My father, an international banker, moved our family to a new country every few years. My mother, who stayed home with my sister and me, loved remodeling every house we lived in. Soon after each of our international moves she would rip out the interior of our new residence, typically finishing the gorgeous redo just in time for us to move somewhere else. Our fifth move was to Germany when I was twelve. We moved into a home built in the nineteen thirties on Amsterdamerstraẞe in Düsseldorf. The house had been built for SS officers. The front door was bordered in carved stone with a blank spot at the top where somebody had removed the swastika that had been engraved there. There were secret exits downstairs and safes in most of the upper rooms. A gas shelter filled a corner of the basement, the rubber casing around the metal bunker door cracking with age.

My mother worked with the carpenters and other tradespeople on each remodel, completing the small tasks she could. She had her own tools stored in drawers throughout the house. With me, my mother was domineering and single-minded. She had strict rules and was revisionist, reframing innocuous actions in a negative light. My father was mainly absent, although he occasionally intervened when my mother’s behavior intensified.

One afternoon I left my room, where I was listening to INXS. I walked down the stairs, my hand lightly running the length of the banister. It was smooth, my mother having ordered a woodworker to polish it to a shine and then, inexplicably, paint it bright red, hiding the knots and inconsistencies in the wood beneath. My mother stopped me.

“I had a conference with your teachers, and you have two Cs,” she hissed. “Why are you doing this? What is wrong with you?”

“Fuck you!” I responded, a little screechiness creeping into my voice. I wondered, frustrated, if the house was somehow to blame for my mother’s anger, the ghost of the SS officer who had owned it possessing her.

Frustrated with my nastiness, she cursed at me in Tagalog. “Bobong tanga!”

The situation escalated rapidly, each of us cursing the other, until she raised her arm wide in a roundhouse movement.

A second later I heard ringing and felt a swelling, vibrating pain in my head. I sat down, hard. My vision dimmed, the world grey, but after a moment the pain was greater than the fade. I looked up and saw my mother had a hammer in her hand.

At least, that’s how I think it went, from what I and others remember.

I did not always remember this incident. One morning I had writer’s block, so I called my sister, Pia.

“Do you remember that time Mom hit you in the head with a hammer?” Pia asked.

I did not.

Pia filled me in. Over time, I came to remember parts of the event, namely the fight beforehand and the swing of the hammer, but the rest is pulled from Pia’s vivid descriptions and my other memories of Amsterdamerstraẞe.

Just before I hung up Pia told me, “I took the hammer from Mom. She used to tell us, you had better not tell your father, when she did something really bad.”

◆

In my twenties I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mother. When my friends started having kids, however, I worried I was missing out on something. I agreed to have a child with my then-husband. After a stint with infertility, I gave birth to twins. I had a medically eventful pregnancy, and it became clear my kids’ father wasn’t very helpful. My youngest child was born sixteen months after my twins. I had three kids in diapers and none of them could talk, the twins’ speech delayed. The four of us survived their infancy, but I don’t remember much from that time, other than diapers and feeding and baths and bedtime routines coupled with all-nighters finishing work reports.

◆

Over the course of a month my son, Roan, flushed toy cars down the toilet three times, requiring three new toilets.

“Roan, why?” I asked. “Why did you do that?” Each time he grinned, completely immune to my concern and anger.

One evening, I dragged him from the bathroom where he had yet again clogged the toilet with a toy. Overwhelmed, I put him on the bed, grabbed his legs, and flipped him over, butt up.

“Roan,” I said, my voice shaking, “I am going to spank you.”

Roan laughed.

I raised my hand and brought it down on his behind, the motion making a thwacking noise. I rested my hand on his pants, realizing not only had I hit my son, I had hit him harder than I meant to. My stomach clenched. Roan squirmed and turned his torso towards me, made eye contact, and laughed harder.

I took a deep breath. I knew, firsthand, that spanking was ineffective, yet I had acted impulsively from a deep place of embarrassment. In that moment, I had wanted Roan to be somebody he wasn’t, a child who made my life easier rather than a kid who was exploring the world. My guilt was fierce. I felt as if my body was shriveling, curling around the pit in my stomach. I scooped Roan up and hugged him, blowing raspberries into his neck. As his giggles echoed through the room, I understood it was my job to manage my own feelings, to control behavior instilled in me in childhood.

◆

My mother is a Filipina immigrant, the oldest of thirteen children. Growing up, she lived in poverty, working to provide for her siblings as well as attending school. After being promised a job interview in the US by an acquaintance, she came to New York on a tourist visa. She landed a job almost immediately and within her first three years in the US put herself through a master’s degree program at Columbia.

My parents met while employed at Citibank in New York. My father was born in Brooklyn, the child of two Scottish immigrants. He lived in a cold water flat in Park Slope with his father and two younger brothers.

When my mother and father married, my father’s Scottish family was scandalized. They suggested my mother, seven years my father’s senior, was too old, too poor, and ultimately too brown to marry him. At their wedding, my mother had only two guests, one of her sisters and a friend from the bank.

I was born in New York after my parents had been married a couple years. A year and a half after my birth, my sister was born in Australia. We moved often, my mother giving up her career to care for me and Pia. She often parented alone given the demands of my father’s work schedule.

At some point my father shared that my mother was ambivalent about parenting. “She thought she was bad with babies,” he told me. “She wasn’t sure she wanted to have any.”

Some years later I asked my mother why she wanted to have children.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “But when everybody else was having one, I thought it was time for me to have one, too.”

◆

After my kids’ father killed our dog and cheated on me for at least the third time, I realized I needed a divorce. I managed to extricate myself and my kids, who were in preschool, and moved into a small townhouse my parents had purchased for themselves in my city. 

I was employed full time and a single mom of three. I enrolled my kids in a small private school down the road that had childcare, lucky that my parents were willing to give me a loan to cover the tuition.

One morning, as the children fought with me about going to school, I lost my temper.

“Shut up! I can’t take it! You’re acting like little assholes!” I roared at my kids.

I walked swiftly into the back courtyard to take a breath, where my neighbor, a single woman in her 60s, stuck her head over the fence. “You shouldn’t talk to those children like that,” she told me. Embarrassed, I wordlessly walked back into the house.

My kids will tell you I was a yeller. When I was screaming or had said something too mean the children would ask me to stop. Sometimes, when I was upset, I would have to give myself a time out. When I calmed, I would find the kids huddled in one bed together with their stuffies.

I was scaring them.

I remembered an anecdote my sister had told me about a friend’s mother. That woman had been an alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive, and neglectful to her children. In a moment of clarity, she realized this, got sober, and became a Buddhist. She learned that being even-tempered and consistent was part of loving her children.

“You can change your parenting at any time,” my sister offered. “You just have to hold onto that.”

I’d like to say I changed right away, but I didn’t.

The real change happened after I saw a psychic.

I wanted some hope the kids’ father would not be returning into their lives. On the day I was scheduled to talk with her I went for a walk, the children safely dropped off at school. I wanted to speak to the psychic outside as I worried my neighbors would hear me through the thin shared walls of our townhomes. I was embarrassed that in my desperation I was seeking help from a medium, rather than somebody more mainstream. I dialed the psychic’s number, and as it rang, I stopped on the sidewalk in front of a 7-Eleven that shared a wall with a sake store. The psychic greeted me brightly. Before I could ask a question, however, she took a breath and began lecturing me.

“You need to relax,” she said. “You’re going to lose those children. Go to some water, ground yourself, and calm down. You have to stop screaming.”

Ten seconds into our call and she was already calling me out. I tried to defend myself.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re trying,” the psychic said, “You’re going to lose them if something doesn’t change quickly.”

I made an effort to change the subject and the psychic pivoted, indicating she was getting a message for me from a loved one.

“Somebody close to you, somebody from your family? They are telling me you lived on a street, it starts with a J? Jones? Jones Avenue?” she shared. My skin prickled. She was right.

“I am hearing about your childhood home from a woman, a small woman, she has an accent… your lola? Who is mama lola?”

“My grandmother,” I responded.

“She tells me you’ve been very upset with your children. She tells me about the yelling,” the psychic said. “She wants you to stop.”

