Like so many of these writings, I don’t know where it will go as I start to write. I’m in Georgia, car camping for a few days and today is Sunday around 9 am. I woke up around 5 am, it was still dark and daylight would not be until 7:21 am. It is a lovely cool morning. I made my breakfast oats (it’s simple and can be dressed up in so many ways) and my first cup of coffee. I make french press coffee every night when I camp so I have two cool cups of strong coffee the next morning. And I watched the creek come to life here. It’s a place called Rood Creek Park. The first thing I noticed was these small clusters of streaks in the water as some animals in small groups moved silently, swiftly through the water. I assume they were fish. Then a bit after that I heard a splash on the hill below my campsite and waited to see if I could identify what animal jumped in the water. It was an alligator. There are several here and signs warn campers about them.
Then the gunshots. It’s Georgia. It’s Sunday. No fishers on the creek today, there have been several in the water each of the three days I have been here-kayak fishers, motorboat fishers, pontoon fishers. But no fishers today, Sunday the day of rest in the south. Only gunshots. From 6 am until this moment, 9 am, I have heard varying crescendo and decrescendos of shooting.
I have lived in the south for more than 30 years off and on at this point. I’m 63. An invisible, white, moderately able bodied woman. I don’t cringe at the guns shooting but I stay very aware. It is my comfortable whiteness that allows that and I have a fair amount of confidence I will get to have a conversation and possible relief from dying by a gun wielding man should I be confronted. And while I feel this way, I suspect I will be confronted one day, if not today.
I mentioned today is Sunday. It’s September 8th at 9:11 am and according to Gun Violence Archive since September 4th when Colt Gray murdered two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School, before his father who gave him the gun as a fully christian christmas gift was rightfully charged with murder, there have been three additional mass shootings. September 6th in DC, September 7th in Kentucky, September 7th in Pennsylvania.
I’m confident by the time I put my finishing touches on this essay and publish it there will have been at least one more mass shooting and murder in America. Isn’t it something to have that confidence?
As the title of my essay reflects, this is, or was supposed to be, about estrangement and conflicting values. And it is. Mostly. It’s also about how the failures of white mothers like me have impacted this really really sick country.
And to many who will read this, you will say (rightly so) that I am centering myself. I am. In service to the message I hope to convey.
Things I did well as a young white mom:
- Loved on my kids every day
- Read to my kids every day
- Taught my kids to cook some things
- Told my kids pretty much anything was possible for them
- Opened the doors to as many opportunities as I could for them as a single mom
Things I did terribly as a white mom at all of my ages
- Did not convey my progressive values in a lasting or evergreen way to my children
- Did not infuse my older two children with the value that people unlike themselves are worthy of every right afforded them-every person
- Did not talk enough about the devastation domestic violence had in our home and the absolute cellular harm it had on us that we are all struggling with today
- Only recently risked speaking about any of the Did Nots listed here
With those things written for the world and you to read I will also tell you my daughter has estranged herself from me for over 11 years and now my two sons have chosen to follow suit. Ironically, depending on the estrangement group one decides to risk being vulnerable in in the usual places - fb, ig, yt, tt - one will be met with the same classifications one is met with in the world. Because people have to categorize you, classify you, rank you, put you in their boxes. I have been told that because I have any contact with any of my children to any degree I am not estranged, or I am low contact, or I am being grey rocked, blah blah blah and should seek out a group that better fits those categories.
Living among humans can be exhausting.
Loving humans can be excruciating.
I have written some of the details of my daughter’s choices and a small amount about my son’s choices elsewhere in this blog, you can search the word estrangement to find them. For today I am writing about the vast chasm in values between myself and my older son.
In his childhood home, my oldest son, now 41, was assaulted by his father who frequently hit him in his head, beat him with coax cables, tree branches and one day because of literal spilled milk, beat him so badly with a wooden cutting board his backside and lower back were bruised for more than two weeks.
