Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir Read online

My mom, born Virginia “Ginger” Stovall, grew up literally hungering for more. Raised by parents whose livelihoods were lashed to the opportunities made available to them by farm owners who needed help on their land, theirs was the transitory life of tenant farmers. Following work, they lived for a time in Oklahoma, in Southern California, and in the panhandle of Texas. One of fourteen children, only two of whom were girls, my mom didn’t really have a place she called “home” until, when she was twelve, her family relocated to Muleshoe, Texas, and stayed planted there. Eventually, after a stint at raising pigs, my granddad went to work at King Brothers’ grain elevator facility as a grain elevator operator, and when he did, his family finally had a more stable home, a place where they could put down their own roots rather than planting on behalf of others. Having lost their last child, a son, shortly after he was born, my grandparents lived the struggle of providing for the needs of their remaining thirteen children.

  Muleshoe was a quintessential West Texas town, a ranching and farming community founded in 1913 when the Pecos and North Texas Railway laid track for the Farwell-to-Lubbock line. Named for the nearby Muleshoe Ranch, which was founded in 1877 by Civil War veteran Henry Black, it is now home to the National Mule Memorial and the biggest mule shoe in the world.

  Mules are known for the best traits crossbred into them—the endurance and surefootedness of the donkey, the courage and strength of the horse—and it’s said that people who rely on working animals prefer mules to horses because they have thicker skin and need less food and water. Perhaps, like the tenant farmers in West Texas, they were just trained to need less. My mother’s family made do with almost nothing because almost nothing was all there was, but I’ll never believe that they truly got used to it. Hunger grew in her like dark shadows, because of what they all lacked in sustenance but also likely because of what she herself lacked in the way of physical attention or affirmation.

  My mom was born smack in the middle of the birth order. “Lucky number seven,” she says with a sarcastic but somewhat wistful tone. The only girl for a while (her sister was the third-from-last to be born), hers was a life filled with intense daily responsibility. Expected to pitch in on the farming, but mostly to help with the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, and the canning of vegetables that sustained them through lean times, my mother didn’t know anything other than hard work. And unlike my doted-upon father, my mother had an upbringing that was devoid of any opportunity to be self-interested or to feel she was in any way the focus of her parents’ day-to-day lives. Even her education had to yield to the demands that such a large family placed on her. She left high school toward the beginning of her tenth-grade year when her mother became ill and she was needed to care for her younger siblings. When she was only sixteen, she married for the first time, more than anything as a means of escape. With her new husband, who was seventeen, she moved to Arizona, but not for long. Within three years she was back under her parents’ roof, living once again with them in Muleshoe.

  My mom’s early years were spent as part of a family who farmed other people’s land while living on it. Every day was a struggle for survival, and they just barely scraped by. They had nothing. Literally nothing. They were the family where the kids slept head to foot in bed because there were so many of them. My mom said they had only two bedrooms in the house where she spent much of her time growing up, with one mattress in one room, one mattress in the other room, and a third mattress in the kitchen, where her parents slept. The children must have looked like an odd assortment, stacked end to end—some of them bearing the dark skin, hair, and eyes of my grandmother, others as fair, freckled, and redheaded as my granddad. At Christmas, if they were very lucky—and often they weren’t—they might each get a piece of fruit, like an orange, grown somewhere warm and picked by other hands. Though a modest gift by modern standards, to them it was an exotic and coveted treat. Citrus doesn’t grow in West Texas, and almost none of their food was store-bought.

  They were poor their whole lives. They grew almost all their own food, canned every vegetable they coaxed out of the earth, and, when they had them, killed one cow and one pig each fall to get them through winter, even after my granddad found more stable work at the feedlot. Despite their best efforts, my mother recalls a time in Muleshoe when my granddad was still looking for work and they were living on “water gravy” and “water biscuits.” “It was like eating glue,” she says, remembering how it was to live for weeks on end in a state of unabated hunger with only water and flour to sustain them.

  It was such a difficult life. I think about that whenever I think about my mom—how what she went through and how she was raised hardened her in ways that would make it challenging for her to know how to be demonstratively loving and warm with her own children. Her childhood had left her deprived and wanting for so many things. Like the parched panhandle soil she’d grown up on, there were parts of her that water never reached.

  —

  When my mom was in her very early twenties, after her brief three-year marriage and divorce, it was the same Uncle Will, the one my grandmother had set outside the covered wagon on the night of the Gypsies, whom my mom followed east to Rhode Island. The navy had taken him there, and my mom went to live with him and his wife and children for a while with the intention of trying to find herself.

  Whether she did or not, I don’t know, but what she did find for sure was my dad. A friend of hers had dated him first, and when she realized she wasn’t particularly interested in him, she’d introduced him to my mom. My mother, just nineteen years old, had beautiful high cheekbones and was far better read than her ninth-grade education would imply, though she lacked confidence regarding her intellect, always self-conscious about not graduating from high school. My dad was handsome, charismatic, and confident—from his high-school yearbook, which I found among his things after he died last year, it was clear he was already a standout: popular, voted onto the student council, and named “Best Orator” by his senior-class colleagues. He was also in all the stage productions and already involved in community theater outside school. Again, acting was his deepest passion. And ultimately he would follow that passion wherever it led, straight to the end of his days.

