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Lunch with my old dad – part one

Lunch with my old dad – part one

“A happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.” – Kinky Friedman

one.

When I was nine years old, on a day very near Christmas, my father loaded the last of his belongings into the car and gathered his children to say goodbye. I don’t recall if we stood stairstep in age order but most likely we did as pictures from that time often showed us oldest to youngest, sister, sister, brother, sister, brother in the order of our birth. I was the oldest. The youngest barely six weeks. Did he say goodbye to the baby? I can’t remember. Most likely he didn’t as my mother at the time clung to my brother as if he were the giver of life and not the other way around. My father was moving out. My mother had had enough of his drunken antics and cruel insults. After he spent his Christmas bonus on drink and who knows what else, (it wasn’t gifts for his children) she gave him an ultimatum. If you don’t stop drinking you should leave. It’s not what she wanted. She wanted him to choose us. He didn’t.

There were probably tears, his or ours I can’t exactly say but most likely his. My mother says in the weeks after he left she had to stop taking us to visit our paternal grandfather because the old man would sob the entire time, grieving over his son leaving these five grandchildren fatherless. My grandfather would eventually die from complications of alcoholism. Like my grandfather, my father was overly emotional, given to easy crying, and periods of melancholy and depression. My mother remembers he would sit in a darkened room, play his guitar and sing along to the Neil Diamond song “I Am I Said” with tears running down his face. You should listen to the lyrics sometime. They are gut wrenching. He was born at the tail end of 13 children. By the time he came along the love and money were in short supply and he suffered from lack of both. He fulfilled his Irish catholic duty by marrying a nice catholic girl and having four children in quick succession. My mother was more German than Irish but that could be forgiven. It was 1964 when they married and having a family was a good way to keep yourself from getting sent to Vietnam. My mother was young and beautiful. She was solidly upper middle class and was out of his league. He was handsome, charming and he needed her desperately. For a young woman, with her own self esteem issues he was irresistible. Her parents had reservations. He seemed a bit aimless with no solid plan for the future, but they paid for a wedding were tried to be supportive. I was born exactly nine months later. 

My grandparents were right to worry. He was often unemployed, and he was often drunk. Fueled by deeply rooted generational alcoholism and feeling stuck in the wrong life, he convinced himself that we would be better off without him.  His affair broke my mother’s heart and eventually he left us. The loss nearly broke my poor mother in half. Her sadness was so wide and deep that had it not been for the neediness of a newborn she might possibly have never gotten up. If my memory is correct, there were a few attempts at weekend fathering. I have a blurry memory of an awkward visit to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend. My sister saw a red high heel pump on the floor of his bedroom and thought to herself “That is so weird. Why would that be there?” There was a breakfast at IHOP which I remembered because we were much too poor to ever eat in restaurants. I was fascinated by all the syrup choices, finally settling on blueberry. There was a trip to an arcade, a movie and ice cream, all the typical divorced dad weekend activities. But time with us was time away from his new girlfriend and probably more difficult, it was time he had to be sober, which in those days was not easy for him. Eventually but not unexpectedly the visits, calls and contact dwindled into nothingness and he was gone. Through the years I would sometimes hear a Neil Diamond song or see some other random thing that would remind me of him, and a memory would surface. I’d push it back down, return it to the place in my mind for things too painful to think about. When I try to conjure childhood memories now it’s images from pictures that I see.  Familiar photographs have replaced my actual memories of him. I cannot find anything three dimensional no matter how hard I try. He had become a face in old pictures and a song I once knew.

For my family, my mother, her four stunned children and newborn baby, his leaving thrust us into immediate poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and trauma. Unbeknownst to my mother we were months behind on rent and there was very little food in the cabinets or money in the bank. One day a letter arrived from my father. It contained a partial child support payment with the promise to send more when he could. My sister says “I remember this very clearly because I sat at the kitchen table and watched our mother fall apart. It was the most traumatizing moment of my childhood. She sobbed over the phone to multiple people that her children would starve.” She was twenty nine years old and had never written a check or driven a car. 

