they call me little buttercup

They call me little buttercup

Dear little buttercup

Though I may never know why

It's dear little buttercup

Sweet little buttercup

Dear little buttercup mine

My mom played the piano well. She could play many pieces, first try, by sight reading.

The piano was on the wall just outside my bedroom, in the dining room. On hot summer afternoons, at my nap time (so I was pretty young), mom would play the piano to encourage me to lay still in bed. I thought her playing was fantastic. I thought she was a great singer, thought she should be an opera star.

My mom played many songs with lyrics. She loved to sing. She sang with what she regarded as a operatic flourish, singing loudly and dramatically. She believed she sang quite well. Mom always said when she no longer had children to raise, she would join a choir.  After her second husband died, the one she left my dad for, she moved back to Chicago and in with one of my brothers. My brother had just gotten divorced and had custody of his two toddler sons. Mom moved in to help with the boys.

Mom's idea of raising kids was still grounded in sending children to Catholic school and getting involved in parish life. So she paid to send my nephews to the nearby Catholic school. And she joined the parish, doing what my mother always did masterfully. She lied. Mom was a masterful liar. She never made statements that were actual lies. When she joined that parish, she made a regular habit of saying her first husband had died and now her second husband had.  She never told anyone in that parish life of hers that her first husband died about fifteen years after she had divorced him and remarried. 

She took great pride, and this goes all the way back, in her claim that she had never told a lie. Her first husband had died and, in her mind, it was not a lie to say so just because he had died fifteen years after she had married in sin.  I knew, at too young an age, that lies of omission were often worse than outright lies. I trusted those lies of omissions. Some of her whopper omissions shaped, or, rather, misshaped me.

Whatever.  Mom was who she was.

My longwinded point is that when the boys got to grade school age and needed less hands-on supervision from her, she tried to join the church choir. Well, she did join it, only to discover that she did not sing very well, she was not regarded as a potential soloist, she could not sing from sheet music. She gave up on that choir quickly.  I wished then, and still do, that she had not given up. A church choir should accept any member of that church in its choir and let the human voices that show up sing. I believe my mother quit because she was confronted with the fact that her lifelong belief that she was a gifted singer and might have sung opera was an unwarranted fantasy and that realization pained her. Although I don't know. Mom, and no one else in my family of origin, ever talked about what they felt.  We were not a great family.

However. Today is her birthday and I want to remember some of my happy memories of my oddball mom.

One of my happy memories was her singing "they call me little buttercup". The whole time I have been writing this, I have heard her shrill, even shrieking but somewhat tuneless singing. I am sure she loved me but I think that singing was about my mom's longing for an audience. She never did it in cold weather. Only when the windows and front door were wide open, so half way up and down the block folks would hear her.

I loved that song. I loved having my mom give me private recitals. I always begged her to sing "Buttercup". She would begin her singing and piano playing session with "Buttercup" and finish with an even more dramatic, more flourished round of "Buttercup".

And I would lay in my bed, not sleeping, and believe myself to be a dear little buttercup. I believed my mother was wonderful. I felt much love for her. I believed she loved me very much.

I was so proud of her.  I thought her out-of-tune, loud singing was wonderful.

I'll never know why but she called me her little buttercup!  She loved me.