It began with, “Who’s going to your graduation?”
I took a deep breath. I had known this was coming, but I didn’t expect it at this exact moment, with my homework spread around the dining table in front of me, while she sat at the other end of the table watching me. Giving me nowhere to escape to.
I told her each graduate got four tickets. She probed more, wanting to know who they would each belong to. This was seriously a conversation I did not want to have. Not now, not ever. She answered her own question, naming herself and her own mother as the first two ticket-takers.
“And Grandmom Darlene.” She finished, naming my father’s mother as the final recipient. I hadn’t even talked to my dad about graduation. Honestly. I knew he’d bring Kim. They’ve been married for almost 15 years now. So I said to my mother that I didn’t know yet, hoping to avoid confrontation.
My mom yelled and went on and on about how “she” didn’t deserve to go – yeah, “she” has only been in my life since I was 8…no one special – and that if “she” went, she wouldn’t go. My mother was making “she” sound like a dirty word, so it was no wonder she couldn’t use Kim’s real name.
I worked for six years to get my Associate’s Degree from Bucks County Community College. Not because I’m not intelligent, but because I stopped caring for a long time. I changed my mind frequently about what I wanted to do, which made me not want to go to the classes I was enrolled in, which resulted in a lot of failing grades. Which meant I then had to fix all of the mistakes I had made. So I spent three full semesters, two summer sessions, and an intersession doing everything all over again. I moved from a 1.6 GPA to a 3.4. And now my mother was threatening to skip my graduation because Kim, a woman she had never met (because my mother had purposely avoided her at every event she was brought to) might be going.
College graduation doesn’t involve assigned seating.
After telling me that I “didn’t give a shit how she felt”, we ended the conversation. I left the house until after she had gone to bed, but that night was just the beginning. I called my dad on the way to a friend’s house and told him everything through my angry tears.
My dad had always made it a point to not talk badly about my mother, at least in front of me. I would tell him the things she said. I would say bad things about her, and he might respond, but he never outright said bad things about her the way she has about him since before I can remember. That night, he lost it. He kept calling her crazy and selfish and, my personal favorite, a “selfish fuck”. That’s how I knew I was in the right and my feelings were justified: my dad finally let me know his real opinion of my mother because of what she’d said.
This isn’t to say I was perfect daughter. Throughout most of my life, I was tough for my mother to deal with. When my dad told me to do something, I did it. When my mom asked me to do something, I mostly moaned and groaned until she did it herself. As I got older, I grew resentful towards her. I felt as though she had made me into a person I didn’t like very much. I felt like I was weak, like I was a pushover, like I was undesirable. And though, logically, I knew I couldn’t attribute all of those feelings to the woman who spent 5 days a week with me for my entire upbringing, she was the one I blamed. So I often got short with her, got frustrated when she asked me to repeat things and just as frustrated when I needed her to repeat things for me. To be honest, I was kind of an asshole. But I felt as though at least some of my anger was justified, and adding this fuel to that constantly growing fire only made my resentment grow.
The subject was dropped for a few weeks. I avoided my mother as much as possible, even going so far as to sit in my car in the far parking lot of our condominium complex to wait until she left for her second job. I eventually had to see her, and she acted as though nothing was wrong. As though she hadn’t lost her mind over my step-mother potentially coming to an important event in my life that she had every right to attend.
The craziest part about it is that my parents were never married. At least, not to each other. My dad was already dating someone else by the time I was born. So, 8 years after that, when my dad met someone and it became serious, it really shouldn’t have mattered. But because I came home with stories about how awful my step-mother was, and you know 8 year olds never exaggerate…about anything…ever, my mother grew more and more hateful. I was just an 8 year old who wanted her daddy all to herself. And rather than telling me to play nice, or taking what I said with a grain of salt, every story I came home with, factual or exaggerated, was taken literally.
It’s also worth mentioning that my mother has never even met Kim. My dad brought her to one event when I was a kid, and my mom ran away and hid in the kitchen with the other parent helpers for the rest of the day. And every event after that, she just avoided her completely. It got to a point where I barely acknowledged my father’s presence at the musicals I was performing in, because I didn’t want to listen to my mother talk about my dad and Kim. Admittedly, at that age, I also just didn’t want to see Kim. I had developed a very distinct dislike for her of my own. It was a vicious cycle. I would tell my mother the things Kim had done this weekend that I didn’t like. She would tell me how terrible of a person she was for doing those things. So I felt as though my feelings were justified. Sixteen years later, I can acknowledge that I never gave Kim a chance until I realized the cycle I was in and decided to start over. But growing up, that wasn’t the case.
