October 15, 2010
Sister from another mother
I heard from Jessie Sholl the other day. Her memoir, DIRTY SECRET: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, is coming out in December, and I am hanging on this book. The title itself is revelatory, makes me think of my own mother — why is our mothers' problem our secret? Why does it hang over our heads? It's vicarious shame, like vicarious embarrassment, the agony you feel when you're watching someone make an ass of themselves in public (which of course the Germans have a name for: fremdschämen). It's empathy, but it's too much empathy. It involves entering the mental realm of the disordered in order to understand them. I've likened interacting with my mother and her husband to jumping into a double dutch; you just try to anticipate how they're going to turn the ropes, try to stay inside the eye of their cyclone of fucking lunacy.
I was watching Hoarders on A&E the other day, thinking suddenly, I wouldn't want my child to live like this. I thought about all the heartbroken parents who genuinely love their kids, but whose kids are suffering from addiction and mental illness to the point where they have to be given up for gone. I thought about how far I would go for my kid, how I'd fly anywhere on the map for them, and how I would march in there (wherever there was) and physically drag them to rehab, or a hospital, or out of the filth they've been living in, and get them cleaned up and safe. So why won't I do that for my mom? Because I tried once and failed? I must not have tried very hard. Shouldn't I try again? I wouldn't give up on her if she was my kid.
I KNOW, I KNOW. My mother is not my kid. I KNOW. She is childlike in her helplessness, in her stubbornness, in her lack of practical sense. In the way she lies about things poorly, stupidly, like children do, with pie all over their fingers and face, insisting that they didn't eat the pie. She is a fucking eight-year-old brat at times. But she's not legally a child. If I had a kid who lived like this, I could appeal to the authorities and courts, I could send that child to a disciplinary school, I could have that child kidnapped, like my friend A.'s parents did to him when he was fourteen, had him woken up in his bed in Brooklyn by two men who threw a bag over his head and tied him up, then threw him in a van and took him to the airport, where he was sent to boot camp in the desert for three months. If my mother were my child, this would be legal.
But she is neither a child, nor is she mine. She is her own adult. She is legally allowed to live however she wants, and though I don't see how that could be possible, the authorities have told me so. Animal Welfare, Building Department, social services for the elderly — they say there's nothing they can do. Even the guy I wanted to hire to clean the place up told me he couldn't and wouldn't do it. "This is how they choose to live," he told me. "They're not unhappy about it. You're unhappy about it."
I didn't realize, until I had this stray thought, that I still thought she was mine, that I ever thought she was mine, but of course I always have. Even when I was avoiding her, I knew I could never leave her. The best I could do was stuff her in the attic like Rochester's wife. Now it seems she's escaped.
The strange thing is, she ran away from me. And all this time I thought I was the abandoner.
5 Comments
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I’m feeling this stuff about your mother leap off the page. Very compelling.
This is exactly why your book needs to be published very, very soon. Not just for us, your whiny public, but also for you. Like the last two helped you let go of the anchors that held you fast, getting this story out into the world will help you do that as well. Of course, the difference is that the childhood pain you chronicled in the first book isn’t a tangible reality anymore — it’s buried in your memory — and the ghost of Sam is just that.. a ghost, but your mother, as long as she is tied to this Earth will be tied to you as well. It’s a huge difference, I understand that, but you are a writer and writers need to purge before they can heal. Eh. You know all this; I just wanted to hold up the mirror so you’d remember when the despair/helplessness gets a little too close.
I think the boundaries, or defining points, between mother and daughter are so incredibly skewed in a situation where a child does not truly experience a maternal presence, that it is impossible to maintain perspective. Particularly without the benefit of the presence of a second parent. And, that last line is positively wrenching.
Silvia’s comment re the last line – seconded. Damn.
As someone who went from leaving my mother to her fate to financially and emotionally supporting her in her old age, this post caught me on a deep level. It’s strange how the shifting context of my relationship with my parent meant that even a couple decades later, she still has the power to sculpt my circumstances and emotional landscape. We’re used to hearing things like “They never stop being your mom” as cliches or empty platitudes. It ultimately rings true, but for some of us it isn’t about fluffy support or hallmark moments. It’s about the awkward things and the reminder of all the things that didn’t happen and probably never will.
William Carlos Williams described this kind of relationship nearly eighty years ago in a poem called “Eve.” I really think you’d like it.
http://flouri.shyou.org/wikianthology/eve