Gone but not forgotten: Mary Irene, my biological mother.
I *INSISTED* on being born!
That's bound to be the opening line of a yet-to-be-written auto-biography, but for now it stands as the beginning marker of the atypical relationship I had with my mother Mary, who passed away a few days ago.
You see, I'm an early seventies IUD baby, and even at the ripe old age of negative forty weeks, I was decidedly stubborn. I was happening. And no attempt to block my father's sperm from finding and fertilizing my mother's egg by some flimsy piece of plastic in her privates was going to be good enough to stop me from being.
For that matter, no family doctor with a little practice in central PA (no offense and RIP James Tibbitts) was going to convince my mother otherwise despite him telling her there was no way she could be pregnant. She knew I was happening, one way or another. Sure she'd take whatever medication he prescribed for whatever condition OTHER than pregnancy he thought she had at first (medication that would later be attributed to the rotting of my baby teeth). But even in the womb, I had perfected my ability to scoff... and to survive.
I insisted on being born, damn it.
And so I WAS born ... born the last of my mother's children ... born *almost* the last of my father's children (he had one more late in life, when he was competing (but lost) for the title of world's oldest father [no offense and RIP Tony Randall]) ... born in the year of Hurricane Agnes that brought destruction to my central PA community ... born into a relationship that was soon to be winding down ... born and added to a family unit that would implode before I would be old enough to really recall any traditional bonding times.
I have come to realize that there was a price to be paid for tricking the fates into arriving into this world ... for it would be those same fates who would keep me from my biological mother for most of my life. And by "fates", I mean a decision by a county judge in a mid-seventies shocker of a divorce decree, followed by the machinations of a jealous replacement wife who deviously manipulated the innocence of children to address her own insecurities, and ending with a separation via distance: first literal, then figurative and now final.
The fates don't like to be tricked ... and they don't come lightly by their reputation for being cruel.
To be fair, though, I was loved as a baby -- although, let's face it ... it's pretty easy to love a baby, especially one as cute and pudgy and tow-headed as I. There are pictures to prove it -- both my cute and pudgy status AND the fact that I was loved enough to be surrounded by all my stuffed animals, or to be permitted to take out all the pots and pans in order to turn the kitchen into my performance arena for a cacophony of my own creation, or to be visited in the basement rec room each holiday by a Santa Claus who had the suspiciously easy to recognize ears of my father's family line. There are tales of me taking aim and throwing bottles in church (the zenith of any display of athletic prowess on my part) and of me chawing down on chicken bones in my highchair to keep me occupied and quiet (poultry and the processing of it is actually a family birthright from my father's side). Surely my mother had some role in this stage of my development, even if I was too young to recall anything -- although it's also likely that my oldest sister had something to do with it, because she's gone on record saying how pleased she was that she got what her friends didn't have ... a real live doll to play with, brought home from the hospital just for her.
Regardless ... "this" didn't last. This family. This home. This life. If there were to be a soundtrack playing as you read this, it would be time for Tammy Wynette to start spelling out the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E and to replace little J-O-E with little T-R-O-Y. Except here's a scenario that that song didn't consider. Namely, what if both parents going through a dissolution of a marriage were each married before? What if father had a separate family from after World War II in the next county over? And what if mother was married with a child and a "one-on-the-way " (to mix a little Loretta Lynn in with my classic country references) when she first met that guy, my father, at the start of the marriage.
To clear up a quick fact, my mother was actually a very recent widow when she met my father, having lost the father of HER first two children to an accident at the race car track just months before they got together. (That oldest sister who was delighted to have a baby in the family was technically a half-sister in that we shared a mommy but had different daddies.) And one other layer to add in ... my mother had *also* lost a brother as a teenager. Who's to say how a young woman deals with those kinds of losses ... and how it changes you at that tender age ... and how it colors your future decisions ... but with the luxury of hindsight ... one does wonder how it may have changed my mother Mary ...
