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?
***********
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.
