A Pearl Necklace

There is a book called "My Mother, Myself." From what I gather, it is about a woman coming to terms with who she is by trying to separate out her psychological identity from her mother.

That's apparently a common phenomenon, thus the book, but I never went through that. I had to separate my identity from my older sister.

At the age of 59, I have finally concluded that most likely my mother didn't want me to be "like mother, like daughter" and intentionally set out to make sure I would not be "my mother's daughter."

My mother is an excellent cook and my sister took over all the holiday baking when she was twelve. I know a lot about cooking because I played assistant to my sister, but my mother declined to teach me to cook or clean.

She always had some excuse. "It's faster if I do it myself." or "Your sister knows how. I don't have time to show you."

My mother is an excellent seamstress, knits and crochets. I had an aunt down the street who crocheted and my sister used to quilt.

I don't have any of those skills.

My sister used to cut out the patterns so my mother could sew her clothes. After my sister went to college, I wanted to learn. I asked to be allowed to do the same.

The first time I cut out a skirt, I cut the front shorter than the back. My mother hit the roof, made a scene, never let me help again.

I know enough about sewing that when she sewed clothes for my children, I had no problem taking their measurements every few months and keeping my mother up to date. I owned a sewing machine when I moved out and a craft box full of supplies for sewing, knitting and crocheting, but my mother actively sabotaged my efforts to be like her, to learn from her, to follow in her footsteps. 

I was a child. I bought my mother's excuses and was ill equipped to argue it, try though I might. As an adult, I eventually realized she routinely made excuses to justify doing what she wanted and it was very consciously planned as the only way she was allowed to pursue her goals in "a man's world."

Probably in my twenties, I realized mom had manufactured the financial crisis that "required" her to get a job when I was twelve.

My sister went off to college on a scholarship when I was eleven. The first year, the college required her to live in the dorms and she had no car.

The second year, my parents moved her to an apartment and bought her a car. Over my sister's objections, who wanted mom's old living room set, they bought her a new living room set, gave away their old set and bought a cheap, ugly new set for themselves that my mother hated and loudly bitched about for years.

When my parents met, my father told my mother "No wife of mine will ever work." This may sound psychocontrolling and misogynistic to the modern ear but part of what he was saying was "I'm a good provider. You won't want for anything."

So after going on a wholly unnecessary spending spree, because my sister could have remained in the dorms and continued to walk to class, my mother told my father "You don't make enough money to back that up." and began officially "working" for pay outside the home, having made good money from home for years as a seamstress while nominally abiding by my father's edict that she would not "work."

I'm the youngest of the three kids. When I was five and starting school, someone offered my mother a job as a seamstress. 

My father said "No" and she nominally abided by his wishes (while making hundreds of dollars a month from home at a time when that was good money) until seven years later when she created a bullshit excuse to tell him to stuff it, she was going to get a job.

Unlike my father, my mother had a good head for business and I firmly believe she could have been a very successful business person had she not been blocked from it by her gender and traditional marriage. 

I once described my father as "institutionalized," sort of a concept I made up (or reapplied -- long-term prisoners who can no longer function outside prison get described that way). He was an excellent soldier and made good money at a serious career for years but had no idea how to make it "on the outside" after he retired from the Army.

He once worked at a department store for four years, but he spent much of my childhood trying to be a business owner or salesperson and not succeeding. He did door-to-door sales that cost him gas and car maintenance and often made no money.

He would spend months at a time unemployed, watching game shows and sports with a jar of peanuts in his hand. My mother bitched less when he did that than when he played at being a salesman while bleeding the household budget to keep up the pretense.

Between his military retirement pay plus generous benefits, their low house payment (about 40 percent of what the neighbors were paying because they made a huge down payment) and her taking in sewing, we had a comfortable life while dad was unemployed for long stretches. I didn't understand how bizarre that was until well after I became an adult.

All the clues and backstory were there all along, but I didn't put them together for decades. I first had to experience marriage and motherhood and divorce myself to get context on a lot of family stories that were oft repeated as anecdotes.

In her teens, my mother wanted to be a doctor and she delivered babies during that time. She also took care of her mother in her final months until her mother died when my mother was still 16 or 17.

My mother was living in communist East Germany at the time. An older, married sister living in West Germany came home for their mother's funeral and brought her infant with her.

After the funeral was over, the border guards refused to let my aunt take her baby home to West Germany. So my mother acquired forged papers, claimed the baby was hers and illegally immigrated to West Germany, returning the baby to its rightful mother, her sister.

I once was told the ruse only worked because the baby threw up on one of the border guards and they were like "Get them the hell out of here!", no longer curious about the sucktastic forged papers.

My mother worked temporarily in a factory, possibly being paid under the table. Something unspecified happened and the rest of her life, one foot would swell over the course of the day. She read in bed every night with her feet propped up until the swelling went down, then she peed and went to sleep.

She's blind in one eye and had migraines for years and never let any of it slow her down. 

She met my father at a party. His German was so bad, she couldn't understand him and asked someone what language he was speaking. She knew no English. 

I believe she was working as a waitress by then. He would go to her place of work and ask if she had debts he could pay off and things like that.

He pursued her hard. She told him repeatedly "I don't want to live in America. Date someone else." 

