Mommy Dearest - Part Three

The first chapters....


Part One


Part Two

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Seeing a full grown woman throw a temper tantrum is an achingly uncomfortable thing to witness, no matter what your age. When it's your own mother it's more than uncomfortable, it's frightening.

My father would give me a small allowance every Saturday. It began with a quarter and grew a little bit every birthday. It was enough to buy some 5 cent candies or a bag of chips at the store. Maybe a pop if I saved up for a week.

Around my 8th birthday I can recall being in our tiny little living room and hearing my mother's voice in the kitchen. She was angry with my father and raising her voice. I don't think he yelled back....I can't remember a time he ever yelled at her. He was a quiet man, more thoughtful than confrontational. His response to most of her tirades was to go for a ride on his motorcycle, or to go putter in his workshop outside.

The argument was about money. I'm not aware of what the inner workings of their marriage was like, but I can make some educated guesses twenty-something years of life and 11 years of my own marriage later. I suspect my father kept a tight reign on all the finances. It wouldn't have been an equal partnership from the beginning. He married a child - an immature child. And he worked hard every day as a self-employed architect, he wouldn't risk the chance that she would screw it all up for our family. I think that being faced with such inequality after what was by then 15 years of marriage would make any woman begin to rebel a little.

I didn't pay attention to the details at first. When it got louder I began to listen....

"Why does SHE get an allowance? If SHE get's one then I should too!"

"She" was said with loathing.

I wasn't very old, but I understood what resentment was. My mother resented me. She resented the 50 cents a week my father gave me and she resented the attention he gave me. She resented alot in life - I don't remember a time where she was ever happy.

She stormed out to her garden to pout when my father closed the argument. I quietly went to my father and told him that he could give her my allowance, I didn't need it. His reply was very short, almost angry. I thought at the time it was anger with me for offering and I went to my room. I couldn't handle the thought of my father being upset with me for any reason.

I know now, looking back, that he was angry at being trapped in a marriage with such an emotionally unstable person. More of a burden than a partner. His anger was for me, not at me.

My father had no idea that I used to wish that he would leave her and take me away. When we would go on weekend trips without her, he's tell me to just ignore her as she refused to say goodbye to us...I would imagine that was the last time I'd ever see her. And it made me happy. I know that he stayed in that house for me, and it was the absolute last thing I would have wanted him to do. He deserved more.

That day I began a new fantasy. That she wasn't my natural mother, that she must be my sister and for some reason my family was trying to trick me. That she was treating me with the loathing reserved for a younger sister - a rival - because that's what I really was. It would have made it easier to understand.

I needed a reason.

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Age 9.

I slept on the top bunk of a set of closely crammed in bunk beds, in a very small room with a desk for homework and all of my possessions. I didn't know anything different, and to me living in a room the size of my current closet didn't feel too small. It was just familiar, and mine.

On a night my parents had friends over for supper, I felt sick to my stomach. I went to bed and woke up later that night feeling very much worse. I felt hot, and my stomach hurt more than I'd ever experienced. The guests had already left, but my mother was awake. She was always awake very late at night. I leaned over my top bunk and was stunned when I violently threw up. I hadn't expected it. My stomach got worse. Unbearable. I cried harder and harder. Eventually managing to call out for someone to come and help me.

My father slept.

My mother came into my little room.

And she was enraged.

"You ate like a pig at dinner! You ate yourself sick. Get down here and clean this up NOW!"

I climbed down my ladder, unable to see anything because of the pain, and my tears. I remember scrubbing at the vomit. It smelled awful. I can also remember wondering if I had thrown up diarrhea....and then crying in panic thinking something inside of me was broken and I was throwing up bowel movements. We had awful carpeting and it held onto anything moist that fell. My room was hot, and the smell was smothering. When I was finished, my mother went over the area again and I crawled into the lower bunk bed. I turned towards the wall and cried silently until she turned out the light and closed the door.

The next morning I was wrapped in a quilt on the couch.

Screaming.

I saw the look in my father's eyes. He was scared.

I remember him lifting me in the quilt and laying me across the backseat of the car. We drove the 40 minutes to the hospital, and by noon I was in surgery having my appendix removed.

I've been blessed by two children who lack a sensitive gag reflex. My son just flat our refuses to let anything he's consumed exit his body via the Northern route. My daughter will thrown up when she's sick. I can count on my fingers the number of times they've been sick in the last 11 years.

How could any mother look at a sick child. Crying, panicked that they're throwing up, hating the feeling......and tell them to clean it up? I don't understand that reaction. Thank God I don't understand it.