The Females in My Life, by Ricky

Like everyone else on this planet, the first woman in my life was my mother.  Mom was the care giver when I was young, but she was also the rat-fink of my life.  She would always tell my father of my daily misdeeds and he was the disciplinarian in the family.  During that time period, discipline consisted of not too gentle spankings, so I learned to fear both of them.  Mom was also the one who came to Minnesota, while I was living with my grandparents, to be a bridesmaid for her sister and then did not take me back to California when she left Minnesota after the wedding.  I think I subconsciously resent her even to this day for leaving me and for being a rat-fink.

The second woman was my father's mother.  After I was born she came to live with us for about one year.  I don't remember that time period much and as I grew up, I did not see her very often.  The next female in my life was my beloved Bonnie, a black and white collie, who became the best baby sitter a two-year old toddler could not escape; that is until I learned to take her with me when I left the yard.  Sadly, she got distemper and passed before her first birthday.  I don't remember if I grieved for her very much.  I only now remember her from old photographs and the stories my parents told me over time.

Next was a girl in my Kindergarten class at the Hawthorn Christian School in Hawthorn, California.  Her name was Sandra Flora.  She was like a girlfriend to me, or more precisely, I was a boyfriend to her.  With long curly hair and the full dress that little girls wore at that time, she looked like a young Shirley Temple.  I carried her Kindergarten school photo in my wallet well into my 40's when I finally lost it.

The next woman in my life would be my mother's mother.  I lived with her and my grandfather for two years on a farm in central Minnesota from the age of 8 until two-weeks before I turned 10.  She was a reasonable surrogate mother but at 9-years of age, I ended up with a mild ‟school boy crush” on my 4^th grade teacher, Mrs. Knoll.  She was a very young beautiful lady and in her second year as a teacher.  The crush was mild because she was married so I knew I had no chance and I was not quite into full blown puberty.  My 3^rd grade teacher, Mrs. Sorensen, was a good but matronly teacher and thus of no interest to me.

Back on the farm, my aunt Darlene, my mother's younger and only sister, would visit occasionally with her husband.  When I was 8, I was a ring-bearer (like Bilbo and Frodo) at her wedding.  My younger cousin, Pamela Anderson, was the flower-girl.  There was one other female on the farm that I had a platonic relationship with, at least on my part.  Her name was Peanuts and she was a Guernsey cow.  Her stall was the first one as I would enter the barn and so she became my favorite, almost like a pet.

One week before I turned 10, my mother and new step-father came to Minnesota to pick me up and take me back to California.  They also introduced me to the next female to enter my life, my little baby sister, Gale.  For the next 9 years she and her twin brother and I had a close family relationship.  They were the kids and I was the babysitter.  Not too much personal time for me, but we did have some amount of fun growing up until I went away to college and then the military.  She still lives at our ‟home town” of South Lake Tahoe.

The next female was never alive in the literal sense but she really was a lady.  She was the Skipalong, my step-father's 39 foot cabin cruiser he used as a tour-boat on Lake Tahoe during 1957 and '58.  I was his deckhand in 1958 and I really loved the ‟job” and the boat.  All I had was that one summer with her as the next summer, at the beginning of the season, she sank at a pier while her engine was being overhauled and was sold for salvage.  I still miss her even today as that summer was perhaps the happiest of my childhood.

She had a colorful career.  It is believed she was built in the 1920's in Morris Heights, New York by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation.  She was originally 36 feet long but upon arrival in San Francisco she was modified to 39 feet long and a ‟lookout cockpit” was added to the bow as she began service as a rum runner during Prohibition.

In the Fall of 1958, after that wonderful summer, I developed another school boy crush.  This time it was during full blown puberty and on my unmarried, first year 5^th grade teacher, Miss Herbert.  She was beautiful, young, and had a wonderful personality.  I was in LOVE!  Then she got married over Christmas vacation.  I was devastated.  It appeared to me that I would never get the women I loved, which due to the age differences, is probably a good thing.

