I Miss You, Mommy. Happy 76th Birthday.
No person is the sum of their bad acts. We are all complicated beings, quilts stitched together, made of scraps of life. My mother went through a very dark period in her life and became, for several years, a terrible parent.
The damage she did, was done. Cannot be undone, in fact. But she did try. She never directly said she was sorry, yet she worked for years to try to repair the wounds she inflicted in her frequent, vicious, and often drunken, furies during my teenage years.
After I moved 600 miles from home, to get married and flee the dysfunction, Mommy floundered a bit, still trying, for a time, to control me. Threatening suicide long distance is a not-nice thing to do.
A few years after I moved to Appalachia, she met the piano man, who would change her life. She seemed to set out to make sense of her life; she was happy. Finally. And she deserved it.
I was terribly lonely living in a place where many people had never left. Mommy would send me cards, telling me how proud she was to be my mother, often tucking a few bucks inside and telling me to buy myself dinner or a book. She would send me flowers for no reason other than she was thinking of me. And despite some others’ disapproval, she supported me when I decided, after 13 long years, to leave my first marriage.
She loved me, and I finally believed it to be true. That in itself helped to heal my broken heart. (Plus therapy. Just saying.)
I kept many of the cards, and on the rare occasion that I take them out, I laugh at her shitty handwriting and I’m touched all over again. I become that hurt little girl whose mother tenderly kissed the wounded place and made it all better. The messages were always clear: You are strong. You are smart. You are beautiful. You are worthy. I love you and I believe in you.
She would have been 76 today. This is my love letter to her.
She was the middle child of eight, if that’s possible. The first girl after four boys, I’m certain she was a welcome addition to her mother’s growing Irish-Catholic brood. There would be three more after her, two more brothers and a little sister. Only the oldest boys got to see their mother into adulthood. She died in a car accident; Mommy was just 13.
Suddenly, the gangly teenager with the long legs was the woman of the house, a sprawling farmhouse in New Jersey, hard up against the border of eastern Pennsylvania.
She took us there once. She wanted desperately to find her mother’s grave, and so we spent a weekend traipsing through the Garden State. The farmhouse was spectacular, and the owners gave us a tour. I was a kid, I don’t know what Mommy was thinking, but I remember how pained she looked at times.
She talked often about the mother she missed so desperately, even as an adult. Always, around the summer anniversary of that death, she would get painfully sad, her melancholy wrapping around her for days. To cope: Joan Baez and Dylan on the stereo, wine and cognac in abundance.
I don’t know what Mommy’s life was like in the aftermath of her mother’s sudden death, but she was saddled immediately with the responsibility for her younger siblings, and left to deal with a father who was utterly lost without his bride.
There weren’t many years separating her from her older brothers, and they left the farm after graduating from the local Catholic high school. One became a pro football player, another a lawyer and judge, another a railroad vagabond-cum-merchant marine.
With all those protective older brothers, I don’t know what drew her to him, my biological father. Certainly, he was handsome, and brilliant enough to earn a full ride to a state university and its law school,serving a year as Law Review editor. His father was a peach; his mother, not so much. He took after his mother. I cannot imagine Mommy didn’t see at least at little of the sadist in him.
Years later, I asked her why she married him. She didn’t have an answer, other than she always wanted to be a mother. When she got pregnant, at 18, it was in an era when women had one of two choices: get married, or take an extended “vacation” with a distant relative and return home a childless mother known to none.
They eloped. On the night of their quickie wedding, her father came to her bedroom and opened the door. Before he could say a word, she blurted it out: We got married. I doubt there was much of an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, and I suspect she might have already regretted it. But she made her bed and she lay with that monster for 10 years.
Two months after her ninteenth birthday, she had my oldest brother. The next boy followed two years later. By then, they were ensconced in an apartment outside of D.C.; he was government attorney, she a stay-at-home mother. I came along in 1965. I don’t know if she was trying to save her failing marriage, or if he raped her. He would sexually abuse me, later, so I think it’s entirely possible. I never told her, and I never asked her why she had me, knowing she was married to the boogie man.
