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Posts tagged ‘parents’

Mar 10

34 Comments

Roy Toy

Andra, we’re going to come down to your house, huh. That okay? Huh? Spend the night? Huh?

Dad, um, wow, you want to spend the night?

HUH??????

I SAID, YOU WANT TO SPEND THE NIGHT!!!!!?????!!!!!

Yeah. We, uh, me and Linda, we can come down there and you can buy us, uh, we can go out to eat.

#####

And, so they came. My parents. Yesterday.

#####

(Five minutes after entering our house.)

So, uh, what’re you gonna do with this furniture, huh? That ice box. You’d better not sell it.

Dad, I’m not going to sell it.

HUH??????!!!!!!

I SAID, I’M NOT GOING TO SELL IT. (Looking at my mother.) The only reason you are spending the night is because he wanted the excuse to go through the entire house and decide what pieces of furniture he wanted.

(Mom laughs hysterically.)

HUH????????? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING OVER THERE?????

I SAID, THE ONLY REASON YOU ARE HERE IS TO LOOK AT THE FURNITURE AND MAKE SURE I DON’T SELL IT. IN FACT, I’M SURPRISED YOU DIDN’T DRIVE YOUR TRUCK DOWN HERE!!!!!

(Mom laughs uncontrollably.)

Why are you laughing?

Because, when we walked out of the house, Roy said we should drive the truck and bring back furniture, but I wouldn’t let him.

######

Andra, you need to stop writing these crazy stories about me on the internet. That Tara Monroe – you remember her, huh?? She told me she reads your stories, and I told her they were lies.

Which ones are lies, Dad?……LIES? WHICH ONES ARE LIES?

Well. There’s that ‘un you told about me and that troll when I was working on the farm with my father. You remember that ‘un, huh???

WHAT PART OF THAT STORY WAS A LIE, DAD?

ALL OF IT!! ALL!! OF!! IT!! YOU DIDN’T TELL IT RIGHT!!! 

(Proceeds to tell the story exactly as I did in my blog post ‘Expletive Not Deleted” here, minus the curse words that offended my mother. He also admitted he cursed like that at the age of 6.)

#####

Roy has been in the house for less than six hours, and I am already hoarse from screaming. My face hurts from laughing.

Sparring with my father is one of my favorite things to do in life.

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.

Jun 12

35 Comments

A Father Called Twinkles

They called him Twinkles. MTM’s father had bottomless blue eyes, studded with glitter. Eyes that had seen lots of life in his seventy-some years.

Eyes that knew they were dying.

MTM and I first came to Arizona in 2005 to say goodbye to his father, a man MTM hadn’t seen since 1989. A man he’d never really known. A man who left when MTM was just three years old, whose only real reliability was his flair for the unpredictable. That knack for fun helped MTM and me find our Happy Place, somewhere we both enjoy revisiting again and again.

Long before I met MTM, he had one of those scares with his father. His dad was dying. And, he was okay with it. Years of being marginal made it hard for him to care, until he felt guilty because he didn’t. Circular discussions with himself produced a sense of peace. It was acceptable to release his dad and everything that went with him.

Even when his dad pulled through his illness. He’d already said goodbye, years ago, when he was a tow-headed toddler who didn’t understand why his father didn’t want to be his dad.

Coming to Chandler, Arizona to say goodbye – in person – didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t matter, wouldn’t change the shape of anything that had come before. It wouldn’t make a man a father to an abandoned son.

And, it didn’t.

We sat in the backyard with MTM’s dad, sipping soda under citrus trees in the spring light. Those eyes still twinkled, a diminished glow, but it was still there. MTM had his dad’s nose and his love of mechanical objects, the stray gesture or shadow of a mannerism.

When we left, MTM got to shake his father’s hand, look him in those twinkling blue eyes, and tell him goodbye. With peace. Knowing the trip all those miles didn’t make him a father, and understanding that it didn’t matter.

In the end, a person cannot become something they never were.

