September Week 1 - Brigit's Flame JFF entry - "Trouble, Party of Two"
Brigit's Flame Entry (JFF) "Trouble, Party of Two"
Prompt: "Ya Got Trouble"
Genre: Alt-history memoir
WC:1,813
Warnings: not really
My mother used to tell people that ‘trouble’ was my middle name. I always hated that. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I felt indignant over her speaking of me to others as though I wasn't standing right there.
I do remember when I’d had enough. My son was about seven months old, sitting in his highchair, while I was in the kitchen grabbing jars of food and the crooked, plastic, toddler utensils that typically ended up thrown on the floor instead of in his mouth. I was holding a jar of blueberry cobbler near my nose and breathing in the sugary scent. My mother came in from the pool, saw Max in his highchair, and [I guess] assumed I had just stuck him in it and walked away (further than the ten steps to the kitchen on the other side of the pass-through from where he was sitting).
“Poor baby,” she crooned with a tch, “did Mommy just abandon you here?”
At first I smirked to myself, believing she was making a joke by exaggerating the circumstances. I looked over my shoulder to quip something at her, but she had her back to me and was pulling him out of the high chair. Confused I opened my mouth to protest but stopped short when I heard her say, “Your Mommy doesn’t love you, Sweetpea, but you’ll always have your Grandma.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked, reeling from the words.
She turned to me, holding my son to her chest as if he needed to be protected from something. “Where have you been?” she demanded in a harsh whisper.
“I was standing right here. I’m getting his dinner together.” I gestured with the open jar to draw her eyes to the mealtime assembly line. “Why on Earth would you tell a child that his mother doesn’t love him?” I didn’t add the question that followed, the one that echoed around in my head, ‘How many times have you done it before?’
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied and reached to take the jar of summery blueberries out of my hand.
I pulled back, “What are you doing?”
“It’s time for his dinner,” she states with an impatient sigh. Once again her diamond-chip encrusted hand reaches for the jar.
“I know it is time for Max’s dinner. That’s why I put him in the highchair and started getting the jars out.” I turned back to the plastic plate with the suction cup bottom, intent on putting a few spoonfuls on it so Max could get some practice feeding himself.
As I worked I was forming sentences in my head - trying to bang the angry words into the shapes they needed to be in to avoid a fight. The last time I had argued with her over Max, it had been a request that she not change his clothes after I got him dressed to go out. The thing that should have been a simple discussion had devolved into her slapping me repeatedly in the face and my father bellowing from down the hall for her to stop as he ran to my rescue.
That time she had called me an unfit mother, which made me angry enough, but this time she actually told my son that I didn’t love him. I was having a really hard time getting around that. I had barely begun to seethe on those words however, when she made a third grab for the jar. One of her gel-formed fake nails flicked the edge of the jar down as she reached for it. The glass flipped out of my grasp, but I managed to save it, clumsily, just before it hit the floor. Sticky blueberry puree streaked the light pine cabinets, my mother’s bare calf, and my favorite Bryan Adams t-shirt. I stood up and noticed a little blob of indigo goo on Max’s pinky toe.
I loved that little piggy, and the nine others who always abandoned it to go to the market. I didn’t just love my son in that obligatory way a parent should, I loved a million little things about him. Like the little creases in his palm that got all linty and smelled like the carpet. I loved his breathy giggle and the way he would lunge up and down at the knee when he was excited about pulling himself up on the coffee table. I loved the sound of him sucking his thumb as he fell to sleep and how he’d continue sucking it idly in his dreams. And I loved the feel of his hair on my cheek, and the weight of him in my arms, and the way he would lay his head across my chest when we sat in the big chair together, and the way he whispered to himself sometimes in a language only he could understand.
‘How dare you.’ was racing around in my head. My chest was closed in anger and my jaw ached to scream at her for ever, EVER, trying to take from my son the confidence of having a mother’s love - my love. My eyes blurred with the hot betrayal of frustrated tears as I set the near-empty jar on the counter and ran a clean dish towel under the tap to start the clean-up.
