CHAPTER 10: Playing Strindberg in August
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother"
“Playing Strindberg in August” is Chapter 10 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother. It is the start of BOOK TWO: A Mama’s Long View Redemption.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Post-Separation Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are Mother-Fucking women—a form of systemic violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is methodically deprived of her children and reduced to One Fucked Mother.
In Chapter 10, Legion has a plan to take a year off from her demanding career to devote to full-time mothering, and then take a teaching job where she can be home with them after school. The problem is, Herry also has a plan which he has been setting the stage for—unbeknownst to Legion…
Meanwhile, Herry remains an absent, cheating husband who constantly disparages her in all her activities, including parenting, wifing, career and 10K’s. His denigrating of Legion is at its height every August during Legion’s annual marathon and two of the kids’ birthdays. Hence, the the chapter title, which references 19th-century Swedish playwright August Strindberg, a misogynist who disparaged and dehumanized women in all female endeavors, including mothering.
Strindberg’s play The Father, which the chapter quote is from, is the height of irony. It is of the “naturalistic” genre of the time—i.e. reality-based, while it portrays the opposite of real life: the powerless father “goes under” in the marital struggle while the all-powerful mother prevails. The father is the victim of a cunning and cruel wife who destroys him by driving him insane, getting him committed, taking the children, and ultimately causing his death.
This follows Chapter 9: “Hope Is a Woman-Killer”. The premise here is that when women fall victim to hope, they may end up being destroyed. Legion’s hope kept her in an abusive marriage and then strung along in abusive Family Court litigation. She reflects on how Herry’s ultimate goal in taking her boys from her was for her to kill herself—the supreme revenge.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so it’s possible to begin with any one of them. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers starting at any point. All published chapters are included in the Women’s Coalition News & Views Section: “The Saga of One F**ked Mother”—accessible on the top bar of the home page. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday. Of course, subscribers will find each new chapter in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
As a matter of fact, the house of cards was coming down, not up; and what it was that was spiraling so low, and fairly rapidly now, was our marriage and our family.
The man, he is especial. So. Herry was off doctoring. Although three times a daddy, Herry was off doctoring somewhere. He was da’ man. Androcentrically, the standard measure.
BOOK TWO: A Mama’s Long View Redemption
CHAPTER 10
Playing Strindberg in August
“I feel that one of us must go under in this struggle.”
—Adolf to Laura regarding their child’s future in Act II of August Strindberg’s The Father, 1887
10K road races were all the rage in the Midwest and other places, too, for that matter. Very well‐attended, they were great for raising money for favorite community charities and causes or for having just plain, wide‐open fun while, at the same time, running off a few kilos in the weeks leading up to one. For those folks, anyhow, who actually concertedly trained beforehand for the race. I wasn’t one of those folks. And, of course, I had pregnancy-acquired, Rubenesque poundage to lose, too. I just was not that disciplined. Not like the guys who usually won these races in our town, that is, the Kenyans attending the local university. Not disciplined like nine‐year‐old Jesse and the effort he was making for his Iowa Games soccer team and its competitions.
My goal in the Iowa Games 10K for three Augusts had been just to finish it—and not to have ever walked during any part of it. Never officially walked, that is. Alongside me, others could walk faster than I could run, but that wasn’t the point to me. I had “to run” the whole damn thing and never, during any of it, be found walking. That third, and the last, Iowa Games 10K that I ever entered, I was just certain about half way through it along around the cut east from the Veekner Golf Course onto 13th Street and the beginning of that annual, horrid, so‐long rise to the final turn, that I was, any minute then, gonna catch up to that woman’s orange butt just 20 strides in front of me and surpass it. I didn’t.
The second year they’d even sent out a scout on horseback … no, not another man on a horse; he was astride a sleek 10‐speed, to find me. I was just about at that same halfway point when he did. He rode beside me the entire way to the end encouraging me, never letting both of my feet touch the pavement simultaneously. I had managed a rather breathless explanation of what I was about and he, in his skintight tartan biking shorts and about 15 years my senior maybe, understood. The usual words. Coach‐like. “You can do it. Suuuurre, ya’ can. I’ll stay right here beside you. I won’t leave you. We just wanted to make sure you were okay, ya’ know. You got kids? O, they’ll be so proud o’ you! Just so proud. You’ll see. We’ll get ya’ there. You betcha! Com’on, now, just one in front of the other. And then just one in front of the other again. That’s it. Com’on, now.” The whole time, except for a few moments when he said he was going to shut up and just ride beside me and he actually did. All the way back to the line. Believe me, he hadn’t needed those 10 speeds. Not at the rate I was never to exceed it seems. Every single 10K every one of those three consecutive years I came in dead last.
I didn’t tell Coach Tartan that Dr. Edinsmaier ... ah, Dr. Wonderful, was gonna see to it that none of my three kids was gonna be there to see me at the end. It wouldn’t’ve helped me. Or him.
At the starting gate/finish line, the one and the same area in the loop that was the circular route of the whole race every year, there was always a bejeweled behemoth of an ambulance out from its usual hanger at our town’s hospital emergency room. The kind with all the lovely bells and whistles and flashing red and yellow lights. It and its staff rarely, if ever, in my stint at road – racing were ever used as I recall. Hundreds of us ran; but we seemed hardly out for blood, either figuratively or otherwise, so fortunately, few injuries or collapses ever occurred. Yet it was there every year just in case, probably because of insurance or that sort of legal stuff; and that was reassuring and comforting. It really was. As reassuring as the four hearty thumbs‐up were to me from both of its arm‐waving and hooting attendants who had been leaning cross‐legged out in front of it until I finally came into their view about an hour and 20 minutes or so after I had first left it. I probably wasn’t the darling of their race every year. It was just that they could go back to the garage now so, after giving me that welcome home, they’d jump in the cab, rev up its engine and be hauling ass out of their assigned medics’ corner as I finally crossed the line. Dead last. But I did come in. And … I never walked.
And they all had helped to do that, too. I know none of their names and guess I never did, and I have never kept in touch with any of them that I’m aware of since that last hot, hot summertime; but they all did this thing, too. This running and finishing thing. This finishing feeling is Midwestern or so I was thinking it was.
After a bit of breath‐catching, it was time to head back to Othello Drive and the Brookside Forest backyard. This was not very far at all, less than 6½ blocks, since the route of the race looped first beside that urban Forest’s southern periphery with the palatial bachelor’s pad at the north end of the circle—around which I had just crawled. I reached the double garage door and paused on the driver’s side of Herry’s Toyota Crown, an old white station wagon with an aluminum plating about a foot square riveted around and hiding some skin flaw near its rear end. I never did know what flaw was being covered over back there.
It was kind of helpful to have that unique spot there though because whenever I was about town and couldn’t see Herry’s 5’6½” stature leering up above the steering wheel, only a silly straw hat or woolen wide‐brim atop the driver, I would know it was he because that particular vehicle was his. That one with the silver metallic plate near the left rear. He wore those attention‐grabber hats I don’t know why. He never said a thing at all about them saving his complexion from the harmful rays, he being a pathologist and all and, by this time, having done a lot of biopsies of skin cancers of the outright worst kinds. Maybe he thought they made him look taller in the saddle. I really don’t know. ’Cept that they did, indeed, garner him a lot of attention all right. You knew it was he coming along when you saw those hats and that car. A couple of his private airplanes were stabled back at the Kansas airport a couple of states away so Herry must’ve ridden that old beater wagon around town as his source of a certain kind of assumed humility or somethin’.
Maybe I should have checked out what was behind that galvanized plate more closely. What other secrets might have been holed up back there? As it was, I blew out one last long build‐up of lactic acid as carbon dioxide and remembered that ugly drift of Herry’s usual type that’d come over the family’s other wagon seat, that one in the tan Dodge Diplomat about how it was I wouldn’t even be able to find the track on which to run the 10K, the one that Herry’d chucked into my chest from his driver’s seat right before he and Zane and Jesse and Mirzah had just dropped me off there at the starting line a couple hours earlier before their all headin’ on over to Jesse’s soccer match. Makin’ sure, he must’ve been doing, probably. Makin’ sure I found the track okay after all.
Its side window was rolled down; and a white splash on the driver’s bucket seat next to the black console all strewn with the usual front‐seat driver stuff of used, crumpled paper cups and several pens and cassette tapes not inside the dash deck and not in their jackets either, caught my eye as I headed toward the russet garage door that opened into the kitchen. I reached in and picked it up. It had writing on it. “Darling Herry,” it began. I turned it over. A lovely autumnal colors’ mountain scene but with no words was on the other side, and I didn’t recognize the area of the picture nor the postcard as any I had ever sent Herry.
Herry, our husband and father, had physically been absent a lot before we’d finally moved to Ames. First it had been to south central Missouri four hours away from the Boys and me. Subbing a week at a time, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier did, for that one pathologist down there who had no kids himself and who flew off east to confab with the feds on some funky military project one week out of every month for about a year. Then Herry lived three to four days a week every week inside Kansas City bunking in some hotel there that I never did visit one time. And drove two hours back home to Manhattan after pathology work at a small, private lab in KC arriving late Thursday nights about 11 or so.
Solidly, every single weekend then of the eight of them, that is, for the first two months we had lived in Manhattan and just a mere five hours or so after Dr. Edinsmaier’s ingress, I myself was up that very next Friday morning and on the road at 4 am back to Columbia for yet another four‐day weekend spent finishing up the writing of the dissertation there. I’d sent Herry cards and letters, not a lot but some. More than one time I had had flowers delivered to him, too, usually carnations, three blue‐tipped ones and one white one, the symbolism I am now fairly certain totally lost on him. He may have gotten it, however, and likely made the conscious choice to specifically not say that he had actually noticed it. Still, I sent them again.
This postcard from next to the Crown’s console wasn’t one of mine. Rhoda it was signed, and she continued in rather a quite scrawled script not, I remember thinking later, not too characteristic of many a woman’s graceful handwriting, “I miss you so. Miss you so much. I’m sending you this picture so you’ll have it to remind you of our wonderful conversations out at The View. I go out there now sometimes after work just to …” I didn’t finish it. I just threw it back onto his front seat without regard as to how it landed there. It didn’t matter how it was placed there. I took no care to see that this particular postcard was propped and tilted just as it had initially been before its tossed placement had netted my notice. None at all.
* * * * *
That message was one piece of a puzzle, and there were only going to be many, many more to come. Once they began to show up then, the pieces seemed to appear quicker and quicker and to not be so far apart from each other either. Like I was supposed to find these clues. And to get the puzzle figured out myself alone—all before everyone else in the family even knew there was a new structure to our long‐term futures going up at all. Herry was excluded, of course, as he was the mastermind actually and strategically positioning these little clues all around.
As a matter of fact, the house of cards was coming down, not up; and what it was that was spiraling so low, and fairly rapidly now, was our marriage and our family. Indeed, these puzzle pieces or, more likely, building blocks, I was supposed to find. I was the one of the two of us to go under. That was the major portion of Herod’s plan of marital and familial deconstruction all along. That is, Herry’s plan to build up his own escaped future.
At the very same juncture and most importantly to that plan though, too, Herod badly needed to all the world but most especially to his Boys and to his father, that Roman Catholic layman patriarch and Republican activist leader of their rural county political party, Juggern Aut Misein, and to his ten other siblings and all of their clans, that enormously expansive extension of Edinsmaiers, to save face. At all cost. That same image‐maneuvering that Mehitable, my mother, was so skilled at creating, Herod needed to securely manufacture for himself.
A rather formidable task at that, this all was going to be, too. Or so it would seem it was going to be. Because not only was the matter of Herod’s image as “so‐not‐the‐perpetrator” of this marital bust‐up quite critical to him, his entire family of origin was allegedly rooted in the marriage‐for‐life‐no‐matter‐what religions, those western and eastern ones, among them Christianity, Islam, Judaism, all put together over a matter of about seven millennia now and all of them so carefully and calculatingly constructed that way by men. That is, Herry was born into and himself hailed from the very source of that genre of marriage-vowing where ya’ couldn’t get out of it. No matter what.
’Least they said they were. At least all of the Edinsmaiers that I’d ever met walked around every day pontificating on and on about how it was that that was that, and it couldn’t be changed. No undoing allowed here now. Not after marrying and after vowing. Not after the woman’s and the man’s sexual union‐making was performed under the auspices and only at the allowed and granted permission of powerful males’ even‐more‐powerful male deities. Yada, yada, yada. At the very least Herry had to then, at the end, wherever that was going to be, come out smelling like ‘the brutalized victim’ in this whole matter of family break‐down. And looking to all others like he had had no other option whatsoever in this made‐for‐television picture, ‘this situation’ that Legion True, his would‐be murderess, had forced him into—other than to choose, in order to save himself from certain annihilation, to run, run, run and to run as far away and as fast away as he possibly could get. This particular type of choosing, then, being the arrant essence of Herry’s plan.
I find out much later—in private therapy and from true friends’ so‐wise counsel—that all this puzzle‐piece finding of mine is such old hat. In strategically attempting to move toward a legally decreed divorce whilst yet retaining an intact image—oftentimes with actually gaining an enhanced one even—clue‑dropping isn’t or need not be, by the conniving spouse of the couple, original or clever or crafty or even well thought out. Herry, I learn, hasn’t had to expend nearly any effort at all. Yet the entire razing of this architectural design of his was coming along quite nicely. And at hardly any expense to Herry of any other kind as well. Like dollars or emotional gut investment or time spent in actual prefatory hours—in addition to the meager thinking processes involved in the plan. I guess the only cost to Dr. Herod Edinsmaier really was the time he spent in patience—that is, in just waiting it out, in just waiting for the plan to unfold, to play itself out and to bring to him, with its final closing curtain, the reward Herry so sought and of which he thought himself so deserving. Escape.
* * * * *
My plan, though, was somewhat unrelated by quite a bit. I was going to not work. Not work at being a veterinarian and professor, that is. Instead, for a short‐term hiatus in the little towards‐the‐future‐in‐my‐head plan for the next five years, I was actually going to take up, full‐time, what I considered to be Olympics‐qualifying yet professional‐quality parenting for the next full year at least. Then I would look to re‐enter actual professional endeavor of the scientifically diagnostic and clinical teaching type after those 12 months or thereabouts.
“I can’t take out much more time than that, a year,” I was thinking on women. “I know what happens to PhDers who stop for a while to have kids and this’ll be no different! Shit happens to their careers. That’s what. And pronto! But I can take a year off. That’ll be safe enough. And then the next four? Why, with so many, many veterinary‐related opportunities here in the immediate Ames area, that will not be a problem at all, I’m sure of it. All the Boys will be in middle school or high school by then. I’ll be an established researcher or clinician by the end of the fifth year since I’ll’ve made myself indispensable, so my asking for more freed‐up time to be home nights when the Boys are all in high school or Mirzah’s finishing middle school won’t be any hassle at all. Guys get parenting time off all the time, fathers do. And so will I. By that time!”
My plan! A very good one, too: I at home much more at night by the time all three of the Truemaier Boys reach that very vulnerable stage—adolescence!
This, after all, was right on schedule really with that Master Plan for me, the one I’d devised back in Hershey during Herod’s pathology residency there when I was working two practices, subbing and taking call so much. I’d become an academician and have more time, then, to be home nights. Home with Herry, Zane, Mirzah and Jesse and not having to take that call. So, as the Boys each blazed past the 12‐year‐old mile‐marker of their lives and acquired that totally frightening title known as ‘teenager’ … one right after the other … why, I would really physically be home nights then. I had had to forfeit that peace of mind as a vet student when Z was such a sweetie baby. Then, too, as a clinician during Jesse’s infancy—of which I can never remember his first six months of existence at all—not even by my purposefully trying on Mother’s Days in Quaker Meetings for Silent Worship to reminisce about Jesse’s wee beginning weeks. Yet cannot seem ever to bring any of it back to my mind. Again, I was gone nights and weekends studying or in the lab or writing the dissertation a state away those four years in the University of Missouri’s Veterinary Microbiology PhD program at Columbia. But those several had been the sacrifices which both Dr. Edinsmaier and I were more than willing to make, Herry being very much in favor of my obtaining the last nine of the 14 total years that constituted my higher education. Those days—and nights—were now all in our past. History.
