Post 13: Looks Like We Made It
Rare picture of mom and dad together, at my brother Michael's house.
“If you judge people you have no time to love them.” Mother Teresa
While all my brothers were alive, my mom remained civil with my dad. She invited him to holiday dinners. He brought her chocolates. I had fantasies of them reuniting. In one of his bouts of homelessness, she let him stay at the house until he got back on his feet.
However, shortly after Sean and Chris died, dad hit the jackpot of love. He met Margie. Margie is a beautiful soul who awakened the best in him. Dad stopped drinking for good. He got and kept a job. He lost weight. He started doing crossword puzzles every day. Margie was a widow who had lost a child herself. She had gone through her trials and had come through gracious, kind and faithful. I wanted to squeeze Margie and put her essence in a locket to wear as an amulet. I wanted to be like Margie when I grew up. I never heard her say a mean thing. Well, I thought, maybe essence of Margie could get me to smile more. And be more positive. So it was great news, when dad and Margie planned to marry and they wanted a church wedding.
So dad set about getting an annulment. Now I could understand why this made mom snap. This became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. This pissed her off to the highest degree of pissosity. About fifteen years earlier mom had an opportunity to remarry. She was blocked by both dad and advice given to her by her Catholic priest. So six children later, after 30 some years, mom says, “you want our marriage annulled so you can remarry? Oh, hell no!”
Because of this our home life turned into the West Bank. War broke out. In no uncertain terms mom demanded that we were to have nothing to do with dad. Our loyalties were scrutinized constantly. Our whereabouts questioned. Dad became the original He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. My brothers and I had to visit dad and Margie on the sly. If mom found out, all depths of hell would break loose. She would shower insults and laments on us and we’d dive for cover, grit our teeth and bear it until the worst of it was over. We would hear all the terrible things our father had done to her and to the family that we never should have known.
She would remind us, “do you know how much I sacrificed for you, worked my fingers to the bone while your good-for-nothing father drank every last penny and never paid child support?”
Then the drama got good: “God, just take me now. I can’t take this life. How come he gets to be married and I don’t? It’s so unfair and my children don’t appreciate me!”
Our disloyalty was the cause of her diabetes. Our desertion resulted in her pacemaker malfunction. She would take photographs and cut her face out of the frame, leaving big gaping holes. She would not talk to an “offender” child for weeks. Eventually the hostilities devolved into a Cold War that dragged on for years because my brothers refused to stop inviting dad and Margie to family events along with mom. So mom came, but she would subtly swipe at a daughter-in-law how a chicken could be made tastier or suggest another way to handle a wayward grandchild. She was just trying to maintain some dignity, I think. I just wanted Margie to work her healing on all of us, like she did on dad. Could she spread some of that calm and happiness and transform the turmoil our family had been through?
It was frustrating. Later I had a fantasy to lock mom and dad in a padded room and let them duke it out once and for all with paintballs or super-soaker water guns. Mom never could forgive dad the grace of happiness he received in his old age. She could not let go of the hurt – that corrosive pain she had carried for decades that literally made her ill. Further, she could not see that we could love them both. The thought of it galled her. (That would become one of the most important lessons I would later take away as a divorced mom myself. Do not mess with your children’s relationship with their dad.) Mom just wore that resentment like a cheap drugstore perfume.
As my cousin once remarked, “How many Kuhn sisters (my mom and aunts) does it take to change a light bulb?”
Answer: “None. (with a big exaggerated whine and sigh) “I’ll just sit here in the dark.” Sadly, for the most part, she did.
Sadly, she didn’t have to.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa?page=8
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.
While all my brothers were alive, my mom remained civil with my dad. She invited him to holiday dinners. He brought her chocolates. I had fantasies of them reuniting. In one of his bouts of homelessness, she let him stay at the house until he got back on his feet.
However, shortly after Sean and Chris died, dad hit the jackpot of love. He met Margie. Margie is a beautiful soul who awakened the best in him. Dad stopped drinking for good. He got and kept a job. He lost weight. He started doing crossword puzzles every day. Margie was a widow who had lost a child herself. She had gone through her trials and had come through gracious, kind and faithful. I wanted to squeeze Margie and put her essence in a locket to wear as an amulet. I wanted to be like Margie when I grew up. I never heard her say a mean thing. Well, I thought, maybe essence of Margie could get me to smile more. And be more positive. So it was great news, when dad and Margie planned to marry and they wanted a church wedding.
So dad set about getting an annulment. Now I could understand why this made mom snap. This became the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. This pissed her off to the highest degree of pissosity. About fifteen years earlier mom had an opportunity to remarry. She was blocked by both dad and advice given to her by her Catholic priest. So six children later, after 30 some years, mom says, “you want our marriage annulled so you can remarry? Oh, hell no!”
Because of this our home life turned into the West Bank. War broke out. In no uncertain terms mom demanded that we were to have nothing to do with dad. Our loyalties were scrutinized constantly. Our whereabouts questioned. Dad became the original He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. My brothers and I had to visit dad and Margie on the sly. If mom found out, all depths of hell would break loose. She would shower insults and laments on us and we’d dive for cover, grit our teeth and bear it until the worst of it was over. We would hear all the terrible things our father had done to her and to the family that we never should have known.
She would remind us, “do you know how much I sacrificed for you, worked my fingers to the bone while your good-for-nothing father drank every last penny and never paid child support?”
Then the drama got good: “God, just take me now. I can’t take this life. How come he gets to be married and I don’t? It’s so unfair and my children don’t appreciate me!”
Our disloyalty was the cause of her diabetes. Our desertion resulted in her pacemaker malfunction. She would take photographs and cut her face out of the frame, leaving big gaping holes. She would not talk to an “offender” child for weeks. Eventually the hostilities devolved into a Cold War that dragged on for years because my brothers refused to stop inviting dad and Margie to family events along with mom. So mom came, but she would subtly swipe at a daughter-in-law how a chicken could be made tastier or suggest another way to handle a wayward grandchild. She was just trying to maintain some dignity, I think. I just wanted Margie to work her healing on all of us, like she did on dad. Could she spread some of that calm and happiness and transform the turmoil our family had been through?
It was frustrating. Later I had a fantasy to lock mom and dad in a padded room and let them duke it out once and for all with paintballs or super-soaker water guns. Mom never could forgive dad the grace of happiness he received in his old age. She could not let go of the hurt – that corrosive pain she had carried for decades that literally made her ill. Further, she could not see that we could love them both. The thought of it galled her. (That would become one of the most important lessons I would later take away as a divorced mom myself. Do not mess with your children’s relationship with their dad.) Mom just wore that resentment like a cheap drugstore perfume.
As my cousin once remarked, “How many Kuhn sisters (my mom and aunts) does it take to change a light bulb?”
Answer: “None. (with a big exaggerated whine and sigh) “I’ll just sit here in the dark.” Sadly, for the most part, she did.
Sadly, she didn’t have to.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa?page=8
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.
My brothers Michael, Mark and Greg and me. One of the first pictures of us together after Sean and Chris' deaths.