Liberating Lomie: Memoir of an Amish Childhood

PREFACE

In childhood there are frequently irreconcilable conflicts between loyalty to our parents and being true to our own selves. ~Alice Miller

My perspective about my childhood experiences has evolved and changed in the years since my first book, Why I Left the Amish, was published in 2011. Back then I was ecstatic about having that book published. It had taken me seventeen years, starting from the time I first began writing down stories about my Amish childhood, until the book was finally published. However, some years after launching the book, I began wishing I could take Why I Left the Amish off the market because of my changing perspective. When my contract with the publisher ended in January 2021, I chose not to renew it.

I had written then about the abuse I had endured at the hands of my paternal grandmother, my father, and my older brother. Some years after the book was published, I began asking myself why I had omitted the abuse I had endured at the hands of my mother (Mem). I realized I was still under the spell of believing that she was a martyr and a saint—a martyr for putting up with my father as her husband—and a saint for being the good parent to her children. She had promoted this view of herself for as long as I could remember.

Mem claimed that she’d had a happy childhood, surrounded by a loving family and a father who could do no wrong. Even in my teens, I sensed the happy-go-lucky story Mem wanted me to believe was fictional, and I became convinced of that as an adult. Yet however many times and in however many ways I asked for Mem’s family history, she refused to relinquish her stories. At some point in her later years, I came to the realization that Mem had every intention of making sure her history and pain would be buried with her. I also realized that I would be left with the daunting task of reconciling my relationship with her, or my memories of her, on my own.

Not only did Mem refuse to relinquish her stories, but she also made repeated requests that I stay silent about my pain. When I was a young mother, I asked her questions in our letter correspondence about something that happened when I was a child. In her response, she wrote that I should "bury these things in the past and let them stay buried." These major differences in the way we approached our lives—Mem’s determination to bury her pain and my need to voice mine, her attempts to silence me, and my attempts to draw out her story—were at the core of our longstanding battle of wills. The chasm between my worldview and the one Mem maintained to her death was never to be bridged.

For reasons I still don’t understand, it took nearly a decade after Mem’s death until I was finally ready to take an honest look at what had happened to me. Liberating Lomie revisits my childhood stories with this perspective.

When I began trying to reconcile my memories of Mem with what I felt was the truth, I started by writing a letter to her soul as a means of coming to terms with her, with the hope of eventually forgiving her. I often had to stop writing when I came to another traumatic event to allow myself a good cry. But I didn’t stop writing until my letter grew to 150 pages long. This letter concluded naturally at the point when I had left home at twenty years old, which had forced our relationship to change.

After writing this long letter to Mem, I decided to braid a rug for a young friend who was getting married. Braiding rugs was one of the homespun arts I had learned from Mem when I was growing up. One day I was sitting in my attic room, braiding and looking out the window over the neighborhood. The flow of the traffic on the bridge that spanned the Connecticut River in the background was like the flow of the water underneath it—the flow of life.

I felt Mem’s presence as my hands folded in the edges of the soft, yielding strands of wool. I longed to reach a point of understanding Mem’s life, forgiving her, and letting go of the past. Over and over I folded—right, then left, right, then left—while creating a braid of dark purple and gray. I thought of each strand as representing three parts of forgiveness: honesty, humility, and compassion. By braiding these three together, I felt I was braiding my way toward forgiveness.

Once I finished the rug, I braided another. And then another. I kept braiding until I had braided seven rugs over several months. Each creation added warmth and beauty to the home my husband David and I had renovated. They were a complement to the newly finished wood floors. They reminded me that even in the struggle to reach a reconciliation with Mem, I could still celebrate many of the things I’d learned from her, including how to create beauty in the form of braiding woolen rugs.

As I reflected on the two very different lives Mem and I had lived, I realized that my life would have resembled hers had I stayed and married someone I didn’t love and then discovered he suffered from mental illness. I didn’t know whether I would have had the kind of strength needed to raise a brood of children pretty much on my own. On the flip side of that, Mem could have had a life of her choosing had she decided to leave and strike out on her own. I often felt like Mem secretly coveted my life, even while condemning my choices to others in her community.

I wondered why I struggled with forgiving Mem as I had been taught I should do. The Amish definition of forgiveness is to forgive and forget. It seemed to me that Mem wanted to skip the forgiveness part—which first requires an admission of committing a wrong—and go directly to the forgetting part. I often wondered how I was supposed to choose which of my experiences to remember and which ones to forget. It seemed this was a natural process that I had no control over.

