A Mother's Broken Heart

by Wanda Goodwin-Yemm

Overview

A Mother’s Broken Heart is the heartbreaking memoir by a woman with a fifth-grade education. She wanted to share her story with anyone who might be facing similar difficulties. Author Wanda Goodwin-Yemm grew up poor and with an alcoholic father, but she had the wherewithal to write about her life.

A loving mother who always tried to give her sons her very best, they did not follow the paths she had hoped they would. But this did not affect her strong faith and unwavering belief in God’s love. From the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father to her unhappy marriage, the author never lost sight of the life she wanted for herself and for her sons. She worked hard to give them a good life; she sacrificed everything for them.

A Mother’s Broken Heart chronicles the life of Wanda Goodwin-Yemm—her love for her two sons and the hope and faith that her future may still hold promise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491734148
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/27/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	50
File size:	171 KB

Read an Excerpt

A Mother's Broken Heart

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By Wanda Goodwin-Yemm

iUniverse LLC

Copyright © 2014 Wanda Goodwin-Yemm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-3413-1

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CHAPTER 1

I grew up in a little town called Fulton, Mississippi. My daddy moved us down there to take care of his bedridden mother. We lived on 380 acres of land. We were cotton farmers, but we also had all kinds of fruit trees and nut trees. We grew our own food, and then we would can everything we could for later on down the road—well, we kids didn't, but our mother did. We were all still pretty young. We also had pigs, chickens, a mule to do our plowing for us, and a couple of cows for our milk. From our cows' milk, we made our own butter, cheese, and buttermilk. I really did love living on the farm. We had so much space to play on. I loved it when it was time for the peddler to come by, for our grandma would give us some pennies and we would go out and flag down the peddler. We could get a whole bag of candy with those pennies. We always called it our grocery store on wheels; it was awesome. It's funny how much stuff you could buy, so different from today. Today, it costs an arm and a leg to buy anything.

There were not any stores for miles besides this one little country store down the main road. I don't know how many miles it was to that store. All I know is that, for me, being as little as I was, it was a long, long way. Sometimes, two of us were allowed to walk to the store. I had to be the oldest. I'll never forget it. I thought it was the most awesome store I had ever been to. I still remember the name of the store; it was called Heckman and Verbles. The people who owned it were two of the nicest people I ever met. When you would go in, it was like they had known you all your life. They were so kind to you, which was one thing I didn't have happen to me very often. They would have this game going all the time for the ones who shopped there. It was called "punchboard." It cost a dime or quarter, depending on which side you wanted to punch. On the quarter side, you got bigger prizes. It was always a candy bar, a big or a medium one. One thing about it—you never lost; you would win some size of candy bar.

Daddy was funny about buying us anything like candy or pop. He didn't spend money on us kids very often, but he didn't mind spending a lot of money on whisky. One time, I punched the punchboard and I won the biggest candy bar they had. I was so happy. I know it sounds funny being so happy over a candy bar, but we never got anything like that, so for me it was a big moment in my life. One thing about it, when we did get some candy or soda, we always shared with each other. I'll never forget one time my sister and I got a soda and a little half pint of vanilla ice cream. We got two bowls and halved the ice cream. Then we poured the soda over it. As we were eating it, we discovered that a dead fly had come out of our soda, and we were so upset. We looked at each other, and my sister said, "That fly won't kill us. Let's just scoop it out." And that was what we did. We ate all that we had left. We didn't stop to think about the fly. We just didn't want to waste our soda and ice cream. I know—yuck! That's what you are thinking, but you were not a little girl who never got anything sweet. We were not about to waste it.

My grandma was bedridden. Her bed was put in the living room because that was the warmest room in the house. We had a potbelly stove in the middle of the floor, and we had a fireplace. That was all the heat we had except for another stove that was in the kitchen. It was funny, but our house must not have been built very well because you could see the chickens under the floor through the cracks in the boards. They just did not meet together like they should.

