The Four Horsemen of the Mom-pocalypse

In which what is lost is sometimes not found. Or at least not in time.

Don’t rush into throwing everything away, they said. You will regret it later, they said.

But I was on a mission: Two months after my mother died, I wanted her house empty and sold.

A Birthday card sent Twenty years too late.

My real estate buddy assured me it would go quickly; I was in a crucial phase of a very important book project, which required me to be three hours away for a two-week photo shoot. So I excavated wardrobes full to the top with used padded envelopes. I delved into the “secret” safe in the corner of her bedroom (I’d known where the key was since I was thirteen). I found a stack of diaries, starting in 1940. I didn’t open even one, just shoved them into a plastic box and labeled it for transport. I’ll go through them later, I told myself quite seriously. I ordered four extra, huge blue recycling bins and arrayed them in a semi-circle around the front door of her house. The front door with the Prohibition-style peep-hole through which she had peered at me as if I were an invading army of Goths. I named the blue bins “The Four Horsemen of the Mom-pocalypse.”

Then I got busy.

Eleven years later, I hauled the box up to my office. Yep, diaries. There it sat for six months. I wanted to throw them away. I didn’t want to throw them away. Because of the leather covers, they couldn’t be recycled. OK, I’ll pull out the pages and burn them, then send the covers to the landfill.

With the first diary, I was ruthless. Unlatching the tarnished little lock, then pulling the pages of crabbed writing from the leather cover by the bunch. It was in surprisingly good condition for its age, but the smell was weird. Like a sickroom in a library. The pages burned with an odd gaiety. By the third diary, I started to have doubts. Then I started reading. No, I can’t read them all! I have a life! But I can’t not read them, either. My only-child mother poured her heart out onto these pages (also the weather, the location, and everything she wore; Every. Single. Day. For 35+ years).

This apple sure fell far from that tree.

Here is one with her name embossed in gold on the cover, from 1947. As I open it, an envelope falls out. It’s from her father, whom she met only once. A birthday card for a two-year-old. Only this is her twenty-second birthday. He’d meant to send it when she was two, he typed on the back, but “somehow this hadn’t come to pass.” So he’d repurposed it by writing “twenty” above the “two” in pink sharpie. He’d had her birthday off by one day, explaining that this was because “they” didn’t tell him about her birth until a few days later. There is no mention of this card in the diary.

Dispatch from the cutting edge of Fatherhood, 1947

Two weeks go by before I can venture into the box again. Now we are in 1954. She is in Nassau, in the process of leaving her first husband, whom she heartlessly denigrates in the pages. She and her friends water-ski, swim “bare-assed,” meet for martinis and/or scotch twice daily, canoodle with the hunky tennis pro, and try at all costs to avoid said husband’s hang-dog presence.

“I wonder who your next husband will be,” gaily muses someone named Connie.

In the 1940 diary I discover a teenager full of herself, as I was too, at that age. In 1947, a young woman whose father doesn’t even know the date of her birth. In 1954, a self-involved, seemingly insensitive woman. This last is the mother I thought I knew.

There are eighteen more diaries in the box.

****

She’d warned me shortly before she died that I would “find some things you won’t like” among her papers, and I did. Voluminous correspondence, constant re-working of “estate” plans, lists of ways in which I had failed. Yes, there were many things I didn’t like for me. But she never mentioned the things I wouldn’t like for her.

Why in all the years did she not share with me the pain, the disappointments, the emptiness, of living life without a father? Why was her focus on my failings, instead of revealing some of her own trauma? This trauma is what made her human in my eyes, or might have if given half a chance.

Today, I mourn deeply for the might-have-beens, the lost opportunities for closeness. Because she kept waiting, and waiting….until it was too late.

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Tidbits For The Week of May 13, 2024

Brigit’s What I’m

CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️ The Ugandan kids dancing to "This Ain't Texas" on Insta (@hyperskidsafrica)
THINKING ABOUT ➡️ All the incredible reviews for my new memoir: Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival
LISTENING TO ➡️ Kate Bush. Ain't we all just "running up that hill"?