Erase and Start Over

The resurfacing memories of a woman with PTSD.

Category Archives: Kansas City


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My Pandora’s Box

Engraving, based on a painting by F.S. Church.

Engraving, based on a painting by F.S. Church.

Spring, 1986 Kansas City, MO

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon. Demi was about 18 months old, and napping soundly in her room. I was trying to find some space in our bedroom closet for extra storage. I ignored the top of the closet, where Dell kept his revolver. I never saw the need for such a thing and was just thankful he kept it out of Demi’s reach. The floor of the closet was a different story. Surely some of those boxes could be emptied or thrown out. Most were filled with books that I’ve had forever, but one of the boxes was filled with paper, kind of like a filing cabinet. I rummaged through it and discovered that it was our financial records, beginning from when we were married in March ’84.

Curious, I pulled out the tax return that Dell had just finished a month ago. He took care of all the bills, the checkbook, and such. I had never done a tax return before, but the form didn’t seem all that complicated. I had no trouble understanding what was on each line, but I was certainly troubled by what I read there.

My husband’s salary was nearly twice mine.

I sat back on my sneakered heels, staring at the paper as if it were a claim that unicorns were real. It couldn’t be true. We were broke. We got our clothes from the Salvation Army. He only gave me $20 a week to spend at the grocery store. We didn’t go to the movies, we didn’t exchange birthday presents with friends or family, our last Christmas was just one present each, and we certainly didn’t go out as a family on a vacation or really anywhere that wasn’t free.

I let my hand fall in my lap, still holding the tax return. It said we would be receiving a $300 refund. My shoulders dropped, and I tilted my head, thinking about new towels. Fluffy, big bath towels to wrap my little curly-top girl in. And clothes. Demi was growing so fast. How great it would be to get her a couple cute summer dresses. I pushed aside the thought that Dell should have told me about his raise, because I was young and optimistic and more than willing to believe in unicorns.

Smiling, I stood up to go look for Dell. He was coming out of the garage, covered in dirt and grease, just as I got to the kitchen.

“Whatcha got there?” he asked, wiping his hands on an old rag.

“The tax return. Dell, I’m so glad we’re getting a refund! Demi needs some clothes, and can we get some new towels?”

He went still, and I sensed he was upset. His eyes narrowed, and he said warily, “We can think about it.”

This was not the reaction I was expecting. That niggling feeling that he should have told me the truth came back in full force. His shuttered face was watching me in the brightness of that small kitchen. There was no sound except for the light pink-pinks of drizzling rain at the windows, but there could have been a tornado roaring outside and I wouldn’t have heard it. I stood there, struggling to get past the idea that he’d never intended I should ever know how much money was coming in the house. He never lied to me, but he purposely led me to believe that he was making about $15,000 a year just like me. He’d even apologized to me for not being able to take me out for my 21st birthday last month because we were so broke. He had brought home a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Coca-Colas for us to share. I didn’t like it much, but with enough Coke in the glass, it wasn’t bad. I had thanked him for trying to be thoughtful. My fingers curled tightly around the tax return. I had actually thanked him for remembering my birthday with his favorite drink.

Still unmoving, he waited, watching the realization growing in my face. I thought about his beat-up old MG on the side of the house. He drove a silver Toyota minivan, and dropped me off at work every day. That was our car, but the unpainted shell of an MG was his alone. Every weekend, he kept rummaging in junkyards for parts, sure that he could rebuild it. He was a bill collector, sitting on a phone behind a desk all day, not an auto mechanic, but that MG was his baby. In that moment, I was sure all our money was being poured into that old thing, with nothing left to take his wife out for her 21st birthday. With nothing to make sure his wife and child could eat something that didn’t come out of a can. Except for hamburger, even our meat came out of a can. Tuna. Spam. Once, our church pastor had invited us to his home for dinner one Friday night, and I remembered asking his wife if she’d cut the corn fresh from the cob to serve. I had never tasted anything so fresh and delicious since the corn-on-the-cob my mom always made. She looked at me funny and said no, that it just came out of a bag of frozen corn. We never bought frozen foods because canned was cheaper.

I could feel my own eyes narrowing as I looked at Dell, wondering how he could prefer car parts over frozen corn. “When did you start making $30,000 a year?”

“That’s none of your business.” I felt his words like a slap.

