What was the beginning?
That's something that I never understood growing up. I was in my thirties when I happened to find my dad home alone in the kitchen of the family home, and I inquired of him as to the difference in the way my sister and I grew up. His comment was nothing spectacular or mind riveting...No real difference, He said. And then he added something I was to hear for the first time. "You were two when you got very sick and we took you to the hospital. The doctor stood with us and told us that there was nothing more they could do for you. That you were in the hands of the LORD." Then he told me how they committed me into the LORD's hands and left me there in the hospital as they went home.
That was the only big difference that happened in my life as a child versus the upbringing and the way my sister Barbara Jean was raised. Except, that is, that I continued to have health issues. Tonsilitis was a continual problem and at about age 4 it was decided that my tonsils would be removed. I remember so clearly being told I'd get ice cream afterwards, but no one told me I wouldn't be able to swallow what was in those days such a special treat!! The day of the surgery is well implanted in my mind even 76 years later. I screamed and screamed as the attending person stood over me slowly giving me ether that ended my screamed. I remember also the day my folks took me to a movie they wanted so badly to see...Oklahoma. They arrived before the end of the previous movie which was a war story and the child in their arms was screaming and continued to scream into Oklahoma....meaning that they had to leave the movie.During such things I was total unaware of my sister Barbara being present.
Then there was the trip to Spokane with my mother and my sister. I was 4 or 5 and it seemed while I could scream and cry, I didn't talk. A specialist was consulted and I so clearly remember that day...or was it my mother relating the story to me, I am not sure the source of this memory. The doctor turned to my mom and said that the reason I wasn't talking was that my sister and her did my talking for me. I didn't need to talk.
DId anything change after that? I don't know other than if my sister or mother were asked, they would say that once I began to talk I never quit talking!!
After I had my tonsels out they found that I was having many of my medical issues from the raw milk that we drank reguarlly. So about the age of 4-5 things began to change as with my tonsels out and a change to pasturized milk my health issues faded.
During these years I havefew remembrances of things involving my sister...a bike ride one day that went by a man's house that had plums and we stopped and ate some of the plums. Later the man called our parents and said they had sprayed those plums that day. We had been told, if I remember correctly not to eat any of them, but we had anyway. We only suffered from my parent's rebuke. Was that one of the times I got the hair brush or the yard stick over my rear end...more than once to see it break in my mother's hands?
It was not until I was my 60s did I understand some of what occured with my sister and I that helped me understand some of her actions as I grew up. When I was 18 living at home, in my first year of community college, my sister who was pregnant with her second child, visited with her young son. One day she was standing, ironing something when a car went by driven by a young man that my sister had known in high school and with whom I had made acquaintence. It was like anger came out of somewhere, and I heard her say, I don't like you, I will never like you and I will never tell you why!"
I was too shocked to say or ask any questions but those words reverberated throughout much of my life as I lived with various forms of her cruel actions now explained by her dislike of me. I was in my mid 30s however, before I came to realize that I had been spending my whole life trying helplessly to please my sister. I had begun a fresh walk with the LORD in those days and many of my fears which I learned had their root in the fear of death that got imprinted that day in the hosptial when I was 2, when the doctor told my folks to go home as there was nothing more they could do. I was left alone as a 2 year old with the knowledge I could die? That isn't done in this century..parents would never leave that sick of a child...but I was left and it was many years before I understood the deep fear that plagued me throughout my early life.
Growing up even my parents would tell folks..Meri Alyce is always afraid!! But they had no understanding of why or what to do with this "fearful" child who also seemed to push the boundaries of their tolerance. One day my parents were driving us from Morton to church in Centralia as we usually did the first Sunday of the month, to have communion with the church family we had long been a part of. It was a snowy day and our car stalled going up the hill having crossed the Bear Canyon bridge and we slid into a snow bank. Thankfully a Milk truck came along and pulled us out. Yes, I was afraid, scared to death but no one really seemed to understand. Then there was the day we were on the same road, it was summer and my folks were on the way to the same church to drop me off for JuniorHigh Church camp. And the car broke down. Along came one of my sisters high school hot rodder friends and he drove us the rest of the way at what I remembered to be breakneck speed. My folks made sure the guy driving knew that Meri was afraid of everything and to ignore her pleas to slow down or whatever concern I was making...which I don't remember. But whatever it was, I was annoying them being afraid!
