Tag Archives: childhood

All the Things My Mother Never Knew

No parent is so blind as the one who refuses to see.

My mom wasn’t home over the weekend, but no one would believe that if they were listening in on her phone conversation. It was a Monday morning, sometime in the fall of 1993, and my mother was on the phone with her sister, rewriting the narrative of my life.

Every weekend since we had moved to this god forsaken desert three years prior, she had flown back to our old home in another state. It was my dad’s gift to her, a promise he had made when he took this new job in New Mexico. His wife would continue to spend her weekends playing soccer with friends and visiting family.

I don’t think I minded too much, really. My mom and I did not get along. Somehow, I knew I wasn’t the child she had really wanted. I wasn’t a boy, I wasn’t sporty enough, I didn’t live to compete.

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I Learned the Secret to Everything In Aunt Nancy’s Basement

(Some assembly required)

Aunt Nancy’s small farm house had a basement. Our cookie cutter suburban tract home had no basement. Maybe this is why I spent so many hours each summer exploring the dark crannies and nooks of this mysterious underground room.

This wasn’t the spooky basement that popular culture had prepared me for. Aunt Nancy’s basement was neat and orderly. A magical place where glittering canning jars with jewel-tone contents were stacked to the ceiling on strong wooden shelves. A place where bunches of onions and braids of garlic were tacked onto the supports for those shelves. Along the bottom, crates of winter squashes, apples, and potatoes lay nestled in protective nests of shredded newspaper and straw.

In one corner a scrap of carpet covered the floor, and atop it sat a few broken down armchairs and an old sagging couch. Stacks of board games and old magazines sat on a shelf. Dubbed “Twister Corner” by my auntie’s family, this was where we all went when funnel clouds threatened. It was also where my cousins and I played when it was too dark or too rainy to go outside.

One set of shelves in Twister Corner held something different, though.

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I Remember In Flowers

A mother’s love isn’t always guaranteed

The flowers are the electric yellow of margarine. These blooms are the technicolor adverts in glossy women’s magazines telling me I can hardly believe they aren’t butter.

Momma collected women’s magazines and spread them across the coffee table like a bouquet, but I never saw her read one. Momma had no time for things like reading. Instead, they collected dust until years later an adolescent me peeked inside to decipher my own womanhood.

Yellow flowers made Momma happy. Yellow was the color of the sunflowers that made Momma think of her childhood home in Kansas. Momma loved that home and Momma hated that home. Even at three years old, I knew these simple truths.

I was always wary of Momma.

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Escaping the Tower She Built

My mother’s fears imprisoned me

The world, from my earliest memories, was made of forest paths that led to dark woods, full of wolves and witches. I knew that the glowing windows of the houses up the hill held ballrooms and gentlefolk being plagued by curses and intrigue. In the corner of every room lurked a Georgie Porgie ready to make me cry, or worse.

I was not yet five, but I had memorized nearly every nursery story my father read to me. Every damsel in distress, every rhyme, every Victorian moral that they contained. My impressionable young mind devoured each new tale as a guidebook to navigating the adulthood I was constantly reminded was my eventual lot.

Never mind that the forest paths that terrified and tempted me were little more than wooded verges separating tract homes from strip malls.

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