In a family ruled by addiction and denial, three sisters find strength in each other.
And the Herd is a raw, emotionally rich story of growing up in a large, codependent family where an enabling mother sacrifices everything for her addicted sons. Amid the dysfunction, the sisters come together—much like a herd of elephants—to protect themselves and their children.
Through heartbreak and healing, the author charts her path to rediscover her identity, rebuild her marriage, and break free from the legacy of dysfunction.
This is a story of survival, sisterhood, and the quiet courage it takes to rewrite your story—one choice, one bond, one step at a time.
Few creatures live in such harmony with their surroundings as elephants do.
In the early 1970s, we lived in a sleepy bedroom community about 60 miles north of New York City. We didn’t know we were poor. We knew that we lived in one of the biggest, coolest houses in town. The house was up on “the hill,” overlooking the town and the town’s reservoir. We had horses, fields, ponds, and woods surrounding us. This house was as much a part of our family as the people living in it. It had personality, it spoke to us with its many noises, and it enveloped us in a tender hug as we grew as a family.
What we didn’t know was that our parents got the house for a steal because it needed so much restoration. Mom, Dad, and my older siblings spent several weekends working on the house to make it livable before the family could officially move into it. My father, Jameson, or Jamie, was thin with dark hair combed back and secured with a dab of Brylcreem. Like Mom, Dad had blue eyes and dimples. He was an Army veteran who now worked as an insurance salesman. The family was thrilled to make the move from our split-level house in a larger town about 45 minutes away to the big house in a small town.
The house was accessible by two dirt driveways that led up the hill to opposite sides of the house. At the base of the hill, each driveway entrance was flanked on either side with sizable stone pillars made of gray and brown river rocks. The tops of the pillars tapered into a pyramid shape. The pillars offered a grandness to the property.
At the top of the hill where the two driveways merged, drivers were greeted by our basketball hoop, which was mounted to a thick tree with large roots at the base. The worst thing was to get a basket because the ball would go through the hoop, hit one of the big, gnarly roots, and go flying down one of the quarter-mile-long driveways.
Our house was an old, white-shingled, Victorian-style home with six bedrooms and four bathrooms. It had a tower room, a huge kitchen with staircases to the basement and second floor, a formal dining room, adjoining parlor-style living rooms, and a grand hallway with an ornate winding staircase to the second floor. The wide, winding staircase’s banister was loose, and when grasped, it wobbled from all of us sliding down it to the first floor. The slick, chestnut brown wooden handrail made for a much quicker descent than walking down the many steps.
The exterior of the home was surrounded by a series of connected porches and patios. There was a screened-in porch, an open-air porch, a glassed-in porch, and a patio with a stone wall that ran the length of the patio. The stone wall was constructed of the same gray and brown river rocks as the driveway pillars. The top of the wall was a wide, flat surface, perfect for sitting or running the length of the wall. Mom took a Polaroid picture of all eight of her kids standing on the wall outside the kitchen. We stood in age order in our Sunday best. Peter, a teenager, cradled my baby brother Owen, my only younger sibling, in his arms.
The house had a tin roof. It was mostly silver colored and had splotches of black tar here and there, where Dad had sealed the leaky spots on the roof. The euphonious sound of the rain on the tin roof was music to our ears. The sound was captivating as the falling raindrops sped up and slowed down as passing storm clouds blew over the old house.
The attic and basement were scary, smelly places we never wanted to enter. We could only imagine the monsters and beasts that resided there. The worn brown hardwood floors and stairs creaked loudly just like the haunted houses in the spooky Chiller Theater or Creature Feature movies we watched on television. Those creaks were like an eerie built-in alarm, warning us of the approach of someone, or something, as the old wood planks groaned and rubbed against each other.
Next door to our house was a smaller white home with a huge red barn and several smaller utility buildings made of weathered wood. We were told back in the day that this home was the servant quarters for the people who lived in our home. My eldest brother’s future wife, Chiara, lived next door with her Italian family. Yep, Peter married the girl next door. He was a good-looking, blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy who was confident, assertive, and full of charisma. Chiara, a sweet and welcoming beauty with long dark hair and eyes, was his opposite in many ways. Both were petite in stature.
Across the street from us was the home of an older couple with no children of their own. They used part of their home for the nursery school they ran. The tree-filled yard was chock-full of everything a preschooler could want and more: a wooden pirate ship, swings, a large sandbox, slides, a carousel, a seesaw, and monkey bars. When I was four years old, I begged to go to their nursery school. It looked lively and fun. Mom enrolled me, and when she walked me down the driveway for my first day, I had a change of heart. I grasped her red polyester pants in my fists and refused to let go. I cried and begged not to go to nursery school. So, she took me home. A nursery school dropout!
