My Story, Part VII

It's almost Mother's Day and in that spirit, I guess I should write about my relationship with my mother and how what happened in my childhood has affected that.

Short story: It's two days before Mother's Day and I woke up with a sense of dread and the knowledge that I have not so much as sent my mother a card. I haven't talked to her in a week.
I am a bad daughter.

Deep breath.

I remember the day I realized I was angry at my mother. Up until that day, that moment, we had an okay relationship. I was grown and with three children of my own. I had married Mr. Moon and we'd had our first child together. I was raking the yard. And suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, I knew exactly how angry I was at my mother.
I don't remember if she had yet divorced C.
It took her years and years to do that. She was miserable in her marriage to him for many years. How could she not be? The cruelty which had become obvious in him only after she married him had become not a streak, but an entire entity. C. focused this cruelty mainly on Mother and one of his sons. This son bore his name. A Jr. He was not the sort of little boy who wanted to play baseball or football. He was thin and he didn't want to fish or work in the yard. He wanted to play music. He was quiet and I think he spent his entire childhood trying to avoid his father.
My other little brother was a bigger guy. He did like sports, he didn't mind being outside. And yet, it was apparent to me that he suffered in that house, too. He has told me stories that break my heart.

I baby-sat my brothers once for several weeks when they were very young, and I begged my mother to get the boys into counseling because it was so obvious that they were disturbed and unhappy little fellows. I used to dream that on one of the trips Mother and C. took that they would die and I would get to raise my baby brothers. I could see that they were living in fear, walking on eggshells every minute to avoid C.'s wrath.
They would tell me that they plotted ways to kill him and make it look like suicide. A friend of theirs, when they were all in high school, was convinced that one day he would come over and find them all dead, killed by C. in some sort of riot of blood.

This was the way they lived.

And Mother tried to protect them, she did, from this wrath. Especially the one C. picked on the most. His Jr. But she stayed with him. While the boys were telling me of their plots to kill him, she would tell me that she was staying with him "for the children" and wouldn't divorce him until they were out of high school. I begged her to leave him but she was afraid and I understood that. I had already gone through a divorce and I knew the way it shook the world and caused so many troubles and difficulties to fall out. But I had known I had to do it and it seemed to me that she did too.
Change is so hard and it's unimaginable how used to insanity one can get.
Finally, the boys graduated from high school and she did it. She left him. She got an apartment, divorced him and moved out.

And like I said, she and I got along. In a way.

But then that moment came when I was raking the yard and I had a moment of clarity and instead of seeing her as a victim of C.'s actions, I suddenly saw her as a woman who had not protected her children. It had been so apparent to me from the time the boys were little that they suffered tremendously because of C. and I knew all too well what it was like to live in that house, every moment charged with fear and dread. There was no safe place there. C. would lie on that awful lounge chair of his in front of the TV, watching the stock report and his presence, his cruel, insane presence, permeated every molecule of air around him. I can see him there and just that image makes me feel sick to my stomach. I can't imagine how those boys lived there for eighteen years, growing up. It's like putting baby plants in an enclosed space and filling the space with some sort of toxic gas that although it doesn't quite cause death, makes the plants stunted and unable to bloom. All Mother had to do was open the door and take those babies out into the real air, the real sun.
And she didn't do it. Why?

Fear. I'm sure. She'd already had one bad marriage and divorce and loathed the idea of another. Plus, there are always the financial concerns. They lived in a nice house and C. gave her jewelry and took her on trips. Beyond that, I have no idea why she stayed and perhaps those reasons are enough.
But to me, as a mother myself, I can't imagine letting my children grow up in such an atmosphere.

I can remember her pleading with C., not just to come to the table every night so we could say grace and eat, but to see reason, to quit talking to us the way he did, trying (futilely, always) to make him see reason. Not only was he cruel, the man was paranoid with a capital P. Was it the codeine? Was it the way he had been raised? Was it a genetic fault? Who knows? It doesn't matter. He just was.

Did he merely talk and make fun and use cruelty in his speech to the boys? Did he spank them as well? I don't know. I do know that he occasionally spanked me. I remember the last time he did it. We'd gone on a family camping trip and there was a boy there at the campground and we buddied up. We hung out together and it was so sweet and we didn't even hold hands but C. noticed. He saw and he was furious. When we got home and it was time to unpack everything, he decided I wasn't helping enough and he spanked me. I was probably fifteen.
Then he offered me money.

Okay. This is crazy. I can't focus. I'm trying to write about my mother.
And I am. Because she saw all of this insanity and she may have protested it, but she didn't do anything to permanently get out of it with her children. She did not protect us.
And she wasn't a poor uneducated woman with no resources. She had a Master's degree. She had a job. She had some money her father had left her. She would have gotten child support and alimony back in those days. But she didn't go anywhere. She stayed right where she was and the realization of that filled me with rage. It still does.

Not so much because she didn't protect me from sexual abuse, but because she didn't protect her sons, the little boys I had rocked and fed and loved since their birth, to the point where they were very obviously profoundly affected.

When I finally got the courage up to tell my mother about the sexual abuse, she couldn't believe me. I was in therapy. I was going to a sexual abuse survivor's group. And it became apparent to me that I had to tell her. I had to. It was part of the healing deal. Part of removing the blame from myself and realizing I had been a child when it happened and it had not been my fault. But because my entire life had I had been taught that my job was to protect her, this was the hardest thing I could ever imagine doing. Besides confronting C. That was completely unimaginable.

