Author Archives: derelictmom

Circadian Rhythms

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The first few months of a baby’s life are hardest on her mother. Babies don’t know day from night and every few hours they scream in abandonment and confusion. This behavior hits its peak a few weeks in when the well wishers drop off, the grandparents have gotten over the novelty of a new baby and daddy is back at work. Suddenly its mother and baby alone to face the dark night right when adrenaline burns out and the shopping list is whittled down to two things: coffee and chocolate.

My daughter Eva was born on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the night of the longest darkness. It felt like that too for about two years, night upon night of soothing a crying baby so she didn’t wake the dogs, who would wake Daddy, who would let the dogs outside to wake up the angry extended family on the Spurling acreage. “Hush little baby” does not work, you might as well listen to whatever music you want at 3am it doesn’t matter.

By the time Eva was four weeks old I was convinced I had given birth to a nocturnal monster and that I would never catch a break. Around the same time when she went for her one month weigh in, the real reason for her night wakings, or rather all night screaming was discovered, in fact it was probably apparent to anyone who had not been up all night for over thirty consecutive days. A month after she was born she was barely her birth weight and she looked like a little alien, a big head bulgy eyes and a tiny little body and Spock like ears. So all night while I was munching away on chocolate crying about not being able to sleep, Eva was staying up all night breast feeding, crying away about not being able to get enough to eat. Ahhh the vicious cycle of the Mother-Daughter relationship. The skinnier she got the fatter I got. Life’s unfair! Supplement with formula!

When she was three months old I left her in her own room to sleep, I was convinced she would be heartbroken that her mother had left her, but alas I think she was glad to be rid of me and those huge appendages that barely sustained her in her first few weeks.  I left her to rejoin the boys, Daddy, and Eva’s twin brothers Piccolo and Piglet, after three months they had developed quite a boys club and they had to reluctantly accept me back into their lair.  The next six months or so were amazing, Eva slept from seven pm until seven am, I was in heaven and then right when I thought I had this baby thing down, a toddler arrived and the night wakings returned.

From the age of ten months Eva was awake almost every single night for an hour or two crying. Eva was so sleep deprived she would get sick and the whole vicious circle would perpetuate. My parents were sure I had to be exaggerating about her being up every single night, but at the same time were perplexed by my erratic behavior of driving on the wrong side of the road, quoting the year as 1998, the U.S. president as Nixon, and other early onset signs of dementia easily mistaken for the woes of new motherhood or maybe just anarchy.

It was around this time last year I can remember putting Eva down to bed one Saturday night. She woke up an hour or so later crying and never went back to sleep. After an entire night walking her from room to room, pushing her under the moon in the stroller, singing her hits from the 1980s all the way back to the 1930s, Daddy and I freaked out and took her to the emergency room. At about 9am, 12 hours after she began her tormented screaming she was diagnosed with a sore throat, and mommy and daddy were diagnosed as having a toddler. The doctors gave her a powerful pain killer and she finally found slumber in her car seat as Daddy drove home and Mommy poked him in the shoulder every few minutes so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. I wish I could say this only happened once but that would be a lie.

In April of last year I finally lost it and decided I needed professional help. I talked to the Doctor about Eva’s sleep issues and he like everyone else decided we had not sleep trained her efficiently and that she (or I ) was spoiled and sent me to the visiting child psychiatrist when I asked for her to be tested for sleep apnea. My child was barely a year old and she was already seeking help for her mental health. There is no wonder I feel like a Derelict mother.  After filling out countless forms attesting to the fact that I do not beat my child, humiliate or neglect her I was ushered into see the doctor.

“I have come to have my daughter checked for sleep apnea.”

The good doctor pauses, I can tell he is checking my irises to make sure I am not on anything.

“Its just coffee and chocolate, I assure you.”

He ignores me, and looks over my paperwork.

“How old did you say you were? I mean how old is she?”

“I am 36, look 46, Eva is fifteen months but she looks like she is barely a year. Isn’t small stature a sign of sleep apnea?”

Eva is sitting in front of him stacking colored blocks.

“She is not behind in development, I can see.” The doctor says.

“No she is quite advanced and she knows about 20 words.” I proudly declare afraid she will come out with a new one like “asshole,” at the doctor’s office.

“You would be able to tell by now if she had any significant development delays, but it is at this age that emotional issues come into play.”

“Please don’t tell me my infant is depressed or prescribe me Prozac because if you do I might scream in frustration.” I think. “but then he might break out the Lithium.” I worry.

I roll up my sleeves in an effort to look less disheveled. I can see the doctor checking for track marks so I tie my hair back into a bun to look less like a hippie drug user. Damn those Youngblood country genes.

“Why don’t you describe a typical night to me?” he asks still weighing me up wondering if I will start nonchalantly mentioning gin bottles and wild raging domestic disputes that wake the baby.

“Okay. I aim to go to bed at 10 but life and HBO conspire to keep me up until 11pm. Right as I am dropping to sleep at about 1130pm I hear a pitiful cry on the monitor. I ignore it. A few minutes later it increases in volume and intensity, I reach for the video monitor. I flick it on and see two red eyes starring back at me like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. I close my eyes and hope it will go away, I ignore it. Then the crib starts rattling and the scream reaches a new decibel and I climb out of bed. I run into her room before her scream cracks all the windows of the surrounding houses, and I lift her from her bed. She then hits me over and over again on the head, and does not seem to know who I am. I take her outside to calm her down which sometimes takes quite a while. It could be possession.” I say in all seriousness.

“That sounds like a night terror.”

“Yes its my recurring nightmare, it happens every night.” I say.

“No she is having night terrors not you.” He says.

“And me!” I correct him. “I thought maybe she was just having the dream where you could change in your mother for someone else’s mother like that episode of the Twilight zone.”

“ No, it is a developmental condition, some children get them, other’s don’t. unfortunately you wont be able to do much about it.”

“Really no magic pill?” I say. He looks worried. I can tell he is looking in my purse for pill bottles but all he can see is Cadburys Cream eggs, I had one for breakfast.

“What about her staying up all night when she is sick, that is not a night terror?” I ask.

“Well there is sick and then there is very sick.” He says.

“Why don’t you turn the monitor off.”

I am starting to like this doctor.

On my way out, he hands me a book. “Toddler Taming.”

I look it over and I look him in the eye and say “Thanks.”

“I think you could use the help.” He says like he understands.

“She is very spirited” he looked around his office, every toy, every plaything had been taken apart and redesigned into Eva’s order.

“What about sleep apnea?”

“She doesn’t have sleep apnea.” He said and looked at me with a don’t worry you will survive this look.

“Read the book.” He said.

I haven’t read the book yet, I hate to admit so very derelict of me. However last spring I did start Eva on an alternative health regime of probiotics and vitamins to help restore her health because Derelict Mom is still feeling guilty that all Eva’s problems are somehow related to a lack of breast milk when she was a baby. This winter of her “terrible twos” has been a lot less terrible than the winters preceding it. Although Eva has been sick she has been up a lot less at night, and just when I was thinking wow Eva seems to have grown out of those night terrors, she had another one a couple weeks ago. It was only one night but it served to remind me never to take a night’s uninterrupted sleep for granted. Around the same time I saw an article trending on the internet which gave me pause to worry even more:

“Kid’s Night Terrors Linked to Delusions later in life.”

It begins, “Children who suffer from frequent night terrors and nightmares are more likely to experience hallucinations and delusions later on in life, new research suggests…. They are more likely to report psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and hearing voices at age 12, some go on to be diagnosed with a full psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia in adulthood.”

http://www.livescience.com/43795-nightmares-linked-to-psychosis.html

Yikes, maybe the doctor is holding back the lithium until she’s twelve and he didn’t want to tell me in case I decided I needed it. I guess I will have to wait and see. I preferred what my previous internet searches had turned up, that children who suffer night terrors are just more creative and imaginative. Until she grows up I will have to be content to imagine that she is dreaming about trading in her monster mother for an upscale model maybe even our idol, Bette Davis.

Last Saturday I flipped on the T.V. to enjoy my new obsession, the Lifetime network’s The Haunting series with medium Kim Russo. It was followed by a new show called, The Ghost Inside My Child. It features children, like Eva and their parents who are driven around the bend by night terrors and “delusions” and what is at the bottom of it is that these children are reliving past lives in their dreams.

http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/the-haunting-of

http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/ghost-inside-my-child

My husband could not bring himself to watch “The Ghost Inside my Child” during Saturday night primetime, so he elected to iron shirts instead. But I was now convinced, Eva had to be dreaming about Bette Davis and wishing she could trade me in. Hell I would trade myself in if I could. Although I had lost probably a year’s worth of sleep in the last several years of motherhood, I was not crazy yet.

Back in our reality I knew Eva was stuck with me as her Derelict Mother and that it was time I let Eva have her own dreams, and admit like Bette Davis in All About Eve, that:

“There comes a time when the piano (the Derelict Mother) realizes it has not written the concerto (Baby Eva).”

N.B. I should ask my mother if I had night terrors as a child. She can blame this blog on my unstable mental health.

Xx Derelict Mom

 

Queen of the Gypsies

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I picked up my parents from the airport yesterday; they had been gone about a week for my mother’s eye surgery in Boston. When I rolled up in their Rav 4 station wagon, our modern version of a Romani gypsy caravan I looked at the sidewalk where an extended family of body bags were lined up next to my parents. I sighed, their bag porter had already high tailed it with his tip. We heaved the body bags into the car one by one, and they just about fit. We shut the doors and thanked god for the minor miracle of fitting everything in, which includes my mother and her many accoutrements.  Mom doesn’t travel lightly, neither do I. When we rented an apartment in Montana on a family holiday it looked like my mother had moved in, she brought three pairs of cowboy boots, several stand up mirrors, a jewelry box etc etc. She had to travel back east by land or she would have racked up a world record in excess baggage. For this trip though she was travelling light by her standards, they only came back with a bag for every day of the week they were away, I am surprised the suitcases weren’t labeled: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday like the kids underwear.  My mom was probably out shopping as soon as they wheeled her out of the hospital door, eye patch and all. Shopping is easier when you can’t read the price tags! Derelict GiGi is trying to get into Ripley’s Believe it or not for the most surgeries in one lifetime, in reality she has had more surgeries than Michael Jackson but no where near as much properfol instead she has a Lindo’s green eco bag stuffed full of East End prescribed happy pills.

I have to admit I am exactly the same as my mother, just with a far smaller budget. And when she unzipped one of the body bags out came a box of almond meal, a huge gallon bag of coconut flour, and custom baby probiotics all ordered by me to their Boston apartment and dutifully transported back to Bermuda by the Queen of the Gypsies, my mother. I am grateful; I am her daughter in training. Just looking in my purse I can find twenty ball point pens, gaffer tape, three notebooks, files, a few novels, two cameras, and floss and a few plugs… you know just in case.

My mother’s lecturing me about not ordering so much stuff to the Boston apartment is steeped in irony. My mother might not order things off of amazon, but she buys enough from Lord and Taylor and Talbots to surpass all of my internet shopping exploits. My father might be the all time worst for online shopping sprees; he is always ordering strange antiques and on occasion making me smuggle in an iron dagger from 1500 B.C. in my luggage. When we got pulled by TSA, try to explain that one..”Yes that iron dagger tangled in my thong underwear is my Dad’s antique letter opener.” Hmmmm. I started wondering if travelling around with lots of stuff was genetic.

My parents have even started bringing in tons of specialty foods in their suitcase, which is reminiscent of my mother’s parents who every Christmas would arrive with several suitcases each, and if you sat next to one on the ride home from the airport chances are you would get freezer burn. When we arrived at the house, they would be opened and enormous steaks as big as my arm would be heaved from the suitcase into the deep freeze, along with sausages, orange rolls, and frozen pounds of cookies of several varieties. I’d wonder where their clothes were as that’s the area they would economize on space, and would have about three interchangeable pieces for as many weeks.

 

My mother was becoming more and more like her mother, as I became more and more like my mother.  That said perhaps on some occasions she was far more like her father. Many early morning service callers have mistaken those gruff adenoidal cadences for the man of the house.

“Hello The Spurling Residence.”

“Hello Sir, it’s Bermuda Telephone Company calling.”

“This is not Sir, its Mrs. Spurling!”

