Don't Call Me Mother (37 page)

By the time Andrew is seven and Amanda is two, my shaky marriage has dissolved. Months go by during which I’m barely able to get up in the morning and go to work, with little energy to care for the children. I do my best, fixing meals, making sure they have clean clothes. I take them to the park, enjoying their laughter and play. Andrew is a wonderful big brother, playing with Amanda, taking baths with her, making sure she gets her bottle.

Amanda is demanding, energetic, and headstrong, often leaving me exhausted by my efforts to keep up with her. It worries me that I’m neglecting Andrew in the melee. Dennis wants Andrew to live with him now, and several times has asked if he can keep him longer than the agreed upon period. He knows I’m having a hard time. Somehow it all starts to makes sense, so I tell Dennis he can take Andrew now, reasoning that my son needs more than I can give. The debate within me about how to mother the children, or how not to, hasn’t changed over the years. I can’t see clearly enough through my own history to know what is best for me, or for Andrew.

The night before he’s to leave, I tiptoe in to watch him sleep. His cheeks are still chubby, his blond hair splays across the pillow. He clutches tight to his chest a yellow and purple snake, his favorite stuffed animal. I can’t bear to see him so innocent, yet so tangled up in my own pain, my own inadequacy. I cry for a while on my bed, returning to look at him again, and feeling torn with indecision. I know that I can’t give him what he needs; I’m hardly able to take care of myself. I stare at him in the dim light, whispering that I’m sorry. I love him, and so does Dennis. It will be all right, I tell myself, crossing my fingers behind my back.

On the way to the airport, I glance at his face. His eyes stare blankly, as if he’s trying not to feel what he feels. At the airport, I reassure him, telling him I love him, but I can see in his face that he’s holding back what he wants to say. I hug his small body tightly, and he clings to me for several moments, letting me know that he doesn’t want to go. His white-blonde hair bounces with each step as he walks away. He turns around once to wave, his eyes hangdog and sad. We wave until he disappears around the corner.

I am not my mother. This is different.

One summer evening, Vivaldi pours from the stereo. Amanda is finally in bed after a day of diarrhea and temper tantrums, and my glass of wine rests on the coffee table. Outside, mothers and fathers tumble on the grass with their children. Lying on the couch, I can hear the sound of laughter, and I know that if things were normal here in my house, we’d be out there playing too. Not being allowed to play when I was young, I find that watching young children frolic makes me sad instead of happy. A profound grief about many things having to do with children and childhood has surfaced since Amanda was born. Suddenly, the full awareness of my situation hits me like a punch in the stomach: My son is already gone, and I am barely able to take care of my daughter.

I don’t know the name of what is wrong with me. Naming my condition—depression—will come later. All I know is that I’m sinking into an impenetrable darkness, fear and shame slithering around me like snakes. Gram’s cruel voice attacks me as I lie there: “You’ll never make anything of yourself; you’re nothing, nothing.” As I sip my wine, I pour over the images I created in the etching: the little girl reaching for her father, the crying grandmother, the passive mother. Nothing is the way it was supposed to be. Is it fate that has created the life I have, or am I truly a write-off, another example of failure like those who came before me—those other crazy, bad mothers.

The voice in my head starts up again: “You are just like your mother and grandmother. You’ve lost your son, and you’re barely able to care properly for your daughter.” There’s Gram, sitting as I am sitting now, consumed by dark thoughts, sinking into the couch. Somehow the cheer I had maintained for so long, a kind of Pollyanna hope that my childhood hadn’t scarred me, has vanished, leaving me in despair. The only thing that soothes me is creating art, painting and drawing the stories that have filled my dreams and nightmares, stories I’ve been too ashamed to tell in words.

A friend who is worried about me refers me to a therapist. If I need a shrink, I must be crazy, like my mother. It means there’s something terribly wrong with me. I make the appointment despite these fears drumming constantly in my head.

The therapist is a soft-spoken man with large blue eyes full of compassion. I’m a nervous wreck. I answer his questions about my childhood, crying, shaking, afraid to look at him. To me it is a shameful story, a story I don’t want to tell, but I know somehow that I need to get it out. Finally I am beginning to unravel the tangled threads.

Compassion flows from him into me, soothing, subtle, and beyond words. He accepts me without criticism and listens attentively for an entire hour. He tells me to write about falling apart when the despair threatens to engulf me, to give particulars to all my thoughts and experiences. Sometimes I have to call him on the phone for reassurance, when the waking nightmares trap me. There are times that I can’t clearly discern what I feel and believe. Being told so often as a child that I was lying when I was actually telling the truth has made me distrustful of my own perceptions. In Gram’s house, she alone possessed the “truth.” I feel guilty because of all the lies I told to protect myself from her, to escape from her prison, to allow myself a little life outside her influence. What is real? I wonder now. Who am I? I explore these questions with my therapist and in my journal.

I discover that my process of recovery involves learning to face my worst anxieties and fears. My therapist and I spend much time in Vera’s basement, at train stations, in smoke-filled rooms. We revisit Mr. Brauninger, Aunt Helen, and all my Iowa relatives. Now that I have a compassionate witness, I can learn to unpeel the layers of my past, but it takes many years.