For me, his leaving forced me into premature adulthood and responsibilities beyond my years. By the time I was ten or eleven I was babysitting my siblings and cooking meals. By age fourteen I was working at an Italian Beef sandwich shop to help feed the family. If you have never eaten an authentic Chicago Italian Beef sandwich, well, I feel sorry for you. I was in a program where I only took core subjects and then left school to go to work. I worked the legal maximum number of hours I was allowed to work for my age and I signed my check over to my mother to buy groceries and whatever else we needed. I illegally worked extra hours on a second time card and was paid in cash. My mother didn’t take the cash, either because she wanted me to have something for myself or because she didn’t know about it, I don’t remember. Sometimes I bought myself a record, at the shop across the street, but more often than not I would spend it on shoes or a toy for one of my siblings.  A year later my fourteen year old sister also started working. With both of us girls contributing, my mother’s minimum wage job, housing assistance, help from family and friends and the literal kindness of strangers we survived. There were times we ate day old bread for dinner or didn’t eat dinner at all, but we got by. I think we all had a touch of PTSD from the abandonment but I do have happy memories from that time. We did the things children do. We played, we fought, we cried, we laughed. My mother made sure we still had a childhood rich in the things that mattered, family, friends and plenty of love.

Once our struggles for food, shelter and stability were over I became a rebellious, moody, promiscuous teenager. I craved the attention of boys. I liked the confidence drinking beer gave me. I stayed out past curfew.  I cared more about my job than school. My mother and I often butted heads about things and when my step father came in to the picture when I was almost seventeen, I couldn’t wait to graduate and get out of the house. Mom still carries a lot of guilt about how fast we had to grow up and how rough we had it. We tell her it wasn’t her fault but I don’t think she believes that. Mother’s have masters degrees in feeling guilty about something. Sometimes I think it would have been less traumatic in the long run if he had died. I know that sounds horrible but at least I could have told myself he didn’t leave on purpose. I remember my fourth grade teacher approaching me right after he left and telling me she knew that things were “tough at home and I could talk to her anytime. ” I was mortified and ashamed. Who told her? “No they aren’t. Things are fine.” I replied, “Everything is fine.” then I buried my face in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book and did my best to hide my tears.

Over the years there were huge, long chunks of time we heard nothing from him. He didn’t pay child support; he stayed under the radar and kept his exact whereabouts mostly unknown. Occasionally I would get a card signed “Love, Dad” if he happened to have our address. Often, he did not and we rarely had his. That “Love, Dad” really irritated us. It irritates us still. The cards never said anything more, never asked about our lives, and they certainly never included any birthday cash. I think he assumed that by calling himself “Dad” he remained tethered to us by some paternal thread. When in fact, the tether he did create is between his five children, each of us unsure of how to process our feelings for him or understand why he still called himself our Dad. I may not talk to my brothers and my sisters as much as I should, we are all busy adults with full lives, but I love them.  The shared experience of our childhood bonded us. We are trench buddies.

Our sweet mother never talked trash about my father which so often happens in divorces these days.  She would answer our questions honestly, but we were in survival mode. Dwelling on the past was a luxury we couldn’t afford and what was the point anyway? He wasn’t coming back. He moved to Seattle for a job. It felt like he moved as far away from us as he could get without falling off the map. He was a thing that had existed in our life and then he didn’t. For him, I am sure we were frozen in time as the children we once were, never growing any older, never having any problems, just joyful happy children. We did grow up though, we had families and careers, we became fully formed humans and rarely gave him much thought.

