My stepmother was the second most influential woman in my life.
It’s been eight years since she died, alone, still holding onto the myth of love, honor, and success she’d created around my father.
That doesn’t mean Shirley Mae was a "good" person. Nurturing, no. Generous, no. Friendly, no. Shirley Mae didn't like children, but since she was my father's third wife the odds were against her: he already had four. I was the lone girl in the bunch.
She was the only model of a woman working in the business world that I had as a child. My father respected her for her smarts; they were in business together.
If she’d given me love, would I have returned it? Yes . . . but with a bite.
Shirley Mae bit first, her psychodynamics more important than mine. She did it in the coldest way possible for an impressionable twelve-year-old: she ignored me completely. Visiting for a few weeks during the summer were one thing, but when I decided to take up my dad’s offer to come and live with him, the lid blew off their stalemate.
At the dinner table, from which my father was increasingly absent, Shirley Mae and I sat across from each other, and never uttered a word. I could stare directly at her and never fear being rude. I existed at the gnat level for her, annoying but for the most part invisible.
My stepmother was high-strung, with facial ticks that caused her to grimace, and unblinking, cold green eyes. She occasionally required electric shock therapy for depression. But I only found out about the latter when I’d grown up and started a family of my own. That was after a thirteen-year stint of no communication with my father. It had once been easy to cast her as evil stepmother, and my dad as the unthinking but lovable dupe. But the truth was that he used us all, told us he loved us, but rarely demonstrated it. He cheated on everyone.
That is when I learned the power of the “love” word, how it can be used to control people, especially women. It took Shirley Mae years longer to shake his hold on her. She was mad with love for him, and she had to go a bit madder to stay with him to the absolute, unrecognizable end.
While going through a box of her memorabilia recently, it became clear to me that her particular obsession was with death and numbers.
In the box was a 3x3 date book where she had written people's birthdays in her tiny, precise writing. The date book is from 1976, obviously saved and recycled for Shirley's not so happy Hallmark memories since her notations have little to do with that year.
She noted the day of people's deaths, people I’d never met, as well as the days my father fell, the injuries he incurred and the damage he did to the furniture, "Bill falls against T.V., breaks short ribs, knocks over cart." Throughout 1991 -1995 there were a series of these tumbles. He drank. He had strokes.
The births, deaths, accidents, and miscellany she recorded included the year of the event. Clearly, the date- the numbers-were important to Shirley. Aspergers?
She liked writing in pencil on the back of cash register receipts, the old kind that came on rolls for printing calculators. The calculations were intriguing, redolent of numbered accounts, but she'd scissor them into 2x4 slips for incessant list making, rendering it impossible to deduce what the heck she was adding and subtracting.
Family rumor had it that my father had married her for her money. I think it was for her talent with math, her organizational skills, and her ladylike whiteability. My mom had none of that; she, and by extension my brother and I, were not even included in my paternal grandfather’s obituary and list of grandchildren. But I can’t place the blame for that on Shirley’s doorstep; that was the work of another woman, and a story for another day. . . my paternal grandmother.
That doesn’t mean Shirley Mae was a "good" person. Nurturing, no. Generous, no. Friendly, no. Shirley Mae didn't like children, but since she was my father's third wife the odds were against her: he already had four. I was the lone girl in the bunch.
She was the only model of a woman working in the business world that I had as a child. My father respected her for her smarts; they were in business together.
If she’d given me love, would I have returned it? Yes . . . but with a bite.
Shirley Mae bit first, her psychodynamics more important than mine. She did it in the coldest way possible for an impressionable twelve-year-old: she ignored me completely. Visiting for a few weeks during the summer were one thing, but when I decided to take up my dad’s offer to come and live with him, the lid blew off their stalemate.
At the dinner table, from which my father was increasingly absent, Shirley Mae and I sat across from each other, and never uttered a word. I could stare directly at her and never fear being rude. I existed at the gnat level for her, annoying but for the most part invisible.
My stepmother was high-strung, with facial ticks that caused her to grimace, and unblinking, cold green eyes. She occasionally required electric shock therapy for depression. But I only found out about the latter when I’d grown up and started a family of my own. That was after a thirteen-year stint of no communication with my father. It had once been easy to cast her as evil stepmother, and my dad as the unthinking but lovable dupe. But the truth was that he used us all, told us he loved us, but rarely demonstrated it. He cheated on everyone.
That is when I learned the power of the “love” word, how it can be used to control people, especially women. It took Shirley Mae years longer to shake his hold on her. She was mad with love for him, and she had to go a bit madder to stay with him to the absolute, unrecognizable end.
While going through a box of her memorabilia recently, it became clear to me that her particular obsession was with death and numbers.
In the box was a 3x3 date book where she had written people's birthdays in her tiny, precise writing. The date book is from 1976, obviously saved and recycled for Shirley's not so happy Hallmark memories since her notations have little to do with that year.
She noted the day of people's deaths, people I’d never met, as well as the days my father fell, the injuries he incurred and the damage he did to the furniture, "Bill falls against T.V., breaks short ribs, knocks over cart." Throughout 1991 -1995 there were a series of these tumbles. He drank. He had strokes.
The births, deaths, accidents, and miscellany she recorded included the year of the event. Clearly, the date- the numbers-were important to Shirley. Aspergers?
She liked writing in pencil on the back of cash register receipts, the old kind that came on rolls for printing calculators. The calculations were intriguing, redolent of numbered accounts, but she'd scissor them into 2x4 slips for incessant list making, rendering it impossible to deduce what the heck she was adding and subtracting.
Family rumor had it that my father had married her for her money. I think it was for her talent with math, her organizational skills, and her ladylike whiteability. My mom had none of that; she, and by extension my brother and I, were not even included in my paternal grandfather’s obituary and list of grandchildren. But I can’t place the blame for that on Shirley’s doorstep; that was the work of another woman, and a story for another day. . . my paternal grandmother.
Here are Shirley Mae and my father during their courting days.
During a particularly bad month of Dad being in-and-out of the emergency room, Shirley felt compelled to write down all the births and deaths of his side of the family, which she paper clipped to a page of the tiny recycled calendar: computing longevity, I guess.
In her book of days, she included the births of puppy litters, the deaths of dogs, and notably April 11, "Coco bites my arm." Coco was my dad's Chihuahua. Unconnected, in a different month and year, a visiting nurse accidentally backed over Coco. Notation: Coco 26 bills $1732.53 plus.
Shirley lasted three years after my dad died. Her little clippings and notes turned religious, and she started calculating the longevity of her side of the family.
I finally made the list on the plus side (not dead yet), and she began to include the days of the week everyone had been born.
She noted that I was born on a Sunday. My own mother didn't even know that.
From Shirley's Book of Days:
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for its living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.
Traditional Nursery Rhyme
Shirley Mae and Dad right before the end:
