The Whole Truth

Whenever I was around people who were close to my mom (there were many; she spent a great deal of her energy making sure people liked her; it was her main function in life), I have for most of my life, felt the need to defend myself to people who’ve never met me. It was either that, or I was compelled to apologize on her behalf. It’s who I became because of mom.  She was beloved by many. Even people she treated like shit; including me in some cases.

My mom gained their esteem and friendship by painting herself to be someone she never was. You see, my mom may have been one of the One Thousand Points of Light, and she might have advocated for the needy. She even got in trouble doing some work for the Massachusetts DHS, when she brought a baby home because the mother was neglecting it and she couldn’t get anyone to respond. It wasn’t unusual, as kids, to come home from school to find some random person living in our home; some young person she found panhandling for money by the metro in Brussels to fund their continued journey. She brought home Irish kids, Scottish kids, Americans, Brits… she brought them home like strays, and fed them, and cared for them, and sent them along with money so they weren’t lost in this world, or alone.  On the outside she was fucking amazing.

My mom also spent a lot of time telling people terrible things about us. Whomever was ‘bad ranger’ at the time, she would rip to shreds. So when we met her friends, whichever target child she’d maligned would be received with a sneer of disdain and disapproval from complete strangers.  This happened a great deal to me in these last years. All her little biddies, they glare at me because I am in their estimation, based on my mother’s words, the antichrist.  Yet this antichrist still marched in as much as she could to pay attention to the old lady, and spend time with her—and more importantly, to allow her to spend time with Alex.

One of the former employees of the care facility told me that I was her favourite. That she spoke well of me all the time, and not of my other sisters. But several of her senior friends had different opinions. So it’s impossible to tell. It’s impossible to know exactly what she said and to whom. It really doesn’t matter, but it is a mark of her character that has always irked me. All those people that showed up at her memorial adored her. They all had such nice things to say about her. Of course they did. She was who she wanted them to think she was.

But I’ve talked about the flip side. The stuff people don’t know about. And as I process the loss of my mother, I am brought back to those things; which, because of their negative aspects, arrive in my memory with clarity and vividness few memories share.  I had convinced myself at the very beginning of this period that I would let it all go with her. That it would fade away now that the source is gone. As if by clipping away the trunk of the invasive plant, its suckers would wither and die. But the truth is the truth. And I have to accept that my mother was not a good person. And I carry a great deal of guilt for feeling that, because of all the good she has done, and the moments she was good to us.

The last time I took my mother to visit my little brother John, this was just before my anxiety issues kicked in and I could still just drive wherever I pleased without having a nervous breakdown; my mother entered the residential home where my brother is cared for. He, as always, was slumped in a sofa chair, his thumb and index finger pressed firmly in his eye sockets, sleeping.  His hair, kept short and manageable, his clothes stretched across his round belly, his five o’clock shadow and thick eyebrows so reminiscent of my father. She went to him, and kissed his face, and he dropped his hand and looked at her. With a grunt of acknowledgement, he waved his hand and put his fingers back over his eyes. She’d spend about ten minutes telling the caretakers what sacrifices she made for him, and then turn to me and say: Okay, let’s go.  Then in the car, she would apply all the strategies for me to take her shopping somewhere on the way back.

John is a product of extreme neglect coupled with diligent care. As a child, my parents enrolled him in an intern program with the Belgian school system; where he stayed for two weeks, with a home visit every other weekend, and a parental visit on the others.  He attended a stellar school, with amazing teachers who were trained beautifully to work with severely developmentally disabled children and young adults. When he was there, he had structure, he was happy and he could communicate.

My mom never learned sign language. She never had us learn it. Nobody in my family did. Yet we have a brother who is deaf. He was absent more than he was home. Which was a good thing, because when he was home, my mother was in no way equipped to  provide proper care for him. She could barely manage her non-disabled children as it was.

When John got home, he was promptly locked in his tiny bedroom to spend the entire weekend in the dark, with only brief breaks for food and hygiene.  He was so frustrated sometimes, he broke things. Even windows. His room had been a nursery, so it had a window inside that was viewable from the corridor upstairs, and then an outside window. He smashed both of them. And they were both boarded up like a shanty house. He smeared his feces on the walls. He would scream in frustration and fling himself against the door.  As kids, we all had to listen to it, and feel the depth of misery for it, but were powerless to do anything about it. To this day, none of us can talk about it without a profound painful sense of guilt and anger. At ourselves and at mom. We were kids, we know it wasn’t our fault, but it doesn’t help to appease that pain.

My dad was noticeably silent on the matter. I don’t know exactly what he felt about this. But there were some pretty hellacious fights over him, many that came to blows. My father resented my mother insisting on having him, when she was presented the choice and told that the child was abnormal. She wanted her son. It was paramount to her, even if it meant she would neglect him for his entire life. When it came to the parental visits to my brother’s school on the odd weekends, my mother never went. It was my father who went and spent the day with him.