The next female arrived at our house on Red Lake Road, in South Lake Tahoe when I was 12.  She was ¾ Oriental Poodle and ¼ Pomeranian—a little, black, shaggy, and “yippy” lap dog.  She bonded to me the first night in our house and became the first female I slept with for the next 9-years.  I was monogamous but she was a very prolific bitch. No! I was not the father of her litters.

After I joined the Air Force, I met my first girlfriend as an adult.  She was the best friend of the woman I would marry 5-years later.  During the intervening years, I also met the woman who taught me about making out and foreplay.  Then there was the woman who took my virginity.  Actually, I guess it was a mutual thing as she did not have to twist my arm to get it.

Then I married Deborah and we enjoyed 27-years and 9-months together before she passed from complications of breast cancer.  During those years, the final women in my life were born to us—our three daughters, one of which made me a grandfather with her 2-daughters.

So those are the women and other females in my life.  I chose not to tell about my two female cats, so be thankful for small favors.

© 23 November 2014  

About the Author 

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach.  Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I was sent to live with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is, TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com.

Mom by Gillian

Most of us are, of course, via nature and nurture, to a lesser or greater degree a product of our parents. I can easily identify many things; good, bad, and ugly, that I got from mine. On the whole, though, I think what a received from my dad was of a simpler, less complex nature, than the traits I received from Mom.  My father was essentially an uncomplicated man. My mother was not an uncomplicated woman, although she put on a good act. Probably most people who knew her, especially the many children she taught and their parents, found her to be a warm, patient, conscientious, motherly woman with a good sense of humor. She was all those things; but a whole lot more that she never presented to the world, or to me, though eventually I caught at least an occasional glimpse of what went on below that smooth veneer.

So it’s little surprise that for the first forty-odd years of my life I found it relatively easy to hide the real, gay, me, from the world and to a huge extent from myself, and play a very convincing part. I learned those skills from Mom. Not that my mother was a lesbian, at least as far as I can ever know, though in fact how can I ever know? I can’t, but I just don’t sense it, and I believe I would. Her issue was her son and daughter who both died before I was born. She never once talked about it; not to me nor to anyone as far as I know. She buried her tragedy deep and set about developing a shell, never to be broken.

At least I eventually broke free of mine. My mother never did. I learned the truth from my aunt. OK Mum, (which is what I actually called her, not the more American Mom) you didn’t tell me your secret and I didn’t tell you mine. Na na na na naaa na!

So I guess that leaves us even in our dysfunction.

I always felt that there was something. Something missing. I can’t really express what I felt, or why, it was simply a child’s intuition. And now, after all these years, I wonder if a mother’s intuition told Mum that there was something, something indefinable, missing in me, in who I was, and in my communication with her.

Somehow, despite our chaotic psyches, Mum and I were close and I always knew I was loved unconditionally, by both her and my dad. They both also had a great sense of humor. Mum loved to giggle. I loved to make her giggle. It was all part of the very complex hidden relationship in which I knew it was up to me to heal her wounds, though I only knew of them subliminally, and make her happy. It was up to me to make her laugh. So in this way she helped me develop my own humor and we laughed a lot together. My dad’s humor was completely different from Mum’s, and I am fortunate enough to have a wonderful mixture of both, but he would look on fondly in puzzled silence while Mum and I giggled helplessly over something in which he could find little humor.

Mum was, as were many people but especially women, I think, back then, very concerned with appearances. I don’t know if any of you ever watched Keeping Up Appearances on PBS, but the show always reminds me of my mother, although she was a much nicer person that Hyacinth Bucket! Mum had a bad case of don’t do it in the street and scare the horses. I could wear that tattered old sweater I loved so much in the house, but I couldn’t venture outside in it, and if there was a knock on the door, I had to bolt upstairs and hide or change clothes before I came back down. My dad didn’t have to wear his tie in the house but had to put it on in a rush if anyone came to visit, and he had to wear it outside even if he was gardening. Someone might see him without it! I, on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s curse about what anyone thinks of the way I dress, or come to that the way I live, or anything about me. That, I think, is greatly a generational thing, but in my bones I feel that a lot of it is purely a reaction to Mum’s obsession with what will people think? On the other hand, of course, it did take me the first half of my life to come out of that bloody closet, so I cannot have been as freewheeling as I’d like to believe.

