Miracle on the Garage Floor: A Memoir of Caregiving and Coercive Control By C.J. Springacre

Paul Sableman CC



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Miracle on the Garage Floor: A Memoir of Caregiving and Coercive Control 


The day my father rubber-bands a handwritten “Notice to Vacate” to the front doorknob, I have been my mother’s primary caretaker for seven weeks and the world has shut down from COVID. She has COPD, congestive heart failure, and advanced Parkinson’s. Ten days prior, he’d called police to come out and evict me.


The reason for that call was because he shouted at her for there being a cartoon on her phone when he borrowed it to save minute usage on his personal cell. He doesn’t know how to use an iPhone and was infuriated the call screen wasn’t available to him because she’d been watching a cartoon. 


“I’m sick of this bullshit!” he screamed as I stood in the kitchen making soup. He shoved the phone back at her so she could try to return it to the call screen. I said, “It is her phone.” He found his Tracfone, and called police. Within the hour, he called them a second time when they still hadn’t arrived. They told him they weren’t evicting anyone in a pandemic, especially since I was my mother’s caretaker.


Prior to making this visit, I’d been away from my childhood home for five years, since July after my first year of graduate school. That night, I’d returned home with my niece after a movie across the river. My father was in sour spirits for everything, or nothing much. “Is everything okay?” I asked.


Refusing to look at me, he screamed at my mother that I had been visiting one of his tenants, Randy, who by then was a friend of almost 24 years. I repeated to him that we only watch movies together. He boomed that I was nothing but trouble, “Always have been!” He lurched forward, swung out and struck me, and then called police. Upon arrival, one of the deputies asked me quietly in the driveway, “Do you think your daddy has dementia?” The deputy offered to give me the number to the local domestic violence shelter. But I’ve volunteered at shelters,  and know their resources are often limited. I didn’t want to use resources needed by others. So I got a hotel room that night. I didn’t return for five years until late February when I came back to visit my mother, who in FaceTime calls, I’d observed ailing health. During the visit, I saw her declining health and his, and decided to stay to care for them.


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Two and a half years ago, when I was in a PhD program in Wisconsin, my mother had a heart attack. She’d just been discharged from the hospital where doctors, concerned about my father’s insistence that she be discharged as soon as possible, made clear to him that any travel was ill advised. But he insisted that there was a house in Florida he needed to sell. Then his church tried to intervene. My father didn’t care: “I don’t see any difference in her sitting in a chair in Virginia or one in Florida and I need to get to Florida.” The afternoon as she prepared to leave, she fell in the floor from a heart attack. Thankfully, Randy was there. My father didn’t want to call emergency services. But Randy insisted. She was airlifted to Richmond where she had heart surgery. While there, she confessed to a social worker who documented that my father “throws things” at her when they’re alone.The same medical record has a note from a separate physician that they have serious concerns about the spouse’s ability to care for patient.


Now, after heart surgery and two hip fractures, as well as Parkinson’s that has rapidly advanced, mom is confined to a wheelchair and must use a portable toilet. When I arrive in late February, at first, my father is grateful to me. He’s been freed, he says.


A few days into my stay mom and I are in the library. She tells me she’s afraid for the security of her own long term health care. He recently showed her a bank statement in his name alone. “That’s a million dollar balance,” he’d nodded. The cost of the home health aide who was mandated to come at least 20 hours a week is drawn from my mother’s retirement, and paid on her personal checks that he signs. He splits the cost of the few groceries he keeps in the house to within ten cents. When I pick up a prescription for her, he goes to her wallet and pulls out a credit card in her name.


On another occasion, again in the privacy of the library, she confides that he shouts at her when she falls. She recounts three serious falls when he’d left her alone when she crawled across the floor to pull herself up before he got back so he wouldn’t get mad. One fall happened on cement of the garage floor. That time too, she pulled herself up. She could scarcely believe she suffered only a scraped hand. “That was a miracle,” she says.


A miracle.


