning after the Black Umbrella….
Now I was in a Social Worker’s office being asked all about these plots that my mother conjured up. What form of punishment had she inflicted on me, and how long had this been going on. I remember thinking that this interrogation was going to continue until everyone realized that I was not a good child and my mother had every right to punish me. I knew that no matter what happened in this Social Worker’s office, I was going to have to go home and face my mother again. She would be filled with rage that I had spoken to these strangers about things that only our family understood. But I didn’t understand.
To my utter surprise, the Social Worker was saying that I wouldn’t have to go back there, and that I would never again have to face my mother’s wrath!
Could this really be happening?
I had told my mother that I didn’t like that she threw me to the floor by my hair because she thought that I was communicating with people outside by signaling. I wasn’t signaling to anyone! But when my mother was in one of her “moods” everything that I said seemed to ignite further rage within her. I had learned to shut down at these times, imagining the peace that would come once my mother’s anger had abated.
I can recall looking over at Carol and her mother, sitting with me in the Social Worker’s office. Theirs was a look of complete disbelief and for a fleeting moment I began to think that perhaps the behavior that I had always taken for granted in my mother, maybe wasn’t the kind of behavior that all children endured. The Social Worker was actually listening to my stories while she made notes and didn’t seem to be siding with my mother. I know that that day changed my life forever.
I was told that I would have to go back to my mother’s but not by myself. I was taken by the Social Worker and a Constable from the Vancouver Police Force, such was the fear of the Social Worker that my mother would become violent with either of us. I will never forget the amazement that I felt that I was actually never going to have to put up with the incredible moods of my mother that had been my childhood memories. I was surrounded by adults, there to protect me.
But with this amazement came the reality of the stress that I had been living under. This would take years to repair and even longer to understand.
From the home I had known on the projects I was moved to a foster home close to my high school. I reveled in the newfound freedom I had. No more was I denied sleep and my life took on a normality it had never known. But with that normality came something that I later learned was called “panic attacks brought on because of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome”.
I would be lying unable to sleep in bed beside another bed in the room that housed another placed-girl of my own age. She would be peacefully sleeping when suddenly my heart would start beating so rapidly that it frightened me. Then my hands would start to claw; feeling as though they were going to go into a tight fist that would never release. My roommate would wake to find me on the floor trying desperately to use my knees to stop my hands from clawing. I would be crying frantically and asking my hands to stop clawing! It was a horrible feeling of losing control and this was something that I had never experienced before.
I remember that my Foster Mom, Mrs. Jessop would be summoned to the room by my distraught roommate. Mrs. Jessop would get down on the floor and gently take me in her arms and rock me until my sobbing subsided. For those few moments I felt safe, something I had never even realized that I had been lacking. My home with my mother had never offered me the feeling of safe refuge. But children never question their parents; at least I never did. My mother’s rule was the only thing that I had known and I became an expert at dodging her frequent lapses into insanity. I know now that this is what it was, complete insanity. And yet my mother could appear to everyone around her like a completely lucid human being, coping with the many stresses that had been placed in her path.
There are so many times that I should have questioned my mother’s sanity but I was a child learning to make my way in a life that was proving very difficult. I can remember being on a Vancouver City bus and having my mother’s face take on that look that always seemed to appear when she was losing touch with reality. She would stand up on the bus and loudly shout out, “That man has been following us for hours and it is going to stop now! Bus driver, please let me and my daughter off the bus immediately!” To which the stunned bus driver would more than willingly comply. The object of my mother’s wrath would look around to make sure that he was the one being victimized and then stare with that incredulous look of the falsely accused! I would try in my own way to convey with my eyes to this person that there wasn’t any truth to what my mother was saying because I had been with my mother for the entire morning and I had never set eyes on this person before.
The embarrassment would almost cripple me but then it was always better to get off the bus quickly before people had a good look at us. It usually meant that we would be faced with a long bus wait before the next bus came along. As we stood there waiting, my mother would go over in her mind all the places where this person had lurked before she finally recognized what was going on. I knew to keep quiet and say nothing.
None of this made any sense to me but I was a child. Perhaps these things were meant to remain a mystery. I do know that if the weather was bad it meant standing beside my mother, not knowing if she was going to verbally abuse the next person that came our way. I would stand cold, miserable and hunched over just in case she started up again. I didn’t want anyone to see my face and identify me with this woman beside me. My thoughts would go to how good it would feel to be back home, where people didn’t upset my mother. At least at the house on the projects, my mother’s raving could go on in private. Trying to grasp all of this as a young girl growing up robbed me of the childhood that I never did experience.
Of course, the moods that gripped my mother were not always connected with the outside world. Saturdays were our day to go into the basement of the row house (called this by the residents because of the fact that these two-level dwellings were part of a four-plex. Today they would be called a townhouse.) These mornings were when I had to use my best resources to avoid setting my mother off. My brother, never the victim of mother’s full wraith, would pull me aside before he left the house and say, “Linda, just do whatever she asks and don’t upset her.” This was so much easier for him to say as he made his way out the door. He wasn’t going to be locked in the house with her all day! Boys weren’t expected to stick around and do ‘housework or laundry’. My brother was free to wander with his friends wherever they went on those days. And he had a vehicle, an even better way to get completely away from the craziness that surround my mother. My brother could even sleep away from the house on those nights when my mother was in her mood, because if need be, he could sleep in his car somewhere.
Back to the basement on laundry day…
We didn’t have a lot of money so modern appliances were not something that we possessed. Ours was an old wringer style washing machine, which we rolled up to the two large concrete rinse sinks. The dank, colourless wooden basement was sectioned off with multiple clotheslines that became the only drying means we had. My mother and I would stand for hours wringing the clothes from one sink to the other as the loads finished in the washer. I always liked watching the rollers squish the clothes flat as they went through the wringing device only to have them become whole again after they hit the cold rinse water. The water was always so cold that it numbed my hands. I didn’t mind this numbing effect because it served as my touch with reality. My mother could go off in her world of disillusionment and I could stay in touch with mine. The cold helped to do this. The last sink had the fabric softener in it. It always smelt like the outdoors, which is where I would have rather been. All of my friends were out playing the games of childhood while I dodged my mother’s wraith in the basement, alone.
As an adult, I was visiting in-laws one time and had asked if I could wash my own and my husband’s travel clothes. It was a beautiful day outside and knowing that my mother-in-law had a clothesline outside, I asked if I could hang the clothes outside to dry. As I was hanging the clothes my husband and mother-in-law followed me outside to chat. I became aware that they had stopped talking and turned to find them both looking at me peculiarly. My mother-in-law said, “I have never seen anyone hang laundry so perfectly straight and according to size before!” I was right back in that basement on a Saturday morning.
There were probably eight clotheslines strung up in the basement. After my mother and I finished running the clothes through the wringer, they would go into a basket. It was my job to then hang the clothes on the lines to dry. But this was no ordinary task to be taken lightly. My mother INSISTED that the clothes be shaken out, and hung according to size, creating a line of perfectly hung clothes in either ascending or descending sizes. Each piece had to be snapped twice before it was hung up, and it must be put perfectly, on the line, no gapping waistbands or unleveled shirt shoulders!
However, I was never told if I had done a line correctly. It came after I had finished hanging the entire line. Then my mother would walk up to the line and tear every piece of clothing off the line, turn to me and say, “Now do it properly”. Knowing that my friends were outside waiting for me to join in their childhood games made me become a quick expert at clothes hanging!
That memory had not really surfaced until the moment when my mother-in-law made the comment about how I hung clothes all those many years later. How well the mind of a child shelters us from the pain of abuse! If hanging the clothes perfect in my mother’s eyes meant that I could go outside, it was worth every clothespin I strategically placed!
Life in the foster home became just a part of my growing experience. I continued to do well in school, and laughed and chatted with the many girls that shared Mrs. Jessop’s home. There were only two of us that were “wards of the city”, and two special transient girls that Mrs. Jessop particularly liked. Being a ward of the city meant that Mrs. Jessop was our legal guardian. The other transients girls came and went like changes in the weather. Sometimes the transient girls would have some incredible stories to share before they left to continue their lives somewhere else.
