Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule Page B

reviewing Medicaid files sent to her by a number of states. This was something she could do at home and that left her free to drive her children to school and to ballet and sports practice. She did not have to deal with other people; her work was solitary.
    Tim and Lissa were attending the very exclusive, very expensive Pembroke Hill school. Tim was playing soccer and hockey, and Lissa was taking ballet lessons. Kelly was only four, and there was plenty to do at home. But Debora took another job, working in an occupational medicine clinic. The man who hired her also contracted to oversee a number of emergency rooms, and Debora had known him for some time. But she had absolutely no training in occupational medicine, and her supervisor was notoriously difficult to work for.
    “Ultimately, it didn’t work,” Mike remembered. “Debora said she was just going to do freelance reviews and stay home with the kids. I thought ‘That’s great. That’s fine.’ We didn’t need the money, and if she’s home with the kids, driving them around—maybe joining a country club and playing tennis—she’ll be happy. As long as she’s happy and not so stressed by work, maybe things will be better.”
    Debora did stay home and she did join a tennis club. She was the most devoted of mothers, always there for car pools and school visits, and to pick up Tim from soccer or hockey practice, Lissa from ballet lessons and Kelly from toddler tennis lessons. Some of the women in her social group described her as a wonderful mother, “very loving with her children. She did everything with her kids.” But others found Debora somewhat abusive: when she sat on the sidelines of soccer matches, “she always bad-mouthed her kids,” one mother said. “She would say, ‘They are driving me crazy!’ It made us really uncomfortable because it was so continuous.”
    Debora had a cleaning lady who came in once a week or so, but between times, the brick house on West Sixty-first inevitably became cluttered and dusty. Debora had never found housework interesting or necessary. It didn’t bother the children if things were untidy, but it drove Mike nuts. He thrived on order.

    Debora was still a licensed physician, but she had no practice and no regular job; and although her profession had never seemed to fulfill her (or even interest her that much), without it she had lost another piece of her identity. She had always been someone special—the best student in school, the wittiest resident in the ER, a doctor with her own practice. Now she had all the time in the world to read the stacks of novels she brought home from the library, time to play with her children, time to take care of the black Lab—Boomer—that the kids had begged for.
    But some essence of Debora seemed to disappear in the early nineties. Few would deny that she had behaved bizarrely in the past, that her tantrums were shocking and uncalled-for, that she could be a pain to work with. But now, in an unkempt house, with the daily chores every mother faces, it was as if her outrageous behavior had brought her to a place that even she—with all her brilliance—could never truly have contemplated.
    She wasn’t remotely special anymore.
    Something else about her had undergone a dramatic change: her appearance. Although there had been times before when she put on weight, she always took it off rapidly enough. Now she gained forty or fifty pounds, and her thighs and hips bulged beneath tight jeans. She was in her early forties now and looked five years older. In contrast, her husband, four years younger, looked to be in his early thirties. Debora cut her beautiful hair into an unflattering straight bob. She wore the thick glasses prescribed for her severe nearsightedness rather than the contact lenses she had once used. She wore no makeup, and her clothing was sloppy and unisex—T-shirts and jeans or shorts. It almost seemed as if she had given up. And if she had no insight into her own