E5. Better Memories

A pink bedroom, a potbellied stove, and a snowfall that turns a farmyard into a fairytale—Sadie walks us through a time when tenderness and harm lived side by side. She characterizes trauma echoing across a lifetime.
Along the way, Sadie honors loyalty to siblings who remember differently, showing how denial can be a survival tool for others and why telling the truth need not be cruel. She describes how limited resources and a lack of intervention can normalize abuse over time.

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Transcript

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Setting The Project’s Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Sadie Green Story about an older adult looking back on her abusive childhood. It's a conversation between Sadie and myself, Pam Colby, her longtime friend. We are exploring how early trauma can affect a lifetime. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hi there, Pam. Hey, Sadie. Thanks for being

Framing Positive Early Memories

SPEAKER_01 0:31

here. Pam comes every week to my house to help me record my story. I'm not sure I could do it without her reliable and trusted support. She's like my backbone at times.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I'm doing it because it's such an important story to tell. And you're an amazing person in terms of all you've been through, and yet what a resilient, happy, wonderful person you are. That's why I think that the combination is so important to share that you have done the hard work.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

There are times when I think, why am I doing this? You know, there's enough misery in the world, and my life is good. But I also feel like I'm able to tell the story, and I just am not sure I would follow through without your dedication. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

I appreciate you, Sadie.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Thank you, Pam. In this episode, before we get too far along, I wanted to share some of what I retained from the earlier years when I was still part of the family, when things were not so bad.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

You want people to know that there there were positive things that happened. Yeah. Especially early on.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, I think I was really a part of the family in those early years.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Okay, so let's hear some of those early memories.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

There were two houses that the family occupied while I lived with them. The first was this little four-room house on a rural highway across from a country gas station. The second, I'll call the big house because it had an upstairs and a basement. And that was further down a side road. The family moved off the highway and into the bigger house when I was about nine. I'm gonna work backwards a bit in time and start with a story that was right after we moved from the first house into the second. A car

Moving To The Big House

SPEAKER_01 2:38

parked in the driveway had its engine running. The Laznick family was just moving into the big gray house, the house with three bedrooms upstairs. The car was a two-toned rambler, and the woman at the wheel was a neighbor friend of Ma's called Millie, short for Mildred, though she never saw herself as someone with a name like Mildred. Flashy cat eye glasses, decorated with glass jewels, accentuated her narrow face. Ma stood beside the car on the driver's side and talked with Millie through the open window. Ma wore the usual lightweight denim pants cut off at the knees. Stray threads from the raw edges dangled down the backside of her legs. These pedal pushers were really old maternity pants, with the special stretchy panel in the front, but now a loose, sleeveless, hanky print shirt with buttons down the front fell long enough to cover up that part. Sue, walking barefoot from the outhouse toward the car, noticed how Ma and Millie laughed big open laughs together, like they delighted in each other's company. It occurred to Sue how everybody seemed to get along with Ma. This realization caused a sharp ache in the middle of her chest, but she drew closer, close enough to see the rhinestones glitter on the rims of Millie's eyeglasses. They were laughing about two upstairs bedrooms that faced the road in the new house, about how easy it was to decide which bedroom would be the boys' room and which would be the girls'. Both rooms opened into Ma and Pa's room at the top of the stairs. Both had a window across from the doorway, and both had deep dark closets where the ceiling sloped so low on one end a girl could hit her head on it if she jumped up too fast without thinking. Sue knew this personally because before the clothes and beds moved in, she and the other kids ran through the empty bedrooms, knocking their knuckles on the walls and marveling at how the noises carried. While Millie snapped her gum between sentences and fiddled with her rear view mirror, Ma continued, Yeah, Ben's crib fits in our room. Four boys will share two beds in the green room, she stressed Green. And the girls have the bunk beds. No, it sure wasn't hard to choose because that room is so darn pink. With that they both broke into peals of laughter once again. But Sue wasn't thinking about

A Rare Moment Of Affection

SPEAKER_01 5:19

bedroom colors as she stood beside Ma in this new driveway. Ma had reached over to draw Sue next to her and had one arm draped casually around the girl's shoulders, as if this happened all the time. Was it an accident? Did she realize this was Sue, not someone else? Was this for Millie's sake? These questions loomed large in Sue's mind as her bare toe drew circles round and round in the soft dirt. Otherwise she hardly moved. Not until the square shaped rambler clunked into gear and drove away. Not until the arm pulled off her shoulders and Ma headed for the clothesline. Ma still smiled, thinking of pink bedrooms perhaps, just as if that once in a lifetime thing had never happened.

