Motherless: Part 3 - Karen

My dad met Karen when I was maybe 13 or so at - surprise! - a group therapy session. (You'd think he'd have already figured out that group therapy wasn't the best place to pick up women, no?) She was much younger than him - I think not even thirty years old at the time. I didn't meet her until they'd been dating for a few months, and I really liked her from the get-go. She was young, and energetic, and fun. She was into all sorts of things I'd never been aware of before, like folk music and contra-dancing and vegetarian cuisine and Quakerism and feminism. She was so free-spirited and spontaneous, the polar opposite of my quiet, habit-centered, serious father. Their relationship didn't last long (I'm pretty sure from things both of them said in the years that followed that they never slept together), but they continued to be friends, mostly because she and I had formed an attachment. She was like this cool older sister I had never had. She enjoyed helping me buck my dad's rules - I'd go to bed at my 8PM curfew, jump out my window, and hop into her waiting car to go to a contra-dance. Of course, she never let me do anything really bad - just pushed around the edges of the discipline I lived under, which was starting to feel really stifling at that point.

She never had much money, but somehow that all became part of the fun. I'd help her throw spur-of-the-moment yard sales to raise cash to go dancing that night. One time we scrounged up change all through her apartment, hitting a grand total of $6.32. She treated us both to ice cream cones with it, because if you've only got six dollars to your name, you might as well get ice cream with it, right? A few years later she started a natural-foods catering service which I helped her with - unpaid labor, but more than worth it to me for the many wonderful natural foods I learned to cook then that I still make to this day.

She was very New-Agey, both then and now. She especially hated modern medicine and everything associated with it. She saw naturopaths and took herbal supplements and weird crap like shark cartilage instead of seeing actual doctors and taking real medicine. At the time, I just thought it was this endearing quirk to be tolerated. Looking back, it's clear she had some sort of an unaddressed phobia. But it wound up costing her dearly.

When I was in my early twenties, she mentioned that she was having blood in her urine. My dad and I both encouraged her to see a doctor for help. She didn't. Instead she started making the rounds of every non-traditional alternative "medicine" practitioner in the New England area, and spending boatloads of money she didn't have on bizarre natural supplements. The problem remitted for a little while, and then came back worse than ever. She finally broke down and admitted she needed a doctor. I went with her for moral support the day she went to have a CAT scan of her bladder. The technician let me come into the control room with her, I don't know why, thinking it would be interesting for me to see, having no idea anything serious was going on. I remember seeing the image come up - fully two thirds of her bladder was dark, the edge between dark and light shaped like a sea horse's profile. The technician went suddenly silent. I knew not a thing about medicine, was a junior in college majoring in poli-sci, but it was obvious even to me that her bladder was full of cancer and needed to come out.

The surgery and recovery period was awful. I was there as much as I could stand to be, but the degree of her need and her terror and her misery at that point was terrifying to me. It was a rough period in our relationship, but I hoped that she'd soon be better and things could go back to normal for us.

She did get better, mostly. If by "better" you mean "pees through a tube inserted through one's belly button." And of course, she had all the normal sequelae of cancer treatment, including hair falling out, fatigue, weakness, etc. In retrospect, it really was no surprise that she wasn't the same person post-cancer as she was before. But it was *how* different a person that was the surprise.

A year or so later, I graduated from college. Karen threw me a backyard graduation party, which was a great success. As we cleaned up afterwards, she segued into a conversation about our relationship and how much it meant to her, and how much she thought it meant to me. She said that it was clear she'd never have a child of her own (she lost most of her reproductive system in the surgery) and I obviously didn't have a mother, so why shouldn't we fill those roles in each other's lives? It sounded like a good idea at the time, flushed in the happiness of the moment, so I agreed. I wished for many years afterwards that I had put more thought into that decision.