One of my earliest memories: I wasn’t yet three and my Grampa called from New Jersey. He and Gramma were going to come stay with us for a time while Mommy was in the hospital.
She had tried to kill herself. After years of being physically beaten and verbally tormented, she reached a point where she just couldn’t take it anymore. The young beautiful woman, who wanted nothing more than to be a mother, who knew the pain of losing her mother at an early age, lost her will to live. He beat it out of her, using his fists and words to hurt her so much, she was willing to leave behind her children. Motherless, like her.
She told me later that she’d swallowed a sedative she’d been prescribed to calm her nerves. She was slipping into unconsciousness when Grampa called. She told him what she’d done, and he called my father who called an ambulance. Mommy was hospitalized for a few weeks in a psychiatric hospital. There, she was given shock treatment.
It was late 1967 or early 1968, when shock treatment was still primitive; think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was painful, she told me when I asked her about it many years later.
Shock treatment erases certain parts of memory from the brain, and is used to treat some types of severe, clinical depression. In fact, it has for the last couple of decades evolved and enjoyed a resurgence within the psychiatric community to treat very suicidal people.
What shock treatment cannot do is change the behavior of those around you. The ones who contribute to the horrific memories that contribute to severe depression.
That time in the hospital gave my mother s break from the monster. But when she returned home, she told me, she had to continue with outpatient shock therapy. It made her cry, just thinking about it. Almost as bad: The monster in the bed next to her would laugh and rub his hands together in glee.
“Come on Betty*, it’s time to get lit up!”
As I said. He was a monster. And she and we were his captives. Until we weren’t.
I was four years old. We were sleeping and then we were being yanked from our beds. He was carrying me, running down the stairs; she was behind him, ushering my brothers, and the friend of one of them who was sleeping over, down the stairs and out the front door. I don’t remember much about what happened next. What I do remember is looking out of the bedroom window of the neighbor’s house and seeing the monster, his arms raised over his head, hands clutching a chair. He was running after her, the mother of his children.
He wanted to hit her over the head and kill her. To murder the mother of his children.
In running from the chair attack, Mommy was locked out of the house. Desperate to get back in, she punched her arm through the glass on the front door. In the end, she managed to escape with a black eye, a gash in her arm that took 175 stitches to close, and her life.
She escaped the monster and took control of her life.
For that, she will always be my hero.
She divorced him. He was by then an up and coming associate at a white shoe midtown Manhattan firm, while she took a job as a waitress at a local seafood restaurant to support us. He paid child support and alimony, but it wasn’t enough. She worked long hours. But still: she made time to do things with us; trips to the Catskills, weekend outings to Jones Beach, where she would cook breakfast on the beach and hold me in her arms and ride the surf. I can still feel that motion; her arms wrapped tightly around me, as the ocean wave lifted us up. She also found time to do things with us individually; she once took me to dinner at an upscale restaurant, where they made the Caesar salad tableside, and we ate escargot and fettuccine Alfredo, and afterwards I danced an Irish jig for the people in the bar. I was six.
Our house was often filled with people; she loved to entertain, and our uncles, aunts, and cousins were all within driving distance. Holidays were drawn out affairs, spending time at this or that uncle’s house, and them coming to our Long Island duplex. Her youngest brother moved in with us for a few years while he went to college, and he served as a sort-of pseudo dad. She had boyfriends, too, but we were her priority. Her mother’s best friend, Aunt Dot, was our surrogate grandmother and favorite aunt. She and my Uncle Stanley were constants in our lives.
She was dating a man named for a Greek philosopher when they decided to take a road trip to Cape Cod. However, her car, a pretty, pale yellow convertible Camaro, broke down by the water in Rhode Island. Within two months, we were following a moving truck and moving from an actual island, to southern New England.
