Realizations

I’ve been thinking about the letter mother sent to me about Ron. There is more to it than what’s written on the paper. Divide and conquer themes run rampant.

It would not surprise me at all if the ulterior motive was to divide Ron and I. A split. Ultimate divorce. To make me distrust Ron too. She has never given any indication that she has did not love Ron as a son, that she did not trust him with everything in her life – including her life. AND then out of the blue he is untrustworthy and has been for years.

Now I struggle for real words – the ones that come out of my mouth. They are much easier to come off my fingers. This year to me has been amazing. I know I’ve said that at least once in this journal.

I probably would have kept taking the horrid treatment my mother kept dishing out except that she turned on my family. She turned on my baby first. This was harder to put together because of the distance in miles, but we did. Then she turned on Ann (actually, she turned on her again, but her behavior toward Ann during her move was so juvenile). You don’t say things to your children like, “I know you think you love me.”

Through all this, I’ve found that I’ve been distancing myself from her. I can’t trust that anything I said would be interpreted appropriately or realistically. I’ve felt manipulated at every turn. In reality I’ve been manipulated my entire life. Then of course there was the letter about Ron. This was the final straw in my eyes.

He is struggling with severing the relationship completely. He is struggling because he is the kind and generous and loving man that I married. No, I take that back. He is more kind and more loving and more generous than he was. It is amazing to me that he can think about picking her up for church, but he can.

I do not want him to be alone with her. I do not trust her. I don’t say this out of malice. I say this out of fact and self preservation. If she were anyone else, I would have severed the ties ages ago. I would have come to the conclusions that it has taken me this entire year to draw years ago if not decades ago.

I know now that God has used this year to draw me out and away from her so that I could sever the relationship when the time came. The hardest thing in all this is to recognize that your mother has used you for her own gains — which I truly believe are to make everyone miserable because she is miserable. This is a shame, but it’s not my shame.

Division

I’ve been thinking back over my adult life at the division Mother has caused. It’s been there ripe for the picking. I just didn’t know it.

Comments that were frequently attributed to someone else.

Your grandmother even commented that your mother-in-law is going to be a handful.
Joe mentioned that he wondered why y’all had moved me out here and hadn’t done more than you’d done.

She’s got something else in mind, that little daughter-in-law of yours. You better watch out for her.

Those kinds of comments, looking back on them, were made for one purpose and one purpose only: to divide and conquer, to keep people from fully trusting one another, to create disharmony. She’s a master of it.

Now, I want to let this go. I do. But I don’t want to sweep it under the rug either. I don’t want to excuse it or make it less than it is. I want to embrace it and understand who she is. I don’t want to forget. I want to look her full in the face (or at least a photograph) and understand how she has manipulated our lives.

Laverne

Laverne, my Dad’s sister, left Arkansas as soon as possible and moved to San Francisco. She went to work for a shipper as his bookkeeper and rumor was that she became embroiled in some scandal involving the mob. Of course that rumor came to us through my mother. So that rumor served as a source to divide and conquer. Divide us from Laverne who I admired because she escaped.

When our grandfather died the scandal was used again. We couldn’t go to the funeral. Who knows who would show up. We had to protect the boys. Like a lemming, I believed her. We didn’t go. Did she use the same line with Ann? I need to ask. We were not talking much then, so I don’t know for sure.

Laverne was in Colorado by the time my grandmother got ill. She quit her job and moved in with her to take care of her in her last days. Mother won’t have this gift. Then when Daddy died, Laverne offered to move in with her. This seemed like a natural transition. They’d gotten along fairly well. Seemed like sisters. We’d not recognized Daddy (once again) for the buffer he’d been.

Things went smoothly for awhile. For awhile. Then we started to notice the comments. Mother didn’t like the way Laverne hung the towels on the refrigerator. She didn’t like the time of day she washed the clothes. She didn’t like the clothes she wore to exercise. She didn’t like the way she ate or drove or well, it didn’t matter, she didn’t like it. We were back to the best friends and then no friends. Before we knew it, Laverne was gone. Back to Colorado. Mother was alone and glad to have her house back. She’d made it clear that Laverne was a guest.

