After my mother’s day post I got to thinking. I thought that maybe I should post about my experiences about growing up without a mom. I don’t know if it will be interesting but it’s something that I want to write about. My parents divorced when I was three and my brother was two. It was 1958 and men didn’t get custody back then unless there were really overwhelming circumstances. I guess that wanting to put your children in an orphanage and it just being you and your husband would be one of those circumstances. At least that is the story that I was always told by my father and my grandmother (his mother). As I got older that story wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been for the fact that from the time I was four to the time I was 11 I never saw my mother a single time. To add to the woe was the fact that my father was 45 years old at the time. An age where most men (at least back then) were enjoying having grown children and grandchildren. When I was 11 I remember one evening Daddy had us dress up in our church clothes. He told us we were going to the bus station to pickup up our mother. He explained that she wanted to come back to us and that we were going to pick her up and go out to eat and then she was going to come and spend the night with us. He also said that he was leaving the decision up to us whether or not he let her back into our lives. We picked her up and ate at the bus station. That was a treat because we had never even been to the bus station before and we got to eat there to boot. After we ate we went home. I don’t remember what we talked about or what we did. I do remember not being happy about the situation because it was obvious that it wasn’t us that she wanted to come back to. There hadn’t been any joyful hugs or I’ve missed you’s, things that you would have expected to hear. It was more awkward hello’s and how are you’s and she looked at us as if we were foreign creatures. No, she was looking for someone to take care of her instead of taking care of us. She had been in a car accident and had limited mobility on one side of her body. I did more waiting on her, fetching this and fetching that than I cared to do. It was obvious to me at 11 year old that I was going to have a very large burden on my hands (remember my grandmother always told me that I was old for my age). Her coming back into our lives was not going to give me back my childhood, although at the time I didn’t realize that I was missing out on it and still to this day I don’t think that I missed all that much. What I did realize was that I wasn’t going to have any more time to play or do what I wanted to do, I wasn’t going to get out of doing the laundry or the dishes or clean house because she wasn’t physically capable of doing those things. The next morning when it was time to make the decision I voted emphatically NO. Cruel? I don’t think it was any more cruel as not wanting your kids in the first place. My 10 year old brother, the cute, out going kid that had always had dozens of friends, the kid who all his teachers though was just adorable voted YES. So we had a tie and that’s when the debate started. The only argument that I could think of was that she wasn’t our mother, she was just some woman who had us and didn’t want us, she didn’t know us and we didn’t know her. It would be like bringing a stranger in to live with us. The only argument that my brother used was I want my mother back. So, who was going to break the tie. Why Daddy naturally, clever man that he was, although he didn’t vote. He added to the debate and agreed with what I had said and he added that it would be one more person to feed and that we’d have to buy clothes and makeup for. That it would mean that we couldn’t go to Greenhaws and get a candy bar at 9:30 at night if we wanted to. It would mean that we had less for toys and things. Then he said, so Buddy what do you think now? Buddy being the toy loving candy addict that he was, changed his vote. Do I regret my decision? Not for one minute. Did I feel happy to have won? No, it was a no win situation any way you looked at it and even I at 11 years old recognized that fact. The only thing I regret is the hurt that it caused for my little brother but that is another story for another time.