But I wrote my mother a long letter and I told her about the abuse. And she called me back. And although I think she believed me, she never offered one apology but kept stating that she had had no idea. She hadn't known, she hadn't realized, and did I know how this made her feel? The only thing she'd ever wanted in her entire life was to be a good mother and this made her realize (she said) she'd been a failure.
This sounds like an apology, perhaps, but it is not.

She was by this time divorced and I encouraged her to get into some therapy herself. She found some woman who was a church-related counselor and started going to her. She begged me to forgive her. Again, this was not an apology, but instead, a plea to me to make it all right for her.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't even talk to her about it. I. Could. Not.

Her therapist wrote me a letter. And in it she said that she realized that I had had a sexual relationship with my step-father and that for my mother's benefit, closure, and peace of mind, I needed to discuss this with her.

I was enraged. A sexual relationship with my stepfather? Who WAS this woman? Who told her she could be a therapist? I was abused by my stepfather. I had been a nine-year old child! I trembled with rage. I wrote her back. I told her that I was going through the most difficult time of my life, in therapy myself, trying to hold myself together and make some sense of the insanity and rage I felt, trying to get some help, some healing, trying to be a good mother to my own children, a good wife to my husband and basically, I did not give a flying fuck about my mother's peace of mind at this point.

And our relationship has never been any damn good since then.
And it is a huge pain in my heart. Who doesn't want to feel close to their mother? Who doesn't want a mother to go to when she needs comforting, needs help, wants to share joy or pain?
And I just cannot do this. I don't trust her. I don't feel like I can trust her with any of my feelings at all. None.

Other things have happened since then which have not made anything better. I could tell stories of situations that were bizarre and made me even more resentful, less forgiving and angrier. I won't.
And I know that I am supposed to forgive. What does that mean, I wonder? Forgive. How do you forgive when someone refuses to ask for forgiveness? Why is it so hard for her to simply say, "Mary. I'm sorry for what happened to you as a child."
Because she cannot seem to do that.
Is it wrong and selfish for me to long for that one simple statement? I'm not asking her to ask my forgiveness for not protecting me or my brothers. I only want her to say she's sorry that all of this happened.

And there are other factors. I think she's jealous of me. I've been married for twenty-four years to a man who seems to adore me. He never abused our children. He's sweet and he's patient and he's kind and he's hard-working and she married his father who was as sweet and patient and kind and hardworking as his son and six months after they married, he died.
I would be jealous of me.

Look- if you met my mother, you would love her. She's funny and she's open-minded and she's spent many, many years doing volunteer work for hospice. She's smart. She's gone through tragedies. She's tough. She was so happy when Obama got elected that she was dancing on air for days. She's not a religious freak. She loves her church, but mostly for the music and because her pastor is so open-minded and because it's a community. She goes to talks and classes. She loves her grandchildren.

And my brother, my "full" brother, berates me for being such a bad daughter. He lives so far away but he comes, every few years, to visit Mother and they go on daily trips and hike all day and explore little towns and they have a great time together. He refuses to believe that our childhood was anything but magical. He doesn't particularly like C., but he says that he was never treated cruelly by him. Of course, he hasn't been in touch with him for many, many years and he never talks to our other brothers.

The brother of mine whom C. did treat so cruelly lives here, nearby. He has two children. He is married. He is the best father in the world. He has gone through therapy. He continues to go, off and on. He is relatively close to Mother. I know he loves me. He changed his last name. He is no longer a Jr. He took my mother's maiden name as his last name, legally. This says a lot.

My other little brother hardly ever, ever calls Mother and she no longer calls him. He rarely calls me, either, but I know he loves me, too. When he gets vacation time, he comes and stays with us. He has never married. He has no children. He is still somewhat in touch with his father who is very old now and I hear is not doing well. He remarried a long time ago, a wealthy widow and they are still married. She is not doing well, either.

And there is the story of my relationship with my mother. I live very close to her and hardly ever call her and feel huge horrible gobs of guilt for that. She's old. She needs my help. She's too proud to call to ask for it unless it's medically-related. Every time I'm around her, I get a feeling of such pain that it affects me for days. I hate that. I hate that I am not the sort of person who can "get over it." Why can't I? What is wrong with me that I can't let this pain and anger go? If my children felt this way about me, I would die. The very thought brings huge wracking pain to my heart. I know I cause my mother pain.

And it's almost Mother's Day. This has taken me hours and hours to write. An entire morning. I'm crying.

I just felt so guilty I called her. She has a doctor's appointment on Tuesday and I offered to take her. She gladly accepted. No mention was made of Mother's Day. We talked about last week's play and she said she'd had such a good time. That it was so good for me to make new friends. And then she talked about her friend who very active in the theater and how she and two of her children and five of her grandchildren were in a recent production of the Sound of Music. I almost fished for a compliment on my performance last week. I didn't get one.

And Sunday is Mother's Day and my children will probably come out and we'll make sushi and it will be fun but the entire time, I'm going to feel vast guilt for not being with my mother on Mother's Day. I'll feel terrible about it but not terrible enough to ask her to come out, too. Either way, the day is never a great one for me. I can't let myself feel honored by my children because of the guilt I feel for not honoring my own mother.

And so it goes.
Abuse that happened forty-something years ago, that was over forty-something years ago is still here, present in my very bones every moment of my life. Or its effects, anyway.

And please don't tell me to go back into therapy, this time with my mother. There is a part of me which could not bear that. I have no desire to vomit more nails in her presence. None whatsoever. And I honestly do not think she is capable of ever seeing the situation in any way except through her own eyes, her own experience, her own fears and disappointments and I understand that.

But I cannot share in with it. I just can't.