Mother Daughter

         
         
         
         
Mother and Daughter

Mother:

I watched as my daughter, Tanya’s, head bobbed like an apple in a tub of water.  The dark circles under her eyes contrasted with her ashen face.  Unshed tears stung my sinuses.  Tanya dozed her feet pointed away from each other at a 180º angle.  She had broken her feet so many times bumping into walls and furniture while navigating her wheel chair that they now turned out permanently. 
Tanya’s ashes snaked from her cigarette and fell on her blanket.  Though she couldn’t use her hands, her fingers were permanently clenched in the cigarette holding position.  She mastered that function. 
I jumped from my chair and yelled, “You’re going to set yourself on fire and in the process kill Alexis and me,” I shouted.
         Tanya grunted from her drug induced fog.  “OK.”  Tanya, a quadriplegic, swore she would stay alive for her daughter, Alexis.  I doubted her.
         I sat down at the kitchen table and my head fell into my hands.  How had things gone so far?  Nausea rose and choked me.  I had to admit that my mothering skills were lacking and now my daughter and granddaughter were paying for my negligence. 
Tanya and Alexis had been appointed a counselor to help them try to repair their relationship.  Could I repair my relationship with my daughter?  Had my bad choices ruined our chance?  It knew it was going to take a lot more than a counselor because now Alexis was out of control. 
This very morning, I had to wrestle her to the floor to get her dressed for school and stop her from pounding her head on the dresser.  It wasn’t easy.  My clubfoot and diskless back make any movement painful.  But my determination to make my remaining grandchild’s life better outweighed my pain.  I wanted to make amends for my abandonment of Tanya and her first two children.
         “Don’t you attack my daughter,” Tanya yelled when our morning discussion turned into a shouting match. 
         “She has to get showered and ready for school or she’ll end up like you,” I threw back. 
         Yesterday the counselor visited.  In the middle of the session Alexis had attacked the counselor.  “I hate you,” she screamed as she threw the stapler at the counselor followed by a bunch of pencils as if she wanted to be sure she had made her point. Then she turned and ran to her room grabbing her shoe on the way to throw at the counselor.  She wanted to be sure she made her point.  She slammed the door and the counselor and Tanya burst out laughing simultaneously.  The counselor was speechless and I didn’t know how to react.  Tanya’s pent up nerves prevented an appropriate reaction.  Her laugher was a mask.  Tanya seemed relieved that a professional had seen her daughter’s behavior. 
         I sat at the kitchen table watching the entire scene but found nothing to laugh about.  I had promised not to interfere.  Tanya and Lisa, the counselor, quietly talked.  What kind of counselor was this? 
         After the counselor left, I went into Alexis’s room to talk to her.  I knocked on her door then gingerly opened it and found Alexis sleeping on her bed.  The stench of the room assaulted my senses like a sledgehammer.  Was Alexis hiding her dirty underwear again?  I quietly opened Tessa’s drawer and gagged at the sight and smell.  Alexis was depositing her worn underwear back into her dresser drawer after she intentionally defecated in them.  I left the room to grab a clothesbasket.  I was needed and I intended stay with Tanya and Alexis until things smoothed out.  Someone had to teach Alexis.  She was filthy, truant and angry and I had no faith in the counselor or the school system.  Life experience was my counselor.  Tanya, drunk, drugged and a quad, could not raise Tessa and I knew I was responsible.
* * *
         I went to the kitchen to make coffee grateful for Saturday.  No wrestling Alexis this morning.  I extracted a cigarette from my pack of Winstons, lit and inhaled deeply.  I shoved two buts out of the ashtray onto the table to make room for my newly lit cigarette too exhausted to care about the mess.  My back and feet ached so much that I couldn’t bear getting up to empty the overflowing ashtray.  I needed Tanya’s morphine.  I cried softly so no one would wake.  I was envious of their sleep.  Aches and pains prevented sleep but they didn’t compare with my guilt that rose like sewage in my esophagus.
         Alexis ran out from her bedroom and reached for the front door.  I asked,
         “Where are you going?” 
         “To see if Carla can play.”
         “Alexis, first you have to get dressed and take a shower.  Did you wet your pants?”
         “No.”  Alexis shouted petulantly.
         “Get back here and take your shower. “
***
         I went to the living room to check to see if Tanya was stirring.  The living room was the only room that would accommodate her hospital bed.  Tanya smelled like raw meat that had been in the sun a few days.  Her bedsores were oozing.  Alexis, last night in a fit of frustration, had angrily swept her arm across the table knocking everything to the floor.  Nothing was within Tanya’s reach.  Her pills, water and ashtray were strewn across the living room floor.  I picked up the various medications, cigarettes and water arranging them on the end table so Tanya could retrieve whatever she needed, a joint or morphine, to help her relax the involuntary muscle spasms and calm her profuse sweating.
         Tanya awoke and lit a cigarette in her permanently curled fingers.  The muscles, without any physical therapy, had petrified.  I silently handed her the Morphine and returned to the kitchen. 
I lit a cigarette which accompanied my self-examination.  I tried to find someone to blame, a reason for all the pain.  No matter how much I examined, I knew that I had to carry the burden of the blame.

