Family Photos

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.

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

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.

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.

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.