The psychic went on to talk about my angel guides and how I could protect myself from bad energy. She never spoke of my ex-husband. After almost an hour I hung up. I had not moved from the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven.

The psychic’s message repeated itself inside my head. “I must improve my parenting; I must improve my parenting.”

Sad and embarrassed, I stewed over the conversation and then walked home.

I sat on our large, stained sectional in the living room. I looked around at the smiling pictures of my children, their toys organized in a corner, their extra shoes tossed in a pile by the door. Their presence filled every part of my life. I strode purposefully to my car, heading to school early. Once there, a teacher brought the children to my car. All three looked anxious.

“Is everything alright, Mommy?” Ana asked. “We still have PE.”

I smiled and reassured them and loaded them into our ugly white minivan, each child strapped into a padded car seat almost as big as they were.

“I love you, Mommy,” Roan said. Ana and Nina, in unison, repeated the same.

I sighed as we pulled away from campus.

“I promise, loves, I will be better for you.”

◆

I spent some of my elementary school years in Darien, Connecticut. In Darien, my younger sister and I were two of six brown children. Other parents assumed my mother was our nanny given both her skin color and her older age.

In elementary school I thought of myself as white. As I matured, I became aware I was white-passing, even if I was mestiza. The other children treated me well at school, but sometimes I noticed adults staring at my sister, mom, and me in the grocery store, or at the park. Even so my mother held her head high. She enrolled us in all the activities she didn’t have as a child. Music and Spanish lessons, swimming and soccer. She took us to Disneyworld and Broadway shows. In Baker Park, where I played my first soccer games, my mother would cheer for me from the sidelines. She always stood a few feet away from the other parents, not quite a part of the group.

◆

My kids’ private school was very conservative, the students from upper middle class to wealthy families. I hadn’t realized the school dynamic was so restrictive; my main reasons for selecting it were the location and available childcare.

At the kindergarten welcoming ceremony, I showed up in short shorts and a tank top, ready to hit the gym after drop off. Many of the other parents were older, in their 40s and early 50s. They were ready for their corporate jobs, wearing suits and dresses, decked out in designer shoes and bags. As I walked past one group of parents I heard a woman hiss, “What is she wearing? Are those tattoos?” I appeared to be the youngest parent there.

After the event, the teachers called for parents to come up, one by one, to say goodbye to their children. I was the only single parent. As the adults left, we were encouraged to connect with one another so we could schedule playdates.

I mingled with the crowd and greeted the other parents, but most excused themselves quickly before we could share information. As the parents dispersed, I found myself alone.

It was many months before the parents began to accept us. At first, there were no play dates and the girls were only invited to the birthday parties that included their whole class. Over time, the parents warmed to us, mostly because our children were friends. Even so, I was rarely included in parent-oriented social events.

◆

When I was pregnant, I wondered if I would include my mother in my children’s lives. I intended to raise them very differently than she had raised me.

My ex-mother-in-law advised me to include her. “If you cut her out,” she said, “the children will always wonder about her and they’ll idolize her.”

I called my mother and announced my kids would call her Lola.

◆

Throughout childhood, my mother told me the story of how I escaped her as a toddler. She had let me out into the front yard by myself while she tended my sister inside the house.

“I only stepped away from the window for a second,” she told me, frustration always evident in her voice, “but when I came back, you were gone.”

At the time, we lived in Sydney, Australia, at the top of a hill. I climbed over the low brick wall that encircled the front yard and made my way down the road into the wide white zebra crosswalk. A driver stopped her car and rescued me. By the time my mother figured out what had happened, that woman was holding me on the sidewalk, looking for a parent.

“What did the lady say?” I asked my mother every time she told me the story.

“The lady told me I should have taken better care of you,” she would respond, “She said I was a bad mother.” 

◆

As my children got older, they recognized the tension between my mother and me. I explained to the children how difficult my relationship with my mother had been and let them know Lola had parented me harshly. The children, now eighteen and sixteen years old, have never known their grandmother as the intensely overinvolved, abrasive adult that I did. When they were younger, however, they acknowledged it was sometimes hard for Lola to hold back when she felt they were doing something wrong.  

“Lola loves us like you do,” Nina offered when she was in elementary school. “But sometimes she loves too hard.”