My Parent's Divorce
My parents divorced in 1984, I believe. My dad had met and had an affair with a child psychologist he met in the course of one of his police cases. The reason he told my mom that he had to divorce her was because this other woman “needed him”. Never mind he already had a family that needed him much more than some floozy. This was the start of his wife-jumping proclivities.
I believe my dad was just too weak to be a good father or a good husband. When my mom started back to college to get her degree, he got mad and felt threatened at her independence. Dad was not satisfied with any situation unless he was in control of that situation. Though that served him well as a cop and as a detective, it was not a great framework with which to build a parenting style. There is a saying that goes: when the going gets tough, then the tough get going. But my dad? When the going gets tough, he leaves.
My dad was verbally and physically abusive towards me. Not the kind of physical abuse that you see in Lifetime movies, but a more sporadic kind of abuse that nonetheless kept you on your toes. One time he kicked me across the backyard while my Cub Scout troop looked on. I also remember him throwing me across the room at Wanda’s house in Forest Park, when Ken and I were staying there one weekend. Another time he chased me across the street with a PVC pipe and spanked/beat me with hit; the whole time he kept saying the more I ran from him the more he would hit me. Being a child it was impossible to stop running and knowingly take abuse. Any sane person would run or fight back when threatened and seeing as I was only 5 or 6, fighting certainly was not an option. I remember that so vividly, even down to the Spiderman Funderoos I was wearing.
The grief and blame I felt at my parent’s divorce in general, specifically my father’s constant anger, created such sadness that I tried to kill myself. A child acting out during a divorce is nothing new, but apparently when I ran out into traffic and lay down in the middle of the road, screaming that I wanted to die, apparently that is a bit more than simply acting out. Mom was at work and I cannot remember what triggered my suicide attempt. My memory of this begins with me running into the road and ends with Ken trying to drag me out of the road, unsuccessfully. Apparently the neighbors all witnessed this and called my mom at work.
I was quickly scheduled to see a psychologist, one of Wanda’s colleagues. The only part of therapy I looked forward to and can remember very well was when I got to shoot basketballs in the gymnasium of the psychiatric facility. I was placed on some kind of medication but I don’t remember what kind it was; I only remember that it made me into a zombie so I did not stay on it long. Given the physical and verbal abuse from my father, one would think the divorce would mean good news but I remember my world being shaken up so hard and fast, like shaking a kaleidoscope and then looking through it at a completely different outlook, all I could think about was that I was the cause of the divorce. Maybe if I was not a sissy my dad wouldn’t be so angry all the time. Maybe if I cleaned up my room when I was supposed to then he wouldn’t be angry all the time. One of dad’s favorite phrases that he would say every time he yelled at us was that “One day you are going to end up in jail for...” and then he would fill in the blank with whatever transgression we did this time.
It was around this time I began to read books. Reading was a safe way to escape. Reading took me to other, better places. When I was reading I didn’t have to deal with the here and now. I withdrew from the world around me and didn’t want to participate in life anymore. My introverted nature became so severe I remember my 5th grade teacher, Miss Williams, speaking to my mom about it because all I ever wanted to do at recess was read. I had zero interest in playing with the other kids. My interactions with kids had a track record of negative outcomes and I was done with subjecting myself to their cruelty.
After we moved to TN, it became more challenging to continue visitation arrangements with my dad. I vaguely remember my dad objecting to our move to TN but I think it was more of a token resistance, because my impression of that time was that he was fully focused on his life with Wanda and not so much focused or caring about seeing my brother and me. I have the impression that he was only doing the token, expected responses to continue visitation.
It was agreed we would meet my dad at a gas station just off Highway 411, at the point where Highway 411 intersected Interstate 75. Mom would drive us straight down 411, and that first leg of the journey always felt like an adventure. We would always stop at the A&W drive in restaurant on 411 and it was a big deal to me. For some reason getting that big frosty mug of root beer was special to me. It represented a stable routine, something known in the midst of so much in my life that was unknown.
Often we would also stop at Ken’s Restaurant in Etowah (not sure if that is the right city). Sometimes we met my dad here, but not very often. They had the most amazing spaghetti and that is usually what I ordered. We had stopped at this particular restaurant when we moved to TN. Next to this restaurant there was this Dollar General we would go into sometimes while waiting on my dad to get there. On our way to moving to TN that first time, I remember going in there and buying mom this little ceramic and cast-iron kitchen decoration that said “Brenda’s Kitchen”. She still has that same decoration hanging in her kitchen today.
