We spent today with Kim’s Mom…Yvette. She has a really bad chest cold- that’s going around the entire area…Mom had an MD appt for a check up. Things are deteriorating quickly.

Yvette was born in 1945. She had three daughters, all in the 60’s, by different fathers. She doesn’t know who the actual Dad’s are to Kim and her sisters. She married Mack in 1969, who adopted the girls as his own. They were all born here in NH and they lived in Peterborough, right up the road from me. Mack died about 8 yrs ago of a heart attack. Yvette has been an alcoholic for as long as I can remember.

Way back when we were little kids, Kim and I would play by the pond. There was a little beach there- man made by a big mound of sand someone had dumped off. Through the yrs that mound flattened down. It was a favorite spot for Kim and me. We would play in the water and pretend to be aliens, LOL, influenced by re-runs of Lost In Space. My family had a boat house, but we never kept our boat in it. Instead it became the play house for the neighborhood kids. It was right next to our little beach. Jimmy would come over with Janine, and together we would pretend the house was a big space ship. Hours and hours were spent in this area, playing and fighting and laughing and all that stuff.

One day we decided it would be really cool to take the boat out onto the pond. The boat would be a neat satelite ship…and so it was. We dragged it out into the water and climbed into it. Did we ask our folks? No. Did they notice all the glee and noise and tugging and lugging that occurred? No. Our parents were all drunk, sitting on the porch of my house. We were less than 100 feet away from them.

We managed to row the boat on into the middle of the pond. I’m sure we made a ot of commotion and noise- 4 young (5, 6, 7 yr olds)…the further out we got, the louder we laughed and the world looked different. The pond was at the base of Pack Monadnock Mnt- which is really just an ant hill, but to a little kid, it looked like Mnt. Everest. I remember looking UP at it and being in awe of it’s massive size. Heh. Next thing I know, Kim falls out of the boat and into the pond. She can’t swim. She can barely keep herself afloat…Jimmy knew how to swim and being the only boy out of the lot, he jumped in and “saved” her. By dragging her to the shore. He wasn’t strong enough to push her back into the boat. That left Janine and I in the boat by ourselves.

I’ll never forget it…and neither will Kim. Her mother, Yvette came over and dragged Kim by her long hair, pulled her pants down, spanked her hard and called her every name in the book.
Kim screamed and cried. We all deserved to be whacked for what we did, no doubt. Jimmy’s Dad smacked him with a branch from a tree; thats when the rest of the grown ups noticed me and Janine out in the boat.

My Dad yelled to me to row the boat back to the shore. Which I did with a lof of huffing and puffing. I was very little for my age- barely 2 1/2 feet tall at that age. Janine was bigger and older and she tried to help but she was scared to death. She knew she would be getting what her brother got.

We eventually got the boat to the shore and my Dad pulled me out, by my hair (that seemed to be a common thing). I got spanked and swatted and was sent to my room. We all went to our respective rooms that night…and after all settled down and the grown up had passed out, literally, we snuck outside to the woods to our secret fort. There we shared the horror stories of our parents beating us up after we got home. Kim got burned by cigarette butts. She showed us the burns on her back and belly. Jimmy and Janine just got spanked again as did I…Kim always got the worst of it. Her mother was the one who scared us all the most. She was the youngest Mom of them all, the one with the meanest demeanor. We called her Yvette the Witch cause she looked like one. She was very abusive to Kim and her sisters.

Which brings me back to now. I look at Yvette and see just a shell of that witch- she has aged and she has shrunk a little. She isn’t so scary now. Kim and her sisters tower over her now, and in spite of the burns and beatings, they love their Mother. They look out for her. They cherish her. Yvette is dying. She has Alzheimer’s Disease which has robbed her of those very memories her children must endure. Every now and again though, the old Yvette comes through. She will be sitting at the table having her lunch…and make a snide comment to Kim about her looks or clothes or something like that. Or she will be sundowning in the early evenings, seeking out her daughters who…must be out misbehaving as always. In her mind the kids are still little. She looks for them while smacking her hands together, as if in preparation for what she used to do to them.

It amazes me that Yvette’s daughters stand by her. I don’t know if I would have the ump to do that. Family rocks for sure. Forgiveness is a wonderful value.