Happy Happy Joy Joy

I love birthdays. And today it is my birthday. Forty seven years ago today I was born to the Virgin Molly at Columbia Hospital for Women. The hospital is long since gone, now turned into condos. I spent a week there and then on to St. Anne's Home for Infants and Unwed Mothers until I made it to the home of JLS and JWS on Morrison Street in NW DC. They gave it all they knew, were there for the fevers, the tears, the terribles and the terrifics,  which is all I could really ask for anyway. I turned out ok. Twenty eight years later the Virgin Molly got the courage to go to court to see if maybe they could find me. I did not yet have the courage and quickly developed hives from my ankles to my neck along with unrelenting insomnia. Not until I was carrying imac around in my very own belly did I muster up the courage. I was blessed because the Virgin Molly is the real deal, a class act and we've now had 13 years of getting to know each other.

I had a homemade card from Melanoma Man and Butter awaiting me this morning. imac made me a Mother's Day card, which he apologetically said he lost in his bedroom. I told him "It's not really lost if it's in your bedroom. I accept Mother's Day cards anytime of year. We'll find it."

Then at work I returned from my morning meetings to find my desk covered in birthday confetti, streamers, banners, balloons, cards, homemade granola and gifts.

Even Dustin Hoffman made me happy this week. Also making me happy this week are Regina Spektor and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis . Hope you are having a happy week too!!

Is that what happened?

I shared my blog with my brother a few days ago. It was a risk for certain. No two children see their parents or their family the same way. He wondered:  "Was Mom really that bad?"  The answer is Yes and No. She wasn't the same mom to each of her children. She was more than just a drunk. She was educated, smart, funny, creative, talented,  insecure, anxious, depressed, and drunk. And she may have been in the wrong line of work, mothering, like a lot of women in the 1950s and 60's who followed the plan: college/marriage/motherhood.

 Ultimately she may have felt herself a fraud, because not one of the four of us came from her. We all came from Catholic Charities. They tried to make us match, using pictures of the older sibling to match up the next. But we don't match. My brother J is probably the closest match because our eyes crinkle up in the same way when we smile. We're just four years apart so we shared after school basketball in the driveway and re-enacting the Civil War in the yard.

Mom cut out a newspaper article for me to read when I was in high school. It linked workaholic fathers with adopted children, speculating that the fathers worked so hard to avoid the children. It was years before I realized it was her he was hiding from, not me. I was the apple of his eye.

We two girls were a threat, more than the boys because we might, we just might bear our own children. And we did. She really couldn't forgive that. She wouldn't come see my youngest when he was born, but insisted that I fly with 4 month old and 2 1/2 year old to see her. I usually complied just to avoid the conflict. She held him once: "He's beautiful. I hope you aren't having anymore."

I rescued her from numerous medical dilemmas, all of her own making: vitamin B deficiency, rhabdomyolysis, a brain aneurysm, mini-strokes, a heart attack. Ultimately Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome set in and landed her in the finest nursing home in her town, which closely resembles the institution in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And the daughter who never visits, that's me. It wasn't who I meant to be. But it is who I am.

Mother of One

I am thinking back, trying to remember what plans I had for myself as a young girl. I remember being elementary school aged and planning to have four children, to be married by twenty five, first child by twenty seven.

By the time I turned eighteen I had no such plans. I had a high school boyfriend.We spent most Friday and Saturday nights together. We were just friends, but friends that held each other up in spite of the circumstances of our families of origin who often pulled us down. By college I had decided against marriage and against children. I would remain single. I would become a veterinarian. I would require my three older siblings to call me Dr. so and so. I didn't understand children or men. I understood animals and that was pretty much my scope.

At twenty, walking from my college dorm on Cold Spring Lane en route to the Farm Store, I passed a young woman with a baby in a stroller. My thoughts of childlessness were over. The game changed. Yet how to get from here to there? I decided to familiarize myself with children by becoming a nanny. The bulletin boards  in the Education Department featured a Help Wanted advertisement for a summertime nanny for one eighteen month old girl, mornings Monday through Friday. How to convince her mother of my qualifications? I crafted a ridiculous resume listing all the varied creatures I had cared for from snakes, to rabbits, horses, donkeys, house cats, dogs. I explained earnestly that babies and toddlers have a great deal in common with puppies and kittens. To my amazement, she bought it. I spent the glorious summer of the seventeen year locusts outdoors with the loveliest purest goodness of an eighteen month old girl.

Fast forward fourteen years, I had been married for two years when I gave birth to number one son. None of it had gone as planned in any version of my plan. That left me thinking that all the other mothers knew a secret I didn't know. I remembered the advice I had given confidently and convincingly to so  many mothers and fathers over the years. I had thought I would be a natural. I certainly had the educational background and the professional experience, working with pediatric patients for ten years.

My mother couldn't be trusted on the subject of mothering, no natural or acquired skills. I had come to her at two weeks of age from St. Anne's Home for Infants and Unwed Mothers. She  was jealous, insanely jealous that I gave birth to this beautiful boy with his gorgeous blue eyes and full head of jet black hair. He looked just like me with darker hair. The first person I had ever known who looked like me.

Melanoma Man taught me to be a mother. He believed I already knew what to do and continued to show me evidence of my skill and worth as a mother until I could believe too. How did he know, fifty years old, confirmed bachelor until age 48? He will tell you he learned it all, Mother and Father from a cat known as Mr. Stubby gifted to him years earlier by me and the Matchmaker.