Hazard: a Sister's Flight From Family and a Broken Boy

Past Joy E. Stocke, Editor-in-Chief, Wild River Review

To read Margaret Combs's moving and fascinating memoir is to enter a earth that had not yet developed back up for families with developmentally disabled children, an era that fostered ignorance and shame.

In the early 1950s, Combs'south parents escaped the harsh reality of Kentucky coal country whose manufacture was already in decline and moved to Colorado where Combs's male parent worked in the aviation industry. Combs'due south idyllic childhood, shared with her older sister, ruptured when her younger blood brother Roddy was born in 1957 with severe autism, something for which there was scant understanding among family doctors and teachers.

By the time Roddy reached school age, Combs writes: "My mother had already sensed what would prove true: his new school would utterly fail him…he would regress…wetting his pants and refusing to get dressed. Mama would finally notice halfway through the twelvemonth that he'd been parked in a grade for deafened children."

Combs had a unmarried goal, to escape from her family and create a new and different life for herself. What she discovers along the way and eloquently shares within the pages of Hazard makes for a compelling memoir. Her road out is through her talent as a gymnast, a souvenir that would cause pain and injury, but too provide transcendence.

"For a few split seconds I hovered in air, feathered and weightless. The floor was miles below me, my anxiety exactly where they should exist. I had gained back my loft and all of my parts and limbs were flying together. This time, when I touched downwardly, the joy and adulation from the audition belonged to me…"

Margaret Combs

Wild River Review: Among the many threads in Run a risk, is the story of your mother and male parent'south childhood in Kentucky and the plummet of the coal manufacture in 1930. The sense that to better oneself, you had to leave. Your book fabricated me think of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy in that your mother and begetter, but particularly your mother, experienced the world through shame, which affected how she/they parented your brother Roddy. Was that difficult to write virtually?

Margaret Combs: Definitely. Shame is one of those elusive emotions so embedded in the unspoken dynamics of family and society that it is nearly impossible to notice, let alone articulate. Similar to J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, I came to know shame was present in my family, but not because I had heard this out loud. I did not abound up in my parent's era, or in the Deep South, and yet the shame my parents carried from their upbringing in poverty, in the Appalachian hills, and in a boondocks that linked birth defects to incestuous behavior seeped into me as a child.

It was made manifest by the severity of my parents' strict rules and disciplinary actions – in that location was no room for deviating from the rules or straying from the path. My grandparents on both sides were hard working and proud, who very much wanted their children to escape the hard parts of a coal mining, hillbilly, dirt-farming life. According to them, that path lay in virtue and prayer and they modeled that beliefs. (Unlike J.D.'s grandmother, mine was strictly church building going and did not utter the 'Lord's name in vain'; my grandparents did not beverage or swear; but similarly they were on a mission to propel their children, and grandchildren, into a life outside of what they had known.)

Wild River Review: I remember growing upwardly in a neighborhood where 1 of the kids had mental retardation. He was part of the cloth but e'er a marvel. How did you deal with the reaction of other children?

Combs: In some situations, I pretended non to notice – in other words, my response was to altitude myself from the reaction of people effectually me. As I became a chip older I tended to put on my boxing gloves and deal with the whole range of reactions – from unabashed gawking to cruel bullying – with an in-your-confront anger. In my chapter "Put 'Em Up Boys", I charge headlong into a circle of boys who take cornered my brother and fiercely protect him by insulting the biggest bully. Those situations were much easier for me than when I was with my female parent in restaurants or stores, or anywhere really, and people would whisper, stare, and look abroad. In those subtle, semi-polite situations, I was witting of my mother's feelings, so I retreated into myself and pretended not to notice the stares, rather than crusade a scene.

Wild River Review: Your mother's phonation is and then very clear. How did you capture her? And secondly, for children who have disabled siblings, the want for our parents' attention becomes acute. What does that mean to you now?

Combs: My mother's voice is brilliant in my head, partly considering she has a southern emphasis, and partly because she tends to apply southern colloquialisms, such as "For crying out loud in a bucket" or "Law sakes." Because my female parent was a homemaker, she was home all of the time, and I spent a lot of time with her in the car going to doctor'south clinics for my brother, and then her mannerisms and emotional reactions were quite deeply imprinted in my early memories. My want for her attending was not nowadays as a immature child – she was upset a lot and I preferred not to accept her attending turn to me; for her to observe me usually meant I was to be scolded and punished.

