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Posts tagged ‘parenting’

Oct 4

22 Comments

Hell Hath No Fury

Daddy is not coming for me. I’ve waited. Since I was three. Since he and Mommy had that huge fight in court. He lost everything, so I’m told. Trying to take me away from Mommy.

I lost things, too.

My Mamou died during the whole business. She was my only other family, besides Mommy and Aunt Bertie. And Daddy.

She lived in a house on St. Charles. Twenty steps from the streetcar to the zoo. I counted, all the way to the Neutral Ground, when she sent me with one of the servants.

I remember seeing Daddy in that house. The way his upright bass matched his voice against the tall ceilings. Mamou played along, her fingernails tapping on her leg.

Sometimes, we made our own band. I was the lead singer. Daddy played strings, and Mamou pounded chords on the piano. We were a threesome. Formidable, Mamou said. We threw the doors open and let the Garden District in. Hearing that music, mixed with traffic and the streetcar, is the last time I remember being happy.

Now, Daddy’s gone. All the way to Nashville. Mamou’s gone, too. Stuck in one of those above-ground graveyards, where her body doesn’t get pushed underwater.

I’m managing. I smile at Mommy’s boys and try to charm them like she wants.

But, I’m waiting for Daddy.

To save me from this scary, confusing life of Mommy’s. Her cards and her boys.

And me.

Welcome to Mommy Dearest, a series of fiction. If this is your first visit to the series, please click here to read the first installment, go here for the second installment and click here for the third. Thanks for your feedback on fiction posts. Your thoughts will help me make a believable character.

Jan 11

66 Comments

Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall

My Mom likes to tell the story of lugging all ten pounds of me around for an extra month of pregnancy. Apparently, I wasn’t interested in moving. Multiple times, she thought I was dead in there, because I didn’t kick, poke, turn cartwheels, prod, practice my jazz hands, or whatever it is fat unborn babies do to torture their mommies. Heck, I didn’t even care to go through the trauma of labor enough to engage. The doctor ended up having to pull me out with forceps and held me upside down by the ankles. I thanked him for rescuing me with loud emissions of gas along with my tears.

Mom loved me in spite of my multiple ejaculations.

Still, I wasn’t in any hurry to move. I didn’t walk until eighteen months. Today, that would put me in the zero-ith percentile or something, but back then, it didn’t matter much. I excelled in other areas.

I could whup four-year-olds at talking. I talked all. The. Time. Real words. Complex sentences. From a tender age, I could even ‘read,’ code for making my Mom plow through the same book hundreds of times in a row. Arty the Smarty and The Saggy Baggy Elephant were the Disney movies of my era, and I memorized them down to the turn of every enthralling page. I could never, ever get enough of those stories. We read them over. And over. And over again.

Children morph into adults and leave maddening traits buried in the past. Not me. Nope. I am the Peter Pan of maddening traits, and my most obnoxious one, according to dear MTM, is my repetitive tendency to play certain music. Over. And over. And over again.

Specifically, the British band Coldplay.

For Christmas, I bought Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay’s latest CD, and stuffed it in MTM’s stocking with tingling fingers and ringing in my ears. It was HIS gift. Yet, I coveted it. Could I open it and listen to it and then somehow force it back into the shrink wrap without any obvious evidence of tampering? If I bought two copies, how would I listen to mine a million times in a row when I could never be sure when he would come home and catch me in the act of cheating on him with HIS Christmas present?

I controlled myself. Now, he’s paying for it. The other day, he drew the proverbial line in the sand. Andra, we cannot play Mylo Xyloto for the twentieth time in succession. Stop the insanity. Pick something else.

Parachutes. Coldplay. That’s what I picked.

Dec 27

45 Comments

Mama Get Your Gun Redux

In honor of my father’s Southern Gothic purchase of a Beretta for my sweet mother, a repost.

When I was little, my Mom had this incredible purse. One of those highly-structured bags from the 1960′s, it was covered in tan snakeskin with an off-center brass clasp along the top. Even the interior was lined with leather. Oh, I was too tiny and oblivious to appreciate all of these details back then. I merely thought the purse was pretty.

Mom had this bag made for her by someone in Nashville, Tennessee. I don’t know whether she designed it herself or if she let the maker draw it up for her. Either way, it was, to me, a priceless work of art.

My Mom is the most beautiful woman I know. Still. But, carrying that purse, she was electrifying.

The chic designs of the 1960′s gave way to the fashion disasters of the ’70′s, and Mom put her out-of-vogue pocketbook away, storing it far in the back of her closet, on a shelf at the top. For years, I never saw it.

But, I never forgot it.

When she asked me what I wanted for Christmas a couple of years ago, my mind raced back to that vanished bag. Of all the things I could think of that conjured my mother, nothing did it for me better. “Do you still have that big snakeskin pocketbook?” I asked, trying to be casual and not give away how much I craved it.

“That old thing? THAT’S what you want?” she asked, incredulous.

When I nodded, she said distractedly before hurrying off down the hall, “Well, I’ll have to go get the guns out of it first.”

Guns?

?

!

MTM and I exchanged a look before quickly following her to her bedroom, the doorway into which we both saw her disappear. When we got there, she was up on a chair, rooting around in the top of her closet. She moved boxes and shoes and all manner of detritus before, finally, pulling that purse from the farthest corner. Even covered in dust, it was gorgeous. My breath caught in my throat, and I reached my hands out eagerly to touch it again for the first time in years.

Instead, she moved past me and put the bag on the bed, clicking open the clasp to reveal two guns: a Glock-type handgun and an antique pearl-handled pistol. She started to stick her hand in there and pull one out, when MTM stopped her. I don’t know whether this was all too Southern Gothic for him or what, but he did not want my mother handling her own guns. He eased them out of the purse like he was handling nuclear weaponry.

