Not that everything was perfect in paradise. Bruce and I disagreed when it came to sex. He wanted it immediately. I wanted to wait until we married. Even though I acted as mother to my siblings and felt I’d lived a lifetime of chores and drudgery, I had few clues about how motherhood came about.
My Catholic mom had instilled in me early on that sex was dirty. When I was almost thirteen I started my periods, and she said, “Now the guys will come round and you’ll be pregnant before you know it.” She never told me about the birds and the bees, but Theresa helpfully filled me in, warning that if a boy even put his arm around me, I could conceive. I had my first “pregnancy scare” a few months later, when a lad called Mark tried to cuddle me at the drive-in movie theater. I pushed him away, went home, filled a small vanity case with rocks, and dropped it constantly on my stomach, hoping to miscarry.
Eventually I told Theresa, who laughed her head off, then took me home to her mother for a talk about the birds and the bees.
Bruce was my first real boyfriend. He was experienced, but all the fumbling around frightened me. We kissed all the time, but I pushed him away every time his hands slipped into my clothes. It was perhaps inevitable that he looked elsewhere for sex. I heard rumors that he was cheating on me, but he denied it. I wanted to believe him. I wanted so much for everything to be right between us. So I closed my eyes, thought of our future together, and gave him my virginity.
It still wasn’t enough. A few months later I was on the phone to Bruce when the local whore came knocking at his door. She had the hots for him and didn’t bother to hide it from me. I screamed at Bruce not to let her in, but he claimed they were just friends and told me not to be so jealous. I slammed the phone down and went running over to his place. She heard me shouting and ran down the back steps to escape. I told Bruce there and then that I wouldn’t marry him and stalked off. He chased after me, grabbing hold of my arms, pleading with me to believe nothing had happened. I wanted to trust him, I really did, but my childhood insecurities about being ugly and worthless kicked in. It didn’t help when he later confessed he had—just once—slept with her. He claimed it didn’t mean a thing, and again he got down on his knees begging me to marry him.
Mom finally agreed to give me her permission to marry. I left the consent forms with her when she was sick in the hospital, and I didn’t bother to check her signature when I collected them a few hours later. I steamed ahead with our wedding plans, not realizing my aunt Martha had signed her name, pretending to be my mother.
I’d abandoned my Catholic faith—although the guilt about sex remained with me for years—around the time Mom started seeing Gilpin. She’d used church as an excuse to sneak out and see him. I tried several different denominations, even toying with the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while. By the summer of 1970, I was attending the Assembly of God Church in the basement of Saint Joseph’s East Mills Shopping Mall. Bruce came with me just once to appease me. I decided the chapel was perfect for our little wedding.
We married on September 20, 1970. I wore a cream just-above-the-knee dress with a red velvet vest. Bruce wore a smart tailored suit. Dad actually showed up to walk me down the aisle. Mom was there too, finally, to give us her blessing. All my family and friends came, along with Bruce’s dad, Marshall, and his mother, Rae. I was the happiest bride ever—even though the whole ceremony was illegal, because the signature on the consent form wasn’t Mom’s, although I didn’t know that at the time.
We couldn’t afford a honeymoon. Anyway, I was still at school, and Bruce couldn’t get time off from his job at the Missouri Valley Veneer wood company. It wasn’t easy finding a home. Anyone in Saint Joseph with long hair was considered a hippie, so Bruce hid his ponytail under a cap.
Eventually, we found a two-bedroom duplex apartment on South 11th Street, and I set about turning it into a home. My life revolved around making Bruce happy. My brothers and sisters still spent a lot of their time with me. Bruce got annoyed if they came around during the day when he was trying to sleep after his night shift, so I’d take them off to the park. Then I’d cook us all a big meal before sending the kids home and seeing Bruce off to work. Sometimes I went to the factory with Bruce’s sandwiches and helped him work. I just loved spending time with him.