When my mother took up with her lover Omar, who would turn out to be my molester, there was one good thing that came from that, and that was Omar’s unease about this situation. Even a child molester couldn’t deal with it. So when my dad was working, or away, he was often there, and he would take John out of his room, feed him, play with him, and pay attention to him. Part of the reason why I accepted Omar to be how he was with me was because I loved him for the care he gave my brother. In a childhood where trusting adults was a dangerous game, there was this one little shimmering good thing next to so many terrible things.

When my mom decided out of the blue that she wanted to return to the US, a several years after Omar killed himself, she got my father to agree, and within a month of this decision, which was not imparted to anyone, even me until the day before the flight (not kidding) we were moving back to the states after 20 years. She left John behind. She also abandoned our saddle club with horses still in the stalls.  She abandoned a lot of things.

It took several weeks to even get her to acknowledge that something had to be done about John. She flew back to Brussels and disappeared for several more weeks. When I called the school, they said they hadn’t even heard from her.  Hunting her down was a task and half. I had to go through a friend of a friend of a friend, cross-Atlantic call after call. When I tracked her down, she was sofa surfing at a friend’s house, partying in Brussels and hadn’t even gone to see John. I talked to her briefly, and she finally said she was going to come home with John.

I was worried the moment we arrived in the US, because I was not familiar with the social services nor with what sort of options could be had for a young adult like John. I discussed it with my dad, who was ambivalent and unhelpful. And when mom got there, I started researching places, and her response was “I DON’T WANT HIM IN AN INSTITUTION!”  All I could foresee was a repeat of those weekends of John locked away in a room.  It was a worry that came to fruition in many ways.

While in New England, John rarely if never left the house. They took him to a doctor to have him medicated, and my brother spent his days both furiously bashing down the house or sleeping. His care became my responsibility on the most part. I lived in that house until I was 27—my entire life crammed into  a small bedroom with a locked door while my mom went around being one of a Thousand Points of Light, and spent her evenings carousing with a bunch of crusty old men at a membership club bar.  When my dad retired, he took over the medication and bathing of John, and I did the housework.  When I decided to move out and get my own life, there was a meltdown in the family that went as far afield as my eldest brother, from whom I had not heard for over a decade—he was sure to call and chastise me for ‘leaving daddy with everything’.

But leave I did. It wasn’t a total split, until I moved to Oregon. I still went there. I still cleaned the kitchen and did laundry or it would just pile up on the floor in mounds. I still cooked holiday meals. I still went there and put up a Christmas tree for John, because if I didn’t nobody would.

I often feel my leaving New Hampshire is what caused the final spiral of my mother and father’s home life.  Perhaps, I even took part in my father giving up entirely on everything. At least that’s my theory. Because the light in his eyes was so faded the last time I spoke to him face to face and he was lucid. There are members of my family who still think I was selfish to leave—spoken while they nestled in the lushness of their full and meaningful lives, jobs and families.

John’s care went downhill, naturally. My battle to get him cared for by the state was lost. My mom’s idea of feeding him a good meal was to microwave him a burrito or bring him Burger King. The laundry in the laundry room was knee high when my husband went to clean out the house. The place was disgusting. I cannot even begin to describe how disgusting, but if you watch Hoarders, the really dirty episodes, you’d have the right idea.

When she arrived with Dad, and dad died so soon afterwards, I watched John’s appearance worsen. His nails were like talons, his beard was like a homeless person; he stunk, she never bathed him. She would drug him with old, out-dated medications so he would sleep most of the day, and she would leave him alone there so she could go shopping. Her house quickly became a disgusting shambles. Her health failed.

She ended up in the hospital, and she would be there for some time. It was the opportunity I needed, so I swooped in with the county and got John into care. And from that point on, for the first time in many years, I was able to go a day without worrying about John.  I visited him to find him shaven and clean, he’s in a day program, he’s got a routine, he eats well, he’s in clean clothes, his nails are trimmed, he’s going to a doctor, he saw a dentist for the first time in his life, he is by all standards as good as he can be.  Some things are too late. Diabetes, the blindness, his failing body. But he is okay.

My mother loved to cry about how I didn’t take her down to see him. I did; many times. But it was never a good visit. It was tedium for her. I’d drive twenty five miles one way so she could say after four minutes of telling the caregivers how amazing she was for John, “Okay, let’s go.” I got tired of it. It was just a way to get me to take her to Marshalls or Ross or Payless. For her to add to her newly growing hoard, and to abuse me miserably with accusations and nastiness. 

Finally, last year, she was in a particularly rankled mood, sour as vinegar the moment I arrived. I said: “Hey, let’s go see John. “

“Who?”

“You know, your son…?” I replied, irritated. She sighed wearily and rolled her eyes.

