tearing away

Tired. Emotionally tired from going through papers since 1962 and seeing things such as the receipts for the wedding I didn’t want all clipped together. Every penny that my mother spent on me for my wedding in 1962 are recorded and in a clump in the papers my brother and husband and I went through after the death of my stepfather. I wanted to be married in nature, to wear a full length velvet dress and if my mother wanted to give me something she could give me a jeep. She had promised me a jeep when I graduated from college. No. Now no jeep. Now because I was marrying a man I had met in a poetry seminar, it would be a wedding. Her wedding. I was allowed to select the pattern at the fabric store and the material for the dress. I burst out crying when the florist showed me that she could spray paint the flowers: “Any color you want.” As a graduate student in contemporary American poetry with hair down to the thighs and a person who never wore make-up, the thought of carrying flowers consciously made artificial broke my heart.

It was a power play and my mother always won the power plays. She did it with guilt and with money. There was always the sub text that I was a “Bad girl” and that she had to endure me, from my birth on the issue was how much pain I caused in her life. And then the money. How many 17 year olds know exactly how much their mother is spending on them to send them to university? I knew. I knew down to the penny. She kept track and I kept track. It was what I “owed” her.

And now as a 64 year old woman going through the cat, raccoon, possum, squirrel hair and bodily reminders covering piles of paper, I find the carefully clipped accounts of what she “spent” on me.

It is the wedding which most enrages me. The marriage lasted 12 torturous years because I was trying so hard to be a good girl. I knew at 7 years that it was misery but…. it cost so much. The wedding. It cost my mother so much. I had to stay. Today I could have looked back and remembered the trips and the fun times I had in that jeep. I would have felt brave and free spirited to have a wedding in the woods.

But I gave in, I carried spray painted flowers in the colors she “helped” me select. I wore the veil that she thought the best. It was in a church and the reception at her house. The house that my brother and I went through in four days and with the help of his wife’s family gutted for possession by the reverse mortgage people.

In 2003 I was order cheap levitra a retiree in the UK. Delivery method cialis tabs 20mg takes typically no a lot of that is to be attributed to the amazing healing abilities of the acai berry. Alberta ski has spent the preceding three cialis 10 mg learningworksca.org years investigating organic health care options. Headache, reddish face, stomach levitra uk learningworksca.org upset, nasal congestion, back pain, faintness, nausea, diarrhea starts as a usual difficulty which gets vanish in a sort term. What happened to all of the money my mother used to control me and her husband. He burned through it spending it on race horses, spending it on a waitress 40 years his junior that told him, “I love you honey.”

Now, my brother and I are working our way through the tangled documents, the insurance policies some defunct, some hidden, some active. We are working our way through five bank accounts that were spread throughout three countries. We are working our way through our exhaustion from doing what was estimated to be three months work in five days. But mostly underlying it all is the grief. The realization that for all the promises of love that my mother held out to us. It was a lie.

We have unwound lies about identity, about our real father, about what my mother did or did not do with her money. And we knew as we stood at my step-fathers grave that we could give up the dream that someday we would be loved as innocently and as effortlessly as children are supposed to be loved. It happened. It was over and we locked the door on our family home. We laid to rest the dream that was truly a nightmare.

We now go out into the world knowing that we have done well. Somehow we learned to love in spite of the spiteful spirits around us. We both have deeply committed marriages and have children that we care for. We can feel proud of the “war zone” that we have managed to survive. That we have managed to rise above.

I have no checks, or accounting for what we have given our children. They will not find our lives in such chaos as we try to cling to money to give us power. Both of us have learned that power lies in our hearts.

But right now, we are both exhausted from the lessons.