Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  I have no idea what my father hoped to accomplish with this letter. I imagine he was simply feeling powerless and needed to feel he had “done something” to try to fix it.

  My father became even angrier when the court informed him that he had to pay my mother support payments. Appalled, he wrote the court that she should actually pay support payments to him, that if she does not find this to her liking that the kids were welcome to live with him in the new family home, and that “my wife is also welcome to share our home if she properly behaves herself.”

  * * *

  Soon after my father got temporary custody of me he flew in his mother, Frieda, from Kansas to help take care of me, and to do all the cooking and other household chores that my mother had always done. The three of us moved into the empty new house in the suburbs once it was ready. I was happy to have Grandma there, but it made my mother furious, not because she was being replaced but because she thought my father should learn how to handle such things on his own. Grandma Andreas didn’t seem to agree. A cheerful seventy-something, with curly, neatly cut short silver hair and thick glasses, she took on my mother’s old domestic tasks without complaint; she had founded the home economics department at Bethel College and had run the dining hall there after moving from Nebraska to Kansas.

  Perhaps the greatest benefit of Grandma Andreas’ presence was that she kept us all to a predictable routine, with each meal served as close as possible to the same exact time every day of the week, just the way my father liked it. Few things could throw him off as much as disrupting his eating schedule. Grandma even handled the phone communication with my mother about coordinating my and my brothers’ visits. No matter how unpleasant the phone call was, Grandma invariably closed with “Carol, I pray for you every day.” And my mother would retort, “You know, Carl will never learn how to be a responsible single parent with you there as his crutch.”

  At one point, my mother sent my father an angry note about Grandma:

  She has succumbed to your way of thinking and is no longer helping Peter to adjust, but is trying to use him as a way of getting to me. You have never had a very warm relationship with your mother, and it is clear to me that you are using her shamelessly and that each of you is bringing out the worst in the other. Can you blame Peter for wanting to escape such a setting and come to live with me?

  I don’t know what I’d said to my mother. I have no recollection of wanting to escape. I wanted to live with both of my parents. My father was safety and stability; I could count on him to walk in the door every evening before dinnertime. My mother was warmth and affection; I relied on her for long hugs and loving smiles. I wanted all these things. What child wouldn’t?

  Once I started kindergarten when I was five, Grandma Andreas gently held my hand and walked me slowly to the bottom of the hill every morning to the bus that would take me to Meadowbrook Elementary School; and I knew I could depend on her being there waiting for me every afternoon at the same stop, bundled up in her gray wool coat and matching scarf. She would have dinner ready by the time we heard the sound of the garage door and my father driving in after his thirty-mile commute. When he walked in he’d holler, “How’s my little boy Peter?” and I’d run to greet him. He liked to call me a “chip off the old block.” Not understanding, I would complain, “I’m not a chip!” I’d rarely heard my father laugh, but I remember this would always make him smile.

  Meanwhile, my older brothers, living with our mother, went to Miller Junior High in downtown Detroit, two of only a handful of white students at the school, which made my mother proud. A year and a half apart in age, Joel and Ronald were inseparable, and almost indistinguishable. Back then, in the midst of race riots and the antiwar protests, even junior high kids were turning into political activists, but few were as radical and outspoken as my brothers. As before, they still liked to play with toy soldiers, but now instead of pretending they were American soldiers, they pretended they were Vietnamese guerrillas shooting at the Americans.

  With my mother cheering them on, Joel and Ronald refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at their school and campaigned to rename the school Angela Davis Junior High, in honor of the black activist and Communist Party leader. When they failed, Joel angrily wrote the principal, “Miller has a pig for a principal and a pig for its name [named after a white former police commissioner]. I think that both should be changed.” Some of the black kids at school admiringly nicknamed my brothers “White Panthers.” They organized school debates about the war and led student walkouts as an antiwar protest. Joel and Ronald even made a Vietcong flag and ran it up the flagpole at their old elementary school late at night as a politically inspired prank. In November 1969, at ages eleven and thirteen, they traveled on their own by bus to Washington, D.C., to participate in a massive antiwar demonstration. My father tried to stop them from boarding the bus, telling them they were too young to go on their own, but they told him our mother had given them permission.

  By that time, Joel and Ronald wore tie-dyed T-shirts, grew their hair long, and had become vegetarians. My mother was proud of them; my father was horrified. Being against the Vietnam War was one thing; it simply marked you as a good pacifist Mennonite. But promoting revolution was quite another.

  When my brothers took my mother’s side against my father in disputes both political and personal, my father desperately clung to me, since I was still young enough to be malleable. I was his last hope for his dream of a traditional family life. Ultimately, there would be no contest between my parents over my brothers’ loyalties, but the war over me was just getting started.

