A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Elinda

Elinda is my mother’s first child, born in 1946.

Elinda’s father was with my mother for only a brief time, physically abusing her and then disappearing for a long time after he was sent away for an armed robbery in Great Falls, Montana.

Shortly after that, Mom met a man named Jimmy and they got married. Elinda was afraid of Jimmy and would have nightmares about him, even after Mom had two children with him—Gary and Russell.

Mom and Jimmy got divorced when Elinda was five.

My dad came into the picture in 1956. He wanted to help Mom with the children, but he was often overwhelmed trying to provide for them. Despite their struggles, he wanted to have his own children. My brother Mark was born in 1960.

When Elinda was a little girl, she would often daydream in school and her teacher thought she was mentally retarded, or, as they called it back then, “feebleminded.”

Mom was wrestling with her own health concerns. She was epileptic and would have seizures quite often, shaking the whole house, scaring the kids, and waking up unsure of what was happening to her. It took several years and several treatments to get the right medicine to stop the attacks.

When my sister, Elinda, became a teenager, she was sent to Medical Lake, a psychiatric hospital, from 1960 to 1970. When she began there, she weighed ninety-eight pounds. Two years later, she weighed two hundred. She became diabetic.

While she was there, she received eight shock treatments. After each treatment, she would sit somewhere and wonder, Why can’t I think?

She was sexually active in the hospital and became pregnant after having sex with one of the other inmates on the concrete floor of the mailroom. She wanted to get married to this person and have a life outside of the hospital with him, but when she had the baby, a healthy boy, the hospital officials deemed her unfit to be a mother. The child was immediately taken from her before she could see it.