I have always loved my mum who adopted me but I do remember when I was a young woman finding fault in some things that happened in my childhood. But when I had my own kids I really appreciated what great job she had done as a mother - and my admiration for her grew tremendously. I really admire your honesty in this strong piece
Thank you for being so open about your childhood and the relationship with your mother. It couldn't have been easy for you to be sent from family to family. Glad you have a good relationship with your mom now.
I really appreciate how open and real your words are. My mum always used to say that I would understand her struggles when I became a mother myself, and reading your essay really made me see why she was right. Your new perspective on your own mum really shows how true this is. I'm so happy to hear you found such a deep and loving connection with her later in life. Thank you so much for sharing, Chingmay.
My mom said a couple of times to me (when we began to bond and bud, and I hadn’t had children yet) that there was no offense to me, but it’s better not to have kids if it’s not necessary. That was her advice to me. I wasn’t offended at all. I think some women just aren’t mom material. 😊
She was persuaded by my dad to have kids. Supposedly, he wanted a dozen. I think she didn't know that he wouldn't be a participating dad at all.
Your story is such a wake up call to me for an entirely different reason. My relationship with my dad have been very rocky within the past few years and maybe, just maybe, if I had the wisdom like you have here.. I can switch my angle and try to see my dad from another pov--a more compassionate one. Thank you for this kind of wisdom ❤️🩹
Oh, how I skipped off towards home that afternoon, stopping only once to catch a glimpse of a stranger in the deli's plate-glass window. Teased hair, lips painted fuschia pink, tweezed eyebrows penciled black. I stuck a pose and sauntered on. Mother was waiting.
"What have you done?" she cried, pointing to my brows. "Your father's legacy. Ruined. Go wash your face!"
That night, I stole the single photograph, hidden inside a Sinatra record album, and brought my dictionary to bed. Legacy??
I looked and looked into my father's smiling eyes, ran my finger down his straight nose, around cheekbones high and firm, across his bushy brows. I think I fell asleep, his perfectly sculpted lips pressed lightly to my own.
Mother always said she married my father because he was gorgeous. He was. The photograph, now framed and hanging on my staircase wall, confirms it. Still, a photo shows only a shallow truth. The back story isn’t always as pretty; it’s complicated, murky, sometimes ugly.
My mother, Norma Jean Pittenger, met my father, DeVoe (Joe) Harriott, in the spring of 1944 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where they were both enrolled.
“Joe was the best-looking guy on campus,” my mother said. She had seen him around, usually with coeds flocking near like preening pigeons, and admired him from afar. One fateful day, Joe staggered into economics class, tardy and drunk. The professor was not amused. Mother was. Joe asked her to go for coffee that afternoon. She accepted.
“Surely there were other things you appreciated about Joe,” I often remarked.
“Oh, he was charming, stylish, intelligent, witty, tall, and fun,” Mother answered, “but, God, he was handsome.”
Mother, with her smooth brown skin, long ebony hair, and perfect Pepsodent smile, got the guy. A few months later, after a night of bourbon and 7-Ups, they were married. Joe pulled Norma into his car and drove straight through Iowa to Kansas. They tied the knot at a justice of the peace off the highway, two friends along for the ride, as witnesses.
Joe had been married before. Mother had known that he had fathered a couple of kids (he claimed one daughter), but she didn’t care. She was 20 and in love. Soon after the elopement, Joe transferred to the University of Minnesota. He and Mother moved to Minneapolis and set up a household in the bleak Quonset hut village for married students.
Minnesota winters are brutal and long. I was conceived in November 1945. Perhaps coincidentally, Joe took to carousing like an old tomcat right about then.
“Let’s see . . . I’ve got my ID. Got some money. Got some rubbers,” he would say, patting his right hip pocket as he bolted out the door. Mother fumed, and I’ve heard this tale more times than I care to remember.
Mother, miserable, powerless, wrote letters to Gramma, begging her to take the train from Des Moines to visit.
“Please don’t have any more babies,” Gramma warned, but Mother was already pregnant with my sister, Renee.
Years later, eons after Joe died an alcoholic’s death, cirrhosis of the liver, in a sleazy downtown Minneapolis hotel, Mother, full of cocktails, leaned across the kitchen table and jabbed her finger in my chest.
“I know why you’re so f***ed up!” she slurred. “I always left you home alone when I went to the laundromat.”
“Wonderful,” I said, “you’d be charged with child endangerment for that today.”
