It's funny-and probably horrible-the things you remember as a child.
My parents were never good at hiding their fights from us kids. Not in the least bit. They would always put on a shouting match for us, usually several times a week. I remember one-I must have been no older than seven-where mom and dad stood before us, fighting about whatever. Mom, in a moment of pure honesty, screamed out in vehement rage I don't want any of this! and toured her open hands around the house like Vanna White displaying a prize on Wheel of Fortune.
Of course, one hand landed on us four kids, an accusatory finger pointed intentionally our way.
My sister Janice began bawling immediately. She was the oldest, she was the one always trying to win my mom's favor, and she was the one completely devastated by mom's revelation. I came next, and a slow, numbing realization dawned over me. I guess I realized I was just trash. We all were. Mom discarded us the same way she would throw out spoiled food; without a second thought. The four year old twins after me in the birth order, they stood there with a toy in each hand and never made sense of what had happened.
Anyhow, long story short, mom couldn't retract that statement, mostly because her true feelings were out in the open and that's how she wanted them. She wanted a catalyst to set in motion some life-changing events. Mom did try to back track of course. She did it half-assed, and I believe she did that phony and transparent effort to convince dad that she didn't mean it. She didn't mean the back track, not that she didn't want us or her life. What I remember about that was that mom didn't try all that hard. I guess we weren't worth the effort. Plus, mom had what she wanted coming, which was a divorce and she wasn't about to screw that up.
So, our parents separated, divorced, and mom took off. We didn't hear from her again until Janice graduated high school and tracked her down. She was living on a ranch in central Montana, teaching women's studies at a community college. She blew Janice off, cold as an ice cube. Janice never spoke her name again.
I always thought, even as a kid, that there is a certain amount of time you have to renege on a marriage before it's just too late. I'm not promoting divorce, there's enough of that floating around these days away, but still. People get married young, sometimes much too young. People get married for the wrong reasons. People get married because they get swept away by something. Whatever it is, people make huge mistakes.
But don't have kids years after you realize you've been swept away by a huge mistake.
My parents were just like the parents in that movie, Hanging Up. Just like them. My mom never wanted anything more than her own place, her own care-free life and no one to rely on her. She's purely and completely selfish, and that's OK until you involve other people. The bitch felt like society wanted her to get married, so she did. Hell, all of her friends were doing it, right? It was probably hip and fashionable at the time. I'm sure that is her excuse.
Then her friends were having kids. Society wanted her to bear children. It was hip to have a baby in your arms. She squeezed out four of them before she put the brakes on where her life was going. And she made it completely obvious that we were unwanted. She was cold and distant, inattentive and just down right resentful that she had spent the last eleven years of her life doing something she had slowly realized wasn't what she wanted to do.
I guess that the fact that her friends were still happy at that point didn't matter to her.
I guess peer pressure and following the crowd will only take you so far.
Mom spent her time at home being so emotionally horrible to us as young kids that it left scars. The memories I was referring to, the ones that really have an effect on you when you're younger, they turn into those scars. Her behavior, her lack of interest, of love, they cut her children in invisible ways. When those cuts heal, the mind sewed the scar tissue up around them in such a way that even though we don't recognize it, we act differently.
Janice never feels she's good enough for anything now. Her job, her family, her house work, her friends. She's depressed half the year. Her memories as a child were of pure rejection. All of them another reminder that no matter how hard she tried, mom would not love her. Even though Janice is great at all she does, the drive she has to be like that stems from her perception that if she only puts out one hundred percent (like she did with mom) she's a failure. She's undeserving. So, she runs herself into the ground and still feels down on herself.
I hate my mother so much that I can't help but distrust all women. I resent them. It never fails that I'll get a great girl and she'll say something, phrase something just right, or even make a facial gesture that reminds me of my mother and I'll go ape shit. I have a switch in my brain that flips on every time I see something that is in any way like her. I've ruined all my relationships because of that, and even though I recognize the behavior I just can't quite turn it off yet. It's built into me. It's a scar from my memories.
Thank God the twins never really knew much except dad, Janice and me. They were spared the blame of ruining mom's life and instead grew up with their older siblings trying to play the part of a mother. I think we did OK. I know we did better with them than that old hag did with us.
formulated some concepts of how she should be living, and then resented dad and us for not letting her live that way. After awhile she became more vocal about her unhappiness, and that led to the fighting.
