Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:08] Today, I thought I would talk a little bit about my mom.
[00:00:12] My mom was very important to me in my life.
[00:00:18] And before I really launch into the whole story of my life, I feel like I need a little disclaimer up front.
[00:00:28] Nobody has a perfect life.
[00:00:31] All of us have been through some kind of trauma in our life, and you don't really know about the trauma or understand the trauma until you're old enough to actually look back and really reflect on it.
[00:00:48] I think that's important to say because I'm going to tell you a story about the relationships in my immediate family with my mom being in the center and how that impacted me in my life.
[00:01:08] But I would say it's not something that I hold on to every day. It's something that I understand, and I learned how to live and cope with it.
[00:01:21] And my mom was a very important person to me in my life.
[00:01:27] My mom had a wonderful, wonderful sense of humor, sometimes at the price of the individual she was teasing, which most of the time was me.
[00:01:41] But I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as I have laughed with my mom.
[00:01:47] And in later years when she came to live with me, when I had first adopted my two daughters, we spent so much time laughing, laughing about everything.
[00:02:01] And it was just such a positive memory and part of my life.
[00:02:10] And I feel so fortunate that I had such a close relationship with her as I grew older in my life, and I am very grateful for that.
[00:02:23] But I'm going to tell you a story that's kind of disturbing, and it just kind of speaks to the family dynamics.
[00:02:33] It also speaks to the fact that in your own personal life, your outside family, your friends, your teachers, the people that you're hanging around with, they have no real understanding of what's going on in your own personal life.
[00:02:55] Especially for me. And I know probably a lot of people find that hard to believe because I am an extrovert.
[00:03:02] I have no problem talking about things if asked.
[00:03:07] But I think I tried a lot of times to fly under the radar when it came to my own personal life. And I really have not talked about it. As a matter of fact, since I've been doing this podcast, I can't tell you the amount of times my friends have said, I never knew that about you. I never knew that.
[00:03:28] And.
[00:03:29] And that's when you know I think I am an extrovert. And I actually do spend a lot of time talk. That's why I can do a podcast, but do I really share the intimate, personal details of my life with people?
[00:03:48] Probably not.
[00:03:50] I think this has been a venue, the podcast, for me to heal myself, since I haven't talked about a lot of things in my life.
[00:04:04] So with all that being said, I'm going to talk to you about my mom.
[00:04:10] My mom was 24 years old when she had me, and like I've said in previous podcasts, my dad had been married once before and he already had two daughters.
[00:04:23] They were 10 and 12 when I was born.
[00:04:28] He was very, very happy to have another daughter. He was thrilled about it and. But my mom, not so much.
[00:04:36] I think I've explained to you that it was very important at that time that the woman have a male child and the male child would be able to carry on the name. And it was really like a big deal back then.
[00:04:56] So she was disappointed in having a daughter.
[00:05:00] And, I mean, she didn't talk down to me or anything. I would say that she ignored me. That's a better way to put it. She definitely ignored me.
[00:05:11] And, you know, I was outside most of the time playing, which is why I ended up to be such an outdoorsy kid.
[00:05:21] When my brother was born, she was elated about my brother being born now. He was 15 months younger than me, and as I have previously said, he was sickly. He had bronchitis and had to go under the croup tent, as they said back then.
[00:05:39] We had the vaporizer going most of the time. He was growing up with Vicks in it. I don't know if any of you remember that, but he was always getting steamed at night with Vicks Vapor rub.
[00:05:52] And so he.
[00:05:55] He wasn't sick all the time, though, but he had his moments where he was sick. And they would be very concerned, my parents, about him.
[00:06:04] Well, what kind of developed from that experience with him is that my dad didn't really want my brother to do much.
[00:06:18] The other thing is that my dad was a perfectionist. I mean, absolutely a perfectionist. If you could have seen his closet, you would be like, holy moly.
[00:06:28] He. He was a salesman or the vice president of a car company, and so he always had suits on. That was a time when people wore suits more often to work.
[00:06:41] And he might have 40 suit jackets, sports jackets and suits in his closet. He had one closet just for himself, and then they had a big closet where they shared their clothes. And there was never one thing out of place in my dad's closet.
