This thread is about having a mother and being a mother. I have been subject to the forces of intense emotion lately and I thought it might do me some good to talk about it.
I made a mistake this month, one that in retrospect seems rather foolish and naive. I have a mother who is mentally ill, and I love her despite the fact that she made my childhood a living hell. I decided to take a trip home to Michigan and spend a week alone with her. I’ve processed a lot of the stuff she did to me when I was a kid, so I thought things were all resolved emotionally. And besides, she seemed much more realistic and willing to acknowledge that the things she did were wrong.
At first my time with her was great, but the more time I spent with her the more it became apparent she is just as delusional as ever. In addition to constructing this elaborate false public narrative in which she was chronically abused by her ex, she’s obviously still in denial about the extent of the damage she did to me. She isn’t really capable of carrying on a conversation. It’s more like she’s talking and you happen to be there. And always about the same thing.
The weird emotional stuff started when I was hanging out with her friends. She said she wanted to show me off, because unlike a lot of her friends’ kids, I’m independent and financially/emotionally stable. At one point, this elderly neighbor of hers turns to me and says, ‘‘Your mother is such a good person. She really is extraordinary.’’ She was referring to my Mom’s imaginary past where she is a battered housewife who bravely overcame adversity to live independently. My Mom reinforces this narrative a lot. She did sustain an injury when her ex husband shoved her, true. She leaves out the fact that she abused him for years before he ever retaliated, and that she was probably attacking him when he pushed her.
To be honest, I kind of wanted to vomit all over my shoes. It was tempting to reminisce about some special times I’ve shared with my extraordinary mother. ''Ah, yes, Susan, I’ll never forget that memorable time I was eleven. Mom’s exact words, as I remember them: ‘‘Do I have to go into my bedroom and get your Dad’s shotgun and shoot you in the face? Is that what you want? Do I have to kill you to shut you up?’’ She was screaming almost to the point of incoherence and had already destroyed half the shit in my bedroom at that point, and I had my back flat against the wall and didn’t doubt for a second that if I said another word I was going to die. So I just closed my eyes and tried not to make a sound. It was somewhat difficult because I was already sobbing pretty heavily. Mom’s explanation for this incident was, ‘‘It’s okay because I really wasn’t going to kill you. I was in complete control. I just wanted to scare you into shutting up.’’ Trust me; she wasn’t in control. But it sure worked like a charm.
So I really wasn’t sure what to say to this lady. I don’t really want to topple the house of cards as I’m really glad my Mom has a social life and people who like her, but I literally had nothing constructive to say in response. I think I said something like, ‘‘She has grown a lot.’’ When my mother heard this, to her credit, she did say something along the lines of, ‘‘Well, I’m not the person I used to be.’’ That is 100% accurate.
Still, I felt like shit. I was staying in the motel room adjacent to hers so I just locked myself in there and cried. My mother’s situation and psychological condition is something I thought I had really come to terms with, and suddenly it’s hitting me all over again. I felt better after a good cry, but I really should have taken the hint and gotten the hell out there.
Then I get the emotional double-whammy. My husband and I are planning to adopt a child, and though I need to finish school first, it’s been heavy on my mind lately. While I’m sitting there in the motel room chatting with my Mom, I get a message from one of my closest friends from junior high and high school, a woman who had a very similar family history and who also ended up leaving home at 17.
She said, in essence, that she was having a baby she couldn’t keep and was looking for a family for said baby. She said it was killing her to have to guess who would best take care of her child when she knew nothing about the prospective parents. She needed someone who wouldn’t attempt to whitewash the child’s race (my friend is biracial.) She said she thought I would make a wonderful mother for her child, if I was interested.
Something about the whole thing was like a punch in the gut. I couldn’t believe it was really happening. It’s one thing to talk about adoption and it’s another thing entirely to have a theoretical child. For that hour or whatever as I really thought about the possibility of adopting my friend’s child, it was like I was pregnant. I can’t explain it. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted this until it happened, because I was willing to do practically anything to make it work.
Prior to this my husband and I had planned in terms of years, not months. It felt like absolute insanity to me, but my Mom was trying to convince me that you are never prepared for a child. She got pregnant with me at 19 and was thrown out of her house. She is still bitter about having to raise me and go to school on her own. She told me all these stories about how she almost gave me up for adoption, she had a family selected and everything and then changed her mind because, ‘‘I knew I would make mistakes, but I figured at least I would be the one who was making them.’’ She kept me, she said, because she wanted to ensure my well-being.
And I was just soaking it up, deep inside thinking, ‘‘Is this for real? Is my mother of all people actually giving me parenting advice?’’ And she was talking about how she would be willing to move out to Jersey and help me care for the child while Sr. Olives and I finished school, and I was fucking considering it.
