Letters to My Son; Part 2
Hints of Something Wrong
Dear Evan,
The first time I realized there was something deeply disordered in Mom’s mind was only a couple months into the relationship.
We’d had a wonderful couple months falling in love and having little adventures around Santa Fe.
Mom wasn’t the perfect match. She didn’t really “do” anything. Her only interests were in going to new restaurants.
She could ski, but didn’t do it regularly like I did. She rode a bike but didn’t bike regularly. She was into the arts and I think enjoyed the fact that I was the director of one of Santa Fe’s best galleries. We had huge openings, filled with live music, an open bar, and often hundreds of people meandering through within a couple of hours time.
I still remember we were on a date to see one of the Planet of the Apes movie remakes. We stopped at Doctor Field Goods for a bite to eat. She told me she had a trip planned to Europe. Ireland and France.
She asked me what the expectations were. It was early in the relationship and neither of us could have anticipated what was to come. It seemed a little early to be fully committed, though I was quite certain that I was one hundred percent on board.
Much later, Mom had told me she and her cousin had planned on “fucking Europe.” The entire point of their trip was to meet European men and sleep with them. Obviously one of the attractions for single people to go to Europe is to have romances with foreign women. Heck, I wrote an entire album about traveling, where one of the primary motives was meeting foreign women. Museums and outdoor adventures, but also women.
So would I be a hypocrite if I judged her for doing the same?
Regardless, we came to the conclusion that we weren’t yet at a point where there could be expectations. So Mom went to Europe and slept with some Irish guy in Galway and a French guy in Paris. I was able to read her journals from this trip, and most of it is about sleeping with a fellow named Eduardo but while thinking about me. Flattering, I suppose.
When she returned I didn’t immediately ask her anything about Europe. It was her business. We’d made an implicit “agreement” that her time there wouldn’t affect our relationship, and I was comfortable with that. However, I was so enamored with her that I didn’t dare do anything that might risk what I intuited as our potential as a couple going forward.
When Mom returned, she found a pair of women’s underwear at my house. I’ll go into the details elsewhere. I hadn’t been with another woman and told her so. I don’t know whether she believed me or not. But I asked her then about what had happened in Europe, and she admitted to sleeping with Eduardo in Paris.
I was disappointed, but couldn’t really chastise her. She’d had the conversation. Moreover, she said she’d had the opportunity to sleep with other men she’d met and turned it down due to what might be going on between her and I. This seemed like a good sign that maybe Mom could be faithful.
A couple days later we went to dinner at Rio Chama. We had a conversation about what was going on between us. There had been ambiguity, but I didn’t want ambiguity going forward. Seemingly she didn’t either, but that turned out to be completely incorrect.
We assured each other that we would focus on this relationship and take it seriously from that moment on.
Yet, a couple days later we were dining on the patio at The Inn of the Anasazi. Mom told me she was headed to Denver to spend the weekend with her friend Kelly from Farmer’s Branch. She said they were throwing a huge birthday party for Kelly’s husband, a dyed-in-the-wool frat boy. All his frat boy friends would be there.
I forget exactly how it came up, but this was one of those “mask off” moments I’d had from time to time with Mom. Those times when she exposed herself for the true sociopath she really was. It was a look in her eyes. The slightest change in her facial features.
With a sort of gleam in her eyes that I would later come to recognize well, she indicated that there was a man who was interested in her, and who she was interested in.
I was dumbfounded. We’d just had the conversation about being exclusive and taking our relationship seriously. About building on the obvious chemistry we had. About taking things to the next level and seeing where this could go.
She acted like we’d never had the conversation.
I said to her, “So if this issue didn’t come up right this moment, you might have slept with another man.
She acted like I was crazy. Of course she would. She was a single woman.
This was another sign of Mom’s sociopathy. This sort of inappropriate disclosure or conversation. Something she thinks is normal, or even “cool” or “admirable,” that her audience thinks is completely fucked up behavior.
I’ve heard about a lot of this since. Mom says things in some twisted effort to brag or boast about something she thinks, or about her behavior, or about the things she’s done that she believes to be “girl boss moves,” but really just come off as pathetic and gross to normal people.
Much more of this to come.
Love,
Dad