Caldera: A Woman's Story

CALDERA

A Woman’s Story

ANNE YERO

Caldera A Woman’s Story

Anne Yero

Hamilton Books A member of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2009 by Hamilton Books 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 Hamilton Books Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922919 ISBN: 978-0-7618-4461-7 (paperback : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-4462-4

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984

“When I was a child, I spoke as child, I understood as a child . . . For now we see through a glass darkly . . . now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known” 1 Corinthians, Verses 11–12

The names of some individuals and towns/communities have been changed to provide anonymity.

Foreword

Wednesday is the most taxing day of my week. It is also the most rewarding day of my week. Rachel, Hannah, and two volunteers are in the kitchen cooking. The doorbell rings every few minutes, and I am in my office gathering materials for my weekly women’s support group and am also preparing for a five o’clock staff meeting. The unrelenting doorbell is still beckoning and there’s a call coming in on the crisis line. “Hey, Emma,” I holler, “if you’ll grab the door, I’ll catch the crisis line.” I am the Executive Director of a women’s crisis center in a rural Utah community. This is par for the course on a Wednesday evening. The shelter is buzzing and the energy is high. For many long, both fruitful and frustrating, years, I have facilitated the women’s support group and have worked with thousands of women, women from all walks of life. Group is the best part of my job. Our group is an open group, meaning that any woman at any time may attend the Wednesday night meeting. We cook dinner for the women and children. They start arriving before six and by six-thirty the women break into their group, the children into theirs. I usually hide in my office after staff meeting from six to six-thirty. I need some quiet time to recharge my batteries, to gather my wits about me, and prepare myself for whatever unfolds in group this evening. At six-thirty I exit my office and walk down the short hallway and into the center’s spacious living room and start gathering the women. We have a big crowd tonight. Eighteen women and twenty-five children. Pandemonium reigns. There are crying babies, whining toddlers, rambunctious children, and laid-back adolescents, who are too cool to attend kids’ group, that is until they feel all the warmth and support and approval emanating their way. Then there’s nothing more rewarding than attending kids’ group.

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We have female volunteers and a few men who volunteer their time each Wednesday evening to assist with the children’s group. It’s good to see Ed and John and Tony. It’s important for the children to know that all men are not violent, that men can be trusted, that men can express themselves in caring and compassionate ways. The women look forward to Wednesday night. We have a hot meal waiting for them and their children; this is one night when they don’t have to cook or clean. And best of all they get to meet with other women, share their stories, feel supported and accepted, and have their children safely occupied and cared for. I count thirteen women in the group room. Hmmm? Where are the other five? I check the smoking patio and sure enough the five missing women are lingering over one last cigarette. “Hey, ladies, let’s do group.” “Yeah, yeah, okay, we’re coming.” The group room is crowded tonight. I pass around the sign-in sheet. I remind everybody about confidentiality, about doing their best to attend if group works for them, about coming to group clean and sober. Some of the women are court-ordered, most are not. But for those who are court-ordered, it’s important for them to do their best to attend so that they are not in contempt of court. These are court-ordered women who have been pegged as perpetrators but with further evaluation, they are found to be victims who are fighting to defend themselves. They comply with their court-ordered mandates by attending group and dealing with their victim issues. For some of the court ordered women, consistently missing group might mean that their children, who are in foster care for a variety of reasons, may not be returned to them. Group might be one of several court-ordered mandates, such as completing a substance abuse treatment program, taking parenting classes, or participating in individual counseling sessions with a licensed mental health therapist. I make eye contact with each woman and invite her to introduce herself, first names only. I start to my left and move around the room, ending with the woman nearest my right. Then I introduce myself. “I’m Anne and I’m the facilitator, but I’m also a group member. We’re all women aren’t we? We all talk the same talk and walk the same walk, don’t we?” I am more a member of this group than any of the women know. Sure, I’m the older, wiser, more mature woman. Although some group members are older and wiser and more mature than I. The older women mentor the younger women. The younger women bring fresh ideas, insights, and energy. We share our stories, share our wisdom. My comments, insights, and observations allude to the fact that I’ve traveled this path before. I know what it is to be a heartbroken woman, a co-dependent, scared, powerless woman. I

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know what it is to be a mother, to discover great joy and delight in mothering and to unearth great pain, heartache, and disappointment in mothering. But I’ve never really shared my story with group. There are varying reasons for this. First, I am an intensely private person. And I am also cognizant of the fact that these women harbor their stories in their heart all week long and they come to group eager to share that story. These women desire an opportunity to be heard, maybe to be truly heard for the first time in their lives. And I believe I have a responsibility to allow them that space and time to share their story. It is not my time to share my story. I want them to know they are embraced and supported and accepted. We may not all agree with what each of us says or how we say it, but we’re here to support, sometimes to confront, to offer alternative viewpoints, to empathize, and to learn. Tonight, the attractive red-headed twenty-eight year old Camille is at group. I haven’t seen her for awhile. Her husband beat her four months ago. She called 911. Law enforcement responded; her husband spent a night in jail, and a victim advocate helped Camille file a protective order. Now Camille is miserable and lonely. Her husband is begging to come home and she allows it. She has violated her own protective order, not a good thing. She sits quietly off in a corner. I say, “Long time no see. How are you doing Camille? What’s up?” She shares with group that she and her husband are together and that she recently discovered she is pregnant. “Is this a good thing or a bad thing,” I ask. She responds, “You know how it is, you get all dewy-eyed and romantic and you believe that having a baby make will make everything okay.” I respond, “So let’s see, you have sex with a man who, you report, calls you a whore and a cunt. You’re pregnant with his child, a child he doesn’t want. You say he battered you when he learned of your pregnancy and accused you of sleeping with other men. So what’s so great about dewy-eyed and romantic?” “But I just have to be with him,” she retorts. “I can’t be alone. And the sex is great. We have a tremendous sexual connection.” Someone in group chimes in, “Yeah, it’s called ‘make-up’ sex and it’s the best.” All the women are laughing and Camille, embarrassed, covers her face. I say, Camille, will you do something with me. Instead of saying “I have to be with him,” are you willing to say, “I choose to be with him.” She looks at me and gives it a try. I gently remind her that life is about making choices, that she is in charge of her life, that she is in control. She has a voice. We talk about how difficult it is to make the right choice, how difficult it is to know the right choice. We talk about how scary and miserable it is to be alone. We acknowledge there’s no great reward in being lonely. It sucks. It hurts. It’s no fun. We talk about the difference between being alone and

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being lonely. Alone doesn’t mean that you have to be lonely. We discuss the idea that a woman can love her partner, can have deep and profound feelings for him, can have children with him, yet still choose not to be with him. Leaving isn’t easy. Even if it is the right thing to do. Some of the women talk about what a relief it is not having a partner, no worries about whether he’s “pissed off” or not, no worries about him cheating or spending hard earned money on booze or street drugs. Lupe clamors, “Hey, I’m glad my old man is gone. It’s great. And I don’t miss the sex either. It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. It feels good to be safe, to be a mother to my children.” Kristin pipes up, “I love my husband. He’s doing his domestic violence treatment stuff. I think we’re going to make it. We’re really communicating.” “Congratulations,” I say, “Great! Good for you. Keep us posted.” I check my watch. Seven-forty-five. Fifteen more minutes of group. Time flies; it’s over too soon. We talk a bit more. I elicit comments or acknowledge those few women who haven’t spoken, but have fully participated by being present. I ask for parting comments or observations. Some women speak, sum it up, share what they have learned, share what group means to them. I thank the women for their presence this evening. I let them know how special it is to be with them, how much I learn from them, how much we feel supported by each other. We call it a night and exit the group room. Their children, all twenty-five of them, are running, playing, singing, squealing, waiting for their mothers. The women hug each other, exchange phone numbers, embrace their children. I am a limp wash-rag, wrung-out and wasted. I work my way through the melee of women and children and head for my office. Just as I am about to unlock my office door, Sema, from group, approaches me and says, “Anne, I really liked when you talked about polarization and finding balance. It really hit home for me. It made me think about some things in my own life.” “That’s great, Sema. I’m glad that meant something to you. Maybe you can share your insights with the group next week.” “Thanks, Anne. It was a good group.” “Thank you, Sema. You ladies make group great. See you next week.” I inch away from the flurry of activity and noise. Finally, I make my way into my office. I close my office door firmly and collapse into the big cushioned chair behind my desk. I take off my glasses and rub my eyes. Another eleven hour day. Every Wednesday is an eleven hour day. I work a half day on Fridays to compensate for my long Wednesday. I am emotionally spent. I don’t want to answer phones, talk to anyone, or field any questions. I just want my space; I want to digest group and all that transpired. I am filled with gratitude for the privilege of working with women. In some way or another, we all speak a common language. I often

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have group members in attendance whose native language is Spanish or Navajo or perhaps some other language. I am, unfortunately, fluent in only one language, my native tongue, English. But there have been many, many times in group where we women have communicated in ways that transcended the spoken language. We read each other’s lives, we know what the shake of a head, a nod, an angry gesture, a smile, a tear means. We know by the expression on a woman’s face what she is communicating. I have facilitated group on a Wednesday night and have had all, but one of the women, speaking Spanish, and I and the other English speaking group member knew exactly what was being said. I couldn’t respond in Spanish, so I shook my head and nodded. We all looked each other in the eye, looked each other in the heart, and cried and laughed together. There were warm hugs at the end of that group. A profound communication had occurred. I lean back in my chair, listen as the chatty women and children exit the shelter, enter their vehicles and drive away. We are a staff of all women. Hannah and Rachel are finishing up in the kitchen. Tavey is running the vacuum. I hear Cayle scrubbing the bathroom. All is made right so that we can begin anew tomorrow. The phone rings. It is the crisis line. I let it ring. Cayle runs to answer it. Through my closed door, I hear Cayle speaking to someone. Sounds like a woman and her two children need shelter tonight. Cayle will handle it. I am a student and a teacher, mostly a student. I learn a great deal from these women, these women who are fleeing battering relationships, these women who are remaining in abusive relationships. They remind me so much of myself. So much of how my life used to be, maybe not in the exact particulars of the situation, but in the very essence in which women choose not to believe in themselves, in the very way that women release their power to others and allow themselves to be demeaned and disrespected. To my mind, it’s not about men. It’s about women and the choices we make, the ways in which we under-estimate the beauty and power and soulfulness of our influence. Women have it all, if only we knew that.

Chapter One

An early July morning and Nicole and I were trusting that the monsoonal winds that carry heavy rains and moisture from Mexico’s Gulf into the desert southwest every summer were taking a few days hiatus so that we could safely reach the mountain peak without fear of lightening strikes, torrential rains, or wind storms. We are on a quest. Our destination: Humphreys Peak, the highest point (12,633 feet) in Arizona, one of three peaks that rise sharply from the 7000 foot elevation of Flagstaff. We begin our ascent, trekking through shimmering aspen, fragrant fir and sharp spruce. The winds are breezy and cool. But I am already struggling, winded and sweating profusely. You see, a year ago I broke my back. At least that’s what I called it: a broken back. The orthopedic surgeon called it a “herniated” disk. Mind you it was not a bulging disk nor a slipped disk and it was not a small herniated disk. It was a medium to large herniated disk in the lumbar region of my lower back. Pain, and lots of it, had been my lot this past year. The doctor recommended surgery. I declined the surgery, against his avid protestations, and opted instead for a less intrusive procedure: a series of epidural steroid injections. This had not been an easy year. I am one who determinedly plows through whatever impedes my progress. Tell me it can’t be done, and I will do it. Give me a mountain and I will climb it. Show me a problem and I will solve it. Yet, despite all my determination and all my willpower and my willfulness, this herniated disk had brought me literally to my knees. Throughout the mind-numbing weeks of pain and after all attempts to thwart this debilitating affliction, I finally succumbed. I could not overcome the impediment nor solve the problem; I could not climb the mountain. All I could do was gingerly creep across the floor of my home, eating in a prone 1

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position and then return to my pillows on the couch, remaining there day after day, lingering impatiently as the days turned to weeks and months. I searched for small increments of progress, some lessening of the pain. There were no big breakthroughs. The healing inched its way forward, slower than a snail’s pace, then retreated, and ever so slowly crept forward again. It was so slow, so cumbersome, so unpredictable that I was not sure whether I was making progress or was simply at a dead standstill. I was frustrated and defeated. I sought a definitive answer but there was none. This pain had been my teacher, but I had been an unwilling and impatient student. I did not want to surrender my control. I could always have it my way, if I tried hard enough, if I bulldozed my way through. I’d never wanted to feel the pain, had spent much of my life subverting pain, allowing the pain to remain unnamed and unexamined: the pain of being motherless, the pain of feeling orphaned, an outsider, not good-enough, the pain of my brother’s mental illness, schizophrenia, the pain of losing my marriage to Lee. If I can remain in control, with a pent-up and unexamined raw emotional release (call it rage) now and again, I am okay. In control. Still I have learned many important lessons along the way, have become aware in ways I never thought possible. Still, I have more to learn about my willfulness and how to surrender. Surrender: giving in, resilient, supple, flexible. I flow with the pain, it flows with me. Slowly I healed. I was able to walk again, a step at a time. Depending on whether the most recent epidural steroid injection was doing its job, I might be able to walk a half block and then a half block back again to my house, spending the remainder of my day reclining on plumped soft pillows, as I fought physical pain and emotional discouragement, still learning the lessons of surrender. Now a year later, ready or not, surrender or not, I was going to hike again. I was tired of my life controlling me; I wanted to control my life. I had softened around the edges, gentled my need for control, but I remained eternally willful. I decided a year was long enough. Nicole and I walked and talked. We’d had many “walks and talks” over the years. I could almost forget my labored breathing and profuse perspiring, because the walk and the talk was rewarding. In time we cleared the aspen, fir, and spruce and began our travels above the timber line. There were no trees to shade us as the July sun increased in its intensity. Nicole and I were walking but we were no longer talking. We reserved our energies for the hike. I stopped frequently; drank long draws of cool water. Ordinarily, before my back problems, I could keep pace, but today Nicole forged ahead, her long sturdy marathon legs pulling her forward. I lagged behind. My legs were wobbly and my back was weak. I continued on. Give me a mountain and I will climb it.

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After more climbing above the timber line, the trail dwindled, and all that was left was a mountain of hot, black, hard molten lava. I was not sure if I could climb to the top. I felt like hollering, “Are we almost there yet?” But I didn’t. Nicole was far ahead and she could not hear me. I assured myself that if I gave myself a mountain I could climb it. I put one foot in front of the other. My lower back where the herniated disk resided was inflamed and tender. I poured a canteen of icy cold water over my head and let the water seep into and through my T-shirt and shorts. I put my head down, burrowed forward, and heard nothing but the words in my head: “I can do it. I will do it.” Onward, upward, over the hot black hard lava cinders. Heat and more heat interrupted by an occasional mountain breeze. A monsoonal shower would almost be welcome, if I could dodge the lightening strikes. I thought I had arrived at the summit, but I was in a saddle and as I cleared the saddle, I saw I still had far to go. I thought about stopping and sitting on an outcropping of the volcanic lava slope. I would sit and rest and eat lunch. Nicole would pick me up on her way down. But I didn’t stop. And I didn’t sit. I moved forward. Give me a mountain and I will climb it. Sweaty and hot and miserable, and ready to quit, I kept going. And then I saw the peak and shortly I arrived. I was alone on the summit. Nicole was elsewhere. Suddenly I knew that I was where I needed to be. From west to east, north to south, I saw my life, my history splayed out before me: California, the Pacific Ocean and the beach cities of Los Angeles to the west, the red rocks and Ponderosa pine escarpment of the Grand Canyon and the vermillion cliffs to the north, Flagstaff to the south and east. And below me, benign and hidden in the shimmering aspen and rich green ferns, the Caldera. I was engulfed in the cool mountain breezes that climbed Humphreys peak; I touched each corner of my life and made it whole. I sat at the summit, undisturbed, at peace. I climbed the mountain, as I said I would. My silent meditation carried me back in time, to my childhood in southern California, to my years on the south rim of the Grand Canyon when my marriage to Lee was new and our children were young, to the years in Flagstaff with Lee and our children, in our little house on the fertile flat fields beneath the San Francisco Peaks, and to our final painful years together north of the vermillion cliffs, in southern Utah. I climbed many mountains over those years. But I remember the last mountain, a mountain I climbed when I was weak and spent and without resources. A mountain that seemed to have no summit, a mountain that challenged me as no other had.

Chapter Two

The Nava-Hopi tour bus glided into the narrow parking space in front of the Bright Angel lodge. Eagerly, I disembarked from the bus and pushed forward through the well-worn oak double doors and then through the cavernous wood and rock lodge, and out onto the rim of the canyon, the Grand Canyon. Awestruck, I had never seen a landscape this open, this vast. Rough, weathered, red. Pinyon, juniper, ponderosa. Gliding hawks, cawing ravens, scolding jays, a deep dark gorge, a river flowing through it, a slender sliver of muddy red ribbon and aqua eddies flowing from somewhere into nowhere, a ravaged raw landscape, brutal and violent, a sentinel unchanged, unscathed, unfathomable. A great, great, great, Grandfather. Silent. Timeless. Formidable. It was April 1974 and I had just completed my sophomore year at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I’d been offered and had accepted summer employment with the Fred Harvey Company, the Grand Canyon National Park’s contracted concessionaire. I was twenty years old and I was alone. Alone in that exhilarating adventurous frightening way that only a young person can experience. All of life was new and fresh, pure and without blemish. I took my time, lingering on the rim of the Canyon, attempting, with little success, to comprehend the depth and breadth of the landscape before me. No matter how long and how hard I looked, no matter how deeply I breathed, no matter how far I walked, I could not fully absorb the character of this Canyon. It possessed a voice and a tenor all its own, a voice and tenor that rang true to my ears. Reluctantly I left the rim to find my Fred Harvey contact person and was assigned a dorm room in Rouzer Hall, a two story brick building which stood in the midst of a great stand of ponderosa pine. At night, the heavy fragrant

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pine boughs rustled and whipped in the high plateau winds and ebony winged bats dipped and dove in the clear night air. I met my roommate Brenda, from Missouri, who was my age and had arrived at the Grand Canyon for summer employment as had I. We struck up an immediate friendship. It was a good fit. She was a friendly, easy-to-get-alongwith young woman. We shared information about our lives, about what brought us to the Grand Canyon. We were both new to the Canyon, so together we discovered where the employee cafeterias were located and discovered where we’d be working and what we’d be doing. Brenda was assigned to waitress at the El Tovar Lodge and I was assigned to cashier at the Hopi House, a Pueblo Indian style dwelling that housed a gift shop, which sat directly on the rim of the Canyon. The previous summer, after my freshman year at BYU, I had returned home to Manhattan Beach, California, to live with my father and step-mother to work at a local pottery factory, as I had the summer before. But now at age twenty this seemed a time of demarcation, where going home didn’t have to be the option. My step-mother Jillian and I had had a mostly discordant relationship over the years, with her being little to blame. Most of the discord and disrespect had emanated from me. I had no relationship, as in Null and Naught, with my own mother and had been overly close to my father for all of my growing-up years. My father was in the middle of two warring and disgruntled women, his wife and a not very well-adjusted immature adolescent daughter. Now twenty seemed an adult age. Twenty was the age to strike out, discover more about a life not intrinsically connected to a confusing adolescence and a painful childhood. Brenda and I arranged our dorm room and talked late into the night, sharing information, sharing our hopes and dreams. As our work schedules permitted, Brenda and I socialized with our suite mates, Belinda and Suzanne, across the hall, who were also BYU students. We four attended church together on Sundays at the Shrine of the Ages chapel. Our suite mates were a bit more conservative and cautious than Brenda and I. Brenda, like me, enjoyed going out in the evenings, searching for something different, something exciting to do. One of the things we discovered in our travels around the south rim were the Friday night dances at the Yavapai Lodge which took place in the late evening hours after families and other Canyon visitors had finished their evening meal. Tables were cleared; the bar was opened, and best of all a live band began to play. Brenda and I did not imbibe, but we loved to dance and the live band and plenty of good-looking young men drew us to the Friday night dances. The lodge sat back from the rim of the Canyon a half mile and

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rested beneath tall stands of rustling ponderosa and pinyon pine, beside lowlying brushes of pungent wild sage. This evening was no different from other Friday nights. We danced with various young men, and, if need be, we danced with each other. The intent was simply to have fun. This was not serious business, this was get-downand-enjoy-yourself business. I danced several times with Lauren, a handsome twenty-four year old Havasupai Indian man. We looked for each other every Friday night, and I flirted with him until he walked across the room and asked me to dance. Sometimes his long black hair fell down his back below his waist and other times, like this night, his thick black hair was braided, each braid falling forward across his strong chest. During winter months, Lauren lived on the Havasupai reservation at the far western reaches of the Grand Canyon. Summers he spent on the south rim of the Canyon, doing seasonal work for the Forest Service. We danced fast and then we danced a couple of slow dances. He was warm and gentle and was a great tease. “Why don’t you come to the reservation,” he asked, “and stay with me at my home. We’ll swim at Havasu falls.” I was definitely smitten by his dark good looks, his laughing eyes. Everything about him was slow and easy. I was a gullible, naive, dreamy, and, thus far, ungrounded twenty year old woman. I almost believed I could float away with Lauren, that he really was enamored of me in some significant lasting committed way. As we danced, I romanticized about reservation life, about Lauren and me tucked away in a deep red pocket of the Canyon, amid turquoise waterfalls and crescent blue pools. But a small, very small part of me, saw how he eyed the darkly beautiful and exotic Navajo, Hopi, and Supai women who came to dance at the Yavapai Lodge on Friday nights and I knew, in some barely-mature-twenty-yearold-way, that Lauren was toying with me. I can’t say I really “knew” because I was immature and idealistic and gullible enough to believe him; but I possessed a tiny-scarcely-there sliver of common-sense intuition, perhaps just enough to save me from myself. My twenty year old self had never had a relationship, at least not a reciprocated relationship, with a man. I had read many books about relationships; I had adored and been “in-love” with men from afar. My kind of love had always been an unrequited and unconsummated kind of love. I was in-love with “love.” But I didn’t know what love was in the “real” world. My unrequited love was passionate and ephemeral. It did not involve children, or responsibility, or finances or jobs. My kind of immature idealistic love was about two people who felt but never did, who completed each other but never completed themselves. I did not yet know what a “self” was.

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Friday night transformed into an early Saturday morning, two a.m. to be exact. Despite the late hour, Brenda and I urged the band to continue playing, “Just for us, Please!” They dissembled their instruments, packed up and left. Brenda and I continued to dance. Patrick and Jim, two young men we had danced with earlier in the evening, were eyeing us from a afar. Jim approached us and asked if we’d like to join him and Patrick for a drive along the east rim of the Canyon. “We’ll find a secluded spot, build a fire and watch the sun rise over the east rim,” he said. We agreed to join them. An hour later, we were wrapped in sleeping bags, warmed by a bright crackling fire, listening to the wild calls of coyote, owls, and the scurrying of small rodents. As the eastern horizon brightened, night retreated like a startled rock wren within the dark secret caves of the Canyon’s red walls. Sleepily, the four of us viewed the Canyon, cloaking itself in velvet purples, quiet lavenders, crimson reds, delicate pinks, deep oranges. The moment, like time itself, was ethereal, present and then transparently absent, a memory, an impression. We gathered our sleeping bags and piled into Patrick’s Volkswagen Beetle. Before we returned to our dorm room to sleep, Brenda and I agreed to have breakfast at the Bright Angel Lodge employee cafeteria. Patrick and Jim, who were visiting the park and were driving north to Utah that morning, agreed to drop us at the cafeteria. We were bleary-eyed and tired, and I was scheduled to cashier at the Hopi House later that afternoon. We needed to eat, find our way back to our dorm, and get some sleep. We entered the employee cafeteria, one of several such cafeterias in the park. This was the first time Brenda and I had breakfasted at the Bright Angel Lodge. I’d not heard country music before. But I was about to. The juke box was honky-tonking: Porter Wagner, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. Rod Hart crooned a melancholy “Arizona Morning” and Redbone taunted, “Come and Get Your Love.” Brenda and I were still dancing. I grabbed a tray and laughingly danced my way down the cafeteria line. I danced from the cafeteria line to an open table, with Brenda trailing behind me. As I placed my tray on the table, I looked up and saw two long rows of young, virile, good-looking cowboys eating breakfast. I’d never seen a cowboy before. But here they were: Wrangler jeans, splashy silver and turquoise belt buckles, cowboy-cut cotton shirts, Justin boots, spurs, and thick felt cowboy hats. A dark, black-haired, azure blue-eyed cowboy was beaming me a shy smile and a very flirtatious wink. I smiled in return, a bit embarrassed to be the focal point of his attention, and then settled down to my breakfast. Every time

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I glanced up, he was sending his shy smile my way, followed by a still very flirtatious wink. I smiled in return, finished my breakfast, and danced my way to the back of the cafeteria, flirting and smiling at him all the while. Brenda and I talked about how good-looking these cowboys were, and I said, “especially the black-haired, blue-eyed guy.” Obviously, my hormones were doing all the talking. So what else was new? My hormones had been doing all the talking for the past five years, since I was fifteen. We were done eating and so were the cowboys. As we readied to leave the cafeteria, one of the cowboys approached Brenda and introduced himself, “I’m Daniel Westwood.” Daniel asked to see her later that evening. Brenda agreed. He would pick her up at our dorm room at eight o’clock. Daniel exited the cafeteria and I noticed that my dark-haired, blue-eyed cowboy was gone also. I was disappointed. I had enjoyed our playful connection and was hoping that he would be approaching me, asking to see me again. Thoroughly exhausted, Brenda and I walked a mile along the Canyon rim trail, made our way back to our dorm, and fell into bed completely depleted of energy, wearing the same clothes we had worn the night before. I awoke at the proper time, showered, completed a six hour shift at the Hopi House and returned to my room at eight. Brenda was primping for her date with Daniel and I was looking for a good book to read to keep me company that evening. There was a knock at the door and Brenda answered. Daniel had arrived and so had my blue-eyed cowboy. Turned out he wanted to meet me but was too shy to say so, so he had Daniel do the asking. But Daniel failed to mention to Brenda that the blueeyed, dark-haired cowboy was tagging along. He took off his hat and introduced himself to me as “Lee McClure. I’m from Mapleton, New York, near Lockport, but I’ve been out west for six years. I hate New York, couldn’t wait to leave. Couldn’t stand the humidity. I like the West, been working for Fred Harvey since March.” I introduced myself, “Glad to meet you Lee, I’m Anne Longmire.” I was still unsure why these two guys were cowboys or what cowboys were doing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I discovered that the local concessionaire, the Fred Harvey Company, offered and had been offering to tourists for many, many years one day and overnight mule trips into the Canyon. Lee and Daniel lived at the “cowboy dorm,” ate breakfast at fivethirty, six mornings a week, reported to the mule barn at six-fifteen and were, at that time, assigned a mule-train to lead for a one-day or a two-day overnight trip into the Canyon. We had a good evening with our cowboys, watched a movie, took a walk, and ended up at the cowboy dorm eating sweet slices of ripe red watermelon. Brenda and I met some of the other cowboys: Tuffy, Dale, Jim, Rick, Javier,

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Chato, Windy. They were an interesting bunch, different from the stereotype I had envisioned. Some of the guys were brash and flamboyant, others were quiet and soft-spoke, others articulate and intelligent. Lee and Daniel dropped us at our dorm late that evening. Brenda and Daniel had made no connection. But sparks were flying between Lee and me and he sneaked a quick kiss at the door. His reticent and quiet demeanor, coupled with an unobtrusive strength, complemented my more outgoing, overtly verbal and quick-to-react personality. If it’s true that opposites attract, then Lee and I were the living testament. Lee was definitely a cool cucumber, taking his time about seeing me again. I arranged my dinner break from the Hopi House to coincide with Lee’s five o’clock dinner at the Bright Angel Lodge. Nonchalantly I arrived, and if he was not on an overnight trip in the Canyon, then Lee was parked at one of the tables, surrounded by a group of young women, mostly young women, like myself, students from BYU, who had summer employment at the Grand Canyon. Lee was all shy-smiles and the women were fully engaged. I sat on the fringes of this interaction, watching Lee revel in the attention of these attractive and bright young women, wondering if he and I would develop a more personal relationship.

Chapter Three

“August 25, 1959 Happy Birthday! Darling— Of all the books I’ve bought you, I guess I never got this one (“Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”) for you. Please understand what I have been through—or all of the living we’ve had. There is so much left for us, Ray—and our children. We have moved the earth together—in young love and mature. I have never loved any one but you, Ray— excepting my children who are a part of us. I am with you constantly working and praying for energy and intelligence. We must let the inspiration of our life come through to us—you listening to me read to you. The humor and good fellowship we’ve had, all of our friends. And our facing things together, our music and the essential selves we can re-discover. Rediscovering ourselves is not going backwards. As I told you, a man may at anytime in his life, really know his soul and his destiny. All of us are too “caught up in things.” There is a way to humility and I have found it in my family. You told me the other night you would leave your heart open—please do, Ray, and I will not fail you. Howard” But my mother, Razel, did not open her heart. She had served my father with divorce papers thirteen days earlier on August 12, 1959, the day of their twelfth wedding anniversary. It was after the serving of the divorce papers that my father wrote his letter of August twenty-fifth, my mother’s thirty-first birthday, beseeching her to reconsider her acrimonious actions. 10

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I was five years old that August of 1959 and was in the room when my mother served my father the divorce papers. She entered the front door into the living room of our small brown beach house that sat one block off the Pacific Ocean in Manhattan Beach, California. She was accompanied by a friend of hers, Arlene Ball. My mother, large and looming to my small five year old self, handed my father, seated on the piano bench, a packet of papers. I did not know they were divorce papers and I did not know what a divorce was, but I vividly recall watching my father breaking down, his head in his hands, crying and sobbing, “For God’s sake, Ray, what are you doing?” “Please don’t do this!” My mother laughed in his face, “If you don’t like it, you can lump it! That’s right, you can lump it.” He remained seated on the piano bench crying, my mother above him, laughing and taunting. Arlene urged my mother to restrain her glee and gloating; still my mother continued on, denigrating and humiliating my father. My father Howard Longmire was born in Yakima, Washington, in 1920, to Clarence Dewey (CD) Longmire and Marjean Netzley. My father was the eldest of CD’s and Marjean’s three sons. Marjean was musically inclined, sang for local radio stations and was invited to sing solos for local church congregations. I met my grandmother Longmire only once when I was twelve years old. She was short and plump, had a beautiful singing voice and played piano for my father and me. She also ate an entire box of chocolates, her gift to us, during her three day visit with us. My father said she was “pure gold.” My grandfather Longmire, with his piercing blue eagle eyes, was by all reports an intense, intelligent, strong, driven man, who had no time for such nonsense as music and literature. He was born in Yakima of pioneering parents and spent his youth in Yakima as a “sheep man,” like his father Benjamin, and later moved Marjean and their three sons to Missoula, Montana, where he continued running sheep in the wilds of the Montana mountains. My grandfather was also a philanderer. When my father, in 1937, was a senior at Missoula High, his mother finally divorced Clarence who then promptly married his younger and very attractive paramour, Vivian. I never met my paternal grandfather; he died in a car accident in 1949, while racing across the border from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, back to Montana. Allegedly, he had a woman, not his wife Vivian, in the car with him. After CD’s death, Vivian returned to her former husband. My grandmother Marjean never remarried. In 1946, after World War II, my father traveled east and enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He paid for his studies through the GI Bill. Within weeks of beginning his studies at the conservatory, my father met, by his report, a beautiful winsome young woman,

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Razel Stern, who was also enrolled at the conservatory. My father, quite smitten, avidly pursued her. They were both piano students at the conservatory, my father a jazz pianist studying composition and Razel, my mother, a classical pianist. Razel Stern was the youngest of four children born to Isaac Stern and Anne (Annie) Vinograd. Annie and Isaac were eastern European Jews who arrived as children with their parents to this “Great” United States of America, in the early 1900’s. Isaac’s family settled in Fall River, Massachusetts, and Annie’s in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Isaac and Annie married in September 1918. My mother Razel, born in1928, was the youngest of my grandparents’ four children. Isaac was a successful business man, working in the wholesale produce business. According to Annie’s eldest child, my aunt Ruth, Annie was a loving mother, devoted, fun-loving, nurturing, and fairly observant in the Jewish faith. Annie’s father, Aaron Vinograd, claimed that of all of his children, he would eat only at Annie’s house because he knew she kept a kosher kitchen. Unfortunately, tragedy came swiftly to this happy and loving little family. In early 1931, Annie was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In June of that year, during the Great Depression, Annie died at age thirty-six, leaving behind a broken and grieving husband and four young children. Ruth was the eldest at eleven, Myron, the only son, ten, Miriam five, and my mother Razel not yet three. Ruth says that not only did her father, my grandfather, lose his wife, but he lost his business and his livelihood also. My grandfather never remarried and died in 1959 of lung cancer. After Annie’s death the family dissembled. My grandfather had no assistance in holding his little family together. The second youngest daughter Miriam was diagnosed with tuberculosis and lived at sanatorium for a year, then returned home, where the eldest daughter Ruth tried to be both a mother to Myron and Miriam and also a devoted and supportive daughter to her widowed father. My mother, Razel, the baby of the family, was sent to live with a childless aunt and uncle who lived in New Bedford, just blocks from Isaac and his remaining three motherless children. Aunt Ruth told me many times that my mother had a “terrible” childhood, that the “adoptive” aunt and uncle, Isaac’s sister Sarah and her husband Jack, were cruel to my mother, and treated her more as an object than as a young grieving child, missing her deceased mother. She was not showered with love, but was, instead, showered with expectations about how she would be better than her motherless siblings, about how she would be controlled to become the “perfect” child to this childless aunt and uncle. Isaac was no longer Daddy. Jack was Daddy and Sarah was Mother. Razel would be raised to marry, with the tacit approval of Jack and Sarah, a well-

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to-do very successful Jewish man. There was no talk of or acceptance of a non-Jewish husband. But as fate would have it, Howard, a non-Jew, met Razel at the conservatory, and Razel, straining at a tightly leashed tether, continued to chafe under the control of her “mother” and “father,” Sarah and Jack. They smothered her, oversaw her every action. She had no privacy nor autonomy. They orchestrated her every move: the clothes she wore, what she ate, who she talked to, where she went and what she did. Reluctantly, Jack and Sarah consented to allow Razel to attend the conservatory for one year if she agreed to return to New Bedford the next year and marry a proper Jewish husband. They phoned her daily at the conservatory and visited every other weekend. My mother, known to her or not, was desperate to feel her own feelings, live her own life. Howard and Razel soon began an intense, passionate, and clandestine loveaffair. In the course of the year, Jack and Sarah discovered that not only was Razel involved with a man eight years her senior, he was also a gentile. From my mother’s unpublished manuscript: “Razel, why did you do it? You know we wouldn’t approve. Why did you do it behind our backs?” Sarah was crying unrestrained; her face distorted with pain. “Why, Razel? Do you love him? The whole town knows you’re going with a goy. Why, Razel? After all we’ve done for you, don’t you think of us at all?” Razel responds, “Mother, don’t cry. It’s not as bad as you think.” “It’s worse, Razel. It’s the worst sin. Will you stop seeing him? Will you promise you won’t see him.” “I can’t promise that, Mother.” Jack yells, “You can’t? We’ll see if you can’t!” Sarah says, “Quiet, Quiet. This is between Razel and me. Razel, you’ve got to promise me you won’t see him anymore.” “Why, Mother? Why?” “You shouldn’t have ever gone out with him at all. He’s not your kind, Razel. He’s a goy. We’ve let you have Christian girlfriends, but not boys, Razel. Can’t you see? He’s not your kind.” Razel responds, “You’re wrong. He is my kind. We think alike and feel alike. We have the same ideals and ambitions. We—.” “Ideals! Ambitions! Are you going to live on ideals and ambitions? You’re not an idealist. All I ask is that you marry a Jewish boy. There are so many fine boys in New Bedford.” “Mother, Please! Be sensible. It’s not as easy as you think. It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt completely alive.” “We give you everything, Razel,” Sarah says sobbing. “We’ve always made you happy. How can you do this to us? Do you love him? Do you love him, Razel?” Razel responds, “I don’t know.” “Then give him up. That’s all I ask. Give him up and we’ll make you happy. He can’t make you happy. He has no money. He’s just a student, Razel.”

