I Was Seven When I Tore My Family Apart
A lot of families begin with the promise and the appearance of happily ever after. The reality is, not all families make it. Ours didn’t.
The setting was a yellow split-level with a chain-link fence in the state of Ohio. The American Dream early 1970s style.
My mom made a career out of raising her two children. She never worked outside of the home while raising my little sister and me, therefore, we never knew babysitters or daycare.
Dad brought home the bacon and drove a red Ford Mustang made in the year I was born. We lived a barely middle-class lifestyle, money was tight but we never felt deprived.
Willowcrest Drive was full of happy memories. It’s where I learned to ride a bike. It’s the place where my parents brought home my new, baby sister. A family making it in the world with big hopes and dreams. A family following the American Dream and all the rules.
Until someone broke a rule.
My dad was awesome, he took us to amusement parks, zoos, movies, the beach — even letting me tag-along while he ran his Saturday errands. I remember going to the car mechanic with him numerous times while getting the family car repaired.
I would scour the parking lots of those greasy gas stations (back then gas stations also did mechanic work) searching for nuts and bolts and rubber washers.
My mom would empty out my pockets on laundry day to find hardware, rocks, and who knows what. She’d repeatedly tell me to quit picking up all those dirty objects, to no avail, of course.
Needless to say, I was a tomboy and a daddy’s girl.
Not long after my sister was born, my dad had taken up a new hobby. Tandy Leather. It was awesome. Tandy was a big thing in the 1970s with stores all over town, all across the nation. You would go into the store and buy large swaths of unfinished leather, leather dyes, paints, and a myriad of cutting knives, hammers, and punch tools.
To start off, he made a belt for himself, a purse for mom, and wrist pouches for me and my sister.
The pouch could barely hold but a couple of coins, but when you are seven in the seventies that’s all you need.
I was so enamored with Dad’s new hobby. I spent hours with him at his workbench in the basement, watching him select from the many tools, pounding the new design into the leather.
I can still smell the intoxicating smell of the leather and the paints.
I can still see the brightly colored macaw on the front of mom’s purse.
I can also still see the letters S-A-N-D-Y on the second purse he was making.
I asked, “Daddy, who is Sandy?”
I don’t remember him ever answering that question. What I do remember is that was the last time I ever got to sit with him at his workbench.
The next evening after dinner, as usual, dad went downstairs to his workshop to indulge his new hobby. Shortly after, I clamored down the stairs and ran into a locked door.
I knocked on the door and there was no answer.
I knew he was in there. I also knew there was a closet with a crack in the paneling which allowed me to spy on him.
Pouting in that closet, feeling rejected by the man who hung the moon. Watching him create a purse for someone who wasn’t my mother.
While a 30-year-old man would and should know the consequences of his actions, how in the world could a seven-year-old girl know that which she was about to do could not be undone?
After a few days of access to my dad’s workshop being withheld from me, I decided to ask my mom who this Sandy was.
Within minutes, I had my mom’s full attention and was being interrogated. In my mind, the crime was my father shunning me. In my mom’s mind, of course, she went way beyond the sin of shutting me out of the basement. I began to quickly realize that I’d gotten my dad into big, big trouble.
My mom stopped what she was doing and looked straight at me and asked, “Sandy? I don’t know a Sandy, why do you ask that?”
“What purse?”
“What did he say to you?”
“When did this happen?”
Next, mom led me downstairs. We entered the workshop, she began to open drawers, rummaging through his things. She pulled out the purse, still unfinished. Intricate designs weaving into the letters S-A-N-D-Y.
When my dad got home from work, my sister and I were sent to my room to play. I heard some of the same questions that she had asked me only a few hours earlier now being asked of him. Except for this time the questions were filled with anger and tears.
Tears that never ran dry. Rivers of tears.
Within days, I was taken out of school. During the day, mom packed up our closets. A FOR SALE sign went up in the front yard and movers were packing up our toys, our pots and pans, and our television. Literally, within days.
I was frightened every day. I knew what I had said had lit the fuse to this hell I was living in at the moment.
While living in our yellow split-level had been a dream come true, overnight it had become a living nightmare. The rooms and walls reeked of anxiety, rage, deceit, heartbreak, and sorrow.
My mother packed the car. As my sister and I slept in the backseat, we wake up at Granny and Pa’s house 500 miles south in Tennessee.
My mom knew good and well running back home to Tennessee was not a fairytale solution for us. But it was the only option she had. She was a young mother of two who desperately needed her own mother to lean on.
After one night at my grandparents’ house, the tension became palpable, even for a kid. I heard the front door open with so much force the walls shook. My grandpa, “Pa,” staggered in full of whiskey and vitriol.
A fight ensued and an airborne candy dish left my mom’s hand and made its way into my Pa’s forehead. I watched that candy dish travel in slow motion on a trajectory no one could stop. I looked at him as he stood there bewildered, touching his face and feeling the blood with his fingers. He was so drunk I don’t believe it hurt him at the time, but it was evident we couldn’t stay there.
In a movie scene, I’d seen only days before, mom is sobbing and shaking as she is throwing our clothing into suitcases. Granny cries along with us, knowing there is nothing she can do.
We spent the next few nights in a literal roach motel. The three of us in one bed, I can’t even fathom the weight of the thoughts mom must have been thinking.