When my youngest sister was seventeen, she told my mother and stepfather that for graduation she wanted a trip to see our father.  Several years before, we had moved from the Midwest to the suburbs of Washington DC. We missed having our grandmother, our aunts, uncles and cousins nearby. She was curious about our father. She was only six when he left. Who among us can remember much from being six. My stepfather paid for her plane ticket and hotel room. God bless his soul he was a good man. The trip was a disaster.  Our father was aloof and distant.  He treated my sister like a tourist, wanting to show her around but was unwilling to engage in any meaningful conversation.  He refused to let her meet his wife. He had married his girlfriend, the secretary from work who offered him an escape from a life that overwhelmed him. My sister came home from Seattle feeling defeated and wishing she had just gone back to Chicago to visit people she knew already loved her. Her hope for a relationship with him ended in disappointment. He had rejected her once more often than the rest of us, and two times too many.

The year I graduated from high school the family took a multi week, cross country car trip out west to attend a family reunion in Montana, visit friends in Utah and Colorado and see all the sites on the way there and back. We were seven people, driving across the country in a station wagon in June and July. I am quite certain that I had a bad attitude before we had even pulled out of our suburban Virginia driveway. In some families, they would still not be talking to one another as a consequence of a trip like this. My mother, ever kind hearted, thought how sad it would be to be that close to my father and not give him the chance to see his children. She got his contact information from one of his many siblings and reached out to him. They arranged a meet up. We were to wait for him at the main lodge in Yellowstone National Park on an arranged day and time. When the appointed day and time arrived, our parents dropped us off at the Lodge and then parked in the vicinity to keep a distant eye on things. The five of us sat on the front porch of that lodge for hours. He never showed. When we arrived home from the trip there was a post card from him mailed from within the park. He claimed to have not been able to find us. We believe he drove past, saw us sitting there and lost his courage. Who knows what happened. My mother’s heart broke. She believed that she had let him hurt us again. She vowed to never let that happen again. After that fiasco, the trip felt like it would never end.  I was eighteen, I missed my boyfriend and friends.  I was anxious to start my post graduation life. I had had enough of “family togetherness.” I wanted to go home. I look unhappy in a lot of the pictures taken on this trip. Being stood up for a date with good ‘ole dad was just the icing on the cake. 

My life took a fast forward not long after our trek out west.  I got married a year later, had a baby right away, another after just eleven months (Irish twins) and my third when I was just twenty six.  I was in the thick of child rearing and trying to keep our heads above water.  There was very little contact between my father and I going both ways for many, many years. My marriage was as happy as it could be for having been just barely out of my teens and pregnant at the onset.  We did our best despite growing apart over the years. Who knows what you’re going to want in a partner when you’re nineteen years old? We did raise three really great kids though and I’m proud of us for that.  When our messy divorce finally came in 2002 I found myself in dire straights. I had a job I loved as an assistant in an elementary school library but the pay was terrible. My ex paid child support but it barely covered the mortgage. I needed money. I had pawned my wedding ring and borrowed to the point of embarrassment from my parents. I felt desperate.  At my lowest, I wrote my father and demanded that he help me. I thickly smeared guilt and obligation all over the letter. A few weeks later I received a letter back with two cashier’s checks totaling around $1,000. I can’t remember the exact amount but it certainly was not a drop in the bucket considering all the years of back child support he had never paid. The card included a note that pretty much said “Don’t ask again. This is all there is.” I thanked him and we easily resumed ignoring one another. Radio silence from him was comfortable and familiar. We went on this way for a very long time.

And then, a few years ago, his wife died.  They were married for 40 plus years and then she died, and something changed. Blame it on loneliness, old age, remorse, or a sudden desire to get right with God….we don’t really know but suddenly there he was.  He started sending birthday flowers, Christmas cards, small checks, copies of life insurance policies with us as the beneficiaries.  He made my sister the executor of his will. He moved to South Carolina to live near his sole remaining brother. We panicked. What did this mean? What does he want? What is our legal and moral responsibility towards him? Does he want us to take care of him when he gets old? Will he show up at my door? How is Mom going to feel about this? We joked about how short the distance is between South Carolina and Virginia and that he would show up at my house before he showed up at their houses further north. We didn’t need a dad. Our stepfather had filled that role nicely. We didn’t trust it. It felt suspicious. An escalating worry started to form about why he was ‘coming back around’. We might not have needed him but maybe there was some reason he needed us and that’s what worried me. Then, as if right on cue, I got a text message from my sister. “He wants to meet.” I wasn’t surprised. We saw it coming from a mile away. We knew eventually that it would happen. What we had to figure out was what we wanted to do about it.

