The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: mother

  • The Black Sheep in the Family

    Every family has one. A relative who refuses to play by the rules. Someone who causes unbelievable heartache, unspeakable scandal, and enormous amounts of frustration. Someone who generates really, really interesting family stories. In my family that was Uncle Dave, my mother’s little brother. When my mom was young, she was bedridden with whooping cough,…

  • How to Spot a Keeper

    I used to think that you could tell everything you needed to know about a man by how he treats his mother. I still think that’s a great theory in many cases. The problem is it only works when the man in question has a decent mother. If his mother is a total shrew or…

  • Apple Butter

    I once asked my mother why on earth she married my stepfather, a man she never really loved, who caused untold amounts of destruction in our lives and was destined to have a negative impact on me long after his death, and she said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Don’t all…

  • A Steady Diet of Estrogen

    “Why do you always forget to clean under the toilet seat?” “Because I grew up in a house full of women. It never occurs to me to lift up the toilet seat.” Only recently has it crossed my mind that perhaps growing up with two sisters and a single mom has left me with certain…

  • Views from my Windows—Part Three

    To start from the beginning of this story, see Parts One and two. As I was saying, and then my mother got cancer. She suffered for two years. Seriously, you wouldn’t have let your dog suffer the way that she was forced to. The doctors kept saying they didn’t know why she was still alive.…

  • Views from my Windows—Part Two

    For the beginning of this story, check out part one. No matter our circumstances, my mother never let it be a question in my mind that I’d be pursuing higher education. She wanted more for me than she ever had herself. I got scholarships and loans and grants and she helped me as much as…

  • Views from my Windows—Part One

    One of my first memories of any type of view was the sagging wooden third floor balcony of our shabby tenement apartment. I lived in fear of this view, because every time I stepped out of the house it was a certainty that our neighbor would be lying in wait. She was this loud old…

  • Stage Mothers

    Anyone who has seen the musical “Gypsy” knows that certain people turn into the stage mothers from hell. It really ought to be a mental designation in the DSM 5, and it should be defined as someone who is so unhappy with her own life that she attempts to live vicariously through that of her…

  • Fantasy Island

    I just got through reading an article on the NPR website entitled, “Pacific Island, Bigger Than Manhattan, Vanishes.” I assumed it was going to be about global warming, and that maybe it had sunk below the rising sea level, but no. Based upon studies of the sea floor, this island never existed in the first…

  • Just Keep Swimming

    My grandfather was old school. Part of his ability to thrive in America after coming over from Denmark stemmed from his philosophy of wasting neither money nor time. So when the day came to teach his kids to swim there were no lessons at the YMCA for his children. Oh no. He just picked them…