“I give you my paycheck every month, and I don’t see hardly any of it being spent on this family. If your money is your business, then my money is my business. Where’s my money going, Dell?”

He snorted and folded his arms across his chest. “Your money is my money. That’s how marriage works, babe. Everything here is mine. Your clothes, that dining room table, that highchair, this whole house and everything in it. Mine.” He gave me that familiar blue wink and grin. “As long as you keep it clean, you’re welcome to stay.”

I was speechless, torn between wanting to wipe that smirk off his face and wanting to stomp out of the room. This was not the man I married. This was not the vulnerable, nobody-understands-me guy who winked at me when I ironed his jeans just the way he liked them. Who ate my bad cooking without complaining, and had no problem leaving the dishes to me.

This man stood there exuding confidence and control as if he’d had it all along. I felt manipulated. Betrayed. And very angry. “Well,” I spluttered, my hands now on my hips and the tax return fluttering to the floor, “well, if I leave, I’m taking my paycheck with me. And for that matter, you’re the one who’ll have to leave, because my name is on the mortgage, and you can’t sell this house without me. So, you are the one who’s welcome to stay, if you can learn to start spending money on your family and not those stupid car parts.”

I had succeeded in wiping the smirk off his face, but I immediately wished it was back. I had never seen a look like that on anyone before, not even my mother at her worst. His face was like marble, a menacing stone gargoyle that only had to take a very slight step toward me to make me stumble and back into the fridge. He stared me down for a moment, then turned purposefully toward the garage.

Frightened, I followed him, unsure of what he was going to do, but very sure that I had to stop him, whatever it was. I stood in the kitchen doorway leading to the garage as he silently reached for something hanging on the wall above the worktable. “Dell, I’m sorry,” I whispered. I cleared my throat and spoke louder. “Dell. Dell, I’m sorry.”

He took the sledgehammer down and cradled it for a minute, looking at me. I backed up.

“Dell, Demi is in the house. Let me just get Demi and we’ll go. Okay?”

He took a step toward me. I took another step back. He stepped, and I stepped, a slow, torturous dance that I knew was not going to end well. I couldn’t read his face – it was completely frozen in that cold stare. I didn’t know who this man was, but I was terrified right down to my bones. I turned and ran across the kitchen, could hear his footsteps pounding behind me, and made it across the house into Demi’s bedroom. I quickly shut the door and leaned my body against it, my eyes running hurriedly over Demi’s room, looking for a way to grab her out of the crib and escape, but there was no time and nowhere to go.

His footsteps stopped on the other side of the door. I could feel the pressure under the wood of his body leaning on the other side of it. My heart was in my throat. I didn’t have the strength to keep him from opening that door. “This is my house,” he growled through the thin wood. The pressure was suddenly gone and I suddenly remembered the gun. What if he was going to get his gun?! The panic tasted like rust in my mouth, and I strained to hear his movements. It sounded like he was in the dining room.

“Don’t believe me?” he called loudly from there. “I’ll prove it.”

The next thing I heard was a loud crack followed by a crash of splintering wood. He had taken the sledgehammer to one of the walls. There was a squeak of metal dragging on wood, as if he had to pull the thing back out of the wall, and the crash repeated. It repeated three more times before he was  back, panting at the door.

“Talk back again, and next time it’ll be you.” Then he walked away.

My body was trembling against that door. I looked at Demi, still asleep on her belly, her little back softly rising up and down with each baby’s breath. What kind of father had I given her? My knees couldn’t support me anymore, and I slid to the floor, keeping my back against the door just in case. My fingernails dug into the hardwood floor, and I took in great gulps of air. My face was burning hot, and my eyes felt heavy and wet. That stupid box. I should have just left that stupid box alone.

I could hear the Toyota fire up. I held my breath. Yes, the tires were crunching in the wet gravel. He was leaving. I glanced around the room again. We were going to leave now, too.


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Demi’s Nails

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April 2014

The alarm went off. I reached groggily for my phone and slid the alarm screen to snooze. I must finish my tax return today, I thought. Then my arm and phone dropped heavily by my side, and I drifted off as if I had never left sleep.

I couldn’t find Demi. I searched all over the house, never questioning that I was back in the home of my first marriage. She wasn’t in her bedroom with the pastel pink, blue, and yellow curtains I had made her. She wasn’t in the living room, where her Teddy Ruxpin bear was laying on the carpet before the couch. I searched from morning until twilight all over that tiny house, even peering through the garage, but she was gone, vanished. My panic kept rising like bile in my throat. She was so little, just five years old, and night was falling. She couldn’t survive alone all night.

I went to the front door and finally opened it, thinking I’d go drive the neighborhood, and there she was, curled up on the front porch in front of the door, sound asleep. There were streaks of grimy tears running down her face. Her little hands were tucked under her chin, and I could see they were dirty and blood-stained, like she’d been scratching at something and tore her nails bloody. Something squeezed my heart painfully as I looked at that sweet, beautiful, clearly traumatized little girl. I turned my head slightly and saw the marks along the lower part of the front door. I suddenly imagined her, kneeling at the door, crying, screaming, calling for me and clawing and scratching to get back in; trying to claw her way in all day, finally giving up, finally realizing that no one was going to save her, not even her mother.

The alarm went off again, jarring me awake, but a part of me was still standing at the door in that nightmare, feeling the horror and guilt of recognizing that I had hurt my own child. The adrenaline pumped so hard that I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. My heart and breath were both going double-time.

It was just a nightmare. Demi had never been missing, I told myself, not ever. Not even for an hour, much less a whole day. She had never hurt herself by scratching a door. I knew logically that none of it had ever happened. So why did I hurt so much? I slid the alarm off and peered at the phone. 6:11 a.m. The whole dream took all of ten minutes.

Sighing, I flopped over onto my back and lay there, steadying my breathing. Demi was down the hall, 29 years old, and likely hitting the snooze on her own alarm clock. I have to get up, get ready for work, and take Daisy to school. But I didn’t move. I felt so heavy in heart and body. My skin was trapped in the clawing sheets, punishing me by pulling me down into the uncomfortable mattress. I could hear the water running in the bathroom beyond my bedroom door, but whoever was there couldn’t know that I was in trouble. I couldn’t shake this feeling that I had sinned against nature, that there was something inherently wrong with me, that I was a bad mother, bad employee, bad person and deserved to sink into that nightmare tangle of bedclothes and never wake up.

My face was wet. My girls were awake. I dug my fingernails into the mattress, silently fighting back, and pushed myself up into a sitting position. “Snap out of it,” I whispered fiercely. Gritting my teeth, I made myself look at my phone, and click the news app. Oscar Pistorius sobbed during his testimony that he didn’t mean to shoot his girlfriend. Russia was claiming it didn’t mean to invade Ukraine, that it wasn’t their fault. Good. My boss was not in the news today. That means it should be a slow day.

I stood up, grabbed my clothes, and headed for my own shower. I thought I should probably talk to someone about these difficult mornings, but I was ashamed to admit that it was hard for me to get out of bed for something so silly as a nightmare. I just have to do a better job of eating right and exercising. My nightmares were my own fault. Somebody in this world needs to step up and take responsibility.


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My Woods

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Of all the things I am thankful for, I must include that safe space of my teenage years in Kansas City, a small woods hidden less than a mile from my home. We had lived on Belvedere Parkway over a year before I found them, and I wouldn’t have found them at all if it hadn’t been for the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed. My mom had eventually handed her album down to me along with her old record player from when we were in California, and I listened to music in my room for hours – like any teenager.

“Something calls to me.

“The trees are drawing me near.

“I’ve got to find out why.

“Those gentle voices I hear,

“Explain it all with a sigh.”

I don’t know why those song lines always move me when I hear them, but they especially did so when I was a young, imaginable teen who played Dungeons & Dragons and read Tolkien over and over. I liked to imagine that the trees could talk to me, that I could understand what the leaves were whispering. I would go on long walks in the neighborhood at twilight, when the lowering sky and lengthening shadows added an air of mystery to the familiar streets and houses.

On one of those walks, I found a stretch of trees, a small woods, that developers had not yet torn down. There was a small creek that ran in front of it, with a high embankment that stood about three feet above the ground. I would scramble up the dusty embankment, finding footholds in the exposed roots from all the trees reaching toward the scurrying trail of water.

