My Second Mother
When I was growing up, I was acquainted with both her mother, Mildred, and her Aunt Bernice, but I'm sorry to say we never had one of these close intergenerational relationships. I just always found it very, very had to relate to them, especially as I got older, and I think they had similar issues with me (and my brothers). I wish I'd tried harder, but you do have to make allowances for kids. Their hearts were definitely in the right place, and Aunt Bernice in particular used to make these stuffed animals for us (not to mention really ugly Christmas tree ornaments). A lot of these are lost to time, but I've held on to the wiener dog below, which was always my favorite thing that she made me.
My mother’s sister—my Aunt Bernice—was everything a mother should be, I thought.
When I received games and toys for holidays, she was never too busy to play with me, leaving the other older folk to their own concerns.
When I could not learn to tell time at school and worried that my whole life would be ruined became of this fatal flaw, she sat down with me in the kitchen and, using the large kitchen clock, worked with me until I could play the telling-time games that had so terrified me at school.
She took me to see The Wizard of Oz and waxed indignant at the horrifying monkey scenes. In my aunt’s mind, life was supposed to be entirely beautiful and orderly for a young child—in fact, for everyone.
Although I knew my mother thought me overweight—but still tried to express her love by feeding me a perfectly horrid diet of sugary sweets--in my aunt’s eyes, I was perfect. She would buy a fancy dress for me for some holiday, and I would hear my mother screaming “It makes her look like a sausage.” I wonder if she was jealous of my love for my aunt.
She did not want to confront imperfections in the world, either for herself or for me. Above all else, everything should be cheery, optimistic. Perhaps this came from her childhood worries over my Uncle Eddie, the black sheep of the family. When he would run away or stay out past curfew, my mother told me that my grandmother would pace the floor with my aunt, a young child, pacing right behind her.
One day, my cousin and I left the room while we had been watching a movie with my aunt, in which a child was very sick. When we returned, we asked if he had died and she brightly said, “No, he recovered.” The problem was that her lie made nonsense of the rest of the movie. I sometimes wonder if my morbid fear of death, which I’ve carried around from childhood, was nurtured by such cover-ups. Death must be pretty awful to a child if it can’t be acknowledged.
She was tall, thin, and I thought the height of glamour, though I can now see she had bad skin caused by the toxins in her body when her appendix burst when she was young. And her thin, lank hair later gave way to unbecoming wigs which made her look like a cancer patient.
But, oh, the sheaths and stiletto heels that she wore—more from necessity because of a toe disfigurement than fashion—marked her as sophisticated.
And she donated old clothes to my dress-up supply. I can still hear my grandmother saying “That child is going to break a leg in those high heels.”
I knew something was wrong when I was in grade school and she would suddenly leave the dining room in tears. A simple question about a dress I remembered vividly that she did not brought about the same reaction. Only later did I learn she had had a nervous breakdown and shock therapy.
According to my mother, this was caused by emotional repression.
This may have been true. Smoking was frowned on by my grandmother and, at about 34 years of age, my aunt would sneak into the bathroom every evening for her one smoke of the day. But I still wonder why my mother was so condescending about it.
In fact, in retrospect, I wonder how close their relationship was.
My mother used to say my aunt had been in love with a soldier, who wanted her to elope with him during wartime, but that she refused because she wanted a traditional courtship. This was always said critically.
And my mother was convinced that she was having an affair with her older boss of many years. I don’t know about this, but I remember my mother making snide comments about her “carrying on” at an office party with a married man. This I later found out to be true. But my mother never seemed to show any generosity of spirit.
For all this, my aunt was very traditional and always wanted to be married and have children, although she used to say God knew what he was doing keeping her single, since she was such a worrywart she would ruin any child she had.
My mother was very short and I was very tall, like my aunt (actually my father who was deceased); on that basis alone, people said we looked alike and I harbored suspicions that I was my aunt's illegitimate daughter. But in later years she said she would have been proud to acknowledge me if I had been.
When my grandparents died, my aunt and mother got an apartment together and that is when my relationship with both women became stoically combative.
My mother, the slob, and my aunt, the anal retentive housekeeper, did not make a good couple.
When they were young, my mother had always been thought of as the ugly, but smart, daughter, while my aunt was the pretty, dumb blond. And they would studiously live out these roles. When they argued, my aunt would say, ”Well, of course I don’t know anything.” And later, after my mother married a second time, she would always find some way to mention casually to my aunt that she had attracted two men. They were still playing their respective roles into their seventies. It seems such a waste.
How I hated these stereotypes when I was in high school. I was constantly filled with rage. I don’t know why I didn’t spontaneously combust. And the worst thing was that we had to give the appearance of the perfect family to all around us.
