Notes for Episode 1: "1980, I think"

As I'm learning how to do all of this and get more comfortable, the podcast is pretty scripted. I'm sure once the story gets going, I'll be wandering off on tangents but I did want to post my notes from today's episode. Check back here often for posts after each episode with a bit of bonus content - episode notes, additional information, and probably some photos and such.

Episode 1

Intro: Welcome to Estranged. I’m your host, Tina Roggenkamp. This podcast features real experiences and stories about toxic and dysfunctional family dynamics. Specific content warnings may be found in the show notes. Today’s episode includes a brief mention about the death of a pet. 

I have written some of my story and even with nearly 25 years of reflecting on what happened, reading memoirs and self-help books, and listening to so many podcasts about family secrets and dysfunctional families, I still don’t know where to even begin. I feel like I’m trying to put together a puzzle and I’m missing so many pieces, just tidbits of truth plucked from a lifetime of lies. I’m hoping that by sharing my story someone will know something that helps me fill in the missing pieces of my family history. 

I have a few tangible things though:

A birth certificate that isn’t entirely correct

A bunch of family photos I took when I moved out

Some obituaries

DNA test 2023 and research on ancestry and other sites

A few childhood medical records

Public records I’ve found over the years

My old journals starting in 1999

I’ve written and published some of these stories from my childhood but a lot of them I have never spoken out loud until I created this podcast. As I have had time and distance to examine events, people, and their motivations, I realize that I don’t need to carry the family secrets and shame. 

It’s weird how you can go back and look at things that happened and little things start to make sense. I think as a kid I knew things weren’t quite right but didn’t know what questions to ask to make things make sense. I’m going to tell you about my childhood as truthfully as I can given I still don’t know everything. 

But today I’m going to talk about my early childhood, my grandmother, grandfather, step-grandfather and the people I spent my early years with. 

I was born in 1980, I think, and I grew up with my grandmother and step-grandfather. My grandfather died when I was 1 and my grandmother remarried when I was 2. We had a 3 bedroom house on a quiet dead-end street. My grandmother, or Granny, as I always called her, is the oldest of 6 children. She  was born in 1937 in Rutherfordton North Carolina. She was the big sister and second mother to her 5 younger brothers. She was close to her mother, my great-grandmother we called Mama Laughter. We would visit Mama Laughter pretty often to take her groceries. My grandmother also called her on Sundays, I guess because long-distance didn’t cost as much that day. I could always tell how long she would be on the phone by where she was in the kitchen. If she was standing it wouldn’t be long, but if she was sitting in her recliner it would be a while. And I was not to interrupt her while she was on the phone. Y’all, she loved talking! She had all kinds of relatives from “up home” as she called it. All her brothers, their wives, friends from school… and she was very friendly, maybe too much so, with her oldest son’s first two wives. She had some other friends of her own, and of course her three adult children. 

Since we visited pretty often, my great-grandmother Mama Laughter was a big part of my childhood. She could sew and was always making us blankets. I still have several of them and think of her when I use them. Now I study her tiny hand sewn stitches, she didn’t use a sewing machine, as I’m trying to learn how to sew quilts. She would cook lunch and I remember her biscuits and how she’d make “funny biscuits” with the leftover dough and how she could whip up chocolate gravy for us to dip them in. She was big into preserving food and she canned food to send home with us - one year we ate so many green beans I swore I couldn’t eat another. Since she was born in 1919 I guess the great depression affected her because she saved every bread bag, wire tie, and scrap of tin foil. I think some of that rubbed off on my grandmother - not the canning, cooking, or sewing, but collecting and saving things. But my grandmother, even though we lived an hour and a half away, did her shopping and we’d take her groceries up to her and help her unload them and put everything away. Mama Laughter never seemed to want to go buy her groceries or do any of her shopping, not even to pick out clothes or shoes for herself. Sometimes Mama Laughter would give my cousin and I kitchen spoons and we’d dig around in the dirt and gravel driveway. I enjoyed sitting and listening to the grownups talk because her brothers, their wives, and all sorts of people would come and visit while we were there. One of my grandmother’s brothers always seemed to get a hole in his pocket on his way down the hill. He’d come in and tell us and we’d go outside to see how many coins we could find. Another of her brothers had 3 kids and I’d visit with them whenever I could. I guess they are second cousins or something but to me they are cousins. I wish now that I had been able to spend more time with them and get to know them better when we were kids, but thanks to my DNA test, we’ve reconnected recently. 

