Mommy Dearest - Part One

OK, as requested and at great mental farkdom, here is the first installment of the evil witch chronicles.

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I have a recurring nightmare. I'm about 5 years old and laying on my top bunk-bed in my tiny little room. My mother is screaming at me and I bite her. She shrivels up, turns brown and while screeching flies out of my window on a broomstick. She circles over our little house and I know she's coming closer and closer, trying to get to me.

I've had this dream for as long as I can remember.

A little family skeleton history lesson. My mother was born in Germany in 1954. Her mother, my grandmother, was born to an orphaned girl who was raised in a Catholic nunnery and later married a German soldier. She abandoned my grandmother and her siblings during the war. Her father was away fighting at the time. My mother's father, my grandfather, was the youngest of 12 children from a good old traditional German family.

My grandparents conceived my mother in order to get married. It was the only way his family would allow him to marry someone of such a low social standing. After the marriage and my mother's birth they lived with his mother which must have been a slap in the face from either end of the picture. They eventually immigrated to Canada with my mother and her little brother, filling in the family here with an additional 3 more children. It was a home full of alcoholism and domestic battery. My grandparents raised 5 emotionally and psychologically fucked up people. Not one of them leads a normal, or a healthy life.

I've been pointing the finger of blame their way my entire life. If it wasn't for them I might have had a chance at a decent mother. Having said that....my grandmother saw her 4 year old twin bothers torn apart in front of her by an allied air raid and then had to raise her remaining siblings after her mother left them and her father was off fighting in the war. My grandfather had his door knocked on at the age of 12 and was told he was to be a "Hitler Youth" and was eventually drafted to the front-lines to fight alongside grown men. I guess almost anyone when faced with those demons would be pretty incapable of living in a healthy way as well.

My father was born in 1934 in England, 20 years almost to the month before my mother. When the war broke out he was the same age as my daughter is today. He was also born a year before my mother's mother....try explaining that one to your school friends! They never believed me, he was referred to as my grandfather. He was raised by an artist/architect father and a wonderfully domestic mother with 3 other siblings. The church was always the main focal point of their lives and he was a proper English gentleman. For the most part. Rumor has it he was also something of a ladies man in his youth. He married after a brief service in the RAF and moved to Canada in the late 60's. His wife left him and he never got over her, I am the owner of her middle name as my first. Once every so often when my mother was distracted I would ask him to see her photo. He would take the old black and whites out of some hiding place in their room and as I gazed at images of them in their old-fashioned clothing standing in front of an English garden, or beside some sports car, I would imagine she was my real mother. They could have been sisters with their looks, separated by decades.

I think the similarities between his first wife and my mother is what prompted my 38 year old father to marry an 18 year old child straight out of high school and her father's home. He was sensible, intelligent, and a very good judge of character. He attracted good people to him. She was the exception, his biggest lapse in judgement as far as I'm concerned.

My first memory of my mother....stretching back as far as my mind will allow, is of her coming into the bathroom while I was in the tub and breaking a wooden spoon over my head. I think it was the same day as my birthday party. We had all run circles around the coffee table in the living room and shortly thereafter, thrown up.

I was five.

The birthday party.

Yes, that is me in the red donkey dress. Let the jokes ensue.