Dear Mother,
Let’s just get it out in the open, shall we? You loved me and I know it, but you were self-serving and cruel, and I’m done excusing it.
You should have done better, for me. You should have done better for yourself.
You were big. So big. Every parent looms large to the child, but Mother, you could have been magnificent – with your capacity to create adventure, to ignite imagination, to impart wonder.
Why couldn’t you restrain whatever crazied you? Was it chemical? Psychological? Why wouldn’t you listen when we tried to help?
Your passing was the final blow of course, or so I thought – the ultimate betrayal in a series of betrayals, though there were more to follow and I know that now. Still, your death came at a time when my son needed you, when I needed you, when we were tenuously rebuilding bridges and counting on your presence… and more time.
The shock of your departure was staggering, and your exit uncharacteristically quiet. You weren’t sick (though you’d been eating yourself to death for years), you weren’t prepared (you simply went to sleep and never woke up), and in the morning the phone rang as someone pronounced the words that you were gone and there was only buzzing, and more buzzing, and then I raged.
I raged with a savagery that was stunning – beating my fists into furniture, wailing like an animal, screaming until I had no voice and furious at your impeccably selfish timing – but none of it in front of my boys.
Do you hear that, Mother? We may weep and we may rant, but we do not lose ourselves in the presence of our children and if by chance we do, we apologize and learn never to do it again.
We do not bludgeon our children with rage.
Naturally, like so many others, I was convinced you were indestructible. The sheer enormity of your personality would ensure you outlived us all. Why did you have to prove us wrong – even in that?
On the surface, you remained beautiful. I see it in photographs, though I doubt you would. So what explains the odious opposite of beauty – your self-absorption, your unfiltered outbursts, your judgment of others who disagreed with your perspective?
Your emotional swings were terrifying, your commentary cutting, your mixed-up legacy lodged in my head with permanence that astounds me. As the years go on, I arrive at turning down the volume on your critical voice, but I have yet to find the means to silence you entirely.
Do you find me angry, Mother?
Oddly, I am not. Nor is finger-pointing the intention of this letter. But I stumble into your image, searching for baby pictures of the boys. I bump into a recollection, when I bruise myself on the corner of your Pennsylvania cupboard. When I put on a few pounds, it is your likeness that glares at me in the mirror, and I succumb to a sensation of being small, crouching, powerless.
If I am writing from my darkened corners, I do so with a steady hand. I have typed out these words or others like them on sunny afternoons and stormy evenings.
I will not allow you to whitewash your behavior, and nor will I dismiss our troubles. But I also want you to know there are days that I miss you, and the little things that I wish I could share – the first time I published an essay that truly came together, those moments when the boys won their college scholarships, the satisfying hunt for a treasured piece of art. Remember the time I called you about the small pipe box and we discussed treen? Wasn’t that delightful?
I wanted you participating in my joys, not dwelling on my defeats. I needed to hear you say “You did great, and I’m proud of you.”
Can you at least admit that my sons are flourishing? As a mother myself, I have done my job? They’re becoming good, decent, focused, responsible, open-minded men. Oh, how you would take pleasure in them now, though they’d give you a run for your money on any subject, and I picture you pleased and miffed at the same time even as you sit with Dad’s namesake and chat in Japanese. His fluency won’t be as good as yours – not yet – but he’ll get there.
I hope you would glory in them, both of them. In their humor and self-possession. Their curiosity and their work ethic. They are, I believe, the best of all of us, parents and grandparents, removed sufficiently from the dramas to know belonging as well as freedom.
As for me, I have been counseled over the years to forgive and forget. I tried for decades, but perhaps forgiveness and forgetting are false gods. Acceptance may be the only viable rite of passage.
So I pick and choose what I recall, or a faulty memory aids in our rapprochement: afternoons at the movies and museums, the penny candy store in Littleton, puttering around Postar’s, then antiquing our way up to Marblehead. I can smell your pot roast (a recipe I’ve never mastered), smile at our Scrabble games, understand (at last) your stacks of newspapers as if the mind could never absorb enough. I stop myself when I tumble into places of hurt, and circle back to the positive lessons.
I get it, Mother. I do. The emptiness of your emotional existence. Loving and feeling so much less in return. The marriage that left you hungry for more.
But your appetites were insatiable. Nothing was enough. However much we fed you, you couldn’t feed yourself and instead, despite all appearances, you sustained a constant state of starvation. You consumed those who loved you, or tried, until we had to back away to save ourselves.
I wonder what awareness exists, if any, if your consciousness is scattered and reassigned, if some “you” hovers and is aware of the consequences you set in motion, if you sense the goodness in your grandsons, if you witness the ways in which you serve as a model: I learned by not repeating your mistakes, yet I trusted my children to values you embodied.
Like any mother, I have done my best with what I’ve been given. But unlike you, I asked my children for feedback and listened. I observed and tried to adjust. I made miscalculations, naturally, but I’ve reached for self-awareness, faced my failings, changed course. Intent without action is utterly pointless. Damage without explicit intent is, nonetheless, damage.
So what do I have of you, after all these years?
As always, you leave me with too little and too much: a crimp-edged photograph of the radiant teenager in the 40s, another of the smiling bride in the 50s, snapshots of the housewife doing her duty in the 60s, memories of an obese and overbearing parent in all the decades that came after. And yes, the doting grandmother holding my infant sons; doting until they could speak back and challenge your authority, that is. Then, your anger spilled out, even on them.
I continue to wrestle with your oppressiveness, to love you in spite of our history, to work on acceptance of my inheritance – the incongruous, the inquisitive, the fractured, the battered, the passionate, the laudable, the laughable – the uneasy companionship of marvels and hurts. I try to linger in the former, and dispatch the latter.
