SOUTHERN SWITCH

THIS ESSAY IS AN UNEDITED WORK IN PROGRESS…

Before I even knew what a family was supposed to look like, mine changed. Our small apartment was mostly for students and inhabited by new graduate school families and upper classmen. My parents were high school sweethearts. My mom was an art history major and my dad an economics major with plans for law school. The modest two bed room was in a rural area near LSU, nestled between the Mississippi River and a cow pasture. Our home looked like military housing, made of concrete and stucco against the oak filled woods that were slowly retreating due to development. The apartments hosted several families with small children and infants. The families in the apartments were always around one another in a sort of community support group with a Cajun flare, meaning lots of costumes and themed parties. My parents were very social and had a range of friends in the community. I remember an endless string of nights around the other families, sitting on the floor while they drank beer, ate jambalaya and watched TV shows like The Incredible Hulk or played cards.  The apartment building was U shaped and each unit had a small porch with sliding glass doors leading out to a grassy area, playground and pool.  I remember looking out the windows and seeing kids jumping in the pool on hot summer days and begging my mom to take me. She would sometimes oblige, loving to swim herself. She took me to the YMCA to learn to swim at 9 months, and I have loved water ever since. Being in the pool gave me such great joy, it was one of the things I had in common with my mom. During our summer visits to south Florida she would wade in the water so I could jump into her arms over and over again. There was rejuvenation in water, coating us with new energy and sunlight.

It should have been a happy time, as I was doted on as the only child and only grandchild, but not all was well. I couldn’t express it, but I felt an underlying strain. On the surface, my life seemed calm, but below there was a raging current shoving around my growing psyche. I heard fighting at night, crying…the sound of my mom’s voice yelling, shrieking. I was sent to bed before my normal bedtime, my room still light. Shadows from outdoors projected onto the wall by the door. I stared at the door wondering how long my mom would cry. I tried to picture the shadows as people and imagined what they look like. I wondered if they heard the crying too.

My toddler timeline was kept by the sitcom slots from the three television channels. I would be wide awake hearing the muffled sounds of arguments as would be a constant trend in my childhood. My mother was often upset and friends would come to talk to her.  One friend in particular was a large brooding man with an untrustworthy smile.  His voice was loud and overpowering.  He knew how to politely but unabashedly dominate a conversation in a similar way that his large frame dominated any room he was in. He had a savvy “Southern” wife that I remembered from a few parties my parent’s parties. In South Louisiana, house parties were common occurrences that include the whole family even children and grandmas. I remembered this man from a party at his parent’s house.  I remember his small but poignant wife. I remember his very sweet mother who could make any food she touched catering quality delicious. This mammoth of a man would come “help” my mother when she and my dad were not getting along. He continued to come over after my dad moved out as well. In a matter of just two short years, he was my stepdad….all by the age of five. 

The man (my stepdad) and his wife split at the same time as my parents. The four of them use to all be friends, but now I was living in the midst of two messy divorces full of broken trust and betrayal. Most of their friends were forced to take sides with a few uniquely diplomatic folks that managed to walk the tightrope between them through out the years. The performances of my childhood mentors created their own trauma circus and I became their sideshow freak. My father and the former wife of my stepfather had been caught in the act of having sex with each other by my mom and stepfather…not once, but twice. This secondary offense was the spark for both couples to file for divorce.

In the midst of family turmoil, I sat on the floor in front of the television. A single red rose in a vase sat on the television set. I stared at the droplet of dew on the rose and leaned in to smell it, it was so lovely. Then, I turned my head to look out of the window at the pool, and I see my dad walking across the lawn, coming out of another apartment. I had not seen him in weeks. I put down my detested bowl of eggs, our daily staple and opened the sliding glass window.

 “Dad Dad Dad Dad” I yelled and ran into his arms.  He picked me up and spun me around. 

“I miss you!  I promise you will see me soon,” he said.

There were a bunch of kids jumping and lounging in the pool as the sun beat down on us, “Come on Dad; take me to the pool now.  Where have you been?  I saw you come out of another apartment,” I said with no breath in between.  I took a big breath, feeling relieved that I could finally see my dad, “Pleeeeeeeeease,” I asked. 

“Listen, I promise I will take you swimming as soon as your mom will let me.  But I’m living right over there in that apartment now.  I won’t be in your apartment with your mom anymore, but I will be in the same complex as you. We can see each other all of the time!” he promised.  

I went inside and smelled the rose again. I accidently leaned in too far and spilled it onto out television. I was sent to the shop for a couple of weeks in which I spent my time looking out the big window for my dad. I saw him from the other side of the sliding doors waving as he walked from his apartment to the parking lot. He was like all of the kids I wanted to play with at the pool, so close and yet so far away.

