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.

"57 Reasons I Hate My Mother": An Email

I was referring back to my old emails while writing the story of The Great Clean Out of '06 (or The Time My Mother Scammed the Poorest People We Knew), but I think this email might be better in its original form.  A few of the things I said at the time make me cringe in the rereading (e.g., repeatedly calling my mother a terrible person; calling the Gardner family "trashy" -- they remind me of Kenny's family from South Park, but still, it was unkind), but I prefer to keep it honest than to edit it to make myself sound better.  The first bullet points might sound familiar from other posts.

Dear Jerry,

It really relaxes my head to list off what is pissing me off about my mom, but I can understand how listening to someone complain can get old really fast (believe me -- I know), so feel free to skip the numbered section of this email.  Please note though that there is a shitload of crazy in there and you might find some of it interesting and/or amusing.  There aren't actually 57 reasons.  I just liked how it sounded.

1.  She called me repeatedly starting at 6am yesterday to tell me she wanted to fax me something.  I discovered later that she had started calling my cell phone at 5:30am.  She told me today that she had called about six other people before that because she couldn't find my phone number.  When each asked why she had called at such an ungodly hour, she got increasingly angrier.  I finally got her off the phone with less than an hour before I had to be at work.  The all-important fax was the name of a hotel in Cleveland, a wedding price list for the chapel in Cincy, and something that looked like spam and said something about 'girlfriends' on it.

2.  She called me tonight for her daily venting and to ask me to wire her $2000.  She said the car that was formerly mine -- which my brother ruined the engine on and then she tried unsuccessfully to give away -- was in the shop and wouldn't be leaving until she had $2k.  She said she hadn't planned on taking the $2k that my father had very carefully set aside in a money market account to pay their property tax, but if I wouldn't give her money, she'd be forced to use it.  Either she doesn't have access to the money market account, or my dad is completely unaware that she does and will probably have a breakdown when he finds out.  I hope for the former. 

Money she spent today:  her $2300 bed was delivered, and she had several scans run on her brain.  Tomorrow she is having an MRI, and she is having people come by to talk about installing automatic handicapped doors on the house. 

Do you know the Gardners (i.e., the very nice Tim Gardner's mostly -- not all, but mostly -- trashy family)?  Otherwise known to me as the poorest family in Cincy?  Well, my mom owes them money.  She told the youngest children and their boyfriends that she would pay them each $100 and all the candy they could eat to clean out her basement but that she would have to give them IOUs and pay them later (she mentioned this part after they arrived).  She also said she'd pay them to get my brother's car out of the shop.  Apparently their father called and yelled at her because his children had to put gas in the car to get it to her, and so far, they have made negative money.  She also offered the pregnant teenager Mikaela and her boyfriend a $1000 IOU to go to Queens and drive back the $3000 van she is still hell-bent on buying.  Mikaela backed out because she is in her 3rd trimester and recently learned that she isn't supposed to be flying.  My mother is a terrible person.  

By the way, I didn't give her the money.  I told her truthfully that I don't have that much money in my checking account.  There is no reason for her to ever know that I have a high-yield savings account and an 18-month CD because she is never ever getting her hands on them.

3.  She announced in church last Sunday that she needed help cleaning out her house and that she would pay people by giving them bags of candy and praying for them (I'm serious).  She was angry and resentful that people who were "supposed to be [her] friends" didn't chip in, and even "the Mormons," some new-ish neighbors who had once said, "If there is anything we can do..." didn't help (apparently "if there is anything we can do..." now constitutes some sort of binding verbal agreement).  Only two people came, a couple from church who we've known for decades who are around my parents age, maybe a little older.  When they asked if there was anything they should bring, she asked for Rubbermaid storage containers.  She told the woman how she wished she could scrub out the bathtub but that her fingers just weren't strong enough.  The woman scrubbed the bathtub clean for her.  I don't think it had been scrubbed since the mid-'90s.

4.  After she bitched about having to wait until tomorrow for the scans of her brain and after I denied her request for $2000, she told me she had no idea if my dad had had his surgery today or not.  She hadn't called the hospital to find out.  She said she had tried the hospital in Cincinnati and expected them to transfer her to the hospital in Cleveland but they hadn't.  Not sure why she didn't call the number she has for another division of that hospital in Cleveland, but apparently she gave up quickly.  That's when I told her that I had actually bothered to look up the hospital's phone number and talk to my dad's nurse, who said he was recovering in his room and doing fine.  My mother seemed genuinely shocked, though I'm not sure about which part.

5.  She tells the same stories ("complaints" might be a more accurate term) every time she calls me.  I think she tells everyone the same thing and actually forgets who she's told her shit to each day.  That, or she just doesn't care.  That's fairly likely, actually.  She is such a terrible person.  I really can't stand her.

6.  She has decided that as soon as my dad gets out of the hospital she will give him an ultimatum that either he treat her "like a human being" or she is divorcing him.  She said she has a terminal illness and life is too short to spend it unhappy.  What a lovely lesson to learn after wasting all of your youth, beauty, and money.  I am thankful for her sometimes.  Watching someone close to you make such catastrophic mistakes helps prevent you making so many of them, and sweet jesus, she covered a lot of them for me.  I honestly believe that, while I might not be a better person for having known her, I behave better for having dealt with her.

Okay, I'm finished with my list for today.  The good news, in addition to the fact that my dad's surgery went smoothly, is that I've been researching Ohio divorce law and Ohio is an "equitable-distribution" state.  This means, among other things, that upon divorce, the debts are divided up as fairly as possible to whomever created them.  My dad would still have tens of thousands of dollars worth of marital debt -- debt they earned jointly, like the mortgage -- but it would most likely free him from her mounting hospital bills.  The only thing really working against him is the fact that he is their sole source of income and a judge might determine that he stands a better chance of paying it off.  However, if he sues for divorce and cites the financial insanity -- and other insanity -- as cause, he might be able to get rid of those debts and of her, though I'm sure he'd have to pay alimony out of his significantly lighter check.  Also, there is a 90% chance (probably better) that he would get the house and would then be able to stop her from calling more and more people to do more and more expensive things to it.  Then I'd only have one parent spiraling out of control, and as long as she doesn't come knocking on my door (hell, if the pizza delivery guy can't find it, why should she be able to?), she can do whatever she damn well pleases.  Michael and I will move to Arizona where the schools are good, the property taxes are reasonable, and the weather is fine, and my dad can sell everything he owns and get a little house not too far away in the desert, the only place it seems he has ever been happy.

I am so looking forward to our Cleveland adventure.  Do you have any ideas for where we should eat?  The CDs I ordered for my dad arrived yesterday, so I now have some 15 CDs worth of jazz to upload onto his new mp3 player.  Plus, I consequently have a new $200 jazz collection.  Which is actually not bad.  I used to hate the stuff, but I think it must have seeped into my brain as a child because so much of it is familiar to me now, and hearing it is really soothing.  "Willow Weep For Me" and "Misty" always make me think of my dad because they are the two songs he played on his guitar every damn day for as long as I can remember.  I actually like them now, I guess because I hadn't heard them in so long.

It'll be good to see him, and I know there's a selfish reason behind it, but I love giving him gifts.  He's so good at receiving gifts, and I love that I know he'll really like this one and that maybe he won't be so sad or so lonely because he'll have something pretty and familiar to listen to and he'll know that it came from someone who loves him and wants him to get well.  I'd better head to bed since it's getting really late.  Be thinking of fun ways to spend our evening together.  There should definitely be mischief involved at one point or another, though I'm not sure how so.  I hope to talk to you soon, my best and favorite friend.  -- C

P.S.  #7)  She got upset when I told her after 11pm that I needed to go get ready for bed because I have work in the morning.  Michael says I should set the fax to call her in the middle of the day and wake her up and see how she likes it (ha!).  -- C

My First Halloween Costume

My first Halloween costume I can remember -- quite possibly my first one at all since I've never heard stories or seen photographic evidence of my dressing up before the age of three -- was the negligee my mother wore on her wedding night.  It was sheer polyester chiffon in Pepto-Bismol pink, trimmed in cheap lace of the same hue, and it comprised all the dress-up clothes I owned as a child.  I cannot remember a time before it was in my possession.

I remember several preschool Halloweens for which I threw it on over my sweatpants and t-shirt and -- with the addition of some kind of accessory such as a toy wand -- claimed to be a fairy, a princess, or a fairy princess.  It didn't occur to me until I was much older that this was strange.  I am not remotely surprised that my hoarder mother would recycle her decade-old wedding night negligee by gifting it to a toddler, but it does seem a stretch that she took me out of the house dressed that way -- both for trick-or-treating and to preschool costume parades at our Methodist church.  I always wore clothes underneath, but it was still very clearly sexy -- albeit heinously ugly -- lingerie.  I also can't remember a time I didn't personally know it was from her wedding night.  She made no secret of what it was, and it was the only piece of sexy anything she'd ever bought -- she made that fact well known too.  Somehow as a child I thought that other people couldn't tell what it was.  As far as I could tell, it was simply the most elegant article of clothing in the house.

Wedding Planning

I got engaged in my mid-twenties.  Michael* and I had known each other for five years, dated for four, and lived together for two.  I didn't know how to tell my parents we were getting married.  I was nervous about their reactions.  Michael called his parents excitedly to tell them the news.

A few days or possibly weeks after our engagement, I told my mother over the phone.  "I didn't realize you were serious about him," she said.  She told me I was too young to get married.  

Wedding planning was stressful and awful in many ways.  What I wanted, what my mother wanted, and what Michael's mother insisted upon were very different things (Michael didn't particularly care what we did).  I had been saving up for my wedding since my first job out of college.  I knew if I left it until I was engaged I wouldn't have enough time to save up enough money to fund it myself.  I figured since my parents wouldn't put up anything and my fiance's parents might go by the "bride's family pays" rule, I should plan to bankroll it myself.  Michael and I ended up funding it together, but he was delighted by my forethought.  Michael's parents ended up funding something too, but that was because they wanted to hold their own separate wedding for us over which they'd have complete control, and we told them we didn't care as long as they paid for it themselves.  (They're actually lovely people.  We get along really well.  But if you give them an ounce of power... I didn't know the ramifications back then.  It was a dark time.)

I could remember my mother badmouthing other people's weddings since I was a child.  She seemed affronted whenever people served full meals at their wedding receptions.  Our family weddings were usually ten minutes long and featured cake and punch at the end.  No meal, no dancing, no alcohol of any kind.  Just vows, cake, and go home.  More than that and she accused people of being "frou-frou" and putting on airs.  Michael's family considered wedding planning a competitive sport and a chance to show up other family members, as I later learned.  "Ooooh, real champagne.  This wedding is so much nicer than Amy's was.  Isn't it?"  

My ideal wedding would have been elegant and featured cocktails and rich food and dancing.  There would be lots of flowers, and it would be held in the evening and go until after dark, unlike the afternoon weddings in my family.  We didn't know where to start though.  Michael and I lived a thousand miles away from our parents, who lived hundreds of miles away from each other.  We looked at some locations near our home in New York City.  They were very expensive, but they would allow me to be involved in the planning without taking undue amounts of time off from work.  My mother wanted me to hold the wedding in my hometown so all the family could attend.  None of my family would be willing to travel except maybe my mother.  I mentioned looking at local wedding venues to my dad, and he told me he didn't care where we held the wedding, that while he couldn't travel for the wedding, he didn't have any particular desire to attend anyway.  I learned later that this was a lie.  He was very upset at the insinuation that I might have my wedding near my town instead of his.  He had apparently wanted me to feel very strongly that I must hold the wedding close to him because his attendance was important.  But he wanted me to feel more strongly about him being there than he did, and I simply did not.  To be honest, I didn't want either of my parents there.  I'd never tell them that though.

I knew my ideal wedding wouldn't work with my actual family.  I wouldn't be comfortable getting married in front of my parents, or Michael's, for that matter.  It just felt weird.  Short of recasting my family, my secondary wedding of choice would have been what I called a "Kids Only" wedding.  Michael's and my friends and his family members who are our contemporaries would be the only invitees.  No one would judge us or say I looked fat.  No one would yell at us.  I wouldn't have to worry that my virgin mother would want to talk to me about the impending wedding night.  It would be like eloping except with friends present.  But I knew the "Kids Only" wedding wouldn't work either because our parents would be so angry at being excluded that we'd effectively trade in a few months of grief for many years of shamings.