Forgiving and forgetting was really sudden for Kim and I. We tried several times, and mostly everyone realized I was faux-apologizing. Finally, when all three of us had admitted to making mistakes and to reacting to things inappropriately, when I realized how ridiculous it was to hate someone for no real reason, I was finally able to truly apologize and truly be forgiven. I told my mom I was just “over it” and she acted like just because I didn’t hate Kim anymore, I was going to start calling her “Mom”. Kim was my mother’s sore point.
Eventually, the topic of my graduation came up again. This time, I brought it up. I was in my room this time, and I voluntarily opened my normally sealed shut door to start the conversation. By this point, things were already in motion for me to move out after my graduation and move into, ironically, my Grandmom Darlene’s house, when Grandmom Darlene was the person Mom wanted my father to bring to my graduation in place of my step-mother. So, because I was already leaving, I didn’t care how the conversation ended. I had told my mother that I was moving in May because it was easier for my work to transfer me in the spring than right before Christmas season, when I was leaving for Arcadia. I told her this in public, around other people and in front of her best friend, knowing that she wouldn’t cause a scene anywhere but our living room. I don’t know if she actually believed me, but she pretended to, which was all that mattered.
So, by the night I brought up the topic of graduation again, I was already waiting with one foot out the door.
“Kim is coming to my graduation. Even Grandmom Darlene thinks she should.”
That was all it took. Again, one sentence, seemingly harmless, sent my mother into a rage I had never seen before. The last few weeks of calm were destroyed. She went on the same rant as before, saying “she” didn’t deserve to go; saying I didn’t care how she felt; saying that I was completely disregarding the times that she was there for my when I was fighting with my dad or “her”.
Then she said that if Kim were next to a cliff, she would push her off, and her sons with her. This time, she used her name.
Kim’s sons, my three step-brothers, grew up with me. We’re all fairly close in age. Brian, the youngest, is a month younger than me; Steve is a year and half older; and Gary is two years older than Steve. I had stopped calling them my step-brothers sometime in high school, and started simply calling them my brothers. When I started going to school with them, I realized how proud I was to know them. I would introduce myself to people in Steve’s grade and immediately ask if they knew him. I wanted to make it known that that was who I was: the big sister of Brian, little sister of Gary and Steve.
They weren’t so nice when we were younger, mainly because I was “the good kid” and they were always getting into trouble with my dad, when they had never really gotten into trouble before he and I came into the picture. I was the annoying little sister long before our parents got married and I actually became their sister. But when we first met, before I realized how much I loved them, I complained to my mother about them as well. And so, she decided, back when I was 8 and my 8, 10, and 12 year old brothers were mean to me, that they were awful people. She soon started calling them the “spawns of Satan”.
Until this particular night, I often let her names for them and for Kim slide, preferring to ignore her than to fight with her. It wasn’t worth it. But now she was threatening to push them off of cliffs, regardless of how literal or not she was being. I had let her talk badly about my family for years, even after I stopped feeling any hatred towards them, but threatening them was a whole different story.
I wish I could go on and on about what my mother was saying, but other than the cliff threat, it was all honestly the same thing over and over again:
“You don’t give a shit about me.”
“You don’t care about all of the times when I was there for you.”
“You don’t care how I feel.”
With more yelling, slamming of doors (mine – twice), and finally silence, my decision was sealed: I was getting out of there as soon as possible. I couldn’t wait for graduation, which was still roughly three weeks away.
I started packing immediately. I used every tote bag and old purse I had to pack as much of my non-essential items, things I didn’t use on a daily basis, as I could. It took three trips, but the weekend of May 18th, I was out. Everything was moved into my paternal grandmother’s basement, where I would be living. I had my own bathroom, my own entrance, even an office separate from the bedroom. I didn’t even tell my mother when I was leaving. I was suddenly just gone.
Graduation was May 23. I saw her that morning, when she officially signed her car over to me, and I asked her about the money she had promised for school. She had said, at least three months prior, that she would take care of room and board, and instead she responded to my inquiry by yelling that she had only said that she would help and that my father had paid for the boys’ education. This was not entirely true – he and Kim both paid for my younger brother to go to Automotive Tech School. So, one boy, not all three, and he didn’t pay for it alone. But that meant nothing to her. He should pay for mine, too. My mother doesn’t have all the money in the world, and she spoiled me as a child, buying me essentially anything I wanted. She had saved money for my college education, which had been wasted during the first six years I spent at Bucks, so she had no savings left for that purpose. She was pretty deep in debt, while my dad was far better with his money and even had an account set up specifically for college, even after spending money on my last few semesters in community college. Still, he was paying off my loans and paying for whatever grants didn’t cover, and she had promised to help. It wasn’t so much that she wasn’t paying for my school – I knew I was luckier than most to have as much help as I did. It was that she had said, ages ago, that she would take care of housing, and now she was expecting my father to pay for every cent of my Arcadia education. I left angrier than when I had arrived.
