Were There Good Times? Or Was It Just My Innocent Perception?

By Tara Overzat

Despite everything that happened, I had happy times as a child. In retrospect the things that made me happy were so minuscule, the things that children in healthy families take for granted. In addition, I think some of it was just my perception of happiness and my warped perception of what was normal.

Before I was old enough to look around and say, “Hey something’s wrong here…” I remember times when I got along with my mother. I remember her playing Scrabble with me and my brother at the kitchen table, (with a bit more liberal use of the dictionary than the rules allow.) My mother liked words and word games, so it was a natural fit for her. There was no concept of “letting the kids win” but we sometimes did.

I remember being around 8 or 9 years old and my mother giving me a quarter to make the beds. I excitedly took the warm, fresh-from-the-dryer bedsheets and made her queen sized bed and the twin beds. She was trying to establish a routine of chore-based allowance. This was short lived though, because with her not working herself, the quarters ran out.

There was a dinner she made every Sunday. The recipe had been taking off the side of a tomato sauce can when she was married to my father, well before I was born, we were told. It was a pretty simple dish, inaptly called “Chicken Fricassee.” (I was actually very surprised years later to order chicken fricassee in a restaurant and have stewed chicken in a cream sauce come to the table.) It basically consisted of chicken breast with the bones still in it that we three split, canned tomato sauce, onions and green peppers, and white rice (usually burnt). A pretty straightforward and typical dinner for some, but my mother prepared this with much fanfare, and yes, compared to our usual “dinners” this was something worth singing about. I think she really thought that cooking a normal meal that did not include a deep fryer full of dirty oil was doing something special, doing something for her family. Just maybe she did…

There were glimmers at times of a mother. And that fed my hopes. That, and the fact that for the longest time I thought we were like every other divorced family in the world. If my schoolmates’ lives were different it was because they had two parents instead of one. As divorce became more common this rationale could not even begin to explain the anomaly of my life.