Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (19 page)

“I do,” I said emphatically. But then, watching the scenery fly by in a blur, I had to change the subject for a moment to ask, “Are we in a hurry?” Ellen always drives too fast for me, and since we were in no danger of missing the flight, I thought it wise to do what we could to avoid getting a ticket.

“Don’t change the subject,” Ellen said as she slowed to just above the speed limit, steering our conversation back to my need to make definite plans to break away once and for all and move to my ultimate destination—somewhere close to my kids.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “One hundred percent right. It’s just that …”

“What?” El asked softly.

I said nothing. But knowing me as well as she does, she had only to glance over and understand my many fears and reservations. It wasn’t just the ominous thought of being alone in a completely new city; it was also my desire not to live my life through her and Vance.

At the curb, Ellen helped me with my suitcases, then hugged me good-bye with tears in her eyes, saying thoughtfully, “Let me know as soon as you decide—whatever you decide.”

On the plane I had a lot of time and a lot to think about. In my mind, I began going over logistics and formulating plans. Midway between Los Angeles and Dallas, I resolved that it was time for a complete change from the environment I had lived in for the last seventeen years. Thinking about all the advantages of living in a big city, I realized how much I had been missing out on.

I clearly remember that in those minutes I found myself looking out of the window, down into the blackness. Every now and then there would be tiny clusters of lights. At that moment I knew it was time to leave small-town life.

8

Come Out, Come Out …

I
LEFT TYLER AT
6
A.M.
on Thanksgiving Day, 1990, with my car completely loaded. I had done this departing act before. But this time it was different.

Having learned from past mistakes, this time I had laid my plans out very carefully and I was much better organized. And for the first time I was moving to a place where I really wanted to be, where I could see Vance and Ellen frequently instead of just during a few quick trips each year, as we had been doing for far too long.

Alter several telephone interviews, I’d been able to obtain a job with a private speech pathology company in the Los Angeles area. In the meantime, Ellen and Jan, her partner at that time—a tall, attractive young woman who is also a top-notch photographer—spent several weekends apartment hunting for me, looking for something in my price range in the Pasadena area, where I would be working, and ultimately finding a nice place in which I could begin my new life.

As I watched the rolling hills of East Texas fade behind me, the reality of leaving weighed heavily in my mind. I was sixty years old and starting all over again. Waves of fear, loneliness, and regret mixed in with my feeling of relief and excitement. The more I thought about what a huge leap I was taking, the smaller I felt. So, I resolved, I wouldn’t think about the past or the future. Instead, I turned up my favorite Debussy on the tape player, hummed along, and made my way through central and West Texas. I tried to live in the moment, as the land around me flattened out for as far as the eye could see and the road ahead stretched to the horizon.

While I was used to driving alone from East Texas and from Shreveport, in the northwest corner of Louisiana, to New Orleans, in the southeast corner, I had never driven halfway across the country alone. Being practical, I reasoned that it might be a good idea to look as if I were not alone. So I put a lamp (without the shade) in the front passenger seat and put a hooded coat around it with the hood over the lightbulb part. The ruse seemed to work very well—that is, until I stopped for gas in New Mexico. A couple of the guys who were working at the station came up close to get a better look; when they realized what they were seeing, they laughed heartily at my “passenger.”

“Not too attractive,” I said with a shrug, “but she’s a good listener.”

Because it was Thanksgiving, there was very little traffic and the highways were nearly deserted. Watching the Texas flatlands give way to the rising cliffs and big sky of New Mexico was so fascinating that the time flew by. I got all the way to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, that first night.

On the second day, my spirits improving, I drove through New Mexico and Arizona, stopping at Flagstaff for lunch. I loved the little I saw of it—-the majestic rock formations, the Native American influences, and the western-style architecture—and put it on my list of places I’d like to go explore one day. That night I stopped at a motel in Needles, California.

“Hey, it’s me, almost there,” I told Ellen on the phone from my motel room. “I’m in Needles—you know, where Snoopy’s brother Spike lives.”

We laughed and then estimated the hours until my arrival.

Ellen was so happy, she said, it was going to be impossible to sleep. El had known for a long time that I would move out one day. She just didn’t think it would take me as long as it did.