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“It’s not good. You’re young yet. Your whole life lies before you. You’re innocent. He’s older and he’ll demand things of you. He doesn’t want you as a wife, God Forbid. He just wants your body, Razel, and before that happens, I’d rather see you dead and me dead. Before that happens I’d kill both of us. Do you hear me! If you don’t stop seeing him. We’ll both be dead. I hope to God nothing bad has happened yet.” “All week your father’s been sick. He heard from four different people in two days that you have a Christian boyfriend. And look at me. I’ve been in bed crying for five days. I’ve wanted to die. I’d rather die than face the torture of seeing you marry a goy. You’d ruin your life and ours, too. Promise you won’t see him anymore.” My mother promised Sarah she would not see Howard again. Then my father mailed a letter to my mother. Sarah tried to intercept it. Razel writes: “Mother! A letter? From whom? From Howard? When did it come? Where is it? Give it to me!” “I forbid you to answer it,” Sarah responds. “It was made clear he’s not to write you. I’ll tear it up.” “Don’t you dare,” screamed Razel. “It’s my letter. Give it to me.” Sarah answers, “You can’t write to him. Let me tear it up.” “No, I won’t write to him, but let me read the letter.” “But you promised you’d stop with him,” Sarah said. “I’ll stop with him. I’LL STOP WITH HIM! Now give me the letter,” Razel screams. My mother reads the letter and Sarah badgers her: “What does he write? Cheap trash? How can you read that trash?” In his letter my father writes, “I miss you . . . I remember the evening at Alice Epson’s recital when we sat apart so we wouldn’t be seen together. And I stared at you all through it and you had your red silk night-time dress on and you wore your glasses and looked so intelligent and cosmopolitan listening to the music. Your face was cameo-like and your eyes bright beneath your glasses. And we walked to the El Cabano Room where we danced to the South American music and we were just a little high on beer. And you were so tall in your new high heels . . . and you felt so soft and your hips swung proud in your red silk dress . . . You were like a fragrant peach, like a sweet dainty lily . . . my little Jewish girl.” Some days or weeks later on July 31, 1947, after the letter to my mother, my father managed to send a book, “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran, to my mother. The inscription on the inside page read, “To Antigone: On the eighth day of our separation. Love, Howard” Twelve days later, August 12,1947, Howard and Razel eloped and were married by a Justice of the Peace in South Bend, Indiana. My mother’s family disowned her and her older brother Myron threatened to kill my father, just as Myron had killed the Nazis in World War II. My father and mother moved to Seattle to be near my father’s family. My father en-

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rolled at the University of Washington. Then a year later my mother’s family forgave her, although the forgiving was not without conditions. Throughout my mother’s marriage to my father, her family constantly berated Howard and nagged my mother to leave “the worthless bum.” But with the supposed blessing of her family, after their first year of marriage, Razel and Howard returned to Boston, where Howard completed both an undergraduate and graduate degree in music at Boston University and Razel gave birth to her first child, a son, my older brother Aaron. With all the pressures and directives from her family and with the usual stresses and strains of a marriage, my mother divorced my father after that terrible scene on the August of their twelfth wedding anniversary in the living room of our little brown house by the ocean. In the divorce papers my mother asked for and received full custody of her three children: Aaron, myself, and my younger sister Jessica. Thus ensued five grim and bleak years. Soon after the divorce, my mother suffered what was then called a “nervous breakdown” and whether it was a “breakdown” or a mental illness or perhaps sheer narcissism or selfishness, it would render her “unable” or “unwilling” to mother her children. Those five years with my mother were filled with neglect, abuse, a total lack of nurturing, unknown men coming and going, and no degree of parental supervision. I cannot recall any instance during those five years when my mother spoke to me in a kind tone of voice. In fact, I have very few, if any, recollections of her speaking to me at all. I was ignored and treated as if I were a non-person, not much more than an object for her to slap or hit. My father, as he was able, or as my mother would allow, was as frequent a visitor as possible to our many houses and apartments in the Los Angeles area. Within the first year of my parents’ divorce, my brother Aaron, age eleven, ran away to live with our father in Manhattan Beach. While my mother was flogging him with a heavy piece of plastic cord, Aaron jumped out a two story window and never returned. I recall my mother bathing me when I was five years old and me crying because the bath water was too cold. In response to my crying, she turned the hot water on full force and stood silent, shampooing my hair, while I writhed in pain from the scalding water. Another time, she threw me head first down a long hallway. I slid full speed along the floor until my face hit the door jamb and split my lip. Then she comforted me, barely. Over four years into this grim existence when I was in fourth grade, I recall thinking, “Everything I care about goes away.” This thought was foremost and forward in my mind, over and over and over again. I did not know words such as abandonment, abuse, trauma. I just knew, somewhere deep within that nothing was permanent, that everything I cared about would be

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removed. I did not know, nor could I have understood then, how that recognition of “everything I care about goes away” would lie unexamined yet acutely alive within the inner core of my being for many, many long years to come. Five years into this painful existence, my father, finally having collected enough evidence of abuse and neglect, went to court and received full custody of all three of his children. In late summer of 1964, Jessica and I and our older brother Aaron, were together again, as a family, with our father and his new wife Jillian. My mother became a distant and repugnant tortured figure in my mind. She was a woman to be feared and reviled not only for what she had done but for all that she had failed to do. It was not just her acts of commission but her acts of omission: failing to be present, failing to acknowledge, speak to, or invest in the lives of her children, in particular this child. During those dark neglected years, I parented myself and attempted to parent my younger sister Jessica. Living within a self-created fantasy world, reading fairy tales, escaping into a world of books, and looking forward to visits from my father were my only respites from those dismal years. When I was eleven years old, a year after my father was awarded custody of his three children, my mother had contacted my father and asked to see me. I had not seen her since my father was awarded custody a year earlier. She was living in a small one room apartment, two blocks off the ocean in Manhattan Beach, little more than a mile from where we were living. I recall my father mentioning my mother, us getting into his car, taking a short drive, and then exiting the vehicle. We entered a small dank one room apartment. My mother, dressed in a worn cotton house-dress was sitting, as always, in a dark corner inhaling long drags on her ever present cigarette. The blinds were drawn and all I saw was the glowing tip of her cigarette. I stood quietly and nervously next to my father. Suddenly, my mother advanced, caged and wailing, pulled me toward her, crying and moaning, a wounded animal, clutching me, grabbing me, rocking me, howling long and low, guttural roars emitting from somewhere deep within her, a desperate, dying beast. I screamed. And screamed. I was terrified. My father said, “Ray, stop it! You’re scaring her!” My mother continued clutching me, pawing me, wailing, moaning. I was shaking, screaming. My father exploded, “God Damn It, Ray, Stop!” I looked to my father, my eyes large and terrified. I reached for him. He pried me from my mother’s clutches, all the while beseeching my mother to release me. I was in my father’s arms, Safe. We drove silently the mile home. Some months later when I had turned twelve, I was alone at home, running around in my bathing suit and a t-shirt, chatting and laughing with friends on

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the phone. I heard a knock at the front door. I ran to the door and opened it. Standing before me were three adults I didn’t at first recognize. Then I realized it was Al and Eleanor Cohen, my mother’s cousins. Eleanor pulled my mother from behind her and pushed her toward me. My mother was a limp rag doll. Eleanor propped her up. My mother’s eyes were dark and sunken, her face ravaged and gray. Eleanor said, “Remember, this is your mother.” I stared, ashamed of this woman, my mother. I was a deer in the headlights, paralyzed, mute. I thought, “My mother? I don’t have a mother. I am motherless.” Then Al said, “Remember, you are Jewish.” I didn’t know I was Jewish. I didn’t know that at all. I thought of my fourth grade year in elementary school. With financial support from her family, my mother had rented yet again another apartment, (my mother moved at least once if not twice a year, trying to make a “new start”) this time in a very Jewish neighborhood near Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. I recalled attending the nearby elementary school and arriving on particular school days when nearly every one of the school children was absent. I sat by myself in a classroom with a minuscule handful of other pupils and asked the teacher why no students were present at school. The answer, of course, was that they were all at home with their families honoring special and sacred Jewish Holy Days. And I was at school, a ragged ill-kempt young girl, feeling as if I were a heathen and an outcast. A very observant Jewish family owned the apartment building where I lived with my mother and younger sister. I recollect on occasion going to this family’s home and playing with their young daughters who were close in age to me. One time in particular, I remember playing with dolls in the girls’ bedroom. Something happened. I have no idea what. But the mother of the family came storming into the bedroom, yelling and screaming in a language (Yiddish?) that I did not understand. I did, however, understand that I was to leave their home and never return. To this day, I do not know what it was all about. Had I inadvertently performed some terribly non-kosher act such as pulling a ham and cheese sandwich out of my pocket? Or was it something more? Something about my mother’s unseemly behavior? Something about my mother arriving home late at night with men she’d picked up at bars? I’ll never know. All I knew was that I was no longer welcome in that home. Again, I believed there something wrong with me. Not once, not ever, had my mother spoken to me about her being Jewish. I was remotely, vaguely aware that I was half-Jewish (whatever that meant) and that it was a shameful thing. Because of my gentile father, I was a halfbreed.

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Standing at the door looking at Al and Eleanor and my mother, I remembered too a time when I had spent a week at Eleanor’s home (she had been very kind to me) and she had introduced me to her father, my great-uncle Abe (Abraham). She brought me to his apartment and introduced me as “Razel’s daughter, Anne.” Abe stared at me, an expression of anger and profound disapproval in his eyes. He never acknowledged me nor spoke a word to me. There was apparently some “thing” that was unacceptable about who I was and what I was. I remembered all of this, these shameful and hurtful experiences as I looked at Eleanor and Al and my mother. I remained a mute and motionless deer in the headlights. I said nothing and closed the door.

Chapter Four

Lee and I did develop a more personal relationship. I saw him off and on at the Bright Angel Lodge employee cafeteria at dinnertime. And then one sunny June afternoon as I was walking the back roads of Grand Canyon Village among the aromatic pine and juniper trees, Lee came looking for me. Driving his 1964 yellow Chevy Impala, he pulled along side and asked if I wanted a ride. I accepted. We drove aimless miles along the rim roads, talking, getting to know each other. Afternoon waned into evening, and then into dinner and then into late evening. We had spent many hours that day talking, laughing, walking, eating, and more talking. After that first long day together, we spent every evening together, every evening, that is, when Lee was not guiding an overnight mule train into the Canyon. He worked days; I worked nights at the Hopi House. Every evening when he was “on-top” he pulled his Chevy Impala into the parking spot in front of the Hopi House and waited for me to complete my shift. We had dinner together and talked into the wee hours of the morning. We talked marriage early on. I foresaw problems in our relationship, but I ignored them. Lee was very politically conservative, I quite liberal. I valued education; Lee verbalized that “college is stupid. It’s for people who have no common sense.” Lee’s background was very “blue collar,” mine very “white collar.” Lee had been a wanderer and a nomad, floating from job to job, state to state, nothing really suiting him, nothing tying him to any particular community or group. His parents still lived in western New York, where Lee was born and raised, his father Frank a heavy duty factory mechanic in Niagara Falls and his mother Doris a stay at home mother, until her youngest was in high school, then she, too, did factory work. 19

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My father taught me to value education, keep an open mind, to excel in all I did, to aim for the stars, to dream my dreams, and to be achievement oriented. That doesn’t mean I accomplished all those things or that I was mature enough to grasp these ideals and then make them manifest in my life, but that paradigm dwelled somewhere within me. Yet despite our differences, at least Lee was present. No one else was. I had a mother, really only biological for all intents and purposes. I still had no relationship with her. I adored my father. He had been my primary parent, but being both mother and father to his three children for many years had taken its toll. He was present but weary too and struggling with his own life crises. And then my brother Aaron had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was nineteen, so most of my father’s “spare” time over the past seven years, since I was thirteen, had been devoted to “saving” my brother, his only son, from the ravages of schizophrenia. As we all later learned, there is no “saving” a loved one from a severe and chronic mental illness. And still there was the little girl voice inside of me that repeated, “Everything I care about goes away.” And indeed many things had gone away: my mother, and now my brother, and in some ways my father, who could be selfabsorbed, often more concerned and consumed with his own needs than the needs of his children. I did not want to feel that “everything goes away” feeling any more. I had had enough of instability and mental illness. And I had had enough of leaning upon the good-will of others to provide a stable platform for me to perch. I was tired of being the motherless child, pecking crumbs from other daughters’ mothers, hoping to bask in the brief and fleeting maternal shadow of reluctant surrogate mothers. I wanted to create my own life, my own security, my own adult world where I could assure stability and know, with a certainty, that everything I cared about would never go away. I would control my destiny. I would never hurt, never feel that everything I care about goes away feeling again. Lee and I continued to see each other over the summer. On non-working days, we took long drives through high mountain meadows and tall stretching stands of ponderosa pine along the winding eighty mile road to Flagstaff. We’d spend the day shopping, browsing, eating, discovering new places. We always ended our Flagstaff trip at a local grocery store, sizing up a ripe cantaloupe or watermelon to bring back to the Grand Canyon for that evening’s late night treat. I was drawn to all that was Lee, all that was male: he smelled of sweat and earth, red sand and Colorado river water, leather and alfalfa hay, clean Palmolive soap and English Leather. His look was Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, blue cotton work shirts, clear Arizona sky-blue eyes and thick black hair. He was all I wanted. Nothing else mattered.

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Still, in late August I decided to return to Brigham Young University and complete my junior year of college. Lee would continue his work at the Grand Canyon and would join me in Provo sometime in the coming year. We would be married, find an apartment, and I would complete my senior year with him by my side. It sounded like a logical solution at the time. I could have my cake and eat it too. But logic had nothing to do with how I was feeling. Lee and I said a very tearful and heart-wrenching good-bye at the Greyhound bus station in Flagstaff. I cried the entire ten hours from Flagstaff to Provo. The bus driver, a mature fatherly sort of man, knowing something was amiss, invited me to sit in the seat directly behind him. I spilled my heart: I was in love with this cowboy, but I couldn’t possibly give up college. I couldn’t possibly make a life at a national park and live in a trailer in a park service trailer court. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. And underneath it all, the part I didn’t share with my fatherly bus driver, was that I knew Lee and I had serious differences about how to live a life, about who we were and what we were all about. But Lee was the first man with whom I’d had a relationship that was not unrequited. There was, finally, reciprocation. Like a lot of young women, I naively believed love would conquer all. Having Lee, being in his arms, feeling him warm beside me, building whatever kind of life together, was more important than a college degree, than propriety or common sense, than self-control or self-modulation. I had been alone and ostracized for too many years. I needed companionship; I needed a place to belong. I needed a family. I needed to love and be loved. I needed to explore the undiscovered parts of my femaleness. I had too long looked to my father to define the parameters of my personhood, with him not fully able to understand nor nurture the woman in me. I over-identified with the male. I now needed to find identity within the female. And I needed to know that not everything I cared about would go away. Lee’s love and commitment would never go away. And even if it did, I simply would not allow it. A week after returning to Provo and BYU, I called the Grand Canyon and located Lee at Phantom Ranch. “Will you come and pick me up? I want to come back.” He said, “I’ll be on-top tomorrow at noon. I’ll leave for Provo then and see you tomorrow night.” I was registered for my classes and had paid my tuition, but college life now seemed empty and meaningless. I was sharing a house with four other young women. I had gotten together with people I had known from the previous year, but volleyball games and late summer barbeques, fun and sport, now held no purpose. I had spent a summer at the Grand Canyon and Lee and I had connected and had shared those months of warm companionship. I

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made up my mind: I was returning to the deep red Canyon, to the pinyon, the juniper, the pine, and Lee. The next day I waited by the upstairs window. That evening Lee arrived, driving his old yellow Chevy Impala. If I was going to recant, this was the time to do it. I could tell him, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m sorry you drove all this way for nothing,” and send him back to the Grand Canyon. It was not too late to return to my classes and to my university life. But I did not send him away. I fell into his arms. We held each long and hard. He slept on the floor next to my bed that evening. The next morning we loaded the Chevy Impala and returned to the shadowed yawning and mysterious vastness of our mystical Canyon. My father had visited me at the Grand Canyon that summer. He met Lee, was pleasant to him, but later in private he urged me not to marry him. He believed we were ill-suited, that there were significant differences in who each of us was and where each of us was going. I heard him, but I didn’t hear him. I had no idea what my father was talking about. I thought he was dead wrong, completely off target. Or maybe it wasn’t about Lee; maybe my father wouldn’t like any man I dated. When I returned to the Grand Canyon, I had a job and employee housing waiting for me. Lee continued guiding the mule trips. I worked at the transportation desk, selling bus tours and mule trips. Lee waited for me to get off work each evening, just as he had waited for me all summer at the Hopi House. We had our differences but we were young and resilient and we loved each other so we remained connected. We were married November 2, 1974, at the Shrine of the Ages Chapel, by our pastor Ray Ketring with two witnesses, Karen and Arden Kessel, attending. At the appointed time, Karen and Arden had not arrived. Apparently they had misunderstood our request to be witnesses. Finally, we reached them by phone. They had just returned home from a day of deer hunting. They arrived minutes later, still dressed in their hunting garb. Pastor Ketring asked that Lee and I face each other and hold each other’s hand. He provided wise and sage advice about tolerance and forgiveness, about loyalty and commitment. He admonished us that our marriage would not always be easy, that we should at all times try our best to communicate, to show compassion to each other, to honor all that was good and noble in our relationship. He advised that when the time was right and we decided to have children that we set a good example to these children, be present and available to our children and remain always present and supportive of each other. Lee and I both shed gentle tears of happiness as we looked into each others eyes. Lee was twenty-six years old. I was twenty.

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Some friends from our church gave us a simple but warm wedding reception. I have pictures of that evening at the Kessel’s home. I wore a light blue skirt and sweater, Lee a western dress shirt, Wrangler dress jeans, a tie and polished cowboy boots. We look incredibly young and optimistic. Lee is lean and smiling. I am happy and playful. The future seemed bright and hopeful. Later that evening, Lee and I retreated to a small rustic cabin on the rim of the Canyon. A warm red fire crackled in the fireplace. By morning, six inches of snow had fallen along the rim and into the Canyon, covering the rough red rocks with feathers of soft white powder. That morning we flew to Buffalo, New York, where I met my in-laws, Doris and Frank McClure. They were the salt of the earth. Doris was gruff, earthy, and good-hearted. Frank was quiet and shy, but wise and insightful. We spent a week’s honeymoon with them, touring Niagara Falls and Grand Island, meeting extended family members, and then returned to the Canyon. Now was our time to build a life together.

Chapter Five

Our first home was a thirty-five foot long by eight feet wide trailer, parked in a trailer court in the little community of Tusayan, just outside the national park boundaries. We rented the trailer from Elden Hagen, a tall lanky ruggedly handsome long-haul truck driver who wasn’t the most responsible landlord nor the most responsible family man. He eventually abandoned his third wife, a black-haired beauty named Sandy, for the lure of an open road and of a life that demanded no responsibility. Lee and I had little money. He was still riding mules for minimum wage and now that the tourist season was coming to its end, he had few riders and fewer gratuities. During the peak tourist season, Lee made more money in tips than he did in wages. But now we were living strictly on his paycheck and my paycheck from the transportation desk, with my pay also being minimum wage. We hadn’t given much thought to the practicalities of a married life. Lee’s Chevy Impala sputtered its last breath so for five hundred dollars we invested in a nine year old red GMC three-quarter ton pick-up truck. Lee owned a very handsome and spirited dark bay quarter-horse named Conejo and had recently transported him from a stable in the Phoenix area to some nearby acreage in Tusayan. We needed to devise some mode of transportation to traverse the rough pot-holed mud and dirt forest service roads daily to feed and water Conejo. So five hundred dollars went for the truck and that was it for our savings. Lee found a discarded used mattress in the trailer court and it became our bed. No bed frame, no springs, just a mattress on the floor of our one minuscule bedroom in our tiny trailer. But we were happy. We worked hard all week and had our Friday night Mexican dinners at Josie’s. Josie’s was adjacent to the Tusayan bar, and it was a lively bunch of drinkers and cowboys every Fri24

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day night, but we had no interest in joining the festivities. We were content with our simple life together and the few married friends we met through our church, young couples like ourselves who were newly married and scraping to get by on seasonal work at the Grand Canyon. Our first winter together in Tusayan turned out to be a winter of record cold, weeks of twenty and thirty below zero. All the pipes in our trailer froze. The propane heater quit. We had no money to repair the heater and Elden, our landlord, refused to help, so we hauled water by hand and for heat we opened the door to our small propane gas oven and turned it on high. It was terribly cold but we survived. To this day, I’m amazed that we didn’t die of asphyxiation from the fumes emitted from the propane cook stove. Soon the Christmas season was upon us and the temperatures continued to dip, colder and colder, no reprieves. And I wasn’t feeling well, not well at all. I complained to Lee that I was “sick and very nauseated. It doesn’t matter what I eat or drink, I still feel like throwing-up. Even the smell of food makes me sick.” We were sure I had a terrible flu, so I toughed it out for another week. Lee and I had never really discussed birth control before our marriage. We figured we’d have a child sooner or later, with, perhaps, that time being a little sooner than later. In all of my book learning, I had read about birth control and even had an intellectual knowledge about birth control pills, IUD’s, condoms, and other methods, but it was all book-learning (maybe Lee was right about “book-learners” having no common-sense) and dwelling in my idealistic dreamy tower, I never thought about the reality of birth control or how it might possibly pertain to me. I knew sexual intercourse begat pregnancy, but I hadn’t thought that my sexual intercourse with my husband would begat, so soon, a pregnancy. I knew I had the plumbing. I just didn’t know exactly how it worked. On Christmas day I couldn’t take it anymore. All I had done for the past week was drag myself to work, spend half my shift in the bathroom vomiting, come home and vomit some more. There was nothing left to vomit except for bitter bile, and I was severely dehydrated. Lee loaded me into our pick-up truck and drove me to a small hospital in the community of Williams, “Gateway to the Grand Canyon,” Arizona, sixty miles south of Tusayan. Dr. Vasquez, whom I had never met before, was on duty at the emergency room. Lee said, “My wife is sick, she’s been vomiting all week.” Dr. Vasquez thought this was all very interesting. He asked me a few questions and then had me pee into a cup. I lay on the emergency room table scared and praying for relief, and if there was no immediate relief, I’d ask Dr. Vasquez to do whatever it took to put me out of my misery. Shortly, Dr. Vasquez returned to the emergency room and said, “Anne, you’re pregnant; you’re going to have a baby. What do you two want to do

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about it.” Lee and I looked at each other, relieved to have an answer but shocked at what the answer was. We answered, “Well Dr. Vasquez, what we’re going to do is have a baby.” And I knew then that there was nothing Dr. Vasquez could do to put me out of my misery. But he did admit me to the hospital, where I lived off IV fluids for three days, and then I went home to our heatless, water-less cramped trailer and continued vomiting night and day for the next three and a half months. Nonetheless, I was a trooper and was up every morning, green around the gills, driving into the park for my job at the transportation desk, making frequent runs to the women’s restroom trying to find relief from my severe ongoing bout of morning sickness. Finally I was able to stomach saltine crackers, slices of cheddar cheese, and, oddly enough, sweetened condensed milk. Every evening after work, I sat down in our tiny kitchenette and spooned out an entire can of condensed milk. I had never before and have never since had any desire to eat sweetened condensed milk in any form. The winter drug on, with no relief from the riveting cold. Lee spent hours outside defrosting our water lines. We’d have running water for an afternoon and then the lines would freeze again at night. We never could afford to repair the furnace, so we continued to keep warm by running the gas burners and gas oven all night. Still if we left a glass of water overnight by our mattress on the floor, it would be frozen solid by morning. But we were up early every morning, in the bitter cold, getting dressed and off to work. I had no winter boots and we had no money to buy any, so every morning I donned a pair of leather moccasins and then wrapped each moccasined foot in a plastic bag (for water-proofing), holding the plastic bags over the moccasins with rubber bands. Then off to work I went. Tusayan, at a 7000 foot elevation, had experienced not only a severely cold winter but a colder than usual spring. Finally by early June spring arrived and in time came the warming summer weather. Lee and I found a slightly smaller but better-functioning trailer to rent inside the park boundaries. We loved our little trailer beneath the ponderosa pine. As the weather continued to warm, I grew more pregnant, more rounded and full. Our trips down rough forest service dirt roads in the warming weather to feed and water Conejo were now a delight. The truck windows were fully open to the spring and summer sun, and there was a honey light breeze and the soft smells of rich soil and fragrant pine needles. The pick-up truck provided a rough ride, but I happily hung on, protecting my ever expanding belly. We had survived a challenging winter, our first winter together. Now life was good. I continued my work at the transportation desk; Lee was back in full-swing, guiding one-day and overnight trips into the Canyon, and with the

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tourists returning to the Canyon in droves, Lee was also receiving generous tips for being an entertaining and helpful guide. We had no medical insurance, but Dr. Vasquez and the Williams’ hospital allowed us to make small but very regular monthly payments. Our evenings after work were spent playing board games, Yahtzee, UNO, checkers, and chess. Lee did saddle repair work in his spare time, and I discovered the joy of cooking and baking. Although I was not talented nor interested in most traditional homemaking skills, such as sewing, knitting, or crocheting, I came to love and feel a great surge of creative satisfaction when I cooked and baked. I gathered recipes and cookbooks by the score, and Lee became my very willing and quite satisfied guinea pig. In time I became a fairly accomplished cook. Although I was healthy and was having a routine pregnancy, and even though I was no longer nauseated on a regular basis, it seemed that pregnancy and I just didn’t agree. I was often tired, felt dizzy at times, and did not hold up well under the blooming summer heat. So the beginning of July, I quit my job. Our baby was due the latter part of August. I was deeply in-love with my husband that summer. He worked long hard hours to support us and to pay for our expected child. He never complained. He came home hot and sweaty and tired, covered with red dusty Canyon dirt, still his eyes shone crystal blue and clear, his smile wide and shy, his muscled frame lean and strong. We slept close every night, in each other’s arms, warm and secure in our love and commitment to each other. When he was gone overnight to Phantom Ranch, I’d clean our little trailer, making everything fresh and cozy for his return. Then I’d don my moccasins early the next afternoon and walk the mile through the sap-praying pine, through the wild sage and rabbit brush, through the red manzanita and sinewy pinyon and shaggy barked juniper to the wide sandy trail where the mule guides traveled to return their unruly train to the mule barn. Upon reaching the trail, I perched my very pregnant self upon my favorite red rock and waited for the jingle-jangle of bits and spurs. For the first while all was quiet. I listened to ravens cawing, blue-jays scolding, and the hot dry winds sighing a lonesome song through the ponderosa pine. Then faintly I heard a distant thunder, a jingle-jangle, and then saw a thick cloud of red Canyon dust. Out of the dust and the cacophony appeared a lean dark-haired tanned figure, wearing dusty worn Wrangler jeans, a blue chambray shirt, chaps, silver spurs, and heavy leather cowboy boots. A rowdy, raucous, boisterous team of mules behind him, Lee would see me, then bring the team to a stand-still, their hooves dancing in the dirt, them snorting and threatening to bolt. Looking down at me on my red rock, Lee would say, “Hello, Anne,” and then his shy smile widened into a warm deep

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resonant embrace. I read every ounce of contentment and desire in his eyes. I embraced him in return with the shining yellow-blue sunflowers in my eyes. Our love was pure, our commitment sure. “I’ve got to unsaddle, feed, and water the mules. I want to talk to Gene about my schedule next week. I’ll see you at home in a couple of hours.” And then he, my strong gentle sweet loving husband, was gone in a cloud of red smoke. I took my time wandering back through the sage and pine and pinyon, savoring the pungent aroma of the high desert forest, enjoying the wild birdsong, feeling the goodness of being alive, basking in the joy of having a companion and building a life together. Nobody told, me but I knew I was having a boy baby. Lee and I had named him Oliver, after his great-grandfather McClure, the moment we found out I was pregnant that December day at the Williams hospital. To us, all through the pregnancy, he had been “Ollie.” We spoke of Ollie every day and looked forward to meeting him in August. August arrived and Ollie’s due date of August nineteenth was upon us, but there was no sign of labor and no other signs of imminent arrival. But we knew that Ollie would surely arrive soon, so Lee traded daily with the other mule guides to take their one-day trip into the Canyon and they took his overnight trip to Phantom Ranch. He did this the entire week that I was well overdue to give birth to our son. Finally, after trading shifts for a full week, Lee came home early the morning of August twenty-sixth and said, “I can’t trade anymore shifts. Gene told me I have to go to Phantom Ranch today and if I don’t I’ll lose my job.” ‘But, Lee, you can’t leave, I felt some contractions last night and I just know that I’ll have the baby soon.” He looked full into my eyes, “Anne, I don’t want to leave. I talked to Gene and told him the situation, but he absolutely will not let me trade anymore shifts, besides some of the other guides are upset and they don’t want to make any extra Phantom trips if they don’t have to.” Lee gave me a hug and left. “Call me tonight at Phantom, let me know what’s going on.” I spent that day alone in our little trailer beneath the ponderosa pine. The late summer monsoonal moisture was in full action. As the wind blew and the thunder and lightening roared and the heavy rains fell, I went through the few baby clothes I had for Ollie, made up his little crib with a soft cotton sheet and a small cotton blanket. I napped and rested, praying that our baby would wait one more night so that his father could be present for his birth. But it was not to be. By four o’clock that afternoon, I was having intermittent and then regular contractions. I continued resting at home and then at eight that evening, I called my friend Paula Bundy. She had been alerted that Lee was not at home and knew

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that I might need assistance. “The contractions are eight minutes apart. What should I do?” “Come over now. Do you need me to pick you up?” “No, I can drive,” I answered. From Paula’s house I called Lee at Phantom Ranch. “Hi, I’m in labor and I guess I’m on my way to the Williams Hospital. I miss you. I wish you were here.” He responded, “Have Paula call me later. As soon as I’m on top, I’ll be on my way to Williams.” By midnight, Paula and I and Dr. Vasquez had arrived at the Williams Hospital. I was definitely in labor, but I was not progressing, meaning my cervix was not dilating. All that night I contracted, walking the halls of the hospital, and doing any other thing that Paula or Dr. Vasquez asked me to do in order to push the process along. The morning of August twenty-seventh I was still in full-blown labor, hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, and my body was still not cooperating. Lots and lots of solid hard labor, contractions every few minutes, but still no progress. All that day of the twenty-seventh, I continued laboring. By three in the afternoon, Lee had reached the rim of the Canyon and, after a quick shower, was on his way to Williams. He arrived at five. Still lots and lots of hard contractions but there was neither hide nor hair of Oliver. I was at the end of my tether. Going on thirty-six hours without sleep, I begged the doctor to do something, anything. Finally, at eight that evening, after more than twentyfour hours of hard labor and thirty-six sleepless hours, he gave me some pain medication and called the Flagstaff Medical Center. An ambulance was on its way. The rest is a blur. I vaguely remember riding in the ambulance the thirty miles to Flagstaff with Lee at my side. I have dim memories of an emergency room, of doctors and nurses scurrying everywhere, and of being wheeled into an operating room. And then sometime later, tidal waves of pain and then Lee telling me that we have a ten-and-a-half pound Ollie. Ten-and-a-half-pounds! Now it made sense. I could not deliver a ten-and-a-half pound baby. I wasn’t built that way. But how could I have produced a ten-and-a-half pound baby when I’d only gained fourteen pounds during the pregnancy? Now that did not make sense. And then more tidal waves of pain from the c-section. Finally I slipped into a blissful drug induced sleep. Later a nurse handed me a note: “I’m proud of you. We have a big Ollie. I love you, Lee.” Then more blissful sleep. About two a.m., another nurse came to my room. “Would you like to see your baby?” she asked. “Baby?!! What baby?!!” “Uh, I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.” I had looked forward to not being pregnant anymore. I was anxious to get back to my “real” life, my “normal” life, where I was “Numero Uno,” where all I had to do was worry about myself, my needs, my wants. I

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was uncomfortable being pregnant, the nausea, the dizziness, the labor. But, boy, was I glad it was over now. In a couple of weeks I’d be back to my old self. I’d own my body again. This foreign agent would not be invading my space anymore. It had been an interesting nine months and I’d survived, but finally now I could reclaim my freedom. I hadn’t yet seen a baby. Someone told me I had a baby. Whatever that meant! I was exhausted and in lots of pain. So I said, “Get Real, nurse, I’ve been through a pretty tough ordeal here. I don’t have the time to be messing with a baby! I’ve got to get some sleep.” “But Mrs. McClure, your baby is in the nursery and he’d like to meet his mother.” “What? Uh, maybe, okay, I guess.” I’d never had a mother; I’d received no maternal nurturing in my life; I didn’t know what “maternal” meant. I’d never had an interest in a baby, ever. Never held a baby, ever. But now this nurse, who I didn’t know from Adam, was going to bring this child to me, supposedly a child I’d given birth to, via c-section, while I was out cold on an operating table. Someone had made a terrible mistake, and it wasn’t me! Minutes later, the nurse handed me a swaddled bundle. I was in such pain from the surgery, I could barely move. I reached for the bundle and pulled back the soft cotton blanket to one side. Inside this bundle was a very chubby baby boy with a full head of black hair and intense, darting very angry eyes. Not only had I had enough, but he, too, had clearly had enough. It had been a bumpy ride for both of us. Gingerly, with my c-section delivering mass amounts of unbridled pain and tenderness, I managed a quarter-roll onto my side, and laid my baby on the pillow next to me. I sang him a lullaby over and over again, assuring him that everything would be fine. We fell asleep together. Oliver became the light and love of our life. He had a well-developed and off-beat sense of humor. He was smart, strong-willed, creative, and loaded with personality. Our whole world revolved around him. I did not return to work; I chose full-time motherhood. The minute Lee arrived home from work, our first topic of conversation was Ollie and what cute and funny things he had done that day. Still I had no idea how to mother my son. “What did it mean to mother? What did a mother do?” I knew I did not want to behave as my mother had. “So, what should I do? Do I do the opposite of what she did? Do I polarize my behavior? Is there a middle ground,” I asked myself. I was clueless. Lee and I attended church each Sunday with a small group of like-minded worshipers at the small chapel, Shrine of the Ages, where we had been married, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Every Sunday Lee and I would arrive for our services and I would have my little/big Oliver in my arms. And

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every Sunday, I would surreptitiously eye the other young mothers and observe what they did with their babies. Karma had combed her baby’s hair into a little curl on top of her head. And Caron held her baby on her lap and rocked him gently back and forth. Next week my little Oliver had a curl on the top of his head and I rocked him gently on my lap. Then the next week, I watched Evelyn walk the back hall, soothing her crying baby. And Marilyn had her baby swaddled in a soft blanket. So, sure enough, the next week, I walked the back hall with my crying Oliver and had him swaddled in a soft blanket. This is how I learned. I looked to other women. These women were my teachers. I was a shy woman, a neophyte mother, a young woman with little confidence and feelings of profound inadequacy, but come hell or high water, I was going to do a better job than my mother had. And despite my lack of innate maternal nurturing skills and my trepidations about being a mother, I did my best. I was fiercely protective of my little boy, but I was also impatient and quick to anger. When Lee arrived home from work each afternoon and we had briefed each other about our day, I was out the door for a brisk walk. I was not endowed with the laid-back easy kind of temperament that would allow me to “go with the flow.” I was easily frustrated and resentful if life didn’t go “my way.” Lee picked up the slack. He held Oliver in his arms and rocked him for a long time every evening. With the emergency c-section, the medical bills were mounting and we still had no medical insurance. Oliver’s birth cost over three thousand dollars. But Lee and I were stalwart and committed in shouldering our financial responsibilities even though we had little in the way of financial means. Each of our creditors (multiple doctors, hospitals, ambulance) was contacted and payment arrangements were agreed upon. Every month, like clockwork, I mailed small but acceptable amounts of money to each of the doctors and hospitals. We also paid a ten percent tithe to our church. And, amazingly, there was always just enough left over for food and rent and utilities.

