VISIT FROM MOTHER

August 8th, 2007
My mother came up to visit about five weeks ago. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas and I was shocked. She’s seventy one and looks and acts like she’s ninety one. Yes, she’s had knee replacement surgery and back surgery in the past two years, but there is one reason and one reason only that she is the way she is prescription drugs.

She can brag that the gene for the tendency towards alcoholism that runs on both sides of my family missed her and God knows she can make you feel like a bucket of shit if you call her when you’ve been drinking, but the gene for dependency didn’t skip her one bit. She walks around in “La La Land” zapped out on Zanex, pain pills, and sleeping pills like a Zombie. She can’t remember anything as regards to when it happened, or who it happened to and takes offense when you correct her. She shuffles when she walks, holds on to things and falls down all the time. When she gets up from the sofa, or out of a car she says “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” like someone’s killing her. This all started about five years ago. Until then my mother was a fun person who could joke with anyone and was a lot of fun.

We got in a fight within two blocks from Love Field when I told her I didn’t want to spend our time together talking about how much she wants to divorce daddy, or hates him, or how crazy he is, I’ve been listening to this all my life, or how she wants to move the whole family to Mexico where it’s cheaper and they will be able to live so much better on their retirement. She can’t even walk from the car into a restaurant without assistance, or at least that’s the way she wants it, nor does she speak one word of Spanish. How in the Hell is she going to get along in Mexico for God’s sake? It was a horrible week to say the least.

Two days after she got home I called her and she informed me that they were going to send my fourteen year old nephew back to “The West Texas Boy’s Ranch” where they send him a couple of years ago because he was getting out of control. My sister divorced his father when he was three and he’s not seen much of his dad, nor has his dad tried to support him all these years, so all the responsibility has fallen on my parent’s since my sister soon to be thirty nine acts like a twelve year old herself.

I blame my mother for his behavior because she’s always let him get away with murder and when anyone tries to correct him including me, she attacks them right in front of the child. The two of them once came to visit me, and whenever I tried to make him mind he would run to her and she would wrap her arms around him and say “Its better at home, isn’t it honey, its better at home?” I ripped her a new one over that. My nephew wouldn’t be civil to me for months afterwards and he hated me as if I were some kind of monster. It was her decision to send him to the boy’s ranch until he’s eighteen, but she blames my sister. My sister called me the next day and told me my mother had been crying all day and I shouldn’t have been so mean to her. I told her that comparing what I’d said to my mother the night before with all the things she’d said to me as a child were like comparing a lightning bug’s ass to the sun.

Later in the day my cell phone showed I had missed a call from my mother, but when I called back my nephew answered. He told me it was he who’d called, but he wouldn’t tell me the reason why. He just asked me if I’d be coming down for Thanksgiving and Christmas and told me he missed me and loved me. My heart breaks for this child, he’s been raised without a father, a mother who never tells him she loves him and two grandparents who haven’t spoken a civil word to one another in fifty six years. I’ve seen Dillon walk up to his mother wrap his arms around her and say “I love you mom.” My sister just walks on like he’s dead weight on one of her legs and I had to say, “What do we say to a little boy who tell us they loves us?” Only then would she even acknowledge him. I know he feels like an unloved, worthless, piece of human garbage, exactly as I did as a child.

My once “Elvis Presley” handsome father has become a “Googly Eyed” old fool who is deaf as a post, dips snuff, and pulls his own teeth. My once “Elizabeth Montgomery” pretty mother has become a forgetful, teary eyed, drug addicted, tottery old woman and the two of them scream at each other constantly.

While mother was here she put on some chocolate colored lipstick and told me it was the color her mother used to wear. Her mother although a bitch, was a great beauty, and looked like Vivien Leigh, but my grandmother always wore a dark red lipstick nothing at all like the color mother had just applied. She said Dillon told her it made her eyes “Pop”. I told her it made her look like a corpse. Then I remembered a time in 1987 when my mother came to visit me in Midland and I couldn’t place what was “wrong” with her. Finally it dawned on me and I said, “Your lipsticks too red”. She admitted it was the color her mother used and since her mother lived near her at the time I didn’t doubt it, but the color was just wrong. It made her look all washed out and pasty faced and she admitted she could never wear that color. Where in the Hell she thought this chocolate stuff was “Her mother’s color”, I’ll never know. All I could think of was when the Jewish family in the movie “Rat Race” stole Hitler’s car and the wife found the dark chocolate lipstick in the glove compartment of the 1930’s Mercedes and realized it must’ve been Eva Braun’s lipstick. The husband wiped it on the steering wheel and when he ran through a fence and wrecked the car in front of a group of World War II veterans his lip hit the steering wheel he got out of the car in a daze with what appeared to be a dark moustache and began speaking gibberish to the group who mistook him for Hitler and started shooting. It was hysterical!

If I could rescue Dillon I would. I tried to tell him the last time they sent him to the boy’s ranch that maybe he would be better in a home where people didn’t yell at each other all the time and he maybe he would realize the whole world didn’t live like that, but he doesn’t understand he cries and wants to go home. That makes me feel terribly depressed and helpless. I know what it feels like to be forced to move away from home.

My mother is a real piece of work. She’s always threatened to divorce my father. I’ve been listening to that shit for fifty four years now and I’m fucking sick of it. I was always so afraid and scared of the future because my mother would always threaten to divorce my father that I can’t feel one moment of comfort, or peace to this very day.