Tessie D

One of my first memories is riding in the backseat of our family’s Oldsmobile station wagon through southern New Mexico, along I-10. We were somewhere between Deming and Lordsburg and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton were singing about islands in a stream. Momma, Annie, and I were returning home to Sierra Vista, Arizona after visiting Daddy at the VA hospital in El Paso, TX. I still remember watching him with the other men, all sitting outside at an old stone patio table in the desert sun, smoking cigarettes in faded blue hospital pajamas. I was five years old, and this was the first time he was hospitalized for a PTSD-induced mental breakdown.

To blame the mental breakdown on his time in Vietnam would be a simplistic explanation of his mental health struggles. After all, he only joined the Navy, lying about his age at 17, to escape his physically abusive, mentally ill mother and neglectful father. I’m sure that months in the South China Sea seemed a respite to him, who’d been left by my grandfather in a Mexican jail at 15 years old after Daddy ran away from home. His older brother, Larry, had recently died following a routine tonsillectomy. Nanny had reminded Daddy all the time that the wrong child had died. She said that she’d wasted all of her prayers on Daddy when he was hit by a car on Azle Ave in Fort Worth when he was 11. Daddy was dragged under the car for half a block before the driver stopped. Daddy had broken both his legs and his pelvis and punctured his lung. The driver promised to pay all the medical bills if Nanny didn’t call the police, but the driver skipped town the next morning and was never heard from again. Daddy’s accident bankrupted the family in every possible way.

But, it was now the mid-1980s and people did not understand the nuances of PTSD and anxiety, so Daddy did the best that he could: he talked to a shrink for a few months, took his prescribed medication, and came home. 

What was it like to retire from the military, move your family some place that was supposed to be easier, better… but it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything but the same thing every day. Children who always kept you at arm’s distance because you were volatile for reasons that you didn’t understand and didn’t feel that you could control. A wife who was too tired to feel anything other than contempt. A community that pretended to be welcoming and friendly but was often mean, passive aggressive, and condescending.

I’ve been so hard on Daddy. I don’t know if I ever really understood what he was going through. What his depression really felt like for him.

I understand it better now after the past two years. The weight of it pulling you down everyday. The choice you have to make every morning to get up out of bed. To make it to work. To sit at a desk and pretend to be alive.

Daddy was not a very good parent: his PTSD often left him angry, scared, and emotionally volatile. But, he was also broken in ways that I don’t know if I ever really understood or could empathize with before.

I don’t want to be like him or Momma. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in this office, shuffling papers from one side of the desk to the other. I don’t want to feel like I’m living on the other side of the window, on the outside looking in. But, I also am starting to understand how hard everything must’ve been for him.

I’ve been going through this for two years and as far as I can get is the dairy. Daddy lived with it most of his life, and as far as he could get was the dining room table.