This one is tough because I want to be unlike my mother. Fortunately am unlike her in many ways. Yet I’m like her in many ways. And that’s part of this devastation of estrangement because I can imagine it’s the same for Daughter’s desire to be unlike me, make assumptions about me in addition to the accurate issues she has with me.
My Mom obligatorily performed being a woman acceptable to others. She deferred and fawned but behind the scenes would gossip and complain about people she cared deeply for outwardly. She also ran as quickly as possible from conflict. It was almost a physical reaction for her. If she couldn’t remove herself from a situation by shutting it down or literally leaving, she would pull the ‘woe is me’ tactic and DARVO or gaslight. It was a completely unconscious thing for my mom who was not interested or willing to work on her lifelong sadness or traumas. Maybe it was a generational thing but the older I get I recognize it was more likely the pressure for her to stay in a small box of who the world told her she was to be.
On one visit from my mom and dad, they came to my kid’s elementary school for their annual ice cream social. The stress in my own life was immense and I think on some level my mom and dad knew but had no skill themselves to help me emotionally. But they kept showing up for my kids. My mom and dad and kids were in line for the festivities when the violent abuser came into the school cafeteria. My mom moved herself behind a brick column - she hid - and did not come out from behind it until it was obvious she couldn’t stay there all night. I saw and noted it mentally in that moment but it still took me years to address it in myself. My flight response is an evolution at this time. I have my mom’s tendency to flee with the added rage fueled willingness to fight too.
Instead of meeting the abuser face to face and saying something appropriate for that moment that would have been meaningful to my children and I - she hid. Mom was not a stand up for yourself person, did not speak out against things that were clearly wrong and would do almost anything to avoid conflict. That’s where she’d DARVO or gaslight - when I told her her oldest son told me he wanted to rape me when we were teens, her response was “I was a bad mother…” and some more words I tuned out in that moment. Not an syllable of compassion toward me. And her own health was shit because of her learned helplessness, loss of autonomy (self imposed or not) and her utter inability to have hard conversations.
Months before my dad died, I encouraged my parents to decide on their final arrangements. Dad was hesitant and joked that all we needed to do was stand him up in a corner of a room after he died. It took some talking but they did decide to pre plan everything. It was a very good decision for them, I was proud of them for taking the steps. My dad’s experience after his own mother died (his dad had died many years before his mom) was a ruthless anger filled back and forth between he and his sisters about my grandmother’s estate and I don’t think their relationship ever repaired…not solely due to that moment but piled on top of many other wounds between all of them that were severe. My parent’s children have never been close and the writing was on the wall that it would be similar or worse between us after they passed.
A short time before mom died, she changed her final wishes excluding me from helping with any of her final arrangements. She didn’t tell me. I’m ambivalent some days about it, other days I am pissed at her. She was influenced by her youngest son without a doubt but it was her decision to cut me out of things. A pattern deeply embedded in my family’s dna: shun/cut off/no conversation absolutely no repair. Emotional maturity is not a trait in any branch of my family.
Mom was depressed as long as I knew her. That performative good woman? She gave all of herself in the only ways she knew to in the constraints of her “should be”; food, gifts, attend grands events as she and dad could. And I believe mom was very good at treating her grands with love and care. Mom and dad gave money they did not have to all of their children, myself included and it harmed their financial future. I did these things until my 50s. Like my mother.
I would have loved to experience my mother being more selfish - which in this culture is really simply a woman caring as much about herself as she does her cultural duties and mandates. You know, like normal giving a shit about one’s self.
It’s likely my mom was among many women in her generation who felt she didn’t have a lot of agency. I don’t know if it was self imposed or not - most likely it was a combination of societal demands, my dad’s expectations based on his own societal expectations and her learned helplessness because my mom gave up a lot in situations I wish she had let her fuse blow. Instead she internalized so much and she hurt so much.
I noticed while driving around Vermont how attracted I am to the many many barns. I love the barns. I love the old homes. I love old broken rural buildings. There seem to be two main colors of the barns: the classic barn red and a greyish blue. It struck me, the barn red paint is something my mom loved so much from what I can recall but I don’t know why. When my dad built an extension on the childhood home I grew up in, the whole house was repainted that barn red. I don’t know what attracted my mom to it, I think she may have had her own longings for some of the southern things of her extended family that came from Kentucky.
She would mention southern foods or ways but she did not incorporate many of the things she cherished from that part of her family into our lives. And we as a family did not hold close relationships with my mother’s extended family, we were only close with my dad’s family. Right now all I can do is make assumptions. I tried asking my mom’s now 80 year old sister about her own memories of their childhood recently and she said she had no memories of their childhood. It hurt my heart because I wonder if that is her own trauma. There are a lot of unknowns surrounding their own long gone parents.
I wish my mom had gotten to a point in life that she was willing to look at the things that she had broiling inside her. Any of the things. But I think that would have been more than she would have been able to tolerate emotionally.
The thing is…I am like my mother. I love and hate it. Mom was encouraging if not convincing about her encouragement. I can be over the top with encouragement - maybe compensating.
After my dad died, my mom did start saying more of what she thought, tentatively, especially around politics. It breaks my heart she probably had simply been following what others did, probably set aside her own opinions. She may or may not have believed some of what she said around world or local events but I know she tried to be the kind of person who at least outwardly understood we never know what someone else deals with. I thank her for that. When I divorced, I was a very immature human at 35 with severely under developed values - or better said, I had absorbed values that were not at all mine or what I believed. I fawned to people like the abuser, his family, many of my own family and more. I have more time than mom did to investigate those things and I plan to do a fucking shredding of the before and after.
Most likely mom was as tangled up inside as I have been for so many years but without the “permission” as it were to get help or try to investigate herself or how anyone else thought. She was deeply enmeshed with her youngest son, who was one of the only constants in her life but also manipulated her and took great advantage of her.
The more I peel back how much I am and was like my mother, the more I'm trying not to be like my mother. To prune the damaged parts while excavating the good of her. To hopefully honor what my mother couldn’t choose, what my grandmothers and other women from my family tree who didn't have - as Efthymia Kli so beautifully says, “access to insights, tools and support to see what’s beyond the patriarchal matrix to make new choices” ~ @the.trauma.educator on instagram - women who were labeled the problems, even pathologized in family lore.
Here’s to you, Mom. You left in a swirl of confusion that you didn’t know how to tie up. You weren’t afforded the brevity you might have blossomed with. You loved the ways you knew how to love. Now it’s time to bust open those dormant seeds of what could be and let them have the sunlight, soil, and rich food they need to salve the space between yours and my lives and grow into something future generations can rest on.
While I go through. While I grow. While I am figuring out what I love and how I love. Because that’s the thing; this life will not stop but we get the chance to cut new paths when we notice the the old ones have become overgrown.
To new paths.