Chapter Six Ancestors in Training

Chapter Six

 

Ancestors in Training

 

“… woman was no more than a machine to make babies for him. 

‘Let them bear children TILL THEY DIE OF IT,’ Martin Luther advised. That is what they are for.’ ”

--- Dr. Rosalind Miles, “The Sins of the Mothers,” in her The Women’s History of the World, p 102.

 

I have asked before:  How did we get here from there?

 

Mr. Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier, the now 91 – year – old patriarch whose seed spawned a passel of more Edinsmaiers than any other’s, told me in such a conscientious – sounding, so – therefore – it – is – so tone, shortly before Christmas 1988, that he himself had been raised up to believe that to tell someone you loved them meant you wanted to have sex with them. 

 

“Well, for christ’s sake, Mr. Edinsmaier, you got Mrs. Edinsmaier pregnant 14 times that I know of and she grew 12 of ‘em to term live.  All in 20 years!  Did you or did you not have sex with her in order for her to’ve accomplished this?  And since, ‘course, ya’ did,” I went right on without pausing for his response, “how come the Sam hell you could never then, in 49 years of marriage to this woman before she died in ’85 just a month shy of being married to you for 50 years, how come the hell you could never bring yourself to tell her, not even on her long, long and suffering deathbed, that you loved her?!  For christ’s sake, Mr. Edinsmaier, you just said that that is what it meant to you to say that to someone, that you wanted to have sex with them … and, and, an’ … you did have sex with her at least 14 times, did you not?! … But you can actually hang there on the other end of this telephone wire and tell me you did not, IN 49 YEARS, get around to telling her you loved her!!!  The woman who devoted her entire being every day all friggin’ day long for nearly half a century to you and your dozen kids???  And the cancer killed her and she never heard it from you?!?!  For god’s sakes, it’s no great stretch at all then that Herry couldn’t either!!!  Can you still honestly say, Mr. Edinsmaier, that that is just not the sickest thing you ever did?!?! … ‘cuz it sure as hell is the sickest thing I have ever, ever heard of!!!”

 

“Well,” he stood steadfastly – as always – resolute and never to admit fault to anything whatsoever, let alone, to a mere woman, let alone, admit to the need for changing himself, “that is what I was brought up to believe.”

 

‘Course all that this discourse had told me was that there was yet another mother out there who had never, ever heard from her children’s father that she was loved by him.  Which I now know is a mighty common and heinous occurrence.

 

When it came to expressing himself to his family members, my own father, AmTaham True, was not at all like Mr. Edinsmaier.  O, Daddy was super tight – lipped outside of the home, yeah.  But in it, he demonstrated daily the overwhelming joy and delight he found in my mother and us kids.  Why he reveled in her is still beyond me and a veritable mystery, I venture to speculate, to all four of us kids.  She was fat, fubsy.  Hell, she was obese as far back as memory serves me.  Frumpy, dumpy, even slovenly most of the time.

 

But much worse than that, she was – and is to this day – a misanthrope and a shrew.  One of the extreme Shakespearean variety.  Not only to us three girls but often enough to Daddy as well and in front of all of us kids of which there numbered four, openly mocking his farm machinery purchases or his lifelong love of reading, especially outdoors magazines and politically or socially analytical newsletters.  And the dictionary.  Yeah, that’s right, Noah Webster’s famous work.  Worst of all was her scorn of his desire for a college education.

 

But never in public.  No, no, no.  Bless her heart.  She was just as supportive and soft and dependent and deferential as she could possibly ooze.

But my father, a wonderfully handsome man with the ruddy skin of an Ioway Indian, hardened and leather – like from the brutal Midwest weather and crowned with gorgeous, thick, black hair that became prematurely and completely snow white at the age of 47 just like his own mother’s had and was never hidden under any sort of covering, loved her.  We heard this constantly.  He’d thank her after every meal.  Even when the supper repeatedly consisted night after night of only white bread crusts with milk, sugar and brown Karo Syrup or Brer Rabbit Molasses poured on top.  He would wrap his arms around her huge waist from behind laying his cheek upon her broad upper back and neck and softly murmur, “Mother of mine,     I love you,” while she stood, elbow – deep in sudsy dishwater and dripping her forehead sweat into it at the kitchen sink at one o’clock on an August farming afternoon.  I took him to mean he was uttering, “Mother of my children.”

