My Mother, The Diner: Part 1
It always seems best to me to start at the beginning.
When I was born in 1962 my parents were 40 years old and my mother was dying of emphysema. My older sister was 18 and embarking on a relationship with the guy she would eventually marry. My older brother was 9 and involved in his own imagination. My father was totally focused on his career as well as a few other women.
I only have one real memory of my mother before she died three years later. I remember her sitting in a dining room chair gasping for air.
I have one other memory from my first 3 years and that is of having to keep my red tricycle out of the way of the truck that pulled into our driveway and hearing the metallic clanging of the oxygen tanks as they were delivered to our house.
I've heard from family and friends that the first 3 years of my life were filled with chaos. My mother was having psychotic episodes that were caused by the lack of oxygen to her brain, the family said, though they resembled episodes of a paranoid schizophrenic. The police were in and out of the house because my mother thought she was being watched through the television. She saw lights and tried to read messages in the rubbings she made from the scratches on the back of my father's credit cards. She wrote messages on the kitchen cabinets with white shoe polish and when the family came home after leaving us alone, Mother had covered us both in glitter.
My sister said it was a horrible time for the family and it seems as though the family pulled away from school, church, and the community. Our family became one of those mid-century families withdrawing from the community trying to hide a mental health secret.
We had a black maid named Gracie and she cooked and cleaned, and took care of my mother and of me. My sister was involved in my care, too. She dropped out of high school to help the family. Her classmates and church people actually thought I was the illegitimate child of her and her boyfriend.
It is said that I called my sister, "Mama" and called my mother, "That Lady."
So, as an infant in this situation, who knows how well I was taken care of. It's probably just as well that I don't remember. As long as I can remember, I used to say, "I don't miss what I never had." I don't know where that bit of wisdom came from. I just knew it to be true of my life.
When I went into any situation or was introduced to people their initial reaction was pity. Everyone felt sorry for me, but chaos is normal life when you don't know any different.
My own family's reaction to me was: guilt. Everyone always felt they had failed me in some way. I don't know what they didn't do, but "I never missed what I never had."
After Mother died, we had the funeral and they said hundreds of people came to see the beautiful young woman who died and left her sad husband and 3 children. I stood on the front pew with my family and a whole community of people felt sorry for me.
In the whole story of my first 5 years of life, there was never a story about meals or food. No mention of food at all. I don't remember what I ate or who fed me. Food was not involved in our family story.
In the coming years, however, food began to make an appearance and she was not pleasant.
