Archives for February 2024

Lessons I Learned from the fears of my mother

My mom suffered from agoraphobia. This is often defined as a fear of open spaces, but that’s not entirely correct. For her, it was a fear of being away from home. She would be certain that something awful was going to happen unless she stayed home, or at least got home. In the 1950’s, this condition would have largely gone unnoticed except that she was also a divorced, single parent who had to work for a living.
Our world was rather small. She worked across the street in a diner, where she could see her home from work. I did not know why my mother had never taken me to school, like the other kids’ mothers did. My first day of school, I tagged along with a neighbor’s kid and her mother. After that I went by myself. It took many years for me to figure why my mom never went to school or ever picked me up. That was just something that other parents did. My home was different.
Until I was nine, my mother had a boyfriend who she wanted me to pretend was my dad. I refused. I remember her crying and saying, “You don’t understand how much we need him.”
Divorce only happened in New Jersey when both parties agreed. Her boyfriend’s wife was very Catholic and would not agree. The boyfriend wanted to take her to Las Vegas, where he could get a quickie divorce and they could be married. My mother could not manage to go. If he was divorced and remarried in Nevada, the state of New Jersey would recognize it. However, they would not recognize the divorce in order for her to be married in our state. He told her that because she could not go, he had to leave her.
I learned how much she needed him after he left. My mother was put into the hospital; she lost her job. We lived on the support checks from my father. Unemployment paid $12 every two weeks. There were nights when we ate with relatives because we had no food. A dinner invitation was a relief. It was my job, to go to unemployment every two weeks to stand on line with her. She would tell me that I did not have to go to school.
Her ex-boyfriend allowed her to buy back a car that she had helped pay for. My mother borrowed the money to buy it. Wherever she went, it was my job to go with her. When she would start to shake and cry, it was my job to tell her that we were going to be ok. It was my role to say that she could do this. That I knew that she was going to win this time.
On the same day that we went to unemployment, we went to Presbyterian Hospital, where my mom saw a psychologist. The waiting room was bright with a few soft chairs, but mostly hard-backed wooden ones. I was allowed to go to the cafeteria and have an egg-salad sandwich. I like egg-salad to this day. They would let me sit there and no one would know that my mom was damaged because I could be there for any reason. Maybe somebody old and very sick would not allow children in the room and that was why I was in the luncheonette that day.
I would always wind up on one of the hard chairs though. Once I tried to go to the gift shop, but they watched me and approached me and then asked me to leave because I was touching things. I didn’t go back because I was afraid that somehow if I got reported that my mom would get in trouble with them. Once in a while, the therapist wanted to see me. I was never sure what I was supposed to say. Was it my fault that my mom was always afraid? I tried to make it better.
I watched them watch me. It was weird then. You’re a kid and your body does things that you aren’t thinking about. But inside, I knew that was because I was a kid. They had all the advantages, so I might as well use being a smart kid. It was my only card to play. It worked. They always said good things to my mom about me and she was proud. I hated it. Silence made the time go even more slowly, like being made to sit quietly at your desk with your hands folded.
When my mom was well enough to work again, I missed a lot of school going with her to look for work. She worked in a jewelry store and then she worked in a clothing store. She got herself to work in the morning by scouting the bus stops and making friends with people who were there at the same time. At night, it was my job to get her home.
There were times when my mom panicked and left early because someone offered her a ride. Sometimes I was already on my way to meet her. I knew that she would never do that to me on purpose, but the fear had been too great. Her fears went back so far.
As a small girl, she had no memory of her father. Her mother died when she was only nine years old. My great-grandmother and her daughters designed a fantasy about how their poor sister lived and died, but my mother had island memories that conflicted with their stories.
She remembered her mother’s larynx had been removed and that she made gurgling sounds when she had to replace the tubes. She remembered that she could not smell or taste rotted fruit and that peddlers took advantage of her. She remembered that there were men with rough voices and actions. She was told that her mother died of lung cancer but she didn’t believe it.
She asked around until she found the men who had known her father. They were in prison. She went to the prison, in Rahway, alone, and visited them, but was told more lies. “Your father escaped but now he is dead.”
She began to search the library records for old newspapers stored on microfiche. She learned that her mother was beaten to death and bled out on the street. She learned that there were few records of her father’s existence and that they led nowhere. She kept at her search for the next thirty years, but did not ever find her answers. Her father had been someone who everyone was willing to forget except for her.
