You and Me Against the World

The pain began when I was six. It probably began before that but I was too young to notice. Mom and dad divorced when I was two. I remember very very early mornings being dropped off at day-care and mom heading to work as a high school art teacher. I remember tv dinners and spending time in her classroom while she worked, but none of those early memories are hard. I don’t know the particulars of how things happened or where I was, but I do remember having to spend the night at a stranger’s house, a woman who perhaps worked at the day-care center I went to or worked with my mom. I remember being afraid and sad and that the Roman Meal bread stuck in my throat terribly because I was trying to hold back the tears. I think I had gone home with this person from daycare, and had not seen my mom since she dropped me off. I don’t know if this was the day she walked onto the freeway and tried to kill herself, but I do know soon after I was living with a friend of my mom’s from work, Greta, and her daughter, Beth who was around my age. I think I remember packing with mom and being told it wouldn’t be for long, that mommie was sick and had to stay in a hospital. She gave me a little folding picture frame with two photos of she and I together and I remember just staring and staring at the photos and holding it at night as I fell asleep

The hospital was Stockton’s State Mental Hospital. The sickness was severe clinical depression and her three-month stay did not cure it. We visited mom on the hospital grounds a few times. It was actually a lovely place, outside. Big oak trees and large lawns. I heard many times growing up how it was not so lovely inside however. Mom had been asked to assist in shock-therapy sessions on other patients, had been abused or threatened by other patients and orderlies and had lived for three months in an environment that would make any sane person wacko. Unfortunately, my compassion for my mom’s ordeals inside the asylum was minimized by the early age at which I began to hear about her experiences there, and by years of repetition. I was six years old, and I was not loveable enough, important enough for my mom to want to live or want to be there for me. That was the lasting lesson.

Well, I could have gotten over that one, could have dealt with that initial abandonment, but in subsequent years, whenever things got too tough for mom, when she couldn’t handle reality any longer, she would either threaten or attempt suicide, although the threats were the most popular choice. One way to deal with the guilt, hurt, fear, loneliness that she was feeling was to say she couldn’t take anymore, that life was too hard, and that she was going to go drive her car over a cliff or into a brick wall. After such a statement was dramatically made, she would leave the house, revving the engine as she drove away and I had to use whatever eight-year-old skills I had to calm myself down and reassure myself that she would be back, that everything would be ok, that Christmas would come again next year and she would be there with me.

Often, I felt as if I were to blame for mom not being able to “take it anymore.” I thought if I held in all my worries and fears and complaints, all my dreams and desires, if I could stay quiet and good, mom would be good too and life wouldn’t be too hard for her. But it was hard for me to be quiet when I saw such injustice happening to me. Why did we have enough money on our miniscule budget for her cartons and cartons of cigarettes, (two packs a day), and not enough for a package of lunch-meat once in awhile, (peanut butter was my number one lunch ingredient, dressed up with pickles or banana on top). Why did I have to accept and allow her string of loser men into my life and what I judged as "between" us? Fine, let them try and wake her in the morning. Fine, I will accept and be happy about the Star Trek Enterprise plastic model set for my “big” birthday present because he is into model sets and we can “do it together.” Why did she get new clothes every time she was dating someone new, but I got my one set of school clothes and one pair of shoes for the year and they had to last, even though I was growing quick and all my pants ended up being floods by January (how was I to make it to June with floods like this?).
The relationships never lasted long, and she always came back to me, singing “our song”, “You and me against the world, sometimes it feels like you and me against the world. When all the others turn their back and walk away
You can count on me to stay”