By Cindy Sams
/ Nonfiction /
There must have been so much blood.
On the floor, on the counter, on nineteen-year-old Patricia Lucille Avery, who sat beneath a fluorescent light fixture that plummeted from a downtown drugstore ceiling. Sharp metal and shattered glass rained down, slicing the flesh of her right bicep and forearm to the bone. She fainted and fell from her perch at the soda fountain. Her date screamed for someone to call an ambulance. Doctors at a nearby emergency room stitched her damaged limb, leaving a crisscross scar that ran from her skinny inner arm to the wrist. Little could be done to flatten her dominant hand. Over time, severed nerves curled the fingers and thumb inward to form a permanent claw.
Her face, with those thin lips and green Bette Davis eyes, escaped unscathed except for a diamond-shaped gouge on her nose.
Patricia Lucille, aka Patricia Anne, aka Patsy or Pat to family and friends, endured months of recovery. She learned to write with her left hand and adopted the habit of wearing long sleeves in all weathers to hide her scar. The mother of a small boy, this high-spirited, sharp-tongued woman soon added a second child to her dysfunctional family fold.
A sickly daughter with whom she would do battle from birth. A child, born just months after the drugstore accident, whom she would abandon then retrieve thirteen years later. A girl who spent her early years with old ladies and her adolescence whipsawed by a mother who couldn’t settle down in one state let alone with one man.
An infant who grew to repeat many of her mother’s mistakes, including but not limited to botched marriages and impulsive decisions that left her own daughter fatherless and spinning out of control.
Me.
* * *
Stories should have an arc. Like this:
Thanks, Aristotle.
Here’s mine:
Thanks, Mom.
* * *
I am not the hero of my story.
Ditto for the woman who bore me and the woman who bore her. My mother and grandmother are the principal players of my fractured childhood, the former a parental pugilists who shaped me from my second-hand cradle to the lips of their bare-boned graves.
To one, I owe my birth. To the other, I owe my life.
And with all due respect to my own self, there’s nothing about the first sixty-something years of my life that would earn any applause. Or if there is, it’s this: in the winter of 1992, I became a mother myself to a seven-pound baby girl who would redeem us all.
* * *
* * *
Perhaps the conflict lived in our blood.
The same substance she shed on the pharmacy floor worked at odds with my father’s A-positive blood proteins. My resulting Rh disease, a potentially lethal form of anemia caused by incompatibility between the blood of mother and child, required a lengthy hospital stay for me and several transfusions to correct. Prevention in the form of an intramuscular shot of RhoGam, a common cure these days, didn’t become available until a few years after my birth in 1959.
Perhaps the trauma of my premature birth soured her on child rearing. I arrived a scant half-hour after a rush to the hospital without a doctor or anesthesia.
Perhaps the struggle between mother and daughter stemmed from Mama’s mangled arm. She could neither diaper, hold, nor feed the infant version of me on her own.
Perhaps her youth fostered an unwillingness to be tied down. She had never tasted life outside of the South and yearned for freedom and adventure. Poverty compounded by a tricky relationship with her own mother kept her rooted in the bucolic splendor of Macon, Georgia—our hometown.
Perhaps the battles with her mother spilled over into her dealings with me. Among other charges of maternal abuse, Mama alleged that she was strip-searched after dates to detect signs of teenage sexual shenanigans. Little wonder she bolted at seventeen to marry the first of seven husbands. Like all her marriages, their connubial bliss—which commenced in a chapel in North Carolina and ended in annulment—was short lived.
Blood gives, but it also takes away. My mother’s voracious fluids threatened to leach the very life out of me.
* * *
I don’t recall living with my mother as a small child. Did we ever indulge in a backyard picnic or a trip to the grocery store or a Saturday matinee?
Beats me.
In my mind, Mama birthed me and then disappeared. Where I was taken afterwards and by whom remains up for debate.
Dueling narratives flavor the sauce of my family history. When put to close questioning, my mother’s mother, Hilda Lucille Avery – the woman who raised me until I reached the age of thirteen – insisted that I lived with her from infancy on.
Then again, she would reverse herself, saying my older brother Bobby and I lived with Mama until a family friend observed the perilous conditions under that roof and insisted someone intercede.
Mama countered with a version of her own: My brother and I were with her until the day I shoved a green pea up my nose and she couldn’t remove it with her good left hand. At that, she sacked up my brother and me and dropped us at Grandmama’s house.
Any of those stories could be true. Or parts of them. Or none of them.
During the six years I lived under my mother’s roof. I witnessed marriages and divorces. Domestic brawls and black eyes. A schizophrenic split between South and Southwest as she ran from one state to another and one man to another,
Reliving the oh-so-similar mistakes I inflicted upon my own daughter shrivels my soul.
* * *
Mama could infuriate, but she could also charm. Her hair-trigger temper and abusive tongue were offset by a knife-sharp wit that made me howl. To a handsome young colleague who once asked her out for lunch she quipped: “No, thank you. Sandwiches lead to sex, and I’m not hungry for either one.” He tucked tail and ran. To me, she lobbed an astute observation after learning that I had married a man in 2008 she considered beneath me: “You must have a grudge against your own self.”
The Artist. The Professor. The Paramedic. The Cajun. The Handyman. She bestowed nicknames upon all the men I dated and/or married after the first of my two husbands died in 2007. Mama was spot-on about their shortcomings. Even when she was wrong, she managed to be right.
