Living Up to Mom

First of all, Sheila’s procedure went well, and she was sent home from the hospital 24 hours later. No stroke this time! She is doing very well.

It was a very long day. Her procedure took many hours. I think she went in for the procedure about 10am. I was on the freeway trying to figure out the snarl of interchanges to get to the USC hospital. It took me about 3 hours of driving to get to Aubrey, pick her up and get us both to the hospital. Sheila’s procedure took approximately 5 hours and we were allowed to see her in ICU at around 4pm. That means when we left the hospital, we were once again in rush hour traffic leaving downtown Los Angeles. I think I spent 5 to 6 hours in my car that day and most of it in rush hour traffic. Add in about 5 hours at the hospital and it was a very long day. I did get to take Aubrey to dinner. It was wonderful to get to know this beautiful 24 year old woman.

It’s just weird to think that I am now the older generation. I have a few aunts and uncles older than me, but when I was talking to my Uncle Marty letting him know how Sheila is doing, it struck me that he and I are the keepers of the family memories for a lot of our younger family members. Uncle Marty is about 3 years older than me. I still remember being a little kid with him, and I didn’t see him much after I became an adult, so it is just weird to me that we are both in our 50’s now. My younger brother just turned 50 also. It doesn’t seem like that much time can have passed. Okay, now I know I sound old, because that is what us old people always say!

So as an older people who is supposed to have gathered some wisdom by now, what would I say to those who are younger than me? Let’s start with: stuff isn’t important, people are. We all have stuff, but are you in charge of your stuff, or is it in charge of you? I come from a family of hoarders on one side of the family. The stuff was saved and piled up until it took over the house, and there were pathways through it. I think about my mother and how she dealt with poverty and dirt and chaos by getting an education and trying to clean and put order to her surroundings, and she went from that to college to marriage at the age of 20, and then married into a family of hoarders!

I was born at a Navy Hospital in Barstow, because my dad was a marine stationed at Twenty Nine Palms. Mom says the doctors had to break up their card game and scrub in because when she got to the hospital 3 hours after her water broke, my head was crowning. My dad didn’t come to the hospital to visit us for three days. He drove home and shared the news with his mom, and did whatever he did. He was told by his commanding officer to buy a layette and go bring his family home. Then he volunteered for a tour of duty in Okinawa. It seems he wasn’t ready to be a father. Mom and I lived with her parents for a short time. My mom got a phone call in the middle of the night from my dad’s mom. She was in labor and needed to be taken to the hospital. Gigi, as we called her, never learned how to drive. She took the bus to work and to get around. I asked her once what she did if one of her kids got hurt and needed stitches. She told me she put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding, and then slapped egg whites on the wound, because as they dried, they would pull the wound together and then she’d get on the bus with her kids and go to the doctor.

My Mom loaded me up into the car in Agua Dulce and drove to Gigi in Hermosa Beach. This is about an hour drive barring traffic. My grandmother gave birth to a little girl. Here was the problem. Grandma was married, but her husband had run off with a Guatemalan lady and had not been living with my grandmother. He had been gone about a year at that point. Here is the other problem. The baby’s father was black. Gigi was married to a white man. We are talking about the 1950’s so this was a big deal at the time. Gigi adopted her baby out. My mom was the only one who held her before she was gone. My mother told me about this little girl who was the same age as me when I moved back to southern California just in case she ever contacted me. That little girl who is the same age as me is named Tammy and she found us shortly before grandma died. Unfortunately, the first time she saw my grandmother was when she was lying in her coffin. Thank God these are different times. Nobody cares who Tammy’s dad was (although I wish we could find him for Tammy’s sake). For all of us, she is just family.

I’m sure I met the grandfather who left Gigi at some point. I’m not really sure. My blood grandfather died before I was born, so this was my grandmother’s second marriage. She had one son with that husband; Uncle Marty. Uncle Marty likes to say that he has 7 sisters and 4 brothers (or maybe it is the opposite), but he is an only child. Grandmother had 3 children with my grandfather, and Marty’s dad had children with his Guatemalan step-mother. You can see why we don’t worry about bloodlines in our family. It’s just too complicated to figure out. I also have a cousin on my mom’s side of the family who was adopted out, because she wasn’t married. He found me when I moved here. My mom had told me about him, too. I don’t think my family is terribly unusual. Babies out of wedlock have always happened. There was just a lot more shame associated with it back then. The moms were hidden. The babies were birthed, and adoptions were done secretly. I’m glad there is not such a stigma any more about this, because it is the mothers and their children who took the brunt of the shame, not the dads.

My mother moved in with Gigi after she gave birth. My grandmother was a hoarder. Her home was piled with stuff. The dirty pots and pans and dishes were piled on the back porch. Clothes were everywhere. My grandmother had two teenagers at that point in her life and my Uncle Marty who was three years old.  My mom washed all the dishes, did the laundry, folded it and put it away and put that home into order.  She also found a job at an explosives factory and worked. She also took care of me. She taught me how to clean and bring organization to chaos. She taught me to throw away. I am not a collector, and I don’t need a lot to make me happy. Don’t get me wrong. My mom also loved shoes. She loved the colors, the designs, the textures, everything. I have too many shoes. My shoes are all in clear plastic shoe boxes neatly stacked in my closet. My boots are all side by side on the floor of my closet. My house is not perfect, but it is clean. I know where things are most of the time. The hardest part about marrying my husband was merging my household with his. Living with his three daughters for the last 6 years has been even more difficult, because I didn’t raise them and they don’t keep a house like I do. I taught my children how to keep our house. Pete’s daughters were young adults when we married. We thought we would be empty nesters by the end of our first year of marriage. It is now almost 6 years later and the youngest is finally moving out. I love his daughters, but I can’t wait. I don’t want to live with people who don’t keep a home like I do any more. I gave up trying to teach adults who didn’t want to be taught. I miss four of my children, and I can’t wait to see them when they come to visit. Our youngest child is finally going to give me the opportunity to miss her.  I need to miss her.