Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [14]
Typically, Mary shared none of this with Bob. Maybe it was all wrong, a figment of her imagination. Bob would be furious. It could endanger the entire marriage. She kept quiet, kept praying, and tried to stay alert.
Thus, externally, life was smooth. Bob got his apprenticeship and began making a good living. Their first child, Joy, arrived in 1960. Fifteen months later, Ed was born in the home they had bought for thirteen thousand dollars in Danville, a suburb east of Oakland. Mary was able to quit work and devote all her time to motherhood.
She was a dedicated, loving mother. The kids had the run of the house. Granny would come and complain that she was being too lenient, but Mary persisted. She was more sensitive to the opinions of her peers—neighborhood mothers, who urged her to wean the kids from their bottles early, or to hasten potty training.
Despite her preoccupation with motherhood, Mary’s secret agony over her imaginings about Bob raged on. The obsession seemed like a thorn in her gut, which she likened to the thorn in the flesh of the apostle Paul. She prayed about it, begging God to take it away. She inscribed in the margin of a page in her Bible: “If you will not remove it, Lord, ease my thorn. It is too painful. Satan digs it deeper. I sometimes feel I will die, it hurts me so.”
But God was not answering. Mary began suffering anxiety attacks accompanied by depression and a loss of energy. She felt too humiliated to tell anyone—not the counselors at the church, and certainly not her family.
Her doctor had prescribed diet pills to control weight during her pregnancy with Joy. After Joy was born, Mary found it easy to keep renewing the prescription. The drugs gave her energy, lifted her self-esteem, and made her obsession about Bob more bearable. Soon, she had to increase the dosage to get the desired effect. Without realizing it, Mary was getting hooked on amphetamines and other substances, such as painkillers. She used them increasingly over the next nine years—through the birth of her third child, Bobby, and into her final pregnancy with Nancy in 1970. All this was in secret. Once, a friendly druggist even dispensed drugs to her without requiring a prescription. Mary hid her drugs in the stove, always remembering to remove them before using it for cooking.
FOUR
The Sissy
1963–1979
Despite the currents running beneath the surface, daily life in the Griffith family fit the “Leave It to Beaver” image with amazing accuracy. Mary was gentle, soft-spoken, self-effacing, good-humored. Bob was a kindly if taciturn father who worked hard on the job and puttered constantly around the house in his time off. Her children remember the 1960s and early 1970s with great fondness. They felt sheltered and loved, and perceived their parents as a devoted and affectionate couple. Life was a pleasant round of school, afternoon play, church activities, and summer visits to the grandparents.
In fact, within the whole Harrison clan, Mary got the votes as the preferred relative. Her brothers and sisters were experiencing tumultuous lives. Bob and Mary’s was the place to go if you wanted an oasis of sanity and stability. The family would find any excuse to turn up there. Granny and grandfather Harrison, who after his retirement had settled three hours away in Sonora, in the Sierra foothills, went down a couple of times a month. Jeanette and Debbie, Jean’s daughters, who lived in nearby Lafayette, loved spending time at Aunt Mary’s, playing with their Griffith cousins. With the birth of three infants in rapid succession, Mary’s first years in Danville were devoted to child care. Bobby arrived fourteen months after Ed, on June