Unlike many of my peers in the 70s, I came from a "broken home". Born in New Jersey, we left the Northeast for Texas after my parents separated. My brothers and I were quite young when Mom moved away, I was around 2, my younger brother 6 months old and my older brother between 5 and 6. Evidently my father had been unfaithful on more than one occasion, later marrying the woman who was his secretary. Later in life, my mother admitted to me that his unfaithfulness was not all my father's fault indicating that she might have been cold and/or manipulative. My older brother suspects that she was unfaithful as well.
Going back further, though, and remembering my grandmother for who she was, I see that maybe problems started earlier. Born in 1916 or 17, my grandmother's mother died at a young age, leaving a single father to raise several girls in a era of financial strife and living in the south. My grandmother, as the eldest child, shouldered much of the parenting though she was just a child herself with no one to teach her "how to mother" nor how to be affectionate. She was often a hard woman to me and my brothers, though I knew and felt she loved us. After she wed, her own husband left her shortly after the birth of my mother. So here she was in the 1940s raising a child on her own. She worked as a beautician, even honing her skills for the funeral homes to work on cadavers for open caskets. She later met the man I would always consider my grandfather whom she married. Grandpa adopted my mother and truly treated her as his own child. My mother, on numerous occasions, told me of the coldness that came from her mother even as a young child. Mom was long when she was born, at about 20-21 inches but didn't even reach five pounds. Her own mother told her that she looked like a shriveled up old man when she was born. What that psychologically did to my mother, I can only imagine. My grandmother was a tall woman at 5' 10" and thankfully, that gene passed to and my brothers and me. Mom was above average in height but not like Grandma. My grandmother, a few years after she married Grandpa, had my only uncle who was cherished beyond measure by my grandmother and also very tall in stature at over 6'2". I think Mom always felt jealous of her brother's spot as beloved but she loved him, too! Mom married at a young age (19 I think) and had Rick by the age of 20.
So here was Mom, raised for at least a while by a single mother, also becoming a single mother. According to my mother, my father did not do his part in raising us. At one point in time, my mother became ill with pneumonia and asked my father to take us so she could rest. He pointed out that it wasn't his weekend to have us. This was when my mother knew that she needed to be closer to her own parents to raise us. She moved to Texas, a 6 hour drive away from her own parents who lived in Shreveport. My mother said that my father also didn't pay the child support that she needed to raise us. She later sued him but he didn't have money anyway.
Until 1976, my mother was basically on her own raising us. We moved a lot in my lifetime. I am still moving a lot. We lived a few different places but my strongest memory is of living on a street called Sheridan in the West University area. We were renters living just off of Greenbriar. More on this later.
Prior to that we lived on a home on Olympia drive north of Westheimer in Houston, it was a wonderful house and life. I remember attending kindergarten and first grade at the public school there. I had a penchant for numbers at an early age, winning the Easter jellybean estimation jar in Kindergarten. I remember wondering how some of my classmates though there were guessing 10-20 jellybeans when there were clearly a LOT of jellybeans. In first grade, Mom used her creative talents to teach us art in my class either every week or every other week. It was slightly traumatizing to have my mother as my teacher as she truly held me to a higher standard than my classmates and wasn't cognizant of that impact it was having on me. I think this is my first clear memory of how my mother could be hard. I fully understand, though, that memory is memory and not necessarily truth.
We moved to the West Houston area in 1974. I have many clear memories of that home and my duties there. Though Mom took Matt to kindergarten the first day, it was up to me after that. So, here I am a second grader, taking a child to kindergarten where I recall Matt wept. Rick couldn't help as he was already in middle school. I remember showing him the yellow "Dick and Jane" books that he would read and trying to get him to stop. My second grade teacher would sometimes let me go check up on him. I loved my second and third grade teachers at Roberts Elementary. Matt, on the other hand, had a teacher in first grade that taped him to the chair and put tape over his mouth. I made friends, some in school, and my best friend, just down the block. I had wonderful experiences with Julie-Anne. She was younger and an only child, but her parents were financially on sound standing and I spent as much free time with her as I could.
There were times as we were growing that things became "uncomfortable" financially and otherwise. Mom was doing the best that she could, all of my clothes were hand-me-downs and we were living hand to mouth. Mom was being paid 50% of what her male counterparts were paid for doing the same job, as a commercial estimator. I have clear memories of Mom telling us not to call her at work unless we were bleeding or vomiting. There were three of us at home alone, latch-key kids. I have a recall of some boy being our sitter which I thought was strange as he was either my brother, Rick's, age or just about. I learned to bake in that house. With my intro to baking from that boy on how to make a cake from a box; what it meant to "eject" on the hand mixer and what the purpose of "preheat" was. Mom was going out in the evening, frequently leaving my brothers and me alone. At one of these evenings, my brothers were fighting. This was a usual occurrence while I was trying to watch television. I tried to push them apart and one of their feet swiped my head and scratched my cornea. I was awakened by my mother in the middle of the night for crying in my sleep and taken to the emergency room.
It was during these years that Mom would also visit a friend, Rita, often. She would take us and place us in Rita's bedroom to watch television while she partied. We were on our own so long that it was there we watched Benny Hill and "Love American Style". There were no games or anything for us to do other than watch television. Sometimes I would bring a book and read, I don't recall if Matt did as he was still so young. If I am not mistaken, Rick was living with my grandparents for much of this time as he was in need of a strong male figure and my grandfather fit the bill well.
I can fully appreciate the need my mother had to escape her circumstances; a single mother with a huge financial burden. I don't remember Mom drinking a lot but I do know she drank. I never felt physically threatened by Mom or anyone I stayed with. I do remember feeling alone and lonely, though.
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