“All he does is sit. And I don’t have money for shopping. Your sister never sends me money…” and she went on to talk shit about my sister.  At that point, I decided I was done with taking her to see John. If she had the desire to do it, she could talk to the facility people and arrange a ride herself.

John is only one of the difficult things I have to hold on to because of her. Her predilection to abandon things, and leave me with the detritus was another—and then her subsequent blaming of me for the failure. She did it several times before I was even 20. 

If I hadn’t managed her books and payroll at her ‘successful’ temp business which was recognized by senators and the like, she would owe Massachusetts so much money, it boggles the mind to try and even imagine how much.  When I left for Oregon and quit that job, she closed the business down a few months later, owing about $70,000 in taxes.

She liked the beginnings of things. She left the aftermath to me. I accepted it, why? I don’t know. For the vain hope that she would realize I was there for her and show me a little respect? Who the hell knows?

I have so much unresolved anger towards her. How tempted I was to just tell her all those things when she was half-paralyzed, but still there. I could have. But instead, I am going to try to kiss it all up to the universe as they say. Write it down, and put the truth out there, so I can know that at least someone knows she wasn’t by any means the saint she painted herself to be. That all those ‘sacrifices (sah-kree-faysus as she pronounced it)’ she claims to have made, were not by any means selfless. Everything came with a price. Psychological interest, as I used to call it.

Did I love my mom? Absolutely. Did she love me? I suppose in whatever capacity she was capable of, yes, I think she did. She even may have loved John.  But mom wasn’t really able to love the way normal people love. She did not love herself, and that is the root of it. Her utter dissatisfaction with her own being is what spurred her forward every day.

It's hard, but I try to understand her.  Her self-reproach, the way any criticism of her would invoke wrath and a lifelong grudge. The way she would write people off, good people, and give value to the biggest losers on the planet.  She was who she was.  She was good, she was bad, she was an asshole, and a glorious woman.

Once, back in NH, a little bit before I moved to Oregon, I was met my mom at a shopping center in Salem to pick her up and drive her somewhere. She pulled up next to me and parked, locked up her car and was getting into my car, when I noticed a couple of teenage girls standing by a car with their doors and trunk open. They were pulling out empty bags of junk food, cups, garbage and all sorts of other debris and brazenly tossing it onto the parking lot.

“Oh my god! What little assholes!” I exclaimed.  My mom’s small eyes locked onto them, her lips tightened into a straight, hard line, and she wordlessly slid out of the car and slammed the door.

I watched her blaze across the parking lot like a bull, and I could not hear, but I could see her just losing it on these teenagers. She stood there, all 5 foot 2” of her, arms flailing, hands slashing, and the girls cowering back with each spittle-laden expletive that came out of her mouth.

The girls, to my astonishment, started collecting their trash. They gathered it up and threw it back into the car. Mom stood by like this angry bastion until every last piece was back in the vehicle. She then remained until they got back into their car and drove away. As they passed us on the main road, they flipped her the bird, which she responded to by blowing them a kiss. I swear I saw their heads exploding. Well, maybe not, but still, it was possible.  She got back into the car, put on her seatbelt and looked at me expectantly.

“Well? What are you doing staring at me? Let’s go already!” she snapped.  I did exactly as she asked, and put the car in reverse. My relationship with mom was like that. It was a roller coaster ride of gloriously brilliant moments followed by belly-flopping pits of negativity.

At least she wasn't boring.

A wordy update and a diatribe....



Because every post, regardless of its subject should be preceeded
by images of Alan Rickman in all his sexy hawtness (and I didn't draw anything today).

I’ve plateaued at 12 pounds so far, damnit! I’m apparently not drinking enough water daily, so I’ve decided to discipline myself more about that. My husband hit 29.4 lbs in weight loss this week. I’m so proud of him it hurts! I want that 30lb mark too! Jealous! Damned men and their fast weight loss.

These past couple of weeks, my emotional craziness has tempered itself a bit, but the hot flashes have arrived and seem to be here to stay. Holy hell. I went to the fabric store with some friends on Monday, and I had this horrible hot flash that not only made me feel as if I was radiating heat like a nuclear fuel rod at Fukushima, but also, my entire thought process sort of short-circuited and it was impossible to focus on even making basic conversation. At the check through, I was fanning myself and sweating like a hog and the lady asked me if I was alright. I told her about the Lupron treatment, and she said: “Oh, my... how wonderful, you get to experience menopause TWICE, what a privilege,” she laughed. I didn’t think that was really funny at the time, but since my brain was in short-circuit mode, I just stood there fanning myself and staring at her blankly until I realized she was asking me for money.

