11
A DAUGHTER'S DECEPTION
We arrived back in the Green Mountains on the twenty-first of June after a brief visit with my parents in Montreal and started the garage sale two days later. It takes a few healthy moves to realize that you don't need it all.
We were selling everything and taking only our necessities. Memories, saved for so long, were tagged. Baskets and barrels of belongings. Things crawled out of cubbyholes, cupboards emptied out, and shelves were swept clean. We were shedding our layers, peeling them off, parting with possessions to go lightly into the mountains where one could live more quietly and anonymously.
The weekends ran into weeks and after a month and a half of steady selling, we were ready to leave for the west when something bizarre and unexpected happened. When Valerie and Susan returned from their father's house they seemed to be having a difficult time and as I watched my two older daughters sitting in the grass in deep conversation, I knew something was up. They finally entered the kitchen and Susan dropped the bomb. They had decided not to return to Wyoming. I was stunned. My insides shook as I stared at them sitting at the kitchen table. Elizabeth tugged at my T-shirt and told me that she wanted to stay with me. I wouldn't have thought of leaving her. Once again I was faced with that old monster, rejection, and not having dealt with it before, there was no way I was going to be able to handle it now. Elizabeth had disappeared while I stood transfixed in disbelief, staring at my elder daughters, hating them for their decision, and wondering what was happening to my family. I found my youngest daughter in the bathroom crying inconsolably because her sisters were deserting her.
In the midst of this mess, the minister who had helped me home from the hospital, after my accident five years earlier, stopped by. I stared at him through the screen door and knew that God had sent his trusty servant to help with this hopeless situation. He advised me unequivocally to give up my children because they were of age and if asked by a judge they would have chosen to stay with their father. I would have to find a way to exist without my two older daughters. He also warned me that I might have a nervous breakdown as a result of the turn of events. It was more normal for a mother and her children to remain together.
Valerie was promised she could finish her high school year with her friends, Susan could go to private school, and Elizabeth might have been overlooked.
All our belongings were lined up in boxes along the living room wall. The next day Susan and Valerie separated their things from ours and while they waited for their father, Elizabeth, Steve and I went for a drive because I didn't want to be there when they left. When we returned, the girls were gone. A few hours later a letter arrived from our bank in Wyoming that his last child support check had been canceled.
The garage sale was over and we were ready to leave. The next day Valerie and Susan came over to say goodbye. I felt distant, anxious, unloved and unloving. With 2278 miles ahead of us it was going to be a sad, lonely, long drive.
When the realization hit that I had lost my kids, I crumbled, cried a lot and spent most of my time sitting by the potbelly stove staring into space. When Elizabeth came home from school every day she would sit on my lap, cup my face in her hands and stare into my eyes waiting for a smile or some recognition that I was there. I tried hard to be present but knew my focus was afar. My art, a light in the darkness of this heartbreaking human drama, was my lifeboat. The most excruciating pain was in the awareness that it was out of my hands. Helpless again, I felt displaced, uprooted, alien. I was re-experiencing my primal tragedy of being separated from my birth mother. There was a hole in my heart. I was devastated.
A few weeks later a letter arrived from my lawyer. There seemed to have been a change in custody and the support factor. But I didn't need a lawyer anymore. I lost!
Years later I was to see that because of my emotional immaturity and personal problems, I couldn't help my children when they needed advice and support after the divorce. I was jealous that they had chosen to stay with their father and couldn't overcome my resentment to guide them. I just wasn't strong enough. Because of their rejection, I rejected them. I had to save myself from drowning.
I felt my insides twist when I thought about my missing girls. As the hours and days and months passed, I realized how blessed I was to have Elizabeth and Steve, always beside me coaxing me to come back when I seemed far away. My mind drifted to nowhere, but as long as my hands were busy, my life went on. And so I continued to chop marble and create life. All things must pass. This would too.
At Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania a nuclear power plant came close to meltdown. The radiation was denied by officials but stories of mutated vegetation, livestock unable to give birth and reddened skin persisted. The China Syndrome came out 12 days before this tragedy and when the meltdown happened people panicked. Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer encapsulated the reality of a decade in which the rate of divorce was higher than ever before.
At the end of May we opened a tiny gallery in a funky area just off Jackson's Town Square that had retained the flavor of old Jackson. I worked outside in the courtyard, chopping marble, while Steve manned the place. There were other artisans working and displaying their wares giving the area a festive feeling.
Susan called to tell me she and Valerie had decided to visit. I booked airline tickets and a week later Elizabeth and I drove the two hours to the Idaho Falls airport to pick them up. It must have taken a lot for my two daughters to come be- cause they were very quiet all the way home. My heart went out to them. It took a few days until they started to talk about the situation at home, the loneliness, isolation and utter lack of communication. Their father and stepmother were absorbed with their own problems and the children were on their own.
My daughters and I filled our backpacks and left for three days of hiking in the Tetons. Steve dropped us off at the Death Canyon trailhead and waved goodbye as if he'd never see us again. Elizabeth was eleven, Susan, fourteen, Valerie, six- teen, and I, thirty-eight. Being in the mountains might allow us to recapture some familial warmth that had been smothered over the last few months. This first trip reinforced our enthusiasm for hiking in the wilderness together and re-established our love for one another that seemed to wear thin during long absences. When they left after ten days, I knew it would be a long time before we would see one another again.
I received a letter from my ex saying he was going for custody of the girls and was after Elizabeth. Nine days later Susan called from my parents' house in Montreal and it all came out. He had taken the girls to court and gotten custody after promising them they wouldn't have to go before the judge and speak against me. What could have been said that was so incriminating to take children away from their mother?
"The law recognizes the mother's claim as supreme unless she is proven unfit." 1
My father was shocked. I was sick to my stomach. In the next five days the girls called repeatedly as well as the minister, who was taken aback at the turn of events. This was an indelible scar on our family psyche from which we would all suffer forever.
Their day in court would forever plague them on all levels of their being. Even if we tried to love one another, it would always get in the way and I would eventually be blamed for what they were forced to do by a man who in their hearts could do no wrong. Whatever they were coerced into saying would be forgotten in time, but their guilt feelings would engender a deep resentment towards me, Elizabeth and finally Steve. Would they ever be mature enough to realize that even if one initiated the divorce, the other was part of the cause? But living in a patriarchal society, we mothers don't count. Fathers can lie, steal, or cheat, and still come up smelling like roses. Most men don't understand a mother's importance in her children's lives.
At the beginning of September the Sheriff appeared at my door