A Whipping Spoon

My mother was not a well woman.  Her photograph can be found under the word "vindictive" in the dictionary.  I remember specific examples of how she would attempt to get back at people who dared to breathe in her presence without her permission.  It was all about my mother.  Never about anyone else.  In my mother's household, the only hurt feelings that "counted" were hers.

My mother threw out any and all Christmas presents from my dad because they weren't from her.  It was an outrage to her that I would cherish something that she did not give me.  I would come home with new clothes, new toys, new books.  And within a few days, out in the garbage they went. 

She did that to a dog too.  I was in third grade when I found a white poodle puppy on the couch one Christmas morning.  I named her Fifi.  She had the typical poodle look with curly hair and bright eyes.  We played together a lot.  Fifi was a bright spot in an otherwise oppressive home atmosphere.  One summer Sunday morning, my mother insisted that I take Fifi with me when my dad came to pick me up.  The following Sunday, she wanted me to take Fifi along again.  I declined to do that.  When I came home that night, Fifi was gone.  I went hysterical.  I loved that dog and she had loved me too.  To shut me up, my mother told me she had given the dog away to my great grandmother.  I wanted to believe her.  But a few months later when we went to visit, there was no dog there.  I asked my mother about Fifi and she did what she always did when I was pestering her for answers.  After ignoring me didn't work, she told me to shut-up.

My mother's vindictiveness did not stop just because I became an adult.  She was angry because I refused to call her second husband, my step-father Tony.  When he died, she called my aunt up to tell her.  Then she told my aunt that I already knew.  I found out ten days after they put him in the ground.  "Pablo only wanted his real daughter with him at the end," she said, "Not you."  Even after I confronted her, she had no explanation for not letting me know about his death.  The obituary didn't even mention my existence.  That hurt.  

When my half-brother's wife died suddenly, once again my mother didn't tell me right away.  She told me the night before the funeral.  By then, it was too late to catch an airplane down to where my half-brother lived.  "I never thought you would be able to get on an airplane," she said with brittleness in her voice.  Okay, so I got brain damage from a car accident through no fault of my own some years before then.  But I was certainly capable of travel.  After all [with planning help by a wonderful and patient AAA agent], I had traveled cross-country alone on planes and trains for three glorious weeks.  Cripes.

I've been doing some research lately on Handrahan vs. Malenko for the radicalsapphoq blog.  [I hope to be able to publish it tomorrow.  Every time I think I am almost done, I find a bunch more stuff on the Internet.  It's been like this for at least a week now].  A quick summary, Lori Handrahan has accused her ex-husband of assaulting the little girl up in Maine.  The almost constant cries of abuse have come replete with hospital trips and rape kit exams and drug testing of urine, beginning at the age of two.  At age four, there was a yellowed healing bruise [and a reddish birthmark].  This reminded me of something that my vindictive mother did once.

Although mine didn't trot me off to the hospital, my mother certainly was observant and opportunistic.  One Sunday afternoon, Dad's girlfriend  had hit me once with her hand.  This was more of a swipe, deliberate but not drawing blood or leaving a mark.  My mother's response was to get out a wooden spoon [which she used to stir the homemade tomato sauce she used to make some Saturdays-- it was clean] and force me to hit myself with it hard on my rear end for several minutes at a time for several days.  I had to do what she said.  I didn't want to.  But if I wanted to survive my childhood, I had to obey.  That Wednesday, she took me to the family doctor.  She wanted him to witness the "abuse" by wife #2.  When the doctor didn't want to get involved-- [as was typical for him: There was no mandated reporting back then and he was a bit of a drunk like most of the folks that my mother surrounded herself with.]-- Mother stuck me in the car and drove to the police station in the town where my Dad lived.  "Show them what she did," I remember her snarling in front of the desk sarge.  But someone had called my dad who showed up yelling, "What are you doing to my daughter?"

So yeah, I know that mothers can hurt their children out of harsh and vindictive feelings towards an ex.  And yeah, a mother can inflict abuse on a child and then claim that someone else did it.  I know this because it was done to me.

sapphoq on life

A Brown Notebook, A Waterbed

My mother hated my dad.  I saw him on Sundays for eight hours.  He came at 11 a.m.  He was supposed to drop me off at 7 p.m. but as I got older I learned that I could beg to stay longer.  Whatever time he dropped me off, my mother was always waiting.

She kept a notebook in the pantry.  The pantry was actually an old set of steps which originally had led upstairs.  The upstairs door had been blocked off.  And so this set of stairs became the pantry.  My mother kept canned foodstuff there and her brown notebook.  Sometimes, the red telephone wound up in there.  Sometimes, I would sit on the steps while talking on the phone seeking privacy in a house where privacy was non-existent.

The brown notebook was not a three ring binder.  It had a slider.  You slid the two metal rectangular fasteners-- one up and one down-- so the two metal points would stand up and then you could add paper.  My mother had stolen this thing from work.  She stole all of our office supplies from work-- three ring binders, notebooks of various descriptions [but all with plain solid colored covers], pens and pencils imprinted with the name of her company, rulers, pencil sharpeners, staplers.  I never got to go to a store at the beginning of the school year to pick any school supplies out like other kids.  To this day, I love going to office supply stores.  I love the smell of them.  I love picking stuff out there.  I didn't get to do that as a kid.  I knew that stealing was wrong, but there was nothing I could do about it.  So I went off to school with the stolen pens and pencils, notebooks of various descriptions, paper, graph paper, and so on.

As I came through the kitchen door on Sunday evenings, my mother would get out her brown notebook and a blue pen.  She would ask me, "What did you do today?" and then she would write a paragraph in her notebook.  I hated it.  She said it was so she could prove in court that she never kept me from my father.  On the day that I turned twelve, she said, we were going to go to court.  If my father could prove otherwise, I would be forced to go live with him.  I waited anxiously for that birthday to come along.  That morning was a school day.  I asked about court but I was made to go to school.  And even after the day when nothing happened, my mother continued to record my Sunday visits in her notebook.

After wife number two left Dad, Dad and I spent a winter of Sundays watching football in his apartment.  He was too depressed to do anything else.  He managed to rouse himself for Christmas visiting with my aunt and her family.  But otherwise, we would go to the supermarket and pick out two snacks.  Then we would go to his apartment and watch football.  During that winter, when my mother came at me with her hated brown notebook, I made stuff up.  I knew that the truth was dangerous.  So I lied out of a sense of self-preservation and in order to protect my dad from my mother's wrath.  In the spring, Dad was able to rouse himself from his depression and we went back to visiting woods and beaches and historical sites and relatives.

I don't think dad knew about my mother's brown notebook.  I don't remember ever telling him about it.  I don't know what happened to my mother's brown notebook.  If she leaves it to me when she dies, I will throw it out.  Those memories-- of her interrogating me about what my dad and I did on Sundays-- are not ones I want to be reminded of by the possession of an object of my hatred.



After school was finished, I went to live in Baton Rouge.  I had a job there.  My first apartment there I shared with a young woman named Neomosha.  She told me that her name meant "new moon."  It was a very pretty name.  We had a two bedroom apartment.  I had snuck in my cat Dylan.  We weren't allowed pets or "parties."  After moving out, our landlady did not refund any of our deposit because "you had pets and parties in your apartment."  There was a neighborhood cat that Neomosha had nicknamed Fleabag.  We figured that Dylan must have invited Fleabag in through the open kitchen window at times when neither one of us were home, and a few times when we were.

A guy who called himself Bozo lived behind us in a basement apartment of another building.  A Cajun named Villere lived on our right in a back second floor apartment.  One time, Dylan ran up the stairs, into his apartment and to his open air balcony.  She jumped off his balcony and landed on four feet on the ground.

Bozo and Villere were both partyheads.  They were free with their booze and drugs.  They were serious users and were interested in getting high but not in sex.  I could always go visit either one of them and get wasted with them and whoever happened to be around.  One night at Villere's, I got really really drunk and went to lay down on his waterbed.  His waterbed was on the floor with boards around it.  Huge mistake.  I could not extricate myself from it.  Plus, I had the distinct sensation of seasickness.  The thing kept bobbing up and down.  After awhile, I did manage to roll off the thing without puking. 

Bozo hung out with a local band called "The Shit Dogs."  I became a shit puppy, one of their groupies.  The shit puppies would show up during practices and get trashed as the band played in their garage and also got trashed.  The Shit Dogs shared a really cool rambling house.  It was in that house during a block party in a first floor bathroom high on mushrooms-- boiled in grape sugar water-- and marijuana and beer that my fingernails "told me" their names.  They had old-fashioned names like Nathaniel, Benjamin, and Emmy.  Each fingernail had its' own distinct voice.  The mushrooms grew in the cow shit of the Brahman cows that hung out in rented plots along the Mississippi.  We would go there to pick our own right out of the cow shit.  We never had to buy shrooms in Baton Rouge.

Villere was a Cajun born and raised in the swamps.  Through Villere, I got my first introduction to shrimp burgers.  One time, a bunch of us went to a small bayou south of Baton Rouge where someone had an old boat turned into a diner.  Shrimp burgers were a dollar and ten cents, cheaper than hamburgers.  It was really cool sitting on that old boat eating shrimp burgers, surrounded by the Cypress trees and murky swamp water.

To this day, I don't know why people allowed me to visit.  I used all of the drugs in whatever place I was in until the drugs were gone.  I didn't care what drugs.  If you had it, I took it.  When I left, you were cleaned out of drugs.  I rarely brought my own stash to share.  I wasn't into sex when high or drunk.  And I didn't have a winning personality.  'Tis a great mystery.


sapphoq on life says: Oh by the way, all you guys who think you are some kind of Don Juans when you are high or drunk-- you aren't.  The genital and the urinary systems are connected in men to form the genital-urinary system.  That system does not work well when you are wasted.  I never had sex with Bozo or with Villere-- we were all far more interested in listening to "We Are Devo" or other albums and getting blasted-- but the few men I did choose to have sex with while partying, well as I said, your genital-urinary systems failed to live up to anyone's expectations.  Just saying.