Tag: Mom

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The Females in My Life, by Ricky

Like everyone else on
this planet, the first woman in my life was my mother.  Mom was the care giver when I was young, but
she was also the rat-fink of my life. 
She would always tell my father of my daily misdeeds and he was the
disciplinarian in the family.  During
that time period, discipline consisted of not too gentle spankings, so I
learned to fear both of them.  Mom was
also the one who came to Minnesota, while I was living with my grandparents, to
be a bridesmaid for her sister and then did not take me back to California when
she left Minnesota after the wedding.  I
think I subconsciously resent her even to this day for leaving me and for being
a rat-fink.
The second woman was my
father’s mother.  After I was born she
came to live with us for about one year. 
I don’t remember that time period much and as I grew up, I did not see
her very often.  The next female in my
life was my beloved Bonnie, a black and white collie, who became the best baby
sitter a two-year old toddler could not escape; that is until I learned to take
her with me when I left the yard.  Sadly,
she got distemper and passed before her first birthday.  I don’t remember if I grieved for her very
much.  I only now remember her from old
photographs and the stories my parents told me over time.
Next was a girl in my
Kindergarten class at the Hawthorn Christian School in Hawthorn,
California.  Her name was Sandra
Flora.  She was like a girlfriend to me,
or more precisely, I was a boyfriend to her. 
With long curly hair and the full dress that little girls wore at that
time, she looked like a young Shirley Temple. 
I carried her Kindergarten school photo in my wallet well into my 40’s
when I finally lost it.
The next woman in my
life would be my mother’s mother.  I
lived with her and my grandfather for two years on a farm in central Minnesota
from the age of 8 until two-weeks before I turned 10.  She was a reasonable surrogate mother but at
9-years of age, I ended up with a mild ‟school boy crush” on my 4th
grade teacher, Mrs. Knoll.  She was a
very young beautiful lady and in her second year as a teacher.  The crush was mild because she was married so
I knew I had no chance and I was not quite into full blown puberty.  My 3rd grade teacher, Mrs.
Sorensen, was a good but matronly teacher and thus of no interest to me.
Back on the farm, my
aunt Darlene, my mother’s younger and only sister, would visit occasionally
with her husband.  When I was 8, I was a
ring-bearer (like Bilbo and Frodo) at her wedding.  My younger cousin, Pamela Anderson, was the
flower-girl.  There was one other female
on the farm that I had a platonic relationship with, at least on my part.  Her name was Peanuts and she was a Guernsey
cow.  Her stall was the first one as I
would enter the barn and so she became my favorite, almost like a pet.
One week before I
turned 10, my mother and new step-father came to Minnesota to pick me up and
take me back to California.  They also
introduced me to the next female to enter my life, my little baby sister,
Gale.  For the next 9 years she and her
twin brother and I had a close family relationship.  They were the kids and I was the
babysitter.  Not too much personal time
for me, but we did have some amount of fun growing up until I went away to
college and then the military.  She still
lives at our ‟home town” of South Lake Tahoe.
The next female was
never alive in the literal sense but she really was a lady.  She was the Skipalong, my step-father’s 39
foot cabin cruiser he used as a tour-boat on Lake Tahoe during 1957 and ’58.  I was his deckhand in 1958 and I
really loved the ‟job” and the boat.  All
I had was that one summer with her as the next summer, at the beginning of the
season, she sank at a pier while her engine was being overhauled and was sold
for salvage.  I still miss her even today
as that summer was perhaps the happiest of my childhood.