There were words coming from her, but I could not hear them. My ears were full from the inside of my own raging monologue and the sound of blood pushing through my veins. I cleaned the chubby little toe off first, then squatted down to take care of the cabinets and check the floor. My mother took Max back to the dining room and his highchair then pulled different jars of food than the few I’d selected, and proceeded to feed him.
That time she had called me an unfit mother - a popular phrase of the day in the wake of Janet Reno and her enactment of the ‘Deadbeat Dad’ laws - her accusation was based on the fact I had gotten pregnant too young and had not magically produced a decent man to ‘do the right thing’ and marry me. I was a fool, in her often spoke opinion, because a guy had offered to marry me (and whisk me off to Oakland, California) but I had turned him down. Dale wasn't the sperm donor responsible for my troubles, just a high-school sweetheart of sorts who truly was a good guy (depending on your perspective).
He had come back on leave to visit his parents a few months prior and had made a point of visiting Max and me while he was in town. I was surprised to see Dale through the screen door that day. I was in my flannel pajamas and napping on a frog embroidered blanket on the living room floor with Max. Dale hadn't called first. He just turned up at a time he assumed my parents would be at work and tapped on the aluminum frame of the door.
I let him in, gave him a hug, and we sat quietly talking on the couch about the Air Force, strange aircraft engines, and the strangeness of being a mother right out of high school. While Max snored softly on the floor (and occasionally sucked his thumb with fervor), conversation turned to our personal history together and some of our old jokes resurfaced to make us laugh awkwardly and then cringe in fear we’d wake the baby. Before Dale left he asked to see Max - to hold him. I obliged and observed Dale as he checked my son’s face for signs of the Lintzer [his family] nose or any evidence in his chin that I might be wrong about the paternity.
He hoped to find these things. Dale repeated his request that I come to Oakland and marry him. I made my arguments against and he headed down a new path of family benefits with the military. It was a tactic to dissuade me from my objections, but it seemed so crude to break it down to economics.
“You don’t spend the rest of your life with someone because you need them,” I stated flatly.
“I love you. I would have thought that was enough,” he countered. “You said you loved me. I even have the notes to prove it.” He smiled warily.
“You will resent us in time. The fact that he will never have the Lintzer nose will catch up with you one day and it will be my fault for not waiting.”
That was how we left things. I had written him a letter after, apologizing for not hugging him goodbye. Dale never replied.
It was few days after the blueberry disaster and I was still too angry to talk to my mother or even my dad about the whole thing. I was alone in the house with a napping Max and found the phone receiver in my hand. I breathed in all my lungs would hold and dialed the phone. My heart was beating loudly in my ears when someone answered my call.
I couldn't hear anything distinct in the voice so I exhaled and asked, “Dale?” really tentatively.
“Nah,” was the reply and then the other receiver clacked in my ear as a muffled voice called his name.
On a September day back in 1967, my mother put most of her clean clothes in a laundry basket, set it on the back step and walked her four children to their school bus. Her youngest was barely seven and was heading off to his first ever day of school. Once the school bus turned the corner she walked through the house to her laundry basket, went out the back door and cut through neighbors’ yards to the city bus stop a few blocks away. She left her family that day, swearing off motherhood for good. Somehow my father changed her mind after their whirlwind romance, but I wasn't wanted by her - just part of the bargain.
On a September day in 1989, I dragged my suitcase, and a stroller off the carousel at OAK airport. Max had slept well for the flight. My father had cried a lot at MIA, but he also told me he was proud of me for doing what was needed to be a good mother. I doubted that it was the best decision, but it was a better one.
Dale walked up just in time to help me click the stroller legs into place. He grinned at me as he leaned on the stroller to test that it was safe.
“I don’t know what you’re smiling for," I said with mocked attitude. "Trouble just arrived in California and you got the VIP pass.”
“You’re my favorite kind of trouble, Blondie.” Dale winked at me in his exaggerated way as he clicked Max’s harness into place. “Things have been pretty dull here without you.”