I gave up.  I told my parents we'd hold the wedding in their town.  Michael's family was willing to travel.  I made the mistake of telling my mother that I knew it was the only way Dad could attend, and she told me that was a terrible reason to hold the wedding there.  I should have been having my wedding in their town so that my maternal grandparents could attend.  Sure it's the same town and convenient to all of them, but clearly I don't love my grandparents and she was going to tell them so! She would tell them the truth about me!  So that happened.

I knew my wedding was going to be a bad experience, so I decided I should at least keep it inexpensive.  My mother used to complain that, when she got engaged to my dad, her father had told her, "Here's $100.  Go have a wedding."  They had been poor, and I guess my mother hadn't saved up anything toward her wedding in the years she'd been working, so she had had a cheap wedding.  Ceremony in the church where we both grew up, cake in the church basement afterwards.  I told my mother she could plan my wedding.  It would be in our hometown, and I would pay for it.  She had a budget of $5000 to work with.  I thought this would make her happy.  It was a truly terrible move on my part.

I knew $5k wasn't much for planning a wedding anymore, so I told my mother I wanted a ceremony in the church where we'd both grown up and a reception in the church basement, just like she'd had.  She'd need to pick out a cake and flowers, which seemed simple enough.  She'd always scorned "fancy" desserts, so I felt sure she would choose a basic cake flavor like vanilla or chocolate that wouldn't offend anyone.  I didn't really care how any of it turned out.  I knew I had to tell her it was great no matter what.  That was how she raised me.  I just didn't want anyone to yell at me anymore.

In hindsight, it seems weird that I turned the reins of wedding planning over to my mother AFTER she told me she was going to poison my grandparents against me.  But then again, maybe it's not so weird.  I would have done pretty much anything to avoid "getting in trouble."  It didn't matter that I was a financially independent adult living a thousand miles away from my parents.  I just wanted my mother to be happy and love me and not yell at me anymore.

My mother seemed excited to plan the wedding she'd never had.  She immediately started looking for new venues.  She found an outdoor location on a major highway in our town.  I didn't want an outdoor wedding, and based on what I knew of that highway, I could only envision the local Hooters surrounded by loud traffic.  I didn't want her to find a new venue.  I knew every venue I'd explored cost exponentially more than the church.  She said she loved the place though and wanted to fax me pictures.  I asked her to send me prices.  She said it didn't matter and she would pay for everything with the money she was getting from refinancing the mortgage on the house (as referenced in A List of Mom's Antics). 

She demanded I fly home so I could taste cakes.  I told her I trusted her to pick something.  If she liked it, I'd like it.  Something basic like vanilla or chocolate would be good.  She said no, they have so many flavors and fruit fillings, I needed to taste them all.  During this time, my mother would call me at odd hours in a variety of moods.  Once she called me around 6am because she wanted to know how to fax me information about wedding venues.  She said she had lost my phone number, she seemed upset at me for that, and she said she had spent the last hour calling people, waking them up, and asking if they knew how to reach me.  She isn't an early riser, and I am confident she hadn't been to bed yet.  Other times I would come home from work to a happy morning voicemail chattering away about wedding cakes and an afternoon voicemail calling me a ungrateful little bitch who she "didn't raise this way."  I never knew what to expect.  This was around the time I started drinking.  It helped me stop shaking, which I had started to do every time the phone rang.

My high school friend Allie, who had declared herself maid of honor and who I was too afraid of to tell no, asked if she could help with the wedding planning.  I said okay.  I would divide up the planning between her and my mother, who seemed overwhelmed and increasingly mentally scattered anyway.  My mother, however, was outraged at the suggestion that I might take away any of her responsibilities.  She said Allie could plan the whole wedding for all she cared.  She was done being treated this way.  The wedding was off.  She didn't raise me to be this ungrateful.  Allie took over attempts at planning for a little while, but it didn't get any easier.  I couldn't handle it anymore.  I was afraid of both women, and I just wanted it all to be over.  I put the entire wedding on hold for almost a year.  When I felt ready to approach it again, I looked up wedding planners online and called one whose gallery of wedding photos looked nice.  It was one of the best decisions of my life. 

Wedding planning changed dramatically as soon as I talked to my wedding planner, Lisa.  She was polite, easy going, and knew how to plan an event.  Her taste was similar to mine, as evidenced by the photos on her website, so I basically just gave her some pictures and ideas of things I liked and she showed me what she thought we should do.  I usually agreed.  Easy.  Fun.  All the leg work was hers, and she didn't yell at me once.  "Are you really this easy?" she would ask when I agreed with her choices or trusted her professional judgment on something.  "This is unreal."  Lisa was a godsend.  She even helped me with my parents.

The wedding ended up being much more expensive and much more elegant than what I'd previously planned, but we had enough saved up.  It was more like my "ideal wedding" scenario except with my family present.  There was an open bar, dinner, an elaborate tiered cake, dancing, and even chair covers, which inexplicably cost $800 to rent for the night but really brought the rooms together.  Allie was a musician and remained in charge of the ceremony music, which was coincidentally the biggest source of stress for me in all the wedding planning.

I knew I had no control over my mother's behavior -- or anyone's but my own -- so I set myself two manageable goals for the wedding day:

1. I would be a happy, gracious bride.  I didn't have to actually enjoy the day or "be fully present" or anything tricky like that.  I just didn't want to give anyone cause to say I was "being a bridezilla" or to talk smack about me.  If someone talked smack about me, I wanted their listeners to be able to look over at me, see me smiling and happy and thanking everyone for coming, and think that the other person was unnecessarily being an asshole; and
2. Be legally married by the end of it.

My husband and I made a few contingency plans in case my mother tried something at the wedding.  In addition to the wedding planner, who would keep my newly divorced parents away from each other, I enlisted two close friends and bridesmaids to act as a buffer between my mother and me.  If my mother tried to engage me in a lengthy conversation, scream at me, cry at me, or do anything that might be hard for me to cope with at my own wedding, they would step in.  They would engage her in conversation, invent a reason I was needed elsewhere, and allow me to extricate myself gracefully. 

