by Su Meck
It was after that excursion to Sea World that Jim began to seriously consider moving away from Texas. I failed to remember ever having been at such a memorable place, and I think he was a little bit disappointed about that. Jim thought a fresh start somewhere else might be good for everyone in the family.
Jim had been with General Dynamics for almost four years. He was only twenty-five, but he already possessed highly marketable skills in the aerospace and defense industry. He told me that his market value as an engineer would be higher somewhere else. He said he was considering looking for a job on the East Coast; perhaps New England or somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, like Baltimore or Washington, D.C. I’m sure that I hadn’t a clue as to what he was talking to me about, but it was decided that he would interview with a few places and then we would move. He ended up accepting a job in Baltimore, Maryland. Jim says he always thought we were making these big decisions together. Looking back now, he thinks it more likely that I was simply feeding back words to him and just telling him whatever I thought he wanted to hear. I’m fairly certain that he is right, because I still find myself doing that at times, even now.
7
Better Things
—The Kinks
Because I had moved so many times as a kid, Jim figured I knew exactly what all would be involved in moving halfway across the country. In reality, there was one not so small problem with that reasoning. At this point, I could barely remember what I had eaten that morning for breakfast, or even if I had eaten breakfast. I was beyond clueless about what it would mean to live in a different house in a different neighborhood in a different part of the country. And a cross-country drive was as alien a concept to me as it was to Benjamin and Patrick back then. Once again, when Jim looks back, he realizes that I had no idea what was going on.
Jim was fortunately able to sell our house right away that August, and he decided that we would move to Maryland soon after Patrick’s second birthday in September. The next problem was somehow figuring out a way to get two cars, two kids, and two cats to Baltimore. Jim came up with what he thought was the most obvious solution: I would drive one car with the kids, and he would drive the other car with the cats. Jim outfitted both cars with CB radios, and showed me how to work mine so we could keep in contact with each other along the way. I agreed readily to his plan, just like I agreed with most everything he said back then. Jim thoroughly regrets the decision now. At the time, he thought there was no other option, but he also admits now that he didn’t fully realize the extent of my confusion about almost everything. He told me recently that in the world of really dumb ideas he has had in his life, this was probably one of his worst.
Again, my actual memories of this mighty trip east are not at all clear, and I don’t think Jim’s recollections are much better. The journey was, however, not without incident. We were supposed to drive that first day all the way from Fort Worth to Jim’s parents’ house outside of Atlanta, and spend the night with them. But for whatever reason—maybe we got a late start—we ended up having to stop in rural Mississippi for the night. There was a bass-fishing tournament in whatever little off-the-highway town it was, and hotel rooms were extremely scarce. We ended up pulling into what looked to be a minimally acceptable motel (the rent-by-the-hour sort). Jim went into the office to ask someone about room availability while I waited with the boys, who were both asleep in their car seats by this point. Apparently, a very drunk bass fisherman opened the passenger-side door and crawled into my car. I have no idea what he said to me. I can sort of recall the smell of him and being frozen in place, not able to talk or move, but nothing else. Jim came back from the office and found me shaking like a leaf, nearly in tears. I was barely able to speak and explain to him what had happened. He was chilled to the bone when he realized what I was trying to say: There was a man. He was drunk. He smelled bad. He said something. I was scared. Then he went away. I sometimes wonder what really took place in my car. Certainly Jim would not have been gone long enough for anything too terrible to happen. Right? We ended up staying for what was left of the night in a tiny, moldy, foul-smelling room. I’m curious as to whether I slept at all.
The next morning we got back on the road and made it to Jim’s parents’ house by late afternoon. After a much more comfortable night’s sleep at their place, we pressed on to what we thought would be our final leg to Baltimore. But we hadn’t driven too far when Jim’s car broke down outside of Charlotte in Concord, N.C. This car was one that he had purchased from my parents, and it had been driven for years by several of the Miller children, myself included. Jim says that there was a crack in the transmission housing, and he fed it transmission fluid regularly. But the car had chosen this particular morning to seize up. Jim left the boys and me at a Burger King and headed to a nearby service station. Benjamin and Patrick were initially thrilled to be out of their car seats, and they entertained themselves in that Burger King playland for quite some time, jumping and running around while I sat and watched. One hour stretched to two, then to four, then to six. They both got hot, tired, hungry, and cranky. And I imagine I was pretty tired and cranky myself. I didn’t have any money to buy them food and drinks. Jim had told me to “Stay here!” in that certain tone of voice he had. And because I was a little bit afraid of him when he used that certain tone of voice, I did what I was told.