She had a colorful career.  It is
believed she was built in the 1920’s in Morris Heights, New York by the
Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation. 
She was originally 36 feet long but upon arrival in San Francisco she
was modified to 39 feet long and a ‟lookout cockpit” was added to the bow as
she began service as a rum runner during Prohibition.
In the Fall of 1958,
after that wonderful summer, I developed another school boy crush.  This time it was during full blown puberty
and on my unmarried, first year 5th grade teacher, Miss
Herbert.  She was beautiful, young, and
had a wonderful personality.  I was in
LOVE!  Then she got married over
Christmas vacation.  I was
devastated.  It appeared to me that I
would never get the women I loved, which due to the age differences, is
probably a good thing.
The next female arrived
at our house on Red Lake Road, in South Lake Tahoe when I was 12.  She was ¾ Oriental Poodle and ¼ Pomeranian—a
little, black, shaggy, and “yippy” lap dog. 
She bonded to me the first night in our house and became the first
female I slept with for the next 9-years. 
I was monogamous but she was a very prolific bitch. No! I was not the
father of her litters.
After I joined the Air
Force, I met my first girlfriend as an adult. 
She was the best friend of the woman I would marry 5-years later.  During the intervening years, I also met the
woman who taught me about making out and foreplay.  Then there was the woman who took my
virginity.  Actually, I guess it was a
mutual thing as she did not have to twist my arm to get it.
Then I married Deborah
and we enjoyed 27-years and 9-months together before she passed from complications
of breast cancer.  During those years,
the final women in my life were born to us—our three daughters, one of which
made me a grandfather with her 2-daughters.
So those are the women
and other females in my life.  I chose
not to tell about my two female cats, so be thankful for small favors.
© 23 November 2014  
About the Author 
I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale
and then in Redondo Beach.  Just prior to
turning 8 years old in 1956, I was sent to live with my grandparents on their
farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents
divorced.
When united with my mother and stepfather two years later
in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California,
graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force,
I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until
her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11-2001
terrorist attack.
I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be
therapeutic.
My story blog is, TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com.
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Mom by Gillian

Most of us are, of course, via nature
and nurture, to a lesser or greater degree a product of our parents. I can
easily identify many things; good, bad, and ugly, that I got from mine. On the
whole, though, I think what a received from my dad was of a simpler, less
complex nature, than the traits I received from Mom.  My father was essentially an uncomplicated
man. My mother was not an uncomplicated woman, although she put on a good act.
Probably most people who knew her, especially the many children she taught and
their parents, found her to be a warm, patient, conscientious, motherly woman
with a good sense of humor. She was all those things; but a whole lot more that
she never presented to the world, or to me, though eventually I caught at least
an occasional glimpse of what went on below that smooth veneer.
So it’s little surprise that for the first
forty-odd years of my life I found it relatively easy to hide the real, gay,
me, from the world and to a huge extent from myself, and play a very convincing
part. I learned those skills from Mom. Not that my mother was a lesbian, at
least as far as I can ever know, though in fact how can I ever know? I
can’t, but I just
don’t sense it, and
I believe I would. Her issue was her son and daughter who both died before I
was born. She never once talked about it; not to me nor to anyone as far as I
know. She buried her tragedy deep and set about developing a shell, never to be
broken.
At least I eventually broke free of
mine. My mother never did. I learned the truth from my aunt. OK Mum, (which is
what I actually called her, not the more American Mom) you didn’t tell me your
secret and I didn’t tell you mine. Na na na na naaa na!
So I guess that leaves us even in our
dysfunction.
I always felt that there was
something. Something missing. I can’t really express what I felt, or why,
it was simply a child’s intuition. And now, after all these
years, I wonder if a mother’s intuition told Mum that there was