Anyway, my grandmother went to study education at Appalachian State for a semester before leaving to get married and have three children of her own. They had a son (Bill) a daughter (Joan) and my mother (Janet, but goes by Lynn) by 1961. They moved to Charlotte and bought a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house on a dead-end street in West Charlotte. They were so proud of that house and always competed for yard of the month. My grandmother said the house and the yard were spotless. To hear her tell it, they had a perfect life. A yard of the month sign in the yard, new cars in the driveway for them and the kids, she cooked dinner every night and even made dessert. She said more than once that she’d bake a cake and put vanilla frosting on one half and chocolate on the other so everyone would be happy. She spoiled her kids and was the perfect mother, or was she? Now I wonder what their life was really like. 

My grandmother loves animals and my earliest memories are of  all of the dogs we had when I was little. Her love of dogs was a core part of her personality as I was growing up. She even had the coffee table and every shelf in the living room covered with dog figurines she had collected over the years. But we had a black lab named Snoopy, two basset hounds suzi and mitzi, a three legged dog named KB, a brown and white dog named Oscar and probably some others. I know there was one they called Fatty Dog. Oscar was gassy and would sleep in the dryer room outside. He’d whine and Granny would go out and mash on his stomach to help him pass the gas. Snoopy was old and died when I was young, but she’d make him scrambled eggs and we’d hand feed him. When he died, I helped bury him. Suzi and Mitzi were gifts from my grandfather just before he died. 

My grandfather (Big Daddy) died in May of 1981. He worked hard, often working multiple jobs so my grandmother could stay home and raise their three kids. I think he was having issues with his heart and went to visit his doctor on a Friday. The doctor told him to take it easy, but over the weekend he wanted to work in the garden. It was too much and he died from a massive heart attack. His son Bill rode in the ambulance with him and he told Bill to take care of his mother. 

When I was younger, my grandmother told me she tried to live on the little bit of money she and Big Daddy had, but being a widow with no job and a toddler it didn’t take long before she was running out of money. She thought getting married again to a man that could help provide was her best option and so she remarried in 1982 to a truck driver named Bob. I have since learned that story isn’t quite accurate and that she was with Bob before Big Daddy passed. 

It’s interesting the accounts I’ve heard about how she met Bob and possibly other men while she was still married because she’s a really religious person and tried to instill her beliefs in everyone around her. Being very conservative, she didn’t even believe that women should have the right to vote because they might cancel out their husband’s vote. Women were not to speak on religious matters and I think she expected silent obedience. Questioning why things were the way they were did not end well for me, I know that much! 

But once his divorce was final, they got married in December of 1982. Bob had three adult, or nearly adult, children from his first marriage. I think the divorce must have been messy and his kids resented my grandmother for stealing their father from their mother. I never understood their resentment and some of their comments until just this past year or so. Anyway, Bob was a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, he rode a motorcycle and drove 18 wheelers for a living. He had a hole in his leg from a motorcycle accident and it never seemed to heal. By 1985 or around that time he lost his first job because of driving drunk. He got another truck driving job but I don’t think it paid as well because my grandmother started trying to figure out where she could find a job. 