And then that last fight that I remember, the one that changed everything. The one that mom barely tried to back out of. All those things said with the words I don't want any of this. All that statement implied, all that was meant by a single gesture seething with malcontent and out-right hate when her finger pointed at us.
Did she want her marriage? No, but apparently she thought she could live within those confines. Did she want children? No, and she hated us every moment of her God-forsaken life. All we wanted was to be loved. Dad did everything that he could. Everything. He was a good man, and he was a man who stood behind his obligations.
Mom sent four letters, the first right after she moved out. The other three came with a few years between each. Dad opened them all. I think he did that with a secret hope that she was asking to come back. To heal these wounds. To make the family portrait whole. Those four letters contained nothing of the sort.
They were all basically the same, Dad said much later in life. He and I got to talking about her one night while we were having a few beers. Janice had called that night to tell him that she was pregnant with number three, and I just happen to be over visiting.
Dad cracked another can open, sipped the top and said that mom regurgitated her mission statement in each letter. She felt the need to justify why she had thrown us away like she had, and was convinced that if she could just make us see then we would not harbor any ill feelings towards her.
She never apologized in the slightest, never felt she needed to.
She asked that we see it her way, because then we would understand.
Then we would not hate her, which she knew we did. It must have just felt wrong, because society (and I'm sure her friends as well) dictate that a mother's family should not hate them so heatedly. So completely. A mother should not be blamed for all the deep-seeded problems in her family's life. Men do that. Men are the ones who take on that blame. Men hit, punish excessively, drink, shout, curse. Make kids cry. Not the mother. Society views the mother doing this as worse, and my mom doesn't want to think of herself that way. It messes up her diluted perspective of her life.
I wish she never existed.
Dad said he read each letter and crumpled each one up in a shaking, trembling fist. He said he burned them all, wishing they were her. He said this casually, and he meant every damn word. I nodded and said I wished they were her too, and sipped from my own beer.
In the letters she claimed to be a driven women and family life, the life of a mother raising four kids, the life of a supportive wife, the life she freely took on, was not for her. Any of it. Not a damned bit. So she bailed, and went off to set the world on fire. She was driven. She was born for a higher purpose.
And she became a fucking school teacher, leading a class in vagina studies.
Maybe that's some of the anger and resentment towards all women I have coming out there, but I despised that woman on a whole new level when I first found out that Janice, myself and the twins, that dad and the good life he created where dumped like so much trash by my mother so she could teach an elective in a community college in the middle of nowhere.
That was what she was driven to do. Not to work in third-world countries feeding orphaned kids (hell, she orphaned her own), not working one hundred-hour weeks on the campaign trail of the next president. Not running a home for battered women, not curing cancer, not finding a way to predict hurricanes and not thinking about anyone but herself. I hate that woman.
She had and still does have about fifty students a year, and brain-washes them with her 'you don't need a man, just your own drive, each other and a dildo' rant. She's not teaching lesbianism, I don't think. She teaches that women can be without men and do everything just as good. Equality. Superiority.
I wonder if her students think that the fruits of my mother's drive equaled what she was trying to impress upon them. If they think that teaching in a community college was worth throwing away your family because we were holding her back from realizing her dream. Maybe. Teachers are worshipped by some of their students. I'm sure mom is no different.
Dad, he struggled to come to terms with what happened. The rejection he felt must have been complete. The abandonment, the sense of failure. All devastating. He was also a driven person, driven to provide and make a good life for his own. And when she walked out on him, I think a dagger was jabbed deep in the heart of his life's work. Just like Janice, I know he must have felt not good enough. He never really recovered enough to convince anyone he was alright. His scars ran too deep to be covered with the human varnish that is a weak smile or superficial behavior.
Dad went on two first dates later in life. There was about a year between the two, and no second date to follow either one. After that he plainly said that he gave up. He had the four of us, he had Janice's three babies and two from the twins, and that was enough. He loved all the grandchildren deeply.
Mother did not know about the grandchildren, nor would she have given them the time of day.
When I look back over my life, I think about what made me into who I am. Some of it was the fight back in the tenth grade where I beat up the school bully for smacking one of the twins. I became self-assured by that, and I wore it well. Some of it was how I watched over all three of my siblings, even my older sister after mom left. I became a provider by that. Some of it was how I got a steady job and helped dad pay the mortgage for a year when he was laid off. I became a man by that.
But most of it was the memory of that fight when my mom said she didn't want us. That let me know something about human nature, something about how dark a trusted soul can really be. How two-faced and hideous.
And I've stood guard against it ever since.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...