by Wendy Davis
SIX
All children, except one, grow up.
—J. M. BARRIE, The Adventures of Peter Pan
LESS THAN A YEAR after my dad and mom divorced, NCR told my father that he was going to have to choose between them and the theater. Travel was an important part of his job as a regional manager of their sales force, and when he was in a play, which he almost always was, he couldn’t travel. When they first sat him down, he agreed to stick with his job and not do theater. But soon after making that promise, he stole away to nearby Irving and did a community-theater production without telling them. He became so worried they were going to find out about it that he finally faced his lifelong question: Was he was going to continue living his dream in the shadows or was he going to follow his heart, his passion, and his optimism and do something brave and bold?
He chose his passion. He went bold.
But as a consequence, just like that, literally overnight, we were thrown into poverty. Up until then my dad had really tried to do the right thing by us financially. He made a generous agreement with my mom to continue to help take care of us and keep our lives going—more modestly, of course, because now he had his own home expenses to deal with, too. But he regularly paid child support and helped my mom with the house payment and groceries. Once he made the decision to leave his job for the theater, though, life as we all knew it ended abruptly. We’d never lived with excess, but we’d always had enough for clothes and school supplies and the electric bill and our yearly trip. Now we didn’t.
—
The first thing he did was open a little sandwich shop in downtown Fort Worth—the Stage Door Deli—with probably the only savings he had. He named all the sandwiches on the menu after characters in plays. The best-known sandwich was the Irving R. Feldman, named for an offstage character who owns a delicatessen in A Thousand Clowns, a play in which my dad had performed the lead role of Murray. In 1978, when he found out that the space next door to the sandwich shop was available, he knocked the wall down and put on his first play there, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. The sandwich shop didn’t last long, but the theater became the focus of his life’s work. The success of his first productions allowed him to open Stage West, a tiny sixty-five-seat theater, in 1979. He built it into one of the best-respected professional Equity theaters in Texas and it’s now in its thirty-fifth season.
From that moment on, he didn’t look back. He would never have the benefit of financial resources again, but he would live a life of incredible happiness and fulfillment. And it’s not like he was living with and we were living without—he was living without, too. Of course, this was back before the days of punitive measures to force the payment of child support, but even if my mother had had that legal option available to her, she never would have done that to him. He was truly the love of her life, and the idea of taking his dream and his passion away from him and forcing him back into another salaried position—in order to pay child support—is something she never would have asked of him. I’m absolutely sure of it. Theirs truly was a unique situation, since in most divorces, women would justifiably pursue their ex-husbands for financial support.
But her support and understanding of his financial stresses did nothing to relieve the fact that things became very hard for my mom and for us. With just a ninth-grade education and only a year’s experience working as a cashier at the ShopRite in Pearl River, my mom had no real skills to get a job, but she had to figure out a way to find work. And she did. First she went to secretarial school and began working as a secretary for a local manufacturing company. Not long after that, a new Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store—a family-owned regional chain based in Oklahoma that had grown out of their earlier business, Peter Pan Ice Cream—was opening up not very far from where we lived. She applied for the job of assistant manager and got it, which meant a pay increase from being a secretary. Eventually she became the manager of the store.
—
My mom worked really long hours, and even after the store would close at 11:00 p.m. she’d often have to stay to do inventory, counting the many gallon buckets of all the different varieties of ice cream in the freezer and recording how much milk and butter and everything else they’d sold. Braum’s was a dairy, an ice-cream parlor, and a neighborhood grocery, all in one, which meant they sold everything from fruits and vegetables to frozen pizzas to loaves of bread—all packaged with their private label. They had stores only within a three-hundred-mile radius of the family farm in Oklahoma—in Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri—close enough for their truckers to make deliveries every day for freshness but still be back with their families at night, which is why taking frequent inventory was necessary. A lot of times, we kids would go there and help her do the inventory—we’d get into the freezer with her and help her count everything up as best we could so she could come home just a little earlier.
She provided for us as best she could, but as hard as she worked and as little as we asked for—we knew enough by then not to ask her for what we knew she didn’t have—we continued to struggle. While we didn’t starve, there were times when our meals had to stretch enough to leave us with less than we otherwise would have eaten. Everything we’d always taken for granted continued to disappear. There was no more shopping for school supplies and buying four or five outfits every September to start the year. Now if we wanted to buy lunch at school, or clothes for school, or go on a field trip, we had to figure out how we were going to make money to get those things for ourselves. Having enough money to pay for rent, food, and utilities just got harder and harder and made the seemingly small things that went wrong, like getting a flat tire fixed, feel catastrophic. My mom even had to take our dog, Rosie, to the pound after my dad left, because we couldn’t afford another mouth to feed and didn’t have the time to take care of her. She left instructions with them to call us if no one adopted her, but Rosie was a beautiful Irish setter, so we never got that call.
