The Stranger

Here is a photo of us. I am sitting in her lap; our heads are close together. We are both smiling. No, I am not smiling; I am grinning from ear to ear, holding a black Fury horse with wheels on its feet and a Joey doll on its back. A gift from this woman who says she is my mother. It is Christmas Eve, my fifth one. Oma had told me that a special visitor was coming, so when the doorbell rang, I ran to answer. I stared up at a vision and thought of my doll: a porcelain face with blue eyes and bud lips, her cloud of dark hair illuminated by the light from the open doorway. The woman beamed at me. One of her front teeth was chipped in a crooked line. Her arms were filled with brightly wrapped gifts. A faint, smoky smell of cigarettes swirled around her. Oma introduced her as deine Mutti. Your mother.

Behind her stood a wide man in a dark green uniform, legs splayed, arms crossed in front of his ample girth as he squinted down at me. His teeth clenched a pipe, his brown eyes were warm and inquisitive. In the formal parlor I was placed in the man’s lap. Das ist dein neuer Papa, my Oma explained. I wiggled nervously, fascinated by this new daddy’s uniform and babbled away with questions about the pins and ribbons on his jacket. He remained silent, frowning slightly, not understanding my German words. I trembled with excitement and looked back and forth between these parents I had so extraordinarily been gifted with. Yet my chest began to feel thick, and my gut twisted in fear. In a moment, I understood that I would be leaving the only life I had known. Leaving with two people I did not know at all.

*

I was born in 1955, an accidental child who lived because abortion was still outlawed in Germany. My mother was twenty-three and had been dating a man a few years older for about a year. When she found herself pregnant, she became distraught and angry. She refused marriage. And shut my father out of my life. For years, questions I asked about him went unanswered as Mom skittered away from me, smell of acrid cigarette smoke following. Who was he exactly? What did he do?  Why didn’t you marry?

One summer day, shortly after my fifteenth birthday, I stood in front of her, hands on hips, legs splayed to keep from trembling.

“Mom, it’s time you told me about my “real” father, who he was and what he was like. And why you guys didn’t get married.”

She squinted up at me as she knelt in the garden pulling weeds, ashy Lucky Strike dangling from the side of her mouth.

“Why are you asking? ‘Daddy Ted is your real father. It would hurt his feelings if he thought you didn’t think of him that way,” she muttered in her still-heavy German accent and turned her attention back to the yard.

I walked away, deciding that it didn’t matter, anyway; I hated being German, I hated my mother’s sharp looks and her even sharper tongue, her clipped words with th sounding like d, and v sounding like f. Why did I even care about my German father, who was not involved in my life? She did toss out a few facts: he wore glasses (he had bad eyes—that’s where you got your eye problems from), he worked as a typesetter (you probably got your love of books from him), he wasn’t very good-looking (here she just looked closely at my face) and he had not much to offer; not much at all. He asked me to marry him, but I said no.

My teenage mind reeled with confusion at these biting words. Choosing to ignore what I could not understand or change, I buried my father deep in a mental file, and with him a part of myself that was unknowable. I did not have my mother’s beauty. I would stare into the mirror and wonder if my father looked like me. I was nothing like my mother, so I decided I must be like my unknown father.

*

For my fiftieth birthday, my mother gave me a priceless gift: a carefully curated photo album I should have seen many years ago. Photos I cannot remember seeing before, a hint of my life before Oma. There I am as a swaddled newborn in my mother’s arms; another a few months later, staring into a mirror with wonder; at about five months, propped up against a tree and squinting at the camera, the words Mein kleiner Liebling written on the back. This last one must have been taken right before she handed me to her mother, plucked up her suitcase and walked down the steps to a waiting taxi. My mother was leaving the country.

Susi was lovely, with a zest for life and adventure. But as the oldest, she had to take care of the house and her siblings, four girls and a boy. Her single mother Katharina worked all day, cleaning and sewing for others. An excellent seamstress, she mended and altered the uniforms of the Nazi officers garrisoned in town. When the youngest began school, Susi moved to Frankfurt and tried to make a life for herself. But she could only do menial work. She waited tables and cleaned Gasthaus rooms. She posed for photographers, hoping to start a modelling career. She had decided she did not ever want to be a wife and mother.

Fate intervened.

After she gave birth to me in a small hospital close to Frankfurt, she came back home to recuperate. In the five months before she left, we spent time together. She took those photos. On an outing to Frankfurt with a friend, she met a French woman who needed one more addition for her dance troupe. My mother had taken a few years of ballet lessons when she was young, and the cancan was easy enough to teach. She saw the brass ring and grabbed it.

When I was growing up, there were times when Mom put her head in her hands and woefully declared “I am so stupid.” Usually it was a minor thing that set her off, but the self-recrimination would last for hours. She would then launch into the importance of learning, and how I need to be able to “keep my education in my back pocket.” I understand this now to be a reference to the certificate that validated one’s skills and was necessary to get a job in Germany. She always regretted that her formal education ended at the age of fourteen; she was needed at home.

