ChaChaCha Changes

Life goes on.  I think as young women, we kid ourselves into thinking that an abusive husband will change.  Their apologies seem so sincere, but they just don't last.  It was a taboo topic during the seventies; you didn't really talk about it; it made you feel ashamed.  It was more acceptable than to knock a woman around, belittle her, and take her power away.  Women understood how degrading it made them feel, but we were expected to tough it out.  Often, we only stayed with the man because we had nowhere to go if we left them.  If we were at home taking care of kids and being wifely, we didn't have our own income to stash away to use to escape a bad marriage.  And that was why I stuck around.  I had no way of supporting a baby and another one on the way.  I refused to turn to my family and have to live under their rules.  I just had to make the best of a bad situation.

I started taking care of my uncle's little girl.  That would give me $25.00 a week to call my own.  I never had any money; Mike never left me money for gas or groceries.  That was a way to control me.  So he would be losing a little of that control now.  I told him that I was doing it for free to help my uncle out.  Now I could take Glen out, and we could go to the park and get some fresh air.  I could go to McDonald's or pick something up from the store,  It almost made me feel normal.

Glen was such a sweet baby, always laughing; I loved being around him.  And Lana, my uncle's little girl, would sit and play with him like he was her little doll.  Everything was fine except for when Mike came home.  I resented him so much, I would never get over what he had done to me.  He would come home and plop his boots down and sit in front of the TV and drink.  He barely paid any attention to Glen.  He wouldn't feed him or change him or help me with him at all.  I could only imagine how it would be with two kids under the age of two.

I didn't tell him that I was pregnant until I was four months along.  And he had the nerve to ask me how that happened.  That was the wrong thing to say to me.  I blasted him about what he had done to me; he claimed to have no memory of it—what a bastard.  Somehow, someway I was going to get away from him.  It might take me a while, but it was going to happen.

It was about this same period of time that he started having horrendous nightmares about Vietnam.  He would wake me up yelling in Vietnamese, grinding his teeth, tossing, and turning and muttering all night long.  I felt bad for him; I couldn't imagine killing people and actually having a hand to hand combat, watching your friends die or be maimed for life.  It left a massive scar on his psyche, he should have been going to a shrink, but they didn't do that then.  He didn't want to ruin his career by having them think that he was crazy.  You would think that over time those dreams would at least diminish somewhat, but they never did.  He lived the war over again almost every night.  He was especially plagued by guilt over the death of his best friend.  He had been wounded but not with a devastating wound, just enough to get him sent home.  He was on a stretcher being carried by Mike and three other guys talking about going back home to Dallas.  They were almost at the helicopter, and one of the guys stepped on a land mine.  It blew his friend up and killed the other three guys, and wounded Mike.  The guilt of being the only survivor was driving him crazy; he blamed himself for his friend's death.  It was tearing him apart mentally.  And nobody could help him.

Occasionally he would come home on a day when I had a doctor's appointment at Bethesda.  He would go with me and Glen and Lana.  That was surprising to me.  He probably was just making sure that I wasn't cheating on him with some imaginary guy.  I was suffering terribly bad from morning sickness, it was more like all day sickness, and nothing the doctor gave me seemed to alleviate it. I think a lot of it was brought on by nerves.  I was sick of being sick.

My brother showed up uninvited one afternoon.  He had bought Glen a couple of toys and was dropping them off.  I had not told my mom or him that I was pregnant.  I was just poking out a little; you really could not tell.  He was playing with Glen with the big ball he had brought him, and he kicked it into me and hit me in the stomach, raising my loose shirt up a little.  He wanted to know if I was "knocked up" yes, he was always a master of subtleness with his words.  It made me a little mad, I told him that I wasn't knocked up; I was pregnant.  He didn't say anything else.  He left shortly thereafter.

Mike's hitch in the Marine Corps would be completed at the end of August.  They offered him quite a bit of money at that time period to re-enlist.  He was thinking about it, but he was thinking more about moving back to Ohio to pick up where he had left off.  I really didn't want to move to Ohio.  It was such a small town, not even a town really, a village of about 4000 people.  There was nothing to do, no movie theaters, no malls, no bowling alley, very little shopping, and that was in the ancient downtown area.  What it did have were too many places to go and drink.  And that was what I was worried about.  And the job market there was minimal.  Most things you needed or wanted or had to have were about 30 miles away, and Lima and Findley's towns were not that big either.  From my perspective, it looked like the men went out, boozing it up and playing cards and the women stayed home with the 20 kids that they all seemed to have.

I tried discussing our future with Mike.  I tried to reason with him that we needed the free health care we got with him in the Marines and his family allotment money.  I asked him how he intended to pay for doctor bills and hospital bills for my pregnancy.  He shrugged his shoulders.  What an answer.  He was just an immature man; he acted like he thought he was still in high school with no responsibilities.  That infuriated me.  I didn't want to change doctors for the last 2 or three months of my pregnancy.  And I was even willing to go back to the cruncky old naval hospital for the birth.  I knew that he might get to stay at Camp David for maybe another year because not many guys had the top-secret security clearance needed to be stationed there.  Then I would be able to stay around my friends and live in the area that I loved.  I was talking to deaf ears.

September rolled around pretty quickly.  I didn't even bother to act like I was happy about moving.  I would be trapped in a place that I didn't like with no friends and no family.  We packed up a Uhaul trailer, and we were on our way.  Somewhere along the endless Pennsylvania Turnpike, we stopped at a Howard Johnsons to eat.  When we got to our table, I sat Glen in a high chair and waited for Mike to put the tray on it.  He didn't have a clue how to do it.  He looked like a big dummy.  Finally, a truck driver came over and put the tray on the high chair.  We ate a delicious HoJo meal. (you don't really believe it was tasty, do you?)  I took Glen in the restroom and cleaned the food off of him and changed him, and we were back on the road to our "future."  

When we got to Ottawa (Ohio), it was almost dark.  We had to stay at his brother's house because there was no rental property available and there were no apartments there.  I liked them, but I didn't want to live with them, and I didn't want to impose on them.  Larry had been unemployed for almost a year, and their resources were limited.  Mike was such a tightwad with his money that I was afraid that he wouldn't give them any to reimburse them for meals and utilities.  At least, Glen had their 3 kids to play with, plus about a million more in the neighborhood.  He was now 13 months old and walking quite well.  He refused to give up his pacifier or bottle, but I didn't really blame him; his whole little world had just crumbled around him; everything that he knew and loved was now gone, except for me.  It had to be a little traumatic for him, especially since Mike's mom insisted on calling him "Glenny."  He didn't really like her, and frankly, all of the grandkids acted like they were uncomfortable being around her.  It wasn't a normal grandma situation by any means.  She couldn't even remember all of her kid's names, let alone her grandkids.  

We stayed there for a month and then moved to a house on the other side of the tracks.  No, not a bad area; it was literally the other side of the railroad tracks that ran through the town.  It was a pretty nice house on a cove, and it was on the corner of the cove and one of the main streets.  The railroad tracks were diagonal to the house about a block away.  And there were lots and lots of trains.  The noise was driving me crazy.  Out of boredom, I would sit at the window with Glen while he watched them.  He loved the choo-choos.  I would count the cars.  Sometimes there would be as many as 6 engines pulling more than two hundred cars—Clackity clack all day and all night long, not to mention the train whistle.  But at night, when it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, that whistle became kind of comforting.  And eventually,   I got used to all of the noise that the trains made.  But that's not saying that I liked it there.  I was never meant to be a Buckeye.