Very short- not to be a long thread at all, but M,P, & SIMS. But like most really short threads, it starts 79 years ago on a small farm in central Alabama.
I understand my father a thousand times better now than I ever did when he was alive. When he was alive I actively despised him, but now that I understand what he went through I sympathize with him and in retrospect I just moderately dislike him. (The whole Chris Rock thing of “I ain’t sayin’ it’s right [the way he was], but I understand!”.) My father was Keeper. Some of the people who read this are probably Keepers. He was still a horse’s ass, but being a Keeper can definitely turn a borderline person to the Dark Side, so I understand.
What is a Keeper?
Into every family and in every generation a ‘Keeper’ is born. I am guessing this is universal, but I know that it’s true in Southern families and from friends whose families I’ve known it seems also to be true in Jewish, Italian and Hispanic families (which means that if your name is Billy Ray Libertino y Goldblatt you’re screwed like Messalina at the Truth or Dare World Championship).
The “Keeper” is a child, it can be male or female- is often the youngest but that’s not mandatory- who is groomed from birth with the unspoken but nevertheless clear purpose that she or he is the one who will take care of Mama and or Daddy and or Whoever Else Needs Taking Care of When They Get Old and Infirm and Drunk. My father was The Keeper in his generation. I am The Keeper in mine. Like a Don Vito/Michael GODFATHER 2 interwoven storyline you could make a movie set from 1926 to the present about our attempts to break free and how they pulled us back in, but I digress.
My father’s parents never divorced but they lived mostly separate lives (physically and emotionally) for most of their marriage and neither was particularly parental. He was raised by his father’s “old maid” sisters (the twins I’ve mentioned in other threads) Kitty & Carrie and by his grandmother, Maw; they were 38 and 64 respectively when he was born and his mother was in her thirties. Though he had many cousins who were the same relation to his aunts and grandmother, he was the one who was raised in their house (4 room wobbling bathroomless cabin) and the one they picked as the Keeper (the word has two meanings, really). He received the special privileges afforded the Keeper (often spoiled, physically disciplined* less often than other kids, his favorites come up on the menu more often than most, etc.) but it’s payment up front for a back-end deal. When they were old an infirm he was to be the one who kept them.
*His father was a physically abusive bastard, insanely jealous of being supplanted as the focus of his distaff’s world [two Keepers will ALWAYS fight] but when he tried to whip my father inside the house the twins would encircle him and take the blows themselves, unless the grandmother was present. She was 5’0 tall and less than 100 lbs. and old, but when she told her son ‘You ain’t gone touch that boy’, he didn’t touch that boy. He had to learn to take out his rage in other ways.
Luckily for my father, his father was also a Keeper, and he looked after his sisters and his own old maid aunts and his mother while my father joined the military, got an education, married and lived in town. Unfortunately for my father, his father died relative young survived by his sisters, his mother and his wife and the keeper responsibilities passed to my father. By this time my father was about 30, the aunts in their late 60s, his grandmother in her nineties and his mother, who made it clear that since she gave birth to him and wet nursed him with her very own black maid’s breast that he was to tend to her needs as well, was about 60 and about to retire. My father was living 40 miles away in Montgomery with his 21 year old wife of five years and trying to start a family (they had problems conceiving), but he still managed to make the 80 mile round trip at least twice per week. At first that was all that was really needed as his grandmother in her late 90s was extremely self-sufficient (she really only needed somebody to bring her groceries and supplies and occasionally take her to the doctor) and she was something of a taskmaster for the daughters- she made sure that they took care of the house and themselves as well, plus my grandmother (who lived in a separate house on the same farm) was even a modicum of help at first- she’d occasionally bring groceries home or at least make a phone call to my father to [the birthplace never had a phone]).
His grandmother remained in excellent health until her last few days of life and died at 100. Ironically his responsibilities became greater and not lesser with her passing, for the twins were now in their mid-70s and my grandmother in her mid 60s and retired and they all became far more demanding (the formidable Old Lady had kept them all largely in check). Now he had two pre-school age children and still lived 40 miles away and his phone was ringing constantly with “I need this” and “Kitty and Carrie need that” and “You need to get my roof fixed” and “My grass needs cutting” and “Kitty needs to get her dentures fixed”, etc.- literally sometimes several times per day. My father, caught in an almost impossible situation of having to care for the old women who had cared for him truly selflessly as a child (and for my grandmother). The twins were largely helpless (they couldn’t drive and wouldn’t have tried to learn if Elvis & Mary Kay had airlifted a brand new pink Cadillac into their drive), didn’t have and couldn’t use a phone, were becoming more feeble as they got into the tractor beam of 80, didn’t even pretend to clean house or try after their mother died and who lived in an un-air-conditioned house in the Bama heat and insisted on keeping their vegetable gardens and “ishing” in the woods and the like (which led to the occasional bee sting, snakebite [never poisonous, fortunately] and accident which led to their having to be transported to the doctor and then cared for afterwards]) and would not hear of moving to town with him or of, GOD FORBID, going to an assisted living facility (which was the same as the county poorhouse/psych-ward/drunk-tank in their minds), and my grandmother was not quite as helpless but she was evil and thoroughly selfish. My father, in his mid 30s, was going to his birthplace at least two nights per week and usually spending the night there on Saturdays, rarely seeing his wife and children, and it was causing major problems with the marriage (and my mother, love her though I do and many good qualities though she may have, has never once been said to suffer in silence).
