Remembrances of a Single Mom: Burger King, Chanel No. 5, and a Lady Who Lost Her Mind.
By MARY FRANCES DAVIDSON
Growing up with my mom was like growing up with a movie star!
She was tall!
She was marvelous!
She was capable!
When I looked at her in our small house in the Little River section of Miami, Florida, shadowed by a looming, notorious Larchmont Gardens public housing project less than a block away, I saw a beautiful lady with the world in the palm of her hand, full of promise, worldly wisdom and knowledge.
Sitting in front of white woven curtains printed with large, colorful birds of paradise which draped our front room bay window, she spoke of philosophers, authors and operas, New York, Cuba, stage plays, Puerto Rico (which she always pronounced Pweh-toe Rico with flair), and the like.
Her short, dark curls gently framed her brown, curious eyes and wide smile.
In her dark, brocade bell-bottoms with black, crew neck sweater and slim-fitting, pointed-toe black boots she seemed like an elegant fashion layout.
Her speech and manner always regal, she walked tall and handled everything with ease and grace, shoulders back, head held high.
In the sixties, I looked at her, then I looked at our often-fuzzy, 14-inch, black and white, Zenith television, my brothers trying to tune it in with aluminum foil and haphazard rabbit ears, and I saw actual stars, Ginger Grant, the movie star from Gilligan’s Island, Ellie May Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies, stunning Susan Lucci on All My Children and everything fit together!
The scent of Chanel No.5, the real perfume, not the cologne, which she kept amongst her belongings, was part of my mother’s repertoire, of course.
No husband was present.
The five of us occasionally dined at The Painted Horse, a 99-cent buffett on Biscayne Boulevard or at other times, Burger King.
My long, blonde, toddler curls almost touching the table as I stood up on the fast-food bench and quaffed my big, chocolate milkshake through a straw.
The dignified Mary Teresa with her sweet, little, well-behaved ducklings following solemnly behind?
Not quite.
Soon, kids from the project were trying to smash our bay window with rocks and we were in constant neighborhood strife.
I was always afraid to get a beat down walking to the bus stop at Soar Park, but, developing dual-personality coping mechanisms, that never happened.
Mary Teresa acted like her kids should already know how to handle it.
Watching a true-crime video recently about a 14-year-old boy who killed his mother after a lifetime of unthinkable neglect and abuse from her reminded me of Mary Teresa.
All such cases do. Not in a good way.
Not like, “Wow, that’s interesting, glad my mom was great, perfectly imperfect, at least, not that bad.”
No, I understood Chance Moseley’s extreme and unfortunate circumstances from the true crime video in a visceral way.
His mother, Nita Mosely, was a pretty woman with substance abuse problems and various personality disorders who, at 19, named her son Chance because he represented a second chance for a new and better future.
Or was that a third or fourth chance? Or fifth?
It can be hard to keep track when such a chaotic individual as Nita Moseley leaves behind a remorseless trail of unplanned pregnancies, broken relationships, tears, and messes for everyone else to clean up.
My single mom was as infuriating as Nita and other moms like her, but with a different storyline.
When one parents’knotted, antisocial personality is so confusing that one of the kids eventually strikes back, I get it and find it satisfying.
So, who wants to write about this? Not me!
But, here she is: Ms. America, my mom.
All four of her gorgeous little ducklings turned into underaged criminals, including arson, burglary, robbery, a hidden pot field for dealing, and a plethora of underage possession of alcohol and drug charges.
All four of her little brood dropped out of high-school, ruining goals and futures with a few impulsive decisions.
Or, no, her youngest, Charles, graduated at 20 years old.
I was there.
It’s an ugly story, but I know I am understood when psychologists and lawyers, only those with academic and professional credibility, no lay opinions here, offer their analysis and agree with me that Chance’s action was obviously awful, but it made sense.
Most reading this will side with those who staunchly conclude that kids need both parents and a stable home.
Yeah, uh, WE KNOW!
But sometimes it’s not like that.
Mary Teresa was staunchly independent, staunchly husbandless and gave myself as a little kid the impression that she could easily navigate all waters.
I’ll run it by my shrink, but from what I can see she worked herself to death and willfully left her kids roaming in a wild, violent neighborhood with no supervision, no money, no rules, and no desire to provide those stabilizing elements or even to leave the area.
She invited violence, crisis and chaos all while consistently working.
I remember later on when there were problems with police she would blame the cops.
At times, I’ve seen her functioning in a shut down manner as if the lights were on, but nobody was home, as if she couldn’t hear the household commotion.
I hated it.
Pills from work may have assisted in her ability to check out.
As a little kid, I would not have known.
And that kind of confounding behavior from her never stopped until her last breath, which she would have liked to inhale with a Marlboro 100 cigarette.
And which for me was a relief.
And I didn’t go back for her memorial.
But over many years, the tangled web she wove has begun to make sense.
Her competing functional and dysfunctional traits deserve to be understood.
Luckily, unlike Chance Moseley, my reflex at an early age was to escape.
I had to leave.
I had to come to Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Malibu, where everything fit and everything made sense!
Four mouths to feed on a nurse’s salary, which were small at that time, was something I avoided like the plague.
Maybe because I dislike being out of control, my mind is not pill-addled.
I like order, not chaos.
I would never risk my sanity after seeing all the televised anti-drug public service announcements.
Remember the one from the eighties?
This is your brain on drugs, with the egg sizzling in a frying pan?
I’m still influenced by that.
Thanks, Uncle Sam!
When Nancy Reagan said, “Just say no to drugs!” I said, “No!”, with an added foot-stomp if needed.
I understand Henry Chinaski in the movie Barfly when he says, “”I should have been a f*^king monk.”
Cut to present time and I am back in Miami, driving down Cutler Road remembering countless car rides with Mary Teresa and her spawn, as we frequented area beaches from Hallandale to Cape Florida to Matheson Hammock.
I have forgotten her 1950s era, on-the-verge-of-collapse, dull maroon Buick, in which she drove to work at night as a registered nurse.
I have also forgotten the four kids in the car, screaming, beating and kicking each other, endlessly shouting profanity and vulgarities while she drove.
As I drive for the first time since the early 70s down the warm, southern Florida coast, all I can feel is Love.
It is obviously my parents’ love.
It’s in the air all along Cutler Road. They married twice, ten years apart.
They had a whole world and a whole life together before it finally ended.
I had never given a second thought to “them.”
When I think of my father, there is always a blank.
With my mother, it is the opposite.
She was everything to us and we all adored her.
Miami was a place I renounced and disavowed and now I’m driving down Cutler Road being enveloped by an uncanny sense of romantic love, that of my parents.
And as before, so it is now – everything fits together.
Back in the Los Angeles area, on Foothill Boulevard in Monrovia, my bus passes a Burger King, a corporation begun in 1954 that has struggled recently for market share.
With some undefined sense of doom, I put my hand on the bus window as we pass the Burger King by, and I mouth the words without sound, “Never close! Never end! Never leave!”
Without thinking, as I exit the bus a short time later, I reach into my bag for my Chanel No. 5 cologne and douse myself in it.
MARY FRANCES DAVIDSON is a writer-at-large for LAMonthly.org. She attended the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. She can be reached at davidson.mary@myyaho.com
