The Focal Point of Falling Apart

When examining someone with an addiction, there is usually a moment in the person's past that can be traced to that began their tumble. It can be as tragic as rape, or as innocent as divorce. Regardless the event, from that point on the person assumes a stride of downward spiral that ties them too tightly to drugs, alcohol, religion, or some other crutch.
My drug of choice is the stage, and I believe I can trace my need for attention, acceptance and understanding, to a tipping point that occurred when I was six years old.
After leaving Tomorrow's Youth, my father encountered enormous obstacles finding work. When the institution started gasping its dying breaths, he did something both honorable and unwise. Payroll was not being met, and as dad was the director of the facility he used the family savings to pay its employees. Revisiting the event thirty-odd years later, dad believes he made the decision while in the grip of a deep depression; his life was not working out in the manner he had hoped, so he began championing righteous causes. If the worker was being screwed over by the powers that be, he would issue protest and challenge said power. My dad believes he delusioned himself into believing the board of directors would reimburse him the expense. That the governing body of Tomorrow's Youth had little interest in keeping the center afloat meant my father was dead wrong.
In an attempt to restore our now decimated bank account, my dad sued to retrieve his money, but all attempts were for naught. Naturally, when you sue your former boss it is difficult to obtain a proper recommendation from them, even if your lawsuit had merit. So as he hunted for gainful employment, anyone who decided to contact the listing atop my dad's résumé got an earful, and my father received no work.
With nothing left to lose, he applied for a job advertised by the Nigerian Government. They were looking for American educators to train teachers inside their West African nation, so dad scrounged up what money he could and flew to the Embassy in Washington D.C. After an interview, he signed a two-year contract. This would not be a solo run for my father; as soon as the family could get passports and shots, away we'd all go.
Within the years of my life already lived, I've had the opportunity to meet people who spent time living abroad, and I have to admit to a tinge of jealousy. They often seem more adaptable and open to new ideas than adults in America, many of who spend an entire life living within a fifty-mile radius of their birthplace. I say I am jealous, because while plans were made to move, the actual event never occurred.
My mom put together a garage sale, and all our winter clothes (a necessity in Wisconsin) and much of our furniture and other belongings were sold. After that, we began the waiting game.∗ Visas were due any day, but as happens all too often in Africa, a military coup played "Swap This Government" with our plans. The ruling body that had been looking to educate its people was replaced by a military dictator who began buying arms from the Soviet Union and issuing anti-American sound bites. In the 1970's, fresh off the Vietnam War and the phrase "the domino effect" still looming large in the public lexicon, to visit such a country was now a very poor idea. Suffice to say, our visas never arrived, and my fathers signed contract was not honored. Thankfully.
Now my parents were scrambling. They were broke, and living inside an uncertain moment projecting a bleak future. We were still renting a farm outside Amherst, so my mother drove into town to register me for kindergarten. While at the school, she inquired about substitute teaching and was offered a part-time position as a math teacher. She accepted on the spot.
Within a month, my father finally fought through the blot on his résumé and signed a one-year teaching contract with the Hammond Indiana School District. Now a decision needed to be made: move the family, or split it apart?
By whatever process they used, it was determined my dad would live in Indiana during the week and return home on weekends. His father extended his stay at the farm, continuing to live in his mobile home parked in the yard. While my mother worked, he would look after my sister Amanda and I. As Amanda was but a baby, this must have been quite an undertaking. That my paternal grandfather decided to help his daughter-in-law raise her children could be an example of his "do what needs to be done" generation, but in this particular case the psychology of support could delve a little deeper.
Patterns repeat themselves, it is an inevitability in life. I was witness to my parent's disaster of a marriage and thus threw six years of my twenties down the toilet, chasing a relationship that was never meant to be. Likewise, my grandparents were unhappy and divorced before I was born. My grandfather, when married, traveled as often as he could for work. He felt trapped, was unsure how to be a father and avoided his family the best he could. With my father now spending the workweek away from my mother, sister at I, a familial pattern began to emerge. So while he may have been simply rolling up his sleeves to help my mother because his generation didn't shy away from hard work, absolution of his own history may have played into my grandfather's assistance.
For one school year we lived this way. In the spring of 1975, my father was offered a one-year extension to his contract, and he accepted. According to my mother, he enjoyed the living arrangement the way it was and wanted to continue commuting between Indiana and Wisconsin. My father has always been a fan of nature, and whether he enjoyed the weekend getaway of the farm or preferred the weekday time away from family, I do not know. But as happened often back then, my mother pushed and my father relented. She was fed up with living isolated in the country, raising two kids with a grandparent. She got married to have a husband, not a ghost, so the living situation shifted against my dad's will and our nuclear family of four moved to Long Beach, Indiana.
I attended first grade and hung out with my cousins; one of my mother's many sisters lived close by. We rented the home of a well-to-do dentist, one who "wintered elsewhere," and when spring arrived, so did he. My father's contract was not extended a second time, the dentist wanted us out of his house, and work wasn't readily available. Though they wanted to stay in the area, the resources did not exist with which to do so. Neither had a job, nor any clue what do next. My parents loaded our belongings into a U-Haul, drove to my maternal grandparent's house in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, and filled their garage.
As he did at the farm, my paternal grandfather assisted the best he could. He was spending his summer teaching band at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, and sent my mother an application for a job as the cafeteria supervisor. She was easily qualified and hired immediately. As if by established legal precedent, my father was then hired to teach summer school in South Bend, Indiana. Like the year before, my mother found work in one region, and shortly afterwards my father was employed elsewhere. So like the year before, he would work away for the week, and return home on the weekends. If that reads like condemnation, it is not supposed to. As I write I am on the edge of forty years old and feel barely qualified enough to care for house pets, much less children. That my father would scrounge for work anywhere he could in order to send money to provide for a family should be read as honorable.
