Dear Reader…
Please, allow me to write two words. Harold Mattered.
Harold Mattered. You matter, I matter, each person on Earth matters. Harold mattered to his three boys on Earth, he mattered to me, he was cheated out of seeing his boys grow up, marry, have his grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It took 40 years before I wrote this book, Her Alibi. Why? As I lay a few scenes out below for you, the reader, please try to see inside the mind of my mother, a woman with multiple mental illnesses that went unchecked her entire life!
Her Alibi is a purely candid read that will remind you that
for many, life is nowhere near peaches and cream, as well as how much
damage toxic mothers can do. But it’s also a reminder of how resilient
and optimistic people can be when it comes to healing and ensuring the
right thing happens. I don’t hold back in this book, and gladly so,
making sure closure happens for my three stepbrothers, and for those
left in the path of my mother’s destruction.
“Harold mattered…” is for me, Harold getting his final last word. Harold’s story told through the lens of my eye and shows that good does prevail. Her Alibi proves Harold mattered.
I bravely wrote Her Alibi while wondering if I had the courage to publish this book or not. Her Alibi is a revealing, heart-wrenching memoir in which I don’t spare the details of what has turned my childhood into a nightmare. I’m scarred, physically, mentally, and emotionally. No pretense, the scars imprinted in my soul.
What? You may wonder how this came about? Glad you asked! My book will shock you. some stories are better left untold, but this is not that case! Her Alibi is brilliant in conveying emotions, cruelty yet infuses hope.
*****
Intro to Her Alibi
Visions of her Cherokee grandmother, Cordie, flashed through Mary's mind as her mother, Marguerite, informed her that her stepfather shot himself and was in the hospital. Oh no!
No! This can't be! Not after the joking around at my home last night. NO!!!!Did she use me last night? She'd never use her scapegoat child. No, she couldn't! Even Marguerite wouldn't sink that low! Or would she? Marguerite had always been abusive and vile to most people, and especially to her children and husbands, but would she shoot Harold?
Yet, here I was, and I had to tell the police that, yes, my mother was at my home all evening and into the night. How despicable that my mother connived her way into using me as her alibi.
*****
I want you to understand the sociopathic people I lived with and the rage they couldn’t control. My mother was a sociopath. Her rages were uncontrolled, and she acted fast, aggressively, and with vengeance. I wanted to believe that my mother was a good mother, but always knew something was off. Marguerite, always seemed to think that she was the best mother, perfect even, but not all mothers are made the same, which I found out from an incredibly early age. My timeline will now jump around a bit.
While still living at the little house “on the wrong side of the tracks,” my sister, Debi and I were playing on a tricycle one summer day. I was two and a half, and Debi was three and a half. My mother and her sister, Aunt Bea, were watching us. Debi pedaled while I stood on the back lower step of the 1960s-era metal trike. We were riding around in our large driveway (our driveway was bigger than our house) while my father got ready to deliver laundry to places in Lyons, Kansas, as this was his second and part-time job. His full-time job was at the salt mine where he worked the night shift Dad got ready to leave in his 1957 Chevy Impala. I remember that car and I always will. As a kid, I thought it was the coolest car, and I still do to this day. My mother told Debi that she needed to move the trike next to her so dad could back the car out of the garage. Debi moved the trike to the side, but I stayed where I was because I did not know what to do. Since my mother did not instruct me to move, I thought I was safe. I was so short my father could not see me through the rear window or side mirrors and, unfortunately, he ran me over. My father jumped out of the car, upset and beside himself! He had knocked me to the ground and run over one of my legs, but after checking me over to see nothing was broken or bleeding, he let my mother and Aunt Bea have it! He was so upset that they had not made sure I was off to the side like Debi. My leg was tender, and I walked with a limp for a while, but I came out relatively unscathed from this event.
Remarkably, my mother never bothered checking to see if I was okay, but she did yell at me once my dad left for work, and “it was my fault Dad had yelled at her”. To this day, I wonder if my mother left me there on purpose. Was her intent to get Debi to safety and not me? She knew my dad could not see me. Did she want me dead? Did she hate me enough to want me dead? So many things happened throughout my life and the lives of my siblings that I often wondered if other kids had mothers who allowed dreadful things to happen. Did other mothers abuse and beat their children, also?
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Oh, the horror of headless chickens! We had a chicken coop for eggs and meat. We could not move the chickens to the big house, that my parents were buying, so they had to be slaughtered. My mother used a most inhumane way, and she laughed with glee while doing it. When the headless chickens took off running towards Debi and me, we climbed a tree for safety. My mother always thought it was funny that we feared the headless chickens, but she did have her drama. She ridiculed our fears and forced us to feel like a tiny ant and insignificant.