Mem’s expectations that I should bear my struggles in silence mirrored those of our Amish community. These expectations had been handed down through the generations from mother to daughter as part of our cultural heritage. I had often wished I could meet such expectations and be a good Amish child and young woman. Growing up in this context, I couldn’t understand where the desire came from to give voice to my experiences as a means of understanding my life and my world.

As I practiced the homespun art Mem had taught me by braiding woolen rugs, it dawned on me that I could choose which of the traditions I carried on, and which ones I could let go of. It didn’t feel natural to me to remain silent about the pain I had endured in my childhood. I realized that forgiveness did not include bearing the burden of silence as Mem had done and as she wished for me to do. By remembering and writing my stories, I had to forgo or give up the guilt of revealing what happened. Instead of forgiving and forgetting, I am remembering and relinquishing.

Mem with an English friend when she was still single, circa 1950

PROLOGUE

Freedom lies in being bold. ~Robert Frost

Idid not sneak away in the dark of night. I left in broad daylight with a little blue overnight suitcase in hand. I was twenty years old, still a minor in the eyes of my parents and the state law in Ohio. If I got caught, there was one last resort for escaping the life I could no longer bear. I didn’t even want to think about attempting suicide, so my life depended on making this work. I kept telling myself everything would work out all right. I’d laid my plans with care to ensure my success in leaving and my survival out in the world. A friend was helping me to make arrangements to go to Vermont, the land of my dreams.

Throughout the night I had anticipated the moment when I’d walk out of my parents’ home with no plans to return. I played the scene over and over in my mind. I’d wait in my room until my regular ride to work showed up and Mem would call up to let me know. By the sound of her voice, I’d know whether she was in the living room or in the kitchen. How I hoped she’d be in the living room so I could leave before she saw my suitcase!

As I heard Mr. Pell’s car coming in the lane, Mem called from the kitchen. My heart beat hard and fast. I grabbed my suitcase out of the closet and bounded down the stairs. I came face-to-face with Mem, sweeping the kitchen floor. She looked pointedly at my suitcase, then at me.

I said, I’m babysitting tonight at the place where I work. It was not an outright lie, but it also wasn’t telling Mem the whole truth.

Mem said severely, Don’t you let this happen too often.

I won’t, I said. I ran down the stairs and out the door to the yellow getaway car. I was leaving my Amish childhood behind, and Mem could not call it back.

This photo was taken after I left home, though it looks much like it did when I was growing up.

EARLY REMEMBRANCES

[O]ur memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. ~William Butler Yeats

Twenty years before I left home with no plans to return, I was born the third child into an Amish family in northeastern Ohio. My parents lived on a farmette, with a barn, garden, fields, and a tiny four-room house taking up an acre of land. They also owned forty acres of woods surrounding the farmette.

I was born the day after my parents’ fourth wedding anniversary. Mem once told me it was the only anniversary she had ever celebrated. But from what else she told me, those days sound more like a family crisis because a family member was leaving the world as I was entering it. My father’s stepdad had died two days before I was born. He had been in a car and buggy accident the day before he died, and my grandmother believed the accident was the cause of his sudden death, though his obituary records the cause of his death as having been a stroke.

My father (Datt) was torn between being there for his bereaved mother and being present for his wife as she was about to give birth. I know he was at Mem’s bedside when she arrived at the Amish midwife’s home because the midwife had him administer the ether to Mem. Apparently, he gave her too much too soon, so she turned her head and ether got into one of her eyes. When she awoke, she wanted to know why her eye felt so strange, and the midwife told her what had happened. The way Mem told the story, Datt was to blame. But I wondered why the midwife had my father administer the ether instead of doing it herself.

After my birth, the Amish midwife, Mrs. Yoder, put me in a tiny basket, all wrapped in blankets, next to Mem’s bed. Mem said I was a beautiful baby, with the thickest dark hair she’d ever seen on a newborn.

Some of Mem’s recollections about my childhood came to me in the form of letters when I was a young mother myself. She once wrote:

The day that I was to come home was the funeral of dad’s stepfather and [he] didn’t come to pick me up until late and [I] remember how impatient Mrs. Yoder got. She said to me, Must be he thinks more of his mother than he does of you. Which pretty well upset me for awhile.