“Less than twenty-four hours,” I sighed happily, knowing I would have no trouble sleeping. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The next morning I drove through the desolate Mojave Desert. That would have been a terrible place to have car trouble, but thankfully, my trip was uneventful, aside from seeing all that desert scenery I wasn’t used to. Before I knew it I was on the Los Angeles freeways. What an experience! If you are unfamiliar with this phenomenon, imagine yourself on a horrific snarled web of six-lane freeways suspended in the air over and under each other, with overpasses and underpasses and exits and entrances appearing out of nowhere. The good news was that because it was the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, there wasn’t much congestion. The bad news was that the traffic was flowing at a racer’s pace. I stayed in the far right-hand lane, trying to stay out of trouble, but somehow exited the freeway without meaning to.

My car, the covered lamp, and I descended the ramp into what appeared to be a warehouse area of downtown L.A. Not a good place to be at any time, and on this holiday weekend, it was worse. The streets were completely deserted. Graffiti covered all the walls. Street signs were knocked down or missing. It looked like a war zone. For a moment, I panicked, but I must have had a guardian angel with me for the whole trip, and she didn’t desert me now. After driving around several blocks, I managed to find another on-ramp and was on my way again.

The next thing I knew I was pulling into the driveway of Ellen’s Spanish-style bungalow—the first house she had ever bought—behind her brand-new beige BMW convertible. (Remember the yellow Vega?)

As soon as I honked the horn, the door flew open. First came El, then Jan. Next came Vance and Mimi. I got out of the car and was swallowed up by hugs. “Welcome to L.A.,” they all said, almost in unison.

We walked inside, all together, as I replied, “It feels so good to be here.”

If home is where the heart is, I was home.

B
IT BY BIT
, step by step, I was starting to be the woman I had always dreamed of being—my own person. It didn’t happen overnight. The idea that I had to be married to be secure took a long time to die. I felt an underlying depression, and at times I felt that I was lost in an abyss—a chasm between the known and the unknown, between my past life and what my life was going to be from then on. My bridge was my work, Ellen, Vance, and two kittens I’d taken on as roommates.

“Does it ever get easier?” I remember asking a therapist in Pasadena whom I went to see for some long overdue input. B. had been making attempts at another reconciliation and I knew it was time to arm myself.

My therapist assured me that it would get easier. Then she paused and asked quietly, “Betty, what do you want?”

The question threw me. I’d spent my life trying to do the right thing or the practical thing or the thing I had to do to solve whatever predicament I was in. But what did I want? I told her I’d get back to her on it. And that night I wrote the following notes in my journal:

During another visit, my therapist said, “Betty, do you realize that you’ve never mentioned your own sense of betrayal? You were violated by his behavior. But you haven’t acknowledged that to yourself. Why?”

“It’s my training,” I reminded her. “I’ve been trained to deny my feelings. No, more than that—feelings don’t count. You shouldn’t feel that way. Don’t make waves. Don’t make a scene. Be nice.”

She gently explained how I had turned my back on myself. Staying with B. was so important to me that I didn’t even acknowledge his betrayal. Instead, I maintained a relationship with behavior that ignored me and my needs. My task, she said, was to recognize the part of myself that I had told to be quiet for so long.

This was a revelation for me: If we offer “nice” or any other guise that is not genuine, the relationship can’t grow. Only when we offer our genuine selves can there be a solid relationship. Once I started acting on that premise—just being genuine old me—and thinking about what I wanted, it was amazing how much happier I became. And soon, at last, I moved into the fifth and final stage of my process, acceptance.

Meanwhile, as was my genuine way, I got busy fixing up my nest and getting to know neighbors and friends in charming South Pasadena.

Early on, I found my “church home,” as they say in Atlanta, Texas—All Saints Episcopal Church, a vital, community-involved congregation. I joined their singles group and also joined a men’s and women’s golf group at a nearby par 3 golf course. Pasadena has a wonderful knit shop, Mariposa, where I took part in a Wednesday night group which included mostly women, and one or two men, who gathered there to knit and chat, and sometimes have a glass of wine and snacks—a thoroughly congenial group.

I loved my surroundings and my routine, but not the daily grind of freeway travel. So by the spring of 1992, I was living comfortably in Studio City—which was more convenient for my job and for seeing Vance and El. This was another area full of interesting shops and restaurants, close enough for me to walk everywhere. There were tennis courts nearby, and I signed up for refresher lessons and met a nice woman about my age, Angie Long. We’ve become good friends, and at some point we changed from tennis to golf. It’s easier to chat along the way.