something, something indefinable, missing in me, in who I was, and in my
communication with her.
Somehow, despite our chaotic psyches,
Mum and I were close and I always knew I was loved unconditionally, by both her
and my dad. They both also had a great sense of humor. Mum loved to giggle. I
loved to make her giggle. It was all part of the very complex hidden
relationship in which I knew it was up to me to heal her wounds, though I only
knew of them subliminally, and make her happy. It was up to me to make her
laugh. So in this way she helped me develop my own humor and we laughed a lot
together. My dad’s humor was completely different from
Mum’s, and I am
fortunate enough to have a wonderful mixture of both, but he would look on
fondly in puzzled silence while Mum and I giggled helplessly over something in
which he could find little humor.
Mum was, as were many people but
especially women, I think, back then, very concerned with appearances. I don’t know if any
of you ever watched Keeping Up Appearances on PBS, but the show always
reminds me of my mother, although she was a much nicer person that
Hyacinth Bucket! Mum had a bad case of don’t do it in the
street and scare the horses. I could wear that tattered old sweater I
loved so much in the house, but I couldn’t venture outside in it, and if there
was a knock on the door, I had to bolt upstairs and hide or change clothes
before I came back down. My dad didn’t have to wear his tie in the house
but had to put it on in a rush if anyone came to visit, and he had to wear it
outside even if he was gardening. Someone might see him without it! I,
on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s curse about
what anyone thinks of the way I dress, or come to that the way I live, or
anything about me. That, I think, is greatly a generational thing, but in my
bones I feel that a lot of it is purely a reaction to Mum’s obsession
with what will people think? On the other hand, of course, it did take
me the first half of my life to come out of that bloody closet, so I cannot
have been as freewheeling as I’d like to believe.
My mother’s other
obsession was with her weight. She did seem to gain weight easily, though she
never ate very much and only drank once a year, on Christmas Eve. It was always
some kind of home-made wine: pretty strong stuff. After a couple of glasses she
was bright red in the face and invariably stated in rather slurred words, how
strange it was that although she only drank once a year, it never had any
effect on her! Oh Mum, ever in denial! She was never obese, just pleasingly
plump in a motherly kind of way.
But my dad and I could never convince
her of that. These days I think it’s much easier to get a good feel for
just how overweight, fat, or obese, you are, and how you look. With endless
photographs of ourselves easily available we can compare ourselves with others
only too often. In the days of only occasional snapshots, my mother constantly
needed assurance.
“Oh dear!”
Mum would
exclaim, eyeing a woman of roughly her age bulging out of her clothes, “I’m not as fat as
that am I?”
Well that was an easy answer in the
negative, whatever the truth. But worse, she would sometimes ask that classic
unanswerable question, “I’m not as fat as I used to be, am I?”
Just try to get that answer right!
I struggle to stay well clear of
denial, because Mum relied so heavily on it. She would cry, not shedding a
quiet tear but sobbing uncontrollably, over things with no direct relation to
her; miners dying down coal pits, a race horse with a broken leg having to be
shot, the death of King George V1. A therapist friend explained to me, many
years later, that this was a classic example of transferred grief, my mother
being way too terrified of facing her own grief, while needing to release it in
some other way.
Poor Mum. She lived in the wrong time
and the wrong place. Her children died in 1940 in a war torn Britain where
people died every day and you just sucked it up and soldiered on. These days
she would have had the benefit of therapy and support groups and various
spiritual teachings to ease her way. Of course you never recover from the death
of one child let alone two, but she would have had a lot of help in dealing
with her heartbreak.
On rare occasions I catch myself
glancing uneasily at an overweight woman and wondering if I am in fact more or
less fat than she is.  I panic. Oh God, I’m becoming my
mother! Eckhart Tolle and I try to keep me grounded in reality and dealing with
my own self, leaving Mum to rest in peace. I am what I am and whether all or
any of it comes from Mum and Dad hardly matters.  I recently accepted that my struggle to keep
the weight off is little to do with heredity and a whole lot more about beer.