I got my second Lupron shot yesterday. Month 2. Yay. Bring on the hot-flashes. ::urgh::

Last weekend hubby and I went into home impro-mode. We had bought some flooring material sometime back, and we decided it was time to install it in the bedroom and I thought, hell, if we’re taking everything out of the room, why not slap up a coat of paint too? So Saturday I rolled out a layer of really awesome coating paint (BAER Premium; that stuff ROCKS. I may sound like a cheesy commercial but as an experienced room-painter I declare its quality now!) while the rug was still in. I did not feel any remorse when I tracked paint on the floor and dripped it here and there. It was all going in the trash anyway.

Simon managed to get a blue dot of paint on his forehead and to also step on the lid of the paint can and make blue footprints into the kitchen. Once I got the majority of the painting done (everything but the cutting-in), we proceeded to tear up the carpet in our bedroom and O...... M...... G....... Carpet is GROSS. I ... for as long as I live, VOW never to install wall-to-wall carpeting anywhere ever again. It’s no wonder we woke up every morning congested and sniffly. It probably didn’t help that the previous owner left the old padding underneath the new carpet, and it was SO GROSS! It looked like someone had died on it and lay there for a few weeks before discovery. And the smell... ::gag:: It probably didn’t help that my mom’s dog saturated a corner of it with pee, which my dog Simon decided would be a wonderful tradition to continue. Luckily it and our subsequent scrubbing with Nature’s Little Miracle didn’t soak into the sub-flooring (thank GOD). The whole thing was just all out icky. I washed my hands like I had OCD for the rest of the day, and had to scrub the dust from it from my face and hair. We pulled it up, cut it into strips, rolled them into little tubes and crammed them into garbage bags. The padding ::gag:: we also tore up and garbage-bagged for the dump. N.E.V.E.R...A.G.A.I.N.

Underneath was a very plain wooden plank floor that was painted brown, with knotholes that were covered up with flattened tin cans secured to the floor by nails hammered in all around the edges. The bay window was floored in cheap particle-wood sheeting. So we scraped up the staples and other debris (apparently the carpeters didn’t mind just spitting out their gum onto the floor, leaving their cutting blades and didn’t bother to sweep up all manner of dust and dirt) and swept it all up. It took a long time to clear off that floor. I wiped it down with a bleach/water solution and we put down the thick plastic moisture barrier first before we laid down the foam base on which the floating laminate floor would sit. Before laying the plastic, I quickly, with hubby’s help, cracked out the cutting in on the high-areas of the painting, and we plastered holes and such.

Hubby spent most of Sunday on the floor locking together pieces of laminate flooring. I helped in whatever capacity I could, but in about four hours he had the bedroom floor pretty much done. We haven’t put in the new baseboards yet (or bought them at this point either), but who cares. We put the bed back in there and our dressers. We’re waiting to install some cabinets we also bought to provide much-needed storage in our teeny house. We’re missing some components and are waiting on IKEA to get their sh*t together and get the parts into inventory. Once that’s done, our room could be magazine cute—except the existing closet which still lacks doors, but that will happen someday. I even found some lovely dark fabric (for privacy) that has the same dark brown of the floor and a similar tone of blue to match the walls. I have some IKEA track system stuff to hang up so I can have a background of sheers and then the heavy drapes in front of those to close when we don’t want our pot-head-alcoholic idiot neighbour looking in our window (we were woken up last night to screaming and laughing from next door as his drunken, high friends stumbled out of his house and into their remarkably loud ramshackle pickup trucks and trundled off to wherever they crawled out of. My levels of dislike for this neighbour have been escalating for a while now, but when he cut down half of a cluster of maples straddling our property on Sunday, my feelings graduated to something akin to hate... MORON!), Ugh...

Anyway... It’s so nice to walk into the bedroom now. It’s so much more... sanitary-feeling. The problem is, however, now the rest of the floors in the house look even crappier than they already are and I am now wishing we could do the whole freaking house in the laminate (except the bathroom which I’d like to tile in ceramic and take out the tub and install a nice roomy standup shower instead). But finances are finances and even if the flooring is reasonably priced, it’s still requiring money we just don’t have... so I will have to content myself with the kyute bedroom for now. ::grumble::. I’d rather not go the stupid route most other people would and get ourselves neck-deep in credit card debt; it’s the sort of stupidity that put this economy in the state that it’s in. So responsible=shitty floors for now and no closet doors.

And onto more serious things...

So Bin Laden is finally partying it up with his great harem of virgins in the sky. I confess, as welcome as this news was to me, I was kind of a bit sickened I have to say, after Obama made his speech and the cameras turned onto the crowds of people waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets and landmarks. The image of it brought right back to the morning of September 11, when I stood before my TV frozen in horror and the international news broadcast images of people in the Middle East waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets celebrating the act of terrorism and deaths of what turned out to be 3,000 people. It was horrifying then, and I was horrified now. What REALLY astounds me is that the age of those people dancing and cheering at our landmarks are kids in their twenties. They were just rug rats when the whole thing went down... So I imagine they didn’t see how awful it really was. Either way, it was just so... unclassy. I guess is the way to describe it.

