A Re-Post: For All the Wonderful Moms in My Life

 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Taking off my black hat

So this is how it usually works:

The kid’s grandmother (my ex’s mom) asks my son what he’d like for Christmas and his birthday (which is just a few days later). He tells her. She goes out and buys it right away, tells him that she’s bought it, wraps it up and makes him wait until Christmas morning to unwrap it.

As a kid, the fun of Christmas for me was wondering what was in those boxes under the tree. I always hated when the surprise of a gift was spoiled for me, and even though I don’t argue with the kid’s arrangement with his grandmother, I just don’t understand it. But, as I said, I don’t say anything about it.

This year, though, it has gone too far. Last night when I got home from work – my first night off in many nights – I was informed by the kid that his grandmother told him she would get him the new Guitar Hero game for his Xbox. No big deal. I was kind of happy actually because it’s somewhere around a hundred bucks and he really wanted it, but I knew I would have to pick up a few extra shifts if I wanted to get it for him. So good for him.

But there was a catch. It seemed she had also told him he could have it early if he wanted. I was slightly irritated by this – the kid has no patience and a lot of this is due to the spoiling he received while living with his dad and grandparents – but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I just said something about not being disappointed when Christmas came and he didn’t have anything new to open from his grandparents.

I went to my bedroom and started changing out of my work clothes when the kid’s voice came through the door.

“Grandma said she would send you the money if we went out and got it. So can we? Go pick it up?”

I moved beyond irritated. I was pissed.

“No, we can’t,” I said, opening the door to see his pathetic face. “I don’t have the cash.”

“She said she would send you the money for it,” he argued as I walked past him and into the kitchen for a drink.

“I don’t have the money,” I repeated. “If she wants to send you the money to buy it, then I can take you out to pick it up when I have time, but I do not have the cash right now.”

He argued with me for several more minutes about how he knew I had that much (I have him count my tips each night and I try to keep him aware of, if not directly involved in our budget), and that his grandma would reimburse me so I wouldn’t be out anything.

I didn’t give in. For one thing, my ex and his family haven’t always been great about paying me back. They’re very generous with the kidwhen he’s living with them, but as soon as he’s with me, they seem to forget that he might need or even want anything (yes, there’s a child support arrangement, but that’s a rant – I mean topic – for another time). And I’ve paid up front for many things – airline tickets, shoes, school clothes – for which I was promised cash in return, only to be stiffed and put into a financial bind when the money didn’t come. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m certainly in no position for that to happen again. For another, if his grandmother wants to get him a present, then she should get it for him. She should get it. I’m already annoyed that I have to do the actual shopping, but I find no reason why I should have to do the paying too.

The part of it that really pisses me off is that she knows we’re on a pretty strict budget. She knows I’m working two jobs and that the holidays are coming and that I’m trying to put some money toward going to Iowa over the break, so she should be aware that I’m in no position to go out and purchase the kid’s Christmas present for her. Apparently, she isn’t aware.

So she told the kid he could have something and because I am unwilling/unable to go along, I am the perceived villain, and the kid moped around the apartment all night.

My ex and his family do this stuff to me all the time. One year, the kid wanted an electric scooter for Christmas. I shopped around all fall until I finally found one I could afford. When I discussed it with my ex, he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. The kid was still fairly young and living with his father at the time, and he didn’t think they were very safe. I disagreed, but we’re in this parenting thing together (like it or not), so I didn’t buy the scooter.

On Christmas morning, the kid was a little disappointed that he didn’t get it, but he liked the other gifts I bought instead and everything was fine. Then for his birthday, his dad and grandma gave him cash and a gift card and took him to the store where they let him buy himself - you guessed it - a scooter. He was so excited about it. He immediately brought it over to my sister’s house, where I was staying, and drove it around the neighborhood. His little face beamed as he showed me the turn signals and the working headlight, and my heart broke a little that I couldn’t be the one to make his holidays so wonderful.

My mom used to complain about my dad doing the same types of things to her, always trying to make her look bad in our eyes, always trying to make her into the bad guy. One day a few years ago, when we finally started opening up to each other about our experiences with depression and the bipolar and therapy, she told me things really changed for her when one therapist told her this: “[dhf’s father] has his white cowboy hat held on with superglue. It’s never coming off his head, so stop trying to knock it off. All you can do is take off your own black hat and refuse to wear it anymore.”