As she continued to recover, she became weirder and weirder. She left Quakerism behind, going through a variety of alternative religions (shades of Alice!) until finally settling on something called MasterPath, that involved sending money regularly to somewhere in the Southwest for cassette tape lessons and meditating to a photograph of "Sri" Gary Olson who looked like a garage mechanic to me. Her circle of friends changed, eventually containing almost exclusively women and all of them with some bizarre-o twist to them - one was a cat lady, another made a living as some sort of a psychic/astrologer, etc. Her view of the world, of people, of how people should act changed until eventually (years down the line) I realized she was living in some sort of alternative reality that had nothing to do with how things/people really were.

Example: she decided she didn't like my hubby - then just my boyfriend - because shortly after we got together he came over to help her, at my request, with some stuff around the house. He was just being his guy self, doing physical things without complaint. Karen was tying a rope around something but Colin noticed her knot was inadequate to the task. Being a Scoutmaster at the time, he offered to teach her the proper knot for the job. She agreed, and he taught her the same way he taught the boys in his troop - put his arms around her from behind and manipulated her hands in making the knot. Afterwards she told me that she didn't like him because he was way too "macho" and had tried to come onto her by putting his arms around her. My hubby was never "macho" - in fact, he's one of the most sensitive and enlightened men I've ever met. This brought home to me the point, proven to me many times over the following years, that Karen simply didn't like men who had the masculine traits of assertiveness, physical surefootedness, a deep voice, and an unwillingness to accept female orders.

She started to become very demanding of me. Karen wanted me to come with her to all the many things she was afraid of for moral support - doctor and dentist visits, long car trips (this set off her panic attacks), anything requiring her to use an elevator (same). And she demanded my help on things around her house. She had a pool which she insisted I do the maintenance on. Like I knew anything about pools. Anyway, around about this time I began avoiding her phone calls because she always wanted something from me. We fought innumerable times because I didn't return her phone messages for long periods of time.

I also didn't like the way she "used" me, as her daughter, to up her status in her own family. She was very competitive with her sister, and would compare me to her sister's daughter, and rub her sister's nose in my accomplishments. Her sister's daughter, tired I guess of being made to feel second-class, avoided anything where I might be present. I don't blame her. Wherever you are, Kristen, I'm sorry, and believe me, I told your aunt how much her behavior upset me and how unfair she was being to you.

I went to law school, one state over - far but not too far. It was a blessed relief to put some space between me and her. Then, when I graduated, I made a decision that I still feel the effects of today. I took the bar in the next state over, but not in my home state. Not in the state where Karen was. Because if I was a lawyer at home, as far as she was concerned, she would be entitled to unlimited free legal representation for the rest of her life. And she has tendencies to get into trouble - minor car accidents, failure to pay contractors, etc. It is her fault that I'm locked into 2 1/2 hrs./day commuting time, because I can't practice law in the state where I live.

My boyfriend and I got married and bought a house - in my home state, where real estate was within my reach. This brought us back into Karen's orbit. She was there all the time. Demanding things of me. Demanding that I do things to make her life easier, do things to make her look good to her family and friends. Always demanding. Anything she did for me always had an ulterior motive. She never just gave to make me feel good.

She turned 50, and demanded that her sister, her best friend and I throw her a huge, expensive, weeklong getaway culminating in a huge party. My piece of it was paying for the catering, which had to include lobster. I hired the best caterer on the Cape to throw a clamboil cookout, complete with more lobsters than everyone assembled could eat. It cost me damned near four thousand dollars. I had been at the vacation house for almost a week by the time the party came around, surrounded by Karen and her crazy friends, drowning in surrealism. I did my duty at the party, slept for a few hours, and burned rubber driving away at 4AM the next morning.

I became pregnant, and then miscarried. I had wanted that baby, had been trying to get pregnant. I was absolutely wrecked. When I turned to her, looking for comfort from my mother figure, she said "well, it's not like it was even a baby yet." SOOO not what I wanted to hear. She never understood why I got mad at her and didn't talk to her for a month.

