This blog sits out in cyberspace until I have something I can't hold back any longer, and the writing takes over. Today it is Mother's Day...
I have always been conflicted over this "holiday." In the best of years, my mother and I had a challenging relationship. In the worst of years, she stood over me and forced me to cannibalize my childhood. I spent most of my early Mays during adulthood looking for appropriate Mother's Day cards. "Thank you for all you have done" and "I am so lucky to have you as my mother" never made the cut. I could never lie effectively, to either myself of anyone else. I always selected the most innocuous cards, "Happy Mother's Day" or "Have a Lovely Mother's Day." I often joked that I really needed to make my own line of cards for those of us who survived miserable childhoods. And in the twisted guilt of familial obligation, I shipped them in the mail and made the Sunday phone calls.
She has been dead ten years now, and in that time, I have experienced both unbridled freedom and intense sadness. Freedom, because even at her best, while alive she still had her grip on me and sadness because of the pain of my own childhood and the loss of what could have been.
I look at my friends and their sweet tributes to their mothers, and I can't help but feel a sense of longing for that kind of relationship. Even though I know now that it never could have been possible, I still grieve.
I often live too much in my head, brooding over what could have contributed to my mother's own intense unhappiness and her need to lash out so cruelly against me. She was a very private person when it came to her own childhood, but in my misty memories, I can remember the difficult relationship she had with her own mother while we all lived together. I try to imagine what it must have been like to live in the shadow of an older sister believing that she was never...enough. Never good enough, never smart enough, never thin enough...a lifelong rivalry. When my mother finally came out ahead of her, eloping and marrying a beautiful serviceman at 19 and getting pregnant with me, the first grandchild, she was dashed back onto the rocks when she discovered he was actually gay and had to come home with her tail between her legs and me in her belly. Divorced and excommunicated from the church, she became a marked woman. And when her father, her one champion, died the month after I was born, she likely hit her lowest. In the foggy reaches of my mind, I can hear my grandmother telling her she was worthless, and that she had no right to go out and live a young person's life because she had a child to take care of. That child was me, and from the beginning, I was not only the thing that hobbled my mother, I was also her daily reminder of my father, even more so as I grew to look (and later act) much like him, even though he was never a part of my life in those early years.
That is how my "story" began, and I learned that I was trouble from the beginning...11 months of colic, the reason my mother had to work two jobs, the child who questioned when she should have been "seen and not heard." Everything revolved around my mother and her needs, the growing narcissism her way of asserting power over her life. I never remember tenderness. I never remember being held and rocked. I remember pretending to fall asleep reading by the nightlight in the hall just so my mother would have to pick me and carry me to my bed, the only time she would touch me with care. I remember her raking a brush through my hair, cursing its curliness while I whimpered. I remember spankings and backhands for my "smart mouth." I remember learning early on to amuse myself and because I began reading so early, I found a way to escape. I never knew what might set her off and make her fly into a rage, so I tried hard to step lightly on the eggshells she tossed into my path.
When my mother remarried and we moved, things began to escalate. My grandmother suffered a debilitating stroke, and my mother totally cut her siblings (and my cousins) out of our lives. My father who had stepped back into my life at five, disappeared (along with my other grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins) to allow my step-father to adopt me. We were isolated, and my mother was in control of all of us. Then, when I decided I wanted friends in my new town, I changed from the fat little girl into the junior high cheerleader, and I think it was then that my mother went totally over the edge. According to my step-father, she was intensely jealous of me, but all I saw was the leveraging of even more control over my life at a time when I should have been given wings. And my "story" grew...I "ruined every family holiday and vacation," I was alternately a "slut" and a "lesbian," I was a "liar" and a "fake" and none of those teachers knew the "real" me. During my high school years, I wasn't allowed to go anywhere outside of school functions, visit friends or have friends over to the house. I wasn't allowed to learn how to drive or be out after dark. The punishments grew, too, and I spent most of my teenage years grounded, and being subjected to bare-ass belt lashings, often administered by my step-father while my mother supervised. She shut me out with long periods of silence, often handing me over to my step-father because she "couldn't control me" and then taking me back when he gave me too much leniency. Finally, when I was being subjected to yet another whipping at seventeen, I took the belt from my mother and told her she wasn't going to hit me any more. She then challenged me to hit her, right there in my bedroom, and I refused. Although, I am ashamed to say that later when she came slashing at me with her handfuls of diamond rings, I sometimes hit back. It makes me sick to think of it now.