He and I were both shocked to see that the antique gun was loaded. Every chamber contained a bullet. MTM cried, “What are you DOING with this in the house? I’m taking these bullets out right now.”

My Mom – my prim, proper, dainty, Southern-lady Mom – said, “But, if someone breaks into the house, I want to be able to defend myself.”

How she planned to defend herself when it took her at least five minutes to FIND the bag that contained the guns in the first place was a mystery to both of us. MTM unloaded the weapon and left the whole mess there on the bed, and we’ve never seen those guns again.

Who knows where she’s hiding them now. If I ask for her wedding dress, will it come with guns attached?

Mom with her spanking new Beretta

Dec 15

36 Comments

Everything’s Going Great Guns

Maybe this will be a series of fiction. Maybe it won’t. But, this story begins with the fictional post, Expecting the Unexpected. Click here to begin at the beginning. And, thank you. Of all the hundreds of thousands of existing options for entertaining blog reading, I am honored you stopped here and chose me.

It’s too early to be clattering along in the back of this stupid truck. The big clock on the mantle struck 3am right when I closed the back door with a thud. No sense trying to be quiet. My sisters and my momma are awake, scurrying around making her room all pretty for when we bring her home.

Or, rescue her, Dad keeps shouting from the window of the cab. We’ve got to rescue her! I don’t understand why somebody has to be rescued from marriage, but I’m only twelve. I just thank everything I was deemed too young to be in the wedding. Wearing all that finery would’ve made me sweat and squirm and count the seconds until it was over. She likes finery. Maybe that’s why she married him, to have lots of finery. I don’t know why anybody wants to get hitched in the first place, but the whole finery thing seems like a dumb reason to me.

Dad is swerving all over the road, making me fight to stay in position in the bed of the truck. He’s drunker than usual, but I can’t say as I blame him. This whole marital mess with my sister would cause a tee-totaler to thrash through three counties to find a still. I feel warm inside from the several big swigs I took from the jug under the kitchen sink before we peeled off. Dad offered. It’s not like he would let me say no.

It’s hard to study the sky when Dad’s doing his inebriated swerve all over the road, but it’s real pretty. Like the bottom of a pit mashed up with twinkle lights and shards of glass. I wonder if my sister can see them from wherever he’s put her to keep her from leaving him. Maintaining my position up against the back window isn’t easy when Dad keeps yelling and swerving and yelling some more. He’s too worked up. Code for drunk. He should’ve let me drive. I’d get us there without the added drama.

I’m cold. And sleepy. I’ve got school tomorrow, and I know I’m gonna be up all night long. Rescuing her. Going back to the home place. Getting everyone settled. Keeping Dad from killing him. I’m too little to be a take-charge kind of guy.

The old jalopy acts like the rig we use to plough the back field, making ditches in the dirt in front of her place. My head knocks the freezing window glass as we make a trough in the earth to their front door. Headlights illumine the entry and bank of windows. Everything is aglow.

Okay, son. Let’s move in.

I grasp the wood-and-steel in my hands and let my body fall through mist to the ground. Maybe I’ll become a man tonight.

I’m guessing that’s what I’m doing here.

Dec 5

50 Comments

Getting Fixed

Sylvia. It’s a play by A R Gurney that stars a dog who’s played by a frizzy-haired actress. Her master dotes on his little female companion, leaving her mistress jealous for his affection. Both hilarity and tears ensue.

The funniest scene, at least to me, is when Sylvia gets loose in a public park and mates with another dog in front of her horrified master. He is shell-shocked by the experience. In the next scene, an enraged Sylvia is back from the vet, her lady-bits removed.

I identify with Sylvia today.

I’ve lived most of life thinking something was wrong with me. Wanting children and having them – that’s what we females do. In my teens, I watched classmates discuss baby names during PE, but I didn’t add my own to the mix. Squinting and straining, I peered down the corridor of time, trying to catch a glimpse of the person only I could create, a being I had to know. Emptiness filled my sight lines. I couldn’t imagine having a child when I still WAS one.

Childishness followed me through college, and idealistic stupidity led me to a young marriage. Lots of people exit mistake marriages. Usually, they have at least one child, and they always say that child made the horrific marital experience worth it. I’m sure that’s true. But, when my ex wanted to have a child, I saw fury and upheaval and monstrosity instead. I knew I would never survive the experience. Shells of people walk the earth every day, their spirits destroyed by untenable, even frightening, circumstances. I wanted to live. To live, in any iteration, I had to walk away before my womb succumbed.

Getting a divorce thrust me into years of wandering, of questioning. Divorce wasn’t part of my grand list of intentions. Rather than decode myself, I wasted several more years letting another man define me, a man whom I would’ve borne a small city to satisfy.

He dumped me instead.

I was thirty-three years old before I realized my life and its happiness were up to me, well into the second decade of adulthood before I even started to try to grow up. Men came and went, but, even with a ticking clock, I couldn’t see a person with a name on the other side of the time divide. Nobody whispered to me when I slept or stepped forward and demanded to exist.

To finally meet one’s soul mate and marry him is worth more than all the buried bounty on earth. After flinging my love down the toilet for more than a decade, I saw myself in the soul of the person who chose me. He was forty when we married. I was thirty-five. Together, we tried to cram the experience of eons of living into the years we had left, because we were starting with a deficiency of time.

And, just like that, I woke up in my forties. When I was younger, I was convinced that someday I really would crave what I was supposed to want: the chance to meet the person only I could make with my soul mate.

I don’t, so I won’t.

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