My mother and my biological father, Beau, met in school in
the early 1970’s. He was a few years
older than her. They were introduced by
mutual friends at a local festival. My mother graduated high school in
1973. She and Beau married the following
year in May of 1974. They were married
in Oma’s living room by a Justice of the Peace.
The story goes that I am conceived in a hotel room in
Texarkana, after a Star Trek episode in June or July of 1975. I am born in March of 1976, in a hospital in
Shreveport, just like most people from Desoto Parish are. In the days before ultrasounds, the old women
told my mom she would have a boy, because of the way she was carrying me. She was going to name me Mike, after her
brother. When I was born a girl they
were all surprised, but happy. Mom took
a bit to figure out what to name me. She
settled on Ilse in honor of her mother.
Oma begged Momma not to name me Ilse, she says, “They will never say it
right. They will never spell it right.” And what she said is still most defiantly
true, but Mom decided to name me Ilse anyways.
I am glad to have a unique name, even if I can’t find it on
a cup or a key chain. Well I can now,
because of the internet. I think unique
names make unique people, never wanted to be a Jennifer anyways. Sorry to you Jennifer’s ahead of time. If you have a unique name, you always know
when someone is about to say your name for the first time, by that confused
look on their face. I’ve always said I
would answer to anything but, “Hey Bitch!”
My first few years seem to have been uneventful. We were living at the time, in a yellow and
white little trailer next door to my great Aunt Ruby, outside of Longstreet. Beau worked for UPS driving a truck and mom
stayed home with me.
Now here is where things seem to get kind of murky. In the Spring of 1978 my mother became very
ill. She began to have paralysis on the
right side of her body. It took them
several weeks, to come up with a reason, why a healthy 23 year old would be
having these types of problems. Many
theories were thrown around. In
conversations, I would have with Beau later in my life. He would tell me, that
the Doctors came to him, and believed that he may have unintentionally spread a
Zoonosis to mom, from the cows
he had been keeping.
Mom had 13 CAT scans during this time. The Doctors saw what they believed to be a
tumor in her frontal lobe region. She was taken into surgery on April 13th,
1978, after 13 ½ hours she immerged alive.
They found no tumor. They did try
to grow a culture, on what I don’t know, but it did not work. During surgery they had scratched a nerve and
this permanently left Mom with seizures.
She remains on medications today, due to complications of this surgery. Before the statue of limitations ran out on
filling a malpractice suit, Mom went to her pastor to ask what she should
do. He told her she should not file a
suit. She has also been denied
disability.
There are many things I still do not know about this time
period in my life. Many of the players
are dead, won’t talk about this, or are no longer involved in my life. My mother would suffer a mild stroke on
December 9th, 2014. We
learned a lot during that stroke. As
they loaded Mom into the MRI machine they asked, “Do you have any metal in your
body?” She said, “No.” She
got in the machine and they found that she did in fact have metal in her body. She has a metal plate in her head, put there
during the 1978 surgery. No one had ever
told her that. They also find evidence
that she has had two significant strokes in her life time. I believe that one of these strokes, may
explain the events surrounding the 1978 brain surgery. My mother does not share that belief. There were no MRI machines around, in this
area in 1978, and a CAT scan would not have necessarily picked up a stoke.
Beau decided to take the events surrounding Mom’s 1978
surgery as a chance to leave. He tells
me years later that he had gone to my mother, while she is sick in the hospital
bed, and asked her to choose him or her family.
She chose her family. My mother
has no memory of any such conversation ever taking place. But then her memories of her being in the
hospital seem to be a bit hazy.
Something from that time she remembers and something’s she does not.
While all this is going on you’ve got to remember, my
Grandpa is right in the center of all of this.
He was a controlling, manipulative, conniving, brilliant, mother
fucker. It is my guess, that he had a hand in all that
went down. Grandpa, I am sure, was
trying to assert his dominance in the situation. What he and Oma wanted to have happen. As for me, I am with family members at this
time.
After Mom’s surgery she was given Amphotericin B, is an antifungal drug often used intravenously
for systemic fungal
infections. It made her
deathly sick. After the surgery Mom had
to walk and talk all over again. She was
never given rehab. Oma helped her to relearn
all these things. After 3 months Mom is sent home. Divorce papers for her and
Beau had been filed, and our little trailer had been moved, about 15 miles
south to Logansport, next door to Oma’s house.
It is on this 5 acre spread that I would grow up, constantly going
between Oma’s house and my own.
Mom would begin to make trips to a place called Scott and
White Hospital in Texas, for her follow up care. She and the rest of the family could no
longer trust the doctors here, after what they had done to her. Scott and White hospital was very advanced
for its time. They believed that Mom had
an abscess from a tooth go to her brain and cause her paralysis. She had gone in to have some dental work
three months before she became ill.
Funny thing is Mom never remembers having had the pain of an abscessed
tooth. Mom would continue to go to Scott
and White for a good majority of my life.
