My Southern Gothic Life

As many of you know, I have been a little preoccupied with my Mother lately.

I’m going to be a little kinder this time…

We have finally reached the point where my sister and I are needing to transition my mother to Assisted Living due to Alzheimer’s Disease/Vascular Dementia.

Being a lifelong Republican who worshipped Ronald Reagan, she’s probably almost satisfied that she has the same disease that ultimately did him in.

This is a very strange time for me.  I won’t pretend or be dishonest.  My mother is a difficult woman.  We have had our issues, but she is my mother and we will do the right thing to be sure she is as safe and comfortable as possible during these final years.

What I find most disturbing about seeing someone at the end of their life is looking at what they missed.  But I realize I can’t force my values or judgements on her or view her life too much through my own lenses. She is a product of a different era and had her own wishes and desires and probably was as happy as she could be given her expectations.

It’s the lowered expectations that disturb me.

When I watch “Mad Men” and see Don Draper and his family- at least in season one- I see our family, but in a much better neighborhood.  I was always struck by how limited the options were for women in the 1960′s– and that is when she was in her prime.

I am grateful for one thing.  I knew her four years longer than my sister.  I knew her when she was still young and vivacious.  Something happened in the late 1960′s and she became a different woman.  I think it was the fact that she was not equipped to deal with change.

My mother was born in 1932 and lived in Danville, Virginia her entire life.  She was raised to be get a “Mrs Degree” and she did.  She had no education after high school and devoted her 20′s and 30′s to building my father’s career.  When he died in the early 1980′s, she was lost.  She tried religion, she tried following politics, but she never really found herself after she was no longer Mrs. H. B. Michaels.  She had never really built her own identity or developed her own interests, so she had nothing to fall back on.

I also saw her and her friends from the 1960′s when I read “The Help.”   I saw so many women, when I was little, who had no purpose and nothing to do, so they became obsessed with trivialities.   I saw a little of Hilly and a lot of Elizabeth as representing my mother.  If you looked in the medicine chest of every woman in Temple Terrace in the 1960′s you found two new wonder drugs:  Birth Control pills and Valium.  They were on the cusp of freedom and change, but didn’t know how to deal with it.  Many of these women didn’t even get dressed until it was time for their husbands to come home for dinner.  If the husbands didn’t spend too much time at Earl’s Bar and Grill and forget dinner…

My mother could be wonderful at times.  She had my father build a stage in our backyard and organized plays with the neighborhood children.  I think that’s where my love of theatre my have begun.  She loved MGM Musicals and, as a child, I watched them with her.  That was also probably the first thing that screwed up my early perception of life.  It ain’t no MGM Musical, but I’m not sure she ever had that realization.  She wanted things to be simple, clean and beautiful.  She couldn’t deal when it wasn’t.

She did go back to work after my sister was born.  Before I was born, she had been a receptionist at Dan River Mills.  When she went back to work in her early 30′s, someone younger and prettier had that job.  So she went to work at Hilton Hall with hundreds of other women who were smarter than their male bosses.

She was president of every Club she over joined.  If she had had the education, direction and self-confidence that would come with the Woman’s Movement, she would have had a different life.  But she didn’t.  She never could cook or run a house, but she knew she was supposed to do so.  I don’t think she ever recovered from not being able to fill the role she thought she was supposed to fill and didn’t realize she should have tried something else.  She went to college, briefly, in her ’50′s, but she didn’t have the self-confidence to keep it up.

She became a master at denial.  I don’t know exactly what went wrong around 1969, but I have my suspicions.  The world was changing and she was frightened.  She did not know what to do, so she ignored it and demonized any change.  My father remodeled our house instead of buying her a new house.  She never recovered from that.  She started gaining weight.  She and my father began to behave more like George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, than Ozzie and Harriett.  Anyone within earshot knows this…

But she kept up appearances and dove deeper into denial.  When my father became ill with cancer, I think it was almost a relief to her.  She got to take care of him, deal with doctors and insurance companies and had a purpose for the first time in years.  Like I said, when he died, she was lost.  She didn’t have a self to fall back on.  She was used to being someone’s wife or someone’s mother and had never found herself.  She was not one for a Jill Clayburgh “Unmarried Woman” reinvention.  She didn’t have the skill set.

I think I may, unknowingly, have been saying goodbye since 1969.

Frankly, she never dealt well with me once I told her I was gay.  Her first reaction was that people would talk and what would her friends say.  Then she worried it would ruin my career.  Then she told me I was going to hell, so I did the same to her.  I would not speak to her for more than 6 months.  Then she tried to work it out.  I give her credit for that.  But we were never close again.

