Joan H.'s Open Salon Blog

Birth Certificate

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:05:32 -0400

When I was eighteen I applied for my birth certificate. A little yellow piece of paper arrived from New York State saying I had been born. The date was wrong, and when I asked my mother about it, she said she remembered me being born on the 26th, not the 25th, as it stated on the yellow colored paper.

Last month I applied for a passport. The woman at the passport office told me she doubted my application would go through, because my parents' names were not on the birth certificate. Sure enough, a letter from the State Department arrived saying I needed a birth certificate that included the names of my parents.

I knew very little about my mother. Although she raised me, and I lived in her home until I was fifteen, I knew very little about her. She kept secrets that seemed insignificant to me. Her age, her middle name, her maiden name, for starters.

I didn't know her age until she died. And I didn't know her maiden name until last week. To be fair, a lot of immigrants changed their names when they came to America. But my mother's parents had not changed theirs, but her siblings did. They shortened the ethnic sounding name. Took off the "vitch" at the end, a sure sign of Eastern European origin. I assumed my mother had done the same.

I got the letter back from the State Department telling me my mother's name was "not found." Did I want to try again?

A friend of mine offered to look on Ancestry.com for me. It took her all of about a minute to find my mother's name. She found other things too. The year my grandparents became American citizens. The bakery my grandfather owned. It was a peek into my mother's life. The life she would not show me.

I called the woman back at the New York State Department of Vital Statistics and told her I had the right name.

Are you sure this time? We only give people one more chance before we charge them for a new application.

I told her I was as sure as I could be. How could I explain my mother's refusal to talk about herself? How could I explain what it was like living with a mother who didn't share her age or even her name with her own daughter?

What I knew about my mother, I could tell her in a few sentences. I knew she wanted to go to nursing school, but her parents needed her to work in the bakery after high school. I knew she wanted to leave my father the same year she married him. I knew she was ambivalent about having children. I knew she liked to scoop out a hole in half a cantaloupe and fill it with vanilla ice cream. I knew she cried when she found out I was growing inside her. I knew she didn't want me at her death bed.

My official birth certificate arrived this week. With my mother's name just as my friend found it by searching Ancestry.com. My father's name. The wrong date, and the time of my birth: 3:03 am.

I remember my mother telling me she had to drive herself to the hospital to give birth to me because she couldn't find my father that day. She told me she had me after midnight, which might be why the date is a day off.

I want to believe she remembered the day I was born.

On the birth certificate, in small print at the bottom, it states that my name was not registered on the certificate until a year later.

I will never know my mother's secrets. I will never know why they were so important to her or why she clung to them so tightly.

And even though she didn't want me in the beginning of my life or at the end of hers, she was still my mother.

And I still can't help wondering who she was.

Taco Tuesday

Wed, 1 May 2013 08:05:18 -0400

It's Taco Tuesday at our house. We laugh at ourselves for inventing these goofy rituals. Ordinary rituals. I'm thinking there are plenty of families with a Taco Tuesday night. Or a Spaghetti Wednesday night. It's something families just do.

In our house, it's just the two of us.

When our daughter left for college, we became a little unglued. Not unglued as in crazy. Unglued as in falling apart. Separately and together we fell apart.

My husband took the longest time adjusting to her absence. Long hours of crossword puzzles, and Jeopardy! and creating a permanent indentation in the old grey couch. I convinced him we needed to buy a new couch. Something cheery, something raspberry or plum colored. He prefers to sit on the old one.

When she left for college, we spent some time in mourning. I'd find him in her empty room, just looking. Not touching anything. Looking at the spelling bee trophy, the horse show ribbons, the books and dolls left neatly on the shelves. In the days right after she left, he kept the door to her bedroom closed. We talked about her constantly. What a perfect baby she was. What a great kid she was. How proud we are of her now.

At a restaurant one evening, I made him promise we would not mention her name. I made him promise we would think of other things to talk about. It was a quiet dinner. We talked about the bread. We talked about unsalted vs. salted butter, and which we preferred. We were in trouble.

