I was watching a DVD with Eric last night, and during one of the previews a character says to her brother, “Maybe Dad didn’t abandon us, he just forgot who we were”. I laughed when I heard this statement, and immediately thought of my mother.
To say that my mother abandoned my sister and me is to exaggerate quite a bit. She never left us, per se, except when she went to work, and she kind of abandoned us only half way emotionally. I don’t want to be unfair to her, but to some degree my mother did forget us simply by keeping her thoughts constantly occupied with other things and rarely spending time with us just for the sake of enjoying our company. She left the house at 7am every weekday morning and came home at 6pm every evening when we were growing up, and shipped us off to language classes on Saturday mornings and church on Sunday mornings so that if she didn’t have time to spend teaching us something, at least she could allay her guilt a little by hoping that we were getting some good learning experiences somewhere else. Any time that we were all home together was used to clean the house (which was very difficult to get me to do), watching TV (maybe I should have put this one first), finding ways to amuse ourselves, or we would go on Sunday drives through the countryside because there’s nothing better than having two kids who can’t stand each other be confined in a car. We spent entirely too much time in a car growing up, and don’t even get me started on the drives across the country during summer vacation. And all of this would have been a little more tolerable had my mother not been so goddamn fake about everything. She spoke in an unnaturally high voice, always smiling and pretending that everything was just “great”. People with whom she associated outside the family thought she was the kindest, dearest, happiest person in the world, but I’m sure they must have felt that there was something off, that she wasn’t real. And in hindsight I see that most people didn’t really involve her in any meaningful interaction, and she was often hurt by people who basically felt uncomfortable with her phony niceness (though they didn’t know it) and didn’t respond to her the way she had expected when she was so nice to everyone.
But back to my childhood. My mother tried harder to be attentive with me, especially in the early years, than she did with my sister, and I can understand why, my being the first on the scene and all. But as the years went on, it seemed she could relate to me less and less, and given how unhappy she was with my father, how troubled she was with a past she couldn’t put to bed (though hardly talked about), and constantly worrying about every Tom, Dick and Harry’s opinion of her, it’s not surprising that the kids who came into her life quite late and only gave her more to worry about might be pushed aside for far more crucial concerns. Like housekeeping, like writing letters to relatives, and like falling asleep in front of the TV by 8pm. And like avoiding reality at all costs. She was incredibly tired by the end of the day, and it’s really no wonder why.
And you know, despite the tone of what I’m writing here, I don’t blame her anymore for what happened when I was her child. She kept her mind as busy as possible as a way of coping with the things she couldn’t deal with, and they were many. And the more the years piled on, the more there was to avoid as new issues came up and went unresolved, and the lurking pain deepened. I don’t think that what happened was okay, but since giving birth to Fisher especially, and as time has progressed since then, so has my sense of understanding and forgiveness.
Despite what she may have unwittingly expected from having a child, I wasn’t born to be my mother’s therapist, and while I take pity on her most of the time, I certainly don’t feel responsible anymore for the dysfunction that existed long before I did. My refusal to be put upon in that way is what has made only a superficial interaction possible between the two of us, and I still feel a lot of pain because of the strained relationship, since birth it seems, I’ve had with my her. But in slowly undoing my mother’s forgetting, I am remembering myself. And in remembering myself, I am assuring Fisher of a “present” mother who not only remembers who he is, but helps him remember, too.
