My Mother's Version of Events

My mother's version of events, as written for the Butterfly Glen house psychologist. All grammatical and punctuation choices are her own. I'll embed links to relevant blog posts so you can compare different perspectives. The only emails I've made into blog posts so far were the big ones, and most of my retellings aren't dated at all, so I'll have to go through my old emails and post the excerpts from the events my mother references in her letter (from 2005 to 2008), partly just to confirm the timeline.

She doesn't mention the times she called me or talked to me during the events detailed below, but we were still in contact. A lot of what I know comes not just from my dad but also from her.

She was often high back then and, based on how long she says we've been estranged, she presumably wrote her version within the last year. I don't trust my own memory that much, let alone hers.

Dear Curtis,

    Could you please help me find my long lost daughter Christina Rosetti Martin DOB 7-31-1980. The last time I saw her was on her wedding day 15 yrs. ago!

    When I married my paraplegic husband, I married in sickness & in health and I took care of him for 36 yrs. but as soon as I got sick he filed for divorce. Paul was in the VA Hospital in Cleveland when he filed for divorce. I was totally blindsided. We had talked on the phone and he hadn't said anything. He followed up the file for divorce by cleaning out our bank account right after I paid the entire mos. bills (wrote checks for) All of the cks. bounced & I was faced with pay up or we'll shut off water, lights, gas, phone & cancel insurance on house & Cars. Naturally I panicked, I called the bank & they told me that my husband had closed out our joint account & opened a single account leaving me penniless & deep in debt. He received $8,000.00/mos Disability & $325.00/mos SS. All tax free.

    I called Paul at the hospital in Cleveland & said, "What the hell do you think you're doing? I just wrote checks for all of the months bills & now thanks to you there's no money to cover them!" He hung up on me, so I called him back & he hung up on me again.

    Paul had an extensive music collection in our family room so I called Guitar Center where he bought it all and told them that my husband passed and I wanted to sell his music studio. Notice that I didn't say my husband died, I just said he passed, as far as I was concerned he passed for asshole of the century!

     I kept out his keyboard & bartered it for massages & as mad & desperate as I was I couldn't bring myself to sell his 3 prized guitars. I just sold the amplifiers & the recording equipment. I donated his harmonica collection to the church, and I donated microphones to the church. 

    Guitar Center came to the house & gave me a check for $1,000.00 which was a rip off but I didn't have time to quibble. I took Jeff's wedding ring (had diamonds) & his grandmother's second husband's wedding ring to a pawn shop, and I sold his computer. 

    I still didn't have enough money to cover the checks I had written and I took all of his record collection (jazz & blues) to vintage stock and they gave me $60.00 which I'm sure was a steal for them and a rip off for me but beggars can't be choosers.

    I went to the bank in tears and told them my sob story all they said was I could've done the same thing to him, he just beat me to the punch. You'd better believe if I had known he was going to clean out our account I would have done it.

    I went to my best friends house and used her phone to call Paul so he would answer the phone after I got served with divorce papers at 8pm on Tuesday. I asked him what brought on the need for a divorce and he said it was because all I did was lay in bed all the time, didn't cook & didn't do laundry. I told him I had been severly [sic] depressed for 6 mos and I had only gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom. I was hospitalized 3 times in 6 mos. for dehydration & falls. He hung up on me again but he said he would put some money back in our joint account.

    Many times after that I called to try to talk some sense into him about the divorce and explain bipolar disorder but he refused to listen, he said I was just lazy, no good.

    Eventually the hospital disconnect [sic] his telephone so I couldn't call him anymore. My mother always said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." So I bought a bus ticket and rode 4 hrs. to Cleveland, to confront the jerk face to face. He was in the ICU so I couldn't see him very long, he looked like Jabba the Hut all propped up 350 lbs. buck naked with a colostomy & foley catheter & IV's & Blood. I slept in the waiting room til it was time to catch the bus for home. As soon as I got on the bus I fell asleep and when I woke up my head was on the shoulder of the man in the seat next to me. I was so embarassed [sic]. We got to talking and he told me he had just been released from prison. I told him my story and when we got back to the bus station in Cincinnati I discovered that I didn't have enough money to take a taxi to my house so he offered to share the cab & he would pay for it. When we got to my house I drove him to the building where he was staying downtown but first we had to go to the Emergency Room to get him some medicine. He asked me to get in touch with some friends of his and tell them that he was back in town.

    I got in touch with his friends and they decided they were my friends too. They moved in with me and proceeded to sponge off of me. I was lonely so I went along with it. My son, Dante came over and he expressed his concern for me taking in a bunch of strangers. Without me knowing he hid my husbands prized guitars in the garage.

    We had a bad storm and the roof was damaged, when I called the insurance company they said they would have to do a walk through inspection of the entire house. The house was a mess so I offered $100.00 to every man, woman or child who would come over & help me clean up & get ready for the inspection, Of course the ex convicts friends were the first in line and the five teenage neighbors of my parents came over too. Dante was suspicious of all the people who helped me.

    After about a month I got tired of supporting 3 freeloaders and I told them it was time for them to go home.

    Dante came over and he asked me what I did with my husbands guitars. I told him they were on there [sic] stands in the family room & then they just disappeared. That's when he told me that he had hid them in the garage. I don't know who took them but it wasn't me.

    Anyway, I'm sure that's why my daughter quit talking to me, because I sold part of my husbands things and she thinks I sold his 3 prized guitars. She hasn't ever let me tell her my side of the story. Being left penniless. I had no choice. She also doesn't understand bipolar disorder.

    If you can help me find her, you can share this letter with her.

    Thank you in advance!

    Annie Rosetti 

 

From checking my old emails, I know that she took the Greyhound bus across the state to visit my dad at the hospital in November 2006, right before Thanksgiving. She says in her letter that it was to confront him about surprising her with divorce papers, but he didn't file for divorce until April 2007, long after she'd invited the ex-convicts to live in their house, and long after two of the convicts had been arrested for stealing Dante's car. Based on old emails, she sold my dad's music equipment at least a week before being served with divorce papers, and she had been threatening to sell all his belongings since at least December 2006. I also knew Dante took the guitars. My dad had been relieved that he'd managed to save something. I don't remember being aware they ever went missing. The only pieces of information that seem new to me are that she pawned his rings and told people he was dead.

My Mom's Friend Messaged Me

I don't remember what I've called her on here if I've referred to her, but my mom's childhood best friend's sister (let's call her Mindi) found me on Facebook (I'm intentionally easy to find) and messaged me. I assumed my mother had asked her to because why else would she. I know better than to tell anyone anything I "wouldn't want on the front page of the newspaper" anyway.

 

We're pen pals now. She told me her niece is pregnant and her sister (my mom's childhood friend) is moving into a nursing home. I told her about my daughter's surgery and how nice my mother-in-law is to me and how much I like having her in our home. I'm honest with her, but I know what kind of message I want to send, and she'll never hear truly personal things like "I'm sad."

 

In her last letter, Mindi confessed that my mother had asked her about me (shocker) but that she wouldn't tell her anything I didn't want her to know. So in my next letter I told her I hope my mother is doing well but that she was abusing prescription pills for the last several years I was in contact with her, I hadn't understood what was going on at the time (my mother had blamed her behavior on menopause, though I didn't get into that), and my mother has a history of calling me at all hours of the day and night to demand money and/or tell me what a terrible person I am. I told Mindi I don't know what my mother's relationship with pills is like right now and I don't want to have to change my phone number again. This information shouldn't have been 100% new to Mindi since she had hunted me down 15+ years ago and emailed me at work to tell me my mother had called her asking for money and that I needed to take better care of her. "I don't have the money to take care of your mother," Mindi had said. I didn't either, I explained, and I gave her a rundown of my parents' finances at the time and the fact that I knew my mother was receiving and spending several times my income every month. She had been nice to me after that. I had also seated her with my mother at my wedding so she could corral her as necessary. My mother had left early, but I assume Mindi had noticed that she was unwashed, shoeless, and high. After this last letter, I was prepared for Mindi either to support my choice (or pretend to) or to unfriend me on Facebook. I haven't gotten a reply yet, but she hasn't unfriended me either and she "loved" a picture I posted. 

 

My Facebook account is set to private, but I only post things I would be comfortable having public to the entire world including my mother. I even friended my brother Dante. He posts nothing and likes nothing of mine. I doubt he shows anything to my mother, but if he does, that's okay. I don't mind quietly haunting my family.