Regardless, for the summer months of 1976, my mother, sister and I lived at a campground in my grandfather's camper, while my grandfather rented a second camper and lived the next space over. Every morning at five, my grandfather would come over and fix Amanda and I breakfast as my mother biked to work. She would return between nine and nine-thirty AM, and the three of us would have until four in the afternoon to attend art, craft and music classes, or inner tube in a local creek. At four my mother would bike away again and my grandfather would arrive to baby-sit Amanda and I until after dinner, when mom would return to us.
One weekend, my father didn't make the trek north, so my mother, sister and I took a ferry across Lake Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. A teaching position was available, and my mother's application garnered enough interest to warrant an interview. My father did not have anything lined up once his summer position ended, so when my mother was offered the job, she accepted. As if a written by in a shitty sitcom or by fate, not long after, my father was hired by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Once and again, decisions needed to be made.
The two of them looked for a house in Milwaukee, but my mother was no longer within the bonds of starry-eyed youth; two children and a half-decade of struggle had put an end to that. While she admits to pushing for the marriage, my mother was no longer certain it was what she wanted. Instead of demurring her obligation to the teaching position in Manitowoc, my mother decided to hold fast and move to the tiny city with my sister and I. My father offered up the continuance of the separate-but-together living situation they had been using; he offered to buy a house in Manitowoc and commute there from Milwaukee every weekend, but my mother desired solitude of a different kind. Even though they had barely lived with one another for several years, or maybe because of it, my mother wanted to make a firm decision in her life.
This would be her first step on a twenty-year walk towards divorce.
My mother's pronouncement did not sit well with my father, and what exactly happened next is unknown. If ten people are witness to one event, in interviewing everyone you will likely gather ten different accounts of what happened. In talking to my parents, I have two diametrically opposed points of view, and neither is very pretty.
Before she was able to secure an apartment, she lived with Amanda and I at her parent's house in Kaukauna. My father had moved to Milwaukee. In her memory, my father showed up one day, saying that if she wanted to move on, that was fine, but he was taking the kids. There was a shouting match, and at some point Amanda and I were grabbed and put in his car. My father started to drive off, the two of us screaming and crying, confused as any child would be in such a situation, when my mother threw herself across the hood of his car. She said she remained there, crying hysterically as my father backed out of the driveway, drove uphill to the end of the block and turned left. My mother remembers him finally stopping at the cemetery, which would have been a good half block away. Not a huge distance, but probably an eternity for both a mother watching her children being taken from her and said children crying inside the car.
That's not where it ends.
My mother rented an apartment and moved to Manitowoc with Amanda and I in tow. As the unplanned abduction didn't work, my father made sure to do it right the second time. A month into our new residency, my father showed up and simply took me back to Milwaukee while she was at work. My mother remembers the principal of the school telling her I was gone and little else. She was in shock. One moment she was teaching wee little minds the wonders of the world around them, the next she was being told her son was no longer in her life.
To complicate matters, my father tells a different tale of how I ended up with him. My father's recollection of the event is altered a bit from what was just written. He recalls arriving in Kaukauna to spend the day with his children. When he pulled into my grandparent's driveway, the first thing he saw was my mother with her "new boyfriend," a person my mother says, if he existed, was a friend at worst and in no way a lover. My dad was not happy. There was a fight, with shouting and accusations thrown all around. Amanda was outside and began to cry, so he put her in the car in an attempt to dampen the effects of what was happening around her. The shouting continued, and at some point he looked up and was witness to me standing in the living room, looking out the window, crying. Realizing the situation was both out of control and detrimental to childhood development, he left. A few weeks later, after my mom moved to Manitowoc, she called him out of the blue. Two children were too much for her to handle by herself, and I was quite unruly. A Sophie's Choice was made and she called him to come retrieve me. So my past has in it either a father who took, or a mother who didn't want. As said, neither one an exciting path to take.
However it happened, I ended up in Milwaukee, living in the lower half of a duplex on Sherman Boulevard.
My mother says she visited a lawyer to inquire about getting me back, but his response was that legally the courts would simply issue a lovely nineteen-seventies shrug and that there was nothing she could do. He did point out, however, that child psychologists believed that separated siblings was the worst way for them to grow up, and that she never should have let me be taken in the first place. There are many reasons lawyers are despised, and I would guess guidance like that is but one of them.
For six or so weeks, I alternated weekends between them. One weekend I would visit my mom and sister, the next Amanda and I would spend in Milwaukee. The exchange took place at a McDonald's halfway between the two cities.
Eventually, this wore on me. I apparently didn't like Manitowoc and didn't have any friends there. One day I balked at an exchange, and my mother realized the situation wasn't going to work as it stood. She was depressed. She was earning $6,700 a year teaching at a small Catholic school and could in no way fight a losing battle in court. She went to see a therapist and instead of helping, he hit on her. In her apartment, she had the pleasure of listening to her downstairs neighbors fight, with one or two such melees ending in violence as the man physically assaulted his wife. My mother was too terrified to call the police, because if the woman didn't press charges, the man would be free to exact revenge on the only person who could have tattled. She was heartbroken when on the worst occasion the couple's two children escaped up to her place to call their grandmother to come get them.
With all this stress raging in her life, my mother decided to do what she thought best for her children. The weekend after I refused to spend time Manitowoc, she brought my sister to Milwaukee and we sounded out what it was like to be a family. Amanda and I seemed happy to have everyone together, so instead of shuffling us back and forth, every weekend after that she and my mother visited my father and I.
At the end of the school year, my mother gave up her lease, a house was purchased in Milwaukee and an attempt at reconciliation was made.
It would not last.

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