I'll Be Watching You Read Online Free PDF

home.
    Home, work. Five days a week. Chores and errands on Saturday. Church Sunday.
    It wasn’t that her parents—and Mary Ellen was quick to point this out—were shielding her from a profane life, sheltering her from opportunity or “devils,” demanding she not date anyone. “Both of them had had such hardship in their childhood, they just wanted to protect their children.”

9
     
    I
     
    It was one night at a Catholic social dance, Mary Ellen later explained, when she met her future husband, the alcoholic. He was three years older, six feet three inches tall, slender, good-looking.
    Blond hair, blue eyes. What was there not to like, she thought. “I was swept off my feet. Here I was, this shy little country girl, and he had grown up in New York City and had already been in the service.”
    Kids came quickly. Within a few years, Mary Ellen was a stay-at-home mom, just like her mother, with two to take care of and, according to her and the girls, a husband who liked to drink, pop pills, and abuse all three of them.
    II
     
    After seventeen years of chaos, Mary Ellen dredged up the courage to leave. Out on her own now, with two kids, Mary Ellen was determined to make it. After all she had been through, Mary Ellen was ready to put it all behind her and start over.
    Living with an alcoholic all those years, Mary Ellen said, it might have seemed as if she were a masochist. Most would ask, “Why not just leave?” But it wasn’t simple, Mary Ellen insisted. He wasn’t violent all the time. “It wasn’t like you got your beating every Saturday night. Six months would go by without him becoming violent. People don’t understand that you go from one nightmare to another—that when you leave, you’re thrown into poverty immediately. And then your children are subjected to all kinds of additional horrors.”
    III
     
    Mary Ellen had never been on her own. To leave meant setting out into the world by herself with two children and a husband, she feared, could come after them and maybe “kill us.” On top of that, “I was childlike when I got married and in many ways still childlike when I left seventeen years later.”
    Those horrors Mary Ellen suffered, coupled with a childhood wrought with disappointment and heartache, even though there were plenty of good times, was nothing compared to what Mary Ellen was about to face in the coming days on her own. If she thought she had lived through the toughest days of her life, Mary Ellen had thought wrong.

10
     
    I
     
    One of Mary Ellen’s daughters recalls those years of living with her alcoholic father and “bipolar” mother as turbulent and disordered—and also, she later told me, “a bit different from what my mom might tell you. It’s been an ongoing chaotic life. Never-ending.”
    Diana was the younger of the two. She loves her mother and they speak every day. But the way Diana describes her life with Mary Ellen is quite a bit different from the way Mary Ellen remembered it. “My mother,” Diana said, “believes what she believes.” Mary Ellen had always tried to protect her kids from her husband’s abusive hand. Yet Diana left the house when she was sixteen. But not, she said, “by my own choice.” The house was an extreme environment.
    Diana recalled punishment as being put in the corner for not a time-out, but for several hours. No dinner. No talking. No going to the bathroom. No television.
    Mary Ellen, on the other hand, was trapped. Terrified. She couldn’t rescue the kids for fear of retaliation.
    There was one time when Diana’s dad was cleaning his shotgun in the living room—or was he?—and it went off and buckshot destroyed one of the walls. A vivid memory for Diana was having to repanel the wall so no one would see it. “Everyday life was like that. Who knows if he was trying to kill my mother?”
    When Mary Ellen finally got the courage to leave, it wasn’t, Diana said, as if she decided one day, That’s it. I can’t take this