L
IFE WAS GETTING
better all the time. Then, in May 1992, on the afternoon when the verdict was announced in the trial of the policemen who had beaten Rodney King, all hell broke loose in Los Angeles. At first, the rage over the unjust acquittal seemed understandable. But as angry mobs started attacking innocent motorists, then destroying businesses and property in their own communities, I watched a terrible tragedy unfold on our streets.

When I awoke the next morning and all was quiet, I saw no reason to miss work that day, other than my two kids’ warnings that it wasn’t safe. Miss work? Not me.

The streets were eerily quiet, and when I arrived at work I found the facility closed. Annoyed, I turned around and headed home. Things started to get scary. Ahead, in the distance, I could see smoke rising from new fires. Businesses I passed were being closed up, some of them by owners carrying guns. On the car radio, I heard reports of rampant looting and burning through more and more neighborhoods. I arrived home to find panicky messages from Vance and Ellen. When I called to let them know I was all right, they did not fail to say, “We told you so.”

We all spent the remainder of the day watching the news of the destruction, feeling sad and discouraged. Rodney King’s comment really hit home—“Can’t we all just get along?”

The sad thing is that, although the burned buildings were rebuilt, we haven’t made great strides in repairing relations between blacks and whites—not in Los Angeles or in any of our major cities. We need to do more. We need to tear down the walls that divide us, whether the divisions are based on race, religion, or sexual orientation. And we need to recognize that, as Ellen would later tearfully plead when she was subjected to bigoted attacks, “We’re really all the same.”

After the riots, I began having thoughts about ways that I could contribute to improving the quality of life for others. Any kind of political activism was still too foreign to me. Instead, I followed Ellen’s example and found opportunities to volunteer at soup kitchens and at Project Angel Food, an organization which provides hot meals to patients suffering from AIDS.

In fact, that year I spent Christmas Day at Project Angel Food. El and Vance were both out of town, and it seemed like a good way to make use of time that I would otherwise have spent alone. That night I wrote in my journal: “Happy, contented day because I feel good about the way my life is unfolding.”

One positive change had occurred in September of 1992, when I began work at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where I would remain until my retirement—a great experience from beginning to end. I worked predominantly with patients who’d had a stroke, a head injury, or a laryngectomy. This was work I found extremely gratifying. To some, it may sound depressing, but for me it isn’t at all. First of all, my graduate school training and my clinical experience had prepared me for this. And often, I could see wonderful progress.

Early on at Cedars I developed one of my closest friendships—with Ricki LeVine, a fellow speech pathologist who is warm, caring, and fun. Ricki and I became partners in crime, organizing staff activities that added some levity to our otherwise serious professional concerns.

“You know, Betty,” Ricki confessed over lunch one day, not long after we became friendly, “I never expected you to be this much fun.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You seemed so reserved,” she said.

Obviously, my more impulsive, light-spirited side had worked its way through. The truth was that I didn’t think of myself as reserved; this was only a protective mechanism I had developed over the years. I resolved then and there to be less reserved, work on it, believing as I do that we’re all capable of changing for the better and that it’s never, ever too late.

So I continued to try to reach out, open up, and do what I could to let good people into my life.

By the year’s end, I had settled happily into my work routine, had cultivated a support system of family and friends, and had, to my pride and joy, just bought a condo for myself in West Hollywood that I was busy furnishing and getting ready to move into. I received a check for new carpeting, and the following note, from Ellen:

MERRY CHRISTMAS BETTY

Happy New Year Too

Here’s a little money

Because I Love You

Make your new home pretty—

You don’t want it to look shitty,

That would be a pity.

I’m glad you live in this city.

I’m proud of all you’ve accomplished—

You’re really one heck of a woman.

So feel good about yourself

And know that 1993 will be

your best year yet—

Now go out and buy cool stuff

for your brand new condo.

Love, Ellen

Finally, I felt I had really arrived. I had completed the process of letting go of all my disappointments from the past. Life was good and full of possibilities. There’s an old saying that one should bloom where one is planted. In my case, I have adapted that saying to one should bloom where one is transplanted. It certainly worked for me.