My husband Michael was concerned Mindi would give my mother our contact information. Literally anyone could do that though. A simple Google search of my name reveals our home address and one of my phone numbers (and I wouldn't give Mindi my phone number), and we've been here unmolested for over ten years now. I'm no longer concerned about my mother showing up on my doorstep, partly because I have a contingency plan but mostly because I can't imagine her being able to focus long enough to make a travel plan. I haven't heard of such a thing happening since the time she showed up at Dad's hospital four hours across the state via Greyhound bus. And her substance abuse issues got worse after that from everything I've heard. And I live twice as far away.

Things That Have Happened in the Last Year

I didn't realize it had been nearly a year since my last post.  Between then and now I've met my paternal half-brother Hans and his wife and young son.  I rejoined Facebook after a 2+ year hiatus, reconnecting me with my paternal half-sister Simone, the paternal first cousin once removed who orchestrated the Von Trapp family reunion, and my various maternal relations who I only ever communicate with on there.  Apparently no one was avoiding me; they just don't bother replying to emails.

No new half-siblings, leaving the donor conceived sibling count at zero.  No new word from my adoptive brother Dante or any other family.  I haven't heard from Dante since 2017 after I wired him our dad's life insurance payout.  I thought he might've friended our cousins on Facebook since he'd said when Dad died that he wanted to get back in touch with them, but the only thing I can see that he he has done on Facebook since then is join a group from our hometown, get into some internet fights with locals, get banned from the group, and then post that he has no idea why he was banned and they're all just too cliquey.  Now that's the Dante I remember.

No new word from my biological father.  No direct communication since he asked me not to contact him again after receiving my letter in 2014.

I can't remember if I wrote about discovering on Newspapers.com that my dad's father had another family and a well documented criminal record (thank you, Fresno Bee) before he moved back to the Midwest and married Grandma.  And thus my dad had a secret half-brother he may or may not have known about.  I emailed Dante about it but got no response.  The half-brother died a few years before my dad did and had no known biological children.  He had been named after my grandpa, but his stepfather had adopted him when he was little and given him a new surname.  I'd like to ask my dad's brother and sister if they knew about the secret half-brother, but I haven't seen my uncle since Dad's funeral or my aunt since my wedding over a decade ago.  I could probably count on my hands the number of times I've talked to them in my life, so reaching out for this would be more awkward than I'm willing to do.

My mom's suspected half-sister's daughter took a DNA test, confirming my grandpa was, in fact, her grandfather too.  I thought I'd written about my mom's secret half-sister/cousin, but I can't find it anywhere but here.  My cousin Michelle and I had started to doubt the veracity of the claim that Grandpa had fathered Ruby shortly before Ruby's mother had married his half-brother.  It was the big family "secret" all the cousins knew.  Ruby's daughter showed up as a first cousin match for me on 23andMe though, which is way too close a match for us to be half-second cousins (we share more than triple the DNA I share with my known half-second cousins on AncestryDNA -- the ones who should be her first cousins but aren't), so I know for sure now that we're actually half-first cousins.  We chatted on 23andMe a bit.  She asked after my (our) remaining uncle, Eugene, who neither of us has heard from in years.  I assume she knows as well as any of us who her grandfather is, but since I'd never talked to her or her mother (my half-aunt) before in my life and I don't know how their branch of the family feels about any of this, we never got onto the topic of biological grandfathers.  I wish I knew a polite and inoffensive way to say, "I've seen some wonky shit on here and I'm comfortable talking about anything you want to talk about.  You won't upend my world; I just don't want to upend yours either."

Foreclosure

After my dad's Dish Network password stopped working, I looked up my childhood home to see if the bank has foreclosed on it yet.  I suspected if Dante hadn't stopped paying for Dish service last year after Dad died, he probably wouldn't stop paying for it until he completely ran out of money or the bank took the house.  

A quick Google search of the address indicated the county was auctioning off the house earlier this month.  The bank had foreclosed on the house last month.  After the auction, ownership of the house reverted back to the bank, and it appears Dante might still be living there.  Which means Dante will probably remain there until someone forces him to leave and locks the place down.

Part of me thinks of the childhood things I left behind in that house and feels weird about someone else going through them when they buy the house as is.  But then I remember that Dante started going through and throwing all my things away when he moved back home over a decade ago after our parents divorced and Mom got evicted.  My clothes, books, toys, awards, and mementos.  Dad said I'd better take some time off work and travel the thousand miles to collect my shit if I wanted any of it because Dante was "cleaning out the house."  Hoard photos he sent me later indicate that was a lie, but I don't doubt my things were discarded.  His girlfriend's son moved into my old room.  I wonder what it looks like now.

I wonder what happened to all the family photos.  That was what I asked Dad to have Dante set aside for me when he found them.  I wonder if he threw them away or just never got that far in his "cleaning."

Dante has lived in an apartment on his own before, or at least with a roommate, sometime in his late twenties I think.  It's been at least a decade since he's had to move or pay rent.  I'm not sure if he has a job or how much of Dad's $10k life insurance policy that I transferred to him remains (my guesses are "no" and "very little" respectively).  I hope he's doing okay.  But I also don't really care.

My Dad's Dish Network password finally stopped working

Nine months after my dad died, his Dish Network password has officially stopped working.  It allowed me to stream literally every show I've ever tried to watch that wasn't already on Netflix or Amazon Prime, including HBO.  That login was my inheritance, and while I knew it was only temporary, I am grateful he let me use it both in life and in death.  I gave it to everyone who asked, and it touched the lives of at least three families who mostly just wanted to watch Game of Thrones.  It will be missed.

I'm wondering what Dante is using for entertainment now.  My dad's Comcast password isn't working anymore either (yes, he had both at one point, my parents made bad choices).  I'm also wondering if Dante still lives at the house.  I haven't checked real estate listings and foreclosures lately.

Small Update

I haven’t posted in a long time.  I’ve been feeling sad.  I’m okay and still functioning at a fairly normal level, but I’ve been having feelings I’d rather not feel.

I met my sister.  That was fine.  Apparently her parents even knew we were spending the weekend together.  My biological father apparently told her to tell me “hi” from him, which almost made me cry because I’d assumed he hated me for writing him a letter three years ago, introducing myself and subsequently upsetting his wife.  He still stays away, but it doesn’t sound like he hates me.  His wife still does though.  Because I wrote a letter once three years ago.  “Maybe when ten years have passed and she sees that her life hasn’t changed at all, she’ll be okay with it,” I told my sister.  But if she’s still mad after three years, I can’t imagine another seven will help.  I also can’t imagine him choosing to talk to me when it would upset his wife further and NOT talking to me only upsets me in my house where I cry in my shower alone.

A lot has happened this year.  I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it all.  I don’t even know where to start. 

Last night my daughter said about the fact that I don’t speak to my mother, “It’s not too late to make the right choice.”  I tried to explain, “This is the right choice.”  She’s never met my mother, only seen pictures.  My mother has required full time care on account of her crippling mental illness and prescription drug addiction for more than twice as long as my daughter has been alive.  Dante said she doesn’t really speak anymore, presumably for the same reasons, and no one else in the family can bear to deal with her anymore.  I don’t think I’m in the wrong here.  I thought my daughter understood when I explained that my mother has a disease that makes her say and do mean things, and she refuses to be treated for the disease. 

I don’t know what to tell her.  My mother is the only person I’ve ever actively cut from my life (my dad was a passive removal – I just stopped initiating everything – same with Dante honestly), and it was really hard and I was sooooo suicidal every time she’d call me to yell at me.  I lived in fear of the phone ringing, and I cried all the time and had trouble functioning.  How do you explain that to a 5-year-old?  Every day she tells me she loves me and asks me to marry her.  I don’t want to tell her how bad things can get with a mother.  I don’t want her to live in fear that things with us will turn out the same way.

Planning Dad's Funeral

My dad died at the end of July.  Dante didn’t want to have a funeral or memorial service.  He wanted to skip it all like my mother and her siblings did with their parents because it's easy and "no one will come anyway."  I didn't want to do it that way, partly because Dad had told me what he wanted and mostly because I didn't want to be as careless as my mother.  I told him I would come.  I told him about what Dad had said he wanted – just a small memorial service with Wes Montgomery’s jazz guitar rendition of “Willow Weep for Me” playing as a final send-off.  I would buy it off iTunes and have it on my phone.  It seemed easy enough, and when I die, I really don't want everyone washing their hands of me and pretending I never existed like my mom's family does.  