Memory, Loyalty, And Denial

SPEAKER_00 6:12

This is really a portrait of your mom kind of having a good time. It so reminds me of you in some ways, just the the laughter and the fun with a friend, and you're such a great reporter as a kid. You're just so there.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yeah, that was a real fond memory, and I'm glad I have fond memories. There was probably a lot more of that. It just doesn't register as closely as a lot of the painful wet stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

It's so nice that you want to include some positive memories.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

I know in part I do because my siblings are still with me somehow, like looking over my shoulder, and I don't want to hurt them, so I want to soften it somehow. But so much of what I remember was just enduring, waiting, watching, hiding. My sister, who is the only one I've had real conversation with, insists on a whole different scenario. So her denial makes me question myself. I have this loyalty to them even now, even without a relationship. I want to include anything that's good to reassure them that it wasn't all bad. But I have to tell my own truth, and this is my story, my reality, as I remember it. And even some of the fonder memories are mixed, as in the next readings.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

And it's so telling to me that your siblings really were innocent in so many ways, and yet they developed their own way of protecting themselves as a way of survival. Like they don't want to admit what they had to have witnessed and lived through.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

They did witness. I know they witnessed. They were young, but they witnessed.

Illness, Comfort, And The Burn

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Getting back to some fonder memories, let me read a couple stories from when we lived in the little house. It was in the first little house across from the gas station where Sue got the mumps. Seems like all the kids had mumps that year. One by one, they were shut in Ma and Pa's room off the kitchen. The tiny bedroom's single window was covered with a blanket. The door was shut, and the light turned off to make it almost dark in the middle of the day. It felt luxurious to lie on her back in the big bed piled high with blankets, while gazing at the dusky pink and green flowers as big as cabbages on the wallpaper. The bed took up most of the room, with a dresser alongside, leaving barely enough room to walk between. The foot of the bed came right up to the doorway. Sue rarely spent time in this room and only when she was sick. One day, both she and George were sick together in the bed, and what a day that turned out to be. It began with the humidifier, tugging out a mist of steam from its temporary perch on a tall stool stuck in between the dresser and the bed. Sue needed a handkerchief. She stood up in the bed, then walked across the piled blankets. She wore light blue tights under her flannel nightgown. Just as she slid down over the bedside, she tripped on the humidifier cord, and that steaming, scalding water came tipping down on top of her. Screaming from the shock, she ran blindly to the doorway. Ma met her just inside the kitchen. Ma's strong bare arms reached out for her, lifting Sue's watted, stinging body off the cool linoleum floor. Held in the softness of Ma's apron body, Sue watched in horror as Ma gently pulled off wet blue tights, watched in horror because pieces of her skin peeled right off with them. But it was not the sight of pink, scalded skin that stayed with Sue. It was the feeling of those strong arms enveloping her in comfort. A memory

Milk Toast And Family Rituals

SPEAKER_01 10:38

of Ma, not on the hurting side of pain.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

