Private Eyes

(March, 2012: Working on indexing/categorizing pieces I've blogged. Transferring this piece from my once-public blog, versions.)

non-subject:  "rooms in the house"
AWW ~ 12/10/09
________________________

The bathroom in my parent's home, the home in Hickory, the home they moved to in 1961 with the three of us children.  That home that was built in the late 1930's before the neighborhood grew around it.  That home that my mother told me was dingy and old when they bought it. From her description my mind has always pictured a dark, damp house with spider webs for decor. My parents bought it on a whim and gave it a face lift.  They must have remodeled, at least cleaned and painted.  But how much did my mother do, even in picking out what paint to use? After all she was institutionalized at Broughton in Morganton, North Carolina, when I was a toddler, not long after we moved to Hickory. At least that is what I've been told.

Until I was in my mid-thirties, I believed Mom was institutionalized for mental dysfunction due to a car wreck. A wreck in which she broke her neck.  The wreck was in Florida, in or around Daytona, sometime between May, 1959, and before sometime in 1961.

According to Mom, we were on our way to the movie theater to pick up my seven-or-eight-year old sister.  Mom, of course, was driving. I was an infant at the time; Mom said I was in the back seat.  My brother would have been five or six years old.  He was in the front seat and refused to take off his football helmet.  My sister awaited pick up at the theater.

In route, the back of a trash truck opened up and dumped trash all over our windshield.  Mom couldn't see, and we wrecked.  I wonder what we ran into?  My brother supposedly went through the windshield; the football helmet, which he had adamantly refused to remove, protected him.  My baby bottle supposedly broke and covered my face.  Mom supposedly turned her head to look at me in the back seat.  She witnessed her baby girl with no face, and she went into shock.

I wonder what kind of car seats protected babies in the late 1950's and early 1960's?  I wonder how Mom could turn her broken neck?  Perhaps she moved her eyes to the far right, her neck already maimed and facing the back seat where I lay. I recall during my preschool years that Mom used to wear a neck brace.

Mom was first sent to Emory in Atlanta; that was when we lived in Florida.  After we moved to North Carolina in 1961, she again had to be put away, but that time was in Broughton.  Both times were to help her get her memory back.  The story she told me was that she couldn't recall her name, our names, how to eat, how to function in daily life.  All due to the car wreck and part of that was the shock of seeing me with no face.  The faceless infant.

Up until my mid-thirties I believed she had gotten well because Dad had decided to bring her back home from Broughton and that her familiar surroundings helped her regain memory and function.  But we were in a recently moved to home; that part wouldn't have been familiar. What would have been familiar to her? Dad, me, my brother, my sister, Hickory and the surrounding area. Mom had grown up in Catawba County. Dad had lived in Hickory when he and Mom dated; they eloped to Gaffney, South Carolina, in 1942 and got married.

I wonder if one reason they moved back to North Carolina, after living in New York and Florida for almost 20 years, was to help Mom regain memory? To reintroduce some of the sights and sounds of her formative years?  To help her learn to function again?

Until my mid-thirties, I had been told the wreck story.  As far as I recall, Mom was the only one that told me.  Perhaps we discussed it as a family; I don't know.

In 1995 Mom tried to commit suicide; I found her on her kitchen floor.  I was around 35 years old. She had called me before the attempt. I called my neighbor when I got the call, the cry for help, from Mom.  My neighbor watched my two young children so I could drive to Mom's alone.  I found her passed out on the floor.  She was breathing and had a pulse.  I called 911.  The hospital staff said she would have died had I not come to her aid. Through the following years I'd sometimes wonder if I should have ignored her call.

It must have been a day or so after Mom's suicide attempt that my sister, myself, and Mom's younger sister sat in the ICU waiting area at the hospital.  My sister and aunt were discussing Mom.  I listened to their conversation and was stunned.  Apparently, Mom had troubles even as a teen. She wasn't institutionalized back when I was a baby because of the car wreck, but rather because of manic depression.  She received her first shock treatments in the late 1950's and/or early 1960's.  But Mom had always told me her problems were due to the accident.

The bathroom, the original bathroom, where I grew up, at the home in Hickory. As far back as I can recall, I used to hide in that bathroom; the bathroom was the only room that had a lock on the door. I hid there when Daddy would get angry; he had a furious temper at times. I hid there for privacy.  One time I couldn't get it unlocked and Daddy, I think it was Daddy, had to drill a hole above the glass doorknob to reach through the door and turn the old-fashioned thumb-turn lock.  The bathroom window was too high up for me to open in order to let someone in through the window.

As a young child I used to wonder if Mom watched me through a secret spy hole in the bathroom wall; the wall that was between her bedroom and the bathroom. In reality, there is no spy hole; yet, as a child it was like I could feel Mom's eyes watching me as I would masturbate on the bathroom floor.

I wonder why I call it "her" bedroom?  Didn't Dad sleep in that bedroom at the time I write of, in my early childhood? Yes, I'm sure he did. I wonder why I never thought Dad spied on me?

Mom caught me masturbating once, when I was around five years old.  It was up in the loft of one of the shacks at the Balls Creek Methodist Camp Meeting Grounds.   I knew I was doing something that was nasty and private. She didn't say anything, but she saw me.  I stopped when I knew she was watching.
________________________