I became pregnant again, this time with Esther. Karen was psyched to be a grandma. She fussed over me non-stop, which was sometimes nice and sometimes annoying as all hell. Then she insisted on throwing me a baby shower. It wasn't like anyone else was going to do it. I was just uncomfortable with it, because by this time I was a practicing lawyer making way more money than any of my friends or nearby relatives/in-laws, so I felt I wasn't entitled to ask for their help in getting all my baby things together. She insisted that I needed the help, and as it turned out, she was right.

The baby shower was mostly wonderful. Everyone came, and I got everything I needed for Esther's arrival. But as usual, her doing this nice thing for me came with a price tag. She never let me forget that she had done this for me, that I owed her for it. I couldn't express enough gratitude to satisfy her.

Other things, weird things, were going on at the same time. She had been friends with a co-worker and her husband. That couple divorced and the friend moved far away. The ex-husband was exactly the kind of man Karen liked to have around - tiny, effeminate, entirely non-masculine and non-threatening, entirely willing to be bossed around. He was also much younger, just a few years older than me. Karen took him in as a housemate, and essentially made him her servant/errand boy/whipping post. Every time I looked at him, I felt like this was how she wanted me to be as well - part of her crew of adoring servants.

Housemate had a best friend. Ed was a big, soft, geeky guy who worked in the tech sector. He had no experience with women to speak of, was more or less a total social misfit, and shared with his friend a total lack of masculine energy. Karen thought he was wonderful, and basically relentlessly pursued him until, befuddled, he entered into a relationship with her, this strange woman nearly 15 years older than he. And she bossed him around and used him for all she could get - both domestic support and emotional crutch. I cringed looking at them together, they were so dysfunctional. They were so icky together, flaunting public displays of affection, acting like teenagers in the flush of first love. Poor Ed - I think that's what it was for him.

Things got worse for me on the Karen front once Esther was born. Karen wanted to see Esther constantly (not like I blame her for that). But it meant I had to deal with her drama, her dysfunction, her million little crises constantly. She would come to me with her problems and try to dump them in my lap to solve. Then she'd get pissy with me when I refused to get involved beyond giving her advice how she might deal with her own problems. She accused me of being ungrateful.

Fast-forwarding through much bullshit - another birthday party approached, July 25, 2005. She planned her own birthday party at an expensive, beautiful restaurant in Maine. Such typical Karen - requiring everyone who loved her to drive 3 hours and spend an assload of money to celebrate her birthday. As the date approached, it became something else as well. She and Ed had decided to get married, so this became a combination birthday/engagement party. I held my tongue and tried to look happy for her.

The party arrived. All her guests were there, waiting, but she and Ed were late. When they finally arrived, clearly something was wrong. Turns out, they had broken up in the car on the way there, so there would be no engagement. But she insisted Ed stay for the party, and that they open up all the presents. Then she engaged in this horrible tradition from her family of passing all the presents around for everyone to see. Everything, including the engagement presents. Everything, including their engagement presents to each other. She felt free to tell everyone how much she spent on Ed's gift, a piece of jewelry that clearly had nothing to do with his tastes. She felt free to denigrate his gift to her. Then she opened up a set of lovely silver his-and-hers champagne flutes from her sister, engraved with their initials. Her sister offered to just return them. Ed suggested, quite nicely I thought, that he and Karen should each keep the flute with their initials as a memento of their relationship. Karen flipped out, started yelling, and said the set was hers. OMG, the awful, awful drama.

Colin and I paid our tab ($160 plus tip) and left.

I didn't call her. She called me, three days later, to harangue me for not calling to wish her happy birthday. I told her that I couldn't do this anymore, that I wasn't her daughter no matter how hard we tried to pretend I was, that I just wasn't like her at all. She hung up on me.