 

Just a year before he was suddenly dead of a massive coronary, the two of us were, alone, outside the veterinarian’s getting Zephyr (pronounced “Zay – fear”, kinda’ Frenchy – like, ‘member?), the Boys’ scroungy gray tabby faithful, his powder sprinkle medicine to pee easily, when Daddy turned to

me and casually announced, “You know, she’s quite intelligent, your mother is.  You kids might not

know this about her, but she knows a whole lot about business and policy and budgeting.”  He said it

like I wouldn’t believe it unless these observations and characterizations about her came to me from him.  He was right about that much. 

 

What I had come to know and to believe about my mother was that she, not my dad like so many folks had conveyed about my dad, compared most to Mr. Edinsmaier.  I have never addressed my former in – laws as Juggern and Detanimod, only as Mr. or Mrs. Edinsmaier, because of the distancing of supposed loved ones that Mr. Edinsmaier was so masterful at maintaining.  I could not get inside Mehitable True’s walls to know her as a regular person like any of the rest of us were because, like Mr. Edinsmaier, she staunchly would not allow this.  Everything, literally every part of her being, her day, her routine was consumed in presenting a certain face to others, whether it be the neighbors, the folks in town, the other members in the Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation’s pews, our teachers, or us, her own kids.

 

Maintaining façade above all else is a distinct religion out here in the Heartland.  Particularly for so many of British, Welsh, Irish, German or northern European descent.  We’re told that Easterners – ya’ know, Korean, Chinese, Japanese Easterners – are so this way, caught up daily with saving face.  I hafta tell ya’:  They can’t hold a candle to an Iowa farmwife bent on lookin’ like what she ain’t!  That might be because the folks in Asia, they worry about face as it pertains to honesty and honor and themselves.  Mehitable’s only concerns were nearly the opposite!  She fretted over image, perception, what others could be led to believe about her, my dad, us kids – and not at all about whether any of it was true or not – let alone, honorable!

 

*     *     *     *

 

What did this do to us girls?  To constantly be displayed to others and to her as that which we were not?  Well, it’s obvious to me.  I know this.  While I cannot speak for my two other sisters, Ardys and Endys,

I never, ever – no matter how many A grades I got, no matter how many hours of piano I practiced, no matter how many times I wore my long, platinum tresses heaped up high in her choice of glamorous, Evita Perón chignons when I’d just wanted my hair to fly away untethered, no matter how many items of apparel I wore that only she had chosen when I’d really wanted only to put on my good ol’ blue jeans, no matter how soft I tried to train my naturally low – octave, husky, oftentimes raspy voice to be, no matter how ‘well’ (a physician, no less!) I had married, no matter how many college degrees I myself had not only earned in effort but had also earned the literal bucks for said educations as well and had fully paid for myself, that is, three – a bachelor’s in nursing known as a BSN from the Ivy League Cornell University,      a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, the DVM degree, and a doctorate in veterinary microbiology, the at - one – time prestigious PhD, all from three different universities – and, finally, no matter how absolutely Aryan – perfect my three children – my three boy children – were, I never, ever measured up to being enough for her.  No matter what.  Measured up to being enough of whatever it was she thought was sufficient – for me to actually be brought out of her hiding places for me and to be seen or talked to by her relatives and friends – up close and true – for who I really, really am.

 

I was quite literally hidden by her.  As an adult.  My ages of 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28.  And before then, too of course.  Since my age of 10, I am thinking; 1957 through 1976.  As an adult, this hiding of me would’ve been when I was home for a holiday or for weekend periods.  Banished to the back three bedrooms of her house when townsfolk came to the front door or even the papergirl there to collect.  “Quick, get to the back!” is what I heard when her doorbell rang. 

 

O, I forgot to mention, didn’t I?  Who I really, really am?  I am, in addition to that in the paragraph above, also divorced once or twice and I’ve gone into a hospital a couple o’ times for a couple o’ weeks each time for exhaustion, too.  Have told you before that I was a graduate of Woodstock, I know; but I forgot to mention that it’d taken place, Mehitable admonished me repeatedly, where there’d been “99% nudity” according to her.  And I forgot, too, didn’t I, to mention that I had become, since leaving her and AmTaham’s home for college, rather a radical, hemorrhaging – hearted, feminist hippie pacifist and uppity freethinking atheist, I had.

 

Guess that that history of mine more than made up for why she claimed to be ‘protecting’.  That’s what she called it, the hiding of me, “I have to protect you!”  And the hiding of my younger sister, Endys, too. 