I had already researched crematoriums in my hometown back when Dad and I had discussed how much life insurance to keep, so I already had an idea of who to call and how much it would cost.  I gave the information I had to Dante so he could be point person, since he was still living in our hometown, and in Dad’s house no less.  I told him about Dad’s life insurance policy, how I was the beneficiary, and how the plan had been for us to split whatever remained after the cremation.  I told him I would give him my half in addition to his own if he would handle whatever needed handling and not make me do anything.  It didn't sound like Dante has a job right now, and he will have to find somewhere to live when the bank forecloses on Dad’s house.  I knew he needed the money more than I did, and I wanted the convenience of not being Dad’s next of kin for whatever needs handling more than I wanted anything else.

My best friend put me in touch with her mother, who has been something of a mother figure for me since I was a teenager.  She is kind and good at logistical dilemmas I would otherwise have to handle alone.  She gave me contact information for an estate attorney and an accountant, in case we (read: Dante) should need them.  She told me everything that she had to do when her own dad died and left her his farm in another state and how she divided up assets for her siblings.  I thankfully wouldn’t have to do most of that because my dad left behind significantly more debt than assets.

Dad died in the hospital across the state, a four hour drive away.  I told Dante I would be driving to our hometown with my husband and daughter in two days, when we estimated the body should be back in our hometown and ready for cremation and the memorial service.  My daughter had a surgery scheduled for the following week, so I wanted to get everything done and get back home.  Dante was calling our Dad’s brother, who told his sister and mother.  They were the last of Dad's family.  We hadn't been entirely sure our grandmother was still alive until that point.  

I would tell my mom’s side of the family -- a few cousins and an aunt by marriage -- less because I thought they cared about my dad and more because he was my dad and I wanted to tell them.  I knew they would be kind.  Dante asked me to pass along his cell phone number so that he might be able to get back in touch with them.  He said he’d been cutting himself off and losing contact with people for years.  He had just recently been coming out of a depression, he said.  He didn’t want to relapse.

“Is Mom still at Butterfly Glen?” I asked him.  “Are you still on speaking terms with her?  I don’t think anyone else in the family is.”

“She’s still there,” Dante replied.  “I visited her on Mother’s Day.  I wouldn’t call it ‘speaking terms’ though.  She didn’t really talk while I was there.”  He described how the people at Butterfly Glen keep her heavily sedated.  “I guess we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to deal with her.”

I asked Dante not to tell Mom yet about Dad dying.  They’d been divorced for ten years and hated each other for at least thirty, so the only reasons I felt she would benefit from knowing were because her spousal support – 100% of her income – would be coming to an end, and because she might be able to use her ex-husband's death to get attention.  “It’s not the end of the world if I have to see her, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer not to, and we’d need a contingency plan for what she might do if she showed up at the service.  I'd rather she not know until I've left town.”

“I already called and left a message, but I haven’t told her yet,” he replied.  “It’s fine with me.  I don’t think anyone wants her there anyway.”  And that was that.

I drove my husband and daughter the seven hours back to my hometown.  I answered calls from Dante each day as he looked for another form or document he needed that seemed to have vanished in the hoard.  He’d found a metal lockbox, but it had gotten wet inside and seemed to permanently smell.  He emailed me the form to collect Dad’s life insurance.  I emailed him an obituary I wrote.  He’d been calling the VA and the crematorium every day, and he finally got the VA to say they would cover the cost of transporting Dad's body back across the state and the crematorium to agree to an early Sunday morning service.  I would have to extend my stay to a sixth day, but it was okay.  There was still a two day buffer before my daughter's surgery.

I spent most of my days in Cincinnati trying to keep my daughter entertained.  Our hotel had a pool, so my husband took her swimming every day, and sometimes I joined them.  Sometimes I stayed behind in the hotel room and watched "Gossip Girl" on my phone until I forgot where I was.  We walked around the local malls and went to lots of restaurants while I fielded logistical calls from Dante.  He asked if I thought Dad had a will and where did I think it might be.  I told him I was 95% sure neither of our parents had ever had wills.  It would have required them to do something.  Since they had more debt than assets, I had always planned to walk away from everything and let it be sold for parts, or whatever happens when you die owing people money.  I think that was Dad’s plan for me too.  I'm not sure what Dante's plan had been since his life had remained tied up with Dad's.  

Dante was freaking out a little bit.  A friend had told him the house would be taken within twelve days of the death of the person on the mortgage since there was no will leaving it to anyone.  The bank would put a lock on the door and he would be homeless.  I told him Mom was still on the mortgage even though she wasn’t on the deed anymore, so maybe they would go after her for the money instead.  I couldn’t find a copy of the deed without Mom on it, but I knew details from the divorce.  I wondered quietly to myself if Mom might try to retake the house. 

Dante asked if I thought he should stop paying the mortgage and the bills.  I told him that’s what I would do.  I told him the bank likely wouldn’t move to foreclose until he’d missed at a least a few months of payments, so I would stop payment on everything but utilities, stay put until the bank at least started sending threatening letters, and save whatever money he could for a new apartment.  He said he’d been cancelling our dad’s magazine subscriptions.  He had so many.   I warned Dante that the VA might not stop Dad's monthly checks right away and that, if they paid him something after his death, they would realize their mistake and demand it back in a few months.  It was the same thing that had happened every time he moved back into the hospital or the nursing home -- his check got reduced retroactively, and he was expected to pay them back thousands of dollars.  If this happened for three or four months like it did before, they would be expecting tens of thousands of dollars back.  I warned Dante not to spend the money from Dad's checking account in case this happened.  He replied, "Well, they better not do that then."


Cincinnati was a long trip.  It was the first time I'd been to my hometown in six years.  I spent as much time with my best friend and her family as possible.  My birthday happened while we were there, so my best friend and her mother and sister and boyfriend all joined us for lunch the day before the memorial service.  It was nice.  There were even presents.  If you have to deal with a parent's death, make sure to do it in the town where your best friend lives.  It makes everything so much better.

The morning of the memorial service, my daughter was supposed to stay with my best friend's mom and sister while my best friend, my husband, and I went to the service.  Then we'd all go out for lunch.  But my daughter started running a fever the night before and wasn't better by that morning.  I asked my husband to stay with her in the hotel room while my best friend and her family and I went to the service together.  We made up half the attendees.  My brother arrived shortly after me, and that's when the man who runs the crematorium welcomed us, showed us around, and said our dad's body should be arriving in two more days.

The Time My Mother Played Santa at Walmart

The best part of reconnecting with Dante has been having access to new "crazy mom" stories.  Here is one Dante told me that apparently happened several years ago.

My mother put on a Santa hat, went into Walmart, and handed out hundred dollar bills to strangers until security forced her to leave.

Dante made it sound like she did this at more than one location.

"Dad's Dead"

I got a call last week from my estranged brother who has literally never contacted me in our lives except at the behest of one of our parents.  Caller ID showed his name, so I let it go to voicemail.  Even if I hadn't seen his name, I won't answer calls from that area code unless I recognize them.  They could be from my mother.

Dante left a voicemail saying to call him back, nothing more.  I received a Facebook message from a random stranger immediately after the voicemail.  A Google image search showed that the profile photo had been all over the internet, and a search of the name yielded no hits, so I assumed it was Dante incognito.  I discovered I could read the message without "accepting" it or sending a read receipt, so I did.  It was Dante saying our dad was doing poorly and the phone number he had for me was defunct (this is the beauty of not having an outgoing voicemail message, Friends) and to call him back.  Dante is still living at home with our dad.

My best friend, Jerry, didn't think I should call him.  I knew the only reasons anyone from my family would be calling me would be either 1) because they wanted money, or 2) they wanted me to do something, and I didn't have any intention of giving them anything or going there, even if a parent was dead.  Still, I hoped for the narrow possibility that something would finally force to the surface the fact that I am not my dad's biological daughter.  Maybe Dante would be asking me to donate a kidney or bone marrow and I could say nonchalantly, "I'm not any more related to him than you are.  Didn't you know?"  Maybe Dad actually wanted to talk to me for the first time in years.

I called back on speaker phone so that I could record our exchange and listen to it later and get thoughts from Jerry as necessary.  That is why I have a recording on my phone of Dante choking back a sob and saying, "Dad's dead."

Dad had been in the hospital in Cleveland again when he died.  His wound had reopened, as it always has, and the VA hospital in Cincinnati had shipped him back to Cleveland to stay in their spinal cord injury unit, as they always did.  He had been in the ICU lately, which wasn't a first for him.  I've visited him in ICUs since the '90s.  Dante said he hadn't been able to get in touch with him lately, though I'm not sure how "lately" he meant.  Some of his updates, such as Dad's driver's license expiring, were things I remember happening four years ago.  He said he had tried calling Dad's cell phone but got no answer, which doesn't surprise me since he always avoided taking valuables with him to the hospital out of fear they would be stolen, even if they were his primary means of communication and entertainment and he didn't know how long he'd be there.  He said he'd finally gotten in touch with a doctor at the hospital and learned that Dad had gone into cardiac arrest, which was a first for him.  He was alive but couldn't communicate except for subtle head movements.  Dante said the doctor had called him on his own cell phone from the ICU and was asking Dad if he wanted "to be made comfortable," and Dad supposedly nodded.  He died later that day, right before I called Dante back.  He was a four hour drive from anyone he knew.

