My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (2 page)

In fairness, Mom didn’t know any better. She was just fourteen when she married Dad to escape her horrible family, and fifteen when she had me. Yet instead of giving us the happy childhood she’d never had, unbeknownst to her she made our lives miserable. Not that it put her off of having more children. In 1968, when I was twelve, she was once again with Gilpin, and gave birth to Betti Renee. Mom—now known as Big Betty—favored Little Betti and didn’t hide the fact. The rest of us, according to Mom and Dad, were stupid and unwanted. Is it any wonder I grew up believing I was worthless?

I ran away from home at the age of twelve, after my stepfather attacked me. I was in the upstairs bathroom when he barged in, grabbed hold of me and tried to rip my clothes off. His breath reeked of alcohol; his face was twisted with lust. He loomed above me, rocking drunkenly back and forth as I screamed my head off, yelling at my brothers to call the police. Steve, who was nine, and six-year-old Todd burst into the bathroom and tried to kick him away, but he was too big and strong for them. The police arrived. They took my stepfather off in handcuffs and I stupidly thought that was the last we’d see of him. But Mom refused to believe me. My stepfather returned home after a night in jail, and I left.

My best friends, Theresa and Bonnie, provided sanctuary. Their mothers taught me about families and love. They wanted to adopt me. They made me feel important. The trouble was, I missed my little brothers. Home was horrible for them too, and they said it was unbearable when I wasn’t there. Running away became a pattern. I’d lie low for a few days, and then Steve or Todd would beg me to return. I’d go home, things would be fine for a week, and then the drama would start again. God, how I hated my life.

School kept me sane, especially when Theresa and I joined the cheerleading squad. Her mom made our outfits, and for the first time, I felt cool. Bonnie was a couple of years older and introduced us to music. She played the guitar. We lived for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. We were hippie chicks and—as far as we were concerned—mature beyond our years.

Edna and Charles Schwartz lived up the road from us. They had no children, so they doted on her nephew Bruce. His family lived in North Dakota, but he often visited. Bruce stayed with them when he was between jobs. Then a few months later he got a job at the local wood-veneer factory. Bonnie had a crush on Bruce, and I trailed shyly behind her as we set about getting to know him better.

We spent hours in the park listening to music. Bruce said he was a drummer and talked about forming a band. He was also kind to my brothers when we met at baseball games. I felt totally at ease with him. It wasn’t a sexual thing. He listened to me, gave advice, and made me laugh.

Compared with other boys I knew, Bruce was cool. Romantically, I thought he was way out of my league. But after he had rescued me from my stepfather, we started talking about our hopes and dreams for the future. I told him I prayed every night for a better life. All I ever wanted was a husband who loved me, a nice home, and a big brood of children. Bruce felt the same. As we sat in the darkness discussing the future, I truly believed that all my dreams would come true.

You can marry—with parental permission—at fifteen in Missouri. One night, after an especially bitter fight at home, I told Bruce I was going to run away again. I couldn’t stand the babysitting, the chores, my drunken stepdad, and the constant battles with Mom. To my surprise, he proposed. Of course I said yes. I was in love. Initially Mom refused to give her permission.

We used to hang out at Jonas’ Coffee House listening to music. I would watch adoringly as Bruce pounded pencils on the table, pretending to be a drummer. He was into heavy metal music and he let his hair flow free as he worked his way into a drumming frenzy. He had the high cheekbones of a Blackfoot Indian and claimed that the Mathers family was descended from witches.

He’d tease me, saying, “You’d better watch out when you go to sleep: I turn into a vampire.” Then he’d bare his teeth at me. It was only a joke, but I was so frightened of violence that I used to cower. Bruce would put his big arms around me, telling me not to worry.

Bruce had two cousins, who were both great. They looked after me. Then there were Theresa and Bonnie and all our friends. We were a big happy crowd, whiling away hours in the local park. Someone always had a guitar, so we’d sit in a circle singing or talking until the police arrived at midnight. They’d order us to leave. As far as they were concerned we were a group of no-good hippies.

Not that everything was perfect in paradise. Bruce and I disagreed when it came to sex. He wanted it immediately. I wanted to wait until we married. Even though I acted as mother to my siblings and felt I’d lived a lifetime of chores and drudgery, I had few clues about how motherhood came about.