Chapter Six

We lived a life of simplicity and diligent labor. It was a fulfilling life, a meaningful life. Our child meant everything to us; he brought us joy and laughter. Lee and I felt connected and were one in purpose. I came to know there was someone, my child, who was more important than me, that someone outside of my own egocentric whims and wants took precedence. I no longer dwelled at the center of my universe. That December, four months after Oliver’s birth, late one cold snowy evening, Lamar Shakespeare, the park service trail crew supervisor, arrived at our door and asked to speak with Lee. He offered Lee a seasonal nine month position with the park service. We were thrilled and Lee readily accepted. The job paid two dollars more an hour than Fred Harvey. Life was looking up. The trail crew employees maintained all trails both in the Canyon and on the rim. The rim trails were easy; Lee reported to work with the rest of the crew, drove a truck to the designated rim trail that needed maintenance, spent the day clearing and rebuilding the trail and was home by dinnertime. But not all the maintained trails were rim trails. Many of the trails were in the inner Canyon. There were only two ways to access the inner Canyon trails, by foot or by mule. And once those trails were accessed by foot or by mule, there was no quick or easy way out. It took a long time to get where you were going and a long time to find your way out. When Lee wasn’t working on-top, he was gone for ten days in the Canyon, then four days at home, with the cycle repeating itself over and over. The four days at home were just long enough for him to unpack, wash laundry, grocery shop, and re-pack for another ten day stint in the Canyon. We 32

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wives called it the “ten-and-four-blues.” We were lonesome for our husbands and alone with our children. The first day of each ten day stint, I marked my calendar, checking off each day as it passed. Ten days seemed interminable; ten days would never pass. The nights were long and lonely. The days crept by at a snail’s pace. Then Lee was home and the four days were too soon gone and he was leaving again. In March, when Oliver was seven months old, and Lee was working a ten day stretch in the Canyon, my friend Karma and I decided to leave our babies with women friends and hike to Phantom Ranch to spend the night with our husbands. I had been breast-feeding Oliver but weaned him rather abruptly. Karma did likewise. It was an exceptionally clear brisk spring morning when Karma and I arrived at the head of the Kaibab trail. We looked at each other, and I said, “Do you really want to do this? Should we turn back and go home? Will our babies be okay without us?” Karma answered, “Let’s do it.” We were on our way. The trail was a steep seven-and-a half miles to the Colorado River and then from the river another mile to Phantom Ranch. It was deliciously liberating to be free of responsibility. I would never be the free young woman I had been when I was a college student. I now had a child and that would forever change my life. But at this moment, traversing the steep red earth of the Kaibab trail, breathing in the brisk clean air, swinging my arms, feeling a sense of abandon, embracing the red raw energy of the Canyon, I was free. Lee and Lawrence, Karma’s husband, did not know of our plans. When we found our way to their cabin, they were surprised but very happy to see us. We all ate dinner together and played chess and checkers that evening. Night at the bottom of the Canyon was warm and soft, gentle breezes stirring through the leafing cottonwoods, the Colorado River a distant thunder, a rhythmic ebb and flow. Karma and I hiked out early the next morning, the day of my twenty-second birthday. My feet were terribly blistered from ill-fitting boots, so Lee patched me up with moleskin and heavy socks. Karma and I hiked out on the Bright Angel Trail, a somewhat longer trail than the Kaibab but a bit less steep. We followed the trail along the Colorado River for two miles and then left the river and began our steep ascent through the barren winding corkscrew and then through the moist plush oasis of Indian Gardens on the plateau and then upward steeply through the switchbacks of Jacob’s Ladder, and onward til we finally reached the weathered rock rim, lined with crags of wild sage, pinyon, juniper, and pine. I never tired of the raw red and smokey lavender expanse of the Canyon, its unyielding character, its absolute and definitive integrity. Its unflinching

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honesty. It was both endearing and menacing. A life giver and a life taker. For some reason, a reason that still to this day remains mostly unarticulated, the Canyon has always nourished some emotional and spiritual desire within me. It has been both mother and father, both yin and yang. Solidity and fluidity. In June, three months after my hike to Phantom Ranch, I felt an old familiar nausea, with the intensity of the nausea increasing daily. I didn’t need Dr. Vasquez or a trip to the Williams Hospital to tell me what was happening. I was a pathetic and wretched sight, traveling from bed to bathroom, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting. Miserable, insufferable, brutal morning sickness. I needed to be hospitalized, but we still had no access to medical insurance. And I didn’t dare incur anymore medical bills, as we were still making payments for Oliver’s birth. And I knew, too, that I would have a second c-section and that, coupled with the prenatal care, would be very expensive. So I toughed it out. Barely. Lee helped with our ten month old Oliver when he wasn’t working, but I, miserable and incapacitated, was mostly alone with Ollie in a unkempt trailer. Somehow I survived and by September I was back on my feet. Again nobody told me, but this time I knew I would have a girl and her name would be Elizabeth. Although the responsibilities were many, Lee and I remained close, still mutually committed to the hard work of supporting and raising a family. Certainly this is what we wanted, or at least I thought we wanted it. Our marriage was interesting, perhaps typical, perhaps not. I was quite verbal and hot-tempered, a blathering bundle of emotions and feelings. I felt deeply, but the feeling that I most easily emoted was anger, with anger being the safest, least vulnerable emotion to express. I would lash out, alienate Lee, and make sure that I hurt him before he hurt me. Not exactly the most humane manner of treating a loved one, but then again, secreted and unknown to me was my deep-seated fear of everything I cared about going away. I’d reject him before he rejected me. Lee’s personality was quieter, and outwardly gentler, but he could be cutting, remote, and cruel. He rarely expressed anger; he simply stuffed his anger and became withdrawn and distant. We rarely, if ever, verbalized or resolved our marital struggles. In many ways, we were polar opposites, yet we were compatible in one area, the bedroom. In that arena we spoke the same language, without ever having to talk about it. Lee continued his seasonal work with the park service trail crew, nine months employed, three months unemployed. His period of unemployment coincided with the last three months of my second pregnancy, November, December, and January. Elizabeth’s due date was February twelfth, but my doctor scheduled a caesarean section for February third. Lee delivered me to the Flagstaff hospital the afternoon of February second, then hurried the eighty

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miles back to the Grand Canyon to be with our almost eighteen month old Oliver. Early that next morning, I was wheeled into an operating room and at 7:42 a.m., my six pound eleven ounce baby daughter was born. I figured with a ten-and-a-half pound Oliver that I would surely have another large baby. But not my Elizabeth. She was a tiny little thing, long slender fingers, tiny features, and a wisp of blond fuzz covering her head. Lee arrived an hour later, stopping first to see our baby daughter in the nursery before coming to my room. “I couldn’t get here any sooner. Ollie didn’t want me to leave. I had to hold him on my lap for almost an hour.” Finally our friend Marilyn told Lee, “Just leave. He’ll be okay.” Shortly, Lee retrieved our little Elizabeth from the nursery and brought her to my room. I was fresh out of surgery and was feeling the effects of my caesarean-section, so I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to hold my daughter. Lee and I spent all morning and into the afternoon holding our little girl, amazed at her tininess and her tranquil peaceful personality. Oliver had been colicky and fussy from the get-go, not so with Elizabeth. She was a quiet and content little baby. Three days later, Lee returned to the Flagstaff hospital and brought Elizabeth and me home. My homecoming coincided with Lee’s first day back to work for the park service. And his first assignment was a ten day stay at the bottom of the Canyon. We were back to the good old ten-and-fours, ten days down and four days up. Off he’d go, and I was alone with a newborn and an eighteen month old toddler. I was awake night and day, doing the post-surgery shuffle up and down the hallway of our twelve by sixty foot mobile home. Up and down all night and all day. Just when I’d close my eyes and sink into a much needed sleep, Elizabeth awoke and was eager to nurse. And just when she took a much needed long nap during the day, Oliver was ready to play, eat lunch, or plain old want attention. When one slept the other was awake and vice-versa. Lee had four consecutive ten-and-fours that spring which made two months of him being gone, most of the time. And then there were many more off and on ten-and-fours during the rest of that nine month contract. Years later, Lee later told me that the best years of our marriage were the years when he worked for the park service trail crew doing the ten-and-fours. He loved the solitude of the Canyon, the aloneness, the bunking with the guys, playing chess, spending an evening soaking in the Bright Angel Creek. Those were difficult and lonely times for me. I needed Lee’s support; I needed help parenting. I needed companionship. I craved emotional intimacy (although I didn’t know that’s what it was called) and a sense of connection with my mate. I wanted to be together. Lee was content to be apart. But then he had a legitimate reason to be apart. His job demanded it. I fully understood.

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And we were close for the days he was home. He told me stories of his ten day trek, the interesting people he’d met at the bottom of the Canyon. At night, we snuggled close together. After Elizabeth was born, I got serious about birth control. I was very shy talking about sex or any related matter, like birth control, with my doctor, but I did manage to mumble some sort of unintelligible patter about the “unmentionable” and with me uncomfortable and turning a bright red, he and I reached an understanding about what I could do to keep from getting pregnant. Two weeks before Elizabeth was born, I made my last payment to the Flagstaff hospital for Oliver’s birth. Eighteen months after his birth, Oliver’s medical bills were paid in full. Now we needed to start paying for Elizabeth’s birth, which cost over four thousand dollars. In hindsight, I realize we could have applied for some sort of assistance from the state. With our meager income, we most likely would have been eligible for some help with our medical expenses. But I didn’t operate that way. I felt fully responsible for my choice to have children. I was an adult. They were my children and it was my responsibility, not the state’s, to provide for them. Maybe paying my own way helped me feel “worthy.” Helped me to feel not “less than.” I remember hearing, when I was a young girl living with my mother during those dismal years of neglect and abuse, that one of my mother’s family members, her wealthy older brother Myron, who had threatened to kill my father those many years ago when he married my mother, was sending her money every month. The sending of the money was shaded with overtones of shame and condescension, that we were a charity case, that we were neglected orphans living with a troubled mother. I had vowed as a young child that I would never be like my mother, that I would never expose my children to that kind of shame, that sort of humiliation. So pay the medical bills we did. Once again every month, like clockwork, I mailed checks to the various doctors and to the hospital. Elizabeth’s birth brought about subtle changes in our marriage. Certainly, the honeymoon was over. We were no longer newlyweds playing house. We were husband and wife and also mother and father to two young children, a mother and father who had many demands, including exacting medical bills to be paid. We were on a beer budget with absolutely no room for champagne tastes. But then many young couples experience demanding financial, employment, health, and relationship hardships, and turn those hardships into experiences that ultimately create a deeper, more meaningful bond. Not so with Lee and me. The changes were gradual, barely perceptible to me. But then I wasn’t yet willing or able to identify those changes, let alone vocalize or acknowledge the truth of those changes. There was no “one” thing that signaled trouble on

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our marital horizon. For Lee, in particular, it seemed a gradual decline, a restlessness, a disregard, an ennui and tedium toward the shackles of daily routine. He seemed less interested in the family. The children and I were burdensome. The children were, of course, demanding as children naturally are. They had many ongoing needs: love and discipline, nurturing, rest, food, attention, interaction, clean clothes, recreation. And I could be clingy and scared and also sharp and impatient and demanding. But then again those demands and irritations are most often part and parcel to family life. Lee worked many long hours, always holding some sort of second job for extra income. But then, why shouldn’t he? We needed the money. Still, I thought we could have gotten by with a little less money and a little more Lee. But he used work as an excuse to be away. “Anne, I’ve got work. I can’t afford to take a Saturday off.” And it wasn’t just Saturdays. He often found some reason to work in the evenings, or if he was home, he sat in front of the television, in the rocking chair with one or both children on his lap. That was often the only time he interacted with the children, on the rocking chair, watching TV. But then, again, how I could I blame him. He needed to financially support our growing family. He worked long hard hours. And I wasn’t always the most pleasant person to be with. I was frustrated from being alone with two children all day and often into the evening. I was angry and pent-up, unhappy with the direction my marriage was taking, unhappy and unfulfilled with unrelenting motherhood, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with few if any respites. I was finding it difficult to be kind and nurturing toward my husband. Actually I was finding it difficult to be kind and nurturing, period. Anger continued to be my most easily emotive feeling. Again, it was safest to be angry. I lashed out or pushed away, before Lee could push me away. Of course beneath the anger and discontent, I was hurt, but then I’d felt hurt and rejected all my life. So what else was new? And much like my father, I was more bark than bite. I would threaten and accuse and issue ultimatums. I was more than able to talk the talk but I was way too fearful, too dependent, and much too insecure to walk the walk. Lee figured this out fairly quickly. I gave away my power, even though I didn’t know I possessed any power, by retreating and retracting like the scared little girl I was. So we’d argue, or rather I’d argue. Lee remained mute, or he’d reiterate, “it ain’t gonna work, Anne,” meaning the marriage wasn’t going to endure. If he meant to hurt me, he did. And his words scared me, which was his intent. If it ain’t gonna work, then where does that leave me? Where does that leave my children? If it ain’t gonna work, then what am I gonna do? Am I going to be husband-less and rear my children with the shame of being father-less? No.

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That’s ridiculous! Lee’s just tired and irritable. He’s just saying that to blow off some steam. After all, he is under a lot of pressure to provide for our little family. I would do whatever it took to make sure Lee didn’t leave. And, of course, I told myself over and over again, Lee didn’t mean it. So we’d make-up, usually in the bedroom, with me eager to make amends for fear that he would leave, which was my greatest fear. Abandonment fears never die; they just linger, a festering devouring abscess. The underlying problems in our marriage were never addressed. And the underlying problems weren’t just about Lee’s emotional absence and increasing discontent with married life. It was more than that; it was about something else, something ill-defined and unarticulated within me. What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t know for many years to come, was that I didn’t have an identity, that I didn’t know who I was, where I came from, or where I was going. I dove into this marriage because I loved Lee but also because I needed to belong somewhere, and it seemed an easy and a quick fix to be somebody’s wife and then somebody’s mother. I had all kinds of desires and needs and pains, and unexamined anguish, that had nothing to do with Lee. This was nothing Lee could fix. I believed we had marital problems and we did, but each of us also had individual problems that we individually refused to examine. Lee had been a loner for years; he had moved from job to job to job, always living alone, always disliking having people in close proximity, always finding ways to remain inaccessible. I, on the other hand, craved connectedness, but I was terribly insecure and almost always felt that I was beneath others, or not worthy or less-than-others. I gave too much to relationships, shouldered too much responsibility, felt that any discord in a relationship was my fault. I was too quick to apologize and too quick to forgive, even when immediate forgiveness was not warranted. I did whatever I had to do to maintain the illusion, or delusion, of a relationship. Things in our marriage never “got-better.” They stayed the same, with an occasional spurt of connectedness, or things ever so gradually got worse. Lee left the park service trail crew and started working seasonally for the forest service, manning fire look-outs during the fire season, summers and falls. He had other part-time and seasonal jobs, and all of the jobs together made a living, generally a meager living, but a living. Occasionally I found part-time work, such as delivering newspapers, that didn’t interfere with my parental responsibilities and that brought in a little extra money. Despite occasional respites of feeling emotionally close and connected, Lee continued to appear disenchanted with the responsibilities and commitments of marriage and a family. He did what he needed to do grudgingly, usually with an impatient and frustrated look on his face. I knew, but could not

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accept, that he was unhappy and feeling strangled by the constraints of family responsibilities. Still, we remained connected through our children. And we had been through a lot together, our courtship, the births of our children, and pulling together to meet our financial obligations. I had the memories of our first year together, when we had been happy and close. And I was dependent upon him both emotionally and financially. I felt incapable of providing for myself and my two children, and I did not want to leave my children in the care of a stranger while I worked for minimum wage. Too, I believed I was not emotionally resilient enough to make it on my own. I was too dependent, too weak, too needy. Maybe our marriage wasn’t in as bad shape as I thought. Maybe I was imagining our problems. Maybe I was the problem. Surely I could do more. Or maybe it was our living situation and the financial duress that was causing the agitation and malcontent. I did not want to hear what Lee had to say. I would try harder.

Chapter Seven

After five years at the Grand Canyon, and as a panacea to our increasingly troubled marriage, we moved to Flagstaff. All land at the Canyon was government land, so there was no private land to buy. And all housing was government housing and most employment was seasonal. Flagstaff had been our second home for five years. Most of our shopping and all of our doctoring happened in Flagstaff. There were “real” jobs in Flagstaff and “real” houses too. We sold an almost new mobile home we had purchased while living at the Grand Canyon and made some money on that sale, enough for us to make a down-payment on a picturesque ponderosa and pinyon pine covered lot just south of Flagstaff in Kachina Village. Lee had found full-time employment as a groundskeeper at Northern Arizona University. We made a trip to Phoenix and purchased a new and attractive double-wide mobile home to put on our tree-covered lot. Life was good again, temporarily. This would continue to be a pattern in our marriage in the years to come. When our marriage waxed miserable, then a new start was all we needed. A new job, a different home, a new town, all of these things provided the answer, the elixir, to a deteriorating marriage. Or maybe, I thought, our marriage wasn’t deteriorating. Maybe it was just plain old bad luck. Maybe things just didn’t work out for us, through no fault of our own. If we just kept making a new start, then one of those starts would knell the bell of redemption to our increasingly discordant marriage. We settled south of Flagstaff in our little home on the tree covered lot. Only our lot wasn’t just tree covered. It was rock covered. We could have named our lot “rocky ridge.” We bought the lot shortly after a heavy snow. What we saw in February was deep snow and majestic mature pine trees. By the time we moved to Flagstaff in May and had our mobile home moved onto the 40

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property, the snow was gone and what lay in its place were lichen covered lava rocks and boulders. We found room on the lot for our mobile home and enjoyed the rocks and boulders, clearing spaces here and there for our children to play. It was rugged terrain but meditative too. Most residents of Kachina Village used their homes as summer retreats to escape the blistering heat of Phoenix, 140 miles to the south. So during the cold seasons of fall, winter, and spring, in the high 7000 foot elevation of mountainous Flagstaff, we were one of the few homes that remained occupied year round. Our little house on a graded dirt road was hushed and tranquil. During the winter months, I took the children sledding down the steep snowcovered dirt access road. And as we had at the Grand Canyon, we heated our home with a wood-burning stove. We had access to plenty of wood, pine for a quick hot fire and then oak for a slow long lasting burn. Our new life in Flagstaff seemed to bring a temporary lull to our marital discord. Lee seemed happier. I continued to attend church with my children and Lee started attending fairly regularly with me and the children. We met a few young couples at our church who were in similar situations as ourselves, fairly newly married with young children, couples facing financial struggles as we were, couples like us where the woman was content, or appeared content, engaged in the traditional role of wife and mother with the husband being the primary breadwinner. I remember years later talking with my Aunt Ruth, my mother’s older sister, and Ruth, in her mid-seventies, saying, “I could have done more. I could have done more,” meaning she could have stepped out and done more for herself, gotten an education, had a career. Her son, my cousin Alan, responded, “Ma, you can’t change the past! You can’t change the past!” With Ruth retorting, “But I could have done more.” Ruth did so much, was very involved in the New Bedford community, was devoted and active in her synagogue, providing service and fellowship always to the elderly and infirm and always reaching out to and giving unselfishly of herself to extended family members. Yet, after all the years of raising a family and supporting her husband, for her there was, even at age seventy-six, still a part of herself that remained unexamined and unfulfilled. Oliver was now four and a half years old and Elizabeth, now and forever known as “BC” through Oliver’s multiple mispronunciations of “Elizabeth” over the years, was three. Somehow, with a little luck and disciplined diligence, I had not become pregnant again. I was definite in my knowledge, those immediate years following Elizabeth’s birth, that I was not prepared for any more afternoon, evening, and morning sickness; nor was I ready for another caesarean-section, followed by a slew of impossibly expensive medical bills.

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But with Elizabeth three and Oliver coming up on five, and now that Lee carried, for the first and only time in our marriage, medical insurance, I decided I wanted one more child. Two children just did not seem a family to me. Three sounded solid. Three was an intentional family. Things were better between Lee and me. Not perfect, not great. But better. Lee agreed to another child. So we tried for a couple of months, and then there it was: the familiar miserable creeping chronic nausea, morning, noon, and night. This time we had medical insurance so my doctor admitted me to the Flagstaff Hospital, and there I rested, with an IV in my arm keeping me hydrated and with a bit of strength to fight the drowning waves of nausea, wave after wave after wave. After a few days, I stomached a few spoons of strawberry gelatin and my doctor sent me home. I toughed it out once again for four months of ongoing vomiting. I prayed, “Oh please let me have a healthy baby, because I know I can’t go through this again.” A year after moving to Kachina Village when I was five months pregnant with our third child, Lee and I decided to buy a home just east of Flagstaff in Doney Park. The home we looked at, and finally bought, was a three bedroom ranch style house, situated on a one acre lot. And it was not a rocky lot. It was a flat, useable fertile acre lot. The house was reasonably priced, and we, with our meager income, qualified for a low-income loan through the government. This was solid. Now Lee and I would be happy. We sold our home in Kachina Village, made a small profit, had enough money for a down payment on our new home, with a little money left over, and inherited a full acre of land to boot. As long as we were making a new start, moving on, as long as there were no long periods of dormancy or stagnation, as long as we could focus on something other than the antipathy in our relationship, then Lee and I pulled together, equally yoked, like two stalwart draft-horses. There were applications to complete, documents to be signed, checks to cut, a U-Haul van to be rented, utilities to transfer, boxes to be packed. As usual, I took charge of all the details, made all the arrangements, placed all the phone calls, coordinated the arrangements. Lee provided the loading and lifting and pushing and pulling. We bid good-bye to our little home under the pines and said hello to our new home on our acre lot east of town. We settled in. I lavished attention on all the vulnerable sapling trees that had been planted by the previous owners. I watered and fertilized them with tender care. This seemed a real home, a stable home, the kind of home I had never had, not ever, not as a child, not as an adult. I had always lived in rented houses, rented apartments. Or in mobile homes or trailers at the Grand Canyon.

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We now had wood fences and gates and a cindered driveway, a sunny south facing porch, and a north facing screened room looking out toward the back yard with its cottonwood and Russian olive trees. And beyond the cottonwood trees and the grass and the Russian olives was the acre of land. It was all ours. We bought chickens for Oliver: petite Bantam hens, and strapping Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds. Lee built the chicken coop. We made friends with Lucinda, the goat lady who lived down the road, and bought two dairy goats, an Alpine and a Nubian, from a rancher in Chino Valley. Lee and I worked assiduously making sure that our does were bred in the fall, and that after they kidded in the spring, they were milked twice daily. I made goat cheese and sold goat milk to our neighbors for extra money. We heated our home with wood, still pitchy pine for the hot burn, followed with hard dense oak for the long burn. We must have had a furnace somewhere in our new home, but I never looked for it. It wouldn’t have mattered. We couldn’t afford to heat with gas or electricity. Lee harvested firewood with his chain-saw and we had a pick-up truck for the hauling. Lee bought a hydraulic log-splitter so we would have plenty of split wood for our family and ample left over to sell, again for that little extra income. But the greatest gift of all was the San Francisco Peaks, leaping sharply from the fertile flat land west of our home, to over a twelve thousand feet elevation. Summers were verdant with monsoonal moisture, the peaks a lucid fluid green of aspen, pine and wild fern. Winters were cold and cutting at Flagstaff’s 7000 foot elevation, and the peaks, statuesque and frigid, were covered in heavy white blankets of ice and snow, often through June and sometimes into July. These mountains were my constant, my ballast, my shoulder, my security. They would never go away. I could count on them, lean on them, talk to them, send my hopes, my heartaches, my joys toward them. They would remain, steady and embracing, sure, solid. They were certain in an uncertain world. Two women I met through my church became faithful and intimate friends. Lorrie Brock, six years younger than me at age twenty, and married to Mike, a construction worker, was short, round and dark haired. The mother of two young children, she was a woman of many talents, all of them creative and artistic. She painted, tatted, crocheted, sewed, and did any other thing that her creative mind fancied. The world was her palette. She became a trusted and loyal friend. Sue Pritchard, six years older than me, and married to George, a part-time police officer and long-haul truck driver, was a tall, statuesque, dark-haired beauty who chewed tobacco and swore like a sailor. She was the mother of

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one daughter and was pregnant with her second child. And while I was neither an artist nor a statuesque beauty, I was a thinker, a reader, and a feeler. When we three women were together we talked about what most women talk about: relationships. Sue and George had a passionate and tempestuous relationship. They were either on or off. No lukewarm for them. At one point Sue packed up her children, filed for divorce, and moved to Prescott, Arizona, leaving George behind. Six weeks later he followed her to Prescott and wooed her for three months before she agreed to remarry him and return to Flagstaff, where together they built a cabin in the pines. Years later and after the birth of two more children, for a total of four, and twenty-two years of marriage Sue divorced George, this time for good. Lorrie had five older sisters and when Mike didn’t treat her well or took her for granted, Lorrie packed up her children and stayed with one of her sisters until Mike came to get her, and “getting her” meant long talks and lots of convincing her of his love and commitment and remorse for neglecting her. Lorrie and Mike are still happily together. After twenty-five years of marriage, at age forty-four, she gave birth to her eighth and final child. Although Lorrie and Sue and I shared our dreams and our hopes and our heartaches with one another, clearly I had the most troubled marriage. When Lorrie or Sue issued an ultimatum, their husbands paid attention. They wielded power in their relationships and they knew it. Either one of them could live without their husband. Maybe it wouldn’t be easy, but they had the backbone to do it. Lorrie and Sue weren’t going to put-up with any man telling them time and time again that “it ain’t gonna work.” They would be gone so fast, his head would spin. When I issued an ultimatum, Lee stepped aside and said, “be my guest.” I had lots of angry bark but still no bite. And Lee knew it. If I wanted to leave Lee, I had no backbone and if I’d had the backbone, I had no place to go and if I did leave, Lee would not come looking for me. He had the upper hand and he knew it and, more importantly, I knew it. We had moved into our new home in August and our third child was due in December. I was past the I-think-I’d-rather-be-dead-than-nauseated stage of the pregnancy. We got everything settled and arranged in our home. Lee continued with his work as a groundskeeper at the university. Oliver and Elizabeth, not yet quite school-aged, were both at home with me. There was lots of time for building forts under the cottonwood tree, playing games in the long grass, feeding the goats, checking for eggs under broody hens, and just plain enjoying the simplicity of being alive. The late summer monsoons brought welcome rain and cooling winds, thunder and bolts of bright lightening. After a monsoonal downpour, the

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rough black extinct volcano cones shone brightly in the shadowed light. The long grasses and Russian olive trees smelled sweet and musky in the humid air. As the monsoons retreated for the season, the high-country autumn prepared to arrive. The nights became chill and frosty, the days thin and wane. I stayed busy stoking the wood stove, cooking, cleaning, watching my two children play, and preparing for the birth of my third child. With my first two pregnancies, I knew for certain, through a mother’s intuition, the sex of each child. With my third pregnancy I wasn’t quite as sure, but I leaned toward another son. And if it was a son, he would be called Jacob. Autumn moved deeper into winter, with winter in the high country arriving early and staying late. My child was due December the twenty-ninth, and I was scheduled for a c-section on that date. I had asked my doctor to allow the Christmas holidays to come and go before I gave birth to this child. So Monday the twenty-ninth it was. Or was supposed to be. Friday the twentysixth, the day after Christmas, Lee and I had agreed to milk goats for our goatlady friend Lucinda. Her house was in our neighborhood, about half a mile away. With Lee leading the way, and with me fully nine months pregnant and our two children stringing behind carrying stainless steel milking buckets, we traipsed down the road toward Lucinda’s milking barn. After an hour of milking and feeding chores, we walked the half mile back to our house. Hoping to move my pregnancy along, I decided to jog, not walk, the half mile home. It was a slow and cumbersome jog, carrying as, I was, a nine month full belly and milk-heavy breasts. By the time we arrived home, I was worn from the walking, milking, feeding, and jogging. I rested that day. I knew I probably could not deliver a child through natural childbirth, what with two previous c-sections, but I yearned for just one more chance at the labor/ birthing process. And with a little extra activity, jogging, I thought I might go into labor and maybe arrive at the hospital well into productive contractions. Later that night I was awake off and on with hard contractions. But by morning the contractions had subsided so Lee decided to take his truck and cut a load of wood. I was cautious and concerned. I knew my labor from the night before was real and could return at any time. Lee and I agreed that he could leave and return by noon. Soon after he left, my labor pains returned. With Oliver and Elizabeth in the living room watching television, I rested on my bed timing the contractions, every ten minutes, eight minutes, six minutes. At noon sharp Lee returned. We dropped the children at a neighbor’s house and proceeded directly to the hospital. I was admitted and the on-duty nurse called my doctor. The nurse strapped me to a monitor. I was definitely in labor, good solid contractions. But as with my labor with Oliver, I was not

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progressing, not one tiny bit, not a smidgen. My doctor was delayed, so I remained, for several more hours, in labor, spinning my wheels. Dr. Bigelow arrived late that afternoon and on December 27, 1980, at 5:15 pm, my eight pound twelve ounce Jacob was delivered via c-section. I held him in my arms. He was a sweet gentle contented little boy, with broad husky shoulders and a swirl of black hair on his well-shaped head. When I brought Jacob home from the hospital three days later, I looked into his sweet face and knew, intuitively, that he would be the last child I would give birth to. I vowed right then to savor every moment with him. I would be patient and kind and loving. I would make time just to be with him. No other agenda would take precedence over my mothering him. And I did, in fact, do just that. I now understood maternal love, the depth and breadth of my responsibility to my child, to my children, understood it in a way that I never had before. I breast-fed Jacob until he was two-and-a-half years old. I rocked him in my arms, sang songs to him, played with him, and napped with him every afternoon. He was a joy and a delight. At age twenty-six, I knew I would never pass this way again.

Chapter Eight

Disgruntled and unhappy again, Lee disliked his work as a groundskeeper at the university; he was restless and distant with me and not wanting to spend much time with the children. The honeymoon was over. There were no exciting changes peeking over the horizon, no house to sell, no barn to build, no papers to sign, no place to go, nothing to do that would alter the landscape of our daily life. It was what it was: children to care for, bills to pay, work to be done. What it was, was a family facing all the normal challenges that families face. Except that the father of this family did not welcome these normal challenges. He wanted something else. He wanted out. Lee wanting out was still not an acceptable solution to me, as if I had any voice in his decision. I was so busy taking his temperature to see how I felt that it never occurred to me to take my own temperature to see how I felt. I didn’t feel anything except that I didn’t want everything I cared about to go away. I would do anything, make any sacrifice if Lee would be happy, if I could make him stay. I must be doing something wrong for him to want to leave. I must try harder, be a better wife, not be angry, not demand too much of him. Certainly, I must be the problem. I’ll try harder to be good enough. We talked about what he wanted to do. He wanted to build saddles for a living. Really? He’d done saddle repairs for years to bring in a little extra money. But now he wasn’t talking about repairing or building saddles in our garage on the weekends; building saddles was what he wanted to do full-time. He would quit his job at the university, rent a space in town, and open a saddle shop. Really? We would lose our medical insurance. We would have no steady income. And he would be gone more long hours working in this shop in town.

