Merry Christmas, Mom. I'm So Disappointed In You

"I would have assumed my father would have taken a baseball bat to Fat Larry’s skull after that. Instead, he tried to commit suicide."

by Justin Rosario

Wednesday, December 21 will mark 23 years since my mother died. Normally, I write a Facebook post to mark the anniversary; something funny about my mother or something about the kids to note how much she would have loved watching them grow up. There’s a good chance I will do that this year as I have every year. Probably.

I am, however, still pretty pissed off at my mother over the whole “questions about my paternity” thing and I haven’t quite resolved that in my head yet. Since writing is my therapy, you get to come along for the ride.

Well, how did I get here?

If you’ve followed my borderline soap opera of a life for the last 14 months, you will recall that in October of 2021, I was diagnosed with something called Muir-Torre Syndrome, a rare genetic condition which would vastly increase the likelihood of me developing a variety of cancers. Not a great phone call to receive. 

After some genetic testing, my MT diagnosis was revised from “You have MT” to “You do not have MT.” Hooray! But there was a good 4-5 months between those phone calls during which we had to deal with the very real possibility I was facing all-but-certain cancer.

Everyone responds to bad news in their own way. Some people panic, others calmly accept their fate. My wife Debbie and I reacted pretty much the same way we did when our son, Jordan, was diagnosed with autism: we mobilized for war, making multiple doctor appointments within hours and tearing through the internet and every doctor/nurse we knew personally for information about Muir-Torre. 

As part of this research, I started digging into my family medical history since Muir-Torre is almost always inherited. The Rosarios are a large and scattered family but I’m loosely in touch with enough of them that if cancer was a thing in our bloodline, there’s a reasonable chance I’d know about it. I definitely know addiction is sprinkled quite liberally throughout the Rosario clan but as far as I knew, only my Uncle Joe and my brother Matthew had cancer and Matthew’s was almost certainly from HPV. 

Shortly after I started making my inquiries, though, my father called me to tell me that he most likely wasn’t my biological father. My mother had had an affair and that information led to an entirely different telenovela of its own. I wrote about that last December if you’d like to refresh your memory. It is not a fun read.  

After getting my DNA results from Ancestry.com, it turns out that I was, in fact, not the product of an affair but that didn’t change certain realities. I dealt with the issues stemming from those realities regarding my father, but I have not yet dealt with the other side of that equation. There were two people involved in making my childhood a miserable shitshow and my mother’s hands are very far from clean.

Saint Janet? Um…no

It was suggested that no one told me about my alleged status as a bastard, even as an adult, because no one wanted to ruin my memory of my mother. I bit my tongue because I love my mother, but at no point did I put her on a pedestal. I knew who she was.

It strikes me as odd that anyone would think I would see my mother as a saint. This is a woman who broke up a marriage to be with my father. It wasn’t a happy marriage and no one twisted my father’s arm to end it but my mother knew what she was doing while she was sleeping with a married man (with kids).

"I would have assumed my father would have taken a baseball bat to Fat Larry’s skull after that. Instead, he tried to commit suicide."

Later, when her own marriage went south, she had an affair with yet another married man (also with kids) and broke that marriage up, too. Again, it wasn’t a happy marriage and no one twisted his arm, either. But when you get right down to it, my mother shows up and divorce follows. I am under no illusions as to who she was as a person.

For instance, she was overly fond of her Peach Schnapps and while she didn’t rise to the level of heavy drinking on the Rosario side, it was enough that I stopped drinking for a while in college. Having alcoholism run through one side of the family is not great. Having it on both is asking for trouble when you yourself are engaged in heavy social drinking. Her drinking never became a problem that I am aware of but I was aware of it.

How was she as a parent? I honestly can’t say. My childhood is mostly a grey fog from before she left, with only snippets here and there. She wasn’t abusive that I can recall other than that one time when I was very young and she hit me with a wire hanger, Joan Crawford style in the movie “Mommie Dearest”…

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