A long-time friend and former co-worker asked, “Why was your mother so horrible?”<\/p>\n
She wasn’t always horrible, and had some good qualities.\u00a0 But she was not a good mother, and not always even a good person.<\/p>\n
She was born in 1933 to a father who didn’t want her and ultimately left when she was three years old.\u00a0 Her mother had such a bad pregnancy that she was sterilized either when Mother was born or shortly thereafter.\u00a0 So from the start, Mother would always be an only child.\u00a0 And when her father left, it was just my mother and her mother struggling to survive as the nation recovered from the Great Depression.\u00a0 I don’t know if it was deliberate or even conscious, but I have no doubt my mother grew up knowing (or feeling) somehow responsible for her mother’s life being hard.\u00a0 And there would be no siblings for Mother to confer with and see if they were really the problem or maybe Grandma was living out her own frustrations onto her child.<\/p>\n
After I got divorced I was talking with my grandmother (Mother’s mother) about my kids and I mentioned something about paying child support, and my grandmother asked, “Why do you have to pay any money? The children are her property<\/strong><\/em> now.” So, I’m guessing that when she and Grandpa Mac were divorced, she was not awarded child support, but that’s only a guess.\u00a0 I don’t know what laws were in place or how well any laws were enforced.<\/p>\n So with a young child to raise, my grandmother went back to school and got her teaching credentials.\u00a0 There weren’t many opportunities for women back then, and even fewer for divorced single mothers.\u00a0 But she managed.\u00a0 I don’t know when she met her second husband, but they were both working in the Santa Barbara school district.\u00a0 He was a math teacher at Santa Barbara Junior High, and she was a Home Ec teacher either at one of the junior high schools or maybe Santa Barbara High School.<\/p>\n Anyway, they met and married, so Mother finally had a stepfather, and at some point she started\u00a0 using his last name, as that was how she was listed in her high school yearbook.\u00a0 What I do not know is when<\/strong> <\/em>Grandma met Grandpa Walt, and when<\/strong><\/em> they actually married.\u00a0 From what Mother told me, they lived across the street from the high school while Mother was attending there, but at some point Grandma and Grandpa bought their land and built their home up on Calle Boca del Ca\u00f1on.\u00a0 That’s where they lived when Mother finished high school.<\/p>\n Side note:\u00a0 Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Boca del Ca\u00f1on was up a slightly winding very steep street, facing downtown and all of Santa Barbara.\u00a0 Grandma told me that while they were building the house and planning the foundation and floors, she had them put up a ladder where the kitchen would be.\u00a0 She climbed up the ladder to where she could one day look out the window as she washed dishes and have a full view of the harbor.\u00a0 From their big plate glass windows in the living room and dining room they had a full panorama of all the city lights and up into the foothills.\u00a0 I truly loved that house and would live in it even today if I could.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Anyway, Mother resented her father leaving.\u00a0 I don’t know how often he saw her when she was little, but as I got older he only came around once or twice a year and usually on his way to take his mother from Tucson, AZ up to Mt. Shasta for the summer.\u00a0 Mother and Grandpa Mac didn’t have a close relationship, very superficial.\u00a0 \u00a0His second and third wives resented Mother because Mother grew up as a troubled kid and only reached out to her father when she was in trouble or needed money or something.\u00a0 Grandma Lucy (Grandpa Mac’s third wife) actively disliked my mother.<\/p>\n By the time Grandpa Mac retired he’d been the head of Martin-Marietta before it was bought and became Lockheed-Martin.\u00a0 From what my brother told me, Grandpa Mac got a very sweet retirement deal.\u00a0 And Grandma Lucy had been an executive at CBS.\u00a0 So they were very well off, proper, social, and so forth.\u00a0 His wayward daughter didn’t fit their lifestyle.<\/p>\n After high school Mother tried to go to college and ended up at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.\u00a0 She lasted maybe a semester, maybe two.\u00a0 I have no idea why that didn’t pan out well for her but I suspect she got in trouble for drinking and smoking and generally not meeting expectations for a young woman in university.<\/p>\n So she went back home to Santa Barbara and ended up working at a civil engineering firm called Penfield & Smith.\u00a0 I’m not sure her initial role, but she ended up running the blue-print machine.\u00a0 That’s where she met my father, who was already a well-seasoned civil engineer.<\/p>\n My father was born in 1923 in Santa Barbara, had grown up and finished school there, then started college at Berkeley, CA until he got drafted into World War II.\u00a0 He took civil engineering training and did that while in the Army.\u00a0 When the war ended he came back home and found work with Penfield & Smith, where he was a rising star.\u00a0 He got called back into service for the Korean War, although I don’t know for how long.\u00a0 When he came home again, his job at P&S had been held for him.