Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (9 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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Mother attempted to make Christmas enjoyable that year, but it was an empty time for me. The season where all families were happily together only pointed up the loneliness I felt, and I ached for it all to end.
Mother surprised me on Christmas day by giving me a small green diary. She gave me other things too, but I felt that this was an unusually thoughtful gift, and I cherished it. I loved to read and write, and any free moments I had were spent writing stories, plays, poems, and song lyrics. I loved anything that had to do with writing, and the diary would be a wonderful way to express my pent-up feelings. I was so anxious to begin writing in it on January first that I wasn’t even disturbed when I lost one of the two keys that came with it.
As I began keeping a daily record of my thoughts and activities, I particularly made note of who noticed me each day and who didn’t. I was desperate for affirmation of my worth and nearly begged for it from everyone I knew. At the same time I was suspicious of people who paid attention to me, feeling that there must be something wrong with them if they did. Because there was never any closeness, communication, or emotional contact in my family, I tried to meet those needs through boyfriends. When that didn’t work, I fantasized in my diary. Though I continued to do well in school, it was not enough to sustain the emptiness, loneliness, and desperation I felt. “Isn’t there someone who can love me?” I used to cry at night to a distant and vague God somewhere out in the universe.
Mother seemed to know everything I did, as if she had hired detectives. What I was doing wrong seemed mild compared to her accusations, however. The degrading, filthy language she used to address me and the slaps on the mouth I received suddenly and for no apparent reason became more unbearable. I began having nightmares again about her coming after me with a knife.
Soon she had me thinking that maybe it was I who was going crazy.
“Where is your white skirt?” she asked me one day.
“In my closet. Where else would it be?” I retorted dis respectfully.
“It’s not there. You’ve done something with it. You’re giving your clothes away to your friends,” she accused. Then she ranted on about my negligence.
I searched through Suzy’s room, the laundry, and the pile of ironing but couldn’t find it anywhere. I didn’t consider looking in Mother’s room, for she was very protective of her private property and I was never allowed to look in her closet or drawers.
Late that afternoon, as I went into my closet for something else, there was my white skirt hanging right in front.
“Here’s my white skirt!” I yelled to my mother. “Did you put it here?”
“Me put it there? It was probably there all along. You’re so blind. You must be going crazy. Your mind is very sick. I think you’re mentally ill,” she said with authority.
Although these incidents were common and I suspected that she planned them, part of me began to believe her. “I am going crazy,” I thought. “I can’t cope with life. I’m a misfit. I don’t belong anywhere. I can’t think clearly. I feel lost.” I began to question why I was even alive.
One evening I was across the street at a girlfriend’s house watching her prepare for a date. She was a beautiful girl and very popular with the boys—everything I desired to be but wasn’t. As I compared myself to her, my depression became unbearable. By the time I left her house to return home, I was filled with pain and self-loathing. When I opened my front door, I met two angry stares. Dad said, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
Before I had a chance to answer, Mother’s venom began to spew out. “You’ve been whoring around the neighborhood like a slut. You’ve been with ... ” and she began to list names of boys I liked.
I fled to my bedroom. How did she know all those names and details? Sure I’d been attracted to those boys, but I had certainly never mentioned them to her. How could she have known my thoughts?
Mother followed me into the bedroom to continue her accusations. She spit out her words between clenched teeth: “Your father and I have decided you can’t go across the street anymore. You can’t see your friends after school and you can no longer use the phone.” She couldn’t threaten me with taking away my allowance because I didn’t get one, or saying I couldn’t go someplace special because I never went anyplace special. But what few privileges I’d had were now gone.
When she finally left the room, I didn’t cry. It was as if I’d been returned to the closet and I was a little child again. Fear, terror, hopelessness, and futility flooded over me, and I could not withstand the magnitude of this force. The voice in my head said, “It will never be any different.” If that was true, I could no longer bear to face another day.
I waited until the house was quiet, then slipped into the bathroom, opened up the cabinet, and proceeded to empty every medicine bottle and swallow every pill. I swallowed 1½ bottles of Bufferin, plus pain-killers, sleeping pills, and a couple of prescription drugs. When I was done I went back to my room, put on a clean nightgown and robe, and laid down in my bed knowing I’d never wake up again. This wasn’t a plan for getting attention or shocking people into caring. I just wanted to end the agony inside me.
When I opened my eyes again, I could not focus. The room was spinning and I felt weak, dizzy, and sick to my stomach. I rolled over, noted the sunlight, and tried to focus on my clock. It was one P.M.
What happened? What went wrong? Why was I still alive? Gradually I remembered. Sometime in the middle of the night, Mother had held me over the bathtub and forced me to drink some vile thing until I vomited.
