Revenge of the Gamer

I had a bombshell dropped on me last Friday.  My brother sent an email containing three simple words.  Mom is dead.  It hit me like a kick to the chest, and honestly I’m still a little numb.  It was a lot to take in even though it was somewhat expected.

Writing is a cathartic experience for me so I’ve decided that the best way to deal with the tumult of emotions is to post about my mother.  I wanted to tell the world a little about her so that she’s remembered in some small corner of the world.

My earliest memory is of a tall dark haired woman with a brilliant smile and the kindest eyes you can imagine.  It happened when I was two.  I was standing outside of a courthouse playing with the fountain while she and my grandmother discussed momentous things in too quiet voices.  I was too young to understand what was going on, but I knew she was sad.  It wasn’t very long until I found out why.

My father had filed for divorce, and she’d fought for custody of my older brother and I.  She lost.  It was a landmark decision that set precedent in California, because in the 1970s custody of children nearly always went to the mother. Losing us devastated her and I’m not sure she was ever the same afterwards.

For the next several years we lived with my father.  Because we’d moved to Arizona and she still lived in California it was difficult for her to come see us, and I don’t remember her ever making the trip.  As a result I didn’t see my mother for the next few years.

As we grew older  my father decided we needed time with her, and arranged limited visitation with the courts.  This went well so eventually we were allowed longer and longer visits, and by the time I was six we were spending our summers at Bethel Island.

Bethel Island was a magical place that nearly defies description.  It was a tiny island in the river delta of central California, and to reach it you either needed to take the ferry or use the island’s one small bridge.  It was largely isolated from the surrounding area, and felt wild and untamed to my young eyes.

My mother’s house was even more magical.  She lived on a house boat, and I found the concept amazing.  I nursed dreams of it breaking loose from its moorings and drifting out to sea.  I told myself I might awake on any given morning to find ourselves blown to some magical island across the sea where we could live together without ever having to worry about returning home to my father.

I was too young to fully understand how poor my mother was, or how close to the edge she lived.  To me cooking spaghetti every night was fun, not the only option because she couldn’t afford anything other than cheap pasta and cheaper sauce.  At age eight staying home during the day with my eleven year old brother was an adventure, not my mother unable to afford child care for her two children.

Don’t get me wrong I knew we weren’t rich.  I saw the sad look on her face whenever we asked for something and she couldn’t afford it.  I still remember sitting home fishing instead of watching cable, because I thought cable charged by the hour and I didn’t want her to have to spend any money on me. 

To me such things were insignificant.  What did it matter if my mother had money?  She had her smile and her magical ability to take away my pain and to make everything make sense in the world.  She was a source of comfort, and I loved her dearly.  Leaving that house boat every summer was the hardest thing my young self ever had to do.

My final visit came when I was eight.  It was the third year we’d gone, and the place was fast becoming my home away from home.  I was so excited by the time I boarded the plane that I could barely sit still, and my older brother Brian felt the same.  My mother picked us up as usual, and we enjoyed the best summer I have ever had.

We spent the time fishing, talking, watching movies and being a family.  I remember my mother showing me Jaws that summer, which in retrospect probably wasn’t the best movie for an eight year old living on a house boat.  We sailed around on her boyfriend’s yaught and sang together.  It was a magical time and one I will never forget.

When the summer ended my mother was heartbroken.  She couldn’t bear to be separated from us again, so she sued my father for custody.  Her case was based around what she perceived as child abuse.  To be fair my childhood was pretty rough, and I had the crap kicked out of me by my father on more than one occasion. 

This never happened randomly though, only after I’d done something monumentally stupid.  Today it would be called child abuse, but in the early 80s it was just discipline and the courts saw it as such.  My mother lost her case and the judge left us in our father’s custody.

On the day the verdict was read my brother and I were left home.  Around noon the phone rang and my mother told us to pack whatever we could carry and run to her boyfriend’s house.  She’d decided to kidnap us rather than give us back to our father.

