My Mother’s Letters

Mom, me, Butchie, sister, sister, Dad, brother
Two years before my father got sick
1977

I remember we had at least one television on all day and night for Butchie and he would scream in his stinking chair in the corner while cartoons blared. I remember we ate food that came from the freezer unless it came from a can or was spaghetti. I remember the stress and the yelling before any holiday gathering as we vacuumed and scrubbed and hid things away for company. It always felt like company was a bad thing. At least that’s how I remember it.

I remember because these things formed me.

The stories I told in Butchie’s eulogy included the time he choked on a hotdog at the kitchen table and it didn’t pop out of his mouth until my mother threw him down onto the table, yelling, “Breathe, Goddammit!” At the rest of us, “Keep eating!”

The day he pulled his G-tube out of his abdomen, covering the vinyl couch with stomach juices, my mother yelled to my sister, “Plug the hole!” while she loaded the other three of us into the Volkswagen bus and sped us all off to the hospital. This was our life, my mother ruling total chaos with an unyielding voice.

I don’t know what more I’d hoped to know about us. We’d mapped our chromosomes, found who was most like my brother Butchie, what there was to know about my sister’s disabilities. I’d been witness to my parents’ marriage, or at least 9 healthy years and 18 sick years before my father died. None of us had ever been in for therapy, but it felt like I knew enough. We all knew enough.

And then my mother brought me the letters. It was not just the letters between my parents: sweet, heartfelt pages filled with innocuous daily observations and deep yearning during their three years of courting and early marriage. There were also letters written by my mother to my grandmother and vice versa. They wrote almost every day, sometimes twice a day, for three years. To read these letters is to meet my mother at age 22. To walk into their dingy, newlywed military house, 500 miles from home. To understand what it meant to wait until pay day to buy a stamp to send a letter.

When you flip through these letters you feel their hands, hear their voices, the concern, the love, the humdrum boredom of Mr. Ed, the profound longing they also felt for one another, my mother an only child, my grandmother who’d try to do all she could in the face of a sour husband and life-long poverty.

Nov. 1 1960

Dear Mom and Dad,

Received your letter of the 26th today…

 

May 31, 1961

Dear Bobbie and Bruce,

Received your letter of the 28th today…

 

August 1, 1962

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well- not next month but the following month I will be home…

 

August 2, 1962

Dear Mom and Dad,

Rec. your letter of the 30th today…

 

August 7, 1962

Dear Mom and Dad,

Am at the laundromat so will start writing…

I can’t sort through these letters. I can’t bear to read more than a few in one sitting and I can’t touch one page of a five page letter without reading the whole thing. They keep me up at night.

My mother and her mother, driving from New Jersey to California
Summer, 1960

May 19, 1961

Dear Mom and Dad:

Will start this letter now, while I am at work…

Last night I went to see Kay in the hospital and I drove to Fresno for hoagies (real live eastern type)… Tonight we are going to Bruce’s prom at Fresno (if I am not too tired), so I won’t be able to write tonight.

Here is the news:

Kay has a 8 lb 11 ½ oz. baby boy 5-17-61 y 4:00 p.m. I didn’t know about it until yesterday afternoon when her Mom called me at work. He’s fine, but Kay isn’t doing so good. She looks awefull and feels the same. They say she had a rough time of it. Dr. Rowe cut and cut, but not enough and she ripped to pieces when the body was born…

I am feeling fine, super-duper fine today… Every night I feel whoozy but am not sick, so it isn’t bad at all…

My mother is pregnant having just seen a postpartum woman for the first time. Later, after my brother is born, after the doctor uses high forceps to deliver him only to find the cord wrapped around his neck, and my mother is torn up and hemorrhaging herself, when Butchie failed to thrive, failed to roll over, my grandmother wrote one of the letters that breaks my heart.

Feb. 22, 1962

Dear Bobbie:

No letter from you today so this will probably be a short letter.

In my phone conversation with Mom G last night she said she knew you were holding something back from her about Butch. She suspected it was more than a heart murmur and can’t understand why you didn’t tell her. I told her it was not your fault as you wanted to write to tell her but Bruce wouldn’t let you do it because it would worry her. But she can’t understand why you two kids are acting like you are and she also said G. is very peeved at you and Bruce for upsetting her so. She said she had a letter written to you and was going to send you money for you and Butch to come home and live with her. All you would have to do would be to take care of Butch. Also she was going to take you to the best pediatrician and spend every last cent of her money if necessary to make Butch better. When she told G. he made her tear that letter up.

Also S. is very peeved and can’t understand why you didn’t bring the baby to Los Angelos for treatment…

Oh, she also said you were too independent. I heard that remark a few times last night. Also she wanted to know why Bruce never helps you…

My mother and Butchie, 6 months old
May, 1962

It goes on and on.

And I think-

I am alone.

I am alone in California, on this god-forsaken military base in 1961 where I am neither liberated nor caged. I love my beautiful husband, this man I don’t wholly understand but who rescued me from the lonely soulless life I was born to. I love my firstborn son. This will be okay, this must all be okay. I am not Job. Look, see? He drank the milk. Look, see? He raised his arm. Look, there. His eyes went to the light. See now? I don’t know why they say he is slow.

Year after year.

Sure he doesn’t talk, but he’s walking. He’s seven and he’s walking!

See now? Your sister can hear that sound with the hearing aid. With that new hearing aid. Now with that better hearing aid. And these glasses, this magnifying glass, this Visualtech machine. She can see all she needs to!

Year after year.

And the youngest one, he just marches to the beat of his own drummer! He’s smart, brilliant maybe. It’s the teachers. He’s just so disorganized. Doesn’t know which way is up! Can’t get out of his own way! But so smart…

Year after year.

Sure, we’ll set up that tube-feeding for your father at night and he can go to work in the morning. We’ll just make up that insulin shot. I’ll blend that formula, just like the kind you buy at the hospital which is too expensive anyway. And look how he’s gained weight! He weighs 120 lb.! He’s doing so great!

And on and on.

I am inside that life, that miserable Job existence. I will raise the five children and they will be fine. I will make this all right. I will make this work if I have to rage against it with the most saccharine platitudes, vicious glares, unrelenting voice.

I gasp. It takes my breath away.

Then I am myself again, 2014, fighting my own battles, lifting my own four children up only to put them down. Yelling at them, apoplectic, only to whisper my adoration.

Me and my mother
Fall, 2013

I am my mother, and she is me. Each word on the page, typed or scratched. From her mother to my mother to me and on and on and on.

(This post was inspired by a prompt from the amazing Rarasaur, for the Daily Post’s Weekly Writing Challenge. Check out Rara’s blog, and thanks for forgiving the loooong post.)