Foreword...how it began

I'm taking this first post, like the foreword of a book.  Let you know why I am writing this blog and why I am not a psychopath for the blog title.

The Dead Mama in question is in fact, to my knowledge, not dead.  She is my next door neighbor.  In fact all of this will be true stories of my next door neighbors.  For the past 20 years I have witnessed the daily activities out my front window of a family that is a cross between The Clampetts and the Hatfield and McCoys...that's if the Hatfield and McCoys were one family and all the in fighting was amongst themselves.

The occupants of the house change regularly, but there have been 4 consistent members of the Dead Mama house.  The Parents, Mama and Daddy, as they are called by the children of the house.  The 2 regular children are a 50-something Son, who is an alcoholic and a 40-something Daughter, who is schizophrenic.  Clinically schizophrenic.  Yes, I am just that lucky.  The remainder of the occupants is an ever changing array of extended family and/or friends.  Sometimes I only know what their relationship is to the Alcoholic son and I sort of extrapolate the relationship.

Daddy is actually gone from us now, but Mama is to my knowledge still alive.  She got the name Dead Mama over this past holiday season.  It's a long story to get here, so understand when I say we (my husband and I) had not seen Mama in a couple of weeks, which is highly unusual, we started thinking that she had died and the children/friends etc in the house either didn't notice or were hiding it.  She is the breadwinner in the family bringing in Social Security, her husband's pension and a reverse mortgage on the house, so all of them would be homeless and penniless if she died.  Since fact is stranger than fiction with this family, we figured she had been "Norman Bates'd" and was in a rocking chair in the garage.

We started daily discussing Dead Mama.  One day, rather warm day, they had the fireplace burning something extremely smoky and smelly.  Likely it was green wood or pine logs, but it was so odd to be burning a fire on a 70 degree day, that we thought, "Oh Dead Mama in the fireplace".  After weeks of this, I finally had a Dead Mama sighting.  She is quite senile right now and was outside pulling the shrubs and jasmine vines off the mailbox.  The vines and shrubs she had planted there years ago.

Over the years, I have told these stories at gatherings and parties, to the shock and amusement of friends.  I never give names and never tell anything that I haven't been told directly by them or witnessed unfolding in my front yard.  And I will say this much about them, they are very tight as a family.  Even after kicking a niece, her boyfriend and baby out of the house, using the police and an eviction notice, that woman still comes to the house on a weekly basis.

I really am not mean spirited, I am just amazed by the behavior of this lot, it's so alien to me.  And I suspect I look just as alien to them.  The Aliens at the end of the street.