Chronology of an Old Woman's Death
March 1st 2008 18:59
Okay, I'm going to step out there and do something a bit odd. Right now there is this incredible drama going on in my family and I just believe it is worthy of documenting. One because it is almost unbelievable and the other reason is just because it's intriguing. I will begin with a background on the family involved because its critical to what is going on. This is absolutely true and happening as I write. I hope you find it as entertaining as I do. It's ongoing, so I will be updating daily. Stay with me beyond this background because this is befitting of a Primetime Mystery segment.
This story begins with a rural midwestern couple who get married and have seven children, one after the other, literally. They were very poor. He worked in a factory and she was a stay at home mom who acted as a foreman with the children farming them out to relatives to do manual labor on their farms...starting at the age of six. None of the kids really minded because it got them out of a house that witnessed violence on a regular basis.
The violence was dramatic. The father did his eight hours at the factory and came home with certain expectations such as his dinner on the table, a cup of coffee in a pre-warmed cup and total silence so he could relax. If there was one little thing that didn't match his expectation, the perpetrator would get a beating and so would the mother because she didn't ensure that things were right. Now her family knew of the madness that went on in this house and tried everything to get her to leave, but she refused. In fact, her family's efforts simply made her life worse. He laid down the rules that she and the kids were never allowed to see her family again. The father monitored the odometer on the car and would not allow her to have a phone. She adapted though, quickly learning how to disconnect the odometer and she kept a telephone hidden that she could wire up when he wasn't home.
During the course of these seven kids growing up they witnessed and experienced things that no one should experience. Rather than bore you with a long history, I will summarize some of the memories these children grew up with:
Two of the boys were out trick or treating when they were 9 and 10 years old. A speeding car came by just as the nine year old was crossing the street. The ten year old witnessed his brother being hit and thrown 300 feet. He raced home frantically to tell his parents. Instead of the father and mother running to help their child the father had a fit, cursing and telling the mother it was her fault because she didn't control her kids...."now the little bastard will have to go to the hospital and that will cost us money!" The mother ran to her son and got there at the same time as the ambulance. This young man was seriously injured with head injuries and compound fractures landing him in the hospital for a whooping 2 months. During the two months, the father never visited and the mother had to hitchhike into town to visit her son because he refused to waste the gas to take her.
The father used to work on his car all the time. He would make his wife stand with a flashlight or play gopher getting him whatever he wanted. One day while holding the flashlight, she accidently dropped it. When she picked it up and apologized he hit her arm so hard with a big wrench that he broke it.
On one Easter, the mother had made a huge dinner for the family and as they sat down to eat, he got angry when he sipped his coffee because it was not hot enough...so he went into a rage and upset the entire table of food. The kids grabbed what they could and ran outside.
Keeping in mind that this was an extremely poor household. The children wore only clothes that were donated to them from local churches. The food they ate was taken from the farms they worked. HOWEVER, the father had a boat and every craftsman tool you could think of. He had a spring wardrobe and a winter wardrobe. The mother cleaned a clothing store on the side and therefore had some decent clothes that were given to her by the store owner.
With all the talk today about domestic abuse, we tend to feel sorry for the mother, but she had many times been offered a way out. Instead she stayed and allowed this man to beat her and her children. She allowed him to spend his check on himself while she and kids worked anything for pennies just to have a few clothes. She also taught these kids to lie about everything to try to avoid upsetting him. She also sent her oldest son to the grandparents home so that he could work their farm and take care of them and this was when he was twelve. She ended up sending the youngest son (the one that suffered some brain damage when hit by a car) to a neighbors house because she couldn't deal with him.
At thirteen, my husband made his father angry one day and he threw him out into the street, never to let him back in the house. He didn't care how or where he would go to survive and his mother did nothing to intervene.
The oldest daughter found herself pregnant at 17 and her father beat her untill she passed out, screaming at her calling her a whore and worse. Mama didn't intervene in that either. Following that, he beat the mother because it was "her fault that she raised a whore."
That's just a few of things that went on these kids lives. So, lets fast forward to when the kids were out of the house....
The house they grew up in was a two story old shack. The parents slept downstairs and kids upstairs with no heat and they could see the sky in many places above them. When it snowed, it snowed inside their room and the temperature would get so low that a glass of water and their "pee pot" would freeze. Well, when the last kid left they decided they were going to build a new home and they did. It was a nice three bedroom two bath home like normal people would live in. When they moved into the new home, the city fire department burned down the old one for practice.
I met my husband when he had returned from Viet Nam. He was great, but wouldn't take me to meet his family. I let it go at first because I wasn't sure how serious we were. Once we decided to get married, I told him I needed to meet them. He reluctantly agreed. I was stunned. They were in the process of moving to their new home. I have to admit I had never been in a house like that and was stunned at the evidence of some of their childhood documented in graffiti on their bedroom walls. It made me proud though, that my husband was such a gentle and compassionate soul inspite of his upbringing. It made me love him more....it also helped me to understand his quest for perfection in a home environment.