My Catholic mom had instilled in me early on that sex was dirty. When I was almost thirteen I started my periods, and she said, “Now the guys will come round and you’ll be pregnant before you know it.” She never told me about the birds and the bees, but Theresa helpfully filled me in, warning that if a boy even put his arm around me, I could conceive. I had my first “pregnancy scare” a few months later, when a lad called Mark tried to cuddle me at the drive-in movie theater. I pushed him away, went home, filled a small vanity case with rocks, and dropped it constantly on my stomach, hoping to miscarry.

Eventually I told Theresa, who laughed her head off, then took me home to her mother for a talk about the birds and the bees.

Bruce was my first real boyfriend. He was experienced, but all the fumbling around frightened me. We kissed all the time, but I pushed him away every time his hands slipped into my clothes. It was perhaps inevitable that he looked elsewhere for sex. I heard rumors that he was cheating on me, but he denied it. I wanted to believe him. I wanted so much for everything to be right between us. So I closed my eyes, thought of our future together, and gave him my virginity.

It still wasn’t enough. A few months later I was on the phone to Bruce when the local whore came knocking at his door. She had the hots for him and didn’t bother to hide it from me. I screamed at Bruce not to let her in, but he claimed they were just friends and told me not to be so jealous. I slammed the phone down and went running over to his place. She heard me shouting and ran down the back steps to escape. I told Bruce there and then that I wouldn’t marry him and stalked off. He chased after me, grabbing hold of my arms, pleading with me to believe nothing had happened. I wanted to trust him, I really did, but my childhood insecurities about being ugly and worthless kicked in. It didn’t help when he later confessed he had—just once—slept with her. He claimed it didn’t mean a thing, and again he got down on his knees begging me to marry him.

Mom finally agreed to give me her permission to marry. I left the consent forms with her when she was sick in the hospital, and I didn’t bother to check her signature when I collected them a few hours later. I steamed ahead with our wedding plans, not realizing my aunt Martha had signed her name, pretending to be my mother.

I’d abandoned my Catholic faith—although the guilt about sex remained with me for years—around the time Mom started seeing Gilpin. She’d used church as an excuse to sneak out and see him. I tried several different denominations, even toying with the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while. By the summer of 1970, I was attending the Assembly of God Church in the basement of Saint Joseph’s East Mills Shopping Mall. Bruce came with me just once to appease me. I decided the chapel was perfect for our little wedding.

We married on September 20, 1970. I wore a cream just-above-the-knee dress with a red velvet vest. Bruce wore a smart tailored suit. Dad actually showed up to walk me down the aisle. Mom was there too, finally, to give us her blessing. All my family and friends came, along with Bruce’s dad, Marshall, and his mother, Rae. I was the happiest bride ever—even though the whole ceremony was illegal, because the signature on the consent form wasn’t Mom’s, although I didn’t know that at the time.

We couldn’t afford a honeymoon. Anyway, I was still at school, and Bruce couldn’t get time off from his job at the Missouri Valley Veneer wood company. It wasn’t easy finding a home. Anyone in Saint Joseph with long hair was considered a hippie, so Bruce hid his ponytail under a cap.

Eventually, we found a two-bedroom duplex apartment on South 11th Street, and I set about turning it into a home. My life revolved around making Bruce happy. My brothers and sisters still spent a lot of their time with me. Bruce got annoyed if they came around during the day when he was trying to sleep after his night shift, so I’d take them off to the park. Then I’d cook us all a big meal before sending the kids home and seeing Bruce off to work. Sometimes I went to the factory with Bruce’s sandwiches and helped him work. I just loved spending time with him.

On the weekends, Bruce and I, along with all our other hippie friends, went to music festivals or fairs. We loved it when a carnival came to town. Sometimes we went to a coffee bar to listen to music. It’s funny: I was old enough to marry but not old enough to drink. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t stand alcohol. It had destroyed my family. So, when Bruce and I bought an old red Chevy Camaro, which we then traded in for a Volkswagen, I was always the designated driver. We thought nothing of traveling for two hours to go to a fair. Some of our crowd took LSD and smoked weed. I wasn’t interested in trying either. I’d started smoking cigarettes at thirteen. That was my only vice, although I managed to quit off and on.