[00:07:01] The same for his medicine cabinet. He had his Own medicine cabinet. My mom had her own medicine cabinet. I remember walking into the bathroom and it was like, from one end to the other, it was like two completely different worlds. My mom was messy. There are fingernail files, fingernail polish, eye makeup, all that stuff on her sink area. Her medicine cabinet was a mess. Her drawers were a mess.
[00:07:30] And I go over to my dad's side. There wasn't one thing out of place. Everything was neatly in place. He would come home from work and let's say he needed to get a fingernail clipper out of the cabinet cabinet.
[00:07:44] If I had gone in the cabinet that day and gotten the clipper to clip my fingernails and put it back, he would know and he'd be like, okay, who was in my medicine cabinet today? And use my nail file clipper, my fingernail clipper.
[00:08:00] I say, I did. Well, you didn't put the clipper back in the right place.
[00:08:05] So this is what I'm talking about.
[00:08:07] Extremely anal retentive, as we used to call it.
[00:08:13] My brother's characteristics were a lot more like my mom. And he was messy.
[00:08:19] Plus he had been sick on top of it.
[00:08:23] So my dad was very frustrated with my brother. As a son, he didn't want my brother to do much of anything. First of all, he didn't want him to get sick. He thought he was sickly.
[00:08:37] But the other thing is that my brother was never, ever in this lifetime going to be able to do things in such a perfect, detailed way as my dad, to meet my dad's expectations. That would be impossible.
[00:08:54] Impossible.
[00:08:56] So I remember one time he let my brother mow the lawn, and the rows were not even up and down, and he had missed a couple of spots.
[00:09:10] And so my dad said, okay, that's it. You're never going to mow the lawn again.
[00:09:15] I am not kidding you. So my brother never mowed the lawn. My dad always mowed the lawn.
[00:09:22] Matter of fact, my brother did very little because my dad didn't think he was capable.
[00:09:28] My mom. This turned my mom into being overprotective of my brother. And you can understand that, right? It makes perfect sense.
[00:09:39] But to me, it ended up to be like a triangle. I always felt like an outsider outside of the triangle looking in.
[00:09:50] I never felt like I was part of that family.
[00:09:56] And because of that, I just became more involved with my friends. I had a lot of great friends whom I still have today.
[00:10:04] And honestly, they are the ones that saved me in this world. I would say also that I had some very good teachers and mentors that were looking out for me.
[00:10:16] It really wasn't my parents that were looking out for me because they were kind of fighting over my brother. And that is the truth.
[00:10:26] My mom saw how the relationship was going to go between my dad and my brother and this really troubled her. Now, this isn't something she really told me until later on, but I think it became her mission to be overprotective of my brother.
[00:10:45] She was going to make sure that he got the things he needed because he wasn't going to get them from my dad. My dad was always going to be extremely critical of my brother.
[00:10:57] So I think it all finally came to a head one day.
[00:11:08] And the truth of what happened I didn't even know about until years later. No one ever even told me.
[00:11:19] It was on a Saturday morning.
[00:11:22] My brother wasn't home.
[00:11:24] He was out playing with the neighbors or doing something.
[00:11:28] But I was home because on Saturdays, that was the day when I was assigned to clean the house.
[00:11:36] And so I had to dust everything, which isn't a big deal, dusting and vacuuming.
[00:11:42] But I was also expected to fill a bucket of water and wash down all the baseboards in the house.
[00:11:50] Seriously, I'm seriously not kidding you.
[00:11:54] I think I managed to get out of it a couple times. And later on I started learning that you could use the vacuum to do that. But in the beginning, he wanted me to actually get a bucket out and wash the baseboards down.
[00:12:08] So I had been cleaning the house. I was 13 at the time. We were living on a house on Hillsdale street and it was an older house and my dad worked a half a day on Saturday.
[00:12:24] And then when he got home at noon, he would go upstairs and inspect our rooms to make sure that we had done our chores and got our rooms cleaned. And we were allowed to then, you know, have a free afternoon or do what we needed to do. This had become a routine and I didn't really think too much of it.
[00:12:48] I remember grumbling a few times because here I am always doing all the work.