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But since I was the problem in our marriage and since I was fearful of being alone and since I was a breast-feeding mother and since I had two other young children at home and needed Lee’s support financially, emotionally, and every other way, then it seemed best to support his wishes. After all, maybe the saddle shop would provide the answer, solve our problems. I still desperately wanted the marriage to work. And why wouldn’t I? Lee was the father of my children. And our children were wonderful. Bright, intelligent, funny, loving, creative. What was not to like? And it seemed to me that a marriage could not end, particularly a marriage which included three young children, without exploring every option, scouring every nook and cranny, investigating every possibility. So naturally I agreed to the saddle business. We borrowed a few thousand dollars from our bank, using our home as collateral, and purchased the needed saddle-making equipment. Lee found a small shop to rent in town and opened his saddle making business. As easy as one, two, three? Not exactly. It was a slow start, a very slow start. If we were financially depleted before, we now lived at poverty level. Lee was under more pressure, not less pressure. Our family life got worse, not better. What was I thinking? Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. After all, I had, either aware or unaware, given myself permission to be powerless. I was needy and dependent, the mother to three young children. My duty and my first priority was to them. And still I loved my husband, held hope that our marriage could and would be salvaged. “Every marriage has its problems, its ebbs and its flows,” I told myself. “So what if ours tends to ebb a whole lot more than it flows. After we, or I, conquer all these painful ebbs, surely we’ll have an abundant flow.” My father, still living in southern California, and I wrote letters regularly (he was such a voracious letter-writer, I could scarcely keep stride). Occasionally we talked on the phone and at those times I expressed my frustrations with my marriage. My father was a good listener and provided a few words of wisdom but ultimately his response was always the same: “Well, dear, can’t you just co-exist together? Can’t you talk to Lee and make it work?” I understood the underlying message. This was my problem. As much as I loved my father, I knew I was on my own. He always had his own agenda of complaints: financial woes, marital conflicts, problems with authority figures, and the ongoing saga of trying to be a father to his chronically mentally ill son, my brother Aaron. He either would not or could not help me. And I accepted that fact as the norm. He’d drop a few pearls of wisdom, and then wonder if someone in my church might assist me (his way of passing the buck), but that was all. It was tacitly understood that I would not be returning to California with my three young children, expecting to find shelter, support, or an open door.

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I still had a non-existent relationship with my mother. Since going to live with my father when I was ten, I had had very little contact with her, by choice. When Oliver was a young baby of about six months, I had traveled to California to spend some time with my father and had made a brief visit to my mother who lived nearby. I was proud of my baby boy and proud of my accomplishment in getting him here. He was handsome and funny and bright and engaging. While visiting with my mother, she began making denigrating and demeaning remarks about Oliver. I realized then that her abuse and disrespectful behavior would not be directed just toward me but toward my child also. I vowed silently right then and there that my mother would not be involved in my children’s lives. And although after that trip to California, I did on rare occasion speak with her on the phone, I chose not to see my mother for twenty-five years. Choosing not to see my mother for twenty-five years, placing her on an unacknowledged shelf in the dark places of my mind and never addressing her abuse and neglect toward me when I was child, did not heal the rift between us. It simply buried it in a numbing place where it festered unexamined for years. And then there were my siblings. My relationship with my younger sister Jessica could at times be warm and supportive but there was a rub between us. I was close to my father and Jessica felt he favored me. She also resented the notion of having an older sister. She could be unyielding, strong-willed, and cutting. She was quite adept at playing the victim. Life hadn’t been fair and somebody owed her something. I couldn’t have disagreed more. And then there was Aaron, the older brother I had always adored. Next to my father, he was the shining light in my life. He was funny and creative, protective and fierce, domineering and angry, sensitive and gentle and unflinchingly honest. He looked after me, gave me advice, mentored me. And then when I was thirteen and he eighteen, turning nineteen, terrible things happened. He changed. He stopped eating. He did not sleep. He walked the streets telling people he was Jesus Christ. He was a minstrel ghost, in our living room, moaning, writhing, unintelligible. Then he went to a mental hospital and was diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia.” And mental hospitals, locked on a ward, locked in a solitary room, was where he, highly medicated, stayed. Whenever he was released, he relapsed, acted out, assaulted somebody, and was re-instituted. Much later, many years in the future, I did develop a very warm and close relationship with my mother’s older sister, my Aunt Ruth. Ruth was a woman of integrity, a woman filled with warmth, compassion, and goodness. A woman who embraced her motherless nieces, who willing shared family lore

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and history. But at the time I was traversing the jagged cliffs of my marital discord with Lee, I was too wounded and too abandoned and too much in denial to have an aware and open relationship with Ruth. So given the state of my extended family relationships, I really had no support, no where to go. Lee and Oliver and Elizabeth and Jacob was where I wanted to go. That was where I belonged, that was my family. There could be no other option. Any option that involved the dissolution of my little family seemed too scary, too unreal, too painful. Surely, Lee and I could work it out. If I tried long enough and hard enough he would come to his senses. Lee continued with his saddle business. He worked long hours and at times the long hard hours paid off. He negotiated a contract with Grand Canyon National Park’s concessionaire to build twenty mule saddles at a thousand dollars a piece. He advertised in local and national horsemen magazines and made some sales through that venue. But while Lee became an accomplished saddle-maker, he was not a businessman. He accepted orders for many custom-made saddles, not insisting on a reasonable deposit, and then delivered the saddles to the buyers without first collecting the outstanding balance. Although he had many thousands of dollars owed him, everybody had a hard luck story and nobody was willing to pay. The check was always “in the mail.” In the meantime, the customers had the saddles in their possession, and Lee was too worried about being the nice guy and being liked by his peers and his customers, to explain that he had a family to support and insist on full payment. We barely made our house payments, let alone purchased food and clothing for our children. But Lee didn’t seem too concerned. More and more, his energy and loyalty was to his saddle shop and to his saddle customers. I came to loathe the saddle business and his customers. For some time, we had one vehicle and Lee took that to town. He often worked twelve hour days, six or seven days a week. And I was not so sure he was always working. He came to make many “horse” friends, people who liked to come into his shop and sit and talk and drink coffee for hours on end. Most days, Lee purchased lunch for himself and his saddle friends while I was home alone ten miles out of town with three children to care for, with little money and meager food. Sure I made it work. I milked goats and ground wheat, and we usually had meat in the freezer, but it was a basic hand to mouth kind of living, with little to no room for frills or treats. I was no seamstress, but still I managed to sew inexpensive t-shirts for Oliver and Jacob, and girly blouses for Elizabeth. I had my friends Lorrie and Sue. We got together and talked fairly regularly. They were supportive and loyal friends. They sympathized and gave me advice, but their advice was for

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a strong, healthy, independent woman. I did not have their courage, their fortitude, nor the strength to do what they advised: “Leave him.” The relationship between Lee and me went from bad to worse. The saddle shop became Lee’s life. If I complained, Lee’s response was, “Well, who’s going to pay the bills if I don’t work?” It wasn’t a matter of him not working; it was a matter of him working smarter, working in ways that benefitted both him and our family. I wanted a win/win solution. Lee insisted on a win/lose situation. Only he didn’t call it that. He was adamant that he was right, with the insinuation that I was wrong, and that I just didn’t understand, that he had to do it his way. “I don’t want to work another job,” he’d say. “I need to put all my time into the shop. It’s going to be a success if I stay with it.” I was a nag, unreasonable, angry, demanding. I thought a better solution at this point, after over a year of full-time saddle-making was for Lee to get a “real job” a job where he received a regular paycheck with, possibly, medical benefits. Do the saddle business on the side, earn some money from the part-time saddle making, enough to supplement a paycheck from a “real job”, I said. Lee would hear none of it. It was out of the question. I was angry, resentful, and powerless. “We can’t go on like this. You’re never home; your customers aren’t paying you. Why won’t you collect the money owed you,” I demanded. We fought, or rather I fought. Lee, wanting to silence me, would throw something across the room to shut me up, and then would leave the house for hours or go the saddle shop and sleep there, leaving me alone with three crying young children. I was miserable and lonely. I got down on my knees and prayed. “Please, Please, Please, Lord, help me, help my children, help Lee to have a change of heart, soften his heart so that he will want to be a husband and father. Please!” If I was good enough, God would answer my prayers. He was all I had. Surely my faith, my obedience, my long-suffering would be rewarded.

Chapter Nine

Despite all my prayers, my begging for mercy, praying for deliverance from this painful situation, Lee and I became more estranged. At times, he left for the saddle shop before I awoke in the morning and did not return until seven or eight at night. He never called me from the shop to let me know where he was or what he was doing. After many long hours of isolation and loneliness, I called him: “Hello, Lee?” “Yeah, What do you want?” “I’m wondering when you’ll be home.” “Don’t know. I’m behind.” “Will you be home for dinner,” I pleaded. “Don’t know. I’m busy. You’re keeping me from working. I don’t have time to talk.” Click. Finally, even I had had enough, although I didn’t know what “had enough” meant. I had no money, no job skills, nowhere to go. But then I thought of my sister Jessica, recently married and living in Rexburg, Idaho. Maybe I did have a place to go. I phoned her. “Jessica, I can’t take it anymore. I need to leave Lee. Can I come to Rexburg? Will you help me find a place to stay?” She agreed, and although she was supportive, she didn’t sound thrilled at the prospect. She contacted her pastor at church and he procured a small unfurnished basement apartment for me. I shared my plans with my friends Lorrie and Sue. They were supportive and were relieved to see me, at last, exercising some semblance of a backbone. When I discussed my plans with Lee, he didn’t ask me to stay. He said, “It sounds like the best thing. It needs to happen.” “It needs to happen,” I thought to myself. “He must be joking. What does he mean it needs to happen? This doesn’t have to happen at all.” We have three young children who need a father. I need support in raising them. My leaving is the best thing? The best thing for whom? For Lee? For his saddle business? For his saddle cronies? Forget that we were breaking the hearts of three innocent young children. 52

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Forget that my heart was breaking. Let’s put Lee’s needs first. But then why was I surprised. Lee’s needs had been taking first place for quite a while now. I was testing the relationship. I believed if I told Lee I was leaving him and if he knew I meant it that he might reorganize his priorities. But that didn’t happen. He thought it was the best plan. I knew then that I could not back down. I was already a doormat and if I now made a decision to stay after what he had said, then I was giving myself permission to be the penultimate doormat, the poster woman for the down-trodden-self-loathing-spineless-woman. That’s who I was. But even I knew that I had hit an all time low. I would like to say that I left Lee with poise and confidence and grace and strength. But I didn’t. I was scared, wimpy, weak, crying, and incredulous that he would let us go. It took me about two weeks to get all my plans in order. I had no money and Lee said he had none to offer. I sold my washing machine and clothes dryer for a couple hundred dollars, and scrounged up a few more dollars here and there. I found cardboard boxes and started packing only the essential items. I be would traveling to Rexburg with my three young children in our small Datsun-F-10 hatchback. I also packed several other larger boxes that Lee promised to send to me when I gave him my new address. Our Datsun had over one-hundred thousand miles on it and the tires were nearly tread-less. Still I was going to make this seven hundred mile trip and Lee did not object. Up until the last day, I kept praying and hoping that Lee would have a change of heart, break down and ask me to stay, that he would come to the realization that our little family was worth fighting for. That never happened. It was mid-December, ten days before Christmas, and about two weeks before Jacob’s second birthday, when my children and I left Flagstaff headed toward Rexburg, Idaho. At the moment of departure, I felt sick. I thought of the bright and cheery Christmas lights I had strung in our living room, the Christmas songs my children and I had sung together, the handmade Christmas decorations they had joyfully and innocently created at school. I thought of the hours I had held my toddler Jacob in my arms, rocking him and breastfeeding him. Everything we owned, everything I had worked for, all my dreams and hopes, were left behind. There was certainly no room at the inn for this mother and her three young children. Surprisingly, as weak and as scared as I was, I felt a wave of exuberance, a sense of liberation, a surge of confidence and strength as I nosed that old Datsun F-10 northward on Highway 89 through the Ponderosa pine forests, past the snow-laden San Francisco peaks, then dropping in elevation toward the scattered stands of pinyon and juniper trees, and outward and onward through the meditative desolation of the red rock and the Navajo Indian reservation.

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I hadn’t expected a feeling of triumph. I was too much the victim, too conditioned to powerlessness. But there it was, a sense of relief, a feeling of strength. But that feeling of strength did not remain constant. It ebbed and flowed as I traveled that long winding narrow road north toward a very distant and unseen destination. Sometimes I was so weak and so scared, I just knew I couldn’t go on. But I knew I could not turn back. I had to move forward. I must do this thing. I said I would do it and I would. I jettisoned myself into that blanket of unknown territory. I stopped fifty miles north of Flagstaff in the little community of Cameron. Two of the tires on my car were starting to blister and bulge. I knew my vehicle could experience a very dangerous blow-out at any moment. I was carrying my most precious cargo, my children, so I stopped at the Cameron gas station to see if I could purchase two used tires, hoping to expend as little money as possible. I talked to the gas station attendant who happened to be the owner. He looked me up and down and read the situation clearly. For the first time in my life, I saw myself mirrored through somebody else’s eyes. His face was full of compassion and concern for this bewildered twentyeight year old woman and her three young fatherless children. He shook his head in disbelief as he noted the condition of the car’s two front tires. He sold me two very good used tires and mounted and balanced the tires for very little money. He truly was a good Samaritan. He saw what I could not see. He knew what I did not know. One hundred miles later we stopped in Kanab, Utah. While food was the last thing on my mind, I knew my children were hungry. And because I was still nursing Jake, I forced myself to eat and drink. My children were unsure what was happening and I was uncertain how to explain it. I said something to the effect that we were “visiting Idaho and you’ll talk to your Daddy on the phone after we get settled.” We continued on, stopping for the night at a dreary motel in Panguitch, Utah. That next morning, still feeling dazed and disoriented and sick inside, I was up and ready to leave at six a.m. The temperature was cold, below zero. I attempted to start my car and the battery was dead. I tried one more time. Miraculously, the engine groaned and then sputtered to life. I loaded the children and we were on our way. Late that night, with temperatures well below zero, driving on icy roads, I pulled into Rexburg, Idaho. Somebody somewhere had been watching over me. I felt a guiding force leading me forward, giving me that extra ounce of strength when I believed I could go no further, when I was on the precipice of collapse, on the cliff of delirium. I just could not be going through this. This was not happening. I was trapped in a horrifying nightmare.

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Somebody please help me wake up, take me back into my safe little house in Flagstaff, where I am stoking the wood stove with pitchy pine and sturdy oak. Deliver me to my warm hay-filled barn with my dairy goats; return me to my safe rocking chair, where I hold Jacob in my arms, where I kiss his sweet face as I lay him in his crib every night. Let me tuck Elizabeth into her bed with her baby dolls, and say goodnight to Oliver as he lines up his herd of favorite stuffed animals. Let me be filling Christmas stockings with fruits, and nuts, and candy, hiding small gifts in closets and cupboards. Let me be safe and secure. Please! I stayed that first night with my sister Jessica and her new husband Richard. The next morning I moved into the pre-arranged apartment. It was a dark desolate basement apartment, with two mattresses thrown on the floor. There was no furniture, no kitchenware. I was grateful for the financial assistance with the apartment, but I all I could carry in my little Datsun were boxes of clothes and a few towels and blankets. I had no belonging with which to create a household. And, as I soon discovered, Rexburg, Idaho, was no place to be in the dead of winter. The temperatures at night were between twenty and thirty below zero. The highs for the days were still two and three degrees below zero. My car died the day after I arrived. I had almost no money, no household goods, and three scared, crying children. It couldn’t get much worse. I enrolled Oliver and Elizabeth in school, Ollie in first grade and Elizabeth in kindergarten. We were not prepared for the extreme cold. Oliver and Elizabeth wore what coats they had, which were inadequate. I had no car so I walked everywhere, tucking my little Jake inside my coat, trying to keep him warm. What to do first. Where to turn. How to ease this nightmare. I had to have food to feed my children. So, with Jacob snuggled inside my coat, I walked long miles in two degrees below zero temperatures to the local welfare office. I was eligible for foods stamps and would have been eligible for financial and medical assistance if I had been willing to name Lee as the father of my children and provide his social security number. But I refused to do so. I still believed that when push came to shove, Lee would provide for his children and would be sending me money or would be asking for me to return home. And amazingly, I felt sorry for him and didn’t want him to be harassed by the state of Idaho. I was concerned for his well-being: “I wonder if he has enough money. I wonder if he has enough food.” What was I thinking? I accepted the food stamps. And although I was humiliated at accepting a handout, there was no doubt I needed to feed my children. I then walked, with my toddler Jacob still tucked inside my coat, to a thrift store and spent a few

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dollars buying sturdy but well-used plastic cups, utilizing them as bowls, plates, and cups. The plan was to leave Lee. I had accomplished that but I did not know what came next. I thought, “Well perhaps Lee will miss us and he’ll come for me in Idaho. We’ll make a new life here and everything will be fine. Or he’ll miss me and the children and ask me to come home.” Once again my answer to our problems was to fix-the-problem by ignoring it, by making a new start, by wiping the slate clean. “This time will be different. This is the right answer, this is the solution.” I did not ask the tough questions because I could not accept the tough answers. Not only did Lee never send me, as he promised to, the boxes I had packed and left in Flagstaff, but he never sent me any money, never indicated he wanted to move to Idaho, and never expressed an interest in having me or our children return to Flagstaff. He did not know if or how his children were being fed, but that didn’t seem to concern to him. After all, he was struggling to keep his saddle business afloat. He had important bills to pay and purchases to make to keep his shop flush. For the first time, in Idaho, I felt some anger, a righteous anger, an indignant anger, a vestige of consciousness that said, “Lee believes he is number one, that his needs take precedence over my needs, and more importantly, over the needs of our young dependent children.” It was a sliver of awareness. Yet despite that awareness, I continued to feel sorry for him. I was still busy rescuing him, taking his temperature to see how I felt. His pain was more important than my pain, and, sadly, more important than our children’s pain. But beneath it all, hidden within all my co-dependency, my powerlessness, my enabling, my care-taking, my rescuing, an inner fire was starting to flame, a long slow ignition. Elizabeth cried fiercely for her father every night. She was inconsolable. She had no idea nor understanding of why we were living hundreds of miles away from her father. Similar in temperament and personality, Lee was her favored parent. I knew that and accepted it, and I also knew I did not have a viable alternative to my life in Flagstaff. Rexburg provided an uneasy respite. I had fled my marriage as I said I would. But with the weeks passing and with the struggles of providing for my children, and seeing them suffer, not having a proper home, missing their father, and with me realistically perusing my options, I realized that Rexburg, Idaho, was not the answer to my problems. I had a home, a three bedroom home situated on an acre of land. I had a south facing porch, where the sun shone warm and bright. I had the mountains and the ballast of their strength and comfort. Jacob had a crib, filled with soft warm blankets; Oliver had his toys and play things, Elizabeth had her

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dolls. And this home had goats and chickens, and trees, and bales of dry crisp alfalfa hay, barrels of corn and grain. I was miserable and my children were beyond miserable; they were hurting, they were confused and scared. Elizabeth continued to cry herself to sleep every night, pining for her father, clutching his picture in her hand as she slept. My car still wasn’t running. I sold a small piece of jewelry and received barely enough money from the sale to repair my car and purchase gas for the trip back to Flagstaff. The decision to return to Flagstaff was not based on emotion or desperate dependency. For the first time in my life, I made a calculated decision. I methodically weighed the options. Why should I run away and deprive my children of their home, their security. Our house in Flagstaff is as much my home as it is Lee’s. Why should he be the sole beneficiary of its comforts. I have three young children who need a safe place, who need stability. And why should Lee be allowed to walk away from the responsibility of supporting his three children. I had been in Rexburg for seven weeks. Elizabeth’s sixth birthday would arrive on February third. I promised her she would be in Flagstaff for her birthday. On the morning of February second, I loaded up the questionably dependable Datsun F-10 and headed south toward Flagstaff. I never spoke with Lee. He had no idea we were returning. I did not need his permission to return to my home. Whether he liked it or not, I was returning. As I drove all that first day and into the evening through the February sleet and snow, and then slept overnight in a run-down isolated motel in southern Utah, and then completed the remainder of the drive the next day, I felt something change within me, some thing was growing, manifesting itself at my very core. I could feel the change emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually. It was a weighty pendulum gently starting its swing from a pole of despair and dependency and repression and fear, toward a place of light, strength, awareness, deliberation, choice. I couldn’t clearly identify nor name the change. But I knew something was different, that in leaving Lee, if only for a brief time, I had accomplished some thing that was life-altering, that I would never be quite the same again.

Chapter Ten

My children and I pulled into Flagstaff mid-afternoon on February third, with four dollars and thirty-two cents in my pocket, which was all the money I possessed in the universe. But I had kept my promise to my daughter. She would be with her father on her sixth birthday. I drove directly into town to Lee’s saddle shop. I pulled into a parking space, turned off the car’s ignition, and did not know how to proceed. Lee still did not know that we had left Rexburg. Elizabeth knew what to do. She opened the car door and ran to her father; Oliver and Jacob followed. I sat there stunned, my mind reeling. What do I say, “Hi, I’m back.” Maybe, “Even though you don’t want me, here I am.” Perhaps, “Look at me. I couldn’t make it on my own.” Or, “So how’s the saddle business? Have you made any sales lately?” How about, “What’s for dinner this evening?” After about ten minutes Lee emerged from the shop with BC wrapped in his arms and Oliver and Jacob each attached to one of his legs. He leaned into the car and said, “I wasn’t expecting you.” I responded, “I know. But I’m back.” He closed the shop for the day and I followed his truck back to our house east of town. When we arrived home, I understood why he said, “I wasn’t expecting you.” Changes had been made. Our children’s bedrooms had been rented to two roommates, a male roommate in Oliver and Jacob’s room and a female roommate in Elizabeth’s room. My children’s toys and belonging had been boxed and set aside. And the boxes I had packed to be sent to Rexburg were still piled high at the far end of our kitchen. The female roommate, in Elizabeth’s room, had begun painting and renovating and wall-papering her bedroom. And the male roommate, in Oliver and Jacob’s room, had moved in, lock, stock, and barrel. And in our bedroom, the 58

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queen-sized waterbed that Lee and I had shared, had been sold and in its place was a new single twin waterbed. Funny, he had money to buy a new bed but no money to support his children. Many of my personal and precious belongings had been boxed and donated to a local thrift shop. I was in shock. What had happened here? My children and I had been in pain. I had been deeply grieving the loss of my mate and our family. And Lee had been busy setting up house with roommates, moving forward with a life that did not include being a husband or father, a life free of encumbrances. Lee asked me what he should do. I had put him in a very awkward position. He had made commitments to these roommates. I thought to myself, “I’ve put you in an awkward position? What kind of position do you think I’ve been in these last seven weeks? You’re worried about the commitments you’ve made to these strangers. What about your commitments to this family?” I looked at him and said, “You tell them to get out and if you don’t I will. This house belongs to me and my children.” The roommates scurried about, gathered their belongings, and left. So now we were back to square one: Lee and me and our three children. What to do about that? I didn’t know what to do about “that.” I unloaded the road weary Datsun, nursed Jake, showered and fed the children and put them to bed. They were glad to be home, felt safe, in the innocent way that children trust and feel safe, not fully understanding the crazy conundrum world of adults. Lee said he was glad I was back, said he missed me. There wasn’t too much else to discuss. Nothing had been resolved. I’d taken a little journey and now I was back. We walked to the barn and checked on our goats, locked the chickens up for the night. I showered and straightened up the house and went to sleep in Lee’s new twin-sized waterbed. The next day I discovered that not only had Lee invited roommates to live in our home, he had also, during my absence, invited a young man, Mark, who he scarcely knew, to be his business partner in the saddle business. My name was no longer on our joint checking account. The account was now under Lee’s and Mark’s name. Lee agreed to reinstate my name on the account and delete Mark’s. None of this made sense to me. What about our children? What about our years together? What about commitment? In seven short weeks, Lee had moved on. I could not (and Would not) comprehend the ramifications of his actions. I suggested marriage counseling. Lee reluctantly agreed. Once again, I expressed my desire to salvage the marriage. I remained committed. Lee remained non-committal and tagged along because it was the easiest thing to do. We attended three or four counseling sessions together. I did most of the talking, expending pent-up anger and rage, crying, pleading, and expressing

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every emotion bottled up inside me. Lee remained mostly mute and unexpressive. When the therapist asked Lee if he was committed to saving the marriage, his response was, “Not really.” Why couldn’t I hear that? Why wouldn’t I hear that? I continued on steadfastly, like a dog with a bone, like a bull in a china shop, like a woman in denial. During our last session, the therapist was saying things to me like, “What are your plans?” “Have you thought about how you might support yourself?” “What kind of work can you do?” I looked at him and asked, “You don’t think this marriage is going to endure?” He responded, “No, I don’t. I heard Lee say he wanted out of the marriage.” I sat there stunned. What? This counselor was out of his mind. I never heard Lee say that. Of course I didn’t hear Lee say that. I only heard what I wanted to hear. As the therapist continued to gaze at me, I felt humiliated and worthless. This man, this stranger, this therapist was sitting here, casually detached, dismissive, clinical. The message: “Lady you are out of your mind. This man is not committed to you or your children. Why don’t you get some backbone and leave.” The session ended. And Lee and I drove home. And that was it. The end of our marriage counseling. Lee and I never discussed it. Clearly, Lee continued to have the upper hand. He wanted out. I did not. And I was welcome to stay, as long as I understood that Lee was not committed, that Lee was unhappy, that I would never have the satisfaction of knowing my husband esteemed and cherished me, that he did not honor me as his wife, his companion. As long as I understood that I was a cumbersome burden, an unwelcome albatross, then I could stay. So, naturally, I stayed. But what about that change I’d felt, the swinging pendulum, on my drive home from Rexburg. It was still there, it was a gradual swing, imperceptible, a vibration, a hum in my soul, slowly germinating, not quite a seedling, reaching toward the light. Lee continued with the saddle-making. The income was sporadic. My Rexburg experience had awakened something within me. It became clear that I needed to help financially. I had no skills, other than full-time mothering and homemaking for the past eight years. If I was to leave my family for a part of every day or a part of every evening, then I would not do it for minimum wage. I needed to unearth a job that allowed for very flexible hours, that required no professional skills, and that paid more than minimum wage. The answer to my pondering was waiting tables. I was strong; I was young, a hard worker, and because of my determination, could hold up to any amount of stress. At almost two-and-a-half years of age, Jake was weaned from my breast. He was plenty old, a strapping two and a half year old toddler, still it was difficult to wean him. He cried for me at night. I could not go to comfort him because he’d want to nurse. So Lee went to Jacob’s bed every night and

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talked to him. After two weeks, Jake was weaned, and I was free to pursue my waitress plans. I found a job at a steak house, working part-time afternoons and evenings. Lee came home to watch the children. It seemed that we were now more partners, that we were pulling together, that Lee could see that I understood the pressure he felt trying to be the sole provider for the family. My waitress income wasn’t huge, but I arrived home each evening with a pocket full of bills and change. I certainly earned well over minimum wage. I had taken my first independent step, feeling that pendulum making its gradual gyration around the moon and the sun and the earth, circling the cosmos. That fall, six months since the children and I had returned from Idaho, Lee was again disgruntled, this time with his saddle business. He had changed locations several times since he’d opened the shop two years earlier. Currently, his shop was housed in a local feed store, but he and the owner of the feed store had a falling out. Something about money, something about a piece of equipment. I didn’t want to know the exact details. I still wanted to bury my head in the sand, just float along, oblivious to the truth. If I possessed too much information, then I might need to make different choices. And I was not prepared to upset any apple cart, particularly my own. I suggested that we move to southern Utah. After all, many of our friends from the Grand Canyon, those years ago, had come from southern Utah. Each of them spoke eloquently and emotionally about the beauty of southern Utah, its family values, the national parks, the homey-ness of Utah. If we moved to Utah, then Lee and I would create a happy family, we would bask in the beauty of Utah’s rural communities, make good friends, just as we had become close friends with our Utah friends at the Grand Canyon. I spoke with my father in California. He thought we were out of our minds. He knew somewhat of our marital discord, knew obliquely of my trip to Rexburg, and knew of my return to Flagstaff. But he knew what I didn’t know, that we were still running, running from some thing, toward some other thing, never dealing with the “thing” at hand, just creating a new thing to replace the old thing, which was always the same old thing: a troubled marriage, a discordant family life. With no clear vision of what we were doing or where we were going, we loaded our rented U-Haul moving van and left the key to the house on the counter. We never sold the house, never notified the lender we were moving. I said a tearful good-bye to Lorrie and Sue. Then we loaded the van, left our dairy goats with our friendly goat lady, gave Oliver’s chickens to our neighbors, put the key on the counter, and drove away. Amazing! Looking back on that event now, our leaving the way we did casts a clear light on the nature of our family dynamics: chaotic, crisis-driven, fearful, barely surviving.

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Two-hundred and fifty miles later, on a balmy late September afternoon, we pulled into Hurricane, Utah, then a small rural town of about two thousand residents, and rented a motel room for the night. The next morning, with our three children, our loaded van, and eight hundred dollars in our pocket, we stopped at a local real estate agency and found a house to rent for twohundred fifty dollars per month. It wasn’t much of a house, very old and very worn, with two huge mature pecan trees out front. We unloaded our van. We were home, at least for the time being. Some months later, after we had relocated to southern Utah, a representative from our home-loan mortgage company in Flagstaff arrived at our doorstep. He was prepared to collect past-due house payments from us. He stepped inside our run-down rental house, surveyed our humble living conditions, spoke with us briefly, then shook his head in disbelief, and walked out. We never heard from him again. Two days after arriving in Hurricane, Lee drove into St. George, a larger town eighteen miles south of Hurricane. He met with a local saddle maker, Val Holyoak, and Val agreed to hire Lee to help with his saddle business. I enrolled Oliver and Elizabeth in school, Ollie in second grade, BC in first. Jacob, three months from his third birthday, stayed home with me. Soon I found a waitress job, working five evenings a week at a local restaurant. Lee left for his job at the saddle shop early each morning, arriving home at precisely five each evening. As he walked in the door, with me having showered and cared for the children, and with a hot dinner in the oven, we did a shift change. He took charge of the children and I walked four blocks down the street to my waitress job, arriving home at around eleven each night, again with a pocket full of change and bills. Depending on the night, tips were fair to good. Still it was money and it paid for groceries and a few extras here and there, while Lee’s money from Val’s saddle shop paid the rent and utilities. We settled into a quiet acceptance of our life. I still hoped for more, more connection, more commitment, more than just a worn down rental house in a strange town with unknown neighbors. This move to Hurricane signaled a new start, a new beginning, as if we were starting over, as we had first started from scratch those nine years ago at the Grand Canyon. But we were not addressing the past pains and the heartaches. We were not identifying or naming our problems. They remained unspeakable. Neither one of us discussed my seven weeks in Rexburg, the “why” of my leaving, the “question” of my unannounced return, the “disloyalty” of him inviting roommates to live in our children’s bedrooms, the “irresponsibility” of him not providing even an iota of financial or emotional support while my children and I lived off food stamps, while the children sorrowed for him.

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It was as if it had never happened. I was afraid to ask the questions because I was afraid to receive the answers, the answers I knew I would hear, the same answers I had heard for years: “It ain’t gonna work.” I didn’t care if it wasn’t going to work. I was here, by choice, and I would make it work for as long as I could, whether Lee wanted me or not, because I knew I could not yet make it on my own, that I was not yet strong enough, that I still believed I was doing the right thing by providing a father for my children, and that I could not accept that everything I cared about was going away. As long as I didn’t ask and he didn’t answer, we existed in fragile state of “everything is okay.” It was painful and scary but it was, unfortunately, the best I could do. With Lee working days and me working nights, we didn’t see much of each other anyway. And our marital problems took a back seat because, once again, we were busy with changes and new challenges: new jobs to adjust to, new schools for the children, new environs, new town, new neighbors, bills to be paid, a house to organize, national parks and hot springs to explore. Still I felt like a drifter, someone untethered, drifting into town, no family, no roots, an outsider. So when hadn’t I felt like an outsider? I’d been an outsider all of my life. It was painful, but it was all I knew. It was all I expected.

Chapter Eleven

After nine months in Hurricane, we moved to Delta, Utah. Lee’s friend Daniel Westwood from the Grand Canyon was starting a business there and had invited Lee to work with him. He promised Lee that he would help him set up a saddle shop. So we moved to Delta. For the first two months we lived in a small dirty two bedroom trailer, parked at the edge of an irrigated alfalfa hay field. The children were besieged by mosquitoes, each of them becoming quite sick from the hundreds of bites all over their bodies. Soon we found a respectable and fairly new three bedroom home to rent. We settled in, found a church to attend, got the children enrolled in their new schools, and I found waitress work, again scheduling my hours around Lee’s work schedule. The tips were good and Lee was making decent money in the business with Daniel. Delta was a friendly little town. A mammoth construction project was occurring just outside Delta, so a town that was usually a sleepy farming community was now all-a-bustle with thousands of construction workers and their families. There seemed an air of progress, of advancement, a flux of people coming and going. I thought perhaps Delta was a place we could stay. Our rented house was homey and secure. The children made friends at school and at church. Although Lee didn’t usually attend church with me, him using church as another weapon to hurt me: “If church is that important to her, I won’t give her that pleasure.” He now seemed somewhat agreeable to attending church with the family, all of us sitting together, shoulder to shoulder in our pew. I relished having Lee beside me at church. He was warm and smiling and attentive. We were mother and father and husband and wife, locking hands, basking in the glow of our three handsome and bright children. I thought, “Maybe this is what 64

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we’ve been looking for, maybe this is the answer. Lee seems happy, has a real job and can build saddles on the weekends.” Daniel did indeed help Lee rent a shop and helped purchase saddle supplies and equipment. It seemed we had struck a healthy balance in our lives. I was primarily a wife and mother, with some hours outside of the home with my waitress work. The extra money I earned helped with food and clothes for our children, and the work helped me feel more worthwhile, like I was contributing and helping to meet the needs of our family. Oliver was involved in our church’s scouting program, the children took swimming lessons, I came to make a few female acquaintances through my church and waitress work. But still I sensed that something was somewhat awry. There was still an unspoken wall between Lee and me. We were doing many of the things that helped our family find more cohesion, but again I felt that I was pushing and pulling Lee to be in step with the family. I could feel a reluctance, a reticence. He was doing it but not whole-heartedly. I was the choreographer, the orchestrator of the marriage, of the family. But to keep my marriage intact, I was willing to do so. Yet despite those times of feeling close to Lee, something was amiss. We had sex. We’d always had that. It was the other: the glances, the knowing, the understanding, the mutuality, the recognition, that we, as a couple, were special, that we shared something together that we shared with no one else on the face of the earth. I felt, despite some improvements in our marriage, that Lee was still not totally invested in our relationship, not completely invested in our little family. To me our family, our marriage, was the sun and the moon and universe. To me it was the totality of everything that mattered now and forever. I welcomed the harness. To Lee it was a noose. After a mostly good year in Delta, after a good enough year that I thought Lee and I were going to make it, after a good enough year that I thought about having another child, after a good enough year that I believed we would and could buy a house in Delta and stay there forever and raise our wonderful bright children, Lee had a falling out, this time with Daniel, regarding some sort of business dealings with the saddle shop. Again, I was in the dark. I thought everything was okay, was, in fact, great. But unknown to me Lee and Daniel were at odds, again something about money, something about equipment. I was floored. I believed we could make a life in Delta. And now Lee was parting ways with Daniel. I never knew the truth of what transpired regarding the falling out. Lee never spoke of it. And I never asked. I was still too fearful, too dependent, and too hopeful. All I knew was that we were back to square one: we had no money, no saddle shop, and no job.

