Hints and Guesses

It was a family saying: “Huh?”

Or at least Sue thought so.

She, an amateur woodcarver, carved a plaque even, a plaque that simply said, “Huh?”

Huh.

I stood alone. My father sat to my left in the black lounge chair. My stepmother sat to the right in the brown recliner. My mother sat somewhere in Kansas.

“Your mother sent a birthday card,” she said. My tenth birthday—or it had been, four days past. “What kind of mother sends a card like this?” She’d signed the card “Happy birthday, Mother.” There was no gift, just the card. And it was four days late.

“She doesn’t love you,” she said. “If she did, the card would have been sent on time, and she would have written something meaningful. And she would have sent a gift.”

My small, skinny, 10-year-old self began to cry, and for the first time, my father spoke.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

Why was I crying indeed? Perhaps because the mother I got, the one I lived with every day, was not so much mother as caretaker. She fed us three times a day. We wore clean clothes. We went to school. She made birthday cakes and held small family parties. These are not small things, and acknowledging them is to recognize part of the truth.

She served as religious educator. We studied our Sabbath School lesson and read assigned religious books every day—an hour on weekends, half an hour on weekdays was the setup, but in reality we started when she told us to start, and we stopped when she told us to stop. She often told me I was a bad, unrepentant child who was on the certain road to committing the unpardonable sin (whatever that was), so to save my soul she repeatedly assigned Steps to Christ. I can spot a quote from that book at fifty paces.

She hit us. Sometimes with a wooden paddle. Sometimes with the leather belt that hung behind our bedroom door. Sometimes with the plastic ruler in the pencil cup on the table next to her brown recliner, or the one she kept in her car visor. Occasionally she hit us with her bare hand. She hit us often, and almost always she hit us in places no one else would ever see.

Fours years and a handful of visits with one mother. Five years of living every day with this other one, plus a father who was often gone. In the face of overwhelming emotion, my ten-year-old self was powerless to do the math, but the result was still the same.

“I’m all mixed up,” I said.

He took me in his arms, and I cried some more.

Read the companion piece to this post at Thursday Drive.

Surprise, surprise. Surprises can be fun, but I’d rather be the surpriser than the surprisee. A childhood in which most of the good and most of the bad (in other words, nearly everything) was a surprise heightened my appreciation of the value of anticipation.

One memory of a surprise floats to the surface. Most of the setup details are lost to my memory, but when I returned from Korea in 1989 at the beginning of my fourth year in college, I didn’t tell my sister exactly when I would be returning. I told some friends, however, and we concocted a plan wherein a group of them would be at the airport to greet me. She’d go there too, on her own, having been told by her boss to pick someone up.

She was surprised, all right. We both cried, and our friends laughed at their success.

Weekly Anamnesis