Read Online Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva by Deborah Voigt - Free Book Online

sat like a row of ducks on the living room couch, “and we’re all going to try to be a family again.” This new trying included going to church together every Sunday as a family again.
    As Dad spoke, I looked over at Mom, sitting a few feet away on the love seat. She was looking up at Dad adoringly, then turned and gave me a reassuring nod and smile. Why is she putting up with this? I asked myself. How many times is she going to go through this?
    After Dad returned home, he and Mom began noticing the steamed-up windows of John’s car parked in our driveway and they jumped into high alert, DEFCON 1 mode.
    First, they tried to find out if we were actually having sex—they did everything except ask me directly. One weekend when my parents went out of town with my brothers for a family gathering, I invited John over. We pulled out the hide-a-bed downstairs in the family room and had ourselves a romantic weekend for two. Come Sunday night, it was time to shoo John away and wash the sheets before the sex marshals returned. As I was putting the sheets into the washing machine, I noticed something in one corner of the bottom sheet: a tiny, seemingly random, but very specific, black pen mark.
    Ugh!!!!! Mother!!!
    She knew that if John and I were having sex, we’d sleep there and that I’d wash the sheets afterward. The disappearing pen mark would be her proof! And now that I’d already stripped the bed, I had no idea which corner of the bed she had positioned the dot on. I was so ticked off, I was determined to outsmart her at her own game. I washed and dried the sheets, and put a pen mark on all four corners of the sheet so that whichever one she looked at, she’d see her dot and think, “Oh, I guess she’s not doing anything wrong.”Of course, if she saw all four dots I’d be found out, but I took my chances. After they returned home, Mom never mentioned a thing so . . . chalk one up for the daughter.
    Until . . . I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks later to the shocking brightness of my bedroom light and Mom standing over my bed. In her hand she held a packet of birth-control pills she’d found in my drawers. I had no intention of ending up in the same situation my mother had found herself in at sixteen. I’d been taking them for a few months by the time Mom shoved the evidence in my face.
    “What’s this, Debbie?”
    Gulp.
    “Oh, ummm . . . what, what? Oh, that ,” I said, stalling, till I could think up a story. “Mom, it’s not mine. They belong to a girlfriend.”
    “You swear?”
    “Yes, Mom, I swear. I’m holding on to them for her so that her mother won’t find it.”
    “But Debbie, I see a week of pills missing.”
    “Yeah, well . . . that’s because . . . I’ve been taking a pill to her every day at school.”
    I don’t know how I thought that up half asleep, but it was good enough that she accepted it—for the time being.
    A few weeks later, she finally tried to talk to me about it. We were in the car, as usual, but this time I was driving. Mom and I had never talked about her getting pregnant before marrying my father after that day she scolded me for counting on my fingers. Now I could see she was trying to warn me, but without saying too much. I could see she was afraid that history might repeat itself with me, and it scared her. She wanted to caution me, but at the same time she didn’t want me to think of myself as an “accident.” It was quite the balancing act.
    “You know, Debbie,” she began, “your father and I alwayswanted you. From the moment we knew I was pregnant, there wasn’t a second we ever thought anything else but that we would have you and be married . . .”
    “Mom,” I said, shaking my head. I was tired of secrets. “Nobody is pregnant and unmarried at sixteen in 1960 and happy about it. I’m sorry. I know that you and Dad love me, and that you did the absolute best that you could. But let’s be honest, you had to be scared