I drafted her a letter telling her everything I'd been holding inside for years. It was 32 pages long. Of course I couldn't send that to her, but I felt she was entitled to know why I was stopping the farce after so many years. So I boiled it all down to a 7-page letter and sent it to her. She responded, in writing, trying to get me to go to therapy with her to salvage our relationship. I didn't agree. Having cut it off with her, I felt healthier than I had in years. I felt, and still feel, that I have no need for therapy around this - it's all her dysfunction, her issues, that need to be dealt with. I wrote her back, stating that if she wanted any relationship with me, she had to read my original, 32 page letter. I didn't care if she enlisted her own therapist's help in processing it, but I wasn't going to hold back my emotions and needs to protect her feelings any more.

Fast forward another year-plus. She sent Esther a birthday card with a note to me inside. It said that she respected my decision, but wanted to hear from me - she didn't want to look back on our lost friendship when she got old and wonder what happened. She included her email address and asked me to write. I didn't, because she still wasn't willing to read the 32-page letter. I didn't respond at all. Two weeks later - just two weeks ago - she called my dad at work and harassed him for an hour over how ungrateful I am, how she was so unappreciated. He called me and asked me to email her with something placating so she'd leave him alone.

So I responded. But I couldn't say anything placating or soothing. I emailed her, telling her not to harass my dad when her problem is with me, because he's not my boss and hasn't been able to tell me what to do for years. I told her that I hadn't responded because she wasn't willing to read my letter. I told her I was unwilling to have a relationship with her that was built on her unwillingness to hear what I had to say. I told her I didn't want to hear from her again unless the first line of her correspondence said "Send me the letter now." I told her I wasn't going to look back when I was old and wonder what had happened, because I knew exactly what had happened and was comfortable with that.

Ultimately, it was Esther that gave me the strength to break out of that difficult, draining, dysfunctional relationship. I couldn't let her grow up with Karen's needy, people-using behavior as one of her role models. I couldn't let her see me take abuse, and be used over and over by someone who supposedly loved us. I do feel bad about yanking this lovely little girl away from Karen after a year - after all, Karen had no children, so Esther was as close to a grandchild as she'll ever get. But I did what I had to do, for myself and for Esther. It was self-defense as much as anything else.

So that's where matters stand with Karen. Not precisely resolved, and certainly still loaded with emotion. I still care about her, and want her to be happy, but I cannot be part of her orbit any longer. I cannot accept the responsibility she imposes on me to make her happier by making her life easier. I don't know if her story will end happily or not. I hope it does, but I take no more responsibility if it does not.

Well, this was the longest post ever. Thanks for staying tuned and reading through to the end. I think it helped me, just a little, to write this. I could have written so much more - 32 pages worth, to be exact. But you get the gist. I had to learn the hard way that I can't just select a woman and make her my mom. I only ever had one mom, and I lost her too early. Nobody could ever have filled her place, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze other women into the mold. I am, and will always be, motherless. Karen, I'm sorry I ever agreed to play your daughter - all I did was lead you on and then dump you on your ass. I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our delay in service...

An anonymous commenter (hi!) indicated she's anxiously awaiting my Motherless: Part 3 - Karen post. I just wanted to say that this post is going to be the hardest one for me to write, as Karen was present in my life for longer than either Leila or Alice, and because to some extent my situation with her is still unresolved. This one is going to require me to unload a LOT of baggage, and will be neither easy nor pleasant to write. It will also require me to find a good block of time to sit in front of my computer undisturbed by either rampaging toddler or curious hubby (who, by the way, has no idea that I've got a blog, much less that I've posted our intimate marital secrets on it.)

Anyway, long story short, Part 3 is percolating away in the back of my brain while other things take priority. I hope I'll get to it soon - frankly, I hope that getting it off my chest will help me to process it, lay down my bitterness, and move on with my life.

Thanks for waiting.

