A few of my first memories are of my brother making me kool-aid out of pixie sticks, fixing me hot dogs, and french toast. I remember having pajamas with footies. I remember crying when my Daddy would leave the house and drive away in his truck. Most of my earliest memories are of my brother and father. Especially my brother. That is probably the reason why I have always been so attached to him and loved him so much.
I don't have many early memories of my mother. It was years before I found out that my mom went to a mental hospital when I was a little girl. She claims my father tried to drive her crazy and ran her off the road while she was driving. My father and the rest of the family say that my mother tried to kill herself. She was a pill junkie and suffered from depression.
I have images in my head of different things that happened during those years. I remember her and a friend fixing frog legs for them and chili for us kids and I spilled my chili on myself. I rarely wore shirts when I was little. I wanted to be a boy and would wear pants but no shirt. I remember my mom putting me in a bathtub because I burned my chest pretty good.
I remember my mom having her friends over. I remember her and her friends laying out in the back yard in their bathing suits. I remember my Daddy's girlfriends. There was one that lived in a trailer with a few kids. She told me that she wrote romance novels after I asked her why there were empty pages in the back of one I was looking at. There was another that he ran over with a truck. She was hiding underneath it and he didn't know it and backed out of the driveway ... over her.
I remember when my mom lived in this house at the back of Whispering Meadows and there was a corn field behind it. I remember my mom telling us to go into the corn field and pick corn. I remember eating a lot of corn, sometimes nothing but corn. I remember my brother and me climbing the water tower in the middle of the corn field and me getting scared and afraid to climb back down. He had to help me down the whole way. I have been afraid of heights ever since.
I remember my mother beating my brother with a switch and leaving lash marks up and down his body, from his neck to his ankles. I remember him lying on his stomach and me sitting beside him. I remember feeling so bad for him and hating my mother for the way she treated him. I am talking the kind of whipping where the lash marks criss-cross. She would take a switch and beat him with it until he was bloody. She whipped him like that a few times.
I can still see my brother sitting in front of the stereo he got for Christmas headbanging to Kiss. We would grab the mop and broom and pretend we were singing and playing guitar. Jumping on the bed, heads pounding out those monster beats, singing at the top of our lungs.
I remember my sister and me having diarrhea so bad that we couldn't even make it to the toliet in time. We were little and my mother lived in a trailer in Marion. She made us go outside and play. Everytime we soiled our panties, she would wash them out in the sink and hang them up on this little rack in the bathroom. We went through so many pairs of panties. She made us stay outside all day.
I remember hiding my mother's paddle, one of those little ping pong paddles that kids buy at convenience stores, when I would call my Daddy and beg him to come and get me from her house. I knew she would spank me as soon as she knew I had called him. I hated being with her, though. Her house was nothing like my Daddy's house. She didn't get up and cook for us or take care of us the way my Daddy did.
I remember eating green apples until my poo turned green. I remember sitting on the top bunk with my sister and our friends reading Disney books to them. I remember falling out of that bunk bed almost every night and waking up on the floor. I remember once how I fell on a glass of tea. The glass didn't break, thankfully.
I remember my cousin and my brother watching me and my sister in that trailer while my mom was out and the power going out. I remember us all sitting on the couch and how I thought the floor had disappeared. I ended up on the coffee table and didn't know it. All I knew was that everytime I reached down around me my hand would go lower than the "floor" I was crawling on.
I remember fixing me and my sister eggs when I was little. I used a whole stick of butter to fry them and even the dogs next door wouldn't eat them they tasted so bad. Once my brother stopped living with my mother, I had to start cooking for my sister.
I remember all the times my mom called me to tell me why she couldn't come and pick me up for her weekend visitation. I would get so upset, especially because I wanted to see my little sister, that my Daddy would take me there himself. At first I would cry because I wanted to see my mother, but that changed over time.
I remember this guy named Amos that my mom lived with when I was little. He had an afro and wore bikini swim trunks. I remember my brother drawing a picture of him and us cutting the swim trunks out of the picture. It is funny what you remember from when you were little. That is definitely a weird memory.
My brother was an excellent artist. He drew me a picture of Scooby Doo, my favorite cartoon. Oh how I treasured that picture. I even kept it in a drawer in my room for the longest time. I would steal away and peek at it whenever I missed my brother. For some reason this enraged my step-mother though and one day the picture just disappeared.
The best memory I have of my mother when I was little is of singing Christmas carols in the car when she drove me back to my Daddy's house. She had an old car and would put it on a station that played nothing but Christmas music. She would drive the backroads all the way there and we would sing and sing and sing.
I remember riding with my Daddy as well. I would stand on the seat of his truck, beside him everywhere he went. I was his little girl; his princess. I was his constant companion and saw so many things I should have never seen and experienced things I should have never experienced. Yet, I loved being with him.
I remember getting drunk and staggering across the yard. I remember getting drunk and falling off my tricycle. I remember walking around the house in his boots, which came up past my thigh. I would put on his hat and his boots and wobble around the house. Years later my youngest sister would do the same thing.
Why this trip down memory lane? Just thoughts that came to mind after typing up a paper my brother wrote about his life for one of his college classes. It reminded me of so many things ... like why I hate french toast. It also reminded me of why I love my brother so much. We have a common bond. We survived. He took care of me and my sister. He taught me how to take care of us too.
He remembers.
