And another piece of the puzzle

So, my mother’s family and my Dad had buried the hatchet. That didn’t last long. We went back to Haddam, Connecticut and I started the school year at Nathan Hale Middle School. My only recollection is not having any idea what was going on or what the teacher was talking about and getting terrible grades. I had never gotten a bad grade in my life, but I was so confused. My Dad was looking for another house because he suddenly had four children in a tiny house and we were making use of every available space.

We found a house in Middletown, Connecticut. It’s funny, but I can’t remember when we actually moved there. I remember a short time at Nathan Hale, and I think I must have started at a new school in Middletown partway through seventh grade, but I have no recollection of that. I do know that we were in Middletown when the tentative peace between my Dad and my mother’s family came to an end. At Christmas my Dad sent out a Christmas letter to my Mom’s family. He was basically saying that although my Mom’s death was tragic, the family should move forward from it. The reaction from my mother’s family came swiftly and furiously. I don’t think that my Dad was saying that everyone should forget my Mom as if she never existed. He was trying to say that this shouldn’t become something that held everyone in this one moment in time that was painful. And because we were an Irish family that dwelt in tragedy a lot of the time, it is probably a safe bet that we would do that. However, it was way too soon and my Dad didn’t always think of the impact that his words would have on the person listening to them.

I remember hearing the phone ring one day and I answered it. The man on the other end said he was from Western Union and he had a telegram for my Dad. I ran and told my Dad to pick up, but when I got back downstairs to where I had left the phone off the hook, I didn’t hang up. Instead, I put my hand over the receiver and listened in because I thought it was pretty cool that Dad was getting a telegram. The guy read the telegram to my Dad. It was from an Aunt and Uncle. “Cross us off your mailing list. We never want to hear from you again.”

A while later I came across a letter from another Aunt and Uncle in my Dad’s office. It basically said that perhaps my mother was thinking of my Dad when she didn’t see the trailer truck and pulled out in front of it. And again, they no longer wanted anything to do with my Dad.

I understand the anger my mother’s family had toward my Dad. He had broken her heart and gone off and married someone else. And then she was killed in a horrible way and way too young (she was 37 when she died). She was brilliant and loved by all who knew her. For a person to die so young is always tragic. But what I don’t understand is how they never figured out or just didn’t care that cutting my Dad off meant they were cutting us off as well. We were a very close family. My grandmother would have grandchildren’s camps where she would have all of her grandchildren come and stay with her with no parents allowed. There were fourteen of us at the time. We played army in the woods and we built forts and we caught lightening bugs and we’d have gymnastics shows or other productions that were dutifully recorded on home movies. But suddenly we were cut off from all of that. My brother was the oldest boy and I was the oldest girl. A few years ago one of my cousins told me about how he was with a group of them and they weren’t very far from where we lived and he asked if they could visit us and was told no. He told me he couldn’t understand why, if they were so close, they couldn’t stop by and see us.

Grammie always wanted us included. But we didn’t get to go there very often since we lived a so far away now. When we did get to visit it was so stilted and not at all the same. Each time we visited we would eventually get back to being like we had been before my Mom’s death, but there were so many reminders of how out of the picture we really were; news that everyone knew that we’d never heard about, stories of trips to visit Grammie where we hadn’t been invited. And then there was that awkward silence where there never had been silence before. I realized later on when I was older and was delving into my past that this was a huge part of my support structure in my life, and suddenly it was gone.

Then there were the changes in my home life. We had moved to a new town where we didn’t know anyone. We had to make new friends and we were the ones whose Mom had died. It got to the point where I didn’t want to have to explain because it always killed the conversation very efficiently. But I’ve never been one who could let someone operate under a false assumption. My stepmom was great. She was only twenty-five with a new baby, but she took on caring for a 13 year old, an 11 year old, and a 7 year old like she was an old pro. She was funny and fun to be around. But it was so confusing. How do you mourn your mother without feeling as if you are insulting your stepmom. And my father was working at making us a cohesive family unit,  but sometimes he pushed too hard.

