Mommy

Mommy,

It has been more than seven years since you died, 11 years since I last saw you, and more than 40 years since I last lived with you. So much has happened, and I can barely contain the sadness that of all the years I knew and loved you -- there were only a few at the beginning and the end when you were really with us.

The days you held me in your lap, your chestnut waves streaming over your blue silk robe as you stroked me and sang Sunny Lemon Tina, did I feel the comfort of your bosom, with the backdrop of the Wasatch nestled the Salt Lake Valley in motherly comfort.

I was annoyed at the incessant Opera playing and your incessant singing of Opera, though your voice was beautiful, but to my two-year-old mind, I was more concerned with trying to scratch the itch off my Chicken Pox. But sunlight floods that memory with happiness.

Even the horrid Holy Cross Hospital with those horrid, tall nuns in their horrid black habits, lied about the Hawaiian Punch I had asked them for sleeping and they gave me medicine instead; the next morning, again they lied when I asked if they were going to give me a shot. They rolled me over, strapped me in and gave me the injection that would relax me until the general anesthesia took over. It was that more than anything that would make me eventually become Catholic. Everyone has a Nun story to tell.

Later that morning, only the cheery young pediatrician who strolled into the room full of girls strapped into their cribs after surgery -- a scene out of previous decades -- did I feel some welcome human happiness, though my tonsils were too raw to enable even a tiny croak to whisper out of my mouth.

Kathy at age 4.

You were with us during those years. The years I was out the door at 6 a.m. with the lawnmower, letting it run down the hill and out to the street until Mrs. Glynis kindly gave me breakfast; the years before you gave me my sisters at 6, when I lay in my crib sucking the balloons until you and Daddy woke up; the years I got up early to make you breakfast so you would get of bed; the years I deliberately stuck my head at age 5 between the crib bars so you would come rescue me, all those were, yes, attempts at getting your attention. You were not with us wholly, as you never truly were, but you were with us more before I was 10 and the last 10 years of your life than in all those many years in between.

You told me how cute I was, which I knew, because my Shirley Temple curls got smiles from everybody, and Daddy of course took me in his lap and on his knee, when I ran, lickety split, falling down from my braces from the genetic defect he and I and my sister share.

I learned so much during those moments that crystallized. How to tweeze, how to apply eyebrow pencil and mascara; how to use powder and how to use red lipstick. How to cut naturally wavy hair, how to straighten the seams on your stockings, and how to wear a pill box hat with a veil. I learned how to let dishes soak to make them easier to wash. Later in my 20s, you were amazed I had learned so much from you. Those few years we had together, I learned everything.

I learned, as every young child does, how to manipulate you into more attention. The first time I became lost in Sears, well, that was an accident. The other times were for attention, attention from the Sales Clerks who would find me, and bring me to you.

I learned how to draw and paint in charcoal, ink, oils.  I learned about stories I wanted to hear and many stories I never wanted to know, but am darn glad now you told me.

I learned how to avoid being a vulnerable woman. I learned later from my stepmother how to be a strong woman, but first, from you, I learned how to not be vulnerable. I saw the pain on your face that afternoon as we sat in the car as Daddy and others tossed young women into the stream, as they were joking and drinking beer.

I learned about the theater people you and Daddy brought over. Though scientists, you and Daddy were pretty loose when you were in the Theater. I think Daddy was the actor, you were a side part. I remember Mr. Lewis, and it was knowing him as a person and not as a man in pink tights, that made me later realize what homosexuality was. Humanity.

I could not figure out how Santa knew I wanted the real stove the winter I had the bad tonsillitis before my tonsillectomy, because I could not spew it out. I was so happy to make omelets, cookies and cakes with you, and you let me make my first cake by scratch, all by myself, even though you knew the lack of baking powder would ruin it. I was hurt when you wanted me to give it away to the black family on the other side of the tracks, but I forgave you when I saw the look on the girl's face.

I am sorry I bit Dr. Varma's daughter, but my soul was telling me something I knew but you didn't know I knew. You were having an affair with him and Daddy was having an affair with his wife.  I never did like the boy doll they gave me.

I loved Betsy Wetsy but never forgave you for buying me an imitation Barbie, the cheaper Mitzi, based on Mitzi Gaynor.  But as a mom, I know how one has to stretch budgets, despite incessant whining and pleadings of young girls.

Yes, after age five, I was always closer to Daddy. He was there in mind, body and spirit for me, while you sat a million miles away in the other room, whispering in tongues and word salad about working for the government to yourself.

Mommy at age 18.

We never imagined the day would come when you would call Daddy and Dr. Goodman to tell them that men were in the house. Men were not in the house, but you saw and heard them. The month in the County hospital, with you, strapped to electrodes which blew your soul out from your mind and body and broke your spirit; the month you knitted blue booties for me, the month when Daddy, Deb and Mari, Colleen and Grandma and I visited you on the grounds and had Kentucky Fried Chicken; County's grounds with bars on the windows and trees so old their roots were gnarled into the ground, a metaphor for your soul now so gnarled it would take decades and heavy meds to ungnarl it.

Paranoid Schizophrenia. Daddy said he loved you and would never leave you. You quoted that in your memoir you had me read. Yet the next year, he took up with the young Polish Doctor woman, who, we later found out, was an undiagnosed bipolar.  Daddy was in love with her looks, her body, her strong personality, her fiery red hair and that she could wrap him around her finger.

I took care of you, then, until my 30s, married and with kids of my own and I was too busy to be responsible for you, and gave that duty to my youngest sister. It was too much. Too much love had been lost, too much love had been stolen from me by Daddy's incessant complaining about how you would never become well and how you would always be ill.

Of course, your letters to me that heroin and masturbation were the fountain of youth did not help.

It has taken decades for me to again feel the love lost during those lost years. I last saw you when you were with us for a month, even though your smoking in the back room gave me horrible asthma. I drove you to the airport then stayed up all night writing and crying, crying and writing, a manuscript written in long hand and long lost but never forgotten.

That you had overcome the ravages of schizophrenia, returned to work as a lab assistant at the university then at age 50 earned your nursing degree and became a nurse, is testimony to the strength you always possessed: Straight A student, neat and tidy as a pin, someone who had control over her primary creative process before that, too, was taken by schizophrenia and your desire to go to Mexico to look for Castaneda and the bi-racial daughter, Nicole, you gave up at birth.

We girls have turned out quite alright. Our kids are doing wonderfully. My sisters and I always told each other that our taking care of you was what held us together over the decades and through the fiber optic telephone lines across country and over Canada.

We could always tell when you were off your meds. Those long drags on the cigarette was your tell. We would call your new doctors to tell them that their dropping your dose would result in your relapse. They never believed us until your behavior proved us right.

The photos of you as a young woman, as a young mother, when your life was perfect, before the unwritten map of your life would terrorize you, still bring tears to my eyes. So much promise. So much unfulfilled.

I learned everything from you. The moon, the stars, the sun. How to sing, how to dance, how to paint, how to love, how to live and how to love again after love disappears.

I miss you, Mommy.

Billie Leigh Esplin 10-31-1926 - 9-20-2001

My first article on Gather, but reposted several times:

My Mother, A Beautiful Soul, A Schizophrenic

Copyright © 2009 Kathryn Esplin. All rights Reserved.