Too Much is Just Enough: Release

 

Apr 22

28 Comments

My Mother Bought Me a Taser

Well, she bought me one, and I refused to use it. Or own it. Or take possession of it.

Or whatever.

MTM and I like to go hiking. In the woods. In places without mobile phone service. And with naked people introducing themselves to us. Where we could disappear and never be heard from again.

Sort of like ‘Deliverance,’ but without the Ned Beatty bits.

My mother spent many brain waves worrying about MTM and me in these hiking situations. I mean, I don’t THINK she’s ever seen ‘Deliverance,’ but she worried that a wild animal might get after us and eat us. Or something.

She knew I did not know how to operate a gun, so she went to some paramilitary web site and ordered me a taser. For hiking. In the woods.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if a big old bear got after me in the woods, and all I had at my disposal to defend myself with was a taser, it would be safe to assume that I would zap myself to kingdom come before I would ever get close enough to the carnivorous bear. I mean, it is a BEAR. A hungry, mean BEAR. I am NOT going anywhere near it to put the taser bits to its bits. I would probably THROW the taser at it and miss, and then get eaten all up by the bear.

That is how spooked and stupid I would be.

So, I refused to take ownership of the taser my mom bought for me. I don’t know what happened to it.

But, I suspect she has it. You’ll have to ask HER what she did with it.

Too Much is Just Enough: Knowing When to Say When to Tasers

Mar 4

17 Comments

The Day It Rained Inside

My cousin Brian sent me a friend request on Facebook. Because my parents have a combined total of nine siblings between them, I have hoards of cousins, many of them people I barely know or have met once or twice in my life.

Brian is different. I haven’t seen him in years and years, but we used to spend months together at my Mamaw’s in Kentucky. In age, he was exactly between my brother and me. Maybe that was supposed to mean the three of us would pal around together, exploring the creek bank and unmown fields around my Mamaw’s house. I went into the summer hoping for some fun escapades.

Instead, I got Brian and my brother ganging up on me. Making slingshots out of rubber bands and duct tape and hurtling bullets for a BB gun at me from them. Pulling the flashing tails from lightning bugs and trying to rub them on me, still glowing. Sneaking into my room at night and scaring me to death with loud noises. Harassing me when I tried to go to the bathroom. Only a couple of days into our visit, and I was ready to flee back to South Carolina and leave the hooligan twins in Kentucky to destroy everything in their path.

Their worst plan for me never came to fruition, though. We were sitting in my Mamaw’s living room watching television and playing Sorry!, the colored game board spread out in the middle of the floor with us sitting around it. My Mom stopped mid-roll and wiped her cheek. “It’s raining in here,” she said with some surprise. Given that we were in the house with the windows closed, rain was unlikely.

Then, she wiped another spot on her face. “No, really. It IS raining in here,” she said again, looking at the fan humming in a circle on the ceiling.

At that moment, a torrent of water gushed down on all of us through the fan, the blades flinging water all over the room. Everything was wet – the sofa, the chairs, the carpet, us. My brother and Brian looked guiltily at each other and disappeared just as my Mom stalked up the stairs to the second floor of Mamaw’s house. A glorified attic, she kept several beds up there for big family visits, and she had a cavernous closet that held all of her hand-knitted afgans and finely detailed, hand sewn quilts, things she had a compulsion to make and then piled unused in the dark, chaotic closet.

Mom opened the door of that closet and spotted a cleared out circle and a cooler. When she opened the lid of the cooler, she saw some water and a container of something liquid, a familiar-looking shade of yellow. My brother and Brian had been peeing into a container and storing it in the cooler upstairs. They were planning to pour it on me in the middle of the night while I slept in an attempt to make me think I wet the bed. They stored it in ice, because they wanted it to be cold when they soaked me with it. But, the ice melted; the cooler leaked; and the water ruined Mamaw’s fan and soaked her living room.

And, I’m still glad it turned out that way.

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