I remember 9/11 with an astonishing clarity. I was already in a depressed rut and when my home co-owner phoned me that morning to tell me to turn on my TV. I switched it on just in time to see the second plane hit and I was immediately and completely drawn into the spiral of misery that the whole thing became—my rut became a chasm I could not climb out of. I did not leave the television for days, I am not exaggerating. I lay on the sofa bawling as they broadcast images of people wandering around the devastation holding pictures of their loved ones, begging for someone to tell them they’d seen them alive somewhere. I was morbidly riveted to the dog searches, the eye-witness stories and could not look away from the footage of people jumping out of windows in desperation to escape the heat of the fires. It was a dreadfulness that took forever to get over and I didn’t even lose anyone in the tragedy. I cannot imagine the horror of the families affected by this tragedy. That event is what spiraled me down into one of the darkest moments of my life; a moment I almost did not survive. If it weren’t for my dog Eddie giving me a reason to get up every day and the intervention of a boyfriend who was bewildered by my utter depression and frightened for my safety, I don’t know where I’d be today. I began therapy then (was nearly committed) and began the job of learning to cope with what seemed to me, a pointless and hopeless existence.

It was impossible for me to quantify the reasons why anyone would do that. I couldn’t bear to live in a world where there were people who would be willing to harm so many others for ideological reasons alone. It was too bleak for me to cope with. Seeing other people celebrating the event like it was a wonderful accomplishment drove me further into depression. There was nothing redeemable about humanity to me. I was sick by it. I sometimes still feel that way. Cruelty can sometimes send me into periods of despair now and again. Survival for me is a matter of just forcing myself to face the world and its daily brutalities in hopes of finding some of the positive things in between.

Surviving depression at that level is not an easy task. Those who’ve never been through it cannot really understand how completely powerless a person can be against the wash of chemicals your brain is guided by, and a lack of dopamine can manifest itself into some pretty terrible things. I can say I’ve been dealing with it sans medication and on my own with some measure of healthiness for about six years. But it doesn’t take much to pull me right back to memories of that fugue; and seeing those kids wooing and yaying, waving little flags, dancing around in exuberance at the death of a mass-murderer, giving his expiration WAY more attention that the man deserves, I felt it for a second... that horrid darkness. I felt like humanity would not ever be capable of bettering itself and rising above the animalistic behaviours that seem to define us. Those kids seemed just as awful as the people in the Middle East celebrating the events of 9/11. I’m sorry, but that’s what I felt. 1 mass-murdering terrorist vs 3,000 innocents; none of those deaths should evoke joy on anyone’s part. The fact that it does makes me so very, very sad.

Anyway, that’s my view on it. /diatribe.

Memories of home.

Wee!

When I was young, my family (namely my mother) bought a riding stable. Riding stables in Belgium are different than they are here. In the US, the barn is just usually a barn, there're little structured activities around it, people come and go rather quickly and it's not really a social center (from my experience so far here). Our stable included a bar and restauarant with windows looking out into the arena, and those who boarded their horses there, and most of the folks who came for lessons paid a membership fee to participate. For members, the lessons were cheaper, and we had lessons going all week and weekend, sometimes I taught, sometimes our hired instructors taught.

People would come and stay most of the day. They'd come with the family, and while little Billy took lessons, mom and dad sat down and drank a beer, they all had dinner, dad would take a lesson while kids ran around the place, and they'd all go several hours later. It was a social center, and a lot like a country-club in many ways. Most stables in Belgium are like that. They have club names, colours, flags and they compete as a club in the riding guilds. It's a horse-friendly culture there. Nobody bats an eye if you ride up to a store or pub, get off the horse, and go and buy yourself something refreshing. People ride up and down country roads constantly.

The stable my mother bought was the same one where I first learned to ride. So I already had an emotional connection to the place. It was really old, the building made of stone masonry, and it had once had a life as a cow-farm, so the banquette seats in the bar and restaurant were actually the feeding troughs. There was a fireplace with a central witch-hat cone flue which we would encircle on the benches after a cold ride, and drink cocoa or lipton soup and reek of horse and nobody cared. Our covered arena was old but was fine, we had about forty-five stalls, and about twelve lessons horses and ponies.

In summer, mom hosted a group of American kids from the embassy for 'Pony Camp', where I would teach them the pony-essentials. They'd learn about grooming first thing, then tack, and before they ever set bottom on any of our lesson ponies, they would have to know how to tack up and prepare their mount for lessons. I remember many a balmy afternoon outside in the outdoor arena, a file of kids on tired ponies languidly trotting and crossing at the diagonal at my command while early arriving parents would lean on the fence and watch them. We did therapeutic riding for disabled children. We hosted Ponyclub. We competed in vast farm-fields with other clubs, and spent all day there drinking beer and watching our club-members ride and win.