I remember one time I was roomed with one such transient girl named, Becky. She was 15, like I was then but she had experienced a side of life that I had never even thought about! She was a teenage prostitute and she shocked yet enthralled me with her stories of “regulars”. I remember that she wore expensive clothing and I thought that she must be successful! I never felt that I wanted to live her life-style, but all the same I was eager to hear her stories.
Mrs. Jessop lived in a house that had a completely separate suite upstairs. The house downstairs had at least 4 bedrooms all with several beds in each. Mrs. Jessop slept on the couch in the living room. Every night she would make up the bed for herself and settle into her sleep routine. I am not sure why someone would give up their privacy so that they could house so many troubled girls. I know that we were treated fine but the meals became so repetitive that to this day, I cannot eat cooked carrots with any enthusiasm! They were on our menu every single night of the week. However, Mrs. Jessop had her favorite girls, which I was one of. This meant that we were awarded special privileges. After the dinner dishes were all done and put away, Mrs. Jessop would send the other girls to their rooms to do homework while us few privileged girls were given the special treats she kept just for us. We developed a sense of bonding through these treats, knowing the four of us were the privileged few.
This feeling of being special only intensified when Mrs. Jessop announced to us one day that because the tenant upstairs had moved out, she was going to allow “her special girls” to live upstairs! This meant that we were basically on our own; the stairway in and out of this suite was outside. To enter or leave the suite we had to walk down these stairs, which were right in front of the kitchen window; Mrs. Jessop could keep a close watch on our activities. Besides, we had already proven to her that we were trustworthy and there was never any doubt that we would do fine living upstairs. We still had to have our dinner downstairs with everyone else but the treats had moved with us upstairs!
During this time of adjustment into my new life, my mother would phone Mrs. Jessop continually and ask to speak with me. At first she was congenial enough, asking how I was doing and whether I was happy or not. At some point though the phone conversation began to bother me. My mother would talk to me about how much I had ruined her life and how disrespectful I was. She would tell me that it wasn’t going to be long before these people figured out how bad I truly was. Then I would have nowhere to run to.
Mrs. Jessop seemed to know right when these phone calls started to take a turn for the worst. I would get off the phone feeling like my new fragile world was already going to crumble as a result of my mother’s intervention. Mrs. Jessop talked to me about the calls and together we decided that I would no longer have to take them. This meant that truly for the first time in my life, my mother was not going to be able to break through into my world!
I had taken a part-time job after school just shortly before the incident on the swing changed my life. I enjoyed my job at the little café. I was a waitress and dishwasher all rolled into one. When it wasn’t busy up front, I was busy doing the dishes. I did a wonderful job for my employer because I wanted to prove that I could be useful despite my young age.
The fellow that owned the café was a great cook and he always fed me well. The business that he did on the side, just out of earshot never really concerned me. I had seen the papers listing the racing results scattered around the telephone table but it didn’t concern me. He spoke in Chinese whenever he was on the phone so I never heard the conversations but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that he was running a booking business in the back of this cozy little café. People would come in and hand over large sums of money and often the owner would hand out large sums of money in return. All the while I would happily go about doing the job I had been asked to do. The system worked well. Until the day that my mother found a way to get back at me because I wouldn’t take her calls at the foster home anymore.
I remember that I was in the kitchen, which was situated behind a counter. I was washing dishes by hand, because that is the way the café did them. I heard the front door open (I believe that there was a bell attached to the door so that if we were all in the back of the café, we could hear customers coming in the door). Out of habit, I turned to see if the people entering the café needed waiting on. If they were there to see the owner, they always just walked through to the back booth.
To my utter astonishment, it was my mother that came through the door but with her were two Vancouver Police Officers! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! And then my mother yelled, “You better watch her because she runs like a rabbit.” I can’t express the surreal feeling that came over me. It was as though I was watching a bad movie but I was very much a part of this one. Of course, the owner of the café was extremely nervous watching two policemen walk into the middle of his booking operation. He only relaxed a little when he realized that they were there for me.