Fear is my most constant companion, fear of falling and tumbling into a dark abyss, which sometimes happens for apparently little reason. I’m confronted with my mood swings and my impatience, my dreams of making a whole family with two parents, and my disappointment at not being able to do it. Each week, no matter how much resistance I have to overcome, I meet with my therapist. He teaches me about the path to myself, a path that gets lost in the woods where I have to double back to find myself again. There are times I don’t want to continue—it’s too difficult to face the ghosts that haunt me—but I won’t let myself give up. I know this is the only way to break free of the generations of patterns etched so deeply within me. After several years, I take a break, then return on my knees after a relationship breakup that sends me to the depths of the loss of my mother, tumbling me into whirlpools of grief I’d repressed when she left so long ago.

Many different paths of healing, including Buddhist psychology and meditation, are presented to me. The idea that you can be present here and now, not caught in a sleeve of time, not defined by the past with its terrible pain, is new to me. In meditation I learn about relaxing the mind and letting go. I learn about appropriate anger and managing my fears. I rebuild myself from the bottom up, brick by brick, tearing down the old structure that never worked, trying to find out what love really means. It means opening fully to my children, my pets, my friends, the plants I learn to grow. I have to learn how to be here with them with my whole heart.

It takes a long time to learn how to love. Gifts come to me frequently in good friends who understand, in my children whose love shines from their eyes. There is much to heal between us, but we at least talk about our issues with honesty, trying to resolve them. This is a huge improvement in the old family dynamics. I learn that it’s okay to be imperfect, though I was punished for it as a child. I come to understand that life is a work of art, an ever-dynamic process that flows and moves, imbued by energies we don’t always understand, gifts that are truly given without asking.

I’m grateful for all the healing that comes to me, but one thing doesn’t heal completely: the broken relationship with my mother. I cannot accept her rejection of me, which has continued through the years. I have tried for decades to prove to her that I’m a worthwhile daughter, and there are brief moments, precious moments of tenderness between us, but then comes the usual fight, her grinding criticisms of me. Though we are destined to find our way to each other, it will not be an easy road. At the very end we will meet each other eye to eye, but only when there is no way for her to escape.

For the Grace of Dan

Battle-ready, Amanda and I stand nose to nose in the kitchen. At fourteen, her golden-brown hair is streaked with various shades of red and black, her eyes ringed like a raccoon’s with black eye liner. In some subconscious way, she’s modeling herself after me, even wearing my trademark black leggings and tunic shirt. I know she’s at the love–hate stage all teenagers go through, but mothers’ and daughters’ love–hate relationships are terrifying for me. I’m afraid these yelling matches mean we’re turning into a version of my mother and Gram. Amanda and I have fought and made up since she was eleven, but today there’s a new edge to it.

During the argument, I tune out Dan, our aging golden retriever, who sits beside us with his tongue hanging out, waiting to be fed. My youngest son, ten-year-old Shannon, chugs his third glass of milk in front of morning cartoons instead of eating his breakfast. I reflect sadly that the dog and Shannon are used to scenes like this between Amanda and me. Today I have the flu, and all I want to do is go back to bed with a hot water bottle. My daughter is more adamant than usual, though, so I have to stand my ground.

“No, you absolutely can’t go hang out somewhere today. There’s a ton of homework waiting for you. That report on the Miwok Indians is due on Monday.”

“But Mom, it’s so important. They’re my best friends, I have to go.” This is her cajoling phase, but I know that soon she’ll turn more angry and demanding.

We go on and on, our voices rising as we pace in endless circles around the kitchen, shrieking our way to an impasse. Finally, she rushes into her room and slams the door.

It’s hopeless, I think. How could I ever believe it possible to break the mother–daughter pattern I witnessed so many times during my childhood? Apparently, it’s in my genes. Can there ever be a resolution to decades—nearly a century, in fact—of this stuff? I’m not quite used to having big arguments and conflict with Amanda. For a long time in her childhood, though she was stubborn and we had struggles between us, she showered me with hugs, little drawings with hearts, love notes, and adoration. I soaked it all up, yet there was a small part of me I kept from her, as if afraid to allow my heart to open all the way.

Heavy in body and soul, I spoon a few reluctant bites into Shannon, feed the dog, and slink back to bed. Every few weeks it seems, I’m felled by another bug. Burrowing down under the quilt, I feel miserable. I’m a failure for getting sick all the time, for having a daughter who’s barely interested in school. What would my therapy clients think? After all, isn’t a therapist supposed to have it all together?

Over the last eight years, I’ve completed a master’s program, earning a license to practice psychotherapy after putting in three thousand hours of internship and passing a state exam. I have a private practice and a twenty-hour-a-week job at a family agency, where I help people like Amanda and me resolve their problems. I should feel good about all this, and I do, but the dark times still come and go, as they always have, setting off moods I find hard to combat.

During the years of study and internship, I gave birth to Shannon, and shortly after that my most recent marriage ended—another good reason to feel bad about myself, though I know that staying would have been worse. It’s a sign of good mental health not to stay married to men who remind me at times of my grandmother, but I have to wonder why I keep bringing people like that into my life. Don’t I get it yet? How much therapy will it take?