I start to think about the version of me my mother had. I never had before. I take myself out of the story to see only hers —or try, but you know, often I think, I was my mother’s total creation; her Frankenstein …..
but I can only speak from myself so, subjective despite it all
I start now with a heartbreaking memory
of …. one of the times she abandoned us.
it was something she did after the shouting matches at home; doors slam—then out she goes with tyres screeching. It was a roller coaster at home. The Florida years. Where did she go?
Where did she go?
For weeks on end.
Anyway, this time, she returned from —this time from New York; one such at attempts at peacetimes at home life when I knew she would be returning that night. My grandmother was there with us. She made us go to bed. My aunt was there. It was late and I stayed up to listen. My heart broke for weeks over her. I was almost five. I didn’t think she’d come back. Ever. I heard her come in through the front door. I crept out from the nursery and stood by the stairs hiding in the shadows watching. I will always remember how beautiful she was. How beautiful she looked in the hallway. All golden, like a movie star. She wore a dark green fitted dress that was satin with black velvet pumps that had little sparkling rhinestones woven through…. and I could not bear to be so far from her that I removed myself from the shadows
It is strange to remember how stranger-like she always was to me; like some phantom I never got near, always out of reach; yet I idolized her and worshipped her more than myself
to see her from twenty years after her passing, I was still such a girl when she left really, I never could have understood what I was to her. Why she kept me so far away. The very danger and threat of my constant existence. The very need for my needing to exist for her in her life. What I signified to her.
She saw me from the hall and told the others to give her a minute with me. She had her bags and motioned I follow her to the master bedroom. There she set down a bag and pulled out a box.
When she opened the box for me, inside was one of those priceless “Sasha dolls” (I’d never seen one before) who looked about five who had the same shade of red hair as me and the same color eyes as me. Now, I never played with dolls but, this one was different somehow. Perhaps that was when the Celf self-actualized. But—do you see, as I had not ….
You see, I did not know she had given up a child when she was young; previous to her second marriage, final marriage. My mother had a checkered past she never told us about. That there was also an annulled marriage is only a hint of what any of us know. What became of my mother’s first child? No clue. Only old black and white pictures found locked in a secret case of her with the child.
Only now can I understand that moment ….the crisis as it happed to me around five. When her second husband beat me unconscious and resulted in a long term trauma reaction that kept me from school for six weeks.
When she asked me if I’d like to be sent away to my ‘real dad’ …. Only now do I see what it meant to her. As that other man had been the love of her life; me—the lovechild—she’d already given up one. I begged her. I couldn’t leave her. I begged her. Till I was sick. I wept until I was distraught and inconsolable and went into a trance. My worst fear in life was to be abandoned by her forever. And how often she did that. But …. on her side: Her only choice was to disguise me. Had she sent me to my real dad —my life would have been so different. As he only lived a few more years anyway, so, I think she had no choice but to hide me in plain sight.
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