![\"img_5848_med\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/talkinggrid.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/img_5848_med.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a>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 \u201caccident.\u201d 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\u2019s wits end, screaming; desperate.<\/p>\nShe is always in control. Spoiled and lovely old lady, pretty and cute, everybody likes her\u2026 people lean in to love her. She still gets marriage proposals. Hah!<\/p>\n
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\u2026 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.<\/p>\n
Feeling relieved.\u00a0 My mother has gone back to her home, far away.\u00a0 Having her stay with me for three weeks was intense.<\/p>\n
First, I have to deal with the fact that she really needs a lot of care.\u00a0 I knew this was coming since childhood.\u00a0 I could tell she did not know… really, what was going on around her.\u00a0 I mean, she spoke no English\u2026 She was a Jehovah’s Witness. \u00a0She saw through the abuse of animals in the meat industry. \u00a0She trained me to reject fast food, frozen meals, and canned nightmares. \u00a0There was no Chef B\u2026 in our home. \u00a0She cooked everyday and taught me the importance of eating fresh food. \u00a0She kept an immaculately clean home. \u00a0She cleans, in fact, compulsively. \u00a0Which, has its pluses. \u00a0Hah!<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s English, on the other hand, was very good.\u00a0 Sure, he had an accent, but his vocabulary was quite vast and he wielded language with real panache.\u00a0 Spanish, he was extremely precise, he was after all an attorney in Dominican Republic, when they met, in their hometown of Santo Domingo. \u00a0When he was a young lawyer, at his first job and the Ricart girl was secretary to him and twelve other lawyers. \u00a0Hah!<\/p>\n
She got a cold. \u00a0He paid a visit to the home. \u00a0She could not see him so she returned the visit to his mother. \u00a0He was not home. \u00a0She met his mother and father. \u00a0They loved her. \u00a0She was so pretty. \u00a0It did not matter to them that she had children. \u00a0She was young, 26, or so\u2026 and a RICART! \u00a0Wow, in their home and she wasn\u2019t snobby. \u00a0She didn\u2019t seem to notice they were not\u2026 well like her.<\/p>\n
What year was it?\u00a0 I have the papers, in a suitcase, in my closet, but I will not go look.\u00a0 No.. I will guess.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Yes.\u00a0 She had FOUR.\u00a0 I am number FIVE!<\/p>\n
She started young.\u00a0 She was determined, she wanted to get married, out of her house, away from her father.\u00a0 She was convinced.\u00a0 It was love.\u00a0 He, a young tailor from down the block, was no-where-near ready for marriage so\u2026 of course, beat her and drank. \u00a0But she was raised on cruelty. \u00a0Her 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\u2019s blessing. \u00a0He never forgave her. \u00a0My 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\u2026 yet, after ONE week of my mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Because, yes, she let me die\u2026literally I flat lined in a hospital in New Jersey\u2026 as a child. \u00a0I saw the white light.<\/p>\n
Today, I\u2019m a mother of two and I live in California.\u00a0 I eat organic food.\u00a0 I am a New Yorker.\u00a0 I have a Latin temper, yet I do not experience the desire to harm others. \u00a0Typically, I\u2019m a buoyant, if moody artist, creative type. \u00a0 Ha!\u00a0 What a human!\u00a0 She is absolutely shocking.\u00a0 I must be exactly like her.\u00a0 I know my daughter is like her.\u00a0 My daughter, by the way, has decided to start listening to me since she met herself, times ten.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0This is my legacy. \u00a0I am the child of colonialism. \u00a0I am the granddaughter of the playboy Spaniard. \u00a0I am the daughter of the attorney, who became a furniture salesman in New York City. \u00a0My mother got what she wanted out of my father: a plane ticket out of Santo Doming. \u00a0She got her kids out too. \u00a0For them, my father and I were, strangers: \u00a0I am in effect an only child.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 He was supposed to care.\u00a0 Yet, caring was not his forte.\u00a0 He learned to gamble at an early age.\u00a0 Going to the sporting matches with his Spanish born father… during the reign of the Caribbean\u2019s most enduring dictatorial regime.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 Dominican Republic was for them an addiction.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He loved to bet.\u00a0 Winning had No Thing to do with what he did. He was a broken prop for the state.\u00a0 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\u2019s grave that, he was one of the political speech writers to… no one less than… the dictator. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Yes, grandfather Ricart was dashing.\u00a0 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\u2019ve never been to Cuba… I intend to visit St. Croix, where my father\u2019s people are from,\u00a0 but… my grandfather\u2019s cruelty lives on in my mother\u2019s ability to laugh at me or my father\u2019s best efforts to please her.\u00a0 She has the uncanny ability to drain me, wound me, leave me lacerated and not even notice that she inflicted any injury.\u00a0 Hah!<\/p>\n