Mem returned home to her other two children, three-year-old Joey and one-year-old Lizzie. As was typical for Amish mothers in my community, Mem cared for me pretty exclusively for the first two weeks while a young woman in the community came and took care of Joey and Lizzie and the household chores so that Mem could get some rest.

Mem wrote to me about my babyhood:

You were a contented baby. I could sit you on the highchair, tied on, so you couldn’t fall off, put the tray down and give you things to play with and you’d play for a long time. Sometimes by the east window and sometimes by me wherever I was working.

I can imagine this. Even in the years I can recall, I often stared out that window when I was daydreaming, with Mem bustling about the kitchen. I loved looking out over the field to the east, where the sky met the tree line. It was the only horizon visible from any window in our home because we were otherwise surrounded by woods.

Mem breastfed all of us children, even though it was common for mothers to bottle-feed their babies at that time. Mem wrote this to me when my older son was a few weeks old:

Well, how is that little baby doing by now? Are you nursing him? What is more enjoyable? I can just feel the contentment sitting on my rocker and nursing my little ones. And wondering about their future. Now that is all over but I can still dream about it.

Mem stopped nursing me abruptly when I was seven months old because she became terribly ill with yellow jaundice and believed the illness could be passed on to me. I put her in a fix when I refused to take a bottle. Her mother-in-law came in and took control of the situation. Humph! Never heard of a baby that wouldn’t take a bottle! she said. Mem told her she was welcome to try. And try she did. She stuck the bottle in my mouth and I spat out that nipple. She stuck it in. I spat it out. She had my other grandmother hold me down, and again she tried forcing me to take it. I still spat it out. Mem said it had been really hard for Grandmother to admit that she had to give up. Mem always told this story with a little satisfaction—as if I had defied my grandmother in a way she didn’t dare to.

The only way to give me nourishment was by offering me milk and water from a cup, feeding me baby cereal mixed with warm milk, and other soft foods from a bowl. As Mem’s health improved, she coaxed me to eat mashed potatoes, eggs, applesauce, and whatever else I’d eat. Despite these efforts, I showed signs of what today would be considered failure to thrive. In Mem’s words:

I remember I was worried because you wouldn’t stand on your legs for so long. So I’d rub them every time I’d change your diaper. Momme, once when she was here saved the potato water, when we cooked potatoes for dinner. She then rubbed that on your legs and I guess I did too after that sometimes but I had more faith in just rubbing them, for therapy.

At the age when most children get up and walk, I was learning to crawl, but in my own way. I sat on my bottom and scooted around, using my legs to propel me—first one leg, then the other. I became very fast at it. Mem described how hard it was to keep my diapers clean because they picked up dirt from her pine floorboards as I went. In those days, she was still using a washboard to wash clothes. She boiled the diapers with lye soap in the water, added cold water, and scrubbed those diapers on the washboard until her knuckles bled.

Mem’s fourth child, Sylvia, was born when I was eighteen months old. Not only did Mem have two in diapers, but she also had two babes-in-arms. Whenever Mem entered the place where women gathered for church with a child on each arm, someone would come to help her. When they reached for me, I screamed and cried until I was back in Mem’s arms. They soon learned to take Sylvia instead.

Sylvia took her first steps only months after I did, when she was eleven months old, just three months after I’d turned two years old. Mem suddenly had her arms free—at least for a spell. When Sylvia was fifteen months old and I was almost three, Sadie was born.

I was talking in sentences by the time I was two years old, but I still wasn’t walking. I gained the nickname Chatter Box. Many years later, one of the other mothers in the community told the story of something that happened before I started walking. It took place during the Communion Service, which was held twice a year. Breaking and sharing the bread for Communion is a somber ritual in which all those who have been baptized eat bread and drink wine. Children are excluded from partaking in Communion bread because they are not yet baptized members of the church. On this particular Sunday, Mem was holding me in her arms, awaiting her turn to eat the bread, which the bishop would hand to her. At that point in the service, it was usually so quiet that people could hear themselves breathe. As Mem received her bread, I said out loud, in the middle of this solemn service, "Ich will oh brot!—I want some bread too!"

