I told the kids about the divorce. And that brought up, indirectly, the memories of Texas. I don’t know how this happened. How the breakdown of the family somehow became synonymous with the sojourn in the Big State. I don’t even know if it’s fair. Sometimes one thing gets to stand in for something else in your mind. But it isn’t just me who has thought this, that this Texas thing finished off our family.
The kids each had their responses to the news of the divorce.
Scarlett: (Just listened.)
Victor: “Well, it violates a principle, but in all things, there are times you just have to go with your gut. This must be one of those times.”
Brian: “I don’t know why it took so long, your fighting was a huge negative influence on my childhood. Papa never taught me anything about how to be a man.” (Brian, remember, is the one who blew up last fall. He isn’t speaking to Leo or Victor, or Tiara, for that matter. One of the underlying causes of my decision to leave was the magnitude of Brian’s complaints about Leo. And about the kids’ childhood and Leo’s ‘oh well’ reaction.)
Joline: “I support you Mom. I’ve seen you suffering with him since as long as I can remember. I had wondered if you would ever get a chance to be happy.”
Andrew: “The house feels more comfortable without all that tension.”
Tiara: (Began to write what she called a Mortality and Morbidity reflection on her childhood.)
Tiara’s Mortality and Morbidity reflection, meanwhile, is based on something they do in medicine when there’s “a bad outcome.” Such as a death. The doctor in charge of the case writes up a report on what went wrong and why and presents this reflection to the other doctors he works with. It’s a learning tool and a protection against the same things happening again.
Tiara woke up at 5:30 a.m. on the weekend Leo moved out and began writing on her document. She identified several factors that damaged the family, but the most interesting to me was:
“Moving from California to Texas was a catastrophic choice.”
Texas, Y’all
When we went to Texas, it seemed like a land of jobs and opportunities and cheap real estate. I quickly found out that there was no social safety net in Texas. As a result of Leo’s going back to grad school we soon needed one. These were the awful years, 2006 to 2008, when we moved from the beautiful House with the Lone Star Gate to the Bilglade House. That house, due to delayed maintenance, quickly began to fall apart.
In Texas, we were repeatedly subjected to bizarrely abusive labor practices. In Texas a struggling company can fail to make its payroll and tell the employees to wait weeks for their paychecks. The good jobs are given out to friends and cronies to an unbelievable degree.
Not to mention insurance rip-offs. You can have your roof insured with your homeowner’s policy but the deductible can be $8000 on a ten-thousand dollar repair. Leo worked for several fly-by-night organizations, not to mention the Catholic Church. In every case there were positively weird political and financial moves going on. It was as if the workplace was a shadow show and you could never see what the real actors were doing back beneath the stage.
I began to get an attitude about the South. I began to say things like “Growing up in California, I thought I knew what conservatives were like. But I never saw what they would actually do if they got control of things. This is nightmarish.”
The Ugly Conservative?
I began to see, while we were in Texas, if you like, the face of what I came to think of as The Ugly Conservative. Now I have never completely repudiated the conservative impulse. I understand it, in general, as political and social thought that seeks to recreate the good that happened in the past. Nostalgia, if you like, as opposed to thought that seeks to develop the good that may come In the future, optimism. Nostalgia is a sure thing, whereas optimism can be misplaced. On the other hand, nostalgia is limited; its potential for growth is small, whereas optomism’s potential is infinite.
That said, the conservatism I found in Texas was ugly. In the organizations Leo worked for were people whose behavior shocked me regularly. Despite being dishonest and not knowledgeable about education, they had built school organizations with byzantine rules and procedures. These functioned to soak up government and personal monies. Mid-level administrators tried to get rid of all foreign language study except Spanish in order to save money. The strange hiring of unqualified school leadership made observers suspect at least cronyism and perhaps even blackmail.
And Somehow We Were Trapped
“This Texas thing is not getting better,” I said at some point. I also had to admit that about the marriage. But for years, there was no escaping from Texas or the marriage. As a result of the economic inequities and Leo refusing to drop out of grad school we went bankrupt. I went back to work, and just getting another house to replace the one that was foreclosed on required the help of my family. Over the years of my marriage to Leo, they seemed always to be stepping in to help.I felt like the black sheep of my family.
I can well remember going to Minnesota to see my father, brother and uncle, and staying in the campground outside town. I didn’t want to ask my brother to put us up. There were too many kids, and anyway, we were used to camping. My brother had four kids of his own, but he was provident. Unlike Leo and me. It seemed each of Noah’s kids, when they were 16, got their own brand new car. And yet, my brother did have a secret sorrow. His oldest daughter had some serious personal problems, and also was not nice to her parents. He didn’t talk about this much. But one day he decided to share a little bit of the trouble that a rebel child can cause to an upstanding and well-known family in a small town.
“I just don’t know what to do. I just don’t see how this happened,” he told me. And he was right. He and his wife, they didn’t do anything wrong, it just happened.