Each time she came home for a visit, the house was filled with lightness and laughter again. And at the airport, when we said our inevitable good-byes, he'd wait and watch as she removed her shoes, swept through the metal detector, ponytail swinging, watching until she disappeared into the crowd. I always had tissues in my purse.

We made plans to do more things together. Maybe a trip to New York. Or a day of shopping and sight seeing in Philadelphia. We drove to Baltimore one day. We ate flabby corned beef sandwiches and split pea soup I swear came out of a can. And we pretended it was okay.

I need to stop wasting my life.

I say this out loud.

He agrees. And promises he will go back to school, travel, buy those boots he wants so badly but are too expensive.

I remind him that he will pay twice as much for boots for his daughter or for me. It is hard for him to do anything for himself.

Four years have gone by since we left our daughter in the freshman dorm. She will graduate in June, and we will be there. Her four years away have been years of growth and change. Our four years have been a work in progress.

When we have the inevitable unsalted vs salted butter conversations, I am sure there is no hope. The glue is gone, and we are doomed.

Then we have Taco Tuesday night, or some other reason to find ourselves in the tiny kitchen together. He is the cook in the family, and he's agreed to teach me some of his tricks. Perfect batter fried fish. Hearty lentil soup. Split pea with smoked turkey pieces.

We are laughing. Something is funny, I'm not sure what. He is a good teacher. He is a good friend. He is a good man.

I see the new boots by the door, although still in the box. He's made an appointment for our passport pictures and applications. Baby steps to most people, giant leaps for the man on the old grey couch.

I don't know how people get glued back together again.

Maybe Taco Tuesday is a start.

Sibling Day

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:04:41 -0400

Apparently, today is "Sibling Day." I only know this because of the posts on Facebook. I have siblings.

I am on top of the refrigerator. Crying. I am four years old, and my mother has left my brother in charge. My mother chooses him over Mrs. Walsh to watch me this day. Mrs. Walsh is old and wears the same flowered housecoat every time I am there. Her house smells funny. She takes the green pill bottle down from the cabinet several times an hour and warns me not to smell the poppies in her backyard.

They'll make you have funny dreams.

I would have preferred her pill popping and her poppy eccentricities over my brother's teasing.

When you stop crying, I'll let you down, he says calmly from the living room.

There are other games he plays with me. There is a small cabinet in the kitchen, and he tries to see if I will fit. I do. He shuts the door.

I'll let you out when you stop crying.

I loved him. He was handsome and cool and all the girls called him John Lennon. He gave me books to read when I was a teenager. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass. All the Carlos Castaneda books. I read them all dutifully. He was my harsh fake Buddhist master.

When he moved to Nepal, I thought he was surely the coolest person I knew. Only enlightened people move to Nepal. He'd come home to visit. Sometimes he would drive up to see me at college. He came with his girlfriend, the one who ate the Brown Cow yogurt she remembered she'd left in the car in the hot July sun, but finished it anyway.

I used to think all his girlfriends were the same girl, just in different packaging. Thin, long hair, hippie, guru seeking types. My brother gave them books to read too. They would fall in love with him, and he'd be gone. Another one, much like the last one, would appear in her place.

The last time I saw my brother we sat on the floor and talked. He had this to say: You were a disappointment to our mother her whole life.

Maybe we all were, he concedes, eating almonds out of the bag, one by one.

Maybe the problem wasn't so much us then, I want to say. But I say nothing. I am relieved that my flight will be leaving soon.

He and his wife take me to the airport.

I hug them both.

I love you, I tell him.

That was eight years ago.

I never heard from him since.

Sibling Day.

I don't celebrate.

Oh Deer

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 19:03:15 -0400

I have a love/hate relationship with deer. Since watching Bambi as a child, and then again later as a mother, (fast forwarding the scene where Bambi's mom gets killed so as not to traumatize my own child for years) I have loved deer. They are beautiful, gentle animals. When I walk in the woods near my home, I am always greeted by one or two of them, like some kind of Snow White in the forest. They are so used to sharing the neighborhood with us, they are rarely startled.

