Mom Found Me

I received mail from my mother at my house for the first time ever in spring of 2024. I've owned this house for 15 years, and my address is one of the first things that comes up if you Google my name. I heard nothing here until I started being penpals with my mom's friend Mindi, so I assume Mindi gave her my address. I always knew this was a possibility. Not a big deal.

The first mail was an anniversary card. There was no return address on the envelope, but I knew her handwriting on sight. The only message she'd written in the card was an updated phone number for Butterfly Glen, the assisted living house where she's been residing since her parents died over a decade ago. I brought it to my therapist, and she found this amusing.

Months passed. Then I got a birthday card with a check for $100. I threw them both away (I'm reasonably rich at this point, as evidenced by giving my brother the entirety of our dad's $10k life insurance policy). Thankfully my best friend was visiting for my birthday when it arrived, and she kept me from spiraling.

Last week Mindi sent me an email asking for my address -- which she knows and where I have previously received her letters -- so that she can send me a Christmas card. She confessed she had told my mother about my daughter (I had assumed my mother already knew about my daughter -- she's nearly 13, she's never been a secret, and everyone else in the family knows about her, Dante included). Mindi apologized and swore she wouldn't give her any more information I didn't want her to know. She asked me not to tell her anything for a few days because she was going to Butterfly Glen for a visit and didn't want to let anything slip on accident. I haven't responded.

Then I got a Christmas card addressed to "Mr. & Mrs. Michael Martin & Family" (one of my pet peeves is being addressed as Mrs. [Some Guy's Full Name], but I don't know if she was trolling me or just ignorant of that fact). She'd used a return address label this time. She wished us health and added something to the card about Jesus being "the reason for the season," which was funny to me because I haven't been Christian in many years and, despite being a regular Methodist churchgoer for my entire childhood, I don't remember her making a big fuss over Jesus in the past. Church-wise, we just did whatever my grandmother did. I might be misremembering just how religious a baseline churchgoer was though. Anyway, it was the first time my mother has ever sent a Christmas card as far as I'm aware and can recall. We lived so close to our extended family that we just saw them in person instead. I threw the card away. I assumed I would get a reprieve until my next wedding anniversary, assuming she's still interested in sending me mail next spring. I was wrong.

I checked the mail today and found a thick card envelope literally bursting at its seams, addressed to my full name in her handwriting. It said:

Do not Bend
Photo enclosed

A lot more than photos were enclosed. It also contained, for the first time ever, a multi-page letter detailing her version of events I've written about in this blog. I'm going to type it up and include it as its own post. 

A Good Memory of My Mother

When I was in Girl Scouts in elementary school, my mother became a troop leader.  I had previously attended Girl Scout meetings at another girl's house where her mother was the leader, but my mother had volunteered to join as assistant leader or something of that nature, followed by a fight between the two mothers about something still unknown to me, followed by a schism of the troop.  The girls who were my friends came with us and joined our new (and admittedly better) troop, and other girls from school joined too.

There was a Girl Scout special event held in our church's basement one Saturday.  About a dozen troops from the area came.  Each troop had been assigned a table and chairs where they would each represent a different country.  We were supposed to set up a booth for our country where the other girls in attendance could do a craft or activity native to that country, or eat a food native to that country, or learn something about that country.  Most of it ended up looking about as interesting as a job fair.

My mother's troop represented Switzerland.  I didn't know what we were going to be doing that day until we arrived at the church.  My mother scrapped the traditional "booth" style everyone else used.  She set up the folding chairs side-by-side and then covered them with a large gym mat she'd brought from home (previously part of the Swamp of Sadness), creating a medium sized hump.  We would be offering people the chance to scale the famous Swiss Alp called the Matterhorn, she told us.  As each girl scrambled over the gym mat mountain and came down the other side, my mother congratulated her and presented her with a chocolate.  "Switzerland is known for its chocolates," my mother explained.  As the only booth offering both not-sitting-still and candy, ours quickly became the favorite of the day.

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.

The Time My Mother Gave Me Caffeine Pills

My mother started giving me caffeine pills my senior year of high school.  I was very tired.  I was in the school plays, took private music lessons at a local university twice per week, was an officer in several school clubs ("colleges want well-rounded students"), and spent all day every Sunday at various choir practices and church groups.  I frequently fell asleep doing my homework and broke down in tears when I had yet another paper to write.  My grades didn't suffer -- I had made straight A's for several years, and that didn't change until I finally got an 89% my last semester of AP Calculus -- but my crying seemed to annoy my mother. 

One day my mother gave me a little yellow box of pills she had bought and told me they would help me get my homework done.  This was the same year she gave me anti-depressants, about three years after she started self-medicating with pain killers and muscle relaxants, and several years after she started doling out to both of us pretty much every vitamin supplement she read about in magazines or saw mentioned on television.  Dr. Oz wasn't a thing back then, but something comparable must have existed because she had us on multiple supplements I had never heard of anywhere.  I don't even remember how many pills I was taking daily back then.  Six?  Nine?  I want to say nine because I knew I could take eleven pills -- including a couple Tylenol -- in one giant swallow.  Most of the supplements she bought had no discernible effect, such as the aloe pills and the garlic pills and the vitamin E.  The caffeine pills did though.  The box she gave me said each pill contained the caffeine of two cups of coffee.  I didn't see how this would work significantly better than just drinking more coffee, but I did as she said and took one, as I always had when my mother gave me medicine.

The caffeine pills didn't help me think or stay awake.  I still felt exhausted, but now I was shaking and freezing cold too.  They left me too wired to fall asleep, but writing essays still took work.  My mother urged me to try the pills again, to take another.  She seemed sure they would help me get my work done, as I always had regardless of what I took or didn't take.  After a couple more tries with the caffeine pills provoked exactly the same shaking and chills, I stopped taking them.  My mother was wrong.  They only made me feel worse.  I would make do without them, as I always had. 

The number of pills I consumed dropped considerably after I left for college.  I didn't have money to waste on supplements that did nothing, and the doctor I saw at university health services when I needed a prescription renewed had made fun of me for being on so many things at my age.  No one had ever bothered to make fun of my pill consumption with my mother in the exam room.  No doctor had ever dared to imply I should take less than what my mother was doling out.  She has a knack with doctors.   

The Time My Grandmother Visited My Mother as a Ladybug

Once when I was in my early twenties, my mother told me she hadn't felt like going to church that Sunday.  "But then I saw a ladybug, and I just knew it was your grandma telling me I needed to go to church." 

What makes this idea slightly less crazy is that my uncle used to call my grandmother "Ladybug" as a nickname.  What makes it slightly more crazy is that my grandmother was still alive at the time, recovering from a surgery or sickness that kept her from church that particular Sunday, but otherwise fine. 

Methodists don't usually have animal familiars, so I suggested my mother ask her mother, "Did you visit me in the form of a ladybug yesterday?" to confirm.  I don't think she ever did.