***
         Mark, my step-father, entered my life when I was four and life was forever altered.  I tolerated years of abuse before moving in with Grandma and Grandpa. 
         Then there was the night my sister, Sara, was awakened by my creaking bed.  Sara heard the footsteps disappearing down the hall before she pulled her now-awake body up to the headboard of her bed whispered to me, “What’s going on?  All I could do was cry.  I barely got the words out but Sara understood.  Grandpa had been molesting me for a year before Sara discovered the midnight deeds.  Typically, after everyone else went to sleep I would detect an increase in the TV volume, and would know what was ahead.  Grandpa would come to my bed.  To keep me quiet he threatened me, “I'll send you up the Hudson Reformatory if you tell anyone.”
  At 19, I was about as ready for marriage as I was ready to practice law but I was pregnant so I got married and got away from my family.  A string of abusive, alcoholic men followed that divorce which didn’t do much for my mothering skills.  I wanted to make amends for Tanya’s childhood by caring for her and helping raise Alexis.  Now she really needed help.
***
I noticed that Alexis was taking a long time getting ready to go out to play. 
         “Alexis, how are you doing?” I called out as I opened the door to her room.  I saw her drag a small rug over to her dresser. 
“Alexis, what are you doing?”
I reached down to pull the rug back to her bedside to find that Alexia was attempting to cover up the fact that she had defecated on the floor.  The stench in her room, though somewhat abated since my cleaning, was unmistakable. 
“What are you doing?”
Alexis was silent.
“Where is your underwear?”
“I don’t know,” Alexis said defiantly.
         I pulled open her dress drawer and the smell of soiled underwear hit me in the face.  I reached into the drawer to separate the soiled underwear from the clean ones.   
I grabbed Alexis’ arm and led her to the bathroom.  “This is where you go to the bathroom.  Now you sit there until you go.”
* * *
Daughter
         “Mom, I’m hungry,” Tanya said into the payphone and heard her mother’s heavy sigh.  “OK, I’ll be there.  Where are you?”  After their brief conversation Tanya hung up and burst into tears.  How she wished she could go home.  Her gnawing hunger so dominated her senses that she barely noticed the urine stench of the phone booth.  Two months ago Tanya had moved out.  Now Tanya thought, All I want is to live with mom and my brother.  No stepfather.  Tanya admitted she wanted her mom to choose her, her own daughter over Bart, her new husband.  But right now all she could think of was food.
         
         Tanya salivated in anticipation of the arrival of her mom.  Maybe she made spaghetti and meatballs and they could eat at home or maybe they could go out to a restaurant.  To create warmth, Tanya danced on one foot then the other like a baby bird chirping for pre-chewed food.  Maybe mom would bring Scott with her, Tanya thought.  She missed her little brother.
         
