family | We Will Begin Again

May 09 2013

mother’s day

Sunday is Mother’s Day. This year, I decided to end my relationship with my stepmother, who raised me, and my biological mother is dead. Both of these women lacked the resources or capabilities to be effective parents. My mother-in-law is amazing, but she did not raise me. And so there is a bit of an empty space where a mother should be. Most of the time, this does not feel like sadness. It feels like relief. Every year, I used to try and find a neutral card to give my stepmother. There were rows and rows of cards with pictures of flowers and heartfelt, saccharine poetry. Generally, I’d find something blank and scrawl something inside.

Dear Mom (I don’t want to call you Mom, but remember how you forced me to when I was 8?):

I don’t really know you even though we lived in the same household for many years. Please accept this candle/lotion/chocolate that I felt obligated to purchase for you. I hope the weather is satisfactory today.

Regards,

Angela

That’s what I always felt like saying, anyway.

This dumb photo of Gwyneth Paltrow and her mother made me cry one time.

My friend recently lost his mother. Although I wasn’t close to my mother, and I didn’t know her very well, and I have in my possession only one photograph of us together, and I rarely think about her or cry about her, I feel that absence intensely from time to time, like pain in an amputated limb. I am so sorry for my friend, who was close to his mother. I know the pain he must feel is 1000 times more intense than what I feel, and that there is nothing anyone can do to change any of that.

I guess what I am trying to say is that Mother’s Day, like all holidays, can be complicated.

I have two lovely boys, and I hope I know I am a good mother to them and I know I can do better. Last night, I helped Ben cast his Mario Bros. toys as characters in Hairspray (again). Mario is Link. Luigi is Corny. Princess Peach is Amber. Toadette is Tracy. I was exhausted after work, and this made me laugh and laugh. This morning, Elliott insisted he didn’t need a sweater, and I told him to step outside and see. I watched as he stood alone in the backyard and felt the breeze wash over him, squinting into the sunlight. He finally agreed to the sweater. Like me, he is stubborn. It is sometimes frustrating, but I also love that he needs to decide for himself.

I want to say thank you to these little guys for teaching me what it is to be a mother even as I am still figuring it out. I want to say thank you to them for making Mother’s Day meaningful to me, something to celebrate. And I want to say that I am sorry to those of you out there for whom this holiday is painful and complicated and nothing like the cards or commercials try to convince you to believe that it should be.

Let’s make this day, and every day, our own.

Photo credit: http://jjscholl.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/i-heart-mom/

Tagged children, death, family, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hairspray, Mario Brothers, mother's day, parenting, stepmothers

Apr 02 2013

7 Comments

Angela Cardinale Bartlett

david

David and I slide down the steepest side of a dirt and gravel hill. Our bodies rattle, plumes of dust rocket from our sneakers, we scream out in terror and joy. There is dust in our teeth, dust in our lungs. We have scraped our legs. Everything is blue sky and orange groves. Our stucco tract home is no more than a couple of miles away, but it might as well be gone. Our sister Sally is still there, neatly tucked into the sofa, reading, or playing Solitaire. She prefers to stay inside.

David tells me he sees visions of our dead mother all of the time. God inserts these images into his brain. God talks to him, too. He tells him to stop listening to Supergrass and Radiohead. I ask David, “If God told you to injure yourself, would you?” He hesitates before he says he doesn’t know. David was too young when she died. He doesn’t remember her.

David asks me if I have thought about my long distance phone service provider. I have not. He wears dark, shiny shirts now. Ties. Slacks. There is gel in his hair. He says “sweet” all of the time, like punctuation. He is a member of a pyramid scheme that has been banned in several states. I tell him I am not interested. I use very few words. I know I am hurting him.

David brings a Franciscan monk with him to Thanksgiving. The monk is a stereotype. He looks like Friar Tuck from that 1970s Robinhood cartoon. He wears a brown robe, tied at the waist with a rope. He is cheerful and round. He eats two slices of pie. I want to make fun of him, to shout to everyone, “There’s a monk at our table!” But he is kind and we take a photo together. I rest my arm on his shoulder and smile.

My friend Betony posts an Instagram of her brother on Facebook. His hair is brown, wind-whipped and frozen in place, and he wears a button-up denim shirt. He’s smiling. He looks like Betony, especially around the eyes. His fingers are curled around a tiny plastic figure. The caption says, “Love means making your brother pose with a Twilight doll.” I laugh when I realize her brother looks exactly like the miniature Robert Pattinson. They are wearing the same clothes. The hair, the complexion, it is all the same. Then, suddenly, I feel like crying.

David will propose to a girl this year. There will be a ceremony at the Catholic church where she lives and teaches. I am not invited. The news I receive about David never comes from David. I heard she has an extraordinary amount of siblings. 16? 17? Aren’t they all girls? That can’t be true. David holds signs outside of abortion clinics. He tells me he is praying for my children. David believes I should stay at home, but I can’t stay there. I can’t believe in God. We seldom speak, there’s too much to avoid. David will marry this girl and move back east, and there is nothing left to recover.

Tagged atheism, childhood, Facebook, family, feminism, God, Instagram, marriage, Radiohead, Robert Pattinson, siblings, Supergrass

Mar 19 2013

7 Comments

Angela Cardinale Bartlett

little ray

We used to call him Little Ray. My father named him after himself–he’s the first child from my father’s first marriage. I’m the third child from my father’s third marriage, and we’re about 14 years apart. We have never been close, but a little over three years ago, he began telling several of my siblings that he was going to bring one of his many guns over to my house and teach me “a lesson.” He thought I thought I was too good. He thought I was turning my teenage niece, his only daughter, into an atheist, a feminist, a liberal. (And maybe I was, though that has never been my intention.)

Ray has been using hard drugs, mostly speed, since he was 13 years old. He dropped out of high school at 15. He’s 46 now, though he looks at least 10 years older. His body has been through a lot. Ray knows a lot about history, particularly Civil War history, and when he is high, he can deliver a lecture that rivals that of any historian. When he is not high, however, he is barely functional. I have seen him spit in my father’s face. I have seen him in withdrawals on my father’s couch, stinking, sweating, raging. I have seen his eyes shine with pride watching his daughter perform a solo at her school assembly. I have seen him rip cabinets away from the walls with just his hands. Ray’s been to rehab before, and he always emerges with hope and plans. He has enrolled in GED programs before, community college classes. Once, when we were on speaking terms, he told me he was taking an astronomy class. “That’s so great,” I told him. And I meant it. There were weeks, months, when things were good again. But that hasn’t happened in a long time.

My father wants us all to get along. I tried to explain to him that it is difficult to get along with someone you barely know, especially when that person threatens to kill you. “He isn’t serious,” my father said, waving it away with his hands. He really wants us to get along, even if it means ignoring reality. I thought it over. Ray had guns. He was angry, irrational, and using methamphetamines. I wasn’t going to take any chances. I refused to attend any family function to which Ray was invited. I started looking over my shoulder when I left the house, and at work. After several weeks of this, with escalating threats communicated to various siblings, I finally just got angry. I decided to write Ray a letter, demanding to know why he was threatening me.

A couple of days later, I received a reply. The handwriting seemed erratic, oversized, pressed hard into the paper. If there were a font called Pain, my brother was writing with it. The note offered no explanation, but pleaded for forgiveness. It was difficult to read, and I instantly felt all of the built up anger dissolve. I just felt sad.

Ray moved back to Ohio last year, and he lives with his mother and his aunt now. His mother was one of the first people who introduced him to drugs, but she says she’s found Jesus and things are different now. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go at this point, and it isn’t going well. Ray’s guns are in storage in a public unit somewhere in Southern California, and my father foots the monthly bill. I am grateful for the distance.

When we moved into a different house, several months ago, I found the letter Ray had sent me. The sadness rose up again, and I crushed the paper in my hands and threw it away. He doesn’t know where I live now, and I don’t know where he lives. I used to call him Little Ray. Now, I rarely call him anything at all.

Photo credit: http://www.kenandpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Big-Idea.jpg

Tagged addiction, drugs, family, guns, siblings

Jan 14 2013

the big a

“By the way,” my father said on the phone this morning, “Diegolina died a few days ago.” He dropped it in casually, after detailing his weekend. He’d gone snowshoeing for the first time, with his girlfriend. He and my stepmother have been divorced for several years now, and Diegolina was my stepmother’s mother. I had been taught to call her Abuela. My father called her The Big A, made her a joke. She never thought that was funny.

Abuela had a hard life. She dropped out in elementary school, sold tamales wrapped in banana leaves on the street. Her home was a collection of tar paper and tin shacks. She cooked food over a fire in the dirt. She had seven children. Her husband was a drunk who beat her constantly and, once, tried to force her to drink poison as my stepmother watched. He hit her in the face with a belt buckle, and, as a result, she was nearly blind in one eye. Abuela lived with us for weeks here and there throughout my childhood. Ay dios mio, she used to say, all of the time, stereotypically. She watched telenovelas endlessly, the loud music and dramatic exclamations bouncing through the house. She cooked a red soup with chunks of shark meat floating in it, homemade corn tortillas. She cried for hours and hours. She told me I was fat. She told me my stepmother betrayed her country when she became a citizen. “Angie, Angie,” she called me. I bent to embrace her tiny frame, as I was required to do, and she’d cup my face and kiss my cheek with feathery lips. Her brown skin felt cool, and smooth, like wax. She smelled like flowers, and something else, something bad. I was expected to love this virtual stranger, whom I first met when I was 8, and whom I saw in short, sporadic bursts.