[00:12:54] Sounds just like a 13 year old kid. Like, why does he get to go have fun? Why do I always have to do all the work? I mean, that was a continual argument, trust me.
[00:13:05] But I think my dad did trust that I would do a good job. My brother was a little bit more laissez faire about cleaning.
[00:13:15] So it just wasn't important to my brother. And, you know, why would it be? It's not. He. He just wasn't built that way.
[00:13:25] So my dad comes home, he goes Upstairs, he's checking out our rooms. And all of a sudden I hear him come running back down the stairs. I didn't think too much of it. I'm in the living room now, and he goes into the kitchen. The kitchen was right off the living room.
[00:13:44] It was during a time when some crazy person had decided that people should have carpet in their kitchen. Whoever came up with that crazy idea, I will never know. Because all the food crumbs, all if you had any food spills, even if you spilled a drink, then your carpet was always a mess. I never was a fan of having carpet in the kitchen, even at an early age. It just didn't make sense to me.
[00:14:11] But I digress.
[00:14:13] Let's just say that in our kitchen we had yellow carpet. Yellow was my mom's favorite color. So I think he talked my mom into getting carpet. And the only way he could get carpet in there is if he made it yellow, which didn't seem so bad for a kitchen. At least it was a light colored carpet.
[00:14:33] And it was more like indoor outdoor carpet, really, like that.
[00:14:38] But anyhow, he goes into the kitchen with my mom and I hear him yelling at the top of his lungs. I'm like, oh, no.
[00:14:48] I'm pretty sure my room was cleaned.
[00:14:52] I am not going to be the recipient of that anger. Right? And I'm scared. Now he is yelling at the top of his lungs. Then all of a sudden I hear this loud crash.
[00:15:05] Like, what the heck was that?
[00:15:09] And then I hear the door slam, so he's gone.
[00:15:13] Then I hear my mom yelling at me, get in here. Get in here right now. I'm like, what?
[00:15:20] What?
[00:15:21] Well, they were in the middle of redoing the kitchen, so they had gotten the yellow carpet and now they were going to paint the cabinets white.
[00:15:32] And they had purchased a gallon of white paint to paint the cupboards. And apparently when they had gotten into an argument, my dad had taken that gallon of paint and slammed it on the kitchen carpeted kitchen floor. And the whole gallon of paint float out onto that kitchen carpet.
[00:16:00] She's like, get in here right now and help me clean up this mess immediately.
[00:16:06] Like, what did I do wrong? What did I do? Mom, she didn't talk to me at all the whole time we're cleaning up that damn carpet. And I'm gonna say damn too, because that's how I felt about that damn carpet.
[00:16:20] So we. It probably took us two hours, and we're like pouring water on it and trying to soak it all up. We finally get it back to Somewhat normal. Although you could always tell that there had been something there on that carpet, but it was going to be, you know, livable, let's put it that way.
[00:16:44] And she says, okay, go to your room.
[00:16:46] Go to my room. What in the heck did I even do?
[00:16:51] What did I do? I am telling you, I had no understanding of anything.
[00:16:58] So I go up to my room. My brother came home. She talked to him for a little bit, and then she sent him to his room.
[00:17:05] My dad did not come home that night.
[00:17:08] There were times when my dad would get mad at my mom and he would leave and he would go off driving and we would never see him. Sometimes it would take two, three days before he ever came back home. We didn't know. We didn't know why he was mad. We didn't know where he went.
[00:17:26] And we knew that when he got home, we were not allowed to talk. We couldn't say a word. So we would have dinner at the table, but nobody could talk. Can you imagine that?
[00:17:38] Look back and I think, what in the hell?
[00:17:43] But the thing is, my mom never said a word. My mom never told me. My mom never relayed to me, really what had happened, why he lost his temper, what went on. It was just, you, you're gonna live with this situation. And that's the way it was.
[00:18:01] Years later, come to find out, my brother had wanted a pair of boxing gloves.
[00:18:10] My mother was feeling guilty, I believe, and upset about the way my dad was raising my brother. I mean, he was good to him in a lot of ways, but. But he ignored him because he would never.
[00:18:25] He didn't measure up to his perfection standards, and he was never going to. I mean, who let somebody mow the line one time and then never lets him mow the line again?
