Bettie Bookish

All that you can't leave behind

I think it is hard for my mother to let go of her house. I know it's true of so many parents who cannot quite accept that living in their homes is no longer practical, or perhaps even possible. They may have raised families in that house. Sorted out all their dreams and priorities while sitting at the kitchen table. Kept vigil in a dark living room the night their oldest broke curfew by four ungodly hours. Four hours of panic and worry.

They were the grown-ups in that house, and now you're going to tell them they shouldn't live there anymore? Who are you, anyway? What right do you have? Especially after you made them sick with worry by coming home at 3 in the goddam morning.

I'm pretty sure my mother feels this way - unwilling to give up her home. And the fact that she died two years ago doesn't dampen the intensity of those feelings. It only makes the conversations with her a bit more complicated.

My family moved into that house in November, 1979. It was a return to Mom's hometown after nine years and seven relocations up and down the East Coast with the U.S. Navy and then EDS.

I didn't know it then, being only 10, but it was also the first step in my parents' divorce. I don't think my dad knew it then, either. Years later, Mom told me that she knew she wanted a divorce, but she wanted to be closer to home before she went through with it.

My parents were married for three years after we moved into that house. Three years. Mom had a steely patience and persistence that cannot be matched. She planned and she waited, planned and waited. When my grandfather died in the summer of 1982 and left each of his children a couple thousand dollars, my stay-at-home Mom pounced on the opportunity her little "windfall" presented, and she changed her life.

She kept the house. He bought -- don't laugh -- the -plex side of a brand new duplex in a sketchy neighborhood. He complained to me recently that he has never made a dime on any of his real estate purchases. No shit, Donald Trump.

And actually? Go ahead and laugh.

That house was my mother's 4-bedroom, 2-bath declaration of independence.

When we moved back to Florida, she did all the house-hunting.

There had been a hurricane (Fredrick) not long before our move, so Mom wouldn't even consider a house that had new carpet. She figured that was a good sign of flooding.

She made the short list of schools to which she wanted to send her kids, and spent a few weeks riding around town with Realtors and trolling the streets on her own.

That was, as it turned out, how she found our house. There was a sign on the lawn and a couple of teen-age boys playing ping-pong in the open garage. She looked at the house, and assumed it was out of her price range. But she stopped anyway and asked.

When she found out the sellers were asking exactly was she was ready to pay, she called my dad at work and they submitted a contract that night.

When I think about that time - back before their divorce when our homelife was pretty ordinary (or at least had a hard candy shell of ordinariness covering the rich, chocolatey center of depression, alcoholism and dysfunction) - I can't think of our house in anything but Suburban Family terms. I picture it the way it looked when relatives were coming for a visit. I picture Christmas morning and birthday parties and sofa forts in the living room.

I picture it . . . I don't know . . . clean.

And now I wonder how my mother pictured it that first time she saw it.

Was she looking at a home for a seemingly typical nuclear family of four? Or did she go from room to room thinking, "Yes, this would be a fine place to be a single mother"? Did she tour the bedrooms and say, "This will be my room, and this will be Bettie's room and this will be Thor's room and this will be the room where I send my awful husband to sleep until his crazyass half-duplex is completed - four months late and thousands over budget"?

Last night, I imagined touring the house with Mom now. If she has resisted letting it go, maybe I have been too eager.

I imagined standing with her on the street in front of the house.

Remember the jump rope that hung on the electric wire for, God, it must have been 10 years? What happened to it? Did it blow down in a hurricane, or did the rope finally disintegrate and float down on the driveway in a shower of brittle little fibers?

Look, I replaced those groovy globe lanterns on the courtyard wall with something a little classier. A little less dated. I know that one electrician after another told you they couldn't do it, but I convinced the guys I knew to slip a piece of PVC into the wall so the lanterns could be mounted on that like a post. I thought of it all by myself, and it reminded me of a solution you would have had. Maybe I didn't think of it by myself after all.

Do you remember the time I stayed out all night at Chantel's going-away party and got drunk for the second time in my life, and was still drunk at 6 a.m., when I scraped through the azalea hedge, opened my bedroom window and tumbled into my room over my old toy box? You must remember it - you were lying in my narrow twin bed, not asleep, just waiting.

Do you remember the time we stayed up late - so far past my bedtime; I was younger then - and sat on the screened porch drinking Constant Comment tea and waiting for a much-anticipated meteor shower? I remember. I remember how quiet it was, and how completely dark. So dark that I could not really see you even right next to me. It was so dark that we whispered when we spoke. And we gasped at every shooting star.

