Free Caring For Mary by Nicholas Andrefsky Page B

having a very good time with that family.
    I greatly loved my parents—although my mother admitted to me eight years ago that she always suspected I loved my father more than her. She told me with great pain in her voice that I had turned away from her kiss and pushed her away with my chubby hand when I was two. That was when she decided that I was her “prickly pear”! Things changed for her with me with that action—or so she said. I couldn’t control my bodily functions, but somehow Mom reasoned that I was wise beyond my years. She safeguarded her heart from me from that moment on.
    That’s not to say that she was mean or cruel. She was an artist of great talent and made beautiful things for me. I had a stage with tiny marionettes, a snowman with a painted face, handmade clothes, and painted mural walls. I loved my mother.
    I moved a lot when I was young. My father used his position as editor of a newspaper to voice his personal beliefs, leaving us an outcast family more than once. That—and poor money management and two bankruptcies —caused us to move three times in three and a half years. The moving stopped when Mom put down her foot and told Papa that we would raise Tiz in one town—and not as a gypsy. I have said to Tiz many times that neither of our parents should have been parents because they were too self-centered. Who knows? One day my children may say the same of me! We all know so much more than our folks.
    I didn’t know my grandparents on my mother’s side. We lived far away, and she barely spoke of them to me. She was not particularly close to her siblings. She went thirty years without speaking to her brother. When her favorite sister died, Mom reunited with Phil, bringing him to her neck of the woods as though they had never separated. When I stated the obvious, she denied ever having less than love for him. Putting the separation on him was a lie; my mother cut people out of her life all the time for the smallest reasons. My father was an only child. I knew his parents. My parental grandmother cared for me when I was little, and I loved her. My mother did not!
    My teen years were tough on my mother and me. I was savvy about Mother’s hypocritical ways—and they drove me mad. She would not reason on matters with me. She stuck out her tongue, spoke to me sarcastically, and told me that no matter how much I knew, she would always know more than I did! When I asked her why, she said, “I am a chief and you are an Indian—that’s why!”
    On a peaceful day, I said, “Please don’t use the chief’s Indians on me, Mom; it drives me crazy.”
    She couldn’t wait till the next upheaval to lance me with her infamous line. It seemed more powerful because she knew it lit me up. That was how she handled her troubled fifteen-year-old daughter! I became a storm cloud of resentment and anger. I married at seventeen with the clear realization that I had to get away from her or I would be harmed for life . I had two children in two years; smart huh?
    She was not a bad mother—she simply didn’t much care for me. I have said all of my adult life that she loved me but didn’t like me. Her heart was my sister’s possession—in spite of Tizzy’s years of drug abuse, wild adventures, school mayhem, and constant disobedience toward my parents. She said that I had sibling rivalry and jealously toward my younger sister. Was that a joke? Denial is not a river in Egypt.
    My older brother—the product of my mother’s first union—lived with us. She was widowed when Frank was six months old. My brother is autistic. My mother always has been embarrassed by Frank’s illness as though it was her personal failing. Regarding the fruit of her womb, I did no wrong. I was simply her flesh—never wrong, never unlikable. The world was always dirty and ignorant, as they were not her flesh. That truth was always undone when I would do a small thing such as not compliment her looks, food, house, art, or books;