When I got my own apartment after college, all of that changed. I was independent and didn’t have to worry about family relationships.
I never did become close with my mother, but I did with my aunt. Still, there were quirks to her character that I had not noticed as a child. My aunt always had to have things done just her way or there would be unpleasantness. When my first husband and I were staying in her apartment and he was experiencing terrible allergies, she arrived home from work to find Arthur sitting on the couch amid a pile of used tissues since he had been sneezing uncontrollably. This went against her sanitation code which allowed for no undisposed-of tissues, and she asked me rather sharply if she didn’t have the right to have her apartment as she wanted it. I was deeply wounded. It was the first time she had ever spoken sharply and critically to me and, even though I was an adult, I came close to tears.
Another time Ed and I visited her and—naively resolving never to have credit cards—ran out of cash. We were supposed to meet friends in the city for dinner. I instinctively knew my aunt would hate this, but Ed suggested that we write her a check—we had our checkbook—that she could cash right in her bank on her street, and we could borrow that amount from an emergency fund of money that she always kept at home. She behaved as if we were trying to steal money from her, and it really hurt me. We just cancelled dinner.
When I could not reach her by phone one summer, I discovered by calling one of her neighbors who had a key to her apartment that she had taken off all her clothes and fainted during a heat wave. She was taken by an ambulance to a hospital and thence to a nursing home. It was a terrible place. They stole money from her and were verbally abusive. Her friends began calling me in Pa. and begging me to get her out of there.
My cousin Claire, who lives in N.J. and is one of the kindest people I know, took it upon herself to close up her apartment, sort through her finances, and take her to N.J. to live with herself, her mother, and her two children. All was well for a time until she began to complain that they were not treating her well, and she and my Aunt Mary started to have terrible arguments and even came to blows. Claire and I talked and decided that probably she needed nursing home care. I went to Jersey to break the news to her, naively thinking, as close as we had been, that she would listen to me. She was furious and started humming and clapping her hands over her ears to drown me out. The next day when she got up, I had to change her adult diaper and dress her, yet as she walked--staggered is more like it—out of her bedroom she said, “Look, I can go home.”
Well, finally the nursing home became a reality. I tried to call her from time to time but she was either too confused or angry to talk.
I think of how our love for each other—or mine for my aunt--waxed and waned. I can only conclude that, like all humans, she had two natures. What concerns me is that I not become a trial to my family and friends as I age. I’ve already told my children that, if I become toxic to them, they are to know that this is not the real me—that they have always given me joy.
I pray to enter old age with acceptance and grace.
My mother’s sister—my Aunt Bernice—was everything a mother should be, I thought.
When I received games and toys for holidays, she was never too busy to play with me, leaving the other older folk to their own concerns.
When I could not learn to tell time at school and worried that my whole life would be ruined became of this fatal flaw, she sat down with me in the kitchen and, using the large kitchen clock, worked with me until I could play the telling-time games that had so terrified me at school.
She took me to see The Wizard of Oz and waxed indignant at the horrifying monkey scenes. In my aunt’s mind, life was supposed to be entirely beautiful and orderly for a young child—in fact, for everyone.
Although I knew my mother thought me overweight—but still tried to express her love by feeding me a perfectly horrid diet of sugary sweets--in my aunt’s eyes, I was perfect. She would buy a fancy dress for me for some holiday, and I would hear my mother screaming “It makes her look like a sausage.” I wonder if she was jealous of my love for my aunt.
She did not want to confront imperfections in the world, either for herself or for me. Above all else, everything should be cheery, optimistic. Perhaps this came from her childhood worries over my Uncle Eddie, the black sheep of the family. When he would run away or stay out past curfew, my mother told me that my grandmother would pace the floor with my aunt, a young child, pacing right behind her.
One day, my cousin and I left the room while we had been watching a movie with my aunt, in which a child was very sick. When we returned, we asked if he had died and she brightly said, “No, he recovered.” The problem was that her lie made nonsense of the rest of the movie. I sometimes wonder if my morbid fear of death, which I’ve carried around from childhood, was nurtured by such cover-ups. Death must be pretty awful to a child if it can’t be acknowledged.
She was tall, thin, and I thought the height of glamour, though I can now see she had bad skin caused by the toxins in her body when her appendix burst when she was young. And her thin, lank hair later gave way to unbecoming wigs which made her look like a cancer patient.
But, oh, the sheaths and stiletto heels that she wore—more from necessity because of a toe disfigurement than fashion—marked her as sophisticated.
And she donated old clothes to my dress-up supply. I can still hear my grandmother saying “That child is going to break a leg in those high heels.”