Motherless: Part 2 - Alice

Motherless: Part 2 - Alice

Alice was the first person with whom my dad had a serious relationship after Leila, my birth mother’s, death. I found out much later that he met her in a group therapy session. She was (as I remember now, correctly or incorrectly) tall, slender, fair-skinned, frizzy-red-haired, and had a big nose that was also frequently drippy. She was one of those women who always had tissues - and snotrags and tissue lint - stuffed in her handbag. [Wow, where’d that come from? Starting out nasty today!] She was much younger than my dad - I’d say about 30 when they got together, whereas my dad would have been pushing 40 by that time. OK, maybe not that much younger, but again it seemed so at the time.

Alice “joined” the family when I was maybe 3. She moved in when I was four-ish. I easily moved to calling her “mommy,” and she seemed to like filling that role. She took me to school and picked me up at the end of the day. She bought me clothes and played with me and let me put her makeup on my face. She brought me into her family as well - her mother and father were for many years my Nana and Gonka; I played with her brother Don’s kids Scooter and Patrick and Carlin. (Don’s wife Marcy didn’t like me.) I had early wonderful Christmases thanks to her family, which annoyed my Jewish aunts but which my dad was too passive to oppose. For awhile, all was well.

After several years, once I was maybe 7 or 8, she began to slip into instability. She got very into astrology (remember, this was the late 70's). Then she became a born-again Christian. She began hanging out with born-again friends and I would hang with their kids, but I had nothing in common with them. She was sometimes moving a mile a minute, and other times lashing out in rage, and other times barely unable to peel herself out of bed. Looking back, it seems likely that she had some sort of bi-polar disorder. But she was still my mommy, and I loved her very much, and her emerging, one-sided battles with my father left me feeling sick and torn inside.

Something happened where she wound up in the hospital for a couple of days (she did something to her leg I think) and she had run out of her favorite perfume, and desperately needed a fresh bottle. She harassed my dad into picking up a bottle at the drugstore and taking me in a cab to the hospital (my dad has never learned to drive) and bringing it to her. (Honestly now - jonesing hard for perfume to wear in a hospital?!) As we got out of the cab, I jostled my dad’s arm and the perfume in its box fell out of his hand, smashing on the ground. Glass slivers glistened underfoot and the overwhelming alcohol-y smell of Emeraude filled my sinuses. I had this horrible sinking feeling that now was when the awful thing would happen. Fortunately, I have no memory of what happened next.

[My memory has very helpfully obliterated most of the hurtful stuff that I know happened in the first 10 or so years of my life; unfortunately it left me with the memory of about 1/3 of the painful experiences of my teen years. I was a miserable teenage and would love to kiss those memories goodbye. ]

She moved out sometime not too long after that. Seeing her, seeing my mommy, became this erratic thing. Bear in mind, y’all - she wasn’t ACTUALLY my mother, and wasn’t married to my dad; why should she come around? This was pretty painful for me, but at least I could pick up the phone and call her fairly often, hear her voice, hear her tell me she loved me a few evenings a week.

Then one day she came in and told me that she was moving to Chicago. She had gotten a job there. But she would call me, and visit, and send letters and presents. I was numb, but accepted her at her word.

She left.

Disappeared. Fell off the face of the earth.

I had no address to write, no phone number to get her.

That Christmas she called when I was out. She told my dad that she had sent me a present in the mail, and he conveyed the message to me.

I watched the mail every day until March before I gave up. She had lied to me, and strung me along.

I can’t remember if I ever cried about being abandoned by my mommy, or at least, by the woman I called mommy. I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t. I don’t cry much or easily, never have, and often can’t find the tears when I know, just KNOW that I have to cry to heal/move on/feel better/let it go. But the hurt sank deep inside me and festered, a festering emotional pustule affecting all my relationships. The angriest I ever was at my husband, before we got married, was when I’d be waiting for him to pick me up (usually from college classes) and he’d be, maybe, 20 minutes late. The feelings of abandonment instantly swept me away on tides of fear and rage. I realized entirely on my own, one day, that those feelings were the direct result of Alice’s abrupt departure. Instantly, the feelings became manageable, and haven’t been a problem since. But still, ten years of abandonment issues was a lot to inflict on a then-12 year old.