  Berkeley

  WHEN THE DIVORCE hearing finally arrived on November 20, 1970, my mother lost. Judge George T. Martin looked down at my mother and told her that she had no grounds for divorce: “These two shall be married . . . until death do them part. Case dismissed.” My father was relieved; he felt vindicated that the family’s dignity and reputation would remain intact. Now, he thought, with divorce off the table, my mother would finally come to her senses and give up what he called “all that women’s lib crap.” In my father’s eyes, my mother had left him at the same time that she had become a feminist, so feminism was to blame for the destruction of his family.

  My father couldn’t have misread the situation more profoundly. Instead of giving up, my mother decided to take matters into her own hands.

  One late November day, she showed up at my school, removed me from my kindergarten class, and whisked me away to a friend’s home across town where my father could not find me. This was a year and a half after the first time I had been kidnapped, and it would not be the last.

  “Where are we going, Mommy?” I asked as we left the classroom and headed for her car, double-parked in front of the building.

  “We’re taking a time-out from school,” my mother replied. “Don’t worry. It’s only for a little while.” And we drove away. I hoped I’d be back at school soon, but I had no idea whether a time-out meant an hour, a day, or more. I also had no idea that this would turn out to be the first of many such time-outs in the years ahead.

  When the school called my father to tell him that my mother had taken me out of class, he immediately retaliated by rushing over to Miller Junior High and taking Joel out of school. He brought fourteen-year-old Joel to his house, telling him that he wouldn’t let him go until our mother returned me, in some desperate plan to swap sons. But Joel ruined the scheme by escaping, running down the street with my father frantically chasing after him. My father drove all over the neighborhood, searching everywhere, but Joel had gotten away and somehow managed to find his way back to my mother, who already had Ronald and me with her.

  Within days, my mother had quit her tenure-track university job without notice, before classes had even ended, and was moving her three boys across the country with a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of her car. She also took the family dog, Sunny, a beagle–basset hound mix we had adopted from the pound.

  “Is t
he time-out over?” I asked my mother as we began our secretive cross-country move. “Am I going back to school now?”

  “No, not yet. But when it’s over, you’ll go to a new school.”

  “Will my friends be there?”

  “You’ll make new friends.”

  “And Daddy?”

  “Don’t worry about Daddy. Mommy will take care of you.”

  * * *

  Our destination was Berkeley, California, a counterculture mecca with liberal divorce laws. My father had no idea where we were until months later, in early 1971, when Alameda County Judge William M. McGuiness sent him a notice that my mother had been granted not only a divorce but also custody of all three kids.

  My father’s strategy to hang on to his family by refusing my mother a divorce had completely backfired. All his life he had followed the rules, the recipe for success: marrying a nice Mennonite girl from his college town, starting a family, saving for a big house in the suburbs, setting up trust funds for his three boys’ college educations. And now he’d lost it all. My father, a simple, conventional 1950s man, had been blindsided by the ’60s revolution. He never quite figured out what had hit him. He was left bitter and disoriented, and never fully recovered. And this was the only version of my father I would ever know.

  My father began sending angry letters to Judge McGuiness, warning him of the disasters he’d wrought and the woman they were both dealing with: “If it were under her power, she would overthrow our American political system. Her conviction is that the family structure, as we know it, only perpetuates the capitalistic system and therefore needs to be destroyed. You, Mr. Judge, have helped Dr. Andreas destroy our family.”

  * * *

  My father still held out hope that he could somehow get me back. He wrote to me in early May 1971:

  Hi Peter!

  I have good news for you. Today I saw my lawyer and he is going to help you come back home. We are going to have Judge Martin give orders that your mother will have to let you go. This will take some time but you should be home in time to go to Meadowbrook School this fall. Tell Joel and Ronald that they can also come. Bring Sunny also. Please have Joel or Ronald help you write me a card sometime. You can also draw a picture. I found a very good tree in our yard to make a tree house. We shall start on this as soon as you return. When I see Jimmy, Martha, and your other friends, I shall tell them about our good news, all hope that you will soon be able to come home. Say hello to Joel and Ronald.

  Love,

  Your daddy

  But the birthday letter he sent me two months later was much more somber:

  Dear Peter,

  On this sixth birthday of yours, we are torn apart by a woman who has no feelings for human relationships. You are too young to understand the consequences of this fact and unfortunately not given the opportunity to express your discontent. Please be patient for only by being patient and long-suffering can we win out in this conflict. Let me assure you, Peter, that I am doing all that is humanly possible to obtain your early release. Until then, and only then, can we rejoice in your attainment of your sixth birthday.

  With love,

  Your daddy

  Reading these letters now—my father kept copies of them along with everything else—it seems clear that they were actually directed at my mother. After all, I didn’t know how to read yet, and so surely my father realized that my mother would have to read them to me. She never showed me the letters at all; I didn’t even know they existed until a few years ago.

  * * *

  While my father stewed in Michigan, my mother, Joel, Ronald, and I moved into a large, cream-colored stucco house on Walnut Street in North Berkeley.

  “We’re going to turn this into a commune,” my mother declared.

  “What’s a commune?” I asked.