I knew something was wrong when I was in grade school and she would suddenly leave the dining room in tears. A simple question about a dress I remembered vividly that she did not brought about the same reaction. Only later did I learn she had had a nervous breakdown and shock therapy.
According to my mother, this was caused by emotional repression.
This may have been true. Smoking was frowned on by my grandmother and, at about 34 years of age, my aunt would sneak into the bathroom every evening for her one smoke of the day. But I still wonder why my mother was so condescending about it.
In fact, in retrospect, I wonder how close their relationship was.
My mother used to say my aunt had been in love with a soldier, who wanted her to elope with him during wartime, but that she refused because she wanted a traditional courtship. This was always said critically.
And my mother was convinced that she was having an affair with her older boss of many years. I don’t know about this, but I remember my mother making snide comments about her “carrying on” at an office party with a married man. This I later found out to be true. But my mother never seemed to show any generosity of spirit.
For all this, my aunt was very traditional and always wanted to be married and have children, although she used to say God knew what he was doing keeping her single, since she was such a worrywart she would ruin any child she had.
My mother was very short and I was very tall, like my aunt (actually my father who was deceased); on that basis alone, people said we looked alike and I harbored suspicions that I was my aunt's illegitimate daughter. But in later years she said she would have been proud to acknowledge me if I had been.
When my grandparents died, my aunt and mother got an apartment together and that is when my relationship with both women became stoically combative.
My mother, the slob, and my aunt, the anal retentive housekeeper, did not make a good couple.
When they were young, my mother had always been thought of as the ugly, but smart, daughter, while my aunt was the pretty, dumb blond. And they would studiously live out these roles. When they argued, my aunt would say, ”Well, of course I don’t know anything.” And later, after my mother married a second time, she would always find some way to mention casually to my aunt that she had attracted two men. They were still playing their respective roles into their seventies. It seems such a waste.
How I hated these stereotypes when I was in high school. I was constantly filled with rage. I don’t know why I didn’t spontaneously combust. And the worst thing was that we had to give the appearance of the perfect family to all around us.
When I got my own apartment after college, all of that changed. I was independent and didn’t have to worry about family relationships.
I never did become close with my mother, but I did with my aunt. Still, there were quirks to her character that I had not noticed as a child. My aunt always had to have things done just her way or there would be unpleasantness. When my first husband and I were staying in her apartment and he was experiencing terrible allergies, she arrived home from work to find Arthur sitting on the couch amid a pile of used tissues since he had been sneezing uncontrollably. This went against her sanitation code which allowed for no undisposed-of tissues, and she asked me rather sharply if she didn’t have the right to have her apartment as she wanted it. I was deeply wounded. It was the first time she had ever spoken sharply and critically to me and, even though I was an adult, I came close to tears.
Another time Ed and I visited her and—naively resolving never to have credit cards—ran out of cash. We were supposed to meet friends in the city for dinner. I instinctively knew my aunt would hate this, but Ed suggested that we write her a check—we had our checkbook—that she could cash right in her bank on her street, and we could borrow that amount from an emergency fund of money that she always kept at home. She behaved as if we were trying to steal money from her, and it really hurt me. We just cancelled dinner.
When I could not reach her by phone one summer, I discovered by calling one of her neighbors who had a key to her apartment that she had taken off all her clothes and fainted during a heat wave. She was taken by an ambulance to a hospital and thence to a nursing home. It was a terrible place. They stole money from her and were verbally abusive. Her friends began calling me in Pa. and begging me to get her out of there.
My cousin Claire, who lives in N.J. and is one of the kindest people I know, took it upon herself to close up her apartment, sort through her finances, and take her to N.J. to live with herself, her mother, and her two children. All was well for a time until she began to complain that they were not treating her well, and she and my Aunt Mary started to have terrible arguments and even came to blows. Claire and I talked and decided that probably she needed nursing home care. I went to Jersey to break the news to her, naively thinking, as close as we had been, that she would listen to me. She was furious and started humming and clapping her hands over her ears to drown me out. The next day when she got up, I had to change her adult diaper and dress her, yet as she walked--staggered is more like it—out of her bedroom she said, “Look, I can go home.”
Well, finally the nursing home became a reality. I tried to call her from time to time but she was either too confused or angry to talk.
I think of how our love for each other—or mine for my aunt--waxed and waned. I can only conclude that, like all humans, she had two natures. What concerns me is that I not become a trial to my family and friends as I age. I’ve already told my children that, if I become toxic to them, they are to know that this is not the real me—that they have always given me joy.
I pray to enter old age with acceptance and grace.
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