Finally a compromise of sort was reached. My mother loved living in Montgomery and hated living in small towns or the country, she quite justifiably hated her mother-in-law with a purple Peloponnesian pederastic passion, and she and my father were having other problems in addition to my father’s Keeper commitments and just generally weren’t happy. However, both were of the mind that it’s far better to keep an unhappy marriage on a feeding tube than to pull the plug and salvage some happiness in life so they decided to “save the marriage” by selling their house in town, buying the interests of all other heirs (uncles and cousins) to the family home place (my father had more greedy uncles than Henry VI that he had to buy out with the last of my mother’s wrestling earnings , though he also had one uncle and one cousin who both gladly gave him their share of the place in appreciation for his Keeper duties) where he built a house and lived within a quarter mile of the Aging Ones.
In exchange for my mother following him into exile he swore a solemn oath (I am not speaking figuratively- there were candles and a dagger and a piece of vellum involved- the old man was nothing if not an appreciator of pageantry) that upon the death or other “final solution” of the old ladies he would sell all or at least most of the family farm and return to Montgomery or to wherever else he and my mother could agree on moving. (He personally dreamed of moving to New Mexico or Arizona.) My father was in his mid 30, my mother in her late 20s, the aunts were much older and it was even agreed that Grandmother could go to nursing homes once K&C were expired (though this was never shared with Grandmother), so they should still have time for a life together when the aunts were either dead or to the point that no reasonable person could deny the need for a nursing home (20 years, tops, they figured). So they built the house, relocated their children (another part of The Compact was that my siblings would never go to public school in the county the farm was in) and moved in on the day JFK was shot.
Speeding ahead a bit: Soon there were two new arrivals to the family: me in 1966 and a lobotomized third aunt shortly after who was also totally helpless. My mother never grew to love or even like the place, but she kept her part of the compact, though the marriage was tremendously unhappy and the Pope himself would have come to perform the divorce, but for all the bad you can say about my mother she made the biblical Ruth look like Anna Nicole when it came to her husband’s relatives.
In 1982 my father died of a heart attack, prematurely old at 55, and was of course survived by all of the old women he had moved back to be the Keeper. The youngest (Lucy Lobotomy) in her seventies while the others had graduated from Aging Ones to Ancient Ones, Grandmother in her 80s and the twins in their 90s and all of them apparently immortal. In his will he bequeathed everything but some college funds set up long before for his older two children (he never set one up for me because I was retarded) to his wife including “all property, real and personal, including household items, books, manuscripts, automobiles, livestock, monies due me and all other goods and chattel”. My mother fell into the position of Keeper for her in-laws and to this day says “Do you know what the word chattel means? It’s Latin for “a bunch of demanding high-maintenance incontinent old women who don’t bathe”.
After five V-E-RY L-O-N-G years the (by then three surviving) chattel were ensconced in nursing homes (there being ultimately no other alternative) and my mother returned (not happily- no money, lots of residual problems, etc.) to Montgomery. One problem followed another and I ended up living with or very close (five minute drive or less to) my mother for the next thirteen years until I was in my early thirties. Several of these years were spent sleeping on a 5 foot long sofa (I’m 6 feet tall) in the tiny airless living room of the 450 square foot 1 BR manager’s apartment of a 12 unit complex for schizophrenics. Those were interesting years in retrospect but not so much at the time. I delayed graduation from grad school for a semester so that I could sleep first in the waiting room outside and finally on the floor of her ICU room for a month and then be her caretaker during her long recovery. When I lived 4 hours away in Georgia I drove the 4 hours to her house at least twice per month and usually more often to make sure she was eating right, feeling okay, as happy as I could do anything about, and on weekends when I didn’t she was on the phone telling me how lonely she was (and that she couldn’t come see me because “it’s such a long drive”). I moved back to Alabama 85% because she was so unhappy that I was so far away and I’m about the only person who can bring her out of a funk.
One of the sad ironies of my mother’s life, incidentally, is this: I would never have been able to live with/near/spend so much freaking time with her had I been straight as I’d almost certainly have been married and had kids by now (women tend to be more forgiving of “fatties” than gay men are, not that I can’t be too bitchy as I tend to cast a wistful eye towards pretty boys myself). On the other hand, I would probably still live in the same city as her had she not had the reaction she did to learning (when I was 30) that I was gay. (The first academic job I was offered was in the same city she lives in [as do most of my friends] and it paid more than the one I accepted in a town I’d never heard of, and I’ve since turned down the highest paying job I’ve ever been offered mostly because it was within an hour of her house.) Petty and I’ll spend at least three and a half months in hell for it, but while I moved back to Alabama to be closer to her I will always keep at least 100 miles between her house and mine until she apologizes for the things she said in the first week of July 1997, which she never will. Oy.
Anyway, I got off light compared to my father in that I only have one (1) She Who Must Be Kept and that one knows how to use a telephone (oh boy howdy, don’t she though) and can drive and has her own income. I’m actually called in far more for moral support than any other reason (though for a decade I remained for financial support as well). I have pretty much accepted that while I’m within my current income level (i.e. unable to afford to take a flight whenever she gets sick or depressed or whiney) I’ll always have a hundred mile umbilicus connecting me to her. But here comes the part about the titular statement.