         Tanya huddled in the doorway of the phone booth, her coat wrapped tightly around her, and watched for her mom’s car.  When she saw it pull up, Tanya ran to meet her.  Tanya always thought her mom was beautiful and loved her arched eyebrows and thick dark hair.  Maria, her mom, extracted a bag and handed it out the window to Tanya.  “I’ve got some groceries for you.”  Tanya peered into the bag and saw a loaf of bread, a pound of bologna and fruit.  Tanya’s disappointment brought tears to her eyes.  She cleared her throat so her mother wouldn’t notice and wiped her nose on her sleeve already crusted with tears and snot.          

         “Thank you, mom.” she said quietly.  Her mom didn’t even ask if she wanted to come home.  As her mom drove away, Tanya thought, “Can’t you see how happy we could be without a stepfather?  I would clean the trailer and take care of little Scott so you could work.”
         
         “He is a good man," her mother had told her from the beginning of their relationship.  Tanya could hear her mother, “He makes good money and will provide stability.”  She didn’t care.
         
         “Does that mean you’ll be in the bar less?”  Tanya had asked sarcastically.
         
         She could hear her mother’s retort, “Tanya, I work in a bar.” 
         
         Tanya had to admit the last year and half with Bart most closely resembled what she perceived as normal family life.  No more bread crumb omelets on Christmas morning. 
         
         Yes, Bart roughed up mom a little but didn’t really hurt her.  There was only one police incident when her mom had grabbed her rifle and threatened Bart.  He had taken her income tax money and mom was pissed.  Tanya was grateful the neighbors had called the police.  She maintained a delicate balance, like straddling a seesaw, in order to keep peace. 

         Since Bart’s arrival they had had enough food and clothes but the competition between Bart and Tanya caused tension that was clearly visible on her mom’s face.  Since the time a neighbor complained, way before Bart’s arrival, that Tanya and Scott were eating out of the garbage, the Department Of Social Services felt they could drop in at any time.  And they continued dropping in long after Bart became part of the family.  Tanya knew that stressed her mom even though Tanya had become expert at tip toeing around danger.  She like it better before Bart when Tanya got to stay home from school if she promised to clean the whole trailer.  She and her mom would talk, drink coffee and watch soaps.           
         But the real trouble started way before Bart when they lived with Bernie, Maria’s previous boyfriend.  That’s when Tanya decided she’d had enough.  No more tip toeing.
         
* * *
         Tanya recalled the first night Bernie sneered, “Come on give me a blow job.”  Then he added menacingly, “This is our secret.  If you tell your mother, I’ll kill her.”  Eight-year old Tanya swore she wouldn’t tell, and she swallowed her shame to protect her mother.  Sometimes Bernie would give Tanya a piggy back ride with his finger in her pants.  Tanya just had to freeze a smile and try to avoid any horsing around.  Tanya was terrified into silence. 
         
         Tanya remembered her panic when Bernie came home, after a night of drinking, without her mother.  Bernie dismissed the babysitter and put Scott to bed and told Tanya to “get on the bed and suck my dick.”  He forced his dick into her mouth and mercilessly pumped her.  Tanya was disgusted and so terrified she couldn’t cry.  When he finished, he slapped her and said, “Get the fuck out of my bed.” 

         Fear gripped Tanya like a sandstorm.  Her eyes stung, she couldn’t see.  Her throat parched, she couldn’t breathe. Tanya ran to her room stifling dry, choking sobs, “Where is my mom?”  Mom came home the next day.  Clearly she had been beaten but made it home somehow and they all settled in mutely as if nothing had happened.  The only reference to the previous night was when Scott displayed his burned fingers and his mom asked, “What happened?”  Tanya explained that the babysitters had punished one-year-old Scott for touching the stove by forcing his finger into the flame. 
         
         Now years later, Tony knew if she told her mom everything, her mom would feel bad.  She would take Tanya in her arms and hug her, crying, and say she was sorry and beg her to come home and they would live happily ever after without any more stepfathers.  Bernie was gone and Tanya wasn’t giving any other man in her mother’s life a chance, not even Bart.
         