Dante and I talked for several hours over the next two days, mostly trading ridiculous stories of our parents.  Every time one of us tried to get off the phone, we'd feel compelled to share one more thing and stay on the line for another ten minutes.  He was doing it too.  It was good.  I've never connected with Dante that way.  Maybe he had changed.  Maybe I had imagined some of his scariness and inflated it over the years of estrangement.

I was also surprised at how little Dad and Dante had presumably talked since Dante had moved back home.  I'm not sure how long Dad had been in Cleveland when he died, but Dante didn't know we weren't in touch.  I told him that he had all my contact information but that, when he wouldn't ask me any questions about my family or my life and I stopped working to maintain the relationship, I stopped hearing from him at all.  It had been three years.  Dante had no idea.

He also had no idea what Dad wanted to happen when he died.  He'd apparently only had that conversation with me.  As I recall, it only happened because he wanted the go-ahead to cancel all his life insurance policies minus the one the VA paid for, and we were confirming it would be enough to cover the cost of cremation.  He didn't want a big service or burial, he said.  He just wanted his favorite jazz song playing on a boom box to send him off.   I can do that, I had said.

More to come.  So much has happened.

The Time I Realized I Lived in THAT House

I had clues growing up that our house wasn't an admirable one.  I remember taking the bus home from elementary school and hearing a handful of children making fun of the house with the Christmas lights still up in spring.  It was my house, and they knew it as soon as I ashamedly stood up to get off the bus.  Dante had been allowed to climb onto the roof to trim the gutters with a strand of multicolored lights the previous fall, and neither he nor my mother had been keen for him to take them back down ("Why should we?  He'll just have to put them back up again in a few months").  There weren't Santas or reindeer or anything like I've seen up year-round at some homes, but we were out of date, and it was obvious enough for the other kids to laugh at without my ever having to invite them inside.

Our yard was unkempt.  A science teacher from the local middle school mowed our lawn in the summer months, once or twice a month.  It was how he made money when school was out.  At least once or twice that I heard of, the grass and weeds got so high that someone called the city to complain.  We didn't garden.  We didn't fertilize anything because, as my mother often said, "Why would I encourage the grass to grow?!"  I loved weeding the rock beds as a child, but my mother wanted Dante to do it, and he wasn't interested.  Sometimes I could convince her to give me $2 for my work since she'd planned to give Dante $20.  She complained that I didn't always get the entirety of the root and the weeds would come back.  "If you can't do something right, don't do it at all!" she'd say.  I think that's why our house so rarely experienced weeding or cleaning in the first place.  An all-or-nothing attitude toward cleaning and home maintenance is a great way to end up in a dilapidated building surrounded by garbage.

The time that really sticks out in my mind though was one of the times Dante totaled a car.  It was the white Camaro.  I didn't have a car yet, and Dante had already totaled at least one or two cars before the Camaro, so we were probably thirteen and twenty years old respectively, give or take.  Our mother had always given him a pass when he wrecked a car ("It was raining!  What was he supposed to do?") and the Camaro allegedly wasn't even his fault.  According to Dante's retelling, a woman had crashed into him turning left while she had a red light.  Other witnesses had said she had a green light and Dante was speeding, but as my mother said, "Dante still had the right of way!"  Regardless, his car was totaled, and the other driver was uninsured, so his insurance was covering everything that was going to be covered.  Dante also had to go to court.

Our mother was furious at both the other driver and the situation itself.  She insisted Dante's crumpled white Camaro be parked at the top of our circular driveway.  She took a large sheet of white poster board and wrote in Sharpie with her perfect penmanship, "This is the result of an uninsured driver."  She taped her poster to the side of the car, facing outward so it was legible from the street.  She seemed surprised and indignant when someone called the city to complain.  The city told her she couldn't do that.  It didn't matter if what she wrote was true.  It didn't matter that she was angry.  It didn't matter that it was "on her land;" it was a neighborhood eyesore.  In case you're wondering, we didn't live in a particularly nice neighborhood.  It was a middle class block of split-levels and ranches with two to three bedrooms each.  There were no Homeowner's Associations back then.  We had the largest, most expensive house on the block, as my parents liked to brag.  It just also happened to be an eyesore.

The Time My Dad Started Recording Over Videotapes of Me

My family's video camera from the '70s broke before I was born.  We never got another one, despite Dante's and my pleas for one throughout the '80s and '90s, so the only videos that existed of me before adulthood were from public performances where copies were sold en masse.

I was in annual church musicals and some school plays.  I started taking private voice lessons in sixth grade.  I remember when my parents made that decision.  I had just sung my first solo in a church musical at age eleven (the musical was "My Way or Yahweh" and I played a slave or possibly a very unimportant priest of the god Ba'al), and my parents apparently felt I had done a surprisingly adequate job.  I remember sitting in the back seat of my dad's van while they sat in the front discussing whether I should take private singing lessons in an effort to pursue this talent.  They decided I should.  I remember feeling excited.

The first time those lessons really paid off was an eighth grade talent show.  I had two years of lessons under my belt and had finally worked out the kinks of my voice that made me sing too sharp or sound worse than someone without training at all.  I sang "On My Own" from Les Miserables, and it was the first recording of a performance I recall listening to afterward and thinking I actually sounded good.

I was in high school when my dad came to my room with the VHS from my eighth grade talent show and asked if I minded if he taped over it.  I don't recall what he wanted it for -- a bad '80s movie or a rerun of MacGyver based on what I know of his taste.  We had a hoard of recordable VHS cassettes -- multiple cabinets of them -- and even now my dad has multiple hard drives filled with terabytes of old movies and entire series he has recorded from TV and never gotten around to watching.  I guess I either asked why that particular tape or paused too long because my dad prompted, "I mean, it's not like you're going to watch it again, are you?" 

I said, "I guess not," and he was one VHS cassette of old reruns richer.  I don't know if my dad taped over all the old videos of my performances, but I recall seeing others that had been relabeled in his handwriting before I moved out for college.  I've considered asking my high school classmates on Facebook if they have any old videos of performances I was in, but for now it seems awfully self-indulgent and pointless to collect old videos of myself mostly singing when I'm not sure I'll ever want to watch them.  Much like old family photos, they were simply something I wanted to be able to look back on and show to my daughter when she is older.  For now though there are simply no videos of me before adulthood.

On Not Fitting In

I watched a documentary on Amazon Streaming the other day (free with Prime) called "Adopted."  It follows two different stories:  an adult Korean-born woman who was adopted into a white American family at the age of 4 months, and a white American couple in the process of adopting a baby girl from China.

I like reading blogs and watching documentaries that feature adoptees.  While my brother Dante is the only adoptee I've been close to, we were never close enough to talk about it.  I knew almost nothing about adoption before I found my biological father.  What I think interests me most about adoption -- or, more accurately, adoptees -- is that, while it's distinctly different from my donor conception, a lot of adoptees and donor conceived people seem to share a lot of the same feelings of genetic bewilderment, wanting to know where they came from, and wanting people to stop telling them they should be grateful to be alive. 

I know a fair number of donor conceived people who feel adoption is different primarily because the children exist before the "intended parents" find them, unlike in donor conception, but the more I read, the more I believe children (and often mothers) are commodified in adoption just like in donor conception.  Most adopted children are not actually "saved" from some unspeakable fate (though some people like my mother like to tell them they were).  The bigger difference, as far as I can see, is not between intent but between how many biological ties are broken at birth, and in some cases of donor conception and surrogacy, all biological ties are broken just as in a typical adoption.  Lines start to blur.  We have a lot in common.  There are very few blogs by donor conceived people that have been updated in recent years, so I read adoptee blogs and breathe a sigh of relief that someone else gets it.  Someone more daring than me is blogging the outrage I'm afraid to show.

