Damaged Merchandise

By Elaine D. Marsh

Most mothers nurture and lavish love and affection upon their children.

Then…there was Elaine Marsh’s mother.

From childhood, Elaine experienced a nightmarish existence at the hands of her mother. The woman responsible for her health and well-being instead demanded to be in control of every aspect of her daughter's life. The most damaging blow would be having Elaine put on unnecessary medications that would have long-lasting negative effects into adulthood.

From the ashes of this childhood rose a woman determined to find her own way, and one who became dedicated to advocating for her own health while showing others how to do the same for themselves. From abused child to strong, confident woman, Damaged Merchandise chronicles the amazing, successful life journey of a woman determined to become the version of herself she longed to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaine D. Marsh
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578836980

Book preview

All names have been changed in the writing of this story, for the privacy of the individuals.

1

I am 17 years old and I feel very sick, dizzy, disoriented and nauseous. My mother and I are sitting at the kitchen table together right after she has spoken with Dr. Snyder, my shrink, and I can see the wheels spinning in her head about how she can manipulate the situation to fit with her agenda of going to the wedding. She looks at me and says, I’m sure you are going to be just fine, let’s go to Indiana anyway. I don’t remember if she even discussed it with my father. I don’t think so. She made all the decisions. So, off we go to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I know this is a bad idea.

It is a four-hour drive from our home in Michigan. We wait for my dad to get home from work. We are ready to leave when he walks in the door. We pack the car and off we go. It is just me, my mother and my father on this short weekend trip.

My father drives the whole way. We are in my mother’s Buick LaSabre. That is the only kind of car she drives. She trades it in every three years. It is green with a green vinyl top. And the windows in the back seat do not go down all the way. They only go down halfway, lucky for me. Not so lucky for my parents. I think they are trying to kill me. The lithium is doing its thing. It appears that I am having a toxic reaction to the dosage I am on. Kind of like overdosing, but not because I want to get high; no, because my mother and the shrink want to have control over me. The shrink says I am manic depressive.

I am in the back seat wearing a sweater that I handmade, myself. Knitting is relaxing for me, also an escape; my grandmother taught me how to knit when I was four. It is a wheat color, long, past my waist, no collar, with a basket weave stitch. Four stitches of knitting and four stitches of pearling and then alternating every four rows, to get a checkerboard effect.

I am still in the back seat, but I am not myself. I am afraid, nervous that more is going to go wrong. I do not feel safe with my parents. I need to get away from them. No doubt, I am starting to hallucinate from the toxic reaction I am having from the lithium, but of course, I don’t know that’s what is happening. I need to escape. I put the backseat window down as far as it will go and try to jump out the window. My father is driving on the highway at 70 miles per hour. My mother screams when she realizes what is going on and tries to climb over the front seat and stop me. She isn’t successful at getting over the seat, but I am not successful at getting out the window either. I don’t fit through the opening.

*

Sometime later we arrive at the hotel, a Holiday Inn. My father needs to rest from his day, and at this point my mother finally knows I am too sick to attend the wedding. We will stay in the room for the night so that my father can rest, and we will drive home in the morning. I have a bad gut feeling I am in big trouble. My parents have plans to kill me tonight. I am sure of that.

This is how I have come to this conclusion. My mother is a great saver when it comes to money, especially if she is saving money for something she wants. She wants a two-carat diamond ring for her 25th wedding anniversary to my father. She has saved for many years and now has $10,000. The year is 1972 and this is a lot of money. She and my father picked out the diamond; it is a pear shape. The jeweler picked out the first setting. The diamond is deep set, and in this setting you cannot see the many beautiful facets it has. My mother hates the setting. She picks out the next setting, and after going to pick it up, still does not like that one any better. She says it is too heavy and will not be comfortable. She and the jeweler put their heads together to come up with one more setting for the huge diamond. But she has to leave it with him again.

She does not have the ring when we leave for Indiana. This upsets her; she says she really wants to show it off to her family. But I am sure that my mother is not having her diamond reset again, and instead has gotten her $10,000 back to hire a gunman to kill me. I am a problem and they need to get rid of me. I am sure of that!

My mother calls Dr. Snyder when we get to the hotel room. I can hear him through the phone. He is scolding my mother for taking me out of town. When they had a conversation earlier Dr. Snyder was clear about not taking me out of town. He told her not to. She has an agenda. It suits her to take me. What matters is her getting rid of me.

The hotel room is laid out so that when you walk through the door, the bathroom is on the right side. Beyond the bathroom on the right, two queen-size beds take up the whole room. When I walk into the bathroom the sink is on the right, the toilet in the middle and the bathtub and shower curtain on the left. The shower curtain is a solid color, beige; you cannot see through it, it is not transparent, not at all.

