Before
Mom always exuded silent strength. Born from a red-headed woman, my mom, a red-headed youngest child of seven siblings, fought. She fought for family, friends. Everyone but herself. For herself she drank. She smoked. To her benefit, not one time do I remember Mom drunk. I remember sneaking a drink of her Mountain Dew only to find it wasn’t just Mountain Dew. Drinking was an on and off challenge. Never really something I worried about out loud. I was cared for. Loved. She was never absent or passed out on the floor. But smoking?
Mom pressed her lips around her first cigarette at sixteen. Her story goes like this:
“Rhonda and I tried smoking once in high school Pulled a puff. Just curious about the fuss. Rhonda never touched them again. I never put them down.”
I never knew her without her smoking. Growing up in the country, I built my bedtime around it. Nighttime in the country created many sounds and shadows. Whip-o-wills. Cats in heat outside my window. The house makes noises like ghosts walking on carpet. My full wall-length window looking out onto the deck and over the pond didn’t help, especially after watching Salem’s Lot.
Dad refused to let me sleep with the radio on to drown out the sounds. I was there to sleep, not listen to music.
“Mom, are you going to smoke before you go to bed,” I asked her every night. If she did, she’d have the television on, right outside my bedroom. I’d have cover sound. I think that is when I developed the ability to quickly slip into sleep.
***
She gave birth to me at twenty-four. Batman had Robin. Elizabeth Corrien had Terra Corinne.
My biological father was abusive, I was told. Not to me. Not to my half-sister, Erica. Just Mom. Photographs of her bruised face trying to hide behind her glasses and smile sit in a plastic bag in my Box of Mom. She lived a nightmare of “Restraining orders are just paper. They won’t stop me.”
Terry held the title of Sheriff. Maybe Deputy Sheriff? I don’t know. Something with power. Mom and her sister, Linda, spoke of him as if he wielded the power of the gods themselves, straight down to the unjustifiable and cruel manner with which it was dealt.
It took two years for her to work out the plan to escape but escape she did. He had taken her after they got married. From Indiana all the way to Montana. Far from anyone she knew.
“One night after he left for his shift, I took you and ran to a friend’s house. Another deputy sheriff and his wife. They let us hide there until it was time to go to the airport. You tore your hair barrettes out of your hair on the flight from Montana to Indiana and threw them at the people in front of us. I wanted to bring Erica. He’d have never allowed it. He’d have come for her. For us.”
Leaving Erica ate at her. Always. Running from abuse traumatized her. She confronted her despair with cigarettes, maybe the occasional drink. At age three I sat on the floor of our apartment. Dumped her purse on her guitar. Swallowed and choked on a penny as Mom slept on the couch. An ashtray full of butts. Asleep, perhaps from drinking a bit too much, perhaps from stress, she still sensed danger – those leopard senses kicking in. I do not remember this story. She told it often, though.
“I had to dig that penny out of your throat with my finger.”
By the time Mom married Dad, Floyd, the man who adopted and raised me, a pack and a half burned from her fingers into her lungs each day. “Smoke follows beauty,” she always joked when I complained. But she smashed the butt into the glass ashtray as she said it. Sometimes an exasperated sigh exited her lips at my protests. That sigh followed her out the room, though, as she walked the smoke away from me. From the kitchen, through the dining room, out the living room, onto the balcony. A trail of smoke followed Mom as she distanced me, spreading the smell, the chemicals, throughout the house.
Terra Orndorff 