On the weekends, Bruce and I, along with all our other hippie friends, went to music festivals or fairs. We loved it when a carnival came to town. Sometimes we went to a coffee bar to listen to music. It’s funny: I was old enough to marry but not old enough to drink. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t stand alcohol. It had destroyed my family. So, when Bruce and I bought an old red Chevy Camaro, which we then traded in for a Volkswagen, I was always the designated driver. We thought nothing of traveling for two hours to go to a fair. Some of our crowd took LSD and smoked weed. I wasn’t interested in trying either. I’d started smoking cigarettes at thirteen. That was my only vice, although I managed to quit off and on.
Once, at a carnival, Bruce became totally paranoid that the police were after us. I kept turning around, but I couldn’t see any officers behind us. He shoved me into the Tunnel of Love. As I sat down on a boat he pulled a small cellophane package from his pocket.
“Quick, eat this,” he said, pressing a piece of thick paper into my hand. I had no idea what was going on, but he was so insistent, I swallowed it.
The boat took off into the murky tunnel. Through the darkness, I saw snakes curling around my legs. I closed my eyes—someone had obviously mixed up the Tunnel of Love with the House of Horrors. Now I could feel snakes slithering all over me. I opened my eyes and begged Bruce to get me out of there. He laughed maniacally. He had become a monster with fangs and horns.
Somehow Bruce got me off the boat. As his cousins gathered around I heard him say, “She’s taken a big hit of Orange Barrel Sunshine.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me to the hospital. I wanted to run, but my legs wouldn’t let me. Even walking was impossible. The ground kept coming up at me. On the way home it started to rain; every drop of water was a different color. Bruce kept saying I needed to eat to help me come down. But every time I tried, the food grew wings and flew off my plate. I was awake for three entire days. I thought the rainbows of water cascading down outside would never stop.
Bruce finally told me the blotting paper I’d swallowed was loaded with LSD. He insisted he was selling it to make money for us. He also claimed that he’d told me to hide the paper in my mouth, not eat it. I couldn’t believe my husband had done this to me. He could have messed me up for life. But as always, I forgave him.
I dropped out of school. It was stupid, really, because I was bright, often helping friends with their homework. But I was a married woman of sixteen. It made sense to concentrate on creating a home.
When Bruce and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with a romantic home-cooked meal, I thanked him for making me happy.
The only blight on the horizon was my failure to get pregnant. We couldn’t wait to become parents. Every two months or so I went running off to the doctor, but it wasn’t to be. I was tiny—five-foot-two and always under a hundred pounds. The doctor lectured me constantly about being too skinny. I couldn’t help it. I had a big appetite but was naturally scrawny. The doctor would order me to go home, put on a bit of weight, and learn to relax. He told me to be patient, and then I’d get pregnant.
Mom divorced Gilpin, married Ronald Polkingharn, and was soon pregnant with her sixth child.
I suppose for Bruce it wasn’t the easiest of starts to married life. His parents loved him unconditionally, and he had just one elder sister, Carol Sue, who was in the military, serving in Japan. He’d never come across a family like mine.
He promised that our children would never suffer the way I had. So every night I prayed to God that I’d be with child. In January 1972, those prayers were answered. After sixteen months of marriage, I was finally pregnant.
CHAPTER T
HREE
I loved being pregnant. I was so proud of my tiny belly and tried to make it stick out more because I wanted the world to know I was expecting a baby. I sang songs as I rubbed my stomach. “Baby Love” and “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes were particularly fitting. Motown Music came out of Detroit—just a few miles from Nan’s house in Warren, Michigan, where I’d spent the only happy times of my childhood.
Nan was the family historian. She was proud of her Cherokee Indian heritage and had boxes of old documents and photos. I wanted to know everything about our ancestors, so that one day I could tell my own child. Nan could trace her lineage back to Betsy Webb, who was forced, with 17,000 Cherokees from the Deep South, to march west to Oklahoma during the brutal winter of 1838–9. More than 4,000 died along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Nan was proud of Betsy Webb, who she said was in all the history books along with another forefather, Washington Harris. Many years later, Nan’s knowledge proved invaluable when I used our links with Alabama’s Echota tribe for help to battle the child protection authorities—a story you will read all about later on.
