“Mommy, I am dying.”

Posted on February 27, 2014 by derelictmom

The other night I overheard my mother putting Sadie to bed. Sadie is Eva’s cousin at a robust, four and a half months older than Eva. GiGi tucked her in and as she was dosing off dreaming about Mickey Mouse and Disney Princesses my mother recited the Lord’s Prayer.

I had totally forgotten or blocked it out I am not sure which – but my mother recited the Lord’s Prayer to my siblings and I every night of our childhood and we would be instructed to say it along with her when we were old enough, how could I forget. The words came creeping back into my mind like a favorite poem:

Our Father who art in heaven,

hallowed be they name.

When kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses

for we forgive those who trespass against us

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil, forever and ever

Amen.

At the end my mother would say God Bless, and then list all the family members who were in heaven.

Every night would be a chorus of “Go to bed! “ “Say your prayers!” we would put our hands together in pretend prayer until we were reprimanded to take it seriously. My sister would always get the trespasses line wrong and we would rarely finish it without help. So all these years later, did it rub off? Not really in the way it was intended.

Far from being a good Christian, I rarely go to church and I got married in my aunt’s garden because our vicar refused to let my two miniature dachshunds, Piccolo and Piglet walk down the aisle as ring bearers. I am what my mother calls a “heathen.” It was this moment, a flashback to my childhood recitations of the Lord’s Prayer to consider the possibility of this being true.

It is always shocking when you turn out to be exactly like your mother even if you had intentions of being completely different. Eva is barely two but every night I make her turn off her Tinker Bell lamp by pressing the center of the flower at its base, and then as the fairy swirls around and the lights go out, I refuse to put her in her crib until she says, “ Good night Fairy, I believe in Fairies.” Most of the time she does what she is told, and curls up without resistance but some nights she won’t say it just to annoy me. Sound familiar? Without realizing it until now, I have been indoctrinating my daughter in the supernatural. I am a heathen; I am a derelict mother. Worse I am just like my own mother. I can’t seem to read her a bedtime story and call it a day.

Age two is when children begin to develop their imagination and I forgive myself thinking that letting her believe in fairies is helping expand her mind. Eva’s make believe usually involves a tea party or a sleep over for her friends: Bunzy, Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Peppa Pig. But the other day she was having just such a sleep over under her blanket tent. I came in and sat down next to her and she laid down ontop of the blanket and looked up at me and said, “ I am sleeping.”

I replied, “No you are not.”

To which she replied, “No, I am not sleeping,”

I agreed, then she said, “I am dying.” For a moment I felt like Tinker Bell fell out of the sky at my feet and expired.

“You aren’t dying.” Was my witty, well thought out reply. I could see her scanning my face for recognition. I was taken aback but tried to hide it with a fake smile. It worked.

“I am not dying.” she said.

“Yes.” I agreed.

I really wasn’t prepared for something so difficult to happen, she wasn’t supposed to throw hard questions my way until she was at least eight and maybe not until she was sixteen. I was supposed to have years to dream up interesting, intelligent answers to, “What happens when you die?” I was worried too that next, pretending to pee like a boy was going to turn into the where do I come from talk at age three.

I asked Auntie Zoe the next day when she picked her up for school if anything happened at school that would make her say something like that. Zoe said they were talking about watering the tomato plants that were dying. That made me feel better, but I couldn’t help but think she had picked it up from an older kid, after all the playground is where you learn most of life’s lessons starting at two.

I am still not sure what I will tell her about dying. I am starting to think I should start talking about heaven first, perhaps I should read her the Lord’s Prayer, or maybe Gigi will have a chance to indoctrinate another generation if she ever agrees to babysit. By saying No she is passive aggressively creating more fairy-believing heathens.

I myself do believe in an after life but how do you explain that to a kid. I also believe in Tinker Bell in the parallel world of my imagination where I am still a two year old waiting for a life full of adventures. Maybe Eva is a bit cynical like her grandmother after all by living we are growing older, which is dying. Or maybe Eva just wants to understand but, in that case I have some bad news because adults are still arguing about life after death and the other mysteries of our world.

