THIS IS A LONG POST. IT COVERS A CENTURY–TWO CENTURIES, and THREE YEARS
This article of truth is a response to the posts stating what a wonderful person my mother Christina H.H. Mayer was. I mean no disrespect, only to heal from a lifetime of abuse I suffered at the hand of a person whom I loved far more than she ever loved me. This may not seem like an appropriate Easter message, but with the truth finally revealed, I pray I will be reborn as the happy and successful person God intended me to be. People are different individuals to different persons. Christina probably was wonderful to most women, and a few men who did not know her character behind closed doors. What I read of her obituary is not the Christina H.H. Mayer I knew.
At eleven, the Christina H.H. Mayer I knew made it known to me, “You were supposed to be an abortion, but your father would not allow it.” That same afternoon, I approached my father, tinkering in his garage. I asked him, “Daddy, why was I born?” Without missing a beat, he replied: “You were born to take care of your mother in case anything should ever happen to your sister”—a cruel burden to place on the shoulders of an eleven-year-old boy with no male role model other than a 72 year-old (grand) father.
I took my father’s words very seriously, as I have taken any vow. Fool that he raised me to be, at my mother’s plea, I came to her rescue twice in eighteen years, only to have her betray me both times. The first time, after serving her for six weeks, removing me from my element, destroying an ascending Hollywood acting career, after accompanying her across the country for weeks, she sent me home without even a plane ticket. The second time, she falsely accused me of senior abuse, had me thrown in jail, and left me there to rot. If not for a friend who paid bail, I might still be there.
As a child in Germany, she continuously insulted me by calling me “Bengel” (misbehaved boy,) “Luder” (bitch,) and “Miststueck” (piece of shit.) As a child, I thought it was funny because I did not know the meaning of her insults. Repeatedly she told me to “Verschwinde”—(disappear,) “Hau ab” (get lost) “Geh weg” (go away,) but when she needed someone to find pins she had dropped on the rug in what was supposed to be my bedroom, she called me to help: “Adler Augen” (eagle eyes.)
At seven, she placed me in her first of five “foster” homes, and took off for the summer in Italy, with her husband and daughter. That summer, in spite of never knowing why she had ostracized me, living across the street from a farm was a treat. At fifteen she sent me into the second (abusive foster) home where at five o’clock on the first morning, a family of three obese “Christians” entered the room I was sleeping in, dragged me out of bed, sat on top of me, and cut my hair off to the roots. This likened me to Samson, who after being betrayed to the Philistines by Delilah had his hair cut off, and lost his power. In the end, God did restore Samson’s power—an event I am still waiting to see occur.
After that abuse, her second foster home choice for me was in the home of a crazed evangelical Christian woman who, when I shared with her my love for a fellow classmate, a boy whom I desperately wanted to be friends with, told me I was going to hell. She was right. Mother’s third foster home choice was to send me into the heart of Germany’s dirty, dusty, noisy coal mining country, Essen, into a downtown two-bedroom apartment with a family of five vulgar chain smokers. At the time, downtown Essen was a major post-war reconstruction site. The family she assigned me to live with ran a small store—purveyors of tobacco, alcohol, sweets, and pornography. The son she had me share a room with was an obese slob, two years my senior, who forced me to hear every night before sleep the taste of his girlfriend’s private parts. The older son was a 21 year-old pimp.
The mother of the family loved me as my own mother never did. Every day she gave me two packs of cigarettes. It took me decades of therapy to realize this was her gift of love, as cigarettes were the only means of currency in post war Germany until the currency reform in 1948. This was an act of love on her part. Unfortunately, that experience led me into a lifetime of substance abuse and addiction. After Mother tossed me into four foster homes, (three of them abusive,) never once did she ever say: “Alan, I am sorry for what I did to disrupt your youth, and your education.”
To Mother, that was normal, as her youth, and education, were interrupted by the Nazis, then war. Why should the life of her son be any different? The experience of being sent to Essen led me into a lifetime being torn between Germany and the States, forcing me to copy her broken education, and her broken allegiance between the two countries, and friends on both sides of the Atlantic, I could never keep up with.
