Tag Archives: Family Programming

I’m Her Mommy, She’s My Mami

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Baby has been at daycare ever since she was a mere 2 1/2 months old. It really bothered me to leave her in daycare so soon, but since Hubby and I do need my extra paycheck and benefits from my full-time job, off she went. She has always been in the warm environs of family daycare. Just a handful of kids ate, napped and played together all the time. We live in a predominantly Latino neighborhood, which means she has always had Latina caregivers, and Spanish is a growing part of her expanding vocabulary.

First there was Sula, a warm, efficient and bustling woman who always kept the kids content and her house super tidy. When Baby was tiny enough for the car seat and we rested her on Sula’s kitchen counter, Baby would greet her by arching her back and poking out her belly, a gesture for Sula to lift her up. Sula always chirped something like “mamita” to the girls (actually, Baby was the only girl in her set) or “papito” to the boys. If the children ever cried or fussed, she soothed them saying “mi amor.” Her second family care provider was Nina, a Puerto Rican woman. The situation was similar, but Nina spoke more English than Sula.

All of this happened as Baby learned to talk. When she said what sounded like “mommy,” I thought she was calling for me. But Hubby pointed out that Baby could be repeating the Spanish “mami,”repeating the term her Spanish-speaking caregivers use for her. It’s funny how that term has so many meanings. I’ve heard it used in a provocative way to describe voluptuous girls, and something much more harmless and even charming—when done properly, of course!

I like the fact that Baby can express herself in two languages. (Soon to be a third, as I am determined to share some French with her.) When she can’t pronounce ‘bread,’ she might asked for ‘pan-ney’. When she first learned to talk, the letter w gave her trouble, so she said ‘ag-aaa’ in what we thought was baby Spanish while reaching for her bottle or training cup.

Baby is in nursery school now, and the same Spanish-speaking caregiver scene is unfolding. The teacher is a kind young Latina, and there are two assistants to give all the kids lots of personal attention. Baby has taken a particular liking to one assistant, Miss Carmen. Baby greets her with a hug in the mornings, follows her around the large, cheerfully decorated classroom, and nestles in Miss Carmen’s arms as she is rocked to sleep before nap time. Despite the fact that I can’t be home with her more often, we’ve been lucky to have Baby situated with great people.

On a recent Saturday, in fact, I was trying to get Baby to count her toes with me. She was fiddling with one of her infant burp clothes, which had three flowers stitched in. I didn’t realize until after I played back the recording, but I think she was attempting to count the three flowers in Spanish! Take a listen and see: Three Flowers

Nowadays, whenever Baby says “mommy,” I know she is calling for me and not using Spanish slang. We went through a call and response phase when she would repeat “maa-aa-mee” and I answered “yes, Sweet Pea,” for minutes and minutes on end. It didn’t annoy me at all. I even look forward to the day when she can understand the difference between the English “mommy” and the Spanish one, and enjoys calling me by both. When used properly, of course!

An Unwanted Treasure: Part 2

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So here is the second part of the entry that I posted on Sept. 24, 2010.

Little Sister has lived with us for almost five years. I could write chapters on how difficult it is to deal with an emotionally complex teenager. But I won’t do that on this blog. My mother’s ability to compartmentalize is amazing. While the whole conflict was unfolding, she swore off all of us in the most verbally abusive, brawling, caustic way you can imagine. Every now and then something sets Mommy off, and she sends me a spiteful email or letter, in which she gleefully conveys vicious, scathing gossip about me and attributes it to others, rather transparently. She never identifies these cattier-than-thou women outright, but she usually stirs the pot by claiming that it is someone close to me, who is pretending to be my friend, but really thinks I’m the worst daughter ever to walk the earth. If she’s trying to bait me into checking out who these “traitors” might be, she’ll be disappointed. I don’t believe much of what she attributes to other people, because I know that she’s just trying to wear me down until I cave in and let her walk out on her responsibilities to the child she adopted. I certainly don’t devote much time wondering why a woman who claims to be a Christian makes a hobby of maligning her own daughter, all for very self-serving purposes.