With dirty knees and fingernails, I would sit with an arm draped around a slender tree trunk, my scruffy sneakers dangling over the creek. It felt good to sit there, feeling the rough bark against my arm and torso through my thin t-shirt; listening to the birds chattering above; watching the sunlight dance to and fro across the water through the moving leaves.

The view was not that great. I was facing the houses where I came from, the very thing I was trying to escape. I didn’t want to look back, so I got up and walked deeper into the woods. The trees were spaced far enough apart that it was easy walking. There was no clear path, but I could see where other kids had been here before me. There were even bike tracks. There were dried leaves and pine needles crunching underfoot, and the breeze flowed easily through the trunks and underbrush.

I only walked about ten minutes before reaching the other end of the woods, which abruptly stopped at the edge of an expanse of meadow. One of the trees at the edge had sturdy, low branches, so I swung up into it and settled myself comfortably, leaning back into the trunk and filling my eyes with all those tall grasses and swinging wildflowers. Most of them were tiny purple things, dotted with Queen Anne’s lace and honeysuckle. It was the end of summer, and already a few leaves were starting to turn in the woods, but that sunny meadow looked like winter could never touch it.

I remember closing my eyes and smelling the warm, earthy air. I was still for so long that the squirrels came back out, climbing the tree next to me, and pausing every time I shifted my weight on that uncomfortable hard branch. I listened to every tiny rustle in the leaves and on the ground, every creak in the swaying branches, every call of each crow and sparrow. I felt far away from civilization, far away from modern times. I could imagine an elf peering at me from behind a tree, or a druid gathering stones for a mysterious circle. For those few, wonderful moments, magic was possible. I was a changeling, and my real mother – some magical being – would soon appear and take me to live with her in a far-away land.

I visited those woods often, and even stopped there to say goodbye the night I ran away from home at 17. I was so happy there, in that world where anything was possible, any dream could come true. They are gone now, developers finally built suburban homes over most of them, but I will always be thankful for the time that I was a child of those magical woods.


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Erase, Start Over – Second Time in Six Months

October was domestic violence awareness month, so I guess I’m a bit late for talking about my first husband. He so rarely crosses my mind anymore. It was so long ago, and I was so very young. But it’s a part of my journey, and there was one wonderful thing that came from it – my daughter, Demi. And Gigi, wherever you are, thank you for being there when I needed you. I hope life is treating you well.

Here’s the beginning of a tumultuous, sometimes violent relationship.

Summer 1983, I was 18

Luke_Skywalker_by_Aliora

I met Dell when I interviewed for a job selling magazines door-to-door. He was short, but had a wiry build, Luke Skywalker hair and cleft chin, and bright blue eyes that were always kidding around. He was seven years older than me, and I thought he was cute. I knew during the interview that it was an awful job and I would never make any real money, but they paid for travel and we’d be touring the country and staying in hotels, which seemed like luxury to me. I used to sell Girl Scout cookies door-to-door, so why not magazines? Plus, I didn’t want to dance anymore (I never called it stripping back then – I was a dancer, thank you very much). Selling magazines was way better than dancing.

So I quit the Pink Garter, told my worried roommate that she could sell my stereo for rent money if I wasn’t able to send it to her, and took off to Wichita with Dell and the magazine troupe. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Dell had a thing for me. How empowering it felt having this older man, one of the team leaders, flirt with me, choosing me over all the other pretty girls on the team. I ended up in his bed and then on the best door-to-door leads.

I spent my days sitting with stay-at-home moms and lonely elderly people, convincing them to buy magazines (often unsuccessfully). I spent my nights wandering cities I’d never seen before, hand-in-hand with this good-looking man (not boy!) who made me feel like the most special person in the world. He was so incredibly charming, putting his coat around my shoulders, helping me circumvent puddles, opening doors for me. My high-school boyfriends kinda treated me like a buddy. Teasing, punching my shoulder, asking me to wait on them when we made snacks at their houses. I had never seen anything wrong with that kind of friendly banter before, but with Dell I couldn’t help but think this was the difference between friendship and love. To treat me so nicely must mean he was in love with me, true love, right?

We made it all the way to Seattle when I realized that there was no way I would have that month’s rent, so I called my roommate to tell her to sell the stereo, and the phone went dead part way through because I didn’t have enough change for the payphone. It never occurred to me to call her back collect – who does that? I wasn’t going to be that rude. Besides, I was sure she understood that I would call her back when I could, and the stereo was worth nearly three times what I owed her, so no big deal.