We also needed a contingency plan in case my mother faked a heart attack.  I've posted here before about my mother faking a heart attack while I was home on break from college and on the phone with my boyfriend (now husband).  Because I think there is a decent chance she faked that heart attack because I was paying attention to my boyfriend instead of her, I was very concerned she might fake another one at our wedding.  What then?  We'd be out thousands of dollars and still unmarried at the end of the day.  Being married was one of my two goals for the entire day.  If I ignored her or said, "It's okay, everyone, she's just faking!" I'd look completely heartless, regardless of if I was right.  Looking like a happy, gracious bride was my only other goal for the day, so I couldn't very well act like a harpy.  "Canceled wedding" and "heartless daughter" both sounded like outcomes my mother would potentially consider a win, so we enlisted more help.  Fortunately, quite a few of my husband's and my friends from college are doctors.  Two different doctors volunteered to leap to my mother's aid in the event of a fake heart attack or other unforeseen ailment, give her a quick once over, call out to the room, "It's okay, everyone!  Carry on with the wedding!  She's in good hands!" and remove her from the premises for further care.  Should anyone present insist on halting the wedding for her, the doctors would insist that we carry on, so we would.  Doctors' orders.

My mother called me to RSVP for the wedding.  I hadn't heard from her in awhile.  She sounded good.  Feeble, but not angry.  I think she'd been depressed.  I think that was usually what prompted her to stop calling me for weeks at a time.  We had a pleasant exchange.  There was lightness in her voice, like she was trying for me, almost like I wasn't her offspring at all.  She warned me she wouldn't look good at the wedding.  "You always look good to me, Mommy," I said, which made my skin crawl, but I felt it was expected of me.  She told me about all the gifts she'd bought me to take on my honeymoon.  She said she had packed an oversized suitcase full of bathrobes and slippers and massage oils and heart-shaped things she had found in the Target dollar aisle.

She said her parents wouldn't be attending my wedding.  My grandfather hadn't attended a wedding in decades, and she said my grandma didn't want to embarrass me with how poorly she gets around.  I insisted she wouldn't -- embarrassing me with someone else's poor mobility is not a thing that has ever existed -- but I'm sure my insistence was moot.  I don't know why my grandmother wouldn't attend -- maybe my mother had successfully turned her against me, or she was self-conscious, or there weren't enough able-bodied people to accompany both her and my mother to the wedding, or Grandpa didn't let her out of the house anymore, or she didn't want to be out in public with my mother -- but I'm confident any reason my mother gave me would be one she'd contrived herself for her own purposes.  Historically, her purposes tended to be guilt or alienation.

Michael and I flew to my hometown a few days before the wedding.  They have a waiting period for marriage licenses there, so we put the extra days to good use and spent our time swimming at the hotel pool and relaxing.  The stress still managed to run me down, and I fell physically ill like I had for my high school graduation.  My dad was delivered from the hospital across the state two days before my wedding.  I spent the day with him, taking him out to lunch and to pick up his tux and rented shoes for the wedding.  It was a difficult day, but I don't remember how much was from being with him and how much was from being sick and exhausted and wishing I could be asleep.  I remember him mostly being nice, but it was still unexpectedly hard spending the day with him in person.  He knew I was sick, but he wanted me to accompany him to his haircut too.  I didn't say no.  I was afraid I'd make him mad at me.  This seems to have been a major theme throughout my life up to that point.

I was taken aback when I saw my mother at the wedding.  One of her younger brothers had brought her and was pushing her in a wheelchair.  She had lost about 80 lbs from starving herself and sleeping all day in the months leading up to and surrounding her divorce, and she said she had trouble walking (as detailed in More Motherly Antics).  What the doctors called muscle atrophy from her months of staying in bed -- cured with some regular exercise over time, they assured her -- she insisted was an undiagnosed degenerative disease that would soon leave her bedbound like my dad.  Hence the wheelchair.  She wore an old knit pair of pants and top that she used to wear to the laundromat when I was younger.  Her hair was greasy, not just at the roots but all the way through, as though she hadn't washed it in weeks.  She wore no shoes.  She looked twenty years older than the last time I'd seen her, she was wild-eyed, and I also had a sort of visceral fear reaction to her at that point from the years of random screaming phone calls and voice mails.   

I shut away all my thoughts and put on my happy mask.  My in-laws were there in their evening finery, along with the wedding party and almost everyone else.  I knew my mother stood out.  I knew my in-laws, who had never met her before, would ask Michael what was wrong with her.  If anyone had asked me, I would have smiled sadly and said in a quiet, rueful voice, "She's severely mentally ill.  She refuses any kind of treatment.  It's really good to see her though," and silently dared anyone to judge me.  I was the gracious, happy bride, dammit.  No one asked though.  I think they could tell.

I hugged my mother and thanked her for coming.  I treated her the way a happy, gracious bride would treat her loving mother.  It was a part in a play.  She smiled and told me I looked beautiful.  If there was more to the exchange than that, I don't remember it.  My uncle wheeled her away while I greeted other guests.  I don't know what my uncle thought of that day.  I remember he wore jeans as he always had and he didn't smile, not even in the photos.  He was never an overly cheerful guy, but he used to smile and laugh with family.  I don't know if my mother had poisoned him against me as she had promised to do with her parents or if he just didn't want to be there.  I also know now that he had a cocaine problem, in addition to his diagnosed mental illness.  He died the next year of a heart attack.  He was barely fifty.

My dad got lost on the way to the wedding.  The ceremony and reception were held in our hometown, but I hadn't lived there since I was a teenager, so I didn't know driving directions particularly well.  My dad had lived there almost his entire life, but he got lost, so he called me from his van, screaming to give him directions from his current, unknown location.  I remember standing in the parking lot in my wedding gown and veil, fighting back tears, trying to orient myself in such a way that I could somehow help him and make him stop yelling at me.  I thrust my phone at the wedding planner and begged her to help.  Wedding planners are amazing.  I assume she was able to give my dad directions or at least talk him through his period of lostness (our town isn't that big, he would have found the venue eventually), but the most important thing she did was deflect the screaming from me while I composed myself. 

Most of my extended family members didn't attend, even tables full of cousins and their children who had RSVPed "yes."  I don't know why.  Maybe they do that with all weddings.  A few of my favorite cousins came though -- Uncle Charles's children -- even one who had to travel to be there.  They even gave us wedding gifts.  I was very touched and happy to see them.

