The Long Reckoning

Today, I find myself again in a descent of sadness from a place in another Slice of Now, where I am a child who longs for the emotional presence of her mother. I am all ache and longing and struggling to keep myself home in my I AM. In my I AM, I am sovereign and eternal, and I don't need anything to fill me from the outside in. But today, it's hard to take those deep breaths that help me feel into that place. Today, I just want my mom.

When I was a kid, my mother was always somewhere else, even when she was with me. She was 23 when she had me, her first born. Later, she would say she married my father and had kids because that's what she felt she was supposed to do. My mom was a good girl who was devoted to her parents and then married the organist she met at a roller rink when she was 19 and had a couple kids with him. It wasn't until the 1960s that women in the United States could have their own bank account, and not until 1974 that women were allowed to have a credit card in their own name. In 1970, when she had me, my mother was not destined to be one of those wild women who ran off to San Francisco to experience free love or war activism or to fight to get the ERA enacted into law. 

I think about the circumstances of the day a lot when I think of my mother. I think about who she was in her life, how she didn't know she was adopted until I was born and didn't find out that the man she knew as her father was actually her second cousin until after he died. I think about how lonely it must have been for her to be an only child with older parents, moving often around the United States while she was growing up. I think about how there was so much unsaid that the woman she knew as her mother was too proper to repeat, and so my mother had to live in shame over things like her changing body and sexuality. I think about how much vitriol was spilled in my childhood home by my father's parents, aimed at increasing my mother's shame for trying to get a little independence for herself. 

When my parents divorced, my mother went on a quest for education, leaving me and my little brother to be mostly raised by her parents. We lived together, but she was physically gone much of the time. I remember that in both my Illinois and Arkansas lives, she was a mother who couldn't wait for naptime, the chance to get a break from our needs, to steal a little time to read a book or watch a soap opera. When she became a nurse, she often worked double shifts. She loved her work. Around us, she was prone to migraines. 

Later, when my mom bought a house behind the baseball fields in town for the three of us to live in, her absence felt starker because there were no grandparents to buffer the emptiness. And then when she met the man who would become our stepfather, she introduced violence into our lives that was different from my grandfather's rages. It was insulting, stranger violence that we weren't sure the limits of, and brought the danger of this man's family with it. I experienced sexual violations and drowned out my rage and fear with alcohol, and my mother was just there but not there. Within the course of two years, she and her husband were drowning in debt, and she took a travel nursing job in Florida, leaving me and my brother to fend for ourselves at our house. My grandparents were a phone call away, but my grandfather was sick and getting sicker as the weeks and months wore on. He would die at the end of that summer, right before I left for Navy boot camp and after my brother was sent to live with my dad. 

After that, my mother and I grew further and further apart. Her husband died in a car accident and a few years later, she married an alcoholic truck driver who treated her badly and convinced her to move from Arizona to northern Wisconsin at the beginning of winter one year, and then died. She struggled to make ends meet even in reduced cost senior housing and asked me for help from time to time. When my dad died, she wanted my brother and I to help her move down to Illinois to be closer to us. I was flooded with memories of her absence and manipulation and refused. My brother was just overwhelmed in general. One day, after a long consideration, I decided to stop speaking to my mother anymore. 

Three years later, she died.

I was thinking about my mother last weekend when I saw a woman and her young daughter wearing the same handmade dress. I have fond memories of my mother making me clothes when I was little. Sometimes she would let me pick out the patterns, and she would work the fabric through her sewing machine with the focus of an artist. I loved that she made my clothes, and she looked at me pridefully when I wore her creations. Later, when she was living in Wisconsin, during a small window of time that felt like that time when I was little, she sent me some yarn samples to choose a color for an afghan throw she was going to make for me. In the envelope, there was a note with shaky handwriting that said, "These are the colors I have." 

My mother did the best she could with what she had to give, and it wasn't nearly enough. She was creative and intelligent and funny, and she was absent and bitter and manipulative, and towards the end of the time I knew her, kind of crazy. She was traumatized and she traumatized my brother and me. I will reckon with her legacy, the ways she betrayed me and the ways I know she betrayed herself, in deeper and deeper layers as I go on. But there were those tiny moments, the moments when she shared the colors she had and the beauty deep inside her--those moments were enough, and I hold them in a special place, where they are safe for us both.