I avoid intimate conversations with my mother. I know that beneath her placid surface lie roiling waters and the occasional mako shark. I’m a strong swimmer (because of her) and I know to avoid undertows: just stay out of the water.
This makes it sound like my mother is scary. She is not. She is lovely. My mother is kind, a closet sentimentalist, and much softer than her bravado implies. She is the meltiest grandma you can imagine.
My mother is usually fairly emotionally buttoned-up, but a year ago she had some sort of angry breakdown, apparently triggered by all the ways all of her daughters are unsatisfactory (in my inexpert deflective opinion, it was more likely the fallout of the loss of two parents in two years in conjuction with December-related madness) and which resulted in the heaving of a Christmas tree into the ocean. Though she lives on the beach, I can’t help but think that this dramatic gesture must have been a lot of work. I can appreciate the gesture. I hope it was worth the work. I also hope that it was a real tree and not a plastic one. The environment, you know.
So, I’m not scared of my mother. I’m scared of her family and her ghosts and the ghosts of her family and how they should haunt her and maybe they do.
It is a paradox, really. I’m a writer. I’m hungry for stories. I love the sweet-and-sour of life and adore reporting the gothic undertones of family life. My mother is practically stacked to the attic with these kinds of tales. And I can’t go near them.
My sister, on the other hand, should be the family scribe and psychologist. She tells me stories, casually, that astonish and horrify me. She has told me things that my mother has told her that make me want to mother my mother. Peeks through the windows into my mother’s life make me fierce and tender and protective of her. Because of these furtive, revealing glimpses, if you criticize my mom, I will sigh aggrievedly, take off one white glove and smartly smack you straight in the face. With my hand, not the glove. It reminds me of Valentino Deng in What is the What and how he actively forgives the people who slight him by thinking – and here I paraphrase inelegantly – you wouldn’t do that if you knew what I had already suffered.
You wouldn’t say a harsh word about my mother if you knew what she had suffered.
Yet she never describes herself in that way: as a victim, a sufferor or even a survivor. She never condemns the people who harmed her. She loves them. She accepts them. She lets them come as they are. She’s totally matter-of-fact about it.
My mother’s father – my beloved, departed grandfather – was an alcoholic. Sometimes when he was drunk, he beat her mother and my mother and her brothers and sisters. Sometimes really, really badly. Sometimes the merely bad and scary was replaced by hot, bloody terror. Yet my mother talks about her father with great tenderness and knows whole-heartedly that when he was not drinking, he was lovely. She can reconcile the poles, the dark and the light sides of people, and accept.
I don’t know if that is a gift. It might be.
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the piece, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the piece, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
Avoiding (motherloving) Intimacy: A Memoir, Starring Cleavage
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line: I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it. Imagine being my mother and reading that line. Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with …
[Reply]
The quality of the info is what keeps me on this site, thanks!
Wish You a Merry Christmas.
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