I enjoyed the "Adopted" documentary.  I don't share much in common with Jennifer, the Korean-American adoptee, but I related to her.  She grew up with white parents who had been raised "not to see race" and refused to recognize that she was any different from them, as well as classmates who mocked her for her physically Asian qualities.  As I've heard many transracial adoptees say, she felt white.  She wanted her outsides to match her insides.  She wanted blue eyes and blond hair and felt somewhat bewildered looking into the mirror as she grew up.  As a white donor-conceived woman who has experienced this phenomenon -- aspects of my face and body looking "off" because I can't place them in the context of my family, long before I knew this was a phenomenon that existed -- I can only imagine how Jennifer must have felt.  As she got older and attended a high school where she wasn't the only Asian student, she tried to pass as a "real Asian" since her new friends wouldn't immediately know she hadn't been raised in an Asian family.  When she reached adulthood, she even moved to Korea for a time, but still she did not fit in.  In Korea, where she'd been born, she was too American.

My best friend Jerry and I were talking about "Adopted" when she mentioned the fact that no one ever feels like they fit in -- that the very idea of fitting in is a fantasy that only makes people sad, like finding the meaning of life or finding one's soulmate.  While I agree with her to a certain extent, I think there are different levels of Not Fitting In that we experience.  I don't feel like I fit in most places or with most people -- I think I'm pretty common in this -- but I've got this Great White Halloween Costume I wear everyday that usually makes it look like I do.  I think my problem is less serious in part simply because it's less visible.  I don't expect everyone with "costumes" like mine to feel that way, but blending in has always meant a lot to me.  I've been in situations in which I stood out uncomfortably because of my race, and I've been in situations (most situations) in which I blended, and having the option to blend in simply by changing my clothes or hair or behavior -- whether or not I feel like I fit in -- makes a pretty huge difference.  This is only one of the struggles facing transracial adoptees, and it didn't even occur to me it existed until I started reading blogs in which people talk about it.

A lot of parents take their children's life challenges as personal insults.  As a parent, I get that.  It's annoying though, both for parent and child.  It makes parents defensive and children either angry or overprotective of their parents' feelings or both.  It creates an unhelpful barrier to communication.  Jennifer wanted validation from her adoptive parents, who she loved and cherished and cared for both physically and financially, but they seemed to treat her problems as a transracial and transnational adoptee as made up problems she'd invented to garner attention and pity.  What did she want them to do about it now?  They'd done the best they could.  They'd been raised not to see race and they never saw her as any different from them.  How could she ask for any more than that?  And these were good parents.  Loving, adoptive parents. 

I got the impression what might have helped was if they'd recognized that any daughter who loved them and cared for them as much as theirs always had was not baring her soul to hurt them.  She loved her parents and wanted to feel seen by them in her entirety.  She wanted them to understand and love her for all of who she was, and that included being Korean and an adoptee and not just a chameleon who could and would change who she was to gain their approval.  I get that.  I'm a chameleon too.  I think it might have meant a lot if they'd said, "I had no idea.  I'm sorry you've felt so much pain.  I did the best I could, and it's hard to hear you felt this way, but I understand that you didn't have the words to express these feelings earlier.  Thank you for trusting me with this now.  I've always loved you as my daughter, and it didn't occur to me that you might still feel adopted or want to know about where you came from.  Is there anything I can do to help?"  Empathy is important.  Validation is 50% of every cure. 

"Don't You Even Know How to Use a BROOM?!"

There wasn't a lot of regular cleaning in my house growing up, as is typical in a hoard.  At least once a week my mother or dad would demand, "Go clean your room!" but I wasn't allowed to get rid of things I'd inherited from Dante (like entire collections of books) or anything someone had made for me (such as nursery decor).  I had no idea "getting rid of things" was something most people did.  As far as I can tell, when I was in elementary school I still had every toy and piece of decor I'd owned since birth, which made tidying up problematic.

I remember my dad helping me clean my room by parking his wheelchair in the doorway so I couldn't leave, watching me, and occasionally yelling at me to clean.  I remember my mother helping me once by actually sitting down in my room with me and then rifling through my belongings until she found something I had written, read it aloud in a mocking voice, and laughed. 

On one of the few occasions that the floor of my room was mostly clear, my mother presented me with a broom and told me to sweep.  I was maybe seven at the time.  I had never seen someone sweep in real life since you can't sweep hoard, so I brushed from side to side haphazardly like I'd seen Cinderella do in the Disney animated movie.  My mother stopped me, shouting, "GAWD!  Don't you even know how to use a BROOM?!" and took the broom away to show me the "right way," the way janitors do it on TV (my frame of reference for normal household behavior will forever be what I've seen on television, I just realized). 

I don't understand why she thought I would know how to sweep a floor when I had literally never seen it done.  She had similar reactions to other chores, such as getting angry that I "never washed the dishes without having to be told" when I was eight and had literally never washed dishes before, or been told to wash dishes, or been permitted to wash dishes.  Wanting to help out also tended to get me yelled at for getting in the way or doing things "wrong."  "Why don't you know how to do this?" she asked me about various skills throughout my life.  "I remember teaching Dante this when he was six!"  Dante is seven years older than me.

The First Time My Dad Gave Me the Silent Treatment

When I was about ten, give or take a couple of years, my mother and I got home from back-to-school clothes shopping.  It was the one time per year I got to go shopping as a kid.  My dad told me cheerily to put on a fashion show for him so he could see everything we'd bought, something I had previously been happy to do.  But this year I didn't want to.  I told my dad I was tired and didn't feel like doing a fashion show.  He stopped being cheery and said something along the lines of, "Tough shit.  Those are my clothes paid for with my money.  If I want to see what they look like on, you have to show me." 

I replied -- and this is going to be pretty close to verbatim because the fallout burned it into my brain -- "I will give you all the money I have never to speak to me again."

Was it hyperbolic?  A bit.  Was it mean?  Absolutely.  Was it unfair?  Not really from where I'm sitting.  My dad threw around his ownership of us and our belongings pretty regularly.  It was his house, his food, his toys, all bought with his money from his disability checks.  Two of the monthly social security checks came specifically for care of Dante and me, with our names printed on them, but I didn't know that at the time.  Or maybe I did and it didn't matter.  I remember the time my mother told me they had gotten extra government money when they adopted Dante but that they had gotten nothing for me.  Dante's check simply got cut in half when I was born.  Poor Dante.  Freeloading me.  I can't remember when I learned about social security.  I also can't remember a time I didn't know I cost my family money and brought in nothing.  I was worthless in the most literal sense of the word.

My dad got upset and decided to respond by giving me exactly what I'd requested -- he stopped speaking to me or even acknowledging my existence.

The really scary part was when I let slip something that might normally upset him.  I don't remember what I said.  It wasn't anything big or intentionally offensive -- it was probably a lame joke, knowing me -- but it didn't take much to set him off.  Both my parents tended to freak out at things I never would have anticipated.  We were in the living room and I said something to my mother or Dante or someone else who did still speak to me, immediately followed by the realization that I'd said something that might upset my dad.  My entire body went tense, as it often did.  I paused and didn't move or speak or breathe, waiting to see if he'd erupt.  Imagine the Jurassic Park kids trying to hide from the T-Rex.  I would freeze like that.  But he didn't erupt.  He didn't acknowledge that I'd spoken at all.  That was when I first realized that he could actually control his rages and tantrums.  He simply hadn't bothered to control himself before.

Before that time, I had seen him more as a wounded wild animal -- dangerous and scary, but not willfully violent or cruel.  When I realized his screaming outbursts -- a several time per day occurrence -- were at least partly within his control, he got a whole lot scarier.  I knew now that he had been mistreating us and scaring us on purpose.  He wasn't weak and broken and completely out of control like I'd always assumed.  He was uncaring.  I had always assumed he was the one who cared for me the most, but if his behavior clearly hurt me and he could in fact control his behavior, he must not care if he hurt me.  That realization felt like a punch in the gut. 

As much as my dad's refusal to rage at me should have been a welcome relief, much like my mother's glee at getting high for the first time, I found it creepy and disconcerting.  It was like being stuck in a nightmare that shouldn't even qualify as a nightmare because nothing is happening, but it's too quiet and something just seems off and I keep waiting for a monster to jump out and assault me.

Within a matter of days, I came to my dad sobbing, begging for forgiveness, begging him to speak to me again.  I couldn't handle the silent treatment from the ruler of our house.  I couldn't handle knowing he was constantly displeased with me but always nearby at the same time.  I felt disgusting and ashamed for crying to him and begging him to speak to me when I knew how he judged me for crying and I didn't particularly like hearing from him anyway, but I was a perfectionist and a people pleaser and I had to keep him happy with me.  It was too scary for me when he wasn't happy with me.  After all, everything I owned was his.  If I didn't stay on his good side, I wouldn't have a home or food or clothes or toys.  What would become of me?  I was just a child, as my parents liked to remind me.  I had nothing.