Just as I was beginning to adjust to life in the States, and was making friends, (after having moved to five cities in four countries before the age of eleven) sending me to a foster home in Germany disrupted my life. That year in Germany, I made friends. In Bulgaria, I met two teens from East Germany with whom I have stayed in touch over the duration of my life, costing me heavily to remain in contact, as they were not permitted to travel outside the Iron Curtain. To see my friends, I had to fly to Frankfurt, take another flight into West Berlin, then cross into East Berlin via Check Point Charlie, a trip I could only afford three times over a thirty-year period. It took me decades to realize why I had become such close friends with people who lived across an ocean, and were unavailable to me. All three of us were second-class citizens in our own country.
Only three times in my life did I ever hear Mother say “Alan I love you“—each time followed by the words “but we cannot live under the same roof together” or “but I don’t like how you…” I was seven the first time I heard this. She was 99 the last time I heard it, while serving as her dedicated caregiver—I even paid her out of the house expenses for the opportunity to serve her. As she believed everything she said, her thoughts became her truth.
“Your (evil) sister is out of the picture,” she told me. With that in mind, as she had passed her hatred for me along to her daughter, I agreed to come take care of her. I later found out she was no longer speaking with her daughter, who told her, “I will see you when you draw your last breath. I agreed, knowing from birth, she had passed her hatred for me (no longer acceptable to hate Jews) along to her daughter. What she did not tell me, she had passed the torch on to her granddaughter, the real estate lawyer who was born for the explicit purpose of hijacking my late father’s estate. Having been raised by a mother filled with a spiteful hatred for her uncle, the child at forty is still unaware.
After one of Mother’s tirades, she accused me of a felony—senior abuse, and had me thrown in jail. This took me two years to fight, without my (stolen) savings to hire a lawyer. To this day her hatred for me has kept me from returning to my home in California. With my $20,000.00 relocation funds stolen by the police, (who forced themselves into my home without an entry warrant, or a search warrant, and went through my nightstand, my drawers, my car, my glove box, my wallet, and my medications) then placed my relocation funds into the hands of her daughter, who gave it to her lawyer daughter. Until then, my only interactions with police had involved minor traffic violations. During my year taking care of her, the police showed up at my door four times—the first time half an hour after my arrival—at Mother’s request.
A week before she called the police to have me arrested, she said to me: “I will never make you homeless again.“ That was another lie I fell for because I wanted so desperately to believe my mother had a bone of justice in her, an inkling of love for her caregiver, but her ‘family’ had convinced her a vote for a reality show host could restore America to greatness. My mother felt comfortable living under fascism, in war. So often, my father would say to me “I would stay out of the kitchen if I were you—your mother is on the warpath again.” Only once did she ever (seem to) regret her choices when she said to me, “a good mother does not put her child in foster homes.” I understand a recently pregnant woman questioning whether she wants to have a child she is carrying or not. What I do not understand is that over the span of my entire lifetime, my mother refused to ever discuss the pain she caused me—every day of my life—through forty years of therapy.
I was twelve, and needed a mother most, when she began a career. She insisted she had to work because, as she put it, we were “poor.” Truth be told, my mother’s tastes were so elevated, even my father’s generous $110,000 income (adjusted for inflation) with every benefit Uncle Sam provided her could not support her. To both my parents, my mother’s career and happiness (lived vicariously through her daughter and granddaughter to make up for the years she lost under the Nazis and the war) were of the utmost importance. My father was always concerned about keeping her happy. He was not only a husband, and lover, to her, but a friend, confident, provider, father, and Savior from the horror of post-war Berlin. She kept my father so busy, he never had an opportunity to be a father to me. I existed only as her footman, and to make her laugh through my father’s personality and wit—which she made fun of.
