BEING INCLUDED

11 March 2022

We have decided to have a memorial for my mother, at some time in the next couple of months when both Jeri and Tom can be here.  Ned is making a slide show to run at the memorial, so he has been scanning lots of photos and I've been going through all of my cell phone photos to give to him.

I came across this photo, which still, 12 years later, after her death, brings tears to my eyes.

This was taken at my mother's 90th birthday party and is me with her three step kids.

My mother was a person who always wanted to make everyone feel good, and who went overboard, when she and Fred first got together, to become a part of his family.  He had three kids and a mother and she spent a lot of time becoming friendly to them all.

She was a person who put herself last and everyone else first and, sadly, she seemed to feel that I would understand if I got put last while everyone else was first.

I made the wedding cake for her wedding and she asked if I would be the photographer for the day, so I made sure that we had pictures of her and Fred, the two of them with his parents, with his children, and with all the grandchildren (including my kids), but there isn't one picture of me with the two of them.  Nobody ever thought that I belonged in one of the pictures.  (I told her this years later, after Fred's death and she insisted that I was, too, in wedding photos...but I was the only person with a camera and I know that I was not...and was very hurt by it.

Over the years, the activities of Fred's family always took precedence over the activities of our family.  They were never here for any holidays, but they would come by a few days after Christmas, for example. 

They missed most of the kids' shows in high school.  She did come to a play that Paul was in at the end of high school, but she was so concerned that Fred wasn't enjoying himself that they left as soon as the applause ended.

She did come to Lawsuit shows, but that was after Fred died.

When the kids did You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, it was the play I was the most excited about, and the most proud of.  Paul, Tom and David were in it, Ned did tech, and Jeri directed it and they kids worked so hard on it.  I begged her to come, but it interfered with something Fred's family was doing and she would come "to the next one," and of course there was no "next one" because this was the final Sunshine Children's Theater performance.

One year Fred's family had a birthday party for her (I think this was after Fred died).  They rented a winery and it was a big deal and she was so excited to tell me about it after it was over. But nobody thought to invite her daughter to attend her mother's birthday party.

She was always very concerned about men and taking care of men.  I remember one day when we were all visiting and I was sitting in the chair that had been Fred's.  We'd been there for a couple of hours when Ed, Fred's son walked in.  The first thing my mother said was "Bev, that's Ed's chair.  Please get out of it."

On her 90th birthday, I was again the photographer and was making sure that I had pictures of everyone for her.  I got Fred's kids together to take a picture and as I started to take the picture, Ed's wife took the camera away from me and told me that I should be in the photo too (I'm crying as I write this).  It was the only time anybody in Fred's family acknowledged me as part of his family and that photo has been very special to me all these years.

Fred's youngest son has died of cancer.  When my mother was in the hospital after she broke her ankle, he and I were both there to visit her.  She was asleep.  She had been married to Fred for 18 years and he had been dead for several hears and this was the very first time I had an opportunity to visit with Fred, Jr.  We discovered that we had an incredible amount of things in common and I loved our visit and wished we had gotten to know each other long before that day.  He died shortly after that.

Fred's daughter kind of slipped away from doing things with my mother, and his oldest son has been absolutely wonderful.  He handles all of her money and is the executor of her will.  He and I have worked together ever since she left San Rafael and moved to Davis, but he never came to Davis to see her because it was too far for him to drive.  But I really like Ed and am so glad he has been such a help with her things.

So I was never a member of my mother's new family and she would have been very hurt to hear me say that because I know she didn't do it deliberately, but over and over and over again from the time she got together with Fred until he died, I was the person in last place and his family always came first.