Eventually, my dad started getting me every other weekend. He had a girlfriend, one that I knew….one that everyone knew. This witchy lady was the women he had an affair with, the woman my stepfather had been married to and the woman who became my stepmom. The unspoken sexual implications of upcoming southern professionals swinging and then switching was forever tainted as a constant blemish in my childhood. Unlike tabloid media, southern secrets are rarely released for public consumption, yet in the small minded city we called home, their secret switch didn’t need a public release. In fact, most of their contemporaries, and “der mommas and dem” were fully aware of the sexual escapades causing the divorces. No one noticeably batted an eye when the new couples formed. Foe me, the deception and disguising was more of a wink, the one that is aimed toward the only scapegoat they could get their hands on, me, a little blonde girl named after a Beatles love song. 

Years later, discussing my parents with a couple that remained mutual friends of all four of them, one said to a thirteen year old me “So, is it ever weird or uncomfortable?  It must be tough for you.”

“Yeah, I’ll say.  Being the only kids stuck in this mess, my stepparents use to be married to each other. Swinging and switching. Now all of them are things like lawyers and CEOs and a clown (literally my mom was a professional clown). I do often wish it were different. I just wish my mom and dad stayed together. They sort made my life all a mess,” I said. 

I knew that what I said was  going to come back to bite my in the ass, but I was growing increasingly tired of hiding their secrets, all of them. At that point, I didn’t care; I was relieved to talk about it to someone who seemed to understand.

By the time I was a teenager, I asked my mother outright what happened with the four of them. She clung to deception. She claimed that the four of them were friends and that the affairs were one sided (dad and stepmom) and that my stepfather’s consoling brought them (her and my stepfather) closer together (it is confusing, I know). I always doubted this story based off of my childhood memories. It was unfortunate for her that I remembered. I remember overhearing the phone calls from the other room. I remembered the shadows of their betrayals dancing on my bedroom walls. However, my mother was a die hard non-confessor (ah-hem, gas lighter), hiding all of her secrets within a body that was constantly fluctuating in size and persona. Half of the time she was literally someone else…her clown self. She ignored reality and stayed wrapped up in clown alleys, magic tricks, make up, acts and gigs. Filling in all of the time that my stepfather had off of work with her own jobs, my mother had a job that required her to be someone else other than herself, someone confident, outspoken and funny. The rest of the time, she spent in bed, a depressed shell of the lively person she once was, the person I saw in photos from her youth with long flowing hair and a warm smile. My favorite picture of her, she shines as an artist and nature lover, picking apples from a tree. The women in the photo was the woman who my mother could have stayed, but didn’t. Instead, she was a shell full of secrets, a vase of lies ready to break at the hands of my stepdad if she didn’t self destruct first. That was the mom I knew, the one that was willing to hide anything for the dirty secrets she held for herself and her husbands. Many of the new secrets that she knew were worse than the secret switch that started it all. And the biggest secret of all was the regret she felt for having me as after the successful burial of various rumors, the only thing left to remind her of her former life, her former marriage, and her former self was me.  

My father and stepmother became lawyers at the same time as one another and began their careers. As if she weren’t possibly the epitome of an evil home wrecker enough my stepmother chose to be an insurance attorney. My father became a corporate attorney that quickly became partner. About a month after my venting conversations with the mutual friends, my two parental litigators called the thirteen year old me into the living room and had me sit down to discuss the scathing conversation. They made sure that I understood that I overstepped my boundaries and that I absolutely was not to discuss such matters.  They informed me that talking about things like this would ensure the removal of the person that I had spoken with from my life…that I would be isolated from talking to anyone ever if it came to that. They made me swear that I would not do that with anyone ever again.

I promised and I lied. I knew that I had to be smarter and more careful about who I talked with, maybe friends only, maybe not. I had zero urge to follow though with their wishes but instead this prompted me to be CIA level careful. Also, I learned that every now and then, I could get my father alone and if he was angry enough at my mom, I could get HIM to talk about the whole thing. He was usually very sly and anticlimactic about his side of the story. He mostly tried to hone me in on the fact my mom tried to take me from him, and how he had a kidnapping plan just incase, “because he loved me.” He would claim that he would take me to Europe, and take me to all of the cool places I saw in photos that he once took my mom to when they were in love. Stories of these places were the backdrops of my childhood fantasies. I wanted to travel to Italy to play chess with locals or Spain to buy leather jackets. He would divert to fairy tales and his undying love for me, like a wandering king and his princess. A few times he alluded to my mom’s wrong doing, or rather, equal doing. He implicated the underlying idea that all of them were into switching partners, and they just decided that the “new matches” were far superior to the original couples. I confronted my mom several times, and she always denied any wrong doing. 

