Mom's Identities

In this day and age, reality is not based on facts as much as it is based on feelings.  It is very chic to reinvent one's self and to force others to go along with one's fantasy life. To not accept a person for who they say they are is now considered bigoted or mean-spirited.  We are not allowed to question anyone, even if it is so obvious that their lives are not reality-based. In order to get along, we must enter a person's fantasy world and pretend right along with them.

Mom was way ahead of her time.  She was an original identity-fluid person way before such a thing was cool. She did not really think it was all that necessary to stick with one name, or one birth date, or one story. She had no problem changing things up a bit if it meant getting an emotional or monetary benefit.

Mom told me to never allow the government to take copies of my fingerprints, or to ever get a tattoo.  This advice was for one simple reason:  Both were used to identify a person.  It did make perfect sense to me.  Coming from a family where two of the older brothers were juvenile delinquents serving time for burglary and other crimes, I could see where a person choosing theft as his career choice might not want identifying prints or tattoos on record.  But I think Mom's reasoning was that you could have different identities more easily if you didn't have that big attention-grabbing  tattoo of a black widow spider catching a fly plastered all over the side of your neck.

When I was about 5 years old, Mom came to me with a pencil and paper and told me that I needed to write a letter to some rich guy and tell him how poor we were.  She wanted me to say that Dad had no job and that we didn't have enough to eat.  I kept asking her why I had to write a letter like that when Dad had a job and our cupboard was full of cans. I couldn't wrap my mind around a new identity as a poor, unfed child.  After many attempts, Mom finally gave up on her scheme to get money from someone who was trying to help people in need.

Mom maintained two identities after her confidential marriage to Paris Young.  She kept her Carol Warriner driver's license, but added an additional driver's license under the name Angel Young.  She could then identify as one or the other depending on the circumstances.  Cashing her social security check required the Warriner ID.  But her preferred identity was Angel Young for business ventures like clowning and dog selling.

As Carol, Mom listed her year of birth as 1929, when it was actually 1921.

As Angel, Mom gave 1935 as her year of birth.  She just kept getting younger as time went by. By the time she passed away in 1986, she was the same age as her oldest daughter, who was born in 1940.

Her relatives knew her as Carol, while her newer associates only knew her as Angel. She had a hard time convincing her older friends to call her Angel.  Her story to them was that her parents named her Angel Carol Jane, but her deceased husband Darwin had never liked the name and insisted on calling her Carol instead.  I don't know if they bought the story, and some of them had to continuously correct themselves when they would slip up and call her by her real name.  I knew Paris had come up with that name for her and that she was lying to her friends. I felt bad when they were made to feel uncomfortable if they forgot to participate in her fantasy world. But I couldn't say anything, because if I did,  I would get slapped across the face for pointing out the truth, days later, when I least expected it.

Mom invented different life stories for different audiences.  For example, her newer friends and business associates were told that her only children were Darwin, me, and the two youngest kids.  All the others were step-children that she took on when she married Darwin.  She would lament to her audience that she devoted her entire life to raising his kids, and they grew up to treat her so disrespectfully.  Again, I would hear her tell these lies and knew better than to say a word. It just made me wonder what lies was she telling that I didn't know the truth about.

She told her older associates, the ones who knew for a fact that the first six kids were her biological children,  that her three youngest kids were also her flesh and blood children.

Mom also liked to pretend she was trained in various fields.  She believed that if you thought you were something, you were. Among her fake accomplishments, she claimed to be a barber and swimming teacher, and displayed a fake barber's certificate and a fake swimming instructor's certificate to prove it.  And while she was pretty good at teaching people how to swim, I can attest that she was no barber.

The fluid identity thing permeated the whole family in one way or another.  From the beginning of our lives on Eagle Street, the three youngest kids were not who we thought we were.  I was legally adopted, but didn't know it yet, and the two youngest children came into the family without the proper paperwork. Mom wanted everyone to believe that she had given birth to us youngest three, and even though she always hid behind people in most photographs, she made sure she was photographed holding baby Jeff, and looking 9 months pregnant with the baby that would be born one week later.

Mom wanted this photo to prove that she was somehow able to give birth to two babies in 1966. So she packed a pillow under her dress, and made sure she looked as big as possible.  She wrote on the photo that it was taken November 1, 1966, but overlooked the fact that the printing date on the photo is October.

When Paris entered the scene,  Mom told us our names were no longer Warriner.  We were told to identify with the surname Young. When I went back to school for my sophomore year at the Academy of Our Lady of Peace, I told the teachers that I had a new name.  They didn't buy into it, and stated that until they saw legal papers proving it, they would continue to call me by my legal name.  That annoyed Mom to no end, but she didn't want to push it and get them looking closer at our family. So I was a Warriner at school, and a Young everywhere else.

One of the things I hated about Mom's ever-changing story is that I was pulled into it.  She told her sister Amy that I insisted on calling myself "Little Amy," and photos she sent to Aunt Amy identified me as such.  When dealing with customers who came to buy our puppies or get their dogs groomed, Mom would brag to them that I was so smart that I had skipped high school and was in college studying veterinary science. Even on my high school graduation day, Mom bragged to her friends that I was graduating from college.  It kind of made me feel like my real accomplishment wasn't good enough.

As Mom got older and sicker, she knew her time would soon be up.  And she made me promise not to post her obituary in the San Diego newspapers, because she didn't want anyone knowing her age or how many kids she had.   When Mom passed away, at the age of 64, her friends were shocked that someone so young could have a heart attack. One of them wiped away tears and said,  "She was only 45 years old, what a shame!" I honored Mom's secret and didn't correct her.