An Excerpt from Life in a Tornado…

CHAPTER 4

My parents biggest fight took place at the beginning of fourth grade, after we’d lived in Dallas for a year. We never saw our parents kiss or hug one another. In fact, they never kissed or hugged us. This eventually affected all three of us in different ways – none good. We never were told we were loved. We were never hugged. We were never kissed. We didn’t know the difference, but eventually we did and then the rejection began to hurt. Badly. There was so much tension inside our front door that our main goal was to stay out of their way. Daddy had a ferocious temper with the boys and would hit or yell at them over the slightest infraction. I hid in my room or in a big closet with my dolls when things became nasty. I grew to love that closet because no one ever knew I was in there. I wasn’t scared; I was relieved to have my own private hiding spot. We had no idea how other people lived because this was all we knew. Maybe all parents fought like ours did. The hostility between them was bad since we had moved from Laramie, where Daddy had been teaching ROTC, at the University of Wyoming. Maybe he didn’t like his new career and missed flying and took it out on our mother. He traveled every week trying to sell life insurance and when he came home it was constant bickering between them. This was a completely different life from being a pilot or an instructor. Maybe he didn’t like the work or maybe he was scared about how his wife was behaving and worried that he wasn’t going to make a living after being in the service for thirteen years.

Late one night, after we’d been asleep for a few hours, we awoke to hear our mother screaming and crying at the top of her lungs. We had never heard her so upset and it frightened us. This was no ordinary argument and we were scared about what was happening to her. Cautiously, we opened our bedroom doors and peeked out. In the hallway, we saw Daddy in his blue pajamas banging on the bathroom door. His face was all scrunched up and he looked furious.

With a loud booming voice, he yelled out, “Patricia, open the God damn door or I’m going to kick it in”. She had locked herself in the bathroom. He shook and pounded on the door with the full force of his six-foot body. What was going to happen when he smashed the door open and got his hands on her? Sweat was pouring off his brow into his eyes. We had never seen anything like this. Maybe he was going to kill her when he got the door open. Would he kill her first and then us? After all, we were the only witnesses.