In 1967, as a student at North junior high school, (half a mile from where I was stuck 2017-2020, in Aurora,) a school counselor noticed things were not right in the Home and called the family in for consultation. After a fifty-minute session, the school psychologist said: “What I see here is four people pulling on four separate ropes.” He recommended family therapy, free of charge, paid for by the school district. Mummy’s response: “therapy is for sick people. We are not sick.” She always knew everything better than anyone else. To her, it was always “My way or not at all.” I am the only ‘family’ member who sought therapy, beginning at age 23 when I was finally able to escape her long extended arm of motherhood, and begin a life of my own in California.
Ever since, I have been in and out of therapy, trying to understand how a mother could harbor such hatred for her son. Over the decades, with no choice other than to abandon her, (after she didn’t speak to me for ten years while I studied) I dealt with her hatred, which she passed on to her daughter. Now that I have been grieving the loss of my mother, I have revisited every memory of her and find, even when we were laughing and enjoying each other’s company, she held a lifelong latent hatred for me. I was not in her plan. Unwilling to blame my father, she blamed me for my birth, and turned me into her lifelong scapegoat. At age twelve, with her adult daughter out of the home, when I needed a mother most, she started a career. I seldom had her attention again until at 98, she called me to the home to become her caregiver, and she would make me pay for the privilege.
It was not until I came to take care of her that I made it a condition she enter therapy with me. With no other choice, she agreed, and fell in love with the (female) therapist. She could not wait for our weekly sessions, and brought gifts every week—usually banana bread, and cheesecake. Nonetheless, for her, therapy turned out to be nothing more than an open opportunity to complain about all the things she did not like about me. I see therapy to be for people who want to understand life and the relationships we are tied into from birth—chosen, or not. But my mother chose instead to see it as another opportunity to stay committed to the ego’s insanity—seek, but do not find.
When I was seventeen, a minor, freshly returned from her latest foster home in Germany, she threw me into the street again when her daughter had a fight with her (first) ex-husband (as per Mother’s account, the one with eleven DUIs,) and returned to the Home with her two cats. I did not know I had any rights because in Mother’s presence, I had no rights, and never got a sentence out without being interrupted, something that still haunts me to this day in every interaction. After raising four girls, (the first three whom my father abandoned,) he had no idea what to do with a boy. Seldom was he allowed to spend time with me because every time Mother entertained her girlfriends, he was required to come out of his study to entertain them. As a Berlin family friend put it, “There was no room in the Mayer family for Alan.“ Mother later described this friend as “Hauptsache ich”—“the main thing is me”—a reflection of her own unexamined faulty character, which she passed along to her daughter.
My father’s way to remedy the family discord was to hire me out as a paperboy, which I am happy he did. It saved me from having to buy into Mother’s desire to fight with me. It took me decades to understand why I started a lawn care business at eleven, which I ran summer, and winter, along with my paper route, until she put me in the next foster home. My father wanted me out of his wife’s way, because he realized there was no room in the house for Alan. There was barely room for him, other than in his office, the garage—and in their pink flocked flower papered bedroom and bathroom with the pink porcelains–which I had to share with two people with dentures, so that Mademoiselle Daughter could have the garden level private suite to herself.
I thought long and hard about Mother’s friend’s statement, remembering how as a child in Germany, her daughter shared the large bedroom with my father‘s desk, and his library, while I was relegated to sleep in the baby’s room, with Mother’s sewing machine–upon which she was constantly sewing blouses and dresses for—your guessed it—her daughter.
I could not leave my Lego houses and cars on the rug because she was not going to step around them. I came home from school every day and found pins, patterns, blouses, and dresses on the cot she allowed me to sleep in. Even then, there was no room in the home for Alan. Later, on Troy Street in Aurora, her daughter was assigned the private suite with the private light green tile bathroom, while I had to share the upstairs pink porcelain flocked flower papered bathroom with both parents, (who each had their own false teeth jar) to pantyhose, brassieres, and nylons hanging to dry over the bathtub doors nearly every night.
That made junior high fun.