None of the contingency plans surrounding my mother ended up being necessary.  She behaved perfectly.  No fake heart attacks, no loud pronouncements of who would be a more appropriate match for her daughter, as she had made at my college graduation.  As my husband and I stood outside the reception hall waiting for the wedding planner to cue us for our grand entrance as a married couple, my mother and her brother were leaving.  She has a long history of leaving events early, but not usually quite that early.  She took me aside and said something nice.  I don't remember what it was.  "Beautiful ceremony," maybe.  She was crying, and I'm not sure why.  That's the part I remember.  Maybe they were happy tears, but she was never the type for those, and it seemed she was crying hard.  My thought at the time was that she was upset I'd foiled her attempt to make me look like a terrible daughter who didn't take enough care of her mother to ensure she was bathed and properly dressed.  Maybe I don't give her enough credit.  Or maybe she was too high to be that self-aware.  She did appear to be high.  I said something nice back, and then they left.  I never spoke to either of them again.

The reception was beautiful.  I accomplished my two goals for the day, and I even had a good time dancing and talking with my friends and family.  I also have photographic evidence of the last time I saw my mother.  No one can convince me she wasn't wild-eyed or that I'm remembering it all wrong.  I have the pictures to prove it, and my closest friends were witnesses.  No more gaslighting me that she is really okay or that the real problems are all my own.  For all these reasons, I consider my wedding a win.

*Not his real name.

My Mother's Oral Family History

I have always known who my biological mother is.  She was the same mother who raised me.  But finding out about her family history was harder than finding my biological father.  I haven't found a single person in her family interested in genealogy but me, and our family is full of secrets that we only know from oversharing.

I grew up within a mile of my maternal grandparents and saw them at least once a week for the first eighteen years of my life.  There were certain things I grew up knowing, stories I grew up hearing over and over again, but they were specific and limited.  I knew my grandmother had had ten pregnancies in eleven years.  I knew my only biological aunt had died of SIDS on Christmas Eve and that my then 3-year-old mother had tormented her own mother with the persistent question, "Where is my baby?" for weeks afterward.  I knew my mother had been named after her own maternal grandmother, and that her grandmother had hated her own name so much that she'd gone by her middle name nearly all her life.  These were some of the facts my mother recited to me regularly, just like the story of my birth (I "ripped [her] from end to end") and of my brother's adoption ("she called and said, 'Do you want a peanut?' A peanut is what they called premature babies.")  They were her oral history, and they are embedded in my brain.

I knew my grandmother had gotten married at age fifteen because she wanted to run away from home, but I didn't know she had been running away from her "wicked stepmother."  I knew her own mother had married at fourteen and lost custody of my then 2-year-old grandmother when she became a teenage divorcee, but I didn't know my great-grandfather's name or that he was a college graduate, unlike anyone else in my family for the next 75 years.  Grandma's maiden name was Adams, or Addams* -- I didn't know which -- and my mother hated my great-grandfather for taking Grandma away from her mother.  He "didn't like girls," my mother told me when I asked why Dante had been invited to meet him and I hadn't.  I knew he'd written and self-published a memoir that my mother claimed was a catalogue of his sexual exploits, but I didn't know the name of the book, and I didn't know that he lived within a half-hour's drive of my home for over a decade of my childhood.  I didn't know he was the only person in my family to live to the age of ninety, or that he'd died within a year of "the love of his life," my Grandmother's longtime stepmother.  I didn't know they had given my grandmother a half-sister, who had finished college but who hadn't been able to bear children of her own.  She has an adopted daughter close to my age who has a graduate degree.  They're both on Facebook now.  She looks like a younger, healthier, more affluent version of my grandmother. 

I've mentioned before how my cousin helped me with my search for maternal family by providing old letters our grandmother had sent her.  Our grandmother used to write letters once a week to pretty much everyone she knew who lived out of state.  My cousin had kept several years worth of Grandma letters.  She pulled them out of storage at my request.  She said they shared too much information, that she wouldn't be comfortable rereading them if Grandma had still been alive.  They read more like private journal entries than something you would say to a granddaughter.  Those letters also held names and dates I hadn't absorbed from my mother's oral history.  They gave me search terms, and the knowledge my mother had embedded in my brain filled in the blanks.  My cousin didn't know the things I knew -- even our great-grandmother's first name -- so I was able to fill in some blanks for her too. 

I assume my great-grandmother's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage because she got married at the age of fourteen and didn't give birth to my grandmother until over a year later.  I learned these dates from documents on Ancestry.com.  She got divorced in the 1930s at the age of 18 and lost custody of my grandmother to her ex-husband.  My great-grandfather left my then 2-year-old grandmother with his parents and moved on.  My great-grandmother spent time in the Deep South, though neither I nor my cousin knows why.  My grandmother's letters made it sound like purgatory.  My grandmother lived with her own grandparents until she was eight.  She became close with her father's only sister, whose name I recognized because my grandmother had visited her every week at her nursing home until she died in the 1990s.  At the age of eight, my grandmother moved in with her newly remarried father and the woman she referred to in letters as her "wicked stepmother."  Her father called her the love of his life.  My grandmother wasn't happy there.  As I mentioned earlier, she ran away at the age of fifteen to marry my grandfather.  She didn't know how to cook, and she never learned how to drive.  Neither of them finished high school.  They eloped on my grandfather's birthday, allegedly to distract the court registrar out of asking for proof of my grandmother's age.  It apparently worked.  Their marriage license lists her age as 18.  My eldest uncle was born ten months later.

I've found my great-grandparents' headstones.  My great-grandmother remarried at least once, but she survived her final husband, so even her death certificate doesn't list his full name.  My mother told me she died of stomach cancer, but her death certificate cites cardiac arrest.  I've learned that death certificates list whatever catalyst literally killed the person that day and will never say what led to what killed them, like cancer or diabetes or blunt force trauma.  I come from a long line of ladies who battled their weight, and my great-grandmother relished the easy weight loss that came with dying of stomach cancer.  One of the few pictures I've seen of her shows her svelte figure standing with both legs inside one leg of pants, demonstrating that she was half her previous size and delighted by it. 

My grandmother's aneurism created the same effect.  The weight melted off when she spent months on a liquid diet, unable to swallow most food without choking.  She recovered though and was unhappily battling her weight again by the time she died some fifteen years later.  One of my last memories of her was of visiting her and my grandpa's duplex and witnessing one of her daily weigh-ins.  She had gained weight and was disappointed.  She was in her seventies. 