In my initial shock I did not realize that in the years to come I would see much more. I was raised in a nice military family. We were kind of poor but had everything we needed and in our home, the kids came first no matter what. What a contrast in our backgrounds. One shocking memory I had was when my husband and I were going to visit them. As we were driving down the road in front of their house, we passed his father on the road. He didn't acknowledge us and looked to be in a rage. As we pulled into their driveway, his mother was standing there sobbing and holding her arm. I jumped out and asked what had happened and she said, "the son of a bitch bit me!" I was sure I had misheard her so I asked again and in response she took her hand from her arm and there was a bloody bruised bite on her arm. You could see the print of every tooth, upper and lower. I was flabbergasted! A grown man biting someone? This was beyond what I could comprehend. I took her by her other arm and took her inside. Now in their house they had a downstairs rec room and kitchen where they spent most of their time and as I got to the top of the steps I could see that the kitchen floor below was totally covered in something. I went down and what I found was all of the doors ripped off the kitchen cabinets and the floor was covered with hamburger, coffee and popcorn seeds. He had trashed this place in a fit of anger because she didn't fix his eggs the right way.
More interesting than what had happened or my reaction to it, was my husband's reaction. He hadn't reacted when his mom showed me her arm and instead had just simply walked into the house. When I had gone downstairs and was standing there with my mouth open, he simply kicked through the crap on the floor and walked into the rec room and turned on the television.
This scared and amazed me. Later we talked for hours and he explained that for that minute he was just a kid again. This was normal, this was actually nothing compared to when he tried to strangle her or when they would come home from school and find her unconscious on the floor bleeding. He told me that when he went in the military and got his first check, the first thing he did was call his mom and offered to pay for a divorce and to get her set up in an apartment. She refused.
He went on to explain that he wanted parents to love, but they just made it so hard. He was one of the seven who actually survived all of this ugliness in one piece. Violence begets violence and his brothers have been known to abuse their wives and a couple of his sister's take abuse. All of them except my husband are totally focused on money and acquiring it (never spending it, even on their own kids). They are very self-absorbed and very into drama.
Well, two weeks ago, my mother-in-law had a major stroke at 81 years old and the fun and drama have just begun. I will write more tonight or tomorrow to get you up to date...you are not going to believe the things I will be telling you....come back, don't miss it.
This story begins with a rural midwestern couple who get married and have seven children, one after the other, literally. They were very poor. He worked in a factory and she was a stay at home mom who acted as a foreman with the children farming them out to relatives to do manual labor on their farms...starting at the age of six. None of the kids really minded because it got them out of a house that witnessed violence on a regular basis.
The violence was dramatic. The father did his eight hours at the factory and came home with certain expectations such as his dinner on the table, a cup of coffee in a pre-warmed cup and total silence so he could relax. If there was one little thing that didn't match his expectation, the perpetrator would get a beating and so would the mother because she didn't ensure that things were right. Now her family knew of the madness that went on in this house and tried everything to get her to leave, but she refused. In fact, her family's efforts simply made her life worse. He laid down the rules that she and the kids were never allowed to see her family again. The father monitored the odometer on the car and would not allow her to have a phone. She adapted though, quickly learning how to disconnect the odometer and she kept a telephone hidden that she could wire up when he wasn't home.
During the course of these seven kids growing up they witnessed and experienced things that no one should experience. Rather than bore you with a long history, I will summarize some of the memories these children grew up with:
Two of the boys were out trick or treating when they were 9 and 10 years old. A speeding car came by just as the nine year old was crossing the street. The ten year old witnessed his brother being hit and thrown 300 feet. He raced home frantically to tell his parents. Instead of the father and mother running to help their child the father had a fit, cursing and telling the mother it was her fault because she didn't control her kids...."now the little bastard will have to go to the hospital and that will cost us money!" The mother ran to her son and got there at the same time as the ambulance. This young man was seriously injured with head injuries and compound fractures landing him in the hospital for a whooping 2 months. During the two months, the father never visited and the mother had to hitchhike into town to visit her son because he refused to waste the gas to take her.
The father used to work on his car all the time. He would make his wife stand with a flashlight or play gopher getting him whatever he wanted. One day while holding the flashlight, she accidently dropped it. When she picked it up and apologized he hit her arm so hard with a big wrench that he broke it.
On one Easter, the mother had made a huge dinner for the family and as they sat down to eat, he got angry when he sipped his coffee because it was not hot enough...so he went into a rage and upset the entire table of food. The kids grabbed what they could and ran outside.
