Diana Estill

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Mother Forgets Her Only Child’s First Birthday

How can an event I don’t remember cause me pain? I ask myself that question each time I peruse my baby book—which, thankfully, doesn’t happen very often.

Recently, I looked again at that stained, yellow, satin-covered keepsake. There, recorded in cursive, was all the reason I needed to question my value. Mom hadn’t even tried to hide it.

“Your first birthday — Diana — we had the wrong day in mind and it slipped up on us,” Mom had written. “Didn’t realize our mistake until two days after it passed…”

Now, before anyone accuses me of being too judgmental and emotional, let me explain. At least I had a baby book. Right? And I lived with both my birth parents. But who forgets their only child’s first birthday? (The next child wasn’t born until I was five.) What must have happened to cause such an oversight? I wanted answers.

When my mother was in her fifties, I broke down and asked her how such a mistake had been possible. Her response was even more disquieting than her tell-tale note.

She gave me a defiant look and said, “We just forgot.”

Either she didn’t think I deserved an explanation or there wasn’t a credible answer. As a child, I’d conjured an excuse for her; I simply wasn’t that important.

Yes, she’d just forgotten my first birthday the same way she’d accidentally sent me to school on Fair Day and hadn’t noticed I’d been left at a football stadium one night. I guess that’s part of the sting.

In my soon-to-be-released memoir I didn’t write about my forgotten first birthday. In comparison to other childhood slights and emotional wounds, that one didn’t stand out. Still, I wonder what had been taking place on that Tuesday in 1955—and what had been running through my mother’s mind when she’d recorded her bad mommy moment.

Did she find her absentminded flub humorous? And, if so, why? Did she want me to know my birthday wasn’t worthy of remembrance? If she hadn’t admitted the incident, I’d have never known about it. Though my belated birthday celebration caused me no harm, I cannot quit pondering its significance.

Royal Wishes

“Would you like to be queen for a day?” Jack Bailey, the weasel-faced, mustachioed gameshow host, asked his TV viewing audience. Inside the Queen for a Day studio, women applauded vigorously. Seven months pregnant with her fourth child, my mother glanced up from her ironing board and stared wistfully at the television.

On that June afternoon in 1963, I sat on the den sofa playing with my Barbie doll. One day, I fantasized, I would marry a man who would treat me like a princess. Then I’d have a perpetual smile like Barbie’s, instead of a scowl like my mother’s.

Mom pressed down on her iron, de-wrinkling a shirt collar. She might have envisioned herself wearing a cape and crown, cradling four dozen roses. Lost in thought, she set her iron upright. “I mailed them a letter. Maybe I’ll be on there one day.”

I tried to picture my mother lauded like royalty, but my imagination wouldn’t stretch that far.

Mom bent to retrieve another shirt from her clothes basket and gasped. “Shoo! Get out of here.” She fanned away my orphaned opossum. The young marsupial liked to hide between fabric layers. “That thing’s got to go. I’m tired of finding it in my clothes.”

The critter leapt to the floor and scampered under the couch.

Mom cut her eyes at me.

I pretended to be deaf and blind.

Bailey addressed his first Queen for a Day contestant. “What do you want most, and why do you want to win this title?”

“Oh, I need a wheelchair for my son,” the timid lady replied. She backed away from the microphone as if it were a snake.

“For your son?” Bailey clasped the woman’s hand, coaxing her closer to him.

I wondered what my mom would say if Jack Bailey asked her those questions. Would her sob-story send the “applause meter” pulsing favorably? The louder the studio audience clapped for a contestant, the farther right the needle jumped. Onscreen, the image resembled the dial on my father’s ohmmeter—a gadget that measured electrical resistance. Once, I had clapped boisterously next to his test device to see what would happen. The needle didn’t budge. It had disregarded me as blatantly as Dad ignored Mom.

“I could use a cage for my daughter’s ‘possum,” I imagined my mother telling Bailey. “It’s outgrown its cardboard box and keeps turning up in my laundry basket.”