People Disappoint You Sometimes
“People disappoint you sometimes,” I told him. I gave him a meaningful glance.
There was silence in the car. Noah nodded. He knew what I was talking about; he had thought this himself, I’m sure. My father’s family are clannish to a remarkable degree. One of the behaviors is that no one will say anything about someone else’s spouse, even someone like Leo. But he didn’t question what I said. Everyone knew this was true.
The voice of the Greek chorus comes in from State Left: So why didn’t you just leave him then, Susan? You knew the marriage was a washout?
I don’t know. The chance that things would change? I was deeply invested in the idea of the cohesive family. We were fighting a war, it seemed. In the same way that wartime coalitions have to tolerate the poor behavior of their allies, we had to tolerate Leo’s bad behavior. The stuff that happened in Texas to the family was bad enough. Without the head of the family in that patriarchal world, who knew what might have gone wrong?
Back to Gone with the Wind
There is a scene in Gone with the Wind, the book. It’s after the Civil War is over, and the remaining Confederate soldiers come back to their homes in the South. They are walking, for the most part, or riding on a mule. They stop at the houses they pass and ask for food. There is no money in this war-torn land. Clothes are patched, basic supplies such as sugar and coffee haven’t been seen in years. The populace subsists on yams, corn meal, and dried peas.
The homecoming men are lean and haggard, and the families who host them ask for news. They ask about their own men folk, trying to find out who is still alive, and who has died. And in that environment of endurance and hardship, Scarlett makes that famous declaration. “If I have to lie, cheat, steal, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”
The Brands had faced that moment when I, a dedicated homemaker, went to work teaching school. Leo, of course, opposed it: with much screaming over the space of a week. He was like Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners. “I’d rather see you starve before I’d see you work,” But he couldn’t stop me. And in that moment of rebellion, all the moments that followed it were contained. After working since dawn on the application, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon I picked up Andrew from kindergarten. Holding his hand I went to the small office where you could enroll in an alternative teaching certification program. It was half an hour before closing on the final day they were taking applications.
I Went to Work, Like So Many Texas Women
In the fall I went to work in Fort Worth ISD. The classroom I would be assigned to was east of Stop Six, one of the roughest neighborhoods in the state. I would sometimes be the only white person in the classroom. I would learn, just a tiny bit, about the parts of the South that had never been right. They were this way due to various economic malfeasances, not to mention racism, tracing back from those war torn days after the Civil War.
Or, if you like, from those war-torn days of the slave ships and plantations. After a few years there, no one had to tell me that unjust laws and prejudice destroyed the chance for a decent life. I’d seen the students and the effect it had had on them. And the truth is, I identified with the students. Unjust oppression was part of my life too. Though it was slight and personal in comparison, it was the same thing.
And yet, my own children grew up, they sought careers, they set their hands to the plow. In the midst of the crisis of Texas, they had managed to bloom as individuals. They went to college (or, in Brian’s case, the military) they left home at 18, they made their way. In 2018, another work disaster for Leo, another lost job. “No more jobs in the South,” I said.
I Ask Once Again to Go Home
“I want to go home, to California. And I will not move anywhere that is not west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Leo, who had been much chastened by the events of the last 15 years, agreed. He wasn’t able to get a job in California, but he did find one in Colorado. We moved here in 2018. I started teaching, and as the pressure from raising the kids had slackened, I started writing again.
I had given up on writing, for the most part, in 2008 when I went to work teaching school. There wasn’t any time left. It was frustrating in the extreme, because I was shopping a novel manuscript that seemed to have potential. It had been requested by a well-known New York agent, and sent back with suggestions for improvement. The DFW Writer’s Workshop, where I was a member and board member, had been a place of solace for me. Now due to teaching I had to quit, which was rather bitter.
We Are Like the Marines …
I remember one of my fellow writers. He was one of the many friends who, over the years, have looked at my situation with disbelief. This guy listened to the latest tale of Leo’s outrageous behavior. And then he said, “Why don’t you just leave him?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You know, this family, we’re like the Marines, I guess. Everyone who goes into the fight, has to be brought back out, dead or alive.”
But Now the War is Over
Last spring, I realized, the fight was over. We’d escaped from Texas, the kids were raised, and it was time for someone to get an honorable (or dishonorable, depending on how you take it) discharge. Leo was like, “What the hell? Who are you, Susan?”
I look back and think, “I’m that girl, who raised six kids, in Texas, honorably, with you for a husband. I lived to tell the tale, and I’ve still got it together. Quite honestly, you have used up all your “get out of jail free” cards now. I’m not giving you anything else for the rest of your life, except what the law and this family demands. Believe me, that’s way, way, way, way less than you’ve been getting.
I don’t think he’ll ever understand. But it doesn’t matter. Because we escaped from Texas, and now, I’ve escaped from him.
All I can say is, Sorry Baby.
Love the comparison to military families everywhere!