I could hardly contain myself. No more lip service was I going to give to ‘being there’ for Jesse, Mirzah and Zane. I was going to be there literally now and chaperone class field trips, host holiday cookie decorating parties, chauffeur the whole team if they all needed rides and volunteer to not only be homeroom parent but to also have an active voice on the principal’s budget‐planning committee. Our committee recommended the Boys’ elementary school’s needs and expenditures for the next academic year on up to the Ames Community Schools’ superintendent and his budget‐planning committee by November, and all of those budgeting deliberations then went on up to the School Board which held open hearings for the public’s input as well during the following new year’s February. I was going to lead, too, both the First Day School and the Library Committees at Friends Meeting.
In addition, I would get the instrument lessons well underway. A major part of my getting those up and running would be for me to figure out some manner in which to get the Boys all to practice because, well, practicing was such enjoyment that they just wanted to! Clarinet first for Zane, then the nearly immediate switch to cornet. He really didn’t ‘have the lip’ for the reed nor the abdominal muscle power of wind behind it or, at this very beginning, the willingness to try to develop it. And his right thumb hurt. A lot. From holding up the whole thing, the thumb constantly strained in its position under the silver metal support at the back of the clarinet a bit over halfway down its length.
This I understood so Zane took up with the brass thingy instead, rented also from Howard over at the Main Street Music Shop; and the contract agreement just transferred over to the cornet. No problem. Howard was real cool. He knew about young boys and their playing band instruments at the first. He knew, too, about politics and the Democratic Party and had sat with me ’til 3 in the morning a couple of weeks earlier while, together, we had hammered out what resolutions and planks we wanted to have worded exactly so and right ready for the county convention upcoming the next spring. Part of my five‐year plan, too, was to get involved in party politicking which I was. Like it mattered. And I should show the Boys that it did.
Flute suited Jesse, my very own, closed‐hole Gemeinhardt 30 years old and seasoned now, the one that Mehitable insisted, nearly demanded, I sell off and get rid of as soon as I’d become a college freshman. But I reneged. And had never sold it. I didn’t take it out of its scuffed, caramel–colored case, assemble it or play it much ever at all anymore. That much was true. But it was mine, and it was a part of me, and the flute would not be sold. The case handle had come apart in two pieces several years earlier and could not be used to carry the instrument in its case at all. For Jesse I fashioned it a new handle out of white hanger wire and cellophane tape, clear at first, now dirty clear, of course, and rusted. I think he was ashamed of it, mentioned something to that effect a couple of times and then apparently fell to actually playing the flute fairly well and said no more about that handle. Which worked. And adorns that flute’s case still.
Also the accordion, of all things, that Mehitable and AmTaham had purchased second- or thirdhand at auction and given to Jesse. The accordion, they said, because of all three Truemaier Boys, Jesse was the one who demonstrated an intense proclivity for the keyboard. That did appear to be true, too. Playing the piano and the typewriting with computer keyboards both. But an accordion? I think it was taken out of its huge and hard‐to‐store case twice, the second time to show some friends of Jesse’s. And that was it. Ever.