“Mr. Spurling if you pass me to the lady of the house I can make an appointment.”

“This is the lady of the house.”

“Mister Spurling I must have caught you on a bad day it sounds like you have a very heavy cold. ”

My mother replies in her best Queen’s English, “It’s Mrs. Jane Spurling speaking at this very moment.”

“I am so sorry Mrs. Spurling it must be a bad line.”

…..

Before doing all this genealogical research I didn’t realize there was such thing as a “Youngblood voice.” It’s deep, gravelly and with a smooth timbre much like my mother’s Aunt Bernice in this video. I wonder if people thought Bernice was a man when she answered the phone. There are some genetic consistencies that just can’t be denied, including my mother’s most definite gypsy like tendencies!

Over to Aunt Bernice:

Like Aunt Bernice, and my mother both my sister and I also register on the lower scale. I’ll never forget one of the most mortifying moments in primary school music class when the music teacher classified us by vocal register. Most of the girls were soprano or mezzo soprano, a few boys were too, then most of the boys were in the middle as tenors, and I am sure you have guessed by now, there was one Barritone Alto, me. I was the smallest girl in the class with the deepest voice. It must have been then I wished to become a boy, little did I know I would only have to wait a few decades to be mistaken for one!

There are many things that are genetic: looks, personality, voice, and well: hair.

When I saw this video below, my first thought was, this is exactly what I would look like if I had a mullet. Scary thought. Mullets I think might be genetic too.  Eva was born with one, and she still has it, see picture below. I tell people it is her genetic adaptation to childhood, which saves mommy from having to cut it or tie it back, but now I am thinking after seeing the video below that it might be a rogue Youngblood gene.  I do hope that Eva has better grammar than our dear relative “which is” Cousin Brenda with the crazy hair. I also still wondering how you can collect careers like cousin Brenda “which is” a nurse, electrologist, interior decorator and chiropractic assistant and still have time to sew, swim and play tennis. You know us Youngbloods, we are prone to exaggeration…and collecting careers, like the gypsies.

Does anyone know what an “electrologist” is? I am guessing it has something to do with sticking a fork into an electrical socket… something this derelict mom must admit my Eva has done under my watch. That’s what happened to the Youngblood hair!

Over to Cousin Brenda:

And here is a picture of Eva “which is” two and has a mullet au natural. Eva who with her Diva nature, and her rogue Youngblood gene is surely destined to take over as Queen of the Gypsies one day from GiGi. She is practicing already, today she went to daycare with two bunnies a Mickey and a Mini Mouse, and she came back with all of those plus one blue dolphin.

Eva to NH

 

Eva and Sadie 2014 072

I remember my grandmother on my mother’s side of course whispering in my ear once at an amusement park when I was about eight, “You see those people over there, they are GYPSIES.” Well Grandma Youngblood, who we called Gawgie, I think we are too! When Eva grows up to tell fortunes, as well as swim, sew, play tennis and be an electrologist, then well I will be absolutely sure.

 

Where do I come from?

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I always felt a little out of place in my family and now most of the time I look out of place too. Sure my dad wears blue jeans but my mother and sister look like they spend most of their time shopping at Saks. In comparison when I walk into a room my mother just shakes her head. I never think twice about what to wear it’s always what is at the top of the drawer but sometimes I make mistakes.  I never seem to notice but I am constantly wearing my clothes inside out, tags and seams out for all the world to see, maybe it’s a new trend. The other thing I have been doing recently is putting on my exercise pants backwards.  I don’t notice, they are spandex anyway, but my mother’s pointer finger makes an appearance at some point during the day,

“You know those slits, go in the back.”

“Oh”

“Go in the bathroom and put your pants back on the right way.”

“No.”

Backwards, forwards, does it really matter? It matters to my mother. Maybe I am adopted.

This morning feeling inspired I put on a “brand new” top. It’s designer. When I went into wake up Eva she said,

“Why are you wearing that?”

“It is Mommy’s new shirt.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“It’s dirty.”

Does she think I only have one shirt? Maybe. I think my mother would like my new top, until she finds out I got it second hand from my dog walker. Someone died and their clothes made a detour by my house, but its designer!