I stumbled to the bathroom and locked the door. The empty bottles were in the trash. Most of what I had taken was aspirin. I looked at the other bottles. The sleeping pills and pain pills were old, from the time right after Suzy was born, when Mother had trouble resting. Maybe they had lost their power. Obviously they weren’t enough to kill me, but just enough to make me very sick.
As I returned to bed, I reviewed all of Mother’s accusations the night before. Where had she gotten that information? How did she know about those boys? Then it clicked. The diary! The lost key! Everything was in my diary, and she was using it to spy on me. Even my most private thoughts were subject to her scrutiny and dissection.
From behind my closed door I could hear the muffled sound of Mother running the vacuum cleaner. Whenever something horrible happened, she ran the vacuum. It was her way of denying the problem and appearing to be perfect. And what was the problem? That I was good for nothing, a disgrace to the human race.
Or could it be that
she
was the problem? I had seen enough families now to realize that my mother was not normal. Something was desperately wrong with her. Lately she had started talking about people watching her through the TV or following her when she left the house. When Dad or I had tried to dissuade her, she became hysterical, and the force of her hysteria overwhelmed us. The number of people trying to “kill” her was constantly increasing—communists, Catholics, blacks, whites, the rich, the poor, Baptists, Armenians, the Kennedys, and on and on until the list eventually included everyone we knew.
When I finally got up late that afternoon, Mother didn’t say a word, not even to acknowledge my presence or find out how I was feeling. And I said nothing to her. It was as if we had silently agreed to never mention the incident to anyone.
Two days later I returned to school. “Flu” was the explanation on the note from home. I wasn’t sure why I was alive, but the crisis was over and for some reason I didn’t feel like dying anymore. Maybe it was because I knew Mother realized she had gone beyond the bounds of decency. However, I entertained no hope that she would ever change. Telling Dad was out of the question. I knew that if I ever mentioned anything to him, Mother would accuse me of lying and I would get punished. He always believed her.
Mother, of course, still didn’t extend herself to me in any way, but she stopped going for the throat. We went back to doing what our whole family did best—pretending that nothing was wrong. The only solution for my life was to finish high school and then leave home as quickly as possible. All of my activities became geared toward that goal.
CHAPTER SIX
ABIDING HATRED
My strategy for escape had several elements. First, after we moved again before my junior year in high school, I revised my ways of gaining attention at my new school. I traded dirty language and loose actions for more respectable methods, such as running for school office and acting in school dramas. I found that if I practiced my lines long enough, I could speak in a way that no one would suspect I had a speech problem.
In spite of the improvement, I knew I needed professional speech therapy. So as soon as I turned 16, I began working in a department store in order to earn enough money to buy a car and pay for voice lessons. When I had earned 200 dollars I told Dad about my plan, and one evening he said he’d seen an ad for a little old Ford. “Let’s go check it out,” he said. I was thrilled with Dad’s interest. He could relate to me well when it came to cars.
The car wasn’t much to look at, but Dad said it had a good engine and that with a few minor adjustments in his gas station it would be in good running condition.
“What color do you want to paint it?” Dad asked.
“Blue. But I can’t afford it.”
“Isn’t it your birthday next week?” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. But sure enough, on my birthday, Dad drove the car into the driveway. It was purring, and it was painted my favorite shade of blue. Mother watched me through the window as I gave Dad a big hug and took the car for a spin.
Mother glared at me when I finally got home. “I didn’t have a car when I was a teenager,” she sneered. “Why should you have one? Think you’re something special, don’t you?” I silently walked past her to my room and slammed the door. Through the closed door she shouted, “And what makes you think you’re going to take voice lessons? I never had singing lessons. You’re not going to have them either.”
In spite of her opposition, I started studying with a voice teacher. Even with professional help I soon discovered that overcoming my speech problems was going to be hard work. The tension in my throat was so great that it took time just to get my jaw unlocked and the throat open. I spoke so rapidly that slowing my speech and making it more intelligible took hours of boring practice and then yielded only barely distinguishable results. Out of frustration, I ended up in tears after nearly every practice session.
I finally saw the fruit of my labor when I got the lead in the school play and became Senior Class Treasurer. Dad was happy for me. Mother was mad. She continued to remind me that I was still a whore and a slut no matter how many things I did. “You’ll never amount to anything, you worthless _,” she would hiss as I left for my voice lesson.
The next part of my plan was to earn enough money to afford college. Following graduation, we moved to a small apartment near Knott’s Berry Farm. I found work there, and so did my dad. The gas station was losing money, so he decided to try a regular nine-to-five job.
Early one morning on my day off, I decided to clean the tiny room that my six-year-old sister and I shared. I couldn’t stand her mess any longer. Every drawer and her side of the closet and bedroom were filthy and cluttered with things that should have been trashed long ago. Suzy helped for awhile, then went outside to play. Mother entered as I was putting the finishing touches on the room. She had just awakened, and her eyes were puffy and burned with anger as she asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

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