         Now that mom had actually married Bart, Tanya felt she couldn’t go home knowing that her presence was contributing to the family stress.  Mom didn’t seem to care anymore.  Maybe it was too just much trouble.  Last time she had an extended stint at home, a social worker had visited to check on the family and Bart had sat in his chair disdainfully tossing a coin in the air indifferent to Tanya’s fate.  Tanya silently glared at her mom and Bart.  After the social worker’s departure, Bart offered her a $20.  “Why don’t you go out some where?”          
* * *
         Scott had bonded with Bart, and Maria was concerned about raising another wayward child.  Maria wanted Scott to have a chance.  They had metamorphosed into a tight family of three like a nucleus of a molecule and Tanya revolved in the outer orbit.  Tanya finally moved to a foster home. 
         
         The first foster family was not too bad but they loved cats and the cats were allowed to walk on the table and kitchen counter licking the butter.  Tanya couldn’t handle that and ran away.  It was easy.  She had no emotional investment.  Her mom finally signed the papers allowing Tanya to drop out of the school that she didn’t attend anyway and Tanya turned her first trick at 13 behind Dunkin Donuts parking lot.  She got $50 from an old man by simply letting him eat her.  It was easy money and to tolerate it, she had to down a shot of Southern Comfort.  Tanya had discovered that she was a black out drinker and was grateful for the velvety darkness.  From the time she was 9, when she started nipping before school, she could always count on alcohol to anesthetize her and make her forget. 
         
         Black outs and vomiting went with Tanya’s anarchic lifestyle and progressively Tanya graduated to harder drugs to stay numb and did whatever it took to get them.  What Tanya was forced to do as a 9 year old, she was now doing for money, food and warmth at 13.  She had no interest in sex but had no choice.  It was just a job and she’d already been through the training period, Tanya dully reasoned.
         
* * *
         Tanya’s favorite customer was Joe, a relatively harmless dirty old man.  She could stay with him for a couple of days at a time, be warm and have a bath.  He wasn’t too demanding, and he had pot and food and they could play gin rummy all day.  Joe just wanted to look at young girls and control them.  All Tanya had to do was follow Joe’s rules, go wherever he wanted, listen to him, like a groupie, and everything was fine. 
         
         “Got any friends that want to play cards today?  I’ve got some good stuff.”  Whatever the good stuff was Tanya was interested.  On the way to Joe’s apartment, they stopped in the corner bar to have a quick pop.  “Rum and coke,” Tanya and Candi ordered simultaneously.  They never had to worry about ID.  Joe stopped at the bar to talk to Sam while Tanya and Candi entertained themselves by rubbing the rim of their glasses to make music and blowing perfect smoke rings.  “Hey, we should start our own band.”  They both giggled.  Joe returned to the table to pick up the girls.  “Let’s go.”  Spaghetti should be ready.”  The frig was full of beer too.   
         
         
         Tanya, now 15, was crouched under the steps at a church when she looked up and saw her mom’s car.  She ran to her mom smiling, knowing that finally mom was going to tell her it was time to come home. 
         
         Maria rolled down the window, "We’re going to Grandma’s.  She had surgery for her cancer – a vulvectomy – and needs me to take care of her.  We’ll be staying there a while." 
         
         “What about Bart?”  Tanya asked. 
         
         “He’ll be ok.”  Tanya’s eyebrows shot up into chevrons.
         
         Tanya absorbed the inviting warmth from the car as she peered in and nodded to her brother.  The car was filled with her mom’s and Scott’s clothes.  No room.  Tanya realized her mom didn’t intend to take her along to Grandma’s.  She just came by to say good-bye.  Tanya wiped her nose on her sleeve.  Couldn’t her mom see how desperate she was to go with them?  All she wanted was her mother’s love.  She wanted to bury her head in her soft belly, smelling of cigarettes and vodka and Jean Nate, and cry.  She just wanted her family back -- mom, Scott and Tanya.  She wanted to tell her mother she was probably pregnant and fall into her arms.  But she could not find the words so she stepped back from the car and waved good-bye. 
* * *          
         Tanya had met Harry in a bar in Bellingham.  She had approached him and said in her sweetest voice, “Want a date?”  He brushed her off but like a stray puppy she stayed to talk to him.  She bought him a drink to apologize for assuming he was looking to pay for sex.  They quickly became friends and Tanya moved in with Harry and finally had a home.  Tanya tried to play house but didn’t have much experience in a normal environment.  She gave birth to a baby girl she named Ashley Brooke.  Tanya was smoking crack while having contractions during her second delivery.  She gave birth to a son, Eric, and since there was cocaine in his blood stream, social services took him away.  Tanya and Harry split up and later Tanya finally gave up her parental rights to both Ashley and Eric. 
* * *
         Tanya and Candi were headed for a party -- a ritzy party in a home with a pool.  Now Tanya was free after two years in a Rhode Island jail for felony prostitution, conspiracy to commit a crime, and sale of Class A substance to undercover cop.  Actually jail wasn’t too bad. Since she had lost her two children, Tanya felt like she’d kind of gone crazy and didn’t care where she lived.  Maybe she could forget everything and have fun at this final party before she went straight, tried to see her mom and then somehow maybe see her children.
         