But she was extremely beautiful, extremely high minded and extremely intelligent. He did not give up.

After the military moved him elsewhere in Germany, he sent cash in the mail three times to get her to take the train to come see him. She never received the first two. 

It was likely stolen, but for all he knew she was pocketing the money and lying about it.

He wanted to marry her. He promised to get her a house and said they could be married in about six weeks, the time it would take to get permission for an American soldier to marry a German national.

She agreed to marry him and moved in with him, but only after he swore to keep some number of promises, including that he would retire in Germany because she didn't want to live in America. 

Within days of moving in with him, she began throwing up. She was pregnant and had morning sickness. 

She went to the doctor to get medication to abort the baby because she figured he would think she "showed up that way," pregnant by someone else and conning him. He talked her into keeping the baby and marrying him.

He had two previous wives and no children. He desperately wanted children and promised her whatever she wanted to get her to marry him.

My father wanted four kids. My mother told him "You will be lucky if I give you two."

I am their third child. I was not supposed to happen. 

She was told she couldn't have more kids after her second pregnancy and she stopped using birth control. I arrived around 4.5 years later, so it wasn't true but it also wasn't crazy talk. 

"Fertile" is medically defined as getting pregnant within a year if you are having unprotected sex regularly. 

So in the 1950s, my mother was a beautiful, intelligent, high minded, kick ass, ambitious young woman who wanted a career, not a husband. She had a lot more bargaining power than most women, knew her worth and stood her ground but ultimately ended up as a "married well" full-time wife and mom anyway.

And ultimately my father did not keep all of his promises. He retired in America -- where their surprise package third child was born -- not Germany. 

My mother is very tight-lipped about some things. My brother and sister are both smart people with talents, but my brother has an undiagnosed head injury from a forceps birth and my sister wore thick glasses from age six.

My mother has never spoken about how well each of us did on developmental milestones in early childhood and I'm the youngest, so can't know what I wasn't told. But I begin to suspect my mother always saw them as special needs and me as "like her," enough that she looked at me and wanted me to be able to pursue the dreams she was permanently denied due to marrying well at a young age, thereby de facto becoming some man's property. 

I was "the pretty sister." I am thinking perhaps my mother taught my sister to cook and clean and dress well so she could marry someday if she wished to. Unlike me and my mother, no man was going to pursue her hard and obsess about her based on her looks.

My mother actively sabotaged my efforts to learn how to do "women's work" and encouraged me to study and do well in school. She didn't want me to live the life she had lived.

My mother's life is metaphorically like that joke where a woman wishes to live in a mansion and -- poof! -- she's the live-in maid. Having completely unintentionally attracted a man who made good money because of her looks, she didn't get the life of luxury she imagined she was trading in her career dreams for.

Instead, she worked hard for long hours, often as a maid, for many years, on top of keeping our home spotless and cooking big from scratch most nights. And had to pull shenanigans to arrange to "work" (outside the home for pay) at all.

She wanted me to fail "as a woman." She wanted me to be a bad cook and lousy housekeeper so that rich men would hesitate to marry me "for my looks" or at least be forced to marry me ONLY for my looks, not nominally for my looks while expecting a live-in servant who cooked, cleaned etc and got little more than room and board out of the deal.

Why is this long post about my German mother on THIS blog? Because one of the previous iterations of THIS blog detailed my realization that most likely my father dropped his retirement papers and left the Army when I was three to make sure he didn't molest me again, like he briefly did after returning from Vietnam with a fresh head injury, and THAT decision is why he retired in Georgia, not Germany. 

So I spent some time thinking my mother set me up to be molested by my brother and thinking she was angry at me and jealous because my father chose to protect me at the expense of breaking a promise to her.

And I'm convinced he chose to protect me because of his Native heritage, which is why those ideas got published here to begin with.

Perhaps this belongs on some other blog of mine. I don't know. I constantly wrestle with such questions. 

I don't think my mother was angry at me or jealous. I think she became disillusioned when he broke that promise, while their lives became increasingly less monied after his retirement and she became determined to make sure her pretty daughter would never follow in her footsteps by marrying an older man with an excellent income.

She did so to preserve the parts of me that would be permanently destroyed by a foolish youthful "easy answer" choice that could not be undone when life took a turn for the worse sometime down the road when the money ran out, my youth and beauty were gone and cooking and cleaning was all I had left to try to survive on.

The title of this piece does not refer to the raunchy ZZ Top song. Instead, it refers to some movie I saw once about a couple in early America.

He sells his wife's pearl necklace to keep the family farm, promising to replace it when they have more money. He never does and years later mistakenly thinks she regrets marrying him because he sold her necklace and didn't replace it.

In reality, she regrets giving up her piano playing, her hobbies, hopes and dreams. In other words, she regrets giving up a life of her own to be a farm wife and support his dreams and goals.

And it's something women still routinely do and still think their mother's warnings are bitter and exaggerated claims, unable to see how impossible it is to get those lost opportunities back until it's too late for themselves. 

So my mother didn't waste any words trying to TELL me any such thing. She just decided to deny me the skills that would make me an excellent live-in servant and interfered with older men pursuing me in my youth.

It didn't prevent me from spending two decades as a homemaker. It did leave me with hope of starting over after my marriage ended.