September 16, 2007
Brenda
She was born in the late fifties in a small Texas town. The oldest daughter of a couple of hardworking people who took life too seriously, and celebrated downtime with alcohol.
She was a beautiful child with a mile-wide grin and bright blue eyes. Beauty wasn't valued during those days in that small Texas town, and she was just one of the kids.
She was an early bloomer, her body grew up far faster than her mind did, and men took notice of her outgoing personality and lack of inhibition. Since her daddy never paid much attention to her, she loved the extra bit that she got from men in town, and was too young and naive to realize that she was being used.
She met the man that was to be her first husband when she was seventeen and by then she had seen a little too much life to trust him completely, but he won her over with his charming ways. When she realized she was going to have a baby she told the charmer, and he decided they should do the right thing and get married.
She had her eighteenth birthday a few months after her son was born, but most people ignored the scandal of her being a teenaged mother because everyone in her family seemed to support her.
Since she grew up in a home where affection was scarce and money was tight, her difficult early married life didn't seem to be much different. She really didn't know much about raising babies except that when they cried you changed their diaper and fed them, and if that didn't fix it you just let them cry.
One Saturday when her younger brother was over for a visit her little house caught on fire. She ran outside, fearing for her safety, but neglected to get her infant son. Her brother, just a teenager, ran back into the burning house to grab the baby. The guilt of that day stayed with her for years, but she didn't really talk about it.
Her husband, who had once been so charming, had turned out to be a monster behind closed doors. She wore glasses to cover the bruises, and if anyone asked about the marks on her body she would complain about how she had just been so clumsy since she had her baby.
Her husband frequently had buddies over for cards and beer, parties from which she was excluded. If she asked about what they did out there in the garage, her husband would tell her they were visiting the 'gas man.' She didn't know that meant that they were breathing gasoline fumes to get high.
She didn't realize how horribly wrong things had gone until one day, in a hallucinogenic rage her husband grabbed a shotgun and shot two teenaged boys who were playing football in his yard. One of them was his own cousin. As they lay bleeding in the yard, he told her it wasn't safe to go outside because "the damn Vietnamese" had gone and brought war to US soil.
He was sentenced to fifteen years to life, and left his young wife and infant son to fend for themselves. While some people stand strong after a tragedy, others collapse, and that is the path that she chose. One afternoon she decided that she would be better off dead, she filled her sons bottle with liquid drain opener and swallowed a handful of pills.
The baby spent three months in the hospital, where every day was a struggle for life. Burns to his face, mouth, esophagus and stomach healed slowly, and the doctors weren't sure he would ever be able to eat again.
His mom spent a few weeks in a mental hospital, where the state decided that she wasn't crazy, but had been through a terrible trauma, and deserved a second chance.
The second time she filled his bottle with poison, it was copper cleaner. Another three months in the hospital for the baby, and another stay in a mental hospital for his mother. This time the state determined that she was unfit to be a mother, and the little boy was adopted by his grandmother.
His mom ran off, and people that saw her couldn't help but notice how much she had changed. "What a waste of a pretty face." they would say.
She numbed her pain with drugs. Anything she could smoke, snort, shoot or swallow was fair game, and people wondered if she had a death wish. Eventually she had to have all her teeth pulled out, and had full dentures before her 22nd birthday.
When she met husband number two, he was everything her first husband wasn't. He wasn't all that handsome or charming, but he had money and a family that loved him. She would see him at the bar and would go out of her way to get his attention and have a few minutes of his time.
He had met women like her before, and at first he wasn't all that interested, but her persistence paid off and he ended up taking her out on a date. She wasn't the kind of woman that said no, and a few weeks later when she told him she was pregnant, he knew he had made a terrible mistake.
His "good" family told him he should do the honorable thing and make an honest woman of her. They didn't know anything about her past, there just wasn't anyone around to tell them the tales.
The oil business was good in those days, and by the time their daughter was born, the couple had moved into a beautiful new home. They had the best of everything. Two brand new cars sat in the garage, meticulously cared for. The manicured lawn was a good cover for the cocaine habit that was brewing inside the house.
They spent money as fast as he made it, and considered it a reward for hard work. Shortly after the second little girl came along the oil industry went bust, and the gravy train came to a screeching halt. They sold everything they owned to pay for their habit, but when he came to his senses and realized what he was doing with his life he begged her to stop.
She chose the drugs over her family, and her husband took their two little girls and told her she should go to rehab and get her shit together or she'd never see them again. She loved those little girls, and went to rehab just as her husband demanded, and while she was locked away for thirty days he filed for divorce and moved away.