Oh what good days those were. I miss the birthday parties, the special gatherings, the camraderie, the competitions... I miss the kids from the surrounding neighbourhood that inevitably ended up at our door and being part of our daily activities. Boyfriends came and went... parties and celebrations occurred, I even hosted the After-Prom party for the kids from the American School there, where they all drank themselves blind, passed out cold on the benches, and ate a hearty breakfast the next day before their parents came to get them.

My last years in Belgium were my wildest and the very best. I was over the alcohol thing before I was eighteen, I'd partied like a rock star with my clutch of close friends from fourteen on. The stable was always a wonderful thing for me. I was loathe to leave that world behind, but I was given no choice by the parental units. My heart broke a million times that day, I remember sitting on the stone stoop at the gate of the stable and wondering what was going to happen to the place. Mom came and picked me up and offered no explanation, only an admonishment of my misery and sorrow. As the plane took off... I cried. And I cried for the eight hours of travel to follow. That whole time in my life is preserved in my cerebral-formaldehyde... unchanged, just hanging there suspended in time and memory. My friends never age, the horses I loved are still there, gazing out over the half-doors of their stalls, the ponyclub is still trotting around the arena in a neat line on a crisp Saturday morning, steam puffing out from small fuzzy muzzles.

The culture shock took months to wane. The loss of everything familiar to me... the complete sense of groundlessness and isolation took years for me to cope with. I gained weight immediately upon my arrival in the US, and haven't been able to conquer it since. Every single day, I miss that time. Every single day.

The T Family.

Cozied Up By The Fire. Office Special 12/28/10

When I was a kid, my family lived a shortish ride on pony to a large private plot of land with a hunting reserve. It was pretty forested, with large, well-maintained paths winding in and out of this forested area and into the farm fields nearby that also belonged to the same property. We were allowed to ride there as long as we stayed on the main paths and only when it wasn’t pheasant season. This preserve was attached to an old house belonging to an old family. They had a noble title still, but there was little left of the prestige the family knew except their name, their home, their property and their history. Mr. T worked full-time.  Their other income source was their manour-house. It was open to touristsduring the week, and either Mrs. T or teenaged young Master T would give tours. The family had moved into a small part of the manour and the rest of the house was set up as the museum.

It wasn’t long before I, and a friend of mine (next door neighbour of sorts) who rode one of my ponies ran into their 2 younger kids on their ponies on the property, and they showed us all sorts of secret paths and wonderful places, and they eventually became our friends. We’d ride over to fetch them, or they come and fetch us... always on the back of a fuzzy Shetland or welsh mix pony. We’d ride right though neighbourhood streets, and bike paths to get there. We’d ride over and the Mrs. T would make us a nice healthy lunch or a goûter of a tartine and some café au lait, and we’d play inside for a while, or make figures out of marzipan to sell to people on holidays door to door in the saddle (the neighbours rarely bought it because we’d made it with our grubby pony-smelling hands). I remember wowing the T family a number of times with my marzipan renderings of Garfield and Odie and such. :)

I loved their home. It was just a few rooms of this huge manour that they lived in all clustered around the neat old kitchen with 30s style appliances. When I slept over, we’d creep about at night into the museumy bit and lie down on the really tiny beds, and play act and so on. The part they lived in was old and beautiful, but also really homey... the elegant paneled walls had these austere portraits of their ancestors hanging on them, against cracked paint and notched plaster. The furniture was elegant, but worn; the rugs rich, but threadbare. The place always smelled wonderful, of leek soup being simmered, of steak-au-poivre with fresh frites, of salad greens with vinaigrette, of baking frangipane, of mussels in white wine.. it was sheer comfort. Their Christmas trees, as most of them were for us, were gangly, very prickly assemblages with tinsel and bulbs, and their table was always welcoming to guests. I spent many hours in that house, admiring Mrs. T in her perpetual chignon, her ever-present string of pearls around her neck, even when she wore jeans, and her class and elegance that oozed from every pore, even when she was kneeling in the soil, yanking up weeds. All of the T family spoke English. And excellent English at that. But most of the time, we kids shifted between Flemish and French when we ran about in a pack of four, the hoofs of our little ponies clattering loudly on the tarmac as we roamed the neighbourhoods.

We’d go riding looking for the elusive red squirrels with the fuzzy ears that were so hard to find, and to see if we could spot some of the hunting stock ... pheasants etc. We galloped wildly along the big paths and jumped small obstacles on the ponies. We pooled our toys and acted out stories with them... We pretended to be a group of hobbits traveling to Mordor.

Every time the holidays roll around I think of the T family. I remember trying to ‘trick-or-treat’ for money dressed as kings on Three Kings day... or sitting in their parlour with the huge clock and drawing horses and ponies, or reading Thelwell Pony picture books, or putting together toys from the kinder-surprise eggs we’d gotten at the corner store. I think about them a lot. I miss you T-Family.