[00:18:37] And my mom was.
[00:18:39] Wanted to bring some semblance of normal back into the situation.
[00:18:48] So when she had talked to my dad about buying the boxing gloves, he basically had forbade her from getting those gloves because he didn't think that my brother had earned them. How can he earn them if he's not letting him try to earn them?
[00:19:08] Actually, it ended up making my brother more of a.
[00:19:13] I don't know. My brother was so smart, but he was troubled. And I know it really was from his relationship with my dad.
[00:19:23] So anyhow, there they are.
[00:19:26] She tells me, like, five years later that he dumped the paint on the carpet because when he went up to inspect our bedrooms, he saw the box of boxing gloves on my brother's bed. And he had forbade my mom for buying Those gloves and she bought them anyway.
[00:19:49] So he was really mad at my mom and at my brother that she didn't do what he wanted him to do. And essentially my brother wasn't the son that he thought he should be. That's really is the truth. And she told me that five years later. Five years later, after I had spent all that time cleaning up the carpet and internalizing it, like I didn't clean my room good enough. I had no understanding of what had gone on. And she never told me.
[00:20:23] It was right about that time that they decided they were going to get a therapist in the house. Because now I am like having real problems with my brother.
[00:20:33] You know, he's stealing from me, he's pointing a gun at me, all that kind of stuff.
[00:20:38] So they decide that we're going to go through family therapy.
[00:20:44] So we had a therapist come to the house to talk to them. And the therapy really ended up to be just for my mom, my dad and my brother. So once again, I was like this outsider. I was always the outsider in my own life. I feel like I was like the hired help.
[00:21:08] It's so funny when I look at it, I actually think I was like the hired help in my life.
[00:21:15] And so they would, they would just talk about it and I was the always the outsider looking in, going, yeah, well that's not really how it went. Well, you know, but I never stayed for the sessions.
[00:21:29] They had like three to five sessions and nothing really ever changed.
[00:21:37] I was relieved though that my mom finally told me the story of the paint can and I could kind of get over it.
[00:21:46] And as I got older, I started to really understand why she protected my brother. I got it.
[00:21:55] That didn't change what my life was like, but it definitely made a difference in my relationship with my mom.
[00:22:05] And we ended up having a pretty decent relationship, I think. Pretty good for mother and daughter. I feel grateful that she came and lived with me when I was raising my daughters in Maine. I'm very, was very, very happy about that and I was glad she moved up here towards the end of her life.
[00:22:25] All of that made so much difference and there's so many things that we did together that were positive and we had so many laughs together.
[00:22:36] She loved all of my friends growing up and I feel very fortunate about a lot of things, but I would say it just wasn't in a non winning situation for my brother.
[00:22:52] He wasn't gonna win, but he was lucky to have my mom because she really cared about him and she tried so hard to get him to be the best person he could be.
[00:23:05] And I think that's all you can really ask for from your mom.
[00:23:09] And from my point of view, I'm kind of glad that they did treat me like an outsider, because I ended up living my own life.
[00:23:19] I've been so independent. I've lived all over the place. I went all the way through graduate school.
[00:23:26] I mean, not that graduate school is this, you know, momentous thing, but I only look at it that way because my dad went through the eighth grade and she went through graduated through high school.
[00:23:39] So somewhere along the line, them not really paying that much attention to me gave me the time to pay attention to myself.
[00:23:52] And that was a big gift and still to have such a good relationship with both of them.
[00:24:03] But my dad died, you know, 19 years before my mom. So I had the last 19 years with my mom.
[00:24:10] And I think that really rectified a lot of the things that had happened early on.
[00:24:17] And so I hated that she died, but I was at peace with it.
[00:24:28] I hope you enjoyed my story today.
[00:24:32] I hope you think about how you were raised, too, because sometimes when you go backwards on the timeline, you're not so harsh about it when you're living in the middle of it.
[00:24:47] Forgiveness is a good thing.
[00:24:50] And understanding where my parents came from helped me too.
[00:24:57] And some of the things that went on weren't great, but they're all part of my story, and they definitely made me who I am today.
[00:25:14] Until the next time.
