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I wrote this character sketch of my mom, Carolyn Lehman, several years ago. I emailed it to her at the time, and she wrote back that it reminded her of a bumper sticker she used to see and relate to that read, ‘Please forgive me, I was raised by wolves.’
Her father, James Polese, like my biological father, Peter Lehman, each in their own time, were employed as engineers developing a heinous, abusive, and illegal national ‘security’ project, which I have written about in other posts on this substack, particularly in my open letter to the Congressional intelligence oversight committees. My mom kept detailed journals in which she documented the abuse perpetrated by her own father, but I fear they will be destroyed, or already have been.
To be clear, I’m not asking anyone to forgive my mom for her support role in my biological father’s crimes. He manipulated and coerced her (and my brother and me) in truly awful ways, but at the end of the day, she made her choice, and I made mine.
There is always a choice.
One day when I was a young child, my mom and I were walking to the library on the Humboldt State (now Cal Poly Humboldt) campus. We stopped because of a bicycle race. There were hay bales in the street marking a turn in the racecourse. Spectators waited on the sidewalk. "They're coming around again," one of them said.
We were by the corner where the College Creek Market is now, but it hadn’t been built yet, and at the time there were small, older houses converted to offices there. The preschool I'd gone to was just across the street. Called "Child Development Laboratory," it was also part of the university. I didn’t know it at the time, but in the preschool there were microphones hanging from the ceiling, and a bank of one-way mirrors along one wall, so people, presumably researchers, could watch the children playing from behind the mirrors and put on headphones and press switches to listen to the different microphones.
The racers came around fast in a tight pack of bright jerseys. One of them swung inside the turn and stood on his pedals, sprinting, and when he came up even with the leader of the pack, the leader nudged him with his shoulder, just a little, and the challenger wobbled and began to fall. There was a machine on the curb for cars to pull up and buy campus parking permits, and there was a mechanical slide sticking out of the machine to take quarters, and the slide caught the falling rider in the mouth, while his bike went flying out from under him. Some of the other racers looked back, they saw what happened, but didn't stop.
The fallen rider sat in the street, legs splayed out, arms resting just above his knees. The spectators stood in front of him in a semicircle, a good distance away. One side of the rider’s face was torn away from his mouth up to his nose and eye and ear, and hung from his jaw. Blood flowed down his chin and neck and jersey and pooled on the asphalt.
Someone ran to call an ambulance. My mom squatted down next to the injured rider. "You've got to put pressure on that," she said. She picked up his hand and moved it so his fingertips caught the hanging flap of his face and using his hand she got his face back in position and she pressed his palm against his head to hold his face there until she saw he could hold it himself.
The rider started to say something in a normal tone of voice. He might have been trying to say "Thank you," or even crack a joke. But whatever he was trying to say, it was utterly garbled by his blood and the damage to his mouth. Right then he started to scream. He stopped to breathe in slowly past the blood in his throat and then screamed some more.
"Shut up," my mom said.
He kept on screaming. My mom leaned in close during the rasp of one of his inhalations, and said, softly and clearly, "If you don't shut up I'm going to shove my hand down your throat.”
He stopped. His eyes rolled across the spectators, looking for someone to protect him from my mom, but they kept their distance. From my perspective, the blood, the screaming, my mom’s dangerous voice, all were frightening, but what was even more frightening were the not-my-problem looks on the faces of the spectators.
"Pick up his teeth," my mom told me. Someone in the crowd stepped forward long enough to hand me a sandwich bag. There were crumbs in it so I turned it inside out and gathered up the broken teeth from the pavement. Some had flown quite far. I didn't think anyone would be able to put the teeth back in the man's mouth, but I understood why he might want them, because they were his.
The ambulance came. When he heard the siren, the man almost started screaming again, but my mom looked at him and he whimpered instead. The paramedics wrapped his face and strapped him to a gurney. I solemnly handed one of them the bag of teeth. My mom wiped her hands on her jeans. A woman from the maintenance department came to hose the street down.
My mom and I walked up the library steps. We would browse the stacks of children's picture books and compare what we found. My mom was an expert, she taught children's literature classes, at different times, at both College of the Redwoods and Humboldt. No one ever bothered us in the library, and she wouldn't be frightened there by having to make small talk with anybody.