It was a good thing that she was still in rehab when she found out the truth. 24-hour suicide watch is all that stood between her and certain death. She couldn't believe that she had lost everything. She couldn't understand where it had all gone so wrong.
She found comfort in the arms of a young and charismatic man who was also in rehab. They shared stories about their lives, bonding over the losses and tragedies that had befallen them. She saw him as her last chance for happiness, and married him before the ink was even dry on her divorce papers.
The doctors told her she probably shouldn't try to have any more kids. Her hard life had taken a toll on her body, and they weren't sure she would even be able to have another baby. She was determined, though, to redeem herself as a mother.
The day her baby boy was born she told everyone that she was reborn. She swore that she would never walk the path she had walked before, and that she had finally learned her lesson.
Promises are always easier to make than keep, and she would get so drunk that she couldn't take care of her baby. She told everyone that they should be happy that she wasn't back on drugs, and that a 'little alcohol' never hurt anyone. Oh, but she was wrong.
Her baby wasn't even a year old when his father packed him up in the middle of the night and slipped away. When she realized what had happened, she was too numb to even try to end her life. She lived in a bottle until she lost everything she owned, and then decided that she should go home to her mother.
By this time her oldest son was a teenager that was angry with the whole world. She knew she couldn't be a mother to him, so she tried to be a friend. He quickly learned that his mom was a great connection for drugs, and before long they were getting high together. She wanted him to love her so much, and she felt like by sharing that part of her life with him, at least they had some common ground.
It wasn't too long before he began to see her face in his own reflection, and he decided to get as far away from her as he could. Money taken from a break-in bought him a bus ticket to freedom, and he headed off to California to make a man of himself.
He had gone as far away from her as he could, but her shadow followed him wherever he went, and before long he found himself picking up her bad habits. He thought it was 'cool' to sleep in a tent, and saw it as a way to prove himself. He might have stayed there forever if his best friend hadn't been murdered in a drug deal gone bad, but when he found himself so far from home with his only friend gone, he called his grandmother for a rescue.
She bought him a bus ticket home, and his family was shocked when they first saw him. He had lost over fifty pounds, and he had a hollow and haunted look in his eyes. His grandmother told him she would let him stay for a month, but that after that he needed to find a new place to live.
I met him a few months after that, but I didn't know a thing about him except that he had a pretty smile and he said he liked my eyes. I was in need of attention, and he was in need of a friend, and we found a certain comfort in each others company.
He told me scant details about his life. He was adopted. He had two names. His dad had just gotten out of prison. The more I learned about him, the more my heart broke for him, and the more I felt the need to love and protect him, but, I digress, this story is about his mother, and not about him.
She was almost 40 when I met her. I knew at a glance that she had led a troubled life. My mother would have said she had been "rode hard and put up wet."
She had a bad dye job and had never stopped cutting her own bangs. Her makeup was so heavy one couldn't truly tell what color her skin was. Her fingernails were bitten down to the quick, and she always had a cigarette burning between the fingers of one of her nervous hands.
She sized me up at a glance as well, and turned to her son and said in her nasally drawl "You got you a purty one this time, dindn't ya boy." I wasn't sure if I was supposed to thank her for the compliment, but I decided instead to extend my hand and introduce myself to her. She looked at my hand as if I were trying to hand her a snake, and with a huff she put her cigarette between her lips and shook my hand in a clammy grip.
When we all got in the car together I leaned over to my boyfriend, her son, and whispered in his ear "I think your mother hates me." He reassured me with a squeeze to my hand, and we rode in silence to her house.
If a persons home is a reflection of who they are inside, the home she shared with her boyfriend was the truest testament to how much chaos still rested within her heart. Figurines of unicorns, dragons, fairies, and every sort of mystical being covered every inch of space on any place she could find to rest them. Native american blankets were nailed over the windows as makeshift curtains, and candles were lit in every corner of every room.
Dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen, and piles of dirty clothes lined the hallway. She dismissed the clutter with a wave of her hand as she led me to the room where I would sleep. She disappeared down the hallway, and returned with a folded sheet and pillow case, and a blanket tossed over her shoulder.
My boyfriend came to help me make the couch into a bed, and we shared a whispered conversation about his mother. He hadn't told me much about her because he hadn't wanted me to judge him by her. I nodded my understanding, and hugged him to reassure him that I knew he wasn't like her.