Across from the bathroom is a door that connects to the room next door. We did not rent that room, but the door exists for someone who wants to rent both rooms at one time and make them a connecting room. Possibly a large family who needs two rooms and will leave the connecting door open during their stay at the hotel. That is not the case for us; we only need one room that night, just one room.

It is late and we are going to sleep. I am in a bed by myself and start to hear the doorknob move from the connecting room next to ours. I am sure of it, very sure. I tell my mother. She tells me to be quiet, that my dad needs his sleep so he can drive us home in the morning. I keep hearing the knob turning, and it is very scary. I break out in a sweat and start to scream. Next thing I know is that my mother has left the bed she is in next to the window with my father and is holding me in my bed.

I tell her I have to go to the bathroom. She says fine and I get up to walk there. I hear rustling of the shower curtain and am sure the gunman is behind the curtain. I run back to the bed and tell my mother. She tells me to stop being silly and to go back to the bathroom myself. I start sobbing and tell her no. My mother finally says she will go with me. I shake the whole time.

We leave the bathroom together and my mother and I get back into my bed. The wall next to my bed is the same wall that the shower is on. I can’t sleep, that is impossible. I can barely breathe. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to breathe, so that the killer in the bathroom, the gunman, will not hear me, find me and kill me.

I know I am not going to make it out of the hotel room alive. At some point during the night my mother is going to force me to return to the bathroom alone so that the deed can be done. Once and for all they will be rid of me.

I keep hearing noise from the bathroom, from the shower. I am frozen with fear. My mother cannot understand why. I can’t share it with her. She is part of the plan. If I let her know that I am aware of what she and my father are up to, I will be a goner that much sooner. Maybe there is a way out for me. Maybe I can escape through the connecting door?

As the night goes on, I get worse and worse. The toxicity is taking over, the hallucinations are getting worse. They are becoming more real and intense. It is a living hell. I am sweating profusely.

My mother keeps telling me to go into the bathroom and get a towel to wipe the sweat. I refuse. Eventually, she gets a towel for me. I can still hear the rustling in the shower; he is waiting, waiting for the right minute to shoot me. Does he have a silencer on the gun, like you see in the movies? Otherwise someone is bound to hear the gun go off. And my parents certainly don’t want to be found guilty of any wrongdoings. It really will ruin my mother’s agenda.

I am sure she has already come up with a lie, some story that the man with the gun comes through the connecting door to rob them, and that there is a struggle between the gunman and my father and the gun goes off. I am the casualty. I am the one who gets shot by accident, and I am dead. Low and behold the gunman escapes and is never caught. The job is done. I am gone, dead, out of their hair for good.

After a never-ending night, the daylight finally begins to show through the drapes. I did not get any sleep. I am not sure anyone did. I know the assassin is still in the shower waiting for the opportunity to kill me.

*

I don’t have many memories after that point. Not getting any sleep, not eating anything. My body is fighting the toxic reaction to the lithium is too much. The hallucinations continue but they become hazy.

My mother has another conversation with Dr. Snyder the morning we are leaving the hotel. After she shares the events of the evening with him, he is sure I am having a serious lithium toxicity reaction and he instructs her to bring me right to the hospital. Not to go anywhere first. To drive straight to the hospital and make it fast.

2

I have no recollection of the ride back home. I do remember arriving at the hospital. My parents take me inside. The nurses have specific instructions of how to handle me as soon as I get there. I am not steady on my feet, having trouble walking, and my father is helping me. There is a big; bad-looking male nurse who says he has an injection ready for me. I don’t want an injection. Isn’t it bad enough that the lithium is causing hallucinations and my parents hire an assassin?

I am no match for the big, bad male nurse, and my parents certainly are not on my side. They must have been thinking that since the gunman had not been successful in killing me, here is another chance for them to get rid of me. Who knows what is in the syringe, something that will do the trick, lights out for good?

The last thing I remember is the needle going into my right arm and how forceful the male nurse is, and how much it hurts and how much he does not care. Everything goes pitch black.

*

Whether I am sleeping, given drugs and in a stupor, or am even a coma, it turns out that this is a psychiatric hospital. I am suffering hallucinations from a toxic reaction to a psychotropic drug that I find out later in my life I actually did not need—and my organs may have been shutting down. What I need is medical help, but, yes, instead, they have taken me to a psychiatric hospital—because that is what Dr. Snyder told my mother to do, she agreed…and my father almost always does what my mother wants.

