Hayfields of the Mind by Jeanne Tody Beroza (color ebook reader .txt) 📖

sank to the hay bale beside him. What could I say? It had never occurred to me that mom might not ever come home. She was supposed to get better. I wanted her to come home. Becky needed a mom. I had to try and be a mother along with cleaning house, cooking meals, doing farm chores and doing my schoolwork. I wasn’t a mom. Taking care of Becky was nothing like caring for an orphan lamb until it was old enough to go out on grass with the rest of the flock. Becky needed someone to love her and care for her and teach her how to grow up right. Who was going to do that if dad divorced mom?

Every since Carrie had moved to the new high school and actually started having a life with kids her age, and then had started taking classes at MSU, all I did was work and act as a referee between Robbie and Becky. They hated each other. They fought horribly. Robbie had tried to hurt her more than once and would have succeeded if I hadn’t stood between them with a chair fending off my berserker brother. Once he’d shot her with a bee-bee gun, on purpose. I couldn’t make him quit trying to hurt her so I shot him with my bow and target arrow and pinned his leg to a tree trunk. Luckily I knew first aid. I got the arrow out of his leg, cleaned the wound and without speaking each of us knew we would never ever tell anyone about the arrow through the leg incident. We would take it to our graves.

Of course, I never told dad about any of their fight episodes. Even though I wished he’d know how badly we needed a mom, I knew he would use our failings as a reason to switch us. That was one time we three did stick together; when it came to not telling dad something so he could not make us go cut a switch to be used on our bottoms.

I didn’t tell him how lonely we were when he was working or traveling and we were home alone. I didn’t tell him I wanted to be a kid, just a kid and not responsible for everything a mother and partner to him should be. I didn’t tell him how much I cried or how I escaped my real life by making up a world in my head while sitting on the hay in the sheep barn watching the lambs play. I didn’t tell him Robbie stayed in his room all day reading and that Becky was so very alone.

I didn’t say anything to him at first. I sat looking at my feet. I was numb and voiceless. Sad. Worried. Anything I said might make him angry. How could I answer? He should tell Mom. She would be alone if he divorced her. How would she respond if asked if she wanted a divorce? Finally I said, “Do you have someone else you want to marry?”

I thought he might yell at me but I really wanted to know. If he married someone new, she could take over raising Robbie and Becky. I didn’t mind doing the chores. I liked the animals. I didn’t even mind the itchy hay. I just didn’t want to be alone and I didn’t want to be a mom at fourteen. “No, I don’t,” he said, “but I might some day. I’ll have to work out her continued care with the hospital and talk to her relatives about legal representation for her. It’s not easy to divorce someone while they are in a mental institution. It seems I am responsible for her since I committed her. I can’t just walk away.”

That’s good, I thought. You shouldn’t just walk away from her. You’re part of the reason she’s there. To his face I said, “I guess divorce is a good idea. I don’t think she can ever come home again and be well. She’s unhappy and alone. Maybe she can have a life someday too, when she’s healed. Maybe she’ll get married again. Are you going to tell Robbie and Becky? Are you going to tell mom?”

“I’ll tell your sister and brother,” he said. “The reason I wanted to talk to you, however, is I need someone to talk to Evelyn. She won’t listen to me. She and I cannot talk without fighting and that would accomplish nothing. I don’t want a lawyer to tell her. They say her condition is improving. Me filing for a divorce might cause her to backslide a little but I think it would be even worse if someone she doesn’t know breaks the news to her. I need you to talk to her, Jeanne. She’ll listen to you.”

“You’ve had a rapport with her even through her worst times,” he said. Oh boy, no I haven’t, I thought. Carrie has the rapport with mom, not me. I’m just good at keeping my head down and not causing trouble. I do not want to tell my mother he doesn’t want her any more. I can’t say she can never come home again. Oh god, what am I gonna do? Oh God. Oh God. If I thought it would’ve helped, I would have prayed at that moment, “Please God.”

I was quiet for a long time, thinking about telling mom, thinking about what I’d say, how she’d feel, how she might react. I thought about taking another trip to the mental institution. She’d been moved to a cottage on the grounds now. She told us she was better but I saw no difference. She was still there. We had to visit her in a room along with other patients visiting with their families. I didn’t like sharing our lives with other people in that manner. She didn’t feel like Mom any more. She was becoming just somebody we had to visit.

She needs to be away from him, I finally said to myself. They don’t belong together anymore. She’s not his wife and hasn’t been for a long time. She needs a fresh start. I guess he does too. Maybe if I approach it that way, she’ll listen. Maybe she’ll agree. “Ok,” I said, “I’ll tell her.” With that I got up off the hay bale and turned my back on dad. I’d never done that before but I didn’t want him to see my tears. “I itch bad,” I mumbled, “got to wash before dinner.

This memory is as strong as if that conversation with my father happened yesterday. Carrie drove the four of us to the hospital. Once I had told mom what dad wanted, Carrie talked with her and helped her accept the situation. They had been close during Carrie’s younger days and I think, what with Carrie’s continuing uncomfortable relationship with our father, they could commiserate as to what a mean, miserable bastard he was. It helped me to have Carrie there. I felt as if I had hurt my mother deeply and ruined her visit with her children. Carrie helped turn the focus away from me and back to the fact that it was my father creating the situation we were all faced with, not me.

Carrie’s memory of this situation is only of the trip to see mom, the divorce and the fact that mom’s relatives were very upset about the situation. By the time dad divorced mom, Carrie was an adult reaching out into the world and ready to start making a life and memories of her own. Robbie has no memory of that particular day in the hayfield. He has no recall of dad singling me out to talk to alone and he doesn’t remember the trip where he and two of his sisters sat in a visiting room and listened to me telling mom that dad was divorcing. Becky has good and bad memories of her life growing up on that farm. None of her memories include that trip to visit mom.

Later, after I was an adult, I asked dad why he had required that I tell my mother he wanted a divorce. He remembered the situation and stated he had felt it was the best thing to do. This was the next to last year I put up hay with my dad. The following year he suffered a serious illness and was forced to sell the livestock. By the time I graduated from high school, he had sold the farm and moved to Lansing.

Memory is a funny thing. I think even more than being slippery or untrustworthy, that it is a selective device the mind uses to help each person handle life. I think our experiences, personalities and emotional make-up color our perceptions of any situation and then our memories become what they have to be to support our well-being. I guess that’s if we’re lucky. Sometimes things go wrong and memories build into hurtful entities and become scourges that sour one’s life for all time. I have a few of those. Don’t we all? If we’re lucky, we remember the fun times of sun warmed hayfields, talks with dad that weren’t all about taking bad news to a mother, and lambs playing in damp fields on a spring day. Best of all we can remember our little brother’s shaking legs as he stood on the John Deere tractor’s brake and tried so hard to not jerk the wagon when he put it into gear and crept forward across the field.

 

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Publication Date: 01-16-2012

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Dedication:
To my siblings. We made it.