When my mom remarried, a new nightmare began. My stepfather and I did not get along, ever. I had given my love to her other boyfriend’s family and when he abandoned her, they abandoned me. I was not about to make that mistake again. Besides, they were not interested in a sullen, solitary boy who was not one of them. I was twelve, I had been without supervision for a very long time and was not about to accept his or theirs.
He did not know how to handle my mother’s fears. He screamed at her and she screamed back with a strength that was rooted in her fears. My job was still to get her home from work every day. I had a system down. I could race home from school and play hard. Anything to get the anger, that had been converted to energy, out of me! Then I would race home and try to make myself presentable again and hop on the bus.
I liked the bus as it rumbled down Broadway until it merged with Bloomfield Avenue and became Broad Street. There was a large bank called the National Newark and Essex Bank at the joining of these two roads. It meant that I was almost downtown. The bus was always at the stop under the train tracks for the longest time. There was a news stand there and the drivers would sometimes jump off for a few minutes to take a break.
Downtown was a different world. There were a dozen movie theaters, cafés and store after store. It was endless. If I was early, I would get off at the train station and walk the length of downtown. There were the old stores, some of which had barrels on the sidewalk in front of them. There were lots of new buildings. They seemed so much stronger. There was endless traffic on the streets. The many walks on all the streets of downtown Newark helped to mold me. It was my identity. It showed me who I was. That is what is meant by street sense on a physical level. It becomes part of who a city street-kid is.
My mom had been a sheltered city kid who went to church. Going to church was a place where my mom felt safe. I liked church. I liked Jesus because my mom was so devoted to the need to go church. I was a young star at Sunday School because I could memorize the longest pieces to recite for the congregation on special occasions.
But then my great-grandmother, in whose arms I lived as a baby, with whom I shared a room died when I was seven. Two years later, her church closed up its doors.
While I was in my sophomore year of high school, my mom engineered the unthinkable, we moved. Glen Ridge is an upper middle class suburban town, two towns out of Newark, but an entire world away. Nobody dressed or thought like I did. These kids came from rich families. They viewed me as someone from a strange land with a different culture. My mom told me that getting of Newark was something that she had done to make a better life for us all. It was a difficult transition.
But she was right. There were no street-corners for me to hang on anymore. Riots broke out in Newark the year after we moved. The kids in my new high school talked about Newark as if it were Mars. My mom told me that it was behind me now and that I needed to make new friends in a new town.
It was around then that my mom taught me to steal. I became a stock-boy at her clothing store and we worked scam after scam to take money and clothing. We were never caught.
Next to the police station on the corner of my street was an old-style A&P. It was a throwback because it was run by one clerk who had worked there for his entire career. The bakery deliveries came about 11 pm. My mom would send me down to swipe cake and other bakery items that were delivered at that time. I carried money and if I was caught, I was to say that I was leaving the money behind to pay for what I took. I was never caught and never left any money. My mom was proud of my skills but cautioned me never to tell anyone what I was doing.
My mom opened her first business in a store on the corner. She found a new psychologist who lived a few blocks away and saw patients in his home. I was no longer needed to get my mom home or to get her to therapy. I was free but stuck in a place that I did not understand.
My mom’s fears taught me to do the one thing that she could not do; they taught me to be alone. They taught me to live inside of my own head. I could live without friends and that was good because I didn’t have any.
Every child learns from their parents, if they have them. I learned that adults could be more afraid than children. I learned that it was my job to not be afraid so that I could protect my mom.
My step-father was a printer. They printed a tabloid called The Enquirer among other things. This weekly publication was sold on Newsstands and in grocery stores. There were no newsstands in Glen Ridge and they were dying out everywhere.
My mom read a story about a woman from England who had not left her house for twenty years. They began a correspondence that lasted a long time. They sent each other caseate tapes instead of writing letters. For a while, my mom had the dream of one day going to England to meet this woman. She never did.
She also wrote to people in prison. One such woman had gone on a killing spree with her boyfriend when she was a teenager. She was about to get out of prison after serving more than twenty years. My mom invited her to come to see us. My step-father was outraged and refused to allow it. He demanded that my mom stop talking to people in jail. Later in her life, my mom conducted a prison ministry, writing to people on death row and advocating for them. My mom was stubborn about her dreams.
She found a new church and became active. It was there that she meant Millard Fuller, who eventually went on to create Habitat for Humanity. Fuller had not done that yet and was visiting the congregation in Glen Ridge. I am sure that he was looking for donations for his upcoming project, but my mom made friends with Millard and his family. They shared meals at our house. My mom begged me to stay home for these visits.