My mother’s other obsession was with her weight. She did seem to gain weight easily, though she never ate very much and only drank once a year, on Christmas Eve. It was always some kind of home-made wine: pretty strong stuff. After a couple of glasses she was bright red in the face and invariably stated in rather slurred words, how strange it was that although she only drank once a year, it never had any effect on her! Oh Mum, ever in denial! She was never obese, just pleasingly plump in a motherly kind of way.

But my dad and I could never convince her of that. These days I think it’s much easier to get a good feel for just how overweight, fat, or obese, you are, and how you look. With endless photographs of ourselves easily available we can compare ourselves with others only too often. In the days of only occasional snapshots, my mother constantly needed assurance.

“Oh dear!” Mum would exclaim, eyeing a woman of roughly her age bulging out of her clothes, “I’m not as fat as that am I?”

Well that was an easy answer in the negative, whatever the truth. But worse, she would sometimes ask that classic unanswerable question, “I’m not as fat as I used to be, am I?”

Just try to get that answer right!

I struggle to stay well clear of denial, because Mum relied so heavily on it. She would cry, not shedding a quiet tear but sobbing uncontrollably, over things with no direct relation to her; miners dying down coal pits, a race horse with a broken leg having to be shot, the death of King George V1. A therapist friend explained to me, many years later, that this was a classic example of transferred grief, my mother being way too terrified of facing her own grief, while needing to release it in some other way.

Poor Mum. She lived in the wrong time and the wrong place. Her children died in 1940 in a war torn Britain where people died every day and you just sucked it up and soldiered on. These days she would have had the benefit of therapy and support groups and various spiritual teachings to ease her way. Of course you never recover from the death of one child let alone two, but she would have had a lot of help in dealing with her heartbreak.

On rare occasions I catch myself glancing uneasily at an overweight woman and wondering if I am in fact more or less fat than she is.  I panic. Oh God, I’m becoming my mother! Eckhart Tolle and I try to keep me grounded in reality and dealing with my own self, leaving Mum to rest in peace. I am what I am and whether all or any of it comes from Mum and Dad hardly matters.  I recently accepted that my struggle to keep the weight off is little to do with heredity and a whole lot more about beer.

© Dec 2013

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

Mom by Lewis

I hardly know where to begin to write about my one-and-only mother.  "Mother" is the last descriptor she would ever want to define her function in life.  If she could, she would surely prefer to be remembered for her contributions to education, journalism, or faith than maternalism.  If I had to choose, I would say she bore more resemblance to the Mary Tyler Moore character in Ordinary People than Barbara Billingsley in Leave It to Beaver.  That is to say, she had few of the maternal instincts that we normally associate with Midwestern families of the post-World War II era.

Like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, my parents slept in twin beds.  My dad dressed in a separate bedroom, which also served as his office.  Although my bedroom was just across a narrow hallway, I don't remember ever hearing any sounds coming from their bedroom that would suggest anything physical took place in that sterile space.  I never saw them hug or kiss, not even a peck on the cheek.  My parents didn't even argue, at least, in my presence.  My dad was a solid breadwinner, meek and mild-mannered as Clark Kent.  Together, they were the very model of the modern, Middle American, Methodist couple--except for their fondness for a highball before dinner.

Mother grew up in the small, rural, southwest-Kansas town of Pratt.  She was proud of the fact that Alfred Hitchcock's one-time-favored actress, Vera Miles, attended school there.  Her father, the only grandparent I ever knew, was an engineer on the Rock Island railroad.  They raised chickens and a few cows on their small property on the edge of town.  There were six children, three girls and three boys.  Mother was the oldest.  As such, she had many responsibilities for home-making and child-rearing.  I suspect that that had much to do with her distaste for such menial labor in her adulthood.  She had more dignified aspirations.

