My mother taught me how to thread my belt in my pants. It never occurred to me that there was any way but one. She had me threading it through the first belt loop to the right of my zipper and then clockwise around my waist.
I have recently discovered that this is incorrect as a general matter. Women thread their belts in that direction, but men thread their belts counterclockwise. Who knew? Does any reader know this? How did you learn? What the hell?
This is a metaphor (see title) for how my mother misled me completely about my life. Yes, this is going to be another of THOSE posts. Tough. I’m sincerely thrilled that you had a happy childhood.
She beat down my spirit and left me bereft and sad and stupid about how to run my life. She deserves whatever vitriol I can dish out. When she died, I told my therapist I was just relieved, and was I a monster? He said no, that I’d be surprised how many people felt that way.
Faithful readers will remember my screed about how she made me go to Auburn when I wanted to go somewhere better, telling me that I wouldn’t work hard enough to justify the extra expense that UNC or Duke would present. She had just finished spending years telling me that I could go anywhere I wanted because my siblings’ educations had been so expensive.
So I vowed that Kate could go anywhere she could get in. She was academically ambitious, worked hard, was a valedictorian, and she was duly admitted to Smith College. The day I wrote the first tuition check (don’t ask how much) was just about the happiest day of my life.
She attended there for a couple of years but really hated it, and I had to sympathize. I’ve never seen so many cold resting-bitch-face-young women, such grimy quarters. Kate gained weight because the food was so bad that she went off-campus for pizza and Mexican.
The social life was so dead that she took a bus 45 minutes to UMass-Amherst, which was a petri dish of everything in a toilet bowl. She got strep twice and Covid once. And Smith’s health office was closed on weekends. Nancy and I keep threatening to write them a vicious email after which no one will be getting Christmas cards.
Not coincidentally a friend who graduated from Amherst told me that all of those elite WASP-y schools (from Bowdoin south to Bryn Mawr is what we’re talking about) have bad food. Her daughter went to Amherst, and she often went over to UMass-Amherst to eat because the food was so good. My friend speculated that the people who run those elite schools are like wealthy WASPs who pride themselves on their economy and look down at anyone with a flashy wardrobe. You can always tell a millionaire by his tattered pinstriped untucked buttondown.
Kate transferred to Michigan this summer. We dropped her off this weekend, and the difference was palpable: in kindness, mood, organization, intention. Her room is pristine, and the lobby’s floors actually shine. The girls on her hall are social and kind, and, when we were moving in, the dads all gave me winks, waves, and grins. Midwestern nice.
But, you’ve been protesting for about five paragraphs, this is about your mother, idiot. Readers of this blog might accurately evaluate it as entirely about my mother.
My mother liked to think of herself as some kind of a sophisticate. She did have a doctorate—an Ed.D, not a Ph.D., though—and taught at the university level. But she never knew how to behave, and she alienated co-workers. She drank too much in public, and, on one occasion in a restaurant, flirted with a man at another table.
She was, in essence, a northern Pennsylvania farm girl. She remembered her grandmother frying potatoes and bacon for the men’s breakfast when they came in after an early morning’s work.
She resented her younger brother, another George Walter, her whole life. She bitterly resented that he got to go to Penn, while she was imprisoned at Mansfield State Teachers’ College, where her father and grandfather were professorial legends (there’s a Retan Hall named for them). Yet my cousin Kathy, Uncle Walt’s daughter, said that her dad only got to go to Penn because of the GI Bill.
My mother's resentment of my Uncle Walt must only have worsened when, after drifting around New York doing stand-up comedy and playing the piano, he eventually ended up at Random House as vice president of juvenile books—editing Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry. His family lived in a four-story brownstone in Park Slope, as unlike my lifetime housing as could be. I loved visiting them; it was glamorous, and it was New York City. That probably didn’t help Mom’s attitude.
To this day, my favorite relatives are Uncle Walt’s daughters, who are sophisticated, funny, well-read, and kind. My mother used to insist that the girls were pampered by their private school educations, and at some point, I asked, “Do you think your own children are all that well adjusted?” She wanted so badly to steal a march on her brother.
Kathy told me that my mom and dad came to visit, and my mom decided it would be just great if she and dad painted the brownstone in the next day or so. Just imagine what Uncle Walt and Aunt Liz thought about this. My mother, with a doctorate that required a lot of psychology, was clueless about certain basics.
When Nancy and I were in Wilmington, DE, Mom came to visit one Easter. Uncle Walt took the Amtrak down from New York. He showed up in a grey suit and tie; I thought, THAT’S the kind of older man I want to be. To this day I do not wear shorts, and I wear short-sleeved shirts only on the hottest days, so twice a year out here. No one wants to see my skinny old man limbs.
For our Thanksgiving, I made a big meal customary to the Retans, featuring a roast leg of lamb, roast potatoes, and I’m sure some sort of vegetable. Nancy and I mistakenly bought a huge wedge of St. Andre cheese, and Uncle Walt and Mom ate it all up immediately.
After dinner, Uncle Walt and Mom discovered some Goldfish, and they started in on those. A very Retan thing to do.
After he left, Mom turned angry. “He treated me like dirt!” she announced. I admit that I don’t have a lot of emotional intelligence, but Nancy does, and neither of us had any idea where that came from.
She had pretensions. I wish I could remember more examples, but there were so many words that she pronounced incorrectly that I parroted and later discovered were wrong. She must have read them but never heard them pronounced. It was too long ago that she taught me wrong, and I can’t remember too many words specifically.
But I remember being awfully embarrassed in front of one of Nancy’s snotty fellow associates at her snotty, I’m-so-much-better-than-you law firm. We had met this fellow and his spouse at a Chinese restaurant. I said something was “Man-DAR-in”, as my mother had pronounced it. This supercilious lawyer felt bound to correct me: “You mean MAN-dar-in?”
This is partly my problem, caring what other people, such as asshole lawyers, think of me. But she pretended that she was some kind of public intellectual. This was to the detriment of my father, the son of a Polish coal miner who died of the Spanish influenza. Dad never had two nickels to rub together, and she derided his lack of culture.
He kept his eastern Pennsylvania hill country accent till the day he died: “We wan the game;” “Want some peenits?” He was self-aware about this; one of his favorite stories was being taught by a German how to drive: the gears were “Da foist; da second; da intuhmediate; und da beckup!” We all laughed about that. Yet my mother herself would say “sompin”, that is, “something.” She had her own regional accent.
Shortly before he died, he said something about how he knew he wasn’t cultured, didn’t know about Beowulf, and I cried and hugged him.
How she could be so mean to him?—who went to college on an athletic scholarship and played four sports, cracked rock for highways during the Depression, got a high school teaching job and won a state basketball championship, went to France during the war and was wounded, then came home and got his doctorate in three years—how could she denigrate him?
Yet she didn’t know how to pronounce Mandarin. Or how a boy should thread his belt.
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