Hours later, I parked in the Bucks County Community College student parking lot one last time. I dawdled in the lounge area, surrounded by families while I was alone. Eventually, I put my cap and gown on and made my way to the cafeteria, where we were to gather and then get into our unorganized line for the walk. The whole thing seemed so informal. I ate sweet potato fries in this room every day, and now it was the gathering place for the end of my time here. After what seemed like ages, they called us to line up. They told us to write our names on a piece of paper to give to the person at the side of the stage, who would announce them as we walked across. I guess that was easier than figuring out alphabetical order. We slowly, ever so slowly, made our way down the seemingly endless hall to our actual graduation.
I entered the crowded gym, already tired of the heels I had decided to wear. I had forgotten how much standing was involved in graduation ceremonies. I could barely hear myself think over all of the screaming, could barely see through all of the flashing cameras. The line of blue caps and gowns was inching along the center of the crowd. As far as I knew, none of my friends were graduating, so I had no one to look for but my family.
Over the music and the cheers, I heard my dad yelling my name. I turned to the right and there he was, with Kim, both of them holding cameras facing my direction. Neither of them had ever looked at me with the pride they did right then.
Then, to my left, I heard my name again, this time from my maternal grandmother. I turned, expecting to see my mother with her. Instead, next to my grandmother was my dear Poppy. They stood, waving, smiling, and trying to get a good picture before the line moved again.
When I finally got to my seat, I felt tears in my eyes. They weren’t tears of joy or pride over my accomplishment. To be honest, I was regretting my decision to walk in graduation more every second. No, the tears were pure hurt. She had really gone through with it. Her early threat of not coming to my graduation had not been a threat after all, but a promise. And she hadn’t even told me.
As angry as I was, I understood her decision, I really did. I knew that she hadn’t avoided my graduation because of Kim, despite her threats. If that had been her reasoning, she would have told me that morning because she would have made me feel guilty about it. Really, her reasoning was logical. None of my grandparents had gotten to see me graduate from high school, as it was held indoors and we were only given two tickets apiece. And we already knew that there was a pretty good chance that Poppy wasn’t going to make it to my graduation from a four year school. So I really did understand why she had given up her ticket so that the two of them could see me walk one time. What I didn’t understand was why she hadn’t told me. After all, I had just seen her that morning.
I spent the entirety of my graduation alternating between angry and hurt. I smiled as I walked across the stage and the woman struggled to pronounce my last name. I smiled for my picture, as I held my empty diploma holder. I struggled to continue to smile as we filed out of the gym at only a slightly quicker pace than we had used to file in. I waited in an obvious spot, as I had no way of reaching my grandparents to tell them where I was. They found me, and they seemed as though they had no idea how I was feeling; as though they didn’t know that I had no idea that my own mother wasn’t coming to a graduation it had taken me six years to walk in. I glued my smile back on, because I wasn’t going to bring them down when they were so happy to have seen me complete this next stage of my education. It was one of the last times I would see my Poppy.
If nothing else, I’m glad he got to see me walk. If it hadn’t been for his sometimes seemingly cruel words, telling me to get my act together, I might have never made it. My Poppy was one of the only people in my family who could talk to me that way, and that was only because I gave it right back to him. We were both stubborn individuals who knew how to get under each other’s skin, but deep down, we both knew that we loved each other the most.
When my dad and his wife found me, the anger finally defeated the smile I had been holding onto.
“She didn’t come.” Saying it out loud made me even angrier.
My father was incredulous, but it was my step-mother who said it best: “That’s absolutely reprehensible.” There was no better word to describe my mother’s actions right in that instant.
Periodically, I received letters and notes from my mother. One told me that Poppy was going to be starting on oxygen soon. His health had been slowly declining over the past year or so. Back in February, before all of the graduation drama, we had all known that when we went out to dinner for his birthday, it was going to be the last time he would be there to celebrate it.
On a weekend in October, a full five months since the last time I had seen her face-to-face, I let a call from my mother go to voicemail. When I checked the message, my heart dropped. My grandfather, as my mother had taken to call him, as if I were no longer worthy of having him be my Poppy instead, was in the hospital. I mostly felt numb to the news, foolishly believing that I had time to visit him. Monday nights I had class, Tuesday nights were for a club meeting. No problem, I would visit him on Wednesday. With any luck, my mother would be working at her second job and she wouldn’t be there.