Prompt: "Ya Got Trouble"
Genre: Alt-history memoir
WC:1,813
Warnings: not really
My mother used to tell people that ‘trouble’ was my middle name. I always hated that. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I felt indignant over her speaking of me to others as though I wasn't standing right there.
I do remember when I’d had enough. My son was about seven months old, sitting in his highchair, while I was in the kitchen grabbing jars of food and the crooked, plastic, toddler utensils that typically ended up thrown on the floor instead of in his mouth. I was holding a jar of blueberry cobbler near my nose and breathing in the sugary scent. My mother came in from the pool, saw Max in his highchair, and [I guess] assumed I had just stuck him in it and walked away (further than the ten steps to the kitchen on the other side of the pass-through from where he was sitting).
“Poor baby,” she crooned with a tch, “did Mommy just abandon you here?”
At first I smirked to myself, believing she was making a joke by exaggerating the circumstances. I looked over my shoulder to quip something at her, but she had her back to me and was pulling him out of the high chair. Confused I opened my mouth to protest but stopped short when I heard her say, “Your Mommy doesn’t love you, Sweetpea, but you’ll always have your Grandma.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked, reeling from the words.
She turned to me, holding my son to her chest as if he needed to be protected from something. “Where have you been?” she demanded in a harsh whisper.
“I was standing right here. I’m getting his dinner together.” I gestured with the open jar to draw her eyes to the mealtime assembly line. “Why on Earth would you tell a child that his mother doesn’t love him?” I didn’t add the question that followed, the one that echoed around in my head, ‘How many times have you done it before?’
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied and reached to take the jar of summery blueberries out of my hand.
I pulled back, “What are you doing?”
“It’s time for his dinner,” she states with an impatient sigh. Once again her diamond-chip encrusted hand reaches for the jar.
“I know it is time for Max’s dinner. That’s why I put him in the highchair and started getting the jars out.” I turned back to the plastic plate with the suction cup bottom, intent on putting a few spoonfuls on it so Max could get some practice feeding himself.
As I worked I was forming sentences in my head - trying to bang the angry words into the shapes they needed to be in to avoid a fight. The last time I had argued with her over Max, it had been a request that she not change his clothes after I got him dressed to go out. The thing that should have been a simple discussion had devolved into her slapping me repeatedly in the face and my father bellowing from down the hall for her to stop as he ran to my rescue.
That time she had called me an unfit mother, which made me angry enough, but this time she actually told my son that I didn’t love him. I was having a really hard time getting around that. I had barely begun to seethe on those words however, when she made a third grab for the jar. One of her gel-formed fake nails flicked the edge of the jar down as she reached for it. The glass flipped out of my grasp, but I managed to save it, clumsily, just before it hit the floor. Sticky blueberry puree streaked the light pine cabinets, my mother’s bare calf, and my favorite Bryan Adams t-shirt. I stood up and noticed a little blob of indigo goo on Max’s pinky toe.
I loved that little piggy, and the nine others who always abandoned it to go to the market. I didn’t just love my son in that obligatory way a parent should, I loved a million little things about him. Like the little creases in his palm that got all linty and smelled like the carpet. I loved his breathy giggle and the way he would lunge up and down at the knee when he was excited about pulling himself up on the coffee table. I loved the sound of him sucking his thumb as he fell to sleep and how he’d continue sucking it idly in his dreams. And I loved the feel of his hair on my cheek, and the weight of him in my arms, and the way he would lay his head across my chest when we sat in the big chair together, and the way he whispered to himself sometimes in a language only he could understand.
‘How dare you.’ was racing around in my head. My chest was closed in anger and my jaw ached to scream at her for ever, EVER, trying to take from my son the confidence of having a mother’s love - my love. My eyes blurred with the hot betrayal of frustrated tears as I set the near-empty jar on the counter and ran a clean dish towel under the tap to start the clean-up.