Dell decided to quit, too. The boss gave us a bus ticket back to our homes, which is what the job guaranteed. Dell went to Wisconsin, promising to travel to K.C. within a day of getting to Madison.

I remember sitting in a bus transfer station in Wichita, smoking a clove cigarette. I had taken them up at the Garter because all the girls were smoking pot, and although it smelled kinda nice – like incense and a warm fireplace – I just couldn’t stand the idea of doing something illegal. God forbid I should get caught. I was pretty scared of any authority figure in those days. Anyway, I took up clove cigarettes because they smelled nice and I could fake smoking them pretty easy. The smoke just gathered in my mouth and I blew it out, without actually inhaling the nasty burning stuff.

So I’m sitting there with this cigarette, thinking I looked so cool and grown up (at 18 years old, out of high school all of eight weeks), when I see a woman in a suit directing a bunch of security guards to check out bathrooms and dark corners. I could hear her muttering something about being able to “smell it”. I looked at my cigarette, looked at her, and realized it would be better if I spoke up first than if they came over to check me out. I was completely mortified to have to stand before this woman and apologize for scaring her and her officers with my sweet-smelling cigarette. She looked down her nose at me, like I was a troublesome child, and walked away without saying a word, dismissing her guards as she went. I had clearly just wasted her time. I was pretty glad when the announcement came that my bus was loading.

When I arrived in the Kansas City depot, I called my roommate. Her boyfriend answered the phone and I asked if they could pick me up, and he said no, that I didn’t live with them anymore. Then she got on the phone and told me she had sold everything I owned and it still didn’t cover what I owed her.

I stood there with my bags at my feet, in that dingy bus station, grasping a greasy pay phone at 10 p.m. at night, horrified to hear that everything I owned was gone. I sputtered about my stereo, and how it should have been plenty. She said no one would buy it, so she was keeping it, and that as far as she was concerned, I had skipped out on the rent and was not welcome back. I asked her about all the stuff no one would buy, like my dresser drawer filled with years of my half-written stories. She said she threw away anything that didn’t sell. There was nothing left.

I hung up the phone, my mind racing. I had only been gone on this magazine gig for four weeks. How could I lose everything in four weeks? I looked around the bus station, thinking hard. No fare for a taxi. I couldn’t sleep here. There were no diners or fast food joints around, and I didn’t even have money for the vending machine that looked like it had hundred-year-old cupcakes in it. Who could help me?

I stepped out of the phone booth, pacing back and forth with my thoughts. It never crossed my mind to call my mother. She was a “you made the mess, you clean it up” person. My sisters were still in high school, no wheels between them. I thought of my various high school friends, but realized I had lost touch with most of them when I ran away from home. I saw them at school, sure, but I was always working, so I kinda dropped out of sight. My SCA friends were also my roommate’s friends – she probably bragged to them about selling all my stuff, just like she bragged that she had a dancer for a roommate. They would take her side. Maybe she did this to get back at me for not taking her advice and keeping the dancing job.

Then I remembered Gigi. I went back to the phone and made my first and last collect call in my life. I was relieved to hear her voice accepting the charges, and almost cried when she exclaimed “that bitch!” after I told her what my roommate had done. I hung up the phone knowing there was someone on my side, that I wouldn’t have to curl up in one of those hard, plastic bus station chairs for the night.

I was going to have to tell Dell that we didn’t have a place to stay. He was taking the bus from Madison to K.C. tomorrow. I let him down. I wished I could tell him just to stay in Madison, but he was doing well at the magazine job. He left that job for me. It wouldn’t be fair to tell him I’d changed my mind just because I was nervous to have him find out we had no place to live.

I gathered my last remaining belongings and sat down. One large suitcase of clothes. One smaller case with makeup, curlers and hairdryer. And my purse. And my keys. Good God – I didn’t think to ask if she had sold my car! Could she even do that without the keys? The big, empty bus station was cold this late at night. One of the overhead lights was flickering, and went dark. I wrapped my arms around myself tightly, holding the fear and tears as deep inside as I could. Gigi was coming. I had a place to sleep. The rest would have to wait until morning.


