My Mother's Romantic Escapades

I thought it was bad enough to have to witness and deal with my parents' dysfunctional marriage for the first 36 years of my life...but no. After my father's death from cancer at age 63, I was dragged along and into my mother's post-widowhood sex-fuelled, romantic escapades.

I guess it really shouldn't have surprised me to find out that bereavement support groups are full of widowers looking to get laid, or to get laid, married and looked after by a replacement wife. My mother was up for the first part of the expectations, but none of the latter.

My mother had been very beautiful (like the movie star Rita Hayworth), especially in her younger years; she was ardently pursued by innumerable men from the time she was a teenager. Her basic personality was likely narcissitic already, and being adored and worshipped by men only served to cement a self-centered orientation and a view of herself as a sex kitten.

I don't know how my gangly, boyish-looking and immature father wound up being the one to win her hand, poor bastard. He'd had some pretty stiff competition. It was these other suitors that I heard about over, and over, and over again while I was growing up. Every time they fought, which was frequently, my mother would wail and list off the names of all the other men she could have, and should have married, rather than my dad. It was the never-ending "Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda Roll Call" of my unhappily wed mother. To this day, I can reel off the list of suitors' names from memory, but one stood out in particular. I will refer to him as "Cameron Donaldson", and it was his name that was invoked most often as the man she wished she'd married instead of my dad.

To put it extremely mildly, she was a very emotionally and mentally unstable person and wore my father out to the extent that it led to his untimely death. Then the job of being her "keeper" fell to me.

Without my father's daily stabilizing and controlling influence, my mother deteriorated to the extent that I eventually had to have her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in the summer of 1998. They got her stabilized enough over the course of 30 days to release her, but told me she was about "the most intractable personality" they had ever encountered; it was unlikely she could be helped or that anything would ever change, especially considering she denied the diagnoses (there were several) and refused all medications.

She was only in her mid-sixties at the time of her release from the psych ward and, as she had recently sold her large home, she initially went to live with an ex-nun whom she had met through a hospice bereavement support group after my dad died. This arrangement lasted all of a few weeks, until her crazy and insensitive behaviours caused the former nun so much stress that she actually burst blood vessels in her eyes that then bled from their sockets!

The ex-nun let it be known to the bereavement support group that she'd invited my mother to find other accommodation. My mother could have easily moved into a condo that she'd owned for years, but it seems she preferred renting the condo out and getting the money, and living off someone else for low, or no cost.

Mom was seen as pretty "hot stuff" in the bereavement support group and had several men vying for her. She took up with one and started living with him after the former nun gave her the boot. I will refer to him as "Whistlin' Roy", because his manner of speech had a very weird whistling quality to it.

I didn't trust Whistlin' Roy one iota and my suspicions were confirmed when an old acquaintance contacted me out of concern and told me Roy had married her widowed mother and taken her to the cleaners; they even suspected him of stealing and selling her mother's wedding rings from her first marriage to my acquaintance's father. My acquaintance's mother had died, which was how Whistlin' Roy came to be in the bereavement support group and met my mother.

My mother happily used Roy for about a couple of years - lived in his shabby little house and sailed with him in the summer on his little boat. She got to live off him to an extent (they shared food expenses and she probably contributed to utility costs) and he got sex. But that wasn't nearly enough for Whistlin' Roy.

Roy knew she had money (my father left her very comfortably off) and he was determined to get some of it. But Roy completely underestimated my mother. She was the Queen of Skinflints - nothing, and I mean nothing got between her and her money. This was a woman who, if she arranged to meet you downtown for coffee, would insist on going into the lobby of her bank branch for the free coffee and newspaper they offered. Even if you offered to take her to Starbucks as your treat, she would refuse and insist the lukewarm bank swill was perfectly fine. This was a woman who, driving on a rainy and cold winter day, would not let you turn on the heat or defogger in the car, as she believed it used more gas to run these comfort and safety features. She'd hand you a well-used rag to keep wiping off the condensation on the inside of the windshield as you shivered. This was a woman who, when she did buy a new car once, had them remove and credit her for the $35.00 AM radio, saying to the salesman "If I want music in the car, I can sing."

Whistlin' Roy tried everything he could to get her to spend money. He even resorting to calling me to get ideas on how to get at her funds. It was my 40th birthday and we were just headed out the door for a nice dinner. I should have known better than to pick up the phone, but this was before we had call display. On the other end of the phone was a very drunk and weepy Whistlin' Roy. I told him we had birthday dinner reservations he was making me late for, but that didn't stop him from bleating on about how he'd tried everything he could think of to get my mother to spend some money on him, but nothing had worked. She would not buy him a better car or a bigger boat, and he was totally frustrated that he "could not get her to open her wallet." I was astounded at his nerve, yet somehow fascinated that he could possibly think this was an appropriate conversation to have with the daughter of the woman you were essentially out to swindle!