When I went to college we used to shop at Thrift City in New Orleans, I used to get so excited when I found something interesting in the pockets of my “new” clothes even though that meant they probably hadn’t been washed. I used to make up stories about the people who had worn them before, the people who had probably died before having their wardrobe cleared out by a relative. My mother would love to do that to my wardrobe but I am still alive.

My sister and mother give me hand-me-downs now too, as well as my dog walker. I must really look like I need help.  My recent hand me down from my mother was a Longchamp bag, hey its designer! She got fed up with my old purse, which was so grungy it looked like it had barely survived the first two years of a toddler’s life, kind of like the toddler’s mother.

Lets just say I always felt like a bit of a black sheep who shops at thrift stores, who watches movie marathons while my siblings are out running real marathons. I would not be caught dead trying to run 26 miles unless it was on horseback.

Since I was little, I felt intuitively that it was extremely important for me to know how to ride a horse.  In high school I was on the riding team, which was a bit of a joke because technically I was useless, but they kept me on the team because I could get over any jump without falling off.  They gave me all the donation horses to break in because I was the only one who could stay on. I remember my favorite horse, Cinnamon. Don’t be deceived by the name, she used to tear ass around the ring kicking any horse that came near her and when I asked her to canter she would try to buck me off. It was in this struggle that we gained a mutual respect for one another. She was my first bucking bronco and I loved it; it was in my blood.

When I see the word Rodeo I think of Cinnamon and the real rodeos I watched in Montana.

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But when my mother and sister see the word: Rodeo they see this in their mind:

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My point is that I have always been a little bit country despite my upbringing. In college my favorite beer was Schlitz and I never tried more than one Cosmopolitan.

My daughter Eva seems to be cut from the same cloth, or saddle we might say in this situation as since she saw her first horse she has been in love, and she even holds the record for the youngest donkey rider at Docker Park Farm in Lancashire, U.K.  Here she is on a horse at age 18 months.  Her new nickname is Eva “giddiup” Worsick.

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I should not have been surprised then when looking through my grandparents belongings I found a video message from my grandfather’s extended family in the southern U.S. and out west, the same VHS tape from 1985 I talked about in a previous post.  I never remembered seeing this video when it was made, but then again maybe he purposely didn’t share it with us. I always wondered where my country, came from, and here it was on VHS: my answer:

I gave my life to Jesus and thats how I met my husband?

Country Living

I like to Crochet and Dance!

(I will be posting more entertaining clips from this video in future posts.)

After the VHS popped out of the machine I was in total acceptance of my country roots, but I wondered if my mother would accept it, after all she was one generation closer to that side of the family. I was pondering this as she sauntered in from the spa in fresh makeup with her new line of fashion purchases.  I wasn’t too sure she came from that side of the family, until I opened the fridge door and found a bucket of KFC with a tell tale shade of Guerlain Voilette de Madame smudged on a chicken wing. We must be birds of a feather after all.

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NB: My mother finally read my blog last weekend. She says she did not use the word “hell” when she said “Why the hell do you want to be part of the DAR?” so this is hereby a retraction of the word “hell.”

My father who was a witness said she said “hell” with her tone of voice. I wonder what her tone of voice will have to say about today’s blog installment.

I have asked her to become a guest blogger, “Derelict Grandmama.”

Xxx Derelict Mom.

“Mommy, I am dying.”

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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

TinkerBell

Long Days Journey into 1985

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I can shoot a gun and ride a horse

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.

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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 4th 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/

Harolowton bar

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I Lost Custody of My Baby

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Pig and Reza-1

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.

Pig and Reza-2

Family Photos

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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:

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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.

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Arthur Rankin Jr. 1924 -2014

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Jim and Arthur

Arthur Rankin Jr. passed away yesterday at the age of 89. The Royal Gazette article of today remembers him as Bermuda’s own movie mogul.

http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20140131/NEWS/140139945

Quoting from the article,

He “cornered the market for Christmas specials with his US partner Jules Bass…. Starting in the early 1960s, Mr. Rankin won the hearts of TV audiences with whimsical stop-motion animation. His company, Rankin/Bass Productions, created perennial classics such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that made broadcast history.

and

“He wrote, produced or directed more than a dozen feature films, including two of just three feature-length films shot in Bermuda: the 1978 cult classic “The Bermuda Depths” and 1980s “The Ivory Ape” — as well as the animated TV series “ThunderCats” and “SilverHawks”, on top of more than 1,000 TV programmes.