My dad deigned to speak to me again, shutting off the silent treatment and anger toward me like flipping a switch.  I had learned my lesson.  We treated this spat the way we treated every other unpleasantness in our family -- we pretended none of it had ever happened.  I cannot remember a time I ever confronted him with my anger again.

Breaking Up with My Mother

Near the end of our relationship -- just before the several months of silence that preceded my wedding -- my mother left me some rather fucked up voicemails.  I've mentioned them here before.  Sometimes I would come home from work to a happy morning voicemail chattering away about wedding cakes and an angry afternoon voicemail calling me an ungrateful little bitch.  Sometimes there were more than two.  I still have them.  Almost all of them.  My voicemail at the time was set up to send mp3 files to my gmail account, and I didn't delete them.  I starred the most fucked up ones so I could find them later if I needed to build a case against her or I guess just feel sorry for myself in a masochistic sort of way.

I listened to two of her starred voicemails the other day for the first time in at least five years.  I'm not entirely sure why, though I have wanted to post them here for a long time.  I've run across them before in my email, but I have avoided them until recently because I anticipated they would make me feel bad or start shaking like I used to whenever I heard her voice.  It was the first time I've heard her voice in at least five years.  I didn't start shaking, so that was good.  I didn't cry either, which is also good.  They were a lot meaner than I remembered.  Pretty much every time I run across an old email or story about her, I'm surprised again by how much worse it was than I remembered. 

In both the voicemails I listened to, she said something along the lines of, "Answer me this one question and I'll leave you alone forever.  What did I ever do to deserve the way you treat me?"  That might not be verbatim, but I don't want to listen to them again to check.  Take my word for it that it's close enough.  And the answer to her question is that she did very little to deserve the way I treated her.  I was kind to her.  I tried to help her and make her happy.  Bear in mind that these voicemails were before I ever cut ties with her, when I tripped over myself trying to save both my parents at the expense of most other things in my life.  Most people would have considered me a good daughter, or at least that's what they say out loud.  She didn't deserve the way I treated her.  She didn't have to because she was my mother and I loved her and felt responsible for her. 

After I got married and my mother stopped contacting me again and my dad made his threat to let himself die of infection rather than live in a nursing home, my husband I moved.  That was when we bought our house so that my dad could move in with us.  My mother hadn't reached out to me in the ten months following my wedding, and I didn't reach out to tell her I was moving. 

I didn't hear from her again for three years, when she finally found me on Facebook.  She sent me this message:

I miss you, I love you. I sent you an anniversary card but it came back. Just wanted you to know I am getting the help I need and would love to be in contact with you again. I am living in a group home called Butterfly Glen and it helps. My address is 12986 Appleton St Cincinnati, OH and my phone number is 513-555-9876. I would love to hear from you. I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and am being treated for it. I feel much better. Love forever and always, Mom

My first reaction was shock.  Not at the content so much as the fact that it was her.  Sort of like how I used to start shaking whenever the phone rang.  Flushed face, pounding heart.  I'm not sure if it was more fear or excitement.  I find them hard to tell apart. 

I didn't know what to say.  I wanted to tell her good job.  I wanted to praise her for getting help, even if the help she was getting was not by choice.  I knew from my dad that she had only ended up at Butterfly Glen because of another "suicide attempt" after both her parents died and she was going to have to find someone new to take her in and take care of her.  No one retrieved her from the hospital's psych ward, so she had been released to Butterfly Glen, an assisted living home I presume she selected from a short list based on its name.  She has always loved butterflies.  Butterfly everything.  Also, it's a shithole -- I've looked online.

The problem with responding to her was that I didn't want to renew contact.  It felt like an abusive ex with a drug abuse problem was reaching out to say she'd gotten clean and was ready to be together again.  Why?  I'm fine now and it was so hard to break up -- why would I ever walk back into that?  I want her to be happy and healthy, but what I don't want her to be is my problem.  I reached out to my best friend, Jerry.  I explained that I didn't want to have to deal to my mother again but that I felt I owed it to her until the next time she went off the deep end.  "Don't respond for three weeks, and I bet she'll comply," Jerry said.  Jerry knows my mom.

The fact of the matter is that I don't know if my mother was still abusing prescription drugs at Butterfly Glen.  I have no idea how much of what she was on or how diligent her doctors were.  I thought back to how she'd been before the muscle relaxants and the sleeping pills and god knows what else.  Back when I was thirteen and younger.  Her behavior wouldn't have been mistaken for bipolar disorder back then, before the drugs.  And that's when I started remembering some of the stories I've told here, and I realized I still wouldn't want her in my life.  No version of the mother I've ever known would be someone I would choose to have in my life.  Life is easier without her. 

I explained to my therapist, "The more I think about my childhood, the more the good memories are colored by the things I know now.  It seems like the love I felt for my mother was mostly Stockholm Syndrome." 

She replied, "Maybe it was."  I didn't expect that response.

I didn't reply to my mother's Facebook message.  She sent me another a few months later on my birthday, but I didn't see it until even later because it was in my "other" inbox, where unsolicited messages from strangers go.  She wrote:

Happy Happy Birthday!!! I can't believe that 30 years ago today you came into my life and changed it forever. I wanted to update you on family events. I'm sure that Dad told you that Grandma Wilkes died in May after your wedding. Uncle Jim died last November and Grandpa Wilkes died on August 4th this year. All I have left is Dante and you and Michael. I'm living in a great group home called Butterfly Glen I am being treated with medication and group therapy for Bipolar disorder. I am doing great and the only thing that could be better would be to hear from you. I don't want anything from you just to hear from you and to know where you are and what you're doing and how you are doing. Love Forever and Always, MOM

I was pregnant with Eliza at the time.  I never replied.

I Hate Being Kissed on the Mouth by Family

Everyone in my extended family of origin kisses each other on the mouth.  I know some families just do that and it's not meant to be creepy because it's what they do and everyone is allegedly cool with it, but being kissed on the mouth by my family has bothered me for as long as I can remember.  I was fine with hugs or a kiss on the top of my head, but because that wasn't how my family did things, uncles, parents, grandparents, and Dante would grab me and/or pin my arms down while they kissed me on the mouth, I presume to show me who was boss.  They often laughed about how much it made me squirm.  My uncles otherwise seemed to be perfectly decent people.  In retrospect, I don't recall being grabbed or pinned at all by two of them.  I just remember them kissing me on the mouth after I learned to cringe quietly and stop putting up a fight.  

I remember my maternal grandfather pinning me on his sofa and nibbling at my neck while my mother and grandmother ignored my screams from the next room.  I was generally accused of overreacting if I protested... anything.  "He's just trying to play with you!  Stop screaming!" was an average reaction to what felt to me like torture or assault.  I was horrified to realize my massively fat grandfather was stronger than me even when I unleashed my full strength, or was at least stronger than me when I was pinned on my back and immobilized and panicking.  I remember being panic-stricken on more than one occasion when I realized even my full strength couldn't fight off a teenage Dante or a grown man.  But shortly after I calmed myself down enough to go limp, my grandfather let me go.  I guess it stopped being fun for him when I stopped fighting.  I spent time with my maternal grandparents at least once a week from birth until I moved away for college, but I can't remember ever liking my grandfather.  I'm not sure anyone did, to be honest.  He was always kind of a dick as far as I could tell.  He's dead now. 

Laundry in the Hoard

The washing machine at my parents' house broke when I was in elementary school.  The laundry room was a yellow, walk-in closet-sized room off of the kitchen that held the washer and dryer, a sink, and a counter my mother referred to as "the breakfast nook."  I remember the room being clean once for I'm not sure how long -- I remember excitedly eating cereal at that breakfast nook when I was maybe seven years old, give or take -- but by the time the washing machine broke, the room was basically inaccessible.  There was an approximately five foot high mountain of laundry from the back wall to within a foot of the doorway, where it sloped abruptly downward.  The washer could only be reached by standing on some of the clothes, followed by strategic leaning.  I recall a beautiful pink sundress I had never worn being relegated to that pile because it had wrinkled in the dryer.  My mother didn't believe in ironing, and that was years before she bought Dante and me each our own iron and ironing board for Christmas (I was genuinely thrilled, and I think Dante was too -- she had previously thrown away or piled up anything that wrinkled, which severely limited our wardrobe options).  I don't remember what made up the rest of the mound.

After the washing machine broke, my mother started doing the laundry at the laundromat.  She said the house was too messy to let someone in to fix the washer yet.  She had to get the laundry room cleared out.  Years passed.  As I got older, I started helping her.  Once or twice a month she would load up all the household laundry into large garbage bags, I would haul them to the car where they took up the entirety of the trunk and backseat, and -- because I had either school or work pretty much any given weekday of the year -- we would spend Saturday at the laundromat. 