I choked up a little when she told me that. Okay, so we had been drinking and I might have become a blubbering mess (two bipolar women drinking – I gotta tell you, it doesn’t get much more fun than that). I was angry with her over the years for various things – I was a teenager – but I never saw her as the villain, and it hurt to think that that’s how she saw herself for so many years, that that’s how my father made her feel. I told her that. I told her that her hat was always white in my book. And even though I know it didn’t take away the pain she felt for so long, I think it healed her in some ways. And we cried and had a few more beers. Well, I had a few more beers. She went to bed.

I know that it will be a long time before my son can step away and really assess our performances as parents. I know that he may never realize the ways in which his father failed us both, so many times, without remorse. And if he never sees his father without the glow from his gleaming white hat, I don’t really care. But I’m not wearing the black one. I’m not going to be the mustache-twisting villain, and I’m not handing over my gold just so he’ll like me. And maybe someday over a few beers, he'll put the white hat on my head.

Mood Entry

Melancholy today. I don’t like it one bit. I want to be happy. Happier. But unlike before, happiness seems to have a cap. An endpoint at which I can no longer feel anything but the numbness of separation. Because after all of the heartache and the sadness and the hurt we experienced together, it feels selfish to be happy now. Without her.

 Especially when the only time I ever believed I deserved the happiness was when she loved me and I loved her. 

*Because It's Our Only Chance of Progress

Nearly ten years ago I was in my first semester of graduate school in Richmond. It was September, hot as anything, and I sat on a collapsible lawn chair I’d bought the day before. I was still waiting for my furniture to arrive and the voices of some morning news anchors on my portable TV echoed off the bare walls and hardwood floors. I was putting my shoes on. I had the phone cradled between my chin and shoulder and I was putting on my shoes, talking to one of my former military bosses now turned friend. The news was almost over and I was getting ready to turn it off and go mow the lawn.

I’d just read Saints and Villains by Denise Giardinia. It tells the story of theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer and his role in the plot to kill Hitler.  I’d read the book for an undergraduate course, my capstone, called “The Nature of Knowledge” in which we discussed that very thing and whether or not it was important to gain knowledge (it is) and if so, why?* Saints and Villains wasn’t the most well-written of the books we read that semester (and there were many), but it was one that stuck with me mostly because of Bonheoffer’s mental anguish knowing that what was going on in his country was immoral and watching his fellow countrymen fall prey to Hitler’s charms, but feeling powerless to stop it.

 We spent a lot of time discussing the Holocaust that semester in my other courses as well and I remember asking my professor, after we watched a film in which cheering crowds thronged to hear an energetic mustachioed man, how the people of Germany let it happen. How did we? I already knew the answer. We’d been reading about it all semester. We don’t know what we don’t want to know. The fact that we think those in power will not run amok is precisely what allows them to run amok. If it is too difficult for us to process, we as human beings are apt to excuse ourselves for our ignorance. Until it becomes absolutely necessary for us to face the truth.

The brutal extermination of six million people from this earth did not go by unnoticed while it was happening; we simply believed the human race had progressed beyond such barbarity. And we had no skills to cope with the notion that it might not be true.

I thought a lot about the book that morning as I rode the bus across the James River. The buildings downtown popped against a perfectly blue sky and the entire scene was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I remember thinking this as I sat there, numb, staring out the window and thinking how sad it was that the day was so beautiful yet so tragic.

 It wasn’t until I got to school, which had already been cancelled, that I actually felt anything. Watching footage online of Middle Eastern children cheering at the news of the deaths of thousands of people, I wanted to cry. We will end up here again, I thought. Over and again. We will only end up here.

 Two years later I sat with a group of fellow grad students and professors at a local restaurant. It was a somber occasion, one that had only become somber because of our general mood. George Bush had been re-elected the day before, and we couldn’t shake the sense that we as a country were going to a very dark place. I thought again of the book, of Bonheoffer and his search for meaning in a world he could no longer figure out.  All of us in the restaurant being academics, it felt to me like a scene from the book, the lot of us bemoaning the wool being so easily being pulled over Americans eyes and knowing full well the consequences to come.

Tonight (this morning) I am watching footage of cheering crowds. Celebration. History. But I can’t help but think of those children cheering ten years ago. They are men now. Men whose greatest sense of communion came when they were children and watched the destruction of what they were taught to be the symbol of all that is evil and wrong in the world.  I don’t know what to do with the thought. It is a cycle. All of it. The cheering crowds, the assassinated dictators, the bombing and invading and training to overthrow. The perpetuation of hatred in the name of nationalism.