When I was maybe five, a bunch of us were in our kitchen in Huntington Park in South Los Angeles. My new father and another guy were leaning up against our long, light green tiled area close to the sink. They each had a brown bottle of beer in their hands. All of the sudden my mother staggers in drunk (such a vulnerable person drunk) from the dining room, and I saw my father put out his right foot and trip her.
She fell hard to the floor. It was such a loud thud that other guests came running in asking what happened. I knew what happened, my father did too, but he said he didn’t know. It took two women (women have their innate suspicions, they always do when other women go to the floor like that) to get her into my bedroom and lay her on the bed. (My bedroom was directly off the kitchen and fairly big.)
My mother was knocked out. Our family doctor was called in. I was standing in the bedroom while the doctor attended to her. After a while, she began to speak. I witnessed the whole thing. Eventually, she was helped into her own bed.
The next morning (Monday), my father drank his hotly brewed coffee (the best smell I can remember from my early years). He smoked his morning cigarette. Afterwards, he was off to the Navy base on Terminal Island, Long Beach.
My mother came into the kitchen and poured a bowl of Cheerios into a medium sized bowl. Poured milk into the bowl. Peeled a banana and cut it into small pieces which dropped into the bowl. She poured a small (too small) amount of sugar into the bowl. In the meantime a piece of white Wonder Bread was toasted and buttered. My mother softly said, “Eat your Cheerios and toast. School today.”
She spoke nothing of the previous day. I’m not so sure she remembered. I didn’t ask her any questions. But, as if an inbred behavior was born into my soul that day, at five years of age, I appointed myself personal protector for my mother. How could my new father do that to my mother? Besides being very good to me, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. How could my father do that to such a beautiful woman? I thought he had to watch his step because my mother might divorce him.
After all she did it to my first father, whom I cannot ever remember seeing but once. (Quite an insight by a five year old. Of course I had nothing more than the intention to protect my mother. Hell, I couldn’t even protect myself. Plus, I did not want my mother to divorce my father. I liked having a father. But, I needed to protect my mother from herself.)
What’s the point? There is no point. . . . However, you crack these nuts open, and out pours memories that you didn’t know you had. It’s all in there. Good, bad, happy, sad. And, according to Freud, it dictates our behavior at an unconscious level throughout our entire lives. UNTIL . . . until it doesn’t.
Funny though, all my parents (3) have been deceased for between forty and sixty years. I’m still coming to resolution about it all. As one wiser than I said, “ husbands and wives test each other until there is a compromise – that’s how it works, one way or the other.“