Impetuous, perhaps, but that was my mother: She really did have a philosophy that we get one go ‘round; that money is only dirty paper and you can always make more; that life is way too precious to waste on people who don’t deserve you or who are holding you back. That life is a journey to be lived and enjoyed and explored and savored and devoured. Preferably at the same time.
And my God: her journey was far too short, just 59 years. But if you were lucky enough to be in Mommy’s orbit, you know that she lived loud and large and fully. She did nothing — nothing — half-assed. And she would not tolerate half-assed from others.
Yoda said, Don’t try, do. She was a do-er. I think that is where my oldest brother S. got his resilience from; he may have been a quadriplegic, but that was just a physical state. He never pitied himself; he had friends, he had lovers, he had a wife; he survived illness after illness; he divorced, and lived in poverty. He traveled and embraced adversity, as if it were a personal challenge and he was too determined not to let it win. He was funny and fierce and phenomenal. He was his mother’s son.
Mommy married the piano man two years after they started dating. He, a widower 25 years her senior, was utterly smitten with this vivacious, funny, smart, generous woman with a troubled and depressed history who nevertheless had an appetite for life.
The piano man was 74 and Mommy was 49 when they married. His family refused to attend the wedding; he had one daughter who had four children and various grandchildren. The night before the wedding she came to the house and called Mommy a gold-digger. The piano man, who had built a successful painting business, had built his daughter’s house, put all of her children through college, and given his successful business to her oldest son, was terribly hurt. He had nursed his first wife through illness that kept her bedridden for a decade until her death. He found love with my mother a year later. Didn’t he deserve it? His daughter didn’t think so. She was wrong. Wrong about that and wrong about my mother.
After his daughter moved him into a nursing home, a decade after Mommy’s death, the piano man’s son in law gave me 10 photo books. Nothing really prepares you to to see naked pictures of your 50-something-year-old mother, taken in various hotels around the northern hemisphere. Still, I laughed and was happy: it was clear that they had such passion for each other. She loved his gentle, gentleman heart; the man who wanted to take care of her, not just sleep with her. And embraced all of us, as a family. He loved her ballsiness; her utter inability to lie about anything; and her incredible generosity and empathy.
The piano man held her hand as she ebbed away in October 1999, less than five months after the lung cancer diagnosis. Less than seven months after she buried her oldest son. A week before she would have learned that her only daughter would be having a baby, who would be named for her.
Because those few years, as awful as they were, did not define her too-short life. They are a fraction of a complicated, full, rich life that a couple thousand words can’t convey.
So this.
Dear Mommy,
Happy 76th Birthday! Thank you so much for all that you taught me. To be strong. To rise, always, when life or people push you down.
Thank you for knowing and showing what it means to be selfless and empathetic and generous to those with less than, who deserve so much more.
Thank you for the books and poetry that were ever-present in our home. Thank you for introducing me to Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, John Denver, and of course, Peter, Paul and Mary.
Thank you for teaching me to be a loyal fan of the New York Football Giants, even when they sucked.
Thank you for teaching me how to make pea soup, and gravy, and sautéed scallops, and boiled lobster, and introducing the idea that garlic and onions make everything better, and that spending a bit more for the best ingredients is always worth it.
Except liver. Liver still sucks.
Thank your for imbuing Christmas with joy and potential and cookies and lights and fresh garland.
Thank you for the cards and notes that still, 25 years later, make me smile and laugh and cry.
Thank you for showing me that people who serve your meal are professionals and deserve to be tipped, and tipped well.
Thank you for reminding me to keep my shoulders back and my boobs out.
Thank you for showing me that settling is not living, and that I will live with the consequences if I don’t stand for myself, and that I am my biggest advocate in this life.
Thank you for doing the best you could with the tools you had.
I am proud to call you my mother.
I am proud that E. is named for such a strong woman.
I love you Mommy. Happy Birthday.
Love always, Heather Nann
