Progeny

It's impossible to completely understand me without a story...

Once upon a time there was a vivacious, astonishingly smart and funny woman in her thirties. She could climb mountains in four inch wedgie sandals and navigate her way through the Negev in French. My mother played the part of the dumb blond just up to the point at which she had men and women by the throat and then turned her wits on them as if she were tossing a ball and sweeping up all the jacks on the floor. That's the only way I can explain how we found French tourists in all parts of Israel because my mother spoke no Hebrew and her Yiddish wasn't sufficing, probably because it was handed down from my grandmother who had stopped being in the presence of other speakers of that language when she was about 14. English was my grandmother's best language, followed by Latin, Polish, a smattering of Yiddish and German. French still is my mother's strong suit. But, her body is now made of styrofoam peanuts instead of bones, as arthritis has shelled her skeleton. Long ago, her mind became riddled with paranoid schizophrenia and the odd remarks about what a person might be thinking gave way to full blown theories about "those who listen in the walls".

I've pretty much thought of my mother as deceased since she was 38 years old and woke up after electric shock treatments unable to remember that I had a tenth birthday party a year before. I don't know whether she ever recovered that, or other memories she lost. She became insufferable as quickly as she became incoherent, insisting that what she "heard" was gospel, that there were people coming to "clean" me (presumably of emotions from the context she gave) and that there were two or more versions of my uncle, one taller than the other. One night she was sitting in the bathroom and she called me over to tell me that she realized she was going to become overbearing and that I should run away. It was one of the few sane moments she had and I am always grateful for it, though it took me too long to take her advice.

My mother's face practically flexes -- her cheeks and her eyes wink in a forward and backward motion. It's a code she uses for "you're giving away a secret" or "how dare you cross that line." She accounts for everything she spends every day, making sure that she isn't missing any money. I've never understood that -- if you've lost a dollar, you've lost it. You can't get it back at two in the morning when you've realized it. Nights did extended tours in the apartment I grew up in and no one ever slept before 3am by the time I was in nineth grade. Occasionally, my mother would go to bed around 12:30 and I could start my homework then. Sometimes I could start earlier, but there would be the constant interruptions.

One interruption which drove me to overeat until I was numb was her violent rages about something she'd lost. A safety pin, a penny or a Monet earring and she would go on and on for hours -- at least four, but usually six and sometimes days. Endless screaming and ranting and twisting of the face. I used to put money in her purse so that would eliminate loss of money. She never questioned why she might be AHEAD a few dollars. If it was a thing I could replace, I would do it, but I was a kid and I didn't have the kind of resourcefulness to find "just the right store" until I was seventeen. You never could believe a person could talk about a thing so much. Any thing. Recently, I threw away a host of things from my mother's bedroom so she could manipulate her walker through it after surgery and because the hospital social worker insisted that, at least, one room be useable for physical therapy. As you might guess, my mother doesn't throw things away very often. Anyway, she sued me for 25,000 and we settled at 10,000. She had to know that doing this would mean I would NEVER speak with her again. It wasn't the money, but the fact that my mother would bring me to court, risk my job in doing it (and threaten to inform my job of things as she saw them which, these days could land me in the Rubber Room just for the excuse...the DOE will do anything to get rid of high salaried personnel.)
That my life meant nothing in the measure of her things...that ended it for us. I don't want to know when she dies or where she's buried. The threatening, malicious husk which inhabits her curved cadaver is of no interest to me.

Which is why except for my cats, my uncle and my friends, I don't guard anything. It makes me a bit difficult because when people lose things I don't really encourage them to get upset. Rather, I try to think of how it can be replaced and if its worth it. Sometimes, I replace it for them. It makes me happy to solve such a silly problem. I swore to myself at nine that no thing would ever mean that much to me. And luck and love have always kept me free from needing things although loss of people gets harder and harder on me.