I remember first meeting Arthur in 2004 with an introduction by Lee Lovett when I was beginning my career and starting work on my first major documentary production, Rare Bird. Arthur was at first a mix of encouraging and intimidating, and he had a great love of nature and therefore supported the idea of Rare Bird, he was less convinced in the beginning that I was the person to make it. Over white wine in his Harrington Sound home he asked me to describe my vision for the film. I have no idea what I said but it wasn’t good enough. I remember him replying, “ Every filmmaker must set out with a distinct vision for the their film, they must see it before they begin.” He was right about that. I am sure he knew from his decades in the business that it is not for the faint hearted. I remember him later telling me about his initial struggles getting people in the U.S. to buy into the idea of Rudolf and he eventually produced it through Japanese animators to great success. After I released Rare Bird and began work fundraising for my next major production The Lion and the Mouse, a cheque arrived in the mail, it was from Arthur. At some point he had changed his mind about me and became my sponsor and supporter. We had begun work together a few years later on a campaign at his request but it was not meant to be and got delayed in development as so many projects do.

More recently I had the pleasure of spending time with Arthur during my 2013 Screenwriting in Paradise workshop with Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick’s producer and screenwriting teacher Jim Fernald. He still had childlike enthusiasm for the world, and for nature as he proudly showed off his garden, unhindered by the ascending climb up the path, which was slowed by his age nor did he blink an eye at the discovery of a Sagres mini stashed in his beloved banana patch. He told us of his love for golden shower trees and I later sent him the picture of my tree when it hit full bloom last summer.

Mr. Rankin was and continues to be a great inspiration. It always makes me laugh when people say its impossible to film a feature film in Bermuda, as with Bermuda Depths and Ivory Ape, Arthur Rankin did just that and as long a go as the seventies and eighties. He was not a man to be told he couldn’t do something, and he did many great things in his life, but foremost he was a storyteller. I remember one story he told us last year about how he happened to find himself staying in a house close to Gregory Peck in France one summer, and one day they passed each other riding bicycles. Arthur stopped and immediately began a speech in his best Gregory Peck voice, “ On the far wall is a mural by American Artist … (I can’t remember the name) depicting man’s quest for immortality.” It was Gregory Peck’s speech at the 1939 worlds fair where they were both tour guides and would pass each other giving the same speech over and over again at the NBC studio exhibit. Needless to say, 1939 was years before their chance meeting in France and before either of them enjoyed the career success they are noted for. It should also be noted that Arthur’s wife Olga appeared in the TV movie The Scarlet and the Black with Gregory Peck in 1983. Arthur added in this same conversation, with a touch of sadness that he felt he would only be remembered for Rudolph.

The last time I saw Arthur, shopping in Lindos, he said “Let me know if I can do anything for you, help you in anyway and I will.” I don’t think he realized how much he already had. I think all of us in Bermuda will remember him for Rudolph indeed but for all his other films, projects, and for me a lesson in perseverance and yes vision. He will be missed, and my condolences go out to his wife Olga and family. In man’s quest for immortality I think Arthur did pretty well even if it has something to do with a red nosed reindeer!

Arthur Rankin Jr. July 19th 1924 – January 30th 2014.

Rudolph

My golden shower

 

Who is Happy?

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2538363/Childless-couples-happiest-marriages-mothers-happier-overall-else.html

I think this article sums up one of the central conflicts of a mother’s life how to be a mother and a wife and still remember who you are without it being in relation to another person. Derelict mother here does take issue with the first sentence though…“Many married couples cite the birth of their first child as the happiest day of their lives. “

