Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  “Yeah, Mom, I believe you.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, while Mom is outside watering her plants, I brown sixteen breakfast sausages and scramble eggs. It's just me and Tina in the kitchen and the sausages don't even make it to the table. She scarfs them off the paper towels as I lift one after another from the griddle to the plate. I pull her over to me and show her step by step how to make them; medium heat, turn them over and over till they're brown on all sides. I stick the spatula in her hand and stand behind her, blocking the view of her in case someone comes in. There is a charged electricity in the air: We are conspiring against Sandy; we are doing something wrong. We both jump in our skin when Mom rushes through the screen door.

  “Tina, goddammit, you know better than to use the stove! How many times have I told you, you are not allowed to cook!”

  I interrupt her. “Sandy, I'm showing Tina how to make sausages so she can feed herself if she's hungry. She's going to be tall and skinny. She could use some protein in the morning.”

  “What are you trying to say, Julie? That I don't feed the girl? That girl can eat whenever, whatever she likes. We got a whole refrigerator full of food.” Tina stands frozen, holding the spatula in midair.

  “But kids can't just eat sugary cereal for breakfast. Tina can learn to use the stove to fix sausage when she wants to.”

  “Julie, you just keep your nose out of this. That girl knows she ain't supposed to turn the stove on. Don't you, Tina, you know that, right? She's slow, you got it? She'll burn the house down.”

  Slow, as in I was slow, as in I would never get past a certain intelligence level, either. Burn the house down, as in what you and Pop did to get the insurance money— but nobody else knows that, so it would be a perfectly reasonable concern to tell people since you lost your home once, why take chances again? This is the advanced logic all those years in isolation granted me, the clarity to smell, see, and taste an undetectable poisonous gas.

  TINA STAMMERS HER APOLOGY to Mom and tries to duck down the hall. I am careening backwards, into some magnetic swirling time warp, powerless against my mother. I can only witness what's unfolding.

  Mom calls, “Tina, get back here, did we give you your medication today?” Mom is grabbing vials off the fridge and slamming pills into her palm. “Well, here, let's make sure you get them now.”

  She slaps the drugs in Tina's hand. The child swallows without blinking.

  My stomach is reeling, I vomit in the bath. This can't be happening. Not me, all over again. Tina is eleven, the same age as the girl I visualized in SHEN therapy.

  What are you going to say to her, Julie?

  I'm not going to say anything. I've got to get her out of there.

  “LET'S JUST GET ONE THING STRAIGHT, you are not going to come into my house and tell me how to raise these kids, all right? Now you look like hell—If anyone knows what healthy is, it's not you. You are not going to turn that girl against me.”

  The rest of the day is spent on pins and needles, tiptoeing around my mother. On my end I am trying to calm her so I can gain her trust and gather details on Tina: doctors' names, medical history, Tina's real last name so I can trace her at the adoption agency. Everyone else is trying to calm her so she doesn't fly off the handle. It is a project that involves the whole family.

  Ed catches me in the barn. “Uh, Julie, could I just have a little word with you? Your mom treats them kids good. She's always feedin' them and buying them clothes. She may get a little upset about Tina not doing good in school, but she's always treating them real good.”

  I can hear Mom in the kitchen, hissing to Tina, “Go tell her, Tina, get in there and tell her. “ And Tina trots in to corner me at the freezer. “Julie. I love my mommy.

  She feeds me and treats me real good.” Tina is automated, just like I was.

  The more I try to de-escalate the sausage incident, the more my mother amps up the volume. I have plucked her rawest nerve, challenged her in her most primal identity: her ability to mother. And I have revealed that I know her tried and true secret for lacing up an appendage, keeping a child bound.

  She spends the day huffing and cursing, following me through the trailer. That night, after the kids have gone to bed, she corners me. “Okay now, we're going to sit down here and get through this once and for all. Ed, you get in here. I want you to listen to this!”

  “Sandy, I really don't think this is necessary. I don't want to make you any angrier.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no, you don't, you're not going to get out of this one, young lady. You get your ass in here and talk to us like an adult. Now what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Sandy, really, I don't think …” I'm trailing off, but isn't this what I've waited for? Haven't I wanted the lead-in to tell her all these years? Haven't I wanted the satisfaction of telling her what she did? Deep breath. I can do it. “Okay. Sandy, when I was a little girl, well. Okay. Well, you did things to me when I was a kid and I see the same patterns being repeated with Tina.”

  My mother's eyes narrow to slits. “Let me tell you something, girl, that kid is a moron, she does terrible in school, she will never amount to anything, and if I didn't take her in, nobody would, you got that? Nobody would have that son-of-a-bitchin' girl!”

  “Sandy, this is exactly what I'm saying. You said the same things about me! That I was stupid, that I would never amount to anything, that I had something wrong with me that would keep me held back my whole life.”

  “Ed. You want to help me here? You just going to sit there and let her talk to me that way? Aren't you going to be a man and get involved here and stand up for me?”

  “Well, Sandy, she ain't saying nothing ‘gainst you, just that you did things to her that she don't think was right and she thinks you're doing them to Tina. Well, that's just in her opinion.”