Back to the divorce decree. Despite it being the mid-seventies and even though it was customary at the time for children OF a marriage to go to the mother IN a marriage that was ending, the breaking up of this blended family in the courts would play out slightly more controversially. In total there were five children ... the oldest daughter of my mother with her first husband, the other daughter of my mother with her first husband who was born after her biological father died such that she only knew my father as her father, the twins that had christened this relationship of second marriages and me (you probably recall ... but I had insisted on being born as well). No soon-to-be-single woman working in a poultry processing plant (so many of the key moments that affected my childhood took place in one of Fredericksburg's many chicken plants) could possibly afford to care for FIVE offspring. Or so sayeth the judge in a divorce decree that placed primary custody of the oldest children with the mother (seeing as how they did have a different father, technically) and kept the youngest children (i.e. the twins and I) with the father.
Fates: 1. Me and my momma: 0.
To be fair, though, there was shared custody. At least at the beginning. But you know how it goes .. daddy meets a new mommy ... mommy meets a new daddy ... daddy's new mommy doesn't like daddy's old mommy (and can barely tolerate the new kids that have to play with her set of kids -- because, yes, daddy's new mommy had been married with kids before daddy met daddy's new mommy through parents-with-partners [an online dating service of sorts that pre-dated there being such a thing as online relationship finders]) ... mommy's old daddy doesn't like mommy's new daddy ... daddy and mommy both soon don't like their new rebound mommies and daddies ... so daddy meets *another* new mommy who really really doesn't like daddy's old mommy (the first old mommy not the latest old mommy ... although not the original old mommy from the WWII family, 'cause that whole thing is pretty much ancient history by this point) ... and so we come to the part of the story that features the evil stepmother. (By the way, it would have been perfectly acceptable for you to have pulled out pen and paper and attempted to illustrate this last paragraph. Really, it's OK. It may be the only way to capture the visual.)
Before we go down the Disney villain pathway regarding my father's next marriage partner, though, let it be said that some of my fondest memories of me as a child and Mary as my mother happened in this section of our shared timeline -- the shared custody section.
I remember playing in the sun room with my Sweet Pickles toys at the Fox house (that was my mother's new last name, as he was her new marriage partner) ... and walking down the road to frolic in the "crick" (frolic being defined as splashing about and overturning rocks to look at the creatures underneath them) ... and using all kinds of Avon products (she was a "distributor"). I remember the drives during the shared custody times, counting cars on the way to her place in Schuylkill Haven to pass the time -- her own apartment, after she no longer was a Fox (because, as said above, the rebound relationships for BOTH didn't work out). I remember going to the diner where she worked, and having ham and cheese sandwiches with a side of chips with the bread and meat stuck together with those little toothpicks that had the colored streamers on the end of them -- items not on the menu, but made special for me because she knew the owner. I remember sitting on the floor behind the bar in the banquet room while she worked, keeping myself busy with the workbooks that she would buy me when we went to the store. I remember that she fed my curiosity and kept my brain engaged by letting me choose the educational lesson books that were in the toy section at Hills (I was a strange child, but a strange child who did realllly well in school for having gotten a head start with those items).
For a time, I even lived with my mother and my half-sister (not the oldest one, who was , at a very young age, out on her own by then ... but the second oldest). I believe it was a part of my first grade ... I recall a Christmas pageant and wearing a white trash bag because I played a polar bear at the North Pole ... and of starting a savings account with a 50 cent piece that I'm hoping is sitting in a bank somewhere, a secretly amassed fortune I'll reclaim for my later years ... and having a bowl of cereal for a bedtime snack ... and watching StarBlazers before school in the morning, and the classic Batman TV show after ... and of playing at a nearby playground and swimming at a nearby community pool (including almost drowning the day I decided to walk across it, slowly moving down to the deeper section until I couldn't touch the bottom any more ... and was saved by strangers). I remember being babysat by Uncle Jack, who wasn't my uncle at all and may not have even been named Jack, but who took me up to the Ft. Indiantown Gap in some drinking/eating establishment that had an old bowling game with the automatic pins at the end of a runway down which you'd push a metal puck through sawdust to get your spares and strikes.