I doubted her request would reap more sympathy than a paralyzed boy’s need for mobility. Mom’s tough times didn’t compare to the typical contestant’s plight.

“Well, if you win Queen for a Day, we’ll see to it that your son gets a wheelchair!” Bailey promised.

Transfixed, Mom watched as fashion models paraded onstage in designer apparel—the day’s prizes. The cocktail dresses and suits they flaunted didn’t look like the ones in my fairytale book. My doll had prettier clothing.

I exchanged Barbie’s swimsuit for her ball gown.

Bailey’s fashion announcer, Jeanne Cagney, spoke with a transatlantic accent like Kathryn Hepburn. “These blouses from Ship’n Shore need little or no ironing,” she enthused.

Mom sighed and resumed pressing Dad’s shirt.

Cagney moved quickly to describing footwear. “There are styles for every occasion in the lovely shoes by Grace Walker. Her Majesty will have a whole array, each pair fit for a queen.

Standing next to me in her drab maternity smock and broken-down nurse shoes, Mom studied the high-heels dangling from Cagney’s grip. What had caught her interest, I couldn’t guess. My mother’s closet held only lace-up footwear and loafers with cushioned soles. I never played dress-up in her belongings. It would have felt too much like playing dress-down.

Tricks Aren’t for Kids

My earliest memory of my father occurred at age four, when he almost killed me for the second time. Thankfully, I don’t recall the first. When I was two, he poured paint thinner in my Tommee Tippee cup, and I drank it. For that, I held no grudges. That sort of accident could happen to anyone whose dad needed a small container and grabbed the nearest one, then forgot he’d set poison on his kitchen counter.

The second time, though, my dad’s affront was intentional. He hadn’t aimed for me to croak. He simply wanted to expose me to the fear of death, I guess. By then, I’d forgotten that whole stomach pumping episode. Most likely he perceived his joke as educational. In a sense, it was.

On that Halloween night, Mom tied the white strips on the back of my Casper the Friendly Ghost costume and sent me into the darkness alone. In 1958, unaccompanied preschoolers were of no particular interest to police unless they appeared lost or injured, and I was neither. My mission to collect candy from the house kitty-corner to my residence couldn’t have been less worrisome. A more Rockwellian setting would have been difficult to find.

Our two-bedroom bungalow, the color of weathered wood, stood like a sentry at a T intersection in Emerson, Texas, a town where cattle outnumbered residents—and sometimes drew greater scrutiny. Passing trains and wandering heifers comprised the bulk of Emerson’s traffic. Out-of-towners motored through on holidays to visit extended family, but we seldom entertained guests from afar. All Dad’s relatives lived within five miles of us. Mom’s kin resided in Florida, which, from a visiting standpoint, might as well have been Australia.

Our single-story clapboard home, built in 1910, featured a screened-in front porch my father had added. Plum trees dotted our one-acre yard. On both sides and behind the back fence, livestock grazed in open pastures. Across the street lived my great-aunt Georgia, a sedentary seventy-something-year-old with waist-length pewter-gray hair and a penchant for As the World Turns. Hers was the only house I visited on that memorable Halloween.

I exited our porch through the screen door that remained accessible to everyone, including strangers. No one ever latched that door for any reason. Sometimes I wondered if a thief might make off with my red rocking horse stationed there, though the odds seemed pretty steep.

Mom waved me on my journey. I glanced back at her only once, which was useless anyway. I couldn’t see well. Casper’s eyes and mine didn’t align, so the mask obstructed my view. To remedy that problem, after I’d collected the Tootsie Rolls, Lifesavers, and Double Bubble from Aunt Georgia, I shoved the plastic contraption onto the top of my noggin and made a beeline for home. My mother, I imagined, had been monitoring my every step.