© Dec 2013

About the Author 


I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Mom by Lewis

I hardly know where to begin to
write about my one-and-only mother. 
“Mother” is the last descriptor she would ever want to define
her function in life.  If she could, she
would surely prefer to be remembered for her contributions to education,
journalism, or faith than maternalism. 
If I had to choose, I would say she bore more resemblance to the Mary
Tyler Moore character in Ordinary People
than Barbara Billingsley in Leave It to
Beaver.  That is to say, she had few of
the maternal instincts that we normally associate with Midwestern families of
the post-World War II era.
Like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, my
parents slept in twin beds.  My dad
dressed in a separate bedroom, which also served as his office.  Although my bedroom was just across a narrow
hallway, I don’t remember ever hearing any sounds coming from their bedroom
that would suggest anything physical took place in that sterile space.  I never saw them hug or kiss, not even a peck
on the cheek.  My parents didn’t even
argue, at least, in my presence.  My dad
was a solid breadwinner, meek and mild-mannered as Clark Kent.  Together, they were the very model of the
modern, Middle American, Methodist couple–except for their fondness for a
highball before dinner.
Mother grew up in the small, rural,
southwest-Kansas town of Pratt.  She was
proud of the fact that Alfred Hitchcock’s one-time-favored actress, Vera Miles,
attended school there.  Her father, the
only grandparent I ever knew, was an engineer on the Rock Island railroad.  They raised chickens and a few cows on their
small property on the edge of town. 
There were six children, three girls and three boys.  Mother was the oldest.  As such, she had many responsibilities for
home-making and child-rearing.  I suspect
that that had much to do with her distaste for such menial labor in her
adulthood.  She had more dignified
aspirations.
Mother was quite intelligent.  She graduated from high school at the age of
sixteen with her sights set on going to college.  It was 1923, however, and her parents saw no
value in a daughter of theirs staying in school.  She was on her own.  She held a lifelong deep resentment over the
fact that her brothers, none of whom were in the least interested in further
matriculation, were given a car as their graduation present.
Denied any way of supporting herself
on her own, she soon married.  By the
time she was 23, she had given birth to a son and a daughter.  More and more, she was feeling trapped in a
hopeless and loveless situation.  She
wanted a career.  She was bright and
ambitious.  Living with a man who she
felt was never going anywhere in life and being saddled with two small kids was
like being entombed alive.  So, in 1936,
she filed for divorce.  Almost
shockingly, she did not ask for custody of the children.  In those times, it was almost automatic that
the children would be placed in the care of the mother.  Not so this time.  BJ and Joyce were placed with their paternal
aunt, also living in Pratt.
Before long, mom and another woman
had opened a beauty parlor above the Sears department store in Pratt.  She took the two kids to the movies every
Wednesday evening.  Sixty years later, as
Mom was brushing my daughter’s hair at our house in Michigan, she started
talking about the time she and the other woman ran a beauty parlor.  My daughter, who is bisexual, later related
that she was getting the impression that there might have been more than
business on the two women’s minds. 
Mother had told me some years before that her partner had, quite
abruptly, sold her interest in the shop to her and taken off for California,
never to be heard from again.  A lover’s
quarrel or a simple commercial transaction? 
I’ll never be certain.
The beauty shop was down the hall
from the office of the man who would become my father.  They dated and were married in 1940.  It would be 4-1/2 years before mom got
pregnant with me.  Perhaps it was the
turmoil of WWII.  My dad didn’t serve in
the war because of his limp from polio contracted when he was 20.  Mixed blessing, I would say.
On the other hand, my suspicion is
that Mom was just not interested in having another child.  By 1945, she was 38 years old.  She was still hoping for a career as a writer
or secretary or something.  My fantasy is
that on VE Day–May 7, 1945–my father swept my mom up in his arms and carried
her to the bedroom where they had their own private celebration of the
sweepingly historic occasion.  I was born
on February 3rd of the following year.  A
new era of American domination was dawning and I would be in on the ground
floor.
There were a few small hitches,
however.  Mom made plain many years later
that I was the child my father wanted–his one and only.  In addition, in her view, I was a
“deficit baby”, that is, a parasite that siphoned off the calcium
from her bones and teeth.  At the baby
shower in my honor, they played a game where the guests attempt to estimate the
birth weight of the baby.  All of the guesses,
duly preserved in my baby book, were on the low side, suggesting to me that Mom
may not have been taking enough nourishment.  
My actual birth weight was over seven pounds, close to normal.
One of my earliest memories is Mom
singing a lullaby to me.  The lyrics,
written by Paul Robeson, are, in part and adapted, as follows:
Evenin’
breezes sighin’, moon is in the sky.
Little man, it’s time for bed.
Mommy’s little hero is tired and wants to cry;
Now, come along and rest your weary head.
Little man, you’re cryin’, I know why you’re blue.
Someone took your kiddy-car away.
You better go to sleep now
Little man, you’ve had a busy day.
Johnny won your marbles, tell you what we’ll do,
Mom’ll get you new ones right away.
Sadly, that was a rare moment of
tranquility between Mom and me.  Most of
my recollections of close contact with Mom involved physical pain on my
part.  Not to paint myself as a complete
innocent, however.  Some of you may
remember my story of many months ago about climbing the neighbor’s
chimney.  Years later, there was the time
I walked home from school in a light rain without a jacket.  Mom was standing in the front doorway.  As I opened the door, she slapped my face,
