It was dinnertime and I was expected home. I was eight years old.
The sun was setting, and the street was quiet. Most families were already inside, at their dinner tables, talking about their day. I could peer into windows lit softly, glowing amber gold. I imagined children being asked about their day, parents listening closely, smiling at one another over details that seemed to matter.
As I walked up the block toward our house, the dread started to settle in. It happened every day. There was nothing waiting for me inside that door. I never felt safe there.
My father worked long hours and always came home angry. My sister, who was 13 at the time, was responsible for making him a martini with three olives. She would stand at the kitchen counter preparing it before he even walked through the door. Ice first. Then the gin. Then a careful splash of vermouth. She would shake it vigorously in a silver container. Then she added three olives. Always three. How a 13-year-old learned how to make the perfect martini, I do not know.
He drank each and every night. As the night wore on, and as the cocktails compounded, he got nastier and angrier. Yelling was the norm. Abuse was common too.
My mom was addicted to Valium and severely agoraphobic. Her life hadn’t started that way. She had once been social and popular, but somewhere along the way she shut down and became a shell of herself.
My sister was born a year after my parents married.
Six years later, my mother had me.
She later told me I had not been planned.
She said she had considered an abortion.
I recall a regular family outing where my dad drove us to Dr. Gordon’s office to get my mom’s regular stash of Valium. Over time, my mom could barely make it past our driveway without having full-blown anxiety. Our annual family vacations were nearly impossible. We had few choices, as we could only drive a short distance from our L.A. home for my mom to feel safe. We could go to San Diego, Laguna Beach, or Santa Barbara. There were a couple of occasions when we had to turn back and cancel our vacation because she couldn’t go through with it.
One evening, as I walked up the street toward our house, the dread got the better of me. I wanted something to happen. Something had to change. Good or bad, it didn’t matter. I just couldn’t take the same dread waiting behind that door.
I stood there for a moment at the edge of the driveway. The house looked exactly the same as it always did. Nothing about it suggested anything unusual was about to happen inside.
But I wanted something different. Anything different.
I made a split-second decision. I bit my left hand.
I bit it hard enough to show teeth marks, but I didn’t break the skin. I then ran home, flung open the door, and cried, “The next door neighbor’s dog bit me!” My mom called my dad into the living room. They both looked at it. Then they wrapped it up in an ace bandage. The next day they took me to Dr. Tom, our pediatrician. He examined me, gave me a lollipop, and wrapped my hand again in the ace bandage.
My parents took me home and told me to lie down for a nap. I remember lying on my twin bed, looking around the room, holding my hand with the ace bandage, and wondering what was happening. No one talked to me. No one asked me how I was feeling. If I wanted to talk about anything.
Months later, I had come down with the flu. I went into the living room, where my mother was eating Planter’s mixed nuts and smoking Marlboro 100s, as she did every evening. She would start by watching television with my sister and me. My dad would go to bed early. Then after my sister and I went to bed, she would stay seated on the couch, playing Solitaire late into the evening. She often slept on the couch, never making it to her bedroom.
On this night, I felt brave enough to lay down on the couch and confide to her that I had lied about the dog biting me. I think I thought I would get sympathy from her by telling her when I was sick. I said in a quiet voice, “Mom, I lied about that dog bite. I bit my hand.” She didn’t even look at me. There was no connection at all. Instead, we both kept our focus on the women’s gymnastics. My mom replied calmly, “I know.” That was it. Nothing else.
When I was 13, my father got very sick. His vision was blurry and he got headaches. We found out he had cancer, but we never discussed it.
At one point he had a biopsy that required surgery. When he came home from the hospital, we tried to pretend things were normal. One Sunday morning we lay on his bed reading the comic strips in the newspaper like we always did.
I remember looking over at his chest. The incision ran down and across, held together with metal staples in the shape of a large “T.” His skin was bright red around it.
He caught me staring and smiled. He acted like everything was going to be fine.
Because my mother was agoraphobic, my father shared very little with her. Instead, he enlisted my 19-year-old sister to shuttle him to and from his medical appointments and to be present for the hard conversations. That is a lot to put on a young person, especially your daughter. On top of that, my dad made her promise not to share any details about his illness with anyone, including my mom and me.
I was aware that something was terribly wrong. His radiation treatments left his chest beet red. Still, he acted like he was going to get well. But of course, he didn’t. His stage IV cancer spread from his trachea to his brain.
Within three months, he was gone. One night he was taken to the hospital. Everything happened quickly after that. I remember waiting at home, not really understanding what was happening or how serious it was. He never came back. I never got to say good-bye.
After my dad died, life became the polar opposite of what it had been. My once agoraphobic mom became a social butterfly. She joined Parents Without Partners, where she met many new friends, both men and women. My mom became a party animal; she went out every night with her new friends. She started to date, but her choices were questionable. One lived in an RV, which he parked outside of our house. Another lived in his van. When RV Man wasn’t visiting, Van man would show up. Each would make his way inside our house for a shower, a meal, and time alone with my mom.
One night, when I was 14, I had come home after visiting my friend. I went to open the door and found the screen door was locked. I rang the doorbell to my own house. My mom opened the door just a few inches, and asked me if I could stay with a friend for the night.
As the years went on, life with my mom did work itself out. Somehow, as I became an adult and she settled down in a stable job with a man who loved her, we met in the middle. She never fully understood me, nor did I understand her. And that was okay in the end.
My mom was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer when she was 59. I visited her one day, bringing her a burger and fries. Normally, she would love to eat that meal. My mom was a foodie. Her cancer had spread to her esophagus. She tried valiantly to eat a couple of fries and take a bite or two of the burger, without much success.
Near the end of her life, when my mom lay in her hospital bed, we had the most real conversation we had ever had. I got up on her bed and lay down next to her. I asked her what kind of funeral she wanted. Who she wanted me to invite. What kind of food she wanted at the reception. She calmly told me in intricate detail everything I needed to know to plan her perfect ending. She would have really loved the food. Deli platters with cold cuts, pickles, coleslaw, potato salad, and rye bread. Lots of rye bread.
I also planned the funeral exactly as she wished. I picked out her favorite dress. I was asked by the funeral director if I wanted to see her before the service started. I surprised myself and said yes. There she was, looking kind of like herself, but not really. She looked plastic. Her make-up had been done, her hair brushed. I bent down to kiss her cheek and it was rigid and icy cold.
My sister and I were the only close family that remained. We sat in chairs near the casket, in full view for everyone to see. My mom had a lot of friends in her later life and they showed up to pay their respects. The service started and for some reason, my sister and I started to laugh. We were both mortified, but we couldn’t contain our giggles. The more we tried to stifle them, the worse it got. People must have thought we were terrible daughters.
Our laughter made sense. We never communicated growing up. This was a way to release all that we were feeling. Maybe we should have been crying instead of laughing. But emotion is emotion. And we were finally feeling something and sharing that.
Carol Ornstein is a lover of life who seeks to see the unseen through words, photography, and nature. She can often be found helping the underdog and writing poetry about everything and nothing.