 

 

 

Mama’s Girl

Mama’s Girl
When I got home from work on Monday there was a package at the door.  This isn’t unusual because my husband gets a lot of packages delivered to the house for work.  However, this time it was for me and it was from my Mom.   I opened the box and it made me cry. This is what was inside.  She has this set of bowls and when she brought something to my house in one of them I told her I liked it. So being the thoughtful person she is, she went out and got me a set and sent them.  The bowls didn’t make me cry though, her note did.   “Life is going way too fast for me. I wish we could spend more time together. Reading your blog has made me feel closer to you. You are very talented. You are in my prayers every day.”
 
Her letter made me cry because I am 47 years old and my mother still worries about me and takes her concerns to the heavens every night. I cried because I miss her too.  I know people who live a lot further than an hour away from their loved ones so I shouldn’t complain, but sometimes that distance feels enormous. I cried because I am touched she is reading my blog and that it makes her feel closer to me. I cried because my whole life I have always wanted to make her happy and have her approval.  I know that I’ve done a lot of things over the years that broke her heart.  I have wandered away from the beliefs that are still very much a part of her life. I don’t visit as much as I should. I don’t call as often as I need to. I am not the world’s best daughter.
 
 I am however a very lucky daughter. My mother showed me by example how to be a survivor.  She taught me that life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you handle it. She told me that when something bad happens to us the only choice we have is to pick ourselves up and go on. That advice has gotten me through some heart breaking experiences of my own.  I can’t say how many times I’ve opened my mouth and her words come tumbling out. I guess one day my children will do the same.
 
Mine wasn’t an easy childhood. I think my mother still suffers guilt for the things we went without. I wish she wouldn’t.  The intangible things she did give us far outweigh anything material that we didn’t have. I grew up singing a hymn in chuch that goes:
 
There is beauty all around
When there’s love at home;
There is joy in ev’ry sound
When there’s love at home.
Peace and plenty here abide,
Smiling sweet on ev’ry side.
Time doth softly, sweetly glide
When there’s love at home.
Love at home, love at home;
Time doth softly, sweetly glide
When there’s love at home
 
My mother took every word of this song seriously.  She did not tolerate meanness or teasing among us kids.  We were to love one another whether we liked it or not. Her insistance on family harmony has resulted in adult siblings who love each other deeply and are there for each other no matter what.  That is an accomplisment to be proud of.
 
I’ve been saying since I started writing this blog that I was doing it for my grandchildren.  I figured telling my stories and sharing my sometimes odd outlook on life would be something that could carry me in to the future.  What I didn’t take in to account was how sharing these stories would also take me back. Back to my childhood, back to the people and places that formed me. And when I look back, the one constant, the rock of my life has been my sweet mother.
 
Thank you for always being there Mom. Thank you for your example, for the lessons, for the prayers and for the bowls. 
 
I love them.