I was the visceral unspoken, I was the dirty secret. All of the couples would have been able to move on with their lives unaffected other than dwindling interest in old rumors if it weren’t for me. I was the only physical evidence that persisted and the only actual witness to any of the transgressions. Because of one small girl, all four members of the “secret switch society” they had formed were forever exposed. I spent the rest of my childhood between the throes of secrecy, torture, neglect, abuse and outright hatred for the small bowl cut headed blonde that looked like both of her parents, talked too much when she thought she could get away with it, and called them out on their bull shit when she became too numb to care about the consequences. 

I never expected to get my mom to admit to having an affair with my stepdad when she was married especially after I read her transcribed divorce papers in which she completely faults my father and takes no accountability for her own affair. Despite the fact that she admitted to allowing my stepdad to abuse me, admitted to abusing me herself, admitted to neglecting me, admitted to purposely trying to crush me with the rest of the secret switch society, despite all of that, she could not face herself and admit her first transgression. Over the years she acquired so many masks of herself that I am convinced she no longer knows who she is. To remove the mask, we would only discover a puppet.

In my mothers’ attempt to erase me, she revealed herself.  In the years before I stopped talking to her, she gave me her and my dads’ wedding photo album along with all of my childhood photos and family pictures. She gave them to me so they would not be with her, so they would no longer be a part of her. She gave them to me to move on from me, to discard the memory of me. But of course, I was glad to receive them because now they were mine. As I flipped thought the pages, I discovered papers tucked behind the pictures. Old photos of my mother and father in their 1970s wedding getups, about to walk down obnoxiously red carpeted of a Roman Catholic Church were padded by multiple letters from my stepfather to my mom written clearly as “courting letters.” One of them referencing a trip that they took together to a small central Louisiana town, a place where “no one knew them,” a place they could be themselves and be alone. The gist of the letter was how much he enjoyed finally having time with her since all of the drama, and how he hoped that she would trust him to move forward in their relationship. He cited being thankful that they participated in the “secret switch,” – HIS WORDS. Yes, there it was, finally the confirmation I was looking for. My stepfather referenced swinging several times and how those times were different than this trip because he was starting to love her, his lover. After reading the letters several time, I stared straight into the hollow eyes of my mothers’ wedding photo. The plaster mask of my photo mom was smiling back, fake and ready to break.

When we sink out feet into the mud we feel planted. When we reach for the stars we feel mighty. When we do both together, we feel empowered. Standing up for myself, staring the switch in the face, made me feel planted. Confirmation was like a gift, but I didn’t actually need it, because I was already reaching for the stars. Reaching up from the mud like a cypress,I found strength in myself. The Louisiana painter, Henry Nubig, is famous for painting landscapes out of mud. He collects mud from all over Louisiana and labels them. As a kid thinking of Nubig and his art, I imagined a man in a high ceilinged antebellum style room full of jars of mud and canvases with varying progressions of landscapes. I thought of how happy he must have felt each time he discovered a new mud or acquired more of one after running out. Reaching into the soft ground, harvesting the same mud that nourished generations, Nubig in my mind must have relished in these same ideas for each landscape he produced.  Each stroke of mud delicately painted the culture, feel and beauty of Southern Louisiana. I always so much admired the way that muddiness could become something beautiful.  The idea that the dirty south was really just a medium full of beauty waiting to be appropriately projected and categorized and respected for its diversity was one that I held onto through my youth. Even as I type this story today, I feel as though I am taking that dirt which was deposited onto me and offering it hopefully as nourishment for someone else like me. But truthfully, the mud of Louisiana isn’t just an fantasy land of alluvial deposits, but also full of waste and hazards from all of the toxic and polluted dumping released in secrecy all over the state. I was a visceral dumping ground for the secret switch of my parents. And I was hated for it by the people whose job it was to nurture me.  As my life progressed, the secret switch society (my 2 parents plus my 2 new impostor parents) went to any length it could to injure, neglect, silence, discredit, and invalidate me in the community and in my family.  I am the visceral enemy of a dirty southern secret switch. They live as though they have won the war but what they don’t realize is they are lost in the wind and in the living in their own wasteland. I have blown them off my path. Each piece of trash they deposited on my heart has been incinerated and my soil is now pure simply by removing all of the masks, the make up, the deceit, the lies, and the toxicity that they dumped onto me. By running away from their circus, I discovered I never actually was a side show freak. By cutting their strings on my heart, I discovered I was not a marionette. I rose from the mud of their secret southern split, I painted my own landscape.