Within two years, I'd lived in three states, all with different ecological and social environments. Each had, associated with them, distinct developmental stages of my life.
Virginia was my first home. There, I was an infant and learned to tread carefully on the uneven brick sidewalks of Old Town Alexandria. It was there that I had my first taste of chocolate ice cream in a private daycare centre. I attended nursery school and Kindergarten at the daycare centre as Mother returned to work.
My birth father was only a central figure in my life when I was very young. He was a caring, affectionate man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard though his hair remained brown. I liked to rub with my hands on the short hair that covered his pockmarked cheeks and chin.
Mother and Daddy took me into Washington, DC, to the National Mall during the Cherry Blossom Festival, during which delicate pink flowers decorated the trees around the Tidal Basin. Mother pushed the stroller and Daddy walked beside us, often with his arm around Mother's shoulders. I don't remember actually very much from that time, so most of my memories were formed from old photographs. There is one picture of me in an infant swing with Daddy behind, having just pushed me forward. There is a black and white photograph of Mother, wearing a dark swimsuit, holding me in the shallow end of a swimming pool. There are pictures of me, standing on leaf-strewn pavement, wearing a homemade pumpkin costume that Mother had sewn out of felt. I'm wearing a soft floppy green hat and black leggings and shoes in that picture. There's another picture of Mother, holding me, presumably against her hip, smiling at the camera, which I assume Daddy was wielding.
But by the time I was forming permanent memories, Daddy was living in Maryland and I was living with Mother in Virginia. The pictures of me with Mother are fewer from that period, for that was then that Daddy ceased to be a regular fixture in our life, or at least he ceased to be someone whom I'd see at the same time as Mother. From my earliest memories, Mother took me to see Daddy, and I'd spend time with him, away from Mother. These visits would only last for the day. Mother would pick me up afterward, bringing me home with her for the night.
When her pregnancy began, the woman who would become my mother tried to stop taking what she would later call “anti-madness” pills. After several weeks, the pregnancy was causing too much emotional strain, so she returned to her “little helper.” As far as I know, she'd only stopped taking the meds twice: once, when she thought that being married to the man with whom she'd fallen in love would cure the sadness; and when she was in the hospital, after her accident, before the hospital staff was informed of her dependency and the meds were restarted before she was released into the care of her husband and her parents, Gong-Gong and Paw-Paw.
Mother never once expressed regret at having become a parent. She
would worry about how to extend what money we had once we no longer had the comfort of her salary. She was frugal bordering on cheap, though she was never cheap when it came to the things I needed. She went to thrift shops and inspected clothing carefully to make sure that they'd last a good, long time. She'd buy all of my clothes two sizes too large. Everything was an investment. Early springtime work in the garden was one form of investment. Canning was both an investment and an insurance policy to help us through the winter months. In a lot of ways, it seemed fitting that I was reading the Little House books because we were living a modern equivalent.
It was when she was discharged from the hospital in Virginia that Mother and her husband sought a different pharmaceutical regimen to help her avoid the Darkness without leaving her emotionally numb. But like I've said, once she found the right drug, it was the beginning of the end. More to the point, it was the beginning of
their end.
We were staying at Grandmother's and Granddad's house, a two-story farmhouse, temporarily, before moving to the farm next door. Mother's husband built and installed a second staircase. The original stair was an enclosed, windowless winder. Mother slipped once, whilst carrying laundry, down those stairs. The winders' proximity to the kitchen made them more convenient than the new stair, but I don't remember Mother using them again after her fall.
Grandmother ran an insurance agency and Granddad taught at a local college, so Mother was often home, alone, during the day after she was discharged from her outpatient therapies. Her husband worked in his shop in town, and occasionally come home for lunch, though he typically took a brown paper bag lunch with him.
Occasionally, Mother would accompany him when he worked in a smaller shop he kept at home, housed in a small dependency. It opened onto the driveway at right angles to the main house. It probably used to be a large garage with a smaller attached workshop, but a floor had been poured to finish the entire interior space. It was there that he built the second set of stairs for our house.