“You don’t have kids. You can’t understand,” she retorted.
Seething with anger, I should have stormed from the room. I didn’t. I longed to hear more. Her stories were like misplaced pieces from the jigsaw puzzle of my life.
I don’t remember my father; I have no memories of him whatsoever. I know of him only through Mother’s repeated narratives and from what I conjure up in my imagination.
As a teenager, I came across a poem Joe had written in school, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of notebook paper, buried beneath some snapshots. I gleaned nothing from it. In photographs, Joe looks pleasant. He’s grinning and cuddling his daughters. In one, I’m sitting on his lap; in another, my baby sister, Renee, is laughing down at him as he holds her high in the air, his back to the camera.
Mother claimed Joe was out boozing the night I was born. He showed up at the hospital the next morning, hung over. He took one look at me and said, “She’s scrawny, isn’t she?”
“You’re the spitting image of Joe,” Mother always said. “And you absolutely adored him. You’d stand at the window in the late afternoon and wait for Joe to come home. When you saw him outside, you’d shout, ‘Here comes my daddy now!’”
Picturing this scene, I feel a great melancholy wash over me; I quickly close the curtains. I’m unable to gaze into the past for too long without wondering what might have been.
The inevitable end to this tale is actual fact. My mother caught my father with another woman. One rash night, while a neighbor watched us girls, Mother hopped on a bus, traveled downtown to Joe’s favorite hangout, didn’t find him, stalked to a nearby hotel, rode the elevator to “Joe’s door,” and tried to break it down with a fist and a curse. In the retelling, Joe opened that door and a marriage ended, just like in a B movie.
I don’t want to know the grimy details of that encounter and, from there, Mother’s accounts turned vague anyway.
Joe graduated from college soon after that, which necessitated our move from married-student housing. He packed us off to Des Moines while he hunted for a place to live. We never saw him again.
Mother filed for divorce, found a job, and we stayed with Gram until Mother remarried.
“Didn’t you consider leaving when you knew Joe was cheating?” I asked my mother a thousand times. “And didn’t you ever think about planning ahead?”
Mother had no answers.
My father, Joe Harriott, was, at best, an attractive, troubled man; at worst, a selfish, colossal jerk. Countless clues pointed to his instability, but my mother chose to ignore them.
I want to hate my father. I want to hate my mother.
As time passes and memory blurs, I’ve come to accept these people, my parents. They’re human, flawed and fumbling like the rest of us, after all.
For most of my life, I feigned indifference to my father. While my sister tried desperately to make a connection with “Daddy,” through letters, cards, and telephone calls (I have no idea how she got his address or phone number). I didn’t. Years later, I learned that I had frequently passed by the very spot where Joe spent his final months alive, while I, full of hope and promise, walked to my first career job at Dayton’s Department Store, in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1968. I find this both ironic and depressing.
My glamorous, intelligent, screwed-up father died at 50 in a fleabag hotel room, sick and alone, having never reconciled with his two (or four?) daughters. What a waste. What a tragic, unfathomable waste.
Sometimes I indulge in a reverie. . . .
I envision a reunion with Joe. I look him in the eye and ask, “Why? Why did you leave us?” But Joe has no answers, either.
The trouble with fantasy is that it glamorizes the truth. When I think of my father, I always see a beautiful, elegant man, a man ambered in time. I see that movie-star gorgeous guy elegantly posed in old photographs.
Inevitably… reality creeps in . . . as a door creaks open . . . I’m face to face with a bloated, wrinkled, washed-out loser. The drinking life is a hard life; it destroys beauty, charisma, potential, relationships . . . everything.
Still, my mother was wrong — I do understand some things. I understand WANT. I understand NEED. I understand LOSS. This is my father’s legacy.
It seems that your mother, like mine, wasn't destined to be a good parent. Thank goodness for grandmothers!
My mother was critical and verbally abusive to me all my life (she called me crazy too many times to count) while my grandmother offered me unconditional love and a safe haven to be myself. She was the only one who attended my college graduation. Looking back, I can't understand why in the world my parents did not attend this life altering event, especially since I was the only child, of four, who graduated with a degree, then continued on getting a fifth year so that I could teach in California.
That you finally established a bond is very good news and I'm sure has helped resolve some, if not all, of your childhood issues. Good for you both! xxoo
I have always loved my mum who adopted me but I do remember when I was a young woman finding fault in some things that happened in my childhood. But when I had my own kids I really appreciated what great job she had done as a mother - and my admiration for her grew tremendously. I really admire your honesty in this strong piece
Thank you for being so open about your childhood and the relationship with your mother. It couldn't have been easy for you to be sent from family to family. Glad you have a good relationship with your mom now.
