Making Hamburgers

I woke up this morning from a wonderful dream. I was making hamburgers in my kitchen. Molding the meat to their hamburger shapes while talking on the phone to my mother. I remember putting the oatmeal and the egg into the meat to give them the consistancy of a 'juicy burger'. Mother and I were gossiping, laughing, and chatting about varied topics. We actually had a wonderful conversation, which was odd because my mother and I never gossiped on the phone. I can still smell the hamburgers cooking while I have the phone cradled in my shoulder. The kitchen, while usually emitting a stark white hyper-lit light, was basked in this honey yellow color.  I remember laughing hysterically as I flipped the patty.

I wish I could have had this kind of conversation with my mother when she was alive. She died on December 24, 1999 due to heart failure in her sleep. The underlying cause of death was an accidental drug overdose. She mixed too many of her prescription medications and died, not long after we hung up the phone. She had called a friend of hers, and told her that she was going to take this extra pill so she could sleep. Three years later, and she's still sleeping.

Mother used to sleep a lot when we were kids. She would be in bed all day long, and would wake up intermittenly to yell for a glass of water and another pill. Then she would be off to bed again, where my brother, sister and I would have to sit and be quiet so we didn't wake her up. I spent many a summer day sitting inches from the television screen, with the volume down low, hoping the noise coming from "The Price Is Right" would be quiet enough to let her sleep.

I did not understand that my mother was different. I thought everyone's mother slept all day and wore dirty nightgowns and didn't bathe everyday. I didn't realize it was odd behavior. I just knew that I had to be very quiet.

When she would wake up, we never knew what to expect. Some days, she'd be a ball of energy; playful and happy. Other days, she would scream and scream at us for no apparent reason. Somedays we got hit. A lot. With belts, with shoes, with her "stick", which was about a foot long, and about one-half inch thick. She made sure never to hit us in the face, but our sides would be bruised like nobody's business.

Mother suffered from multiple personality disorder I learned when I was a Junior in High School. There was the normal "Mom" while "Charlie" was the one who hit us. "Mom" didn't know what "Charlie" was doing to us. I can vividly remember one afternoon lying on my bedroom floor sobbing from the beating I received, and Mother coming back in the room a short time later asking what happened. I don't remember my response. Just that gnarled feeling in my stomach looking at her. She also had another personality, which I do not know the name of. That person was a little kid, and I don't remember much about her. Maybe she's who would emerge when Mother would have her good days. I'll never know.

When I was in college, after years of Mother going in and out of mental institutions, and pathetic excuses for doctors who failed her at every turn, Mother began to integrate her personalities. By this time, I had been long out of the house.  I really didn't care. I hardly talked to her for a period of two years. I'd go over to her house and steal food when she was gone, but I tried not to go over there when she was at home. I just couldn't look at the woman in the face.

I decided to move far away from home, to run away from all of my problems, my family's problems, and all of our neuroses. Only after I moved, and my mother was stabilized, did we actually have any sort of adult relationship. I never called her "Mom" after the age of 12 or 13. I always referred to her by her first name. Relatives always chastized me for doing so, my mother never did.

I think she understood.

I could not live my life looking up to this mentally ill woman. Parents are to be there to guide a child into adulthood. My parents were too busy taking care of themselves and my brother and sister that I was pushed aside soley for the fact that I COULD take care of myself. Everything I've done, I've done it on my own. Nobody has ever given me any help, until recently when my father gave me some money. I didn't ask for a dime, he offered and sent me the money. The reason for the money: I have never asked for any.

I had learned a long time ago to not ask for things, to sit and be very quiet, and to expect those you love to treat you like shit. That is what I learned from my mother.

I never learned how to make hamburgers from my mother. I still make hamburgers as one of my childhood friend's father made them. He was the one who taught me to put egg and oatmeal in with the meat, and how to tell when they need to be flipped over. When they would be done cooking, he'd pop it on a bun and announce, "Now that's a juicy burger".

For a moment in my kitchen, in my dream, it was as if Mother and I were exchanging the recipies she wanted to pass on. We were laughing about those carefree summer afternoons. We were giggling about some random family inside joke. I could feel her love through that phone, something I all too rarely felt as a child and as an adult.

That moment was perfect.