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I was stunned, taken aback. I knew something had to have been amiss for a while, that Lee may have done something dishonest, that Daniel may have done something dishonest. Why had I not seen this coming? Were Lee and I still that far apart? I thought we had grown closer. Maybe it was just more of my denial, more of my fantasy world, the world where I was okay and we were okay, and our little family was okay. When actually nothing was okay. Old dreams die hard. I begged Lee to stay in Delta. I knew he could find good work, well paying employment at the newly constructed power plant, if he just gave it a chance. In fact earlier I had encouraged Lee to submit an application to the plant and he had. And just as things were falling apart with Daniel, the power plant called and asked Lee to come in for an interview. It was a job and it paid well. “We can stay in Delta. You can build saddles on the weekends, we’ll buy a house. We will be happy,” I pleaded. But Lee was adamant: “I’m not interested in working at the power plant. I’m going to build saddles. Can’t you get that through your thick head?” I thought, “Why can’t he get it through his thick head. We can’t adequately support our family on saddles alone; the demand is irregular and many customers don’t want to pay even when the saddle is completed.” Lee didn’t care what I said, or how much I pleaded, he was going to build saddles. He had a friend, Glen, who hauled hay for a living and who lived forty miles east of Delta in the little alfalfa hay-growing cow-milking town of Paiute. We were moving there. And that was that. If I didn’t want to go, I didn’t have to. I suppose I and the children could stay in Delta and do God knows what while Lee moved to Paiute to build saddles. Three weeks after Lee’s troubles with Daniel, and a year in Delta, and after the children had completed their school year, we moved to Paiute. Again, we rented a U-Haul trailer, and loaded our belongings, looking more like the Beverly Hillbillies, than a respectable cohesive family. But why should we look like a respectable cohesive family? No matter how much I wished it, it wasn’t true. This was just one more town, one more weary rental house, one more new school for our beleaguered children, one more church to attend, one more opportunity to be the outcasts, the misfits in one more small rural Utah town. Only this town was smaller and more narrow and rigid than the others. Once again, I found waitress work, this time in the tiny town of Fillmore, eight miles north of Paiute. There was no energy nor optimism in this little decaying town of Paiute as there had been in the budding community of Delta. Paiute: population twohundred fifty souls. Small town, small minds, small spirits, small lives. Five nights a week, I drove from Paiute to Fillmore and worked my waitress shift at the “Garden of Eaten” restaurant, the restaurant that for certain coined the term “greasy spoon.” My co-workers were immature high school

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students and disillusioned housewives, who spent most of their time in the kitchen berating and denigrating their wayward husbands. These were housewives, like me, with children, stuck in loveless, bitter stagnant relationships. Our “boss” was a middle-aged woman who was way over her head into chronic alcoholism. For this, I left my home in Flagstaff. I was one of the hardest working waitresses at the restaurant, not only waiting and bussing my own tables, but waiting and bussing other tables as needed, completing not only my own “side-work” but usually completing two or three other workers side-work to boot. Again, the tips were good to fair, depending on the night and whether I was serving locals or tourists who were passing through on the interstate on their way to Salt Lake City. I was full of drive and ambition, always one who wanted to excel and achieve, but all my ambition was directed toward delivering meals, filling coffee cups, refilling catsup and mustard bottles, and wiping down counters and table-tops with hot soapy bleach water. I wondered about myself and the disillusioned housewives I worked with. Wasn’t I just like them? Wasn’t all my energy and drive and desire to do good, to create a warm and loving family for my children condemned to failure? Wasn’t I doomed, just like them, creating a web of excuses that allowed me to stay in a relationship with a man who clearly did not respect me, who did not care much for my desires, wants, needs? Wasn’t I going to become middle-aged and bitter, squandering my talents, secreting my desires and needs, blunting my emotions and drives, so that one day, I, too, could waste in the back room of an unclean restaurant kitchen, swiping and sniping at tables with tepid dirty dish rags. I wondered too about an insight I’d had weeks earlier. At our church, Lee had befriended a man named Dale. Dale was in his mid-forties, older than Lee and I. He was happily married and the father of five children. Dale’s oldest child, a son, had been born with Down’s Syndrome and subsequently had several disabilities. Dale visited with Lee at our home several times, hoping that his visits might spur Lee toward more regular church attendance. I remembered a time when Dale spoke of his wife, a woman I had not yet met. He praised her mothering skills, her devotion to their family, the kind and loving and patient manner in which she dealt with each of her children, in particular with this eldest son who had the multiple disabilities. “She is so kind, so loving. She is great. Our family could not make it without her. She is an angel. I’m so lucky to have her.” Then Dale invited us to his home for dinner the following weekend. With a bit of pressure from Dale, Lee consented to the invitation. That next Saturday evening, Lee and I and our children arrived at Dale’s home. I was looking forward to meeting this “angel” of a woman. I thought,

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“For him to love her and honor her, she must be perfect, beautiful, gorgeous, with a model’s figure, tall, thin, dazzling eyes, a full head of shiny silky hair.” I was quite surprised when I met this middle-aged, short, round overweight woman. I couldn’t get my mind around it. Dale loved, honored, revered this very ordinary, pleasant, smiling matronly woman. In his eyes, she was beautiful, she was the fulfillment of all he wanted and desired in a woman. She was clearly a woman who had worked long hard hours bearing and rearing her five children. She was clearly a woman who had devoted diligent and frustrating and loving hours to raising this son with multiple disabilities. And she was revered and respected for doing so. This was an eye-opening experience for me. I never thought I was “good enough.” I did it all: cooking cleaning, rearing my children, teaching and loving them. I was faithful, smart, intelligent, devoted. I was attractive, slim and trim. I was passionate and willing and affectionate. Sure, I was hot-tempered, bossy, and demanding. I was anything but perfect. I was loaded with imperfections. But I also had many, many worthwhile assets. Only, I didn’t know that. I only understood the ways in which I did not measure up. I saw only my imperfections. I never valued nor envisioned what I did right. The only vision I possessed was the vision of “unworthiness” of “not good enough” of “try harder, be better,” of “I don’t’ measure up,” of “everybody is better than me.” Why? I didn’t know. I just knew what I recognized at Dale’s house, that an imperfect overweight middle-aged woman was esteemed by her husband as beautiful, attractive, desirable, smart, and worthy, in every way. The saddle-making business was a disaster. Glen owned a small disheveled shop, an old converted gas station, in Paiute. And he was more interested in hauling hay and grazing his cattle on BLM land than building saddles. Saddle work for him was a side show. Saddle-making, for us, was our bread and butter. Once, after venting my anger at Lee, I confronted Glen, telling him that we could not survive on crumbs, that Lee needed more work and more money. Glen told me to “shut my mouth” and get out of his shop. How dare I, a mere woman, confront him? I stood there powerless and speechless, blaming myself for having been “out of line.” Shutting my mouth, being silenced and unheard was, no matter how painful, my way of life. So now since there wasn’t much saddle work and since Glen wasn’t that interested in making a go of the business, Lee started milking cows for a local dairyman. Once again we were back to square one, or was it square four or nineteen or maybe square fifty? I’d lost count. We eked out a living, if you

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want to call it that, with a little cow-milking money, with a little saddle money, with a little waitress money. And, as always, Lee still wanted out of the marriage. I heard the phrase, “It ain’t gonna work” more and more frequently. Sometimes Lee slept at Glen’s shop, sometimes he slept in an outside travel trailer, sometimes he slept in the house with me. He never quite left, but then he was never quite there. There were rare occasions of closeness, a kind remark, an unexpected small gift, a shared moment of parenting, a cuddling at night, a brief discussion of his day or my day. But these moments were infrequent, and were usually closely followed by a bitter remark or rejection of some kind. Lee and Glen planned a trip to a horse show to be held in Nephi, a community fifty miles from Paiute. Many horse and saddle type people would be in attendance so Lee and Glen wanted to seize the opportunity to hopefully make some saddle sales. Glen invited his wife, Laree, to accompany him. I hoped that Lee would do likewise. When there was no invitation forthcoming, I invited myself. Lee was adamant that I not attend, nor did he want our children to attend. I was so alone in Paiute, so isolated. I desperately wanted to feel accepted, feel a part of something. More exclusion, more rejection, was the least thing I could bear. I begged Lee, “Please let me drive over with you.” His reply, “There’s no room for you in Glen’s truck.” I pleaded, “I’ll follow in our car. I’ll bring the children. It will be fun. They want to be with you. I want to go. We never do anything together. Please!” His answer remained the same, a definitive, “No!” I was desperate and deeply hurt. When Lee and Glen and Laree drove away to the fair, the three of them smiling and chatting in the cab of Glen’s pick-up truck, with Glen’s wife snuggled warmly beside him, I was despondent. I just could not spend another day alone, isolated in this miserable lonely place. So half an hour after they left, I loaded my children into my car and followed. My car was not very dependable, and fifteen miles into the trip, the car broke down on an extremely isolated stretch of highway. It was a cold early spring day; my children did not have heavy coats and I had fifteen dollars to my name. I was many miles from a phone, from a house, or from a place of business; I felt vulnerable and frightened. My children and I were easy prey to anyone driving by who may have had less than honorable intentions. We sat in the cold car and waited and waited and waited. I hoped someone would stop and offer help but, too, I was also fearful that someone would stop and offer help. The children were hungry and scared. Eventually a family stopped and rescued this fearful mother and her three hungry children. They loaded us into their vehicle and drove us back to

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Paiute. I was very grateful for their kindness, their concern, their compassion. When Lee returned home late that evening, I told him what had happened. His response was, “You know I didn’t want you at the fair. That was a stupid thing to do.” I told him my car was still broken down on the side of the road, fifteen miles away, and asked him to help me retrieve it. He was angry, disdainful, and denigrating.

Chapter Twelve

Something happened to me that year in Paiute, something that had never quite happened before. I didn’t know what to call it then, but I know now that it was a clinical depression. Despite the odds, I’d always had tremendous drive and will and strength. I thrived on challenges. If you told me something could not be accomplished, I would go out of my way to achieve that accomplishment. I would go to any lengths to succeed. The word “no” never quite registered with me. “I will make my marriage work, no matter what.” “I will succeed in spite of, or, perhaps, because of the odds.” Now I just didn’t care. Life was gloomy and senseless and meaningless. Finally, even I, the one-woman power piston, had run out of steam. I awoke each morning, got breakfast for Oliver and Elizabeth and saw them to the school bus. I returned to the house, finished breakfast with Jacob and planted him squarely in front of the television, with some modeling clay to keep him occupied. Listlessly, I sat on the couch, mindlessly overseeing his TV programs, sleeping, staring, mute, numb. At noon every day, after his lunch of a peanut butter sandwich, I walked Jacob the two blocks to the one room general store and bought him a candy bar or ice cream cone. Deep in stupor, I walked him back to our dingy house, and sat myself again on the couch, mutely overseeing Jake’s activities. At four in the afternoon, Oliver and Elizabeth returned home from school. I pulled together some sort of dinner and then readied myself to leave for work, while Lee supervised the children and prepared them for bed. Day after mindless day, week after mindless week, month after mindless month. This was my life. I knew, given our history and given our current circumstances and our most likely future circumstances, that my desire to bear another child would never 71

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reach fruition. But then I had already intuitively known that, five years previous, when I had given birth to Jacob and had promised myself that I would savor every moment with him. I knew then I would never pass that way again. And although I had not allowed myself to acknowledge the futility of trying to make my marriage work on a unilateral contract (with me being the unilateral partner), I had still acknowledged at some level that my marriage would not endure the test of time and having another child was not prudent nor wise. Yet, I felt strongly that if I’d had another child, it would have been a girl. I sorrowed for the little girl I would never know, sorrowed for what could have been. I thought too of those years in Flagstaff, when I had been friends with Lorrie and Sue. Whenever we talked of our marriages and our husbands, I always entered the conversation as if we were peers, as if we were all in the “same boat.” They were at times irritated with their husbands, at times disillusioned, at times angry. I wanted to be at one with my cohorts: “Men! Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.” I was just like them, having a few marital stresses and strains. I believed (or wanted to believe) that I had a run-of-themill ordinary marriage. I was just like Lorrie and Sue. We’d nurse our babies, rock them to sleep, and gripe and moan about our husbands, then we’d each return home, and all would be well. All marriages had their ups and downs. This was just women talk. Now we felt better. But I had been kidding myself, downright lying to myself. Lorrie and Sue were going home to husbands who by and large respected them, husbands who by and large honored their marital commitments. I wasn’t going home to that. I was returning home to a man who did not really want me, who did not really want a family. But here, now, in Paiute, I began to acknowledge the full truth: “Lee and I don’t have an average marriage. We don’t have a few marital problems. We have a major problem: the husband and the father of this family wants out.” Sure there were moments of compatibility; there were shared moments of pulling together, planning together. But there was no longevity to those moments, no continuity. I would believe that we had successfully navigated a major hurdle, perhaps a financial hurdle, or a parenting hurdle, and the next day Lee was reiterating that it “ain’t gonna work. Can’t you get that through your thick head.” Each time I heard those words, I allowed myself to be beaten down, time and time and time again, my hopes dashed, my sense of worth destroyed. If this was a game, if this was a ploy on his end, it was no fun, never had been. And my bout of depression had been teaching me, signaling me, speaking to me about the terrible toll this verbal and emotional abuse was taking.

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And I could see too that all women weren’t being treated the way I was. I observed women in relationships being treated with deference, with respect, just as I had seen in Dale’s home, where he esteemed his wife, where there was a sense of warmth and caring, a sense of unanimity between them, a playful rapport, a sense of reverence for who they were and what they had achieved. One evening while waiting tables at the greasy Garden-of-Eaten restaurant in Fillmore, I stood in the back kitchen waiting for an order to come up. Surrounding me were high school students making filthy denigrating sexual remarks, disillusioned housewives, snickering about affairs and lies and deceptions, and our manager Nan drunk, slurring her speech, and leaning and then falling against the oily steel counters. I told myself, “I can do this for the rest of my life, or I can do something else. The choice is mine. It’s not Lee’s choice. It’s not my children’s choice. It is my choice.” That spring, the March of my thirty-second birthday, my father visited me in Paiute. He and his wife Jillian were still living in southern California. He stopped first in Juniper Ridge, a community a hundred miles south of Paiute, to visit my sister and her family, before traveling to Paiute. He knew me and intuited that things were deeply amiss. We walked long afternoons down the rutted dirt roads, past the dairy farms, through the woods, skirting the rabbit brush, the wild sage, looking full into the rugged mountains. He said, “Dear, how can you live like this? You have so much to offer. This is a terrible town. Don’t you want more for yourself?” “Yes, Daddy, I do,” I said. “I’m leaving this place. I know something has to change. I can’t live like this anymore.” I did not know where I would go or what exactly I would do, but I would be leaving soon, with or without Lee. After my father’s visit and after my thirty-second birthday, I thought seriously about where I would go and what I would do. Staying in Paiute was no longer an option. Moving our children to a new town, a new school every year, was no longer an option, living in poverty, hand to mouth, was no longer an option. I did not yet know what options were available, but I determined to find out. For the first time in almost a year, I felt the cloak of depression, despair, and hopelessness lifting itself off my shoulders. I stewed over my options. I knew change was coming but I hadn’t been able to articulate to myself what exactly those changes were. In May, two months after my father’s visit, I made a trip to Juniper Ridge, ostensibly to visit my sister, but beneath that facade was my wondering about the possibility of building a life there. I knew Juniper Ridge was home to a four year college, Southern Utah State College. I also knew that since I had left Brigham Young University almost twelve years earlier to return to Lee and the Grand

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Canyon, I had regular dreams, every few months or so, about being back on the Brigham Young University campus. In my dreams, I was walking on campus, finding my way to class, ambling through wooded areas and paths back to my apartment, strolling through favorite areas, past the Wilkinson Center, the Harold B. Lee Library, down the steep steps, over the creek and on toward the botanical gardens. Always, always, these were good dreams. I was fulfilled, happy, beaming, industrious, motivated, challenged. I savored every moment of those dreams, and then I would feel a sense of dread as my dreams were intruded by the morning sun, or the crying or calling of a child, the alarm clock, the noises of morning arriving. Clearly, subconsciously, I had left some thing behind those many years ago that had more import than I had been willing to allow. I had convinced myself that motherhood and wifedom would fulfill every nook and cranny of my narrow existence. To desire anything other than that would be a form of heresy, a form of infidelity, a form of dishonor to my husband and children. Why had I allowed the parameters of my life to be so narrowly defined? What was I afraid of? What was I running from? And where was I running to? With thoughts of BYU on my mind, with thoughts of the life I had left behind, with thoughts of exposing my options, I drove to Juniper Ridge. I did visit with my sister, but I also walked around town, ventured onto the SUSC campus, checked with a food stamp and welfare worker, investigated what assistance I could receive if indeed I did move alone to Juniper Ridge with my children, if indeed I did enroll in college to complete the college degree I had abandoned those twelve years ago. Financially, there was not much available through the state, certainly not enough to live on. I would have to hold a job and attend school at the same time. I was fearful of leaving my children, not trusting their care to strangers. I knew it would be tough and I knew that I would now have to cross the bridge I had refused to cross those three years earlier in Rexburg, Idaho. I returned to Paiute and announced to Lee that I, and our children, were moving to Juniper Ridge and hoped that he would move with us. His response was, “I’m not moving. I’m staying here and building saddles.” I said, “Okay, but I’m moving to Juniper Ridge.” We never discussed it again. I remained fearful but determined. The outlook seemed grim, but then how much more grim could it be than the outlook in Paiute, the outlook those years ago in Rexburg, the outlook for the past many years, the years of poverty, the years of loneliness, the outlook of being with a man who continually and emphatically expressed his desire not to be married to me? Sure it was grim, but then it had been grim for years.

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How much of a masochist was I? How much more beaten down could I be? I had hit the “bottom of the bottom” in Paiute. Nothing could be worse than where I now was. What did I have to lose? Not much. I’d already lost it all. Still, it would be easier if Lee came with us. I wanted my children to have a father and I knew if he provided some sort of financial support, it would be better than nothing. I moved forward with my plans, looking for a house to rent in Juniper Ridge, looking into attending SUSC. One afternoon in Paiute, I happened to open the door to our garage and saw, to my surprise, a trailer neatly stacked and loaded with Lee’s saddle making tools and equipment. He never said a word to me, but this was his way of saying, “I’m following you to Juniper Ridge.” Apparently he, too, knew that it was hopeless in Paiute, hopeless with Glen and the saddle shop, hopeless with the dairy farmer and the cow-milking. In July, after nearly twelve years of marriage, after too much poverty and too much heartache, after too many new beginnings and too many false starts, after I had lost all hope, after Lee had told me more times than I could count that “it ain’t gonna work,” after too many U-Haul moving vans and too many strange towns, after too many years of isolation and me not believing I was “good-enough,” after too many years of me shouldering full responsibility for the failure of our marriage, after great chasms of non-communication and missed communication, after all the years of me loving Lee, after a history of shared passion, after all my hopes and dreams, after all the years of me hoping and praying, of me carrying the full weight of the marriage on my shoulders, we were journeying together again, in some sort of painful dysfunctional dyad, with me plying the banner of hope, one last time.

Chapter Thirteen

What we found in Juniper Ridge is what we had found in most of the small towns we had lived in. We found a small sub-division of houses seven miles out of town, much like our sub-division east of Flagstaff, only the houses were on half acre lots instead of one acre lots. We found a three bedroom house with a full basement and promptly put down a deposit and first month’s rent. But there was something different about Juniper Ridge. What was different was that I was different. I knew, no matter what, that I would not be packing up a moving van in ten months and traipsing toward some new horizon. This horizon was good enough. Not only was it good enough, but we were back in mountain country. I’d had my dark deep mysterious red Canyon and then my strong sturdy safe mountains in Flagstaff and now I had what I most needed: more strong mountains and red rock. This was bliss. This I could do. God willing, somehow, some way, I could do this. Lee unloaded his saddle-making tools and saddle equipment and set up shop in the basement of our new home. He’d learned something along the way: There was no sense in paying high overhead when he could build saddles in the shop in our basement just as easily as he could build them in a rented space that would cost several hundred dollars a month. I enrolled the children in school. Jacob was ready to start kindergarten in late August. Oliver was entering fifth grade, and Elizabeth fourth grade. My children were sweet and bright and resilient. Oliver, just turning eleven, continued to raise poultry (chickens and ducks) just as he had in Flagstaff when he was five years old. In fact in all our various moves from one community to another, Oliver’s chicken coop had always been firmly planted and attached to a trailer at the back of our U-Haul mov76

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ing van. Since he was a young boy, Oliver had been in possession of a wry insightful humor. He was quiet and not very verbal, a young man of few words, but he had an astute intelligent manner of intuitively reading a situation without having to talk about it. Elizabeth, on the other hand, at age nine, was quite verbal and creative and inventive, an excellent reader, and a devoted older sister to her younger brother Jacob. And Jacob, at age five, was tender, sensitive, and caring. He also had a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong. He was the most social of my three children. He was also entertaining and bright and he wanted his mother and father to love each other and be happy together. I felt a potent sense of duty to my children. I wanted, at almost all costs, to give them a warm and loving home, with both a mother and father in residence. But I did not know if I was capable of paying that price anymore, if I was capable of maintaining that painful charade. The routine was the same as it had been in Hurricane, Delta, and Paiute. I found a church to attend. I scoured clean our new rental house from top to bottom. I did all the things I had been doing over the years. Yet something was different this time. I was thirty-two years old and was for the first time devoid of dreams and hopes for my marriage. My dreams were for myself and my children. Perhaps I possessed an inkling of faith, a wisp of rapidly dissipating hope, but not enough to give myself one-hundred percent to my marriage. I was emotionally battered, worn thin, and psychologically beaten down. Still, if it was possible to salvage our troubled marriage, I was open to that evasive conundrum of a possibility. Possibilities? I had fruitlessly spent so many of my own possibilities over the years, waiting tables in run-down cafes, hiding out in small mindless towns, devoting unflinching loyalty to a dying marriage, allowing myself to be consumed with idealism and hope and faith and prayers for deliverance. Yet the only deliverance I was willing to accept was the deliverance I so desperately desired, the deliverance I had longed for as a little girl: the deliverance of belonging, being loved and accepted, being a member of a family, the deliverance I desired from childhood, the sure knowledge that “everything I cared about would never go away.” But now at age thirty-two I knew there was a possibility that everything I cared about could go away. Maybe. Possibly. I still did not want that, but now I knew and I knew too that I would not travel easily into that dark night. Immediately I found waitress work and Lee got his saddle shop up and running. Over the years, he had advertised in national horse magazines and he had other contacts, so ever so gradually the saddle orders started coming in. Over the years, he had made a bit of a name for himself as a saddlemaker. I made the seven mile trip into town to Southern Utah State College

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and completed financial aid and entrance applications. I was going back to college. But I was terribly insecure and lacked confidence. I thought of those twelve years before when I had been a student at Brigham Young University. I was young and sassy and full of myself, bordering on arrogance and narcissism. But then that’s what youth is. I remembered when I was student at BYU, I used to spend time at the Wilkinson Center in its Listening Room. At the Listening Room, students could request that a particular musician’s album be played and then listen to the music through a set of earphones. Often I requested Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” album. One of my favorite songs from that album had always been “Tiny Dancer.” I would sit in the Listening Room writing poetry and swaying to the music. I firmly and emphatically believed that Elton John was singing not only to me but about me when he sang “Tiny Dancer.” Being from Los Angeles, I was the “L.A. lady, blue-jean baby.” I narcissistically pondered over the mystery of how Elton John knew me. He was singing my song. Since that time, I had been shaped and refined by motherhood, by poverty, by disillusionment. Certainly arrogance and narcissism were characteristics I was not now well acquainted with. I wondered about the young students I would be attending class with, their brightness, their confidence, their accomplishments. How would I measure up? Of course thirty-two was not that old. I was only well-seasoned and aged in pain, in disillusionment, in dying dreams. I was admitted as a student to SUSC and, thankfully, was deemed eligible for financial aid. If I had a late class, Lee agreed to be at home when the children returned from school, so I did not need to worry about child care. I transferred my credits from BYU to SUSC and decided to declare a major in elementary education. But why? I had never been enamored with other people’s children. Quite frankly, I didn’t like children that much. I had never had the desire to provide child care to other women’s children. The only children I adored were my own. I was not a particularly nurturing woman. And the classes I had most enjoyed at BYU were English and psychology classes. Still, I thought elementary education was what I should major in. But I hedged my bets by registering for an expository writing class. In September, I returned to college. All my fears evaporated after that first day on campus. Finally, I had somewhere to channel my drive, somewhere besides funneling it into the sinkhole of an untenable marriage. I felt quite at home in the classroom. Too, I had matured since I had been a college student at ages eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. I was no longer the naive, foolish, and

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hopelessly ungrounded young woman I had been those many years ago at the Grand Canyon. My life for the past twelve years had involved children, financials strains, responsibility, and work. My thirty-two year old self (and I did now possess the inkling of a “self”) knew love, not unrequited. I’d known passion and consummation and pain and heartache, all at levels and depths previously unknown and unforseen. For the past twelve years I had been busy devouring a large slice of real life. My days of hypothesizing, floating like an untethered balloon, were over. Although I enjoyed all my courses, my expository writing class was the most stimulating class that first semester on campus. I promptly came to my senses and switched to an English major. My writing teacher, Doug Alton, was supportive and encouraging. Looking back, I’m certain that my writing was quite tentative and amateurish. But that was okay. I was taking baby steps, a thirty-two year old toddler learning to walk. I wrote about my marriage, about my brother, Aaron and his mental illness, about my father, my mother. I had never before allowed myself to form the language that revealed my true self. Honestly, I did not know the language. It was not a part of my vocabulary. My true and honest self was not acceptable. It was unspeakable to acknowledge mental illness, to acknowledge an absentee and abusive mother. Now I begin to carve the unspeakable into rudimentary language. Writing became my catharsis. I allowed myself to begin to acknowledge that which I had never allowed myself to know. Lee and I settled into our house. As our home bordered farmland, alfalfa hay was readily available and inexpensive. Lee bought a pony, Jeremiah, for the children and an Appaloosa horse for himself. Oliver had his poultry. I loaded Jake and BC, bareback, once or twice a week, for a pony ride around our rural subdivision. And as usual, because we had made a new beginning, we were looking at new scenery, new territory, Lee and I established an unspoken truce. Once again, we pulled together, like two equally yoked oxen, for the common good. Initially, Lee attended church, for a while anyway, with me and the children. Why was church so important? Why did I care? Because I desired a sense of spirituality in my marriage. I wanted us to be a family, a husband and wife, united in purpose, unified in our devotion to an omnipotent power, a Heavenly Father who was wiser and more loving and more knowing than us, a benevolent Father who would guide and direct and bless our little family unit. I believed we were acknowledged, loved, and known by our God.

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And I still desired to be at one with my mate, hoped that we would find humility and faith and guidance as we traveled together through this mortal experience. I desired to be a spiritual being having a mortal experience, not a mortal being desperately failing at a spiritual experience. I hoped to see beyond this world, beyond greed and pride and arrogance. Unfortunately, Lee and I were failing hopelessly at this endeavor and my faith was waxing weak, very weak, at an all time ebb. I was flat out of excuses, flat out of hope, and flat out of faith. I had loved Lee through it all, through the thick and thin of it. I cherished the memories of our early days at the Grand Canyon, the birth of our firstborn, Oliver, and how proud we were to become parents, the way we worked shoulder to shoulder to make ends meet, how frugal, how diligent, how upright and earnest and hard-working we had been, how passionate and connected we felt together, the goodness of loving each other. Always, I’d had hope, always had felt a primordial connection to my husband, that we were meant to be, that our children were meant to be. Two months after moving to Juniper Ridge, Lee had an accident. His Appaloosa horse, Redeye, bucked him off and Lee broke his wrist. The ramifications were obvious. With a broken wrist, Lee was unable to build saddles, unable to support the family. Usually in a situation like this, I would be strong, the long suffering Hero, rushing in to rescue Lee and our children. I thrived on adversity. I could single-handedly make everything okay. I just needed to dig a little deeper, work a little harder. But not this time. I was angry, furious, enraged. For the first time in our marriage, I had no desire to be the hero, the competent one. And for the first time in our marriage, I looked at Lee and saw an incompetent and selfish man. The primordial connection I’d felt all these many years was becoming a memory of the past. I knew it was an accident. He didn’t mean to break his wrist. He was in physical pain and wished, too, that the accident hadn’t occurred. But I was beyond disappointment. I was brittle and disillusioned. Not again! We can’t be falling down this hole again. No medical insurance. No income. Poverty. Scraping to make rent and buy food. Period. No relief. No deliverance. Somehow we made it through. And in time Lee’s wrist healed, and he got busy in the saddle shop. The orders were arriving at a steady pace. He received enough orders to build one saddle a week. If he collected the money owed him, we could live on that. If. We could get through until I graduated, if I worked part-time and stayed with my studies full-time. If. A realist is what I now was. I had no dreamy fantasies about love and bliss. Lee and I would co-exist, live together in an uneasy truce, for the sake of our children.

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Lee would follow his path, I mine. He’d build saddles; I’d study literature, writing, teaching. And somehow, somewhere our twain would occasionally meet. We’d each have our own friends, comrades; perhaps he and I would go out to dinner on a Friday night, or treat the children to a Saturday night movie. It was now clear to me that we would travel separate paths, with our selfdefined routes crossing on occasion for the sake of our children. Perhaps this was good enough. Perhaps this is what marriage was: disillusionment, discontent, animosity, tolerance, antipathy, with occasional moments of intimacy, closeness. The alternative, divorce, seemed scary, final, delusional. Divorce was too large; I still could not digest it. Two people could not terminate a relationship. I told myself, “It’s better to stay, to compromise, make it work, tolerate the relationship, than to leave. Do whatever it takes to make it work, even if that means it doesn’t work.” My father and his wife Jillian had been together many, many years. They bickered constantly, fought for hours, with my father showering and “rinsingoff” between verbal rounds. Then, later in the evening, after an interminable battle of wills, they’d call a truce, dress, and go out for an evening of dinner and drinks, of musician friends and jazz. Maybe that’s what marriage was. Besides I still could not accept that “everything I care about goes away” feeling. I never wanted to feel that, even if it was more painful trying to avoid the feeling. And I had certainly invested a whole lot of sweat equity into avoidance, rather than in doing, seeing, and feeling. But how long could I keep up the facade? I was destroying myself, carrying two-hundred percent of my marriage on my shoulders, investing twohundred percent into making my marriage “work.” And it was my marriage. Lee remained clear about wanting out. And wasn’t that convenient for him. As long as he wanted out, and I knew that, then he shouldered no responsibility. He remained divested; I remained overly invested. Nothing was expected of him because he “wants out.” If anyone was going to make it work, I was. I did all the pleasing, the chasing, the crying, the begging. When it really got bad, Lee threw me a bone, and I, like Pavlov’s salivating dog, came running. He’d been dangling the bait for years and I continued to salivate. I was placated for the moment; became completely invested again, and Lee was off the hook for the time being, until the cycle repeated itself again. And how convenient for me. I helped maintain the cycle because every time I felt him pulling away, felt him ready to walk-out, then I experienced my terrifying, paralyzing fear of everything going away. Abandonment. The vocabulary I did not want to know. And that fear, that pain, was more than I believed I was capable of bearing. I was a rat in a cage, round and round and

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round I went. Running, running, constantly running from pain, all the while creating more pain as I was running. My life was one large painful orb, with occasional and short-lived respites of affection and acceptance, the security of being in Lee’s arms, now and again, the surety of loving my children, the surety of feeling their love for me, of my believing that I was performing a noble deed by keeping my family together, that, surely, my children were not privy to the pain-laden dyad between their father and me. Surely I was doing my children a favor. Or was I really doing myself a favor?

Chapter Fourteen

At the completion of that first semester, Doug Alton recommended that I enroll in an upper division non-fiction prose writing class. David Shapiro was the teacher and Doug was confident I’d find a challenge there and that David’s class would provide additional opportunities to improve my writing skills. David was the teacher who changed my life. That first day in class, I felt an immediate connection to him. He was short, darkly handsome, ten years older than me, father to a young son and married to a woman of whom he spoke highly. David seemed familiarly familial to me. He was a bit like my father: entertaining both sides of an issue, emotionally intense, and gently verbose in his intellect. And he reminded me of myself: intelligent, private, sensitive, honest, and committed. David recognized me and helped me to recognize myself. He was warm, challenging, funny, smart, gentle, acrid, and always supportive. I recall sitting in his office one afternoon, as he was providing feedback regarding a rough draft of a long essay end-of-semester project I had written. Slowly and with a warm smile, he said, “Well, Anne, this is obviously an “A” essay. Now, here are a few suggestions for revision.” What! An “A” essay? To whom was he speaking? I looked behind me, assured that he must be directing his comments elsewhere. But he was looking directly at me. I couldn’t quite figure out how an “F” woman as in “Failure” could write an “A” essay. It was as if David was saying, “You are an “A” human being.” I had such respect and esteem for David, felt such a kinship and caring for him, that for him to acknowledge me as bright, thoughtful and intelligent greatly impacted me. It was the first time in a long time, maybe for most, if not all, of my life, that I felt valued, recognized, esteemed for who I was, accepted for the honest, forthright musings of my soul. 83

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I wrote my true and authentic thoughts and feelings in that end-of-semester essay. I wrote about my brother Aaron, who he had been, who he was, what he meant to me, what schizophrenia had done to our family. David didn’t snicker, denigrate, or shame me. He didn’t make me feel less than; in fact, he made me feel “more than.” Finally, I was receiving some feedback that said, “I am okay. I am worthy.” All these years, the years of my childhood, the years of my adolescence, the years of my adulthood and my marriage to Lee, I’d always believed I wasn’t good enough, that I was intrinsically flawed. My job had never been to value myself, acknowledge myself. My job had been to sustain and support and care for others: my sick-angry-falling-apart-incompetent-narcissistic-mother, my indecisive-little-boy-artist-musician-peter-pan-father, my beloved ailing schizophrenic older brother, my vulnerable younger sister, and for many years, my unwilling and unhappy husband. I was the angry martyr, nailing myself to the cross, the savior of my family, paying the price for their sins, shouldering their burdens. And no matter how much I sacrificed, no matter how much I prayed, no matter how long and hard I hung on that cross, I never could provide redemption. But instead of coming down off the cross, I believed I needed to abide longer, try harder, be better. “I’m not doing enough. If I was everything would be okay.” I used to pray, “Please heal my family, protect them, lift their burdens. I am strong. I can carry their burdens. I willingly carry their afflictions. Please heal my mother, my brother; relieve my father’s pain, help my sister to know she is loved, make Lee understand that he should want this marriage, help him to know that leaving our little family is not the right thing to do.” It never occurred to me that my prayers had been answered, that the answer was, “You’ve done enough for others, now do for yourself.” Or, “You cannot do for others what they refuse to do for themselves.” Or, “You cannot prayaway someone else’s free choice.” I was never cognizant that it way “okay” for me to discover my “self,” unearth my “self.” I believed to do so would be an act of selfishness. And perhaps by care-taking others, by controlling that which was “external” to me, I would never have to examine that which was internal to me, my own fears, pains, disappointments, anger, hurt. My rescuing behavior dated back from the early days of my childhood, when I was a young girl. I knew no other way. Apparently, I learned to rescue and no one had ever identified my behavior as unhealthy or unwise. Rescuing, saving, was who I was and no one had ever attempted to release me nor educate me about this disease of enabling, care-taking behavior, although, it was not as if I had the ears to hear. My entire life had been about the identifying of and being in tune with the needs of others, while my needs remained buried and unknown.

