I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (13 page)

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.

—Ozzy Osbourne

W
e 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.’ ”

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 diapers 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.

—Queen

J
im 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.

I have tried countless times to put myself in Jim’s shoes. It must have been more than a little infuriating to live with me. Our home should have been the place where he could relax, spend time with his kids, and carry on adult conversations with me. Our home was none of those things.

Our constant quest for normalcy made every event a high-stakes performance. As a way to illustrate this fact, I’ll relate a story that we laugh about now, but at the time it was not at all amusing. That first Christmas we lived in Maryland, Jim thought it would be fun to go and chop down a tree to decorate for our new
house. He had fond childhood memories of finding and cutting down the perfect Christmas tree with his family every December, and he wanted to start a new tradition with Patrick and Benjamin. So, off we went. Jim was carrying an ax and a saw. I was carrying Patrick and holding on to Benjamin’s hand as we trudged through the snow. My boys and I had never seen snow before. When it snowed for the first time early that December, I can remember Benjamin, in his pajamas, barreling out onto the deck, full speed ahead, so loud and excited. Patrick, always more cautious, sat in the doorway for a bit, hunched down, touching the flakes tentatively with his fingers, before walking out onto the deck. I can remember being a little confused as to why snow was both white and wet. I had seen pictures of snow, so I should have known it was white, but I didn’t expect it to be
so
white and I don’t know why, but I thought it would have a different consistency.