On the other hand, I have not had a decent garden for the past two summers because of them. They are bold. Shameless, really. I found one in my garden nibbling the tops of my tomato plants as I snapped pictures of him with my camera.

They are everywhere. They are beautiful, they are gentle, they are nuisances. But I don't want them dead.

Tonight, at 7pm, Rock Creek Park, (which is the park that runs through Washington, D.C,) will be closed. The deer will be shot and killed and this horrifies me.

The deer population is out of control in our city. I understand that. They have no natural predators. But there is something so lovely about running into them in the woods. Or seeing them grazing across the street from the Vice President's home on Massachusetts Avenue. They live here alongside us.

As I write this, I know it has begun. The area around the park has been closed off, and the shooting has started. I feel unbelievably sad. It's too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel.

They said on the news that the deer would then be donated for meat for poor people and the homeless in our city.

I wish that made me feel better.

On Not Winning the Lottery

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:03:49 -0400

Sunday morning. Coffee is made, yoga is done, Facebook is checked, I can't put it off any longer.

I nonchalantly pick up the lottery ticket from the table.

There are a few dishes in the sink I need to take care of first.

Every Sunday I do this. The dance with the lottery ticket.

It really begins Saturday night. My husband buys his lottery ticket from the same place every week. He and the woman behind the counter have an understanding. If he wins, she will get part of it. I'm not sure how they've worked this out, but it will surely come out of his half. My husband is a creature of habit. Sturdy, strong, stubborn. Loyal. He will not change his ticket buying habits anytime soon.

I, on the other hand, am loyal to no 7/11, gas station, or corner liquor store. Nor am I loyal to one person who hands out the lottery ticket. In D.C. there are hundreds of places to get a Powerball ticket. Sometimes I get the ticket over the border, in Maryland or Virginia.

Take last week, for example. At a gas station in Maryland, I yelled out the window to my husband: Pick up a lottery ticket!

From here?

Yes! I have a good feeling about this place!

Last night as he went out the door, I asked him to pick up a lottery ticket for me.

Make sure the Powerball is eleven. I've got a good feeling about this.

And so it goes.

I used to have more of a "shining" a "sixth sense," a "shinning" we started calling it in my family. Sometimes I just knew stuff.

We don't live far from a racetrack. One summer, I looked at the paper and saw that a horse was running in the 5th race. A horse I knew was going to win.

Kind and loving, and hoping like hell I am right, my husband agrees to drive us to the racetrack for the 5th race. It is a long shot for the horse, and a long shot for us getting there on time. Traffic is tied up on the Beltway, and by the time we park, pay our entrance fee and buy a program, the race is over.

I ask the man standing next to me which horse won, even though I already know. My shinning was spot on that day. Our timing wasn't.

Yeah, that horse won. 50 to 1 odds too.

I tell the whole story to this total stranger. He wants to know if I can pick the winner in the next race.

No, it doesn't work like that.

Sometimes my father had the shinning, and we were rich for a little while. Other times he just couldn't call on his 6th sense for the horses no matter how hard he tried. I know better than to force it. When it's there, it's there.

And when it's not...well...

So I go back to my Sunday morning dance with the lottery ticket. I've put it off as long as I can stand. Last night I felt so sure I had the winning ticket. At least the Powerball. I make myself look.

Nothing.

Not even close.

I have pretty much lost my shinning. Shining. Sixth sense. Over the years, I've pretty much lost it.

Yet on a smaller scale, I am still my father's daughter. I love the terrible tension that comes with gambling. The exhilarating feeling of planning how I will use my winnings. The house I will buy, the people I will share it with, the party I will throw for 100 of my closest friends in Paris...

It's the crazy dance I do with a ticket every Sunday morning.

It's not over yet.

The winning ticket could still be in my husband's pocket at work.

To be continued...