I knew I had to leave that house or I wouldn't survive. And in November of my senior year, I started packing, and my mother and I quit speaking. I received luggage for Christmas that year. I turned 18 on May 20, 1980, and graduated on May 25. My mother never came to any of my school events, and she opted out of my graduation, as well. The next day, with the help of my high school boyfriend whose parents where gracious enough to give me a place to live for the summer, I moved out. Loading his van was a Battle Royale, my mother screaming from the porch and flying after me and grabbing me in a rage. She later told me I had left a scar on her upper arm from my nails that day when I pulled away. I never told her that all of my wounds were inside and likely would never heal.
I got myself to college, and sometimes came back to town, but never spoke to my mother until my step-father begged me to break the ice. I did, and from that point on, we attempted to build a relationship as adults. She refused to speak of the past, but it always surfaced, and even at the end as she was dying, she once more shut me out and refused to speak to me. I only spoke to her at the end as she lay in an ICU on a ventilator. I told her I was there and would take care of Dad, and that she didn't have to fight any more. I know she heard me because she was still in there. And then the hardest thing I ever did was tell the doctor to turn off the ventilator and then watch her die, gasping for breath through lungs clogged with fluid.
In retrospect, I can now see so much that contributed to my mother's being the person she was. Being overweight all her life was always an issue that affected her self-esteem, so much so, that even as she was dying, she was thrilled about finally being under 200 pounds. Her addictions ruled her life...the cigarettes that ultimately resulted in the small-cell lung cancer that killed her, the alcohol and later the Valium that her doctor prescribed for close to 40 years, and the gambling that didn't surface until after she died and my step-dad began to receive the mail she always had sent to a PO box. None of us knew that she had gambled away much of his retirement and maxed out multiple credit cards. Apparently, she had a whole other life that none of us knew about. And I can't help but wonder how much of her parenting style came from her own mother, and how much of our relationship resembled theirs. I know that when I became a parent, my biggest fear was becoming my mother, and at times, when things were especially hard and I didn't have tools for coping with them, her words and actions crept out through me. I was self-aware enough to see that, and to apologize for my own rage and words, and I worked very hard over the years not to let my past predict my future. But...I will never know my mother's stories since she never told them and anyone who was there is either dead or estranged from my life. I have accepted that there really is no explanation.
I have been through years of therapy, continuing today, and even though
I understand so much now, I still have issues separating the past from
the present when I am triggered by someone behaving toward me in ways
that my mother did and reviving old "stories." I recognize my reactions against anyone who tries to control me or treats me poorly as stemming from the incidents of my past relationship with my mother. I know my need for control over most aspects of my life stems from never feeling safe because I had no control or predictability in my childhood. My difficulties trusting anyone else to take care of me is the result of not having care from the one person who should have done that above all. My need for affirmation for achievements is a pattern from my childhood when even straight-A report cards (or a PhD) were just "boring grades" or a way for my mother to increase her status. And all the women my mother's age I have sought out who have become dear friends over the years, and the friend's mothers who have so graciously allowed me to call them "Mama" have been my attempt to fill some of the need I have for a mother's nurturing.
So, Mother's Day is hard for me, and this year, it is especially hard. Maybe because this story needed to come out in order to twist that pressure valve in order to release some of the pent-up feelings that, no matter how much I try, I still feel so intensely. Or maybe, as I near the final arc of my own life, I see so much that could have been different, and I grieve. Something inside made me sit down again to write, and this time, I followed my gut.
