Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (8 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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CHAPTER FIVE
GROWING PAIN
The “better” life was a small gas station in Compton that Dad leased along with an old, run-down shack of a house for us to live in. The front door of the house was four steps from the back door of the gas station, so grease and dirt became a way of life. An empty field adjacent to us was a breeding ground for rats, which had no problem finding their way into my bedroom. Occasionally they got brave enough to climb up my bedspread and run across the bed. When that happened, I was paralyzed by fright and unable to sleep.
Dad worked 14 hours a day, from seven in the morning until nine at night, six days a week. When he was not working, he was always “dead tired.” Considering how hard he worked, we barely survived.
Our poverty was obvious. No one lived in a worse house or drove a car that was older than ours. And even though I was able to get five new dresses for school—one for every day of the week—they were of such poor quality that they soon looked dowdy and ill-fitting. We ate so poorly that my hot lunch at school seemed like the finest gourmet meal. I went to bed hungry many nights when there was nothing in the kitchen but a nearly empty jar of mayonnaise and a bottle of ketchup. Usually I lived on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
Between the hunger and the rats, life seemed hopeless. My escape was to dream about being a beautiful movie star. I would make millions of dollars, wear beautiful clothes, be chauffeured in a limousine, and live in a palatial home kept spotless by a full-time maid. Everywhere I went, adoring fans and handsome suitors would give me the love I had never known at home.
There was a glimmer of hope when my sister was born. For awhile she provided Mother a new lease on life. And I was ecstatic. Though Suzy was nearly 12 years younger than I was, I viewed her as a companion—someone to talk to, to relate to, to love and hold. I saw her as my ticket out of intense loneliness. Also, seeing my mother care for someone else gave me hope that maybe she would care for me too.
One afternoon when I arrived home from school, I could hear Suzy, now three months old, crying in Mother’s bedroom. I went into my bedroom to attack a pile of homework. Suddenly Mother was standing over me. As I looked up, she dropped Suzy into my arms.
“Here! She’s all yours.”
“But I’m doing my homework,” I protested.
“Don’t argue with me. From now on Suzy is your responsibility. When you’re not in school, you take care of her.”
“What about drama? I was going to try out for the play.”
“You come right home when school is out!” she yelled. “Do you understand?”
I felt overwhelmed. How was I going to keep up on my homework? I had finally started to make some friends, but now I wouldn’t have a spare moment to develop those friendships. I couldn’t bring anyone home. The house was too filthy to have someone see it, and Mother didn’t want anyone in the house anyway. I tried to resent Suzy for being such a burden to me, but I couldn’t. She was sweet, good-natured, and loveable, and I grew attached to her. She became my total source of affection.
One morning shortly after my twelfth birthday, I woke up with a throbbing headache. I could barely stand up straight because of the cramps and back pain. I stumbled into the bathroom to show my mother the blood on my nightgown.
“Well, now you have the curse of all women,” Mother said in disgust, as if what happened was my fault. She had never, of course, warned me about the changes that would occur in my body. Her attitude communicated that I had done something irreparably wrong.
As my breasts began to grow, I noticed that the other girls in school were wearing pretty little bras. Tentatively I asked Mother to let me buy one too.
“We don’t have money to waste on you!” she snapped. She went to her bedroom, came back a few minutes later, and threw her maternity nursing bra at me.
“There,” she said. “You’ve got your bra. Now get out of my sight.”
“I can’t wear this!” I protested.
“And why not? It was good enough for me.”
“But it’s way too big. Can’t I buy my own bra? Please, I’ll earn the money myself.”
“No you can‘t! I didn’t have nice things when I was a kid. Why should you?”
There was no further discussion, so I had to wear what she gave me. I was mortified in gym class when I had to undress in front of the other girls. I tried to hide as much as I could, but was quickly discovered. “Where’d you get that thing?” said one girl with a loud voice. “Nobody wears that.” I wanted to crawl into my locker and disappear as all the girls started laughing.
True to my mother’s erratic nature, she shocked me one Sunday morning by saying, “Get dressed. We’re going to church.”
“Church?” I expressed my shock. We had never been in a church outside of a few weddings and funerals and the times Aunt Delores took us. “Where on earth did she get the idea to go to church?” I wondered. It seemed like such an uncharacteristically normal thing to do that I was eager to go.
I got Suzy ready and we drove to a pretty little church just a few miles away. Mother listened intently to the sermon and must have liked what she heard, for we came back the next Sunday. A few weeks later Mother started teaching a Sunday school class while I joined the young people’s program. As she began acting like a normal person, I was hopeful that Mother might start treating me nice too.
One great thing about church was that the youth group had terrific beach parties and picnics. I fell hopelessly in love with nearly every boy in the young people’s fellowship and tried anything to attract their attention. Because I was the poorest and the youngest, I thought the only way I could win them was to be an “easy necker.”
Unfortunately, someone caught me necking in the backseat of a car in the church parking lot while a youth party was going on inside the fellowship hall. Whoever reported it called the pastor and he called my mother. “You’ve been out whoring,” she yelled as she grabbed my hair, slammed my head against a wall, and began slapping my face with her free hand. “The pastor wants to see you. We’re going down there right now and maybe he will pound some sense into you.”