When I was pregnant with Baby, I didn’t tell Mommy about it until my eighth month, because I knew she would start to lay a lot of emotional claims on Baby. I knew she would find a way to make herself the focus of the pregnancy. Sure enough, now that Baby is here and growing up nicely, she is trying to take credit for the baby’s good looks, sweet nature and anything else she can think of. She’s trying to move in on my daughter’s life, while pushing everyone—including me—off to the side. It amazes me that she thinks it’s acceptable to deride Little Sister and me, mock and badmouth us both to whoever will listen, and then expect me to allow her to form a bond with my child. It is beyond presumptuous and damned near diagnosable. Does she think I was brought into this world specifically to be her patsy, then navigate all the complexities of a high-risk pregnancy, all for her greater glory? Moving on.

Mommy is contemptuous toward Little Sister and the more callous family members who worship Mommy and have taken sides with her are just as cold. Little Sister gets ignored on major occasions like birthdays and holidays. She rarely gets cards, and never receives gifts or phone calls. Meanwhile, Mommy will go out of her way to send money and little packages for Baby. Also, Mommy only checks in to get Little Sister’s grades. Mind you, she doesn’t ask whether she is involved in sports or clubs. She just wants the grades. I am suspicious about this, because she seems to be fishing for fodder to berate Little Sister with, and argue that we shouldn’t be sending her to a private school.

That is daily life for us now. We live out a cycle of seeing her lash out in some way, admonishing her to be civil, receiving backlash for our admonishment, and getting the iceberg treatment for several months. Sometimes I wonder what Hubby must be thinking, with several clusters of his wife’s Jamaican family taking sides on the issue, from the island throughout the diaspora. Aside from the ones here in New Jersey and maybe outside of London, who are not as harsh and strident as their more insular kin, my family’s response has been disgraceful. They expected me to turn a blind eye to everything that was going on, and to pardon Mommy’s destructive actions.

Heaven help me if my family ever gets wind of this blog, and its contents. Because here is the other expectation from my clan and culture: Never publicize your family woes. Even if your parents and family elders are being deliberately cruel and oppressive, take the passive, submissive role and suck it up. The unwritten doctrine of parental infallibility says that as long as they put up with you long enough to clothe, feed and shelter you, they can say and do whatever they like.  The son or daughter’s role is to be meek and pray that God will supply a wellspring peace to withstand everything that is thrown his or her way. But THAT is the part of my upbringing that I utterly reject, because I’ve learned that my mother had developed a recent habit of blatantly throwing people away. She got away with a lot of it because of her beauty, talent and general longstanding popularity.

I personally have very little hope that Mommy will restore her relationships with me, or with Little Sister, even if she grudgingly grumbles that she “went too far” by dumping Little Sister abroad. Mommy is a very unforgiving person, who believes that Little Sister compromised her health and finances, and deserves whatever suffering comes her way. She tells herself—and several others from our tight-knit community—that the only reason I helped Little Sister was to get revenge on her for what she says was some totally innocuous and completely unavoidable slight on her part. Even others have been swept up in this ridiculous mania and written to me, begging, “for God’s sake” to come clean about  whatever so-called grudge I supposedly have against my mother, wipe the slate clean and quit persecuting her. Sometimes I wonder if a mass dose of mood stabilizers is not in order for this crowd.

I hope that woman in Tennessee feels contrite about what she’s done and finds a way to make up for her actions. And I wish the same for Mommy. Both women still have a couple of choices before them. They can either redeem themselves, or use up the rest of their lives in denial about the cruelty and recklessness of their actions. I think my mother should drop her hopes for unconditional sympathy and rebuild her family life as best as she can. Judging by the backlash to that Tennessee woman’s decision, the general public has no sympathy for someone who says they’ve adopted a child, but when they decide that it’s not what they want, just tosses that person away like an old piece of luggage.

If my guess is correct, there are more people in our family who actually crave the old fellowship that we all had in the 1970s and 1980s, and would readily embrace Mommy again if she abandoned her belligerent and hurtful ways. Her future well being, then, is really up to her.