I had moved on, but she couldn’t.  I loved the way the world had changed and embraced it.  She was always stuck in Danville, Virginia as it had been in about 1960.  I think that was the last time she was comfortable with the world.

So, it may be a blessing that she is moving to the place where she lives in the past.  She was never comfortable in the present and she feared the future.

And we’ll try to continue to say goodbye with as much grace as we can muster.

We went to see my Mother in her Assisted Living facility a couple of days ago and I now know what it would be like to visit “Maggie the Cat” at age 78.  With dementia….

It’s hard, after spending years avoiding your  parents most of your life to be drug into their lives  again.

I thought I had left the family history behind, but I realized today, it sneaks up and bites you when you least expect it.

That scares me.  I thought you could deal with things and move on…apparently, that’s not the case….

I could deal with my Mother, a couple of weeks ago, when she was like Bernice on “Designing  Women”.  Dim, but amusing.

Today,  that was not the case.

I saw a glimpse of the woman  recognized from my youth, at her worst, and it scared the hell out of me.

This might be a shock to some of my Danville friends who knew my parents socially, but I grew up in a very unhappy house.  Once the doors and windows were shut, it was a different world.

I thought I had put that behind me.

A this point in my life, I have a basically quiet, sane, no-drama life.

Steve and I have been, honestly, very happy and stress free for almost 14 years. We don’t fight, we talk.  We are mutually supportive.  It’s so good, it’s almost scary…

Today, I was dragged back into my past.  And I don’t like it.

But she was determined to take us back there…

Let me start by saying, I don’t deal well with crazy.

My Mother had my Father’s Mother committed to the State Hospital for the Insane about a  minute after they were married.  I will never forget the annual obligatory visits to her when we were growing up…I’ll write more about this in the future.

Let’s just say it is traumatic, at six years old, to have crazy women crawling over the car and beating on the wind shield  begging for money to buy cigarettes while Daddy is getting a pass to see his Mother.

Let me also be clear on one point before we delve into this:  My Father’s Blue Blood Richmond FFV Relatives hated my Mother on sight.

She was a very pretty cheerleader from the wrong side of the tracks.  Hillbilly West Virginia background on the make is what they saw.  My Father was already the product of the “family scandal”, being his parent’s divorce in 1932, when “good families”, in Virginia simply did not do that.

That is another story for another time.  Let’s just say my Father’s Rush relatives did not take to her.  They read her immediately.  And she knew it and she always looked for a way to get even….

I will eventually  get to the events of today, but they were a product of the past…

Flash forward to about 1949.

My Mother was a pretty girl in a poor family.  Frankly, the entire family was betting on her being pretty enough to marry out of the Mill Village and into “money”.  She was the youngest.  The Prettiest.  The most Spoiled.

My Grandmother always told me stories about my Mother, who she considered a pretty,  social-climbing fool.

Let me set the stage:

It’s 1949 in a 4 room house in the Mill Village.  My mother is 17 years old and trying to find a rich husband.  She is having a fit for a “peach chiffon cocktail dress” to wear to a party.  The dress is from Rippes, the most expensive women’s shop in town.

My father is back in town from the army and 4 years in Japan.  With a convertible.  Brand new…

I might add, she is a “winter” and “peach” is not even a good color for her….

My Grandmother talked, to her dying day, about the fit my Mother threw over that dress.  My Mother threw herself in the floor, kicking and screaming, when told she could not have that dress.  My Grandmother calmly went to the kitchen, filled a pot of water, and threw it on her.

Unfortunately, my Aunt Goldie still bought her the dress.  And she ended up on the front page of the social section  of the local paper wearing it, with my Father.  At a dance.  What can I say?

It did photograph well in black and white.

And it went into her “cedar chest” with the other prom dresses and event dresses that got her noticed.

Flash forward again to about 1964. “Mad Men” era.

My parents had been married 14 years and had a new ranch house in a new post war neighborhood.  I was about 6 and my sister was two.  (BTW:  My Mother refused to have children until my father met certain conditions:  More to follow)

My Mother thought she was the social leader of Temple Terrace, which ain’t saying much, and she knew it.  But she was the President of the Temple Terrace Women’s Club. She decided to put on amateur theatricals in our backyard.  She had had my Father  build a cinder block stage back there with some  lights, via extension cords, chairs, curtains and the works.

She was determined to lead the neighborhood children in theatrical productions of  Disney Classics.  I do have family films to prove this…

It didn’t last long.  ”Snow White” did her in….

Let me, so to speak, re-set the stage:

It’s 1964.  In Temple Terrace in Danville Virginia.  It’s June.  The Stage is set for our amateur theatricals…

It’s like a “Mad Men” scene in not as nice a neighborhood.

