Christmas memory

My parents got divorced the day after I graduated from high school. I had spent most of my unschool time raising my baby sister and baby brother (aged 4 and 7 when the folks got divorces, my babies of the heart!). Mom swore to the judge she would keep those kids in the State of IL even as she knew she had hired a moving company to come to our house that afternoon and remove most of the furniture, including the beds of a couple of her kids left behind.

She disappeared for a couple years with my babies. I used to drink 3.2 beer in my college in Wisconsin which allowed eighteen year olds, back then, to drink 3.2, get drunk and weep about my babies. It hurt so much that they had been ripped out of my life. [Not unlike the greater pain of having my only child begin to shun me at age 17 and she still does at age 35. . . wtf did I do to attract that karma, eh?).

My mom had the balls to go back to that judge and ask him to force my dad to pay his court ordered child support. That judge told my dad he did not have to pay a cent, and never had to pay it retroatively until our mother told us where the kids were in this world. Mom was shocked but she held out another year or so. She told us older kids she was afraid our father would kill her.

My father was a flawed man but not at all a violent one.  I was so appalled to hear my mother telling her older kids, three of us in college when she disappeared, that our father would kill her if she toild us where she lived.

He finally hired a detective to find his kids. He did not try to kill our mother. And then she showed up to demand her child support.

She had a lot of nerve. She left him with college bills for three of her children. She did not contribute a cent for our college. And, kinda pathetically, she had told me that my indentured servitude for her children and housekeeping for, altogether, about a decade, was helping her go to college and once she had her degree, she'd help me get mine.  I wrote to her once at the beginning of a semester to ask for a sall contribution towards my textbooks for that semester. She said, and she was married to a wealthy man and had a full time teacher job, that she could not possibly spare me $30 because she spent most of her salary buying a Winnebago.

I have not been well loved and here I am, 64, and still struggling to see myself as lovable.

To the Xmas memory:  when the kids did return to our lives, they would spend Christmas with dad and the rest of us in Chicago. As the only adult female on the scene, I took over Christmas planning, cooking, gift buying.

So one Christmas while I was in college, or maybe law school (the date eludes), I made sure every sibling got what they really wanted for Christmas. I baked and cooked.  On Christmas morning all the kids, including my two bros also in college, tore open all their presents and then settled in to enjoy them when my dad noticed that no one, not even he, had given me a gift. Not one.

I had chosen virtually every gift that my five siblings and my dad had received (dad paid) but no one had thought to give me a damned thing.

Dad got up, hitched his pants as he often did and said "Charles, come with me, I need your help." And they went to Walgreens. In those days, the only stores open on Xmas were a very few drug stores for medicine. But Walgreens sold other stuff. Dad had asked Chuck to go with him to help him choose something for me at Walgreens.

When they returned home, dad said "I found some presents for you in my trunk. I had forgotten to bring them in." This was not true. He had bought me a couple gifts at Walgreens with my creepy brother Chuck's input. I got some Cachet cologne, a candle and an odd address 'book' that was made of metal, with a slider for each letter in the alphamet. Closed, I was supposed to slide the slider to the letter of the alphabet where I was supposed to correctly post people's names and addresses.

I kept that weird thing for years. I never used it.

Funny. Dad gong to Walgreens and buying me junky presents was more upsetting to me than getting no presents. Truth told, I would have preferred fifty bucks.

Oh, he had also bought an electric hair dryer. That was useful. And he made quite the fuss about how he had kept the hairdryer in the trunk to 'surprise' me. 

I acted happy about my gifts. I did not say anything negative. I just moved our holiday feting along to our Christmas brunch.

My daughter did not like to give me gifts. The last time I saw her near Christmas, when, I believe, she had decided to shun me for the rest of her life, she special ordered a pendant for me that was crafted by a jewelry artist whose work I really liked back then. I had several of the artists earrings and the pendant went with most of the earrings.  It was costume jewelry but it was very important to me because it was the first time my daughter had been thoughtful and went out of her way to get me something she considered special.