What I remember most about this psychiatric hospital is being in a room with a lock on the outside, no way out. On the floor with a hospital gown tied at my back and neck. The staff coming in to give me more injections. And I sleep. I do not remember eating at all or even ever going to the bathroom.

*

My father picks me up a few days later and takes me to another hospital, for observation. This is a regular hospital, but it has a psych unit as well. My father tells me that I have been in a drug-induced coma, from the lithium toxicity and from the injectable drugs they have been giving me to keep me quiet. I have very little recollection of my stay at the first psychiatric hospital.

At the new hospital an endocrinologist, Dr. Burger, orders further testing when I arrive there; lots of testing—lots of testing with iodine, which proves to be an almost fatal mistake, which I find out some thirty years later.

* * *

How did I—and my mother—get to this frightening and out of control place in my life? Control. What follows is the story how my mother’s obsessive need for it—and inability to always have it—resulted in a life full of hellish moments for a substantial part of my life. How her choices set me up for a lifetime of life-threatening illnesses I continue to face today. And how me taking back control has allowed me to survive and flourish, despite my body continually fighting against me.

My mother made so many decisions about my care that were about as bad as they could have been. She had a hard childhood herself, and I would have thought that would have made it even more important to her to take care of me. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Our stories began innocently enough—as most people’s stories often do. Our story demonstrates how events, personalities—and choices—shape the future. My mother’s choices threatened—and still threaten—my life. But my choices brought me to a life of survival, yes, but so far beyond that—beyond the fear, beyond the challenges…to a life filled with joy and happiness, finally breaking the cycle she and my grandmother started. My passion is to help others not go through the things I have had to survive.

Here is my story…which begins with her story.

3

My mother is the only girl in her family. She has three older brothers and one younger one. The apple of her father’s eye, my mother still had a tough time growing up. She sometimes admits it. My grandmother was a handful. And being the only daughter made it harder on my mother. She had to take responsibility for helping my grandmother more than she would have liked. My mother was a bit of a tomboy and resented having to help around the house. I didn’t know until I was in my early thirties that my grandmother was suicidal when she was raising her five children. My Papa would have to hire someone to watch her at night so he could sleep. A lot of this responsibility also fell on my mother during the day after school, which affected her deeply, leaving her extremely self-centered to say the least.

As hard as life could be for my mother, there were also examples of how she was loved by her family.

As a teenager, my mother needed braces on her teeth, and my grandparents said they had enough money for only one child to have braces. My Uncle Simon was the oldest, so he was the one that was going to get the braces. He was a real sport and said the girl in the family should have them. Amazing that my grandparents agreed, but they did. My mother took a bus to the orthodontist office for four years until the process was complete.

She also took piano lessons. Something I was very envious of. She again took the bus to the piano teacher’s house for lessons weekly for several years. She never played the piano after her lessons. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that there was not a piano at her house to practice on. She says she was tone deaf and didn’t like to play.

A lot of her friends and family called her Slugger. She and all of her siblings would go to overnight camp for three weeks every summer. My mother loved it and that is where she got the nickname. She was a tomboy and loved to play ball with her brothers.

Lucky for her she had the opportunity to go to overnight camp. The camp was on a lake with many activities; there was canoeing, hiking through nature trails, crafts, and baseball too. She met Ellen there. Ellen was her counselor and my mother adored her.

Ellen was more of a mentor than a friend to my mother. When my mother got her period for the first time, she was at home and my grandfather congratulated her and told her she was a woman now. She had not wanted to approach her mother, afraid she might get in trouble. My mother had no clue what a period was, how often it would occur, or what to expect. Ellen was the one who made it easier for my mother. My mother would call Ellen and ask her all sorts of questions to help her through her teenage years.

*

After my mother graduated from high school, she and three of her closest friends went on a trip to a beach town in Michigan. They had a memorable time, and this is where my mother met my father. My mother tells the story that she was dating Henry Kimball at the time, but after meeting my father it was all over with Henry.

They were both 19 and my father said it was love at first sight. My father was very romantic and wrote my mother poems about love and happiness. I still have copies of a few of them. They did not date for very long before they became engaged; however, my grandmother was struggling with depression again, and it didn’t look like she would be able to plan a wedding anytime soon.

My parents decided to get married by the justice of the peace at the courthouse. My mother wore a suit, and my father bought her lovely flowers to pin to her lapel. They did not take a honeymoon, as World War II was starting.