The 2nd leg of the journey, once we were transferred over to my dad, was not so fun. Dad drove a Jeep Comanche pickup truck with a camper on it. He and Wanda sat up front, while Ken and I were put in the bed of the truck, as if we were cargo to be transported. Communication with Dad and Wanda was limited to the sliding window between us and them. Needless to say it was very loud in the back of the truck, flying down the interstate, the wind slamming through the crevices and nooks of the truck bed. Most of the time I gave up on trying to talk over all the noise and ended up reading or falling asleep. They always had a blanket of some sort for us to at least we weren’t directly on top of the truck bed. I don’t remember anything special or fun or good about that 2nd leg of the journey to my dad’s house. I remember it felt like it took so long to get there, but I am not sure if that was because he had further to travel or if it only felt that way because I was so uncomfortable in the back of that truck.
There was however a bright spot in all the chaos. I grew to love Wanda, my dad’s girlfriend. They had met through his work for the Clayton County Police Department. She was a child psychologist for the county I believe. Wanda was the first of our stepmoms. It was Wanda who developed and nurtured my love of food and cooking. One Thanksgiving she had me help her make homemade yeast rolls. I felt so important to help her make those! We had dyed them green and blue and I can’t remember what other colors. It struck me that someone who was outside of the box (green and blue rolls?!) just simply had to be cool. Wanda also introduced me to my lifelong love of reading, especially sci-fi and thrillers. It was she who introduced me to Piers Anthony and Robert McCammon. On Sundays when they had us for the weekend, Wanda and I would also sit down and read the Atlanta Journal & Constitution together. To this day reading the Sunday paper is one of my favorite ways to unwind.
Sadly enough Wanda died from multiple brain aneurisms while I was in college. I was living in my apartment in Greentree Village at the time when I received the call from my dad. Without hesitation I jumped into my Toyota Celica and drove to me dad’s house and then to Athens, GA where she was hospitalized, in serious but stable condition. Three aneurisms had already burst and they had drilled her head in order to get to the fourth one, but it burst before they could get to it. Seeing her with her head shaved and bandaged and swollen was gut-wrenching. It was very clear that recovery was not possible.
Driving back and forth between Athens and Greensboro was a lonely drive, with too much time spent doing too much thinking. I pondered how my Dad would survive on his own, without a woman to tend to him. My dad was either old-school in that regard or he was simply emotionally unable to be alone or both. Dad went crazy after she died, and after I left his house. He found the sister of his friend who died in Vietnam and within a month moved to West Virginia to be with her. He married her, at which point I stopped talking to him for years.
I could never forgive him for how callously he disregarded the memory of Wanda. I could not forgive him for being such a weak man, unable to be on his own. I certainly learned independence from my mother because my father has never known the meaning of the word. In retrospect, it was always Wanda who became engaged in mine and Ken’s life. She was the one who thought about school clothes, who came up with activities to do, who always had our ear if we needed to talk about something. My dad was just a shadow in the background, distant and always planning his next fishing trip.
One time shortly after the divorce, Dad, Ken, and I went on a father/son camping trip with our Boy Scout troop. It was the only time I remember my dad being active in scouting with us. The trip was to the Okeefanokee Swamp which straddled the border between Georgia and Florida. The scout troop had chartered a bus to get us there because there was so many of us going on the trip. Most of the trip was a disaster. Wooden pathways were built throughout the swamp; these pathways were about ten feet above the top of the swamps. Me being me, I had somehow gotten left behind on some such pathway; I was probably chasing a butterfly or some such distracted nonsense. When I realized I was alone on this path in the middle of the swamp I also noticed the sun was starting to set. Panicked I began running to try to find everyone, clumsily falling over the edge of the pathway, falling straight toward the alligator-filled swamp. Thankfully I reached out and hung on to one of the railings and stopped my fall, dangling over the path. I was so frightened and just knew I was about to be eaten by alligators that I did the only thing I could do – I shit my pants. Alligators were very real in the swamp and we had already seen several, so it was not just a child’s fear of being eaten. If I had fallen into the swamp it was a very real possibility. I wonder now why they never screened in the pathways. Surely I was not the first person to almost go overboard. Somehow I was able to make my way back to the group and the bathroom and get myself cleaned up.