The stretch between Aunt Georgia’s house and mine engulfed me in blackness. About a mile to my right, near the cotton gin, existed a mysterious place my parents called “Colored Town.” Neither provided a definition for that confusing term.“Don’t go down that way,” Mom had instructed me. I didn’t ask why. Maybe child snatchers lived there, I surmised. I’d never walked that direction to find out. Right then, darkness prevented me from seeing my feet, much less a kidnapper. I hastened my steps, listening as rock cinders crunched beneath my scuffed sneakers.

The chill night air induced a shiver, though it couldn’t have been colder than sixty degrees. What earlier had felt like a quick jaunt now seemed like a half-mile hike. I longed for Casper’s powers to levitate and fly. With relief, I glimpsed our roof’s silhouette and, directly beneath it, the welcoming porch light. Almost there. I needed only to traverse a two-foot drainage ditch that tunneled under our caliche driveway to reach safe ground.

Crossing the expanse, I sought my mother’s profile, but she had disappeared. I looked left and right in search of her, fearful of spying an abductor. Behind me, a menacing growl erupted, followed by sounds of shuffling footsteps. If friction between two objects sparks fire, my sneakers should have ignited. At a decibel normally reserved for tornado sirens—which didn’t yet exit—I screamed, “M-o-m!

Post Election Stress Relief

Here we are, the morning after Election Day, with no clear idea who will be leading our country for the next four years. We will have to be patient and wait for the outcome, I’m told. But what can we do with our angst in the meantime? Some suggest meditation for stress relief. Here’s what happened to me when I tried to quiet my mind. I hope you have greater success than I did.

Thinking I’d give meditation a try, I sat down in the comfort of my reading room, surrounded by magazine litter, disorganized books and other clutter, and attempted to become One with The Universe.

Who ever knew birds could be so loud? They wouldn’t stop chirping so I could hear that Still Small Voice within. So I started chanting, silently, to distract myself from the shrill singing and the percussion of pounding hammers. (Someone is building a new home two blocks from my house.)

I am grateful fro this day. I give thanks for all that I’ve received. I ask only that You guide me in the direction of my highest good.

Chee-ee-urp! Chee-ee-urp! Chee-ee-urp-urp-urp!

Whack, whack, whack!

OK. This isn’t working.

Wait a minute. What did Eckhart Tolle say in his book, The Power of Now? Or was it A New Earth? You know, about the spaces between thoughts? I’m supposed to try and extend the time between my thoughts so that the intervals become longer and longer.

I will think no thoughts.

(Pause)

But isn’t “I will think no thoughts” a thought? Oh, great. I’ve already botched it.

Seriously. That’s it. No more thoughts. Not a single one.

(Moments pass.)

I did it! I didn’t think a single thought for, what? At least several seconds. Uh-huh, but now here I am THINKING about how long I’ve managed to not think! I’ve probably negated the benefits of whatever minor accomplishments I’ve made.

This is insane.

Try again.

I entertain nothing but the quietness within me.

You ninny! That was a thought!

Start over.

“Start over” was a thought!

Stop, already! Quit thinking! Let it go-o-o. Just be.

Time and external stimuli ceased.

And then I woke up.

Did that count?

Follow me for more stress-buster ideas! 🙂

Hurricane Tests

Three years ago, Mom retired and moved to Florida—lightning capital of the U.S. She wasn’t afraid of storms, and I guess she figured two billion alligators couldn’t be wrong.

To further elevate my concerns, she refuses to evacuate for hurricanes.

“We’ll be okay,” Mom recently assured me as a major hurricane tracked her direction. “The eye is supposed to make landfall seventy miles from here.” The way she said this, you’d have thought we were discussing the probability of the sun’s collision with Earth.

“Why won’t you come visit me and wait this thing out?” I pleaded, knowing fully well that she’d refuse. She’d never let me off that easy.

“My back hurts,” she said. “I don’t want to ride that far in a car.”

Boarding a plane was out of he question. I might just as well ask her to skateboard cross-country.

When we next spoke, Mom laughed at the urgency in my voice. (It was the same sinister laugh that had escaped her when she’d told me how, when I was a child, I’d nearly strangled between two crib rails.) “We’ll be all right,” she insisted. “Stop worrying. We’ve got plywood over the windows.”

