Part ii. The Divorce

trigger warning: mentions of trauma, neglect, divorce, homelessness

THE CHANCE MEETING

In the mid 1970's a man and a woman meet on a city bus in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The man is from India, with a handsome, charismatic smile and dark coffee colored skin. He is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Concordia University. He has already adopted the fashion of the times; flair paints and a smart button down shirt with a tapered collar. The woman is an American and a student at McGill University. She looks beautiful in a sundress that reveals her pale milky skin. 

"Are you from India?" She asks. 

"Tamil Nadu," he replies. 

"Vanakkam," she greets him in his native language. 

He is startled by her familiarity with his culture. She has always had a fascination and love for India, she explains, and she even did a trip by herself the year before. Thus begins a whirlwind romance, resulting in pregnancy and marriage in only a few months, the woman 21, and the man 26. 

 

 Mom has requested to not show her image

 

EARLY CHILDHOOD

 

Years: 1982-1994

Albums of the Time: 

Bruce Springsteen- Born in the U.S.A. (Vinyl)

Sesame Street 2 Original Cast (Vinyl)

Amy Grant-   Heart in Motion (Cassette)

DC Talk- Self Titled album (Cassette)

The Bangles- Everything (Cassette)

My early childhood was mostly a happy one. My parents were almost hippies; easy going about everything. We were raised without religion. We were free range children, going unsupervised most of the time. Eventually things began to sour with my parents' relationship. I remember a lot of fighting. I remember waking up in the night to them arguing, and walking in on my dad throwing a chair across the room. I didn't understand why they were fighting. Sometimes my dad would come home smelling like beer. It made my mom angry. Sometimes she would be talking about the babysitters. I learned later that my dad was being inappropriate with the babysitters, and this was a source of animosity between them. (More on that later)

 

 2 years old

 

I'm in the middle, in red

 

I'm the one hanging off my dad's back

 

One day my parents were in a particularly bad fight. My mom tried to get away in the car, and my dad stood in the driveway to prevent her from leaving. My mom kept driving really slowly, to the point where my dad was on the hood of the car and the car kept moving. Eventually she stopped. I remember them being very immature in their fights like that.

One day some Christian people came to the house. They told my mom that my dad was abusive and she should leave him. My mom started turning to religion more and more as a way to escape the relationship. She didn't have enough strength on her own to leave him. I remember my dad on a rampage one day. He was tearing up a bible, saying that Christianity was changing my mom. I hid in the closet.

 

THE KIDNAPPING

One day, when I was in 2nd grade, my mom announced that we were going to visit my grandmother and we should pack for the weekend. What we didn't know is she was taking us away without telling my dad, and she wasn't planning to come back. I heard later that she called her mom, my grandmother, and she told her not to come with us kids. So my mom took us with a few belonging in the car and she drove up to NH or VT, to some Born Again Christian church, and pleaded for help. We were essentially homeless. Some Christian family took us in, and then after a week or two we stayed with another family. All in all I think it was 3 families we stayed with for some weeks, before someone from the church donated an apartment in Hartland, VT to us.  It was a small one bedroom apartment. There was my mom's bed,  a bunk bed for us girls, and my brother stayed on a cot in the closet. My mom soon got a job in a grocery store.

 

THE PRIVATE SCHOOL

My mom enrolled us in a private Christian school near our town called Dartmouth Area Christian Fellowship, or DACF. We sang hymns and would hear bible passages before we started school every day. They told my mom that fantasies like unicorns and teenage mutant ninja turtles were tools of the devil and we shouldn't be allowed to play with them. We learned about all the important prophets in the bible. There were only like 3 other kids in my grade. They had multiple grades in the same classroom. 

I remember being mad at my mom for throwing away my unicorn puzzle that my Grandma had given me. I also had lots of unicorn posters and toys, My Little Ponies, Care Bears, which she got rid of. She gave me a plastic horse (Breyer) and encouraged me to get into horses instead of unicorns. The Last Unicorn movie had been my favorite movie for as long as I could remember. My parents had recorded it onto VHS tape for us as kids and I watched it countless times. I especially used to rewind and re-watch the part at the end where the red bull was defeated and all the thousands of unicorns came out of the water at once. It made me happy. I didn't understand why I wasn't allowed to like unicorns anymore, and it started to build up resentment inside me.

 

Scene from The Last Unicorn

 

The teachers at school in the church told us that our friends who weren't Christian were going to Hell, and it was our job to try to save them. I remember telling my best friend from Bolton, Sierra, that I didn't want her to go to Hell and she should be Christian too.