Interestingly around the same time this happened, I came across this article trending on the internet, evidently most kids believe in immortality whether its believing in heaven, fairies, ghosts or God.

http://digitaljournal.com/news/religion/op-ed-kids-believe-in-immortality-regardless-of-culture/article/367857

Not planning on giving up on Tinker Bell anytime soon.

Xx Derelict Mom

Long Days Journey into 1985

Posted on February 21, 2014 by derelictmom

I can shoot a gun and ride a horse

A few weeks ago I went to see my friend Timothy Trimingham Lee’s play in the Bermuda Festival. He came back from London to put on a production of the Eugene O’Neill play Long Days Journey into Night, and that it was – a long night was had by all. The original play is four plus hours and Tim was able to expertly cut his version down to three and a half hours, which is quite a feat to do seamlessly. Nevertheless it is a hard ask of a modern audience to watch a play that was written in 1941 and set in one location for four hours. From a critical rather than entertaining perspective it is a towering play, Eugene O’Neill’s best, a thinly veiled autobiography of a family plagued with addiction. Although the play is certainly not modern it’s themes are and they resound for an island where families so often reside together or near each other (like our family) and cannot escape the ravages and temptations of addiction nor can they escape the temptation to argue with one another and life is generally better when the booze stays locked up in the garage outside. That’s where James Tyrone of the play locks up his liquor from his sons, and coincidently my father does the exact same. My dad says he keeps it locked up so the handy men don’t steal it but I think it’s actually so his wife and kids don’t help themselves. For some inexplicable reason he has now moved it out of the garage and put it under his bed. Our family of course comes from a long line of drinkers in the Bermudian tradition of rum swizzle mixed in a washing machine, vodka everyday and champagne only on special occasions. During the play I am sure we were all thinking, “Geesh it’s Friday I could really use a drink.” I made my way right to the bar during intermission, but I think I might have been the only one to know we had another almost two hours to go.

Most of my family attended the play: myself, Chris, mom and dad, Aunt Ann, and the Uncles Michael and Michael. At about 11:30pm the play came to it’s long awaited climax when the drug addicted mother now finally completely insane and wearing her wedding dress, in faded glory, representing all she and the family had lost went on a crazy monologue about the past because everyone knows Mom has to have the last word. When the curtain fell, there was a moment of disbelief that the play had actually ended, for those of us who remained, who hadn’t snuck out at intermission, or made an exit in the second half when it was clear the play was not going to end before last call in the front street bars.

Leaving the theatre there was a heavy cloud following us out, the awkwardness of not being able to say what an amazingly life affirming play, but being haunted by its truths and reflections. Ironically Eugene O’Neill had found solace in Bermuda from his alcoholism and inspiration for this play, perhaps by watching the other ten thousand or whatever the population was then, alcoholics clinging to the rock.

Standing outside waiting for everyone to emerge there was a collective sigh, as everyone wiped their brows, “Phew my family is not as bad as that.” When my mother and father tracked the rest of us down, my aunt laughed and said to my mother,

“I remember a party when you came out in your wedding dress.”

“I remember that too!” I said, imagining her swigging off a champagne bottle, but in reality it was far more sophisticated than that, it was Crystal champagne flutes and the wedding dress was worn to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary.

“It wasn’t just me!” my mother defended.

“All the guests were wearing their wedding dresses,” and they all happened to be swigging champagne too.

Looking at our watches it was after midnight, so instead of turning into pumpkins we went to the after party. I had a glass of champagne, which was followed by a hot flash and I had to go home like Cinderella, as the clock crept farther past midnight and closer to Eva’s waking hour. There is nothing like a toddler to curb your social life.

The next morning I was digging through old pictures for a genealogy project I am undertaking for Eva and I came across a picture from that infamous anniversary party of my mother in her wedding gown. I figured out it must have been in 1989. My mother looks great, my father looks like he needs a makeover but it was the eighties. We already saw in a pervious post what I looked like in the eighties and it wasn’t pretty. I was thinking about how our family had its vague similarities to the Tyrones, but we are really more happy drinkers, although we have all been known to have a monologue or two.

My pride in my familial line was brimming over as I began researching our history but little by little going through my parents’ files I found things that started to chip away at that family image previous generations had done their creative best to create. I have to admit I am still a little disappointed I can’t trace my lineage back to Queen Victoria (she used to have dachshunds like me and sometimes I wonder if she let them kiss her like I do.)