I've spent a lot of time agonizing over the yearlong chore of cleaning your house after you died. I've accepted the fact that, no matter how I try to describe it in terms of labor hours or metric tons of trash and precious artifacts, no one no one no one will ever understand what that job was like. I just don't have the words yet to paint it real. I can't properly say just how angry I was, how sad, how ragged and scorched.

And all the while I was so grateful that you didn't die in that house, as you had told me so many times you feared.

Have I told you - have I told anyone- that every reciept and silver ring I sorted and cataloged made me love you and miss you and curse you with an intensity I really thought might crush me some days?

Probably. That sounds like something I would say more than once.

That is the story I've been telling of that house for two years now. But that is not our home's complete story. And I'm sorry for making such a lop-sided illustration.

I've left out too much. I've left out jumping on the bed when I was really too big to engage in that. I've left out the two weeks when you had strep throat and Dad quarantined you in Thor's room and wouldn't go in there because he didn't want to catch what you had. I went in. I played your nurse in little ways, just like you played my nurse all through the years before we moved into that house - the years when I was sick and in the hospital and coming home with tubes and dressings and unexplained fevers.

This was the first house we'd ever lived in where I was never sick like that. You must have breathed just a little easier. Just a little.

This house and my wellness, along with a couple thousand dollars, must have seemed like a blade of sunshine slicing through the dank cell of your marriage to someone who did not really love you because he just couldn't love much of anyone. It must have looked like the sweet prospect of Something Better.

You know what? You did a good job. No, you did an amazing job.

You began as a stay-at-home mom with $2,000 in the bank, and you became a well-respected professional who raised two children who are both happily married. You sent one child to get an advanced degree at an Ivy League school, and you gave the other everything she would need to survive corporate life, cancer and whatever else is on the horizon. (You heard me, Life. Bring it, bitch.)

And you were loved. You are loved. Your story is a good one, and we'll all tell it as real as we can.

Now sit with me, here by long the windows next to the front door. Let's remember the time we stood here together during a hurricane watching the trees whip dangerously close to the roof then careen in the other direction.

Remember the way we all just felt safe? That storm was beating the city, but we might as well have been miles away. We watched through those windows with the vague interest of someone watching Jim Cantore on television.

Hmmm. Would you look at that.

It wasn't the house that made us feel safe, Mom. It was the woman who chose it.

Maybe now we can open the door, step into the courtyard with one hand on the brass doorknob (remember how you made this door look like a wrapped present one Christmas?) and pull the door shut behind us.

You have to pull hard until you hear it click. There you go. That's it.

So, yeah, my family's kinda effed up

Sometimes, when you were adopted, you're the last to know.

That was, at least, the case for me.

The year was 1968, which in Deep South years translates somewhere around 1955. My mother was a singe gal in her early 20s going to college, working in the steno pool and dating a guy with serious goals for his future, including a detailed five-year plan.

Then she got pregnant.

She found out in short order that "serious goals for the future" did not and would not include marriage or fatherhood.

You do what you want, but leave me out of it.

And since this was 1968 (or '55) my mother was quietly sent to live with an aunt and uncle several Southern states away, where she would gestate her baby; write lots of unsent letters, poems and lists of baby names in a blue spiral notebook; formulate a plan for her baby's future; and deliver that baby on an April afternoon in 1969.

My mother was not the only young woman to leave her hometown for a year or so and return with a baby. She was not the only person in my extended family, even. I could bore you for hours with tales of secret sons and nieces who were really daughters. For hours, I could bore you.

And you could probably bore me, too.

But really, what were they thinking? Was it just the physical pregnancy that was too shameful to have witnessed in one's hometown? Was anyone fooled? Was a good fooling even part of the equation? Or was the nine+ months away like so many Hail Marys - a proper show of penitence for having got knocked up by a douchebag with a rigid five-year plan?

So anyway, my mother returns to her hometown with a little one in arms. And before even a year passes, she meets, dates and marries another man.

And here's where you're going to feel compelled to judge, and I have to ask you not to.

The man adopted the baby, who got a new birth certificate complete with his name on it, and the newlywed couple decided that it would be a good idea to not tell their daughter anything about it.

Lalalalalala - What adoption decree?

The problem with family secrets is that they never remain secret. When every person in the family knows something about one member, sooner or later someone is bound to mention it.