And then, somehow, the conversation took a turn for the uncomfortable. At some point it stopped being this amazing emotional bonding experience and started being all about her perpetual victimization. And then she started talking about the ‘‘mistakes’’ she made with me, and how she had assumed it was okay because at least she wasn’t raising me as badly as she was raised. And when I challenged this – because nothing I’ve heard about my grandfather’s temper seems much different than what I grew up with – she started getting tense and defensive, saying shit like, ‘‘You can’t possibly comprehend what it was like to be raised that way’’ and ‘‘I made mistakes, but you had it so much better, you could have never handled my childhood.’’ Then she would tell me anecdotes that sounded exactly like what I went through… only without the constant emotional abuse… and expect me to react with horror to what she had endured. ‘‘But all parents make mistakes,’’ she said. ‘‘Once you’re a parent, you’ll understand.’’
I felt… so intensely, suddenly angry. I wanted to stand up and say, ‘‘You didn’t ‘make mistakes’ you daft bitch, you physically and emotionally abused me, threatened to kill me on more than one occasion, intentionally broke my shit and punched holes in my doors, mocked me when I cried, tore up my letters of apology when I was 7 years old, screamed at me routinely about what a lazy, self-absorbed, irresponsible, unloveable person I was, told me I made you sick to your stomach and delighted in my suffering. You made me feel like I wasn’t even human. I would slit my throat before I’d ever do that to a child.’’
I can’t even believe that after all the shit she put me through, and after my willingness to put the past aside and move on with her, she had the gall to turn this into some kind of pissing contest over who had it worse. She has always treated me like a threat – maybe because I am too honest for her, because unlike my mother, I DID stand up for myself as a kid, best as I could, by telling her to her face that she was being abusive and that she was causing me pain, even though the consequence for talking back was more abuse and more pain.
As she prattled on and on and on, I then got a message from my friend revealing that my potential baby was in fact due in just three months – at exactly the same time I start my final year of grad school and a new internship. The timing couldn’t be worse, really. I don’t think it would be fair to the kid to take on the parenting thing in the midst of so many other demands, and I cannot in good conscience put off school. So I guess my short pregnancy miscarried. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I didn’t fight with my mother. Instead, I listened to her drone on for several hours, tried to help her as best I could to learn to deal with her feelings constructively, and then went to bed too late.
I spent the drive home (about 12 hours) sobbing off and on. I am so angry. I am not really an angry or grudgy person, not really the sort of person to sustain this level of rage. But damn it I am pissed off. It felt like a slap in the face to the gift I gave her – my forgiveness. Not only that, but I feel like she was using me, even the attempt to show me off to her friends doesn’t make me feel good. Now it feels more like she is trying to take credit for who I turned out to be. I am so fucking tired of giving a shit, you know? It would be so much easier if I didn’t love her so much. I was raised by a child, and in that vein, I always had to put her needs ahead of my own, to make sure she was okay even when I wasn’t. I hate that feeling; it makes me feel so alone. I was so alone as a kid, so trapped with her bizarre delusional interpretation of reality, and I think being with her this summer just kind of recreated that.
I know this was my mistake, for getting my hopes up that she could really ever change and be healthy. I dropped my boundaries and I exposed my vulnerability to her. Never again. It’s time for this ‘‘nostalgic for Michigan and my family’’ shit to end. I talk a great deal lately about ‘‘honoring my roots,’’ but I’m beginning to think that is a really bad idea. There is nothing to honor there. I am not anything like the vast majority of my family members. They ought to take up as little mental space as humanly possible. I might as well have been born on a different planet.
And on top of this, I want to be a mother so damn bad. I didn’t even know how bad until all this happened. Even though I’m not even sure we could have pulled off a later delivery date, I am just crushed, and a part of me is trying to make it work even though it would be damn near impossible to be ready for a child in three months. It could still be years before we find the right match at the right time, at yet here is a woman I love offering me a child, an opportunity not only to fulfill our desire for parenthood and a child’s need for a home, but also to give the gift of peace of mind to someone I care about who is making the most difficult decision of her life. It feels so cruel to all of us to have to say no.
I’m not really sure the point of all this; just trying to sort through my feelings I guess. I’ve been crying a lot lately, but I don’t know if it’s grief for what I lost, or gratitude that I am not and will never be like her. That’s right, a part of me feels enormous gratitude for my life and the home that I built with my loving husband. What we have is so much better than anything she could even conceive. It was only a week, but I feel like I’m coming out of this whole thing older, wiser, and with even greater conviction to be the best damn mother imaginable.
For those of you who got all the way through this, thanks for listening.
Olives,
Christy
My dad used to do the same thing and the sense of total hopelessness and helplessness was overwhelming. Sometimes after he’d dumped all the drawers and turned over the bed, he’d go get the kitchen garbage, with raw meat scraps and eggshells and dump that on top of the pile he’d made in my room. Sometimes I wasn’t allowed to clean it so I’d have to find a spot on the floor to sleep.