My father is a 46 year member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. No one in the family joined the church immediately after him, because the contrast between the tenets of the church and the families of the local branch could not be reconciled with the violence in our house. My sister was the first to join eventually, and she agrees now and mom and I could see then, she did so in an attempt to please him, to calm him. It would be a decade before my mother joined, and she did so after he threatened divorce.


On a Sunday before he serves the “Notice to Vacate” to me, I roll mom’s wheelchair to the window to look at birds in a tree and squirrels. As Brigham Young University television flickers on screen, he loudly announces in agitation,.“The President is speaking!” I hurry her over. I watch from the stove and fry potatoes and eggs while I stir brown gravy for the potatoes, an addition I hope will please him. The President and subsequent speakers praise family unity, familial love, forgiveness.


The blue garbage bag that mom is made to sleep on is covered with a faded, fraying towel that when needed, he hoses off on the clothesline and leaves to dry. Some time ago, the health agency provided a free pack of bed liners. To prolong their usage, he cut them in half and reused them when possible. Then they ran out, and were replaced by the garbage bag and towel. One afternoon, after he leaves for McDonald’s, Rhonda*, the home health aide who mom has grown close to, jokes about his insistence on the garbage bag. Then Rhonda retells his imposed limitation on the dollar menu on the occasions he treats my mother or her to McDonald’s. Rhonda is the reason there’s any food in the pantry, since she told him not long ago he needed to provide food so she could make lunch for mom. That was an afternoon she almost quit after declaring, “This is a crazyhouse!” Today Rhonda shakes her head in amused wonder. Then I remember the key he gave me last night and tell mom I have a house key now. “You go girl!” Rhonda laughs sarcastically. Our laughter is momentary relief. But after a moment, Rhonda says she reported him to the agency the day he pulled a used diaper from the trash and berated her for changing a diaper that could have been used longer. She reported him again for the garbage bag.


The obvious answer to anyone is social services, eldercare experts, guardianship. It’s supposed to be simple. After all, there’s documentation from social workers, physicians, nurses. Many of these have begged mom to move in with me. She has said repeatedly that she wants to be with me. But the head of the battered woman’s shelter who visited her when she was in a medical facility – the same facility that by court order barred him from setting foot on the property – reported to me that mom has “classic battered woman’s syndrome.” The social worker at that facility, Grace*, got to know mom well and called me almost daily. Before he was barred from the facility, he regularly exploded on staff and tried to take mom out. One afternoon while I was teaching, I got a call from Grace. “Your daddy is trying to take your mama out of here.” She wanted me on a conference call, she said, because unable to stand or feed herself, anyone could see she should not be sent home. But then, as now, he tried to separate mom from anyone whose aim was to help her, to keep her alive.


When I undress her after a bath and at night, she says about her clothes, always with a note of urgency, “Make sure it’s right-side-out.” Her constant reminders are unnecessary. I’ve seen him belittle her for leaving a shirt inside out. And he requires that she wear the same shirt for days, so as to reduce laundry. Splotches of a bit of chocolate morph into different shapes across three days of wearing. After a bath, I sneak a new shirt on her. An hour later, he appears perturbed, holding the shirt pulled from the laundry and demands to know, “Why is this in the hamper?”


I’m not allowed to use the washer. No one is. Rhonda laughs at the absurdity of his telling her the washer is broken. “He said that so I won’t touch it,” she states.


Two days after rubber-bands to the knob the Notice to Vacate, I look out the kitchen window where I’m washing some dishes. He is stomping across the lawn to Randy’s house. I go outside, concerned, and find him screaming at Randy, who I’d learn had said to him, “You’re scaring the girls.” As advised by a deputy sheriff familiar with the situation, I pull out my iphone and capture the goings-on. He looks at the phone and screams, “I’ll destroy that thing!” and lunges at me to hit me, as he did successfully five years ago. This time, Randy steps between us. I go inside Randy’s house. Minutes later, I hear him return. He throws another “Notice to Vacate” on the ground, this one for Randy.


