chapter three - up and down and all around
The mental snapshots of my earliest childhood are mostly of my mother, siblings and extended family members. Dad was not in the picture when we visited out grandparents, probably because that was where my mother went to get away from him. We loved going down there, though. Grandma had a white convertible with a red interior and we used to ride around town with the top down singing, “Little old lady from Pasadena. Go Granny, go granny, go granny, go!” We would run around their lawn at dusk on hot summer nights, catching and playing with fireflies. It was one place where we felt happy, at peace, and loved.
We were used to being bounced around, either because of my father’s career trajectory or because of their marital problems. The world was a very uncertain place. When we found ourselves in the home of another woman, whom we initially called Mrs. Street – her name at the time – at first it did not seem anything about which we should be unduly concerned. It fit right in with the life we had been living, in some ways, except that suddenly my father appeared on the scene more frequently. As time went on, however, it was obvious that this was not to be like any ordinary climb or dip of the roller-coaster ride we were on. One afternoon shortly after we took up residence there, I asked Mrs. Street if I could have a cookie and she said, nicely but matter-of-factly, “Yes. You can call me ‘Mom’ now. Your father and I are married.” In a life where change was a constant, it was just one more.
It quickly became apparent that something was seriously wrong: our past life was to be completely erased. In the world according to Dad, our lives began when he married my step-mother. We were immersed into her extended family while our previous families faded away and eventually disappeared. My mother visited a few times after we went to live with Dad, and then stopped coming around altogether. By default, my father and step-mother became “my parents” while my mother became an increasingly distant memory.
My father never again mentioned my mother in our presence, and never again acknowledged the existence of any relatives on my mother’s side of the family, and neither did my step-mother. We got the message loudly and clearly, so neither did we, except in secretive conversations among ourselves out of their earshot. It was the same with my other assorted step-siblings and half-siblings, with the exception of my oldest step-sister: their previous families also ceased to exist. Although they forced my step-sister to use my father’s last name for several years, her father would have none of the charade and could not be chased away. By the time she graduated from high school, she was using her proper birth name.
Shortly after they got married we moved to the suburbs. Ironically enough, my oldest half-sister looked more like my step-mother than her own daughter did, and if ever there was a comment about that, my parents simply smiled and nodded. They told everyone that I was named after my step-mother, since our names were similar: Christopher and Christine. They would avoid conversations about exact birth dates, as there was no way to explain away the fact that my step-brother, who was adopted by my father and carried his last name, was only five months younger than my sister. Or perhaps when it could not be avoided they would tell people that he was adopted, since that would have fit right in with the family profile that they methodically cultivated, of a large and loving family which could always find room for more youth in need. Fortunately for them, his birthday fell in December, so he was not in the same grade as she was in school. I’m not sure how they finessed the comings and goings of my step-sister and her father within our small community, but they did. They were extremely skillful tricksters and charlatans, and it is hard to imagine all of the lies that they perpetrated in order to maintain the family image.
My sister and I used to sit on the side of our beds and bounce up and down, rhythmically chanting, “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama … “. It was a spontaneous and uncoordinated expression of grief and longing. Where was our mother? Why didn’t she come to visit any more? Would she ever be coming back? Somewhere inside we hoped that in calling for her we might ease our pain, or conjure her up out of thin air. We never saw her again.