That next morning calamity struck again and again clumsiness was my partner in crime. As a child
I had always had a fascination with fire. Not a psychotic fascination; I didn’t ever want to burn down houses or anything. On every camping trip we had ever been on as a family I was always getting in trouble for playing in the fire. On this particular father/son trip fire was again my source of trouble. Instead of playing in it though I was trying to put it out. I was standing too close to the edge of the fire pit when the edge crumbled and gave way, plunging my foot into the coals. Instinct caused me to immediately pull my foot out of the fire and thankfully I was wearing tennis shoes, but the coals were able to burn the upper inside of my foot. The wound blistered immediately and we did first aid of course. The strongest memory that sticks out was not my clumsiness or even my pain however. The only thing my father seemed concerned about on the bus trip back was how much money it was going to cost to have my foot looked at once we got back home. “Money, money, money! Money, money, money!” he would keep saying to himself. I was old enough to know that maybe I should have been his primary concern and was hurt that I was secondary to his financial concerns.
My mom, brother, and I grew to have a close relationship with Wanda’s family as well, especially her mother, Clara Liva. Clara was a former sheriff’s deputy and a very loving and affectionate grandmother. She was exactly who we needed to get through the rough time of the divorce. Mom and Clara had also grown close over the years during and after the divorce. When Ken and I needed time away from the immediacy of my parent’s divorce, she would take us and her other grandkids to her house in North Carolina, which sat on the shore of Lake Norman. It was always a treat to get to go there and I always had a blast playing with the electronic seat controls in her huge car. Such a thing was beyond cool to us back then. Clara and I used to sing together going down the road; this was the year Dionne and Friends came out with “That’s What Friends Are For”. We sang that song as well as “Lean on Me”. Thinking of those songs nowadays brings up such a happy feeling as I remember flying down the interstate with my Memaw Liva. It was an idyllic lake house, the perfect summer getaway. The only time anything bad ever happened was when there was a murderer on the loose around the Lake. The news stations sent out an alert and all of us kids were frightened yet excited. I don’t remember how or when the killer was caught, but I do remember vividly seeing Clara get her gun and load it, thinking “Wow this granny is toting a gun!” Ken and I also grew close to Wanda’s sister, Angie Buice, and her children, Greg and Tina. Greg was later murdered by his stepdad, though officially it was ruled a suicide.
I believe my dad was just too weak to be a good father or a good husband. When my mom started back to college to get her degree, he got mad and felt threatened at her independence. Dad was not satisfied with any situation unless he was in control of that situation. Though that served him well as a cop and as a detective, it was not a great framework with which to build a parenting style. There is a saying that goes: when the going gets tough, then the tough get going. But my dad? When the going gets tough, he leaves.
My dad was verbally and physically abusive towards me. Not the kind of physical abuse that you see in Lifetime movies, but a more sporadic kind of abuse that nonetheless kept you on your toes. One time he kicked me across the backyard while my Cub Scout troop looked on. I also remember him throwing me across the room at Wanda’s house in Forest Park, when Ken and I were staying there one weekend. Another time he chased me across the street with a PVC pipe and spanked/beat me with hit; the whole time he kept saying the more I ran from him the more he would hit me. Being a child it was impossible to stop running and knowingly take abuse. Any sane person would run or fight back when threatened and seeing as I was only 5 or 6, fighting certainly was not an option. I remember that so vividly, even down to the Spiderman Funderoos I was wearing.
The grief and blame I felt at my parent’s divorce in general, specifically my father’s constant anger, created such sadness that I tried to kill myself. A child acting out during a divorce is nothing new, but apparently when I ran out into traffic and lay down in the middle of the road, screaming that I wanted to die, apparently that is a bit more than simply acting out. Mom was at work and I cannot remember what triggered my suicide attempt. My memory of this begins with me running into the road and ends with Ken trying to drag me out of the road, unsuccessfully. Apparently the neighbors all witnessed this and called my mom at work.