I failed my son in all of those moments because I stayed with the violent domestic abuser who is his father for almost 18 years. I gave that monster all those years to harm my son in body and spirit. And those things show up in adulthood for children who were abused in their early years. Once in a while I get a glimpse into the harm my son is dealing with. He chose to marry a woman who belittles him and calls him names. He has listened to the continued gaslighting of his father who has convinced him those beatings were character building. He is the example of the successful business person who is also working himself to exhaustion.
I was a less than perfect mother. Deeply flawed. I stayed silent through the times my children’s father harmed them. Harmed me. Until I decided to divorce the violent domestic abuser, he was given free reign to harm any of us. My daughter tells me I was abusive and negligent to her. I believe the negligent part. I’m struggling to see the abusive part, and have to reconcile my non actions were probably abusive. She won’t open a door for us to have any conversation or work through any of her hurt, though she’s told me she thinks I’m stupid and a fucking idiot and has worked through “everything” with her father. Yes, I’m angry about that.
Loving humans is excruciating.
Why did I stay silent? I don’t have all the answers. I have some. One reason was I made a vow that I now understand is one of the biggest tricks this culture plays on women to keep them in line and silent. Another reason was I naively thought that something might change one day. In my immaturity I believed if I somehow was better (at anything) things would be better. The trick in that incorrect thinking is, his nature to be a violent person is his nature. We had no chance for things to be any different than they were with him. One other looming reason is the model I was taught in my childhood home: silence in the face of everything; sacrifice yourself (only girl people) to the point of not existing; do not under any circumstance talk about hard things. I brought all of that into a violent marriage where I had some mysterious expectation I would grow a healthy relationship, be cared for and grow happily old-not bitter to the very end like my parents did to each other. What a surprise things did not go well.
Between my suffocating silence and my skill less parenting for so many years, my oldest child to this day being exposed to the ultra right wing, post divorce hide behind the bible thumping, misogynistic, homophobic values his father brings to the table, my son is understandably mired in what he is familiar with. I didn’t give him traditions, or hard conversations, or skills to question people who told him what to think instead of think for himself. And now he thinks a lot like many of the people I vehemently disagree with in politics especially but on social concepts too. And my heart hurts about that. The thing is, I know my son to be someone who would do almost anything for someone else who needed it. He did so for me for 10 years before I realized I was simply perpetuating one more situation of dysfunction in my family. He gives of himself in ways that are probably a disservice to his own health and care. He is a person who has grown into a fixer. He’s not an investigator. I don’t know if those are terms used in mental health or human development but they are words that fit. He was (probably still is) often the friend who would come to the defense of his friends no matter the consequences to himself. He was the boyfriend who believed he could fix things for girlfriends by being their protector, to the point he could not see deeply red flags. He is the husband who has chosen a wife who is not kind to him in many situations but in many cases shows him love he needs to feel. He does not investigate his or other people’s feelings. Much like the example he was shown by his parents, and both sets of grandparents.
This is where the my title for this essay meets its intent. While I was learning to be a whole human in the midst of violence and believing incorrectly that I was the sole problem, I abandoned many of my responsibilities to my children, like teaching them the necessity of repair over and over and over because I did not yet know it. My oldest son learned that women who don’t rock the boat are both good and always the problem as told him by his father’s words and my example of silent acquiescence.
And he and I struggle to find a way to each other, made infinitely more difficult with the climate of political assumptions that someone who thinks differently than we do is not worth our effort. Or our view of the world is superior to anyone who thinks differently. Or we simply don’t make the bandwidth for people we see as challenging our perspectives. So I text him weekly to ask if I can talk to my grandson, to tell him I love him, to try to connect with him, to let him know I hope his wife is well in her high risk pregnancy and their soon to arrive daughter is someone I will love even if I never get to meet her. And he does not respond.
And I continue to grow and learn how to be a better human. Some days with success. Some days not.