Mom could trace her family back to Great Britain. Her great-grandmother, Ailsa Macallister, sailed from Scotland to New York at the age of twenty-three, in 1870. My great-granny, Martha Mount, inherited a Scottish love of whiskey and terrified us kids by chasing her husband around with a fire poker. She called cabs to collect her booze. There was a constant stream of taxi drivers bearing bottles at her door. She would get really mean with Grandpa and the other kids, but favored me because I was born on her birthday.
Bruce, who’d been born a few miles from the Canadian border in Fort Fairfield, Maine, was part Blackfoot Indian. The Mathers name originated in Scotland, although he thought his branch came from rural Wales. He’d grown up hearing stories of a book about the black arts, apparently detailing the Mathers’s links to witchcraft. We discovered a creepy British occultist called Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers, who’d founded the Order of the Golden Dawn. He was an early mentor of the hedonistic witch Aleister Crowley. Bruce loved that. He was crazy about heavy metal music, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page lived in Crowley’s Scottish mansion. Now when Bruce bared his teeth at me and pretended to be a warlock, I really was frightened.
He also terrorized my brothers, who spent most of their time with us. I had no problems feeding them and helping with homework, but it really started to get to Bruce, especially when he was trying to sleep after his night shift at the factory. He took it out mainly on Todd, who was big and could be clumsy, screaming constantly at him to leave us in peace.
Bruce had a terrible temper, but he’d never lost it with me. That changed in the seventh month of my pregnancy, as I finished decorating our baby’s bedroom. I had been told by a doctor that I was expecting a girl, and I wanted everything to be just right for the big arrival. I called to Bruce to help me carry the paint tins back down the stairs. Out of nowhere, he started shouting at me, yelling abuse.
“I don’t want a fucking child,” he screamed. “What about me, you selfish bitch?”
He ran up the stairs, got in my face and demanded to know why he was being ignored, starved of affection. I told him to drop it and tried to get out of his way. He shoved me hard. My legs gave way and I tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, landing hard on my side. Bruce was with me in an instant, apologizing.
He’d never been violent before, and I didn’t want to believe he was becoming abusive. I wanted to believe it was just an accident, but I couldn’t get over the fact that he’d hurt me, and possibly the baby we’d tried so hard to conceive. That night, I sobbed myself to sleep, praying to God my baby would be okay.
Then there was sex: Bruce wanted to make love two or three times a day. As the birth date neared, I couldn’t fulfill his needs. He started to disappear at odd times. I was convinced he was having an affair, although he denied it time and again.
I’d suffered menstrual bleeding throughout my pregnancy and feared I could lose my baby. I was always at the doctor’s office demanding to hear the heartbeat. On October 13, my water broke. Bruce’s Aunt Edna rushed me off to Saint Joseph’s Sisters’ Hospital, an old Catholic institution on Cathedral Hill. I had mild contractions that lasted on and off for most of that day and the next.
Finally, the labor pains began in earnest. They continued for the next seventy-two hours. I didn’t know it, but I had toxicoma blood poisoning. I remember holding a nurse’s hand and counting spots on the ceiling to take my mind off of the contractions. Doctors rarely did Cesareans back then. Instead, after sixty hours in labor, I was offered some medicine in a paper cup.
I heard a nurse shouting at me, “You’re both going to die if you don’t push, Debbie.” Then I recall someone saying it was a boy. But that was it: I blacked out.
I’d started having a seizure and fell into a coma in the recovery room. This lasted for several days until the sound of a ringing bell brought me round. My eyes slowly focused on the shape of a man in black waving a bell. He was a priest and apparently he’d given me the last rites. As I awoke a nurse grabbed my arm and started to take my blood pressure, and gradually I became aware of lots of noise and commotion all around me. It was enough to make me want to go back to sleep, until someone brought in my baby. I had a baby son!
I saw the faces of my aunts, my mother, my brothers Steven and Todd. They were all crying. Dr. Claude Dumont was sitting at the end of the bed with an unlit cigar in his mouth—you could smoke in hospitals then.
“You gave everyone a bit of a scare,” the doctor said. “We didn’t think you were going to make it.”
