Chapter 01: Childhood and Adolescence

Linda’s Early Life

Life is all about contradiction, and more than most people, Linda Joyce (Belcher) Hathaway exemplified this. She was one of the strongest people I have ever known. She lived through events that would make most people lie down and die.

At other times, the smallest things could turn her world upside down and send her weeping to bed for a week.

Linda was born in Northern Texas on February 17th, 1961.

Linda once wrote about her birth:

I was born early and weighed in at 4 pounds, 13 ounces. At birth I was blue and an operation had to be performed to get me to start breathing.

I feel certain these four events (my mother having toxemia, being premature, being born blue, and the surgery) are connected to later events in my life that caused me to feel unworthy of life, that I should not be permitted to live my life, in fact that I was not welcome to life.

From letters I have read, I know that my mother looked forward to my birth and was very excited when I was born. My baby book is filled out completely during this time with colorful descriptions of parties, gift giving, and notes of every coo and cuddle.

While climbing from the front seat of her father’s car to the back, Linda (at the age of 2) accidentally kicked her mother in the breast. This was excruciating for her mother and it was because of that kick that they discovered that her mother had breast cancer.

Within a few months, her mother was dead. I mention this kick because as a child, Linda overheard her father telling someone about it. She spent most of the rest of her life believing that she was responsible for her mother’s death, or that her father thought she was.

According to my baby book and letters my mother wrote, I continued to progress fabulously. However, when I was 2 years and 2 months old, my mother had to have a mastectomy. I am sure it was hard on my sister (who was a year younger than I was) and myself, and of course on my mother and father.

She had a radical mastectomy. I am sure she could no longer pick me up or care for me as usual. I wonder what I thought about during this time. She was in a lot of pain.

In November, she went into the hospital and never came home. My father says he only took me there once to visit her because every time he went people were screaming with pain. He did not want to subject me to that. She died one month before I turned 3.

Instead of being permitted to say good bye to my mother, neither my sister nor I were allowed to attend the funeral. I know that this death and lack of closure has affected me to this day. Whenever a friend’s friend or even an acquaintance dies, I have strong emotional reactions and feel an irrational personal loss accompanied by anxiety.

Linda’s father was in the Air Force and could not take care of two little girls (as he said in a letter following Linda’s death, “I had never changed a diaper before.”). So, he had to put them in foster care. Linda always believed that while she was in foster care she was sexually abused. She believed this because she started masturbating while she was in grade school and because she placed so little value on her sexuality.

Within a few months, Linda’s father had the good fortune to meet another woman who was either brave enough or naive enough to marry a man in the Air Force during a time of war, to live with him at a site that was a target for Russian missiles from Cuba, and to care for two orphaned little girls.

Unfortunately, Linda did not get along with her stepmother. I have no doubt that her new mother tried her hardest, but Linda saw her as a threat. I think that before Linda’s real mother died she said something like “OK, you’re the woman of the house while I am gone.”

My first clear memory is of being at my Aunt Bonnie’s house and my stepmother to be saying that Sarah, my younger sister, could not go to the wedding. I told her, “But she is my sister.” She said to me, “Sarah is too young to go.” I was angry and shocked that we would be separated. I was not part of the wedding. I watched them cut the cake and literally felt myself sinking inside, not to surface until three years later.

One small memory I do have is of a flight attendant giving me my own set of wings on an international flight to Germany at approximately age four. This was a momentary pleasurable feeling.

When Linda was 4, her father was assigned to Germany and the family went with him.

The next memory I have is of being in first grade in Germany and it had to do with an attraction to a boy in my class. I have scattered memories of living in Germany, but no memory of a fire in our apartment and having to evacuate or of either of my half brothers being born.

As Linda grew, her conflicts with her stepmother also grew. Linda wanted a life much more glamorous than that of a sergeant’s daughter living in a small town in Texas. She wanted to wear beautiful clothes, makeup, and do up her hair like the people she saw on TV and in the movies, but the realities of life and little money made that impossible.

Linda’s family all lived in a small house with one bathroom, so the four children had to limit their time in there. Her mother worked to help support the family so Linda could not be in Brownies or do things other little girls were doing.

Linda used to tell me the stories of her life as a child, like how her mother let her join Brownies with the warning that if her mother got a job Linda would have to quit because she would not have time to take her there. A few days later her mother did get the job and Linda always felt like her mother had set her up and betrayed her.

She told me that she wanted to be a cheerleader but they did not have the money needed to buy her the outfit, so she was not able to.

She felt her father was always on her stepmother’s side, except a few times, like when he would take the girls to the BX (Base Exchange) and give them five dollars, then warn them not to tell their mother.

He also insisted that they be on swim team.

It may be that mothers naturally feel differently toward their biological children or it may simply be that time, changes in life situations, and experience mean that each child is treated differently, biological or not. Linda always felt that her half brothers were treated better than she was.

She could not be a Brownie or a cheerleader but they could have music lessons. Although Linda was a girl, and therefore according to Linda “should have had more time in the bathroom,” she and Sarah had the same amount of time as the boys.

Sometimes Linda felt just like Cinderella, like the times when her half brothers, when they were younger, had an accident in their beds, it would fall to Linda to clean it up. This jealousy she felt toward them was terrible for her because while she was jealous of them and resented them she also loved them deeply.

Each Saturday, after she completed her chores Linda would watch “Bandstand” (American Bandstand with Dick Clark) and dream of escaping. Music and dance were always important to her, a magical place where she could escape and feel wonderful about herself.

Linda always yearned for the attention that she lost when her mother died, but was never told how beautiful and graceful she was. She wanted praise and worked hard at school, getting all “A’s,” but no one seemed to notice.

She desperately wanted to learn more about her real mother but her father could not bring himself to share that with her.

Repeatedly I would ask him to tell me about my “real” mother, to tell me what she liked, if I was like her, or anything personal about her, to see pictures of her or any of her belongings.

Linda wanted so much to be beautiful, she would steal the clothes that her family could not afford from the local stores.

She wanted to feel accepted so she would sneak out at night and go dancing, drinking, and yes, she started doing drugs. She was into rock music and the people she saw and read about did drugs. Besides, it was only marijuana. It let her escape, or that is what she believed.

She told me that she was never told anything about sex when she was young or that she should wait to have it. I do not know whether that is true or if she was just rebellious, but in eighth grade one of the boys in her class dared her to have sex with him so she did.

From what Linda told me this was basic sex and Linda did not feel much or enjoy it. In fact, it was not until she was out of high school that she found on her own what it was to be fulfilled sexually.

Linda quickly found that having sex meant being accepted and to some degree feeling beautiful, so in high school she had “a lot of sex.”

On a recent trip to visit the town she grew up in, she showed me the house she would sneak off to each lunchtime for sex or the country road where she and her friends would compete to see who could get their guy off first. She also had a thing for pilot cadets from the local Air Force base, especially the Iranians.

Her stepmother tried to control her but may have gone too far. Having caught Linda in the act she beat her and accused her of giving the boy oral sex, but she was much more blunt in her words.

Well, Linda had never even heard of that before but soon became quite good at it. Unfortunately, twice while she was in high school she became pregnant. The first time she had an abortion.

I do not know what they were teaching in sex education in those days, but Linda believed that she could use the rhythm method to prevent herself from becoming pregnant. In fact, she believed that if she had not been smoking marijuana she would have remembered that she was fertile and not have made the mistake of getting pregnant again.

At sixteen, she was pregnant for the second time, and this time she decided she was going to carry the baby and give it up for adoption. The father of this baby was upset by Linda’s decision and every afternoon would try to talk her into going with him to the abortion clinic.

Somehow, without help from her parents, according to Linda, she located a home for unwed mothers across the state and she went there.

In May 1978, she gave birth to a little girl. Linda never knew the name that her little girl’s adoptive parents gave her. Linda always called her Jennifer. Years later, Linda and I did attempt to locate her daughter, but we were not successful.

Giving Jennifer up was the hardest thing Linda ever had to do. She wanted to keep her, especially when they brought Jennifer to her and she held her.

Not for the usual fifteen minutes, they let her hold the baby for forty five minutes, while Linda cried.

Then they took Jennifer away and asked Linda to sign the forms giving her away. Linda decided not to sign, so they told her that she would then have to pay for all the care she had received before they would give the baby back.

It had been made clear before Linda went away that if she brought the baby back she would not be allowed to live with her folks anymore. Linda wanted her baby to have a good life, not the life she would get being brought up by a high school dropout for a mother.

So Linda signed the adoption papers. But Linda never stopped loving that little girl.

When Linda got home, she had to face a new challenge. Her parents told her that she would have to go back to the same high school she had left, where everyone knew she had left to have a baby.

Linda simply refused and got herself a job after school so she could pay the transfer fee to attend a different high school.

Linda worked hard and paid the fees, got herself a car and an apartment.

On the day after Linda graduated from high school, 1979, she got in her Volkswagen bug, left Texas behind, and struck out for California.