Happy New Year to all of you.  Think of good warm things as much as you can.

The pudgy black pig with the smooshy-face.

Teehee!

When I was in the fifth grade, we were living at the ‘magical house’ that I loved so much. I was getting ready to leave for school, and waiting for my father to find his keys because he always lost them. He lost his glasses a lot too and would get all huffy, shouting around the house “Whare the hell arr mai glahsses?” One of us would meekly point out that he had them up pushed them up onto the top of his head, and then scurry away snickering as he grumbled to himself and slid his glasses back down onto the bridge of his nose. My dad was kind of a curmudgeon. A good kind of curmudgeon though, on the most part. His grumpiness was endearing, and sometimes, when you called him out on it, he’d snicker mischievously and his eyes would glimmer like he’d been playing a joke on us all the while. He was a strange fellow in some ways, and you could never predict how he’d react to something. When I came home after getting into my first car-accident, I was terrified about telling him. I came into the house, and my eyes were red and puffy from crying all the way home, and there he was, coming downstairs to feed the dogs. I said: “I got into a car accident today daddy…” and started blubbering. He stopped and stared at me for a second and replied; “Vat? A car acceedent vasn’t necesserrry.” Seriously, that’s what he said. That’s just how he was. Unpredictable. He had no patience for pranks and tomfoolery though, and we of course, taunted him frequently just to get a rise out of him. I would purposefully mispronounce words to annoy him... we loved teasing daddy.

Our study used to be a room that was about three feet above the level of the living room area, and there were some steps leading up to the study. My sister Anna decided it would be funny to run up the stairs, pretend to trip, and dramatically fall onto the floor and act as if she’d died. She did a pretty bang-up job of it, but the conveniently placed sofa cushions were kind of obvious, but daddy still fell for it. I remember my dad just freaking out… He was like “Aneeta? Aneeta? ANEETA!” and then she couldn’t resist and started giggling, and he just got all pissy that he’d been duped; and eventually started laughing after giving my sister a good dressing-down, who just giggled all the while.

So that morning, when I stepped out of the house to throw my bookbag into the car, and my eyes moved reflexively to the center of the long orchard, attracted by something unusual. When I saw it, the first thing that popped into my head was; how am I going to tell daddy this? I went into the house and found him. He was already really worked up because his keys were nowhere to be found (they ended up being in the pocket of his coat that he was wearing). Anyway, I walked up to him warily and said: “Daddy, there’s a fat hairy black pig in our yard.” His head snapped in my direction and his furry brows crowded together and he replied: “Vat are you tokking about? Don’t say stoopid things, I don’t have time forrr thet.”

“Really, Daddy, there’s a really hair fat black pig, right out there in the back yard,” I insisted.  He looked even madder and then stormed out to the stone veranda, and looked out at the orchard and lo and behold, there was a massive black pig eating the fallen fruit from the apple trees and rolling chestnut burrs around with his snout. I told him: “see?” His brows arched up in puzzlement; there were a few farms near us, but they were grain farms, and the livestock in our neighbourhood were mainly draft horses and cows. Pigs were not usual, and this pig was particularly non-traditional looking, with a smooshed up face. He was really cute. I walked towards him, and daddy shouted at me not to. The pig only ran a few steps away and then continued rooting around. He sighed, and then went to wake up my mother so we could figure out the pig conundrum. He found his keys after yelling around for ten minutes, he took me to school anyway, and he went to work. We listened to BBC World Service, (this ident music still pops into my head sometimes)



as we always did, and he whistled along to it. The day was uneventful, except I spent all day wondering about the pig.

Mom came and got me after school, and as soon as I got into the car, I wanted to know about the pig. My mother discovered that the somewhat nearby Planckendael Zoo, which was a small zoo which at the time was a sort of nursery zoo for the animals from the main Antwerp zoo, had lost a Vietnamese pig. They were going to dispatch someone to get the guy.

When we got home, he was still there, this time further back in the yard, eating crab apples and chestnuts. Not long after, the young men from Planckendael showed up, and we were wildly entertained by the attempts to capture the pig. Our garden had a moat around it, I am not kidding. It was about 80% of the moat on our end, the driveway cut over part of it, and the last 15% of it was on the back side of the property where the third house was. The pig, after being leapt on by one of the guys, dragged his assailant into the moat, where he shed him, and then the pig waded on the edge a bit, and circled one end to climb out out in our pony pasture, where Penny and Silvermoon came over to check him out. He didn’t like ponies, so he went back into the water and paddled like an Olympic swimmer back to the apples. It took them another hour or so to catch the portly guy, and the two guys were worse for wear. Piggie was taken back to the zoo. We visited him there a few weeks later, he was in a pen with a bunch of other smooshy-faced pigs.

