Nothing was working: Trash on the windshield, wreck #2

July 7, 2021

Prompt: Nothing was working

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The first bad car wreck happened before Mom and Dad started the family. They landed in a creek where Mom had to use a straw to suck blood from Dad's trachea. She spit the blood in the creek. The ambulance whisked Dad away to the hospital where he underwent surgery. A metal plate was implanted in his forehead. He lay in a coma for three weeks until Jesus appeared to him under a lone tree in a field and told him, "It's time to wake up now." 

The second bad wreck happened around 1960. Mom was driving. My five-year old brother sat in the front passenger seat. One-year-old me sat in an infant carrier in the back seat, sucking my baby bottle. We were on our way to pick up my eight-year old sister at the movie theater.

"Ted, take off that football helmet," Mom demanded.

"No. Not gonna do it," Ted retorted.

Back and forth, back and forth.

"We are going to pick up Becky at the movie theater. Now take it off."

But Ted would not comply. 

All of a sudden Mom screamed, but not at Ted. The trash truck in front of us had malfunctioned, and trash came pouring out, covering our windshield. 

Another scream. 

We crash.

Mom is whipped forward and backward.

Ted flies into the windshield, making a giant crack in the glass with his football helmet. 

Mom manages to turn her head and look at me in the back seat. 

I don't have a face. 

She goes into shock. 

The truth was, I had a face. But my baby bottle had burst and my face was covered with milk and bottle debris. 

Mom stayed in shock. Whatever the wreck did to her, she couldn't remember our names. She was like a child unable to make decisions and care for herself properly. That's when she was first institutionalized, in the psychiatric ward at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. I don't know how long she was there. A lady named Katie, whom I have no memory of, helped Dad care for us kids. I feel sure Uncle Fred's family helped too. We didn't live far from them in Daytona. Fred was Dad's eldest brother.

After Mom came home, she still had trouble, especially with memory. So Dad and the doctors decided we should move nearer to her origins in North Carolina. Maybe that would help her memory come back.

So we moved to Hickory, North Carolina, around 1961. But Mom had to be institutionalized again. This time at Broughton Psychiatric Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina. 

I don't know how long Mom was in Broughton, but my older sister said it seemed like a long time. The family would visit Mom, and she'd show us the ceramic crafts she had made. 

Her mind found its way back; she was able to come home (at least) by the time I was four years old. I remember she had to wear a collar around her neck, an injury left over from the whiplash. She'd undergone electroconvulsive therapy both at Emory and Broughton. The shock treatments probably caused some of her memory loss, but they also helped her recover. Duality. 

Mom got a job selling Avon and then encyclopedias. By the late 1960s she was the top, national, Compton's Encyclopedia salesperson for five years in a row. 

In the mid-1990s I found Mom on her kitchen floor after a suicide attempt. I then learned the rest of the story about why Mom had been institutionalized back in the 1960s.

Until I was around eight years old, I slept with a baby bottle. I hugged it  for comfort as I fell asleep. I didn't suck the nipple; there was only air in the bottle, no liquid.  

Instead of a security blanket, I had adopted a security bottle.