I decided to dig out some old VHS tapes of my grandparents which I had transferred after they died and found one dating back to 1985. Watching it I was instantly transplanted into the mid eighties of suburbia Texas around about the same era as my parent’s twentieth wedding anniversary. While my parents were swilling champagne celebrating their anniversary our relatives in Texas were “letting Jesus save them.” I didn’t know whether to be horrified, entertained or order myself a mid day bloody mary.

My mother has been denying the existence of relatives and Jesus for that matter, for years. In 2009 I was inspired to trace my American lineage with hopes of becoming a Daughter of the American Revolution, and when I asked her about her father’s family tree, her response was:

“They were poor, their parents died young, all the siblings went their own ways and didn’t stay in touch so no one would know anything, and why the hell would you want to be a Daughter of the American Revolution?”

Fast forward to 2014, being under employed I decided to finally complete my side of a photo book Eva’s Great Gran (who is 105 and remembers the Titanic) created for her with pictures of relatives dating back to the 1800s up to the present with the respective family trees etc. Digging through family files, I came across a file with my grandfather’s initials: CTY. Inside was a partial family tree and correspondence from at least two branches of the family descendant from his siblings. I announced its existence to my mother who denied knowledge of it, leaving me wondering who filed it away, but I did recognize the handwriting on the file tab.

My mother has never been interested in her genealogy and I had always put that up to her not being interested in history or the past, as she was more concerned with her current social standing, even if she alternated that concern with threats of arson and moving to Hamilton (only a few miles but a world away.)

After reading the genealogy file on her side of the family and watching the Texas video from 1985 I think there is more to it. Her whole life had been a detour from the past, her family gradually moving East and simultaneously moving up in the world until mom ended up in Bermuda swilling champagne. I remembered a detour we made a few years ago on a family trip to Montana to go “glamping” (glamour camping) at an exclusive ranch resort called Paws Up. My mother’s mother’s family was from Montana so after landing in Billings we detoured to a little town called Harlowton for July 4^th celebrations on our way to the resort. Despite the fact that I found it almost impossible to find a vegetable in the entire place, it had the rustic charm of a ghost town. I even met one of my grandmother’s old boyfriends who was able to continue smoking thanks to his handy wheel around oxygen cylinder.

We visited the house on main street where my great grandmother once lived which was now a museum. We went shopping at the local antique stores; we all bought cowboy hats and my father just to be different picked up a bear skin rug that the owner had shot and killed. Next door to the museum was the Graves Hotel, a railroad era establishment, which had long ago been shut down, but perhaps because they heard we were in town the bar inside was still in operation. We bought a few rounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon beers for the locals and they let us share in one of their bar side delicacies: Chicken gizzards, fried to order right next to the beer taps. A few gizzards and beers in, Chris started dancing with the locals, but our happy hour was called abruptly to a close when the meth addict lady with no teeth tried to kiss Chris in the corner. I shook my head sure she would end up revealed as my long lost cousin. To get away from her Chris had to trade his Bermuda t-shirt for his freedom and like true out of towners we high tailed it out of the saloon wishing we had brought our horses. This incident was my husband’s (who is from England) happy initiation to the Wild West and my American roots.

Some of the country must have rubbed off on my father, because when we got to the resort, while the rest of the family were enjoying happy hour at sunset, he crept behind a rock wearing his bear skin rug and scared the hell out of everyone especially the Uncle Michaels who called out for a rifle. Miraculously no one dropped their cocktails and Dad was able to shed the rug before he was shot by his own brother. Let’s just say there is a little bit of country in all of us, and we discovered on that trip how important it was to be able to ride a horse and shoot a gun. A few years later my sister considered naming her daughter Montana, but decided against it after my mother convinced her it wasn’t appropriate.