One teacher told us she could see angels ("there is one right there" and she pointed to the empty wall). She spoke in tongues (a made up language that only you and God communicate with), like a few other teachers there. All this extreme religious stuff was new, confusing, and unsettling to me.

 

LIVING WITHOUT

I was 7 years old. I remember crying for my dad a lot. I was really close to him. I didn't understand why I couldn't see him or talk to him on the phone. My dad had bottle fed me when I was a baby and we had a special bond. Whenever my sisters would pick on me my dad protected me. I was really missing him.

I remember my mom struggling with money. I remember her buying the discounted old food at the grocery store, and checking the oatmeal packets for insects before giving it to us. I remember singing along to a Bangles cassette tape my mom had, "Eternal Flame" which was one of our favorites.

I played games with my sisters. We made up stories about our old pets, and funny songs. (Some of them my brother still has on cassette tape). My brother got really into Christian music, especially the  rock/ rap group DC talk, with hits like "Heaven Bound." Around this time my mom took us to revivals, where the pastor would touch someone and they would get so possessed by the Spirit they would fall to the ground and shake. My mom also took us to our first concert, a Christian artist named Carmen.

I remember us fighting with my mom about our haircuts. She always cut our hair, and she cut these really ugly thick bangs, which we no longer wanted. My older sister resisted badly one day. She ran away while my mom wasn't looking. She made footprints in the snow in circles so my mom couldn't trace her, and she hid in the car. My mom found her eventually, and at that point she didn't force us to cut our bangs anymore, and we grew them out with the help of hair clips.

That Christmas we were still up there in VT and still not in touch with my dad or the rest of the family. My mom was hiding us. We got Christmas presents from a charity. To this day I am grateful for that. I remember opening a present that read "To a 7 year old girl." Inside was a barbie doll. I didn't like dolls, but I was happy to have presents at all. We had something, and we had each other.

 

THE SEARCH

My dad never gave up on us. He didn't go to the police but he hired a private investigator to find us. He was able to trace my mom because she had kept using the ATM and credit cards. Eventually, after about 6 months, my mom was served with papers to appear in court over custody. My mom took us back to the Bolton house. They tried to reconcile I hear, but it didn't work and eventually my dad moved out. My mom was given full custody, and dad was given visitation every other weekend. My mom took us to get evaluated with a psychologist during the court proceedings. She coached us on what to say, "tell them you want to live with your mom." I remember telling the psychologist that we were fine. It was better that my parents weren't fighting anymore. We knew that they shouldn't be together anymore. And I think I told her my parents were the ones who needed psychological help.

 

THE RETURN

We started back at our original school in Bolton like nothing had happened, but everything had changed for us. Our friends were glad to see us back, but even this reunion was not to last.

My mom still kept up with the Christian religion. She took us to different kinds of Born Again Christian churches, sometimes changing churches when she didn't like what was going on. One was a foursquare church, I don't know what that is exactly. In the summer, while other kids went to Summer Camp, she made us go to Christian summer camp which was a whole lot like church and bible study with some crafting in between. During the school year she made us go to Pioneer Girls (Christian girl scouts). I remember not liking it. My brother went to Boy Scouts.

My best friend Sierra's parents paid for me to go to summer camp with her in Bolton one year and I remember having a really great time with her there. We made shelters in the woods, went swimming, and learned camp songs and different kinds of clapping games to go along with it. I think it was called the Bolton Conservation Day Camp. I'm grateful to her parents for being so generous and treating me like one of their own. 

 

 with my best friend Sierra

 

 

 

My mom sometimes worked part time jobs, like as a sales clerk at a grocery store, and sometimes not. She had a couple of boyfriends around this time. One was a very nice black man who was great with kids, and another was a Persian guy with a daughter who I remember being a bit cold. It didn't last long. 

 

MY SINGLE DAD

We went to visit my dad at his different apartments. We got a kitten named Ricky there, who he later gave to his neighbor. We also got a couple parakeets we named Kiki and Kikette. One apartment was in Woburn MA, and the other was in North Reading, MA. He didn't have beds, but mattresses on the floor and we would decide who would sleep on the couch which was a wood frame nest-like couch he had gotten at Pier 1 Imports. His apartments were mostly empty of furniture. We would watch TV shows like Dinosaurs, and COPS.

My dad sometimes went on dates with different young, beautiful women. One of them was nice and gave us quarters to play video games and the claw machines at the bowling alley. I liked her. We collected so many, we had a cardboard box full of stuffed animals from the claw game.  

We played flashlight tag at night with the neighborhood kids we made friends with. We also played games like sardines. This was a time before the internet and all the kids played outside. I remember my mom quizzing us when we got home from the weekend about what we did. She got mad when we told her we were playing outside by ourselves and dad had gone off somewhere.