I was quickly scheduled to see a psychologist, one of Wanda’s colleagues. The only part of therapy I looked forward to and can remember very well was when I got to shoot basketballs in the gymnasium of the psychiatric facility. I was placed on some kind of medication but I don’t remember what kind it was; I only remember that it made me into a zombie so I did not stay on it long. Given the physical and verbal abuse from my father, one would think the divorce would mean good news but I remember my world being shaken up so hard and fast, like shaking a kaleidoscope and then looking through it at a completely different outlook, all I could think about was that I was the cause of the divorce. Maybe if I was not a sissy my dad wouldn’t be so angry all the time. Maybe if I cleaned up my room when I was supposed to then he wouldn’t be angry all the time. One of dad’s favorite phrases that he would say every time he yelled at us was that “One day you are going to end up in jail for...” and then he would fill in the blank with whatever transgression we did this time.
It was around this time I began to read books. Reading was a safe way to escape. Reading took me to other, better places. When I was reading I didn’t have to deal with the here and now. I withdrew from the world around me and didn’t want to participate in life anymore. My introverted nature became so severe I remember my 5th grade teacher, Miss Williams, speaking to my mom about it because all I ever wanted to do at recess was read. I had zero interest in playing with the other kids. My interactions with kids had a track record of negative outcomes and I was done with subjecting myself to their cruelty.
After we moved to TN, it became more challenging to continue visitation arrangements with my dad. I vaguely remember my dad objecting to our move to TN but I think it was more of a token resistance, because my impression of that time was that he was fully focused on his life with Wanda and not so much focused or caring about seeing my brother and me. I have the impression that he was only doing the token, expected responses to continue visitation.
It was agreed we would meet my dad at a gas station just off Highway 411, at the point where Highway 411 intersected Interstate 75. Mom would drive us straight down 411, and that first leg of the journey always felt like an adventure. We would always stop at the A&W drive in restaurant on 411 and it was a big deal to me. For some reason getting that big frosty mug of root beer was special to me. It represented a stable routine, something known in the midst of so much in my life that was unknown.
Often we would also stop at Ken’s Restaurant in Etowah (not sure if that is the right city). Sometimes we met my dad here, but not very often. They had the most amazing spaghetti and that is usually what I ordered. We had stopped at this particular restaurant when we moved to TN. Next to this restaurant there was this Dollar General we would go into sometimes while waiting on my dad to get there. On our way to moving to TN that first time, I remember going in there and buying mom this little ceramic and cast-iron kitchen decoration that said “Brenda’s Kitchen”. She still has that same decoration hanging in her kitchen today.
The 2nd leg of the journey, once we were transferred over to my dad, was not so fun. Dad drove a Jeep Comanche pickup truck with a camper on it. He and Wanda sat up front, while Ken and I were put in the bed of the truck, as if we were cargo to be transported. Communication with Dad and Wanda was limited to the sliding window between us and them. Needless to say it was very loud in the back of the truck, flying down the interstate, the wind slamming through the crevices and nooks of the truck bed. Most of the time I gave up on trying to talk over all the noise and ended up reading or falling asleep. They always had a blanket of some sort for us to at least we weren’t directly on top of the truck bed. I don’t remember anything special or fun or good about that 2nd leg of the journey to my dad’s house. I remember it felt like it took so long to get there, but I am not sure if that was because he had further to travel or if it only felt that way because I was so uncomfortable in the back of that truck.
There was however a bright spot in all the chaos. I grew to love Wanda, my dad’s girlfriend. They had met through his work for the Clayton County Police Department. She was a child psychologist for the county I believe. Wanda was the first of our stepmoms. It was Wanda who developed and nurtured my love of food and cooking. One Thanksgiving she had me help her make homemade yeast rolls. I felt so important to help her make those! We had dyed them green and blue and I can’t remember what other colors. It struck me that someone who was outside of the box (green and blue rolls?!) just simply had to be cool. Wanda also introduced me to my lifelong love of reading, especially sci-fi and thrillers. It was she who introduced me to Piers Anthony and Robert McCammon. On Sundays when they had us for the weekend, Wanda and I would also sit down and read the Atlanta Journal & Constitution together. To this day reading the Sunday paper is one of my favorite ways to unwind.
Sadly enough Wanda died from multiple brain aneurisms while I was in college. I was living in my apartment in Greentree Village at the time when I received the call from my dad. Without hesitation I jumped into my Toyota Celica and drove to me dad’s house and then to Athens, GA where she was hospitalized, in serious but stable condition. Three aneurisms had already burst and they had drilled her head in order to get to the fourth one, but it burst before they could get to it. Seeing her with her head shaved and bandaged and swollen was gut-wrenching. It was very clear that recovery was not possible.