How exactly I ended up there I'm not quite sure, other than my father and the wicked stepmother had given up on me. Because I get it. I was willful and obstinate and clever and creative and imaginative. I was a handful. I was under nourished from having love withheld from me. I was sensitive and insular and damaged. I had no outlet. I had few friends. I needed attention and I wanted out, in so many applications of that word. I know me now and I know from whence I came. PS -- I love me now (faults and all). I flourished. I repaired. I found an outlet ... and friends ... and success on my own terms. And I am still willful and obstinate and clever and creative and imaginative ... and a handful. I embrace it. I am proud of it. I stand by it. But I get it. I accept the fact that I may have represented a parenting challenge back in the day.
When it comes right down to it, I like to think that my recently deceased mother actually encouraged me to be "a challenge". As I remember it, I was her "tigger", a la Winnie the Pooh's friend, a la "the wonderful thing about tiggers is that tiggers are wonderful things", a la don't let Rabbit try to change who you are or what makes you special, for those familiar with that story.
Upon reflection, how I ended up back in the care of my father and the aforementioned wicked stepmother ... I'm not quite sure. Rumor has it I phoned and stated I was over it. Frankly, I don't think I had the power to make that kind of claim or to force that kind of decision. Based on my age, I feel strongly that I was wrapped up in the machinations of the adults. Because it wasn't long after that custody swap that we (my sisters AND I) were allegedly terminating our own ability to spend time with our mother in another now-suspicious phone call.
Divorce wasn't prevalent in Jesus Bible times ... but if it had been ... I know in my heart that the following would be a verse in the New Testament -- maybe added to the Sermon on the Mount, possibly a Debbie Downer style addendum to the Beatitudes, likely a statement that would have gone a little something like this: "Cursed are those who manipulate the minds of the innocent youth for their own nefarious purposes". Or, summarized another way ...
Fates: 2. Me and my momma: 0.
What is one to do when one is spurned by one's own children (through the machinations of another)? The same thing that historians say many Americans did at one time in our past when the call to action was to reinvent oneself. That is ... to heed the call to "go west, young Mary ... go west". And so it became that my mother ended up in Montana, and ended up with a new last name -- of Drey -- to go with her new life out west with her new husband.
To be fair though, there was still contact between her and me (and my sisters). There were cards at every holiday (addressed to Master Troy, which was technically correct yet comical to me as a child), and there were leather bound Louis L'Amour books arriving by mail every so often, followed by the Time Life Civil War series, and an electronic dungeons and dragons game where you tried to build the walls of a castle/maze before you accidentally stumbled on the electronic dragon.
Of course, all the cards and letters and photos were opened by "the warden" before being given to me, so I can only assume that I got everything that was actually sent to me. And I was forced to throw out that dungeons and dragons game, ostensibly because it was leading me to Satan, but more likely because my father's wife-of-the-time was a jealous jealous woman. She was a bit "touched" even before she was in a car accident where the majority of her brains was replaced with a metal plate (OK, I exaggerate slightly ... but she did get the metal plate in her head, even if she kept most of her brains after being in that car crash).
Her fascination with all things Mary led to some questionable parenting (i.e. telling me that my father is whomever my mother says it is, implying, of course, that my dad was NOT my dad after all) and some bizarre posturing (i.e. not letting me go to my 8th grade field day because my mother was back visiting the east coast and had allegedly organized a kidnapping of me to take place in the midst of the hullabaloo that day -- and so I was forced to play hooky and accompany her to Green Dragon to foil the plot). That was a similar approach to when my mother's mother passed away, and, after much debate, I was whisked into and out of the viewing for my Nanny, but kept from the funeral for fear that I be snatched away. (Mind you, by this time, it was abundantly clear that I wasn't necessarily wanted by the stepmother, and that I only represented the pawn in her jealousy game as defined by her warped relationship with my father.)
However, the damage to our relationship was done. The signature on the cards and letters, the image in the photos, the gifter of the books (that , thankfully, I still have) ... it represented a woman who was no longer involved in my life ... and who was harder and harder to think of as a part of me, despite our time together when I was younger. Grade after grade passed by with birthday after birthday, but the fact was that there were over 2000 miles between us in a pre-interwebs age. The literal distance was succeeding in dismantling our relationship.