I gave up a beautiful two-bedroom two-bath apartment in West Hollywood, with access to a yard for my dog Pokey—of whom she said: “I love this dog more than I love my own great grandbaby.” At her request, when no one else would take care of her, I put my life in storage to be thrown into jail, where she and her “family” let me sit. If not for a friend who paid bail to get me out, I might still be there. Now my animals (and I) are trapped in a third floor walk up one bedroom apartment sharing a smelly stairwell with twenty-five noisy low class neighbors in twelve apartments in the same low income ZIP code Mother “raised” me in—a third rate dormitory of minorities—in which I am the minority. If not for my friends, I would have been on the street these past three years—or as Mother would have had it—dead.
And if for the neighbors, I would be shot in the head, but thank God, I have moved on, and am back in California, by the beach–without my life, but I am by the beach.
As a child, and as an adult living in my father’s house, under German occupation, everything she had and owned came through my father and his generous Uncle Sam, including medical care, world travel benefits, and museum quality furniture pieces, which she bought on the Black Market with my father’s Lucky Strike cigarettes—something he forbade her to do. She never listened to him. For more on my father’s take on their marriage (his third) see my father’s poem: “My Marriage Determination—the Ideal Husband.” Now, the only furnishing left to me are the ones that Goodwill would not pick up.
Because every stick of furniture from that house holds painful memories for not only me, but the people who traded that furniture that they could eat, I said I do not want any of it. But I do want half their value.
There was not a corner on Carson Street that did not have Mother’s scent on it. If I closed the door, she opened it—without knocking. If I locked the door, she yelled at me, pounded on the door, and proceeded to call everyone on her phone list to complain about me, beginning with her granddaughter lawyer (who was often not available, and her daughter was no longer speaking to her.) Then the threatening text messages and phone calls would come in from her granddaughter lawyer, and one particularly rude friend of hers with whom she played (in her words) one-up-manship, telling me how I should handle my mother.
“She always tires to one up me, but she can’t.” is the game they played, this surrogate Cuntoj daughter, the exact same age as her estranged daughter. All Mother ever knew was separation, and division. It’s in the German blood.
Everyone pointed the finger at me. NOT ONE PERSON ever offered a helping hand. I could not sleep a night without her waking me with her electric chair, at three in the morning, then often again at four. She never could sleep. Her conscience would not let her. But she would not listen.
She refused my suggestion I buy her a small refrigerator and microwave that she could heat her cocoa upstairs. It had to be in her kitchen—regardless whether I was able to sleep, or not. Then she would yell at me—“Just you wait until my family gets here.“ I was never part of her “family.” She had detached me before birth.
When people visited, she was a sweet old lady. As soon as they left, she turned into the monster only my father, and I, knew. In one of my father’s limericks he wrote: “Let me tell you about my beautiful wife Christina. Get on her bad side the devil couldn’t be meaner.“ When I showed her his cartoon, and the verse, she refused to believe he had written it, and came after me with a serrated kitchen knife. To my knowledge, only George and I ever saw the hatred in her eyes.
Like most women in postwar Berlin, she held a hated for men, as the women blamed them for losing the war—in spite of not having gone off to fight themselves. The few men who did return from war were missing limbs—and their sanity. War takes something out of a human being—the human part. All of her adult life, my mother suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but refused to admit it. To admit less than perfection in Nazi Germany destined one to a concentration camp, along with Jews, dissidents, and homosexuals (which, in her ignorance, she labeled me, then blabbed her opinions to everyone who knew me.
When I turned eighteen, she used to invite models over for dinner, served them wine, then told them they should not drink, and drive. She put them into bed with me, an uncomfortable situation for both of us. It was not until much later I realized she was auditioning potential daughters-in-law. Instead of allowing me to make my own choices, or accepting the help her doctor offered, she refused to take medication, chose instead to drive her husband, and children, crazy, passed her trauma on to me, as I did not have the option to marry a man to take care of me. I was on my own. And since my father was at fifteen on his own, why not his son?