She started yelling at me for putting my clothes in the hamper after only wearing them once, as I had always been taught to do.  She yelled at me for only using towels once too, though there was nowhere to hang them except over the shower, where they got extra wet the next time someone used it.  That's where we kept them though.  We could only ever tell which towels were our own because my mother always bought brightly colored beach towels instead of normal bath towels, and none of them looked identical.  You just had to remember which one you'd used and hope everyone else did the same.

I remember asking in my teens why we didn't just clear out the laundry room and get the washer fixed.  My mother frequently complained about how little money we had, and I saw how much we spent in quarters every trip.  My mother brought large Centrum vitamin bottles filled with quarters, and they each held multiple rolls.  She insisted it would cost even more in water bills if we did the laundry at home.  She said she would also be expected to do laundry every day if we had a working washing machine at home, and she refused to do that. 

When I got to college, the laundry room in my dorm was made up of the little machines designed for home use.  It was ironically my first experience using a classic washing machine with a lid and an agitator, like the one we'd had in my house all my life.  I was used to the high-capacity, industrial-grade machines we used at the laundromat, and I needed help the first time I used the dorm's equipment.  "You didn't do your own laundry at home?  God, you're spoiled," a dormmate informed me.  I didn't correct him.  After all, I didn't do my own laundry at home.  And at one of the most expensive private universities in the country, "spoiled" seemed like a significantly more flattering image than the one people would associate with me if they knew the details.

My mother finally replaced the washer and dryer in one of her spending sprees after I graduated from college.  According to the paperwork from my parents' divorce, they cost $5000 when she bought them a decade ago.  I don't know if anyone other than Dante has ever used them.  I've had my own personal washer and dryer since my husband and I bought our house.  Laundry is my favorite chore because it feels like I'm getting something done while a machine literally does the work for me, and I don't have to leave my house.  I can sleep on fresh bedsheets every week and have my favorite clothes ready to wear with less than a day's notice.  I've had to have someone come over to fix the machines and even replace them at one point, and I have to say -- it is still easier than going to the laundromat.  Then again, I've never had to scale a Matterhorn of wrinkled laundry to use them either.

Another Email

For the record, I was grossing $30k per annum in 2007.  I don't even know off hand what the mysterious $2k referenced below was all about.  It might have been something extra my dad had me transfer over when their account was empty, intended to cover the household bills that were on autopay (which was most of them).  I know that was a thing that happened at one point.


From: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 4, 2007 at 2:07 PM
Subject:
To: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>

Hi Dad,

I returned Mom's calls today.  She told me she already spent the $2000 that she discovered in the bank yesterday and then said she had come to me to solve her money problems.  I told her I didn't know what she should do, and she accused me of not caring.  When I told her I care but that I didn't have a solution, she got mad at me for not immediately offering her money -- apparently the solution to her money problems is supposed to be me.  She claims I have "money coming out [my] ass" and that Dante is better than me because, despite the fact that he is getting evicted from his apartment and losing his electricity, "he cares."  She said, "You make good money, dontcha?"  I told her I don't make nearly as much as she does, and she said, "I don't have any money!"  She started to yell some more, so I told her I had to go and I hung up.  She makes me very sad.

Love,
Chrissy

My Adopted Brother

Dante's adoption anniversary is the anniversary of the day our parents -- my mother and social father -- finalized his adoption in court.  He was two months old and had lived with our parents since he was strong enough to leave the hospital.   

Every year we celebrated Dante's anniversary by going out with our mother's extended family -- our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and many cousins -- first out for lunch at Pizza Hut and then to a movie or the bowling alley and ice skating rink.  I loved spending the day with my cousins, almost all of whom were local and spent every major holiday with us, including nearly a dozen family birthday parties throughout the year.  But I was jealous that Dante had an anniversary and I didn't.  It was almost like getting a second birthday party every year, even if there weren't presents.  I was jealous of Dante a lot, any time he got something I didn't, any time I felt things weren't equal.  I think that's a pretty typical kid reaction to perceived unfairness.

When my mother told me I was donor conceived and immediately told me I could never tell another soul, including my dad or Dante, it cast Dante's adoption anniversary in a weird light for me.  Why was his adoption, or the fact that our parents weren't biologically related to him, deserving of a party, while what I saw as a similar facet of my own identity -- being biologically descended from a secret parent outside our family -- was a dark secret?  It didn't seem fair at all.

In hindsight, I think my mother was just doing what had she had been told to do (except for the telling me I am donor conceived part).  Tell adopted children where they came from (to the extent that you know).  Celebrate them.  Tell them they are "special" and "chosen."  That was where adoption had gotten to when Dante was born.  Never tell children they are donor conceived.  Never tell anyone where the donor conceived children came from.  If anyone knows the truth, the intended father will reject the child and the child won't respect him as its parent.  That was where donor conception had gotten to when I was born.  "For god's sake, tell your child," has been the prevailing wisdom since the '90s, but when I was conceived, secrecy was king.  Adoptions used to be dark secrets too, so it seems to me the prevailing wisdom of "what to tell the children" is a couple decades behind for donor conception simply because it's a newer phenomenon. 

It seemed bizarre to me to treat us so differently when the goal was apparently to treat us both "as their own children."  But the prevailing wisdom of the day was dramatically different for our individual circumstances, no matter how similar those circumstances appeared in my mind.  Secret parents.  God knows how many siblings.  Falsified birth certificates.  The wondering.  The perpetual unknown.  His unknown was twice as big as mine, but my secret was darker.  It seemed we had a lot in common, but I wasn't allowed to tell him so.

I'm not jealous of Dante anymore, or of the fact that he got an extra annual party.  I'm not even sure he liked those parties.  He never talked to me or our parents about being adopted or how he felt about it.  It might have meant nothing to him or he might have been broken up inside.  There was no way to know because we weren't close.  We weren't close, and our house wasn't a safe place to talk about such things.  Had he dared to bring up the topic of his birth parents, even if it was just to express a curiosity in who they were, I can only imagine how our mother would have retaliated.

I can only remember my mother bringing up the topic of Dante's birth parents in my presence two times.  I remember her telling Dante that his mother had been 15 and was impregnated by a man whose children she had been babysitting.  I don't know if any of this was true, nor if it was "consensual," to the extent that sex with a 15-year-old can be consensual.  It struck me as a way for my mother to tell Dante that she was better than his birth parents.  Period.  The "slut" insinuation was there.  I'd like to say I imagined it, but as far as I could tell, my mother tended to view any sexually active woman as a slut who "had it coming," even if she was a child or married.  The only other time I remember my mother mentioning Dante's birth parents was once when he wanted money for something in his teens or early twenties.  She'd sneered at him, "Why don't you go find your REAL parents?  Maybe they'll have some money for you."  It had the desired effect of shutting him up.

I remember once prattling away in the living room as a child and accidentally saying "my mom" instead of just "Mom."  Dante and our parents were the only people to whom I called her "Mom" instead of "my mom," so it seemed like a natural slip up to me, but my mother cut me off and laid into me.  "How dare you?" she screamed.  "I'm as much his mother as I am yours!"  I'd never thought she wasn't.  She'd favored Dante for most of my life.  When he hadn't recently done something to prompt her to turn on him viciously, he was the one she chose for her team while I was left out in the cold with our dad.  I knew how things worked at our house.  I hadn't been trying to insinuate that the only brother I'd ever known wasn't a part of our awful family.  He'd been a part of it for longer than I had.  Still she blanketed me in shame.  It feels strange to feel so sure I had made an innocent slip of the tongue with no deeper meaning behind it and to also feel so deeply ashamed for it.  Maybe that's what good parents are supposed to do though -- defend their children against the perceived slights of others.  It was confusing whenever I became one of those "others."

I wish Dante had known I was donor conceived.  I don't believe it's harder than being adopted (or even as hard most of the time, depending on the family and the surrounding circumstances -- half the unknown = half the trouble?), but it's another way of being different, of being "other."  It's something we sort of had in common.  We don't relate to each other at all, and yet I imagine he must've felt like as much of an outsider in that house as I did.  I felt like an outsider years before I knew I was donor conceived.  I remember being in preschool and thinking I must've been secretly adopted.  I thought I had both a mom and a dad out there in the world somewhere -- people who would understand me and make everything make sense.