Or maybe I am just not one of the many or perhaps I just had too much morphine after my first abdominal surgery- the c section. I would say the day Eva was born was one of the more eventful days of my life but not the happiest. I am a scrooge aren’t I but I can think of better places to spend the Christmas season than in the hospital. The day Eva was born I was barely able to move and expected to take care of a baby. When they put her in my arms I smiled and said wow, and tried to look like I was beaming with joy but that was just the hormones, inside my rational mind was thinking, okay what am I going to do with this thing and who am I going to enlist to help me. Locate nurses’ buzzer, put the La Leche League on speed dial, handcuff doula to the hospital bed. Then I had to try breastfeeding, now there is a first time for everything but when you put your breast in an infant’s mouth and nothing happens, there is a new feeling of total panic and helplessness that comes over you- I wouldn’t call it joy. I cried all day the day Eva was born, it was tears of total bewilderment and fear. I am still talking about it two years later because it is etched in my memory and I was lucky Eva was born full term and totally healthy. Perhaps I am a wimp. A derelict wimp. However, one of the happiest days I do remember was the day six months later when I finally gave up breast feeding, and the day a few months after that when Eva first told me she loved me in sign language- now that was special.

Before I had a child of my own I thought women who became obsessed with their children and neglected their partners were just asking for trouble and the child obsession was some sort of choice. I laugh at my ignorance now… I had no idea because it wasn’t my reality, but that when a child comes into the picture, you don’t have time to focus on your husband or the marriage all you can do is take care of the screaming infant and if you are lucky take a shower once a week, and then there is that neglected other 75 percent of your life – your job. It really isn’t rocket science that marriages have a hard time after the introduction of children.

Everyone manages differently I have one child, and that’s enough for me. A lot of couples I know with two children are divorced or have discussed it. And there are always exceptions’ as I have a happily married friend with four kids, and that is her job and she is damn good at it. The fact of the matter is that I love my husband but a quiet candle lit dinner- Ha! But last night for the first time in quite a while Chris and I decided to have a date night after my writing group was postponed as I had already arranged for my parents to babysit. Our favourite restaurant was closed, and we had to go somewhere, which made me wish we had come home and warmed up a hot dog. Anyway, I made the unwise decision to call during dinner to find out how she was.

“Not good.” was the answer.

“All she would eat was three yogurts then she drank her bottle and cried and wouldn’t go to sleep and then she threw up everywhere.”

“You fed her three yogurts?”

“Your father did.”

When we arrived home at 10pm she was still awake watching TV after finishing an apple juice sugar riddled toddler cocktail. Oh well, so much for our night-cap.

Since we had our daughter Eva, Chris and I are both perpetually tired, but Chris seems to have retained his faculties, whereas I am perpetually absent minded. When Chris is on toddler duty in the playpen he usually asks me for a cup of tea. He is English and loves his cuppa. Sometimes I remember, but most of the time I forget, or bring him a cold cup of tea that has been steeping for an hour because I got side tracked. I can at least try to do that better, so while I am teaching Eva to say Please and Thank you I can do better at a few things myself. I am grateful but I am not very good at expressing it. Cup of Tea anyone? I wrote it under the to do list or rather do not forget list that Chris left for me this morning next to my computer. Here is a picture. Chris has started making lists for me 🙂

Chris'slist

It’s Friday even for the Under employed!

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Its Friday even for the under-employed like me: Aristocrats and Derelict Moms. I wish I was one but am currently taking ownership of the other. Happy Friday. If you haven’t revisited gin lately I suggest it. I haven’t touched the stuff since I was in college but my palate has become “refined” with age, and wine is too expensive. My lovely husband who still makes me a drink when I consistently forget to make him tea, fixed me a gin and soda the other weekend and a new devotee was born. Then someone broke out this bottle in our writers group 🙂 I have to say it reminded me of the days in New Orleans and that special distillery: K&B although vodka was their tipple. I just noticed my iphone is K&B purple- how cool am I. Wondering how many people remember the K&B? It was a pharmacy in New Orleans that was sadly bought out by Rite Aid circa 1997 and one more wonderful thing about New Orleans became history. I remember rushing to the K&B and buying memorabilia: vodka and purple flip flops. I think I still have the flip flops somewhere.

Tonight I am celebrating dereliction, underemployment and the old brands with an Aristocrat gin and soda. Chris tells me it’s actually called a tom collins if you add lemon juice and a bit of sugar or a gin rickey with lime. Gin n Juice, derelict mom style. Enjoy the weekend.

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