Mental illness was my mother's best diet.  She lost around eighty pounds when she stopped eating or drinking or getting up from the couch in her early fifties.  She was pleased with the effect and bragged to me over the phone in the days leading up to my wedding.  It was the thinnest she had been since before I was born.  She commandeered one of my dad's old wheelchairs because she had grown too weak to walk.  When I saw her next, she had aged twenty years.  Her formerly thick brown hair was sparse and grey, and the skin hung loose from her face and neck like wax dripping from a candle.  She reminded me of Emperor Palpatine.

My grandfather's lineage was much harder to trace because his parents were never married or lived together, and he never spoke about either of them.  I met one of his half-siblings once as a child, but it turns out there were at least six more.  More on Grandpa next time.

An Open Letter to My Father

I found you.  I did the thing I thought I'd never be able to do and I found you.  I wrote you a letter, and you wrote back.  You answered my questions and told me never to contact you again because your wife doesn't like it, and that is where we stand now.  I am so fortunate to have gotten this far.  I know your name and your favorite book and where you grew up.  I know how my grandparents died and I've seen their wedding photo.  I have photos of more of your extended family than of my mother's, thanks to Ancestry.com.  More photos of you than of the parents who raised me.  There used to be more photos of my family, but a lot got lost when my mother fell apart.

I don't know if you meant for your letter to sound condescending or if I read that tone into it.  It doesn't matter really.  I never expected you to want a relationship with me.  Lunch someday would have been nice, just to hear your voice and have a conversation, but if I'm being honest, I never expected it to happen.  My friends didn't even think you'd respond.  In hindsight, I wonder if you told your wife about my letter because you're so open with her or if she opened it herself because she reads your mail.  It doesn't matter really.  Just curious.  I know so little about you and your family dynamic.

Thank you for telling my brother and sister about me.  In hindsight, I realize you were probably up against a wall.  After your brother saw me on a DNA database, he had to contact your son to get a hold of your current phone number to ask you if you had any illegitimate children he should know about, so a dangerous number of people already knew something was up.  You probably thought you couldn't keep me a secret if you'd wanted to.  Regardless, thank you for telling my brother and sister about me, even if you did forbid me to contact them myself, as though forbidding me is a thing you have the power to do.  They both reached out to me before I even received your letter, so that took some of the sting out of it.  Did you ever consider they might want to know their donor conceived siblings?  They do, and it seems like it didn't occur to you.  I'm glad you told them though.  I know you aren't close with them and they're not close with each other, but they seem like good people and they welcomed me. 

Your son and I look a lot alike.  You'll know that if you've looked me up online.  I guess we both look like you.  We have the same sense of humor too.  Yours?  Your daughter tagged me as her sister on Facebook, much to the shock of some people who thought they knew the entirety of your immediate family.  I think that's what she was going for though -- shock factor.  She does that a lot, doesn't she?  It was exactly what you forbid me to do in your letter -- exactly what I wouldn't dare to post online myself -- so I got a kick out of it too.  I hope to get to know them better.

If I find more siblings, I'm going to give them your name and the information you gave me.  You know that, right?  They might contact you, just like I did.  Prepare yourself for that. 

I don't really talk to my parents anymore.  I could never actually tell you this, but you brought them up in your letter as Paragons of Child Wanting, so I want you to know.  I don't tell most people about my parents because it's not their business and I don't want them marking me as damaged goods or a terrible person, but the people who know my parents -- my best friend and my husband and my extended family -- they understand.  If I wanted you to know about my parents, I could post one of my wedding photos to Facebook where your kids would see it and wonder what's wrong with my mother.  They might be shocked enough to mention it to you, though the more I learn about your relationship with them, the more I doubt they tell you much.  That's how severely mentally ill my mother is -- it's obvious even in still photos.  Just thought you ought to know.  The things wrong with my dad don't come through in a photo.  They'd just see his wheelchair.

I don't know what I still want from you.  I wrote to you in the hopes that you'd tell your kids about me and tell me about yourself and maybe someday agree to meet me for lunch.  You gave me most of that and I still want more.  I realize I'm in a place of privilege to be able to want so much.  I didn't think I'd ever know who you are and here I am wanting to hear your voice and wanting to know what kind of jokes make you laugh.  I've already found everything about you I could online.  I wish you'd start a blog or something.

I think what I really want, at least what I really want for now, is for you to feel something for me.  Even if it's regret for the actions that led to my existence.  I'd settle for regret, you know.  I want you to lay awake at least once thinking about me, even if what you're thinking is how much you hate me for finding you and writing to you and getting your wife all "irrationally angry," as your son put it.  I want to be something to you, and I will never tell you these things.  Even if we were in contact and you wanted to get to know me, I could never tell you these things.  I would be always on my guard, always showing my best self, never taking my mask off because I know that I have always been nothing to you, just as I have spent the last thirty years being nothing to my half-siblings, and I have to constantly be earning the privilege of their inclusion.  One slip up and they can write me off forever because, while people say you can't choose your family, we both know that isn't true.  If my mother can say you're "just a donor" and you "don't count," that's a choice, even if you both made it for me.  My parents adopted another child -- that was a choice that was made for him.  And when I decided I didn't want to see any of them ever again, that was my choice.  You can indeed choose your family.  I want your children to continue choosing me, and I am afraid they won't, and you won't, no matter what I do. 

I'm glad I reached out to you.  I don't know if I ever want to hear from you again.  It's not a secret wish I hold onto or anything.  Mostly, when one of us dies, I just want the regrets to be on your end.

The Time I Took Over My Parents' Finances

When I was in my early 20s, after my mother went off the deep end and my dad was living in the hospital across the state, my mother decided she was going to ruin my dad's life.  This might sound hyperbolic, and I don't know what she was actually trying to do or even if she knew, but I think "ruining my dad's life" sums it up rather well. 

As part of the deal for refinancing the house, she got a check for $40,000.  It was all gone within three weeks.  No one knows where it went.  She had elaborate plans, such as renting a bus and taking troubled orphans to the movies for a day, but none of it ever happened.  She had previously vowed to fix up her house, buy her parents a house, and pay for my wedding, but unsurprisingly none of that happened either.  The money just disappeared, as money in her possession so often did.