And that is how my mother and her oldest sister became estranged.

For reasons I could never begin to tell you, I became convinced at age 13 that seeing as how I was a deeply mysterious and complicated teenager, I must have had an equally mysterious and complicated origin. You know those fantasies where you find out that your boring, over-protective parents are just stand-ins for the brilliant, artistic nomads who were your REAL parents? It was something like that.

And I happened to mention something like this fantasy to my cousin, who was two years younger than I, and she informed me that I was half right. Or a quarter right, technically, considering that my birth father with the five-year plan was a boring accountant and not, as I had suspected, Mikhail Baryshnikov or Sam Shepard or any other man who had slept with Jessica Lange.

My mother was furious with my aunt for not guarding her secret more closely. My aunt was furious right back. Or defensive. Or whatever. A phone call was placed and heated words were exchanged.

After that call, they didn't speak more than a few strained words to each other for 23 years.

When it comes to conflict, the women in my family don't play.

And they don't make up.

My aunt came to Mom's funeral two years ago. And in the ensuing months, as I was going through chemotherapy, my aunt did something she had never done. She called me. She listened. She sent her prayers and support. She dedicated (bought? I don't remember RC protocol) a mass for my mother at her church.

My mom would have done the same thing for my cousin if my cousin had lost her mother and was facing a serious illness, or a serious treatment, as it were.

Mom always maintained a line of communication with my cousin. She loved her.

Ironically, my cousin and I felt too strongly the strain of our mothers' relationship, and our friendship over the years has been sporadic at best. We were pitted as competitors as small children. Then became close friends in adolescence. Then everything just got awkward and lumpy as we tried to smooth our friendship over the rumpled mess of history that we were both really too young to understand.

We lost touch except for Christmas cards and ... no, just Christmas cards.

Now my mother is gone and her mother is facing a terrifying diagnosis.

I called her over the weekend to tell her how sorry I was to hear about her mom's illness and to ask how she was recovering from surgery. Honestly, I wasn't sure as I dialed the phone exactly what I was going to say. God. What do you say?

She answered the phone and I introduced myself.

"It's your cousin Elizabeth."

I stopped there, and did not add, "You know, Xerxes and Buttercup's mommy. Maybe you remember me from the family? I'm the one who was half adopted?"

I was relieved to find that she was happy to hear from me. This is my family we're talking about, so I don't take anything for granted. I feared she would greet me with a closed door and yell through the peep hole, "Get away! This is private. Go away cancer girl. Get away from us with all your cancer surviving and your dead mothers. We're all full here."

We talked for more than an hour, and it was just heartbreakingly wonderful and awful and important.

She and her parents are slogging through fresh hell this week. They have a million questions and so few answers. They're on a day-to-day rollercoaster, clinging firmly to every syllable uttered by every doctor and nurse passing stranger in scrubs who speaks to them.

I've visited that country. And I don't recommend it to anyone. But there are some spectacular views if you know where to look.

For my homie-- er, mommy

As I have written about before, my brother Thor and I are in the process of selling our mother's house. We've been in that process for more than a year now, and it is getting very, very old.

We've had several firm offers fall apart. We've had a couple of contracts fall apart.

We had one contract fall apart on closing day. TWICE.

Honestly, I don't know how people make a living in real estate without self-medicating with copious amounts of alcohol and/or topquality prescription meds4u purchased discreetly and often from the Internets.

Last weekend Thor and his wife Lila were in town again for what should have been a weekend celebrating the Friday close of the house.

It wasn't, because the house did not close on Friday. So, instead, it was a frugal weekend of dour contemplation of impending financial ruin and phone calls to the company that was supposed to install carpet and other flooring throughout half of my house* to say, "Um, don't come because I can't pay you yet."

*Have I mentioned that, because we were doing the tear-out, we are walking on subfloor in half the house? And that the neatly rolled carpet is still in my garage, which flooded and soaked that carpet, so now it smells like moldy dog ass? Have I mentioned that?

At some point over the weekend, I told Lila that we needed to have a seance and speak sweetly but firmly to Mom, begging her to let go of the house.

Lila exclaimed that she had told my brother the very same thing on the drive to New York from Boston.

So, one evening as we were gathered here for a barbecue, Lila poured Mom a nice glass of wine (hey - it always worked in life) and we gathered on the porch. Buttercup was especially excited about this, and was jumping around in the princess dress she received for her birthday.

