Thirty years ago, I was my oldest daughter's age. I look at her and am amazed by how young she is, how she laughs at silly voices and bad knock-knock jokes. I don't remember feeling young. I quickly grew up after my father's arrest, suddenly flooded by knowing, and the world became a rising tide.
I've been feeling significantly depressed over the last few weeks. It's the feeling I get every July. I carry it with me through August and can't shake it, especially on my birthday. While researching for my memoir, I discovered that my depression is a common phenomenon suffered by people who experience traumatic events, especially in childhood. It's called "anniversary reaction" and it's a type of PTSD.
I thought I'd try something new this year and instead of sinking into the familiar and nearly-irreversible sadness, I'd share a bit of my experience from thirty years ago. These are some snippits of a chapter titled "Baptisms."
I have a friend who becomes a hermit in the week leading up to the
anniversary of her husband’s death. Typically, she’s boisterous, social,
driving all over town to visit people and deliver little gifts to brighten the
days of others. But during that week, she doesn’t even answer her phone. She
won’t see anyone. She falls into the grief of a situation thirteen years past
and has learned it’s best for her to cope by being alone. Then, on the
anniversary of the day he died, she visits her husband’s grave, and celebrates
his life in a small service with their only son and a few family members. The
next day, she’s back to her old self.
Like her, I suffer from what psychologists call “the anniversary
reaction.” Loosely defined, the anniversary reaction is “an individual’s
response to unresolved grief resulting from significant losses [and] can
involve several days or even weeks of anxiety, anger, nightmares, flashbacks,
depression, or fear.”[1]
Unlike her, my trauma refuses to be soothed by isolation, or therapy, or
medication. For me, the last weeks of July bring on an uncontrollable sense of
restlessness, grief, anger, shame, and fatigue. Most of what I felt about my
father’s arrest went unresolved in my childhood. My family’s reaction—the
product of a repressed American culture—was to sweep it under the rug, keep it
taboo, lie about it. Let it hang over our heads and leave us to simply toughen
up or drown under the weight.
The morning after my father’s arrest, a group of thin Brothers and their
over-stuffed wives from our LDS church ward convened in our living room. They looked at us with a mixture of pity and
doubt as if we were co-conspirators. My mother got down on her knees while one
of the Brothers held his hand on her head and prayed. From a metal vial he wore on a beaded chain
around his neck, he sprinkled water onto her forehead. My mother cried the way
only a woman whose husband had been keeping secrets could cry—tears of shame
and ignorance. The thin Brothers then moved on to praying over me. The holy
water ran down my forehead and caught in my eyelashes.
Out in our dirt yard, Grandma smoked one cigarette after the other and
snubbed them out into the marigolds my mother had just planted.
While the Brothers prayed, their wives set up shop in our kitchen. They’d leave behind casseroles and Bundt
cakes, all of it laced with pity and suspicion. While the holy water dripped
from my face and onto the brown shag of our living room, I could feel the women
staring. And the stares of those
churchgoing Brothers and Sisters, our townspeople, our friends expected us to
be hiding other secrets. After all, we’d let my father’s evil into the house.
No one believed my mother nor I—because I was the oldest—knew nothing about my
father’s double life.
Immediately following his arrest, my mother phoned my father’s parents to
tell them what had happened, and they didn’t say much, only that they would
come to see us in a few days. “They didn’t seem surprised,” Grandma told me a
few years later. “I imagine they’d been waiting for something like this to
happen. Of course they were waiting.” She’d scoff at this point, light a
cigarette even if she still had another one burning, and say between puffs, “Of
course they were waiting because they knew he was sick way before Mickey
married him, and they just let it happen. Without saying a word. They never got
him any help. Even after The Gas Company, they didn’t tell anyone even then.
They should’ve. They were sorrysonsofbitches not to say a word.”
The Gas Company was code for my father’s short stint as a meter reader. A
few years after his conviction, when I was ten or eleven, I’d come home from
school to find a strange man standing in our backyard. Men in general scared
me, and when I ran through the house screaming to Grandma that someone was in
the yard, she’d said, “Don’t be an idiot. That’s just the gas man.” After he’d
jotted our numbers down on his clipboard, he walked on to the next house, and
through a slit in the curtains I watched him go.
That incident prompted Grandma to tell me about my father’s career when
he was just twenty-three years old, just after my younger sister, Deidre, had
been born. His blonde hair had just begun to recede, so both his forehead and
his aluminum-framed glasses glinted in the sun while he walked from property to
property on his Hollywood route for the Southern California Gas Company. Sometime halfway through, he found himself
inside the bedroom of a woman who lived alone.
She was about thirty and sleeping atop the sheets with her sliding glass
door open to the faint summer breeze. He
didn’t know how long he’d been standing there watching her, but he’d touched
her hair and it had woken her. She began yelling at him immediately. He stepped backward, nearly falling over the
frame of the sliding door. He dashed
around the corner to where he’d parked the company truck. He started the engine
and drove.
“He smelled gas, that’s what he said,” Grandma told me. “He rang the bell
and knocked, gone into the back yard to see if the family was outside. That’s when he saw the woman through the
window on the bed and worried that she’d asphyxiate, but she got
hysterical. Accusing him of all kinds of
things. He panicked and ran away.”
When I finally wrote to my father twenty years after Grandma’s rendering
of the events, he admitted he’d known he’d done something wrong, but couldn’t
explain what had brought him into that woman’s bedroom, why he thought he could
get away with the gas leak story. All he wrote about it was that he knew he
was “in trouble” because he’d pulled into the company lot and saw the police
cars.