Now, you have to understand that my mother’s idea of disaster preparedness is having a camp stove, some honey buns, instant coffee, and one of those battery-operated mister fans (no larger than a deodorant stick) on hand.

“What have you done to prepare for a power failure?” I asked.

“We’ve got a deck of cards and a cell phone,” she said, emphasizing the cards. Clearly, the loss of television programming was her most immediate concern. The cards were a substitute, I guess, for The Price is Right and All My Children.

“That’s nice, Mom. I imagine you can play a wicked game of Fifty-two Card Pick Up in one hundred and sixty mile-an-hour winds,” I wanted to tell her. But instead I asked, “Do you have a generator? Have you got water?”

“No. We don’t have a generator.”

“But it’s hot there.” I pressed on. “What’ll you do when the air conditioning goes out?”

“Oh, I guess we’ll open the windows,” she said, presumably to see if I was paying attention. Then she added, “After the wind stops, of course.”

The next night, the hurricane cut a swath through Florida, its eye passing less than one-hundred miles from Mom’s house. We spoke by phone as it came ashore, and then remained online with each other for some time thereafter.

At 2:00 a.m., when the winds were approaching 60 mph, Mom said, “I can hear noises and banging outside, but I can’t see anything because of the plywood.” My stomach knotted. I had the same sick feeling I get when watching those National Geographic programs about nature—the ones that show some predator sneaking up on an unsuspecting bunny.

An hour later, the wind speeds now gusting to 90 mph, Mom wrote in an e-mail that (surprise!) she was eating a honey bun. Then the hurricane eye made landfall and delivered a temporary reprieve, so I went to bed and slept for a couple hours. But first I asked God to protect Mom from the worst—her apparent lack of valid reasoning.

I was again awake by 5:45 a.m. and watching the Weather Channel. Scenes of collapsed bridges and flooded roadways dominated the air waves. I tried to call Mom, but all the phone lines in her area were jammed. Eventually, she contact me by cell phone. As she relayed the damage, her phone battery began to die.

“Quick, Mom, plug in the charger,” I blurted.

“I can’t,” she said. “There’s no power in the house.”

“Plug it into your car charger, then.”

“I would, but I don’t have one.”

“What brand is it? What model? What does it look like?” I fired back.

Faintly, I heard Mom say, “…Nokia…,” then nothing.

The rest of that day I researched cell phone models and chargers. I made calls, visited stores, and at last found a “universal” charger that operates from an automobile cigarette lighter. Hurrying against the clock, I carried a box containing the charger, an assortment of batteries, and a few canned goods to a local shipper.

When Mom received her package the next morning, she immediately called to thank me. “Are you talking to me from the car?” I asked, inflated with self—pride. Surely, I reasoned, I’d passed Mom’s latest test. Maybe I’d proven, once and for all, the extent of my love.

“No, I’m in the house,” she said matter-of-factly. “I got the power back this morning.”

Who was she kidding? We both knew the truth. Mothers don’t ever lose their power.

This story was excerpted from the book, Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road. Hurricanes are no laughing matter. But sometimes the way we deal with them is humorous.

Is it wrong to expose your parents’ flaws?

Is it wrong to expose your parents’ flaws and family secrets? That is a question I and many others writers, especially memoirists, have struggled to answer.

Early in my writing career, when I wrote humor columns, I disclosed some of my mother’s and father’s funny quirks. They were both alive at the time, and Dad loved the attention. Mom, though, hated it so much that she once stopped speaking to me for six months. She let me know just how much she didn’t appreciate “being the butt of my little jokes.”

My mother recovered from her emotional wounds. Eventually. But today I’m writing about more serious topics.

My parents died six years apart, from terminal illnesses—Mom from pancreatic cancer, and Dad from Alzheimer’s Disease. Journeying with them through their final months of life deeply affected me. I needed to write about that to find meaning in my grief and loss.

