Terry's 3M's

On February 17, 1968 my life changed.

Some of this will be a redunancy as I believe I have written some of this before...but, not quite in the same manner.

It started out as a typical school day. This meant that after I made sure that the porch steps and sidewalk were free of snow, I did a quick cleaning of the living room. Then after a breakfast of cereal for my brothers and I and cooking eggs for step-mother and my 15 month old half-sister, I washed the dishes. Then I went upstairs to change into school clothes.

When I came down, my step-mother was blocking the stairway. She had a Columbia Music House advertisement from a TV Guide in her hand. She asked me how it had gotten torn.

I said, "Lisa was sitting on the potty chair crying. I gave her the advertisement to keep her quiet, and she tore it."

Mary (my step-mother is too cumbersome to continue to write repeatedly) grabbed me by the hair and I got my right hand up in time to cushion the blow as she knocked my head into the doorjamb. Repeatedly. I counted--11 times.

While my hand was enough to keep my skull from cracking on the wood, it was not enough to stop all the pain, and I was crying.

Then she raged at me: "Don't bother coming home from school today--just keep going and walk to your Aunt's in Perth (about 15 miles away)."

Just as I was thinking, "Great--that's EXACTLY what I WILL do!"; she changed her mind.

"Nevermind. Come straight home from school and kneel. Kneel until I get home from work. Then I'm gonna lock all the doors and burn the house down with all you kids in it."

My father said something. Then the 2 of them were arguing and my dad yelled, "Then I want your mother out of MY house!" (Mary's mother was there to babysit Lisa while she worked.)

I'm not quite sure how I made it out of the house. I was scared. Mary probably wouldn't burn the house down--but, then again she might just be crazy enough to try it.

For the past 3 weeks, there had been an ongoing dialogue between we kids (my 3 brothers and I), the school psychologists, and Children's Services about the abuse that Mary had been perpetrating upon us. The woman from Children's Services had told me enough to know that they had been keeping an eye on Mary ever since I had run away from home the previous summer.

[It made me wonder if they had a regular spy network going--because they knew that Mary was cheating on my father, who her boyfriend was, and how often they met. My father didn't even know those things!]

Anyway, they had told me that if things got too bad, I should tell the school nurse and she would contact Children's Services.

On the 2 mile walk to school, after going through feelings of rage and fear, I decided to tell the school nurse exactly what had happened that morning. And as soon as I got to school, I did.

I went to my regular classes. I was working on my "novel" in study hall at about 1:15 when I was paged to go to the nurses office.

The nurse told me that I was to continue to go to classes today, but, not to leave the school after classes were over. "You're not going home today--you're going to a foster home in Riceville."

I'd never heard of Riceville. That wasn't too surprising because Riceville is only a length of country road with a Gloversville address and phone number. But it's in the Mayfield [population 500--maybe] school district.

In Home Ec, next period, I excitedly told my friend, Linda Hollenbeck, that I was going into a foster home. [I had been in a bad foster home before--but, nothing was as bad as the life I had been leading in the past 3 years.]

Linda said, "I bet you're goin' to live with my Aunt Virgie!"

My reaction was along the lines of "yeah, right."

The class wasn't over with before I got called to the office.

My father was standing there with a woman I hadn't seen before. I thought that he was going to be furious because he would have to pay for the Home Ec book that I lost. But, he was quiet and subdued. It would come to me much later that he was scared.

The 3 of us got into the woman's car and she drove us to our house where I picked up my clothes and packed them into the woman's car.

Mary was there, crying. She wanted to know why I had called the authorities when I KNEW that she really wouldn't do what she had threatened to do that morning.

I refused to speak to her and the whole packing and getting stuff into the car took about 15 minutes. When I got into the car again, I started to get nervous and it dawned on me that my brothers were going into different foster homes and it would be a while before we saw each other again.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, I was escorted into my new home.

After getting we had gotten my stuff out of the car and the caseworker left, Ma K said abruptly, "Put your boots there and hang your coat here."

When I heard the tone of voice, I thought, "What the f*#k did I get myself into this time!"

Then I sat across the kitchen table across from her. She had a manila folder open in front of her. She told me that she could see that I was very intelligent and she expected me to do much better in school than I had been doing.

Her tone did nothing to alleviate my fears. I thought that I just might have gone from one bad situation into another.

All of my clothes were dirty. I explained to her that Mary made me wash out all of my clothes by hand in the bathtub using a washboard. And that I had to have permission before I could wash them and that permission was only granted about every 2 weeks.

So, Ma Kline said that we would take the clothes to a laundermat that night.

The door into the house was about 6 feet--almost straight across--from the outside door of the porch.

The first thing that I noticed about the kitchen was that it was so blue. There was blue wall-to-wall indoor carpeting, the cabinets and walls were painted blue, and there was a rectangular table in front of a window that was flanked with 2 church pews that had been painted blue. It was at that table where I would eat my first meal in this house.

There was another table in the center of the kitchen. A dryer (but no washer) was against the porch wall. A fridge and stove were between the door to the garage and the cupboards.

The large cupboards formed an L and the top cupboards ended before a window that was over an old-fashioned sink.

Across the room from the stove and fridge were three doorways. The one in the middle had a door. Later I would learn that the door was to the cellar. The left doorway led to the "dining room". [Dining room was a definate misnomer. At this time, it held the desk with everyone's records, the sewing machine, the hamsters in their cages, and a large hutch where everyone stacked their schoolbooks. After the next Christmas, it would also be the home of the bumper pool table.] The doorway on the right was to the living room. I would soon be perusing the built-in bookcases.

At just about 4:30, I sat down in one of the pews with the other kids for a dinner of scalloped potatoes and ham (the first time that I ever had that dish) and peas.

Pop walked in the door a few minutes later and said, Hello, Terry and I became Terry forevermore.

After dinner, Ma K and I put all my clothes into the car and we went back to Gloversville to the laundermat.

When the clothes were in the washing machines, Ma K told me that she wanted to take me to her brother's house and introduce me to some other members of her family.

A minute after we were in the door, a familiar voice proclaimed, "See!! I told you were going to my Aunt Virgie's!!"

Ma K said about a year later and thereafter, "For the first two months, we couldn't get Terry to speak. After that, we couldn't shut her up!"

It took me much longer to stop flinching any time anyone got near me.

I learned that Ma K's brisk manner was just simple efficiency and not unkindness.

She took care of her two adopted children (Sheila and Danny) as well as between 5 and 7 foster kids.

It took a while to notice, but, the woman was warm and kind. She had great expectations for each of us. I don't know how she did it--but, she managed to make each one of us feel special.

With me, one afternoon a week after school, she would be waiting to share a pot of Constant Comment tea with me and let me talk about whatever I wanted to talk about for a half hour or so.

The only time that I ever heard that she slapped a kid was one time. Danny was mad at her and called her a f@#king b(*$h. He defended his action saying that so and so talked to his mom like that all the time. Guess who he was forbidden to play with after that!

I can't express how much I love this woman.

She taught me to love again. She taught me that when a grown-up is wrong, it is okay for the grown-up to apologize. I learned that it was okay to dream. And I learned to feel safe again. I learned how to perform random acts of kindness before it became a book and a fashionable philosophy.

When Mary called her on the phone a day after I moved in, Ma shut her up with one question. And Mary never called again.

God Bless Ma K and all the women like her who take the shattered spirits of hurting kids and pour salve on the wounds and heal them. Bless those who supply hope in hopeless lives.