* * *
A warm autumn Saturday, the first of the 2010 college football season. Richard and I snuggle on the sofa in my house in Macon waiting for kickoff. The Alabama Crimson Tide vs San Jose State Spartans. A cupcake matchup, but Alabama is playing, so what do we care?
The early afternoon sun sparkles through the windows in my den. The room smells of scented candles—sugar cookie and cinnamon spice. Richard, a former paramedic from Enterprise, Alabama, hands me a fresh Mimosa, my second of the day. Cheap champagne and store-brand orange juice over ice. A double-dose of fuck-it-all, tart and bubbly and alive in my mouth. We toast to a Tide victory. We are celebrating the weekend, the fine weather, the sweetness of new love.
My cell phone rings. Mama’s voice fills the edges of the room.
“I’ve been thinking about this man you’ve been seeing. Men from Alabama have two knots on the bottom of their skulls called Dothan knots. You need to check on that. If he doesn’t have them, he is not from Alabama.”
This is Mama’s first whiff of my new fella, a man I met through an online dating site. Her tone, teasing and flirty with a hint of edge, lulls me into going along with this farce. Reaching my fingers through Richard’s dark blonde hair, I probe the base of his skull for the supposed tell-tale signs of his regional identity. There’s nothing there. No knot. No swelling. No lump, bump, hump, contusion, or nodule of any kind. Despite all logic, a hint of concern niggle at my brain.
“Mama. He doesn’t have one.”
She cackles. A smug, self-satisfied sound.
“You know what that means. He is lying about where he comes from, and if he’ll lie about that, he’ll lie about anything.”
Could she be right? He might he be feeding me a dose of future grief to compliment the champagne. He wouldn’t be the first. As is my pattern with men, I rush in where more discerning women wouldn’t tread.
Richard’s deep drawl bats the doubts away. He’s never heard of a Dothan knot and wouldn’t brag about it if he had one. Dammit man, he says. Hang up that phone and let’s watch some football.
“Mama, I’ll talk to you later. We’re watching the game.”
“Oh, you two like football, huh? Let’s see how long this relationship lasts after the season is over.”
We lasted five seasons until Richard’s death from lung cancer in October 2015.
So there, Mama. So there.
* * *
Out for Blood: A Discourse on Maternal Criticisms
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Do You Eat to Live or Live to Eat?
Chapter Two: You Would Look Better with Long Hair.
Chapter Three: You Would Look Better with Short Hair.
Chapter Three: Why Do You Lift Weights? Do You Want to Look Like a Man?
Chapter Five: You’re Just So Damned Educated.
Chapter Six: Why Can’t You Be Someone Else? Anyone Else? Anyone but You.
* * *
Such loving care hardened me. Left me in a chronic state of low-level anger and anxiety. I learned to gather perceived slights with the same delicacy I used to collect Easter eggs, cradling the delicate painted shells in my hands before tucking them away in a soft, grass-lined basket for safe keeping.
Petty transgressions set me off. Abandoned at lunch by my teaching colleagues during a theater educator symposium?
Fuck y’all.
Chosen dead-last for the university trivia team?
Fuck y’all.
Left friendless and alone during a pandemic?
Fuck y’all.
Not just you or you or you. A y’all.
* * *
At 74, age and chronic illness cooled my mother’s jets. The emphysema that had surfaced ten years earlier stole her breath and limited her mobility. The bottle-blonde pixie she favored turned silver and grew over her ears. A snappy dresser, her favorite navy blazer and gray slacks flapped on her wasted frame as if she were a mortal scarecrow. Her feet shrank in her shoes. She could no longer wear her favorite perfume, Dior’s J’Adore. Strong fragrance sucked away what little air she could draw into her wasted lungs. A nasal canula delivered oxygen in greater and greater concentrations, the clear tube competing for attention with her only other adornment: clip-on earrings in fake yellow gold. She refused to leave home without them.
* * *
Lunchtime following a doctor’s appointment. Mama wobbles toward the front door of her favorite Mexican restaurant. She’s in no condition for dining out, but she insists on having lunch before returning home.
I keep a light hold on her left elbow. Too much pressure on her porous bones could snap her arm in two. Without support, she’ll fold like a rag doll. She’s fallen twice in recent weeks and fractured vertebrae each time.
Rickety but upright, Mama stumbles at the restaurant’s door just as a man about her age opens it to leave. The old gentleman, natty and dimpled, catches her as she sinks to the ground.
Unabashed, Mama looks up at him and grins. Her lashes batted from force of habit.
“I would run smack into a good-looking man when I’m dressed like a hag,” she quips.
The old gentleman plays along. “You look good to me, lady. Maybe I should join you for a second lunch.”
They laugh. He moves on. Mama turns to me, eyes glittering in their sunken sockets. There’s satisfaction there. And triumph.
“I’ve still got it.”
* * *
As I edged toward womanhood, I swore that I would never be like my mother. Would never abandon my child, never deny my child’s existence. Never put a man’s welfare above that of my child. I’ve made good on every promise except the last one.
Bonnie, let me introduce you to ______. We’re engaged. See my diamond ring? I know we just met. I know I have a pattern of rushing into things that don’t work out. I know you don’t like him. I know. I know. I know.
Bonnie, let me introduce you to ______. I know you’re uncomfortable with him being here. He’s staying anyway. You’re moving out? You’re going to Atlanta? For good? I guess that will be ok.
Oh, Mama. I followed you after all.