Not long after, my mother called me and told me she wasn't paying the mortgage anymore because she wanted the house to go into foreclosure so that my dad wouldn't have a home anymore when he got out of the hospital.  Please understand that I am not claiming to read her mind -- wanting him to be homeless was the explanation she gave me.  It was her house too, and it was where she lived at the time, so I don't know where she planned to go.  I somehow doubt she had a plan.  I decided to intervene because one or both of my parents becoming homeless could adversely affect me personally even more than intervening in their broken marriage would, and I went about setting up a joint checking account with my dad at a bank in my town, far away from my parents.  

It isn't easy to set up a joint account with someone who is bedridden in a hospital halfway across the country, but with the help of a polite customer service agent at my bank and three-way calling, we did it on my lunch hour.  Then my dad had to put through paperwork to have his veterans benefit checks direct deposited to our new joint account rather than his account with my mother.  This was the start of my managing my parents' finances.  This was how I found out just how much money they had.

When the first check went into my joint account with my dad, I contacted the mortgage company.  It's generally really hard to get people to talk to you about someone else's account, but if they're some kind of debt collectors and you want to give them money, they really don't care who you are.  My mother hadn't paid the mortgage since before the refinance, so they owed more than one payment.  I paid it up to date.  I changed the mailing address on the mortgage statements so that they would come to my apartment, after making sure there was no way I was somehow taking on my parents' debt by doing so.  Then I transferred the remaining money into my parents' joint account for my mother to spend as she saw fit.  This is what I would do on the first of each month.

Soon my mother called my dad in the hospital and told him that, if he didn't give her more money, she was going to sell all of his possessions.  The problem with that was that all of the money that wasn't going toward the mortgage was already going to her every month.  Unless you count his comparatively meager social security checks that my dad set aside to pay the property tax on the house, there was no more. 

My dad had tens of thousands of dollars worth of musical instruments and amps and related equipment.  My mother sold all of it.  She also gave someone his computer in exchange for a second used refrigerator she decided to keep in the garage.  All the while, she called me regularly to complain about her week and make money- and divorce-related threats.  Once she said I had to send her $2k of my own money or else she would spend the money my dad had set aside to pay the property taxes on the house (I sent her nothing).  Another time she threatened to file for divorce unless my dad sent her an extra $2k.  I don't know why the number was so often $2k, but it was. 

That's around the time I convinced my dad to file for divorce.

More Motherly Antics

My best friend also forwarded me this follow-up email I sent her a few days later.  

Dear Jerry,

You always make me feel so much better.  As a means of keeping a log of my mother's antics, I will note here what she has done since my last email.  Feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.

Yesterday she called me three times between 8:30pm and 11:30pm.  Her last message was that she was afraid I was dead in a ditch somewhere and that I needed to return her calls.  I called her back, pretending to have been asleep (I was watching The Colbert Report), and told her not to worry so that she wouldn't call again and actually wake me up.  I had been trying to wean her from the daily calls.  She sounded so offended when I asked why she was calling at 11:30 at night and what terrible thing had happened that I thought I'd get a break for at least a couple of days.  Then she called today.  Apparently she had been trying to call me repeatedly but had ditched her cell phone (she says her fingers aren't strong enough to turn it off) for a new flip phone and had been getting my number wrong.

She said she thinks she has MS, and when I mentioned that that was one of the two diseases she said the doctor had ruled out, she said, "Oh yeah," but that the doctor wanted to do an MRI just in case.  She said she went to the eye doctor and said she has the beginning signs that she will someday probably get cataracts.  

She went to the VA hospital and talked to a quadriplegic woman about discounts on hotels in Cleveland (I doubt I have all the details on this visit).  I didn't tell her I already have reservations because I didn't want her asking where I'll be, whether I'm sleeping with my fiance, or if she can stay with me.  If she asks, I will tell her a different hotel.  The same woman also told her various charities to call where she can beg them to pay her debts.  I somehow doubt they will oblige.

She lost her wedding/engagement ring.  She said it was 35 years old and probably not worth anything anymore anyway.  I explained that diamonds and gold don't work that way.  

She told me that she has fallen down 40 times in the last month.  Once was when she 'broke' her nose.  She mentioned today that she had lain in the front yard screaming but no one had noticed, so she had pulled herself to her car and called 911 -- an ambulance and firetruck came.  Earlier this week, she fell in her parents' yard and screamed and the workmen in the next yard didn't do anything, and her father claimed he thought the sound was just a bird.  When he saw it was her, he told her he'd call her brother to come help her.  She told him he should call an ambulance instead so they know where the house is in case they need an ambulance later and it is hard to find the front door.  He called her brother.

She said today that she visited another possible wedding venue (we have the church already reserved but they made the mistake of not requiring a down payment), and she claimed she forgot the price.  She loved the place.  She said the woman who runs it will send me pictures.  I told her I wanted prices.  She said it's immaterial because she will pay for everything with all the money they are getting.

My Mother the Virgin

[Warning: I do mention sex in this post.  But as the title might indicate, it's rather limited.]

I want to write about how my parents created their family through adoption and donor conception, but I think I need to explain this part first.  I've mentioned how my dad became paralyzed from the chest down.  He could never walk again, but that was far from being the only side effect.  He had no control over his muscles below his chest.  He couldn't sit up without something to lean against.  He had violent muscle spasms.  He urinated through a catheter into a bag he wore tied to his leg under his pants, and he set aside an evening each week for "bowel training," when he sat on his toilet for hours, screaming curses and attempting to defecate.  He also experienced "counter attacks" -- a clever phrase I imagine came from the VA hospital -- when he catastrophically shat himself without warning, often when we were out for dinner. 

He also couldn't have sex.  He'd been this way since he was 21.  I didn't know that until my mother told me I was conceived via artificial insemination.  Until then, I'd assumed I just didn't understand what my dad physiologically could and could not do. 

I've mentioned that a major facet of my mother's identity seemed to be wrapped up in the fact that she was a virgin.  She told me she had been saving herself for marriage because she knew if she got pregnant out of wedlock (like much of her family) it would "kill" her mother.  I don't know if my grandmother ever told her anything of this nature, or if she intuited it or simply made it up.  My mother has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the topic of sex, to put it mildly, so I can imagine one of the things that appealed to her about my dad might have been her ability to get married and have children -- as she'd always planned to do, either because she really wanted to or simply because it was expected -- without being expected to have sex. 

