Unavailable Mistress

The macaroni and cheese did not taste right to me. It was not like my mom made it. Carol did not rinse the macaroni but used the cooking water as part of the cheese sauce. My mom said the macaroni should be rinsed with cold water after it was cooked. Her cheese sauce was made with milk.

Everything about being in this home was strange to me. There were several children here. I was not sure why I was among them. It felt foreign to me, so foreign that the night I was supposed to sleep over I became sick to my stomach and vomited from the severe homesickness I felt in my core. My father drove 30 minutes into the city to pick me up and 30 minutes to take me home so I could sleep in my own bed in the suburbs.

Cindy was close to my age, a little older but not much. One day during a visit, we were in her yard playing when we decided to go exploring, being the daughters of an explorer. The house and neighborhood were in the city, a place where I did not recognize the streets or the houses. 

When we realized we were lost, Cindy suggested that we pray. Two little girls, aged four and five, knelt down on the cracked cement sidewalk between a chain-link fence and a moving van to ask God to help us. When we looked up, Carol and Brian, Cindy’s mother and brother, were coming down the sidewalk running towards us. We had been found; God heard our prayers. I felt safe knowing that God was with me while I was with this family. He did not seem to be in my home.

Visits to the Hanson home stopped when I started kindergarten as my mom had her needed break from parenting while I was in school, I later assumed. I did not miss visits with the family that was so different from my own, but the memory of being lost stayed with me and the connected memories of my visits with them stayed with me as something I could not explain about my childhood. The memories would resurface throughout my life whenever I struggled with the ideas of God and religion. I remembered the day God stepped in to rescue me, so I remembered Cindy and her family although the details grew fuzzy over the years.

People said that Carol Hanson was a friend of my mothers. However, I never saw my mother talking to her like friends talk. Carol left a dozen black roses on our doorstep years after I stopped going to her home. My mom was so upset at my dad that they had another of their fights. My dad spent even more time bowling or at work after the black roses.

My mother had screaming rages often. Some of her rages were directed at me. My first memory of her is of one of these angry outbursts. I was sitting on the floor in front of the television watching Saturday morning cartoons; she was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She screamed, with spittle flying from her mouth, “I hate you and wish you had never been born!” I was too young to have caused this kind of hatred; I was too innocent to understand that this hatred could not have been caused by anything I had or had not done. All I knew was that there was something very wrong with me, my very existence was wrong. 

In the 1960s in Utah, parents did not get divorced. Families went to church together on Sunday and held Family Home Evenings on Mondays. My dad moved to Las Vegas a few months after a family camping vacation to Canada when I was twelve. 

The calm setting, a glistening, deep blue-green lake with gentle waves lapping against the rocky shore, a clear sky dotted with stars just beginning to appear in the twilight and the sound of crickets chirping was shattered by the noise coming from our camper. My sister and I sat on large tree trunks that had been turned into benches, staring into the campfire trying to pretend that we did not hear the noise coming from inside the camper. When we got home, our mother threw our father’s clothes into the front yard.  

They divorced after the family camping vacation. This made me different from my classmates, but I was okay with that. Mom would still rage. She would rage about how she hated men, especially my dad, and about how the only thing men wanted was sex, but mostly she stayed locked in her bedroom and my sister took over household chores such as cooking and cleaning. Mom was not interested in what I was doing so I was free to roam as I pleased. My sister did not care what I did as long as I helped her with the housework.

I knew my mother hated me so shortly after my father had moved out of our house, I rode a bus to his apartment with my suitcase. I wanted to live with him. I sat outside his door on a concrete balcony waiting for his return. I fell asleep on the fake grass doormat. He came home late, put me in his car, and took me back to my mother.  My mother had not realized I was missing.

Fifty years later, a family Facebook group shared the name of someone who had come up as a close DNA match to our family. No one recognized the name. A few family members who were interested in genealogy looked back a few generations to try to find how Greg was related to us. Maybe it was through an adopted grandmother, they thought. This was a dead-end. After two years, Greg asked his mom to have a DNA test. 

“Nancy, are you awake? I have some news about our dad.” Was the message from my sister. I was living in a time zone eight hours ahead of my sister, so when I saw her message, she was asleep. Our father had passed away twenty-two years ago. How could there be news about a man who had been gone for twenty-two years, I wondered. I messaged her that I was awake and curious.

“We have a sister, her name is Cindy.” She had been born exactly nine months before I was.