*

My father had enlisted in the army and would be traveling to many different US cities for training. He spoke several languages, and was going to be a translator. He would be stationed in many cities before he would be assigned a permanent position in Europe during WW ll. Since my parents were married, my mother was able to tag along, and would always find a job where my father was training. The way my mother describes their travels on the troop trains, it sounds like they had a lot of fun together. Especially since they had both left behind oppressive environments. She was no longer on suicide watch for her mother and getting away from that had to be very freeing.

*

My father was the oldest of three children; he had a younger sister and brother. His parents had an arranged marriage and hadn’t shared a bedroom for decades. My father worked for his father for years and was promised he would be paid for his hard work but never was. He helped his mother often around the house as his father was basically useless. My dad worked two jobs to put himself through college. He graduated early from high school and was just graduated from college at age 20 when the war broke out.

When my dad had to go to Europe, my mother returned home to her parents’ house. She says she took up knitting, which is hard to believe. I know she also had a job; usually they were bookkeeper positions. She and her friends would go to the movies every weekend, and my father would send home money to his mother to buy an orchid corsage for my mother this went on for several months. All her friends were jealous. My mother, being practical and a saver, finally told my father to save the money and not send it home for orchids.

My father sent my mother this poem on their second anniversary:

May 23, 1945

2nd Anniversary

Of all the days throughout the year

Today’s one with special meaning, dear.

To say I love you seems so very mild,

For you’re my every life—Over whom I’m wild!

So please always remember, my dear

Keep faith and lay aside all fear

The sun will shine once more

To warm our hearts to the very core!

Today’s two years to the very date

That I can proudly, say you’ve been my mate

Smile, my angel—across the wide cruel space

And join in my prayer that a full life will be ours to taste.

Eternally,

Sam

*

My father was a translator during WW II. He spoke Spanish, French, German and English. Because my father did not know how to drive a car, nor have a driver’s license for that matter, he had a chauffeur who would drive him from place to place in an army Jeep. It made him look like an officer, but he had no desire to make the army his career and wanted to get home to my mother as quickly as possible and start a family.

With his job as a translator, he was often in tough situations. He would have to go into concentration camps to translate as the war was ending. He would help the survivors of the war communicate with the US Army to help get them to a better place.

My dad could have become an officer, but he wasn’t interested in making the army his career. He was most interested in getting home to my mother and starting a family.

*

It was a joyous day when my dad came home from the war. My parents were ready to move into the four-flat that my Papa, my mother’s father, had bought for his four eldest children as a surprise when they arrived back on United States soil. All my uncles came back unharmed. At least physically that is.

Since my mother had been diagnosed with a tumor on an ovary, and had a tube and ovary removed before having any of us, her obstetrician suggested they move along quickly with starting a family. He wasn’t sure it would be that easy for her to conceive.

In the meantime, my parents were having fun furnishing their apartment. My dad’s mother, Paula, bought them a kitchen set. My mother insisted on six chairs because she was planning on having four children.

Mom got pregnant pretty quickly with her first. Lee was born in May of 1948. He was an adorable baby, the best looking one of all of us. He resembled my mother’s side of the family. Miles arrived in November of 1951, on a bitter cold afternoon. Miles was cute and sweet. He needed glasses at an early age for a lazy eye. Warren was born in April of 1954. He was a colicky baby and gave my mother a lot of trouble. He never slept through the night until he was way over a year old. I remember that his hair grew straight up, so Mom would always have to take him for a brush cut.

Lee and Miles had always gotten along just fine until Warren came along, then everything changed. Miles was now the middle child, and Miles and Warren became close and left Lee out.

Mom still couldn’t believe she had three children successfully in six years, and she decided to wait a while to try for the fourth. And the fourth one had to be a girl. Even though Papa kept reminding her it wouldn’t be possible for her to have a girl, because he believed that the female determined the sex, and after mom had a tube and ovary removed she would only be able to have boys. This seemed to be what people thought at the time. Mom wanted to have the fourth child anyway. Keeping in mind she had the kitchen chairs for it.

I was due to be born in early January 1958. When my mother’s water broke on an evening late in December, she and my Dad where thrilled. It would mean that I would be born in 1957 instead of 1958, which would be cause for celebration. I would be a tax deduction!

My mother didn’t believe I was a girl and insisted that my Dad remove my diaper. When her best friend sent pink carnations; she knew that was a sign it must be true as well. She got her girl!

They brought me home from the hospital and showed me off to my brothers. My brothers were not sure what to do with me. My mother acted as if I would break.

4

I think my mother’s and father’s lives were fairly happy for the next few years, but when I was 2½ years old my mother’s father, my beloved Papa, died. Looking back, I realize this is when my mother’s personality seemed to change—not for the good. It was as if her father dying broke her. I remember lying in bed with her sometimes with her