Back in present day digging through these family files I realized that what I discovered in Montana and what I would discover in tracing the family, is that we are all human, the meth addicted toothless Montana cousin, the God Fearing Texas folk on the VHS tape, and us. In the words of a cousin in her letter to my grandfather in the eighties,

“I started to research my family tree a little over a year ago, and at that time I promised myself that I would do research without judging the actions of our ancestors. Understanding that people live different lives in different generations and circumstances, it was not up to me to judge their actions as right or wrong. In our lines I have found ministers, lots of farmers, a family who sold one of their children, two committed to insane asylums, a family who chased down Indians to retrieve their captured wives, two murders and one suicide. Pretty much what most people find when they research their family trees.”

Most people? Okay. The first thing I thought was that she left out the alcoholics, but with this letter I was hooked on investigating the family tree starting with my mother’s side. Because mothers always have to have the last word, even Derelict Mothers, I will end this blog post with a quote from Mary Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night “ The past is the present isn’t it? It’s the future too.”

More on my genealogy in blogs to come, with video clips too.

Photos of the Graves Hotel:

https://timmazzaferro.wordpress.com/tag/harlowton-mt/

I Lost Custody of My Baby

Posted on February 13, 2014 by derelictmom

Last week I strapped my first born into the car, packed up his toys, his bed, blankets, his clothes and booties and even his hot dog Halloween costume, packed up a months worth of food and dropped him off on a leash and left him on his new mother’s doorstep in floods of tears. It was something I swore would never happen to him or me but he had been a problem child since birth and well, I am a derelict mother, one who would abandon their child in a basket on a nice lady’s doorstep. It had come to that. Piglet moved to St. David’s.

When I got home I put on a huge pair of sunglasses to hide my tears, and Eva put on her Elton John star shaped glittery sunglasses and we left to go to a friend’s birthday party. When we arrived Eva had had an accident in the car and so the two of us arrived crying, wearing sunglasses in the middle of winter and covered in pee. We were just what our friends wanted at their kids’ fifth birthday, a crazy mother spontaneously bursting into tears, who gave away one kid, and can’t cope with the human one. A mother who claims Eva is potty trained while she runs around the friend’s brand new house finding places to mark her spot and then spent the rest of the party in only her party dress swinging on a tree swing with a full audience of five year old boys. When I got home our little cousin brought me down a Valentines card covered in glitter and addressed to: Luci, Chris, Eva, Piglet and Piccolo. I burst into tears leaving my uncle, an innocent bystander, to explain to our little cousin how I had to move Piglet to St. David’s. I immediately put extra pairs of hello kitty underwear in my wallet just in case there is a next time, as they would conveniently double as a handkerchief.

My new normal was hard to get used to, especially every time I looked at my backpack emblazoned with “I have multiple dachshund syndrome” but then I remembered I could count Eva, as she was following Piccolo around on all fours mousing. But I was still having difficulty letting go of my dream life as a happily married family woman with 2.5 dogs, Piccolo, Piglet and Eva. I had worried that it would come to this after Eva arrived, but after the first few months I thought we had survived the worst. The boys, Piccolo and Piglet were not jealous of Eva but they hated each other. When Eva was born, Chris dropped the baby hats they give you in the hospital around the house and when we got home from the hospital with Eva all the hats had been collected and put together in their bed where the boys were guarding them. It was a good omen; we would all be one happy family. WRONG.

Piccolo and Piglet had always had fights, and I had always been able to separate them. I almost lost a few fingers but that’s motherhood I expected to loose an organ or an appendage at some stage. When it got worse we summoned the dog trainer, they were walked in a pack three times a week and in the worst case scenario they went off to boarding school for a few days to blow of steam. All of this seemed to diffuse the madness, which is sibling rivalry. When we added the half dog/ half human child Eva to the brood, the fights grew worse for awhile but got better again as we all got accustomed to our new life. I was worried that when Eva learned to walk that her relationship with the dogs would change and things would go wrong, but that milestone came and went and by one and a half I was sure we were in the clear. But when Eva developed an affinity for ham, and bacon it signaled the beginning of the end.