When we lived in Morton, my bedroom was at the front of the house looking out over the front porch with view of the sidewalk and the street. My sister was in high school and was dating a fellow my folks weren't too happy about. If I remember rightly his name was Jack and he was a drummer in a band and had slicked back hair of the 50s. My sister hated it that her comings and goings with Jack were all "monitored" by her little sister who was always keeping track of her at her bedroom window. Little did she know, that it wasn't so much curiosity as it was my deep "fear" that something would happen to my sister.
When we moved to Centralia in 1958, I was a 8th grader and my sister who we now called Jean because in Morton there were two other Barbaras...Jean was a senior and not a happy one having to move from where she'd been happily a part of the Morton community for 3 years. I have no remembrance of any interaction with my sister during those remaining years in Morton when I dutifully went off to pick strawberries.......oh yes...maybe I do remember that my sister who always excelled, reported to my parents that I would just sit down in the fields and not work all day. I was a 6th grader at that time..So I continued to be the nuisance of a little sister....
In Centralia, Jean graduated and moved to Portland while I went on to go to 9th grade and then start high school as a sophmore which was the system of education at the time. I excelled in high school, active in band and in the dating field, with the same boyfriend for three years in high school. On occasion when my sister would come home, she would try to humiliate me infront of my boyfriend and get my parents upset with me for some reason. This was before I understood that she deeply disliked me, so her behavior always left me devastated, Whenever there was an opportunity she would triangle against me and my parents. In later years she did that with my first husband, calling me "mentally ill" to him in my presence and humiliating me knowing his passivity would keep him from standing up for me. She went as far as sitting on his lap at family events fully recorded in family holiday photos.
Needless to say I wasn't the most pleasant sister to deal with either. In the late 60s we both lived in Northern California. My husband was in the Army in the area near Petaluma California where we lived and Jean and Les and the two kids lived over across the way less than an hour a way. Those visits were troubling....I was arrogant and narrow minded and clearly everything I did drew my sister ire and we argued horribly, one time making a scene in the street of the trailer court where we lived in Cotati. Over what...some nonsense difference of how we responded to our young children. I was as much at fault as my sister. There was no way the two of us could have a reasonable conversation...yet I wanted so badly to have her approval.
From that point on for several years there was no peace between us. My kids went to visit her with their grandparents and their one memory of that time was being told they must never put their hands on the walls of her house or she would make them wash the walls!!!My son Tim idolalized his cousin Mark and as they grew up he admired Mark's knowledge of technology and his job as a young man and was absolutely devastated by his suicidal death, something I sadly have never talked with him about.
My second marriage to Chuck brough a whole different relationship with my sister. Jean dispised Chuck because for all her dislike of me, she was deeply opposed to his violence and control. In like manner, Chuck, being the controller he was, knew my sister's "game". It was strangely much of his talk about my relationship to my sister, that helped me learn to stand up to be my own person along with the work that the LORD JESUS was doing in my life. His on going telling me just to tell her "f off" just reminded me that I could speak graciously and stand true to whatever it was that was important to me, rather than yielding to the pressure to plese my sister. I got to learn more how to stand in my own identity, little that I had at this point, in the fall of 1986 . I was pregnant with Holly who was born in December and helping my mom prepare for their 50th Wedding anniversary. My sister lived in California and had insisted that she wanted to do all the planning and was bringing all the stuff that would be needed. The one thing she didn't plan was for coffee. My husband was an avid coffee drinker and indicated he'd like to have the coffee pot going the day of the gathering. So my mom decided to have the Mr. Coffee going in the kitchen where Gene could easily refill his coffee cup or anyone else who wanted coffee. When Jean arrived and found that there was coffee pot going, she threw a horrible fit but the coffee pot remained as it wasn't there for her benefit or there to harm her plans in any way.