Bruce was missing when I came to. He’d gone off to celebrate the baby’s birth—I found out later—with one of my friends. They were having an affair. But at that stage, all I wanted to do was see my baby.
The nurse handed me a tiny bundle and said his name was Marshall Bruce Mathers III. Bruce had named him when everyone thought I wasn’t going to make it. We hadn’t discussed it, but I didn’t mind. I loved my father-in-law—the original Marshall B. Mathers—and thought it was a privilege to call my child after him.
Marshall was so tiny: he weighed just five-pounds-two-ounces. He had a blister bubble between his eyebrows. He had long dark eyelashes and a few tufts of blond hair. He was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen, and I was filled with overwhelming love. He was mine, and no one was going to hurt him.
Dr. Dumont charged ninety dollars for prenatal care, the delivery, and Marshall’s circumcision. I was worried we’d be charged more because of my coma and blood poisoning. But Dr. Dumont just kept repeating he was glad I’d survived.
Todd, who was ten, was jumping up and down. He and Steve had seen a shooting star outside in the sky just moments after Marshall was born, and he wanted to drag me out of bed to see if it was still there.
Years later when Marshall was first famous he told me not to believe everything I read about him in the media. I laughed because his very first mention—in the “Hello, World” births section of the Saint Joseph newspaper—was wrong. It said he was born on October 16, instead of the 17th, at the Methodist Hospital. Marshall himself added to the confusion when he hit the big time in 1999 and his record company shaved a couple of years off his age. One of his staff once called me when they were trying to update his biography. Marshall thought he’d been born in Kansas City, sixtyodd miles away.
Recently I was going through some old Saint Joseph newspapers and found Marshall’s horoscope for the day he was born. For Tuesday, October 17, 1972, it said, “You have a great love of color and beauty but you are practical enough to realize that, unlike many other Librans, you probably could not commercialize art to any great extent. You would do much better in the theater, where you could shine as an actor.” It also suggested that the future Eminem was “endowed with a great sense of justice, would make an excellent jurist, arbitrator, or mediator.”
All these years later, it’s hard to imagine my son as a keeper of the pe
ace. His early career consisted of dissing me, his wife, and his musical rivals. He also turned his love of the arts into a multimillion-dollar empire. But the astrologer got one thing right. From the moment he was born, my son Marshall was a beautiful actor. He knew exactly how to look at me from under his long dark eyelashes and put on a show.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marshall was two months old when Bruce suggested we move to his hometown of Williston, North Dakota. He was sick of my family, and I had to agree. Mom was interfering as usual. She’d given birth to her sixth child, Ronnie, a couple of months before Marshall was born, and she constantly compared my child-rearing skills unfavorably with her own.
Bruce was offered his dad’s job as assistant manager at the Plainsman Hotel in Williston, where his mom, Rae, also worked as a bookkeeper. My father-in-law had heart problems and was forced to retire early.
I knew no one except my in-laws, but everyone was so welcoming that I felt at home almost immediately. During my childhood we’d moved many times, so I had no qualms about starting over in a new place, even though I missed my brothers terribly and worried about them all the time.
Williston’s a tiny town, thirty miles from the Montana border and famous only for the crossing of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. At first we lived with Bruce’s parents until I found us an apartment, and I got a part-time job as a cashier at the Red Owl grocery store. Everyone loved Marshall. He was so cute I entered him in bonny-baby competitions. He was seven months old when he won a hundred dollars in a Gerber Baby Food contest.
Bonnie and a friend came to visit, and we went on a day trip over the border into Canada. All went well until we tried to return. We had drivers’ licenses but no identity papers for Marshall. Immigration officers took him away. We could hear him crying in an adjoining room. I too was in floods of tears. The officials said they had to check hospitals and police reports to make sure we hadn’t abducted him. We finally got him back four hours later. I couldn’t stop kissing his tearstained cheeks as we drove back into the United States. It was such a horrible ordeal that I vowed never to leave America again.
My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem: Setting the Record Straight on My Life as Eminem's Mother Page 2