The Lovely Carissa did a very incredible thing this weekend. She received her degree after years and years of going to school in the evenings, balancing a full-time job and two kids under the age of 5.
But she had kind of a lousy graduation ceremony and I’d like her to know how cool she really is, so if you’d like to make someone feel good, send her an Email, or maybe a card and tell her how absolutely wonderful she is.
It will make her day. And mine.
I caught a bit of the movie Mermaids yesterday. It was Mother’s Day and apparently, this is a touching movie about Mothers or something.
I HATE that movie. I hate it with the passion normally reserved for puppy molesters and people who throw their cigarette butts out their car windows at stoplights, as though the world were their mofo ASH TRAY.
And why do I hate it? Because I lived that mofo movie.
When Mo and I were growing up, our Mom raised us primarily single-handedly. She had some help from my Mafia Grandma and also from my great grandmother. They would appear on our doorstop with bags of groceries and it was like Christmas because there would be food in the house for at least a week. My great grandma would always bring boxes of Saltine crackers and I remember many nights that we ate a dinner of peanut butter on Saltines, or worse, simply buttered Saltines. I mean, it wasn’t as bad as it seems. There was likely food in the house and we always had milk to drink and the like, but remember, an eleven year old does not know what to do with a raw pot roast. The oven itself was off limits, although sometimes we’d skirt that rule and make boxed brownies or muffins. I learned to excel at breakfast food. French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, even pancakes were all relatively easy two- or three-step meals that could be made on the stove.
Because it paid more, my mother worked at night as a waitress. This meant that I always resented the hell out of this because she was home or taking courses at the university while we were at school and then she was usually in white linen covered dining rooms, filling salt shakers and folding napkins into lovely fans and weird cravat’s by the time I came home from school. And then we had a babysitter in the evening. She would take their place at night, and in the morning, the cycle would repeat itself. Although I’m certain that this is not the case, it seems to me that I got myself ready for school in the morning. I have a distinct image of using a curling iron in 4th grade secretly, figuring that I was totally get away with something, not realizing that my curls would be evidence that I had used the verboten beauty implement. I could have burned the house down, you know. Mafia Grandmother turned me in. And also informed me that I could have burned the house down, you know.
After years and years of leaving the curling iron plugged in, I have not burned even one house down.
And we moved. Oh yes. We moved around constantly. I remember in 5th grade when we learned the word “nomadic” and I could only nod and know exactly how they had felt. My mother was nomadic. She was never satisfied. The poorly kept rental property is always roomier on the other side of the block. Between year 1 and year 18 of my life, we moved no fewer than 14 times (and one of those houses we lived in for six years, so you can do the math for the other 13). I specifically even remember once not being told that we were moving. I just walked home from school and found a mostly empty house, so then just sat down on the porch and did my homework until they came back for another load. Unlike Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci, we stayed in the same city but it was distracting, nonetheless.
Between these constant upheavals, she dallied with various men. Our constancy was only that there was always one coming into or being replaced in our lives. I remember being sad that one was leaving for a month to go to Alaska and knew instinctively that he would be replaced before he returned. And I was correct. To paraphrase John Irving, my mother isn’t good at being alone. Thus, her similarity to the Cher character did not end at their physical resemblance.
Don’t get me wrong. She did well with what she had. There were choices that she made that I certainly would not have made but then, I’ve never been in her situation, so what do I know? Perhaps I wouldn’t have GOTTEN into her situation, but that is another matter altogether.
A side-effect of this lifestyle, or lack of one, is that we, as children, did not have a kind “other parent” who would take us shopping for Mother’s Day. We didn’t get allowances. The change which might have been scoured from between the couch cushions was used to buy milk. Thus, on Sunday mornings, if one of our Grandmother’s hadn’t had some foresight, we felt like failure children.
We were failures, but with creativity.
On Mother’s Day, I would make Mo wake up in the wee hours of the morning. Then we would get dressed and then go out into the nippy spring morning and, with great stealth and commit various acts of what could technically be described as vandalism upon the neighbor’s property.
We’d rob their gardens of flowers.
Now, to be fair, even then I had a rather healthy dose of guilt and would not allow more than a small percentage of flowers to be stolen from any one garden. I could not bring myself to leave a garden of lonely stems. And we never took the biggest best flower from any one garden. We only took what, in my mind, would not be missed. And we didn’t steal from a house whose inhabitants appeared to be awake.
We’d then take our fistfuls of tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths back to our house and stick them into a milk glass (could never find a decent vase). Then I’d make a meal of scrambled eggs, toast, possibly cereal, and bacon. Sometimes coffee.
One of the survival lessons I’d learned is that my mother is a very very deep sleeper and came out of hibernation much like a startled grizzly bear. She was not a morning person, to put it mildly. We were very quiet children, not out of courtesy, but rather fear of that which slumbered in the next room. A freshly brewed pot of coffee served as a medicinal balm to that fury. I have a rather deep belief that I might have been killed in my youth, a victim of double homicide along with Mo, had it not been for the intervention of Folgers and a splash of 2%.
I’d then carefully cover a greasy cookie sheet with a ratty dishtowel and carefully walk with the tray into her bedroom. Usually it was 9 or 10 o’clock at that point. She had been asleep maybe 8 hours. She preferred 11, maybe 14 hours of sleep.
By the time we could coax her from slumber, the food was probably cold. She generally made a fairly good go of it, usually eating only the toast, hard as roofing shingles. Her half-awake excuse was that she “doesn’t like breakfast”, which was primarily true. And she’d half-heartedly scold us for stealing from our neighbor’s gardens, a charge we’d bald-faced deny, but I think she was touched. She’d coo over those bouquets, leaving them up until they had long turned limp, sitting in a skirt of dropped petals.
I could probably buy her bouquets which would dwarf those little ones, picked furtively on early Sunday mornings, but I doubt I could match the earnest sentiment we had with those modest gifts. In fact, I doubt anyone ever could.
We’re still working out the quirks of this new layout. A tweak will possibly come later tonight. If you’re still getting horizontal scrolling problems on the plain text entries tonight, please let me know.