********************
My mother did suffer as a child, most of it sexually, but never as an adult. She never gave any of us kids affection, hugs, or kisses. She was the same with her grandchildren. Instead of affection, I remember strong, unyielding hands that dragged me by my hair across our house. I would scream, curse, and beg her to release me. But when her hands loosened on my hair, her feet would find their way to my stomach. Often, they would land on my head, too, and I would howl in agony. Marguerite gifted me with my first set of traumatic brain injuries. My mother never hid her smirks and glee after each incident. How could a mother act with such hatred toward her daughter? Now that I’m a mother, it’s surreal to think she behaved that way. I have no idea why she was never affectionate toward me or any of my siblings. Loving warmth was never learned from her, yet as a child, I would try to pull my siblings next to me in photos.
*******************
My mother weaponized the fact that I hated the taste of peas. She would force-feed me peas, spoonful by spoonful. Why? She loved the control it gave her, and she found sheer delight in the evilness. My weight was just fine for a five-year-old, and I knew what she did wasn’t a manifestation of her love. Every time I threw up. When that happened, the rest of my supper came up, too, so I went to bed hungry. Children should not go to bed hungry. Age five and hungry? What normal mother would do this?
*
My mother loved to take us to parks and other places to see floodwaters after we got a lot of rain. Waterspouts would pick up a lot of toads and then drop them back down to earth wherever it wanted. One time we kids piled into the car to check out the flooding west of Lyons, in a roadside park next to Big Cow Creek and the Santa Fe Slough. Both were out of their banks and the park was full of water. We’d seen this before after many heavy rains. This time was different, though. The highway was littered with toads, and she drove back and forth over them. It was sickening. After parking the car, the younger kids started catching toads. Baby toads. Once they were all released, she drove over the small toads twice more! Who does this to innocent creatures?
*
Drama is what my mother thrived on, and if no drama was going on, she created it. She used her dramatic, gory stories to put fear into all of us kids. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t think any of them were true. She just enjoyed telling them, each time enhancing them to be more dramatic. I remember one story had my brother David, age four and a half, walking into the little house with wolf spider legs hanging from his lips. She told us that he had put a wolf spider into his mouth and ate it! I find that extremely hard to believe for a child of four and a half. Sure, toddlers put things in their mouths, but I honestly don’t think that ever happened. Every time she told us that story, she’d float around as if on a cloud for the rest of the day. These dramatic stories would play on repeat incessantly over the years. I have no idea if my younger siblings believed any of them or not. She would gather us kids together to tell the stories, and if we didn’t listen, she would yell until we sat quietly on the floor to listen.
Here is one example of her dramatic stories: An old lady was in bed one evening when she saw a mouse on her quilt. She opened her mouth to scream and down went the mouse in her throat. And it killed her, or so my mother said. My mother made us kids scared and that fit in perfect as she added that this old woman was unable to breathe due to a mouse stuck in her throat!
Oh! I can’t forget the story about Black Widow spiders! She made sure that we knew a Black Widow was shiny black and had a red hourglass shape underneath its belly, but she omitted that Black Widow spiders come in other colors. I believe that this part was true, so we knew to leave those spiders alone. The story goes that an older woman had her hair nicely done in an updo, but she was soon found dead in her bed! Supposedly, the woman hadn’t washed her hair in a month! When she arrived at the funeral home, and they were styling her hair, the funeral director found a Black Widow spider and her nest of eggs inside her hair. The woman had been bitten on her head by the spider. My mother made it gorier by saying the poison went into the old lady’s brain through her skull! I do not believe this story. She had so many stories that she would relentlessly tell over and over because she craved drama with a capital D! Little did she know, she would be called the Black Widow later in life, and she had her alibi for the shooting of my second stepdad, Harold.
Another story involved a friend of hers from Lyons. A woman, Helen, supposedly ran a stop sign with her car at Saxman Road and Hunter Blvd. Helen’s head was “chopped off.” Who tells their kids this last gory detail? I believe this woman was killed and she had a head injury, but the rest is from my mother’s sick imagination. I never read Helen’s obituary, but every time my mother drove through that intersection, she would embellish that story a little bit more. Her goal was met when she saw the anxiety in our faces and how scared we were. She had her drama. All eyes were on my mother.
In one story, my mother and grandfather were outside, possibly picking cotton, and it was dry earth in the 1930s. The story goes that my mother would jump into dust whirlwinds for fun. How would being in a whirlwind be fun? A whirlwind coming at you throws debris and tiny pieces of sand at your skin and face. I never understood how that could be fun. My mother’s story continues that one whirlwind was a bit bigger than usual, and my grandfather had to stop her from jumping into it. Together, they watched that whirlwind demolish an outdoor shed. I leave this one up to the reader to believe or not.
When we lived in the big house in Lyons, Debi and I found small red floppy plastic squares in the yard now and then one year. My mother told us that those red squares “came from Russia, because the Russians are coming.” That was her mantra over and over. It was her propaganda and drama to scare us by saying, “The Russians are coming to kill us.” I never saw a Russian. I don’t know how those squares ended up in our yard, or if they landed in other people’s yards, or if they were something my mother did to put fear in us. That was during the Cold War when we had fallout shelters. Debi and I discussed at length the diverse ways we could be bombed all because she put the fear in our heads from her horrid drama.