While he and I were in college together we spent every weekend at her house. She drank often, and I came to enjoy those times, because only then would she soften to me and tell me how good she thought I was for her son. She told me of her hopes and dreams for him, and that she hoped he made a better life for himself than she had. She told me about her other children, and I learned her story in bits and pieces.
I sometimes saw glimpses of the young and innocent girl she had been, and glimpses of the woman who lost every one of her children. My heart ached for her, and when she started calling me "daughter" I was honored. I wanted so very much to be the daughter that she needed.
When she married her boyfriend, who was her fourth husband, they had a roller skate wedding. I wondered if she would even remember the day, since she said her vows through a haze of pain pills and alcohol. She told everyone that she had finally found her soul mate, and I couldn't help but overhear the hateful whispers of those who had been at her other weddings where she had uttered the same words.
Two months later when her son became my husband, she wrapped her arms around me and told me how happy she was that I was finally, truly, her daughter. I wasn't talking to my own mother at the time, and and my mother in laws words touched me very deeply. By then I had come to consider her a friend, and she saw me as a confidante. We talked about everything but her habit, but there was no denying the obvious.
When my husband left for boot camp, I moved in with her and her husband, and she proudly led me upstairs to my room which she had painted pepto-bismol pink. I thanked her for her kindness, and when she left I sat on the bed and cried. Someone had died in that room a few years before they moved into the house, and she had often told me about the 'noises' she heard on the stairs.
One night, when I couldn't sleep, I crept quietly down the stairs just as she was lighting up a joint. I whispered her name, trying not to startle her, and she quickly shuffled everything behind her. I laughed and asked her if she minded sharing with me. She looked at me strangely and asked "Are you sure?" I assured her that I was quite sure, and we sat on her living room floor and smoked a joint together in front of the gas furnace.
Before long we spent every night together in the living room, smoking weed and telling stories. She filled in the missing pieces that my new husband had neglected to tell me about his life, and I told her about my own life. We came to an understanding that those conversations were to stay between us, and only then did she open up to me about her habit.
She laughed as she told me how she had duped so many emergency room doctors into giving her narcotics that her photo was probably posted in every hospital within 5 counties. She showed me how she could dislocate her shoulder to prove an injury, and she showed me how easily she bruised as more proof of her pain.
By the time my husband came home from boot camp, I was ready to move out of his mothers home. The novelty of having a 'cool' mother in law that I could smoke weed with had long worn off, and she had dragged me along on one too many trips to the emergency room with her. The last straw for me was when she used my name and social security number to get assistance from the state. She lied and said I was a dependant, and she bought groceries and beer with the food stamps that she was given.
My husband and I moved from Oklahoma to Florida in May that year, and I was determined to make a good wife. We had only been there two weeks when he left for his first cruise. I spent a lonely two months waiting for him to come home to me, and when he came home he announced that he was through with the military.
We sold all our belongings and packed our little car with what we could fit, and we crossed the state border at three in the morning headed for a friends. That only lasted a couple of months, and the second time we packed up and moved, it was to his mothers new home in Florida. She had moved across the country to be closer to her son, and she was happy to have him back under her roof.
Our relationship changed during this time, and she and I seemed unable to agree on anything. She would snap at me with hateful comments, and called me lazy and 'useless.' I worked overtime at my job as often as I could, and would arrive home in the wee hours of the morning, grateful to find her passed out from a night of drinking.
My husband and I fought bitterly, and he would often criticize me for being a 'bitch' to his mother. I was crushed that he didn't see how horribly she treated me. A friend at work told me that it would be unwise for me to try to come between a man and his mother, and so I learned to keep my mouth shut when she would spout off her abuses.
After a few months, we packed up and moved away, and after a few stops, we ended up in Texas. We hadn't been there very many months when I found out I was pregnant with my first baby. My husband excitedly called his family to tell them, and his mother decided that she needed to be closer to her son and future grandchild. She left her husband in Florida, and moved to Texas.
I dreaded having her so close, and the day she arrived in town, I stayed at my dads house while my husband went to see his mother. When he arrived at her house alone, she demanded that he call me so that we could talk. She told me that she still loved me and that she hoped I wouldn't deny her the chance to be a grandmother. I closed my eyes thought of all she had lost in her life, and decided to let bygones be bygones, and told her that we would start over.
It wasn't enough to be across town, and she ended up moving into the same apartment complex that we lived in. She was a frequent visitor to our home, and she would bring her new best friend and a bag of weed every time she came. When I used our money to pay bills, she would slip her son $20.00 bills and tell him not to tell me, that it was just for him.
