Dad told me that Mom came by his house shortly after she received my letter. She sped up his driveway in the Porsche she’d bought, though Dad couldn’t discern exactly what she wanted. She just stood on his front porch, yelling and crying, angry and hysterical, screaming that her most treasured daughter was dead.
Dad said she’d had the unflinching nerve to claim that the daughter she’d deprived of love, the daughter from whom she’d hoarded and stolen money when that girl was actually dying and needed her the most, was her princess, her favorite child. The girl she’d hardly bothered to nurture as she grew up had turned into a woman she heartlessly let wither and die without a mom.
“My baby,” she’d called her, weeping.
Dad said he told her there was nothing left for her there. Tiffany was gone. And then she sped off as quickly as she’d appeared.
Poof.
To this day, he hasn’t heard from her again.
They never formally divorced, she never gave back a dime. She’s just gone.
A few months after Tiffany’s death, I was offered the job I’d always wanted, reporting for a financial news network in New York. The job at CNBC was exactly what I’d been aiming for since college.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I wanted to physically move away from all the pain. Put a continent between myself and all that had cast a long shadow over my life.
My mom had held a power over me, over all of us, for a long time. I was a hostage to her moods, her violence, her praise, her favor, all doled out in random doses and with confusing inconsistency, which had been designed to control me, training me to crave her attention like a starving dog.
I thought when I anchored shows on CNBC four years later, visibly pregnant with my son, Thompson, or three years after that, with my son, Greyson, she would be compelled to act. When I read the news on the Today show or stood on the promenade at the close of the program, in Rockefeller Center, holding my older son as he waved into the camera and grabbed my microphone to speak to millions of viewers, I wondered if she would be watching somewhere and wouldn’t be able to stop herself from reaching out.
But I’ve heard nothing.
Make no mistake, I’m relieved by that. I used to live in fear that she’d show up at my door. Just the thought of one of her loud, angry, manic scenes playing out in my home or my office would make my muscles tense. I told myself that if she ever knocked, I simply wouldn’t open the door. I’d stay calm and say almost nothing. I’d tell her the truth through the intercom or through the window: There is nothing left. Go away.
Now I’ve grown confident in the silence that I won’t have to explain myself again. I won’t have to tell her that I’ve seen so many other women, especially in news and on television and in other driven careers, who can physically weather a hurricane or climb over a hundred other women gunning for their jobs, and do it with ease. But those same heroines are instantly reduced to tears, cut down in their path, by a few hard words from the controlling moms who gave them strength in the first place.
“You look fat in that dress,” one such mom offered a fellow anchor over the phone after a newscast, quietly crushing her.
When I see those moms and daughters, I feel relieved that I’ve escaped. And I wonder if a different approach to mothering my sister would have stopped the descent into tragedy before it accelerated beyond recovery.
Having my own children has shown me that they are each different from the other. Like my mom, I have two very different kids. Ask my younger son, Greyson, a question, he shouts out an answer immediately. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
“What sound does O make?” I ask him, reading from a book.
“Ooooooo,” he sings, not yet two years old, but his big blue eyes and wide smile are already brimming with confidence. He’ll try anything, unafraid of a mistake.
But it took time for me to realize that when my older son, Thompson, refuses to participate, he’s not defying me, or testing my will. He’s telling me something else.
“Which one in the top row,” I said, pointing at a workbook, “goes with something in the bottom row?” I was trying to help him with a type of question I knew he’d be asked at preschool soon. I’d learned firsthand how valuable it was to be the first one to know the answer to a teacher’s query, even at four years old.
But his eyes wouldn’t touch the page.
“Thompson?” I asked. My son, usually the mayor of any room, gregarious and friendly like any handsome politician courting votes, this time pretended not to hear me. He wouldn’t look my way.
“I don’t want to,” he said turning his back to me.
“You can do it,” I said softly. “You are the smartest boy in the world. You know that. Look at these things in the top row. An airplane! You love those,” I said, tempting him.
“Look! It’s flying through the sky. An airplane and what’s that?” I asked, pointing to the object next to it.
Silence.
“Hmmm. Looks like something we take to the park to scoop sand,” I said.
“A shovel,” he said, turning to me now, still pretending not to care.
“For the sandbox! Remember last week, we played in the sandbox in Central Park. That was fun. Now look at the bottom row,” I said.
His eyes slid down the page and he came and stood next to me.