It turned out the car could not be fixed. Jim called his new boss in Baltimore, who suggested that Jim rent a truck and tow the car. The only rental available in town when Jim inquired was a twenty-six-foot U-Haul. He came and told me all of this at the Burger King, where I had been sitting with a two- and three-year-old for almost eight hours. Jim remembers me telling him that I didn’t care what we did next but that whatever it was, the kids were going to be his! I wanted nothing more to do with either of them for a very long time!
It was nearly evening at this point, and none of us really wanted to drive anywhere except to a hotel for the night. Unfortunately, there was a huge NASCAR event going on at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, so there were no hotel rooms to be found. We kept going, on to the next town, and the next, but everything for miles around was booked. It soon got dark, and the oncoming headlights on Interstate 85 began to bewilder me. This kind of sensory overload, along with being thoroughly exhausted, was precisely the worst scenario for me, the exact kind of situation that would cause me to shut down. We were approaching a busy interchange at Interstate 40. I became confused and chose the wrong lane, heading west toward Tennessee. Jim, trying to navigate the road with the enormous U-Haul that was towing our dead car, didn’t immediately notice that I was no longer behind him. He had gone several miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw, to his horror, that I wasn’t there. He reached for his CB radio and turned up the volume. Immediately he heard a group of truckers declaring, “This crazy lady on the radio has hijacked channel ten and keeps asking for ‘Jim’!” Jim picked up the receiver and called out for me. I recognized his voice and he asked me what I could see, so he could try to figure out where I was. Unfortunately, I was panicking, and for a while I didn’t make much sense. I have no idea how, but Jim says that eventually he was able to calm me down, and ultimately talk me through exiting I-40 and making my way back to I-85. I still think it is a not so small miracle that I was able to follow his directions and, in the end, locate him. How was it that I was able to keep it together enough to even drive, let alone follow his directions? It makes no sense. Like so many things in my life, how did I ever live to tell the tale?
The following day we rolled into the parking lot of the Welcome Inn in Towson, Maryland, our home for the next several weeks until we could close on the house we had bought in Bel Air. Jim remembers arriving late at night, exhausted after days of driving. I have only the vaguest of memories of the whole time we lived there: carrying laundry down to the Laundromat that was at the bottom of a long hill, and the boys flying down that hill on their blue Fisher-Price tricycles, watching all the different-col
ored Disney “Sing-Along Songs” videos, and looking at books with the boys. I have no idea what Benjamin, Patrick, and I did to fill those days. Did I know where I was? Did the boys and I ever try to venture out anywhere? If so, how did we find our way back? Did I rely on Benjamin? Did I understand that I was no longer in Texas? Basically, everything I knew was gone again, and Jim thinks that the boys and I just sat in our room every day waiting for him to come back. He doesn’t remember me complaining about the situation, or showing any outward signs of stress, so he didn’t worry too much until one evening when he came home and found me in a state that he hadn’t seen before. He says that I had “lost it, like catatonia, lost it!” He says that I was awake but “checked out, unresponsive, just withdrawn, like PTSD.” I spoke, but only if I was spoken to first. He says I looked “stunned, or in shock.”
Had something terrible happened that day? I don’t know. These are the kinds of stories that freak me out a little bit more each time I hear them. Again, how the hell did I survive? How did my kids survive in my care? What kinds of things did Benjamin and Patrick see me do? What did they think of me? Or was my erratic, inconsistent, and childlike behavior normal to them? Was this just the way their mommy was?