For decades, she delegated me into taking medication. Because my father raised me to be his fool—out of his guilt, I made myself available to her beck and call—usually only after she had fought with her daughter—a regular occurrence, and only because I so desperately wanted her love, something she was incapable of giving me. She only had enough like for her daughter to live vicariously through her. But never face the truth.
When my father passed, she and her daughter had another falling out. Again, I came to her call, and took care of her for several weeks. I flew her to visit her friend in Reno, rented a car, drove her through Napa Valley, spent four days in San Francisco with her, took her to the Monterrey aquarium, and drove her down the Pacific Coast Highway to my house, my home, in Los Angeles. Then I sent her to her friend in Brazil, who had been inviting her for twenty-five years, (the friend she brushed me off onto at eleven, whose six and seven year-old sons one evening laughingly showed me their mother’s pornographic collection—two booklets of a woman having sex with a horse.) I was sixteen then. I would say it had some effect upon some screwed up thinking. Not only mine. Her kids’.
As soon as she returned, she became best friends with her daughter again, and did not speak with me for ten years. After passing my house along to an ex business partner, to remove it out of the acquisitive hands of my sister, (in whose name my mother’s (daughter’s lawyer) had placed it in her Will,) after going on Section 8, drawing in two hundred dollars less a month for him. Diagnosed with P.T.S.D., along with other red flags, I could no longer work, and as a result, I found myself on the street, with an eviction on my record.
As a result of helping her, my acting career came to an end, and I became homeless for five years. I let her know I was driving to Colorado to seek solace. She locked the house and disappeared–to go barhopping with her daughter to meet a new man for herself, and a new husband for her daughter. Once she told the story how her daughter tore her first husband off the arm of his fiancée, and cried, “He’s mine!” leaving the poor girl in tears, tying herself to the wrong man. He was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, had a sharp mind, was supposedly valedictorian of MIT, and small minded.
She told the story how she met my father, at a party in, Berlin in spring, 1947. “I went straight for the filet mignon,” she said. I did not blame her. Bombed out, from a castle on a lake to renting a room from Nazis (there was no other choice) I would have done the same. As a husband, my father was a catch. He just never had the opportunity to be there for me. I know he wanted to love me, and in his defense, he never hit me. He never told me I was stupid. I never heard him swear, but he also never protected me from his wife’s evil deeds, her several abusive foster homes, her evil daughter. and the insulting names she called me as a boy. NEVER ONCE did I ever hear him say: “Christina—enough of your warpath thinking. I am going to step in, and protect my son.”
Of the year plus I took care of Christina (in my Father’s house, under German occupation,) I counted seven days when peace prevailed, and that, only because I heard my father’s voice: “Don’t rock the boat, Alan. Bite your tongue. Stay out of the kitchen.”
—No different from growing up in my father’s house on Troy Street, from which I could not get away fast enough. I asked my parents to co-sign for a loan so I could afford to buy a house, she put my home into the hands of her daughter in my late father’s Last Will and Testament, in spite of telling me she would never make me homeless again, then specifically calling me into the room: “I want you to hear this with Alexandra here.” She turned to her friend. “Didn’t I tell you just the other day, ‘Alan has been so good to me, I am leaving the house into his name’?”
Another lie, to get more out of me.
I wanted so badly to think she had my welfare at heart, but it was always, “Hauptsache ich— a life lived vicariously through her daughter, then granddaughter. Rather than let my house fall into the hands of her daughter, I quit claimed it to my business partner of thirteen years. He sold the house, bought a bigger house with a pool, and not understanding P.T.S.D. any more than I did, evicted me into the street, after I had spent almost five years rebuilding his house, and thirteen maintaining it. “You will always have a home in Silver Lake,” he told me, another lie I fell for because I was accustomed to being lied to by people I loved.
“Do I wish I could have your love? Lie to me.”