  By the time he’d met my mother, he’d been honorably discharged by the air force because he had asthma. He had also already married once and divorced, but unlike my mom’s early marriage, his had produced a child, his first daughter—my half sister, Kathy Russell, whom I would be lucky to get to know later in life. In spite of their radically different upbringings, or perhaps because of them, my parents fell in love, and in the span of only one year they married in West Warwick and had my brother Chris when my mother was only twenty-two; my brother Joey, and then I, followed in quick succession.

  I wish I could say that their union was happy from the start, that my father only had eyes for my mother, and that he would never break her heart, or ours.

  But that’s not how the story goes. All marriages have their ups and downs, their twists and turns, their times of bounty and drought.

  Theirs had more than most, I think. And with our wagons hitched to theirs, so did our childhoods.

  —

  When my mother became pregnant with me, I was not an expected child and my parents didn’t greet the news with great happiness. Their marriage was already on rocky ground, and when I was born Wendy Jean Russell on May 16, 1963, I was not a child who came into the world and started life in a happy, stable situation. As my mom recalls it, she weighed only ninety-eight pounds when she gave birth to me. Her doctor would tell her to drink beer and milk shakes: anything with a high calorie content, to try to get her to put weight on. But she was too depressed to eat. Her energies were focused on her failing marriage, a marriage that she desperately wanted to succeed. Her emotions were focused on my father, whom she loved with all she had. During her pregnancy with me, and after I was born, she had no capacity to nurture me. Instead she was de
aling with the devastation of having lost the man she loved and with the responsibility of having to care for three children under the age of four with little if anything at all left in her emotional reserves. Not very long after I was born, when I was only a few months old, my parents separated and then divorced. It would be their first time to do this, but not the last.

  My dad had met someone else and fallen in love. And we were left in his wake.

  I don’t know the particulars of that situation, but getting involved in community theater wherever we lived and then falling in love with his leading lady would become an unfortunate pattern of his. Years later a marriage counselor would tell my mother that my father had a hard time creating an appropriate separation between himself and the characters he played and that that was why he got so caught up in the parallel universe of whatever new world he entered as part of his stage persona. But at that time, in West Warwick, after only a few brief years of marriage to a man she loved and adored, all she knew and all that mattered was that he was gone.

  It makes me so sad to think of my mom then—to imagine how awful and depressed she must have felt. Here she was, the daughter of tenant farmers, who had picked cotton until her fingers bled when she was only a child, who was now far removed from her real home in the Texas panhandle, alone in Rhode Island, in the small house where my dad had abandoned her with only her brother and sister-in-law to lean on and three small children to take care of all by herself.

  Joey, who is just one year older than I am and to whom I’ve always been incredibly close (I’m the only one who still calls him Joey and the only one he allows to do so), has a remarkable ability to recall memories from when he was just two and three years old. I remember none of those years, but Joey does. He remembers the vineyard behind our house. He remembers he would crawl around the vineyard and pick the grapes and eat them and that when he did, the old man whose vineyard it was would come out on his upstairs back deck and holler, “Get out of my grapes!” He also remembers that I got a toy lamb with wheels for feet that was too tall for me to ride and that on one of his visits to see us, my dad took a handsaw and cut the tail off the lamb so it was low enough for me to climb on and roll around on.

  But even Joey doesn’t remember understanding the depth of my mother’s despair. Even when she acted on it in a way that likely would have ended all our lives, he didn’t understand why it was that she put the three of us kids in the trunk of her car—Chris, four; Joey, two; and me, not quite one—in the garage, with the intention of getting in the car with us and starting the engine. As she told me many years later, without my dad she didn’t want to live anymore. But she didn’t want to do something to herself and leave us behind, not knowing what would happen to us.

  Joey remembers that the car was one of those old round fifties models, a Pontiac or Chevrolet Bel Air, with a great big trunk. He remembers her laying us down in there as if it were a little bed, and he remembers actually being excited about it, not scared, as if it were some kind of game. But sometime after she’d gotten us all into the car, the doorbell rang. It was a neighbor, a gentleman who was not in the habit of visiting but who’d come to the door that day, he told her, because he wanted to check on her. They sat in the living room and talked for over an hour; then they prayed together. When he left, she’d gotten past that terrible dark spot she’d been in, so she took us out of the open car trunk and brought us back into the house.

  I’ve long believed in angels on earth, in a higher power, in moments when someone or something comes into your life out of the blue and saves you from the dangerous path you’re on. Like that one. Whether the neighbor saw something strange or just sensed that something wasn’t right and felt the need to reach out and check on her, we’ll never know, but I absolutely believe that an angel saved my mom that day. And us.

