Family | P.S. Parenthetically Speaking

This is personal. I’m not overthinking these words. I just want to get them out.

I’ve written about some of this before. My dad was in prison in Indiana. I heard so many different stories when I was younger. The Terry family was cemented into compulsory silence about this and many other things. (Such as the fact that I had another sister until a few years ago.) To find any truthful reference to ‘why’ my Dad was in prison, I had to do it the hard way: I searched THOUSANDS of pages of newspapers across Indiana. I’ll never forget that feeling of finding specific information. I had a cousin who probably knew most of it correctly. But she opted to adhere to the family code of silence. That’s why I had to do it the hard way. When she didn’t provide the information, I told her that I was patient and that I would find it.

I don’t disclose these things to shame members of my family. Apart from the fact that you can’t shame someone who is no longer alive, facts don’t bring shame. They bring revelation. I’ve proven time and time again that anyone who stays at it will uncover most truths. That’s how I used DNA and a decade to find my sister. It’s also how I kept at it to substantiate the details of some of my dad’s life.

I received the Indiana Reformatory index card out of the blue today. The prison stopped maintaining most old mugshots. But in those few lines of information, there are massive implications.

I was born in March 1967. My dad was imprisoned on February 1st, 1967. He was in prison for two years, ten months, and six days. That’s a lot longer than anyone ever mentioned to me when I pressed them for information. Dad was living in Indiana before his arrest, which is the first documented proof that my parents were not living together. Dad joked that he had been in Alaska. He didn’t make the joke often because being in prison wasn’t something he talked about unless he was drunkenly telling people.

Less than four months after being released from the Indiana prison, my dad was involved in the death of a maternal cousin during a DWI incident. My Dad didn’t suffer any charges for this. Regardless of how people feel about me saying so, connections kept him out of trouble. Monroe County, Arkansas, was a different place then. The Terry family didn’t hesitate to use those connections to quash any concerns. Had my Dad been held accountable, it might have caused him to return to an Indiana prison. His parole wasn’t discharged until almost eight months after the DWI death.

When I’m thinking about my life or talking about it, I mention that I lived with my maternal grandparents while Dad was in prison. I wonder what life might have been like had he not returned. Whether his presence would have been substituted for another man of similar temperament. It’s all speculation. I wouldn’t have my other sister had Dad not returned, or if he had been put back into the system.

After the DWI death of my maternal cousin, Dad jumped into a highly questionable affair. It took me years to piece together that one of my earliest memories of standing up in the back seat was one in which I accompanied my Dad to Clarendon beach with his affair partner. Mom said that I couldn’t possibly remember it. Normally, I’d agree. Growing up that way tends to erase a lot of memory. But that memory stuck with me.

After that affair debacle, Dad engaged in another affair, one that led to the birth of my sister. I didn’t realize until I met her that her birth explained my family’s sudden departure from Dad’s beloved Monroe County to Northwest Arkansas. Away from my grandparents and some of my maternal family, who would have altered the trajectory that Dad’s behavior brought upon us.

I’m sharing this because I feel vindicated for finding more pieces as time passes. I’m not revealing anything that should not have been disclosed to all of us. The foolishness and false family honor of those who demanded secrecy still bother me. Then again, I’ve come to learn that this tendency governed their lives. Several of them were completely different people than their demeanor indicated.

Love, X

I remember my 5th birthday, a plain white cake with white frosting. My grandma made it for me, the one cake that embodied practical love. My cousin Michael Wayne sat excitedly at the table with me. Because I have to reconstruct the tangents of memories, I know he was only three years and two months old at the time.

My mom never made a cake for me, at least not that I can remember. If I had one on subsequent birthdays, it would have involved my Aunt Ardith. So much of my childhood came from her generosity. She spoiled my cousin Jimmy on his birthdays and those cakes were more than enough to satisfy my cravings for cake. I don’t look back with sepia memory about my birthdays, but I also don’t remember with animosity. Mom had her own issues to contend with. That almost all of them were the result of her choices is irrelevant. The realization of my own hypocrisy prevents me from judging her like I once did. Having said that, if I were to hear her say, “I am what I am” one more time, I’d use her hair spray to light her bee bonnet hairdo on fire. My brother Mike grew to turn his hatred for our mom’s mantra of “I am what I am” into a series of brilliant jokes, often rendered in the voice of Popeye.

When I think about my fifth birthday, I also love to frame it in the context of the fact that an entire secret life was already gestating inside a stranger’s body. My birthday is in March. As my cousin and I sat in a shotgun house’s kitchen devouring cake, my sister still had two months to wait before she’d come into the world.

It wasn’t until a few short years ago that she and I reconstructed why my dad broke his vow to never again leave Monroe County. After being in Indiana and prison, he returned to his stomping grounds, insistent that he’d die in his boots in the dirt of his birthplace. Despite his promise, it wasn’t long after that my family suddenly fled to Northwest Arkansas. It wasn’t until New Year’s Day in 2021 that I met my sister for the first time. We accidentally discovered that my dad fled Monroe County to escape his secrets. My sister was at the fulcrum. Dad died in 1993, 28 years before I’d met my sister.

I love that my obstinacy regarding genealogy and DNA gave me answers I KNEW were there – and that the same stubbornness on my part to accept the family’s malevolent veneer of family honor gave my sister answers. I ripped the truth out of their hands.

When I dream, I often think of zooming down from the sky, rapidly approaching the tin roof of the little house on the hill that bookmarks my childhood. I end up sitting on the porch. Because of technology, I can “see” the overlay of memory. Though it’s been five decades, the two trees in the front are still standing. This amazes me. The house is long gone, the driveway was expanded for a nearby house, and even the ditch banks gave way to gentle slopes. But under the picture is the template of tar paper, storm cellars, creosote railroad ties, mosquitoes, and screen doors that had better not be slammed. These things are the ghosts that are more real to me than what my eyes see on Google Maps.

Time moves ten times slower there. Even when I sit outside here, listening to the cicadas, I’m hearing them from my childhood, out in the fields. The roar of insects in the middle of expansive fields and heat is something that I wish everyone could experience. It’s the background static of the universe if you live in a place to grow things. The night is truly night in those places.

People wax nostalgic about those times, to return to simplicity. It wasn’t simpler. It’s just that we gloss and filter, remembering the terrible valleys and also the green fields and the people who sat with us when we witnessed them.

My other sister’s birthday is Monday. She will be 21,917 days old. That’s 60 years for those of us mundane enough to celebrate the wrong milestones. We don’t live in years. We wake up to the sunrise with the ability to start over. She started over a few short years ago. And because life is a series of lightning bolts, she recently started over again. When my sister talks, the Monroe County inside her oozes through her with a drawling Southern accent. I think she is wise enough now to see that the birthday isn’t the thing she should be happy about. Birthdays require no nod and come to us relentlessly if we are lucky. I hope she celebrates the 21.917 days instead. Monday will be just another day, one she’s waking up to. I ask her to dive into memory and recall what it felt like to sit in the back of a pickup for endless hours over mountains, seeing the house on the hill finally come into view. Knowing that Grandma would be inside.

For me, I’m going to sit and think about white cake and cicadas. And secrets that should have never been secrets. One of them was a person, an entire universe of life that was kept hidden.

Love, X
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P.S. Parenthetically Speaking

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