\u00a0 Then he met Mother.<\/p>\n The way Mother told it, they had their first date parked in his car at Ledbetter Beach.\u00a0 When Grandmother asked her the next morning how the date went, Mother said, “It was fine, we’re getting married in two weeks.”\u00a0 Or something like that.\u00a0 Whatever he offered in his back seat, or whatever she thought she found, she was bound and determined to latch onto that and latch on fast.<\/p>\n She was 19, he was 29, if my head math works right — my brother was born February 25, 1953, so they were married in June of 1952.\u00a0 Yes, Mother always swore Scott was “two months premature.”\u00a0 \u00a0Yeah, okay.\u00a0 Whatever.\u00a0 \u00a0They honeymooned in San Francisco, and because she was now a “grown-up married woman” she wasted no time drinking whenever she could.<\/p>\n Now, my dad was the youngest child of four.\u00a0 With three older sisters and a domineering mother, dad learned to keep to himself and out of the way.\u00a0 His father was some sort of lay minister, and both his parents were quite devout in their Christian faith.\u00a0 I think one or two of Dad’s sisters took up smoking, but Dad was a smoker and a drinker.\u00a0 A family of dark-haired non-drinking religious people had to quickly get used to the fact that their youngest child and only son was quite suddenly marrying some blue-eyed blonde smoking and drinking sinner.\u00a0 <*gasp*>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n So, you remember Mother was an only child. She really got excited that when she married, she would have three<\/strong><\/em> older sisters to look up to. Yeah, well, that didn’t work out so well.\u00a0 With the sharp contrast in lifestyles, Mother was not welcomed with open arms.\u00a0 Dad’s oldest sister Mary already had some kids and some “life experience” of her own, so it seemed Mary and Mother got along well enough.<\/p>\n Mother was NOT a good financial manager, didn’t seem to have a lick of sense about where money came from or how to use it wisely.\u00a0 I think that comes from being bailed out of her shenanigans by both her mother and her father.<\/p>\n Early on in their marriage, Dad was doing well.\u00a0 I sense he’d grown up somewhat lower-income, but during my parents first marriage he owned a large lemon grove in Hope Ranch and was doing well.\u00a0 But whatever money Dad made, Mother seemed to drink much of it away.\u00a0 Part of their divorce settlement included selling off the lemon grove, which pissed Dad off enormously. It would have been worth a lot even back then.<\/p>\n So they got divorced when I was 3 or 4 years old. Mother took us to Hollywood where we lived in at least three different apartments that I can remember.\u00a0 I don’t remember her having any work during that time, so I’m assuming either my Dad was paying her some alimony and\/or child support, or perhaps her parents were supporting her.<\/p>\n Dad ended up marrying Charmaine during time.\u00a0 As it turned out Charmaine was also the blueprint operator at Penfield & Smith.\u00a0 I have no idea if she was there when Mother was there, or when Charmaine came on board, but that’s where Dad met her.\u00a0 \u00a0Charmaine was already divorced and had a daughter about a year younger than me.<\/p>\n At some point, Mother has casually dating now and then.\u00a0 I met one or two of the men she dated, but I don’t really remember any of them.\u00a0 At one point, probably around February or March of 1962, she got pregnant.<\/p>\n We didn’t know about the pregnancy at the time of course, but one day seemingly out of the blue, Mother packed us up with some clothes and told us we were going to go live with our Dad– he’d just gotten married and they’d bought a nice new house and things would be better for us.<\/p>\n She got a cab and took us to the Greyhound bus station, bought us two one-way tickets from Hollywood to Santa Barbara.\u00a0 Mind you, I was 7 and Scott was just barely 9.\u00a0 Travelling alone, not really understanding about time and distance.\u00a0 But we got on the bus and I vaguely remember waving good-bye at Mother as the bus pulled out.<\/p>\n Next thing I remember we were off the bus and waiting toward the back of the bus station in Santa Barbara, wondering if Dad was going to come or not.\u00a0 They did finally show up, Dad and Charmaine, and neither looked particularly pleased, although of course they were glad we were okay.<\/p>\n Mother had made sure we got on the bus.\u00a0 Great.\u00a0 Then she went back to the apartment on Las Palmas, probably had a drink or two, and then (only THEN<\/strong><\/em>) called Dad to announce our impending arrival.\u00a0 There had been no plans, no arrangements, no preparations.\u00a0 Mother just put us on a bus and then told Dad we were already on the way.<\/p>\n This is already far longer than I had expected, and I have other things to do, so I’ll continue this another day soon.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A long-time friend and former co-worker asked, “Why was your mother so horrible?” She wasn’t always horrible, and had some good qualities.\u00a0 But she was not a good mother, and not always even a good person. She was born in 1933 to a father who didn’t want her and ultimately left when she was three … Continue reading “Why Was Your Mother So Horrible?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raywhiting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}