At one point about a year after my mom died, when my baby brother was learning to talk, my Dad came to us and told us that he thought it would be too confusing to Ted for us to call my Stepmom Florrie and Ted to call her Mom. So he said he’d like us all to call her Mom. I remember feeling that it was wrong. I couldn’t put a reason to it at the time. What he said made a lot of sense. But even though I complied with his request I remember feeling uncomfortable with it. Years later I was at a wedding for a colleague of my husband’s and one of the friend’s of the groom told me a story about the bride. The groom’s wife had died and their kids were still pretty young. The new bride had insisted that in order for them to be a cohesive family unit the kids needed to focus on her. And so, she had removed all of the pictures of the Mom that had died, including the one next to the youngest child’s bed. I felt absolute fury. I couldn’t even look at the bride after that and I told my husband shortly afterward that I couldn’t stay there any longer. I realized that I had felt as if I was being told to forget my Mom when my Dad told us to start calling my step-mom Mom. I don’t think that is what my Dad intended. It made sense to try to get us all on the same page, but I don’t think he realized how hurtful it was to us, just as I don’t think he realized how his letter to my mom’s family would affect them. Sometimes he approached things from a logical place that didn’t take people’s feelings into account. And sometimes I don’t think he realized that just because he felt comfortable in our new world, it didn’t mean that we were all as quick to make the transition.

My step-mom has been my Mom now for longer than my mother ever was. I love her and she has been a great Mom. As I go through all of these memories and realizations in my head it does not take away from how great she has been at all. But in trying to figure out why I make the choices I make I have to look beneath the surface to understand my motivations. For many years I thought my mother dying at a young age was the only reason I had issues. later I realized that my parent’s divorce and my father’s subsequent departure for the east coast was just as responsible.

Many years after I’d graduated college and after Dad and Mom (my step-mom) had moved from Connecticut to Washington I was visiting them on Bainbridge Island one day. My Dad and I were sitting there watching television and Oprah came on. The show was about divorce. Two women had just written a book about how divorce affects children much longer than previously thought. On the show they had a woman and her Dad talking. The Dad had gotten divorced from the woman’s mom and then had moved away. The daughter hadn’t had a lot of interaction with her Dad  for a while. They were trying to resolve their issues. So Oprah asked the woman, “what do you want to ask your Dad? He’s right here and if there was anything you wanted to know now is the time to ask.” And the woman turned to her Dad and said. “Why wasn’t I enough to keep you there? I understand about your problems with Mom. But why didn’t you love me enough to stay?”

I felt as if I’d been stabbed through the heart because finally, THAT WAS IT! Suddenly a lot of my issues with men and other things in my life became crystal clear. Why wasn’t I important enough to my Dad for him to want to stay with us? I realized that I had spent years feeling as if I was somehow to blame for what had happened. Maybe I wasn’t good enough? Maybe I had been bad, or complained too much. After all, in a little girl’s world, her Dad is the most important person. But he left. And if I wasn’t a good enough person to keep one of the most important people in my life around, then how could I ever hope to keep anyone else?

I jumped up and went into the kitchen because I could feel the tears coming and I didn’t want my Dad to see me crying. I was the good kid. I didn’t cause trouble. I was strong and self-sufficient and didn’t bother people with tears. Plus, I think I was afraid to know the answer. I stood in the kitchen trying to get a hold of my feelings and terrified that he or my Mom would walk in the door and ask me what was wrong. Some time later I realized that was one of the reasons I was always trying to be “the good kid.” If my Dad had left because I did something wrong before, then what was to keep him from leaving again? And this time there was no backup plan. My mom was gone and my mom’s family had disowned us. My subconscious decided I was going to be fucking perfect! Mother Theresa would have nothing on me!

Of course none of this desire to be the best I could be was a conscious decision. My subconscious was in full charge of my feelings. I have always been good at intuiting what people feel or how they are reacting to what I am saying. I seem to have an ability to see people’s emotions and empathize with them. That was helpful when trying to figure out how to act or react in a manner that would ensure I wouldn’t be put out on the street.

The weird thing in all of this is that I know my Dad loved us. A lot. My stepmom told us about the last night he saw us before he left to move to the east coast and that leaving us was the hardest thing he’d ever done. They went out to dinner and he cried through the whole dinner. But, once again, the mind reacts at the same age level it was when the incident occurred. My eight or nine year old mind looked at the evidence and decided that I could give my father no reason to reject us. I began to build a model in my mind of the ways I would have to act, and the things I would have to do that would make me safe from rejection.

So, add up this feeling of being physically repulsive, plus the knowledge that I had learned at the age of six that men want girls for sex, plus my desire to make someone love me enough to want to stick around and you get a whole lot of poor choices where men are concerned. But that is a story for another time.