To my darling baby daughter, Mother wrote on the morning of my birth, in a letter given to my half-sister for just in case.

The Letter was sealed in a small envelope, which came without a copper lock of downy baby hair in it nor a name on the outside of it. The Letter was written on tiny-lined paper with a dull pencil and was apparently ripped out from one of those mini-pocket spirals made in the seventies that contained words like: eggs, milk, or remember to darn socks when you might as well have just damned them and thrown them away if they were in such bad shape rather than wasting the time to write about them.

The frayed edges of the Letter’s pages still clung to each other in fragmented chaos. It was difficult for me not to pull them off and discard them. Yet, they were all that was left of Her.

The words swished by like summer reeds caught in a gust of wind. I remember the morning you began, Mother wrote in perfectly slanted cursive, in a script oddly similar to my own. Both Mothers had neat and legible script, most likely forced into them by harsh educators from their childhoods. My spaghetti-stuck-to-the-bottom-of-a-pan style characters had been tamed by three months of writing slanty-looped letters after school. Then it was an obsession with calligraphy, a need to make menus look official and cook the only item (buttered noodles) for friends and guests. By using a fountain pen, the letters became more traditional, and, shall we say, legitimate? I began to gravitate towards spelling things out.

Then Mother included a bunch of strange words, trying to make sure The Intended Recipient knew how two ghosts with no faces were allegedly fighting and possibly drunk until their helpless hands created (eeewww) their lovechild.

Their lovechild who broke up two marriages simultaneously, leading both families into poverty. [See, with the alimony and child support on one side and the lack of alimony and child support on the other, and their combined lack of ability to be emotionally supportive in relationships, (oh and alcoholism)—they had become the old lizard chasing its own tail.]

Their lovechild who had no idea that the reason she had felt alone year after year was because there had been eight others before her with one already dead from an earlier marriage Father had had, looking like James Dean as he did, and acting like him, too, driving around like a maniac, breaking everyone’s heart.

Somehow Mother went from feeling heavenly joy as I grew within her to the terrors, the hopelessness … in the same sentence. I wondered what the three unmentionable dots referred to. She resolutely declared: I opened the door to your future (for you to live in my mind). And just like that, She turned me into an apparition, the parentheses serving as hugs I would never receive.

Becke had warned me that the letter might not sit right because Mother had likely been—how’s that joke go? What’s worse than a narcissist? A sociopath. Ha, ha, ha. We had been Zooming regularly since The DNA Test in February 2020. Sigh. Mother and Father had died a few years ago, and I was suddenly, unbearably, an orphan at 48.

However, this all gets glossed over when it is revealed that for one moment, Mother and Father had been the talk of the town, driving around in their purple Camaro, Mother stopping traffic with her silhouette …

Or was it the golden tresses or green eyes that shone like streamers from their purple Camaro with a cardboard sign painted Just Married on it, while their crestfallen lovechild awaited her next destination in the crusty hands of dried-up nuns?