Once, at a carnival, Bruce became totally paranoid that the police were after us. I kept turning around, but I couldn’t see any officers behind us. He shoved me into the Tunnel of Love. As I sat down on a boat he pulled a small cellophane package from his pocket.

“Quick, eat this,” he said, pressing a piece of thick paper into my hand. I had no idea what was going on, but he was so insistent, I swallowed it.

The boat took off into the murky tunnel. Through the darkness, I saw snakes curling around my legs. I closed my eyes—someone had obviously mixed up the Tunnel of Love with the House of Horrors. Now I could feel snakes slithering all over me. I opened my eyes and begged Bruce to get me out of there. He laughed maniacally. He had become a monster with fangs and horns.

Somehow Bruce got me off the boat. As his cousins gathered around I heard him say, “She’s taken a big hit of Orange Barrel Sunshine.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me to the hospital. I wanted to run, but my legs wouldn’t let me. Even walking was impossible. The ground kept coming up at me. On the way home it started to rain; every drop of water was a different color. Bruce kept saying I needed to eat to help me come down. But every time I tried, the food grew wings and flew off my plate. I was awake for three entire days. I thought the rainbows of water cascading down outside would never stop.

Bruce finally told me the blotting paper I’d swallowed was loaded with LSD. He insisted he was selling it to make money for us. He also claimed that he’d told me to hide the paper in my mouth, not eat it. I couldn’t believe my husband had done this to me. He could have messed me up for life. But as always, I forgave him.

I dropped out of school. It was stupid, really, because I was bright, often helping friends with their homework. But I was a married woman of sixteen. It made sense to concentrate on creating a home.

When Bruce and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with a romantic home-cooked meal, I thanked him for making me happy.

The only blight on the horizon was my failure to get pregnant. We couldn’t wait to become parents. Every two months or so I went running off to the doctor, but it wasn’t to be. I was tiny—five-foot-two and always under a hundred pounds. The doctor lectured me constantly about being too skinny. I couldn’t help it. I had a big appetite but was naturally scrawny. The doctor would order me to go home, put on a bit of weight, and learn to relax. He told me to be patient, and then I’d get pregnant.

Mom divorced Gilpin, married Ronald Polkingharn, and was soon pregnant with her sixth child.

I suppose for Bruce it wasn’t the easiest of starts to married life. His parents loved him unconditionally, and he had just one elder sister, Carol Sue, who was in the military, serving in Japan. He’d never come across a family like mine.

He promised that our children would never suffer the way I had. So every night I prayed to God that I’d be with child. In January 1972, those prayers were answered. After sixteen months of marriage, I was finally pregnant.

I loved being pregnant. I was so proud of my tiny belly and tried to make it stick out more because I wanted the world to know I was expecting a baby. I sang songs as I rubbed my stomach. “Baby Love” and “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes were particularly fitting. Motown Music came out of Detroit—just a few miles from Nan’s house in Warren, Michigan, where I’d spent the only happy times of my childhood.

Nan was the family historian. She was proud of her Cherokee Indian heritage and had boxes of old documents and photos. I wanted to know everything about our ancestors, so that one day I could tell my own child. Nan could trace her lineage back to Betsy Webb, who was forced, with 17,000 Cherokees from the Deep South, to march west to Oklahoma during the brutal winter of 1838–9. More than 4,000 died along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Nan was proud of Betsy Webb, who she said was in all the history books along with another forefather, Washington Harris. Many years later, Nan’s knowledge proved invaluable when I used our links with Alabama’s Echota tribe for help to battle the child protection authorities—a story you will read all about later on.

Mom could trace her family back to Great Britain. Her great-grandmother, Ailsa Macallister, sailed from Scotland to New York at the age of twenty-three, in 1870. My great-granny, Martha Mount, inherited a Scottish love of whiskey and terrified us kids by chasing her husband around with a fire poker. She called cabs to collect her booze. There was a constant stream of taxi drivers bearing bottles at her door. She would get really mean with Grandpa and the other kids, but favored me because I was born on her birthday.