Post #162 – Women’s Memoirs, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
An Honorable Mention in our June 2011 Contest
Today, we are pleased to publish the first of two Honorable Mention winners in our June Memoir Writing Contest. We choose winners based on the author’s storytelling skills. Some stories are fun, light and happy. Others are sad, dark and filled with pain. All of these stories deserve to be told. Today’s winner, Marcia Noren explores the family myth of normality with the dawning insight that something was wrong. Women’s Memoirs offers our congratulations to Marcia Quinn Noren for her story, Myth and Fact.
FAMILY MYTH AND FAMILY FACT
By Marcia Quinn Noren
The Myth
On the night she met Daddy, my mother attended a college dance with her friends, dressed in a gown of pink organza. When she saw him standing across the crowded floor with a group of other young men, gazing at her with approval and intent, her heart was struck instantly with a profound attraction. His walk, as he approached her was regal and proud; his confidence, apparent. There was no doubt, she was meant to be his. He swept her away into a dance that would last forever.
A long war erupted that took him far away, but they reunited and were married under crossed military swords. He, handsome as a man could be in uniform and she, without concern that she wore a linen suit and pert hat cocked over one eye, rather than a white satin wedding dress.
Her dreams had come true, and she would be happy forever.
He returned to the war in Japan as a paratrooper, jumping out of army planes into enemy territory. During his liberties they conceived two children; first a son, who would be named after his father, then a daughter, eighteen months later. In the meantime, Mother prayed to God that if only he would come home safely, she would never ask anything for herself again.
A finer legend has never been found in any story book. The power that my father held in my mother’s life was firmly set upon that first meeting, and would not waver throughout forty-seven years of marriage or beyond his death. As a young, idealistic girl, I was especially attracted to the notion that their destinies had been linked from the beginning of their lives on the great Nebraska plains. Their childhood homes were a mere twenty miles apart.
Long before they met, the summer breeze that tousled his hair where he sat reading on his grandmother’s porch on any August night may have, moments later, lifted the hem of her skirt as she walked across her grandfather’s prairie pasture under the same orange moon. Those glowing fireflies, captive in the thick glass jar he held, may have, had fate allowed, winged their way southward to light up the night outside the window of her farmhouse on the hill.
Family Fact
One morning that began as an ordinary day in my fourth year of life, l wandered outdoors, forgetting that my father had told me to stay in. Walking on without thinking, I reached the neighbor’s Quonset hut where my friend was always waiting, ready for me to join her in play. Her mother noticed my face pressed against the screen door. “Come on in, honey,” she said, “don’t stand there outside.”
She was a mom, you were supposed to obey moms, so I dismissed the lingering memory that an order had been issued, that Daddy had said I was not allowed to play, and did as she asked. After a short while, my attention was focused on my friend and our game. Suddenly, without warning I was yanked upward into space, suspended by my arm. My body dangled there, akimbo, as my father took long, hard swings at my bottom, spanking me again and again. I was taken by surprise, in shock almost, as the stinging palm of his hand landed over and over.
We were home now. He opened the screen and hurled me inside. I’d survived. But no, he wasn’t finished. He threw me over his lap, pulled my panties down past my knees and spanked, spanked, spanked me, yelling until he was hoarse, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever disobey me again!” I was amazed to see my mother leaning against the wall nearby with her face buried in her hands, crying. Welts were rising higher on my buttocks, but still he continued. “Didn’t I tell you not to go outside? Are you ever going to disobey me again? Answer me, goddamn it, answer me!”
“No, Daddy,” I cried, numb except for my flaming red behind, tears running in rivers down my cheeks. “I promise I’ll never do it again.” I wanted to explain that her mom said it was okay to go in, but knew an explanation would only prolong the fury that at last now seemed to be winding down. Mother was still crying. “Oh Rod, for God’s sake”, she shook her head, seemingly unable to believe what she had just seen him do. He had hurt me badly…his precious little girl. I was his favorite child, the shadow who tagged along behind him, the one who loved him without condition and who wanted to marry him when I grew up. I was sent to my room.
Lying in bed, I stared at the wooden slats of my brother’s bunk above me. Still in shock, feeling only the biting pain of my swollen bottom, I was awed by the certain knowledge that this melodrama had somehow changed me, had indelibly shaken what I thought I knew about my world. My father was, in fact, capable of carrying out the mayhem he threatened.
I should not have been so dazed by this event. More times than I could count, I had seen Daddy hit my brother Rick deftly across the side of the head with the flat of his powerful hand, the blow landing with such force that it sent him flying, careening across the room into a wall or onto the floor. Being held witness to that punishment, so harshly and coldly delivered, always gave me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to intervene somehow, and stop this cruel and insensitive man who was usually, but not now, my father, from hurting my brother, who was so small. At least he didn’t do that to me; not even this time. This had been a spanking, which seemed more within the rules, within the bounds of reasonability, I supposed. But then, why was Mother crying?
She came quietly into my room awhile later to comfort me, without standing against the discipline my father had meted out. The sad and incredulous look on her pretty face as she knelt, stroking my hair showed me that I had not deserved so great a punishment for so small an infraction, and that indeed, she felt sorry for me. Even then I wondered if she felt sorry for herself, too. Some illusions have to be shattered when you watch your husband do such a thing, when you see him lose control and hurt a little child, your own child. I can’t remember what, if anything, she said to me. What was there to say?
Marcia Quinn Noren is working on her memoir: Sheets of White Linen