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Being Revealing

I was interviewed yesterday by a small local magazine about the missing-child part of my story. We met at the gala Friday night in Saratoga Springs, NY to benefit the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. She and my dad (my real father) got to talking, but I was busy helping the gala chair make sure everything went smoothly, so she took my number and called me yesterday.

After I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of my story, the reporter asked what it’s like, sharing a story that’s so personal and revealing. I’ve been getting that question here about my blog, too.

Well, frankly, it’s like stripping. I remember that first time I got up on that stage at the Pink Garter. The lights were not strong like the stage lights in my high school plays, so I could see the audience as clearly as they could see me. I remember trying to simultaneously smile at them and not look at them. I was nervous as hell, and couldn’t believe I was seriously going to stand up in front of these strange men and take my clothes off down to pasties and a g-string. I glanced nervously at my friend, Gigi, by the jukebox who had talked me into this, and she nodded and smiled and clapped, encouraging the audience to give a welcoming clap, too, as the music started.

Africa. I was dancing to Africa by Toto. I picked it because that was the song that a different friend and I stripped to at the after-party among the cast and crew of Camelot, our last play before we graduated. We were a bunch of drama club high-schoolers gathered at my new apartment with that older friend of mine who took me in after I ran away from home. Yep, there was alcohol, and yep, we all got silly, and before we knew it, me and Sandy were giggling in our bras and underwear, running screeching from the room when the song ended to put our clothes back on. I had just turned 18 a couple weeks earlier.

Well, Gigi, my future maid of honor (who knew that I would be married less than a year from that night? Certainly not me!) was an exotic dancer part time, and she knew I was struggling to make money at Taco Via and pay rent while going to school, so she convinced me that if I was brave enough to strip in front of my friends, I could certainly do it at the Garter. She told me that some girls made over $1,000 a week. Back in ’83, that was a whole lotta money.

On that postage-stamp-sized stage, though, it seemed like a very bad idea. The room was dark, dingy and smokey. The audience was dressed in thrift shop clothes for the most part, although there were a couple of suits. Lots of unkempt hair and beards out there beyond the lights. Some looked like they hadn’t bathed in a while. Not the people I was used to seeing in suburbia, where I had just graduated two weeks earlier. I definitely didn’t feel safe, but that I was used to. I had long since given up looking for safety. There was no such thing.

So I stayed right on that stage, without the false courage of a Fuzzy Navel, but with the real courage that survival gives to desperate young women. My roommate didn’t take me in out of the goodness of her heart. She expected to be paid my share of the rent or she would sell my stuff and throw me out. How can an inexperienced 18-year old high school graduate make enough money to pay for rent, food, and car insurance? Taco Via and Pizza Hut were the extent of my skills, unless you count the Star Wars fan fiction I had written. Much as my friends liked it, no one offered to pay me for it. I could thread a needle, too, but everyone could do that. I couldn’t waitress because the only places that paid decent money (what I now know to be a living wage) sold alcohol, and I had to be 21 to serve it. Until then, all I had was a pretty face and a Bunny figure, plus my friends told me I was a good dancer, so how bad could this be?

Grown men liked me. They would chuck my chin and “accidently” brush a hand across my chest or bottom. They’d laugh and call me “jailbait”. I took it as a compliment. I was a powerless girl, suddenly getting a feeling of power. And now I was told my adult curves would also bring me money. My mother didn’t teach me about morals or values, but she sure taught me about men and opportunity. It didn’t matter that some of my friends and family would judge me if they found out. This was an opportunity to support myself, to become independent and maybe make enough money to get an apartment on my own, one that I could share with my sisters, freeing them from my mom’s metal cooking spoon. So what if I had to expose myself to do it? There were bouncers to make sure there would be no touching, so what’s the big deal if foolish men wanted to pay good money just to look? No skin off my nose.

So, yes, I stayed right there, dancing like I was in one of those new MTV videos, and revealing more of myself than I ever thought I would to strangers who just sat there, watching, without the laughing cheers or teasing catcalls of my friends at school. I avoided those silent, cool, assessing eyes and pretended I was surrounded by choreographers and make-up artists and an adoring audience, maybe even a talent scout, all clapping just for me.