Mother grows tired of dealing with the children and rehearsals.  She decides it’s time to go inside and lie down in her newly air-conditioned bedroom.  And take a couple of more of the newly invented Valiums.  It was so stressful being a Housewife in 1964…

My Mother also never had the longest attention span…

As a last move, she pulls a peach chiffon cocktail dress out of her cedar chest, because she can’t remember why it’s there to begin with, but she thinks it will be perfect for our 11-year-old neighbor to wear as she sings “Some Day My Prince Will Come” at the climax of her production.

She goes in to lie down with Valium and air conditioning,  leaving us on our own.

That was my chance.

I did not like my part as one of the dwarfs.  I felt I was being under used.  I also had decided our leading lady was woefully inadequate.  Therefore, I took it upon myself to demonstrate how the “big number” should be done…

That’s when my Father, who WAS Don Draper, comes home, unexpectedly at 3:30, and all hell broke loose…

His only son is wearing a peach chiffon cocktail dress singing “Some Day, My Prince Will Come” at the top of his lungs in his backyard with all the neighborhood children watching.

His wife is nowhere to be seen….

What followed was not pretty.

Let’s just say my stage career ended immediately.

Daddy pulled me off stage and gave me a “talking to” I still recall.  I’ve never since seen a man so scared…

But I learned three things:

1. Never wear chiffon before 4:oo.
2. Never let people see who you really are
3. Never tell the truth to your Father

Number  2 took 30 years or so to work through.  Sadly, or not, the others stuck.

The next steps involved my Mother.

It was not pretty….

He stormed into her bedroom, with me in tow, and let into her.  In short, he said:

“Goddamnit Lou, I count on you to do two things:  Run my house and raise my children appropriately.  You obviously can’t do either.”

To make a long story short, she agreed to save face by working the “Tobacco Market” for 3 or 4 months a year as a Secretary for “pin-money” and my maternal Grandmother took over the House.  With a salary.  She wasn’t about to deal with her daughter for free.  The maid thing had simply not worked out.  That’s also another story…

And the house was run smoothly for a few years….

Today:  almost 40 years later….

My Mother is at her very expensive Assisted Living facility that my late Father’s money is paying for.  She is not having a good week.  This is basically what she was saying when we got there today:

“Your Father’s relatives were trying to kill me at my house.  They snuck in at night to poison me because they hate me.  You don’t know that they are like! They hated me because I inherited some of their money!  I also have a house I inherited  from your Father’s family, I need to go there, but they want to do me in before I can get it!  But, I guess I’ll stay here for a while where it’s safe…”

The drama, real or imagined, really never ends…

There is a big difference between “Southern Gothic” and “The Jerry Springer Show.”  I should know.  I’m Southern.  And I’m a Virginian.

Since I’m writing this blog, I feel this need to disclose the factors that color my perceptions.  Things a lot of people who know me know,  but that may surprise others.  In recent terminology, I’m “putting all my business in the Street.”

Discretion is so passe, so  what the hell?  So here we go…

“The Jerry Springer Show” is/was based on sensationalism and trashy revelations.  With our “Southern Gothic” tradition, we all know each other’s secrets and no one cares.  Therefore, we can’t have “revelations”…It’s the inverse to the New England reticence.

We may choose not to acknowledge or mention certain details, but as I said in the South, we all know each other’s business.  We accept things without comment.  Even when we know better…

We put our crazy relatives out with the “sane” ones.  It never really occurs to us they are different.  For us, it’s just normal to have crazy relatives and to accept differences within the Family.   No locking them in the attic for us!  Well, most of the time…

I grew up dealing with this situation.

The first thing my Mother did after marrying my Father was to have his Mother committed.

Like all good Southern stories, there are multiple versions of the tale.  The one I prefer is that my Grandmother, Susan Catherine Rush Michaels, called up my parents one evening and told them she had just ground up a Coca Cola bottle in her Waring blender and drank it in a drink to try to kill herself because she was tired and depressed.

My Mother had no sympathy for quitters.  And she wanted her furniture.  So, off Susie went to the State Hospital at Staunton.

Unfortunately, for my Mother, my Grandmother’s maiden sisters, who lived with her, sold all the furniture during the Commitment Trip for cash because they were afraid my Mother would put them on the street penniless.  My Mother never got over this betrayal.

It’s also important to note the differences between my Mother’s family and my Father’s family.

My Father liked to think he came from a background beyond reproach.  He claimed he was descended from  a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, and his relatives were allegedly inter-married with the Virginia Randolph family.