hard. 
“How dare you not wear a coat
in the rain.  Do you want to get
sick?”
“I’m sorry.  I wasn’t thinking”, I said in complete
contrition, hoping to appease her anger. 
(After all, it had worked before when I suggested that mom stop worrying
and ask God to take care of me.)  Still,
I was blind-sided by her action.  Looking
back on it now, I believe that Mom resented being stuck at home as a lowly housewife
and my getting a cold would only aggravate her sense of obligation and
despondency.
When I had a spanking coming, it’s
delivery came at the hand of my mother. 
Her hands were good for other things, as well.  When I had ringworm of the scalp, it was she
who was stuck with the most unpleasant job of removing the hairs from a
circular patch of my scalp about two inches in diameter with a pair of
tweezers, one-by-one.  About five minutes
at a time was all either she or I could stand. 
When I got stabbed in the hand with a pencil at school, it fell upon Mom
to dig out the remnants of graphite with a needle.
I believe that Mom simply did not
have the disposition for being a caregiver. 
I remember her telling me about having to care for my paternal grandmother,
who was dying of colon cancer in the early 1940’s.  It was clear it was not something she found
rewarding. 
But Mom’s hardness was shown in
other, perhaps even less endearing ways. 
When I graduated from law school, my parents drove to Detroit from Hutchinson,
Kansas, for the ceremony in Ford Auditorium downtown.  With about an hour to go before the
procession began, Mom announced that she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to stay
at our house.  I was terribly
disappointed but not surprised.  She had
been deprived of the opportunity to be a part of such an occasion in her own
right; how tough it must of been for her to look back on her life of nearly
three-quarters of a century as principally a home-maker and not feel big-time
self-pity.
Her predicament came most into focus
for me on her 50th birthday.  I was
practicing my Hawaiian steel guitar–hats off to The Lawrence Welk Show–in the utility room across the tiny dining
room from the kitchen, where Mom was ironing. 
All of a sudden, she burst into tears. 
I had never witnessed such a scene in our emotionally sterile
household.  Being gay–though closeted
even to myself–I wanted to rush over to her side to comfort her.  But I had not the slightest idea what to say
to her.  I had no clue what was going through
her head.  Had Dad said something before
leaving for work?  So, I just kept on
playing my syrupy music, which seemed to be of no help whatsoever.  Fifty years old, ambitious, and still ironing
in the kitchen.  That’s enough to depress
anybody.  I myself don’t iron to this
day.
On my parents last visit to Michigan
in 1989, Mom was sitting in the new family room addition.  At one point, she said, “I think I must
have left my cane upstairs”.  We had
no upstairs.
After my Dad died in 1990, my entire
family–wife, two kids and I–went to Kansas to take care of Mom.  It soon became apparent that Dad had been
covering for Mom for months.  She was not
able to live by herself.  We moved her to
a “progressive living” type of senior housing–independent living, assisted
living, and nursing care. 
Initially, we thought independent
living would be the best choice, as she was still able to do quite a few things
for herself.  Ten weeks later, we got a
call from the staff.  Mom was having
hallucinations about someone being under her bed and was not regular about
showing up for meals.  They suggested
moving her to the nursing section.
Within a week or two, we got another
call, one which caused my mind to harken back to my daughter’s story about my
Mom’s possible sexual orientation.  My
mother had gotten out of bed and dragged her roommate from her bed onto the
floor.  Then, Mom had sat astride the
other woman demanding sex, saying, “You are my husband and you owe
me!”  The institution informed me
that they had to tie my mother into her bed with straps and that she would have
to be moved to a different facility as they were not equipped to handle such
behavior.
Not only was Mom suffering from the
side effects of medications that lower one’s inhibitions, but she also was apparently
afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease.  It
was Christmas Season.  I had to quickly
find her a place with an Alzheimer’s patient wing.  The nearest decent one was in Wichita.  We moved Mom there as soon as the
arrangements could be made. 
At this point, I would have given
almost anything to have my old Mom back. 
Her disease may have dulled the loneliness and frustration of losing all
track of time and familiarity of face and habitat but I can only imagine that those
last three years were nearly unbearable, both for her and the staff and other
inhabitants, for whom Mom had nary a kind word to say.  It was during that period that my
half-brother–her son–died of lung disease at the age of 63.  I never told her.  How could I, when she kept saying that BJ was
coming to pick her up for a drive?  At
the end, she no longer recognized me. 
She died surrounded by strangers, pushing a walker down the hallway,
saying antagonistic things to those she passed. 
Was she ever truly happy?  Did I
ever make her smile?  Either I don’t know
or I can’t remember or both.  I do know
that I made my Dad smile and I guess that will have to do.

©
2 December 2013 

About the Author  

I came to the beautiful state of
Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married
and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of
Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an
engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26
happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I
should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t
getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just
happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both
fortuitous and smooth.
Soon after, I retired and we
moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years
together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One
possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group
was there to light the way.