Thank you💕
I really appreciate how open and real your words are. My mum always used to say that I would understand her struggles when I became a mother myself, and reading your essay really made me see why she was right. Your new perspective on your own mum really shows how true this is. I'm so happy to hear you found such a deep and loving connection with her later in life. Thank you so much for sharing, Chingmay.
My mom said a couple of times to me (when we began to bond and bud, and I hadn’t had children yet) that there was no offense to me, but it’s better not to have kids if it’s not necessary. That was her advice to me. I wasn’t offended at all. I think some women just aren’t mom material. 😊
She was persuaded by my dad to have kids. Supposedly, he wanted a dozen. I think she didn't know that he wouldn't be a participating dad at all.
I'm glad you found the connection
Your story is such a wake up call to me for an entirely different reason. My relationship with my dad have been very rocky within the past few years and maybe, just maybe, if I had the wisdom like you have here.. I can switch my angle and try to see my dad from another pov--a more compassionate one. Thank you for this kind of wisdom ❤️🩹
Hi A, thank you 💕
MY FATHER’S LEGACY
Oh, how I skipped off towards home that afternoon, stopping only once to catch a glimpse of a stranger in the deli's plate-glass window. Teased hair, lips painted fuschia pink, tweezed eyebrows penciled black. I stuck a pose and sauntered on. Mother was waiting.
"What have you done?" she cried, pointing to my brows. "Your father's legacy. Ruined. Go wash your face!"
That night, I stole the single photograph, hidden inside a Sinatra record album, and brought my dictionary to bed. Legacy??
I looked and looked into my father's smiling eyes, ran my finger down his straight nose, around cheekbones high and firm, across his bushy brows. I think I fell asleep, his perfectly sculpted lips pressed lightly to my own.
Mother always said she married my father because he was gorgeous. He was. The photograph, now framed and hanging on my staircase wall, confirms it. Still, a photo shows only a shallow truth. The back story isn’t always as pretty; it’s complicated, murky, sometimes ugly.
My mother, Norma Jean Pittenger, met my father, DeVoe (Joe) Harriott, in the spring of 1944 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where they were both enrolled.
“Joe was the best-looking guy on campus,” my mother said. She had seen him around, usually with coeds flocking near like preening pigeons, and admired him from afar. One fateful day, Joe staggered into economics class, tardy and drunk. The professor was not amused. Mother was. Joe asked her to go for coffee that afternoon. She accepted.
“Surely there were other things you appreciated about Joe,” I often remarked.
“Oh, he was charming, stylish, intelligent, witty, tall, and fun,” Mother answered, “but, God, he was handsome.”
Mother, with her smooth brown skin, long ebony hair, and perfect Pepsodent smile, got the guy. A few months later, after a night of bourbon and 7-Ups, they were married. Joe pulled Norma into his car and drove straight through Iowa to Kansas. They tied the knot at a justice of the peace off the highway, two friends along for the ride, as witnesses.
Joe had been married before. Mother had known that he had fathered a couple of kids (he claimed one daughter), but she didn’t care. She was 20 and in love. Soon after the elopement, Joe transferred to the University of Minnesota. He and Mother moved to Minneapolis and set up a household in the bleak Quonset hut village for married students.
Minnesota winters are brutal and long. I was conceived in November 1945. Perhaps coincidentally, Joe took to carousing like an old tomcat right about then.
“Let’s see . . . I’ve got my ID. Got some money. Got some rubbers,” he would say, patting his right hip pocket as he bolted out the door. Mother fumed, and I’ve heard this tale more times than I care to remember.
Mother, miserable, powerless, wrote letters to Gramma, begging her to take the train from Des Moines to visit.
“Please don’t have any more babies,” Gramma warned, but Mother was already pregnant with my sister, Renee.
Years later, eons after Joe died an alcoholic’s death, cirrhosis of the liver, in a sleazy downtown Minneapolis hotel, Mother, full of cocktails, leaned across the kitchen table and jabbed her finger in my chest.
“I know why you’re so f***ed up!” she slurred. “I always left you home alone when I went to the laundromat.”
“Wonderful,” I said, “you’d be charged with child endangerment for that today.”
“You don’t have kids. You can’t understand,” she retorted.