“You know your step-father hates to talk. I need you to carry the conversations at dinner. You know how to talk to a man like Millard Fuller, your step father will just offer him drinks.” So, I stayed for these dinners and we spoke about the Bible and Christianity. Fuller prayed that “a mind like yours will find its way back to God.” I responded that I was pretty sure that God did not want me and that if he did not want me, I saw no reason to worship him.
“Why do you think that God does not want you?” asked Fuller.
“Because I disagree with all of his people so completely,” I answered.
“Why?”
“Because you have stolen people’s cultures. Missionaries took their songs and gave them Christian meanings. You teach that people are never good enough but good is defined as being like you.” Strangely enough, they enjoyed talking with me. I have never really understood that.
As she grew older, computers helped her to stay in touch with people from all over the country. She turned down offers to speak on behalf of the distribution of Chicken Soup for the Prisoners Soul. She was surrounded by people and always had someone that she trusted with whom she could leave her house.
My mom now had a big house with more rooms that she ever went in. There was always plenty of food and my mom was generous about sharing it. She had many people around her.
It was like I was a small boy again when I told her that when she went to the hospital everything was going to be ok. I calmed her and then she slipped into a coma. I only know that I was there for her last days, I’m not sure that she was. When I eulogized her, I told the Parable of the Talents. I asked that the servant who had been afraid and hid “talents” for fear of losing them not be punished. My mom was not that servant but she understood his fear.

Lessons from my father.
The lessons of a parent are curious things that have an endurance of their own. Some lessons are immediate and some take a lifetime to grasp. Some are physical and some profoundly emotional. The lessons of a father are different from the lessons a mother teaches. Sometimes they are in conflict.
My father’s lessons were blunt. He was a tough man when it came to his sons. “You better learn to work with your brain because you sure as shit ain’t good at working with your hands.” That seemed harsh to me. My dad always worked with his hands and I was hearing him say that I was not good enough to do that. So, I tried as hard as I could to learn to work with my hands. I took pride in the things I could do with my hands, and shrugged off the things that I could do with my head. It wasn’t until much later that I understood the wisdom in my father’s lesson.
My dad’s lessons came in luncheonettes, in the car and while watching TV. In the car, it was just the two of us. We spent many hours together in the car. It was there that we had intimate conversations. It was there that he told me that he had not done right by my mother but had tried to make up for it. “Sometimes you just can’t fix your mistakes. But inside you know when you are going too far. Stop before you go too far.”
It was in the car when I would brag about my boyish talents. He told me, “There is always going to be somebody better at anything than you are. Don’t set yourself up to be taken down.” I didn’t know what he meant. So, my dad took me to my pool hall and proceeded to whip me six games in a row, in front of my friends. I was almost in tears when we got back into the car and he said, “I guess you’re not as good as you thought you were.”
We related through sports. He was a natural athlete. Whether it was golf or softball, bowling or pool, my father was always good at it. Football was my sport because I was stocky and liked to throw my body around.
There was one day when my dad asked me to throw him a football and try to tackle him. I hit him with all that I had and knocked him down hard. I was only 14. I was proud to have tackled my father. Then I realized that I had hurt him and felt guilty. My father was not indestructible.
My dad understood street-code. He had grown up on the streets. He taught me to always consider the source of my information. If the source of the information wasn’t reliable, neither was the information. If you played a game without the necessary information, you were a sucker. You were meant to be taken advantage of.
One Saturday morning, at the local luncheonette, my dad talked me out of my allowance by allowing me to confuse the Celtics with the Knicks and make a bet with him. “While you were studying the newspaper and the statistics, I was watching you. I knew that you didn’t know what you were talking about. After that, it was easy.”
I got into trouble for gambling and beating another kid for so much money that he gave me his bankbook and then told his parents that I had hustled him. My dad told me that I was greedy and stupid. If I had only beaten him for a little money, I could have kept on beating him. “But you got greedy and wanted show off and now you are banned from the Boys Club. Not because you gambled, because you were stupid about it.”
My dad was a hustler and a gambler, but he was not compulsive. He cared more about winning than he did about betting. That was why he taught me to never give up control of my bets. “As soon as you spot points, you are not playing the same game as the team that you are betting on. You are a sucker. You may have to give odds, but never give up points.”