 

‘Course, my older, fundamentalist sister rarely came home.  Ardys lived far enough away in Michigan with a family of two strapping boys and a fine and faithful, engineer husband after his four – year, stateside stint in the Air Force during the early 1970s when they’d all lived together in Florida then and their sons were being born.

 

But my only brother, Sterling?  Well, he could do no wrong.  No ‘protecting’ needed there so Sterling was always out and in front.  Mehitable couldn’t tell others enough about Sterling’s heroic exploits flying killer jets in Viet Nam or his being whisked suddenly off to Washington from his HQ at SAC in Omaha ‘cause of some big – time secret this or that, that that was why he, just at the last minute, wasn’t able to join her for Thanksgiving that year, or about his owning just farm after farm after Iowa farm, not to mention, of course, that little toy of his, the red Vet he’d escorted and squired her adoringly around town in.  More like, hauled her around in.

 

She forgot, that mother of ours, however, to set straight the facts for all those listeners of hers.  That it had been Sterling’s wife’s inheritance money gained from the deaths of her parents early on in their marriage that had purchased all those farms.  Sterling’s part?  He had, at his controlling demands, managed things so badly that in less than a couple of decades not only was his wife’s inheritance all gone, so were all the farms.  All lost.  Everything.  But that wee incidental the townsfolk didn’t know.  The farms had not been in AmTaham’s and Mehitable’s county so the Truth?  From her lips?  Also all gone.

 

That same and only brother of mine ferried his dear ma – mah, the one, now widowed and who was on schedule, so to speak, to bequeath to Brother a few shekels more than his in – laws had already done,  –  that bro’ – o’ – mine chauffeured her at her behest to Grubtrop, West Virginia, the autumn after AmTaham was lowered into April’s ground, 1992.  Without ever telling me they were intending to go visit my three Boys.  Those three whom I’d had no contact with whatsoever since, exactly a year earlier, they’d suddenly been checked out of the Urbandale, Iowa schools one Monday afternoon and the next morning, unbeknownst even to them as to where they were headed, spirited 900 miles east and five states away, Tuesday, 29 October 1991.

 

On Saturday night, 16 October 1992, upon returning to her home now in the suburbs of Williamsburg, my Iowa hometown of about 2,000 white people when I was growing up on the farm just a mile and a half outside of it, my Boys’ maternal grandma called up my answering machine in Ames and triumphantly announced her crafty and cunning, final blow upon me.  Me, the real and devastated mama of those West Virginia kids and Mehitable’s own flesh – and – blood kid.  “Now don’t you be calling me back ‘cuz I’m just awfully, awfully tired after such a long, long trip,” she shrilly whined into my tape.  And then, just as suddenly, her voice changed and took on the monstrous enormity of an in – your – face, army drill sergeant booming orders at 5:00 am, “… but I have just returned from Grubtrop, Weessssst Virginia and four glooooohhh … rious days visiting yooo – ur Boys.”  Nah, nah … na, nah, nah!  Click.

 

It was well after midnight, now Sunday, 17 October 1992, when I played back the message flashing, having just gotten into my very chilly condo from my nighttime part – time work as a production machine operator at the junk mail factory over in that courthouse town about ten miles to the east.  I phoned her back immediately, no regard whatsoever to the hour nor to her command that I not.  As naturally as if I’d rehearsed the script for hours until perfect, I calmly and evenly stated, “From this day forward, Madam, you are dead to me.  And when you actually physically do die, no one … no one needs to ring me up and tell me that.”  Free at last, free at last.  Thank goddess in heaven, I am free at last.

 

It wasn’t my father I had married.  Nope, no way.  Isn’t that what the armchair psychologists and the

$100 - an - hour, shingle – flapping shrinks always espouse?  “She’s just looking for her father in her husband, ya’ know.”  “She married him, don’t ya’ know, ‘cuz he reminds her of her daddy.”  What I had married in Herod Edinsmaier were several things all right, but not one of them was my daddy!  Indeed, however, one of those many things in him was my mother.  My ruthless, utterly insecure, face – at – all cost, power – mongering – but – in – the – end – deferential, always – dependent and, therefore, so cleverly controlling mother.  Whose validation I was never going to have, so … I craved it all the more.

 

*     *     *     *

 

This man, this husband of mine, never once, in all the 14½ years of our knowing each other before the separation came, told me, me, the womb that grew those three perfect male children of his, that he loved me.  I knew it was never going to happen, that I was never going to hear it come out of his mouth when Mirzah, the youngest, the last, was six months old.

 

Up until this time, I had played a little game with myself.  Ya’ know the one, I’m sure.  “Well, here’s Zane, our first – born child, a boy child at that, and so perfect, so healthy.  And I did it with no drugs, just           22 hours total in the hospital … from start to outta there!  Surely, of course, now he’ll tell me he loves me, won’t he?  Me, the one who’s done this most amazing thing, this life, this Zaney – Boy.”  August 1976.

 

A couple of years pass by.  I’m big now, about as big as the barn I’ve rented 13 miles from our trailer house near the University of Iowa campus where Herry is a junior in medical school.  I am now a graduated vet just beginning a solo, mixed animal practice using the outbuilding and inventory on a little acreage there of a doc who no longer wants to work it and driving Zane daily to Mrs. Start’s day – care a mile from me and my work while taking emergency call every night for what seems like forever.  “O, m’god.  Here is Jesse.  Our perfect, beautiful little brother for Zane!  Again not only a boy child but perfect in every single detail right down to the same hair so fine and soft and platinum – a carbon copy of Z if ever there was one.”  An organically grown, literal carbon copy – and it is August 1978.

 

I was breast – feeding; but, unlike with Zane nursing when I’d flowed sweet, sugary nectar as plentiful as the waters of the Niagara Falls, I hadn’t nearly as full an udder for Jesse.  No matter that I locked up and left the shop every single lunch hour and headed for Jesse’s sitter’s bedroom.  A different babysitter than Z’s day – care, one who took infants because Mrs. Start’s day – care didn’t.  So Jesse could suckle, the same as I had done when Zane was an infant and I was still in vet school. 

 

Back then during veterinary medical college, Zane’s sitter had lived in Old Garden Trailer Court which sprawled itself just adjacent to the vet school quadrangle, a seven – minute or so walk away.  I’d spent

every single middle of the day for two terms, six months, in the back trailer bedroom nursing Zane while Mrs. Lime fed her other charges lunch.  When spring arrived and I was scheduled for surgery lab in the afternoons, I had to stop the midday foray to Z and, instead, scrub, shave and have anesthetized the upcoming afternoon’s surgery subjects.  So I ceased coming to him a bit before the spring term commenced because I wanted to study over lunch break for the final winter quarter examinations.  Zane, a half a year old now, screamed and carried on so, such that Mrs. Lime asked, after a week of this behavior during those exams, that he not come to her anymore.  I remember driving him home to our apartment in married student housing on that Friday night after such an exhausting week of tests and lab practicals and announcing this ‘situation’ to Herry who, between swallows of brew, guffawed, “My firstborn’s just been expelled from school!” 

 

Of course, we needed to find another babysitter before Monday morning.  O, no, that’s wrong.  I had to do that, to find another childcare provider, not Herry!  No time off to celebrate the end of the term.  It really wasn’t an end of anything except exams for a couple of weeks.  Regular vet work at the student – staffed clinic awaited Monday, and the next term of vet school classroom stuff took up in another seven days again after that, always two weeks earlier than the rest of any other of the university’s classes.  It was wintertime, February 1977.

 

I did, too.  Find another sitter, that is.  Lei – Ping, with a four – year – old daughter, Janie, and without her green card, spoke not a word of English, a perk I hadn’t known of at the time.  Four months later, she breathlessly called her husband, Daniel, an ISU engineering graduate student, at his campus office and implored him, because he could speak English, to phone up to the vet college and try to locate me there amongst all of the labs and classrooms and animals’ quarters. 

 

Because Zane … had just taken his first step. 

 

And she thought I would want to know that.  At the precise moment of it.  Well, nearly anyhow.  I am certain that Zane was counting to ten in Chinese long before he was saying “mama”.  He loved her –        and I did, too.  Thank goddess.  Thank goodness.

 

*     *     *     *

 

Why was I so exhausted?  I collapsed, fell right down on my exploding tits, expressing milk all around the exam table on the raw concrete flooring near noon one wintry Friday morning at my shop.  I hadn’t yet been drained dry as Jesse hadn’t drunk lunch yet.  My infamous cat client, Mrs. Evelyn Roberts, who owned 43 and Lambie Blue Pie, a slate gray domestic who suffered from end – stage kidney failure, was in to see me with Blue for an end – of – the – line evaluation and where – do – we – go – from – here recommendation.  Mrs. Roberts telephoned Herry to leave his med school routine and come collect the dropped corpse that was his wife.  He did, of course.

 

The Thursday following, 15 February 1979, Sally, Dr. Hess’s OB – Gyn nurse, brightly declared, “Why, no wonder you’re so tired, my dear, you’re pregnant!”

