Mother's Little Helper

 Mother's Little Helper

     When I was a kid people did not seem to talk about the dark places we all live in occasionally. No one "drank too much," or "got rough on the wife" or "could not seem to hold onto a job." The adults just pretended nothing was wrong asd lit another cigarette or had a drink of something. Many of my friends had alcoholic parents but no one thought it was that bad because it was the norm and not some aberration. There was a nice Dad in our circle who became very feminine when he had second drink but being closeted was just as foreign an idea as you could find in blue-collar South Gate. Our next door neighbor Tom had a buxom wife who stayed home when he walked up Annetta avenue to Continental Can on Firestone where he worked in the factory. At about noon, gentlemen would arrive and "visit" with Olive and be long gone when the mousy Tom returned from work around 3:30 with a six-pack of Brew-102 under his arm purchased at Gracie's Liquor store right on his way home. Then,  Tom and Olive would sit in the front room of their brick front home watching TV and smoking. So, this malaise or restlessness was not confined to neighbors but was manifested in different ways. Around 1956 with four kids attached to her life and an alcoholic husband in her bed my Mom's spirit collapsed. She seemed to give up hope and wore the same unappealing outfit every day: a blue t-shirt and bermuda shorts. It was not mentioned but her termperment changed too from Motherly to mean sometimes. She was normally harder on big sister than us but she once broke a broomstick over my back for some minor reason but it was not mentioned again. She did not go and hang out in bars or find a boyfriend because she was thoroughly trapped in the web of family. After all, she had been having children during the thirteen possible years she was under vows that included five pregnancies and all the stress of raising them with very little input from her husband. It was the 1950's where medicine was kind of simple and after many months passed in the blue t-shirt she visited old Doctor Nebeker who prescribed tranquilizers. Probably Miltown which would have been better than the othert suggested "relaxer" Thalidomide. These "mother's little helpers" did not seem ot have much effect on her glumness but by blind luck something else brought her out of her walks with the black dog. It was a set of women's golf clubs BC gave her and a cleaning lady we called GD Marie who visited every so often on Saturday mornings. All of her formerly repressed athletic prowess was allowed to flourish and she managed to connect with other bored and hostile women of suburbia. Things were so old-fashioned that they had lady's day at the golf course when the old hens could putter around and not irritate the links patriarchy. In truth it gave these women and probably many repressed lesbians a chance to pour out their discontentment about boring husbands and not terribly rewarding children. What my Mom needed was an outlet and sympathetic ears instead of pills given by a male doctor who had no idea that women were anything more than baby-vessels.