His eviction made me homeless for five years. I lived out of my car for over a year. Again, I drove to Colorado in search of solace. Again, Mother locked the doors, and took off with her boyfriend to barhop with her daughter to find her a second husband. And it worked. They both met men, in a bar, together, just like the bladder cancer they shared, at the same time, getting a Mother/Daughter two-for-one special from the clinic.
A week before she had me arrested, she called another of her friends into the room and said: “(Her rude friend’s name) I want Alan to hear me say this in front of you. Did I not tell you, Alan has been so good to me, I am leaving the house in his name?” Even in death, she could not leave me with a roof over my head, or with my dignity in place. In 1998, after taking care of her and my late father’s Last Will and Testament (a wet noodle without faith who would not even pay for my flight home) she placed everything into her daughter and granddaughter’s hands. She never approved of my choice to become a teacher, or an actor, and with fifty-six film, stage, and television credits to my name, not one of her ‘family’ members ever came to celebrate one premier with me.
In their defense, there were only six worth attending.
Christina H. H. Mayer lied to me my whole life. All my adult life, I gave her every possible excuse. She spent the last nine months of World War I in the womb. She was named after three queens. Her mother died when she was three months old. She was raised by governesses. She was raised in a villa on a lake with ten servants at her feet and was then bombed out. Her main role model was her twenty-year older Nazi half-sister, (who as an illegitimate mother had a son who has lived his entire life believing his father was a naval commander.) She was a pure evil Nazi wife who went out of her way to destroy her son’s life—intentionally. Mother survived Nazi Germany, where she learned anyone who did not fit in with Nazi ideology, Jews, dissidents, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, were destined for a concentration camp. She was raised under fascism, and survived the war. She lost her youth (and her teeth) to the Nazis. She was the product of a divided family, the product of a city divided by a wall, citizen of a country divided by an Iron Curtain. She learned how to mother a son from her evil Nazi stepsister, who intentionally destroyed her illegitimate son’s life because she could not face the sin of her own illegitimacy.
She hated my father’s American sisters, and separated him from them. She could not stand that they were self-supporting women who did not need a man. My older Aunt Leanna was a Ph.D, and a lesbian, something my mother could not accept. Mother divided my father’s family first, then she divided her own because division and separation was what she was raised under, what she felt comfortable with—excitement. We lived fifteen minutes from my two American aunts. Only twice did I ever see them, when my mother was out of town on business when my father dared take me with him, at my request. “Don’t let your mother know I took you with me,” he said. “She’ll have me in the doghouse.”
I gave her every excuse because we only get one mother in this life, and I wanted her love so desperately, as hardened as she was. At 13, I changed my name to her maiden name, thinking that would make her love me. Instead, it gave her, and her daughter opportunity to ostracize me further, “You are not even a Mayer.”
At 18, my father took me to the courthouse to change my name legally, without even asking me why I was doing so. It took me twenty-nine years of therapy to figure out instead of loving me for it, she used it to further ostracize me from the family she had built up for herself, and was going to defend at all cost.
When at 18 I left for Colombia (to get away from her) she wrote me a letter in German which she gave me as I got on the plane: “Ich bin eine Mischung von Haerte und Zaerte”—I am a mixture of hardness and softness. I never saw her soft side. The only side I ever saw was the hard side. My parents’ support of my university education was $1,500.00, which lasted one semester at the University of Colorado extension. To this day, I have still not paid off the total of my university education. Her daughter received a scholarship from my lesbian aunt—a Humanities Professor at Colorado Women’s College. Anytime my mother ever helped me out (she was in control of all the finances, without my having the support of two husbands, and a lawyer daughter,) she would say to me, “You have cost me thousands of dollars.“ I responded, “and you have cost me millions.”
Without financial support from anyone but California state scholarships, it took me 13 years, dropping out three times, often to work three jobs at a time to get a degree Mother got for free—because she slept with the boss. My father was the U.S. Department of Defense Education Director of the largest Air Force Base outside of Wiesbaden, Germany. He hired her to teach, without any training or degree. Having gained experience working under my father, she then taught adult school, and later told me how she wrote on her Joslins application she had a college degree in design. “Everything in Berlin was burned to the ground” she said—one truth she ever told. No one could prove, or disprove her. Never once did I begrudge her this, even when she told me she never earned more than $12 an hour—less than she would have earned had she been a man. In spite of she and her daughter blooming together at the height of the women’s movement, (and sharing the same wardrobe, and the same cancer,) nothing was ever enough for Christina, or Daughter.