I'd had enough of his whining and outright asked "If she's so bloody awful and making you so miserable, then why do you stay involved with her?" His answer? "Because she's a great screw."

Great. How delightful. Just what every girl wants to hear about her mother on her 40th birthday. But, it was true to character for my mother; I knew that on his deathbed my father had thanked her "for all the great sex." So it wasn't the first time I'd heard about my mother's aptitude.

Whistlin' Roy screwed himself right out of the relationship through his unrelenting financial pressure on my mother. Well, that and then there was the fact that her first love had recently become a widower and looked her up. After decades of hearing his name invoked during marital spats, I finally met Cameron Donaldson when he took up with my mother after a 50 year hiatus.

In the beginning the outward appearance of their romance was actually quite delightful. It was like both of them were again 17 and 24 - their respective ages when they first dated. My grandmother had apparently put the kibosh on the original relationship, deeming Cam too old for her daughter. But they had both carried a torch for each other for five decades. They retreated into the past at his rustic lakeside retreat that had been in his family for ages; my mother's name was still visible in the guestbook there from when she had signed it 50 years previously.

I was glad they seemed so happy together; I stayed out of their way and kept my fingers crossed that she could somehow keep it together and make this work. My mother was good at "honeymoon" phases, what she was incapable of was any of the tough slogging required in real relationships. Tough slogging soon came up in the form of Cam's grown daughters and his grandkids, and his expectations that my mother contribute financially to their life together.

He soon proposed and my mother accepted. He gave her a ring with a lot of diamonds that had been his beloved mother's - a ring he had never even bestowed on his first wife. His daughters were cheesed off, about this and a lot of other things, some valid and some petty.

The first wedding date got postponed when my mother would not agree to the pre-nup Cam was insisting on. Basically, she refused to share in their living costs in any way. Despite the red flags that should have raised for Cam, over the course of the next few months he watered down the pre-nup agreement enough that she eventually signed. They agreed everything they owned when they came to the union would remain solely their own in the event of a split, and my mother agreed to contribute $200.00 a month to their joint living expenses. I'm thinking the sex must have been r-e-a-l-l-y good for her to have gotten Cam to agree to this paltry sum!

All too soon after their wedding in 2001, they were both privately contacting me and complaining about each other. Between the two of them they had life experience totalling 143 years, and yet they were incapable of any insights or strategies for overcoming their respective foibles and deficits.

In addition to tangling with Cam, my mother ran afoul in her role as stepmother and stepgrandmother. Prior to the wedding, she had portrayed a more maternal aspect - smilingly hosting and cooking for the clan at Cam's home in town and at the lakeside family retreat, and feigning interest in her stepdaughters and their children. I knew this was a total charade that would be completely unsustainable. Hearing about what was being required of her - things she never would lift a finger to do even for her own blood family - made me snort and say to my husband "I wonder how long she'll be able to last?" Not long at all, it turned out.

Everything had unravelled by the summer of 2004. Cam called me to give me the heads-up that he was going to be tossing my mother out of his home and filing for divorce. He found her impossible to live with and she had never lived up to any agreement she'd made with him. She refused to pay the $200.00 per month stipulated in their pre-nup, and also refused to reimburse him for her share of some holidays they had taken together to Hawaii, California and to Newfoundland. Her excuse was that he had made all the arrangements and paid far more for the airfares and accommodation than she ever would have, therefore she was not beholden to pay him back. According to her, she would have waited for an airline "seat sale" and gotten a cheaper flight, and she would have stayed at a hostel or the "Y" as opposed to the beachfront condo Cam booked in Maui. He'd had enough.

My mother finally moved into the condo she'd owned all along and re-started her life as a widow/divorcee. She refused to return the Donaldson family ring and Cam dealt with this by having their separation agreement stipulate it would be returned to his family on her death. In the ensuing years, my mother tried to insist that if she pre-deceased Cam I was not to ever return this ring. Did I mention Cam and his eldest daughter were both lawyers? I told my mother in no uncertain terms that I would not renege on a legal agreement she had made, and that it was totally unreasonable for her to order me to do otherwise. I said "If anything ever happens to you, one of the first things I am doing is returning that ring!" This infuriated her (not being able to control people from the grave).

My mother had a debilitating stroke in 2009 and died early in 2010. Cam was vacationing in Mexico at the time with his third wife. When they got back home, I contacted him and made arrangements to drop off the cursed ring.

I literally felt my dead mother's grip on me loosen considerably when I fulfilled this obligation - it felt good to be clear and capable of doing the right thing, something she was seldom able to do in her own life. It wasn't much of a redemptive moment with respect to my relationship with her, but that was typical of all her relationships - don't expect much of her. Because of this, I've always expected a lot of myself and I learned not to let me down, and that's more valuable than any diamond ring.

Todo bien. (It's all good.)