On my mind were thoughts of anxiety, as well. Did dad know I told on him? Did he really believe mom found the purse when she was cleaning up his workspace? Did he hate me? Would I ever see him again?
I did see him again. Within a week, he quit his job, broke it off with Sandy, and drove the 500 miles south to reunite with us.
At least, that’s what he told us.
Sandy must’ve misunderstood the “it’s over” declaration, for she followed him to Tennessee with his clothes and belongings in the trunk.
We would soon realize he had told her to wait for him while he tied up the loose ends with us here in Tennessee.
Weeks went by and I was further traumatized by attending three different schools during my 3rd-grade year. I found the only sanctuary was deep within myself. It seemed things would never get better.
I was doomed to live an impoverished, miserable life with an absent father and a mother who had experienced a nervous breakdown and continued mental health issues.
But, one day dad visited and didn’t leave. I’m not sure if forgiveness was given but I can bet ultimatums were. He and my mom were going to try and work things out.
Sandy, the other woman, put two and two together and followed us to my Granny’s house one Sunday afternoon. She took all of his belongings and threw them all over the front yard. My Pa begins yelling four-letter expletives and then I hear tires screeching down the street.
That was the end of Sandy, dad was back home and we were going to start over again, this time in Tennessee. As the weeks and months progressed, from a kid’s point of view, our family appeared to be getting back to normal.
Looking back, to say my mom was desperate to reunite was an understatement. To say my dad didn’t deserve forgiveness was obvious. For whatever reasons, they did reunite and I was extremely happy for it.
Within a year, we’d move into a brand new, three-bedroom ranch complete with a 30-year mortgage. I was finally enrolled in a school I wouldn’t have to leave.
Within a decade, dad would be dead. A few months before his death, he had left us again for another woman. This time her name was Marty. This time there would be no reconciliation. There would be no forgiveness, no ultimatums. No reuniting.
On an August night in 1986, at 1:06 A.M., my mom comes screaming into my bedroom telling me to pick up the phone and listen to the man on the other line.
Drunk from sleep, I looked at her with contempt at the rude awakening. She pleaded with me to pick up the phone and listen to the man, for she thought she was having a nightmare and needed confirmation she wasn’t dreaming.
I placed the receiver of my princess phone up to my ear and with fear in my voice said, “Hello?”
I’ll never forget the sound of the voice on the other line. The man identified himself as the Campbell County coroner. He continued by saying my dad (he verbalized his first and last name, I omitted here for privacy) had been in a car accident, the car had flipped, he was ejected from the vehicle and was killed on impact. He was not wearing a seatbelt.
I never said another word on that call. My mom continued the call from the phone extension in her bedroom.
She was in the car with him, Marty. She was injured but survived. Unlike Sandy, she never returned my father’s clothes to us.
My mother teetered between crippling depression and anxiety for many years after dad’s death. However, somewhere, somehow she found an inner strength to be there for my sister and me. She went to work for the first time in order to keep the house we were living in and made many more sacrifices to feed and raise her two children.
You may think after reading this my father was a very bad person. But I knew him to be a wonderful dad. What makes one horrible as a husband doesn’t necessarily make a terrible father.
Yes, his actions caused extreme irreversible pain on my family and if he’d been home in bed at 1:00 A.M. like he should’ve been, he would more than likely still be with us today.
Do I regret telling my mom that day he was making a purse for someone named Sandy?
No, I don’t. I believe my intentions for telling were not for spite or retribution for being shut out of the workshop. I told because I knew something was not right about it. I knew his silence and hiding away was not right. I was afraid something bad was going to happen if I DIDN’T say something.
Knowing what I know now, I also realize if I hadn’t spoken up something would’ve been discovered eventually, since his problems with infidelity were chronic.
I know I was not privy to all of the details of my parents’ marriage, (grateful for that!) and I also don’t know both sides of the story. It’s very possible that living with my mother was extremely difficult for him.
I don’t think I blame myself and I don’t hate my father. I’ve spent all these years guarding my heart against unforgiveness for what he put us all through. I won’t allow myself to slip into a pit full of resentment and bitterness. For if I do, I may never be able to rescue myself from it.
Yet, I know the emotional trauma I suffered during those years is a burden I’ve carried every day since then. How does a seven-year-old process something like that?
It was never talked about again in my family, and I’ve never told this story to any of my friends over the years. It was a deep, dark family secret that even the family never dared to bring up.
Also, I like to think my dad never held what I did against me. He never made me feel as if he didn’t love me, he worked hard for us, he was so funny, and loved to shower us with gifts. I love to think of him now as a guardian angel watching out for me from above.
I miss my dad terribly. I’ve missed getting the chance to see him grow old. I get angry at times because he’s not here to take care of my mother. Who can know the way things would have gone. I still imagine he would’ve been able to correct his wayward ways and we would all still be together.
This story has been a very private one in my life. I’ve never shared the details of this story until now.
Today, I felt ready to tell it. I no longer want it buried deep within me. I chose to write this post here and now to get it out in the open, just in case it is causing me any subconscious mental or emotional anguish I’m not aware of.
Hopefully, by exposing it, I take its power away and affirm my power over it. Therapy through the keyboard.
Thank you for reading.
I Was Seven When I Tore My Family Apart
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