Can you imagine what Laverne’s life had been like once Mother turned on her?

Mother’s Car

When Mother called me over to tell me her driver’s license had expired, she wanted to sign her car over to Ron and I.

Wouldn’t that be awkward in lieu of her letter . . .

Hindsight

So much is clear in hindsight.

When Mother first moved here, I took her to all my doctors.

She liked Dr. Hudson, but they cheated her on the bill.
The nurses at the allergist talked ugly to her.
Her eye doctor in Arkansas was a nice guy but the gal that fitted her glasses spoke to her like she was ignorant.

The helped a young man with a loan and he quit paying it. When she went to see him, he wouldn’t talk to her.

She’s never had a job or volunteer job where the people didn’t eventually turn on her.

This has played out dozens upon dozens of times. Here and there. Literally everywhere we’ve lived. It’s not just friends. It’s everyone.

Houston to Atlanta

I was pregnant with Joe when Ron was transferred to Atlanta. The movers came the same day Joe did.

I stayed with my parents while Ron moved. He made arrangements for us to move out 17 days later. I was anxious to see him. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s not your parents you want to be with when you have a newborn.

Now Ann was living with my grandmother and going to college. She had planned to come in the weekend after Ron was coming back to get us. Mother and Daddy let me have it. Ann had every right to meet this nephew of hers and I would stay. I was alone, defenseless, and didn’t even have a room to go into and shut the door because I was staying in the living room. I really did sink into my shell.

I tried to explain to Ron. I knew he wouldn’t understand and it was on the phone.

I recently told Ann and her response was, you’ve got to be kidding? Of course I would have liked to see Joe, but you guys needed to be together.

I was almost afraid they wouldn’t take me to the airport. AND I was never so relieved to see anyone as I was to see my husband that day.

Ron

Ron is not perfect. He would be the first one to tell you that. But he is kind and generous. He is generous when I am not. He has been oh so patient.

He has always been generous with my mother. He has taken her shopping for groceries and clothes, picked her up for church. He buys her air filters and changes them. He has changed light bulbs and moved furniture. He has paid for untold number of Sunday lunches and weeknight dinners.

There was a time I told people she loved Ron more than she loved me.

Full Disclosure

Nothing was ever discussed fully.

You want to go to college? OK, apply. That was my college talk.

Daddy had open heart surgery and I found out after he’d had it.

Your Father’s been married before. I was a teenager when I found that out. Something was about to happen. mmmm Maybe that was the year I had a brother. Maybe that was the year his exwife called everyday.

Mother made Barbie clothes. She also sold them – that I didn’t know until I saw my next door neighbor with the same Barbie clothes I had. She’d gotten hers from Santa. I told her where they really came from. Shouldn’t have done that.

Information was doled out in bits and pieces or no pieces. Just enough to make you wonder what was happening. Just enough to keep everyone on their toes.

I spent a lot of time in my room.

The Fiasco

This is the event that began to bring my mother’s true colors to light for the rest of the family. This is the time when my sister and I solidified the relationship that had begun to come together in December. This is the moment that I realized when I remembered, what I remembered wasn’t skewed. It just wasn’t right or normal.

January was a difficult month for me migraine-wise. I thought I’d lose my mind. I had 16 days of full-fledged migraines. In the middle of this my mom called. We had just gotten back from a trip to see Joe and Blythe and she wanted to know if they’d talked about her.

“No,” I said.

“I’m not surprised.”

“Why?”

“They’ve defaulted on a loan that I made them.”

It seems that they needed some money to sit in the bank for their loan approval. $4000, and they asked Mother. She agreed. The loan was for two months. Mother said they were two months late and she called Joe about it before we went to see them and Joe yelled at her. He told her he had no intention of paying the loan. That she’d made it as a gift to them.

Well, this was all a surprise to me. I sputtered a few things. I wasn’t sure what I said. I tried to stay as neutral as possible. Ron was out of town. Mother said that she had an appointment with a lawyer and that at the very least she intended to ruin Joe’s credit. She intended to ruin his credit? This is her grandchild she’s talking about isn’t it? I mumble a few things trying still to remain neutral, yet supportive. I wanted to hang up.