*

The January before her death in 2013, my mother came to Florida to visit me. She was living in my half-sister Jackie’s Colorado mountain home and wanted to get out of the cold and snow for a few weeks. During her visit, we both worked hard to be kind to one another. COPD and emphysema limited her activity. A trip to the grocery store sent her to bed for the afternoon. So we dallied over lunches, sat under the oak trees in the backyard and looked out over the lake. We did not talk about the important things we needed to talk about, such as what was happening in her life when she left her infant daughter behind and took on the world as a dancer in a troupe. We had reached a quiet truce. The questions still plaguing me receded in the urgency to spend quality time together. 

I had adopted a rescue horse in North Carolina and was taking horse-riding lessons in anticipation of her delivery to Florida. I took Mom with me to the ranch on the day of my lesson and sat her in a spot of sunshine near the fence in the paddock. The ancient mare I was learning to ride on shared her grassy acre with a spirited young gelding. As I was saddling the mare, the gelding sauntered over to my mother nodding off in her chair. He gently began sniffing her face, her hair, her body. A slow smile spread across Mom’s face. She sat perfectly still, at ease and clearly delighted. The sniffing went on for many minutes. When Mom opened her eyes, she was nose to nose with her new friend. She lifted her hand and stroked the gelding’s soft muzzle.

Later, back home, I exclaimed about the gelding’s interest in her and his gentleness as his lips nibbled at her hair. That afternoon, as we cradled cups of hot tea, she told me a story.

I was about three or four, I guess. We were living together at the time, our small family, before my father was sent away to build garrisons. He swooped me up, put me on his shoulders and off to the stables we went. I ran around in the sweet-smelling barn, small enough to walk under the horses, and stroked their warm bellies with my fat fingers. My father swung me on a horse’s back, no saddle, and led me around the paddock. The horses were always calm and gentle with me. He also played a mean harmonica and showed me how to blow into one. I kept practicing and soon I could play a little tune. He loved photography and showed me how to look into the lens and frame a picture. My father called me “little Felix.” I knew he loved me and was proud of me. And then, he was gone. I missed him so. Home was never… home anymore.

Here was a blink into her childhood and the father she loved and felt close to. She may have witnessed the altercation between her parents when her father discovered his wife pregnant with a child that was not his. She may have heard the screams and begging during the awful beating that her mother took. Mom never mentioned this time, or the days that followed, her mother Katharina locked in the bathroom, and Felix a madman standing guard at the door demanding the baby be flushed down the toilet. She would have been six. Perhaps she was in school when it happened. Or perhaps she was home, huddled with her younger sisters in a corner of the hallway, helpless. Katharina was able to convince Felix that the baby was his. But a few years later, after another tour, he found his wife pregnant again. This was too much. He moved out, abandoning his family. Soon he was sent to fight on the front in France. In 1944, the family received word that he had taken a gun to his temple. Considered a traitor and a coward, his body was buried in an unmarked grave.

My mother must have suffered deeply. The nightmares that plagued her kept her pain alive and saturated her years with sadness and anxiety. But she never spoke of the war horrors she must have seen, or the pain of a family in so much turmoil. So I can try to understand how a mother can leave her “accidental” infant behind. The need to escape the memories. Of never wanting to be a putzfrau in a small town, living a small life and doing what she had always done: clean and take care of others. To have a chance to dance, wear fantastic costumes, be regaled by princes and dignitaries in an exotic country far away, well, this was an opportunity that only came once.  

*

My mother met my stepfather in Ankara, Turkey. She was performing in a supper club. He saw her and couldn’t take his eyes off the tiny brunette with the huge smile who could kick her legs the highest. He proposed. And proposed again. And once more. She finally said yes. Perhaps she was tired of performing nightly and saw the life of an American officer’s wife as the next brass ring. The one caveat? He had to adopt her accidental child. This is how I became an American. Then he wanted a son, and my mother gave him one. A little girl followed two years later, and then we were five. Mom stayed home and took care of us and the house. We moved every two years until Ted retired. The year I turned sixteen we located to St. Pete, Florida. Ted had been hopeful for the wilds of Alaska, but my mother needed warmth.

My stepfather went to night school and received an accounting degree. He was hired by Florida Gas. When the company merged and became Enron, Ted was relocated to Houston. He and Mom bought a beautiful home in a golf community. When he retired a few years later, they moved back to Florida. The home they purchased included a generous yard that butted up to a sandy incline in the back and a view of a small lake in the front. Mom coaxed the sandy soil into beautiful flower groupings. The numerous bird baths she erected were quickly dominated by cardinals, Carolina wrens, and mockingbirds, with the occasional blackbird or scrub jay to run the others off. Sandhill Cranes strutted through her yard daily on their way to the lake, protesting with a loud bugle call if she was outside. The weather was warm and sunny. Ted played golf. Life was good.

