Mom and Me ...

And then there were three.
     Our first house in Alamogordo holds a lot of conflicted memories. While I clearly remember giggling and hiding in the back seat of my father's car so that I could go with him to work and then, later, often being frightened of him, too, I clung more dearly to my mother's skirts. I was never shy. I remember my mother putting me in beauty pageants at that age. She would buy me beautiful clothes and I would model at community functions. I can still see the stage and me going out and turning around and around. I also remember sitting with her as she read books to me. She had so many books and I know that my love of books comes from her. We went to movies a lot, too. My mother loved westerns. After a matinee, we'd walk home and I chattered like a magpie. Mom said that I talked early and ever so often, when she would hear me speak, she said that she knew that I would write for a living.
     During the day, it was just my Mom and me. We walked together everywhere. I learned later that the reason my mother walked everywhere was that she had not yet learned to drive. I can remember my chubby hands in hers as traveled to the market or to the movies. She was my beautiful mother and she loved me dearly. My mother told me that I was the best baby. She said that I had the sweetest disposition, sleeping through the night almost from the first and giving her time in the morning to rise and do chores before I awakened. She said that I always smiled and was happy.
     That seems to work with my memories. About her. About me with her. Playing jacks on the steps. Walking home from a movie. Making ice cream with her. Being read to. Comforting memories of our time together.
     When I asked my mother about how she met my father, she told me that she was a junior in high school in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. My father was a teacher there. Mom said that he was the smartest man she had ever met. My mother had to have been about 17 or so. She was the only of her siblings at the time who pursued her education, finally going to school where her mother's sister lived in order to finish. My mother's father was not the same father as her siblings. He was a dark man with wavy hair, like my mother's with strong Indian blood. She met him a few times and was even friends with his son later in life, but she didn't like to think of herself as the bastard child although the stigma lay dormant in her heart.
     Interesting how history often repeats itself. I consider myself as having two grandfathers--the legal one and the biological one. We have family reunions where my legal grandfather's family (cousins, aunts and uncles) meet and we never discuss my mother's father. I'm part of that family dynamics and culture. Simple enough, but when my mother was divorcing my father, she shared with me that she thought a child should be with his or her real parent and that it went a long way in her decision to marry Henry. She told me about Dr. Hill and said that she was ready to marry him until Henry divorced his third wife and asked for her hand. Mom explained that she didn't want me to feel as she often felt, abandoned and never really belonging to her father. But, I did feel that way sometimes. There was something fractured in my relationship with my father early on. Was it my fault?
     Being almost a decade older than my Mom, I wouldn't say that she was looking for a father figure when she and he came together. Dad was still relatively young when they met, but he was the adult and she was the child. Her relationship with him probably wasn't sanctioned by society. My mom remembered that one day he was gone. I asked her if Dad had been fired for dating her. She said simply, "I think so."
     My mother idolized my father and even at their worst moments, she didn't allow me to talk bad about him. She would quietly remind me when I was at my wits' end about him--"He's your father, P.K." However, I do believe that the time they met in Bartlesville placed them indelibly in each other's soul. It was several years before they would meet again. The attraction was still strong and then I was conceived. While home, awaiting my birth and her belief that they would get married, he abandoned her again. Yet, her heart was true. Those times that he abandoned her, I believe he was bowing to societies' dictates. Each time they came together, she was ruled by love.
     I think over the years my father basked in my mother's worship of him. Even when they divorced and she was at her angriest about the things that he had done, she never stopped loving him. She never remarried. I believe she understood him best and now, trying to see through her eyes, I begin to see why.
     Next: The March of the Munchkins--Siblings Galore