Mother was quite intelligent.  She graduated from high school at the age of sixteen with her sights set on going to college.  It was 1923, however, and her parents saw no value in a daughter of theirs staying in school.  She was on her own.  She held a lifelong deep resentment over the fact that her brothers, none of whom were in the least interested in further matriculation, were given a car as their graduation present.

Denied any way of supporting herself on her own, she soon married.  By the time she was 23, she had given birth to a son and a daughter.  More and more, she was feeling trapped in a hopeless and loveless situation.  She wanted a career.  She was bright and ambitious.  Living with a man who she felt was never going anywhere in life and being saddled with two small kids was like being entombed alive.  So, in 1936, she filed for divorce.  Almost shockingly, she did not ask for custody of the children.  In those times, it was almost automatic that the children would be placed in the care of the mother.  Not so this time.  BJ and Joyce were placed with their paternal aunt, also living in Pratt.

Before long, mom and another woman had opened a beauty parlor above the Sears department store in Pratt.  She took the two kids to the movies every Wednesday evening.  Sixty years later, as Mom was brushing my daughter's hair at our house in Michigan, she started talking about the time she and the other woman ran a beauty parlor.  My daughter, who is bisexual, later related that she was getting the impression that there might have been more than business on the two women's minds.  Mother had told me some years before that her partner had, quite abruptly, sold her interest in the shop to her and taken off for California, never to be heard from again.  A lover's quarrel or a simple commercial transaction?  I'll never be certain.

The beauty shop was down the hall from the office of the man who would become my father.  They dated and were married in 1940.  It would be 4-1/2 years before mom got pregnant with me.  Perhaps it was the turmoil of WWII.  My dad didn't serve in the war because of his limp from polio contracted when he was 20.  Mixed blessing, I would say.

On the other hand, my suspicion is that Mom was just not interested in having another child.  By 1945, she was 38 years old.  She was still hoping for a career as a writer or secretary or something.  My fantasy is that on VE Day--May 7, 1945--my father swept my mom up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom where they had their own private celebration of the sweepingly historic occasion.  I was born on February 3rd of the following year.  A new era of American domination was dawning and I would be in on the ground floor.

There were a few small hitches, however.  Mom made plain many years later that I was the child my father wanted--his one and only.  In addition, in her view, I was a "deficit baby", that is, a parasite that siphoned off the calcium from her bones and teeth.  At the baby shower in my honor, they played a game where the guests attempt to estimate the birth weight of the baby.  All of the guesses, duly preserved in my baby book, were on the low side, suggesting to me that Mom may not have been taking enough nourishment.   My actual birth weight was over seven pounds, close to normal.

One of my earliest memories is Mom singing a lullaby to me.  The lyrics, written by Paul Robeson, are, in part and adapted, as follows:

Evenin' breezes sighin', moon is in the sky.
Little man, it's time for bed.
Mommy's little hero is tired and wants to cry;
Now, come along and rest your weary head.
Little man, you're cryin', I know why you're blue.
Someone took your kiddy-car away.
You better go to sleep now
Little man, you've had a busy day.
Johnny won your marbles, tell you what we'll do,
Mom'll get you new ones right away.

Sadly, that was a rare moment of tranquility between Mom and me.  Most of my recollections of close contact with Mom involved physical pain on my part.  Not to paint myself as a complete innocent, however.  Some of you may remember my story of many months ago about climbing the neighbor's chimney.  Years later, there was the time I walked home from school in a light rain without a jacket.  Mom was standing in the front doorway.  As I opened the door, she slapped my face, hard. 

"How dare you not wear a coat in the rain.  Do you want to get sick?"

"I'm sorry.  I wasn't thinking", I said in complete contrition, hoping to appease her anger.  (After all, it had worked before when I suggested that mom stop worrying and ask God to take care of me.)  Still, I was blind-sided by her action.  Looking back on it now, I believe that Mom resented being stuck at home as a lowly housewife and my getting a cold would only aggravate her sense of obligation and despondency.