I couldn’t call Ron because I know he’s at a dinner, so I sent him an email. He needed to know in case something happened. Turned out that Ron had talked with Joe over the weekend. Joe had agreed to pay Mother back by the end of January.

After Joe talked with both of us, he called Mother. Mother was very short with him, but we have the phone records that he’s called. Good thing.

In the meantime Mother mailed us a copy of the check. The check was dated November 8. This is very interesting. How can it be two months overdue if is was dated November 8 and now is just mid-January? Joe said that they had a verbal agreement for payment at the end of January. He’s upset over her behavior. Blythe is upset. Ron and I are caught dead center.

The next Sunday we went out to eat. At this point Mother said she needed to talk with us.

“OK.”

“I know I was a foolish old woman for loaning Joe the money, but you weren’t completely honest with me.”

“What?” we ask.

“I’m not going to say anything else,” she says.

“You can’t drop that bombshell in our laps and quit talking.”

“I’m finished with this discussion,” she replies.

Now this is common for her. She makes a jab and retreats. But I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve come to grips with lots of things in my adult life and I don’t let up. And Ron’s sitting there too. It’s not just me anymore.

“The night I called Bitsy, she said, ‘You’d think he’d outgrow that kind of thing by now.’ You should have told me he had a history of not repaying his debts.”

Well! I don’t even remember saying that! I was just forming sentences. I was just stringing words. I was trying for noncommittal. So much for that effort. I tried to explain that wasn’t what I meant. Ron and I had already shared with her before lunch about how bad a month January had been. We’d already told her about all the migraines, about the different meds, about the crying fits, about the night we got in the car to go to a Wake game with customers and he had to bring me home because I couldn’t stop crying and she latched on to one phrase I said.

“You’re right. I’m just a stupid old woman.” She actually said that.

At this lunch, we told her that we’d talked to Joe and that he told us he’d called her. She called him a liar. We had his cell phone records though. He wasn’t the one lying. We also had the copy of the check she said she never got.

We tried to placate her, but this was the beginning of the end. She wrote her grandchild off. If we were Jewish, he’d be dead.

The Move and After

My mom had been talking about moving to Winston Salem almost since the day my dad died. She talked about moving to Little Rock first. That’s where my sister was. She offered to buy a townhouse for my sister. My sister wisely said no knowing that one day mother would call that favor and move in.

About five or six years ago, when mother came out, she asked to start looking at condos. She actually put a hold on some new units over by Wake Forest but let that lapse. I figured it was just talk and wasn’t worried about it. I was in no hurry for this to happen.

Then she got sick. One winter she got pneumonia or something as serious, and in her version of events, no one would take her to the doctor. She was so sick she crawled around the house, so she decided to move here so that Ron and I could take care of her if she ever got that sick again.

She wanted to move into the boy’s rooms with the bathroom in between. We told her that wouldn’t work. The boy’s weren’t finished coming home. They’d not graduated from college/grad school yet. Even when they did we’d like for them to have a place to stay. There was a unit right across the street from us. That would be nice — a little close but nice. She could walk over for dinner occasionally, go to the grocery store or shopping with us. She wasn’t interested in that though, so we looked for something else and she eventually found something by the church.

Now the adventure began.

Ron offered to fly out and drive back out here with her, but Mother would never give us a firm date. She got Ann to do it instead and she’d been fussing that we weren’t there helping. When she got to Winston Salem, she had no idea when the moving van would get here. It was almost a week later.

She wanted to help in the Media Center so I got Kathleen to train her, but she never would start working. She went to Sunday School with Ruth Ann once and talked about how terrible the teacher was, so she never went again. She signed up to work in Children’s Bible Fellowship, but she complained about Sherri and the people in her class all year. She went to one of the Senior Adult Luncheons, but no one called her, so she didn’t go back. She wanted to work in Children’s Choir, so I introduced her to Gale Foster. I guess they didn’t know they were supposed to call her either. This past year, she has gone to a class of very old women and felt at home, but she’s made no friends.

