MaMa’s Big Lie and Other Revelations

Did I ever tell you the story of MaMa’s big lie to me? “MaMa” (pronouncing the ‘a’s as in “jam”) was my maternal grandmother.

Well, she and PaPa were visiting us near Buffalo, New York, when I was three or four years old. It was morning. Dad had left for work. I’d watched Patty and Stan board the school bus at the end of the long gravel driveway. I was sprawled on the cold kitchen floor next to Heidi’s dish, sharing her dog food with her while Mother and MaMa were standing at the sink washing up the breakfast dishes.

There was some kind of talk about things that Patty and Stan got to do that I wouldn’t be able to do until I was “older.” Now, it seemed to me that I was ALWAYS hearing this excuse for being left out because I was younger than they were and I’d become quite tired of hearing that lame excuse. So, I asked Mother why I’d been born younger than Patty and Stan.

Mother and MaMa both chuckled, looked down at me, and said, “You weren’t born YOUNGER than them. You were born AFTER them.”

Of course, this did not compute because the entire world came into existence at the moment of my birth. There was no “before.”

I listened incredulously as MaMa told me they were already little children when I was a baby, and that they had each been born a baby, just like I was, but a few years before me.

No…. Not possible.

Then, MaMa dared to tell me that she remembered when my MOTHER was a baby!!!

Heck no! This was total Science Fiction, now!

Then, she completely destroyed her credibility when she tried to explain that EVERYONE started out as a little baby, even SHE, this incredibly old woman (she might have been all of fifty-eight) had started out as a baby! This was obviously a baldfaced lie! What did she hope to gain by saying such an obviously untrue and confusing thing to me?!

I always had trouble believing her after that. A couple of years later, she even tricked me into eating yellow squash by calling it “vegi-tables.”

I’ll skip over several decades and just mention that PaPa died when I was seven, and MaMa never remarried, although I’d seen her get tipsy and flirt on occasion.

Because Dad was in the service and we moved around pretty much, I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up around my grandparents or cousins, so the stories they told the other grandchildren didn’t always get to me. But MaMa finally gained real credibility with me when she was in her nineties and living with my parents.

It had been practically a miracle to discover, when I had my first child at twenty-six, that I wasn’t the result of a virgin birth. Actually, that is an overstatement. I was fifteen and having a conversation with my sixteen-year-old friend, Joannie Fifield, when we both realized that our mothers were not virgins! What a thought! Up until that moment, the story of Jesus’s virgin birth was no great deal because MY mother had done it THREE TIMES, not just ONCE! Suddenly, I was in possession of knowledge that Mother had committed THE ACT THREE times! But when Shannon was born and Mother came to help, she confided that she’d also had two miscarriages before Stan was born – which meant that she’d had sex FIVE times!

Okay, so when I turned forty, I was in the midst of a two-year divorce battle after sixteen years of marriage. Mother, being perfect, never wanted to talk about unpleasant things, so Dad was my go-to during that ordeal.

But, in MaMa’s dotage, she started telling tales about what a handful my mother had been growing up, dating, and even after she’d married my dad! Oh, no, Mother was not quite the Saint that she wanted her children to believe, and it seems MaMa had been something of a “Flapper” in her youth! (I’ll let you google “the roaring twenties” for yourself.)

The neatest conversation I ever had with MaMa was some time after the divorce when I’d started getting out a little. MaMa got on the phone with me and told me she was jealous that I could go out to bars and dance with men (she imagined more than what was happening). She complained that my mother wouldn’t let her go out and have any fun!

Then, she said, “Oh, Barbara! I wish you’d come down here and we could go bar-hopping together. It’s been so many years since I’ve wrapped my legs around a man!”

Well, well, MaMa….