Peggy Jaeger, Author

What sounds worse – or better – from your perspective: 16 weeks or 4 months?

They mean the same thing, but to me, referring to something in weeks makes it seem…worse, for some reason.

Either way, weeks or months, this is the amount of time my mother has been gone.

I’m doing better. I know that because I’ve been having a lot of memories surface of all the horrible events I experienced as a kid when my mother was at the height of her paranoia and mental issues.

Although, she and my stepfather always denied she had any issues. He still does to this day.

In the grocery store the other day I was standing in the meat section and I glanced over and spotted a section devoted to baked hams. All of a sudden, an Easter Sunday when I was 11 shot to the front of my mind.

We were living in Staten Island, still in an apartment. My grandmother, my aunt, and my cousin were coming for dinner. This was the first time my mother had ever cooked for a holiday since she’d married my stepfather. His family never came to our home. Ever. We usually went to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, or my aunt’s, in Bay Ridge to celebrate a holiday or just visit.

How it came about my mother was the cook this year I don’t know. But my aunt was driving them in and my mother was in a tizzy about…everything. From the state of our apartment to the cook time for the ham, to her worrying something was going to happen to ruin the day.

Paranoiac foreshadowing? As it turns out, yes.

My grandmother made her displeasure known immediately when she walked through the door. They’d gotten caught in traffic on the Verrazano Bridge and she’d had to sit in the car for fifteen minutes without moving an inch. Of course, it was my mother’s fault for living in Staten Island – the old bitch made that evident.

Needless to say, things progressed downward from there.

No one ate the cheese and crackers appetizers my mother put out except for me. My grandmother commented several times that cheese was fattening and I was fat enough.

No one wanted a drink of the sparkling cider my mother had bought, except for me, and I wasn’t allowed. My mother thought it contained alcohol.

It didn’t, but she wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to read her the ingredients.

Now, our apartment building wasn’t the best-maintained place on earth and the appliances were all at that stage where they should have been replaced by the building management.

They weren’t. They were all the originals and had gone through about ten tenants by the time we moved in.

 My mother preheated the oven to the desired temp and when it was ready, placed the ham inside it in a roasting pan.

About ten minutes before it should have come out, the acrid odor of smoke wafted from the tiny kitchen. When we went in, you could see actual flames inside the oven through the glass door.

My aunt screamed, grabbed her daughter up in her arms, and bolted through the front door, heading for the hills, or in this case, the stairwell. My stepfather let loose with a string of curses and stood there scowling across the room at the oven, and my mother – with the forethought to grab potholders – yanked the oven door open, then pulled the roasting pan out with the flaming, on-fire ham in it. Instead of tossing it into the sink and running water on it to douse the flames, she tossed it out the window, roasting pan and all.

Why? A question she could never answer.

We lived on the sixth floor and our apartment faced the alley. The crashing sound of the metal roasting pan hitting the concrete pavement thundered up from the street level. We all went to the window – all except my grandmother and my runaway aunt, that is – to see the ham, still shooting flames. It had bounced from the pan to the top of a metal garbage can and landed with a thud.

Now, I neglected to mention it was raining buckets that Easter Sunday, which was the real reason for the traffic delay. Luckily, for my mother, it was coming down like crazy because the rainwater extinguished the ham after about a long minute of sitting on top of the garbage can lid, flaming.

I’m laughing like a hyena as I write this, but let me tell you, at the time it happened, no one was laughing, least of all my grandmother.

The old you-know-what screamed at my mother that she had ruined the holiest of holy days with her “stupidity.”

I remember asking, quite innocently, why she’d said that. My mother wasn’t stupid and it wasn’t her fault the oven caught on fire.

The backhand I got across my face shut me up quickly. My mother didn’t say or do a thing when her mother struck me. She just stood there, I believe, in shock.

My grandmother grabbed her purse and slammed out of the apartment, I assumed, to go look for my aunt. They obviously found one another, otherwise, my grandmother wouldn’t have been able to get home. She was never going to splurge on a taxi from Staten Island to Brooklyn – and remember: Uber didn’t exist in the 1970s.

I am still haunted by the utter deafening silence that filled our apartment after she left.

My stepfather cursed again and then started yelling at my mother that my grandmother was never welcome in his home again.

Silently, I said a prayer of thanks for that edict.

My mother, quietly, nodded, then slunk down to the kitchen table and dropped her head in her hands, and then began to cry.

My face was on fire – quite like the ham – from the slap. I remember being mad at my mother for not sticking up for me, but seeing her so ravaged with tears I did what I always did in situations where her emotions were overwhelming her, and sat down next to her and rubbed her back.

You can probably guess Easter isn’t my favorite holiday.

Those are the kinds of memories that have been surfacing for the past week or so. As I look back on them now, with an adult’s perspective, and through a mother’s eye, I realize several things I didn’t then:

1. my grandmother was a psychopath
2. she really hated my mother, and because I was her daughter, added me to the hated equation just because.
3. my mother had deep-rooted mental issues, centering on abandonment, which manifested whenever situations became too overwhelming for her. She couldn’t protect me because she’d never learned how to protect herself.
4. my stepfather was an enabler.

Kinda wish I’d known all these things as a kid, you know?