T A B L E++T A L K Mother always said ... and it was true! Fill in the blank in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Missing
Children Drama Queen
Candidates Sex and
the 7-year-old boy The
foundling Confessions of a teenage
mom - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
- - - - - - - - - -
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THINKING OF YOU | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It's Christmas Day and our family is sitting outside on the steps of our house. The landlord lives in the last house in the row, the second largest building. His is painted, with a fence and windows that have glass in them. He lives in the house with his wife, who has suffered a crippling stroke and can hardly walk, and his illegitimate daughter. His daughter is pregnant, and he is the father of the baby. The first house in this gray line of crumbling shacks is the largest and nicest of them all, home to the rest of his family, his son and daughter born of his marriage to his shrunken wife. His wife spends a lot of time in the front house, his son and daughter rarely visit the back house. I haven't seen them today, which is odd because it's Christmas and everybody visits at Christmastime. We're sitting outside because my father has returned home and in a drunken fit has thrown most of the dinner out the window, along with some glasses, a pot and plates. He has long passed from frenzy into melancholia and is now sobbing into vomit-flecked sheets. Soon he will be asleep and we may even creep out to see our friends' new toys. We have to hurry back, though, because he sleeps fitfully and has been known to awaken and start hollering for us. None of us want him alone and drunk with my mother, and I don't want it ever to get dark because my mother will be asleep in our bed and he will insist that I sleep in theirs. As much as I try to will blessed unconsciousness, there is no escaping the base perversion the night will disgorge. But it means that he will calm toward my mother, and in that pitiful cause-and-effect pairing of the young, unformed mind, I see that I can help her, I can alleviate our suffering. I can shield my mother by having my father visit his awful intentions instead on my body. How perverse that a child should bargain for her mother's welfare with her own self, that a mother should accept this heartbreaking gift -- and that childhood should be dismissed in such a summary manner. My father tells the same story time and again when he has had too much to drink, when reason mutates into mindless black rage. It begins with my mother leaving him just before I was born and not returning until I was 3 years old, and it ends the same way with each telling, with him sobbing and reaching for me, clumsily petting me and calling me his prize, his gold, his most treasured child, all the while spraying my mother in bespittled invective. He rails too against my mother's family, but I sense fear and something else beneath the bitter onslaught: My father is both afraid and grudgingly respectful of my grandfather. I close my eyes and search for those early years, but there is nothing in my memory of the time spent with my grandparents, and there is an odd absence of any baby pictures in my grandparents' photo albums. The earliest images I can find show a chubby, shy child holding hands with her brother in the front yard of my grandparents' home on the Pomeroon River. In the background is the house my grandfather built, and off to the far right you can barely see the muted gleam of the Pomeroon. I love this river, the urgent, buzzing life of its banks and this creaky dim old farmhouse wrapped in the dense, ripe promise of fruit-heavy trees. It takes us an entire day to travel to the farm: cousins, aunts, my mother, brothers and sisters, all one excitable shrieking group, and us giddy with the realization that for a week or so, the long arm of my father will not reach this far. My aunts arrive first, weighed down with bags of food and clothing, which they arrange around their feet underneath the steamer's slotted wooden benches. Once settled, they smile benignly at us, hand out sweets to clamoring hands, and we're free to run off. Which we do, up and down the narrow stairs, shoving and yelling from the bow to the lower sections, perilously leaning out over the iron rails. The day slides by in a dusty rumble of docking boats and bumpy land vehicles, until our bus rolls to a belching end on the river bank. And there is my grandfather waiting by the launch -- familiar, comforting, faded craggy gray head crinkling in our direction. He gets up and lumbers over, a stooped beloved giant of a man. We chug noisily down the river and arrive with the setting sun. This is when I have seen my mother at her happiest, with a father she loved and a life simple in its needs, generous in its return. We feasted hugely, childish appetites burst open by days of simple farm labor and excessive play, by climbing trees, swimming in murky river water, digging through piles of dusty old magazines, chasing after complacent chickens and running screaming from imaginary tigers. Oddly, I discovered I missed my father on the journey back and was foolishly glad to see him. I came to realize this was but a vestige of hopeful childhood that faded and died in time. I couldn't make that journey to Pomeroon as often as I wanted, coming to rely instead on the embellished tales my siblings relayed back to me. My mother went many times, choosing not to see or to ignore a young child's terror at being left behind, seeking for herself the desperate relief of her childhood home. That was the darkest time of my life, the years from my earliest memory until well after my 11th birthday. I haven't seen my father in 12 years, and four years ago I spoke to him for the last time. There were no showdowns, no violent last scenes, I just never picked up the phone again and never responded to letters. I spent much of my life trying to figure out why I was the target of his terrible abuse, and some explanations were there, but none that pointed the way to reconciliatory measures. At some point a shift must have occurred, because I stopped being angry with him -- worse, I stopped thinking of him as my father. I think I grew weary of my own internal struggles and wanted very simply to move beyond them. But the anger didn't go away; instead it shifted to my mother.
What is a parent's role? My West Indian ancestry stabs an accusing finger
in my direction and swats the question away. It is the duty of the child to
the parent that is more important. Your parents do for you and they
sacrifice their entire lives and this is how you turn out. She is your
mother! But a mother, my mother, would have taken me away from
the hell of my home, my mother would have run away with me, my mother would
have protected me. Instead my mother needed protecting, she sought escape
and she couldn't comfort, and in the end, the child could not continue
being mother to its own mother. But children need their parents, and as
much as I seem unable to draw comfort and enlist support from mine, I can't
ignore synthetic constructs such as Mother's Day. I will send her a card so
she can display it and point to it proudly and say, "That's from my daughter
in America." A small white sheet of paper, embellished with color and
glitter, its safe anonymity tells nothing of the sender, but to an aging
woman on the far side of the continent, it speaks of hope and
reconciliation and family.
Rose Stoll is a writer living in Northern California. |
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