An Unwanted Treasure: Part 1

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I originally wrote this post in April, but didn’t feel like revising and re-posting it until Friday, Sept. 24, 2010. It’s a rare look into my untidy, emotional family melodrama. Some blogs work best when the writer is concise and snappy, I’m told. Well, this is not a concise, snappy situation, as you’ll see, which is why I split this post two parts.

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When I read the story about a Tennessee woman who sent her adopted Russian son back to his native country on a plane, all alone, I didn’t feel the same sense of outrage as the rest of the country. My family has been living in the wake of a similar situation that unfolded four years ago, after Mommy did something similar to Little Sister.  I looked at this from the perspective of someone who had already passed  through several phases of a crisis and had become reconciled to how seriously troubled some people, even mothers, can be.

The long and short of it is that my mother adopted Little Sister, then mismanaged her, which probably caused Little Sister to rebel. Her behavior got so out of hand that Mommy eventually got fed up, flew Little Sister back to her native country and left her unexpectedly with her birth mother. Then Mommy walked away and never looked back. She never checked in on Little Sister, never made arrangements for her schooling and financial support, and months later she said she didn’t want anything to do with the girl anymore. Little Sister was almost 13 years old when that happened.

Can you imagine how rejection by two mothers would devastate someone emotionally? Even in the best of times, 13-year-old girls are full of angst and self-consciousness, but to be basically thrown away, and by two mothers?

While all of this was happening, Hubby and I had been married less than two years, and we were settling into a new house. Despite everything that was going on with me personally, I could not pursue my own interests in working, traveling, writing, decorating the house while Little Sister lived a life of deprivation and possible abuse overseas. We were getting unsettling information about her living situation. Little Sister’s biological mother did not want to keep her, and strenuously reminded me of that several times. “This is not my child,” she would say sometimes. “I gave her up for adoption, and this is not my child.” So I, along with Hubby, had to doggedly pursue Mommy to give us the child’s passport and other critical documents, so that we could pull her out of that situation and bring her to live with us.

The process of getting Little Sister to live with us was horrendous, because my mother was firmly set against it. She wanted to wash her hands of Little Sister, leave her in Jamaica and never look back. For four months, she was belligerent, dishonest, uncooperative, and she subjected Hubby and me to a series of ferocious tirades. It was exhausting.

We eventually took in Little Sister, filed for custody and eventually made Mommy contribute financially to Little Sister’s upkeep. That last part, about  financial support, sent Mommy over the edge of civility and elevated the conflict to the point where it opened up a chasm in the family. Some people allied themselves squarely with Mommy, and strenuously tried to impress on me just how fundamentally messed up they thought Little Sister. They either defended Mommy’s decision to desert her or came up with weak rationalizations for her actions. (“So what if she overreacted?” on aunt wrote in an obnoxious letter, which I’ve since shredded.) The names and analogies that some of my cousins thoughtlessly used to describe Little Sister should not be repeated. From what I can gather, the people who think ill of me believe I should have left Little Sister to rot in that third-world country where my mother returned her. But what would we say to people who would ask, who must ask: “What happened to the little girl that your mother adopted?”

While we were preparing to take in Little Sister, Mommy quietly moved from Florida to South Carolina. She left us no forwarding information at all. She didn’t even program her phone to inform callers that the number had been disconnected. There I was, calling the house in Florida over and over, not realizing I had been brushed off—again. (I should have suspected, after a long period of being on the receiving end of those sorts of tactics.) When I became suspicious about the phone line, I asked my aunt if she knew what was going on. She said, “Your mother moved to South Carolina, about two weeks ago.” It became very clear, after several months, that Mommy wanted to wash her hands of me, Little Sister and anyone else who stood up to her for making potentially destructive choices with her life. Mommy might have wanted to forget she ever had two daughters and start fresh, but as she—and I—quickly realized, clean breaks are hard to accomplish when little concerns like morals and ethics get involved.

Mixed Family Drama

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Police dramas, hospital dramas and family dramas are what makes (and has made) for some of the best TV shows around aren’t they? And I bet some of us lead lives wherein situations either of our own making, or those inflicted on us, would bring in some pretty high ratings if they were put to scripts and dramatized.