Bull in the China Shop

Bull in the China Shop
I make my husband nervous when we are in antique shops.  It seems that every time I touch something I knock something else down or something falls to the floor.  He gasps and says "Honey be careful!" Once I dropped the lid to something and his eyes got big as saucers as it clanked around on the ground. I said "I'm sure they are used to people dropping stuff all the time."  He didn't look soothed.  Sometimes he just walks away from me because he doesn’t want to be around when I break something.  I haven't  broken anything yet but I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time. I guess I’m not graceful and can’t delicately lift a plate off a shelf without upsetting the things around it.  I have a domino effect on stuff. I pick one up and three fall over. I am the proverbial bull in a china shop.
I think my real issue is I’m not happy with just looking at what’s on top, what can easily be seen.  I like to dig around. I like to poke underneath and behind.  I like to look for the treasure that might be hidden underneath something else. When you do that things get jostled and you’re going to make a little noise.  While I hate that I embarass my husband, just like with people, if you look beneath the surface you are sure to find something wonderful.
This past weekend we threw together a last minute out of town get away to visit thrift, antique and junk shops.  We hadn’t been away in a long while and we needed to hit the road.  Turns out we really needed to hit the road because a bad storm knocked out the electricity at our house and in 100 degree weather we needed to find air conditioning and fast. We headed south to Richmond Virginia, capital of the confederacy and home to Virginia Commonwealth University.  As it turns out also home to some really cool thrift and antique shops.  I’ve always been a thrifter but since becoming a Pinterest fanatic I’ve also become interested in Upcycling. Upcycling means taking something old or useless and converting it in to a new product that is useful or has a higher value.  In other words you take some old piece of junk you find in a thrift shop and you make it in to something cool to put in your house.  My mission this weekend was to find a few of those old pieces of junk.
What we found was this place.  We liked it so much we went twice. I came home with a solid wood antique window shutter for $12.  Not exactly sure what I’m going to make with it but I know it’s going on a wall when I figure it out.  My husband is building an antique tool collection and he bought an old hand saw and file for about $5. I got this old cookie crock.  It was missing the lid but otherwise in perfect condition.  The thing is heavy…solid.  It spoke to me.  It said “You are always making cookies…you need me in your kitchen.”  It cost $4.  I have repurposed it to hold my kitchen utensils.  We found lots of old goodies for not very much money.  Call me a simple woman but I got so much pleasure from digging through what basically amounts to other people’s old stuff. If you haven’t heard George Carlin’s routine about “Stuff” you must check this out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
This place smelled like my grandma's attic which was one of my favorite places to hang out as a child. I  found things that were familiar…things I had around me when I was a child. I would pick up something and say “My grandma had a mirror like that” or "My mother had a pan just like this." I couldn’t pass a Pyrex bowl without picking it up. I’m not quite sure why but there must be some deeply seated memory attachment to it.  I found a red toy  chicken from a farm set we had as children and I remembered playing with those  Little People toys for hours and hours with my brothers and sisters. I wish like anything I still had my Fisher Price  doll house.  I can remember every detail of the thing from the fireplace painted on the living room wall to the thin little foam mattresses on each plastic little bed. I remember the daughters braids and the way the dogs ears stood up. I loved that little people family.  They had a perfect little house and a perfect little life. 
I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to this old stuff lately other than I'm getting older myself.  I wonder 50 years from now what will be important to my grandchildren and their children. What will they pick up and say "remember when Grandma used this?" The idea of a part of me sticking around in my belongings and in my stories makes me feel really happy.
 
Now I'm off to eBay to see if I can find myself one of these.

 