She has made very good friends with two women in her complex, Barbara and Mary Ellen.

The week school started, Ron gets a phone call from Mother while he is on the golf course. She’s upset, but too upset to talk. He calls me, I call her. I go over. I call Ann before I go. I don’t know what I’ll meet. We pray.

She’s miserable. She’s got no friends. She’s lonely. Her driver’s license has expired. She can’t pass the test. She wants to go home. She’s never been in such debt.

She’s been telling Ann all this with a whispered “Don’t tell Ron and Bitsy,” so I know, but I don’t know.

I walk her through. “Where’s home?”

“Arkansas.”

“If we could get you there, would that make you happy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have anywhere to stay now.”

“What if we could find somewhere for you to stay?”

I asked enough questions to circle it back down to the fact that her drivers license has expired. Now she let this happen, but I don’t bring that up. She’s known since she moved here it would happen. She took it twice in the first week she was here and failed it. She said she went again but can’t pinpoint for us when that other time was. She waited until the week school starts to make an issue over it when it expired on her birthday in July. The timing is suspicious . . .

I took her out to eat lunch when all was said and done. I asked her if she’d like to try a different Sunday school class with one of my friends. Ruth Ann’s class has a new teacher and they have raved about her. That teacher is a friend of mine too. Maxine’s teacher is excellent. How would that be? Oh, that would be wonderful! Both ladies have taken mother’s number. I brought Mother in so they could work out the details. Told them both she’d not made friends where she was. Told them that she’d like to go with either of them. Where is she? Why isn’t she here this week? I don’t know. I can’t make her come. I appreciate your efforts.

Mother said that she thought about going to a driving school. I told her that was an excellent idea. I would find one for her to go to. She wanted my help preparing for the test. I told her I’d make flash cards if I could take her book. This was Friday afternoon. Sunday morning she asked for her book back. I hadn’t gotten flash cards made yet because it was the first week of school. She asked Ron to make sure she got to the grocery store each week. He said he’d do that. I gave her the school’s name and number I found that was conveniently located so that Ron and I could get her there.

The students returned on Wednesday. Ron called the next Saturday and took Mother to the grocery store on that day. Sunday he picked her up for church after he dropped me off as is our custom and we went out for lunch. Monday she called and asked about school. This caught me off guard. For a few minutes she acted like she cared. Then she said, “I’m going to put some pressure on you. I need some help with this test. Will you help me?” Ann had been here over the weekend. She’d drilled Mother all weekend, but I hadn’t done enough. We picked her up for dinner, and Ron casually asked her when her drivers license expired and she actually said it had a few more days on it. She lied. He said, why don’t you see if you can get your Arkansas license renewed online. I suggested he try to do that for her while she was over our house. When he looked it up, the instructions said that it expired on the birth date and he read that to her. She had to admit then that it was expired.

He drilled her while I fixed dinner. She hasn’t called the driving school. She has no intention of calling them. She got someone else to take her to the grocery store the next weekend.

Ron called twice the morning of the letter. He most likely won’t call again.

Ann

I have a sister.

It’s true I do. For years no one would have known it necessarily because I didn’t talk about her much. There is six and a half years difference between us. We didn’t run in the same circles growing up, so of course friends didn’t overlap. We didn’t talk much as adults. We lived and learned about each other through my mother. Isn’t that a very odd way of doing things. It’s the way my mother set it up.

This past Christmas we got a chance to talk and started to rebuild some bridges – still not understanding why they needed RE-building.

The reason for the need started to become clear near the end of January and early February. Our Mother had been the master puppeteer. She guided and directed and shared stories and items and tidbits that were designed to keep us apart. Stories that had a basis in reality but which were not true.

We’ve had to apologize to each other multiple times. We believed her! Why wouldn’t you believe your mother. You are supposed to be able to believe your mother. I think we’ve gotten past that apologizing for not trusting that the other would know better, do better, act better — but just past it. Now we’ve started to apologize for the hurt she’s inflicted – the pain she’s caused. The pain she can still cause.