Driving back and forth between Athens and Greensboro was a lonely drive, with too much time spent doing too much thinking. I pondered how my Dad would survive on his own, without a woman to tend to him. My dad was either old-school in that regard or he was simply emotionally unable to be alone or both. Dad went crazy after she died, and after I left his house. He found the sister of his friend who died in Vietnam and within a month moved to West Virginia to be with her. He married her, at which point I stopped talking to him for years.
I could never forgive him for how callously he disregarded the memory of Wanda. I could not forgive him for being such a weak man, unable to be on his own. I certainly learned independence from my mother because my father has never known the meaning of the word. In retrospect, it was always Wanda who became engaged in mine and Ken’s life. She was the one who thought about school clothes, who came up with activities to do, who always had our ear if we needed to talk about something. My dad was just a shadow in the background, distant and always planning his next fishing trip.
One time shortly after the divorce, Dad, Ken, and I went on a father/son camping trip with our Boy Scout troop. It was the only time I remember my dad being active in scouting with us. The trip was to the Okeefanokee Swamp which straddled the border between Georgia and Florida. The scout troop had chartered a bus to get us there because there was so many of us going on the trip. Most of the trip was a disaster. Wooden pathways were built throughout the swamp; these pathways were about ten feet above the top of the swamps. Me being me, I had somehow gotten left behind on some such pathway; I was probably chasing a butterfly or some such distracted nonsense. When I realized I was alone on this path in the middle of the swamp I also noticed the sun was starting to set. Panicked I began running to try to find everyone, clumsily falling over the edge of the pathway, falling straight toward the alligator-filled swamp. Thankfully I reached out and hung on to one of the railings and stopped my fall, dangling over the path. I was so frightened and just knew I was about to be eaten by alligators that I did the only thing I could do – I shit my pants. Alligators were very real in the swamp and we had already seen several, so it was not just a child’s fear of being eaten. If I had fallen into the swamp it was a very real possibility. I wonder now why they never screened in the pathways. Surely I was not the first person to almost go overboard. Somehow I was able to make my way back to the group and the bathroom and get myself cleaned up.
That next morning calamity struck again and again clumsiness was my partner in crime. As a child
I had always had a fascination with fire. Not a psychotic fascination; I didn’t ever want to burn down houses or anything. On every camping trip we had ever been on as a family I was always getting in trouble for playing in the fire. On this particular father/son trip fire was again my source of trouble. Instead of playing in it though I was trying to put it out. I was standing too close to the edge of the fire pit when the edge crumbled and gave way, plunging my foot into the coals. Instinct caused me to immediately pull my foot out of the fire and thankfully I was wearing tennis shoes, but the coals were able to burn the upper inside of my foot. The wound blistered immediately and we did first aid of course. The strongest memory that sticks out was not my clumsiness or even my pain however. The only thing my father seemed concerned about on the bus trip back was how much money it was going to cost to have my foot looked at once we got back home. “Money, money, money! Money, money, money!” he would keep saying to himself. I was old enough to know that maybe I should have been his primary concern and was hurt that I was secondary to his financial concerns.
My mom, brother, and I grew to have a close relationship with Wanda’s family as well, especially her mother, Clara Liva. Clara was a former sheriff’s deputy and a very loving and affectionate grandmother. She was exactly who we needed to get through the rough time of the divorce. Mom and Clara had also grown close over the years during and after the divorce. When Ken and I needed time away from the immediacy of my parent’s divorce, she would take us and her other grandkids to her house in North Carolina, which sat on the shore of Lake Norman. It was always a treat to get to go there and I always had a blast playing with the electronic seat controls in her huge car. Such a thing was beyond cool to us back then. Clara and I used to sing together going down the road; this was the year Dionne and Friends came out with “That’s What Friends Are For”. We sang that song as well as “Lean on Me”. Thinking of those songs nowadays brings up such a happy feeling as I remember flying down the interstate with my Memaw Liva. It was an idyllic lake house, the perfect summer getaway. The only time anything bad ever happened was when there was a murderer on the loose around the Lake. The news stations sent out an alert and all of us kids were frightened yet excited. I don’t remember how or when the killer was caught, but I do remember vividly seeing Clara get her gun and load it, thinking “Wow this granny is toting a gun!” Ken and I also grew close to Wanda’s sister, Angie Buice, and her children, Greg and Tina. Greg was later murdered by his stepdad, though officially it was ruled a suicide.
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