The nursery school also had a “money tree” with circular indentations carved in the bark where coins had been glued in place. When no one was around, my brother Jameson pried out all of the coins and stole them. Jameson was the second born. He had shoulder-length blonde hair, light blue eyes, and big dimples. He was a sweet kid but didn’t always make the best choices. At the time, no one knew exactly who had been de-coining the money tree.
In December, Mom asked Jameson to cut down a tree for Christmas. So, he walked down to the nursery school, chopped down one of their evergreen trees, and dragged it up the driveway. Mom and Dad had to go apologize for the missing tree. As these stories were retold over the years, there was never any indication that Jameson had been held accountable for stealing the coins or the evergreen tree.
Chiara’s father, Rex, with his wavy hair and Marlon Brando features, bred and raised harness racing horses on his farm. We spent many days playing in the horse pastures, the hay loft, and all the utility buildings, which held all sorts of treasures packed away by Rex.
The farm is where we had our sex education. We learned about the birds and the bees while hiding in the hay loft or in the vestibule of Chiara’s house and watched the prized stud, Sunny, as he was bred with various mares. Hiding in the vestibule, we were treated to the enticing aromas of meals being prepared by Chiara’s mother, Hattie. Hattie was a short, robust woman with bouffant platinum blonde hair and pearlescent blue Avon eyeshadow from her supply of Avon cosmetics, which she sold as a job. Watching Sunny the Stud and his mares was a key point in our growing up, as Mom and Dad never told us anything about sex—beside the occasional, “sex is for marriage only” comment from Mom. So, the gaps were filled by observing Sunny the Stud and immature conversations with friends.
Our town was a real old-fashioned town with a town center and mom and pop shops owned by the locals. Most people knew each other and were often welcomed by name when they entered a business. Many of the townspeople wore multiple hats. For example, our bus driver was also a local farmer and a sheriff’s deputy. Decades after I moved away, our town was used in a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, if that tells you anything. It was small-town America at its best.
When Mom needed to ride into town, we’d all pile into her old orange and white Volkswagen van and head into town and listen to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” by Tony Orlando and Dawn and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce on the van’s AM radio. During these trips, we’d first go by the post office to pick up the mail. One time, Mom fell down on the ramp outside of it and my siblings and I couldn’t help but laugh. As she rose back to her feet, she hissed “It’s not funny!” through clenched teeth. Her tone and stare were a clear warning. We promptly stifled the giggles.
If we were lucky, Mom would let us run over to one of the two candy shops in town. Around the corner from the candy stores was the pharmacy where we’d go pick up Grandma’s prescriptions. Next door to the pharmacy was a bicycle repair shop, and across the street was the diner. Through the town’s main intersection was the butcher shop. I hated going in there, the smell was just awful. At the butcher, Mom would order a variety of cold cuts and her usual order of $5.00 of “chuck chop.” On the way home, we’d pull into the Texaco gas station by the railroad track, and after the van ran over the hose on the ground that generated a bell notification, Mom would yell out to the attendant “$5.00 regula.”
For some reason, my Mom and other fellow New Yorkers would pronounce a word that ended in -ar or -er as if it ended in an a. Likewise, if a word ended with an a, they pronounced it as if it ended with an -er. For example, water was “wata” and china was “chiner.”
Several of us kids drove into town with Mom one time. On the drive into town, Owen, the youngest of the siblings, was being especially annoying.
He pinched me and I yelled, “Owen, stop it!”
Then he nudged Jo, and she yelled, “Owen, knock it off!”
Then he plucked a hair from Gerti, who yelled, “Owen, cut it out!”
With that my mother turned to yell–but not at Owen. She yelled at us girls, “Don’t say his name again!” Then one by one she looked at each of us as she said, “You call him Sydney! You call him Walter! And you call him Jerome!”
What she said was actually very funny to us, but we dared not even crack a smile based on the angry look on her face. Our lips pursed tightly trying not to smile, but our dimples still showed. So, all three of us had our hands to our faces to cover any evidence of a smile. When Mom finally turned towards the front again, my sisters and I looked at each other and silently laughed.
Mom made her usual stops, and then we were back into the van to head home. Soon after we arrived home the phone rang, and Mom answered it. On the other end of the line was Owen.
Mom yelled into the phone, “Owen, where are you?” In my head, I said to her, “You call him Walter, Sydney, or Jerome!” She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t at the house with us.
Owen replied, “Mom, you forgot me in town!”