In my chapter "Monkey Bird", I depict that feeling of wanting to stay out of the line of fire, to not make racket and cause more upset. It was later in life that I yearned for my mother'south attention, when I was a young developed and wanted to have a unproblematic cup of java with her, to talk with her about union and grown upward things that were baffling to me. But by then, she had two other young children every bit well as my brother, who still needed looking subsequently, and she couldn't "get away", physically or emotionally.

One of the most frustrating things almost being the sibling of a disabled brother or sister is to yearn for my parents' attending only also know I was selfish for wanting it; my blood brother needed and deserved it more than. My chapter "Losing It", which I wrote very belatedly in the process, is when I finally permit that frustration and sadness testify up on the page.

Wild River Review: Your parents were very religious. How did their faith help them cope with your blood brother's disability?

Combs: For my female parent, her Baptist faith was both her strength and solace. The way she held herself together was through prayer and devotion to the church. My father was not every bit devout in the early years – he wanted to fly model airplanes on the weekends and, to my mother'south deep thwarting, he was not oftentimes with u.s. in church building. As our lives went forward, however, my begetter began attending more often, and eventually became a deacon in the church.

Without her faith, I'm not sure my mother would accept made it through in i piece – she needed to put her troubles in the easily of Jesus and to believe this was somehow God'southward program. Otherwise, it was merely too baffling and sad. The church was also her social life and her musical outlet – the one place she could take my brother and leave him in the nursery while she had an hour to sing in the choir, often as a soloist. She had a beautiful singing voice and at once dreamed of beingness a musician, and so the church building non only gave her a condom net just a chance to polish.

Unfortunately, even this sanctuary failed her: a number of small scandals within the congregation acquired her to stop attention church building when I was a teenager. It wouldn't be until my youngest sister and brother came along that she would change to another church and renew her devotion.

Wild River Review: In the starting time half of Hazard, you lot shift between Colorado where you and your siblings were raised and Kentucky, which you visited. You escaped to New England, your parents moved with Roddy and your younger siblings to Florida, and you at present alive in the Pacific Northwest. Where practise you consider domicile?

Combs: My home is where I am at present, which happens to exist on an isle in the Salish Sea, nearly my older sister, Barbara Ann, and other members of my extended family. As I allude to in the volume, I am most centered in nature, particularly amidst trees, ragged peaks, and water. Nature is where I feel nearly at home. After years of racing around in urban cities, I take learned to make sure I'm near a place where I can walk and feel the forces of weather on my skin and the earth through my shoes. It is essential to my life as a writer: when I'chiliad outside in nature my mind stops racing and drops to a deeper channel, a frequency where I tin can hear what needs to be said. In memoir writing, you have what is chosen a mature narrator, the i who has lived long enough to accept insight and perspective and can step into a scene of your childhood and add together the wisdom that y'all did non accept as a child. That is the vocalization I oftentimes hear when I am walking amidst giant cedars and hemlocks of the Pacific Northwest and it's the voice the reader hears in my epilogue.

The other thing I've learned as I've shifted around the country is to non waste whatsoever time in making a living space my own – rather than yearn for some mythical house that I'll occupy one 24-hour interval. I don't quibble with the landlord or neighbor to improve the holding – I become right ahead and plant flowers, paint railings, hang paintings, tend to the weeds, sweep the porch. It'south nourishing to intendance for the space in which yous live and the more you lot care for the patch of land you're resting on the deeper you are grounded in the present and inside yourself. No matter how long I will alive in one place, whether it is for one yr or 10, my life is going to be happening, it's not a rehearsal. At the beginning and end of the day, I desire to dearest where I am and know that I am dwelling.

Wild River Review: I was fascinated by your gymnastic career in grade school, high school and college. The hurting you lot put yourself through and your desire for control to the point of injury. How was that related to your relationship with Roddy?

Combs: I know that part of me was naturally driven to accomplish, and that would have been true fifty-fifty if I had not been born in a family with a disabled child. Nevertheless, initial research almost siblings of disabled children has shown that many adopt like coping mechanisms: they tend to exist perfectionists, extremely well behaved, not likely to human action out or cause any fuss. They practice not want to rock the boat any more than it is already rocking. This is definitely how I conducted myself, at to the lowest degree in early on babyhood through college.

2 chapters in my volume focus on this aspect: In "Wings" I am a ascent gymnastic star and for the first fourth dimension realize I can brand my mother happy past existence a winner. Though I truly reveled in the sport, I also needed to go on achieving for my family, to rest what I felt every bit a pervasive sorrow and replace it with pride and joy. Later on, in "Falling", I'one thousand in college and in chronic pain from years of grooming and competing, just cannot permit get and just remainder. Though I'm miserable, I'm willing to try whatever drug or healing method to keep going. By and then, my team had become my family, the 1 that was exhilarating and joyful, and winning was so much a function of my identity I couldn't fathom life without it. It terrified me.

