Double Take

I look a lot like my mother.  At one point in time after she died, my dad and I went out to eat at their country club where the two of them used to go and eat with friends.  One of her friends audibly gasped when she saw me with my dad, the similarities were that obvious.  I have done the same when passing a mirror.  

That being said, I don't always favor my mother.  My brother Matt, used to favor her a lot.  He has the long lankiness that she did in years gone-by.  My nephew, Aaron, though over 6'3" also has facial features that remind me of Mom.  Sometimes, when I grow out my hair I look less like my mother.  I have had short hair for a while and in my life, many times.  After Mom died, I refused to get the short hair that I wanted as a courtesy to my dad, knowing that if he looked at me, he would certainly see my Mom.  Given the amount of care I was giving to him, I didn't want those lines blurred.  I have darker skin than Mom and tan more easily, I tan VERY easily.  I also have my father's deep set eyes.  Mom didn't have those bags that I now carry.  Because I was a smidgen taller, I had longer fingers.  That drove her crazy that I was taller by an inch.  She was quite competitive in just about everything.

We did, though, both have scoliosis, mom had migraines in her earlier life, and at a few points in time, we both wore the same size.  I, of course, got larger and she started shrinking.  

We have some personality characteristics similarities as well.  Mom and I both love(d) color though we didn't love the same colors.  She had a talent for making a room look like a magazine spread.  We both love the creative endeavors and stage performances.  We both loved playing games; she was competitive though and I just loved the togetherness.  Both of us loved to read and we both needed glasses.  Both of us could be perceived as "bitchy" as we were a little too direct for many peoples taste.  Maybe that was lack of female influence in our lives, I don't know.  

There were some quite obvious differences between us, though.  Mom, from about 1976 onward (when she married Bud) was always concerned about what other's thought. I think as she got older it became even more of an issue. I think this was when her Borderline Personality Disorder began.  While I do like having friends, I think that Mom was a bit preoccupied with keeping up.  She liked the perception to be that she had money.  She was nosey about what Glen and I had and we were/are extremely private about that.  Mom was manipulative and controlling and I am more apt to let go of things, I hope.  If I cannot, I talk to Glen about them and usually that sets things in balance.  My mom was a self confessed gambler.  She told me she lost their "fortune" in the stock market twice, with losses near millions.  I am a sit and wait kinda girl, way less impulsive.  Mom had real talent when it came to decorating and cooking, but she lost interest in the latter. Mom was often insensitive to others feelings, she would lose friends in a heartbeat and not know why.  I lose friends, too, but not in the same way.  I am so desperate to have that long term friendship, I am more apt to fail to recognize that some friends are only for a season.  

So, yes, I am in so many ways LIKE my mother.  I am not, however, my mother and I refuse to become the woman that she was.  I will continue to pray that God's grace stay with me to keep me strong in the pull to the darkness that my mother succumbed to: BPD and self absorption. I thank God for the gift of my mother and all that I have learned both positive and negative while I hope to be mindful that my life is a gift from God and what I do with it is my gift back to God.

Friends

 I almost took today off from writing but I really do want to establish a habit until I think that I have either worked through my issues or until it has morphed in some way to something else.  I just really didn't want to be sad and truly digging through sometimes unpleasant memories can be heavy.

That being said, I think I want to focus on friends.  I have friends that have a friend network that goes back decades, truly.  I don't and most of the time, I am okay with that.  We all enter this world alone and that's how we go out. Well unless you were a multiple birth.  My student asks me every few months who my best friend is and I know she is on a fishing expedition.  She needs to hear that she ranks in my life enough to be named.  She doesn't like my answer though because it is Glen.  We have been friends for such a long time and we usually behave like friends.  He wants to sit and drink coffee with me in the morning, we take turns deciding what to watch and even with that we are mindful of what the other person avoids, he knows I don't like to dry so I usually wash.  

The friends in my stages of development have been pivotal.  I don't have a whole lot of memories of friends before we moved to the West University area. In the West U area, Mom was working hard as a single Mom and we were on our own a lot. When we moved there, I don't remember how, my I became friends with Erica Herndon.  She had a lot of friends and I am pretty certain that I ranked lower on her list than she did on mine but that was okay.  She lived about five blocks away in a house that was perhaps 3 bedroom 2 bath and she didn't have siblings.  This was so novel to me as I was always scrapping for my place with Rick and Matt---seriously stuck in the middle. Erica, though, had at least 3 doting parents: a Mom, a Step-Dad, and a Father.  During this time, I had one. Mom.  She lived with her Mom and her Step-Dad in what I thought was a dreamy house. There was color and style and there were pretty things.  I remember my awe at her bed linens as they seems so cloud-like.  Any way, she was nice to me and we spent time together.  

My best friend, however, was Julie-Anne.  She was also an only child, living just down the street from me with her Mom and Dad.  I know her Dad was former Air Force and her mom a Psychologist.  Her Mom later divorced her Dad and took up residence with a woman.  That was pretty earth shattering for 1974.  She and her parents also had nice things. I think mine were all hand-me-downs and our furniture was not quite as stately.  With both of her parents working, I think we might have been their charity case.  At any rate, Julie-Anne had fabulous creative birthday parties.  Her parents owned a sailing vessel that could sleep 5 as well as a small Prindle cat.  I wish I could thank her parents for including me in so many of Julie-Ann's experiences for a few years.  They were so kind!  Julie-Anne attended a private school while I went down the road to Robert's Elementary (where I frequently dropped Matt at Kindergarten).  The difference was inconsequential as she was a year younger and we wouldn't have been in the same class anyway.  Being with Julie-Anne and her parents was my first real glimpse into what a happy family looks like.  Her Dad, even after the divorce, stayed near and active in Julie-Anne's life.  

I guess what I am realizing is that everyone in your life has a role:  some are principal actors, others supporting actors, and there is always the crew.  My heart is full of gratitude, for those few years in particular. 

In My Beginning

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.