It’s mother’s day, and nearly every fiber in my being resists writing about my mother because it is too painful - so i will go ahead and honor her in the only way i know how · by mending through the creative process. When i say painful, here is a vivid memory from my pre-pubescent post-divorce childhood. She and my soon-to-be aunt were sitting in the living room of the house i grew up in. By this time ma had employed pop to see her through her college degree, and as soon as she was a woman of independent means, she fired his ass. It was all the rage at the time, the movie “Bob and Carol; Ted and Alice” was popularizing marriage breakups as only the media can. Marty and Gerry were getting hammered on red wine and making witty as only divorcee broads can in the safety of their husband’s former living rooms, Ma turns to Gerry and, referring to me remarks, “how can you talk with something that has fangs.” They cackled, i likely said something as equally cruel or tried to and slunk off to wallow in my self-loathing preparing for my next encounter with the emerging feminists of Orange County. It is not ma’s fault, her genteel mother from Alabama would routinely refer to her husband as a “rough cob” because she was Southern Belle, and he was an itinerant miner orphan who wooed and won her in the wilds of Nevada.
And ma was a middle child, whose older sister was the “fair haired one” who was also a bully who routinely savaged the younger sister - small wonder that dominance and bullying were a blood sport in the home i was raised in. To her credit, ma shepherded the youngest brother who would have been a fatherless child - to hear her tell the tale. Tales which always somehow came out with her as the aggrieved, as was the case with my long suffering father, or the heroine, as was the case when she married Gerry’s brother Leo. My mother Marty, then become Martha, and was ensconced in the Hills of Beverly, and sister-in-law Gerry became Edith. Times were good and the desert rat from the badlands of Nevada, became the munificent regaler of all that was good and noble in the upper echelons of Los Angeles during the heydays of the raging 80’s, or so i’m told. At the time i was a wage slave by day putting myself through college at night; i had met my 2nd wife by then and her 18 month-old - we were doing battle with her ex. I held the couple in BH in the highest esteem for very standup reasons. When there was question of molestation my stepfather stepped in without batting an eye and secured an attorney that effectively rescued the daughter from further danger.
Though nothing is ever black and white. For example, when leaving ma’s new home with my soon-to-become, and then not - first wife, the paranoid schizophrenic Cherokee on what i remember as my first visit to the house in the hills of Beverly - my crazy filly turned to me in her exciting street jargon and said, “you know those people are punking you, right?” It had never occurred to me, or as i was to latter learn through years of therapy, i refused to look objectively at my role in this family - besides, i’d never heard the expression “punking” in those days - how could i be what i didn’t know existed? I began to suspect something was amiss in the land of all good things. I knew it when they contracted with my younger brother to build a room addition which included room and board for him, and the crust of bread washing the plate glass windows of the back patio for me. I began to understand as a pattern this punking would never change, and so when i came years later to retrieve the 3rd carving i’d ever made from the patio to find rivulets had etched their way into what had once been a polished sheen, i realized i needed to reorient my thinking about expecting a fair shake from these loving people - know this, that the statue was allowed for years exposed to sprinkler water to its detriment is no one’s fault but my own · it was just a harsh lesson on “who’s got your back.”
They are burning the harvested rice fields just now, and at some level i wonder if i am not doing the same. My purpose is not to defame a 92 year-old woman in the memory impaired wing of a geriatric hospital - a comfort i’m not likely to enjoy as a foreigner in a country my nation once tried to bomb into the dark ages, but reconcile the paradox of the determined love i have in my heart for this sad life my mother has lived to its fullest. She once confided in me that as a child she had an inconsolable fear of death, so when i was in Bejing i made an offering at the Taoist Temple for her - she seemed to takes some solace; that she is 92 and going strong in the midst of the Covid-19 holocaust gives me comfort for the amount of influence i have given to Lao Tzu. Ma is one of the funniest people i’ve ever known once you get past the acrimony and self-serving narcissism, but you must be alert because it is a dry humor that is almost as shy as the child she hides. I learned that she was handed over to strangers to ride the “stagecoach” - a bus service from Las Vegas to Reno when she was barely 13 or so. I also know that she took off on a midnight ride on the back of a motorcycle with her half-brother Clyde riding from Fallon to Reno - some 50 miles, and willing to take her comeuppance for it.
She did the best that she could with what she had and a lot of it is pretty remarkable - and a lot of it is incredibly selfish and mean-spirited, that makes her human in every meaning of the word. I doubt that she knows how much i love and respect her, and i imagine she feels pretty much the same about me. That is unnecessarily sad, nor am i confident that i will acquit myself any better. I believe that she loved he 2nd husband Leo for more than his wealth, and i believe that Leo loved her for more than her beauty - that is enough for me. She poisoned the well at the sacred circle of family and that is hard to forgive. Each of my siblings, as i understand it would like to attribute our estrangement to anything or anyone other than themselves. I accept that i am difficult to get next to, but not malignant or hateful. I wish it had turned out otherwise and in this time of great upheaval we could turn to each other for comfort - but as my first wife the crazy Cherokee would have said “wish in one hand, and shit in the other - see which gets fuller faster.” Ma introduced me to my last wife at one Thanksgiving Dinner for the books - and like all things ma, she liked to take credit for the romance and her prescience - but when my last wife left me 3 days after an emergency appendectomy 14 years later - ma was the first to say “i never trusted her.” Still - warts and all, like my friend Bob Dylan might say, “i love women, and she loves men.”
Happy Mommy’s Day - Ma
jts 10/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment