I had just finished cleaning my second house for the day, after a full week of work, just hours before I went into labor. It was a Friday. My son was born that Saturday, after 12 hours of labor, they finally had to perform a C-section.
I returned to work with my infant in tow two weeks later. I was strong and fighting daily just to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.
The house that I cleaned that Friday afternoon was owned by a most unkind of clients, the last one you would want to have right before you go into labor.
I remember her well. She was a one time job. Over the phone, she said she was a few months pregnant and could no longer clean her home, needed a maid. I warned her that I was nine months pregnant but that it’s what I did for a living and was used to it.
I cleaned her house. It took longer than my regular homes. One time jobs always did. You’re new to the home and there’s always a build up of dust, dirt, grease, limescale deposits, that you wont have in a house that you regularly maintain.
So I cleaned her house. I still remember the extra dust in her upstairs rooms and having to stand on a chair in her kitchen to clean her cabinets.
When I was finished with the job, she handed me a broom and asked me to sweep her outside deck. This is the first and only job that ever asked me to include yard work as well. She hadn’t mentioned that when I had visited and made my bid.
My services included a lot of things, including replacing bed linens and towels, washing and folding the used linens. Dusting and cleaning the inside of homes from floor to ceiling, mopping every bare floor, scrubbing every tub, shower and toilet, every piece of the kitchen, even the inside and outside of every sliding glass door, but never was I asked to sweet an outside deck.
It was August in Texas and it was my due date. I took the broom and swept a very large deck. It took forever because the leaves kept getting stuck between the grooves of the wood and I had to bend over and pull them out. This woman did not become a regular client of mine.
Several hours later, my son was born.
When my mother learned of my pregnancy with him, she flew down to visit immediately.
“You’re going to have to get an abortion.” she said to me, the moment we sat on the couch in my home. I was 34 years old. It wasn’t that my mother was helping me out financially in any way at that point. I think she was upset at the anticipation of having to help me. I told her that I had not decided and she began to fume.
There was no talk after that, about the pregnancy, for the rest of her 24 hour visit. Until she was about to leave and she noticed a bottle of pre-natal vitamins in my cabinet. She picked up the bottle, turned around to me as if I’d done something criminal and said, “So you’ve decided.”
She never got over her anger at my decision to keep my son. She flew to Texas once again after I’d given birth to him. She sat in the hospital room and glared at my baby daddy the entire time he was there.
It’s true, we weren’t married and weren’t even living together, but he’d been paying all my medical bills, wanting to be there for his son at the very least. Her stares were so icy that he stayed away from the hospital, and from my home, until she went back to New Mexico a week later. After that, our relationship was never the same.
It’s probably just as well. He wasn’t a healthy man in any sense of the word, and never changed from what I ever learned. He never saw his son again after the age of two, not a penny of support, not even a call or a card.
He was going to drive me home from the hospital but my mother kept insisting that she could do it and he was relieved to not have to cross paths with her at the hospital again, so she drove us home.
It’s a ride I will never forget, the most painful memory of my life, physically. I’d just been stitched together three days earlier. They let me out early because I was in good shape, having stayed active the entire pregnancy. I might have been in better than average condition, but the stitches had not even begun to heal.
The road to our subdivision was a long, unpaved, graveled country road with lots of bumps and turns. My mother flew down the road and every bump felt like sharp needles shooting across my belly, all the way through, as deep as the stitches went. I cried out in pain. I feared I would split open. My mother moaned that her knee hurt and she had to get back to her pain pills. She was addicted the last several decades of her life. I braced myself against the bumps but nothing stopped the pain of each jolt. She never let up.
I felt her rage as we flew down that dark, bumpy country road.
I just found these pictures in an old scrap book, on the very last page. I had not looked closely at them until now, 39 years later. The rage in her face is so clear.
I still love my mother, don’t get me wrong, she was misguided in so many ways throughout her life. But truth is truth, and the fact is that she was furious with me for having a second child, for years she would storm around my house whenever she came to visit and no one else was around. She would moan and groan and let me know in every possible way how displeased she was with me. Yet no words were ever spoken.
This look on her face is the look that she mad-dogged my baby daddy with every time he was in the hospital room.
I’m sure that my sister, Nancy’s, mother-in-law saw this same look when she stopped visiting my sister in the hospital. Nell, my sister’s mother-in-law, had dearly loved my sister, had always been there for her through the years, when our mother had not been there for her in any shape or form. My mother had almost no contact with my big sister for her entire adult life. She was her stepmother and had never been kind or done anything to make her feel a part of the family, not since the age of five when Nancy came to live with us.
My sister told me in distress that Mom had made Nell feel so uncomfortable she didn’t want to come to the hospital any more. She said Nell told her, “I guess that you don’t need me here.”
My sister, Nancy, knew why Nell said it but felt helpless to protect her. She didn’t know what to say to Mom about it. She was afraid of hurting this woman who had ignored her existence for the past 45 years.
It is hard to communicate with someone who uses grunts, groans, moans and glares, rather than words.
I never wanted my hair to be that bleached out color. I bought my hair color from the bargain shelf of a drug store. All of my clothes were second hand. I only had two maternity dresses, both second hand.
We were dirt poor and I was scrubbing toilets for a living. It wasn’t a terrible job, and it wasn’t bad pay for the time. I mean, I stayed with it for twenty years, so I did enjoy it. Being active all day long kept my endorphins going. I adored most of the people that I worked for.
You choose your regular clients when you’re an independent contractor, so after a few years I had a solid list of wonderful people that I’d chosen because everything about working with them was a positive experience.
I noticed that most of the homes I stayed with had some things in common.
They had nice homes, but they were also modest homes, rather than ridiculously oversized.
Their children’s art work was on the refrigerator and throughout the home.
They recycled and were very conscientious about that.
They never asked for unreasonable amounts of work.
They were very generous with Christmas bonuses.
They were wholesome families, couples and singles, who lived modestly and not like entitled pigs.
A great number of them were teachers or professors.
I worked for these families for decades and watched their children grow up, go on to college and obtain careers that paid more than I would ever see. I recall blowing up rubber gloves for them when they were little, and making them laugh.
On the upside, my body grew stronger from all the physical exertion of the job. There’s a lot of squatting, bending and stretching involved when you are crouched over toilets, reaching behind them, bending over mop buckets and dust pans, reaching up to dust ceiling fans and light fixtures. When time is important, which is always the case for a single parent, you learn to make every move be efficient.
While in the recovery room after the C-section, there was a team of nurses working on my legs to bring back sensation. My legs were shapely and rock hard and the nurses kept carrying on about what good shape my legs were in. They asked me what I did to work out. Work out? I asked. I don’t think I’d ever heard the term before. Exercise, what do you do for exercise. I explained to them I don’t exercise, it’s what I do for a living, that must be it. I wasn’t even aware at the time that I was in good shape.
I didn’t realize how much I looked like a piece of trash. I guess by all angles, I was. Although, I never drank, never have. I hadn’t used drugs in over a decade. I worked extremely hard and tried to give my kids everything that I could. I didn’t party, lie, cheat or steal.
My crimes were smoking, hooking up with the wrong men, bringing my children into an unstable life, and raging about it afterwards.
I’ve tried to apologize for this and the response has been somewhat dismissive. She tells me it’s alright, and shuts me down, making it clear she doesn’t want to hear or talk about the past.
Yet, I hear the tales she tells, some of it completely fabricated, other stories distorted to make me the villain in every situation. She never mentions the years she was a dangerously impossible teenager.
I don’t try to defend myself to any of them, I only wish she were truthful. I guess this is my punishment.
Looking at my pictures from this era, I can see why my mother was upset with the direction I appeared to be heading. I don’t know why I never realized that I could have lived a better life. I think I really could have, I just submitted to so many crazy people around me. I just can’t understand it in any other way.
In this picture, it was my first day home from the hospital. I was heavily drugged because just three days earlier, I had been cut open across my middle, and given birth. Looking at these pictures now, I’m honestly shocked at what good shape I was in after a nine month pregnancy.
Once my mother got us home, insuring that the baby daddy wouldn’t be around to help since he lived on the other side of the lake and he was lead to believe she would be there the next week, my mother suddenly took my daughter and disappeared on me for a night or two. I think I almost lost my newborn son one of those night, waking up from my drugged sleep to see him lying horizontally in my lap, mouth filled to the brim with spit up. He couldn’t breath and he was too small to make a sound. He was only a few days old and couldn’t even turn his head to the side. I woke just in time to save him from choking to death. He was drowning in his own spit up. My mother had left me alone when I was in no condition to be alone, and it was her who had made sure that I would alone.
Years later, she would do the exact same thing to my oldest sister with fatal consequences, running off all the people who loved her and then disappearing on her as she lay struggling for her last breaths.
It might have been helpful, way back when, if my mother had stood behind me financially, but she did not, despite the fact that I pulled off a real estate deal for her, with no work on her end, that profited her by 50% at a total of $15,000 in the same year of my pregnancy.
When she suggested to my little sister that she give me that money as a gift, my little sister told her that I would find it insulting if she offered it. I asked my little sister why she took it upon herself to tell my mother not to offer me this financial assistance, and she just grunted. Always her mother’s daughter. She never had words to explain the many betrayals over the years. The only thing that was made clear was that she never took her eye off our mother’s pocket book.
Oikos 