These were the ways that my dad taught me about life. His beliefs did not come from books but from life experiences. My dad fixed jukeboxes, pinball machines and pool tables in Newark, NJ. Because I did not live with him, most of our time together was on the one day a week that he picked me up and took me to work. As a kid, I was in some of the hardest bars in Newark on Saturdays. Often, people were still there drinking up their paychecks from the day before. These behaviors shaped his view of race relations. He did not care about social theories on the effects of poverty. He was rightly pretty sure that no one had grown up poorer than he had.
He had run away from an orphanage at an early age and lived on the road. He slept in back of billboards. He was befriended by a man who had been an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane. That man was his father figure. His mom died shortly after giving him birth, and so he had no mother figure. When I would talk to him about Civil Rights, his heart was hardened. He had been attacked while making collections. He carried a gun with him into these bars. He was convinced from his experience that Black people were shiftless drunkards who squandered their pay instead using it to feed their families and make their lives better. There was no amount of convincing that his son or anyone else could muster that would change his mind. He did not think in the abstract. His beliefs were based solely on his experiences.
When I objected and interjected by book-based theories about civil rights, my dad ridiculed my lack of real-world experience, then he got angry, then he told me that I should stay away from his home and his second marriage children so that I did not infect them with my stupid ideas.
These were hard years. I stayed away and lost any chance of really having relationships with my half-sister and brother. They never knew why I went away. My beliefs were very strong and so were my dad’s convictions. Family was the victim.
My dad and I reconciled largely through the efforts of my sister Terry. She was old enough to remember having a big brother, in name anyway. She was my dad’s favorite and she pushed us to make up, which we did.
“He’s our dad, he’s allowed to be weird.” I remember her saying that and believing it too. She caused me to remember the years and years that my dad was my idol. Now that I had discovered his clay feet, I could not worship him anymore, but I could still love and respect him.
When I was ready to marry, I asked my dad’s opinion of my soon to be bride. His response was “You have to live with her, not me.” That was the sum total of his advice. It gave me insight about he felt about his marriages. He could not live with my mom but could live with his second wife, Dorothy. I knew that my mom was a hard person to live with. I wanted to ask my dad about love, but I never did. I knew that he loved my mom. I knew that he loved me. I am pretty sure that my dad never gave much thought as to why he loved those that he did. He would probably say that they were good to him.
My dad loved my mom. They had the strangest relationship I have ever seen. My dad was not capable of being faithful to one woman. He was not faithful to my mom and he was not after my mom and he had divorced and they had both remarried. They were friends. They had an unmistakable chemistry that caused both of my step-parents discomfort. Despite this, the two couples socialized for years after I was grown and moved away.
My step-father was a compulsive gambler and my dad would beat him at cards most every time the four got together. My step-father would get red in the face and shout and slam the table and my dad would quietly take his money and let him rant. In his own way, I think that he was showing off too.
When my dad first got sick, he was shocked by it. A neighbor sponsored him at The Deborah Heart and Lung Center. He remembered having Rheumatic fever when he was a child. He said that had been in the hospital for a long time. He did not know that it had ruined the lining of his heart and valves. He was not the same after the first bypass surgery. The second one nearly killed him and the doctor told him that he was now on borrowed time. His end could take years or weeks or days, but it was on the way. It was an odd way of his past catching up with him.
My dad told me that he did not want to keep living this way. He’d had a stroke and his left arm was not right, but the rest of him had recovered. I remember the last time I saw him alive. He told me with a great deal of pride that he had his golfing clubs modified and had shot an 80.
I don’t really know if that was the truth or the truth my father wanted it to be. My dad often told me the truths that he wanted to believe. He told me that he was a pre-med program at school, but he barely finished high school. There were other stories and lies too. Some were to cover his affairs. Some were the truths that he wanted to be but were not.
I realized later that by telling me, they were at least true for that moment. My dad did not live to see me earn the title of doctor, but I think he would have loved that.
The last lesson from my father came after his death. He specifically asked to have no service, no open coffin and to be cremated. Dorothy told me that he didn’t want people staring down at him in a coffin.
I felt the need to eulogize my dad. I wanted to make him appear elegant. He had supervised a story that I had written about his life. He was pleased with after I incorporated his corrections. I wonder if he would have been pleased with this?
He has been gone for thirty years. I think that he would be amazed that he was remembered.
He was a reserved man who took pride in the way that he dressed. When he wanted to be charming, he was. When he wished to be cold and distant, it was easy for him. I don’t know if I would have loved him if we lived together. I think that only seeing him once in a while helped me to think highly of him. He had done the best that he could.