I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. . .

Diary - Entry 8

I think that is a line from a country music song, but apparently it applies to the current situation as I am, once again, up in the middle of the night when the rest of the house is quite.

I was laying in bed, thinking about when we where young. Little really.  Before Vic was born, when it was just you and me, before the stuttering began.  I spent the better part of 30 years trying to forget those nights when they would fight, like wild dogs. I always see you face, frozen.  When you didn't come back from the bathroom and I went to get you, you just stared.  They did not even know we were there.  You had wet yourself.  I brought you back to the bedroom, changed you clothes and put you into my bed.  You were shaking, crying and I sang you to sleep.

Then it reminded me of the time we at the Memphis airport.  When dad caught up with mom and us trying to leave. . . they slugged it out until he knocked her out and I just started screaming.  Dad picked up you under one arm and Vic under the other and took off down the escalator.  A young man in the AirForce and his mother had witnessed it, they stayed with me until mother came around.  Every time I fly out of the airport, I see that scene.

I think out of all the memories I have, the worst was the night in Michigan.  We had been riding out in the street, it was cold, there was snow on the ground.  We did not know that dad had rented a house down the street, he had been watching us and when the moment presented itself, he snatched us all off our bikes and we went down to his house.  It did not take long for mother to figure it out, because dad called her.  They were always tormenting one another like that.  She came walking up the sidewalk, while dad hid behind the bushes with a giant shovel.  She never saw it coming.  He hit her in the back of the head with such force, it knocked her wig off (this was the seventies afterall) and all we could see was her lying on the ground bleeding and her wig off to the side in the snow.  Dad turned off all the lights in the house and we all went to the back of the house, laying on the bed as we listened for the police.

It is these precious moments, that make life worth living and childhood a nightmare.