This means two things:  My Father could claim undisputed FFV status (First Family of Virginia, for the uninitiated-and no one ever disputes anyone’s claim) and that I was genetically predestined to go to Washington and Lee University.

My Mother’s family was from the mountains and coal fields of West Virginia.  They literally walked down to Virginia to work in the cotton mills.

In any event, my Mother ultimately became a Cheerleader, which we all know means a woman determined to better her station in life by jumping and screaming in front of hundreds of strangers in 30 degree weather.  I hear she was beautiful and a classic Southern Belle.  My Father never had a chance…They married in 1950.

What my Mother apparently didn’t know was that my Father was from the most respected category of Southern lineages:  Old Family, No Money.

This is another thing she never got over…She always thought a woman had one card to play- her virginity- and that it went to the man best positioned to enable her to retire early.  She never recovered from, in her mind, misplaying her card.

Growing up, I always thought my Mother’s first name was “Goddammit”.  As in, “Goddammit Lou, what were you thinking?” or “Goddammit Lou, how much is this going to cost me?”

I’ll never forget her coming downstairs to the den one night when I was about 12, all dressed up in a new negligee’ and trying to look fetching, and my father just looking at her and saying:  ”You still aren’t getting new furniture” and pouring another glass of bourbon.  Cheerleaders don’t have a long shelf life.

But it was her family that grounded me.  My Grandmother Sigmon could barely read and write, but I was much closer to her than the fancier Rush relatives.  I’m not quite sure how she produced my Mother.  She was non-judgemental, accepting of all people and infinitely curious about life.  She also thought my Mother was a pretentious fool.  My Father adored her.  She proved a Great Lady was made by an open heart and not by an open checkbook or family lineage.  She practically raised me, as a small child,  as my Mother was too busy with other things…

I found my Mother’s family infinitely interesting.  When she dumped me off at my Grandmother’s house in the Mill Village, I was in a different world.  Her instructions were not to play with anyone there or leave my Grandmother’s house.  She did not want me “mixing”.  But I did…

One of her brothers, my uncle, Wiseman Lafayette Sigmon, lived with my Grandmother and had not left the house since about 1945.  Today, we would call him crazy or agoraphobic.  Then, he was just different.  He would stay up late watching whatever would be on late night TV.  Back then, it wasn’t much.  But a lot of it was about history.  He loved history and learned it from TV.  I’m convinced he gave me my love of History that led me to major in it at Washington and Lee University so many years later.  He was crazy as a could be, but to me, he was just a normal part of my life.  I loved him.

My Mother’s Sister Goldie, was a working single woman.  Rare in that era.  She moved to Charlotte, NC, alone, in about 1965 and was the first one in her family to go out on her own.  She was a brilliant woman.  Valedictorian of her class in High School.  She took some college course, but never finished.  She knew her options were limited, but still made the best of it.  She was like my Auntie Mame.  She would sweep into Danville and give me a taste of the outside world.  She actually saw Carol Channing in “Hello Dolly” on Broadway, the first time she played it.  I never got over this revelation.  She let me know there was a life outside of Danville and  you could get out to a much more interesting place.  She also taught me not to forget your roots…She never did.  I’ve tried not to….I loved her very much.

My Uncle Sammy was a mystery to me.  He was younger than the others and just kind of a laid back, occasional presence.  He’s still an enigma to me.  I really don’t know him…

My other uncle, Daniel, was a cautionary tale.  I won’t speak of him too much as that was how I was raised-to not speak of or to him.  Let’s just say, I know White Trash when I see it.

This is where I come from…So, what can I say?

I learned to keep my eyes and ears open at an early age.  I come from a complicated background and from complicated people.  This all  taught me to watch people and question everyone and everything.  Not to accept anything at face value.  I have no regrets and many thanks for these lessons….

You know me a little better now, but none of this-and all of this- defines me.  That’s what it’s like to be Southern.  We like the Gothic side as much as the classy white bread side.  We invent ourselves and are a product of our past.

We all have secrets and we all usually know each other’s.  We just try to pretend otherwise.  We are raised to accept the perceptions one choses to offer at the expense of reality.  It’s much more pleasant.

We are all a mix of different energies.  That’s what makes us all unique and never boring…

I just choose to talk about the secrets and to explore them.

I’m getting older, but no less curious.  I want to revisit some of these secrets and memories from my older, hopefully wiser, perspective.

I want to keep all of this information forefront in my mind as I continue my journey.  It all colors who I am and will be…

It all means/meant different things at different stages in life.

And if Jerry Springer can put it all in the street to entertain people, I can put it out there to try to learn from it….