Over the years, she would write to my dad, or I think even call him. I’d hear bits and pieces about her life from him. She had become a minister in some culty-sounding regional offshoot of Christianity. She had become ill with lupus. She had found a new boyfriend and had lived with him for all this time. But I told him to tell her not to contact me, because I didn’t want to hear from her anymore.

Fast forward to the early-to-mid 90's. I would have been about 23 or so. I got a letter in the mail FROM HER. I was with my not-yet-husband at the house of his mom’s then girlfriend (she’s gay) who was a psychologist (duh, I’m sure she still is.) She was letting us do some laundry in her machines. Future hubby (FH for short) stopped home and came back with the mail. He handed it to me and I just froze. Then, sitting right there in her kitchen, I opened the letter and read it.

It was chatty! She opened with what was going on in her life before saying that she was sorry and knew that she must have hurt me and asked for my forgiveness. I just completely fucking lost it. Hysterically crying sitting at the kitchen island in my FH’s mom’s lesbian girlfriend’s kitchen. She, bless her heart, drew me into her office and sat down and threw me an emergency session, gratis, allowing me the opportunity I needed to express the emotional pus that had burst forth from the pustule Alice’s letter had pricked open. She and I didn’t often get along [she was rather uncomfortable with my FH and his siblings being in her house and around her kids all the time], but her immediate presence and willingness to help at exactly the moment I needed help enabled me to experience the emotions quickly, face them down, and finally - FINALLY - move on from the hurt Alice inflicted on me.

I wrote Alice one letter, very long, telling her exactly what I felt. That one I put in an envelope, stuck it somewhere, and never mailed it. I expect I’ll find it someday when I go through all the boxes of my crap my dad’s been storing in his basement for me.

Then I wrote another, shorter one, telling her much more briefly that there was no way she could comprehend the way that she had hurt me, and that if she wanted to really think about that for awhile and try apologizing again, I’d be willing to consider it.

She wrote back almost write away, assuring me in breezy tones that she had indeed thought a lot about it, and wanted to try to have some sort of ongoing contact with me. I wrote back again, saying that seeing as she had written back right away, she clearly had not thought about it long and hard enough, and that she would have to do better if she was to have any contact at all with me.

I never heard from her, or about her, again.

That’s OK. I’m better off not knowing what the hell happened to this woman; whether the life she chose was better than the one she would have had if she had kept me in it.

Long before then, Karen had entered my life.

Next - Motherless: Chapter 3 - Karen

Motherless, Chapter 1 - Leila

I no longer remember how I found the website themotherless.com, but it struck a deep chord in me to read stories of other women who had lost their mothers. I've never written about it here, or talked about it much to anyone, but the drive to fill the "mother" void in my life was a huge thing for me for the second and third decades of my life.

This is Chapter 1 of three - Leila, my birth mother.

She was always a cipher to me. I have a few pictures of her. This one is the only one I have in my living space as a framed photo in a glass cabinet; all the rest are buried in boxes of family pictures in the basement.




In this picture, she and my father are walking into, I believe, their engagement party in Brooklyn in the mid-1960's. It is one of several pictures I have of her in which her eyes are closed or downcast. I have a precious few from after I was born, in which she looks far more alive (if fatigued), holding me, wearing her glasses, wearing casual clothes, in the apartment she shared with my dad and his Airedale.

I have no conscious memories of her. I was close to my grandparents, her parents, and my aunt, her sister, growing up, but neither they nor my dad ever talked about her as I grew up. When I asked my dad, he never seemed to remember anything substantive - only that she loved to cook and was good at it. My aunt told me that all she had ever wanted was to be a wife and mom to a lot of kids, and that she was happy after marrying my dad. My grandmother never answered my questions and became stonefaced when I asked. I only once asked my grandfather about her, after seeing the grief that washed over his face.