—
The most significant change for all of us was that we went from having a stay-at-home mom to having one who was rarely home anymore. Working at Braum’s meant working many nights and lots of weekends, so even though she’d never been the traditional baking-cookies kind of mom, it used to be that every night at six o’clock, while my dad was still around, there was always dinner on the table when he came home from work. Now, all of a sudden, that baseline of normalcy and stability was gone.
More than that, we went from always having a parent around to not having parents at home anymore. From when my sister was seven, I was twelve, and my brothers were thirteen and fifteen, my mom was almost entirely our financial provider, which meant we had to do without her much of the time, leaving us all to pretty much raise ourselves. At least Chris and Joey and I had a base, a foundation that my dad had given us and that had created a stability we could draw upon, but my little sister didn’t. Jennifer was almost six years old when my dad left and around seven when my mom went to work, and she was saddled, in many respects, with the responsibility of raising herself. Those years were especially hard on her as a result.
—
That my mother would end up supporting herself and her four children, alone, by working for a company that had originally been named after the Boy Who Would Never Grow Up—just like my dad—especially after naming me for the girl in Peter Pan—is one of the sad ironies of that period. I’m not sure if she knew the origins of the store’s name, but even if she didn’t, and even though she never, ever complained, she must have thought about my dad’s choices and wished he’d made different ones. And she must have been disappointed, even if just secretly, that he hadn’t ever stopped being Peter Pan. For my father the world might have been made of faith and trust and pixie dust, but for my mom and us kids it was made of very different things. We didn’t have the luxury of not growing up in the world we lived in.
In fact, we grew up too fast.
We all started working t
o try to help out, and I was fourteen when I got my first job—selling newspaper subscriptions for the Star-Telegram. We got a dollar for every one we sold. A woman would pick Joey and me up in a van, and the two of us, plus three or four other kids who’d be working, too, would get dropped off in a neighborhood, usually in Arlington, to fan out and go door-to-door. Sometimes guys would invite me into their apartments, and, not knowing any better, I’d actually go in. My mother would have been horrified to know this at the time. Fortunately, I was never truly endangered, but it probably wasn’t the wisest way for a young girl to try to earn money. When we had a good night, the woman would take us to a go-cart place on the way home as a fun reward.
When I was fifteen, I got a job at Orange Julius at the North East Mall, because they’d hire you even if you weren’t sixteen yet—and when I actually was sixteen, I went to work at Braum’s, the same store my mom managed. Teenagers don’t often work after-school jobs with their parents, so they don’t often see, as I did, the tough choices and difficult sacrifices parents make to provide for their children. Our daily survival depended on my mom working long hours, which meant she wasn’t home much and we weren’t able to be together as a family. But she did what she had to do and because she did we got through it. To this day I’m amazed at the example of selflessness she set for us—an example that inspired me years later when I, too, was a single parent.
We didn’t spend a lot of time with my dad during those years, because he was busy doing his thing—and we were busy doing ours. The relationship he was in after my parent’s separation didn’t last. And we all paid a huge price for his decision to follow his dream. But, over time, we came to see the silver lining in watching my father answer his passion’s calling. And, through that, we learned an invaluable lesson: that there are things in life bigger than us and that there are some dreams worth following, even if those dreams come at a great cost. I have no doubt that my father lived with the shadowy regret that comes from having caused pain in the lives of those he loved. He was incapable of acting with chagrin where we were concerned. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to answer only to a voice that called her to put sacrifice above self. Both experienced pain as part of the essence of who they were as people. Watching my parents, through their triumphs and their struggles during that time and beyond, I learned what it must have meant to them to become present to the reality that they were imperfect. As parents, they gave us their best while also answering to the deepest calling of who they were as individuals. And, just as I’ve learned and grown from my own triumphs and mistakes, from my own humanity, I learned and grew through theirs. I’ve suffered some of the very same costs in pursuing a calling that has often felt bigger than me, something beyond self, something that couldn’t be quieted. As I’m sure was the case for my dad, following those pursuits has not been free of collateral damage—damage that has left me with an aching regret for having caused pain to the people I love most in the world.
—
All parents question their parenting and the decisions they’ve made. Looking back now at the parent I was, I think about the challenges I faced, the choices I made, and all the things I wish I could have done differently. The experience of having children forces you to reflect on your own behavior, just as it gives you the perspective and the grace of understanding and forgiveness of your parents’ flaws and weaknesses. We are all human—as parents, most vulnerably so.
Amid the complexities of who my parents were, how different they were, and somewhere in the emotional push and pull of their successes and failings with each other and as parents to my siblings and me, I have grown as an adult to have immeasurable love and appreciation for them both. Had we been raised by only one of them, I think it would be harder to say that. But theirs was, truly, a yin and yang of parenting.
