It’s odd that no matter how contentious a child/parent relationship has been, there’s a certain sadness that rears it’s ugly head when the roles reverse. In my case, it’s been hard to watch my mother’s decline and I say this fully admitting that our relationship has been difficult. And I believe this goes back to when I was a zygote.
After years of therapy, ass loads of introspection and enduring a variety of mind-blowing successes and colossal failures, I can honestly say if I were to ask a statistician about who owns the bulk of responsibility for our beleaguered relationship, the answer would be 80/20. I’ll own up to ten percent.
I’m the youngest of three girls. For the longest time, there’s been a saying in our home: Mother raised two lovely young women and one ABC After School special. You remember those, right? For example, “Laurie K: Portrait of A Teenage (insert malady here). But in reality, I wasn’t the problem child my mother insists I was. I was basically a normal child reacting to a very abnormal mother.
Wow. It’s very liberating to be able to say that freely without any kind of fear of retribution.
I won’t talk about all of my mother’s specific maternal infractions. Or how I might have responded to them as her daughter. To recite them all yet again would diminish them and make them feel as if it were rote. Besides, I’d have to divide them between that which I experienced as a child vs. my adulthood (pre-psychological fortification). Even today, to reflect back on the two stages reminds of something like the Old Testament and the New Testament. No grandiosity here. I’m merely using the Bible as an example of what it felt like.
A quick note about my father: he was also damaged and did some damage in the process, but my mother played a larger role as parent because my father had the chance to leave. He fled, actually. He was a psychological refugee every chance he got. He’d play golf, often in tournaments away from home, he’d go on hunting trips, bowling plus his civic involvements. I suppose at one point he seemed liked the model citizen. Maybe he was and maybe he was an opportunist in that regard.
He and I don’t talk about my/our childhood much. I’d like to assume that’s probably due to his own guilt, but I think he was well aware of what was happening. I don’t know how he could’ve not known it. His silence spoke volumes…as it does to this day. He did nothing because he selfishly wanted to keep the peace in his own little chaos free bubble of tranquility. He was either physically absent or when he was present, he checked out emotionally. Besides, what could he have done? Tell my mother to stop ranting? To contain herself?
No.
My mother couldn’t be told she was wrong,….not without paying a price.
And in retrospect, my sisters and I never went to our father seeking help or advice about how to deal with the woman he married. We just didn’t. At the time, we didn’t dare talk about our lives among ourselves. We Just went along with the shared punishments and the unique ones she concocted for each of us. There were no aunts or uncles. Our only living grandparent then was Daddy’s mother, but she was just as damaged. And it would have been a waste of time. She would never say anything against her son.
And as much of a cop-out as this sounds, you must understand this was the 60’s; a very different time. There were no agencies. Child Protective Services and other advocates or advocacy groups either didn’t exist or were only in metropolitan areas. Small town kids at this point inhibitory had no one to go to, because we’ll frankly, kids didn’t rat out their parents. That would be a fate worse than death because secrecy was key to keeping up the illusion. Happy, nuclear family. Curtains and Venetian blinds hid the truth.
So, we just took what she doled out, kept mom while we secretly feared and hated her, aware yet being willfully ignorant of what the other sisters were going through. Maybe we were aware of trust issues long before it because a buzz phrase found in so many Psychology Today articles, circa 1972.
It was physical at times, but always emotional. Mother could get both smarter and meaner depending on the depth of her rage. And that was the most confusing part about being a child of an emotionally/mentally fractured parent. We understood the slaps and pinches, because we understood second half of the phrase, “cause and effect”. We were painfully aware of the effect, but we never knew what caused her anger. There was never an explanation as to why she yanked us out of bed before dawn and sat us down on a couch in the living room and screamed at us for hours.
Behaviorists will talk about the damage caused by a clenched fist or verbal abuse. They can talk about neglect and how some kids are fed and clothed with a roof over their heads, yet these kids can still be starving (for affection), cold (they aren’t nurtured) and they feel homeless, because there is no shelter from the emotional storm. The experts never talk about how painful it is for being punished without a clue behind the reason why. To be punished almost for sport.
This may be a very lopsided comparison, but it might offer some insight into what I’m trying to say. Prisoners of war, enemy combatants, etc., hate whatever their torture might be, but they also know that finding themselves in these situations are risks soldiers take when fighting for his or her cause. Like the beginning of the first Predator movie. Arnold, and his merry band of mercenaries were fighting the scariest enemy of all: the one they couldn’t see. His invisibility and later on, his relative transparency gave him the edge. They couldn’t see him, but he could see them. He or it, I suppose, had the advantage. Arnold, Jessie V. and Carl Weathers et al, were sitting ducks.
But while it hurled me to my present, you have to find some kind of livable, tolerable perspective with your past. There comes a time in life when you finally understand why you still have to be the bigger person. There comes a time when mean mommy has to regress right before your very eyes to become the damaged, child she always ways but this time in the form of a wrinkled, shriveled body. A damaged child with no recourse, as if there was any during The Great Depression, is the seed that grows into…..well, my mother.
I’m not always as patient as I should be when my mother exemplifies symptoms common with her length of years. When she gets cranky, when she hurts and feels tired and blames me, I can’t help but flashback to the various times in my childhood and young adulthood. I have to resist becoming her and screaming at her because her age has changed our narrative. She’s doddering and slow, deaf, and feeble at times. She’s no longer this massive, unpredictable monster that inflicted so much bullshit. Being with her as I have over the past seven years has allowed me to see the woman behind the curtain. She’s slower at pushing the buttons and turning the knobs, but still operational. But the power as seen from this angle, lessens.
I could say she’s just a much older version of who and what she was at 35, but that would only be a half truth.
The full truth is that I know my mother hates being this way…rewarded with living long enough to see seven of her eight siblings die and all of her friends leave.. ALL of her friends.
As I get older, I understand things more clearly, even though I lose my own lead in that arena at times, I’ve tried desperately not to be my mother’s daughter, but the fear that I so easily fear remains constant inner struggle. I’ve tried to be kinder, gentler, more empathetic. But she was my first relationship with an adult woman. Like all parents, she set a precedent. If you’re raised by a Narcissist, do you not retain some of the traits with which you grew up? The reality is if my mother doesn’t like where she is, who she is and how she is, then there’s no doubt I’ll hate it as well if I live long enough. I never married, never had children, so I’m limiting our similarities to just the circumstantial ones. So, maybe all that’s really happening now is much more simple than our extremely complicated past.
I still see her as she was, but with added negatives. As I said, she’s doddering and slow, deaf, and feeble at times. Mean? Yeah, still mean, she’s still caustic and still knows exactly when and where to lunch those salvos.
Perhaps, I don’t like that the comparison of mother then and mother now is still so easy to make. Perhaps, I don’t like seeing what could very well be my own “Coming Attractions” preview.
Nothing scares me more.
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