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We were a good Irish, Catholic family with eight kids. Five boys and three girls. All of us had various shades of blonde hair, blue eyes, and dimples. Gerti, my eldest sister, was the third born and Jo, the middle sister, was sixth born. I was lucky number seven. Back in those days, to save money, Mom cut all of our hair herself rather than going to a salon. We all donned essentially bilayered hairstyles with blunt bangs at the top level and a longer, jagged second level.
Gerti was always so nurturing. She was a “good girl,” a rule follower, who stayed out of trouble. Jo was a little tougher…perhaps being further down the pecking order called for toughness, or perhaps, as Jo later resolved, being raised by an indifferent menopausal woman would cause her to be a bit more rebellious. Jo would test her boundaries more than Gerti or me. We girls didn’t start out being especially close, we were undoubtedly sibling rivals. Perhaps it was because of our places in the pecking order of our family. But whatever the reason, as time went by year after year, we grew closer and closer.
Mom’s mother, Beatrice, or Birdie, Grandma to the kids, lived with us for as long as I can remember. Grandma was a tall, very thin Southern woman with big blue eyes and snow-white hair who smoked a pack of Benson & Hedges 100s a day. She did not wear a bra, didn’t even own one, and wore colorful smocks with pockets that snapped down the front to cover the evidence of that. We kids always chuckled at Grandma’s Southern sayings: colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra, that makes about as much sense as tits on a bull, she’s pitching a hissy fit, he couldn’t find his ass with both hands in his back pockets, busy as a one-legged cat in a sandbox, he doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of—they went on and on.
Grandma served a couple important roles in our home. She was the official laundry folder. Every day, we would report to Grandma’s room and pick up our neatly folded pile of laundry off her dresser and bring it to our room. If we were lucky, Grandma would sneak us some of her stash of Fritos or M&Ms and pour a Dixie cup of warm Coca-Cola. It was a decadent treat for us. We never had soda back then. We mostly drank water, powdered orange flavored Tang, or powdered milk. Grandma also worked endlessly, sitting at a brown table in front of the stone fireplace in her second-floor bedroom, writing addresses from the phone book onto envelopes so Dad could mail insurance information to potential customers.
Most importantly, Grandma was who we went to when we needed to be consoled when we got in trouble. She would hug us and rub our heads as we cried. When she knew we had been bad, she would point to a statue of Jesus on her dresser. It was a bust of Jesus where His forehead was bloodied from wearing the crown of thorns. A tear was running down Jesus’ cheek.
Grandma would say in her Southern drawl, “Now look, you made Jesus cry!”
Oh, the guilt!
Grandma had a tabby cat named Sandy. Sandy rarely came out of Grandma’s room. His food and water dish and kitty litter box were in Grandma’s en suite pink bathroom. One morning, Mom was talking on the olive-green phone that hung on the kitchen wall. She had the long green cord stretched taut across the big kitchen and was just inside the dining room, reaching for the hamper when she heard Sandy screech. The screech was promptly followed by the sound of metal banging. Mom rushed back into the kitchen and saw her yellow canary Georgie’s birdcage swinging back and forth. Georgie wasn’t in the birdcage. She lowered her eyes and began scanning the area looking for Sandy. She found him under the kitchen table with yellow feathers sticking out of his mouth.
She yelled, “Goddamn cat! Get the fuck out of here!” Followed by, “Mother! Come get your damn cat that just killed my bird!”
Mom was the only woman we knew to use cuss words. And use them she did—she could poetically string together expletives like no other.
Dad worked long hours, and Mom had the colossal job of managing us eight kids. It was amazing that she had the mental and emotional toolkit to do the job, considering she was the only child raised primarily by her divorced, promiscuous, alcoholic mother with the help of a Catholic priest. Grandma was incredibly lucky Mom allowed her to remain in her life, given her past and problem with alcohol. It’s not every daughter who would let a mother who had screwed her boyfriend stick around.
Mom’s father, known to us as Grandad, essentially abandoned his daughter. He never tried to find her. But later in life, my mother wanted to meet him. When she was in her 40s, she easily found him. He still lived in Memphis, where he resided when he abandoned her. He had never remarried and never had other children. Grandad hoarded his money and turned out to be a warped old man who taped magazine centerfold pictures over the framed art that hung on his walls. Despite coming from a broken upbringing, Mom was determined that our family would be close and that we would love each other all the days of our lives.
People looked at our family with envy. We were seen as a big, fun, loving family, which we were to a degree. The close and amusing relationships we shared made others wish they were part of our family. We were living a charmed, fairytale life in the big house on the hill in a small town—but things aren’t always as they appear. Indeed, we shared happy times, but we had our fair share of imperfections hidden beneath our charmed exterior.