There were words coming from her, but I could not hear them. My ears were full from the inside of my own raging monologue and the sound of blood pushing through my veins. I cleaned the chubby little toe off first, then squatted down to take care of the cabinets and check the floor. My mother took Max back to the dining room and his highchair then pulled different jars of food than the few I’d selected, and proceeded to feed him.
That time she had called me an unfit mother - a popular phrase of the day in the wake of Janet Reno and her enactment of the ‘Deadbeat Dad’ laws - her accusation was based on the fact I had gotten pregnant too young and had not magically produced a decent man to ‘do the right thing’ and marry me. I was a fool, in her often spoke opinion, because a guy had offered to marry me (and whisk me off to Oakland, California) but I had turned him down. Dale wasn't the sperm donor responsible for my troubles, just a high-school sweetheart of sorts who truly was a good guy (depending on your perspective).
He had come back on leave to visit his parents a few months prior and had made a point of visiting Max and me while he was in town. I was surprised to see Dale through the screen door that day. I was in my flannel pajamas and napping on a frog embroidered blanket on the living room floor with Max. Dale hadn't called first. He just turned up at a time he assumed my parents would be at work and tapped on the aluminum frame of the door.
I let him in, gave him a hug, and we sat quietly talking on the couch about the Air Force, strange aircraft engines, and the strangeness of being a mother right out of high school. While Max snored softly on the floor (and occasionally sucked his thumb with fervor), conversation turned to our personal history together and some of our old jokes resurfaced to make us laugh awkwardly and then cringe in fear we’d wake the baby. Before Dale left he asked to see Max - to hold him. I obliged and observed Dale as he checked my son’s face for signs of the Lintzer [his family] nose or any evidence in his chin that I might be wrong about the paternity.
He hoped to find these things. Dale repeated his request that I come to Oakland and marry him. I made my arguments against and he headed down a new path of family benefits with the military. It was a tactic to dissuade me from my objections, but it seemed so crude to break it down to economics.
“You don’t spend the rest of your life with someone because you need them,” I stated flatly.
“I love you. I would have thought that was enough,” he countered. “You said you loved me. I even have the notes to prove it.” He smiled warily.
“You will resent us in time. The fact that he will never have the Lintzer nose will catch up with you one day and it will be my fault for not waiting.”
That was how we left things. I had written him a letter after, apologizing for not hugging him goodbye. Dale never replied.
It was few days after the blueberry disaster and I was still too angry to talk to my mother or even my dad about the whole thing. I was alone in the house with a napping Max and found the phone receiver in my hand. I breathed in all my lungs would hold and dialed the phone. My heart was beating loudly in my ears when someone answered my call.
I couldn't hear anything distinct in the voice so I exhaled and asked, “Dale?” really tentatively.
“Nah,” was the reply and then the other receiver clacked in my ear as a muffled voice called his name.
On a September day back in 1967, my mother put most of her clean clothes in a laundry basket, set it on the back step and walked her four children to their school bus. Her youngest was barely seven and was heading off to his first ever day of school. Once the school bus turned the corner she walked through the house to her laundry basket, went out the back door and cut through neighbors’ yards to the city bus stop a few blocks away. She left her family that day, swearing off motherhood for good. Somehow my father changed her mind after their whirlwind romance, but I wasn't wanted by her - just part of the bargain.
On a September day in 1989, I dragged my suitcase, and a stroller off the carousel at OAK airport. Max had slept well for the flight. My father had cried a lot at MIA, but he also told me he was proud of me for doing what was needed to be a good mother. I doubted that it was the best decision, but it was a better one.
Dale walked up just in time to help me click the stroller legs into place. He grinned at me as he leaned on the stroller to test that it was safe.
“I don’t know what you’re smiling for," I said with mocked attitude. "Trouble just arrived in California and you got the VIP pass.”
“You’re my favorite kind of trouble, Blondie.” Dale winked at me in his exaggerated way as he clicked Max’s harness into place. “Things have been pretty dull here without you.”