I loved my mother with a ferocity that I cannot adequately convey, and I wanted to protect her at any cost.  More than that I cherished the summers at Bethel Island as they gave me freedom from the strict home my father and stepmother maintained.  As you might expect I did exactly as my mother asked, because I wanted to stay with her. 

My brother and I wanted to live with her as much as she wanted us there.  We dutifully packed a little clothing, and since I was the brains of the operation I thought it was a good idea to pack food as we had no idea when we could get more.  What did I bring?  About a dozen Twinkies.

From there we crossed Bethel Island in search of her boyfriend’s house.  My brother was eleven and I was eight, and today what she asked us to do would have been called reckless endangerment.  To us it was normal.  She knew we were responsible enough to take care of ourselves, and that we could reach her boyfriend’s without getting into trouble.

She met us there a little while later, and for the next several months we were on the run from the law.  We used assumed names and never stayed in the same place for very long.  Our first stop was her boyfriend’s 180 acre ranch down in Arizona.  It was isolated and as safe a haven as we could find, but it was also stocked with a healthy supply of guns and Playboys. 

My mother was less than thrilled with the latter so we fled to Yuma to stay with my grandmother Mary and my grandfather Merle (known affectionately as grandpa Snoopy).  Now you have to understand how desperate my mother was to reach the point where she asked them for help.  My grandfather was the sweetest man alive, and I cherish his memory.  But my grandmother was a different story.

Mary Mitchell was a vile woman who wasn’t happy unless she was making someone else miserable.  She taught my brother to tie his shoes by making him stand in the corner day after day until he got it right.  She didn’t actually teach him to tie them.  She just expected him to learn on his own.  That should give you some idea of how horrid this woman was, and she gloated over the fact that my mother needed her.

Seven months after I’d been kidnapped my mother couldn’t take it any longer and fled from Mary Mitchell.  She brought us back to Bethel Island, the idea being that we were going to stop home just long enough to pick up a few things before heading to the next destination.  You can imagine how it worked out.

The cops had been watching the place, and within an hour of our arrival they swarmed us.  My mother was dragged off to jail, and my brother and I were placed in foster care.  Not only did I lose my mother, but in the same blow I was placed in the most corrupt, horrifying situation a child can be. 

I won’t speak more about the horrors that occurred in the various foster homes we stayed in.  If you’ve ever lived in one you know what I’m talking about.  It more than scarred me.  It forced me to become an adult when I was eight years old.

By the time I was nine my father had gotten custody back.  We were taken from the horrible foster homes and placed back in his care.  I was terrified he’d be angry that we’d chosen to stay with my mother that summer, but quite the opposite.  Life improved for us because I think it was a wake up call to him.

Things did not improve for my mother.  Not long after we came home my family moved to New Hampshire.  My father wanted to take us as far from my mother as possible, because he was terrified she’d kidnap us again.  My mother might have, so it was a valid concern.  Instead she was left behind in California with a felony arrest record and a crushing amount of debt she could never hope to pay back.

She called us once, but that was the last I saw or heard from my mother for the next decade.   I spent a lot of time wondering why, because each and every time we moved my father dutifully made sure we saw him mail her a letter giving her the new address.

I often wondered if she’d stopped loving me, or if she’d found a new family.  I was lonely and bitter and I missed her terribly.  My brother felt the same and somewhere along the way we forgot about her as best we were able.  It was the best way to manage the pain.

It wasn’t until just after I’d gotten married that I heard from her again.  I had just turned nineteen, and had plunged pretty heavily into the world of drugs and parties.  I was hurt and angry that she’d been gone for so long, and when I asked her why I was upset because she had no good reason.

My mother told me that she hadn’t been able to find us, but when I asked how she’d finally tracked me down she admitted that a friend bought her the services of a private investigator as a gift.  Apparently the man found me using my social security number, and had my phone number within two days of starting his search. 