  I was a young adult when my mother first told me that story; she talked about it again when my father was dying last summer and we were all gathered at the hospital during his final days. It was an upsetting and disturbing story for me to hear, of course, especially as the mother of two daughters, but as I’ve processed it, I’ve moved from my initial feeling of horrified disbelief—How could she have thought about doing that to us?—to one of compassionate astonishment—How incredibly depressed and desperate must she have been to want to do what she almost did.

  As I look back at that time in her life, my heart breaks for my mom. She loved my dad so much, and he had started a relationship with someone else while she was pregnant. That meant her time carrying me and delivering me and caring for me as an infant must have been so sad and painful and traumatic for her. Was she also suffering from postpartum depression and severe hormonal changes—neither of which was regularly treated at that time? Likely. Dealing with what her body was going through biologically, together with what she was going through emotionally because of my dad, had put her in a state of absolute despair—enough to want to end both her own life and her children’s.

  I think that the state of her mental health contributed to her inability to truly bond with me during that time in my life. Though she is the most loving and giving of mothers now, back then I don’t think she had the capacity. I don’t have memories of her being physically affectionate. Because her parents were not the demonstratively nurturing sort, combined with the fallout from the pain that losing my dad caused her, my mother was never one to show much in the way of physical affection to either me or my brothers. That all changed when her grandchildren were born. Today you would never know she had a hard time connecting with her ability to show love. I understand all that now. But for a small child, it created a void.

  We spend our lives trying to fill the empty places in our souls that love never got to, where there wasn’t enough water to reach our roots; it’s those deficits that often have the biggest impacts on us and that shape us the most. Whatever the void created in those early formative years, I think it’s part of who I became as an adult. I think it contributed to my drive, to my toughness, and to where my public-service energies ultimately have led.

  TWO

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “The Second Coming”

  SHORTLY AFTER MY PARENTS separated and sometime during their divorce, while my grandparents were still living in Muleshoe, my mother left Rhode Island with us and moved back there. It was the mid-sixties by then, and Muleshoe had grown since my mom had finished ninth grade—well on its way, by that point, to being a town with two hospitals, two banks, a library, a newspaper, a radio station, and a wide and thriving Main Street, where big-finned American cars angle-parked nose-in on both sides. I doubt that her decision to move back there had anything to do with such chamber-of-commerce selling points, but I imagine it had everything to do with desperately wanting to escape the painful memories of her life with my dad and wanting to be near her family.

  How hard that must have been for her. She was twenty-six when she had three children under the age of four to take care of all by herself, and a badly broken heart. Going home to such a small town couldn’t have been easy under such circumstances—the shame of divorce was still visited upon women then. Whispers must have rustled through porch and parlor conversations like wind through the fields my mother once worked. It must have been depressing and humiliating for her to move back in such a sad state of defeat.

  I’m not sure if her plan went any further than moving home to Muleshoe—I know from my own experiences that some plans are like that, because that’s all you can see from where you are in that tough moment—but unlike her putting us in the trunk of her car on that darkest of days for her, this move was a step forward toward a new life. Whether she knew what she’d do after that or not—and I suspect she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do next—there had to have been a very small part of herself that trusted she’d figure it out.

  I was so young when my parents first separated and divo
rced that I don’t even remember a time in my early years when they weren’t together, when my father wasn’t around. I had to be told that later on. Occasional blank spots in memory are blessings, I suppose, but just because I don’t recall those days of his absence, that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen or that my mom, and especially Chris, didn’t feel them intensely. Three years is a long time for a young family to be without a husband and father.

  But while memory might be fallible, pictures don’t lie. Old family photos tell stories we sometimes only vaguely recall or don’t remember at all. When I look at the picture I found of myself from that time, I see clearly what I was too young to know then. I’m about two, and I’m standing outside my grandparents’ house in Muleshoe, wearing one of those terry-cloth diapers babies wear when they’re potty training. I’m crying, and I look scruffy and unkempt and lost in a way that would come to feel familiar as we moved around the country and lived in houses that never quite felt like home. I may not have been conscious of it, but on some level I knew that things had fallen apart and that without my dad our center did not hold.

  For a while we lived in that home with my grandparents. Eventually, with the fifty dollars a week that my father was sending to my mom, we moved into a small house of our own on a corner dirt lot. It was a sad-looking little two-bedroom house. We were living there when my older brother, Chris, started first grade. And it was a letter my mom wrote to my dad about Chris’s first day in school that ultimately led to their reuniting.

  —

  That letter came about two years after my mom had moved back to Muleshoe. And it wouldn’t take long before it prompted my parents’ reunion. But there was a complication. My father had married the woman for whom he’d left my mother in Rhode Island—his third wife—he’d even had a son with her, a child he would never know beyond infancy and who would never know him either, or us—but in time he’d had a change of heart. He missed my mom—he missed us all terribly—but more than anyone, I think he missed my brother Chris.