Hungry Heart

Introduction
Though I tried, I could never get far enough away to ever want to come back. I knew. It seems I always knew. I was not wanted; unplanned for. Ugly. Fat. Loretta was wanted. She was beautiful. Everyone said so. But I was an accident, they said, deposited into a world of not enough. Not enough love. Not enough money. Not enough time. But time has a way of slowing down when we finally quit our running from ourselves and look within, discovering that enough love, more than enough love, can be found. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how my search for love began and why this incessant hole in my heart was so deep and unyielding.
I was born in a small town in Montana, the seventh of eight children. My dad worked long hours as a railroad depot agent for the Milwaukee Road. My mother, in order to make ends meet, in addition to caring for the kids, was forced to take jobs waiting tables in the local cafe or cleaning hotel rooms. We were poor but I never recall going without food. Momma saw to that.
Due to the frequent moves my dad’s job required, twenty two times in thirty years, we had a home on wheels, a ‘65 Detroiter trailer house. Mom hated it; hated dad for dragging her all over North and South Dakota. She despised the constant stopping and viewing of new “modular” homes with never any real intention to buy. Knocking on the cheap paneling and finding it hollow, brought a sneer of disgust from her lips for trailer houses and the man who was smitten with this economical way of living. Her discontent released in frenzied rage, as she and Dad fought with increasing severity and duration each year.
Plates were thrown; legs were kicked with the sharp points of cowboy boots until black and blue bruises appeared. Kids ran down the hall screaming, begging Dad not to hurt Momma, clasping their hands tightly over their ears to block out the fighting, seeking whatever shelter could be found in their bedrooms. We remained hidden while the neighbors called Jim the Cop; too embarrassed to be seen by the officer who had kids in the same grade as us at school.
“Are you kids, OK?” he’d ask, walking down the narrow hallway, looking into one of the tiny bedrooms sandwiched on both sides of the furnace.
“Yes, we’re fine”, we’d quickly respond. We just want to have a normal life so please don’t notice us, all right?
Finally the inevitable day came when Momma took every single one of dad’s possessions and threw them out of our rickety screen door, emblazoned with a regal looking “M”, scattering them across the dirt we called our front lawn. Dad simply picked up his things one by one and packed them into the family car, a ‘65 Volkswagen Bug and drove away.
Jimmie Rodgers’ “Train Whistle Blues” blaring from the eight-track player reinforced his feelings of despair. A Folgers coffee can on the floor at his feet quickly filled with used Skoal chewing tobacco as he spewed out thirty-eight years of marriage. He crossed the railroad tracks whose scheduled freight trains had kept him employed- his excellent record keeping earning his bread and butter and feeding his children for too many years to count. As former guardian of the tracks, he could still fondly hear the train whistle in his mind. And then suddenly, it stopped. It was over. He knew it. He would not return again. She finally got her way. He could not live with her any longer. The last two kids were almost grown anyway. He was simply not needed any more; his welcome long wore out. The train whistle slowly faded from his memory as tears fell at what was and what would never be again.
I was seventeen and in the beginning stages of a sixteen year eating disorder that would cause me to beg God for death time and again. My mind was Satan’s playground. I felt powerless to overcome the compulsion to overeat. Completely unable to relieve excessive food of the role of attempts at loving me and giving me what I never had.
A reason to live.

Chapter 1
Baby Beginnings
You have upheld me upheld from my birth;
You are He who took me out of my mother’s womb.
Psalms 71:6
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“I’m tired of it! I’m tired of you bringing those pop-eyed babies home from the hospital! No more, I tell you. No more!” My dad’s voice accelerated in anger as he crudely tied my mother’s hands with a dirty, white rope to an old oak tree. Perspiration from the late fall sunshine matted Momma’s short, dark hair to her face in sweltering globs. The yellow, cotton housedress she put on that morning clung revealingly to her body as her mind fought to block out the pain, cocooning itself around her unborn child. Every anguished cry gave voice to her attempt to shelter the baby from the blows to her belly my father used to unleash his fury at the swelling of yet another mouth to feed growing in her womb.
“Please, please don’t hurt the baby!” Momma cried. Babies gave her a reason to get up in the morning. They gave her someone to love-someone who loved her. Babies needed her as much as she needed them. The endless requirements of caring for a child took her mind off of all she didn’t have.
For years, I’ve replayed this scene over and over in my mind; imagining the lonely agony my mom must have felt that day as the new life inside of her was threatened. My emotions traced the fear that had to live in her heart, knowing that the announcement of another pregnancy would have quite a traumatic impact on her relationship with my dad.
It seemed to me that Momma thought that babies gave my father a reason to drink and stay away from home. My dad remarked once that he only wanted one or two. Pity the child who was baby number seven. Pity every child who was unwanted.