I've been taking my mother to the doctor the past couple of days and it's brought some past transgressions back to light that I want out of my head so I am going to let them make a home here and I will put it away and make it a memory. There's something liberating about actually writing it out and getting it out of my head. I feel safe with this blog because I know even if someone does come upon it they don't know me and I don't know them and I am finding it therapeutic doing this. I have no one to confide things in so this will have to suffice. Hey it's better than keeping it in my head. Cause that'll make you crazy right?
My mother was a strange woman. I know now it's narcissism but as a child it's hard to fathom. My mom was really big on me earning my keep. Even as a very small child I was expected to " earn my keep" usually by doing the menial chores she felt were beneath her. My mother did not cook, clean ,do laundry, yard work, anything. She managed a motel by day and laid on the couch watching tv every single night of her life and she is still doing it today. My mother is a lazy woman and I'm not being a bitch by saying it I am merely stating a fact.
From the time I was six until I was eleven my mom shipped me off to one of her sisters for the summer. She had six sisters and four brothers. This was not a summer vacation for me , I was sent there to work. Since all of her sisters were man hating , castrating bitches they had no men in the picture and I was to help them while they worked. This meant laundry , washing dishes, cleaning that sort. My cousins were busy having summer vacation and unable to do these things for themselves. The first time she sent me to New York I was six and I made a fuss. My mom had her own way of teaching me lessons but that is another post. Anyway by eleven I could work at the motel cleaning rooms and waiting tables so I was allowed to stay and be her slave year round.
The problem I'm having at the moment is the summer I was five. She refuses to talk to me about this and swears it's not as bad as it seems. Evidently the summer I was five my mother sold me. I remember almost everything from the time I was two years old on but I have only a few memories of that summer. They are not pleasant, they are actually very scary.
One is of the daughter of the people she sold me to, she is sitting on an old mattress thrown on the floor of this shed that's on the farm I was taken to and she has a paddle ball. You know the kind that had a ball attached and you hit it. She was telling me how her boyfriend liked to paddle her ass with it and how it made her feel like she had to pee and he would lay on the floor and she would pee on his face while he drank it. She said he would pull his knob, her words ,and then cream would come out and she would lick it off because it made her boobs bigger. Now this is not the memory of a five year old , I did not fucking make this up out of my head at that age. I didn't read the Happy Hooker until I was twelve so I had never heard of these kind of fetishes. These were the sixties. Things were different.
The second memory is being in the loft of the barn and I don't know why but I'm hiding and I'm really scared. It's hard to breathe and it's hot and the straw is sticking to me and I'm breathing in this dust like stuff floating in the air but I am more afraid of what I am hiding from than what's happening in the loft. I find this old box and in it are all these Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. They used to have little cartoons with the stories so I started looking thru them. I taught myself to read with those little books which would cause me more trouble when it came to school than if I hadn't. I think I spent a lot of time there in the loft that summer . I don't really remember but it's a feeling I have. That's enough, the rest of the memories are foggy and I think it might be better to leave it that way.
The next thing I knew I was in the field picking apples that weren't bruised up off the ground and putting them in a basket when my aunt from Cincinnati pulled up. All I know is being hustled into the car and the girl putting my clothes thru the window and then pushing that box of books in. It tore as she shoved it thru the window and the books fell out all over me. [ I have a story about another box of books that changed my life also but that's another post. Is it any wonder I love books so, they have saved me when I needed them most. ] As we drove away I watched the girl stand in the road watching us and she looked so sad. My aunt made me drink some coffee and I think there was something in it because I don't remember anything else until I woke up and was back with my mother.
Whenever I would question any of them about it they always told me I was crazy and it didn't happen. It's the southern way. Deny anything unpleasant ever happened and sure enough it will go away. Some things don't. Anyway while my mom was sick I was cleaning her place for her and in her closet at the very back under everything I found a box of old Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines dated in the years 1960 and 1961. They were yellowed and falling apart from heat and age. So she kept the damn things all these years. I'd like to know why but I know better than to ask her. Hell she still thinks I don't know I have a half sister out there somewhere. I'll probably get a letter justifying everything after she dies so she will to the very end never apologize for her actions. At least I've been a better daughter to her than she was a mother to me and she may be in for a surprise because I believe we all have to answer in the end to whatever higher power there may be. I don' t know where I got this belief but I think at the end of it all we have to watch our lives through someone elses eyes and not with any rose colored glasses. Maybe that is hell, whose to say but my mom is hanging onto life like grim death and I'm ready to go tomorrow so I think I live with a lot less guilt than she does. And that's a good thing right?
Well I hope this puts this ghost to rest. "We all have our own time machines, some take us back, we call them memories, some take us forward , we call them dreams." Jeremy Irons
You better kiss me , your gonna miss me when I'm gone.
Brooks and Dunn
Cheers, Amelie
