The crazy old cult leader, Cyrus, called me on the phone and told me that God, his father, had people who would take care of me if I tried to do anything about him and his relationship with his daughter. Then his sweet and innocent little twelve year old daughter got on the phone and began to plead with me, “I know you think my Daddy is a bad man, but he’s not. He’s really a good man.” And for some reason I felt like a monster.
I told everyone about it. My parents, my husband’s parents, my bosses at the university, my bosses at NASA. In retrospect I ask myself now why no one called any authorities although they were all well aware of the cult I was only 24 and didn’t even know enough to call authorities on behalf of my own younger and abused siblings, let alone any other family. My step-father was NM state senator during this era while my mother was medical examiner in Albuquerque, NM. Neither of them reported the incest and rape. A few years later I did learn there were agencies and so I filed a report as soon as I knew.
I assumed that my husband felt the same revulsion as I did, and that the man should be stopped. I assumed it for the past 45 years. Apparently I was ,completely mistaken and since I’ve learned, now 30 years later after his death, and 40+ years after his crime, that in order to have impregnated and had an actual relationship with her, he must have been witness to the horrors that went on within that household for nearly a full decade … and I remained clueless during that time and for the next 30 years.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the new information and readjust the entire understanding of my own life ever since. It’s a process and I consider it a blessing that I was given enough time in life to learn the full truth… it has opened the door for me to learn as much of the truth as I can about the decisions in my life and why I made what seem such poor decisions. I didn’t begin as a raging lunatic but life turned me into one, or so I allowed it. Until I didn’t.
A dear friend asked me recently if my mother-in-law had been funny, which set me to pondering my few but memorable experiences with the woman.
John and I spent our first year in Albuquerque. I worked for temporary typing jobs until my daughter was born.
John worked for his parents and hated every minute of it. I’ve always loved being domestic so I kept the house spotless, made meals from scratch, packed him huge lunches every morning, along with a big breakfast. I played the perfect little wife, really, except for the romantic part. I’d lost all interest in him by then. I remained devastated by the loss of my sister, his family had been cruel to me in virtually every way, and he had done little to protect me. My heart was no longer in it, but I stayed, for some reason, for a while, for a couple of years.
A sweet old man that John befriended, who lived out in the desert, offered us a free adobe to live in, in Socorro. Socorro is a small town where I attended college 3 years earlier. It’s through that college that I got my job with NASA. The name of the college is New Mexico Institute of Mines and Technology .. and it is a college for science majors. It’s a charming campus with lots of green landscaping, tucked away at the base of a small mountain. The grounds are very peaceful and very green. Surrounded in every direction by hundreds of miles of dry, brown desert, the campus was like an oasis. Science students are a quiet bunch and it was a most peaceful experience for me.
The college library, of course, was the most peaceful place of all and that is where I worked while I was a student. So, I was thrilled when the old man offered a house in Socorro. I got my old job back at the library while John watched our baby on the week days. He went to chop wood on the weekends. Eventually I discovered that he was doing more than chopping wood.
John hated working for his parents, not to mention that he felt completely alienated by the criticisms of his family and brother. Personally, I was glad to get away from the frequent family gatherings where his parents and brothers and a sister-in-law got in a circle at the end of each gathering and exchanged disgustingly slobbery kisses. I wasn’t raised in that kind of family and was never comfortable with it.
All those many years I thought it was something that I lacked when, in fact, as the truth has unfolded over the years, it appears that at least 4 of those slobbery kissers were pervs who molested and violated others.
I was an overly protective parent due to being shattered by the loss of my little sister, and I wanted to get away from the grandparents because I felt they weren’t childproofing their home enough for my comfort and they scoffed at my insistence on seat belts for my baby. So did John, by the way, an issue that never resolved.
So John and I both jumped at the offer of the adobe, situated about an hour away from his parents, 3 hours from mine and 30 minutes from the cult (something I’d neglected to take into account. I immediately got my old job back at the college library while he watched Jane (she had just turned one year old) .. he started leaving on the weekends to chop wood for his brother’s firewood business … he said he couldn’t get a job anywhere else although i don’t recall him ever looking … his favorite motto, by the way, was, “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”
I was delighted to be working back at the library, on that wonderfully peaceful oasis of a campus. I tried to dig a garden in the yard but the desert soil was hard as a rock. The adobe was authentic, with one foot walls .. no better insulation … cool as a cave with no A/C. John began to fill the house with marijuana smoke and I had still sworn off the stuff since 1969. I began to complain about the smoke in the house and the loaded pistol under the pillow. He began to complain he wanted more sex. I wanted less.
Eventually, I found out he had visited the cult. For some reason I’d assumed that now that he had a daughter of his own, he’d understand what a grievous act it was to rape ones own child. I’d been wanting to leave him for a very long time. This was the final straw. To my surprise, John agreed to it immediately. He even helped me load up the u-haul. I was always grateful for that because every time I’d ever tried to leave him before, there had been a scene. Given the new information I now have, now 35 years later, the little girl would have been around 15 at the time. It all makes sense now and as the final piece of the puzzle falls into place I realize that in some ways I may be inexcusably clueless, or inexplicably ..
When the sweet old man who’d given us the house found out that I’d left John he kicked John out. In all these years it never occurred to me until now where John must have been staying all those years. I honestly believed he could never be comfortable sleeping in the same house where a man was raping his two daughters and the children of those daughters that he had conceived with them. He was raping his children/grandchildren. I knew that certainly John could not be comfortable even visiting their home. Apparently I was wrong. He must have lived there … under that roof .. knowing what was going on .. and being comfortable with it.
I remember now, the article. John brought me the article about Cyrus’ trial, conviction and sentencing. It’s the first details I’d ever received about it and it’s also the last time that I ever saw John. I recall a strange feeling that I got while reading the article. I was sitting in the living room chair and he leaned against the end table, watching me closely while I read the article. I recall now that it said something about 2 followers and I asked him who they were. He did not give me his name or his brother’s. I realize now that he was searching my face to see if I had any clue. He left that day, that last day that I ever saw him, thinking he’d gotten away with it. He’d screwed up in life, and he did regret it, clearly. He was hoping I would never know the full story. He didn’t get what he hoped for. The DNA evidence seals the deal.
But this story was to be about a mother-in-law, because a good friend recently asked about her. Specifically, he asked whether or not she were funny. I will leave it for him to decide.
When John called his parents to tell them I’d left him, he told me his parents replied, “Well, get your money out of the bank before she does.” Of course, the only money that was in the bank was mine. The mother-in-law demanded that he go and get the crib back from me that she had given us for Jane. He made a trip of a few hundred miles just to come and take his daughter’s crib away. And thus I began my life of single parenting, alone in San Angelo, not knowing a single soul, no job, no crib, and no idea what the plan would be.
The last time I saw her, at John’s funeral, she had completely changed her attitude toward me … she fawned all over me and told me I had been the love of her son’s life and that they had banned his second wife, Elizabeth, from coming to the funeral, something that I thought was terribly cruel. I was certain that Elizabeth most likely loved him more than I did.
In John’s final conversation with me over the phone, he was very drugged. He told me that he felt so sorry for me and my struggles and he wished he could help. Then he went on to say that he would help but that he couldn’t because he owed his parents so much money. He muttered enough to me that I realized I needed to look into things, and, sure enough, John had filed for disability and on the form he claimed his daughter was living with him and was receiving her share along with his. I’m pretty sure the mother-in-law was involved in filling out those forms. He was living with them by then. They were receiving Jane’s benefits and not sharing that information with me.
not a lot of funny things to say about the mother-in-law …
Oikos 