By this time I’d spent nearly fifteen years living with Maryann, my stepmother.  She was the woman who’d watched over me while I was sick, made my birthday cakes and picked me up when life knocked me down.  Maryann was more my mother than my biological mother ever could be.  That’s true to this day and blood be damned.

I was angry with my mother, and things were made worse by some of the wild claims she made.  She told me that my father had taken us away from her, which was understandable.  What was less easy to accept was that she said my father had bugged her house, and that it was still bugged over a decade later.

My father is many things and I’d count asshole among them.  Even he would never stoop that low, and even if he would he lacked the means.  My father was too busy getting high and avoiding the real world to do anything as elaborate as bugging his ex wife’s house ten years after the last time he’d seen her.  Yet she persisted in these claims and our conversations devolved into bitter fights about him. 

In the end I couldn’t handle the stress and I cut things off.  In my mind she’d been gone for over a decade, and hadn’t made any serious attempt to find me.  That didn’t leave her much room to attack my father, who for all his flaws loved us as best he could.  He’d been there.  She hadn’t.

Fast forward another ten years.  I’d just turned twenty eight when I received a call from my brother.  He told me that D.D. had been diagnosed with Lupus.  She wasn’t doing well, and he asked me if I’d give her a call as he felt it would lift her spirits.  Of course I agreed and for the first time since I was eight I re-connected with my mother.

She lived up in Washington and I lived in Los Angeles.  Fortunately for me I had a six figure income and a company that was understanding about vacation.  I flew up to see her several times over the next year.  It was without a doubt the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but I did it anyway.  I did it for her.

What made it so difficult to see her was a mix of things.  First and foremost was my mother’s health.  Gone was the vibrant smiling woman I remembered.  In her place was an old woman with swollen legs who found walking difficult.  She smoked like a chimney, and her entire house was a constant cloud of smoke so acrid my eyes burned.  That was far from the worst of it though.

My mother was insane.  I’m not talking about a little crazy like your eccentric aunt Freda.  I mean so off that it’s immediately apparent, like a fence with missing posts.  My mother believed every crazy conspiracy theory out there.  She believed that she’d been kidnapped by aliens, that my father still had her house bugged (she showed me the bugged phone and spoke in whispers around it) and that if you wished hard enough you could find a magical world full of hobbit holes.

It wasn’t a malicious sort of insanity, but not all of it was as benign as the examples given.  One manifestation tore me apart inside, and every time I heard it a little part of me died.  My mother believed that it was my fault we’d lost touch after she was sent to jail.  She believed that as an eight year old I should have found a way to cross the continental United States to find her. 

No amount of reasoning with her worked, because as I said she was crazy.  She believed what she believed, and I think a part of her mind recoiled at all that had happened back then.  D.D. was meant to be a mother, but through circumstance she lost her children and I think that started her on the road to insanity.

In the end I couldn’t take it anymore.  I spent too many nights crying and had too much heartache.  One day she called me and we got into a huge fight, because I was so tired of being told I’d failed her as a child.  The fact that she expected me to have figured out a way to come find her infuriated me.  I was the scared eight  year old boy wishing for his mother.  She was the adult.  Yet somehow it was my fault.

I knew she didn’t really mean it, and that it was her mind’s only defense against the truth.  Just like my father bugging her house, it absolved her of responsibility and made it not her fault.  Logically I can say that, but emotionally I couldn’t face it.

That final conversation took place three years ago, and I’m ashamed to admit that I never spoke to her again.  I don’t blame myself.  The last time I dealt with her it sent me into a crippling spiral of depression.  As much as I wanted to be there for her at the end I just didn’t have the strength.

Whenever I think about her it makes me sad.  She had so much pain in her life, and endured more humiliation, shame and heartbreak than anyone should have to.  My mother did the best she could in a difficult world, and I will always love her for that.

Wherever you are now Mom I hope you’re happy.