I did not make an effort to know her. I am ashamed to say that mostly, she annoyed me. I was a selfish teenager, and she sighed and criticized constantly. She took up a bedroom, and I had to share a bed with my sister. She spent what seemed like hours in the bathroom. My stepmother was even meaner than she usually was with Abuela around. I didn’t have the patience for it. My junior year of high school, she got sick, and I had to take over her job for no pay at the Wishy Washy Laundromat. Abuela was sick a lot–she had diabetes and gall bladder problems and severe depression. I was in high school at the time, and for weeks, I stayed up into the early morning hours, scraping hair and gum from the wheels of the laundry carts, sopping up strangers’ scum.

When I wasn’t annoyed with her, I made fun of her. I have a photograph of her wearing a black t-shirt featuring a huge, fluorescent green marijuana leaf. It says, “This bud’s for you.” She had no idea what she was wearing. She poses for the photograph, stony-faced, somewhere in San Bernardino. None of my stepmother’s Mexican family smiled in photographs. It was only after she lived here for several years that my stepmom began to smile. When you think about it, the constant smiling is goofy, for people who don’t know true suffering, who expect everything to work out. For Americans.

It was cruel of me to make her into a joke. I make jokes all of the time, about everything, even when I shouldn’t. I didn’t want to deal with the guilt of knowing about her life and the lives of all of her family back in Mexico. Were they my family too? Who was she to me? Who were they? My stepmother didn’t seem to care, then, or now. Abuela was sick in a hospital in Mexico for awhile, and my stepmother didn’t visit. Her family will call her for money, and she will send it, like she always does, and she will do so begrudgingly. She will not go there to face all of those hungry and angry faces, all of the chaos that will surely result from this death.

Once, when I was maybe sixteen years old, Abuela sang a birthday song to me in Spanish, in front of my family and a few of my friends. She had tears in her eyes. I know it took a lot of courage. I didn’t love her, but sometimes I think she loved me.

Tagged death, empathy, family, love, Mexico, poverty

Aug 12 2012

2 Comments

Angela Cardinale Bartlett

options

(I know I look angry here. That’s just how my face looks.)

We don’t look exactly alike, but when I saw this photograph of my grandmother several weeks ago, I was startled by the resemblance. Part of my surprise came from the fact that I’d never seen a photo of her so young. All of the photographs of her at my dad’s house, she’s seemingly forty to fifty years old, no matter the age of her children. She just had one of those faces that seemed to spend so much time in one decade. Now, she’s 95, spending her days reading newspapers in an assisted living facility. She doesn’t remember any of us. When my father tells her how old she is, she puts her hands up to her cheeks and forms an exaggerated “O” with her mouth, a Macaulay Culkin-esque gesture of extreme surprise.

In this photo, Grandma is probably somewhere around 18-20 years old. Years ago, she used to tell me how ugly she was, how ugly her mother told her she was, how her mother used to dress her up and put makeup on her and place her on a chair out on the front porch and hope someone would see her and want to marry her. No one did. My grandmother’s parents were from Sicily, but she had been born in Ohio. My grandfather and his parents were from Sicily, too. That is no coincidence. You see, my grandparents were first cousins. Their mothers were worried about them. My grandfather was a womanizer. My grandmother would be an old maid. The solution? Arranged marriage!

As you might guess, that didn’t turn out so well, though they did remain married until my grandfather died in 1991. My grandfather was an abusive alcoholic. He slept with many other women and did little to conceal it. My grandmother accepted this, and she grew hard and mean and abusive herself as the years progressed.

Old-school Italians, at least the ones I grew up around, are not kind to their women. Their women stay inside and spend hours kneading dough and allowing it to rise and baking it into bread and serving it with sauce and noodles and pig ears and feet and kielbasa. They stand and sit and stand and sit, retrieving forks and napkins and coffee and ice, and finally eat their meals when they are cold. The men move to the other room and the children move outside, leaving the aftermath, which the women dutifully clean. The men grunt and smoke and curse and watch t.v. They compare cars and sons. They beat their women if they talk too much.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother had a minor stroke. Her life had been centered around him for over fifty years. A couple of years later, she was visiting his grave and saw a man visiting his wife’s grave. They went to coffee and became girlfriend and boyfriend and eventually moved in together. He is dead now, too, and it is just my grandma again. As she has lost her memory, her edges have softened. She doesn’t remember any of us, but she is happier than I ever remember her being.

My father is Italian-American and my stepmother came from Mexico. Neither of these cultures, in my experience, is kind to their women. Though I was not placed on a porch, I was raised to know my place. I was hit for talking too much. I was told no man would ever love me. And I believed that for a little while. I might have spent a life filled with despair and hardness, like my grandmother did. But I rejected all of that, because I was able to. I had options that my grandmother never had.

Tagged family, Italians, misogyny

We Will Begin Again

one badass writing gang

Tag Archives: family

mother’s day

david

little ray

the big a

options

Follow “We Will Begin Again”

We Will Begin Again

one badass writing gang

Tag Archives: family

mother’s day

Share this:

Like this:

david

Share this:

Like this:

little ray

Share this:

Like this:

the big a

Share this:

Like this:

options

Share this:

Like this:

Follow “We Will Begin Again”