Many times I invited her to spend Christmas with me in my home in Silver Lake Hills. Her response was always the same. “I cannot get away from work.“ Then, year after year, I would see photographs on her coffee table of her and my father and her “family” before a Christmas tree. Though she loved the beach, palm trees, and the colorful bougainvillea that reminded her of Casablanca, she hated California. I could not understand why, (not only because I chose to live there,) but because all the bombs that were dropped on Berlin during the war were made in California. She preferred Pittsburgh to the beaches of Orange County, where for eight years, I lived a block from the ocean. I chose not to pass the insanity of my childhood onto another generation. The price I paid was second-class citizenship. This explained my close friendships with my friends in East Germany, whom I met during foster years in Europe, and could only see every ten years. Not that I could not afford to travel. I just chose to travel to island nations, rather than rainy Germany.
Now, with my $20,000 relocation fees, (paid out by my California landlady,) in the hands of her “family,” again I was stuck in Aurora without my savings to get me back into my element. After seventeen years writing, (given no other choice) she finally read my literary works. Her comment on my works: “You are a genius.“ I was however not genius enough for her to want to see me published. She said: “I don’t understand why you have never been published.” How could I—without the support of two husbands? Without friends who believe in my talent, I would have been on the street these last three years, or worse, if Mother had had her way—in jail, and she was sitting on three quarter of a million dollars of my father’s savings. Her $12/hr. earnings went to teeth, designer clothes, and travel.
When my father turned 100, she held a party in Pittsburgh. It was her (first) ex-son-in-law (as per Mother’s account, the one with eleven DUIs) who presented to my father the cake with 100 candles on it. She had more respect for a drunk than she did for her husband’s only son, her own flesh and blood. Friends from Europe were there. I was not even told there was a party.
Repeat both parents’ memorial services, to which I was not invited.
That is the reward my mother, Christina H. H. Mayer left me. After helping her through my father’s passing, the inheritance I received was a sweater, a brush, a flashlight, and a book entitled Thoughts to Build On. My father wanted me to stay warm, groomed, and have a light to see to the end of the tunnel, as I developed my mind on thoughts to build on.
When Christina was not even able to stand on her two feet, I took care of her for six weeks, and did such a wonderful job that it never occurred to her how I had fulfilled my father’s prophecy—twice, a statement I shared with her the first time I came to her rescue. My reward—she passed me over a second time, to put everything in the hands of her granddaughter, who was born to become the “family“ lawyer, and hijack my later father’s estate. Daughter moved my father across the country at 102, forcing him out of his home kicking and screaming, only telling me AFTER her “family” and friends had packed them up and moved them out of their homes, kicking and screaming.
Repeat both parents
I later learned everything I had entrusted to my mother in a footlocker in her crawl space (my entire childhood of toys, hundreds of dollars of Corgi cars, and 1960’s car brochures I collected, gone,) either stolen, or tossed into the trash. Not one person called to let me know the house was being sold and my father was being moved. Six months after they send his lifeline to Goodwill—his desk, typewriter, papers, and pens, I was called three days after he was put in the hospital—at 102 ½. When she was no longer speaking with her daughter, she begged me to move her back to Aurora. I put her condo on the market at a $200,000.00 profit, put her in touch with an Aurora real estate agent, and got her settled into a beautiful house on Meadow Hills gold course. She later told her friends I was lying.
You guessed it, three years after her realtor daughter sold the house, I have yet to see one dollar.