 

“I’m what?  I’m pregnant?!  But I’m still nursing Jesse.  He’s only six months old today!”  I couldn’t help my unsophisticated incredulity.  Hell, of course, I was pregnant.  That explained everything.  Especially the exhaustion and the no – return of my period and the exhaustion and the unending stance of my eyelids at half mast through every single afternoon session with the account books and, O, … did I mention the exhaustion?!? 

 

Hell, I was a doctor, sort of.  And I’d practiced nursing before that, an OB nurse, no less!!  For christ’s sake.  How had I been so stupid?  Why hadn’t I seen this for what it was?  For what it was was:  I was lactating and gestating at the exact same times – for the second time – in as many of my 31 years!              A veritable sow I was.

 

And then he was here, all so, so fast.  “Our beautiful, platinum Mirzah!  I can’t believe it.  He’s here, our baby!  And it’s our third gorgeous boy baby!”  Dr. Hess and Sally smiled broadly at each other, nearly simultaneously exclaiming that they’d never before known a mama so ecstatic and grateful to see a third of the same gender pushed out.  “Didn’t you, for sure, want a little girl?  But this is so great, ya’ know, that you wanted another boy!”

 

True it was, I had.  Wanted another boy, that is.  No girls for me.  Nosirree, none.  Girls were terrible as teenagers.  Terrible as teenagers and terrible throughout their whole miserable lives really.  Even when they’d managed to shag a doctor, no less, and marry ‘well’.  My mom had had three of us, and she hadn’t been pleased with any one of us.  Besides, this was my crowning glory, for sure, wasn’t it? 

 

Three perfect, perfect, perfect, platinum – haired, blue – eyed, male babies.

 

He’d tell me now for certain.  No other woman Herry’s ever known in his whole life could have possibly accomplished for him the feat I just had:  three stunningly beautiful, blonde baby boys.  Bang, bang and bang.  1976, 1978, and 1979.  August, August and September.  I will finally hear Dr. Herod Edinsmaier say the words, “I love you, Legion.”  I know it.  I know I will.  An hour passed.

 

A day.  The whole day.  The first week.  Mirzah was now a month old. 

 

In the turn of a cheek, Mirzah was six months old, and I remember smiling down on his face as he sucked in the southwest bedroom of the East Chocolate Avenue rental in Hershey, P A that Herry’d backed up to, though smashing the garage awning, so that we could finally unload.  Herry had taken our perfect, five – member family on just two weeks’ notice March 1980, from item one into box one and no housing lined up whatsoever into which to move in Pennsylvania – to – a Ryder, loaded down, even with a full freezer, and three days on the road leading at last to a rundown shanty alongside one of the Commonwealth’s many, many muddy, hillside country roads which took half the night to find in the midst of a driving downpour.  And in which we spent only that first cold and dirty night before I telephoned the local Lutheran minister from our hotel room to ask his help in connecting us to a rental agency.  The move was half way cross the continent at the end of a brutal Midwest winter so Herry could begin his pathology residency … early.        I knew at that moment that that picture, our ‘family portrait’, was exactly like that of my mother’s ... a total sham.  Come to find out, the sham extended to his family of origin as well – though I hadn’t then yet known to just what huge an extent.

 

I was never to hear it.  If I could do this deed, if I could incubate, grow, nurse and nurture for this man

the three most perfect sons in the history of the entire World and not get elicited from those Boys’ sire an

“I love you” for it by now, by Mirzah’s half – year – old birthday now, let alone, that plus getting him through medical school and me through veterinary medical school, it was never, ever going to be.

 

What a crock.  I couldn’t measure up for my mom.  And I couldn’t measure up for my husband.

 

As I listened to my father – in – law, Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier, explain away love and sex and how the two were, to him, the same thing, it hit me square between the ears.  I could not remember having ever heard my own mother say to me, “Legion, I love you.”  Surely she had.  She was a mother after all.  But     I could not remember in my mind’s ear one time ever hearing it and what that time was like.  Then again,   to Mehitable I was not a male child:  It could be, then, that a mom like her never had said it to me.

 

O, m’god.  I was suddenly feeling quite white with rage, and I lost my grip on the receiver as it quietly came to rest on its base disconnecting me from the tyrannical Edinsmaier elder.  I had, indeed, married my mother.  And the year was now 1988; and he, my husband, had been absent from our family home almost seven months, since the 06^th of June to be exact.  It was Christmastime in the Heartland.