         Remarkably, Tanya had resided in 35 rehabs, most of the detox centers, halfway homes and juvenile centers in New England.  Tanya, as usual, found it easy to run away.  At Massachusetts Woman’s Correctional institution, she took a piece out of the back of the toilet and unscrewed 25 screws in a Plexiglas secured window and jumped from the window using sheets.  She sprained her foot jumping and was caught and put back in the detox.  Tanya faked a seizure so they would go easy on her. 
         
         But that was behind her and for this one day she would have fun, swim and have a couple of drinks before she called her mother and began again her plan to get her life back on track.  She wanted to be normal.
         
         She was going to ask if she could visit her mom had who stayed in New York after grandma had died.  Who knew what could happen next?  They might even be a family again and she could enroll in school – maybe study accounting or counseling.  She was sure she could be a counselor and that she could still turn her life around.
         
         The pool was warm and the food was elegant -- unidentifiable hors d’oeuvres and a potpourri of drugs.  She quickly found the room where the coffee table was lined with coke she felt she deserved some fun.           
* * *
         Tanya, sufficiently high, headed to the pool for a swim.  She dove into the 8-foot deep pool and the hair stood up on the back of her neck.  A premonition?  Suddenly she was looking down at herself in the pool.  She could see the bubbles rise from her lungs and her splayed hair and knew “this is it.”  Something had broken.  She knew she would have to breathe before she reached the surface. 
         
         Tanya awoke choking on the side of the pool, with Frank, the host kicking her in the side shouting, “Get her out of here!”  She struggled to breathe, fighting to stay conscious.  Frank had called his insurance company, his sister, then 911, in that order. 
         
* * *
                   Maria was shocked into wakefulness by the jangling phone.  “What time is it?”  She thought as she threw off the covers and stumbled out of bed to answer the phone.
         
         “Hello.”
         
         “Mrs. Richards?”
         
         “Yes.”
         
         “Is your daughter Tanya Carter?” 
         
         “Yes.”
         
         “She is here at the hospital.  I’m afraid we have bad news.  She has broken her neck.”
         
         “Oh, my God.”
         
         “She had a diving accident -- dove into the shallow end of a pool.”
         
         Maria robotically threw on sweats and drove from New York to Massachusetts General, arriving with circles under eyes and breath foul from cigarettes and coffee. 
         
         Maria cautiously crept into Tanya’s room to find her on a ventilator with a morphine drip and stabilized by a “halo” an apparatus screwed into her skull to keep her neck motionless.  Though Tanya was immobile, Maria could see her fear.  Nothing was more frightening to Tanya than the ventilator.  Its breathing was not synchronized with hers and she felt she had to wait a minute for the ventilator to catch up with her every breathe.  Each breath seemed like an hour.  She knew she could not live long on this machine. 
         
         A tracheotomy was necessary to help her breathe.  Tanya clicked her tongue to get the nurses’ attention.  “We hear you, Tanya,” the nurses responded to her cryptic language.  Tanya cried all day every day, the same TV commercial repeatedly running through her head – “The softer side of Sears.”  She sat next to Christ on the TV shelf and hung onto her IV.  Was it a hallucination?  Was she conscious?  She saw her mom’s tears rolling down her face as she brushed Tanya’s hair with the pink brush, clumps of hair clinging to the brush.  Was her mom really here?  Tony had two wishes -- to see her mom and to see her children before she died.  The nurses would not allow any children visitation rights and explained that it would be too traumatic for her children to see her in her present condition.  If she coughed her tracheotomy out, it would disturb the children.  She was dying but she couldn’t even see her children because she was so grotesque. 
         