When I had a spanking coming, it's delivery came at the hand of my mother.  Her hands were good for other things, as well.  When I had ringworm of the scalp, it was she who was stuck with the most unpleasant job of removing the hairs from a circular patch of my scalp about two inches in diameter with a pair of tweezers, one-by-one.  About five minutes at a time was all either she or I could stand.  When I got stabbed in the hand with a pencil at school, it fell upon Mom to dig out the remnants of graphite with a needle.

I believe that Mom simply did not have the disposition for being a caregiver.  I remember her telling me about having to care for my paternal grandmother, who was dying of colon cancer in the early 1940's.  It was clear it was not something she found rewarding. 

But Mom's hardness was shown in other, perhaps even less endearing ways.  When I graduated from law school, my parents drove to Detroit from Hutchinson, Kansas, for the ceremony in Ford Auditorium downtown.  With about an hour to go before the procession began, Mom announced that she wasn't feeling well and wanted to stay at our house.  I was terribly disappointed but not surprised.  She had been deprived of the opportunity to be a part of such an occasion in her own right; how tough it must of been for her to look back on her life of nearly three-quarters of a century as principally a home-maker and not feel big-time self-pity.

Her predicament came most into focus for me on her 50th birthday.  I was practicing my Hawaiian steel guitar--hats off to The Lawrence Welk Show--in the utility room across the tiny dining room from the kitchen, where Mom was ironing.  All of a sudden, she burst into tears.  I had never witnessed such a scene in our emotionally sterile household.  Being gay--though closeted even to myself--I wanted to rush over to her side to comfort her.  But I had not the slightest idea what to say to her.  I had no clue what was going through her head.  Had Dad said something before leaving for work?  So, I just kept on playing my syrupy music, which seemed to be of no help whatsoever.  Fifty years old, ambitious, and still ironing in the kitchen.  That's enough to depress anybody.  I myself don't iron to this day.

On my parents last visit to Michigan in 1989, Mom was sitting in the new family room addition.  At one point, she said, "I think I must have left my cane upstairs".  We had no upstairs.

After my Dad died in 1990, my entire family--wife, two kids and I--went to Kansas to take care of Mom.  It soon became apparent that Dad had been covering for Mom for months.  She was not able to live by herself.  We moved her to a "progressive living" type of senior housing--independent living, assisted living, and nursing care. 

Initially, we thought independent living would be the best choice, as she was still able to do quite a few things for herself.  Ten weeks later, we got a call from the staff.  Mom was having hallucinations about someone being under her bed and was not regular about showing up for meals.  They suggested moving her to the nursing section.

Within a week or two, we got another call, one which caused my mind to harken back to my daughter's story about my Mom's possible sexual orientation.  My mother had gotten out of bed and dragged her roommate from her bed onto the floor.  Then, Mom had sat astride the other woman demanding sex, saying, "You are my husband and you owe me!"  The institution informed me that they had to tie my mother into her bed with straps and that she would have to be moved to a different facility as they were not equipped to handle such behavior.

Not only was Mom suffering from the side effects of medications that lower one's inhibitions, but she also was apparently afflicted with Alzheimer's disease.  It was Christmas Season.  I had to quickly find her a place with an Alzheimer's patient wing.  The nearest decent one was in Wichita.  We moved Mom there as soon as the arrangements could be made. 

At this point, I would have given almost anything to have my old Mom back.  Her disease may have dulled the loneliness and frustration of losing all track of time and familiarity of face and habitat but I can only imagine that those last three years were nearly unbearable, both for her and the staff and other inhabitants, for whom Mom had nary a kind word to say.  It was during that period that my half-brother--her son--died of lung disease at the age of 63.  I never told her.  How could I, when she kept saying that BJ was coming to pick her up for a drive?  At the end, she no longer recognized me.  She died surrounded by strangers, pushing a walker down the hallway, saying antagonistic things to those she passed.  Was she ever truly happy?  Did I ever make her smile?  Either I don't know or I can't remember or both.  I do know that I made my Dad smile and I guess that will have to do.

© 2 December 2013 

About the Author  

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn't getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband's home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.