That brings me to the awkward, even queasy part of my marriage, my mother. I generally avoid talking about her too much, because in my mind, people have much bigger problems than whether or not I get along with her. And I’ve refrained from talking about my mother on this blog because I’ve already done that with a therapist last summer and I didn’t want to conjure up old ghosts. Well folks, Hubby and I have been married for almost 4 1/2 years, and for half that time, my mother and I haven’t had a decent conversation. I only call at Christmas — maybe Easter, too. Mommy is usually aloof, offering almost nothing beyond formalities and customary pleasantries. I didn’t even tell her I was pregnant until I was well into my seventh month, and it was well-meaning family pressured me to. I meant to tell her in March, but the timing coincided with her decision to send a nasty birthday card to my 15-year-old sister, who as a result of a fallout with Mommy, lives with us. The card was so mean and icy that I’m pretty sure just opening it sent up an Arctic blast that should correct the whole global warming problem any minute now. Hubby and I couldn’t just let it slide. At the end of a tense exchange between the three adults, Hubby and I drew the line yet again with Mommy: We want you to be part of this family, but you must be civil. Mommy pretty much let us know that she wasn’t interested in our lives if it meant treating Little Sister with respect. And so the estrangement continues.

Now that Baby is due next month, I find myself fighting fiercely to keep this woman out of my head. It doesn’t help that the expectations are high for me to mend fences. How should I handle the news about the baby? Do I tell my mother when I go into delivery or wait until after the baby is born? Would she come to see the baby and to the christening? Do I do what’s right for me and stay away from her, or listen to the entreaties of family and keep her in my life? Considering that nothing I do or say will stop my mother from behaving in vicious, damaging ways, why should I give in? Something is wrong with this picture. In a perfect world (at least according to magazine pictures and based on my friends’ stories about their moms), she would be helping me decorate the nursery and I’d be getting the spare room ready for her to visit after the birth, right?

This is a tough situation, because my mother is an unforgettable woman. She is tall and has those high cheekbones and regal beauty that remind a lot of people of Phylicia Rashad.  She’s affluent, usually well put together and a talented singer, organist and pianist. She is such a great cook that when I brought Hubby (then possible fiance) home to meet her and my little sister, Hubby gave this assessment a few days later: “Your mom is exactly the person I’ve been looking for my whole life!” Hubby is a devout gourmand.

On the other hand, Mommy and me have never quite seen eye to eye on anything worthwhile. It’s safe to say we’re almost opposites in temperament. But I didn’t expect her to ignore me during our wedding weekend in Jamaica, dress up like the wife of the sun god and outshine me, yet behave as cold as ice and aloof toward Hubby and the in-laws. She barely socialized with any of us, did not stay at our hotel or tell us where she was staying (I asked her a million times), never had a meal with us, did not send Little Sister to the wedding rehearsal like I asked her to, and did not sit with us during the rehearsal dinner.

More than one family member has asked me privately whether Mommy disliked the fact that I married outside my race. It never occurred to me that she didn’t want a white son-in-law. I just thought she was being an extreme version of her usual button-down, circumspect self. If she did not think I should have married this man, I reasoned that it must have had something to do with her (formerly mine, too) staunch religion, social class or culture. I won’t accuse her of racial bias, because I think I’ve said previously on this blog that Jamaicans are used to intermarrying, and she must be used to that sort of thing by now, right? But the thing is that Mommy is one of those stoic, insular Jamaican women. She is religiously conservative and very opinionated about everything. During the last presidential election, she drove her luxury SUV out of her gated community to her polling place and voted … Republican!!! Hubby is kind of like a leftist New York intellectual, so if my mother has any kind of aversion to Hubby, it might stem from their different politics.

This situation is so complicated that it’s hard to guess how things will turn out. But now that she has emphatically let me know that she is no longer interested in me or my life, then what am I supposed to do? I know that babies are magical, and when they come into the world, they have a tendency to melt people’s hearts and make the way for reconciliation. But whether she’s in her glory or her disgrace, my mother is a force of nature, as anyone can judge from the clip below. I think the reason she left Florida several years ago was that she was tired of competing with the hurricanes to leave destruction in her wake, and I’m not too thrilled about passing the family madness to another generation.