 

The rage was empowering.  I had heard that it could be.  I, of course, had mostly heard, though, that it was bad, that rage was a no – no, that good girls didn’t feel this way nor ever, ever show this.

 

But I was feeling it now, and it was teaching me.  In flashes.  Lucid flashes.  Insight dropping all around in bits and pieces, so fast that, at times, I couldn’t quite grasp it all and, later, would have to consciously think back hard on all the spurts that had gone shooting across my forehead so that they would have a chance to sink in and stay with me.  It must be that rage is taught as a bad thing for women to have and to show because, otherwise, things we rebels learn from having it, those insights we gain must, to our mothers and our husbands, cause them way too much havoc in their lives.  Threatening.  Havoc otherwise known to us women as … change.  Freedom.  Independence. 

 

*     *     *     *

 

Spurts like how could I have gone 12½ years and never, not once, shown jealousy.  That’s right.  There’d been all these women waltzing in and out, to and fro in front of me and my marriage, right before my eyes and under my nose.  How had I dealt with this barrage?  And his flaunting it?  Jealousy, like rage, is also a big no – no.  An even bigger one than rage is really.  Why, no self – respecting (Ooooo, that’s another real crock, “self – respecting”, my ass) lady ever lets jealousy rear its ugly, serpentine head now, does she?     So what’s a nice gal to do?  When all these women are in her face? 

 

Who’ve really already been, shall we say, in her … husband’s?

 

Well, let’s adopt the Intellectual Doctrine.  Fuck, yes.  Let’s.  This’ll work.  After all, I am one.  And, golly gee, so is he really.  Intellectuals, ya’ know.  We are both so educated and so brilliant and, well, hey, don’t we just know it, too?  So let’s be smart here.  And, above all else, let’s be deferentially calm about this … this little matter of soooo many, many other women.  And, well, let’s just deal with it, ya’ know, kind of dependent – like but intellectual – like, too, at the same time, of course.  This way we won’t see that awful green thing implode and get us all in a snit now, will we?

 

So.  So let’s see.  Hhhmmmm.  O, I’ve got it!  Yes, indeed!  This is it!  This is how I can smartly handle all these women ‘cause this just has to be how it must have been:  Herry thinks of himself as Mr. Wonderful.  Well, isn’t it so, isn’t it quite true then that Mr. Wonderful could not possibly be married to a schmoe.  No!  He wouldn’t be married to a dolt, a jerk, a frump.  No, no, no.  Why, Mr. Wonderful’d be married, wouldn’t he, to … Mrs. Wonderful.  And since Mr. Wonderful was, indeed, married to me, why then it quite logically followed, did it not, that that meant that I was Mrs. Wonderful?  Er, Ms. Wonderful?     Well, indeed, it did now, didn’t it?

 

What a crock.  What a deferential, dependent, intellectual crock.

 

As brilliant as I was I had never learned this in graduate school.  Yet, nonetheless, how so well I had learned this.  And who’d been my teacher?  Well, why, none other than Mehitable.  So was I jealous?  Never.  How could I be?  Jealousy was wrong.  And this – this explanation about me being Ms. Wonderful by way of being an aberrant form of extension off of Mr. Wonderful was right, wasn’t it?  Mom said so, too.  Marry well, she’d said.  And, brother, had I!  Not only was he a doctor but he was Mr. Wonderful Doctor.  That’s Doctor Wonderful to you, thank you very much. 

 

No matter that, as a person, mama had to me, a dozen years earlier when Zane, the cherished first – born, was only in my uterus, called Herry behind his back in his own home, that old, dilapidated, coral – colored trailer back at med school, a “milquetoast”.  ‘Bout as complimentary it was, I remember thinking at the time, as labeling him out loud as, “trailer trash, Mom.”  She must have, being so deferential and all herself, seen in him that which was in her.  No matter that.  Face – wise and out there for all to see, he was now a doctor – and, therefore, that meant for me in her eyes, that he was wonderful – and so then, I thought, I was wonderful, too.  Wasn’t I?  Well, wonderful to her, of course, as I had done all that I could possibly do, all that anyone could ever possibly do, to be wonderful enough for her and still … not be.  But certainly I was wonderful enough in all those women’s eyes, I was.  I was married to Dr. Edinsmaier.

 

Crock.  Insightful crock. 

 

That’s how we got here from there.  To Christmas 1988.  The first Christmas of all of them since for which I and any one of my three perfect, blonde sons have not been allowed to be … together.