I try to imagine how Mem dealt with this situation. To have given me even a little bread would have been considered sacrilegious, yet leaving the service was also inappropriate. Perhaps she found a way to distract me so I wouldn’t persist in embarrassing her further.

There are several incidents from when I was very young in which Mem’s telling blends with my own memories. One night, when I was perhaps three years old, I sat on the woodbox next to the stove in the living room, surrounded by my family. I had a secret: I had a marble in my mouth. Mem had warned me many times not to put marbles in my mouth, but I could not resist the silky-smooth roundness as I turned it around and around with my tongue. Then, without warning, that marble slipped down my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t panic until I found myself being dangled upside down by one ankle and pounded on my back, hard. Mem had grabbed me, swung me upside down, and smacked my back. The marble popped out.

I wasn’t old enough to realize that Mem had just saved my life. I thought she was punishing me for disobeying. I have an ever-so-dim memory of Mem gathering every marble she could find and getting rid of them. But there was no need as far as I was concerned. The feeling of dangling upside down in midair and being hit like that was enough to prevent me from putting marbles in my mouth ever again.

Another story Mem told me fuses with my memory. On a wintery Sunday morning when I was three, Mem bustled about, getting all five of us children ready for church. She discovered that my overshoes (boots that slipped on over my shoes) were too small for me to wear, but she remembered that there was a pair of boots in the box of used items that an English family had brought us as charity. There was one problem. They were red, a color we were forbidden to wear because it was too bright. But she had to keep my feet warm somehow, so she slipped them on over my shoes. Mem warned me that when we arrived at the home where church was being held, we needed to put them in the corner of the washhouse, so no one would notice.

I sat up a little straighter on the way to church that day. I couldn’t easily look at my boots because they were under the buggy blanket that covered our laps to keep us warm, but I tried.

When we arrived at the service, Mem carried Baby Sadie into the washhouse, with Lizzie, Sylvia, and me walking by her side, bundled up in our black coats, capes, and bonnets. As I walked in, I looked around and spotted Mem’s friend, Clara Yoder. I walked up to her and said, Look, I have new boots! I held one boot up for her to see.

Mem’s face flushed with shame as all the women in the washhouse became completely still. After a long moment, she urged me into the corner and pulled my boots off so fast that my shoes came off with them.

As the women lined up to go into the service, Mem’s friend Clara said, It’s okay. Don’t be ashamed. Mem’s grip on my hand relaxed a bit. Like many others in the community, she worried about what other people thought of her. I imagine her shame was lessened just a bit by Clara’s reassurance.

I wore those red boots home that day and never saw them again.

In my early years, my parents created an environment that allowed us children to develop normal and happy memories. These are mixed with more traumatic ones.

None of Mem’s recollections of my young childhood involve my father, so I have to rely on my memories of him. When we were babies and toddlers, Mem used to place us on Datt’s lap after she changed our diapers and fed us. I remember rocking with Datt for hours on end, sometimes with toys in my hands. One day, I had just drunk a lot of water when Datt was rocking me. I could hear and feel the liquid sloshing in my tummy. I started giggling as Datt rocked back and forth and I heard the doink, doink that went with the motion. Datt realized what was happening, so he rocked back and forth, then stopped abruptly, and the sloshing inside tickled. I giggled and giggled. Datt had a wide grin as he played this game with me. It was the first time I remember the feeling of giggling so hard that the giggles tickled on their way up.

When I was a toddler, Datt sometimes placed my feet on top of his shoes, held onto my hands, and walked me around the house. I liked the feeling of being transported around on top of Datt’s feet. Later, I saw him walking my younger siblings in the same way.

I also played a hand-stacking game with Datt, often after supper while we were still sitting at the table. He placed one of his hands on the table. I put one of my hands on his. He put his other hand down, and my other hand became the top of the stack. Then he took his bottom hand out and dropped it on top, and I followed his lead. If I forgot, he gently squeezed my bottom hand to remind me. We’d go faster and faster until our hands became like a threshing machine and we’d laugh. Sometimes Datt played the hand-stacking game with two of us at a time.

Mem had a red plastic Viewfinder that I loved to hold up to the light to view the magic pictures: mountains, fields of flowers, a huge dam, a waterfall, and images of what I now know to be the Grand Canyon. (I vaguely knew that Mem had been to some of those places. Later I understood that Mem had taken a cross-country trip before she was married.) There were also pictures of storybook characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and many others. It seemed that I should be able to reach out and touch what was in those three-dimensional pictures. I used to feel like using this toy was such a privilege because Mem didn’t let us play with it often, making it all the more special.