My mother used to reminisce about her wedding night -- how she and my dad laid on their bed in their new apartment, fully clothed, eating takeout barbecue and watching the traffic out the window.  She told it like it was her fondest memory of marriage.  She really liked watching traffic go by.  When I was a teenager she added a new part to the story:  he had approached her with his flaccid penis in some attempt at intercourse, she had said something along the lines of, "Ew, gross," and he'd never tried to touch her that way again.  It's not the sort of story a mother ought to tell her daughter, but I can't help but feel sorry for both of them.  More rational or hope-filled people might have annulled their marriage after that, but my parents stuck it out for 35 years.  Their misery compounded.

Meet the Parents

My parents have hated each other since before I was born.  I saw them kiss once, a quick goodbye peck on the lips when my dad dropped us off at the airport for a trip to Walt Disney World while he stayed at home with the dog.  I got the impression my parents didn't confide much in each other, but they told me lots of things.  Here is how they ended up together, based on the stories they each told me.

My parents met in high school when they worked together at a local fried chicken joint.  They weren't friends, and they attended different schools on opposite sides of town.  My dad graduated and enlisted in the air force to avoid being drafted to the front lines of the Vietnam War.  My mother graduated a year later. 

My dad worked on airplanes as a mechanic during the war.  When he wasn't in Vietnam, he lived in a house near the base in Reno.  He loved the dry heat of the desert and still talks about it in a wistful sort of way.  He got into a motorcycle accident while he was home on leave at the age of 21.  He said he was riding his motorcycle when a cop hit him while making an illegal left turn.  The handlebars of my dad's motorcycle had pushed around through his back, severing his spinal column.  He spent the next two weeks in a coma, and when he woke up, he said he received notice that the police had benevolently decided not to ticket him for the accident and also that he was never going to walk again. 

My dad had been seriously dating a beautiful red-haired girl at the time of his accident.  He'd been planning to propose to her.  She was the love of his life, he told me.  When he woke from the coma, he drove her away.   She had still wanted to be with him, but she deserved a fully functioning man, he didn't care what she wanted, and it goes on.  I don't think he really expected her to leave, but she finally did, and he was alone.  The scenario seems predictable if you've met him. 

He was still recovering from the accident when he received a letter from my mother.  She was still living with her parents in the town where they'd both grown up, taking a course to become a licensed practical nurse.  She'd read about his accident in the local newspaper and wanted to reconnect.  I presume this was about the time that my dad realized the beautiful red-haired girl wasn't coming back and that my mother might be his last option.

My mother said she had liked him when they worked together at the fried chicken joint in high school but that he'd been a jerk then.  Now he was paralyzed from the chest down, wheelchair-bound, and largely dependent on someone to take care of him.  Why should that change how I felt about him? she wondered.  "Everyone has a right to a little bit of happiness," she told me.  Besides, the doctors had only anticipated he'd live five years beyond the accident.  With her help, he could have a wife and a house and a child in that amount of time.  "I always thought of your dad as my first husband," she explained.  And she started writing him letters.

My parents wrote back and forth, and when my dad moved back into his parents' house in their hometown, my mother started coming over, courting him.  She was only twenty but had already been engaged twice.  My dad was sorry to leave Reno.  He'd liked the desert.  He'd liked riding his motorcycle.  He'd liked the red-haired girl.  My parents' dates largely consisted of hanging out at my dad's parents' house, snacking and watching television.  A man my mother used to date came back to town for a visit and asked if he could take her out.  My mother asked my dad what she should say.  He said he didn't care, they weren't exclusive, and she could do what she wanted, so she made plans.  When their date finally rolled around, my dad asked her, "Are we getting married, or what?"  She canceled the date with the other man, and my parents were engaged.

My Biggest Regret

My biggest regret about the state of my relationship with my mother is what it did to my relationship with my maternal grandmother.  My grandmother was the nicest, sanest person in my family.  She was cheerful, kind, and generous with her time, attention, and any money she and my grandfather had.  She was the only babysitter I ever had growing up, and she would cook for me, help me sew clothes for my dolls, and let me help water the enormous number of flowers in her yard.  When I went away to college, she wrote to me every week -- as she wrote to all her friend and family who lived far away -- and I wrote back occasionally too.

By the time I graduated from college, my mother's mental illness was already starting to be apparent to people who met her.  She would say cruel things to people's faces -- not just to me and my dad, but to her brothers and parents who she loved too -- and you never really knew what mood to expect from her when the phone rang, but she was often yelling and angry.  It was around that time that I started shaking every time the phone rang.

I was living far away, working full-time, and engaged to be married.  During one phone call with my mother, she asked where we were holding the wedding, since my fiance and I lived about a thousand miles away from our parents, who also lived hundreds of miles away from each other.  I told her we'd decided to get married in my hometown so that my dad -- the only parent of the four who we knew wouldn't be able to travel long-distance -- could attend.  My mother was angry.  It was a convenient location for her and everyone else in my family, but she said since I was doing it for my dad, I obviously didn't care about my grandparents, who also live in that same town.  "I'm going to tell them the truth about you!" she said.  I didn't know what she thought "the truth" about me was, but I knew it wouldn't be good.  She told me that as soon as she hung up the phone she was going to call her parents and tell them all about me and how I don't love them at all. 

When my mother hung up the phone, I called my grandparents.  As soon as I could get through, my grandmother answered the phone sounding unusually tired and unlike herself.  I told her I just wanted her to know that, no matter what my mother tells her about me, I loved her and Grandpa.  She said okay and that they loved me too, but she still sounded tired.  I'm not sure if she sounded that way because of things my mother had said, the fact that her only daughter was so clearly mentally ill, or just because she was getting old and tired.

I saw my grandma a couple more times after that, but she didn't come to my wedding.  My mother said it was because she didn't want to embarrass me with how poorly she got around.  My mother came to the wedding though, dressed in some old knit pants and a t-shirt and a wheelchair she didn't need.  She wore no shoes, and based on the oiliness of her hair, I don't think she could have showered within the last two weeks.  She was wild-eyed, and one of my bridesmaids mentioned that she appeared to be high. 

One of my uncles escorted her there, and they left before the reception.  By that time, my parents had divorced and my mother had moved back in with her parents, where her brothers came by a couple of times each day to do the laundry and cook their meals.  That was how they lived until both my grandparents died and my mother had to find somewhere else to go.