Benjamin and Patrick on their blue tricycles, 1989
Jim called his new boss, Bill, and explained the situation. Bill said that Jim should contact the Employee Assistance Program, which he did. After that phone call, Jim decided to take me to a psychiatric hospital. He thinks that all this happened on a Friday, and that I may have spent the weekend there while they did a psychiatric evaluation. The results came back showing that I was not suicidal, and not a threat to the kids. I was more lucid by Sunday, asking Jim, “Why am I here?” He thinks, looking back, that everything just got to be too much for me. I must have been so confused about what was going on since leaving Texas. Too much change, too quickly, and Jim not knowing how badly off I really was. Unfortunately, this was not the last time that I would be uprooted and set down in a new and confusing place.
8
Mama, I’m Comin’ Home
—Ozzy Osbourne
We moved out of the Welcome Inn and into our house right around Halloween in 1989. The house was a small two-story colonial with three bedrooms, a finished basement, and a one-car garage at the end of a cul-de-sac called Kingsmark Court. By the end of that moving day, Benjamin had dumped the tricycle and was instead riding his red two-wheeler around and around the circle right in front of our new house at top speed, with Patrick trying to keep up on his trike. Obviously the weeks we spent cooped up in a motel room had not had any negative effects on the two of them whatsoever. I, however, struggled with learning a new house. Jim remembers me having to keep all the cupboards and drawers opened in the kitchen for several weeks—possibly months—before relearning where things were kept. It drove him crazy, and he often shouted at me because it meant the boys had open access to everything from knives and scissors to pots and pans, canned food, and opened boxes of cereal. Another issue: My washing machine and dryer in Texas had been right off the kitchen, and in this house they were in the basement. I would forget that I even had a basement, so I would think there were no washer and dryer. Then I would get upset with Jim and complain, “Jim, why did we buy this house? There isn’t even a washing machine or dryer!”
The house in Bel Air is the first house that we lived in that I sort of remember, but even here, the memories I have are more impressions. We bought the boys new bunk beds from Cargo Furniture. Benjamin slept on the top bunk, Patrick on the bottom, although there were some mornings when they would be curled up together on the top bunk. As soon as Patrick turned two, he wanted to do everything Benjamin did. They were inseparable for many years.
We started attending Bel Air United Methodist Church on Sunday mornings, and Jim and I both sang in the choir. On Wednesday evenings we went to choir practice, and a few of those fellow choristers became our friends. Socializing, for me, still remained puzzling. Jim talks about me being confused whenever we were invited to somebody’s house for dinner. I usually asked him at some point during the drive home, “What was that all about?” A woman named Janet White was probably the youngest member of the adult choir at the church, along with Jim and me, so we sort of gravitated toward each other and became good friends. Janet was single and a math teacher at the local high school. She would come over to our house for meals and movie nights. One time I made blueberry pancakes. But instead of buying what I thought were blueberries at the grocery store, I had gotten little grapes. With seeds. It was a difficult, messy ordeal trying to eat pancakes with seeds. She says she still laughs when she thinks about it. She and Jim both loved the Monty Python movies, and had most of them practically memorized. At the time, I never quite understood the humor, so I couldn’t really share in the experience with them. Nonetheless, Janet had an easygoing personality and more than tolerated Benjamin and Patrick, so I felt comfortable with her.
It was about a year after first meeting her that Jim and I told her about my injury. When I asked her recently about what she thought when we first told her the story, she remarked, “I was amazed, because you and Jim seemed like this perfect couple with these lovely children. I specifically remember Jim describing how you didn’t remember him, and you didn’t remember the boys. And I remember you talking about your bewilderment initially as to who all these people were. I was amazed at how much you appeared totally normal. It wasn’t until it was just you and me, or the two of us with Jim, that you would kind of reveal things you didn’t understand. You weren’t really opening up to anyone. It was like, ‘I don’t want to look like an idiot.’ ”
Benjamin and I raking leaves in our backyard in Fort Worth, Texas, 1989. Notice who has the big rake and who has the child-size rake.
