Janice Kay Gastineau Budd

July 22, 1950 - October 17, 2024

If you have read my memoir, you know that I did not have a great relationship with my mother. You also know that I desperately wanted to mend that relationship, often returning to her only to be pushed away with fists or screams. She could be ungodly violent with me; leaving my back and legs bloody from my father’s leather belts, bruised from the punches and kicks, ashamed because of the things she would say to me, the words she called me.

And still, I loved her more than she would ever understand.

Mom, or Janie as most knew her, was born in Denver, Colorado in 1950. Her father was a Boeing engineer who helped design the Apollo rockets. Her mother, a secretary for a high-ranking Boeing administrator. Her childhood was filled with moving from Denver to Seattle to Los Angeles to New Orleans (where they thought she could speak French because of her last name) to Huntsville, Alabama where she met my father. This left her without many friends as a child, and responsibility for cleaning and cooking from an early age. Mom and her sister were required to have dinner ready for their parents when they returned from work. According to mom, Grandma and Pop Gastineau were quite cold and mean. She could recall my grandfather punching her in the face and cruel comments, slaps from grandma.

Isolating at home was a constant theme.

These are the stories told to me after I would receive a beating from her. Through her tears, she would explain that she could not control her anger against me because of the trauma she had endured as a child, and then she would demand my forgiveness, forcing me to profess my love for her before she would let me go. This left me with deep sorrow for her, and a never ending need to win her approval.

Mom and Dad met through mom’s sister. She was a senior in high school, he was at my alma mater, Auburn University, when they decided to elope. It was either that or she would have to move again with her family.

Much in the way I chose the Border Patrol over my family, Mom chose Dad for better and a whole lot of worse.

She wanted to go to college, be an attorney, loved to draw, garden, cook and read. But all that vanished in the early 1970s when they had my brother and then me. Believing they needed something more, a purpose, a path, they joined the Church of Latter Day Saints or Mormons. Neither came from religious backgrounds, but my parents and their siblings all joined Christian denominations that were not mainstream. For my mother, it was an attempt to accept her position as a wife and mother, subservient to my father.

When I was six years old, she began drinking to soothe her trauma. It was a hobby that wound up taking us on a family vacation to the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee. I can still smell the yeast fermenting. As the years rolled by, she became less interested in us as children. Born eight years after me, my sister would never know our mother without a drink in her hand. And though my brother and I suffered greatly from her violent rages, we made sure that our little sister did not after one terrible incident left us threatening her with police. It was a hobby for a lifetime.

I think we all felt sorry for her.

My father and siblings all knew she was mentally ill and self-medicating with alcohol although we would never discuss it. My father dealt with it by working and having affair after affair, only becoming loyal to her when she inherited enough money to retire on. My brother dealt with it by joining the military and becoming a right-wing militant Christian, beating his children as we were beaten. Our sister is the only one willing to take care of them as they age in hopes of inheriting whatever is left. Mom is why I joined the Border Patrol instead of going to law school after college. I feared incurring more debt, more violence and wanted to be free.

While an agent, I would visit my parents from time to time. They retired in San Antonio, Texas; a place I did not call home. Each time, I felt as if I was growing more distant from her. As a child, my whole life was her. Every day was her. Every decision involved her. And now, I barely talked with her. Once, after realizing it was always me who called, I waited to see if she would reach out. I gave up after two months and called her.

After leaving the Border Patrol in 2001, my mother started calling the house harassing me with past issues I did not care to talk about or lies that my father was abusing her. This resulted in screaming messages and curse outs being left on my voicemail simply because I did not want to be re-traumatized by my past or engage in her fights with my father. This resulted in a decade of no contact, then a few years of a little contact only to go back to over a dozen years of no contact.

I did reach out after my suicide attempt and told them, but both my mother and father blocked me on Facebook after reading the meassage.

On October 17, 2024, I sat down on the couch to work on some research. As I went to open my laptop, I paused and thought of Mom. It had been some time since I last thought of her. My memoir had been out at that time for over two years, and I wondered if she even knew about it; that her eldest daughter had written a book and got it published by a real publisher. A chill came over me as I wondered out loud if I will ever know if she died. I shook it off, literally saying quietly to myself, “I don’t even want to think about that."

That afternoon one of my brother’s daughters text me.

When I was in high school, Mom would tell me that when it was her time, she wanted us to all get drunk on Jack Daniels and wine to have a wake for her. We should all be drunk and singing songs, reminiscing of all the great times we had together. None of us are drinkers, and the good times were far too few. This was never going to be anyhow because she lived in a make believe world. She spent nearly fifty years sitting on a couch, day after day watching CNN constantly. Her world was cable news and alcohol.

In our last talk, she explained why she threw a knife at my father stabbing him in his thigh; Whoopi Goldberg stated on The View that if her man ever cheated on her she would stab him. I had to tell her that television was not real life. And when I asked her why she had been so violent with me in particular as a child, she stated in her drunken stupor that it was my father’s fault. He had cheated on her when she was pregnant with me. She believed her name was Jennifer and that is who I am named after. “I have never been able to look at you without seeing her. It makes me sick. That’s why I tried to fall on my stomach and get rid of you, but you just came out jaundice.”

I didn’t know what to say after that.

My family claims she died of dementia, but it was alcohol induced dementia. Alcohol that caused her to beat us, that my father continued to give her to keep her happy, that my whole family continues to deny. Alcohol ate her brain. She did not know who she was or where she was when she passed having refused water and food for days. For all her hypochondria, it was her hobby that killed her.

My niece said she knew about the book. She had called my brother and warned the family, “She is going to tell everyone what we did to her.” I do not know if she ever read it, if she knew that I never told the stories she is referring to or if she knew that in the end of the book I wrote about how much I loved her and wanted to reconcile. I was always open to that, but she did not want it because she hated me.

I am devastated that I was not there when she passed, and I miss her every single day.