Later there was an issue over my mother's 90th birthday the gathering at the church where my mother attended, my good friend Joyce and I were visiting and she asked about flowers for the gathering...and I toldher that there were only flowers on the cake table...and she loved my parents and decided that she would go gather fall flowers from the various stores around so that there were flowers on each of the tables....they looked so pretty and mom and dad were tickled!!
But Jean was livid..so much so that she didn't speak to me throughout that gathering, to the degree that family were well aware that Jean was on the warpath but didn't know why. On Sunday, their 50th anniversary was to be celebrated after church service in Olympia..the previous was in the fellowship hall of the Chehalis Baptist church where Mom and Dad had previously pastored and had many friends.
The Saturday celebration was at the family home in Centralia and on Sunday there was a celebration after church at First Baptist in Olympia where my folks attended. My husband Chuck was replacing the diesel engine in our Impala with a gas engine and needed that Sunday to finish that vehicle so it would be operating for the family on Monday morning when he went to work. So he opted to stay home from the celebration. Les found out about it and made mention that he would also have liked to have stayed home but that wasn't acceptable to Jean. It was a warm day and I was pregnant and it was my job to bring the remaining anniversary cake home in my little Honda from Olympia. I stopped at Hub City Transfer where Chuck was getting our family car back up and running with the new gas engine, and he and his coworker each had a piece of the anniversary cake and then I drove the 2 minutes on to my folk's house. I had my plan in place. Since I was very tired, I would leave the cake which I had just checked which was just fine, in the car and go on in and sit down a spell before emptying my car. And that is just what I did. My sister met me at the back door, and demanded I give her my keys to bring the cake in. I assured her I had just checked the cake and it was fine and I was going to sit down and would bring things in a bit later. That wasn't acceptable!! I quietly went and sat down in the front room and Jean stormed. Mom and Les each in their chairs in the front room as Jean twirled profanities and got herself so upset that she finally exited to "take some medication" out in their travel trailer. It was the first time, that it was clearly seen that I WASN"T THE PROBLEM!! My mom saw that I had done nothing deserving of such a angry fit...though she and Les were scared to death at what they saw and were totally silent and never did I hear my mother discuss the event. But this was a similar scenario that had repeated itself over years. I did something Jean didn' tlike and she threw a few and I got blammed for upsetting folks. I WASN'T UPSET this time. I was shaking in my boots but I had done what I said I had planned and was confident in what I had chosen and left the results up to Jean. One time years before a boyfriend had come to dinner with my folks and Jean was visiting. My mom had made her cranberry muffins and somehow they got really soggy. She and I had talked about this prior to dinner and during dinner I said something to my mom about how they turned out. And Jean railed at me for talking like that...in front of my guest. I looked at her and said, I was talking to my mom, not you. And with that she stood up, slammed her way in anger into the kitchen saying what I don't remember. But I was always the blame for causing trouble.....My mom and I knew that what I said wasn't rude..or wrong and was actually just a matter about her muffins that we both knew about and I'd commented on.yep they were a bit "moist." LOL!! NO, In those days I was still sucking all that stuff inside...still so wanting to please my sister and still unaware that it was so wrongly the focal of my life and made me a target.
In 2008 my mother got a UTI and got sick and was lying to us about what she was eating. We had Ensure and things and checked on her daily and she'd tell us that she'd had such and such for breakfast but little did we know that the UTI had her brain messed up and she wasn't telling us the truth. She ended up passing out on the floor of her kitchen and her body temp was 67 when the Aide Unit found her and took her to the hosptial. The doctor told me as I sat beside her that night, as she was encased in plastic tubes that were slowly warming her body that if she survived the night she'd live a good while. She survived the night and went on to live into the next year for 6 months after spending some time in rehab. She could not return to her home as she was weak and in need of assistance for most activities. and it worked out to have her in my home. I was working and my daughter Cyndee lived next door and she would watch Mom drom 8am -8pm the four days a week that I worked. And then i did the night shift being up with her several times in the night to the commode. It was a wonderful time with my mom.