Fates: 3. Me and my momma: 0.
Fast forward to 1989, a seminal year in my development, because that was the year, with the support of so many, when I escaped the life I had with my father and his wife-of-the-time, and when I struck out on my own, while still a senior in high school, three months before my graduation. It kicked off the biggest and most important decade of my life.
To be fair, though, she was there for the kick-off to this part of my life. My mother Mary came to central Pennsylvania that summer, attended my graduation, accompanied me to a picnic with her side of the family (from whom I had been sheltered), and did her level best to re-spark a relationship with me. Even after the visit ended and she returned to her life out in the wild wild west, the cards and photos and letters continued ... but a return to any kind of traditional relationship just wasn't in the cards.
Not for her want of trying ... but because I didn't have the skills to process it. I spent that decade trying to figure out who *I* was, and in relying on *my* support system to get me through college ... and then through law school. And the reality was that I had people in my life at that time who served as substitutes who knew me better and whom I cared for more than a distant figure. I was so unbelievably free, that I wasn't bound by blood when it came to defining my family, and so I sought out (and thrived because of) "family" connections who were real and present and invested in my day to day.
Before I knew it, I was content seeing my mother Mary once a decade ... in the late eighties when I graduated, in the mid nineties at the wedding of a sister, and in the mid naughts at the graduation of a nephew. Each time, I posed for pictures and I smiled and I dealt with the awkwardness of a relationship that had taken the path that ours did. She kept on sending the cards and the letters and the photos ... and so it was that I had some peace knowing that she had found a lasting relationship late in life, and was close enough to interact frequently with a set of grandchildren who were also out west. And the holidays always brought with it a gift -- despite her being on a fixed income due to a disability (more on that in a moment) -- and frequently with some holiday trinket (and so there will be many memories again this upcoming holiday season when it is time to decorate).
I went through phases where I was better than at other times in returning the communications. Without great regularity, I would send cards and letters and photos ... although I often struggled since Hallmark doesn't have a line of cards that quite captures all that we had been through. I will say emphatically that we each played the hands we were dealt, and that it was neither person's fault per se that we couldn't recapture the bond we obviously once had ... but by this time, the figurative distance was simply too great.
Fates: 4. Me and my momma: 0.
As per our pattern, it was soon time for us to meet again ... in *this* decade.
To be fair, though, I had just started the earliest conversations about possibly connecting while I was in Vegas (my company sends me there each year for a conference), because, in my mother's advanced age, she had lost that late in life love, and her health was proving to be more challenging, and she had moved into my out-west-sister's home ... in Nevada. Of course, it was the opposite end of Nevada than Vegas, but, with enough planning ahead of time, it was something that might have been possible come next February.
But then the true nature of her failing health became known. My mother Mary suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for many many years -- even back in the diner days -- and the disease had twisted her hands at a too young age. For too long, she managed her day to day with the strongest of medications. Many many medications. I remember in our meet-up in the mid naughts that she had a literal tackle box in order to manage everything she was prescribed. And so years and years of the strongest of medications had given her the weakest of bodies. Once diabetes joined the malady play list, it was only a matter of time before something like the scheduled visit to the hospital for a toe amputation would lead to much worse. With hospitals being the hotbed of germs that they are, my mother caught pneumonia and succumbed to septic shock within a fortnight.
In the final hours when we were notified that it would only be a matter of time and that comfort care was involved, I was invited to make one final phone call to her. I declined. I wasn't in the habit of making phone calls, and I was frightened that my attempt to do so at this time in these circumstances would end up like the final words sung by Freddie in 'Pity the Child' in CHESS, the musical (i.e. "just in case she said ... whoooooo?") -- a song that has always haunted me every time I heard it for all the obvious reasons. And so it was that I was the absentee son, up until and including the very very very last minute.
Now the distance, once literal, then figurative ... now it is final.
Fates: 5. Me and my momma: 0.
