My dad was gorgeous when he was young, with big brown eyes, olive skin, and black hair. He loved leather jackets—and motorcycles and cars and airplanes: anything that went fast. He was the apple of my grandma’s eye, and she definitely favored him. He could sing, and he was smart and funny, a great catch for a raven-haired beauty like my mom.
Patricia Ann Floyd, my mom, was the middle child between two brothers; her parents were Mildred and Ralph Floyd, aka Granny and Papa. My mom was a strong and vibrant athlete in high school. She was super-smart, with a wicked sense of humor, and so striking that she looked like a 1960s movie star. Both of my parents could’ve made it on the big screen, but they chose the simple, small-town life, and right after marriage they started having babies. I think that’s just what most people did in the sixties and before.
A year after the wedding, in 1966, my brother Jay was born. My brother Matt followed in 1968. Three years after him, I made my entrance into the world, and Lesley and Ashley followed.
My parents were married for eighteen years before they divorced. When you get married at a young age, it’s probably impossible to know who you really are and what you really want out of life. I think that’s the story of my parents, to put it simply.
My mom wanted to be a farmer and have a big family. My dad wanted to be a delinquent on Welcome Back, Kotter and had dreams of being on the open road with the wind in his face. I inherited my dad’s wanderlust, for sure, because I’ve spent much of my life on the road. I even recorded a song on that topic, called “Restless,” which was the title track on my fourth album.
I’m sure my parents didn’t marry thinking they’d get a divorce. No one does. But this was the eighties, when divorce wasn’t as frowned upon as it had been previously. My parents had a lot of stress with five kids, money problems, multiple jobs, a four-hundred-acre farm, and very different dreams. I can only imagine the many issues that eventually pulled them apart.
It’s not that my parents fought. Actually, our family had a lot of fun. I always thought of us as a really cool, tight family, which made it even worse when, during the summer of 1983, my mother told us that my dad had moved out. It was the summer before I started sixth grade.
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My parents’ divorce was different from most, I think. Like I said, they really didn’t fight, but we could see the tension a lot. Especially in those six months before we were told that my dad had moved out. And that’s exactly what happened. One Sunday morning we all came downstairs, my mother was cooking breakfast, the little girls were playing in another room, and she told Jay and Matt and me to sit down. She said, “Your dad has moved into an apartment in Columbia so he can be closer to work when he has to do the graveyard shift.” I think we all three knew in our hearts that’s not why he got an apartment in Columbia. We were too afraid to ask the question, “Are you guys getting a divorce?” But we knew. We all looked at each other, and we knew. And I think it was maybe later that day or not long after when he came home, and we watched them through the window. They were arguing by the car. We were never really told anything more.
One night I was in bed upstairs and the phone rang. We had one phone upstairs and one downstairs. I picked it up as quietly as I could and started listening to my parents’ private conversation. I knew it was wrong and I could get into BIG trouble if I got caught, but I couldn’t stop! I had to know something about why they were divorcing. All I heard was a bit of a conversation that I didn’t really understand before I hung up. I put the phone back on the handle as slowly and quietly as I could and tiptoed back to my bed. That was the first time I cried about everything. I cried and cried, sobbing into my pillow until I fell asleep. So to this day I really can’t give you a concrete answer as to why they split.
It wasn’t like today’s divorces. There weren’t any court battles or custody issues, and we never really got into the routine of “every other weekend at Dad’s house.” It’s almost as though we went on with life and Dad didn’t live with us anymore.
I remember once or twice we did stay with Dad in his apartment in Columbia. But it was just a one-bedroom apartment, way too small for five kids, and it wasn’t fun. In fact, it was kind of depressing. I think he tried to make it fun. He got a bunch of snacks and soda and a little bumper pool table, and our mom let us take the ColecoVision from our house. We tried to make the best of it, but there was no room, it was in a bad part of town, and we had to sleep on the floor, which had dirty wall-to-wall carpeting. We stayed Friday and Saturday night.
On Sunday morning I woke up with the loudest, most horrific noise in my ear! I mean, it was excruciating, and I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I started screaming and crying and panicking, so Dad took me and all five of us to a clinic down the road. They saw me immediately because I was so freaked out from that awful loud noise. Turns out, a teeny-tiny bug had crawled in my ear while I slept on that disgusting carpet. So the doctor poured some kind of fluid (maybe just water, I don’t know) in my ear and told me to keep my head tilted for about ten minutes to keep the fluid in, and then he said, “All right, turn your head the other way.” And a bug fell out onto a tissue that he was holding. It was so tiny you could barely even see it! I remember being shocked at the loud noise that tiny little bug made and being so relieved that the noise stopped. Just like that. The doc said it was because the bug was lying right on my eardrum. I told you, I am accident-prone. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen to me.
I think we may have only spent one other weekend, if that, at my dad’s sad little apartment, and then we began visiting him on Wednesday nights at Grandma and Grandpa Evans’s house in New Franklin. Our hometown. But that was kind of terrible, too, because my dad was so depressed. He couldn’t even pretend. He would just sit there on the couch and watch TV while we waited until the “visit” was up and we needed to go home to get our homework done or whatever. It was very uncomfortable, and I remember being sick with worry and pity for him. For all of us.
And of course it wasn’t too long before the “newness” of the divorce wore off and my dad couldn’t make the child support payments. He was struggling big-time financially. I don’t know the details or the ins and outs of what agreements or arrangements they made, but I remember Mom saying, “Tell your dad I need the child support.” Of course, that is not what any child wants to do. So we would get in the silver van that had become Jay’s when he turned sixteen, and discuss this on the way to go see Dad. “What should we say?” “Should we say anything, or just ignore it?” “Will Mom get mad if we don’t tell him she needs her check?”
Around this time, Jay, Matt, Lesley, Ashley, and I vowed that we’d always be close and not ever let anything come between us or get in the way of our love for one another. When you’re a child of divorce, it’s something that you share with your siblings that nobody else can really understand. There’s a closeness with all of us that remains to this day.
Everyone, including our extended family, was devastated about my parents’ divorce. And in a small town in the eighties, it was embarrassing to say that your parents weren’t together. As a family, we had been popular and well known in our town. Everything about it sucked.