  “Oh. My. God. I don't believe this. So that's what this is all about!” My mother is escalating into hysterics. The realization of stumbling upon something dark and terrible clouds her face. “I'll be goddamned.” She is dumbfounded, astonished. “You came out here to steal my husband! You and him got something going on together, now, don't you?” She slaps her leg in revelation. “Oh, Jesus, I shoulda known I couldn't trust you.” Her brain is tallying the impact of my affair with Ed at lightning speed and she shrieks, “You can have her, Ed, you can shack up with her and I'll just crawl off and die.” It's one in the morning and she is storming through the rooms, flailing her arms and launching at things to throw while Ed tries to calm her from his armchair.

  “Just leave me alone,” she screams. “You and her can just run off together, the two of you, and I'll just stay here and kill myself!”

  And she has won. She is racing back to her bedroom where the shotgun leans against their wall. She is going to take the gun and Ed is going to save her. She is manufacturing the glue that will bond the two of them back together and seal her cracks in the process. And no one will call her on it because she has made them responsible for whether she commits suicide or not. Tonight will never be mentioned again. It is not about Tina or what Mom did to me. It is not about the sausages or the starving or the pursuit of sickness and surgery. It will be remembered as the time I tried to break up her marriage to a good man.

  I run into my room and wedge a chair under the doorknob. She screams hysterically and races through the trailer, while Ed tries to wrestle the shotgun away from her. I brace my back against the door in panic, my breath coming in gasps. It is not my place to go out there and take the gun from her. It is not my responsibility to save her. And there is a new awareness tonight, something I have never known before; a strong inkling that we have grown so separate, so distant and distinct from one another, my mother and I, that the gun she's charging around with might not be for her after all, but for me.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Ed drives me to the airport. I'm shell-shocked. I have made it three days with my mother. I am carting back the dog, the clothes, the books. The presents stay
behind, the cake overturned and smeared into the kitchen's indoor-outdoor carpet. As we pull out of the driveway, Sandy is sitting in the minivan at the end of the lane with Tina. She does not want to even be in the same house as me, the home-wrecker. She wants to watch Ed from afar and be witness to him cheating on her. And Tina, like I was, is the therapist she leans on.

  On the hour-and-a-half drive, I learn that Ed is not an actual husband. Sandy bought the ring herself and started using his last name a few years ago. The stones are cubic zirconia. The children are not adopted. They are distant relatives twice removed from Ed's side, and after they'd been shuffled around to other family members that didn't want them, Mom jumped on the chance to get them.

  Ed says, “You know, your mother just gets like this sometimes and the only thing you can do is agree with her and try to calm her down.” If only you knew, Ed.

  But he doesn't. Sandy is Ed's first real girlfriend. Ed has lived as a Montana cattle rancher his whole life, too remote even for Sweethearts Magazine. He lived with his parents until he was in his thirties, until Sandy met him at a barn dance. Ed and I share the same decade. Just as my mother shares the same decade with his. And Ed wouldn't recognize child abuse if it slapped him upside the head.

  He drops me off at the airport and we exchange clunky good-byes. He's sorry it didn't work out between us. Sandy sure was looking forward to having me around; she's got too much work with them horses to have that girl be doing it all by herself.

  “I know, Ed. I know.”

  WHEN I WRITE IT ALL OUT, I just fall i f over asleep. It plucks the stuffing right out of me, like pulling the marrow from my bones. I'm good for about an hour and then I cut off into dreamless, flat sleep, drugged by the arrow tips of memory that slip poison into my bloodstream.

  All I want to do while I write is lie in bed and be a hospital patient. I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to see anybody. But I don't want to be alone, either. I want people bustling somewhere off in the distance, doing the things that keep them busy, but nearby in case I need them. Writing about my life is like pulling a fine hair out the back of my throat. I just keep pulling and pulling and it just keeps coming. It's exhausting. So I rest. Some days I stay in bed all day, write, sleep. Sometimes I go out and come back, write, sleep. Sometimes I sleep when I write and sometimes I write when I sleep. When I write about pushing a gun into Dad's head, I close my eyes and slip into a blank dreamless void. I come to an hour later, my fingertips still touching the keys. When I sleep, I write perfectly formed text directly from a deep place, without the use of my hands or mouth, because something gets lost in the transmission. I see the text before me: exactly what I mean to convey, in its purest form—indents of paragraphs, brushstrokes of feeling. I am flushed with the beauty of it. When I wake, a flurry of words operates my hands, a backlog of words building inside, rushing to get out.

  I WAKE IN THE NIGHT to panicked dreams of Tina in Montana. My heart thuds densely in my chest. What am I doing here? I have to get her out. I can't just sit around and pretend it didn't happen and isn't getting worse every day. I have to get her out.

  But I am petrified of my mother. While I sat in the Great Falls airport, waiting for the next flight out, she called everyone she had a phone number for and told them about my trouble with the police, you know, that warrant out for my arrest. I came back to L.A. to find a voice mailbox full of messages from people who know me, but don't know Sandy. From people who have normal moms and dads, who can't comprehend the lengths a biological mother will go to discredit her offspring and bolster her own cemented denial.