After I am sent from the house, a church official tries to intervene and calls the sheriff’s department. They are familiar with what’s going on here, he tells me. But she has to be the one to report him. She is scared.


She’s not the only one. My sister tells me that without me there as witness, she’s afraid he’s going to hurt her. My sister would visit and help more with mom, but the last time she and her husband visited, my father flew into a rage about their parking their camper in the wrong spot and told them never to return. Isolation always the rule. In another phone call, my parents’ closest friends of decades finally tell me they feel the same fear.


On a Sunday afternoon, mom calls my sister and says he’s had a “kicking spree.” He kicks furniture and doors, she says. I call and ask how often. “Not that much,” she answers. “When he really goes nuts.”


Mom occasionally calls and asks me questions, asks for items he can’t find. In the background, he shouts questions at her to deliver to me. When I ask him to simply make the calls to me himself, he screams profanities and insults from behind her.


Today mom told me she’s not getting her breathing treatments.He isn’t assembling her medicine.The home health aide is not legally permitted to. The aide is concerned but she’s not permitted to handle these tasks. Mom had another message from him to me: He has my purse and won’t return it until he gets some keys he lost, keys he believes I have. Yesterday he told the health aide she isn’t doing enough to justify the cost and he’s going to let her go. In the middle of a pandemic, he takes mom out several times a week. “I don’t want to go!” she has told me. She understands the risks to her health in particular. Still, he goes out almost daily. She says she’s scared about the state re-opening. Today Randy told her on a FaceTIme call, “We love you and we want you to be around a long time.”


“It’s not going to be a long time,” she said.


Randy and I make lunch and deliver it to the side porch when he’s not in the house. I’ve delivered her Mucinex, the vitamin supplements she’s been prescribed, boxes of organic gummy bears – her favorite – and mini chocolates. I watch Express Scripts to keep tabs on her medicine delivery.Today Randy took over two roast beef sandwiches, pickles, a jug of herbal raspberry tea sweetened with honey that I made her, and a Starbucks Frappuccino with the label removed so he won’t fly into a rage over her drinking coffee. Mormons forbid coffee, but elders gave special permission to mom because her doctor cited research that small bits of caffeine help Parkinson’s patients. Their permission is a frequent subject of my father’s rants.


Today’s message from him to me: He’s going to have me barred from the property. Property half owned by my mother.


Bruises on my arms in my prom photos. Holes kicked into doors of every house I’ve lived in. The doors to my high school bedroom and bathroom removed from their hinges. Wite-Out painted over my genitals in baby photos. Much of high school spent with aching pubis and tailbone from being kicked. I have mostly stayed silent. Out of shame as much as loyalty, I’ve kept quiet for the most part, even as I’ve tried to sort through the agony of watching my mother and sister and me actively abused by writing a little about it, I’ve avoided the darkest secrets, and still do.


Yet when I was writing full time for media outlets, if I encountered something he perceived as an injustice – a radiator that apartment management was lagging to repair, a store who wouldn’t allow me to return a phone bought broken – he would say,  “I don’t understand why you don’t use your job to expose this. Write about this for one of the papers.” Out of respect for him, I didn’t want to point out that newspapers and editors have production schedules to cover more important issues and events than my minor consumer complaints. Not wanting to insult and anger him, I’d say, “Maybe so.”


Let me make this clear, and in some odd way, finally take him up on that suggestion to tell the truth openly and publicly: A man is murdering his wife day by day.

And by the end of August, the clock ran out. That summer ended everything: her patience, her breath, the life she had carried through years of suffering, all under my helpless gaze.




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C.J. Springacre is an essayist, poet, and publisher based in Virginia. Her prose is rooted in a sense of place with broader themes of cultural heritage and survival. She adopts the Springacre name to find distance needed to write through unfolding, unpeaceful histories. When not writing, Springacre can be found hunting for vintage art or working in her pollinator garden. Contact her at [email protected]