Seething with anger, I should have stormed from the room. I didn’t. I longed to hear more. Her stories were like misplaced pieces from the jigsaw puzzle of my life.
I don’t remember my father; I have no memories of him whatsoever. I know of him only through Mother’s repeated narratives and from what I conjure up in my imagination.
As a teenager, I came across a poem Joe had written in school, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of notebook paper, buried beneath some snapshots. I gleaned nothing from it. In photographs, Joe looks pleasant. He’s grinning and cuddling his daughters. In one, I’m sitting on his lap; in another, my baby sister, Renee, is laughing down at him as he holds her high in the air, his back to the camera.
Mother claimed Joe was out boozing the night I was born. He showed up at the hospital the next morning, hung over. He took one look at me and said, “She’s scrawny, isn’t she?”
“You’re the spitting image of Joe,” Mother always said. “And you absolutely adored him. You’d stand at the window in the late afternoon and wait for Joe to come home. When you saw him outside, you’d shout, ‘Here comes my daddy now!’”
Picturing this scene, I feel a great melancholy wash over me; I quickly close the curtains. I’m unable to gaze into the past for too long without wondering what might have been.
The inevitable end to this tale is actual fact. My mother caught my father with another woman. One rash night, while a neighbor watched us girls, Mother hopped on a bus, traveled downtown to Joe’s favorite hangout, didn’t find him, stalked to a nearby hotel, rode the elevator to “Joe’s door,” and tried to break it down with a fist and a curse. In the retelling, Joe opened that door and a marriage ended, just like in a B movie.
I don’t want to know the grimy details of that encounter and, from there, Mother’s accounts turned vague anyway.
Joe graduated from college soon after that, which necessitated our move from married-student housing. He packed us off to Des Moines while he hunted for a place to live. We never saw him again.
Mother filed for divorce, found a job, and we stayed with Gram until Mother remarried.
“Didn’t you consider leaving when you knew Joe was cheating?” I asked my mother a thousand times. “And didn’t you ever think about planning ahead?”
Mother had no answers.
My father, Joe Harriott, was, at best, an attractive, troubled man; at worst, a selfish, colossal jerk. Countless clues pointed to his instability, but my mother chose to ignore them.
I want to hate my father. I want to hate my mother.
As time passes and memory blurs, I’ve come to accept these people, my parents. They’re human, flawed and fumbling like the rest of us, after all.
For most of my life, I feigned indifference to my father. While my sister tried desperately to make a connection with “Daddy,” through letters, cards, and telephone calls (I have no idea how she got his address or phone number). I didn’t. Years later, I learned that I had frequently passed by the very spot where Joe spent his final months alive, while I, full of hope and promise, walked to my first career job at Dayton’s Department Store, in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1968. I find this both ironic and depressing.
My glamorous, intelligent, screwed-up father died at 50 in a fleabag hotel room, sick and alone, having never reconciled with his two (or four?) daughters. What a waste. What a tragic, unfathomable waste.
Sometimes I indulge in a reverie. . . .
I envision a reunion with Joe. I look him in the eye and ask, “Why? Why did you leave us?” But Joe has no answers, either.
The trouble with fantasy is that it glamorizes the truth. When I think of my father, I always see a beautiful, elegant man, a man ambered in time. I see that movie-star gorgeous guy elegantly posed in old photographs.
Inevitably… reality creeps in . . . as a door creaks open . . . I’m face to face with a bloated, wrinkled, washed-out loser. The drinking life is a hard life; it destroys beauty, charisma, potential, relationships . . . everything.
Still, my mother was wrong — I do understand some things. I understand WANT. I understand NEED. I understand LOSS. This is my father’s legacy.
Thanks for sharing your story. My mom used to say I got my dad’s smile (not in a way as if she was happy about that).
That's passive/aggressive....just like my mother would say I had a phoney smile. Who in their right mind says things like that to a child??!!
It seems that your mother, like mine, wasn't destined to be a good parent. Thank goodness for grandmothers!
My mother was critical and verbally abusive to me all my life (she called me crazy too many times to count) while my grandmother offered me unconditional love and a safe haven to be myself. She was the only one who attended my college graduation. Looking back, I can't understand why in the world my parents did not attend this life altering event, especially since I was the only child, of four, who graduated with a degree, then continued on getting a fifth year so that I could teach in California.
That you finally established a bond is very good news and I'm sure has helped resolve some, if not all, of your childhood issues. Good for you both! xxoo
Thank you❤️