That black and white monstrosity did serve to remind me, though, that I could not let Jesse—nor Zane and Mirzah either for that matter—lose touch with the many music skills they had learned from Suzuki. I was, indeed, going to make sure that Celestine’s teachings and my earlier untiring efforts with all three of them and piano continued to pay off long into their adolescence and beyond, I was. I would keep the battered 1939 W. P. Haines & Co., New York, tuned well and humidified—something that I had been most lax about doing in the past—even when the Boys actively took those four years of lessons each in Columbia where I, alone and without Herry even one time making any such offer to do so, accompanied each one of them to every weekly lesson and nightly, right after concluding my day job of graduate studies, practiced separately with each Boy ultimately arranging for their Saturday group lessons as well as for their individual Book recitals. And I was going to buy their favorite rock and roll songs in scores easy enough for both them and me to read and to play. Not just their Suzuki Books. If that would help.
Grandpa and Grandma also announced at the same time the accordion came to live with us for a little while how it was that they had also bought a drum for Mirzah whenever he was ready to start lessons. Well, not exactly a drum … but four of them actually. Complete with two foot pedals, top hat cymbals and hot pink, glow‐in‐the‐dark drumsticks. “You wouldn’t usually think it so, I know,” the seller had easily convinced Grandpa AmTaham who already knew he was going to buy the shiny, bing cherry red and pearly silver and chrome set for Mirzah, “but the drums and the drummer? They’re the Soul of the band, Mister! Without the drummer, well, ya’ just haven’t got a band at all.”
And not to forget to get in enough time for just plain playing in the pool along with diving fun. In addition to making absolutely certain that all three of them kept current their star abilities as strong swimmers now, the skill they had acquired at great dollar cost to Herry and me when they had had those private swim lessons, too, in Columbia. Literally, … life‐altering … lessons paid for after Herry’s four‐minute canoeing calamity on the North Fork of southern Missouri’s White River with Mirzah, Jesse and me all violently plunged into an early spring melt’s worth of a raging, debris‐strewn and St. Patrick’s Day‐freezing cold river tempest—and after the deflating air mattress near‐tragedy at Finger Lakes State Park with the babysitter, Stacey. When she hadn’t put a life jacket on any one of them. Life jackets that we actually possessed. And that likely had saved us all during that North Fork fiasco. Which Herod had, truly, the same evening that its shameful story came crashing through to the psyches of the Truemaier Boys’ parents, giggled away with, “Well, nothing happened, did it? So forget about it.”
My babies’ lives! But. Hey. I should forget about it! My husband and the father of my precious Boys was actually making to me, their mother, the declarative statement that I should forget about it!
I have never forgotten about it! Not the crippling and frigid fear knotting up my gut, the throat choke when I couldn’t swallow. Their friggin’ real‐life yet near‐death, literal day‐at‐the‐beach mother‐fuck! Jesse, Zane and Mirzah have not forgotten how that ‘special’ splash in the pond made them feel that day either. No. We would swim and swim and swim and truly practice this year. And we would—all four of us—we would remember Nursemaid Stacey’s stupid, Finger Lakes faux pas. Even if Herry‐Daddee again made it his choice to forget.
Pretty Stacey was a puzzle piece, too. One of those numerous names of females that was ushered in and uttered up in that southwest Othello bedroom on dark, mother‐fucking nights. “I haven’t nailed her yet; but if you died,” Herod Edinsmaier figured out loud to me, “why, the Boys’d need a mom and since they really liked Stacey and her little twin sisters who were just Zane’s age when we lived there, then I reckon I could probably go back there and get her to marry me even though she’s half my age and not yet done with nursing school. She’d be done, though, no doubt, by the time you died.”
I wondered: “Do normal married couples converse like this? Like, ‘In case you died, then I’d go off and marry so and so.’ Quite matter of fact‐like and not, ‘I’d cry like freakin’ hell if you died!!! It would grieve me so!!!’ Especially as foreplay conversation?” I wasn’t wearing a life jacket either. While flailing about and trying to swim in that swampy pond scum smut that was Herry’s spew. And Herry’s semen.