         Tanya spent three months in the hospital and improved somewhat.  She was taken off the ventilator and, always resourceful, learned to turn tricks in the hospital from her wheelchair.  But finally she got her wish and went home to her mother -- in a wheel chair – as a quadriplegic. 
* * *          
         Maria set up Tanya’s bedroom in the middle of the living room in her trailer in New York.  It didn’t take too long before the initial determination to rebuild the family crumbled under the tension between mother and daughter.  Old anger and resentments were too big and overshadowed the good intentions.  Tanya, again, felt she was on her own.
         
         “I’m going to get some groceries.  I’ll be back in a couple of hours.  You’ll be ok in your chair, right?”  Maria asked Tanya.
         
         “Yeah, mom.  I’ll be ok,” Tanya answered.  Where could she go?  What could she do?  She was paralyzed with a broken neck and she knew there was no way to keep mom home.  Besides, what else could happen? 
After Maria’s departure, Meg, Tanya’s aunt, stopped for a cup of coffee and a chat with Maria and Tanya.  She was not surprised to find Tanya alone.  As she headed out the door she said “I’ll stop back later.”  Meg had propped Tanya up in a chair with blankets serving as padding so she could watch TV.  Meg had always been as close to Tanya and more like a sister than an aunt.  Tanya looked forward to her return.  Maria’s return was less certain. 
Two hours later Meg drove back into the driveway and as she got out of the car heard a faint, “Help.”  She found Tanya hanging over the side of the chair, lips blue, sweating profusely and her urine bag full and backing up in Tanya’s system.  She had tried to move in her chair but had tipped over and just hung helplessly waiting and praying that she would be found.  She had autonomic dysreflexia -- over-activity of the Autonomic Nervous System stemming from an over-full bladder.  Tanya went back to the hospital. 
* * *
         After a scant soul-searching session, Tanya had to admit that she had to take over her life and move out of her mom’s home.  She could count on no one but herself.  So after only five months, she left her mother’s trailer in upstate New York and returned to Massachusetts to begin her recovery.  The recovery was not automatic or quick or easy.  There were nine more years of relapses into alcohol and drug abuse and several close calls that should have ended her life.  There were years of AA meetings, detox centers, rehab and unprotected sex.  And once again, Maria received a phone call from a hospital.  Tanya had shattered her pelvic bone during violent sex which precipitated internal bleeding.  The doctors were concerned because they couldn’t keep her blood pressure down or her temperature up.  Tanya’s shattered leg had to be tied together.   
         Tanya told Candi that her mom wanted to see her.  Candi again came to Tany’s rescue and offered to drive Tanya to New York.  When Candi’s van pulled in and Candi wheeled Tanya down the ramp, Maria immediately realized the reason she volunteered to drive.  Candi thought that Tanya was going to die.  She was addicted to heroine and had decaying bed sores large enough to insert a fist.  She was pale and hallow eyed and Maria couldn’t stop sobbing as her daughter’s arm flopped trying to hug her.  Maria had her admitted to a hospital to try to save her once again.
* * *
         Tanya and Maria continue to try to work on their relationship.  Tanya is resentful of her mom and Maria insists Tanya needs to forget the past sexual abuse and move on. 
         Tanya has another aunt – in California – and decided on another move – this time to California.  Her mother did not like the idea but Tanya argued that she’d hire someone off the street to drive her if Maria won’t.  Maria under duress agreed to drive her while trying to talk her out of a move so far away.  None of her arguments seem to matter to Tanya.  Tanya thought, What do I care about debt?  With 3,000 miles separating them, she knew would never see them.  Maria lives daily with the knowledge that someday someone will walk into Tanya’s apartment, wherever she ends up, and find her dead with now 8-year old Alexi sleeping next to her.