Dearest Readers of The Talkinggrid,
The best part about having one’s own blog is that one is FREE to write about touchy subjects; like family and Feelings.
We all have families and we all have feeling about our childhoods, when we were powerless. Some of us NEVER Grow UP and are thus, forever powerless.
I am the daughter of an adult child. She has never done a single harmful thing to any other person on purpose. She does it all by “accident.” She is never responsible. She is always and forever the the victim in any interaction. She will not relent in her defiance until one is at one’s wits end, screaming; desperate.
She is always in control. Spoiled and lovely old lady, pretty and cute, everybody likes her… people lean in to love her. She still gets marriage proposals. Hah!
Yet, she is exclusively attracted to Spanish, I mean European men, like her X husband, a man at least twenty years her junior, the one she married after she divorced my father for the second time, younger than her oldest son… ouch. My father was no thing like the little boys she digs. He was big, strong, craving power, looking for status, marrying her in hopes of entering into a very closed circle of elites in the island nation of Dominican Republic, where he was born, a parvenu with parents from the British Virgin Isle of St. Croix.
Feeling relieved. My mother has gone back to her home, far away. Having her stay with me for three weeks was intense.
First, I have to deal with the fact that she really needs a lot of care. I knew this was coming since childhood. I could tell she did not know… really, what was going on around her. I mean, she spoke no English… She was a Jehovah’s Witness. She saw through the abuse of animals in the meat industry. She trained me to reject fast food, frozen meals, and canned nightmares. There was no Chef B… in our home. She cooked everyday and taught me the importance of eating fresh food. She kept an immaculately clean home. She cleans, in fact, compulsively. Which, has its pluses. Hah!
My father’s English, on the other hand, was very good. Sure, he had an accent, but his vocabulary was quite vast and he wielded language with real panache. Spanish, he was extremely precise, he was after all an attorney in Dominican Republic, when they met, in their hometown of Santo Domingo. When he was a young lawyer, at his first job and the Ricart girl was secretary to him and twelve other lawyers. Hah!
She got a cold. He paid a visit to the home. She could not see him so she returned the visit to his mother. He was not home. She met his mother and father. They loved her. She was so pretty. It did not matter to them that she had children. She was young, 26, or so… and a RICART! Wow, in their home and she wasn’t snobby. She didn’t seem to notice they were not… well like her.
What year was it? I have the papers, in a suitcase, in my closet, but I will not go look. No.. I will guess. I was born… yes, so it had to before that… and well they met, she got sick, he paid a visit at her family home where she was living with her FOUR CHILDREN.
Yes. She had FOUR. I am number FIVE!
She started young. She was determined, she wanted to get married, out of her house, away from her father. She was convinced. It was love. He, a young tailor from down the block, was no-where-near ready for marriage so… of course, beat her and drank. But she was raised on cruelty. Her father beat her and her mother every chance he got, because he had told Maria Dolores Perez, the pretty fashion designer, that he wanted NO CHILDREN, she defied him in having my mother, with his mother’s blessing. He never forgave her. My mother was born into a home where a sense of scarcity underlined every luxury, every piece of finery, where people DIE of Hunger, and the poor live in conditions, unthinkable to most… yet, after ONE week of my mother’s voracious appetite for LOVE, attention, and service, all the while, proclaiming her LOVE for Jehovah, after ONE week with her I was tempted to punch her in the face.
Because, yes, she let me die…literally I flat lined in a hospital in New Jersey… as a child. I saw the white light.
Today, I’m a mother of two and I live in California. I eat organic food. I am a New Yorker. I have a Latin temper, yet I do not experience the desire to harm others. Typically, I’m a buoyant, if moody artist, creative type. Ha! What a human! She is absolutely shocking. I must be exactly like her. I know my daughter is like her. My daughter, by the way, has decided to start listening to me since she met herself, times ten.
My mother was, on the one hand, a very spoiled child and other the other, an neglected and abused, unwanted daughter to a M O N S T E R. This is my legacy. I am the child of colonialism. I am the granddaughter of the playboy Spaniard. I am the daughter of the attorney, who became a furniture salesman in New York City. My mother got what she wanted out of my father: a plane ticket out of Santo Doming. She got her kids out too. For them, my father and I were, strangers: I am in effect an only child.