Keeping in mind that this was an extremely poor household. The children wore only clothes that were donated to them from local churches. The food they ate was taken from the farms they worked. HOWEVER, the father had a boat and every craftsman tool you could think of. He had a spring wardrobe and a winter wardrobe. The mother cleaned a clothing store on the side and therefore had some decent clothes that were given to her by the store owner.
With all the talk today about domestic abuse, we tend to feel sorry for the mother, but she had many times been offered a way out. Instead she stayed and allowed this man to beat her and her children. She allowed him to spend his check on himself while she and kids worked anything for pennies just to have a few clothes. She also taught these kids to lie about everything to try to avoid upsetting him. She also sent her oldest son to the grandparents home so that he could work their farm and take care of them and this was when he was twelve. She ended up sending the youngest son (the one that suffered some brain damage when hit by a car) to a neighbors house because she couldn't deal with him.
At thirteen, my husband made his father angry one day and he threw him out into the street, never to let him back in the house. He didn't care how or where he would go to survive and his mother did nothing to intervene.
The oldest daughter found herself pregnant at 17 and her father beat her untill she passed out, screaming at her calling her a whore and worse. Mama didn't intervene in that either. Following that, he beat the mother because it was "her fault that she raised a whore."
That's just a few of things that went on these kids lives. So, lets fast forward to when the kids were out of the house....
The house they grew up in was a two story old shack. The parents slept downstairs and kids upstairs with no heat and they could see the sky in many places above them. When it snowed, it snowed inside their room and the temperature would get so low that a glass of water and their "pee pot" would freeze. Well, when the last kid left they decided they were going to build a new home and they did. It was a nice three bedroom two bath home like normal people would live in. When they moved into the new home, the city fire department burned down the old one for practice.
I met my husband when he had returned from Viet Nam. He was great, but wouldn't take me to meet his family. I let it go at first because I wasn't sure how serious we were. Once we decided to get married, I told him I needed to meet them. He reluctantly agreed. I was stunned. They were in the process of moving to their new home. I have to admit I had never been in a house like that and was stunned at the evidence of some of their childhood documented in graffiti on their bedroom walls. It made me proud though, that my husband was such a gentle and compassionate soul inspite of his upbringing. It made me love him more....it also helped me to understand his quest for perfection in a home environment.
In my initial shock I did not realize that in the years to come I would see much more. I was raised in a nice military family. We were kind of poor but had everything we needed and in our home, the kids came first no matter what. What a contrast in our backgrounds. One shocking memory I had was when my husband and I were going to visit them. As we were driving down the road in front of their house, we passed his father on the road. He didn't acknowledge us and looked to be in a rage. As we pulled into their driveway, his mother was standing there sobbing and holding her arm. I jumped out and asked what had happened and she said, "the son of a bitch bit me!" I was sure I had misheard her so I asked again and in response she took her hand from her arm and there was a bloody bruised bite on her arm. You could see the print of every tooth, upper and lower. I was flabbergasted! A grown man biting someone? This was beyond what I could comprehend. I took her by her other arm and took her inside. Now in their house they had a downstairs rec room and kitchen where they spent most of their time and as I got to the top of the steps I could see that the kitchen floor below was totally covered in something. I went down and what I found was all of the doors ripped off the kitchen cabinets and the floor was covered with hamburger, coffee and popcorn seeds. He had trashed this place in a fit of anger because she didn't fix his eggs the right way.
More interesting than what had happened or my reaction to it, was my husband's reaction. He hadn't reacted when his mom showed me her arm and instead had just simply walked into the house. When I had gone downstairs and was standing there with my mouth open, he simply kicked through the crap on the floor and walked into the rec room and turned on the television.
This scared and amazed me. Later we talked for hours and he explained that for that minute he was just a kid again. This was normal, this was actually nothing compared to when he tried to strangle her or when they would come home from school and find her unconscious on the floor bleeding. He told me that when he went in the military and got his first check, the first thing he did was call his mom and offered to pay for a divorce and to get her set up in an apartment. She refused.
He went on to explain that he wanted parents to love, but they just made it so hard. He was one of the seven who actually survived all of this ugliness in one piece. Violence begets violence and his brothers have been known to abuse their wives and a couple of his sister's take abuse. All of them except my husband are totally focused on money and acquiring it (never spending it, even on their own kids). They are very self-absorbed and very into drama.
Well, two weeks ago, my mother-in-law had a major stroke at 81 years old and the fun and drama have just begun. I will write more tonight or tomorrow to get you up to date...you are not going to believe the things I will be telling you....come back, don't miss it.
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Comment by S.L. Bradish
Comment by Cathy
Fakes Frauds Fools
Anyway, the best is yet to come......I promise..
Comment by S.L. Bradish
Comment by Cathy
Fakes Frauds Fools