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