Let me tell you a story about that with all her drama and jealousy. Dad dated Aunt Bea, my mother’s sister, who was ten years older than Mother, first. My mother came to visit when she was seventeen, and she decided to show Aunt Bea that she could take her man away from her. She did just that. At seventeen and pregnant, she married my dad, who was thirty-three! After twenty-three years of marriage, my mother decided to divorce my dad, and she took the four younger kids with her
My younger brother, David, told me one time w that my mother helped him climb a water tower. David was 16! My mother drove her blue Ford pickup next to the water tower, in the grass near the town pool one night in Ellsworth. David took a step up from the truck and onto the water tower ladder. Never mind it wasn’t known if David was afraid of heights, or that he could have fallen to his death. There also wasn’t a cage around the water tower ladder, so if you fell backwards, nothing would save you. David simply climbed up and then back down – no vandalism. What responsible mother allows and supports doing this?
I often wondered about her mentality, and why her brain worked as it did. My mother was always truly bipolar, and her mood swings were horrific. I only learned that my mother was an untreated bipolar and schizophrenic person after I went to nursing school..
My mother drank a lot and messed around with many men in the county. It was embarrassing. She broke up one marriage and nearly wrecked two others. In her mind, if a man was married, he was a good man, and if he wasn’t married, then he was no good because no one wanted him. Ernie was one of those married men, and he stayed married, but my mother got my younger siblings to chant, “Duh, Ernie! Duh Ernie!” over and over. This was a stupid chant, but my mother loved to hear the name “Ernie” even though they no longer dated. She would simply smile and keep on driving, knowing my siblings had no idea that they were chanting about an ex-lover and a married man! It gave my mother great satisfaction. Why would anyone receive satisfaction from something this bad?
It was humiliating to sit in a parked car outside a guy’s house while waiting on my mother giving said guy oral sex or intercourse. She would have me, or Debi drive her home afterwards due to her drunkenness. Sounds like the kind of mother you want to have, doesn’t it?
After the divorce from my dad, my mother first married George Cook, but he died of a massive heart attack six weeks later. She dated other men and soon she married Harold, not just once but three times! I always remember each time she dragged me around the house by my hair, the pointed toe of her cowboy boots kicking me in my back and stomach, and the horrible and disgusting words that she threw at me. My friends would sometimes come to the house, but they would end up leaving because they couldn’t handle what they saw and heard.
The saga of being her alibi started late in the evening one frigid
winter day in 1982. For three years, my mother never once came to visit
the place where I lived with my first husband…
Read Her Alibi for only .99 cents. You decide my mother’s entire psyche.
Mary L. Schmidt writes under her given name and a pen name, S. Jackson, along with her husband Michael, pen name A Raymond. She grew up in a small Kansas (USA) town and has lived in more than one state since then. At this time, Mary and her husband split their time between homes in Kansas and Colorado as they love the mountains and off-road four-wheeling. Traveling is one of their most favorite things to do and Mary always has a book to read on her Kindle. Books are one of her favorite things. When she was younger, it seemed like every time she turned around, a new library card was needed due to the current one being stamped complete. Diving into a good book made any day perfect and you would be surprised at the number of books she read over and over.
As a child, Mary drew paper dolls, and clothes for them, using watercolor as her medium when painting scenes, especially flowers. She continued with art in high school exploring a wide variety of mediums such as jewelry making, ceramics, leather works, drawing, painting and more! Her creative loves to be an amateur shutterbug and she has an online art gallery.
In college, she went into the sciences, and received a bachelor’s degree in the Science of Nursing. Throughout her nursing career, Michael assisted Mary in her work with The American Cancer Society, March of Dimes, Cub and Boy Scouts, and sponsored children alongside his wife on music trips. Mary’s nursing career was highly successful, and she hung up her nursing hat in December 2012.
Mary and Michael love to read, fish, play poker, go Jeeping, and travel, especially to visit their grandson, Austin, and granddaughter, Emma.
Website: www.whenangelsfly.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaryLSchmidt
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MMSchmidtAuthorGDDonley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mschmidtphotography/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/marylschmidt/
Art Gallery: https://www.deviantart.com/mschmidtartwork/gallery
Visions of her Cherokee grandmother, Cordie, flashed through Mary’s mind as her mother, Marguerite, informed her that her stepfather shot himself and was in the hospital. Oh no! Did she use me last night? She’d never use her scapegoat! No, she couldn’t! Even Marguerite wouldn’t sink that low! Or would she? Marguerite had always been abusive and vile to most people, and especially to her children and husbands, but would she shoot Paul? Chills raked Mary and triggered her shuddering. Was she more shocked that her mother shot her stepfather with murderous intent, or that she left Mary as her alibi?
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