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Two years after the divorce, my mom married another farmer, my stepfather, Melvin. Mom and Melvin are still married today, and they had two more little girls, my half sisters, Erin and Allyx.
I was fourteen when Erin was born, and much of the responsibility for her care fell on me. In a way, she felt like my own child. Mom had been driving the school bus for many years, so in the mornings, I’d be responsible for watching my baby sister while I got ready for junior high. Then Matt and I would take Erin to school with us, where we’d meet Mom, who’d just finished the bus route. She would take Erin and drive our car home. After school, it was the opposite routine, unless we had sports or a gig to play. Mom would meet us as school was getting out, and we’d take the baby home, where I’d watch her till Mom got done driving the school bus.
Mom and Melvin sold the big farm and moved into another house—this one white—in New Franklin, on forty acres. We packed up the last of our childhood and the family we’d been, saying goodbye to the place we’d loved since I was four years old.
We started growing tobacco at the new farm. My brothers and I were expected to help, as usual, and if I’d thought we’d worked hard before, I soon discovered that tobacco farming was incredibly demanding. Since tobacco is grown year-round, we didn’t have the usual seasons of planting, growing, harvesting, and a winter rest in the fields, like we’d had at our old farm. There was a cycle of growing the tobacco, but it didn’t stop in winter. Unlike most other crops, every tobacco plant has to be physically handled. Harvesting meant cutting and spearing each of the tall tobacco plants, which were over six feet, and hanging them to dry. During the harvest, we’d get out of school and head straight to the tobacco fields.
There was at least one key benefit to this hard work, and that was the hiring of cute teenage boys to help with the harvest. I was in my early teens and loved being able to put on some short cutoff jean shorts and flirt with them! All of my girlfriends suddenly wanted to help in the tobacco fields, too! The guys were impressed that I was out there, and I put in extra effort showing off that I could work as hard as anyone else.
We still had other work on the farm besides the tobacco. We’d haul hay for the horses and livestock, and do the chores a farm requires. I remember countless times that we’d earn extra money picking up hundreds of bales of hay from someone’s pasture. My mom would drive the truck and flatbed trailer and the boys and I would buck every single bale. I would wear shorts because it was so bloody hot, and I’d tie a bandanna around my right leg, the one I used to push the hay bale up onto the trailer. You had to wear work gloves, too, or your hands would get torn up. And, of course, being the competitive tomboy that I was, I HAD to try to buck as many bales as the boys, and I usually did. Maybe more. I love hard physical labor. Love it. And there is always the random bale that you’ll pick up and discover a huge snake coiled up under it, and you would scream and run as fast as you could to get away! Everyone would have a good laugh at that.
Mom balanced everything—even while pregnant at thirty-nine and forty-two, she worked nonstop. I watched her change a flat tire just one week before she gave birth to my sister Erin. I can hardly remember her ever slowing down. She was farmer, homemaker, mom, wife, school bus driver, and, for a while, she took on additional work at a gas station and the post office. Melvin worked for the Highway Department in addition to farming. He was always being called out in the middle of the night when it snowed, to clear the roads and get them ready for people to get to work and school the next morning. We hardly ever had snow days. I still can’t believe my mom drove the school bus on those days. I would have been scared to death! But again, she’s not afraid of anything. She knew exactly how to handle the icy, hilly roads, how to pump the brakes just right so she wouldn’t lose control of the bus. She taught us all how to drive in the snow, too. When Mom worked long hours, Lesley and Ashley and I took on the housework, making the beds, doing laundry and dishes, and cooking some of the meals. We knew the work better be done by the time Mom pulled up to the house. Sometimes we’d procrastinate or get busy with other things, like watching TV, and then we’d hear the car coming up the driveway and spring into action.
I remember us calling out, “Mom! Mom’s home!” as my sisters and I looked at one another in terror and raced around finishing up the chores before that door opened. There wasn’t a question of what would happen if we didn’t get it done. We just better get those chores done! So to make it fun, we pretended to have powers like Samantha on Bewitched, where she could move at triple speed. It was hilarious! But it worked!
It did not escape our minds, though, that we had sort of moved on from the divorce as if nothing had happened. We were carrying on with life as usual. But it was never quite the same.
Meanwhile, my dad was living his own life without us. Eventually, he started to move on after the divorce, and he began dating. He had a cute girlfriend named Malia who was younger than him, with short blond hair. She was nice, but it was strange seeing my father in a relationship like that, looking at a woman other than my mom with affection. I hated it immediately. I felt like he should want to spend his time with us kids now that he was getting back on his feet. But instead, he was so into Malia. At thirteen years of age, I couldn’t understand it.
I still wanted to hang out with my dad and be Daddy’s girl. The further he pulled away, the more I tried to get him back. I went shopping with Malia and my dad in St. Louis one time. She took me to Banana Republic, which was the kind of store she liked. I walked through the racks of neatly hung clothing, loving the outfits I saw that were so different from the western shop and Walmart clothes that I was used to. Then I looked at the price and swallowed hard at how expensive it was. This was a world way different from what I’d known. I had a feeling at that time that maybe my dad had no idea who he really was or what he really wanted.
Eventually Dad and Malia broke up. He was alone again and unhappy. Then he started dating a very nice woman named Christine—we called her Chris. Dad was happyish again, but that didn’t mean he was available to us kids. He made an announcement shortly after they started dating: “Guess what? Christine and I are getting married.”
Even though my mom was remarried, it seemed too soon. There was nothing wrong with Chris. She was nice to us, but Dad had just changed so much. With Mom and Melvin, we were an intact family, and Mom hadn’t changed. I was beginning to learn that my dad really didn’t like to be alone, and that he was a chameleon: once he met a woman, he changed for her and kept getting swept into her world and her ways.
It seemed there was never a time after my parents’ divorce when we really had our dad to ourselves. They say that most men are like this, and that when they get divorced, they don’t like to be alone for long. They want to get married again, and quickly. But for me, a wedding meant losing my dad forever.
Christine had a daughter the exact same age as me—my new stepsister, Johnna. She was an only child. Dad moved into Chris’s beautiful condo in Columbia. I walked around looking at the feminine touches, thinking how strange that my manly dad lived here now. Johnna’s room was perfectly decorated and all her own, without siblings. I had shared a bed with my sisters my whole life. She was obsessed with Princess Diana and had every book about her as well, huge picture books, and an array of Princess Di collectible plates on the wall.