Good Mom

Good Mom
Dear Daughter,
Have I told you lately what an awesome mother I think you are?  After spending some extended time with your son recently I am amazed at how intelligent, well adjusted and happy he is.  I think that is in large part because of you.  You are such a good Mom. 
What I see you do so much better than I ever did is take every day moments and make them learning experiences.  Just the other day you guys went to the park and flew a kite.  You talked to him about wind and how it was necessary to lift the kite in to the sky.  You showed him how to run to get the kite off the ground.  He thought you guys were just playing and having fun but you were teaching him a science lesson.  I’ve heard you talk to him about nutrition and math and how things work.  You read to him all the time and answer his endless questions.   It’s not just the numbers and letters and shapes you’ve taught him that impress me.  It’s that you teach him about being nice and sharing and having compassion.  You are teaching him about character and integrity and he is only three years old. When the time comes, his kindergarten teacher is going to be very grateful to you for giving him such an amazing head start.
Sometimes I look back at pictures taken when you were little and I’m amazed at how young and exhausted I look.   I had two babies within a year and I was barely twenty years old.  I was overwhelmed and tired.  I remember I used to take you and your brother in the bedroom to play and I would lie down on the floor in front of the door.  I always started out playing with you but I knew that if I fell asleep you would have to climb over me to get out and I would wake up.  I relied heavily on my mother for advice and help.  If it wasn’t for her and the fact that you and Nick were both such good babies I may not have survived. 
Parenting is a “learn as you go” experience.  I made plenty of mistakes when you were younger.  Every Mother makes a mistake now and then.  You’ve heard the story of how I rolled off the bed when I was a baby so my inexperienced and young mother put me back up on the bed only to have me roll off again.  One of my biggest mistakes was when you fell out of bed in the middle of the night and hurt yourself.  I think you were about four at the time.  You were crying and crying that your arm hurt and it didn’t seem like anything was broken so after a quick examination and some children’s Tylenol I sent you back to bed.  The next morning your shoulder was swollen and you could barely move your arm.  A trip to the emergency room confirmed my worst fear that you had broken your collar bone.  You had broken a bone and I made you go back to bed.  For months I felt like the worlds worst mother. You had to wear this hideous vest thing for 8 weeks but you took it in stride and didn’t let it change your happy nature.  Even this picture says so much about who you are.  You weren’t just showing me your brace, you were modeling it. You have an innate ability to make the most of any situation.   And now with mothering, you have accepted this challenge with gusto.  You aren’t just raising your son, you are growing him in to the best person he can be.

 

Keep up the good work my daughter.  When it gets tough always remember that there is nothing more important than what you are doing.  And when you need a break I’ve got your back.  Mind you I’ll be sending back a child hopelessly spoiled and stuffed with cookies, but that’s MY job and I take it pretty seriously too. 

I have a plaque in the craft room, I’m sure you’ve seen it.  It says “Here’s to good women.  May we know them.  May we be them.  May we raise them.”   I sure know a whole lot of good women.  God knows I try every day to be one.  And most importantly, one of the greatest accomplishments of my life is that I’ve raised one.  I think you are amazing.
Love
Mom

What the what?

What the what?
My son has this tattoo on his forearm.   
Why you ask? Why would he do that? That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for over a year.
The short story is he’s an idiot.
The long and true story is that he wants to duplicate the tattoos his cousin Bobby had including this one.  I told him that just because Bobby had it doesn’t make it a good idea but I’m not sure it’s right to speak ill of the dead.
Bobby was killed three years ago in a drunk driving accident.  His friend lost control of the vehicle they were riding in and wrapped it around a tree.  They were both killed instantly.  It remains a tragedy of unspeakable proportion. My brother lost his only child.  My son lost his childhood best friend.  He was only twenty one.
So Alex wants to memorialize his beloved cousin by recreating his tattoos.  He never wants to forget someone that he loved.  I understand that.  I respect it.  I am not against tattoos but this one has been hard to swallow.  I think because it is offensive to many people, it’s hard for me to accept that it’s now a permanent part of his body.  When my brother saw it for the first time he literally said “WTF Alex?”
It’s pretty common knowledge what WTF stands for.  Even my mother knows. In my quest to make this go down easier I’ve convinced myself that there are lots of other things it can stand for.  What do you think of these?
Why the Frown?
Where’s the Food?
Well that’s Fabulous
What’s that Friend?
Wow that’s fun
Welcome to Facebook
Write to File
What's This For?
Who the Freak?
Where's the Fridge?
Where's the Fish?
What's This Foolishness
Where's the Fire?
We’re Tasting Frosting
Work Time Fun
Welcome to Finland
 
As much as I’d like to think it stood for something else I know in heart what it really means.  It means my nephew is gone way too soon.  It means my son has to deal with his loss in the best possible way he knows how.  And when I honestly think about it I’m inclined to say WTF myself.  In this situation….what else can you say?