One day my dad told us he felt bad for the birds, that they were in cages and he decided to "free them." He let them out of their cage outside. Only one flew back. He didn't think about that they were domestic tropical birds and had no chance of surviving outside in New England. We were sad for the lost bird. I don't remember what happened to the other.

Sometimes my dad would drive us into Boston/ Cambridge for fun. He picked up drawing after us kids. He set up as a street artist in Harvard Square. He liked to buy a few roses and give them to pretty girls and offer to draw their portraits. He made friends with some homeless people and street musicians there. He really wanted us to sing with them, especially his one friend Luko. We were shy, but he gave us $20 to share each time we did. We sang songs like La Bamba, and Over the Rainbow. The rest of the time, we would walk around Harvard Square by ourselves and look at the stores. I was like 8+ years old, my sisters 6+, and 11+, my brother 13+. Sometimes my dad would hang out at Au Bon Pain in the square and play chess. He liked when we would play chess with some of the people there. Some of them I remember being off, mentally ill and/or homeless but it didn't bother my dad. He didn't think this was unsafe for us.

Sometimes he would approach a complete stranger and say, "Hey do you think my daughters are pretty? Do you want to marry one?" We would say "Dad stop.." with an awkward smile. We thought he was teasing us, or testing us. I remember that uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach, but all I could do was try to laugh it off or ignore it. This was a common pattern with my dad. 

He would also flirt with girls who were working at stores and restaurants. I would get embarrassed, and apologize for him sometimes. 

 

THE POOREST FAMILY IN A RICH TOWN

Even though we had never been rich, we were perhaps lower middle class, we were suddenly flung into poverty following my parents' separation and divorce. My mom was counting every dime, and got really into couponing. I remember her driving around, stealing those plastic bags of coupons from the neighbors mailboxes too. I thought it was weird but she said it was fine. I think sometimes my grandma, who was wealthy, gave money to my mom. My dad was ordered to pay child support, but my mom always said it wasn't enough.

I had won a state book cover contest in the 4th or 5th grade. It was part of an anti-smoking campaign, and we were the "Smoke Free class of 2000." I drew a cartoon of people in an elevator. One guy was smoking, the others looking on in disgust, with the tagline "Smoking is stupid." The prize was a $100 savings bond which was deposited at a local bank in my name, and when I turned 18, I could have it. I think it was supposed to teach us about saving money. I have a memory asking my mom about it when we were moving. To my horror, my mother told me she withdrew that money and spent it. Today, my mom denies that this happened.

 

 

There were more and more signs that our lot in life had changed.

There was a food drive at our school, and a basket in our classroom. I remember asking my mom for cans of food and non perishables to help the poor and needy. She didn't give me anything. Then I remember that basket ending up at our house full of food. I felt ashamed. That is when I realized we were that poor family.

We started getting free lunch at school. I remember feeling shy about that. I tried to hide it from my friends.

One day my mom told us that we were losing the house. She hadn't paid the mortgage for some months and the bank was taking our house, something called FORECLOSURE. I didn't understand. To this day my dad says he paid enough to my mom to cover the mortgage, and she says he didn't pay enough to cover food and bills, plus the mortgage. Who knows what the truth is, probably somewhere in between.

My best friend suggested we could go live in a trailer park in town and keep going to our school. I suggested the idea to my mom. I remember feeling embarrassed about it, but I also didn't want to leave my friends, especially my best friend. I used to stay at her house overnight once a week on a weekday. Her family was a second family to me.

Our immediate neighbors, the ones with the sheep, were kind enough to let us stay at their house for the summer after the bank took the house. They were going to Newfound Lake for the summer and their house would be empty anyway. It was kind of them. I remember pricking my hand on a cactus there. My sister reminds me that I told her to touch it too. I remember them telling us how to take care of the house, especially the cherry countertop where you couldn't leave anything wet on it or it would make a mark. We didn't want them to get mad at us so we did our best.

This kindness bought my mom some more time to figure out what to do next. 

 

OUR DOG

 

saying goodbye to Koko

 

Our dog Koko went with my dad when we lost the house. She was living in his car and he was bringing her food and water from time to time. Eventually he gave her to a random lady he met. I cried every day for her. One time he let us go visit her. The lady was nice and she had a son around 5 years old. Koko didn't remember us at first but after a few minutes she did. We gave her a hug and said goodbye at the end of the meeting. We never saw her again. 

 

THE SOCIAL WORKER

Around the time we were losing the house, a social worker showed up to our home. His name was David. He was assigned by the state to help us. My mom started dating him. ■