Suzy Says

It seemed like a long time since we had a family dinner together, so we gathered at Megan’s place for some pizza from Café Beaujolais and some delicious rosé from the winery where our friend Monica now works.

Maybe it was the approach of Mother’s Day, but we ended up talking about Mom. We don’t often talk about our childhood, and I have to say, it is only recently I have really begun to understand that it was a little odd, to say the least.

Mom was bi-polar, and also suffered from serious post-partum depression. Again, this something I figured out in retrospect. Mom stayed in bed all summer after Megan was born in late May. I thought she was sick. After all, she went to the hospital to get the baby, and that’s where sick people went. Keep in mind, I was 9 at the time.

Despite being 9, I somehow ended up helping to feed and change Megan, and did the laundry. I still remember thinking that the smallest person had the most laundry, as I folded the diapers and onesies.

Before Meg was born, there was an incident where Mom dumped Jonathan’s Spaghetti-Os and milk over his head and then stormed off. My major concern at the time was that the tomato sauce would irrevocably stain his platinum curls, and that I would never get the stain out of his hair. I now realize that was the least of what I should have been worried about in this situation. Jonathan asked me if I remembered what he did to spark this, and neither of us could remember. I just remember the clean up.

Even though Mom didn’t work and had a car, we always walked to and from the school bus stop. We lived in the country, and our driveway was a quarter of a mile long, so it was at least half a mile and maybe more to the neighbor’s houses where the bus stopped. Yet there was never the slightest suggestion that Mom should drive us to the bus stop or to school. This only occurred to me over the past couple of years. And if Mom was even up when we were getting ready for school, she wasn’t making lunch or helping us to get ready. She was sitting at the dining room table with coffee and a cigarette.

She was kind of a ghost in our lives. I don’t have a lot of specific memories with her. Even though Dad worked full-time, he was the one who made dinner and read us bedtime stories and took us to the library and grocery store on Saturdays.

But Mom could be charming. We all had the experience of our friends saying how fun she was. Even at the hospital where she eventually died, the staff (and Megan’s co-workers) thought she was charming. We all said to each other that we just agreed with anyone who said this. I wasn’t going to tell them how she used to tell me, “You’ll never amount to anything. You’ll be a clerk in a dime store your whole life”, or how she used to call me up and reduce me to tears for no reason, or throw the phone at my head when I came downstairs in the morning. There’s no point. Let them think what they want. Their truth is also true.

I do feel sorry for Mom and the pattern of abandonment that plagued her whole life, starting with being left on the orphanage steps as a newborn and ending with her second husband leaving her as she battled the cancer that would eventually kill her. She should never have had kids, and I don’t think she ever got the treatment she needed that would have helped her to have a happier life. It must have been really hard living inside that head.

But I’m glad my brother and sister and I have each other, and I think our childhood, though difficult at times, helped us all to grow up to be people who work hard and don’t expect the world to bend to our whims. We all just suck it up and deal, and that has stood us in good stead.

It’s not surprising that Mother’s Day is hard for me, though. I avoid Facebook not just on that day, but for days afterwards. All the fuss just reminds me of what I didn’t have and will never have.

FIVE YEARS AGO: A wonderful time at the circus.

TEN YEARS AGO: A field trip for garden supplies.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Of cats and dogs.