We poured ourselves glasses of wine, and raised them in toast to Mary. We said a few words.

Me: Mom. Let my real estate go!

Buttercup: GIVE IT TO JESUS!

(Don't ask me; I have no idea.)

After our toast, we held Mom's glass over the deck railing, and gave the wine to the grassy earth. Then we all went inside and drank the rest of the bottle.

A little later, Buttercup asked for some milk, and as soon as we had filled her cup, she shot like an arrow (an arrow swathed in tulle and pink satin) for the back door, holding her milk above her head, calling out, "Give it to Jesus!"

And she did.

I will leave the story there. I will not tell you that Lila and I have now both created small altars (in the fashion of Dia de los Muertos) in our homes, and that we ply honor Mary almost daily with small gifts such as wine, a book of matches, a crumb of cheese danish, a silver pram charm for her bracelet, a Constant Comment tea bag, flowers, candles, slices of lemon, a doll's shoe, a ladybug bead, two packets of Equal sweetener and anything else for which we think she might have use.

No - I think it's best if I leave that part of the story out.

We eat the weak and broken

Dear Mom~

Remember those spritz cookies you used to make every Christmas - by which i mean "every Christmas before the divorce, when our domestic life sort of went to hell'? Do you?

Do you remember the silver metal cookie press with the copper ends that you used to pipe wreath and candy cane shapes onto the cookie sheet, and how the candy canes were especially prone to breakage, and our standing rule was that we got to eat all the broken ones?

Remember? You do?

Well, can you tell me exactly how the fuck you made that dough?

Because I have tried this Christmas, and it just didn't work out so well.

That's what mothers and daughters do, right? And now that I have a daughter - and one who is so incredibly keen on kitcheny things - I thought it would be a good idea to continue a family tradition. I even bought a fancy electric cookie press that looks like it could have been Julia Childs' vibrator.

But the results were just ... eh...

First, I didn't have your recipe. I know, I know - there were almost 35 years there in which I had you as a real, living parent and plenty of opportunity to ask for things like that. I dropped the ball, admittedly.

The recipe I found formed into the consistency of thousands of tiny, dry dough balls that would never have joined together. So I added more butter, and I got a dough that almost worked. Almost.

Of course, by the time I adjusted the recipe and figured out how to detonate, er, assemble the hi-tek cookie press, it was several hours past Buttercup's bedtime, so she was fast asleep and cranking out all those cookies was much more an exercise in endurance (and alcohol resistence) than of celebration.

All in all, the cookies are passable. Particularly to anyone who never ate the cookies we made.

Although they taste similar, I know they're not the same. Only one of them broke.

Where my Jungians at?

I had a dream last night that my husband and I robbed a bank. Twice.

It was his idea, and apparently the scheme was foolproof. So foolproof that we accomplished it twice. At the same bank.

I love my husband. He's really smart.

CAN I CALL IT A NA-NA?

Yesterday was big. In the morning, I had another followup appointment with my ladydoctor, who pronounced that everything looks peachy. You know that makes a girl feel proud when someone says her (per husband's request, I am not going to call it a hoo-ha) "looks great, REALLY GREAT - the best I've seen it."

He also said that, even with all the reconstruction, it's obviously "functional."

Flatterer. Now you're just trying to make me blush.

After my appointment, I picked up Buttercup and raced to my mother's house so I could meet the charity truck and make another donation.

Just so that you can understand what it has meant to clear my mother's house, let me explain to you the layers of archaeology that I had to accomplish.

First, I removed at least 10 bags of trash per room - and these were big, black lawn bags of trash. I had to have thrown out somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-150 bags of trash. And that was just the OBVIOUS trash. The trash that could be ascertiained without any effort.

Then I had to sort through every purse Mom had owned since she was 25 - all of them still full of stuff. And no, I couldn't just toss them, because among the gas receipts and napkins and disintegrated latex nurse gloves, I would find things like her baptismal certificate, a wedding ring, an original photo of my grandmother as a child.

And I've just discovered that I can't even go further in describing the work, because even putting it in writing is too grueling.

I also am struggling against the feeling that my brother could have done more. Or, indeed, anything. I need to let go of that, because it will only get in the way.

I just wish I hadn't been the one who had to look at EVERY piece of paper in the house. I wish that, when I watched the man close the truck door on the living room sofas that had been in our house since I was five, I wish I hadn't been alone watching it go.