A few years ago, I was on the phone with my dad. This was before he got really sick, and I had called to ask him to help me troubleshoot some computer hardware issues I was having. In the middle of our geek-fest, he popped out with “Feffa… do you rremember when there vas a peeg in our back yahrd?” he chuckled. I laughed too, and said: “yeah, I remember you not believing me when I was telling you about it.” He had a good laugh about that, and replied: “Vat do you expect? You kids ver alvays doing stoopid things to make me mad.” His laugh was so hearty and wonderful.

I miss that old curmudgeon so much—I miss hearing him whistle to the BBC World Service intro, I miss watching him make a ritual out of eating an apple. I miss talking computers with him, and building them with him. I miss him so much. All these fertility-pill-induced hormones are putting me in that frame of mind lately. It’s so hard to think about him being permanently gone sometimes. I sort of pretend that he’s still in New Hampshire and I just haven’t gotten ‘round to talking to him for a few weeks—that he’s still at his ham-radio, logging his QSL contacts—sitting at the microphone enunciating: November One Mike Papaah Zulu and laughing with his Hungarian friends.

73s Papa.

The art of pony-riding

OMG… my sister posted this video on Facebook and it brought back flashbacks of a wonderful time. I laughed so hard thinking about the times when we-little-me enjoyed many of the same antics as the boy in this video. Learning to ride on a Shetland is a real life-lesson. But I guarantee that the little boy in this video is one hell of a horseman today. Ponies are the most singularly stubborn, devious and rotten creatures in the world! They will try to scrape you off on fences, they will do what you see Ed doing in this video, the quick-stop-head-drop, which throws the rider onto the neck and hopefully (if they’re not sticky) onto the ground… They will stop and roll you off, they will buck and kick you off, and they will run forward and then in a flash, veer off, leaving you still going forward. Ponies are evil. Penny (the one pictured in this post) was so round, that her little saddle would slide forward onto her shoulders and neck, and before we went out and got a crupper to secure it to her tail to prevent the sliding, she would constantly do the quick-stop-head-drop so I’d go sliding onto her neck and pitching forward with comic slowness into the dirt. Her favourite tactic to get me off was to veer into the center of the ring at a canter, stop short, and then try to roll me off. I had to learn to predict this behaviour and keep her on her feet.

Penny and her progeny, Eva.  Yes, we bred the bratty evil.  But luckily,
she was sold to another young victim by then.

Penny and Pinto, Viking and Ugly were all wonderful teachers. I fell so much, that falling doesn’t scare me (even when I’m now old and fat). They taught me to feel that particular tightening of the spine that occurs before your mount is about to do something rotten, and they taught me to not be a big baby about cuts, bruises and even the occasional bone fracture. Riding kids are tough little things… Riding mommies don’t go running fretfully into the riding ring when little Sally falls. Riding mommies purse their lips and say: “Go on, get back on… don’t let him get away with that!”

I rode my ponies everywhere. When we had them at home, I would ride them to see some friends whose family owned lots of land nearby, and we’d all hop on our ponies bareback and wander the countryside and invent adventures. I would play ‘Hobbits' at home when I was alone, and ride around our expansive back yard with its tunnels of rhododendrons and dark, sunken paths, and imagine I was on Middle-Earth, riding a pony on an adventure, I would ride my pony to the store to get a Kinder-Surprise chocolate egg and a cold Gini. I would ride my ponies to the traveling carnivals and all over town. Whenever things got rough at home, I would ride my pony away.

I started instructing ponyclub when I was about fourteen. It was really fun. Ponies are so much fun! I wish I could have one again.. I wish I could teach ponyclub again! I loved the little competitions with all these kids dressed in jods and blazers with their ponies all shiny and braided. The last pony I ever owned but was too big to ride was a pony named Lady. She was a Shetland/Welsh mix, and she was pitch black and beautiful. She was the first pony I trained to cart, and she was a perfect carting pony; unflappable and calm. I would drive that little carriage with her just about everywhere. I was training a young girl to ride shortly before we moved back to the US, and I trained her on my full-sized horse until she became comfortable, and then started letting her ride Lady. I let her ride Lady in a competition, in which she did fairly well in as a novice, and it was then that the parents and the little girl fell in love with Lady; and asked me to allow them to buy her. It took a lot to let her go.

Lady and I, giving rides to people at the Brussels American School gym track during the
1988 or 1989 July 4th celebration.

I have decided that if I am fortunate enough to get pregnant… that this will be the excuse to get a little squat, ornery Shetland again. I look forward to tiny saddles, and tiny bits, cruppers and itty bitty jodhpurs and paddock boots. I think it’s a wonderful thing for a child to do… and it’s full of great lessons. And you can’t put a value on the memories of growing up around these amazing creatures. Yeah, it can be dangerous. So is crossing the street, and you can’t get moments like that video above doing that.