I wish Dante knew that I wasn't as favored or as belonging as he seemed to think I was.  As jealous as I was of him (sometimes childishly, sometimes with good reason), I could see that he was treated unfairly, especially by our dad.  And that, as often as our mother gave him an undeserved pass on his bad behavior, she sometimes said terrible things he didn't deserve either.  Did he ever see when I was treated unfairly?  Did he recognize how hard I tried to keep them happy?  Did it ever occur to him that his abuse made my life harder and scarier?  Could he care? 

I wish he knew that it wasn't always just him on the outside being mistreated like he seemed to think.  Nothing there was fair, and neither of us was the full-time golden child.  If he hadn't been a psychopath, we might have been friends.  It would have been nice to have a friend in that house.

Dante is still in that house.  I almost said "stuck in that house," but I suspect that's not how he sees it.  Every time he left -- usually because our mother had kicked him out -- he gravitated back.  When she finally moved out after the divorce, when he was in his mid-thirties, he left his apartment and independent adult life to move back into his childhood bedroom.  Why?  He brought his girlfriend and her son with him, but still, why?  Why would anyone live in that awful, dilapidated house by choice?  And now he lives there with our dad, the person who always treated him the most cruelly.  I don't envy Dante anymore.  He might be happier than me -- I honestly have no idea -- but I could never live the way he lives.  We are too different.  I have never been able to understand him. 

I don't know what effect being adopted has had on him.  No ones knows.  There isn't a "control" version of Dante who isn't adopted with whom to compare him.  I don't know how he might or might not have been different had he been raised by his birth mother, or by more functional adoptive parents for that matter.  This post isn't really about that.  I guess what I mean for it to be about is that you can't predict how someone will feel about being adopted or react to being adopted, and I don't think there is a way to undo the fact that someone is adopted simply by throwing them a party and calling them "special."  And just because you love an adopted family member like they're blood and treat them like blood and genuinely feel like they're your flesh and blood doesn't mean they don't still feel adopted (or donor conceived, as the case may be).  And that's okay.  It'll be more okay if you can let them feel it without taking it personally or trying to make them feel something else.  That's what I think anyway.  I can't speak for anyone else.

The Time My Mother Found My Address -- and a Contingency Plan

Dear Jerry,

My dad says my mom finally looked up my name on the internet and found me.  My address is on the first page of hits, so it's an investment of about 5 seconds.  I figured it was only a matter of time, but 2 years is a pretty good run.  It's pretty obvious she is in the mania stage right now, based on my dad's email below.  I'm wondering how long this one will last and if she is still living at that group home and if she is or was on any kind of stabilizing medication while there.

My phone number doesn't appear to be listed online yet, but even once it is, caller ID makes it easy enough to avoid 513 calls that aren't from my dad or you or your family.  I doubt she'd take the 8-hour drive to show up on my doorstep if she hasn't been able to reach me by phone in 3+ years, but if she did, I have no idea how one is supposed to handle that situation.  I imagine she would take a bus like she did when she accosted my dad in Cleveland and then take a taxi to my house, and then say she can't leave because she'd need to call another taxi and doesn't have enough money for it to take her anywhere anyway.  Have you ever heard of someone in this situation?  My first thought was that I would call the local police, but I think they'd just say they don't want to get involved in a domestic squabble and that she hasn't committed any crime and she'd be left sitting outside my house waiting for me to make a move.  I'd like to have some kind of contingency plan that doesn't involve giving her money or letting her into my home.  -- C

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 3:53 PM
Subject:
To: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>

By the way, you'd better watch out. Evidently your mom has access to a computer, and is with it enough to have found you there.
She's also told Dante she is going to sue me for another $500 a month for monthly maintenance. I'd sure like to know who's putting her up to all this.
Love, Dad...
___________________
DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF, IT'S ALL SMALL STUFF...

For a couple years after I stopped communicating with my mother, I still feared her showing up on my doorstep, as noted in the email above.  I had moved halfway across the country since the last time she knew my address, but my new address was highly findable.  When Michael and I bought our house, our county published our names, address, and the purchase price of our house, as they do with all real estate purchases.  For awhile it was the first thing that came up in a Google search for my name, and it worried me.

I live a full day's drive from my mother, but I imagined the craziest things she could do, such as taking a taxi to get here and demanding I pay the thousand dollar cab fare because she had no money, or something similarly ridiculous.  I worried about this scenario a fair amount, and sometimes it kept me awake at night.  How would I get rid of her if she showed up?  What if she threw a fit in my driveway and said she couldn't leave because she had no phone, no car, and no money?  I couldn't control it.  I can't control anything she does. 

What I can control is how I react, so I hatched a contingency plan so I wouldn't lose any more sleep imagining this stupid scenario.  First, I had to decide what else I had control over and what I would be willing to do.  I have control over my house and my property and my body and my money.  These were all things she had seemed to control up until I got my own apartment and a full-time job, so it was easy to forget I was a financially independent adult who could put my foot down. 

I decided I would not pay anyone who brought her to my home.  That would do nothing to benefit me, and no one could legally make me do it ("no one can legally make me" has become a big deciding factor in letting myself say "no" to things -- I say "no" to a lot of things now).  I also wouldn't give her money or let her into my home under any circumstances.  I could just imagine her kicking off her shoes, lying down on my couch, and declaring squatters rights or something.  I know squatters rights don't work that way, but it would still be harder to make her leave once she got inside.  I also wouldn't drive her anywhere in my car.  I refuse to put myself in any situation in which she could try to abduct or kill me, likely or not, and I also don't care for the inconvenience.

What I would do is tell her politely and firmly that she is not welcome at my home or on my property and that, if she doesn't leave immediately, I will call the police.  No conversation, no "hearing what she has to say," just my telling her politely and firmly to leave.  If she said she couldn't go because her cab already left and she had no phone and no money and it was raining -- my god, the rain -- and she had nowhere else to go, I would be willing to give a little to ease along the progress of the situation.   

If it were raining, I would give her an umbrella I don't mind parting with forever.  We have at least one cheap, collapsible umbrella that is sort of half-broken but still in use because it's small enough to fit in a backpack.  If it were raining, she could have that (envision "I am a benevolent god" meme here).  I would bring the cordless phone to the door (after locking the door behind me while I went to fetch it so that she couldn't sneak in) because if she tried to steal it or break it, I have two others and they don't work beyond my yard anyway so it would just be amusing to me.  I would let her call someone on my cordless phone to retrieve her, and if she swore she had no one, I would call her a cab myself.  I would allow her to wait at the curb for the car rather than calling the police on her immediately.  There would be a time limit on how long I would allow her to wait in sight of my home, and it would be based on how long it typically takes a cab to come.  Maybe 30 minutes.  I might be willing to pay a taxi driver in cash to take her to a bus station or airport, but I would give no money to my mother directly, and if she came back, I would not pay another cabbie again.  I consider this very generous of me since paying the cabbie in the first place isn't my job and calling the cops is free.  

If she came back again or refused to go in the first place, I would call the police, and they would come and remove her because the police in my town are very helpful and I am a thirty-something, affluent, white woman, while my mother looks like a crazy homeless person.  I forgot this fact a lot when I was younger.  I am an affluent white woman, I have power, and the amount of respect I receive from strangers has increased dramatically since I entered my thirties.  Even if my mother tried to claim she has a right to me and everything I own because she is my mother, the cops wouldn't accept that because it is crazy and not how America works, even if it's how my mother's mind works.  I would calmly and quietly explain that my mother is severely mentally ill, refuses any sort of treatment, and that I haven't been in contact with her for the last seven years for this exact reason.  I would express a subdued but believable amount of fear and, now that I have a child, mention protecting her.  They would take my mother away from my home because it's their job and also because I know how to behave in a variety of situations and she does not.  I have no problem calling the police as many times as necessary.  And unlike my dad, I have no qualms about pressing charges if it came to that.

I also had a clever plan in which I would sneak out the back door, go to my neighbor's house, sneak us both back in through my kitchen door, and have my neighbor answer the door to tell my mother I had sold the house and moved.  I think it would take too long to go get my neighbor though.  It might be worth trying if my mother were higher functioning and more dangerous, but I think the flat out rejection of sending her away or calling the cops would be equally effective at getting rid of her in the long-term.  She doesn't handle rejection well, and I don't think she'd be willing to put herself out there a second time.  I think she would crumple.  Sometimes I think if I were to look her dead in the eye and state point blank, "You aren't worth the trouble," she would explode into a pile of ash.

[Edited:  Re-reading all this I realize my contingency plan has changed.  I would tell her to leave and then call the police.  I wouldn't give her an umbrella or call her a cab or let her wait at the end of my driveway for a ride.  I would just call the police.  Apparently I don't have the patience or benevolence I had four years ago.  Oh well.]