Well, I’ve procrastinated writing this first page for oh..about 7 years now. It’s been nearly 7 years anyway since I made my last journal entry. Which, in its own right is hard to believe considering that I have stacks of journals downstairs in my closet chronicling every move of my pre-married life. don’t get me wrong, those are good for a laugh or two. However, it really makes me sad that I haven’t been able to bring myself to write a single stroke in a journal in these last seven years. In fact, my last journal entry was on on January 4, 2004 and the final sentence read, “ Well, it’s official, I am now Mrs. Jeffrey Vadas”.
Seven long, arduous years after I made that statement, it takes on a whole new meaning..even sounds different rolling off of my tongue. The girl who penned that sentence was so full of promise, and hope and optimism about my future with what I thought was the love of my life.
I’ve often asked myself, if I had to go back and write a letter to that girl of seven years ago..what would I say and how would I say it? And furthermore, would that girl even listen? The answer, as I’ve come to understand it, is a resounding NO. I wouldn’t have listened, in fact..nothing could have prepared me for the battle I was up against and at the same time nothing could have deterred me from it. I’m sure at this point, I’m still learning the ‘why’ of the whole thing, but I think on some psycho-babble level, I had to experience it. I had to go into it naively, go through it headstrong and come out of it with clarity to learn whatever it is that it was meant to teach me.
And that...I’m still unraveling.
To fully understand the brevity of the whole mess..I guess it’s important to go back to the summer of 1981. I was 6 years old, the Pointer Sisters were playing on the radio, birds chirping outside the door and kids playing in the street. But even with all of that, the only sounds I heard were doors slamming and keys being thrown, or something that sounded like metal hitting glass anyway, and the voices of my stepfather calling my mom.....a “bitch”, and a “worthless” one at that.
My little sister was barely 1 year old and somehow she became the responsibility of a 6 year old child. I remember barely being able to carry her around yet every time that the loud sounds and screams would start I would carry her into my bedroom so that she could unknowingly play in silence in my room. By doing this I knew that at least SHE could have some peace.
Over the next 5-6 years the abuse seemed to escalate. By the age of 10 I had seen my mom beaten up so badly that her eyes were swelled shut, her nose was broken. In fact, when I think of my mother of my childhood, she is wearing sunglasses...not as a fashion statement, yet it seemed to be a regular staple to her wardrobe, it was to cover up the black eyes that she received at the hand of my step dad.
One especially vivid memory that I have is of a warm summer day, playing outside with my friend Kim and watching my sister Stacey crawl around in her diaper on the front lawn. Just as we were enjoying the day on our rollerskates, pretending that my front driveway was our own personal roller rink, my step dad pulled up in his orange corvette, windows down and t-tops out, blaring Sammy Hagar, ‘I can’t drive 55’. I’ll never forget him getting out of the car with a yellow round laundry basket in his hands. At this time, he had moved out of the house and as far as I knew was either living in a hotel or an apartment...all I knew was that the day to day chaos had stopped, and for that..I couldn't care less where he lived.
As he walked towards the front door carrying this yellow laundry basket, he looked back and simply said to me, “watch your sister”. It’s amazing how I can’t remember what I had for lunch on Tuesday but I can recall every second of this film reel in my head from nearly 30 years ago. See, I knew that the laundry basket was simply an accessory to the crime..an accomplice and a distraction. He wasn’t there to do laundry at all.
It wasn’t very long before I started hearing the all too familiar sounds of argueing. My friend Kim and I were enthralled in what they could be talking about so we knelt down behind the bushes, trying to get as close to the front door as we could so that we could hear the drama unfold. It was about then that I heard a loud ‘thud’ and looked up only to seem my mother sliding down the glass porch door leaving a streak of blood that appeared to be coming from her nose.
My first thought, “oh great, he broke her nose again and she’s going to have to wear those stupid sunglasses for a whole week.” I was always afraid that other people who saw her in those sunglasses would know what was going on at home and that she or my step dad would get in trouble..it was a constant fear that I had. Hearing myself say that as a 36 year old adult..knowing that it was coming from a 7 year old is absolutely shocking and sad.
Seeing her slide down the door like that and continuing to hear the sounds that were coming from inside yet unable to actually SEE what was going on so that I could make sure that she was ok inflicted this feeling of fear inside me that I cannot describe into words. I knew that I had to do something..but what could I do? I was only 7 years old! The first thing that came to mind was to go to my neighbor Joyce’s house and call the police, maybe they could stop the fighting? So, I wrangled up my 1 year old sister and carried her across the street with my roller skates on and knocked on Joyce’s garage door. I can still vividly see her coming to the door and looking down on me and asking if everything was ok.
Joyce was always a very gentle person and motherly, I always envied her son Robbie for having such good, normal parents. I told Joyce that my step dad was at the house and they were fighting and he was hurting my mom. Joyce called the police and then pulled a kitchen chair away from the table and over up against the door and sat me and my sister in it. I knew she did it so that I couldn’t see what was going on out the window, but I felt like I was being punished!