I wondered, though, if stories about my parents’ illnesses and deaths were mine to tell. Was disclosing our final moments together an invasion of privacy? Our stories were entwined and inseparable.

Author Ann Lamott wrote, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

(My parents’ behaviors were questionable, decades before either one became ill.)

I agree with Lamott. But the deciding factor about whom to include and what to share in my essays and books has always been based on personal reflection. As a rule of thumb, I’ve tried not to write negative portrayals of living persons. When I wrote my novel, When Horses Had Wings, I turned my real life experiences into fiction to protect those who hadn’t yet kicked the bucket—including myself.

Sometimes telling a story honestly involves confessing family secrets. When, if ever, in nonfiction should you disclose unsavory truths about your parents?

Mitch Albom, author of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven, wrote, “Secrets. We think by keeping them, we’re controlling things, but all the while, they’re controlling us.”

“What doesn’t get reported gets repeated,” I’ve often said. The family secret I concealed for many years allowed a perpetrator to continue his abuse. It also held me captive to a crippling fantasy.

When you’re withholding significant story facts, you have to come to peace with who you’re protecting and why. Family appearances based on lies allow others to escape their consequences and delays their repentance and recovery. Confidants, then, end up carrying the shame and guilt that rightfully belong to the person they’re protecting.

Oh, but what about the Biblical commandment to honor your father and mother? you might ask. I struggled with that, too. Honor does not obligate you to hide the truth or protect the guilty. Honor means to respect the roles your parents played in your life, treat them fairly and with compassion, and forgive them for their transgressions. Forgiveness does not include pretending they are (or were) saints. You’re not obligated to hide faults, yours or anyone else’s. If you disagree, it’s likely because your parents influenced that belief. 🙂

Only you can decide how much to disclose about your parents to others. It requires some soul searching, but given enough thought you will arrive at the correct decision.

I hope my opinion on this topic has helped you in some small way. If so, please be sure to “like” this post, leave a comment, or share this with friends.

What’s in a Photograph?

What’s in a photo image? Have you ever really looked beyond the faces in your family photos to find obscure details? As an author, I’ve spent many hours searching through old pictures and gleaning what I could from them.

Photographs document more than individuals’ moods and settings. Every image has a background that discloses added details. An infinitesimal item often reveals a hidden truth.

I’m going to offer a few of my family photos as examples. But before I do, I should forewarn you; I did not have a happy childhood.

That’s me, age four, posing with my parents.

Right off, I note that no one in this picture is smiling. The backdrop suggest we were visiting my maternal grandmother’s home in Florida. But what else is noticeable?

My mom and dad are disengaged. Their arms appear to touch ever so slightly, which could have been unintentional. Mom looks dressed for a ladies’ tea, and Dad appears to be wearing someone’s Goodwill donation. Clearly, he did not take any cues from Mom on how to dress that day. Maybe he didn’t give a flip what his mother-in-law thought about him. (He didn’t.)

The auto‘s color suggests a cheerful owner. Definitely not our vehicle.

Now let’s look at another example:

This is a picture of my brother washing dishes. He has used a barstool to reach the sink, which suggests someone staged the chair for him.

Can you guess the time period? The refrigerator is copper-colored, as are the cabinet fixtures. Research tells me that GE sold it’s first “coppertone” fridge in 1964. I happen to know this picture was taken that year, based on my brother’s age.

What else can you tell from the background? I see a bottle of cough syrup and baby bottles lining the kitchen backsplash. The bottles indicate that my two-year-old brother had not yet learned to drink from a cup. But more concerning is the electric cord dangling from the clock just outside the frame. Note how the cord runs behind the sink and over to a wall socket. This image was taken before the advent of GFI breakers. Yikes!

It’s fun to extract as many details as you can from family photos. What might you find in your family album that you’ve previously overlooked?

I’ve written about my absentminded dad and some of our family shenanigans in my humor book, Idiots and Children, available from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Idiots-Children-Slightly-Off-Kilter-Firearms-ebook/dp/B00OY2QOYG/