When Ted began to have urinary problems in 2008, he thought it was his prostate. Tests came back inconclusive, and his doctor recommended he get further testing. Instead, he waited. By the time he readdressed the problem it was too late; he had advanced bladder cancer and died in April of 2009. Mom blamed herself for not insisting he continue with testing when it was recommended. Ted hated to go to doctors, and she gave in to his refusal. In the meantime, Mom suffered from osteoarthritis, and began taking Hydrocodone for the pain. Eventually she had lumbar surgery and gave up driving. Jackie and her family had already moved to Colorado. I drove the forty minutes or so back and forth every few days to take her shopping and make sure she was doing all right. After her surgery, I stayed with her for a while. It was obvious to all that she couldn’t stay by herself. She opted to move to Colorado. Most of her belongings, and her lovely house and garden, were sold. The remainder of her belongings were loaded up in a rental truck by Jackie’s husband, who drove her and Pippy the cat to their new home in Evergreen.

When she returned to visit me that last January, we piled into my Toyota and drove to Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, where Ted is interred. After a stop at the entrance kiosk to get a map, we wound through large green lawns filled with identical simple headstones lined up like sentinels. When we re-located Ted’s grave, Mom asked me to give her some time alone. I retreated some distance away and sat under a large live oak. The air was still and warm.

For a long time, Mom knelt at the grave, her head bowed. Then her face collapsed, and angry words tumbled out of her. Alarmed, I began go over, then thought better of it. This was her chance at a closure she needed. After many minutes, her tears stopped, she composed her face, and slowly rose, spent. We drove home in silence, and she went straight to her room to rest. That evening she seemed settled, although resigned.

After dinner, she looked over at me and said fiercely “He left me alone, all alone. Just like my father. Because he was a stubborn man who tried to be strong. He always had to be strong. I counted on him and now I have to be strong alone. And I don’t think I can, anymore.”

A few weeks after my mother returned to Colorado that cold January, she developed a problem swallowing food and was admitted into the hospital with aspiration pneumonia. I flew out and stayed for several weeks. My half-brother Patrick joined us. Every day we gathered in her hospital room, not knowing how long we had with her. She would rally, and then regress. But often she was alert and determined about going home.

At the end of February, she left Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge and moved back into her basement suite. She spent her time reading and fussing over Pippy, her massive Himalayan cat, the only survivor of the four cats she doted on in Florida. A few months later she was re-admitted once again with aspiration pneumonia. The doctors told Jackie her lungs were too compromised; she would not recover. Yet once again, she rallied and returned to her basement suite. That year, Jackie and her family planned a short trip in July. I was to fly out and mom-sit.

*

My mother was always a shell to me, a hard, outer carapace that I couldn’t—wouldn’t— penetrate. I never had a sense of the meat and bones and heart and blood and viscera inside the shell. And, most of all, her essence. In order to do her justice, I needed to accept her as the person she wanted to be, not as the mother I wanted her to be. As children, we don’t think about our parents’ lives before they were our parents. We see them as caretakers from whom we eventually break away from, their job being done for better or worse.

To think of our parents outside of this feels strange and somehow voyeuristic, as if it’s not natural, or right, for us to know them any differently. Mostly we feel bonded to our parents. Especially our mothers. They nurtured us with their bodies, endured great pain to bring us into this world, fed us and kept us as comfortable as they were able to. Some are better at this than others, but for the most part maternal instincts kick in when needed and life goes on. The love and caring emanates from this bond, that my mother and I did not have.

After I left home to get married at eighteen, I stayed away. Mom and I went years without seeing each other. She was probably relieved; I know I was. That we didn’t need to circle around each other, trying to be mother and daughter. I convinced myself that she never loved me. Perhaps she felt I had never loved her.

As I booked my flight for that summer visit, I resolved to sit in front of her and find answers to the questions I had carried for fifty-eight years. Who was my father, what does he look like? What was your life, and what are your nightmares? What happened to the happy, smiling woman who pulled me onto her lap that Christmas day so long ago?

Help me to understand you.

To love you.

Please.

A week before I was to fly out that fateful July, Mom succumbed to pneumonia and was readmitted to the hospital. That night, Jackie held her hand as Mom took her last rasping breath.

 I like to think my mother found herself in a meadow, filled with the flowers she loved, the warm sun she always craved caressing her skin, the multiple cats she had doted on rubbing against her ankles, and Ted striding towards her with a big smile. I believe she found peace during her golden years. Until Ted’s illness overcame him, they seemed content. I believe that her choice to marry after all and give Ted children was her gift for the security and love he gave her. I’m grateful that Ted adopted me. I’m relieved that my mother came back for her wild child, proving she did want me, after all.

If only she could have told me.

Originally published in the Unleash Press Conversations anthology. Winner of the Editor’s Prize.