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From the time I was five years old through the age of ten, the years I lived with my mother, I had gotten myself up in the morning, off to school, found my own food, cleaned, cooked, and cared for my younger sister Jessica. I have no recollection of my mother speaking to me, caring for me, feeding me, bathing me, or supervising me. I found friends, ran the streets, and then somehow found my way home, each afternoon, each evening. My mother expressed no interest in me, she imposed no limits, no boundaries, no rules. I could do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. The message: “I don’t care about you. It doesn’t matter what happens to you.” Underneath it all, with my mother’s lack of concern, lack of protection, I felt scared, insecure, angry. It was not so much what she did but what she failed to do, her acts of omission. I read her loud and clear: I was on my own. When I was seven or eight years old, my mother and I and my younger sister Jessica were living in a duplex four blocks from the ocean in Hermosa Beach, California. It must have been a weekend day or during summer vacation because I did not have school. I had gotten myself up and dressed and walked out of our duplex to go somewhere to do something, I don’t know what, for the day. As usual, I would simply leave our house in the morning and find my way home that evening. My mother never spoke to me, so she had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. And, quite frankly, she didn’t care. As I walked down the cement sidewalk to leave, I glimpsed my mother and my sister Jessica sitting in a sandy area in front of our duplex. My mother had apparently purchased a set of small plastic play shovels and rakes for Jessica and was sitting in the sandy area playing with Jessica. I stopped in my tracks, startled and surprised to see my mother actually being attentive to one of her children. I did not know my mother was capable of communicating with or of being aware or present with any of her children. I continued to stare at my mother and my sister. I could not believe what I was seeing. A fleeting thought crossed my mind, “I didn’t know my mother knew how to care for a child.” And then, “Why is my mother paying attention to my sister but not to me?” My mother saw me but did not acknowledge my presence. I continued walking past the sandy area down the sidewalk, to the street and left for the day. I desperately desired nurturing, caring, contact, communication, limits, boundaries, security. But since my mother was unwilling (or incapable) of meeting those needs, I attempted to meet my own needs, in the only way that a scared little girl can. I created my own world of security, created my own safety, my own fantasy Leave-It-To-Beaver-June-Cleaver world. I took care of my sister, became the little mother. I cleaned and cooked. I took control. I could not be weak. Everything around me was weak and unstable. If

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I allowed myself to be weak, then everything would collapse. I was too much of a survivor, too strong, too smart, too driven to allow my fantasy world to collapse. I chose life. And being in charge, care-taking, controlling was how I prevented the collapse. What about the years, from ages ten to eighteen, when I lived with my father and Jillian? Why was I still care-taking? My father and I had an interesting relationship. I adored him and he adored me. That was clear. Although my father was not a perfect man, in fact a very flawed man, he was, in my estimation, a good man, a good father. With him I felt safe; he watched out for me, made sure I was showered and fed and loved. We talked and we teased. He was always my very much loved Father. But he was also a dreamer, a romantic. He did not have a practical bone in his body. And I always feared that I might lose him, that he might die prematurely. I had no realistic reason to believe he would die, but it was my greatest fear. (I was not yet able to identity the word “abandonment.” My mother had emotionally abandoned me, and had relinquished her role as my mother. I was the child most like my father and she despised my father; thus I was, to her, an untouchable. All I had was my father.) Without my father, I would have no parent. I was acutely aware of how much I needed him to “be there.” And he was there. I knew I could always count on him being present. But my love for him and my terror of being parent-less was such that I wanted to protect him, oversee him, make sure he never died. (As if I could control that.) When we drove together on the freeways of Los Angeles, I watched the traffic, foresaw accidents, danger everywhere. He was a bit overweight so I worried he would have a heart attack, that he would be killed in some other sort of accident, that he would be a victim of a crime, and on and on. My relationship with my father had always been warm and loving. He told me once that he had wanted a daughter and when his firstborn, Aaron, came into the world, my father was happy to have a son but still he desired a daughter. When I was born, and I looked like him and we had similar personalities, my father was thrilled. He claimed me as his own. All my growing up years, both before my parents’ divorce and the years after their divorce, my father and I had this warm and compatible relationship. When I was a little girl, he and I held hands and walked along the beach together, he my all-loving-all knowing funny, smart, gentle Daddy. We made up stories about the Cheshire Cat and Anne’s Adventure’s Along the Strand, about leprechauns in the wilds of the Montana mountains, where my father trailed sheep when he was a young boy, about pepper-pot soup, about the sandman lulling me to sleep each night, about everything that was magical and mystical.

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My father was the adult and I had the utmost respect for him as my Father, but he was also childlike and could be weak and needy. He was extremely indecisive and leaned upon others to advise him in making decisions. And I became one of the people he depended upon for advice, for help in making decisions. Thus, I was once again, in the relationship with my father, a caretaker, again striving to please, in this instance, my father, often putting his need’s before my own, with me still trying to circumnavigate the possibility of my father being harmed or killed, leaving me orphaned, with me still striving to control the inevitable. The inevitable being that a life, fully lived, encompasses loss. But now at college with David, as my teacher and mentor, something was different. We didn’t talk about rescuing, about enabling behavior. I had no idea at that point about my inner workings. It was something else. I felt David’s approval, that he liked me, that he thought I was someone special, that I had a talent, that I possessed a voice. That I was a person, an interesting, bright, intelligent human being. I felt his warmth and approval radiating through his eyes, his confident smile. He esteemed me in a way I’d never been esteemed before. My thoughts and prayers and supplications had been for others, with me beneath them, and them above me. Always. But now from David the message was, “You are a special person, I like you just the way you are.” Something else happened with David, something that changed the way I viewed my relationship with Lee. Whenever David spoke of his wife, and he did often, it was always in ways where he esteemed her, where he discussed her talents, her insights, her experiences. She was an artist, was well-read, and was involved in the community. My experience with Lee had been about put-downs and criticism. David talked about his wife in ways that pleasantly surprised me. “Oh, so this is the way a relationship can be. It doesn’t have to be about pain and discord. It can be warm and enjoyable and interesting. A marriage is about companionship, about sharing,” I thought to myself. I’d had no examples of “good” marriages when I grew up. I thought pain and discord were just more grist for the mill. I had never thought of marriage as a pleasurable rewarding endeavor. Thus I was prone to create anger and turmoil and rejection so that I could be a victim and always have some reason to be licking my wounds. I was miserable in my marriage, but I thought that was par for the course. Now I knew differently. Things were changing for me. Did David change me? No, I changed myself, but David was an implement, a catalyst for change. He mirrored for me what I could not see for myself. Instead of disdain and contempt, he mirrored caring and esteem and humor and benevolence. Whenever he saw me, he was

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all smiles and warmth. He encouraged me and then challenged me to reach further, write harder, write more honestly, write more diligently. Be more myself! When I stumbled or thought I had failed, I hadn’t failed. With his warm endearing smile, with his laughter, with his seriousness, with his intelligence, he’d say, “Anne, write it again. You’re bright and creative but undisciplined. Focus, read the text, study the literature. Bring a revision back to me next week.” He believed in me. He had faith that I could achieve. It was not about him, and him wanting me to write to please him; it was about me and him wanting me to be the best I could be. And while David and I shared similar temperaments both intellectually and emotionally, he also reminded me of my father: benign, benevolent, approving, able to entertain both sides of an issue, and gently verbose in his intellect.

Chapter Fifteen

Initially, Lee seemed pleased that I was returning to school. Perhaps “pleased” is too strong a word, but initially he accepted it, although he still maintained the same stance he had maintained when we were getting to know each other at the Grand Canyon those many years before: “College is stupid.” The more immersed I became in my studies, the more my world opened up to something more than waitress work in small seedy backward towns, and the more information I received and the more global I became in my thinking, the more angry and threatened Lee became. I was a vacuum, inhaling and digesting every morsel of information that came my way. Soon I was taking courses in world literature, Eastern literature, modern poetry, the short story, English literature, American literature. I could not read enough, I could not write enough, I could not ask enough questions. I was indefatigable, insatiable in my desire for knowledge, an empty sponge voraciously soaking up every ounce of knowledge that was available. I devoured Gandhi’s autobiography; I understood every word, every nuance of Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s poetry. They were talking to me, talking about me. They had lived my life; I had lived their life. I was home, finally home. This is where belonged. I had been too immature to fully appreciate my college experience when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty years old. But now I was a woman who had traveled a “reallife” path for the past twelve years: marriage, motherhood, poverty, unending responsibilities to a husband and children, sacrifice, discipline, disappointment, heartache, love, euphoria, pain. And all the while, David was there, supporting, encouraging, mentoring. Did I fall in love with David? I suppose I did. Did we have an affair? Certainly an emotional affair, which is still a form of infidelity. But, no, we never 89

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saw each other off campus; we never touched or kissed, or verbalized anything of an inappropriate nature. I had the utmost respect for David and I had the utmost respect for myself, in terms of knowing who I was ethically and in terms of knowing that the one thing I would never lose, not ever, was my integrity. No matter how low I had been in my life, I always knew I could hold onto the fact that I was honest and true. Those were things that my mother was not and I had promised myself when I was a young girl that I would never be like my mother, not in those ways. I also knew that falling into another man’s arms might provide a quick and easy fix, might soothe my breaking heart, might put a nice big band-aid on all my raw wounds, but I knew it was not the solution. Was it easy to maintain my integrity and self-respect? No! I was lonely, I was very attracted to David and I knew he to me; I was extremely vulnerable, miserable. Did I say I was lonely? So lonely, I ached, I yearned, I desired, almost more than anything, to be loved, to be safe in the arms of a man who esteemed me. But I never did. And to David’s credit, he never suggested it and neither did I. We never spoke of such things. And for that I still maintain a deep respect for him. He told me, somewhere along the way, that there had been rumors on campus about us, rumors that we were having an affair. He told me his wife had heard the rumors and was very hurt and angry. In fact, they had a “blow-up.” He assured her it was not true and I am grateful that there was no validity to those rumors. Sometime during that second semester on campus, something else began to change within me. I had always enabled Lee and his behavior. No matter what he did or said, I was always present to pick up the pieces; I was always attentive, neglecting my needs and desires, in favor of meeting his needs and desires, making sure the laundry was done, meals cooked, bills paid, waiting around with baited breath for him to want me, need me, making sure that I anticipated his every need, anticipated each and every need of my children. No matter what Lee said or what Lee did, I was convinced he “didn’t mean it.” He was tired or stressed or unhappy or depressed or overburdened. It was never his fault; after all, he couldn’t help himself, because, as I always remembered, I wasn’t good enough. Through sheer willpower, I would hold everything together. Lee was making a big mistake by wanting out of this marriage, and it was my job to keep pointing out to him what a mistake his leaving would be. I was going to save him from himself, whether he liked it or not. It is interesting that for all of Lee’s protestations about wanting out of the marriage, he never really left. He threatened, he distanced himself, but he never filed for divorce.

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But now things were different for me. During that second semester on campus, for the first time in our married life, I just flat-out didn’t care about Lee anymore. I was experiencing an emotional release but I felt it physically. I felt a thousand pounds of weight sliding off my shoulders. I experienced a profound physical sensation that a burden had been lifted. I was light! I was free! Unexpectedly, I didn’t care what Lee did anymore. I stopped enabling. I stopped care-taking. I didn’t buy groceries; I didn’t pay the bills; I didn’t beg him to love me. I handed him the checkbook, walked out the door every morning and drove to school. And I began to feel very, very angry, enraged. I was still devoted to my children, but my anger and my discovering who I was made me less attentive to their needs. All of my needs and my anger that had remained unexamined and neglected since childhood came gushing forth. There was no balance, no moderation, no easy way to digest all of this new information. I rejected the woman I had been and embraced the new woman who was emerging. Just as the act of physical birth is bloody and painful and euphoric all at the same time, so was my emotional birth. There was nothing neat nor tidy nor contained about all I was discovering, all I was becoming. Looking back over those years, it would have been more humane to both myself and to Lee and our children if I had been capable of moderating and modulating the birth of the New me, but it was not to be. Angry and wrathful and out of control would describe the hot boiling geyser I had become. But then I had been so much about control that control was the one thing I needed to release, in order to give birth to this new woman. Lee observed all of this, must have known that he was losing me, yet only once did he verbalize his observations. He walked into our living room one day and said, “You’ve changed.” That was all. He never spoke of it again. He did speak, however, of how “worthless” I was, how “stupid” I was. But for the first time, I didn’t believe him. I knew now that he was speaking of himself, that he had always felt a self-loathing, that he had a chronic low self-esteem. I finally understood that his wanting out of our marriage, that his denigrating remarks were about him, not about me. I no longer owned his blaming, his incompetence, his depression, his what-ever it was.

Chapter Sixteen

That summer, after having completed my first year at SUSC, and having taken a few days off from my waitress work, I made a trip to southern California to visit my father and to visit my brother Aaron. I had not seen Aaron for a number of years. I had kept my distance, as it was too painful to see him sick, in the throes of delusions and hallucinations. I still did not want to acknowledge my painful childhood. I had been running from it for many years now. My father now aged sixty-six had experienced a very small stroke two years previously, not enough to damage his mobility, not enough to spend more than a day in the hospital for monitoring. But he did retire from teaching and was at home with his wife Jillian. My father was very pleased to see me. We hugged and talked. As always, he called me “Dear” and as always, I called him “Daddy.” None-the-less, he was quite depressed and absorbed with his own angst. I’d always coddled my father, worried over him, care-took him. Suddenly at this visit, for the first time, I felt anger toward my father. I was annoyed with his narcissism, with his self-absorption. I tired of his lamenting, his woe-is-me attitude. Seems I was angry at everyone, everywhere. My father was proud of me, but he was still at front and center stage, even in his illness. His stroke was the number one topic of conversation. And if not, then he was telling me about all the authors I should be reading: Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hemingway. “Yes, Daddy.” The dutiful daughter. The little girl who always put Daddy first. When I spoke of the women authors I was discovering, my father was taken aback, had never read them, thought that they might be frivolous. He said, “Nothing compares to Thomas Wolfe, he is the giant of American Literature.” Okay.

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After spending a couple of days with my father and Jillian, I drove to San Bernardino to visit Aaron for an afternoon before returning to Juniper Ridge. My father had taken on the brunt of Aaron’s mental illness. He was the person over these past twenty years since 1967 who had been Aaron’s primary support. Aaron was my father’s eldest child and his only son, and I know my father felt some guilt, wondered if he was in anyway to blame for Aaron’s illness. So out of love and perhaps out of some guilt, my father was always there for Aaron. My father drove to whichever state mental hospital Aaron happened to be at, arranged a day pass for Aaron, and then they’d spend the day having lunch, walking along the beach, going to the house and listening to and talking about music, mostly jazz. (Aaron had been a budding musician, drummer, before the schizophrenia set in.) Early in his illness at age nineteen, Aaron had remained in our home, between stints in state hospitals, but as his illness progressed, Aaron became violent, with his violence being particularly directed toward our step-mother, Jillian. Because of the violence, Aaron was no longer allowed in our home. Still my father remained stalwart in sustaining his relationship with his only son. So instead of Aaron coming to our home, my father and Aaron now took long drives along the coast, went to lunch, walked along the beach, toured art galleries in the Los Angeles area, frequented bookstores. Because Aaron was no longer visiting our home, I saw him less frequently. And after my high school graduation, I left the Pacific Ocean and the beaches of southern California to move to Utah to attend BYU and then on to the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff. I rarely returned to California, so my contact with Aaron was minimal. I always asked about Aaron when I spoke with my father. Aaron was certainly an ongoing topic of conversation, and I respected my father for being a continuing support to his only son, knowing, as I did, that my father suffered greatly over Aaron’s mental illness and his continued relapses into paranoia, delusions, and violence. It was a losing battle, but a battle my father deemed worth fighting. I was perhaps a coward, or perhaps a young woman who had had too many losses, a woman who had had too many traumas. I needed distance from the losses of mental illness, of an abusive and abandoning mother, of a traumatized childhood. But now after not having seen Aaron for nearly ten years, I was bound toward San Bernardino and Patton State Hospital. I’d always shied away from the state mental hospitals. But now I was face to face with one. I exited the freeway, pulled my car into the parking lot, and found my way to a block of administrative offices. I hadn’t called ahead and I knew nothing about procedures nor about what a state hospital looked like or what happened

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there. I had never had the courage to investigate, feeling that “see no evil” was the safest route to take. But now here I was, God only knows why, to see my brother, to pick the scab off a raw wound. Although that’s not what I thought I was doing; I thought I was visiting my brother, but somewhere, beneath consciousness, I needed to feel some thing, identify some thing, heal some thing. I spoke with a staff member at the main administrative office and explained that I was here to see my brother, Aaron Longmire. I was given a map and told to go Building K, floor five. Patton State Hospital was large and looming, a silent monstrosity. Rows upon rows upon rows of concrete slab buildings, barbed wire fences, and narrow strips of browning grass between each gray building. There were no people, no conversations, no hope, no vitality, just staff riding in jeeps, round and round, patrolling the grounds. I walked and walked until I found Building K. I tried to open the entrance door, but it was locked. I pushed buttons and buzzers for a time, until finally a staff member opened the door. I explained that I was here to see my brother. The staff member led me through more locked doors, up an elevator, through even more locked doors, and then into a gray linoleum floored vestibule. Where was Aaron? Where was I? For some reason, I had brought a fresh cantaloupe for Aaron. I was told to wait in another gray room with my cantaloupe. Soon a tall lean thirty-something man entered my gray room and asked what I was doing there with a cantaloupe in my lap. I knew he thought I was a patient and he was wondering how I had gotten off the locked ward. This was getting bizarre and I feared that I would be locked up because the more I protested, the more deranged I appeared: “I drove from Utah and I’m here with a cantaloupe looking for my brother.” Finally, I retrieved my drivers license from my wallet and explained I had come from a visit with my father in Manhattan Beach and was here now to see my brother, Aaron Longmire, before I returned to Utah. The man I was talking to happened to be the psychiatrist on Aaron’s ward. He asked me a few questions and answered a few of my questions. He then left to retrieve Aaron. I walked to the ward entrance and watched Dr. Bloom unlock the door, enter the ward, then re-lock the ward doors, walk down a gray corridor, stop at another locked door, that looked like a prison cell, and unlock that door. Emerging from that unlocked door was my beautiful, beloved brother. Aaron stepped out of his cell and Dr. Bloom ushered him back to me. Aaron offered me a small grin through his highly medicated haze and then he stepped through the ward doors and into my arms. I held him and cried. And cried. He said, “Anne don’t cry. It’s okay.” But nothing was okay. I had just opened the door to my own locked ward and there was no way to close it.

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Aaron and I sat and talked. We received permission for him to walk outside with me. Slowly we walked, him stooped and weary, me with my arm around him, supporting him in our walk. He cracked jokes about Richard Nixon, danced wildly as he used to do at the Love-In’s at Griffith Park. Aaron was still living in 60’s. We talked music, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin. Still stuck in the 60’s. I was thirty-three years old, Aaron thirty-eight. This should have been the prime of his life, filled with music and work and friends, with family, maybe a wife and children, a time of meaningful companionship, meaningful endeavors, a time of creativity and accomplishment, a time for Aaron’s brilliance to shine. I looked at Aaron and saw all of his potential, all that could have been for him, knowing that it would never be. I saw his gentleness and innocence, the way he held my hand and smiled his gentle smile at me, the way he said, “Aw, Anne, don’t worry about me. I’m okay.” Still the older brother, watching out for me, wanting to protect me. We ambled back to Building K, Floor Five. I pushed the buzzer and entered the building with Aaron by my side. We rode the elevator to the fifth floor, and stepped out onto the gray linoleum flooring. I stepped into the little side room and retrieved my cantaloupe. Dr. Bloom greeted us. Aaron and I hugged. I could not let him go. I could not. No! He cannot go back to this hell-hole, back to this life of locked wards and sterility and isolation and medications force-fed down his throat. No, not my brother. And as I cried in his embrace, burying my head into his shoulder, feeling his soft whiskers on my cheek, feeling him holding me tight, he whispered to me, his voice thick and slurred, “It’s okay, Anne. I’m okay. Aw, Anne, don’t cry.” He slipped away from my embrace, stumbling toward the now unlocked entrance to his ward, his shoulders hunched, his gait uneven and slow, weighted down with a cantaloupe, as I watched him being locked into his cell. And then it happened. Aaron was gone and everything I had been repressing, everything I had been controlling for thirty-three years, broke loose. I let go of the control and I cried. I cried what I had never cried. I grieved what I had never grieved. I Broke-down. Broke-through. I cried non-stop for seven days. I drove to Juniper Ridge and cried. Went to church on Sunday and cried. Showed up at my waitress job and cried. I could not control it. I could not stop it. I cried when I showered, cried when I cooked dinner. It came from somewhere deep down, some place I had never explored, some place I had kept hidden for thirty-three years. Finally, I released all I’d been denying: my rescuing, my controlling, my care-taking, my enabling. Lee was Lee. Anne was Anne. Aaron was Aaron.

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Razel was Razel. And no amount of fantasy, no escapism, no amount of denial, no Leave-It-To-Beaver-June-Cleaver-Father-Knows-Best-Fairy-TaleWorld was going to change that reality. I had hidden from myself long enough, and now I was face to face with the woman and the little girl. They were doing all the talking. And I was listening.

Chapter Seventeen

All my life, this was what I had been running from; all my life this was what I had been running toward. And now the two worlds were colliding. I had been running to Lee to protect me and shelter me from this pain, expecting him to make me safe, make me whole. I expected him to define me because I was too afraid, too ashamed to define myself. After all, without Lee, how would I identify myself? A motherless child? An orphan? A brother-less sister? The sister of a mentally-ill psychotic man? The daughter of an abandoning, abusive, promiscuous, unstable mother? The daughter of an unconventional whimsical dreamy jazz musician father? I’d always been ashamed of and afraid of who I was. I did not want to be like my mother, not like my brother, not like my father. I was ashamed of the name Longmire because I feared it wasn’t good enough, not honorable. I had remained silent about my mentally ill brother, about my absentee mother, ashamed that anyone would know she was my mother, uncomfortable about my unconventional father and his ongoing battle of wills with my stepmother, Jillian. If I could be attached to or adopted by a respectable friend, a respectable family, then I could hide my shame and be defined within the folds of that entity, allowing my true self to remain undiscovered, unnamed, and unknown. In high school, I was good friends with Julie, a young woman my age. We had been close friends since the age of twelve when we first met in junior high. She was a good friend, loyal and generous. I practically lived at her house. As long as her family would put up with me, I was there. Julie’s mother was very kind to me. But I had very little self-confidence and was willing to accept whatever crumbs they threw my way. I knew at times that Julie’s siblings were annoyed with me, hanging around all the time, but this 97

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was a family and there was a kind and caring mother in the home. I was more than willing to be the stray alley cat. It was better than what I had at my own house. As early as junior high and high school, I was vociferously embracing my shame, believing I was never good enough, that others deserved more, much more, than I did. During my freshman year of high school, I applied to become a member of the school’s literary club. I wrote what I believed was a thoughtful and competent writing sample. I met with the faculty advisor and we discussed my essay and I talked about my interests in reading and writing. I’m sure I stammered, lisped, appeared unprepared, and look directly down toward the floor the entire time. It was clear I had very low self-esteem and very little to offer. I was denied membership in the school’s literary club. Interestingly, my friend Julie, blond, blue-eyed, very athletic, and extremely beautiful, who’d never read a book in her life and had no interest in ever reading a book, decided she wanted to join the literary club. So naturally, I wrote another writing sample, very similar to the original essay I had written. Later that week, Julie submitted the essay I’d written and she was immediately embraced with very welcoming arms into our high school’s literary club. I simply accepted that kind of behavior, that kind of rejection as the norm. That’s who I was. I was not worthy. I was not good enough. I knew that and everybody else knew that. My job was to support and to be a cheerleader for other people’s success. Never for my own. After all, what was there to support? What was there to cheer about? Nothing. But now, finally, after all these years, I was discovering that I was a Somebody. And I was discovering the beginnings of a courage to stop running away from something and start running toward that which had always been before me. What was wrong with having a mentally ill brother? So what if my mother was abusive and abandoning? So what if my father was a dreamyimpractical-can’t-manage-his-money-jazz musician? Yes, my father was far from perfect, but I loved him and respected him. Not all well-educated but semi-employed penniless jazz musician fathers would fight for custody of their children and win that custody in the state of California in the year of 1964. But my father did. Yes, my brother Aaron had the disease of schizophrenia, but he was a caring and attentive older brother, and I embraced him. I was proud of him for enduring all that he had endured. Against all odds, he was alive, and he continued forward in the best way he could. And no I did not have a relationship with my mother and, yes, I was an orphan in some sense, but so what? Perhaps she had done the best she could, given her particular set of circumstances, which I might not understand. Or maybe she had not done the best she could.

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Perhaps all of her abuse was meted and measured with full cognition. So what? Her actions spoke nothing of me. They spoke of her. Microscopically I began to understand all of this, that I was, as a person, acceptable for who and what I was. My worth was not measured by the actions of family or friends or anybody else, for that matter. I was worthwhile because I was a good person, because I had done the best I could, even if my best had, at times, fallen short. I was a devoted mother, a faithful wife, and, against all odds, I had persevered. In fact, I was capable of success, in whatever ways I chose to measure that success: loyalty, perseverance, honesty, integrity, commitment. When my tears of my grief, had run their full course of seven long days and nights, they segued into an intermittent daily grieving for six months. I attended college full-time, worked part-time, cooked, cleaned, mothered, and every day on my seven mile drive from the college campus back to my home, I shed tears of grief and more grief and more grief. This was not a fount of grief that was easily dispensed. There was no prescription for this grief: imbibe two cries daily, for ten minutes, four times a week. No this grief had a mind and a will all its own. This was a cleansing, healing, angry grief that had been subdued and held closely in check for thirtythree years. And now it spoke to me, “Release me, let me live, allow me to feel what I feel. I will not be deterred! I will not be contained!” This grief was about loss, it was about anger, it was about self-deception, about half-truths, and untruths. It was about the loss of all my dreams, about all my illusions and delusions, about the way my life was “supposed” versus what it really was. I now knew why I clung so desperately to Lee. He provided the barrier, the obstruction to discovering the real me. As long as I remained focused on him and the pain in our marriage, then I never had to examine my own fears and heartaches. I wanted to fix him but I never wanted to “fix” me. And now there was no where to go, nothing left to do except to feel my own feelings and discover the woman who had remained in hiding for a very long time. I continued on with my studies, working toward my bachelor’s degree in English, working part-time waiting tables, cleaning motel rooms, or tutoring students, for extra money. And although I had never been able to articulate, and did not possess the vocabulary to do so, about what was happening in my personal life, David Shapiro maintained his support and mentoring as my teacher. He knew, from my writing assignments, that I was struggling with something, that I was I was off kilter, fiery and hot, swinging wildly from pole to pole. As I went through this grieving process, I became incredibly angry and rebellious. The grief was healing, but it was not dispensing itself in discrete

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digestible increments. It was instead erupting in mammoth bonfires of emotion, hot fire-breathing molten mountains of emotional lava. It was more than I could process, more than I could contain. I felt too, with each tsunami wave of grief, that I had been a fool, that I had been, for all my life, too trusting, too needy, too seeking for approval, too vulnerable, too faithful, too eager to please, too idealistic, too willing to believe that others knew more than I, too willing see myself through another’s eyes, too unable to stand up for myself. I rejected that weak needy woman and over-compensated by developing a tough exterior that said “screw you, screw everybody,” belying how I really felt, which was vulnerable, lonely, frightened, humbled, angry, overwhelmed, and incredibly inadequate at processing all this information. Lee and I continued to remain estranged, even more so, because the more I grieved, the angrier I became, and my crusty hard exterior communicated, “I’m no longer available, you’re not hurting me again.” I thought more about how I had held on to Lee all these years. I wished I had been strong enough to let him go, that I hadn’t I begged and clung so desperately. If I had released him, maybe he would have discovered for himself what he really wanted. Maybe he did want out. But given the opportunity, maybe he didn’t. Can a marriage between two people survive when it is founded on coercion and rigid dogma? If I’d been healthier, I’d have allowed him his freedom, wished him well, and moved on. If the space and distance brought us back together again, at some time, at some place, if the bonds of our marriage, if our shared history, if the investment in our three beautiful children was deep enough, then we might have come together again as friends or as lovers or in any other meaningful configuration. Isn’t love between a man and a woman about wanting what is best for each partner? Can’t love flow from differing fonts? Lee often said, partly in jest, partly not, “I want a small house across the street from you and the kids.” I understood he wanted me but that he also wanted unencumbered space, perhaps more space than in most marriages, but then perhaps not. Who’s to say how two people can creatively define their relationship, as long as the relationship maintains its mutual respect and caring and integrity, and honoring of the commitments that have been made between the partners. But I had been too needy and too dependent to have entertained such an arrangement. If I had been strong enough to release him, would we have found our way back to each other? But too many years had lapsed and too much hurt and too many angry and abusive words had passed between us. I knew our marriage was over. Perhaps Lee did not. When the opportunity arose for us to buy the house we’d been renting, Lee made all the arrangements. I was not involved in the transaction other than to show up at an appointed time and sign certain papers. Lee and I

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never spoke about buying the home; he simply arranged it on his own. Later, he asked me, “Are you happy about buying the house?” I looked at him and walked away. It just didn’t matter anymore. Faithless and rebellious, I was a missile, fully loaded with fuel, burning through the cloistered, cloying atmosphere of repression, fear and lies. I gave myself permission to think the unthinkable, to speak the unspeakable. I was no longer the woman Lee had married. I was strong and I was filled with fury. Lee did not know this woman. He became more rigid as I became more fluid. He did not like these changes one bit. This was not the young, naive, dependent, insecure, needy, bread-baking-clothes-washing-goat-milking-breastfeeding little mama he had married. No, this was a mean-angry-get-out-ofmy-way-single-minded-strange-woman who was inhabiting his wife’s body. I had discovered my liberation and had embraced it by storm. Yet despite my fully fueled anger, I still anguished over what was best for my children. They were innocent in all of this, this fist-a-cuffs between their father and mother. They loved us both, and they, of course, wanted their mother and father together, although they were reaching an age where they could perceive the angst and pain between us. Lee was now sleeping in the basement. I slept in our upstairs bedroom alone. I kept myself busy during the day with school and homework and parttime employment and mothering duties. Night time was the most difficult. All of my dark and loathsome fears crept into my bed each evening. I had always hidden behind my children, behind my husband. My children were still there, but they were growing and were becoming more independent, needing more space of their own. And Lee was not to be found. And I had reached a place where I knew I was no longer going to go begging. If he wanted the basement, he could have it. If he wanted to play power games, he could play them. If he was angry, so be it. I was now, for the first time in thirty-three years, feeling my own feelings. My anger continued to fuel me. Anger was my only ballast. And beneath that ballast was a vulnerable, lonely, terrified little girl. At night in the dark, alone in my bedroom, I knew that my entire world was collapsing. Many nights, I turned on the light and reached for the phone book. Searching the Yellow pages, I sought help. Who to call? Where to turn? Do I just go through this alone? “Why not,” I asked myself, “I’ve gone through everything else in my life alone.” “Where can I turn? Who cares enough to nurture me, support me?” “Nobody,” I realized.