It was under those stairs that I had my craft area. He'd installed full-extension drawers under the stairs, and my table and bench were placed underneath a window there. I kept the drawers in order: drawing pencils, coloured and graphite, and crayons in the top drawer, with accompanying sheets of white and coloured paper; painting supplies in the middle drawer, including a travel watercolour set with a small brush and a palette on its hinged lid. Mother had given it to me for my birthday with some blank watercolour paper greeting cards. She smiled when she presented them to me: “I think you'll enjoy creating things as much as I do.” I could paint my own pictures to give away (or keep).
The bottom drawer held Lego bricks, Lego plates, Lego circles, Lego animals and people, and Lego plants. Lots and lots of Legos, for Mother encouraged my creativity. Her husband was already a Lego lover when they'd met. In fact, it was at a Lego convention that they'd initially become acquainted. He was visiting Washington, DC, for the weekend of the bi-annual Lego Convention, and Mother brought me there to spark my imagination and to appreciate the creations people made.
Being home alone, Mother would scour the local newspaper for nonexistent jobs, then retreat upstairs, where she sat at Grandmother's computer and played Bridge online for hours at a time.
Sometimes she would bake. I think she was, indeed, already bordering on “batshit,” and it was our departure that saved her from eternal, if not lethal, boredom.
I never thought to question whether it was a good idea for Mother to buy a gun. I went along to the sporting goods store with the two of them. They looked at a few different models, and Mother would hold them, getting a feel for their heft and balance. She finally decided to buy a bolt-action .270 rifle. It had a black barrel and a moulded black stock. It was capable of holding three bullets at a time, with one in the chamber, thus allowing the hunter to take three shots before reloading. She'd only once emptied the gun, and that was at a twelve-point whitetail buck who bounded across one of the fields into the wood. The buck escaped, unscathed. Her husband saw the deer when she started firing, and allowed her to take her chance in shooting it, without pulling out his 30-06.
Mother and her husband spent the snowy weekends of November sitting in the tree stand out back, at the edge of the wood and field, occasionally looking out over the stubble, but mostly reading their paperbacks, listening. They wore Day-Glo orange hats they'd sewn for themselves out of synthetic fleece. They occasionally poured themselves and each other a drink from the Thermos and tipped the warm fluid through their cold lips, and make bathroom runs.
They came back into the house, looked at my Lego creations, then sat down to a hot lunch, typically soup that had been simmering on the stove since before daybreak. Homemade tomato-based vegetable soup with our homegrown vegetables, and fresh bread that Mother had made the previous night, was the typical fare. Afterwards, after having warming up and fed themselves, they walked back out, through the snow and up the tree, to the stand.
They'd remain in the tree until after dusk. Grandmother would prepare dinner for us, for she was the only adult who did not hunt. Mother participated in so-called “masculine” activities, it seemed, whereas Grandmother's realm was the “feminine” Interior Domestic. Perhaps she saw the marriage of her son to Mother not as losing a son, but gaining another one...
Once, before we'd moved to Pennsylvania, we visited during Thanksgiving Break and Mother shot a big doe as it ran across the corn stubble. She took careful aim, following the animal with her scope, then pulled the trigger, once. The doe continued to run, and Mother lost sight of it.
Father and son looked for it while she watched from the stand, ready to take another shot if they flushed the deer from hiding. When he found the doe laying in a copse, Granddad ended the deer's suffering with a single shot to her head. His son brought over their red four-wheeler, and together, the three of them picked up the deer and lay it across the front if the small vehicle. Mother's husband drove it to the barn on Granddad and Grandmother's property. When Mother and her husband hung the carcass from a crossbeam, they saw that the deer had already been shot several times. In fact, the left forefoot, or hoof, had been nearly severed at the wrist (or are they ankles?) by the shot of a hunter who had failed to kill her. After they stripped off her skin, Mother's partner made a lengthwise incision, spilling, from the deer's udder, the milk she would never feed to her fawn, who was probably either scared and hiding or dead.
To me, hunting meant that Mother and her husband were able to provide, by their own efforts, food for our table. We were not wanting for anything, as far as I was aware, and had a pretty good life. We had means of producing and/or procuring our food, Daddy worked in his shops, and I read to Mother before going to sleep each night.
My childhood idyll would not last.