By this time I was in Kindergarten but I have little flashes of memories before Bob lost his job and Granny started looking for work. Most of my early memories and how I tell time are from school. Preschool I remember there being two women and a man, snack time of oreos and some orange drink, playing in the gym, the blocks and toys we had in the classroom, and even a couple of my classmates. My grandmother wasn’t working and she’d take me and pick me up. Preschool was from 9-12 on tuesdays and thursdays, I think it was. Granny would make me scrambled eggs with syrup, which I hated, and coffee with a couple of ice cubes to cool it down. At least once when she picked me up, we got some sour cream and onion chips that I snacked on in the front seat of her blue ‘82 Caprice Classic. I think it was an 82. When I graduated, I was put in the group to recite our numbers even though I knew all of my letters. My grandmother was upset that I wasn’t in the alphabet group. I’m pretty sure that was me, but it could have been my cousin who went to same preschool a couple yeard after I did. Bob’s kids and even his ex-wife came over to our house, which usually caused drama and fights. There was one time his ex came over and either granny tried to hem her in the driveway or she blocked my grandmother in. I vaguely remember a gun involved, but I can’t really be sure of that recollection. 

How was all of this affecting me? I think I was already experiencing signs of stress. I had heard the story that Big Daddy had to pad my crib because I was banging my head against the sides of the crib as a baby. When I got older, I would rock myself to sleep at night. I’d lay in bed on my side and rock back and forth, which made a real mess of my long hair. During the day, I would  sit on the couch, lean my body forward, and then throw myself back against the cushions. Maybe it’s gross to mention, but I’m being very real here. I started picking the skin on my fingers. That is a habit I still have to this day when I am stressed out. I learned early on that I had to be independent and try not to show any emotions, which are traits I have to this day. I’ll get into how all of this affected me as an adult in future episodes. But for now, I will say I recognize now how much anxiety I was feeling as a young child. 

I went to Kindergarten in 1985 to 1986, right about the time Bob lost his job. I remember a bit more about kindergarten. I had Mrs. Anglin and she was a great teacher. I nearly failed though because I was sick so much, but I remember watching sesame street, naptime on our towels spread out on the floor, learning to count with goldfish, being one of the first kids in the class to learn to read and her making a group for those of us that had begun to read. I remember the day Mrs. Anglin called my grandmother to come get me because she’d sent me to school with pink eye. I also remember one day when my grandmother picked me up from school in the afternoon she had a new dog in the front seat. A black and white long haired chihuahua mix. I named her Lady and I loved that dog! I had several friends in the class but I guess Granny didn’t think I had enough friends because one afternoon she brought two tubs of toys - one full of hot wheels for the boys and one full of plastic bracelets for the girls. Granny thought I was too shy to make friends but really, I think she was trying to buy her way to Mrs. Anglin because she was hoping my teacher would help her find a job in the school system. Mrs. Anglin did though and my grandmother got a job for the next year as a preschool teacher assistant at a different school. 

I can’t say I adapted well to her working. I would get teary in first grade sometimes but like everything else, I just had to adapt. Granny worked long hours, dropping me off at my aunt Joan’s house before school and picking me up there afterwards to go back to her school to work and socialize some more. Then there were days after school where we went to one of her friends, Mr. C, and we would be there until later in the evening. I remember working on my spelling and writing homework at his house and being there when he died from cancer, I think it was. Now I look back and wonder who he was and the nature of their relationship. 

I spent as many hours at Joan’s house as I did my own, I think. Joan lived in our neighborhood and was married to Billy and they had a child. Brent and I were close growing up, especially since I was over at his house before school and either Joan or Billy took the two of us to the neighborhood elementary school. I spent nearly every afternoon at their house playing with Brent. He had a room full of toys and we’d play boardgames or ride our bikes or just play outside in their yard. He had a swingset in the backyard and they lived on a culdesac that had a giant tree planted in the middle. We’d ride bikes together for ages around that tree. When we came back inside Joan made dinner and I had a place at their table. She often treated me like I was her own, I guess. 

I know I spent more time with her than I did my own mother. 

Coming up next time: More stories from my childhood being raised by everyone but my parents and a confession I’ve only ever told one person. 

Outro: Thank you so much for listening! Please subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast with your friends. Visit the website estrangedpodcast.com (no w’s) for more information about the podcast. Email me at theestrangedpodcast@gmail.com if you’d like to share your story. Take care of yourselves and have a great week!