Chapter Eighteen

With resources depleted, with no answers to my questions, with me believing I was experiencing a total break-down, with me feeling deranged and disoriented, I turned again to the Yellow pages. Maybe I could find some answers there. But where do I look? Do I turn to “P” for psychotic, perhaps “C” for crazy, or “H” for help, or maybe “A” for anger. I picked up the phone and started to dial, but before my call was completed, I hung up. I’d never leaned on anyone. I’d always been the strong one. I’d never learned about community or collaboration or mutuality. I’d never been nurtured or coddled. I still believed that I possessed the answers to my questions. And ultimately I did. “Who is this woman filled with fury and rebellion? Why is this woman, little girl, so needy, so scared?” I turned off my bedroom light and laid quietly in bed, searching for answers, seeking knowledge, praying for guidance, knowing that the answers were not extant within some font of knowledge external to myself, but that the answers lived within me, waiting to be discovered. Each night, in the dark, alone in my upstairs bedroom, I wrestled with my loneliness, with my heartache. I had a writing desk in my bedroom—actually in my clothes closet. Perhaps my writing desk lodged in my closet signified the ways in which I had secreted and closeted my true self. It was interesting that Lee’s saddle shop took up a fair portion of our basement, whereas my writing desk inhabited but a small closeted space. I began to allow my writing desk to reflect the authentic me. I posted pictures of my brother Aaron, art-work that my children brought home from school, scarves, colorful leaves and flowers, interesting rocks and feathers, quotes from favorite poetry. I thought too of my relationship or lack of relationship with my mother. Although I was still choosing not to have her involved in my life and we were 102

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not in contact, I wondered about her life, about who she was and what had compelled her to travel her particular path. How must she have felt to have her children removed from her, what heartache had she borne. The time was still many years in the future, but eventually I reconnected with her and we fashioned a sort of relationship, perhaps more of a cautious and distant civility between two women, more that than mother and daughter, although over the years, there have been the occasional sparks of selfdisclosure, moments of vulnerability. She told me once how she hated the constant rain in Seattle, when she lived there with my father, but then again because it was the place of my birth, Seattle remained special to her, because she had me. She told me she had made many mistakes; we didn’t enumerate or mention them by name. But she knew and I knew. She said she believes she was a “bit pampered” when she was a child. And despite reports to the contrary, she views her childhood as idyllic, but that she was not ready for adult responsibilities when, at age nineteen, she married my father, and was not prepared for motherhood at age twenty. She briefly discussed her biological mother, my grandmother, Annie Vinograd Stern, who died when my mother was a toddler, mentioned her biological father Isaac Stern, and said she never really knew until later that Isaac was her father, never knew til much later that Annie was her mother. I’d have liked to pry further. I was filled with curiosity, but I knew with my mother that our relationship was guarded and tenuous at best. I wanted to fill my empty spaces with her life. Each afternoon, I rode my bicycle and found healing in the sweet smell of wild sage, found comfort and companionship in the rugged stalwart mountains, in the call of wild birds, in the wildness and isolation of the back roads. I was concerned for my children. Afternoons, when I was at home, I sat on the front porch of our home and watched my children delight in riding their bicycles (“Mom, Watch!”), running through nearby hay fields, collecting pheasant eggs (“See what I found, Mom”), chasing jack rabbits, plucking bouquets of wild flowers, riding our pony Jeremiah, building downy nests for broody Bantam hens, running home at dusk (“Mom, I made it before the street lights came on”). Mom! Mom! Mom! It was not possible to betray them. But the relationship between Lee and me continued to disintegrate. At every moment, I could feel Lee’s anger and disdain and disapproval. I knew he was threatened by my newly found independence. I knew he was puzzled and disoriented by the ways in which I was changing. The situation was untenable. But neither one of us had seriously discussed divorce, nor had either one of us filed for divorce.

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As usual we were two miserable people locked in a miserable situation. Misery was all we knew. And unfortunately misery had defined our relationship for many, many years. Still Lee made small concessions in his unspoken way. I arrived home from school and my bicycle was sitting on the back porch. He’d brought it to the bike shop and had it greased and tuned up. On my birthday, I arrived home to find a new microwave oven waiting for me in our kitchen. But the concessions were too little and too late. He could not have it both ways. I was hardened and believed he was “throwing me a bone.” The same tidbit he had always thrown my way, the one that said, “Perhaps I have overstepped my bounds. Perhaps I’ve been too hard, too cruel, and now I hope this gesture makes amends for my unkind behavior.” But I was done groveling. So I threw his bones aside, discarded them without thought or consideration, without appreciation, without acknowledgment. Still I worried for my children. Even if it was a sham of a marriage, perhaps that was better than no marriage at all, perhaps better than a divorce. Lee and I had been at this for a long time now, almost fifteen years. I had remained steadfast in my college studies, against all odds, the odds being lack of financial support, my break-down, my break-through, the state of my marriage. Since I had no (or very little) money and since Lee and I were at such odds, I scrounged under beds and couch cushions for thirty or fifty cents so I could purchase a half gallon of gas to get me the seven miles to school and the seven miles back home again. My old weary Plymouth Colt had no heater, and I had no means to repair it, so on record breaking cold January mornings of twenty-four below zero, I drove to school with no heat and fifty cents in gas. No matter what happened, I would graduate from college. No thing and no one would stand in my way. I was determined and adamant. I would pay any price to achieve this goal. I had been silenced too long. I would be silenced no more. That last year on campus, I completed my course work and then completed two student teaching placements at the local high school, one placement for English and the other placement for my minor, Special Education. That final year of schooling was more difficult than ever. The civil war in my marriage was at its peak. As a part of my “no more rescuing, no more enabling, no more co-dependency” regime, I handed over the financial reins to Lee. I wanted no more dealings with checkbooks being overdrawn, no more fights about how much money went into the saddle shop and how much money went toward the family’s living expenses: food, clothing, utilities. I was tired of him blaming me for his problems. According to Lee, the checkbook was always overdrawn because I purchased food for the family or paid

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the phone bill, when in reality, the checkbook was overdrawn because he purchased frivolous items for his saddle business: two thousand dollars worth of horse and saddle books that sat on a dusty shelf in his basement saddle shop, reams of outdated horse magazines. He still relinquished completed handmade and hand tooled saddles to customers who refused to pay in full. I was done engaging in futile power struggles. He could run the finances as he saw fit. And if the bills didn’t get paid, they didn’t get paid. If our monthly mortgage was not paid, it was not paid. If our home was repossessed, then so be it. I would no longer be held hostage by Lee’s threats, by Lee’s incompetence. I was now, and had been for many years, fully accountable for myself and my actions. Now it was time for Lee to be fully accountable for his actions. I could only do what I could do. I could only control what I could control—and nothing more. Lee had made sure that he had pulled almost all emotional and financial support out from under me. He was angry, threatened, and wished me to fail. But I was now strong enough to stand on my own two feet. And I determined I would succeed. I recall during those last months of my college program talking with an acquaintance, Bill Osgood, on campus. He was employed at the college as a program coordinator for the Upward Bound program. I had come to know Bill through the tutoring and teaching I had done with his Upward Bound students. He was older than I and possessed some insights and wisdom about life and about relationships. One afternoon we were sitting in his office and I was talking with him about some confusing repetitive dreams I had been having for many, many months. Weekly, if not nightly, I had recurring “flying” dreams. I was always alone, flying up steep canyon walls and mountain sides, and usually I was flying through impoverished rural areas, where the hillsides were dotted with older ramshackle houses. And as I was flying, I encountered numerous power poles (electric poles) along the way. If it was a good dream, I was able to fly, veritably soar, over all the power poles. If it was a bad dream, then my feet were dragging and catching along the power lines. Sometimes, I couldn’t even drag my feet over the power lines; I had to fly under the power lines. And sometimes, I flew so low that I could not fly over the house tops. I had to duck through doors and windows and fly through these dilapidated houses. Those were the worst dreams. I could not obtain adequate altitude, no matter how hard I tried. I mustered all my strength and willpower, still I could not gain enough altitude to fly high. My feet trailed through the power lines, creating chaos. I told my dreams to Bill and completely puzzled, I asked him what he made of it. I was at my wits end. Why was I dreaming night after night after night

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about flying through power poles. What was this all about? Bill looked at me, his face breaking into a wide warm grin: “Power poles!? Think about it.” And suddenly I understood. I had been powerless all my life. I did not know how to name “power.” I didn’t know the word for it. But my puzzling subconscious dreams had been all about power, my personal power, or lack of it. I questioned my ability to obtain and maintain personal power; thus in my dreams I was alternately succeeding or failing in maintaining strength enough to conquer these power poles, which represented my own personal power, my ability to either remain in control of my life or revert to being out of control of my life. Subconsciously, in my dreams, I believed in myself, while alternately, I doubted myself. The metaphor was accessible and transparent, but I had not been able to decipher it without outside assistance. Now I understood. I needed to believe and trust in myself, that I could achieve, that I was worthy of achievement and success, and that I was strong enough to live life on my terms. Those last months of my marriage were the most painful times between Lee and me. For the first time in our nearly fifteen years of marriage, there were no more reconciliations. I was no longer rushing into Lee’s arms, willing to make peace, willing to fashion any compromise in order to make him stay. I now knew, that no matter how painful, I could live without him. And now Lee knew that too. In May I graduated from Southern Utah State College with my Bachelor’s degree in English. Lee did not acknowledge my graduation nor did he attend the graduation ceremony. I wished he was there, with our children. Perhaps his support on that special day, his presence, an arm around my waist, a warm smile, would have softened my heart. Perhaps that one thing, his approval and support, would have made a difference. But it didn’t happen. And his disinterest nailed one more nail in an already well-nailed coffin. After graduation, I applied for a one year position to teach entry-level English classes at SUSC. I was hired. “So what do I do now,” I wondered. I did what I set out to do: get my degree. But nothing had changed for the better in my marriage. Lee and I were at the peak of our malevolence, where our arguments and silence and disdain permeated the environment like a voraciously growing malignancy. But there were my children to think of. Unbelievably, I still believed that keeping the marriage intact might be the best thing for them. What was I thinking? What was I teaching my children? What were they learning about relationships? I wondered, too, could I keep up this charade much longer?

Chapter Nineteen

But then came the final nail in the well-nailed coffin. It was late August. I had spent my second summer teaching English for the SUSC Upward Bound program. Late summer had arrived and I was to begin my one year teaching contract with the college in a few weeks. I was at home and was downstairs in the basement piling a load of laundry into the washing machine. I still slept alone in my upstairs bedroom; Lee slept alone in his downstairs bedroom, although our paths did on occasion cross. I passed Lee’s basement saddle shop on my way to the washing machine. As usual, his shop door was closed. The implied message was that I was not welcome; he wanted to be left alone, at least by me anyway. Others were welcome. I overheard Lee conversing with someone on the phone. He was speaking in a tone of voice I was unaccustomed to hearing. His voice was warm and flirtatious and endearing. I was baffled, yet surprised at the same time. Under what circumstances would he be using that tone of voice, and with whom would he be using use that tone of voice. I could feel my blood pressure rising. I felt a sense of shock and then fury and then denial pulsating in my throat all at once. My ears were ringing; my temples were throbbing. I’d always thought that if Lee just gave me some sort of definitive reason to leave him, I would. As if all that had transpired over the years was not definitive in and of itself. And now, clearly, the one definitive thing, the unalterable circumstance I always knew for sure I could hang my hat on was right under my nose. Now, what was I going to do about it? I left the washing machine and walked quietly to his shop, pressing my ear against the closed door. I listened as Lee continued on with this very warm and caring conversation. I gathered there was

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a woman on the other end. I surmised they knew each other and had spoken or had been in contact several times previously. Despite everything, Lee and I had always had a chemistry between us. I naively believed, or talked myself into believing, that if we were sexually faithful to each other, then we still had an unbreakable bond. Now, I was hearing something through Lee’s closed shop door that was telling me otherwise. With the blood coursing and throbbing through my temples, with my ears ringing, with me shaking and feeling sick and weak all over, I stood steadfastly by that door and listened to the entire conversation. When Lee hung up the phone, I entered his shop, shaking and trembling from head to toe. Lee looked up at me from the phone, which now lay safely in its cradle. His face reflected guilt and shame. He knew he’d been caught doing something he ought not to have been doing. “So who were you talking to?” I asked. “Nobody. Just a saddle customer,” he responded. “No! It wasn’t a saddle customer. I want to know NOW what is going on here!” I bellowed. “And I mean NOW!” Lee was in my cross hairs and there was no getting out. I was going to get to the bottom of this, if it killed me. I knew intuitively that there was something, no matter how painful, I needed to know. Thankfully, our children, after a long summer vacation, had returned to school and were not at home to witness this altercation. I pushed and pushed. Lee denied and denied. And then the truth came out. We had a terrible violent fight. I vented my wrath, in every which way I could. He retaliated. I hurt in ways I never thought I could be hurt. I was blinded by my rage. I was emotionally wounded and betrayed in ways I never thought possible. My husband had been seeing this woman, a woman he had met through some saddle business in California, for at least a number of weeks if not several months. I told Lee to find his gun and hide it because if I got my hands on it, he would be in grave danger. He was raw and exposed, as well he should have been. I knew then that there was great truth to the saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” I was scorned and tossed aside like a dirty used rag. I was furious. I was bruised and broken, spent, defeated. And Lee was a caged animal, knowing he had crossed a line that would definitely finalize the termination of our marriage. And what a fool I had been. A big, stupid, idealist trusting fool. We continued fighting, verbally, physically, emotionally. Every which way. I was hoarse and crying and enraged and defeated. Lee was defensive, scared, and ashamed. It had come down to this. This betrayal. This last act of desperation. And there it was. The final straw. The end of all we had shared for

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better and for worse. This is what it boiled down to. Our fifteen years together, our triumphs, our heartaches, our dysfunctional fifteen year dance. The love we had shared. Our children. The disgust and disillusionment. It was all there. It hung in the air. The scent of defeat. The fragility of sadness. The weight of finality. The stench of betrayal. The deep sorrow for our children. The defiling of their innocence. The end to something that had been so promising. The end of our deep rugged red Grand Canyon. The end of our towering Flagstaff San Francisco peaks. The end of everything. We would never again share a home together. We would never, not ever, share a bed again. He would never come home to me, tanned and dusty, smelling of Colorado river water. And I would never again be at home for him, with a baby on my hip, a smile on my face, waiting to be in his arms. This was the end. And finally I knew it. Even in the heat of anger, in the lamentations of shame, a sadness hung about us. Our children had to be told that our marriage had ended. That their mother and father would never live together again. Finally, as the last particles of rage settled in the amassing doom, I picked myself up, gathered a few belongings, my purse, my shoes, my glasses, and I walked out the back door of our house. I walked past the rich green alfalfa fields, down the long rutted dirt road toward the highway. I walked the seven long miles into town, and passed along the way the little lost motherless girl, wishing for her mother’s love, the bereaved sister grieving for her older beloved brother. I passed the young mother holding her babies in her arms: playfully teasing her chubby Oliver, rocking her gentle smiling Elizabeth, nursing her sweet tender Jacob. I passed the eager to please, insecure, frightened, trying much-to-hard-young woman. I saw her bussing tables, baking, cleaning, washing. She was waiting for her husband to come home to her, but he did not. He worked late instead. I saw the woman’s wide smile, her tender entreating eyes, wondering if she was good enough, hoping that if she tried just a little harder, that maybe she would be acceptable. I spoke to the young girl, the young mother, the young wife. I looked into their eyes and told each of them how I valued them for all they had done, for all they are, and for all they had become. Warmly, they embraced me and wished me well. I continued on my way, waving a long good-bye.

Chapter Twenty

After leaving Lee, I found an old dilapidated Victorian house in town to rent. The house was quaint and ancient but really not quite habitable, with plaster peeling off the walls and the electricity and heating sources not fully operable. But the price was right, at two-hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. And from the front porch I could look into the solid bulk of the rising mountains, their shoulders strong and sturdy. I knew that as I waxed weak and felt I could no longer go forward that I could step onto that front porch and find strength and healing in those massive enveloping mountains. I knew they would hear my pleas and petitions and transmit strength and hope to my wounded soul. I took my children with me, and within days launched into my one year teaching contract at the college. Pain and grief were my constant companions. I lost weight on my already thin frame. I was a withered leaf, dry and lifeless. I remember walking across campus that fall, my sorrowing eyes hiding behind dark glasses, looking into the faces of vibrant attractive young college students, and thinking to myself, “I wonder if I will every smile again.” Two weeks after leaving Lee, I filed for divorce. Four weeks later, he loaded his pick-up truck and moved to California. Apparently he had both personal and business connections there. Our divorce was final in December. Lee never contested the divorce nor did he attend the divorce proceedings. I arrived at the courthouse one cold December morning. My attorney put me on the stand, asked me a few benign questions, and the judge issued a divorce decree. It was over. No fanfare. Just me alone driving the twenty miles from the county courthouse back into town. Alone. Alone with my thoughts, my tears, my heartache. Knowing that Lee would never come home to me again, that I 110

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was on my own, that we were traveling divergent paths. Leaving Lee was the most difficult thing I had ever done. I grieved long and hard. And now at long last, I knew that “everything I cared about” had indeed “gone away.” I had been terrified of abandonment all my life, had gone to great lengths, to dire lengths so I would never have to feel that “everything goes away” feeling I had felt as a child. Now here it was. It was tough. It was, at times, unbearable. It was not what I desired. Not at all. But it was here and I had two choices: embrace it or reject it. If I embraced it I knew I would learn potent truths. And I also knew that by embracing the abandonment I could make peace with loss, examine it and come to understand that loss is a normal and natural part of one’s life. If I decided to take the less painful road and chose not to embrace abandonment, then I would most likely doom myself to repeating more cycles of pain and heartache until such time as I was willing to embrace loss and understand its place in my life and in all of life. I pondered the alternatives and wisely committed to learn the lessons of loss now. I was traveling this dark road by myself. I was at my most weak and my most needy, but I had a glimmer of faith, a tendril of hope, that, no matter the outcome, I would survive. As I taught my English classes that fall, I fought hard each day to present the lessons and facilitate the discussions, without falling into a depressive funk. “Paste on a smile, Anne, lose yourself in the energy of the moment.” Those brief hours of teaching and commenting on student papers became one of the few respites from the heavy laden horns of grief I carried with me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When with my children in the afternoons after school and in the evenings and during the weekends, I again donned the “strong woman” persona. I was all they had. If I fell apart, they had nothing. We shopped and cooked and cleaned, completed homework assignments, and on weekends, took bike rides and hikes around town. I held them close and assured them of my love for them. As I continued to examine my marriage and its termination, I pondered, “Why did I stay?” Why did it take an act of infidelity for me to end the marriage? Wasn’t it enough that my husband told me time and time and time again that he wanted out of the marriage? Wasn’t that an infidelity enough? Wasn’t that grounds and reason enough to end a marriage? It takes two people to sustain a marriage, but only one person to terminate a marriage. I had been single-handedly carrying my marriage on my shoulders. For many years it had been a largely a unilateral relationship, but I had duped myself into believing it was a bilateral relationship. Perhaps we were both infidels, both to each other and to ourselves. Lee continued on with his saddle-making en-

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deavors in California. Unknown to me, Lee had left debts behind in Juniper Ridge. Soon after his departure to California, I received several calls from businesses asking of his whereabouts, explaining that Lee owed them money. I did not get involved. My primary concern was for my children and myself. Those autumn and winter months, immediately following the break-up of my marriage, were difficult yet healing. I was finally free to feel all that I needed to feel. With each shedding of hot tears, I could feel a gentle and subtle healing taking place. Sleeping in a bed by myself reminded me too much of what I had lost. So my children took the two bedrooms and I slept on the couch. Somehow, the couch seemed neutral and devoid of emotional connotation. The couch was safe and I slept well there. Each evening I rolled out my little bedroll of two sheets and a blanket. And each morning I folded my little bedroll and tucked it away into an invisible corner. I was asexual and neutered and that was just the way I wanted it. Safe. Lee returned to Juniper Ridge on occasion to visit our children. I never stopped loving Lee, not love in the addictive, self-destructive way, but in the way of truly caring for someone, acknowledging that which had been good and right in our relationship, knowing that there had been times of emotional intimacy, times when we had been light and easy, nights in bed when we read books together, sharing our thoughts and insights, laughing, examining, thinking. Still, despite the deep feelings and connection we had shared, I knew I would never return to Lee. The bad outweighed the good. In March, seven months after I made the long seven mile walk into town, Lee visited me and the children. We spent a day together, Lee, me, and our children, hiking and lunching at Zion National Park. Lee was attentive, considerate, patient, kind. I wondered why, now, after all our years together, after our divorce was well finalized, did he decide to participate with our family in the very manner in which I had desired when we were married. Why now? Now that we were estranged, with me knowing it was too late for us. I would never return to him again. No matter how lonely I was. And I was very lonely. It was either that March trip to Juniper Ridge or one shortly after that Lee sat in the living room of my dilapidated Victorian home and told me about a house he’d found in town. It was the perfect home, three bedrooms, a big yard, and room for a saddle shop in the basement. He asked if I’d like to drive over and look at it. Lee, being a man of few words, did not ask to come home. But I knew that was what he implied. And I, being a woman of many words, went against my nature and chose not to respond. Lee read the silence between us. He walked to his pick-up truck and returned to California.

Chapter Twenty-One

My children and I survived that painful, lonely autumn and winter and then into spring. The months had been jagged and unchartered. I was without a husband and my children were without a father. But as the days grew warmer and brighter, so did my disposition. It seemed I was exiting a dark, dank cave of lonely hibernation. After that visit in March, Lee never again mentioned finding a house for us and returning to Juniper Ridge. His visits were sporadic. My children loved their father but they felt abandoned. Still, they craved his presence and attention so were eager and willing to see him when, or if, he came to town. And I was exiting a prolonged period of extended and productive grieving. I still had more tears to shed over the coming years, but I had processed and integrated a large parcel of heartache. I knew I had done the right thing by taking the time to turn inward and do some personal healing. I had followed my intuition and had not allowed myself to be sidetracked by frivolous flirtations or heady short-lived affairs. I had been invited on several dates, often times by men who were much younger than I. These were attractive, intelligent men, who were wellmeaning but they had no idea how fragile and battered I was. So my answer was always a definitive, No. I was a single-minded celibate woman charged with the responsibility of working full-time and providing for my children, both emotionally and financially. Now spring had arrived. Lilacs were in bloom and honeysuckle was sweet on the vine. And I was ripe and ready to re-engage. I had made a few female friends and they became trusted companions. We talked much and shared much. But I now was ready to venture into the venue of male companionship. More than a year before, when I was in the last throes of my marriage to Lee, 113

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I had been become very casually acquainted with a student at SUSC, a man named Terry, who was in one of my English classes. Terry was six years older than I and had himself come to the end of a long painful marriage. He and his wife and their daughter had lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, for seventeen years and he had followed his wife and teenaged daughter when they relocated to southern Utah, in hopes of salvaging his marriage. Terry had introduced himself to me in class one cold January afternoon. He asked for some writing tips and told me a little about himself. He was new on campus and I was reaching the end of my program, getting ready to graduate. We talked writing and I wished him well with his studies. I never gave him a second thought. Apparently, he had given me not only a second thought, but many subsequent thoughts. That spring as I was coming out of my dark and lonely hibernation and over a year since we had met in class that January afternoon, Terry unexpectedly re-entered my life. He had found my name and phone number, sans address, listed in our local phone book and had noticed that only my name was listed, without Lee’s name included. Terry called me and inquired about my marital status. I told him that Lee and I had divorced. He asked if I would meet him for a cup of tea and wondered if I would proofread a brief autobiography he had written as part of an admission application to a graduate program. I agreed but made it clear that I would meet him at the restaurant and that he was not come to my house nor know my street address. When Terry arrived at the appointed restaurant for our cup of tea, I was pleasantly surprised. I had not paid attention to him when we had first met in our mutual English class over a year earlier. I had been consumed with the pain of my disintegrating marriage. Now I took a second look. He was wearing a soft wool sweater and had grown a very appealing full dark beard and moustache. What I thought would be a somewhat boring, perhaps obligatory, fifteen minute cup of tea turned into a fruitful three hour long conversation. Terry was sensitive and caring, responsible and stable and very attractive with his dark beard and thick almost black hair. His blue eyes were sincere and probing. In certain ways he was like Lee, even-tempered and laid back, but he carried none of the complications that Lee had. Terry valued education, was an avid reader, was a responsible father and had tried, over many long difficult years, to salvage his troubled marriage to his first wife. During our conversation, Terry kept telling me how attractive I was, how soft and warm I looked. Toward the end of our three hour cup of tea, Terry explained that his mother had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that he would be leaving in a few days for a three month stay to visit with her and his father in Wisconsin. We said good-bye and I wished him well on his trip. I remained very busy with my work and with being a single parent to

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my three children, so I rarely thought of (or remembered) Terry those three months. At the end of May, as I was nearing the conclusion of my one year teaching contract at the college, I happened to be in the college library and noticed that the English Department had issued its annual literary magazine. For no particular reason, I picked up the magazine and started perusing the poetry and prose entries. Suddenly I noticed a familiar name. The magazine had printed three of Terry’s poems. I remembered him now. The night of our cup of tea, he had scribbled his home phone number on a scrap of paper. I hadn’t thought much about Terry, in fact, had crumpled the scrap of paper several times and thrown it in the garbage, but for some reason had retrieved the paper from the garbage can each time. When I arrived home, I looked for that crumpled piece of paper and found it on my desk. I immediately called Terry. He had just returned from Wisconsin two days previous and said he had planned to call me that week. I congratulated him on having his poetry published in the literary magazine. He immediately asked to see me and we scheduled a time to get together. I was now ready for a relationship and apparently so was Terry. The timing was right for both of us. We were two mature people who knew exactly what we wanted. We had waited a long time for this kind of commitment and caring to come into our lives. We had a brief but intense and loving courtship. Three months later in August, we married. We are deeply grateful for the life we share together.

Afterword

HOWARD My dear sweet wonderful, and very imperfect and fallible, father, Howard Longmire, passed away suddenly of a heart attack one frigid January night. He was seventy-seven years old and still married to Jillian, his companion and wife of thirty-eight years. My father had been depressed and ill with diabetes for a number of years. Those two maladies were not a good combination and my father did not take care of himself those last years of his life. Jillian had become his maid and caretaker, a responsibility much too large for her. She was a very small woman, maybe five feet tall, weighing one hundred pounds. It was a blessing, to both my father and Jillian, that he died suddenly at his home, with Jillian at his side. I visited my father the August before his January death at his home in Eugene, Oregon, where he and Jillian had retired. We talked and took small walks together. He was becoming disoriented and I was concerned for him. One day I accompanied him on his daily workout at a local gym. We were in the pool together, swimming modest laps. He stopped, stood up and looked at me. “Do I know you,” he asked. “Yes, Daddy, I’m your daughter Anne.” “Oh yes, Dear. Of course. I did not have my glasses on. I knew it was you.” The reality was that he did not know it was me. I could see my father was failing but there was not a thing any of us could do about it. He always talked about “if” he died. He could not accept “when” he died. I had never rebelled against my father, ever. I was too close to him and loved him too much. And I was still fearful of losing him. But after that August trip to Oregon, when I was forty-three years old and my father was turning seventy-seven, I finally rebelled. I was angry about one thing or another, 117

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perhaps about his selfishness in expecting Jillian to wait on him hand and foot, perhaps because of his continued daily phone calls and reliance on me to give him advice and prop him up. I wrote him a scathing letter. I told him, in so many words, how selfish and narcissistic he was, how he expected everybody to wait on him hand and foot, how he believed he was the center of the universe. And then I mailed it. Finally, the grown daughter was having her adolescent rebellion. And I knew, now, as a grown woman, not as a scared little girl, fearful of losing her father, that I could say whatever I needed to say and that my father would accept it with grace and with a loving response. And he did. First I received a phone call. He was very hurt and wondered if I did really feel that way about him. “Yes, Daddy, I do feel that way and I am angry. But I love you. You have been my only parent.” He cried, and said, “Yes, I know, Dear, I have been your only parent. I did the best I could. I’m sorry if I made mistakes.” “I love you Daddy.” “I love you too Dear.” Then came the letters, his letters to me and mine to him. We wrote more about how we felt, about why I was angry and we continued to talk on the phone. Each conversation ended with, “I love you Daddy.” And, “I love you Dear.” By Christmas, a month before he died, he was starting to fade. He called me multiple times before the holidays, trying to remember names—names of his grandchildren—the name of my husband, confused as to whether my son Oliver, his grandson, was my husband or my son. Eventually, he did get it right and sent cards and small gifts to each family member. I was in a deep sleep that January night when the phone rang. It was Jillian’s son Leonard, calling to tell me father had died. Perhaps I, like my father, was in denial of his pending demise. He had been walking up a short flight of stairs to his and Jillian’s upstairs bedroom, when he suddenly called to Jillian. She rushed to his side. But he was already gone. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack. The next day my sister Jessica and I booked a flight to Eugene, Oregon, and made our way to our father’s home. Jillian, small and fragile, was waiting for us there. My father had asked to be cremated, so Leonard drove Jessica and me to the mortuary to view my father’s body. Initially I feared seeing his body, fearful of death. But as I waited in a private room for his body to arrive, I felt peace. I lifted the sheet from his cold body and kissed his forehead. And just as I had hundreds of times when I was a little girl, I rubbed my cheek against his bristly whiskers and cried. I cried for the father I had loved and cherished for all my life. I see him in my dreams. He is talking to me, smiling, approving. And I am flying to him. Daddy! Daddy! My face is beaming, feeling his love and warmth embrace me.

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RAZEL Some years after my divorce from Lee and after my marriage to Terry, when my mother was in her mid-sixties, I decided to have intermittent and casual telephone contact with her. I cannot recall the specifics of our telephone conversations but she was generally cordial and respectful and glad to hear from me. Many years earlier when she was thirty-nine years old, she had given birth to a son, Andrew. At that time, I was fourteen and was living with my father and Jillian. I knew nothing of my mother’s relationship with Andy’s father. She did not marry Andy’s father and had raised Andy alone, as a single woman. Because I chose not to see my mother for twenty-five years, I subsequently did not have a relationship with Andy. One February, after a number of years of telephone contact, I decided to make a trip to southern California to visit my mother. Terry came with me. I did not see Andy as he was out of town for an extended period of time, in conjunction with his duties in the Navy. It had been twenty-five years almost to the month since I had last seen my mother. She was living in a small motel room in downtown San Diego. Our visit was idyllic. My mother, anxious and nervous about seeing me again, was pacing back and forth in front of her motel. She was wearing a brown corduroy skirt, a brightly colored blouse, and sensible leather walking shoes. She looked eager and vulnerable. We spent two days with her, walking and talking, and carefully and gently remembering earlier times. One of the days we rode the trolley to Tijuana. The next day we took a boat tour of the San Diego harbor. The ocean breeze was moist and salty, the weather cloudy, cool and rainy. It was a wonderful twenty-five year reunion. She was gentle and sensitive. I felt protective and compassionate. But it was not to last. I continued to remain in telephone contact with my mother. And she was appreciative of my phone calls but as my phone contact became more routine and predictable, she became at times denigrating and disrespectful, mostly about my father and about the predictability of my phone calls. Terry and I made two more trips to California. The last trip was arranged so that I could meet with my half-brother Andrew. During that trip, while sitting in my mother’s one room senior citizens’ apartment, where she was now living, she looked at me, her voice dripping with sarcasm and thinly-veiled rage, and said, “You were Howard’s (my father) favorite child and I VERY much resented it.” I wondered, “Why is she taking this out on me? Why is this still an issue after all these years? He’s dead.” Later during that visit, Terry and I and my mother were at Andy’s home. Andy, a tall, muscular good-looking man, is happily married with children. We had not seen each other since he was seven years old.

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We sat in his living room staring across at one another. And every few minutes, Andy would say, “Wow, this is blowing my mind!” It was shocking to see each other but, on the other hand, it was obvious that we were connecting. We both felt a familial connection, both genetically and emotionally, through our mother. He had a bit of the Jewish family look, something about the nose, something around the eyes. And although, I looked more like my father, Andy mentioned many times how much my mannerisms reminded him of our mother’s. While Andy and I sat in stunned awe, two long lost siblings discovering each other, my mother, sitting on the couch to my left, started slapping and then slugging my arm. Her hitting became more and more pronounced and abusive with each attack. I was totally taken aback. Here Andy and I were experiencing this powerful connection, and my mother was hitting me. Nobody knew what to do. We were all stunned. I was caught totally flat-footed. My husband Terry was speechless. Finally, Andy’s mother-in-law Joy, said, “Why, Ray, I do believe you are jealous.” Andy said, “Mom, WHAT are you Doing!” I remained stunned. After all these many years, my mother was still the same insecure, jealous, abusive, cruel, denigrating woman she had always been. I was her rival. I wasn’t her daughter. I was her enemy. Terry and I agreed to have dinner with my mother and Andy that evening. I felt it would be safe visiting with her at a public venue. At the restaurant, my mother continued to make denigrating remarks: “You hate the Jews, don’t you,” she said to me, her voice sneering and snarling. “Mother I don’t know what you are talking about. That is not true.” She talked about my father and said that he had a big head (he didn’t) and that “You (Anne) have a big fat head like he did.” She started to laugh, laughing at me. She would not address me by name, as if she did not remember my name was Anne. Or as if her naming me would be indicative of some sort of acknowledgment of my worth or existence. She called me, “you,” as in “you live in Utah,” or “you have a big head.” Always, it was “you.” Never, “Anne.” All during our telephone conversations over the years, she never said “Anne.” It was always “you,” as if I were a stranger or a social-worker making a scheduled follow-up telephone contact with her. During our dinner with her and Andrew that evening, she asked me what my last name was and I told her. She asked two or three more times about my last name, again as if she could not be bothered to remember it, and then started to laugh as if it was a ridiculous last name. I was puzzled because since I had re-connected with her, I had always sent birthday cards and Mother’s Day cards and other little notes to her. Each envelope had a return address with both my first and last names clearly printed at the top of the en-

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velope. Certainly, she knew my name (she had named me) but clearly she would not acknowledge me nor validate my existence. When dinner was over and we exited the restaurant, my mother continued on with her sarcastic and demeaning remarks. When, Terry and I dropped her at her apartment, she became quiet and withdrawn. She said, “Well, you’ll call me when you get home to Utah.” I responded, “I don’t know, Mother.” I could still feel the throbbing ache of my bruised arm where she had punched me over and over. Later that same evening, Andy came to our hotel. He and I sat alone together by the hotel pool, in the dark moist salty evening. He said to me, “I don’t know who my father is. Do you know?” I was surprised by his question. How would I know more than he did. I responded,—Andy, I do not know who your father is. I asked our mother once about your father, many, many years ago when you were a baby, and she told me, “’We don’t talk about that.’” (And quite honestly, given my mother’s history, I’m not sure if she even knew who Andy’s father was. But I did not share that information with Andy. After all, perhaps things had changed after I went to live with my father.) Andy responded by saying, “My birth certificate says Howard Longmire is my father but I do not believe that is true.” Again, I was caught off guard. There seemed to be no end to mother’s deceptions and cruelty. My mother who hates my father with every ounce of venom she possesses listed his name on Andy’s birth certificate, this nine years after she divorced my father and abused his three children. She dared to let Andy believe that Howard Longmire, a man she despised, was his father. I responded, “Andy, let me confirm to you that Howard is not your father. Our mother divorced my father in 1959. My father married Jillian in 1964 and you were born in 1968.” “So, you and I are half siblings,” Andy said. All these years, our mother had led him to believe that we were full sister and brother. “Yes, Andy, we are half-siblings.” And those times when I was a teenager and had spent time with my mother and Andy at my mother’s apartment and my father had come to pick me up, Andy had believed that the man picking me up at the door was his father also. Andy said he always wondered why Howard would come to the apartment and would take me home with him but would not take Andy. So all those years, with my mother knowing that Andy believed Howard was his father, she lied to her youngest son and allowed it to appear that my father was an insensitive disinterested father to this young boy. We continued our conversation in the dark by the hotel pool, Andy nervously chain-smoking, me shaking and barely able to speak. The conversation

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had become potent with long awaited answers to unspoken questions. We could scarcely articulate our thoughts and feelings. Andy told me that my mother had been good to him, that had she always helped with his homework, made sure he arrived to his sports activities on time, that she always had dinner ready, and had made herself available to talk or give motherly advice at anytime. I said to Andy, “I do not know that mother. I can barely comprehend what you are telling me.” Then I remembered that one time when I was seven or eight years old and saw my mother sitting in our sandy front yard in Hermosa Beach playing with plastic shovels and rakes with my younger sister Jessica. Apparently, she was capable of some sort of parenting, if the time and the particular child was right. As our late evening conversation wound to its end, Andy did say to me, “There is something wrong with her though, right? I mean she never held a job; she lived on welfare all the years she raised me. She could have worked.” “Yes, Andy, I believe there is something wrong with her. But you say she was very present in your life and that you are very close to her.” Andy responded, “Yes, I am very close to her. But I know she has a lot of problems. In the past, when I have asked about who my father is, she has turned on me in the same ways she turned on you today.” “Andy, do you still wonder about your father?” “No, when I was younger I really wanted and needed to know. It doesn’t matter anymore.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I’m sure. I’m okay. I don’t need to know.” I recall a conversation I had with my father shortly before he passed away. I knew my parents had divorced when I was five. I have described vivid memories of my mother serving my father with divorce papers. But I never knew why they divorced. I had gathered through hushed and secretive conversations between various family members that my parents’ divorce was caused in part because of my mother’s family disapproving of my gentile father. But surely that alone could not account for my mother’s decision to divorce my father. After all, she had three children to think of. Certainly there must have been more. So when I was forty-two years old and my father nearing seventy-seven, I finally asked him point blank why my mother had divorced him. He explained that my mother had been employed part-time as a secretary at Hughes Aircraft in El Segundo and had become involved in an affair with her boss. My father said she had always been terribly insecure and had feared that my father would cheat on her (he assured me that he never had and I believed him, although he did admit to flirtations with other women) so she began an affair to “pay him back.” She flaunted her affair in my father’s face and then filed for divorce to rub salt in the wound.