While that experience was traumatic, over time the sting lessens and the bruises seem to blend in. For me, this was completely normal. As I got older, I felt more and more compelled to interject my opinions and do what I could as a young girl, to stop the madness that made my mom so sad. I remember getting out of bed with a plan in my mind and marching to my bedroom yet unable to fully possess the courage that it took to turn the knob and put my plan into action. It wasn’t until one day that I physically felt like I had just had enough! I heard them fighting again in the living room which was sunken by three steps off of the kitchen. I remember holding my sister Stacey’s hand as she was wearing her normal attire, a t-shirt and a diaper, I marched to the edge of the stairs, pressed her face against the side of my body with my right hand so that she couldn’t see what was going on in the room below. With my left hand I raised up my finger and pointed directly at my step dad and said with the loudest, most commanding voice that I could muster up at 10 years old, “YOU LEAVE MY MOM ALONE RIGHT NOW!” and then I held my breath...
I glared down at him as he was straddling my mom on the floor of the living room pinning both of her arms out to each side and screaming within inches of her face. At that moment, I really..truly believed, even if for one second, that my presence, and my voice was big enough to actually make a difference. He looked up at me with a disgust on his face that I can still see in my minds eye today and he said, “ Oh, you mean your WHORE Mother?” I don’t even know if I knew the definition of the word ‘whore’ at this age, but I definitely knew the context that he was using it in and I knew it was demeaning and did not describe ‘MY’ mother!
My mom was screaming at me to get back in my room, so that’s what I did...I walked to the back of the house, wiping my tears, dragging my sister along, and went into my safe place and shut my door. As I continued to hear the fighting escalate, the feeling of helplessness mixed with fear set in. This was a combination that I knew all too well at this age.
I don’t want to misrepresent my childhood, it wasn’t ALL bad. There are many happy memories that I can recall..and in some way, the good times are just as much to blame for my future as a co-dependent enabler, as the bad times were. My step dad could flip the switch faster than anyone that I knew. Well, anyone that I knew at that time anyway.
There is a period of my childhood that seems to be missing for me. I am still trying to unravel what was happening during this period and why it seems so unclear for me. I’ll tell you what I DO know. First, I know that my mom and step dad had divorced. This left me with very mixed feelings and of course, at the time..nobody was concerned with MY feelings so I just tucked them away, like everything else.
While I was happy that the fighting had stopped and I was looking forward to having my mom around more and happier, in fact, the exact opposite happened. She started going out alot and staying out late or sometimes never coming home at all. There was one incident which sent me directly into a panic, and I can still remember like it was yesterday. My mom was at home with my sister and I and I had just gotten out of the bathtub and gotten ready for bed and got my sister ready for bed. At this time, my sister was going through a phase where she liked to sleep with me and to avoid argument, my mom let her. This particular night, I noticed that as I was getting ready for bed, my mom was seeming getting ready to leave. What made me think this? It was easy..I smelled her Giorgio perfume. That was always a dead give away. I remember getting a very nervous, uneasy feeling that she was going to try to leave as soon as I went to bed. I even asked her several times if she was going somewhere and she said “No” each time. But, by this point in my life, my perceptive skills had developed so much from all that I had seen and heard in my 11 years that I could tell without a shadow of a doubt that the minute I went to bed, she was going to leave for the night. It was a school night and I had no real reason to be up, although I remember stalling all that I could to avoid the inevitable. So finally, I went into my bedroom and shut the door and laid down in my bed. It wasn’t 10 minutes later that I heard the front door open....and then shut. I clearly recall panic setting in...I opened my door..went out into the hallway to see the headlights of the car driving away..I called out, “Mom..are you here?” and heard nothing...silence. I went around to each door in the house and checked three times to see if they were locked...and then I sat on the couch and cried..apparently until I went to sleep.
All of the sudden out of nowhere I heard a car door shut and I awoke and realized that I was still in the living room..‘she must be home and if she see’s me in the living room, I’m in big trouble’. So, I jumped up and ran into my bedroom..closed the door, and pretended to sleep. It was 1:25am and I could poignantly smell the stale smell of alcohol and cigarettes. This always meant that she had been out. At least she was alone....this time.
During this time period where my mom and step dad were divorced, I recall waking up on several occasions to multiple people sleeping throughout my house. In fact, I would wake up and make them coffee, take orders for cereal or toast...I grew to enjoy the chaos of it all. There was one person in particular that my mom had around quite frequently and his name was Jim. I don’t remember alot from Jim other than he completely occupied almost all of my mom’s time. Oh, and he was pretty good looking. Or, at least that’s what my friends thought anyway. I remember going to visit his mom’s house, she had a big trampoline outdoors and my sister and I would jump for hours and hours on that thing.
One day, I came home from school and our babysitter, Rhonda was there. I could tell by the look on her face that something had happened. This is when Rhonda told me that there had been an accident..I IMMEDIATELY started panicking that it was my mom! She proceeded to tell me that Jim was involved and that he was killed. All I could think about was wanting to be with my mom. I didn’t know where she was or if she was ok, and nobody would tell me. Here I was, this 12 year old girl who had done nothing for the past 6 years but worry about my mom...and at that very moment I had no idea where she was or how she was. This was a horribly empty feeling that I still remember to this day.
What proceeded after Jim’s death is still a mystery. It feels like I barely saw my mom the majority of that next year. However, I can also recognize that this is coming from a 12 year olds perception which means that a year could have been a month at that time. Either way, she was MIA and I was worried sick...constantly.