I pieced together the little bits of information I was able to gather about her. I knew she had died when I was about six months old. I knew she was the same age as my dad. I knew she was a little heavy, much as I turned out to be. Once, snooping through my dad's stuff (I was a sneaky miserable little kid) I found an old spiral pad of his that he had made a few diary-like entries in. One entry mentioned how he had been trying unsuccessfully to get his hands on some marijuana, and how she kept bugging him to get it. This was most interesting to me, at the age of 10 or so, not yet having tried the stuff myself.

I don't to this day know where I got this idea, but my whole life growing up, I thought she had died of liver cancer. I have no memory of anyone ever having told me this; it was just something I knew like I knew that the sky was usually blue.

My husband only met my aunt and her husband one time. We were recently married and we went to New York City to visit. I dropped hubby off with Uncle G. and my aunt and I went uptown to visit my grandma at the Jewish Home for the Aged. Sure enough, hubby and Uncle G. hit it off like gangbusters, and G. spent the day showing hubby around all his favorite NY spots. And he had a substantive conversation with hubby, whom he just met, about my mom and my dad and how he felt about the situation. G. told my hubby that my mom had died due to medical malpractice but that my dad had never taken any legal action as a result, and so G. hated my dad for having allowed me to be shortchanged out of having a mother and then never getting me anything to compensate for that loss.

G. never talked to *me* about my mom, not even once.

My aunt and Uncle G. both died in a car accident in 1994. My grandfather had already died of heart failure sometime in the late '80's. My grandmother, long since lost to senility, passed away in 1996. I didn't think I had anyone left who could tell me anything about my mother, given that my dad somehow didn't seem to remember anything important about the woman he married.

Fast-forward thirty-three years. My dad's sister, my one remaining aunt, was elderly and not physically well, but had made what would be her last trip to visit my dad and me in our home town. I was pregnant with Esther, and feeling contemplative about all things maternal. I drove her to the airport nearly two hours before her flight home, and we sat talking about motherhood - how she had delivered both her sons without anesthesia (very unusual in the late 50's) and how she had helped my dad with caring for me in the months after my mother passed. I mentioned that I worried I might die young of cancer and deprive my daughter of her mother, the same as had happened to me. She looked at me strangely and asked what I meant. I told her that I was afraid to die of liver cancer like my mom. She was really surprised, and told me that that wasn't how my mother had died at all.

My aunt then told me - finally - what had really happened. My mom and dad had had a lot of trouble conceiving. When she finally did become pregnant with me, her OB/GYN discovered that her uterus was full of fibroids. She actually had to undergo surgery while pregnant with me, cutting-edge at the time, to remove enough of the fibroids to allow enough room for her to carry me to term, but not all of them could be removed. The idea was that once she had healed up sufficiently from delivering me via C-section, they'd go back in and remove the remaining fibroids, after which conceiving again should have been much easier.

So, sure enough, six months after I was born, my mother checked back into the hospital to have the fibroids removed. It was supposed to be, at most, a three-day admission. After the surgery, she complained that she wasn't feeling well. She then went to sleep and never woke up. The autopsy showed that the surgery had left her with an air embolism, an air bubble that had traveled to (I think) her heart and caused heart failure. Or perhaps it was her brain and it caused a stroke. Either way, it was an air embolism that killed her.

Ooooohhhhh.....

To go 34 years without knowing how my own mother died, even worse - thinking I knew how she died but being completely wrong, is just so sad. I barely know the woman at all, even now. She is just a few photographs and a few stories to me. I'll never know things like, did she like to sing? was she good at it? what kind of clothes did she like to wear? what kinds of books did she like to read? what did she hate? was she interested in politics? I would give anything for one face-to-face meeting with her, even if she came to me in my dreams, just so that I could see how her face looked when she spoke, whether she talked with her hands, hear what her voice sounded like. And maybe, just maybe, to hear my own mother say "I love you, Susan" and feel her arms around me. Oh well. People in hell want ice water too.