When he went before a judge to plead guilty for trespassing, one of the
police who’d first arrived at the gas company to arrest my father gave a brief
statement about how calm and collected he’d seemed. The woman had spoken to him at the police
station. She’d said she wouldn’t press
charges. The judge listened patiently
when my father told his story of the smell of gas. He didn’t know why he was standing in the
courtroom, why the police insisted he plead or stand trial.
My mother and grandparents, and our church bishops believed the
story. But the judge didn’t buy it. And
after his arrest, Grandma told The Gas Company story with suspicion, with
gusto, as if she too hadn’t been duped. At the end of it she always said, “I
knew something was wrong. I told your mother to leave him then.”
“She never told me that,” my mother told me recently. “She didn’t even
know the whole story. Your grandmother could take a little bit of knowledge
about something and turn it into a circus when she wanted to. That’s why we never
told her the rest of it, just that Terry had been let go.”
But really, he’d been sentenced to psychiatric therapy. He spoke to a
court-ordered psychologist for six months.
By then, he’d found a new job as a machinist at Menasco, and at the end
of his Tuesday and Thursday shifts, he headed to the clinic on Tujunga. He sat with the man for an hour each time,
while he was asked questions about his family, his friends, the church, his
job. After a month, the doctor began probing him about his parents and my
father began to suspect the therapist was fishing for something. Those things were private, he’d said. He could handle them himself. They had nothing to do with why he was there.
That was the judge’s doing. He just
wanted to get the six months over with.
***
My father’s arrest happened during the summer break between my first and
second grade years of school. I’d spent much of first grade in a deep funk
because I missed kindergarten and the naps we’d taken in the afternoons. My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs.
Kreis, but to my young Mormon ears it sounded like Christ, so I’d spent many
days after school complaining to my mother that I missed Mrs. Christ and wanted
to go back to kindergarten. To this complaint, my mother told me to go to my
room and get Mousie and read a book.
Mousie was a felt hand-puppet that Mrs. Kreis used during story time.
She’d read to us from a different book each day and as we all formed a circle
around her she asked for a volunteer to retrieve Mousie from the closet where
she kept all kinds of supplies. I always volunteered, not scared of the dark
dank closet, and so I was nearly always the one to grab Mousie from his shelf
and bring him into the circle. He was made of gray felt and wore a bright pink
vest with a watch fob dangling from the front pocket. At the end of my
kindergarten year, Mrs. Kreis left Alpine Elementary, and she’d given me Mousie
because I loved him. I spent much of the summer afternoons with him on my left
hand, reading books in my room. After my father’s arrest, I took Mousie with me
to Grandma’s house where the three of us girls were staying while my mother
“sorted things out.”
That summer I also moved up into a new Sunday school class and it became
my responsibility to remember all of the Ten Commandments. On top of these, our God had sent Joseph
Smith some additional rules, and I learned his history by singing, “Book of
Mormon stories that my teacher tells to me/ all about the Roman knights in
ancient history.”
Our Sunday school class met in the church gym, the place where the
teenagers held their dances and, once a year we had a family festival and a
Magic Show. The room was partitioned on
Sunday’s by gray cloth screens, creating cubicles for the classes—one for the
five-year-olds, one for six, seven, eight, etc.
It wouldn’t be until we were in our teens that they’d start grouping us
with different age mates based on what we could learn out of The Bible, The Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine
and Covenants.
Our teacher arranged us all into a circle, and we recited the Ten
Commandments. It was well known in our Sunday school class that if they
couldn’t be memorized or if the numbers from the thirteen Articles of Faith were given incorrectly, advancement to the next
class would be impossible. That’s why
one of the teenager groups was whispered to be the stupid group. The members of
the stupid group consisted of kids who’d joined the church late or didn’t own
their own Book of Mormon, and every
Sunday they’d check one out of the library where my mother worked. None of them could even read, really, we said.
Although I was bright—a Super Speller and Math Whiz—I couldn’t keep the
Ten Commandments and Articles of Faith straight. I was too busy wondering where my father had
gone, and trying to believe my mother when she said, “He’s never coming back,”
even though I thought he would. And then I’d think, if the words of God were so
important, then my Sunday school teacher should make up a song to help me
remember them, the way Mrs. Kreis had taught us in kindergarten. Of course, I
was the only kid in my class thinking this as very few of them actually
attended public school—their mothers taught them in makeshift classes in
garages and living rooms. I had all of
this on my mind, coupled with the weight of the stares in my direction, when I
arrived in class after Testimony (There
she is, the white elephant we won’t talk about!), so that by the time my
Sunday school teacher got around the circle to me and stated a number for a
Commandment or Covenant, I’d answer incorrectly.
She’d ask, “Joyce, do you know Jesus Christ in your heart? He wants you to know him, but you have to
live by these words.”
On one of the Sundays after my father’s arrest, when I hadn’t seen my
mother until that morning before church, I thought long and hard, staring at my
patent leather shoes and stupid frilly socks I had to wear. Finally I answered, “I know Mrs. Christ, my kindergarten
teacher. She read to us with Mousie, and
he makes reading easy.”
At the end of the church, as families stood around the massive foyer and
chatted about the upcoming workweek and family dinners and who’d be giving Testimony
for next Sunday, my teacher pulled my mother aside and told her what had
happened. She was afraid for my soul,
she said.
“She’s seven,” my mother said, always practical. “Have you tried a puppet? Maybe that would help.”
No, she hadn’t tried a puppet, my teacher
said. All the other kids in my class
were capable of saving their souls without Mousie.
[1]
“Anxiety and Sadness May Increase on Anniversary of Traumatic Event.” American Psychological
Association. 2011.
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