In the space of six tortuous months our house became a ridiculous circus like obstacle course of gates and barriers and bizarre rituals which had to be adhered to exactly and in sequential order or else hell would break loose and the dogs would tear each other limb from limb. Eva would cry “Boy’s fight, Boy’s fight.” One of us would be taking a dog to the vet or boarding school, the other trying to explain to Eva why one dog brother tried to kill the other dog brother. I would have happily carried on with this madness, after all I had been doing it to a lesser extent for ten years rather than face what I had to do last week. But it all came to a head one Saturday evening in December, when the two dogs followed me into Eva’s room while daddy was bathing Eva. I saw them facing off and knew it was going to be a bad fight. After it erupted Daddy had to take Eva out of the bath and lock her in the bathroom, dripping wet in a towel, the equivalent of locking her in a closet, which I had done before to protect her from the mayhem.

It took us several minutes to get them apart and at the end of it there was blood spattered all over us and up and down the staircase. If anyone had come over we would have had a hard time explaining why there was so much blood over the stairs and one child locked up, and another missing because I had taken the injured dog over to my parent’s house to recuperate. When I returned Chris said essentially “It’s me or the dog.” This had to end. After ten and a half years I had to find a new home for Piglet. In the eight weeks between the fight and Piglet’s relocation, his brother Piccolo stayed with my parents, where he howled and marked his spot and generally drove them crazy. Unsurprisingly they did not volunteer to adopt Piccolo or Piglet. We came to the decision to rehome Piglet and keep Piccolo because Piglet was the aggressor. Our dog walker who is sweet on Piglet agreed to adopt him after her oldest dog passed away and so Piglet’s fate was set. In the meantime I had been interviewing potential adopters, handing out flyers, calling people for advice and losing my body weight in tears all with consternation and back handed encouragement from family members.

Eva has been taking Piglet’s relocation much better than mommy. Now instead of saying “The Boys had a fight,” Eva says, “ Piglet went to live with Reza.” And when I ask her, “ Do you love Piccolo?” She says “No, I love Piglet.” And I say, “I love Piglet too,” and then I tell her, “we did our best for him,” and I try to believe it myself.

Eva is developing fears now and she plays a game where all the tiles on our floor are where the “Sharps” live and she runs away from the “sharps” and climbs up on my feet for higher ground. At night when I read stories to her in bed, she looks at her animal book and gets scared of the lion and the leopard pictures and snuggles into my chest and I tell her “Don’t worry I will protect you and keep you safe. “ I then feel horrible and think to myself, I hope I am not lying to her like I lied to Piglet who thought I would be his mommy forever.

When I shed a tear, my own mother says, “ Good God Luci, grow up, you should have followed my advice and put the dog down, good riddance that’s what I say.” I just think to myself, I wonder if they established the social services department in the 1970s because my mother moved into town. I should be thankful I made it out of 1984.

My recent underemployment has allowed me to look into my genealogy in order to complete a picture book and family tree for Eva. It turns out I come from a long line of derelict mothers, in fact, one actually sold a child into slavery.

I know you are dying to know what side of my family that derelict mother was on…. Drum role….. yes indeed, that derelict mother is found on my own mother’s side, the same mother that suggested I kill Piglet. I am hoping Eva improves our genetic line and can live out her entire life without having to admit that she gave away a child, or got forbid sold or killed one, because now I have to admit I left a very sweet only sometimes vicious miniature dachshund named Piglet on a very nice lady’s doorstep in St. David’s.

Family Photos

Posted on February 6, 2014 by derelictmom

2013 was a good year, and our family immortalized it with a typically awkward Christmas photo, which of course I will include in the my blog as well as a few from the archives. I am not sure when the Christmas Photo trend started it seems like an 80s thing to me. I can remember having family portraits in the 70s but not Christmas card photos until at least the mid eighties when cameras became more accessible right in time to capture my awkward years. I have two siblings though and it’s a toss up at who looks worse each year, there is usually someone, my mother, who looks good every year, and that’s the perks of being the matriarch and having editorial control. I suppose she should be called the grand matriarch now.

