May 10, 2003

• On my first step-father’s “disappearance”, RiottGyrrrl wrote:

  
  

  “I’m amazed that Jim just left your mother like that.  Was there ever a reason?”

  
  

  I think Jim probably had two or three excellent reasons for pulling a disappearing act.  I was one of them;  my mother was another; and the ghost of my father, our memories of him, the way he would always come up in conversation, was probably a factor, too.

  
  

  

  
  

  Mama apparently sent this old shot of the two of them to Jim right after he found her in ’52, and then got it back again.  In her hand on the back, it says:

  
  

  “How about this–ain’t we a handsome couple?  I’ll bet we were about the happiest couple in the country.  I know we were certainly in love.  Please don’t let this get away.  It’s the only one I have.  Maybe you have one.  This was taken about 1926 or 1927.  I was about 15 or 16.”

  
  

  This is how he remembered her, a teenager whose world revolved around him.  By the time they met again, I don’t think she had matured significantly in any emotional or intellectual sense, but her body had certainly aged.  Her weight was close to double what it had been last time he had seen her.  Pregnancies and surgeries had left her with a pendulous abdomen.  Working on her feet for years had left her with ugly varicose veins in her legs.  Whether on the job or off, she usually wore a hairnet, as I now wear a bandana, to keep her hair out of her way.

  
  

  I was a smart-ass, know-it-all kid.  I loved posing riddles that adults couldn’t answer.  I enjoyed showing off what I knew and making people feel stupid.  At that time, when Jim married my mother and took us first to Arkansas and then to Kansas, I was morose as well, consumed by grief and guilt. 

  
  

  My mother was a bitch.  She was an Aries, so it wasn’t a matter of wanting to get her way, she just didn’t realize there was any way other than hers.  The tactics she used to get her way were passive-aggressive, manipulative, seductive.  She explicitly taught me that the way to get a man to do what I wanted was to make him think it had been his idea.  If that didn’t work, she’d whine and play the martyr to try and guilt people into serving her.  If that failed, she nagged.

  
  

  She had serious hang-ups about sex.  She would not talk about it.  My birds-and-bees education came from a book.  When she handed me the book, she wouldn’t meet my eyes and couldn’t speak.  Once, when I was about thirteen, I told her a dirty joke I’d heard in school.  She blanched and ran to the bathroom and vomited.  The joke really wasn’t all that bad.  I do believe her about not having consummated the marriage to Jim.  That might have been a problem for him.  I would guess that it wasn’t what he was expecting.

  
  

  If Jim failed to grasp that she was grasping onto him to rescue her from her widowhood and poverty, he had to be pretty stupid.  Maybe it took him a little while to catch on, or maybe he just didn’t get a comfortable opening to make his break before he did.

  
  

  The time they got together again, in the late ‘sixties, my mother and I had a new sort of long-distance relationship that was gratifying for me and uncomfortable for her.  I was doing speed and psychedelics.  I had let a lot of my inhibitions go.  I’d get high on the weekend and call her collect.  She always took the calls because it fit her martyr image.  I spoke straight to her, told her what I was doing and how I felt.  I was trying to work things out between us.

  
  

  I questioned the things she had taught me, the feminine inferiority, co-dependency and all.  I wanted her to be open with me.  That just wasn’t in her repertoire, and she did a lot of sighing and crying during our phone conversations, her standard ploys for evading questions or handling criticism. 

  
  

  Jim was retired, living on Social Security, and had had a few heart attacks.  When I asked Mama if he had any explanation for his staged disappearance, she said he had “cold feet”.  When I asked her why she took him back, she cried and said something to the effect that if I didn’t understand “love” she couldn’t explain.  Later on, when I asked her why they split up that time, she had no real answer, just some facile crap I don’t even recall.  She said she left him that time.  If that’s true, it was because of his ill health and poverty, and maybe for revenge.

  
  

  For a while, back then, I thought I could shake her out of her bullshit, but it never happened.  She died at age 75, mired in bullshit.  The last time I saw her she was in her sixties and still practicing feminine wiles, playing head games, batting her eyelashes and trying to endear herself to men by making them feel “big”.  She had appeared ridiculous in my eyes when she did that in her forties.  I seriously doubt that she ever gained enough self-awareness to realize how absurd she appeared, trying to play the coquette so long after she’d lost all her girlish charm.

  
  

  Very rarely, I embarrass myself by expressing some of the crap I learned from my mother.  When I catch myself sounding like her or, even worse, thinking like her, I drop that shit fast.  In my youth, her influence got me in a lot of trouble.  As an adult I have gone to the opposite extremes of frankness and self-sufficiency both because I learned from my own errors when I followed her example, and because she appeared so pathetic and absurd in that role she played.

  • 4:34 pm
  • 18 Comments