When you decide to move, do you tell your children why?
How does someone justify moving and not telling their children?
Do you know that the age of reasoning is seven? But it can be as early as six or as late as eight.
How does someone justify moving and not telling their children? Do you know that the age of reasoning is seven? But it can be as early as six or as late as eight.
I want to make a case for your children to be brought into the conversation early.
Even babies feel tension with your walls, and certainly within the parents.
So, be honest and tell them why and what to expect. My parents were old school. Children didn’t need to know, and their opinions and feelings don’t matter. We are more enlightened nowadays and know that children’s feelings and opinions matter.
That is why I was clueless when my parents moved me and my four siblings in with our grandparents. They didn’t think telling us what was happening and why moving was necessary.
Leaving me behind would have been more merciful. After all, I was, as Mother said, too ugly to name. At six, I felt lost the first time we moved. No one told us we were moving. Not then, nor the six more times we moved in three years. Of course, by this time, I had picked up on the signals; after all, I was nine.
Middle class with conveniences.
Daddy’s business was on the property. The milkman, coke man, and the Dutch Oven Bakery truck called on us.
We became beggars within days. We could smell fruit ripening out of our reach. Placed in a closet with only a curtain for a door by the grandmother, who rarely spoke to us in a civil tone. The fruit was for the cousins who lived at the foot of the hill.
It was now an outhouse that replaced our indoor bathroom.
We had to learn how to use a chamber pot (or slop jar) at night and whose duty was to empty it in the morning. A most unpleasant experience, it fell to me and my brother, who was eight.
The twins were still in cribs, placed between two regular beds. Two boys in one bed, me in the other. The rooms in my grandparents’ old four-square farmhouse were huge. My dad and five brothers had shared this room growing up, and four girls shared another of the same size. There was Granny’s parlor, with glass doors, to see the beautiful furniture; it was an adults-only space.
The property we left in Atlanta was what Daddy bought through the GI Bill. When he returned from WW II. A house set off the highway, and his auto body repair business was at the bottom of the hill on the back of the property. He had contracts with the Atlanta Farmer’s Market and Fulton County Schools for their buses. Plus, there was plenty of word-of-mouth business. Busy enough to work with one or two other men. My uncles.
I was lost and afraid. That house had been my security.
Here is where I was traumatized the first time when a noise in the hallway awakened me. I opened my bedroom door just to peek. There was Daddy on the floor, and Mama was beating him in the head with her high heel. Blood was splattering, and I was scared. I closed the door and went back to bed. I told my brother in the morning, and we went to Daddy’s shop to see if he was alive. He was there and had a bandage around his head.
Now, I knew a little because I listened to adult conversations. I knew my Daddy was drinking with some of his brothers, and it seemed they sometimes ended up in jail.
I started to second grade. It wasn’t long until the teacher announced we would go on a field trip. We would walk to some city buildings, and the jail was one of them.
I hoped or prayed that my Daddy or uncles would not be there.
I was so afraid. Of course, they showed us an empty cell.
It’s time to move again. Down the highway far enough that we have to change schools. Here, my brothers and I share a room. We find friends in the neighborhood, and I make a friend at the new school.
We move again, farther down the highway. I get to stay in the same school. Sometimes, Mother takes Daddy to work. She leaves us alone all day with the babies, still in cloth diapers and on bottles.
I have turned seven, but changing diapers and taking care of babies are not things I should be doing.
My brother was nine, and we became good at caring for them. I don’t think Daddy knew what she did when she kept the car.
Next, we move back up the highway to the school we attended a few moves ago. I go to third grade here. The school system will not let a bus come down the unpaved road we live on because of the ruts. So if Daddy’s off on a drinking binge (those usually last three weeks), we have to walk over a mile. We live part of the time without electricity and for more than three weeks without running water. Food was scarce.
The house was the biggest and most luxurious we had lived in.
We kids thought it must belong to some movie star. This is a place where the twins go missing, and they are not three years old yet. Law enforcement came to help look. There was talk of searching the Chattahoochee River, which wasn’t far from the house. Someone locates the twins asleep behind some shrubbery.
This is also where a major fire occurs across the road. There are no homes on the property, but the large barn that goes with the house is there. Fire services bring in heavy equipment to cut a fire break and set backfires to get under control. We watched animals, deer, rabbits, and even rats, try to escape the flames.
I think we moved again shortly after the fire. We kids were told to say nothing of Daddy working on the water pump before the blaze started. The pump was on that side of the road. The blaze likely began with a miss-tossed cigarette. The pump- house and barn were saved.
We move North up the highway again, farther this time, and I attend fourth grade here at a new school. I don’t want to make friends because we will leave them.
Yes, I am a depressed and angry nine-year-old.
I finally made a couple of friends, and of course, over the summer, we moved again. North, a few miles, but another new school.
Three years of living like gypsies. We had moved six times. We moved back to my grandparents’ house for a while. I didn’t count that. We weren’t moving to improve things, but because both parents had alcoholism. We kids didn’t know they had lost the house in Atlanta and the business.
Can we stay here?
With this move, Daddy would be away from his drinking buddies. He would be working at a car dealership owned by our landlord.
Here, I wanted to find security. The house was the worst one so far. It was part of a building that had been moved there. The wallpaper was stained with oil. Mother wouldn’t let us use the bathtub until she bleached it. It had been the habitat for a raccoon for the family who lived there before us. The house consisted of a twenty-six-foot-long living room. And what the landlord called three bedrooms, with no closets anywhere. A kitchen and a bathroom.
This move felt different.
Were we going to put down roots? We moved here on July 4, 1957.
My sister and I shared one of the bedrooms. The oldest brother took the smallest bedroom. My parents, the other large one, and that left two brothers to sleep on a bed at one end of the long living room.
We all had to go through our parents’ room and my oldest brother’s to get to the bathroom. My brothers never had any privacy. No wall was ever constructed to block out the noise and light. When my oldest brother married and left home, the next oldest boy took his room. When he entered the Marines, the youngest boy moved to the smallest bedroom and out of the living room.
Another sister, the final child, would join us a few years later.
We did stay, and all grew up here. All but one of us would get married and move out.
Two of the boys joined the Marines.
And when one went to Vietnam, Mother’s drinking became something we all noticed.
This is the house where I would get beat the most and where I tried to die twice before I was thirteen. I was so depressed and so angry and felt so unloved. I would have the most birthdays here. Every year, Mother would remind me that she didn’t name me because I was too ugly to name. I am sure the other five children have good birthday memories. Not me; I can not find one pleasant memory related to my birthdays.
The youngest would soon be a college graduate, our only one.
But before that happened, Mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She passed on November 19, 1982; Daddy had passed away on January 8, 1972.
At thirteen, I would learn about God while living here and get saved by a hellfire and brimstone preacher. But I didn’t know about the Holy Spirit until several years later and what an active role He wanted to play in my life. Thanks to Jesus for giving me a new life without bitterness or depression. One full of joy.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever — the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. ( John 14:16–17 NIV)
We all need security.
The five of us probably more so because we all bought homes, and every child became successful. But, we found true security in the Lord first. Going through such a difficult childhood made us all grateful and generous people.