I had a great mother. I have never seen anyone work as hard as she did. Mother would get up early, give Grandma a bath, cook breakfast for all of us, clean up Grandma, clean up all the dishes, and get all us kids dressed and off to school if we were old enough to go to school. If we weren't, then that meant we went to the cotton field with Mother. Sometimes, she would take a blanket and lay us under a shade tree, and the oldest would watch the younger ones and keep the snakes off them. I know you're probably saying, "Why would there be snakes?" There were all kinds of venomous ones, so Mother was not going to take a chance. A lot of times, she would take the baby and put him or her on the end of her tow sack and pull it as she picked cotton. When she did this, that meant we were behind on our picking, so then all the kids who were older than the baby got a tow sack and picked cotton also. When we first started doing this, we thought it was fun, but when it got to days here and there and we were still doing it, it got to where it wasn't much fun at all. Sometimes, Mother would pick three or four tow sacks full a day and her fingers would bleed. We never picked that much. We were lucky to pick a sackful combined. We always stopped for lunch because Mother would have to go back home and clean up Grandma and cook some dinner for all of us. Then, we would clean up the dishes and make Grandma comfortable, and back to the cotton fields. We always stayed down there until time for school to be let out then headed home to cook supper. But that was how life was; we were always so busy trying to survive. We had an old ringer type of washing machine, but Mother didn't use it a lot because it didn't work too well—the ringer did, but the washer part didn't. So when it was time to wash clothes, we always went down to the stream, and Mother would wash every one of them out by hand—and you are talking about three grown-ups and four kids. That is a lot of clothes! I always felt so sorry for my mother. Her hands hurt all the time. She never had anyone to help her except us kids, and we were not that much of help.

We had a big black pot in the backyard, and she always used that for the clothes that had stains on them. She would make a fire underneath and then put Red Devil lye in it, and when it was boiling, she would put the clothes in it and stir them with a big stick. She would rinse them and then run them through the ringer machine. What would we all do nowadays if we had to wash our clothes like that? There would be a lot of unwashed clothes if you ask me. Have you ever used a ringer washing machine? Well, I would try to help Mother and wind my hand or finger up in it. I hated that thing. One thing I helped with, which I didn't mind to do, was when she was done, I'd hang all the clothes on the clothesline she made. One bad thing about not having a dryer, all your clothes came out wrinkled. And if you knew my daddy, there was no way he would wear anything with a wrinkle in it. So that meant Mother had to iron every piece of clothing she washed. She ironed towels, sheets, pillowcases, everything so that meant one whole day of nothing but ironing. My dad would not have it any other way. He was a spick-and-span man. The house had to be clean all the time. I would see my mother take soap and water to scrub the wood floors. I thank we were the only country folks who had a country shack that was always spick-and-span. I just can't imagine how tired my mother was when she went to bed after all that she had done that day. And all these young people nowadays do one little task and they think they have done the biggest thing in the world. Then they have to sit down for three or four days to get over what they have done. There were other things Mother did besides what I have described.

I haven't told you about the animals or our huge garden way down in the hollow. It was like Groundhog Day—same old thing every day, except maybe the next day would be a little harder; it never got easier. It really got cold in our house in the winter, and with the only heat a potbelly stove and a fireplace, well, guess who had to get them going all the time. Yep, Mother. You say, "Well, your dad was alive. Where was he?" Daddy did help pick cotton and helped in the garden, but Mother did the milking of the cows. He would clean the barn and plow the garden, but Mother would also plow some. It was always according to whether Daddy was drunk or not and if he had to take care of his still in the woods. When it came to bedtime for us kids, Daddy was never there to tell us good night. Mother would always come in where we were to make sure we had cover and were not cold. If we were, she would take our blanket and hold it up to the fire to get it warm and then run in and put it on us. Then she would take the old irons and warm them up on the potbelly stove, wrap them in a towel, and put them at our feet to keep us warm. My sister and I slept together, and my two brothers slept together. You should have seen us when it came bath time! Mother put water in this big tub, and one at a time, we would take a bath. Boy, if you were the last one to get in the tub, you hated it because by then it was like bathing in dirt water, but that was the way we had to do it. I'm sure glad it's not like that today.

Okay, let's talk about my daddy for a while. Daddy spent a lot of time in the US Navy. He was an ambulance driver while he was in there. He had a lot of issues. I don't know, but maybe it was being in the navy that gave him these issues. While he drove the ambulance, he would go to where these men were hurt and sometimes they were dead and all blown to pieces. It was said he would pick up all kinds of body parts and just toss them into the back of the ambulance. That had to work on your mind, your heart, and any part of your life that had feelings, I would think. He was a bad drinker, and I'm sure that didn't help his mind either. Mother always told me she loved him so much, but I don't really know why because he was so mean to her all the time. In his eyes, I don't care how hard Mother worked or what she did to wait on him hand and foot, he was still always trying to kill her. You say, "Kill her?" Yes, kill her. I will give you some examples of some of the things he did to her, and there is no way I can cover them all, because it went on every weekend from the time I can remember until he died. He died when I was fifteen years old, so you're looking at fifteen years of abuse not counting what happened before I was born.