Wild River Review: You movement with your husband to his family unit home on Prince Edward Island. The spousal relationship is non a happy one. There yous encounter what seems to be a ghost? Was it real to you? What did the ghost signify?

Combs: I can't say whether information technology was "real" or not; certainly not in the conventional sense. (By that I hateful a transparent ghost, a la Disney's Haunted House, or a droopy sheet floating around with skeletal features.) I don't actually try to brand that conclusion in the book, nor would I be able to now. What I tin can say with certainty is that I perceived and witnessed an breathing energy. I was pregnant at the time and tended to have wild swings of chemistry, headaches, and dizziness, then they may accept played a part; and being in that business firm aroused my imagination, the stories of who had lived there were vivid and ofttimes spoken of by neighbors, so information technology may take been a mixture of things coming together in that moment.

I know now that I was feeling myself disappear in the dynamics of my wedlock, only was not willing to acknowledge at the time. So the ghostly effigy may accept been an inner omen, a foreboding that my marriage was doomed. Information technology's also entirely plausible that the bogeyman was the haunting fear that I would have a disabled kid. As is frequently truthful with siblings of disabled children, I was acutely enlightened that things can go wrong and knew just how hard information technology is to raise a disabled child. That potential was very present with me – some other emotional electric current humming at high frequency. All of these complexities are present in the ghost.

Wild River Review: One of the biggest challenges for parents and siblings of a disabled child is what happens to that child when his/her parents are no longer here. What happened to Roddy?

Combs: My brother simply turned sixty years old this spring. He lives in a group home with three other men on the autism spectrum, near where my parents live in Orlando, Florida. The dwelling house, which my parents arranged for and fix upwardly thirty years ago, is staffed by a local special needs system. Rod comes dwelling to my parents' firm every weekend and on holidays and his altogether. I'm extremely fortunate that my parents are still living and able to treat my brother, although this will soon change: my mother is in her upper eighties and my dad is 92. So as siblings we accept begun talking near what we will do afterwards my parents are gone.

My youngest sister and her husband, who are currently in Orlando, have taken over as Rod's official guardians, meaning they must fill out exhaustive government forms about his welfare and expenses. We're still working out what information technology looks similar for all of us to share the responsibility for his care into the hereafter.

Wild River Review: How long did information technology accept to write Hazard? And does Roddy know y'all wrote the book?

Combs: If I get back to the beginning, I'd have to say it took x years to write this book. I started with a box full of journals that I had been keeping for several decades, and took a whole summer to go through them, page by page, mark recurring themes with dissimilar colored tabs. My blood brother'southward tab was cherry-red, and once I'd finished, I saw ruby running through all of the journals – it was a prevailing colour and my get-go concrete bear witness that I carried him with me to that extent.

I took those episodes and transcribed them into a long discussion certificate and that is what I first took to my writers' group. Some of those one- to ten-sentence episodes grew into capacity, others into flashbacks that deepened the chapters. I couldn't accept written this story without those journals or without the valuable feedback from a circle of trusted writers. I did non finish writing the last chapter until the final stage of editing with my editor Olga Greco, at Skyhorse Publishing. Information technology became clear from her questions that an of import affiliate was still missing, which became affiliate iii, "Back Seat." So, I was generating new material nearly all the fashion up to the point of publication.

I have told my brother about the book, but I'm non sure he understands exactly what that means. He tin can read simple sentences, such as those in a birthday card, but cannot manage the density of a book. When I visited him this spring I sat with him and talked about some of the memories in the book, such as his marble chute and passion for coloring books, and we looked at the book cover together, which is a family photograph from very early in our babyhood. He was able to name everyone in the photo, including himself, so it was a dainty moment.

Wild River Review: What are you writing now?

Combs: Happily, I have begun something new, simply in these early stages I have found it is a mistake to talk about a slice of writing before I've lived with it for a while and the story has had a run a risk to play out on the page. I can say with certainty that my next literary endeavour will not be about my family unit. They've earned a good long rest.

To learn more than about Take chances and Margaret Combs, click hither: http://margaretcombs.com/

Joy East. Stocke is editor in master of the online mag Wild River Review where this interview first appeared. She is the writer of Tree of Life: Turkish Home Cooking, published by Quarto/Burgess Lea Press 2017.

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Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hazarda-sisters-flight-from-family-and-a-broken-boy_b_59400254e4b014ae8c69e41d

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