What a beautiful story, Sadie. And I have to say that it is so moving to hear from you about getting burned so badly, and yet what the memory is is that your mother was kind to you.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Do we always remember the hard stuff? I'm sure in part I remember it because of the scalding water. But I also really remember her being so tender.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah, and the idea of you and your brother in the bed with the mumps and just feeling so part of the family at that point. It's a cosy memory.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Yeah. It was also in the little house that Sue ate milk toast, just like the other kids. It's good for everything that ails you, Ma would say. In the center of the house, which was the dining room, the living room, and a bedroom for brothers, stood a black pot-bellied heater stove. On the top surface of the stove were raised iron letters. And when Ma laid thick slices of homemade bread on the stove to toast, those letters, printed backwards on the bread. Sue and the other kids crowded round the table, between the wall and that big stove, and waited with their spoons in hand. They watched the fork in Ma's hand closely as she flipped the thick slices of bread to see who'd get the toast with letters on. Milk toast, even without the letters, was a treat beyond compare. When Ma plunked a thick, crunchy slice of toast in everybody's bowl, she spread each piece with the rich butter, then poured the steaming milk on top. Elbows grazed the tablecloth, as small hands passed the square glass salt shaker around. This habit came from Pa who put salt on everything. Then the only sounds in the room were spoons brushing the bottom of bowls and slurping noises as the soft, buttery bread melted in their mouths and the warm milk dribbled down their chins. The milk toast.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

It seems like food was a really important part of your memories of the family.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

The family in general always seemed to have good food. Sue

Babies, Scar Tissue, And Resentment

SPEAKER_01 13:36

often heard how hard it was when she was a baby. How brother George, at three years old, had to sit by Susan's crib when Ma went out to milk the cows, and Pa was working. How George was trained to run out to the barn and get Ma if Sue so much as cried. How often Ma and Pa had to visit the hospital with Sue instead of getting hay in on time or providing proper meals for the other kids. Sue herself has few memories of being a small child, though she carries one inch scars on both feet that show where she was fed through tubes while in the hospital. And she remembers wanting to suck her thumb, but was unable to reach it to her mouth because big wire casts ran down both arms to keep her from doing so. She remembers an orange cloth clown doll she received from Grandma Francis and how she carried that doll everywhere until the awful day it disappeared inside the hospital. She kept wanting a nurse, a doctor, somebody to bring the clown doll back, but they never did. During the early years, in the first of the two houses, Sue's life seemed mingled with the rest of them, not singled out yet as the burden of the family. But when she was just five or six years old, Pa was bundling them into coats and mittens, hers a long fitted little girl coat with buttons down the front, for the ride to pick up Ma and the new baby from the hospital. As he knelt on the floor in front of her to tie the hat under her chin, she started crying. Her face scrunched up all by itself and spilled the tears right there in front of him. What's the matter? he asked, but she couldn't answer. When she looked into his face, she couldn't tell him how she wanted time to stop, so they could live like this forever. How she wished Pa could dress them and take care of them. Then Ma might never need to come back home. But she couldn't put those wishes into words. He picked her up, hoisted her onto his hip, as he held his finger out for Littler Matthew to hang on to. Crying quietly, she clung tightly to his denim coat sleeve as they made their way out to the car. Later, on Sue's seventh birthday, Ma was sweeping up the living room. Sue got in her way and didn't move fast enough. Ma swung at her with the broom as if to sweep her up like dirt and hard enough to knock her across the room, where Sue hit the metal bedpost, holding up her brother's bed. Sue crawled under the bed and cried, watching drops of blood drip from her nose into her hands. She caught the drops so not to make a bloody mess on the clean floor. She cried because it was her birthday, but even so it made no difference. And she cried because Pa never seemed to notice her at all. Not like the night she stood inside the wide-open garage, watching snowflakes fall through darkness like a curtain. With face turned towards the sky and both hands in her jacket pockets, she felt cozy in a sleepy kind of way. The snowflakes, thick and falling fast, were so big she could see them individually against the yellow of the yard light. But for the veil of falling snowflakes, the entire world was still. Nothing else mattered. Like a lullaby, lifting up from solid ground, she floated off with fluffy snowflakes. Then Pa emerged, passing by the doorway with two sparkly silver buckets of fresh milk. She remembered she was waiting for him to come in from the barn. He set down his buckets for a moment and smiled as if he understood the magic, and he stood with her while the snowflakes melted on his cap. Then he reached down for the buckets,

Hospital Trips And The Court’s Order

SPEAKER_01 17:57

and she followed him along the path through softly falling snow toward the house, as if they walked inside a fairy tale. Without a word, he carried the milk pills while she kept both hands curled roundly in her pockets. Just as they entered through the lit kitchen doorway, the magic of the evening slipped away.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

What strikes me about that reading is that you're aware at that young age that you're better off with your father and you don't really want your mother to come back. But it also emphasizes that you felt that your father was really a kind and tender caretaker, that you would prefer him.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

That is the feeling I had around that memory, and also how I have always felt in general.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

And then I wonder as she brings home babies, because after you there were five more babies? Correct. So she's having all these healthy babies. Yeah and none of them have a birth defect. Correct. And along with the fact that it's a lot to have all these children, do you think that as each one came without a birth defect, it highlighted that you were the one who had the birth defect?