Then I went into the dressing room and met the other dancers. One was hooked on drugs, sporting a bad bruise on her upper arm that make-up couldn’t quite hide. Another was a very petite 31-year-old woman who was supporting both a child and a sick mother, and scared to death that her height wasn’t going to make her seem young enough to keep this job for much longer. There was a former Las Vegas showgirl who had long since aged out, but she was a friend of the owner and had glamourous outfits, so she had job security. And then there was Star, who was just as cool and assessing as the men in the bar. She said she was 22, and that was the most personal information she ever gave me. Looking back, it wouldn’t surprise me if she were an undercover cop. I’ll never forget the desperation and showy bravado of that tiny back room. Just a handful of women who had each other’s backs because they all knew nobody else would.

I made fifty bucks in tips that night. I went home, gave it to my roommate, showered, crawled into bed, and cried. The world was just as bad as my mother always said it would be. My heart shrunk a size smaller that day.

It’s now 31 years later, and a reporter wants to know what it’s like to be writing and sharing my very personal story with the public. I told her it’s like stripping. Revealing way more than most people ever would, knowing I’ll be criticized for it, knowing I’ll hate myself at times for saying too much, and knowing I’ll have to wrap a tight band around my heart to get through it. But in spite of all that, there’s no question that this is an opportunity to reach other young women, somewhere out there, who think survival is up to each of them alone. They’re not alone. I never did go back to rescue my sisters, but there are many more out there still silently desperate for help. In the end, we’re all sisters. My story is not rare to happen, it’s just rare to be revealed.


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Step 2 Toward the Hospital

Step one, to recap previous posts, was my already cycling up depression. Step two began with my visit to Kansas City this past Memorial Weekend to spend time with family. I hadn’t been back there in about a dozen years, and I missed it. I stayed with Meg and her family – it was wonderful to be with them again after all this time. We had dinner on the Country Club Plaza, drove around Swope Park, and spent plenty of quality time together. Amy drove out to meet us, so only Beth was missing of the four of us sisters this time, and miss her we did.

Saturday morning, very early, one of my sisters came in to wake me up. I don’t remember which one. Mom’s husband had died. The three of us called Mom on speaker phone, and she was incoherent in her grief. They had been together 30 years. She was also completely wasted at 7am. We spoke with a neighbor of hers who had thankfully responded to Mom’s call and was there with her, and able to tell us what happened.

It wasn’t completely unexpected, just six months sooner than any of us thought. He had been diagnosed with cancer in March, during my 100-hour work-week marathons, and I hadn’t even called him until Friday, while I was waiting for my flight at O’Hare to KC. I told him how much I valued his kindness to me over the years, how glad I was that he was a part of our lives, and joked with him about subscribing him to a sherbet mailing list, so he could get gallons of orange sherbet mailed to him every week. The cancer was everywhere, but it hurt his throat most, and the sherbet was almost the only thing he enjoyed eating anymore. Then, less than 12 hours later, he was gone. He had gotten up at 2 in the morning to use the bathroom, fell, and was gone. Mom called her neighbor, then started steadily drinking. I was so thankful I had spoken to him, and horrified that I had almost missed letting him know I cared about him. He was Mom’s fourth husband, but I didn’t meet him until a couple of years after they were married, so there was never any attempt at a father-daughter relationship, just a natural one between two related adults. There was respect, and laughter, and no pressure to be anything except ourselves. We didn’t agree politically and in a number of other areas, but neither of us felt it necessary to convince the other of anything they didn’t want to hear, so we just agreed to disagree and focused on the lighthearted. I wish I could have at least have had that with my Mom.

Back to that Saturday morning. After we hung up with Mom, we called Beth, and then all worked out travel plans so Mom wouldn’t be alone. Amy and Beth were with her by Sunday, and I went ahead and kept my flight home Monday to New York, and drove to North Carolina to be there Tuesday evening. I was uncomfortable as hell about going, but I kept telling myself that this is a 69-year-old woman who had just lost her husband of 30 years, who needed help more than I needed to stay away from her. My phone call on Friday to my stepfather was the first time I had spoken to her in four years.

To use my mantra yet again, I was done. Four years ago, I had a conversation with her that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I realized I was done with her. I asked her not to contact me or my children ever again, not even during the holidays. I wasn’t angry, I was just done. No more toxic people in my life.

Anyway, I called work and let them know that I would be taking the week off to help with the funeral. Little did any of us know that it would be over a month before I would spend a day at my desk again.