A rope swing hung from a tall branch of an oak tree out next to the sandbox. I loved swinging high on it. Lizzie pushed me to get started, and then I pumped my legs until I was flying high above the woodshed roof. The wind swooshed past my ears, and butterflies fluttered inside my belly and made me giggle.

We played on the buggy that was in the shed attached to the barn. In our minds, we’d go places. I could even hear the horse hooves clopping along the pavement, as we clicked our tongues. We held the reins, which were made of braided twine, and once in a while called out, Giddyap! if we wanted the horse to go faster.

Behind the buggy was a pile of straw for bedding down the horses and cows. When the pile was high enough, we climbed into the haymow and took a flying leap into the pile of straw. Mem didn’t like us doing that, but whenever there was a new pile of straw, it was too tempting not to.

I loved jumping rope. We had homemade jump ropes that were made of three strands of baling twine braided together. I counted the jumps as I twirled the rope over and over and over. Before I learned to count to one hundred, I’d count to twenty, then jumble numbers and yell, One hundred! when I was ready to stop. It was the highest number I knew, though I didn’t comprehend it any more than I comprehend infinity as an adult.

I loved when Mem bathed my sisters and me on Saturday nights. I particularly remember bath nights in the winter. First Datt carried buckets of water in from the hand pump out by the barn and filled the copper boiler on the cookstove. While the water was heating, Mem brought up the tub from the basement and set it on a hand-crocheted rug next to the wood stove. She collected our clean clothes from the drawers in the upstairs bedroom and hung clean towels out to warm by the stove. When the water in the boiler was hot, she dipped it out into a bucket, then poured it into the tub, mixed it with cold water, and tested the temperature with her elbow. Then she helped my sisters and me strip off our clothes and get into the tub together. After she used a clean washcloth to wipe our faces, she bathed the youngest one, dried her off, dressed her in warm, clean clothes, and started again with the next oldest. I used to love the feeling of her washcloth bathing me down: first my face, then my neck, in and behind my ears, shoulders, arms, armpits, all the way down to my toes. Then she would dunk her washcloth into the warm water and rinse off my body before lifting me out and taking me into her ample lap. I can still feel what it was like to be enveloped in Mem’s love. It was the closest thing to an embrace I ever experienced in my childhood. Like other Amish mothers, Mem did not show her affection for her children by hugging or kissing us. Still, on those Saturday nights when Mem wrapped me in that warm, dry towel and dried me off—all the way down to my feet and in between my toes—and dressed me in the fresh-smelling clothes she had laid out for me, I felt loved and cared for.

After bathing us, Mem braided our hair. She began by undoing the braids from the week before, brushing out our hair, and sectioning it into four parts—two front sections and two back. She dunked her hands into a bowl of water so they slid over my hair. She braided a front section and then braided that section into the back one. Toward the end, she braided a string into my hair. Once both sides were done, she looped the back braids through the front braids several times and tied them up with the strings she’d braided into the hair. She had a gentle touch, yet my hair felt tightly braided afterward.

On some Saturday nights, Mem would decide it was time to wash our hair. She’d put warm water in the wash basin and a pitcher, then one by one, she laid us on the counter next to the sink. All too soon it was my turn to lie down and move my head way out over the sink where Mem wet it down, added shampoo, and worked it through my long hair before rinsing it with the pitcher of warm water. I did not like having my hair washed and fussed as Mem did it. She tried soothing me by saying there were birdies in my hair as she was working in the shampoo. I didn’t want birdies in my hair, and I didn’t want to get my hair washed, either. After Mem rinsed out my hair, she dried it with a towel, and then came the painful part when she had to work out the tangles. Once that was done, I had to let my hair dry before Mem braided it. I was glad we didn’t have to wash our hair every Saturday.

One morning, I watched out the window as Joey and Lizzie laughed and talked with the neighbor children, Susan and Brian Sakura. They were about to get on the school bus. I wished I could go to school.

Susan and Brian wore store-bought clothes because they were not Amish. Susan’s shiny dark brown hair hung down her back.

When all four of them had climbed the bus steps and were sitting in their seats, they waved to me. Autumn leaves blew in swirls behind