The way they raised us was a reflection of how they were each raised. My dad, the idolized only child, had parents with a more sophisticated understanding of how to bring him up healthy and whole. My mom, though very loved by her parents, grew up with so many other siblings and so many demands on her from such a young age; her parents knew how to provide for basic physical needs, but not much more.
My dad grew up in a world that gave him permission to pursue his passions, my mother in a world that taught her there was no place for that kind of frivolity. Fortunately for us, we got a foothold in both.
There is no defending my father’s amorous pursuits. And yet we and all his loves ultimately forgave them, for without his passion, his zest for life, the magic that was my dad wouldn’t have existed at all.
And he was magic. Everyone—and I do mean everyone—who had an opportunity to come close to him grew to love him with abandon. I was no exception. In fact, I was the rule, a blazing neon sign of unconditional love. I forgave him every fault and loved him almost blindly. The reason was simple: He loved me, and he was the only adult for most of my childhood life who knew how to demonstrably show it. I have so many memories of his warm hugs. Of dancing with him to the music on his reel-to-reel, my bare feet on top of his wingtip shoes. Of the Old Spice smell of him. Of being told by him that I was smart. Of being reassured, during a terribly awkward teenage stage when I was painfully thin, that all the French models were thin and that I was beautiful like them. I have memories of his hearty laugh, and of what it felt like to be taken in and so visibly loved by those deep brown eyes of his. Even when we were distanced through the space and time that followed the divorce, I knew that he loved me. And I knew he was never going to let me go.
And he didn’t.
Most girls seek out their mothers for advice. Until I became a mother myself, I always sought out my dad. My mom just couldn’t quite seem to connect with us, though she so clearly loved us. She sacrificed everything to provide for us. While she struggled to overcome the barren emotional upbringing she’d endured, her wrenching heartache over the fact that my father was never able to sustain an unfailing love for her left her with a depression so deep that there were times it could be unimaginable.
After my parents had been divorced for a few years, I have a vivid memory of my father coming to the Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store where she worked. I don’t remember why he came, but I do remember that it was when I was working there, too, and that my mom and I had gone out behind the store to say hello to him. His car still running, he had stepped out to greet me. “We missed you!” my mother said jubilantly as I was engulfed in his hug. Instinctively, she reached out to him, and when she did I saw my dad’s subtle but obvious recoil. I could see what he was doing. It was a boundary he didn’t want to invite her to cross. And she could see it, too. That brief moment said so much about them. It said that my mother was still in love with him and that he recognized allowing even the smallest physical connection would be painful for her. He knew how vulnerable she was to him and he knew to draw a boundary that wouldn’t create a place for her to fall into again. And it made my heart ache for her.
No, my mother was not the nurturing sort with us. But she gave us so very much nonetheless. She was our safety net. She was never going to let us fall. And she sacrificed herself completely for us following her second divorce from my father. At the time, I thought she was old. I couldn’t imagine that she still had the desire to be loved, to be held, to be intimate with a man. But of course she had those desires. She was only thirty-seven when they separated for the second and final time, and though she went out occasionally with a girlfriend or two, country-western dancing at the Stagecoach Ballroom, and though I’m sure she had some brief flirtations, she resolved not to bring a man into our home until we were grown and gone. Her concern about exposing us to someone who might turn out to be more harm than good for us was ultimately much more important to her than satisfying her own human needs for companionship, for love.
Never was there enough in any way of financial resources for much beyond food on our table and a roof over our heads after my parents’ divorce.
But she did make sure that we had those, which usually meant that she herself did without. During that time, I can’t recall her treating herself with a new dress or a new hairstyle. But she took care of her children. And when we became parents ourselves, she took care of her grandchildren as well.
In the last couple of years that I lived in my mother’s house, before I turned seventeen and moved out, Jennifer and I were there much of the time alone. At sixteen, Joey had moved to Nashville to live and work with my Uncle Jesse, who had moved there after he graduated from Christ for the Nations. Chris, at eighteen, three years older than me, had moved out as soon as he had a paying job and could afford to do so. He married young. Joey married even younger, as did I. Joey and I had our first babies within one month of each other. I was nineteen and he was twenty when his son Daniel and my daughter Amber were born.
And from the day each of them was born, my mother transformed into someone whom none of us recognized. All the love that she’d so obviously had for us but had been unable to show came spilling out of her like water trapped behind a logjam for decades. If you were around my mom today, particularly on occasions when she is surrounded by her children and her grandchildren (and now a great-grandchild), you would see a woman who seems completely happy. She married twice since she and my dad divorced, for twenty years to a dear man named Ira whom her grandchildren called Poppy. She lives a simple life punctuated by the pains and joys that she feels at her children’s and grandchildren’s occasional sorrows and at our happinesses. She has reconnected to a deep faith in God and prays for each of us continuously. Never for herself. Selfless, as always. But at peace and happy in a way that she probably has not been since she was a young girl on the farm.
SEVEN
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.