In his Last Will and Testament, my late father stipulated he wanted his ashes distributed within six months of his passing. My mother ignored his wishes. I never interfered, believing it was not my place to intervene. When she finally decided to distribute his ashes, three years later, she did not invite me. Months later, again, I saw the photos on her coffee table with her “family” and strangers—people I did not even know. She did not feel my father had the right to have his only son attend what was the only memorial to his long life.
Even in death, she continues her attempt to emasculate me, as she did my father. After a lifetime of abuse, Christina H. H. Mayer now haunts my days. “Little Christ” as I often reminded her—to deaf ears. My mother was a different person to different people. It had long been my hope that her passing would free me—and her, but she continues to let me know who “rules the roost”—as she accused my Aunt Leanna of doing. My father never stood a chance. She was her father’s little girl, his favorite, destined to inherit a vast estate that went up in flames before her eyes. She was going to make sure her son had it no better. I remember my father telling her, “Christina, you will cut off your nose to spite your face.” Indeed, he was right.
When in the 1980’s I went through re-birthing, she refused to answer any questions I was given to ask about my birth. Years later, I managed to loosen her up. She told me how upon bringing me home from the hospital after birth, her daughter cried: “I hate him. Take him back where he came from.” She laughed. “You think that is funny?” I asked her. “You should have told her how lucky she is to have a brother. Instead, you and your daughter have turned my life into your private joke.’
I supported this woman in everything she did over the duration of my entire life, but she had a double standard; one for men, who were meant to take care of women, and another for women, who were meant to be taken care of by men. As I did not marry any of the girls she brought home from work, those whom she forced into my bed, I was useful to her only for what she could get out of me—the services of a loyal footman who came back to the home every three years to paint with her–the house, and her hair–every three weeks.
It was an exciting, eye-opening, and abusive life to be the son of Christina H. H. Mayer.
One day, after another of her screaming tirades, she yelled at me with such hatred in her eyes: “You hate me!” she screamed at me. I replied: “hatred is in the eye of the beholder.” When she had settled down, I approached her, and said: “all I want is to live in peace with you.” She yelled at me. “I don’t want peace—I want excitement!” I hope she has found the excitement she craved for, or per chance (I hope) at the moment the Lord called her home, she changed her mind and chose peace if it wasn’t too late. I do not know, as she claimed to be a Christian whenever it was convenient, but in every one of our lifelong conversations, she confirmed herself an atheist, nd quickly adapted to whatever religion you said you were.
I thank my mother for giving me broad shoulders, big feet, lots of hair, a big dick, and for teaching me the German language. Without any form of support, or even a kind word from any member of her “family,” this post is my way of grieving a life spent in pain—her life, a pain which she passed along to me rather than claim as her own, grieving process I should be sharing with “her family,” in German, a grieving process that instead is against “her family.”
I knew who Daughter was when I was seven, and she was eight. That summer, visiting the States, upon being introduced to the paraplegic son of friends of my parents, she turned to me, deformed her arms, and face, and stuck out her tongue. When she nearly let me drown that summer, and I heard he use the “N” word to describe Aretha Franklin, I thought I knew who I was dealing with.
Out of his own guilt, my father raised me to be caretaker of a woman I have had to forgive over the course of a lifetime.To anyone who experienced me as a not-so-good friend, or a complainer, perhaps this grieving post will clarify the person my mother raised me to be—her confused footman, tossed around from one home to another—like a package, as her friend put it. I spent a lifetime bound by my mother’s constant judgment, and her lies about me to others.
Over the span of my lifetime, I have relied upon the help of therapists, and the love of strangers to learn what it is to be a loving human being. I thank God for giving me a father, a noble man who wanted to love me, but could not find his way around the endless needs of his third wife–whom he protected, and kept happy, at all cost.
Godspeed that I may replace the insanity I was raised in with the sanity of God’s love. May my mother, Christina H. H. Mayer have finally found peace, and may I be reborn this Easter Sunday to become the successful human being God wanted me to be all along, and may her “family” learn the true meaning of life, without alcohol.
And so it is. Und so ist das.
Amen.
AmerIcanValuesRestored 