I slowly dried my hands and walked towards the policemen that were coming to the back of the café for me. I remember saying to them that I had no reason to run. They motioned me towards one of the back booths.
My mother had that look on her face that I knew so well, and I realized that there was something very wrong with all of this. As I sat down one of the policeman slid in beside me as though this would prevent any attempt on my part to ‘run’. My mother was on the other side of the booth with the other policeman.
One of the policemen asked me to roll up the sleeve of my shirt. I couldn’t believe what was happening! I did as I was told and the whole time I couldn’t take my eyes off of my mother’s face. She seemed almost smug to me as she said; “you can see the marks on her arms where she has been shooting up.” I couldn’t believe what she was saying! All throughout my school years there had been drugs around us. Two of my very close high-school chums had died of heroin overdoses but I had NEVER even considered ‘shooting up’ anything! This is the day that I realized to what extreme my mother would take her delusions.
As I rolled up my sleeve to expose my arm, the officer sitting beside me took my arm and started examining it. I had suffered terribly as a young child from eczema and it had left a discolouration on the inside of both my arms. There is a huge difference between track marks and eczema scarred skin. The policemen quickly deduced that I was not a user. But this was all happening right in the place of my employment, in clear view of the owner and any customers seated in the café! This was humiliation in the extreme! Things would never be the same for me in this café again.
Now that the police realized that the story my mother had concocted had no truth behind it, they decided to speak to me about trying to keep the relationship up with my mother. One of the policemen took my mother outside while the other officer stayed and talked with me. He let me know that my mother had been feeling cut-off from me because my foster mother would not allow telephone conversations between us. This seemed to justify her behavior somehow. In the officer’s mind anyway. The experience spoke to me about the extent my mother would go to get her way. It was months before I would speak with my mother again.
But after several months had gone by, it came around to Mother’s day. I couldn’t imagine not at least going to visit with my mother. At the foster home we had all secretly planned a celebration for Mrs. Jessop but I wanted to be with my own mother as well. I decided that I would phone and start the journey that I hoped would help bridge the gap between my mother and myself.
She seemed pleased to hear from me and we agreed on a time for me to come for a visit on Mother’s day. I was looking forward to seeing my mother again. There was a side to my mother that had been nurturing and kind; it was just when she went into one of her ‘moods’ that things got out of hand.
Mother’s day arrived and I dressed carefully and headed to the bus stop. The ride back to the projects felt like all the times in the past that I had taken this same route. I was pleased that we were going to get a fresh start at being a mother and daughter. At the foster home all the girls had gathered to present Mrs. Jessop with the wall clock that we had purchased for her. All of us had chipped in what we could. We wanted Mrs. Jessop to know how special she was to all of us. I had gotten flowers for my mother. I smiled to myself as I got off the bus and started the short walk to our row house.
As I approached the door to our house, I remember wondering if I should knock or just walk in. I decided that I should knock. My mother called for me to come in. I was still smiling as I walked into the kitchen. She wasn’t there though. I called out to her and started walking into the dining room. She met me right after I came through that doorway. The impact of the slap to my face sent me stumbling backwards into the wall and the special flowers I had bought fell to the floor. That was what I tried to focus on as I attempted to regain my balance. The flowers had burst out of the special paper they were wrapped in. My vision of the bouquet of flowers being placed into a vase for my mother’s table vanished.
My mother was screaming at me saying that she knew what we had gotten Mrs. Jessop for Mother’s day. She couldn’t understand how I could give my love to some other woman I guess. But she hadn’t even noticed the flowers, or considered the kindness of my gesture as she had slapped me across the face in a rage.
I felt a certain sense of power as I ran crying from the house. My mother was still screaming but I knew that I didn’t have to stay there. There was a room for me waiting at the foster home where I could go and find refuge. No one at the foster home was going to deny me my privacy.
I would never have to face my mother’s punishment again.
Freedom.