“A train, and a flower. You ride in a plane. Is there anything you ride in down there,” I said, pointing back to the train and the flower.
“Train! Airplane and train go together!” he said, now suddenly pleased with himself and sitting next to me. A few examples later, he was holding the book and asking me the questions with authority.
When the time came, he aced the exercise at school, confident that he could do it.
It took failed attempts at forcing him to do things for me to realize that if he doesn’t believe he can do it, he won’t try. Unlike his brother, who may not know the answer but will bark out a guess without hesitation.
“I won’t, really means, I don’t think I can,” a wise teacher told me around this time. I didn’t believe her at first. Why would he put pressure on himself to succeed at things he hadn’t even been taught to do yet? How could he be so hard on himself? He was brilliant! Was that my fault? Did I expect too much?
“Don’t see him as not trying, or defying you. Hear him telling you ‘I don’t think I can,’” she said.
She was right.
It’s just one small example of how differently my sons are hard–wired. They were just born that way. From the start. Different children. And Wray and I have had to adjust the way we nurture and teach them to bring out the best in each of them. We had to figure it out along the way.
The once–size–fits–all, hardline approach: pushing children as hard as you can and demanding the very best doesn’t fit them all, as it didn’t fit Tiffany and me. A fire-breathing dragon of a mom may produce a champion, or she might burn her child to death.
Still the biggest lesson my boys have taught me is also the hardest.
“What do you want to see first, boys?” Wray asks, pushing Greyson’s stroller through the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History. At five and nearly two years old, the boys make the “Dinosaur Museum,” as they call it, a regular outing in New York City.
“Brancasaurus! And T. rex!” shouts Greyson, his unruly corkscrew curls bouncing with excitement. He has his father’s hearty laugh, wide toothy smile, and shining blue eyes, every bit the classic Gerber baby.
“Are those your favorite dinosaurs, little one?” Thompson asks his younger brother, always the caretaker, from the moment he jumps into Greyson’s crib each morning. They greet the new day together, laughing and chatting. He bends down and gives his brother a kiss on the cheek before patting his head. They are thick as thieves, though they look nothing alike. Thompson’s short dark hair and olive skin set off his ruby lips and blue eyes, which have flecks of my yellow in the iris. He’s movie star gorgeous already.
&
nbsp; “And stegosaurus!” Greyson shouts, straining mightily against the belts in his stroller.
“Mama,” Thompson starts, right pointer finger raised straight up in the air for emphasis, “T. rex is a theropod. You can tell by his feet. And he’s a carnivore, which means he eats meat, like Greyson.”
“Roar!” Greyson yells on cue. Then he puts his feet on the floor and stands up, now wearing his lightweight travel stroller like a backpack. He looks like Godzilla.
“Whoa. You are getting strong,” Wray says, unclipping him and laughing. “Let’s go, boys!”
Thompson turns back to me, glowing. “Mom, can we go see the Creatures of Light next? They have alien stingers!”
“Whatever you want, my sweet.”
“I love you, Mommy,” he says, before running after his father and brother.
The texture and color of my love for all three of them has proven to me that I can love, even though I was not ultimately loved myself. It doesn’t matter what’s come before if I can let go and try to do better. That truth was an awakening. My own family is a new beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Publishing Director Georgina Levitt and everyone at Weinstein Books, especially Editorial Director Amanda Murray; this work is a direct product of her tireless cheerleading, coaching, advice, and support. Thank you as well to Judy Hottensen for being among the first to see potential in this project, and to editor Maggie Crawford for contributing her energy and wisdom.
I’d also like to thank my agent, Mel Berger, who convinced me to climb this mountain and provided all the tools along the way to get to the top. A special thanks to Roger Ailes and my Fox colleagues for understanding what this project means to me and getting behind it.
I feel lucky to have my husband’s family in my life; they blindly supported this effort, having no idea what I might say about them. They are the kindest people I have ever known.
I’m eternally grateful to my dad, Anton Francis, who has been next to me on every step of this journey, through joy and despair, never leaving my side, always believing, and my sister, Tiffany, whom I will always love and never for a minute forget.
I can never adequately thank my beloved sons, Greyson and Thompson, for filling every day of my life with laughter, love, joy, and meaning. You are both gifts from God.
And most of all, I thank my husband, Wray, who is my everything.
Copyright © 2012 Melissa Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.
For information address
Weinstein Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor,
New York, NY 10107.
eISBN : 978-1-602-86175-6
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter Page 27