Because there were rarely other adults around to help me, Jim sat down with Benjamin at some point and taught him how to tell time and how to read a map even before he could read books. “It started out as a game that Dad and I played. Dad would give me a location, the name of a place, like the grocery store, and I would have to find out how to get there. It progressed to streets and even intersections that I had to find. I was always the navigator for many years,” Benjamin recalls. “Whether I was in the front seat or the backseat of the car, I would have the map on my lap. If we had to go somewhere new, it was my job to find it on the map, and then tell you where to go. It never felt like a responsibility. It was more exciting than that. Nothing about it seemed like a job or a chore. More like a mission.” He was three.
I slowly began to learn my way around, but continued to depend on three-year-old Benjamin to help me navigate when Jim wasn’t around. I was terrified to drive on the highway after the long frightening drive up from Texas, so Benjamin learned the back roads to get us from one place to another. I think that both Jim and I started about this time to look to Benjamin as “head of the household” when Jim was away. Benjamin definitely had very different skills from most other three-year-olds. He was very verbal, with an enormous vocabulary, but he was also very physically coordinated. He learned to ride his two-wheeler just after turning three, and he was fearless when it came to almost everything! It wasn’t until he was much older that Benjamin realized he had done many unusual things for his age as a little kid. He talks about how he remembers sitting down with me at the kitchen table and helping with the grocery lists. At the grocery store, he remembers helping put Patrick in the seat in the cart, and then holding my hand as we navigated our way together up and down the aisles. He says, “It didn’t seem weird, because it was the way things had always been.”
Every morning Benjamin would ask me something like, “What’s going to happen today?” or “What’s our plan?” And we would go through the day together. “Maybe we could go to the library today. Or maybe you can take a walk. You can push Patrick in the stroller while I ride my bike.” He was helpful with Patrick, remembering where his juice was in the refrigerator, or where his dia
pers were located. He was horrible about picking up his toys, or getting ready for bed at night, but he had some pretty intense survival skills, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. Jim says now that he was worried back then about me having one of my “lightning strikes” in the car while driving with the boys. And apparently I did, although Benjamin is the only one who remembers these incidents. He says, “There were a few times when we would be going somewhere and you would pull over, and we’d have to sit for a while.” I would say to the boys, “I’m going to lie down for a minute.” And I would lie down with my hands over my head. Did I not tell Jim about these episodes on purpose, or did I honestly forget they had happened by the time he got home? Benjamin and Patrick somehow knew that they shouldn’t tell him when stuff like that happened, either. I was afraid of doing almost everything back then. But I was more afraid of Jim.
9
The Great Pretender
—Queen
Jim doesn’t remember us ever sitting down and having a specific conversation about how we weren’t going to tell people about my injury and the implications it continued to have for my life. Instead, it was just understood that there would be no discussions about it with any of our new neighbors and friends in Maryland. We did tell a few very close friends, over the years, a sort of shortened, watered-down version, making the whole experience seem far less serious and far more humorous than it was and continued to be. I don’t honestly know why, exactly. Was I embarrassed? Was Jim embarrassed? Did Jim really think that there was nothing wrong with me anymore, and that I was totally back to normal? Did he have to think that way in order to be able to leave the boys with me each day? I am sure we both wanted more than anything for everything to just be normal.
In September 1990, we enrolled Benjamin in a preschool program at our Methodist church. The following month, his teacher asked if I wanted to help chaperone the trip to the pumpkin patch and farm. I declined. I just couldn’t do it. Chaperoning a field trip was something I had never done before, and I might have been afraid of doing it wrong. I was constantly afraid of doing things wrong. But unfortunately, I did stuff wrong all the time. And Jim didn’t let me forget it. If I tried to change the bag on the vacuum cleaner, and ended up with dirt everywhere because I had installed it incorrectly; if I forgot to get bread, or eggs, or chips, or whatever Jim specifically asked me to get at the store; if Jim got a call at work from Benjamin’s preschool teacher that I had forgotten to pick Benjamin up that day; if I got lost coming home from the library, and at 6:30 I still hadn’t started dinner; if I mistakenly used bathroom cleaner instead of furniture polish on the wooden kitchen chairs and ruined a number of them; if I forgot to go to the dry cleaners to pick up Jim’s shirts: If any number of things like that happened, it meant I was stupid.