Monday night, my class was cancelled. Behind on schoolwork, I stayed home to catch up. An hour into what would have been my class time, a call came in from my grandparents’ house phone number I instinctively knew what had happened – why else would they be calling me so soon after he had entered the hospital – and I couldn’t answer the phone. I checked the message to attempt to alleviate my fears, but no such luck.
“I just thought you’d like to know that your grandfather passed away.” My mother’s voice was cold and angry, as though I wouldn’t care about this devastating news. I simply didn’t know how to deal with the truth. I never listened to the voice mail straight through. I had a friend delete it for me later.
I e-mailed the professors of the three classes I had on Tuesdays, informing them of the situation and that I might not be in class the following day.
I cried, of course, and I talked to Poppy. I somehow believed that he could hear me now that he was no longer tied to his body.
The following day, I went to my morning class, and I made it through. I went to my car afterwards, as I always did, to switch out the books in my bag. I sat in the driver’s seat and made one of the phone calls I had been dreading: I had to call my grandmother to ask about the funeral. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to her. But I was still having trouble accepting what had happened, and hearing her talk about it was going to make it real.
I don’t know much about my Jewish faith. My grandparents went to synagogue every Friday when I was growing up. Up until high school, my mother worked a lot of Friday nights, and I would be with my grandparents, so I would go with them. My mother never went, at least not to my knowledge, and my father, the son of a Protestant, obviously did not go either. I quickly learned that Jewish funerals occur very quickly: Poppy’s was Wednesday, less than a full 48 hours after his passing.
With that knowledge, I put my faux-strong voice on and called work. I obviously wasn’t going to be able to work my whole shift, from 8am to 4pm, as the car for the funeral was leaving my grandparents’ house at 11am. I would need to leave at 10. They, thankfully, took care of the shift coverage for me, offering to give me the whole day off, but I declined. I wanted the closest thing to normalcy I could get. After the stress of the upsetting phone calls, I went home for the rest of the day.
I did inform my mother that I would be going to the funeral. She was, understandably, surprised to hear from me. I kept the conversation short, still not sure how I was going to handle seeing her in person for the first time in five months.
The following morning, I put on my normal work clothes: black pants and my red polo, and brought a black dress and heels to change into at my grandmother’s house.
Work was a blurry two hours, during which very few people knew what had happened, which was surprising. Normally, word spreads before someone even completely finishes a sentence.
I pulled up to my grandparents’ house, one of the most familiar landmarks of my childhood. I had spent five afternoons a week there from kindergarten until I started high school. I had spent nights in the spare room on the fold out couch. Poppy had read me to sleep with ‘Goodnight, Moon’. I had spent summer days in a pool that no longer existed in the backyard. They had it filled in once I was old enough to stay home alone during the summer – no one else was using it. I had seen two dogs pass away, including Shana, who let me hold onto her slobbery tongue and listened quietly while I read to her underneath the dining room table. I had grown up more in this house than in the one at the address on my driver’s license.
I parked in my usual spot, against the curb, underneath an oversized tree I couldn’t name. I looked across the yard at the three maple trees I used to try to climb as a kid, even though I was only tall enough to make the first step on one of them. I walked up the white cement driveway towards the two-door garage, thinking about how they wouldn’t need two cars anymore, and turned right to walk up the concrete path to the house. The first block of cement on the path made me pause – my initials were carved into it: ‘CRC’. They were upside-down from where I was standing. Years ago, my six-year-old handprints had been there, next to my own sloppily written initials. When the path was re-done, my teenaged self was too cool to get her hands messy with wet cement, but Poppy wrote my initials in the fresh new block anyway. I still wonder why that block was the only one to ever get re-done, so obvious from the way the fresh white of it has always stood out next to the dingy brown-gray of the rest of the path. But in that moment, I just wondered why I hadn’t just stuck my hands in the damn cement like Poppy had wanted. My carefully written initials mocked my decision from the ground.
I made my way into the house and greeted my grandmother and my aunt, deliberately avoiding my mother. I incoherently mumbled something about getting changed, which my mother had to repeat for my grandmother. She had, after all, a lifetime’s worth of practice with translating my mumbles.
The dress I had brought wouldn’t zip in the back. I had tried it on that morning, after not wearing it for over a year, and it had fit snugly, but I had been able to zip it up on my own. I was now faced with a few choices. I could change back into my work clothes, sans red polo, I could ask for help zipping my dress, or I could throw my black leather jacket on over the dress and pretend it fit.
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to a funeral service in my work clothes.