My mom and I were never "on the same page" Mom was more like my sister...and I was more like my dad. My sister and my dad were always at odds....I remember when Jean came home from California and it was in the time when "rights" were the big talk...and she badmouthed my dad over some trivial thing to his horror and that of us watching. She humiliated him and then said "she had every right to call him anything she wanted." I loved my mom and my dad, and while I got busy with my own life and didn't spend the time with them I could, I do not think I was ever openly disrespectful of them. My dad didn't underestand me any more than my mother however. My dad was a private person and emotionally was not expressive nor was my mother. She was a giver and a doer and loved to give gifts which she was always blessing the kids and I with. Dad didn't know how to give gifts and one time when an anniversary or a birthday was coming I talked wto him about getting something for my mom that SHE would value. And he ended up getting her a Fostoria white hobnailed vase that she so valued for years and that sat in a prime location on her piano often with a bouquet of roses in it...which incidently is in my house nowadays and is often what I have a bouquet of roses in. Dad was a black and white person who dealt mostly with his intellect. His relationship with the Lord Jesus, tended to be more in the basis of understanding and knowledge rather than personally applicable except as it was in terms of seeing others which usually fell into some category of right or wrong, or heart felt empathy based on a perceived injustice. He often married folks who could find no pastor to marry them because they had been divorced, something I didn't understand for years not knowing until I was a teen ager that my dad had been divorced early in his life when his first wife had wandering feet and was "returned to her father." It was during those years that my dad supposedly lost his full head of curly red hair, which had given him the name Red growing up and in high school. I only saw pictures of my dad with that kind of hair so traumatic was that divorce and time of infidelity which in many ways followed my dad all his life as generally it was not known in the congregations he pastored that he was a divorcee as that was still unacceptable in those days.
When my mom lived with me, many things began to be made known. One day she told me that she and dad had "not prepared Jean for my birth." I had begun to understand that over the years. My sister was an only child...a special child as they had waited four or five years after marriage for my mom to get pregnant and Jean was born in 1941..a SPEcial GIFT FROM THE lord...and that was how she was treated for 4 years UNTIL yet a second SPECIAL CHILD...was conceived...oops...yes, they didn't expect to have a second child as my father's sperm count was very low. So when the second child was conceived, she too was a "Special child"...oops..can't have two special children. My mom explained that they never thought about Jean's response to her pregnancy or the birth of a sister being in "competition" to her "special only child status." And for that my mother asked forgiveness. As my mom lived in my house 24.7 for 6 months she learned that my home with Gene was a "quiet peaceful place" dispite the tumult of my mother's illness and both Gene and I working. She enjoyed the peace filled times that 6 months. When my sister came to visit in that spring it "just happened" in God's providence that the week she planned to come my daaytime caregiver who was my daughter who lived next door, needed to have her teeth pulled that week. So it worked out well to have Jean carre for mom in the mornings when I left for work until I got home in the evenings. What a special time it was...for the first time in my mom's life, she saw the difference between my sister and I. Remember, she always saw me as the trouble with my sister...I was always the cause of stuff. During that week, my mom saw the difference between the "way my sister treated her and how I treated her." I had already seen this..for whenever my sister was around my mom was put in the role of a child without a mind of her own. Jean made the decisions and my mom, out of fear, never disagreed with Jen to any extent for fear of Jeans wrath. It was so different with mom and I. I t We went to lunch one day and then to KMart for her prescriptions and at the counter the clerk started talking to me..and my mom quickly said..I handle my own medicines!!! My mom was my mom and always had her own mind and I knew better than to ever treat her like she was not able to make her own decisions...even when she "needed help" with those decisions or began clearly not able to handle the full responsibility.