  I know that if I call Montana Children's Services and they send a caseworker out, my mother will know it was me. That she will at first feign shock, then chuckle as she puts the pieces together in front of the caseworker and it dawns on her, that, oh, this must be the work of my homeless daughter. She will dab at a few tears and explain the story of her oldest daughter who has been in and out of mental hospitals. It will be far easier for the Montana caseworker to believe that, than to look around at the pastel rooms full of toys and stuffed animals and detect the subtle odor of poisonous gas.

  I know Tina will answer all the questions to benefit my mother, because she's been told that if they take her away she'll be raped. I know Ed will be himself, a good-hearted, painfully naïve ranch boy. I know that Paul will cling to my mother's leg and wail, “Mommmmyy.” I know that the case will get dismissed and my mother will simply tighten her security on the kids or even worse, move them to a place where I'll lose all ability to check on them. I have got to do this right. I have got to go back to Ohio, the heart of it all. And I have got to be as crafty as my own Munchausen by proxy mother.

  DANNY PICKS ME UP AT THE AIRPORT. We are happy enough to see each other but we don't have much to say. It's been two years since he's seen me and even longer since he's seen Sandy. His memory, as mine once did, has opted for the starrier picture. It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom's singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.

  He still needs a mom and dad. His psyche has draped the sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps the past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom's random phone calls to him. He is a race car driver, a full-time engineer, a restorer of vintage cars—anything to gobble up the seconds in his day and direct his thoughts into a plan for the future. He owns a home and acreage, a John Deere tractor, and fifty classics waiting to be fixed, ticking in his head for every moment he can't get to them. And to me he feels far older than the youth of his actual years.

  I am a writer with nothing but endless interior corridors in which to wander. I own almost nothing, and in the empty space I make, I have adjusted to a life without a mom and dad. I never had any anyway. My books raised me right and my mirror was the truth. My distorted beliefs, which kept me in dark caves, were put back on the potter's wheel and spun into tall, solid cones that tower into lighted skies. I have lived a lot of life. I know what it feels like to nestle a gun into my father's temple. I know what it feels like to think I'm going to die at the hands of another. I know what it feels like to be cut, caged, or taken and I know what it feels like to escape. I know what it feels like to be trapped in the person they made you into and to break free to be the person you truly are.

  And I have come back to God. The essence of God is everywhere. I know it when a ladybug lands on my wrist. Feel it in the teary intense gaze of an old man's adoring eyes. Know it when the sky is set ablaze by fiery colors when it seems as if I, in this harried world, am the only one truly watching.

  In my mind's eye, I stand at ocean's edge, arms outstretched and lifted to receive all of the truth, beauty, and love that life can give me. I have finally found my pure white peace.

  MY BROTHER AND I CRUISE ALONG the wide open highway, eighty miles an hour on a seamless glide in his cherry red Mustang convertible. The radio coaxes me back into the spacious Midwest and we sing along, my brother and I, to Eddie Vedder growling out “Jeremy.” Danny grips the ball shifter; he punches the gas and roars down the highway, just like my father did when he ran. I lean back into my black leather bucket seat, turn my head out the window, and a thick tear squeezes out of one eye and plops down my face. Two of the toughest kids in Ohio, tearing along an empty highway, singing lyrics of a lost childhood out their bitter throats without smile or irony.

  I HAVE COME BACK to prosecute my mother, to tell her secrets, to rip from her a veil burnt, sewn, crusted onto her skin. I don't know what shape the process will take, but I have got to stop my mother. Stop her from taking each new girl she lures into her life under a false pretense, an altered last name, a soft initial touch, and lacing her tightly into the appendage she will carry with her from doctor to doctor, like a worn, favored teddy bear or satin-edged security blanket. I have pushed the last bubble of my guilt from out behind the wrinkle of wallpaper. I owe her nothing. I will f
ind the records that showed her Ohio foster care license was revoked; I will find the caseworker that jerked the kids away that day; I will make them run a tracer on my mother's Social Security number. I will save that eleven-year-old girl, that next-generation replica of me. And I will do it all through the back door. Because my mother is not done yet; she never will be.

  I pick up the phone and call Children's Services.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks go to Katherine Boyle—agent, friend, confidante—who tirelessly donned a miner's cap and cheerleading pom-poms to guide me through every dark turn along the way. With emotion, I thank Ben, who believed in me, and the authors who raised me with their titles: I Had It All the Time; Weight Loss for the Mind; The Four Agreements.

  FOR MORE INFORMATION

  For more information on Munchausen by proxy, please visit www.mbpeducate.com.

  If you need help or suspect abuse, call the Childhelp USA® National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-4-A-CHILD® (1-800-422-4453) any time of the day or night. Calls are toll-free and anonymous.

  This is a work of nonfiction. The events it recounts are true; many are

  documented. Most names outside the family have been changed to protect the

  innocent and the guilty.

  SICKENED

  A Bantam Book

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.