She recently told me she has made peace with the man who butchered her,
Neurologist, Dr. Donald Smith. Maybe one
day I will be able to too.
I have watched the story of what Beau did change over the
years. At first I was told he left mom for
a 17 year old. Now it has become a 16
year old, who was pregnant at the time.
Part of this is a lie. My sister
Elisha was not born until the 1980’s.
When Beau began his relationship with his second wife Sandy, and the
mother of my 3 siblings, is really of no consequence to me. Beau and Sandy have both told me they do not
remember when they met. Sandy has
assured me she was of age at the time of their meeting. I have not felt it is my place to dig into
her life. The important thing is that
Beau chose to leave this situation, maybe he had been looking for an out for a
while. I don’t know.
In the few years that I have known Sandy, she has been
nothing but gracious to me, including opening her home, so that I might meet
and visit with my siblings. I am not sure, if I was in her shoes, that I would
have been so kind. The first time I met all of them, which you can read about
in My Mother, I learned a few things.
It was hammered into me, from the time I could remember,
“Beau left US! Your Daddy left US!” US is an awful big word to use for a
kid. It means me and you. For most of my life I felt Beau had left
me. Sometimes I felt that it was because
of something I did, even if that was just existing. It took a lot of therapy for me to understand
that Beau did not leave US. Beau left my
mother. I was a causality of a war that
I never even knew was being fought. Nothing I ever could have done, could have
resulted in this outcome. One day I had
a father and the next day I didn’t. I
still have abandonment issues because of it, and a deep distrust of all
men. From an early age I remember my
mother telling me, “Don’t ever trust a man!”
My mother never spoke a kind word about Beau in my life, or
shared with me a pleasant memory of him.
I grew up hating him, and any part of me that reminded her of him. Anything that I knew was like Beau I squashed
and dismissed. When I smile you can see
my teeth. It’s a natural response on my
part. My mother would tell me, “You
smile like Beau.” I learned to smile
without showing my teeth. I remember
this often the moment, before a photo is snapped. For years I wanted to rip out my brown eyes,
because they were his. I wanted to rip
out my own DNA.
For most of my life, I would not even look, at his old
family home in Longstreet, as I passed by it. One day I would have a large
family that loved me and one day I wouldn’t. When Mom erased Beau from my life,
she erased the whole family. He’s
extended family, who carried for me while Mom was in the hospital, was
forbidden to see me, or have any contact with me. Attempts to visit me were met by my shotgun
wielding Grandpa. I was taught to hate
all of them, as much as I was taught to hate Beau. I was told how horrible they were, how dirty
they were, and what white trash they were.
Only two members of that family were ever allowed to have anything to do
with me, Aunt Ruby and my cousin Bobby Joe.
I remember receiving a phone call, from Beau’s mother,
around my 18th birthday. I
thought she was someone else, so I talked to her at length. It wasn’t until the end of the conversation
that I began to understand who she was.
No caller Id back in those days kido’s.
She told me, “Well you are 18 now darling. You can make your own decisions.” When she said that, and I realized who she
was I hung up on her. I have no idea how
long she had waited to make that call. I see now what courage it took for her to
call. She died a few years later, and I
never got to say how sorry I was, about what I had done.
My mother destroyed all pictures of Beau. What few I found I horded. After spending a summer putting together
photo albums, when I was 19, I found about 5 or 6 that had not been
destroyed. I put them in a little yellow
photo album that I kept hid under my bed for years. I was terrified she would find them and
destroy them too. When I had my bad days
I would pull it out, and stare at them and wonder. Wonder what he was like and why he didn’t
want me.
Even my own name, part of my identity was taken from
me. Not long after Jef, my Daddy, legal
adopted me, which I wanted. I came home
with my birth last name on one of my school papers. I remember my mom telling me, this is not
your name anymore, and making me erase it and put my new name. While I was proud to be Daddy’s, it came at
the price of having to erase who I felt I was at the time, who I knew myself to
be. It caused a shit storm in my family,
when I added my birth last name back to my Facebook page. It was a way to reclaim my identity, and help
others in the family find me. I am proud
now to be associated with the rest of my birth family and with Beau.
If Beau had not left Mom, I would never have had Jef, my
Dad. I asked Beau why he never fought
for me. He said, “I knew Jef. I knew
he was a good man and would be a good father to you. I did not want to disrupt your life.” I am glad for what he did.
The moral of this part of the story is if you are angry at
your partner due to divorce or whatever, PLEASE I implore you, don’t bad mouth
them in front of the kids, or even in the same house!!! Those little ears are listening. You never know how a child will take this
kind of stuff, how they will internalize it, and how long they will carry
it. Your anger at your partner may make
your kids hate who they are, what they are, and anything that came from that
parent. Clean up your own shit! Don’t make your kids carry it too! If you need to vent do it away from them, do
it with a friend, or better yet in therapy.
These kids already have enough to deal with, having a parent gone,
without having to hating themselves too, because of your anger.
Ilsa
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