We still lived in the country when he almost cut her fingers off on one hand. It was because he had a friend over to buy some moonshine and I guess he started talking to Mother some. Well, it made Daddy mad. He thought the guy was flirting with her. Mother overheard Daddy mumbling to himself, saying, "Well, when he comes through that door, I'm just going to cut his head off." At that point, the guy was in the kitchen getting a drink, and it had a swing door on it. My mother yelled, "Don't come through the door! He's behind the door with a machete!" The guy ran through the door, and as Daddy came down with the machete, Mother grabbed the knife to keep him from hitting the guy in the head, but it was the blade she grabbed and as it came down, it almost cut off four of her fingers.

He did all this with his mother lying there in bed sick. She would yell at him, but it would not do any good because he never listened to anybody. He was a hard worker, but when he got to drinking, he would stay drunk for days. In that time, he would try everything he could to kill Mother. We always knew when he started drinking to hide some food and something to sleep on in the woods because if we didn't leave, all he would do was beat on her the whole weekend. Mother had a black eye every weekend. It's funny though; when he wasn't drinking, I didn't see him hit her. He always held his job. His mother told him when we all went down there that if we stayed there with her and took care of her, that she was going to give us the farm, which was 380 acres. That was why we moved down there.

Daddy had a still out in the woods hidden somewhere from the Feds. They would find it every once in a while, and they would bust it up. It didn't do any good; he would just find another place and build another one. This time, he would hide it better. I think everyone around there had stills because he was always taking me to these men's houses with him but made me stay in the car while he did whatever he did when he was in there. Maybe he was selling the white lightning.

Daddy never gave Mother any money, so she never had any. She never got to go shopping except to get groceries, and then he would give her about twenty-five dollars and she would have to make that get whatever we needed. She did not know how to drive. He would not let her learn because he wanted to keep her helpless and dependent on him. We never got any new clothes unless our aunt from the city got us some. Mother had to make all our clothes. She made them out of flour sacks and anything else she could find.

When Christmas came every year, that was a disaster. We could not go out and buy a tree or decorations. We had to go out into the woods and cut a tree. Most of the time, it was a little pine tree. For decorations, we made our own out of popcorn, colored paper, and anything that we could think of to put on it. Then Mother would tell us to go find the biggest sock we could so we could put it on the fireplace for Santa to fill. We were always excited. Then Daddy would get drunk. He would come in and cuss Mother and start beating on her. We would say, "Daddy, don't hit her!" That's all it took. If we took up for Mother, he would come over, take a hold of our tree, throw it down, stomp on it, and throw it out the door. We were just brokenhearted, and when Mother said anything, he would just beat on her that much more. We would leave and go to the woods for a few days until we knew he was sober, and then we would go back with another tree and put it up all over again. Sometimes, we had to do that two or three times before Christmas came. All we ever got was a sock full of nuts, apples, oranges, candy orange slices, chocolate drops, and mixed hard candy, but you would have thought we got a million dollars. We loved it.

One time, we had an aunt from the city bring one doll and one wagon. She told us to share this between us two girls and two boys. We were so excited about that. But it didn't matter to us about toys because Mother would make us girls sock dolls. Then we would go out and look for wood, and we would make cars. We would take the empty spools from Mother's thread and make spools that rolled with rubber bands. We would find one of those steel rims that came off a tractor wheel and roll it with a stick. We also had a swing made down in the woods off a hill with a vine, and we would swing off that hill and go a long ways. It was so much fun. So if we never got anything for Christmas, we didn't let it bother us. Our main concern was Mother. When she was unhappy and mistreated, it made us so sad. I remember once I found this rock that looked like a dump truck. I played out in the dirt forever with that. Sometimes, Mother would take old socks and make my sister and me a rag doll. She really did a good job of making them. She didn't have a pattern; she always cut it out by guessing. That is one thing she taught me as a child, that I could cut any pattern out of a newspaper just by guessing. I still do that. Life never got better; it always got worse. We never knew what to expect from Daddy. It just seemed no matter what, when he got drunk, he wanted to kill her, so we were always on the run when he was drinking. Don't ask me why my mother did not leave him, for I don't know that answer. There were times she would go out of state and stay with some of her family. Maybe it was because she had all us kids and she didn't want to put pressure on her family. One thing that kept her from it was she did not drive and she had never worked outside the home before, so maybe she was afraid of what would happen to all of us.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Mother's Broken Heart by Wanda Goodwin-Yemm. Copyright © 2014 Wanda Goodwin-Yemm. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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