She came over one night after a particularly bad fight, just after my husband had left. I didn't really have any friends, and I broke down crying and told her everything. She told me I shouldn't push his buttons, and that if I would learn to keep my mouth shut he probably wouldn't hit me anymore. I remember looking at her and trying to understand how a woman who had been through so much just didn't seem to understand life at all.
When I was six months pregnant, my husband accepted a job three hours away from his mother. I prayed that she wouldn't follow us, and joked to my husband that he shouldn't tell her where we were going. He chastized me for being so cruel to his mother, and told her what I had said. I guess that is when she decided I was the enemy and that she would do whatever she could do to make my life miserable.
After we moved, we had three months of peace and quiet, and then the baby was born. My mother and I made amends, and she came for a visit, and when she left, my husbands mother came for a visit. Just a few weeks later, he lost his job and we ended up moving back to his grandmothers house.
She knew her daughter best, and she knew how I had been treated, and she told me that she felt she should apologize to me, but wasn't sure what she should apologize for. We had only been there a few days when my husband was picked up by the police on an outstanding warrant, and I was left with an infant son, 300 miles from my own family.
When I drove to my dads house my heart was broken, but I was determined to 'be there' for my husband while he served his time. I wrote him letters and accepted his collect calls and he cried to me that his whole family had turned their backs on him. Inside, I felt as if it was a blessing in disguise, but that blessing was short-lived.
When he got out of jail, he moved in with his mother. She told him he should forget about me, and that she was the only woman who would ever truly understand him. She poisoned his mind while she poisoned his body, and when I learned that he had picked up a cocaine habit, I was mortified.
I was still hoping that I could love him through the hard times, and he would call me late at night, speaking in hushed tones so she couldn't hear him, and he would plead with me to take him back. I finally admitted to him how much it hurt me that he always chose his mother over me, and he promised me that he would change.
We agreed to live with each other again, and I fought the urge to ask him to stop talking to his mother. When he would complain to me about her I would gently remind him that she was poison for him and that he should re-evaluate his relationship with her. He was in a bad position; he sat directly between his mother and his wife.
When I was pregnant with our second child his mother had all but dismissed me. We were no longer speaking, and she frequently would introduce her female friends to my husband. It was an affair with one of those friends that ultimately led to our divorce, and while deep-down I knew that he had made the choice on his own, I couldn't help but blame his mother.
I wanted to hate her, but I would think about all the things she had told me about her life, and I knew she was just acting on a basic instinct. I couldn't harbor anger for her any more than I could for him. They were both damaged goods, and the fates had dealt them both a nasty hand.
My husband and I did reconcile once more, just long enough to conceive my third, and last, baby. When he left me for another woman I finally washed my hands of him, and did my best to begin a new life.
I got a job, got my own apartment, and went to college. I went through a few rough years, but I would remind myself how bad it could have been if my husband and mother in law had been involved.
When my baby girl was a few months old I took my three kids to see my ex husbands grandmother. We sat and visited with each other like old friends, and she told me how proud she was of me for standing on my own two feet. She was a woman that had been through a lot in her own life, and I felt bad for her having been the mother and grandmother of two walking disasters.
I refrained from asking questions about my ex, or his mother, but the topic inevitably came up. She disappeared down the hall and came back with a scrapbook. She sat it in my lap and opened to the first page. "Did you hear we lost Brenda in November?" she asked me.
Looking back at me from the pages of that scrapbook was the face of my ex mother in law. Her obituary was short and to the point, and she was listed by her maiden name.
Her boyfriend woke up one morning to find her lying next to him, dead, with a needle in her arm. She had always told me that she was determined to make amends with all her children before she died, but she passed away before her youngest son was old enough to be found.
I often think about her, more frequently than I care to admit. I see her haunted expression on the faces of young women I pass at the grocery store, and I hear her loud, obnoxious laughter in the voices of older women I pass on the street.
She would have been fifty this year, and I like to think that she would have wanted it this way. She never really wanted to get old, and she lived her life like a spoiled child.
When I lost my own children and I was wallowing in self-pity, I thought of Brenda and how she had destroyed herself after she lost hers. I suppose I should thank her for setting an example of how not to go on after a loss like that.
Every Memorial Day I tell myself I'll go put flowers on her grave, but the day comes and goes, and I can't seem to find it in my heart to make the trip.
I hear that my ex husband has picked up right where his mother left off. He's tearing himself apart bit by bit. I can't help but be struck by the fact that she tried so hard to kill him when he was a baby, and was unsuccessful, but by example, she is leading him to his own death.
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jktty at 9:35 p.m.