I debated asking for help but that would mean letting my mother know that I had been putting on weight since she last saw me – something I wasn’t actually aware of until the moment the dress wouldn’t zip.
Weight was always a sensitive topic between my mom and I. I always felt as though she would consider me a perfect child if only I were skinny. She fed me Pop-Tarts for breakfast and Burger King for dinner and then told me I should be eating healthier. When I lost 30 pounds, she told me I used to look pregnant. No, I wasn’t letting her know I had put on enough weight that I couldn’t zip up a dress. I slipped my leather jacket on over the dress and walked out as though everything was fine.
When we arrived at the cemetery, my aunt, mother, and grandmother were all given pins with ribbon attached to them and then the ribbon was torn. It was another Jewish tradition I didn’t understand, but I was mostly confused by the fact that I didn’t get one, too. What were the qualifications for a torn ribbon pin? Was I, his only granddaughter, really not close enough in relation to receive one?
We sat down in front of the closed casket, my mother and I on opposite ends of the row. People my grandparents’ age who I barely remembered or didn’t remember at all were coming up and kissing my cheek and hugging me like old friends. I was relieved when it seemed like everyone had arrived and the rabbi started talking.
A few years prior, the synagogue my grandparents were going to was shut down. The members of Temple Shalom were combined with another synagogue, Shir Ami, in Newtown. At this point, my grandparents stopped attending. Poppy wasn’t able to drive much because of his health issues, mainly his lack of memory, and my grandmother didn’t like to drive in the dark, particularly on a 25 minute drive to a synagogue they couldn’t really call home. So, the rabbi of Shir Ami, the one speaking in front of us at that moment, standing next to my Poppy’s casket, hardly knew any of us, and he had never met me before at all.
As he rambled on about Poppy, sometimes serious, sometimes funny, I wondered how he knew anything about my grandfather as a person. I was annoyed that this was the rabbi we had chosen, rather than a former rabbi from Temple Shalom, someone who would be able to honestly talk about him, about the hard work he put into that synagogue, about how dedicated he was to it and to us. Someone who actually knew him, unlike this complete stranger.
And then he got to my Poppy’s relationship with me. He talked about the way Poppy talked to me – and the fact that I was the only one who could and would talk back to him. Any attitude he gave me, and he gave me plenty, I handed right back to him twofold. And the rabbi knew that from speaking to my family. I forgot my annoyance for a moment, because he really captured our relationship so perfectly in so few words. The next thing I knew, I was bawling my eyes out.
Back at the house after the service, more people I didn’t know or remember were coming up and telling me that they hadn’t seen me since I was “this big”. I sat on the couch behind the circle of chairs that had been made in the middle of the living room, listening to everyone talk about their latest hip surgery or who was in the hospital this week. Altogether a very depressing conversation to listen to, even after a funeral service.
I eventually realized that I was going to be with my mother in this house for a very long time that day, so I should at least speak to her. We didn’t talk about my living situation. She didn’t ask about school or about my Grandmom Darlene. We just made fun of my unhealthy, extremely rude aunt.
“At the service, someone asked Aunt Susan if she was Poppy’s sister,” I told my mother.
But at the end of the day, when I was packing up my things to go home, I told her that we weren’t okay, that I was still angry. Because I was.
“Tell me what I need to do,” she requested.
“Stop talking badly about Dad and Kim. I don’t care what you say to yourself or to your friends, but you need to stop saying bad things about them in front of me.”
“Okay. I’m done. I really am,” she promised.
I believed her for a long time. I thought that we were on the way back to normalcy. I didn’t want to let her back in, because my anger was still so incredibly strong, but I wanted to try.
We spoke on the phone a few times, and everything seemed okay. We talked about absolutely nothing, as she still never asked about school or my paternal grandmother, and I volunteered very little, but we talked.
One day in January, something had gotten mailed to her house instead of my new address, so I stopped by to pick it up. The topic of money for school came up again, because Poppy had a large amount saved for me specifically for studying abroad. My dad had asked me to talk to my mother about putting the money from Poppy with the money that he and Kim had saved for me. In a separate account, but together and accessible for all of us, rather than leaving it with my mother. It was, after all, my money.
I should have known from previous experience not to bring my father up in this conversation, but I did it anyway, and suffered the consequences for it.
“No,” she was dead-set on this response.
“Why not? It would be in an interest-bearing account with the money he has for me already.”
“Because I don’t trust him with that money.”
And there it was. Over the past few months, nothing had changed. Never mind that Dad already had almost three times that amount saved for me for school. Never mind that he was paying for every penny of my education, including student loans. And absolutely never mind that the money was actually mine to begin with.
And so, with one statement, we were right back to square one.