Her mother decided to have the child and leave her in the care of all-loving, Alta Gracia Ricart, the wife of Eduardo George Ricart, mother of the three sisters… and ONE son, he was supposed to be responsible for his sisters. He was supposed to care. Yet, caring was not his forte. He learned to gamble at an early age. Going to the sporting matches with his Spanish born father… during the reign of the Caribbean’s most enduring dictatorial regime. His cousin, married to the son of El Jefe… life was grand for them… almost all the Ricart were a northern blond/brown haired hearty stock of Spanish, olive oil, international merchants and importers, of a product the island nation they loved, to vacation, so much FUN! Dominican Republic was for them an addiction. It had everything they wanted: pretty women, mixed girls everywhere, hungry lovely happy musical dancing entertaining people to serve and cock fights, are even more FUN than bull fights and YOU know that crazy SPANISH look Picasso had in his eye… Grandfather Ricart was a world class gambler, he worked for the state in its casinos. He loved to bet. Winning had No Thing to do with what he did. He was a broken prop for the state. It was his public duty to show how RICH and extravagant… My family, his sister, my aunt told me in November 2013, when I went to visit my father’s grave that, he was one of the political speech writers to… no one less than… the dictator. Not too surprising considering that his uncle was no less than Mejilla Ricart, the historian of the early Dominica People, who has an large avenue named after him, today, in Santo Domingo, the capital of our, the first nation in the New World, with the first church, first university: of which my father is a doctoral graduate.
Yes, grandfather Ricart was dashing. His entire family held sway that to this day, in Dominican Republic, I am home, like nowhere else… I speak and people hear in my voice that payment is forthcoming, that I KNOW what I am speaking of, and that I am comfortable in my own knowing… thus, I love Puerto Rico… I’ve never been to Cuba… I intend to visit St. Croix, where my father’s people are from, but… my grandfather’s cruelty lives on in my mother’s ability to laugh at me or my father’s best efforts to please her. She has the uncanny ability to drain me, wound me, leave me lacerated and not even notice that she inflicted any injury. Hah!
When I was young in New York, growing up… I left home early, and I always favored the taller blue-eyed more refined yet country boys. My boyfriend was all of the above and more, he got me a job cooking, which fortunately, I learned from my mother the importance of nutrition and domesticity… thus, I knew how important it was to learn to cook and I worked hard in low-level yet professional cooking situations, such as health clubs and other venues. At one point I made a turkey a day...
My father was by everyone’s, except his own, understanding a “BLACK MAN!” He never told me he was a black man. He told me he had to be careful, always wear suits, be extra polite, keep his hands in sight, be attentive, listen, pay attention, read more, work more, stay longer, be on-point: precise. He taught me how to fight. How to punch. Hit. How to be first. “Carry a book with you at all times!” Was a maxim in my home. He kept a library. He taught me to read. I went to school speaking fluent Spanish and pretty good English, too. I could read by age three. I was designated “gifted.” I was his girl.
My father worshiped my grandfather. He had grown up during the dictatorship. He had read the news papers about the leading families and how beautiful they were and how splendid it was that El Jefe was allowing the Jews asylum, from Nazi Germany, and how our highway and telephone system where the best in the Caribbean. My father was a quick boy, his dad a Marine Mechanic and his mom a domestic in a grand home, but she had learned British style service, which gave her a certain panache unlike the typical Dominica, housekeeper. My father was a boy with a talent, pitching stones with rat kill accuracy and listening to the signs on the wall. He was a shoe-shine boy. He was the one they could trust with a more important errand. He was fast, reliable. He got into law school and decided that baseball, was NOT a worthy profession for someone like him, much like I reached a certain point with cooking and realized I need a more intellectual profession. Besides, I’d always called myself an, “artist.”
Grandfather Ricart was very blond and blue eyed and a darling of the state, cousins with Octavia Ricart. You don’t need to look to far into the history of Dominican Republic, “discovered,” by Columbus; when he smacked into the island of Hispañola in 1492, to learn about the dictatorship… just look it up. The lists with the families that “owned,” Dominican Republic and decided who could and who could not… the name Ricart, figures prominently, for generations… in Dominican society and politics… today, my family, are administrators, educated people, servants of the state: forever.
You don’t have to look into the history of evil because, evil is common. It springs up from deep within a lizard’s heart, as it squirms from the sea floor out to the dry land, legs spring from deep within its boney self and running it goes to hide in a tree… the rest is my song.
