I have an eldest sister who I never met, a half sister. We have the same father. Her name was Bonnie Lou and she died of cerebral palsy when she was three years old. ,
I grew up with my other half sister, Nancy, who kept pictures of Bonnie, along with her real mother, in a box underneath her bed, in her tiny little room at the top of the stairs. That treasure box beneath Nancy’s bed was my favorite thing to look through whenever I visited her little matchbox of a room.
It was a sweet little room. The walls were covered with a pale pink wall paper. There was no print on the wallpaper, just little dots of shiny pink paint, like drops of pale pink fingernail paint. It fit my feminine and fastidious big sister, Nancy. Her room was filled with what-nots and keepsakes from her “other” family, the one she went to visit every year and that I never met. They taught her how to cook and be domestic, things we never learned at home. Throughout her life she became a collector of what-nots, The tinier and more detailed the what-nots were, the more she treasured them.
For one birthday Nancy bought our father a tiny carved lion for the what-not collection she’d started for him. The carving was intricate, it was an exquisite piece of wood. Nancy had become a connoisseur of the what-not.
Our stepmother, not understanding Nancy’s history of values, was insulted by the tiny gift and went right out and bought Dad the largest lion she could find, made from plaster of paris, with green plastic eyes and painted with a shiny, gold spray paint. And the gaudy, gold green-eyed lion became the centerpiece of the living room for the next four decades. She would point at it when people came to visit and say, “I was so angry about that tiny lion Nancy gave her father, I got their Dad a REAL lion. “
While sitting in Nancy’s room, and sifting through her treasure box, I would pull out the pictures of her mother first and admire the red haired beauty with porcelain skin. Nancy would tell me the single visual memory that she had of her mother, dressed in a pretty pink nightgown, lying in a casket while everyone was crying. Nancy was too young to understand that was the last time she would ever see her mother.
It wasn’t until after Nancy’s death that Dad told me the story of how he left Nancy’s mother, Hester. After returning home from his marine service in San Diego, Dad and Hester were living with Hester’s parents and siblings. He and the father-in-law were fighting when he decided to leave so he got in his car and before he pulled away he cried out to Hester, “Are you coming with me or staying with him?” He said that she stood in the yard, crying, looking back and forth at her father and at her husband, not knowing what to do. At some point Dad gave up, drove away and never saw her again. My father told me this story with the deepest of regrets, some fifty-six years after the fact and long after Nancy had left this earth.
As my father shared his life story with me, I didn’t know at the time that the next time I’d see him, he would have alzheimer’s disease and barely remember who he was himself, much less me.
My last visit with him where he was cognizant, he was looking up old girlfriends, so desperately lonely by then with a cold-hearted wife, and he shared each memory of the old girlfriend with me as he searched. A few he’d once dated, another he’d stood up on a prom date. It was a blessing to have that final time with him, the last few months he was able to connect to the memories of his life.
Not long after Dad left Hester, she was diagnosed with cancer, her arm was amputated and she passed away soon after. My sister, Nancy, was five when she lost her mother, and remembers nothing about her except for the funeral and that her mother loved her. She also remembers being pulled off the rose colored trellis by the police officers who came to take her away from her grandparents’ house and deliver her to her father after Hester’s death.
My mother was shocked. She had recently given birth to her first child, B., and was pregnant with me when Dad brought Nancy home to live with us. Mom had no idea her husband had ever been married before, much less that he’d had two other children. Our grandmother, Mimi, helped our dad out with that lie, pretending the pictures of Nancy and Bonnie were those of nieces. Mom never got over that deception and had a strained relationship with Nancy throughout her life. That relationship had much to do with the molding of me, and of others.
Thumbing through the pictures and memories in Nancy’s box, I would always pause at Bonnie Lou’s two pictures … Those eyes of her, staring straight at you, hollow and haunting eyes, underscored with deep shadows of exhaustion. She looked tired for a tiny baby girl, but also well dressed and loved. Her hair was red, like her mother’s, and she looked painfully frail, her arms and legs like matchsticks.
I had not seen these pictures of Bonnie Lou since my childhood when I came across them fifty years later while taking care of my father, who I’d just discovered in devastating condition, unable to walk from a swollen knee, and completely confused with alzheimer’s. He was so emaciated that his body had completely transformed into a skeletal state that I would not have recognized as my father had I seen him walking down the road … which is what he’d already begun to do, until his knee went out.
I was so distressed to see him in this state, I ran around frantically for weeks, gathering things up and bringing them to the hospital to make him as comfortable as I could. I gathered up every family picture I could find. All of his children’s pictures had been shoved into junk drawers, stuffed underneath junk mail, by a stepmother who refused to display a single one. She had pictures of her niece about, but no one else.
“I don’t want any reminders around me that he shared a bed with another woman!” she declared when they were first married, and she proceeded to erase the existence of his children from then on.
My father lay in the hospital bed, looking pleased, thumbing through the pictures I had brought for him until he came to the picture of Bonnie Lou. He was shocked and looked around in fear, then he stuck her picture under another picture in an effort to hide it
.“Hide this,” Dad hissed at me in fear. “Don’t let her see this.” And he looked at me as if I’d uncovered a crime. He still hadn’t realized his 3rd wife was deceased and would never be watching over his shoulder again.
I was stunned to realize that after the marriage to his first wife ended, my father married not one, but two other women who were so jealous of children he’d had by another woman that he felt compelled to deny their existence to the very end of his consciousness. To see that fear in him was gut wrenching and heart breaking and I didn’t realize until that moment that he had been hiding Bonnie Lou for all these years, and I’m not very proud to share it. My father was a good man in many other ways … and I believe he was good in the balance.
But in honor of Bonnie Lou, the eldest sister who only got three years of life, I wanted to share her story and give a shout out to anyone anywhere who is suffering because a jealous stepparent has found their way to ostracize you, with no cause, save that of jealousy, and you feel betrayed by your very own blood.
Remember the innocence of Bonnie Lou. Try and keep your heart as pure and do not engage. You don’t deserve that any more than Bonnie Lou.
Oikos 