  “It’s a big home where everyone lives together.”

  “Oh, like a family?”

  “Yes, exactly. Just like a big family,” she replied. “But even better, because everyone is equal.” This sounded appealing.

  My mother got the commune started by simply posting a notice on the bulletin board at the food co-op on Shattuck Avenue a few blocks away. The house had seven bedrooms and we converted the living room into an eighth. A sizable yard and garden were out back. I spent many afternoons out on the wide porch while Sunny kept lazy guard by my side. Sometimes Sunny and I wandered around the neighborhood together. No one noticed our absence, but as a curious yet cautious kid I was not going to stray too far. We lived in a hip part of town, with the original Peet’s coffee shop around the corner and a French café called Chez Panisse behind the house. Live Oak Park was just up the street.

  Usually there were eight to ten people living in the house at any one time. Communal living meant carefully divvying up the chores and cooking. Each week, everyone in the house contributed seven dollars toward food. We found creative ways to save money, including mixing powdered milk with real milk. My task was to make the orange juice every morning from the frozen can of concentrate. On the floor, sitting cross-legged at a long, low dining table, we all ate dinner together—typically some bland concoction with noodles or rice, not always easily identifiable but always vegetarian. At all times of day, that common room was full of people smoking cigarettes and caught up in loud and intense conversations.

  Hanging out with Sunny in Berkeley

  My mother had been right: it was like a big family—except that those who left never came back, and new people were always arriving. And apart from my brothers, who were in their early teens but thought of themselves as adults and insisted that my mother and everyone else treat them that way, I was the only kid in the commune. I didn’t mind. I got plenty of attention. My mother was by default the mother of the house, though she didn’t really like that role because it included picking up after everyone else, and no one else seemed to care if the place was a mess. It also bothered my mother that no one else looked after her little boy. She complained about it in a letter to her father, whom she wrote to regularly: “I had a dream in which Peter and [his friend] Garrett took off accidentally in a horse and carriage that was soon out of control and nobody seemed concerned about it in the least except me. I guess I’m feeling like people here in the house aren’t as responsible as I think they should be.” To her dismay, communal living didn’t mean communal parenting.

  Mostly, though, my mother was pleased with how the commune was working out. She later described the place in a diary entry:

  House meetings about every other night. People are feeling good. . . . Main thing I feel here is that people are very accepting of each other—there is no trashing, no sneaking around to avoid each other, no nosiness, no pushiness. There are frequent celebrations, acceptance of outsiders, people are basically good to each other. I am surprised at myself for how non-judgmental I am (people don’t do their jobs as they should but jobs do get done). The house is never locked, Sunny gets fed, the plants get watered, people do get to bed eventually, neighbor kids wander in and out.

  I lived with my mother and Joel in the main part of the house, while Ronald took over the semifinished basement, a dark dungeon with tiny windows. Though Ronald and Joel had once been close, Ronald’s relationship to the family began to change during this period. From the very start, he wanted nothing to do with the rest of the commune. We saw him less and less, and he seemed content that way. So we mostly left him alone. Joel, the oldest, was the most outgoing of us three boys. He liked to be in the thick of things and he was always active and sociable. Ronald, the middle child, was much more aloof, always suspicious and judgmental of others. His signature laugh—short, nervous, high-pitched—matched his subtle sneer. So while Joel was the earnest activist and aspiring revolutionary, Ronald was in some ways the more rebellious one. Whereas Joel dressed like a sloppy hippie—so proud of his own indifference to clothing that he wasn’t the least bit upset when his laundry was stolen at the Laundromat—Ronald always appeared carefully put together
in his cowboy boots, cowboy shirts, bell-bottom pants, and wide-rimmed brown leather hat. A thick strand of his long light-brown hair hung down over his right eye. He viewed collective activities like cooking and cleaning with disdain. So while Ronald was the best cook in the house and was rightly proud of his vegetarian dishes, he only cooked for himself.

  Ronald and Joel in Berkeley in the early seventies

  Nosy little brother that I was, I sometimes sneaked down to the basement to take a peek at what Ronald was up to, and when he caught me there, he would bark, “Get outta here, get back upstairs.” With the basement all to himself, Ronald could smoke pot as much as he wanted. He earned extra cash by selling dope to his friends and acquaintances who dropped by.

  I can’t imagine that my mother didn’t know: I remember the distinct sweet smell of marijuana smoke rising up through the cracks in the basement door and into the kitchen. I recognized that same smell in other rooms, too. When I finally asked Joel what it was, he said, “Oh, that’s just someone smokin’ weed.” People smoked weeds? That didn’t sound like much fun, and Joel didn’t seem particularly interested, yet it was obviously one of Ronald’s favorite activities. My mother, meanwhile, didn’t smoke anything. Whether it was a habit carried over from a culturally conservative childhood or an offshoot of her later ideological purity, I’m not sure, but the fact was that, for all her rebelliousness and unconventional ways, she never touched drugs.