From: hounddog23x@gmail.com   
      
   PERSONAL HEALTH   
      
   My Mom Threatened to Kill Me   
      
   The writer's elderly mother is now at the mercy of the daughter she abused for   
   years.   
      
   By Judy Bolton-Fasman / DAME   
   January 15, 2015   
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   43 COMMENTS   
   This story first appeared in DAME.   
      
   The night my mother threatened to kill me, she stood in the doorway of the   
   shag-carpeted room I shared with my little sister. Silhouetted against the   
   hall light, her long hair falling out of its bun, she said once I fell asleep   
   she would stab me so    
   quickly I would never know that I had died.   
      
   My mother and I were living on borrowed time. According to a tarot-card   
   reader, my mother was not supposed to live past 30. Yet here she was, alive at   
   33, and still with a predilection for knives. She often threatened suicide by   
   pulling out a steak knife    
   to press against her belly. But that night it was me she threatened to slice   
   open like one of her baked eggplants.   
      
      
   I'm sure that any sin I had committed at 8 had to do with not giving her   
   enough attention. She needed me to regularly praise her dinners or to   
   acknowledge that she had made my bed. The night I was supposed to die, I   
   stared out my window at the star-   
   flecked sky, trying not to fall asleep.   
      
   A poet once promised her daughter to paint the entire solar system on the back   
   of the girl's hand so that she could proclaim: I know the entire universe like   
   the back of my hand. I wanted a mother like that. In my world, stars exploded   
   in anxiety attacks.   
    In my world, I was keenly aware that the stars shining brightly in the sky   
   had actually died eons ago.   
      
   When I woke up the next morning, I didn't know if I was dead or alive. My   
   mother, still in her tattered pink-and-white check housecoat, had fallen   
   asleep on the living room sofa.   
      
   I've always excused my mother's bad behavior as homesickness for Cuba; she   
   grieved for the place. In the middle of a Connecticut winter she'd moan, "Hay   
   Cuba como to estraño."Because she missed Cuba so did I. It didn't matter that   
   at that point I had    
   never been there. Cuba was like my mother--inaccessible, exotic, ruined.   
      
   I've never told my 20-year-old daughter about my mother's homicidal   
   tendencies. I don't have to. She has her own reasons for mistrusting her   
   grandmother whom she calls Abu--short for abuela. Abu favors her 17-year-old   
   brother over her because he's a boy.    
   She says it outright and without apology. Abu has never said she is sorry to   
   anyone.     
      
   Abu, beautiful and flirty and stormy when she was younger, still carries a   
   torch for her first boyfriend that ignites heartache over and over. The former   
   beauty queen, the aspiring university student, came to the United States in   
   1958. She was 22 and    
   rented a room in Brooklyn from distant cousins. No amount of coaxing would get   
   her to go to out on a Saturday night. Only unrefined girls attended singles   
   dances--chusmaswho wore ankle bracelets and painted their toenails red.   
   Instead, she danced alone,    
   her hand over her heart and her hips swinging to the tinny music on The   
   Lawrence Welk Show.   
      
   It would be another year before my father zoomed into her life in a new   
   yellow-finned Chrysler. When he did, my mother was smitten with the idea of an   
   older, Ivy League-educated man, his hands soft, his nails trimmed. He looked   
   like Harry Belafonte. He    
   drank too much, but so did most Americans.   
      
   My mother was the oldest daughter of a violent alcoholic father and a   
   depressed, hypochondriac mother, frequently hospitalized for mysterious   
   ailments. Raging father and absent mother. I called him the kissing   
   Abuelo--sloppy, gummy, mouthy smooches. I    
   ran circles around him as he tried to chase me. It was my saving grace that if   
   he did anything more than shuffle--it triggered his angina.   
      
   My mother has created an entire mythology about her life in Cuba. She said she   
   lived in Old Havana in a grand apartment with a marble staircase. A maid   
   cleaned each stair into blinding shininess. In America my mother said she was   
   the maid in her own    
   house. ¡Soy la criada!,she screamed as she furiously scrubbed toilets in her   
   housecoat and the dark-framed, thick-lensed glasses she switched out for   
   contacts when she was in a good mood. She was feral when she cleaned.   
      
   But the central narrative of my mother's life is pure fabrication. She claimed   
   to have attended the University of Havana where she was a social-work   
   student--a saint of a girl who, over the objections of her supervisors, bought   
   her clients food and    
   clothing. These stories were the fairy tales of my childhood.   
      
      
   The dates that she said she went to the University of Havana did not align   
   with history. On the day that she said she heard gunshots while taking a quiz,   
   the university had been shut down for over six months. The University of   
   Havana never had a school    
   for social work. And Fidel Castro could not have been the man sitting on the   
   bench who invited her for coffee. He was still in the Sierra Maestra Mountains.   
      
   Facts have never counted in my mother's stories; rules have never stood in her   
   way.She only listens to curanderasand women who read las cartas.She believes   
   in the power of healers and signs from tarot cards. They give her the   
   confidence to ignore reality.   
    In one spectacular instance of self-assurance my mother applied to a Masters   
   program in Spanish Literature and was admitted without proof of educational   
   credentials. This was the mid-'60s and the rusty iron curtain had completely   
   hidden Cuba from the    
   world. My mother rode a wave of educational amnesty. Her university   
   transcripts, she said, were hostage to Castro's government.   
      
   In pictures of my mother the graduate, she poses in the driveway in full   
   academic regalia--a black robe with wide masters sleeves--as if she is about   
   to fly away. A mortarboard and tassel crowns her head. She does not smile. She   
   never smiles.   
      
   At her graduation, she pulled out the cheat sheet my father wrote for her so   
   she could sing the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner." Patriotic American   
   lyrics eluded her. "My Country 'Tis of Thee," turned in to "My WTIC"--the call   
   letters of Hartford's    
   most popular radio station. When she switched on the radio music seeped into   
   every corner of the house. The "Big Band Show" was her favorite and she danced   
   to it with the ghosts of the boys who adored her.   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)