What to do when she would pass, was a subject that often happened between her and I. To begin with my mom used to say...Cremate me, I don't want to be in the ground where the worms can eat on me! And I knew that People's Memorial was set up for whatever end of life we were to decide. We went over the paper work for songs and stuff months before death's door was very close. One day after we had talked and I had shared my feelings about cremation, my mom, in the presence of my daughter Cyndee, said.Meri, you are free to do what you need to do. You can bury me. The plan was to bury her in Ethel Cementary which was close to where we lived and actually bore my mom's name..Ethel Ellen Brown. My sister somehow thought that I went over my mom's desire to be cremated in making my decision to bury her. But that was not the case and for some reason my sister chose to use that as the reason sshe ended relationship with me...the fall AFter my mom passed in June 2009;
When Jean took care of my mom for that week, there were some very difficult things that took place. One night I picked up new liners for mom's dentures and when I brought them home, Jean proceeded to dig out the permanent liner of mom's dentures..........WHAT?? it made her dentures unusuable and at this point she was too disabled to go to the denturist and get new permanent liners put in....
I will nevr know all that took place while I was working that week...but on the day when my husband came at 1pm to take Jean back to the airport, my mom sat down in the big leather recliner and said, I never thought 1pm would come!! The pressure of her in the house was gone!! And my husband reported that on the way to the airport, had he been any other than the kind of gentle guy he was he would have pulled along the side of the road and left my sister stranded so grievious was her talk on the way to the airport. She said how horrible it was to have to stay in Meri's house for a week...and made comments trying to suggest discord between me and my girls which was not at all valid and other things that my humble kind husband Gene took great exception to. When he returned home, he made it clear that if Jean and Les were to come to visit Mom, they no longer would have the privilege of putting their RV on the Winlock property as he had previously offered, since she do disliked everything about me and OUR home. And he made it clear, that when she came, that she needed to know that Cyndee would be in charge, and that they were welcome to visit off and on for limited times each day...but that Jean would not have charge of mom's care. How to tell Jean this? For two weeks I waited upon the Lord to know how to tell them what we had decided since Jean had indicated just how dispicable she thouught my home was and how little she thought of me. And after working through the hurt and anger, I wrote what I was least uncomfortable with detailing the need for them to find some place locally to stay in their RV and to plan times to visit when it worked out with Cyndee's care.
The result of this...was BEHIND MY BACk she sent a letter to the pastor who did my mom's memorial service and for whatever reason he read it to the whole congregation in which she said she was not allowed to come visit my mom on Mother's day...and who knows what else was said...I was shocked...why the pastor would read that when I was the one arranging the service and not even talk to me about whether it was true or not? A few months later I had sent a necklace of Austrailian crystal to my sister that needed restrung and she indicated that she didn't want it. I was going to visit a friend in SanDieage and suggested I might stop by and pick up the necklace and visit. It was then. 5 months after mom passed and I'd sent stuff to Jean that she wanted or I thought she might want..and done all I coudl from my end...pictures, etc...and I got THE LETTER, saying because I had disrespected my mother they did not ever want to see me and were disowning me.....for years I sough to undo that...cards, flowers on occasions, apologies...how did I offend her so much that she would break off contact with her ONLY blood relative? Yes, we had major differences, but she was MY SISTER..we'd been sisters for 64 years. I loved my sister...has shared everything I could with my sister despite her negative responses. I remember the day I called to let her know Mom had been taken to the hosptial by ambulance due to a prolific nose bleed the EMTs coudn't stop. I called her as I went out the door and her comment was...Meri, let her die!! WHAT?????? They just put a baloon in her nose and she lived for several months...while it could have been life threatening, and she was terminal, she still had a good measure of life....It wasn't in me to chose life or death for her...