SPEAKER_01 19:21

I don't know. I can only Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

Well we we do know that what was happening for her was that her rage against you increased with each year.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

But that could also be attributed to just the work of all these children.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

An escalation of abuse if there's no intervention. It just becomes more and more normal. One morning, every summer, till she was nine, Ma would shake her awake in the wee hours saying, Hurry up now and get dressed, while pointing to a clean white blouse and pedal pushers, or a dress with ankle socks that was already laid out for her. Then Ma or Pa helped her into the pickup truck to sit between them as they drove for what seemed several hours toward the big city. Upon reaching their destination, they drove down inside a tunnel underneath the hospital and parked the pickup in a huge garage. Then they wound themselves through many hallways until they reached a glass door that led into a waiting room. From there, Sue followed a man in a white coat behind the curtain, so he could look down her throat and poke around inside her mouth with a popsicle stick. She sat on the edge of a crinkly sheeted bed with her legs dangling over the side, made funny sounds, and moved her head from side to side when he said so. Sue didn't mind at all because everything was clean and new, and because the nurse handed her a sucker and a plastic wrap when the doctor finished with her. After moving into the bigger house, Monpa did not take her there again. When she was fourteen, and they finally went to court, that was the reason for removing her from the Laznic farmhouse to begin those delayed operations on her birth defect. At least, that's what the judge said in the courtroom, in front of everyone. She has an extreme inferiority complex. I order that she return to the University of Minnesota Hospital and resume the plastic surgery to enhance her physical appearance. So at age 14, Sue visited the hospital again. But this time, Ma and Pa didn't drive her there. A social worker did. And when the doctors finished with her, the social worker was a very good idea. Worker did not drive her

Why Care Stopped And What It Meant

SPEAKER_01 22:02

home, but this came later.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

What a powerful image of you in that pickup truck sitting between your parents. And it seems like at that point feeling quite safe with your parents.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Yeah, I have no scary feelings about that. It was curiosity more than anything.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Do you feel like because you were the chosen one to get to go with them in the pickup truck to the big city that made me your siblings felt jealous?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Oh, that never occurred to me.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

I was so self-absorbed. Perhaps so you feel from your research that all those surgeries were paid for by your parents, there was no help in the middle.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

It says so in the hospital notes. It's in there more than once. The five surgeries at the University of Minnesota hospital through four years old, they paid for. It wasn't until I was fourteen admitted to the hospital, and welfare was already involved then.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

But you looking back do feel that some of what started the rage within your mother might have been related.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

I do. There might have been other ways that I was taking up time and resources, but certainly I was financially. I was supposed to have a primary surgery when the rest of my face had developed more, probably about twelve. So I would go every year. Other than being in the hospital when I was four and having those casts on my arms. You know, I don't remember being in the hospital between four and fourteen. But we would go for these annual visits. Drive to Minneapolis, have the appointment, and drive home. And then they just stopped.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

So when you were about ten and the abuse became more and more so it's an interesting thought that they weren't getting you the medical care you needed at the same time as the abuse was really intensifying. I wonder if there was frustration on especially your mother's part, with feeling bad about not getting you what you needed and somehow taking it out on you.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

I have no idea. She must have been so busy, overwhelmed, eight kids by then, and no money. I really don't know what her inner world was like. Interesting to think

Open Questions And Closing

SPEAKER_01 24:41

about.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

We'll never know. We'll never know. We will leave it there for today.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Thank you, Sadie. Thank you, Pam. Thanks for listening. Till next time.