It took me years to realize how empty her absence left me. Over the years, I would desperately try to fill her place with other women who came into my life, not seeing the pattern, not understanding that it was in fact not possible to substitute just any old female adult for the mother I had lost.

Coming up next: Chapter 2 - Alice.

More photos Blogger wouldn't let me attach to Esther's birthday post.

This is the photo that Blogger wouldn't let me post for seven days:


Granna helping Esther with her birthday cake:


The birthday cake:


The train table, complete with 131 pieces to sprinkle throughout the house!

Two!

My Esther turned two years old on Wednesday Sept. 27, and Sunday 10/1 was her birthday party. (Blogger, since then, has not been cooperating with uploading photos, grrr...) How did that happen? Almost overnight she's talking up a storm, just saying all kinds of things like "Sure!" and "tea party" and "have pickle please" (more like "haff pickoo pease") and "my friend Chucky" and "Mama Esther home!"



She had a great birthday. Her Granna flew in from New Mexico and showered her with gifts and love. Among the gifts were a pair of cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat. The boots stayed on all day; the hat, not so much.



Granna then spent the next couple of days buying Esther presents: a stuffed elephant that can be colored on and then erased; "magic wands" with globes that have spinning lights in them; a remote control dump truck; Dora and farm animal bath toys. Esther had more than enough toys for a birthday before her party even rolled around.

The party went off really well. The hubby cooked up a storm - meatballs, sausage, peppers - and I had a cake made with Dora, Diego and Boots on it. Lots of people came, complete with about half-a-dozen kids, and it was so nice having everyone there that it didn't even matter that it was raining out so we couldn't use the backyard. The kids were all entranced with the *train table!!!*, Mama and Daddy's present to the birthday girl, although she wasn't sure how she felt about sharing it.



Everyone seemed to understand Esther's tastes, because she was fascinated with all her presents. She really loved the box of old-fashioned wooden alphabet blocks from her Gramps, and especially the tea party set from my buddy G. and her daughter L. In fact, her first word when she woke up this morning was "teapot," so we had a tea party on her floor at 6 in the morning.

What can I say about Esther, about how much she has brightened my life and my world these last two years? Sweetheart, you are my shot of sunshine, my all-natural antidepressant. My favorite sensation is that of you wrapping your arms around me and giving me kisses while I breathe in your scent. You grow smarter and funnier every day. I look at you and cannot imagine how two squarely average-looking folks like me and your dad made someone as beautiful as you are.

[I would insert another photo here, but for seven full days now Blogger has refused to allow me to add even one more photo to this post. You'll just have to trust me on this one - it's a beautiful photo of Esther. Grrr!]

Esther, my life before you came was often dark and lonely. I've been prone to long periods of depression and self-hatred since I hit adolescence. But you are like a regular dose of all-natural Prozac - when I see you, when you smile, when you wrap your arms around me and press your round soft cheek against mine, I am happy and whole and at peace with myself, if not with the world. And for the first time in my life, I have a wonderful, intimate, fulfilling relationship with someone who loves me as much as I love her, who wants to be with me as much as I want to be with her. I know this cannot last, that you will get older and then you will naturally move away from me, and that this intimacy will be just a treasured memory. But believe me, I am so grateful to have this with you now. It is so very healing for me - I never had a mother, so I was never on the other end of the mother-child bond. To be your mother, to give you the love and attention and support and affirmation that I never got when I was little, is the best medicine I could take to finally heal that pain.

Thank you for choosing me to be your mama. I am profoundly grateful for the two beautiful years you have spent in my care, and can only hope that the next sixteen will not fly by quite so fast before you fly out of my nest. Yes, in the meantime you will grow and change and become independent of me. But with any luck, you will still welcome my love in small doses, and I will at least be able to get one sweet hug and kiss from you when I need them. Just like the words in the hokey old song I sing to you all the time - you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray. I am a better person for having you in my life.

I love you, now and always.
Mama