Spit and Hellfire
Or some unspoken history
As we sat at the table across from the associate principal and Special Ed Teacher three days ago and listened to them tell us about how our son scratched his teacher and spit on him while he was blocking him from exiting the room, my ex said “I don’t even know where he got that spitting thing from!” I agreed. “Yeah, I have no idea,” shrugging my shoulders and looking bewildered.
Later that day as I was driving to pick the kids up from school, a couple of memories popped into my head as I was replaying that scene.
The first time I drove in winter after we moved up to Northern Wisconsin, I managed to put our explorer in a ditch. That’s what I always say, but thinking about time, it’s all wrong. It had to be my second winter there. We moved there in May of 2006, I gave birth to our daughter the following year in August 2007. I was due any day with her when we bought the Explorer. I was newly pregnant with our third child in the winter of 2008, so it was actually my 3rd winter there, not even the second! It’s so much more dramatic when I say it’s my first though, so I will probably always tell the story that way.
I was confident in my winter driving skills as I had driven through many years of Iowa winters. I was also overly confident because our Explorer had four-wheel drive! That first snowfall of the season (probably in October) was the wet, slushy kind.
I was driving my ex to work that morning. We only had one working vehicle at that time, and I was probably going to go to the store after I dropped him off. We lived in a very rural area, and had to drive 2-lane rural highways to get anywhere. He worked for his tribe, and the tribal land highways were pretty bad, especially in winter. I did a great job of driving through the slush with the four-wheel drive on. Until I took the tight S-curve a little too fast. My tail end started sliding and I freaked out. The side of the road we were heading for was the side with a really steep drop off (most of the roads to get anywhere were similar) I yanked the steering wheel hard in the opposite direction, which is not what you are supposed to do, and I knew that. From there It turned into the slowest of slow-motion accidents. I slowly slid from one side of the highway to the next, doing the steering all wrong because I panicked. Thank God there weren’t other cars around. Thankfully, with my maneuvering, we landed on the opposite side of the highway in a ditch full of pine. The impact wasn’t too bad since it was so slow, BUT I managed to hit the only oak tree in that ditch full of pine. It probably wasn’t the only one, but that’s how the story is told, and I relied on his ability to identify trees.
We hit the tree head-on and came to an abrupt stop. We lunged a bit forward, and then back. My first action after that was to look back at the baby and toddler in the back seat to make sure they were OK. As I was turning my head towards the rear, my ex hocked the biggest loogie and it slammed right into the windshield.
My youngest wasn’t born at that point. And it was my third child that was safely in my belly.
The next memory that flooded in was many years later. We had moved back to the area and were renting a townhouse in Parkview, IA. It was 2014. My bio children were 8, 6, 4, and 2.
One night at dinner, my 4-year old son accidentally coughed and a little food came out of his mouth. I laughed a little (because it was kind of surprising and funny), and just told him not to do that again. My ex stood up and spit his mouthful of food all the way across the room. When he sat down he started mocking me “oh Dylan tee hee,” covering his mouth, “Don’t do that again tee hee” in a high-pitched voice. He continued on with it until my 6-year old daughter stood up on the bench and said “Dad I love mom!”
Until that night, I had convinced myself that my children were oblivious to what was going on. That was also the point when I told myself I needed to leave him for their benefit.
Those two memories really told me all I needed to know about the history of spitting in our household.