I was particularly going to get involved in making certain Zane and Jesse became certified safe Iowa hunters. It was a little early for this since certification, by Iowa law, couldn’t occur before a youth’s age of 12 years; but, still, we could go to all the classes and I myself could become a certified instructor. As part of my plan, then, the four of us, Zane, Jesse, Grandpa AmTaham and I would be readied, three generations together of hunter‐gatherers! This was going to be a key piece of my super‐parenting year off from vet work; and with three teaching sessions offered in the county that same year, there would even be a choice of times for our fitting this in. Or, we could go to them all certain to learn something new each time and, at the last one then, Zane would be 12 and able to sit for the certifying exam! Mirzah was not hunter‐inclined, and that was just fine. No pressure there. But Jesse and Zane certainly were, and this so pleased me.
And AmTaham. My daddy had such grand plans himself that he could hardly be contained. Besides the hunting thing, his favorite babes were finally, at last, all back in Iowa and only two short hours’ driving time from him. Even I pleased him immensely. He couldn’t get any happier. It was early August 1987.
* * * * *
The Iowa Games over, it was time to think about school enrollment and all of my school‐related activities besides those of the Boys. At the pinnacle was the fact that this would be yet another new school placement for all of them. Zane’s next birthday, as well as Jesse’s, was fast approaching, too, but Zane was yet officially ten years old.
And this one, to Ames, constituted Herry’s and my 12th move then as a couple. Four of those had been several states or some states apart, not just cross town. A dozen moves in Zane’s first ten years. What kind of parents do this to a kid? No, to three kids. Because, while it was that many moves done onto Zane, to date Jesse, too, had been moved by his parents ten times in his eight years of life; and in his seven years on the Planet Earth then, Mirzah was uprooted by these same two adults from whatever personal space he had managed to claim as his own eight different times, too.
So. ‘Upwardly mobile’ I think it’s termed. That’s the genre of parents that have no apparent qualms about this level of unrest in three little Boys’ lives. At least it’s one kind of parent that often does this anyhow.
Rationalization and justification had come easy. Herry had to do what Herry had to do. Everyone knew that. It was standard. The guy did whatever made him feel good about himself as a human doing. And that was that. No matter that this particular guy was absent a lot. That was part and parcel to the making of a man’s identity. The kids’d just have to come in second. Or third. Or later somewhere. The man, he is especial. So. Herry was off doctoring. Although three times a daddy, Herry was off doctoring somewhere. He was da’ man. Androcentrically, the standard measure. And that was right.
Me? Legion? I cleaned up after every one of those packed Ryders or U‐Hauls—ya’ know, the oven, the stovetop, the refrigerator‐freezer, the floors, shampooed the carpets, scoured the toilets, polished the fixtures. And the windows. I often joked—but only to myself since Herry was never around to be found with a scrub rag, a floor mop or a toilet brush in his hand—that, “My house was never cleaner than when I’d scrubbed it up that one last time ’fore we were all traipsin’ away from it for good!” And I, Legion, retrieved back then for our family, as well, every single penny of rental deposit money after every single landlord’s walk‐through and checkout. All twelve times. Like clockwork, this deal of finishing up.
Not the human doing of the Edinsmaier‐True marriage, I, on the other hand, had done it all in particular preparation for my being home early evenings when the Boys neared and entered their respective adolescent years. That was my plan. Back when. To enter and finish veterinary medical school. Then, soon after, to enter and finish the PhD program. A Midwestern thing in me, this finishing, or so I was thinking it was. And I felt so proud of myself for these accomplishments. A dozen moves and over a decade later, damned if it weren’t true. We were right on track. The plan was on the right track—and I was finding it!
On schedule, too, we were for our next move, the one that is ‘the movin’ on up’ one. After all, the two airplanes and the sprawling bachelor ranch were already material proof of that one happening. And I was not only home early evenings, I was home all day, too! For the next 12 months or so at least—so that quest on my part to be a star‐studded, celestially Olympian mother would make it all up to the Truemaier Boys for both Herry’s and my having been so occupied with the acquisition of our educations and our beginning professional experiences—before this upcoming 11th birthday of Zane’s and the ninth of Jesse’s. And then so closely following his older brothers’, Mirzah’s eighth one in late September.
* * * * *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: ex/“Sperm Source” [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissis(t) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Friends: Yanira, Grace, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Family Court lawyer
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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