I insisted on being born. My mother was complicit in that act. I survive. She is gone. My story ... my truth ... admittedly much different for my siblings ... and much different for her siblings and their families ... for me, it boils down to how we are the choices we make. We live ... and we die ... with their consequences. It is so very hard to miss again what I didn't have and missed for years before, for reasons laid out herein. But I owe her my life. Which means, I owe her respect with her passing. Because she was key to the fact that ...
I *INSISTED* on being born!
Mary Irene ... with whom I once played a game regularly, where I would say "I love you" and you would answer with "I love you two" and I would counter with "I love you three", and so on, and so on, on we would go to the highest number I knew at the time (I was quite young) ... tonight I say to you, "I love you to infinity" ... and I say to you that you will be missed.
For a time, I even lived with my mother and my half-sister (not the oldest one, who was , at a very young age, out on her own by then ... but the second oldest). I believe it was a part of my first grade ... I recall a Christmas pageant and wearing a white trash bag because I played a polar bear at the North Pole ... and of starting a savings account with a 50 cent piece that I'm hoping is sitting in a bank somewhere, a secretly amassed fortune I'll reclaim for my later years ... and having a bowl of cereal for a bedtime snack ... and watching StarBlazers before school in the morning, and the classic Batman TV show after ... and of playing at a nearby playground and swimming at a nearby community pool (including almost drowning the day I decided to walk across it, slowly moving down to the deeper section until I couldn't touch the bottom any more ... and was saved by strangers). I remember being babysat by Uncle Jack, who wasn't my uncle at all and may not have even been named Jack, but who took me up to the Ft. Indiantown Gap in some drinking/eating establishment that had an old bowling game with the automatic pins at the end of a runway down which you'd push a metal puck through sawdust to get your spares and strikes.
What is one to do when one is spurned by one's own children (through the machinations of another)? The same thing that historians say many Americans did at one time in our past when the call to action was to reinvent oneself. That is ... to heed the call to "go west, young Mary ... go west". And so it became that my mother ended up in Montana, and ended up with a new last name -- of Drey -- to go with her new life out west with her new husband.
Fast forward to 1989, a seminal year in my development, because that was the year, with the support of so many, when I escaped the life I had with my father and his wife-of-the-time, and when I struck out on my own, while still a senior in high school, three months before my graduation. It kicked off the biggest and most important decade of my life.
To be fair, though, she was there for the kick-off to this part of my life. My mother Mary came to central Pennsylvania that summer, attended my graduation, accompanied me to a picnic with her side of the family (from whom I had been sheltered), and did her level best to re-spark a relationship with me. Even after the visit ended and she returned to her life out in the wild wild west, the cards and photos and letters continued ... but a return to any kind of traditional relationship just wasn't in the cards.
Before I knew it, I was content seeing my mother Mary once a decade ... in the late eighties when I graduated, in the mid nineties at the wedding of a sister, and in the mid naughts at the graduation of a nephew. Each time, I posed for pictures and I smiled and I dealt with the awkwardness of a relationship that had taken the path that ours did. She kept on sending the cards and the letters and the photos ... and so it was that I had some peace knowing that she had found a lasting relationship late in life, and was close enough to interact frequently with a set of grandchildren who were also out west. And the holidays always brought with it a gift -- despite her being on a fixed income due to a disability (more on that in a moment) -- and frequently with some holiday trinket (and so there will be many memories again this upcoming holiday season when it is time to decorate).
But then the true nature of her failing health became known. My mother Mary suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for many many years -- even back in the diner days -- and the disease had twisted her hands at a too young age. For too long, she managed her day to day with the strongest of medications. Many many medications. I remember in our meet-up in the mid naughts that she had a literal tackle box in order to manage everything she was prescribed. And so years and years of the strongest of medications had given her the weakest of bodies. Once diabetes joined the malady play list, it was only a matter of time before something like the scheduled visit to the hospital for a toe amputation would lead to much worse. With hospitals being the hotbed of germs that they are, my mother caught pneumonia and succumbed to septic shock within a fortnight.