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I then remembered that when I was five years old during my parents’ divorce, that a man, my mother’s boss, came to our apartment after my mother had moved into her own place. Things were beginning to make sense. Shortly after my parents’ divorce was finalized, I recall that my mother severed the relationship with this man. I was still too young to understand the inner-workings of a male/female adult relationship, but I do recall my mother having a very nasty, ugly and heated argument with this man, the boss she’d been having an affair with. My mother and her boss/boyfriend argued about one thing or another and then my mother started hurling ugly insults toward this man. He tried to leave our apartment but my mother blocked the front door. Finally, he pried her from the doorway and shoved her across the room. He left the apartment but then came back a few minutes later and apologized to me for his behavior. He was deeply upset and agitated. From that time forward, my mother moved from apartment to apartment, with unknown men coming and going during the night. During this period of the five years, while I got myself up for school and scoured the cupboards for a slice of bread or a box of cereal for breakfast, my mother would lay in her bed, mute and unmoving with the stench of her selfloathing hanging in the air. I sensed that something was terribly wrong with her. I was repulsed by her. But I was a young girl and never knew what to make of it. I was on my own and the best I could do was try to survive. I continued the conversation with my father and asked him how he had received custody of all his three of children in 1964. He told me he had found a supportive attorney in Manhattan Beach who agreed to represent him Pro Bono, without fee. I also asked my father how he received the damning information about my mother that ultimately provided him custody of his children. He told me that my brother Aaron had provided him with the information. I was surprised and my heart immediately went out to my brother, a young adolescent who was living with our father but was trying diligently to help his sisters out of a untenable situation. As my father and I continued our conversation, I asked him why my mother had behaved the way she had. Why had she neglected and abused her children? He responded, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?” I responded, “I have tried to ask her but she won’t talk to me. She either laughs, becomes silent, or makes nasty remarks.” My father looked straight at me and said, “You know Ray always had fantasies of being a prostitute.” I sat there stunned. I did not know how to respond. We looked at each long and hard. I understood, or believed I understood, what he was telling me. I could see the compassion in his eyes, as he spoke these words to his daughter.

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Immediately I thought of my brother Aaron and what information he must have relayed to my father. He knew what I had not known and had carried it with him throughout the years and had never discussed it. I thought too about Aaron’s early years with schizophrenia. He had been, at times, angry and violent toward our mother. What did he know? What had he seen that fueled his anger? I looked at my father. I tried to comprehend what he was telling me. I tried to read carefully between the lines. Was I understanding him correctly? I did not know. And I had no courage to investigate further. Our conversation ended. And before there was an opportunity to revisit the subject, my father had passed away. I have wondered often over the ensuing years, could it be true? Was my mother prostituting herself? Is it possible? If so, then much of her self-destructive behavior makes sense. She hated herself for what she was doing, but she was caught in a web of self-loathing and self-deprecation. She had already destroyed her marriage and her children. She was not accepted by her family. She had lost everything. Why try? Except when her last child Andrew was born. Then she could start anew and do the best she knew how with him. Recently, I read a book about the bond between mothers and daughters. The author indicates that the mother/daughter relationship is the most powerful and influential bond in a woman’s life. While I read the book, I kept thinking, “I cannot relate to this maternal bond. I am not my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s daughter.” Still, I tried with every ounce of understanding and compassion I could muster to understand what the author was supposing. I thought of my own bond with my beautiful daughter Elizabeth and how my daughter is everything to me, how much I love her and feel connected to her, how proud I am of her. And then I tried to endow those feeling toward my mother. It was not possible. I have endeavored to bring to mind any brief moments of connection with my mother. They are few and fleeting. But I do recall a time some years ago, during a telephone conversation, when I asked my mother about when she was pregnant with me. She already had a son, my older brother Aaron. I said, “Mother, when you were pregnant with me, were you hoping for a girl?” Her voice, filled with emotion and longing, responded, “Yes, I very much wanted a daughter.” I was that daughter.

AARON I did not see my brother Aaron again for many years after my life-altering visit with him in 1987 at Patton State Hospital. His mental illness was still too painful and I was still too much the coward. If I dealt with Aaron, then I had

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to deal with all the pain, with all the losses. I had been exceptionally close to Aaron during my growing up years. I looked to him for everything, for guidance, for advice, for approval, for protection. I was the younger sister but in certain ways we were peers; we were two kindred peas sharing our little pod. During those early years, before Aaron’s mental illness, we talked freely about our father, about our mother, about life, about our developing aspirations. Aaron was a budding musician, a drummer. When I was young, ages three, four and five, before my parents’ divorce, if I wasn’t with my father, I was with Aaron. He taught me how to read when I was four years old. By the time I entered kindergarten, I was reading at a fifth grade level, the grade level that Aaron was in. He was at my side, opening the world to me. Aaron would pull books off our father’s bookcases and say to anyone who happened to be present, “Anne can read anything. Now, Anne, read this.” And I did, to please Aaron. I was happy that he was proud of me. I adored my brother. His influence was powerful and his word was definitive. After his high school graduation, Aaron moved to the San Francisco bay area in northern California and lived in a commune with like-minded young people, studying Eastern philosophy. He let his reddish brown hair grow long to his shoulders and grew a full beard. Before moving north to the bay area, Aaron ran with musician friends and had been experimenting with marijuana and LSD. The Vietnam war was in full swing and Aaron was deeply disturbed about being called into active military duty. Aaron was artistic and sensitive. He would never survive the military. My father tried to quell Aaron’s fears and supported him in his resistance to the war. Aaron came home now and again, during the year he lived up north. While he was gone, he sent me letters on occasion, asking how I was doing, sharing information about his daily doings: “We awake at 5:00 a.m. and greet the sun...getting closer to God and Nirvana....I’m on a macrobiotic diet. I am with good people. How are you doing, Anne? Are you okay? Write Back. Love, Aaron.” I remember the first Christmas after Aaron had left for the bay area. He hitchhiked south and arrived at our home in Manhattan Beach on Christmas Eve. I stayed up late that night and Aaron and I talked about anything and everything. Then a day later he was gone again to San Francisco. Aaron continued to stay in touch, called our father on the phone occasionally. Then he returned to Manhattan Beach for a permanent stay. Something was wrong. But neither Aaron nor my father would (nor could) talk about it. And I was engulfed with puberty and friends and starting to notice boys. Aaron did not return to San Francisco. He remained in Manhattan Beach. His behavior became erratic and bizarre. He withdrew and went for days without

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speaking or eating. He woke my father in the middle of the night, fraught with fears and ideas and delusions of grandiosity and paranoia. After several weeks (perhaps it had been months) of this behavior, one evening Aaron was walking down a street late at night in the nearby community of El Segundo. A police officer stopped and spoke with a very gaunt and disoriented Aaron. The officer asked Aaron what he was doing, walking the streets so late at night. Aaron did not respond. The officer asked for identification. Aaron had none. The officer then asked, “What is your name?” Aaron responded, “I am Jesus Christ.” Somehow the officer got Aaron to our father and Aaron was admitted to a psychiatric acute care unit at a nearby hospital. After two weeks of assessment, Aaron was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The year was 1967. Aaron was nineteen years old. Aaron and his illness became the center of my father’s focus. I felt I had lost not only my brother, a young man I so desperately needed in my life, a good brother who was close and attentive. But, in a sense, I also lost my father. My father’s world was now all about schizophrenia and what to do about it. How to rid his son of this malignant maniacal monster. In time, despite my love for Aaron, I came to resent him and all the time and attention that was directed his way. It was not Aaron’s fault. But I needed my brother and he was gone. And I needed my father but he was consumed with the mission of healing his son. And I wondered perhaps if I was mentally ill. That if Aaron was diagnosed with schizophrenia then maybe I too would receive such a diagnosis. When I was with Aaron, his conversations were often bizarre and incomprehensible: “Anne, do you know that I am Jesus Christ and John Lennon. I killed thousands of Jews and Hitler too.” Then he would throw his head back and laugh demonically. I knew it was nonsense. But it frightened me. What was real? What was not? Who was Aaron? Who was I? I felt angry and resentful toward my brother. He was destroying my world. He was destroying our family. He was challenging my sanity. I did not want to be with Aaron. I wanted to get away from him and his disturbing, violent, and crazy world. I wanted to feel safe and secure. I chose sanity. Whatever that was. But in time, I was done running. And at about the same time when I chose to re-connect with my mother, and several long years since I had last seen him in 1987, I decided to reconnect with Aaron. My father was still living, so I talked to my father and got Aaron’s phone number and address in Los Angeles. Aaron was still in and out of state hospitals, with short-lived semisuccessful stints in supervised board and care facilities. I wrote Aaron letters, sent him cards and little notes, and made sporadic phone contact.

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Then Aaron was transferred from a state hospital to a more permanent stay at a board and care facility in Los Angeles. With proper medication and various support groups, Aaron became fairly stabilized. During one of my California trips to see my mother, Terry and I drove into Los Angeles and made a trip to see Aaron. He was living at Ocean Park Board and Care in downtown L.A. I had called ahead to let Aaron know we would be arriving. I also spoke to a staff member at Ocean Park and asked him to remind Aaron of our visit. Terry and I wound our way through the mass confusion and craziness of the L.A. freeways and eventually found our way to Aaron’s board and care. It was around ten in the morning when we arrived. The board and care facility was in reality an old very modest down-on-its-heels dwelling in downtown LA. I suppose at one time, it had been a residence, a family home some fifty or sixty years previous. When we arrived, I spoke with Miguel, an administrator at Ocean Park. “Miguel, I’m Anne Longmire. I spoke with you on the phone. I’m here to see my brother Aaron. Is he here?” “Yes, he’s here, but he’s nervous about seeing you. He showered and washed his hair. I just sent him back to his room to put on a clean shirt. I’ll go get him.” But before Miguel could retrieve Aaron, he appeared in the hallway, looking shy and uncertain. I walked to him, wrapped my arms around him, and buried my face into his shoulder. I cried and Aaron held me close, with his little boy voice telling me everything was all right. And I knew that this was as “All Right” as it would ever be. Aaron had aged in the nearly fourteen years since I had last seen him. He was now in his fifties. The thirty-five plus years year of mental illness had taken its toll. Aaron was stooped and balding, his demeanor childlike and innocent, but his wit as razor-sharp as it always had been. With his eagerness to share his life with us, he took us on a grand tour of the facilities. We saw his bedroom, the chair he sat in each afternoon smoking his cigarettes, the run-down washing machine in the washhouse on the hillside where he laundered his clothes, the aged mess hall where he ate his meals. We walked down the street to his favorite coffee shop and had juice and donuts. Then we retired to the board and care’s dowdy front room. I knew that we would need to leave soon. We had made commitments to other family members and we could not stay much longer. Aaron sat next to me on the couch, watching me closely, acutely tuned in to my emotions. I tried not to, but I began to cry. Aaron then began to joke, reminding me of funny things, doing his Richard Nixon impersonation. He reminded me of when I was a little girl and had gotten lost on the beach and how he had searched until he found me, how he brought me home and told me never to wander off again.

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My face was wet with tears, and then came Aaron’s “Aw, Anne. It’s okay, don’t cry. I’m okay everything is fine. Don’t worry about me.” Then he radiated his earnest big-brother-ear-to-ear smile toward me, his eyes gentle and brown, his hands warm and soft, his face animated and filled with compassion. “Really, Anne, I’m okay.” And I knew this was as good as it would ever get for Aaron. I knew he accepted and had surrendered to his life. I saw little to none of the old anger that he’d always had, his lashing out, his fury and violence. I knew this had been a difficult life for him. In the past he had shared with me his loneliness, his desire for more, his desire to hold a job and pay rent and listen to music and drive a car. I knew and he knew this would never happen. There had been too many years and too many relapses and too much damage from mega-doses of psycho-tropic medications. His schizophrenia is at times barely held at bay. There have been a few re-hospitalizations for reassessments and changes of medications. He has shared with me that there are occasional mornings when he cannot get out of bed, when he sleeps all day, when he feels depressed. And I read between the lines that he is saying he feels alone and abandoned, that he knows he has no family. I thought too about what my father had told me before he died, that Aaron had been the person who had been providing him with damning evidence about my mother’s behavior which ultimately led to my father receiving full custody of us children. I looked at Aaron and worried over that adolescent boy, ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, and how he would drop by our various apartments, and would generate a conversation, smoke a cigarette with our mother, observing what was going on in our home. Sometimes he came by late at night, other times he would arrive afternoons or mornings. Although I knew something was terribly wrong with my mother, I was too young to put the pieces of the puzzle together. But Aaron, a bit savvy and perhaps mature or wise beyond his years, would have understood what was happening in our home. He never tipped his hand, never suggested that he was doing anything other than dropping by a for a pleasant visit. But because my father had very little access to our home, Aaron could be the eyes and ears for our father. I know Aaron was not coerced. He would have willingly helped my father. He loved his sisters too much to see them suffer. I looked at Aaron sitting on the couch at the board and care and I saw his sweetness shining through the schizophrenia; I saw his concern and desire to protect his sisters. I also saw his caustic disillusioned hurt side. I wondered what part, if any, my mother’s behavior over the years may have played in Aaron’s collapse and subsequent mental illness. I knew those years after his initial diagnosis of schizophrenia that Aaron had gone to our mother’s house and had beat her severely, once to the point that an ambulance was called to

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transport her to the emergency room. I was a teenager then. My father was horrified and worried for my mother. Despite their bitter divorce and my mother’s ongoing loathing toward my father, he said he always loved her, if not as a wife then as a sister or a friend. He encouraged my mother to put some safety measures in place to protect herself. Eventually she moved further south toward San Diego and discontinued her relationship with Aaron. I have at times wondered about Aaron’s violence toward my mother. Was it motivated strictly by his mental illness or had it been motivated by some knowledge and information he possessed about how she had lived her life and how she had abused and neglected her two young daughters. And about she had treated him. Aaron and I are still sitting on the couch at the Ocean Park Board and Care. Aaron asks about our father and we talk about his death. Aaron says, “Dad’s in heaven with the angels.” And I say, “Yes, he is, Aaron, and I know he loves you very much and is still watching over you.” Then Aaron’s expression changes and he angrily retorts, “No, Dad is not dead. He came by and took me to Concerts By the Sea (on the Redondo Beach pier) three weeks ago. We listened to jazz. Dad said he still lives in Palos Verdes.” I respond, “I’m glad you had a good time with Daddy. I know the two of you have always enjoyed music together.” In his childlike voice, Aaron asks, “Doesn’t Dad still teach for the L.A. city schools?” “Yes, Aaron, he does. He’s very happy with his work and he loves you very much.” We walk to my car and we hug each other. Terry shakes Aaron’s hand and embraces him. I hug Aaron for a while longer. As we drive away, Aaron waves and says, “Bye-bye, Dear.” With my head out the car window, “I love you Aaron.” One December, Aaron sent this letter to me: “Dear Anne, how are you? I received the Christmas gifts today. I am so happy that you really cared. It makes me feel so good. I spent over 91⁄2 years at this board and care without one hospitalization. I’m sorry I haven’t written to you in so long. I’ve been having a healthy period for about 7 years. I feel well physically, but mentally I still have some problems. In my room here at the board and care, I have a brand new bed. I have a radio. I have your card on my desk. PLEASE TAKE CARE. I am so happy for the presents you sent me. I wish you a merry Christmas. Love, your brother, Aaron.” Recently I spoke to Aaron on the phone. He had moved from the board and care facility in downtown Los Angeles to a board and care facility in San Pedro. His fifty-eighth birthday was soon arriving and I wanted to wish him a happy birthday as well as let him know that I had put a gift in the mail to him. He told me he was disgruntled with his new board and care and that he would be meeting with his caseworker in two weeks to look into other board

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and care facilities. He recalled that many years ago he stayed at a facility in Gardena and might want to transfer from San Pedro to Gardena. He reiterated his usual litany: “I haven’t smoked marijuana in nineteen years, no alcohol for thirteen years, except for last New Year’s Eve when I had one beer. I’ve been off sugar for six months and am cutting down on caffeine.” He discussed his tobacco habit, saying he is cutting back, but like our mother, he is a chain-smoker and has been for over forty years. I know all of this. He covers this territory every time we talk. I doubt that much of what he says about this is based in reality. For some reason, his drug/alcohol/ tobacco/sugar consumption is always an important topic of conversation. As always, I listened politely and congratulated him on making wise choices for his health. “That’s great, Aaron. I’m sure it helps you feel better when you eat well and take care of yourself.” We talked some more, discussed the medications he is taking. He said his psychiatrist recently readjusted his medications. He is now on lower doses and fewer medications. He lists his meds and tells me at what time of day he takes each one. We converse a bit more about his daily routine and he thanked me again for remembering his birthday. We are just about to say goodbye, when Aaron suddenly shifts gears. Sometime ago, perhaps a few years ago, Aaron and I had a telephone conversation where he told me he was no longer my brother, he was my sister. I said, “Aaron, you are my brother. You are my older brother.” Aaron became quite agitated and belligerent at that suggestion. He insisted that he was not my brother and certainly not my OLDER brother. He was perhaps my sister or maybe an aunt but not a brother. He said he was nobody’s brother. The more I insisted that he was my brother, the more angry he became. To smooth things over, I agreed that he was my sister and that indeed, I must have been mistaken about him being my older brother. So as not to leave our conversation on a negative note, I even joked with him about it and suggested that if he wasn’t my brother Aaron then perhaps he was my older sister Amelia or my aunt Amelia. That broke his anger and we laughed a bit. We left it at that and I had never revisited that particular conversation with him. Still, whether it was rational or not, I had been hurt by his remarks. It was as if he was denying me the one thing I had always kept sacred: Aaron was my brother. He was my older brother. And no amount of mental illness could take that away from me. I knew that for sure. I had many, many loving memories of us together, him always the older protective bossy brother and me always the adoring younger sister, wanting him to be proud of me. But as I reminded Aaron to be looking for my birthday gift in the mail and as we were getting ready to end our telephone conversation, he unexpectedly said to me, “Anne, I am your older brother. You know that don’t you? Re-

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member that time I told you I was not your older brother?” “Yes, Aaron I do remember.” Aaron continued on, “Well, I want to make sure you know that I am your older brother.” Then he discussed something he never speaks of: “Remember, Anne, when we lived in El Segundo and then Playa Del Rey on Sandpiper Drive and then Manhattan Beach on Ninth Street, and Hermosa Beach on Bay View Drive and then I left for San Francisco and I didn’t live at home again.” “Yes, Aaron, I remember all of that. I have sweet memories of you and me together as brother and sister.” “They are sweet memories,” he says. I tell Aaron that I remember all of it, that I remember every house we lived in and all the things we did together and how we slept in cots, side by side, on the outside patio of our house in El Porto. Aaron says, “Remember, I used to watch you and take care of you when Dad was at work.” “Yes, Aaron, I remember. I do remember.” We reminisce for a few more brief and fleeting moments. The conversation is tenuous. I know at this moment that Aaron is lucid, that he wants to make amends for any hurt he may have caused in the past by his denying being my brother. His voice is kind and gentle, his manner protective. He has opened a fragile window to the past and invites me to enter. Then he becomes quiet and gently closes the window. More recently, my step-mother Jillian passed away. Although she and I had not been close, I still grieved her passing. As long as she was alive, I felt there remained a repository of information available regarding Jillian’s and my father’s life together. She remained, in certain ways, the conduit into my father’s life. They had shared thirty-eight years together and she, more than any other family member or friend, knew my father far better and more intimately than anyone. I grieved Jillian’s absence. She was a very private woman but a good woman. And I also grieved for losing the last remnants of my father. Upon Jillian’s death, I immediately contacted her daughter, my stepsister Bobbie, who lives with her husband in South Dakota. Six years older than me, Bobbie and I had not been particularly close over the years, although we had been in phone and email contact, very casually, every now and again. I called Bobbie that first Sunday after Jillian’s passing. We talked non-stop for three hours, without one single break in the flow of our intense and very honest conversation. When we hung up the phone three hours later, Sunday afternoon had waned into Sunday evening. I placed the phone gently in its cradle and sat alone in the now darkened basement of my home, mulling over my forthright and and emotionally moving conversation with Bobbie. We had covered many bases during our three hour conversation. Many things that had never before been revealed were now discussed with brutal honesty and candor. One of the many topics covered was what Bobbie knew

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about my mother and my mother’s relationship with my brother Aaron. I told Bobbie that my father had alluded to the fact that my mother may have been prostituting herself during those five years when Jessica and I had lived with her and I wondered if she knew that to be true. And if so, what, if anything, did Aaron know of this. Bobbie answered me as honestly as she could. This had happened many, many years ago. She would have been sixteen years old when Howard and Jillian married. I was ten. Because of the age difference, she would have had a bit more maturity and understanding of the situation than I. Also she and Aaron were very close in age, about three months apart. And she and he had talked often during those teenaged years of sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. Bobbie became silent and thoughtful for a minute and then said that, yes, she recalled some talk about my mother having been prostituting herself. She could not remember the exact details of the situation but she knew something of that nature. I asked Bobbie how much Aaron knew of this. She responded that, in fact, her recollection was that Aaron knew quite a bit about this, that my mother had somehow involved Aaron in it, in terms of either inviting him into the bedroom to watch, or leaving the bedroom door open for him to see her with various men, and that she may have somehow sexually flirted with Aaron. “Bobbie, are you certain of this,” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. She had overheard my father and Jillian speaking of it. My heart ached. I finally began to understand why Aaron, at age twelve, had jumped out the two story window of our apartment complex and ran away to live with our father. Bobbie also recalled that during those years when we all lived together with my father and Jillian, that Aaron had been confused about his sexuality, was not sure if was gay or straight. Bobbie wondered if Aaron had been confused about his sexuality because of what he had been party to in regard to my mother’s sexual advances toward him or her sexual flirting with him or perhaps her allowing or inviting Aaron to view her sexual encounters with anonymous men. The evaluating psychiatrist who subsequently made Aaron’s diagnosis of schizophrenia felt that my mother’s inappropriate, perhaps incestuous relationship, with Aaron may have played a part in his breakdown and subsequent mental illness. But not once, not ever, did Aaron speak to me of this. He was always, unfailingly, the protective older brother. Who really knows how much, if any, my mother’s behavior played in Aaron’s breakdown. But as I have already mentioned, I do know that after Aaron’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, he did have violent outbursts toward women over the ensuing years and had been violent toward our mother. In fact, I recall a time a few years into Aaron’s illness, when I was in my midteens, when he said to me that he had beat our mother and that “she is a sick woman who deserves to be in the hospital.”

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I was repulsed and frightened by Aaron’s violence and I did not understand why he believed our mother should be in the hospital. But now these many years later, his remark makes sense. Not that I believe that his violence was or is to be condoned, but now I know from his point of view, that she was a deeply disturbed woman, a woman who needed to be stopped or perhaps a woman who needed to make recompense for the pain she had inflicted on her children. Maybe he felt that she should be in the state hospital, not him. Still, despite Aaron’s violence toward our mother and others, not once, not ever, had he or has he raised a hand toward me or toward Jessica. And despite his own confusion and his own pain, never did he give up on his sisters, never did he turn away.

LEE October Our daughter Elizabeth is pregnant with identical twin baby girls. She and her husband Chad are in the process of moving to a larger house in order to accommodate their growing family, so Lee has driven his pick-up truck from his home in California to our little community in southern Utah to help BC and Chad with the burdensome process of moving. My children have told me over the years that their father has approached each of them and has expressed his remorse over losing our marriage. He wishes he had worked to keep our family together. He regrets losing me. He regrets not being present as a father. He has had intermittent relationships with a few women over the years, none of the relationships sustaining themselves in loving healthy ways. His saddle business, which had the potential to flourish, has fallen by the wayside. He builds a few saddles here and there, does some saddle repairs on occasion. His health is failing. He has developed diabetes, high blood pressure, and thyroid problems. Despite our years apart, I still have feelings for Lee and many poignant memories of our Grand Canyon years together. I ache when I hear certain songs, certain music I associate with our early years, when our children were young and we had a synchronicity between us. When I’ve traveled to the Grand Canyon over the years, hiked the Canyon trails, purveyed its majesty from the rim, when I pass the cowboys and their mule trains, walk through the Bright Angel Lodge, the old feelings well up inside me. I can taste my former life, can smell, touch it. I want to devour it, make it manifest again. I ache for the memory of it, ache for the reality of it. I wish I could grasp it, hold it, see it. It is that tangible. It is a dream. It is translucent. It is here. It is gone.

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There remains an earthy alchemy between Lee and me, a substance of who we were together, of what has been, what is, and what will be. I see it in our children, our grandchildren. Lee sees it also. It is mid-afternoon. We are worn from the frenzy of packing and loading and supervising and unloading. Lee and I and Elizabeth and my son Jacob’s wife, my daughter-in-law Yanavey, are taking a much needed break. We are in the babies-to-be bedroom. Lee, wearing Wrangler jeans, a cotton shirt, and work boots, is leaning against the bedroom wall. BC and Yanavey and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor. BC shows us her cribs, baby bouncers, baby blankets, and other infant apparatus. We “ohhhh” and “awe.” We engage in more “baby talk” and then ever so gradually the conversation takes a different direction. Lee leads the way. With our daughter and daughter-in-law listening and participating, Lee reminisces about our years at the Grand Canyon, our small unheated trailer in Tusayan, my debilitating morning sickness, Dr. Vasquez, Oliver’s birth, Lee’s years riding mules, his time with the Park Service, the years we scraped and scrimped every cent to make ends meet. Lee looks at Elizabeth and says, “I made the money and your mother managed every penny so we could pay our bills. I don’t know how she did it, but everything got paid.” There is more talk and chatter and laughter and incredulousness, with my beautiful stylish daughter-in-law having a difficult time believing that our lifestyle was so primitive, that there were no grassy lawns, few shopping facilities, that our trailers were parked on the hard dirt, that our water was hauled in by truck twice a week from sixty miles away and if we ran out of water, we ran out of water, that we lived beneath the pinyon and the pine trees, that it was a quiet rugged life, that we were the earth and the earth was us. Lee and I look at each other and we can’t quite believe that we lived that life, that it was as challenging as it was, that it was a good life. We are alive with the memories. I look at Lee and see the rough-edged vestiges of the robust young man he once was. These days he is heavy and graying. And he eyes me, seeing a fit and trim but maturing middle-aged woman. I know he sees beyond my wrinkles and thinning hair and sees the vibrant young woman and young mother I once was. There is a pause from the chatter and laughter and then Lee turns to me, reaching for words, “Would you do it again? Was it worth it?” From the floor, I look up toward him and I know what he is asking, “Was marrying me a mistake? Was it so terrible that you wish we had never married?” I am taken aback. When I am with Lee on occasion, he probes a little deeper than I care to. I can talk about our children, we laugh about being young and naive, that we didn’t know a darn thing about birth control, that we froze our butts off in Elden Hagen’s trailer. But we’ve never

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tackled the bigger issues. We’ve never broached the “tough” subjects. We have always danced around the pain. I continue looking up at him and then look away. “Yes, it was worth it because I got my children, I had my family, the family I was meant to have.” I make it about our children; I can’t quite make it personal about our relationship. I sense Lee is on a healing mission. I have been healing all these years, slowly, slowly. But now after all the years of avoiding and denying, he is feeling the feelings, grieving the grief. I look back toward him. He is quiet, not able to talk, his eyes filled with tears. I see a different Lee, a gentler Lee, a middle-aged man who is coming to terms with and feeling the remorse of having mistreated his wife and children, a man who believed that his own needs and wants and desires were of more import than the needs of his family, a man who abandoned a wife and three young, vulnerable, dependent children. The next day, Sunday, I am at church with my grandson Garth and as I exit the chapel, walking toward the downstairs Sunday School room, I see Lee in the foyer advancing toward me. I say, “I didn’t know you were here. Why didn’t you come and sit with Garth and me?”—I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Do you want to go to Sunday School,” I ask. “Yes,” he says. We walk downstairs together and drop Garth at his children’s class. Lee and I sit together, quietly, wordlessly. I think of all those times so many, many years ago when I wanted Lee to sit in church with me, when I prayed that he would provide spiritual guidance to our children. And now here, at this moment, he sits quietly beside me, neither one of us speaking. At the end of class, we turn toward each other and talk quietly. I ask him, “Will you see (our oldest son) Oliver today?” “Yes, I’m going to drive over and see him now.” “Lee,” I say, “all he wants is your love and approval. Be kind to him, listen to him. He needs you.” I look at Lee. He cannot speak through his tears. He leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “Love you,” he says. And is gone. December I am talking with my daughter Elizabeth on the phone. I talk to her almost daily, now that the twins are within weeks of being born. We talk babies and birthing, ultra-sounds and fetal movements. Then she says, “Dad’s in town.” “Really,” I respond, “I didn’t know he was coming.” I am thinking about the late afternoon Christmas Eve lunch I am bringing to BC’s house later today, and am a bit uncomfortable knowing that Lee might be there. “Is your dad going to be at your house this afternoon,” I ask. “I’m not sure,” she says. “I think

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he’s staying with Jake and Yanavey, and Jake’s coming for lunch so Dad might come too.” My husband Terry and I arrive at BC’s house a couple of hours later, loaded down with hot chili, freshly baked cornbread, apple cider, and salad. We eat and talk, my grandchildren open their Christmas gifts. It is a lovely afternoon. An hour into our festivities, Lee arrives. Elizabeth and Jake are glad to see him. I’m not sure how Terry will respond. He and Lee are amicable but Terry feels a bit threatened when Lee is around, sensing that Lee and I remain quite connected through our children. He is probably right. There is an initial awkwardness after Lee’s arrival but then it smooths itself and all goes well. This is fairly new territory for Lee and me, this “communication stuff.” We rarely communicated when we were married. He refused to do so, and my communication was usually fueled by and expressed through anger and wrath and rejection and loss and powerlessness. During our fifteen years of marriage, our primary verbal communication, when we were communicating, involved parenting issues; rarely if ever were marital issues or relationship issues addressed. Those topics were taboo. Voiceless. Mute. Silenced. But now here is Lee and the conversation and the new ground we broke in November resumes again in December. We’re all lounging on soft deep couch cushions. I tell Elizabeth to “sit and prop your feet up.” She’s supposed to be on bed rest. Lee sits across from me on the far end of this long circular couch. “Lee,” I ask, “which one of our children do you think is most like you.” In his quiet slow-to-respond manner, he peruses my question. I, all words and action and energy, speak for him: “I think you and BC are most alike.” “Really,” he says, “I thought it was me and Jake.” “Oh, but BC and you are both quiet and shy, reticent, even tempered.” He mulls this over, “I guess you’re right.” Then I ask, “Which child do you think is most like me?” He answers rather quickly, “Oliver.” “Oliver? Why do you say Oliver. I hadn’t thought that he and I were alike. I thought it would be me and Jake.” Lee looks at me, “Where do you think Oliver gets his hot temper?” I laugh, “From me.” Lee continues, “You are both very single-minded and driven.” This is true. Lee also says, “I see both of us in each of our children, a little bit of you and a little bit of me. We can’t say which child is more like which parent. It’s like a horse race, first, second, and third. No one wins by a mile but by a half or a quarter length, just like our children, a little of both us, each child running a close first, second, and third.” What surprises me the most about Lee’s comment is not that he said “Oliver” in response to which child is most like me, but that he knows who I am, that he is actually articulating my personality characteristics. I am surprised. He knows I am bossy and driven, impatient and explosive, knows that

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I am stalwart in my dedication to my family. All the years we were married, he rarely expressed a knowledge of the person I was; he rarely seemed interested in who I was. He knows me. And I know him. Elizabeth mentions a family characteristic that is common to the McClure clan, the characteristic of being loners, verging on being anti-social. Elizabeth shares this trait with her father; she wants to be left alone, doesn’t want anyone in her “business.” Lee affirms, that indeed, that’s the way the McClure’s are. I ask him about that—that very feature that caused so much pain to me in our marriage, always feeling him distancing himself from me, him needing more and more space. I say, “But people need to communicate, need to be able to resolve differences.” I see him stiffen. “Well, maybe, but I don’t want to hear it. I never have.” He becomes subdued, sinking into himself. Quietly he says, “Anne, that’s just the way I am. I don’t want anybody telling me what to do. I want to be left alone.” There is no rancor nor anger. We’re treading the same turf these many years later that we treaded when we first married in 1974, the very thing that brought us together those many years ago at the Grand Canyon: his shy quiet reserve, my quick verbal high energy response, two opposites attracting, inextricably drawn to each other. But the very thing that drew us to each other also pulled us apart, as we became more polarized, more angry, and more isolated. I wanted what he could not give and he wanted what I would not allow. I wanted connection and commitment; he wanted space and more space. But this conversation, now, is filled with caring and respect. He acknowledges me and I acknowledge him. We see ourselves mirrored within each of our children. Our children, now grown, are good people, not perfect, but good, each child wrestling with the yin and yang of their mother, their father. And the mother and father making peace with the yin and the yang of their relationship.