Irony

September 7 I had a migraine that Imitrex didn’t help, so I came home and went to bed. These migraines are exhausting. My face stays numb, my head continued to ache even when the migraine itself goes away.

So when Ron brought the mail in and said, you have a letter from your Mother, I asked him to read it – I just didn’t have the strength myself.

I knew that eventually, the past would have to meet the present. I’d already been thinking about the things that would have to be addressed – a mental laundry list if you will, but the fact that I’d just written about letters and then one presented itself was almost too much to handle.

Then we get the letter. This one was scathing. She loved and trusted Daddy. Daddy had told her before he died to never trust Ron. She should not have let us move her out here. We moved her out here with dishonest intentions. Where did that come from? We did not move her out here. That was her decision. She would not even tell us when so that Ron could fly out and drive out with her like he offered. We do not come over enough, we do not do enough, we do not spend enough, we are not there enough. She is going to see a pastor at our church.

Is that last line a threat? It’s hard to tell with the fantasy the letter is. Mother loved Daddy? She trusted him? Daddy didn’t like or trust Ron? OH my goodness!

What would she like to see? Us not go on business trips? Ron not drive a company car? We tell her where we are going and why we are going and yet she still tells Ann that we never tell her anything or that it’s been three weeks since we’ve seen her.

Then there’s the part about us moving her out here. She announced to us that she wanted to move out to be near us so that she would be near someone in case she got sick again. She’d had pneumonia the winter before and was all alone and it scared her! I told several friends at work how uncomfortable I was with the idea.

This is typical of how she operates. Expectations that she has kept secret, but expects you to know. She dumps them on you ceremoniously and then expects life to go on as usual. Well it can’t. How do you do that when she tells you that she doesn’t trust the man you’ve adored for almost 30 years?

I’ll go forward, but I won’t be abused. That’s one thing I’ve learned in 2007.

Affairs of the Heart

I don’t know if affairs are really of the heart. What I do know is that they are heart-wrenching. My dad was what is fondly known as a philanderer. Where in the world did that term come from? Sounds dashing doesn’t it? Well, it’s not.

I didn’t always know that my dad ran around on my mom. I knew their relationship was almost always strained. I thought that was how everyone’s marriage was. It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 that I knew for sure . Daddy was a graduate assistant for Dale Carnegie courses and there was a woman in one of his courses, Ruth. She was older, divorced, attractive, and Daddy began spending a lot of time with her. He helped her do all the things a single woman needed help with. She had a cute little single sister and he helped her too. He confided in me. What a treat to find out that what you suspected was true. He loved her. He loved Mother, but he loved her. Wow.

Now the only parent to whom I could talk had put me in a position in which I could no longer talk with him. I was so disappointed. He needed someone, I knew he did. Mother was impossible, but this was not right and it wasn’t right for him to tell me! What in the world was he thinking!

He had one other affair that I knew about for sure. This one was with a woman named Dixie. Dixie worked in the office with Daddy. She was not attractive or cute, but she was available. Daddy actually left Mother for Dixie and moved in with her. I was older now. Ann was the same age I’d been before. Amazing coincidence huh? AND you know what else? He told Ann about it! What makes a man want to tell his daughters about his affairs?

I had the boys and we were in Atlanta. Mother and Daddy had moved to Dallas and Daddy left Mother. Pretty despicable. Lower than I thought Daddy could stoop. Lower than even Mother deserved. She drove out to stay with us for a while and he cleaned out a couple of their checking accounts. I didn’t think he had it in him. He was always the generous one. He was always the one to make sure everyone was taken care of.

They reconciled eventually. Did Daddy stop? I doubt it.

I remember when I first came to grips with the fact that my childhood wasn’t normal thinking that the reason for this was that my dad was a philanderer. Now I know that this wasn’t the entire reason. It took me a while to realize why I thought that. My entire adult life, and possibly long before, that’s what I’d been told. It’s not true, but it’s what I’d been told. It is part of the truth but not the entire truth.