I will close with these undeliverable words along with the shadow of thousands that I have penned before them: I wish you had done better, but I believe you did your best.
Perhaps this is forgiveness after all.
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I will take a somewhat different approach in my response.
The mothers that I see in your mother are my former wife (now deceased) and Fran’s mother. How do we (other parent or concerned family members, most likely) communicate to children that they have a parent who has serious personal problems in their thinking and emotions – sick in thinking in the way that some people are crippled in the body and cannot function in a normal or healthy function.
I worked very hard on that with my children regarding my former wife, who shared a number of the characteristics you described. I developed various techniques to emphasize that the person with a problem was their mother and not them and that although this was sad they had to try to understand/recognize their mother’s illness, even while recognizing that she did indeed love them (it is hard to accept both of these seemingly contradictory aspects).
Fran’s mother likewise had serious mental problems. Fran’s concern was to not be a person like her mother. We all recognize that there are genetic factors involved, which is scary to acknowledge because to some extent that means things are going to be whatever they are going to be. Although a parent will often blame the child for the problems that develop after having children, a better approach is to think of it as a genetic selection where the positive traits (and indeed there are many) associated with the condition are paramount during the years of maximum fertility and are very attractive (and thus reproductive) to capable males. After the family arrives the disabilities can come out because your genes have acquired their offspring and are ready to pass on these successively attractive and then maddening characteristics. Herewith is the reason why men are hoping their chosen partners don’t change – because we’ve seen it happen.
To see how Fran deals with all this is interesting. Her response is to indeed forget the past (not literally, but to put it behind her), which is natural for her. That is a reason why she has no interest in this blog, and from her rather harsh perspective considers this approach not helpful but simply a failure to grow beyond a sense of childhood victimization (very INTJ). Mother’s Day, anniversary, the day we met – the issue for her isn’t about the past (she doesn’t remember these days) but looks positively to the future. Fran can have her own issues (don’t we all), but it is interesting how different our responses can be.
Happy Mother’s Day to a good mother.
p.s. Fran was leading an alpaca for shearing today when it suddenly bolted and threw her flying into a muddy ditch. Typical Fran adventure. Apparently just bruises and strains after returning from the ER with Fran all in one piece. Everybody at the ER loved this story — the alpaca injury lady.She still loves the animals and is positive about them – it simply was frightened.
I have felt this anger and rage over my own upbringing circumstances. And that is what it was. Circumstances. We don’t have a choice over what we will be born into. For me it was into a lonely, only childhood with older parents who didn’t know how to parent – my father bipolar (with 3 several month long stints in a mental hospital) and a mother who had had her dreams shattered. She had to return to work full time, sometimes worked 2 jobs for us to survive, and for that I am grateful. Her own anger plus her exhaustion, she took out on me. Was it fair? Can I forgive her? Thankfully, she has lived long enough to reflect and feel some remorse and to apologize for some of the most egregious episodes. She did the best she could with what she had, which was not very much.
Her legacy? I did a terrific job as a parent. Like you, I frequently check in with my daughter, listen, adjust. According to her, she loves her parents to death, has had one fabulous childhood and she has come out of it confident and strong. I successfully stopped the pattern of physical and verbal abuse, recognized my failings and sought help if I felt myself slipping.
And for myself, I am the product of my upbringing, and some of what was hammered into me may never be dislodged. I never felt unconditional love and have a hard time trusting. There are remnants of confidence and self esteem issues that I continually work on. And I still need to look out for my mother as she is still alive, in her 90’s. Even though she has mellowed through the years, she is still larger than life, and on the outside admired and held in high esteem by many. But I know the inside story.
I’m sorry you’ve lived with this, and understand. For some of us, we are able to stop those patterns, yes, and do better by our kids. Thankfully. Strange, isn’t it, to have a parent admired by others and you know why, yet they have little to no inkling whatsoever of the depths of the darker side.
I wish you a very good Mother’s Day, Lunaboogie. Sending warm wishes.
Thank you. And a very good Mother’s Day to you, as well.
Wow. This is the best raw-yet-polished, wounded-yet-reasoned, childlike-yet-adult piece I think I’ve ever read.
In it I find sadness and anger and tragic emptiness; and I find strength and hope and power. To say that you have done a fabulous job with what you’ve been given is incredibly understating the case.
I appreciate in this reproach of a mother who did not do what she should have some direction for all of us. To raise good, decent, focused, gentle, respectful, responsible, open-minded men, we must be Good. Decent. Focused. Gentle. Respectful. Responsible. Open-minded. And to succeed in not damaging the weak and small (and infuriating and exhausting) we must walk gently near the cores of these children, for parental footfalls are heavy, reactions are mirrored, and love must be more than just words.
What an amazing letter. Thank you for sharing it with us.
If I could have found the time and enough unutilized neurons to make a coherent thought I would have tried to write something like Naptime’s response. It is just as well, as her response is perfect. Thanks to both of you for incredibly moving writing.
I second Naptimewriting’s comments above. Thank you for this post, BigLittleWolf. Your eloquent words are inspiring to those of us who have similar struggles.
I think just about every human being is broken in some way. For some, it’s on on the outside – the Coke bottle glasses, the hearing aid, the allergies, the club foot… And some people are gorgeous on the outside and inside they are a hot mess.
I think more people have personality disorders and other mental illnesses than many people can imagine. So sorry in your case it was your mother – in mine it was my father. Sometimes I can “smile and wave,” and other times I am consumed by rage at the way he failed as a parent.
Sending you love and healing.