As I was brought into the pastor’s office I felt terribly ashamed. Mother had so frequently referred to me as a whore and a slut that now I felt like one as I stood before him. Surely he must be angry.
But the pastor looked at me with eyes of compassion and love. He invited me to sit down and gently said, “I don’t want a nice girl like you getting into trouble. I’m going to pray with you that this does not happen again.”
“That’s it?” I marveled to myself. He said nothing more except a short prayer that I didn’t hear because I was so shocked. No beating? No punishment? How could it be? He treated me with respect and love, and I felt like I was given a second chance. I vowed to never forget his mercy and never to do it again—at least not around the church.
While I was in junior high school, our family left the filthy shack and moved to a relatively nice house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Mother always improved during the first few months after a move. It was like a new beginning, and she tried really hard to take care of the house and keep an attractive appearance. Unfortunately, she couldn’t keep it up for long, and then she sank even deeper. She became irritable and mean and never said anything encouraging or smiled with approval. She called me obscene names, and corporal punishment was her sole mode of dealing with me. The only physical contact I had with her was when she slapped me across the mouth or struck my head.
Soon she was sleeping most of the day and roaming the house at night carrying on imaginary conversations. One night in a fit of rage—I have no idea what prompted it—she took the big family Bible she had bought after joining the church and hurled it out the back door, across the patio. It landed in a plot of dirt. I gathered she was mad at God and the church. She apparently forgave God, because in a few days the Bible was back inside the house again. However, she did not forgive the church, and we never went back.
She made friends with a few of the neighbors on our street, and while she never became so normal as to have them over, she was at least cordial. But when they were not around she screamed and raged at me for no apparent reason. Her vocabulary became liberally sprinkled with the most disgusting profanity. She only referred to me in filthy names, the nicest of which were pig, whore, and slut. Suzy was learning to talk very well and began to pick up some of the filthy words that Mother used and to treat her dolls like my mother treated me. Mother was horrified. Fearing that the neighbors would notice, she carefully cleaned up her language and controlled her actions better in front of Suzy.
Her discipline was consistently inconsistent. She got furious if I tried to clean our filthy house, yelling, “This is my house, not yours! If I want it clean, I’ll do it myself.” Yet when I did something seriously wrong, like the time I took the car out for a drive before I had a driver’s license, or set the bedroom curtains on fire while smoking, she said nothing. Her behavior made no sense, so I never knew what to expect. Her constant degrading words and abuse built such a deep hatred inside me that I began to wish she were dead.
Of course I couldn’t bring anyone home from school. I never knew from moment to moment what condition Mother would be in. I was always aware of the fact that I lived in a crazy house—not like the homes of normal people. There was no laughter, no fun, no peace in our lives, and no hope for it ever being any different.
I seldom saw my father. He left for the gas station before I got up and often returned home after I’d gone to bed. As far as my sister, Mother had an obvious affection for her. In fact, she went to the opposite extreme. While I was treated with violence and hatred, Suzy received no discipline whatever. Sometimes I wondered if Mother was trying to make up for the way she treated me. Despite the obvious discrepancy, I never felt jealous. I was glad that Mother could actually be nice to someone on a regular basis. Besides, Suzy was cute and affectionate, and she loved me. She was a little pal, my companion.
During my last year of junior high, I spent a night away from home with a girlfriend, Mary Hammil. It was the first time I had ever spent a night with a friend. Mother was very angry about my going, but I did it anyway. When Mary and her mother brought me back the following night, Mrs. Hammil joyfully told us the news that she was two months pregnant.
A week later as I walked in the door of our house after school, Mother grabbed me by the hair. She slammed me against the kitchen door and began slapping me as she screamed, “You murderer! You murderer! You’ve killed an innocent child! I hope you’re happy with yourself, you selfish bitch!”
My mind raced. What could I have done? Maybe I had left the front door open and my sister had gotten out and been hit by a car? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I yelled back. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“You killed Mrs. Hammil’s baby. It’s your fault. You didn’t listen to me. I hope you’re satisfied, you murderer!”
“What baby?” I spit in her face. “Mrs. Hammil doesn’t have a baby.”
“She lost her baby!” Mother screamed at the top of her lungs. “She had a miscarriage and it’s your fault because you made her pick you up and drive you home. That’s why the baby’s dead. You murderer!”
I pulled away, dashed into my room, slammed the door, and fell in a heap of sobs on my bed. “Oh no, God, no!” I cried. “The baby’s dead and it’s all my fault. Everyone will hate me. No one will have anything to do with me anymore.”
After awhile I started to calm down and tried to think rationally. I had to call Mary. I had to know what she thought about this. I opened the door and tiptoed toward the phone. Mother saw me. “Don’t touch that phone. It’s my phone, not yours.”
The next day at school I asked Mary what had happened. “Oh, nothing,” she replied casually. “Mom just started feeling sick and she went to the hospital and the baby miscarried. She’s all right.”
“My mother says it was my fault,” I said sheepishly. “She said when your mom drove over to pick me up that day it injured her badly.”
Mary laughed. “How silly! My mother had been driving all along. Your mother’s nuts.”
I laughed with her, but inside something tightened and my heart hardened even more against my mother.
Never,
I determined, would I let her devastate me like that again. She might beat me and try to destroy me verbally, but she would never penetrate the hatred I had for her. From now on I would look upon her as a crazy animal, never to be trusted.

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