The grand matriarch is a woman of many agendas, and photographs are often at the top of her list. She has an iphone, an ipad, an imac but she still carries photos around in her purse. Thank god my sister gave her a grandchild in 2009 or she would still be carrying pictures of my thirty one year old little brother around in a baby blue pleather wallet frame. She now has three grandchildren, the youngest is my daughter Eva and the grand matriarch just hounded me for two weeks to print out a picture of Eva for aforementioned pleather wallet frame. At the last minute before she departed on a trip, I fished out some photo paper and obliged. Need I mention my mother has plenty of pictures of Eva, she has an imac, a printer and photopaper. I reminded her that she could also show people pictures on her iphone but when I started talking about how she had to download Iphoto 11 and then when she took a photo on her iphone it would magically appear on her computer in Photostream. Lets just say she looked at me like I was talking about the delta flight to Mars. I gave up on initiating my mother to modern technology, she is not on facebook and thank heavens will never read my blog!

My mother never warns us when she has decided to take the family photo, although she has probably been planning it for some time, and you are not safe after the month of October. It could be the worst day of your entire life, you could have a bee sting on your eyelid and a fat lip and be at a family party and out would pop the professional photographer and especially if you are, like we are, related to a professional photographer- then you are never safe. My mother has the perfect way of picking the imperfect moment. Before the days of photoshop my mother’s editorial control would predictably choose the best picture of herself, which would undoubtedly be the shot where I looked like a deformed cousin. There was no way to make it democratic. Now we use photoshop and try to find an equitable solution.

Trolling through the shots this year…. Yes you can imagine I am the one with the unwashed hair and no makeup. I asked my mother for warning and her only response was that I should not have left the house looking like that. I have gained at least some control over my mother with the fact that she asks my husband Chris to print her annual Christmas card, which is how I caught the picture of me pregnant in a bathing suit, which she snuck into the family photo montage a few years ago- I almost fainted. We now have a chance to edit her Christmas letter too. Once she wrote that my husband was the CEO of his company which was not only untrue ( he is Sales and marketing manager) it is also blatantly wishful thinking. When we got married she drafted our wedding invitation because it was “her wedding” and when we saw the proof she had given him a new middle name. Christopher Fortescue Worsick. My husband does not have a middle name, but my mother thought he needed one and her invention, came out of a gross misunderstanding of a joke three years before, you can expect nothing less.

This Christmas we convinced the grand matriarch to tell the truth a little bit more so we put the photoshopped picture on the front of the card, and one of the real pictures on the back but that can’t change the Christmas Letter which is usually an inflated, competitive and highly selective version of the truth. For instance this year, she writes about my father:

“Rick continues as Chairman of the St. George’s Foundation and President of the St. David’s Historical Society ( Carter House c 1640). This year the construction of a Settler’s dwelling c 1612 was completed. Rick received the “Clipper Award” from the Bermuda National Trust “for contributions to and unwavering support of St. George’s and St. David’s and championing their preservation.”

What she doesn’t mention is that she threatened to burn down the dwelling, a replica of a 1612 settlers house that was made by hand by forty volunteers and masons, and it took over a year to build with antique tools that look like this and wooden tree nails:

She also didn’t mention that she calls all of his colleagues “relic hunters” and refers to them mockingly as his girlfriends even though most of them are male.

She mentions how my sister trained and ran the New York Marathon, an amazing feat, but my sister’s real motivation was to get some personal time away from her two kids, Trystan 5 and Sadie 2. As any mother knows you have to come up with a good reason to stash them with someone else even if it’s their own father. But a marathon- I haven’t gotten there yet myself as I can barely run around the block, but if I had a second child, my name would be at the bottom of the marathon sign up sheet with all the other mothers and fathers escaping the weekend trappings of family life even if it was a race I would never finish!

My brother’s paragraph is still feeling the weight of omissions from previous years, and true as it maybe, the family is, has not and will not be full of job success, weddings and births year in and year out. Take my paragraph, I might as well be unemployed because I made the hilariously naïve decision to become a documentary film maker which is being unemployed and extremely busy all at the same time, oh wait- being a derelict mother feels exactly the same way. I highly doubt my mother will advertise in next year’s letter that her oldest daughter has started a blog, www.derelictmom.com. But maybe I should have more faith in my mother, always a truth spinner as she could probably editorialize it into a positive. Perhaps she will say that I have chosen to “self publish” a series of essays on motherhood. Or she might choose to believe the internet does not exist like her iphone.

Anyway here are our most recent family photos and some from the archives. I don’t have too many followers so hopefully my siblings will forgive me for sharing these.

Xxx Derelict Mom.