When I was a child I never slept at my friends ' houses. I couldn't be away from my mother.
My separation anxiety would turn into addiction and compulsive need.
During my first bout with compulsive behavior (around 7 years old), I had the very normal jewish childhood experience of obsession with death. For months I'd have to ask my mother, almost hourly, if I would die some day. It started off by her saying that i didn't have to worry about it, then out of exhaustion she told me “they'd find a cure” by the time i was old enough. Then when my compulsive teeth brushing and hand washing came years later, when I was so plagued by emetophobia that I stopped eating anything other than cheez-its every 6 hours, she assured me I was not going to get sick, that I was just anxious. She became my oracle. My superstitious beacon. If my mother said it, it had to be true. I started to think my mother had superpowers. That her words really could predict the future.
My mother was the most beautiful mother out of my friend group. maybe the most beautiful woman id ever seen. She made sure to go out of her way to show skin, to wear makeup. I watched her blow dry her hair every morning and in my second decade of life I'd go on to steal Victoria's Secret bras from her 6 drawer collection. She always smelled like vanilla. shed slather herself up with vanilla lace victoria secret lotion after every shower, ritualistically. The whole 15 years my parents were married she never farted in front of him or pooped while he was home. My mother took pride in being a robotically perfect wife.
My mother used big words when we fought. Forget hearing a pin drop, you couldn't hear a pan set drop in our family. We fought, we yelled, we laughed often . I learned words through my mother only through context. Conniving, manipulative, anomaly, psychotic, enraged.. In kindergarten I would call children conniving for not sharing legos while the adults looked at each other stifling back a snicker. But carefully scrutinizing their reactions, I'd beam, i love/d being impressive to adults. with my mothers temperament, i was naturally precocious.
My mother hated her body. Shed poke and prod and suck in while passing a mirror. She didn't need to. She called herself fat in front of me. She'd go on crash diets. She winced when my dads arms grazed her stomach. I learned even beautiful female bodies were wicked in some way. She gained and lost the same 15 pounds every year. I sat in awe as I watched her shrink and expand.
This is going to be very messy and unorganized. I'm not going for a Pulitzer. I'm getting my thoughts out on stage in a projectile vomit.
I wouldn't hear stories about my mothers past until I was an adult. My mother was a mystery to me for as long as I had proximity to her. A papermache of traits, ever changing and shifting. I could not explain my mothers personality in easy terms.
My mother is cunning, beautiful, emotional, pitiful, desperate, intimidating, unflinching, strong, fragile, cold, clinging, striking, dull, ditsy, god, Mary magdalene, jesus.
My mother is everything. She was everything.
My whole childhood I thought of myself as some disease afflicting my mothers life.
It was clear this was my role. In every argument the underpinning was that I ruined my her life. I grew up with my mother. She was a teenager when she fell pregnant. with a boyfriend she didn’t stay with. In whispers between yells I saw regret in her teeth and eyes. In her most precious rage, she'd remind me of my necrotic nature.
How easy. Her life would be. If I simply were not in it.
My mother sent me away when I was 14. I spent most weekends and nights with my grandparents. She did not want to raise me.
In most ways I hate her.
In some ways I crave her.
In small ways I grieve her.
I am so mad. I am so mad I lived for 22 years believing that I was necrotic.
I hate her for making me necrotic.
And I understand her deeply and to my core.
In every way I hate my mother, I am her.
I speak to my mother very infrequently, but the one time a year I do, I usually stay with her for a night, like a wild animal in the house I did not grow up in, while she buzzes around it, avoiding eye contact.
Last autumn I sat with myself and her new boyfriend who is not my father but who is my father in all the descriptions. We caught up shallowly, the only way my mother knows how.
He had a sports show on, or a war show, or some other cliche and my mother had asserted that she was JUST AS EXCITED TO BE WATCHING the boy show, thankyouveerymuch, icanhangwiththeguys, iamverycoolandchill and ilove showsaboutwar and sportssportssportssports.
My mother, in her many oscillations, has one particular mood that is so…childlike. When she's excited she almost vibrates, propped up on one leg tucked under her and in as straight a posture as you've ever seen, she’ll tell you a story or a fact at 140 MPH. she'd go on and on and giddily describe something in the way a 6 year old begs you to watch them do a cartwheel. I soften every time i see my mother do this. My resentment hood falls to my shoulders and I hang on to her every word, seeing my truest mother.
And I watched her drunk boyfriend tell her to “zip it”.
In front of me. A 60 year old man told my mother to zip it.
I was struck with the nostalgia of hearing verbatim the exact thing from my adopted father growing up. Verbatim. I was gobsmacked. I excused myself saying I was too cool for boomers, laughing to bed so I could not cry.
On the way to the bedroom he looked at me smiling, as if we were in some sort of club. He chuckled, We both found my mother intolerable, we were above her. We had our own club, where we were smart and she was simply ridiculous.
I'd spent years of my life reciprocating these looks with my sister's dad in front of her.
Oh, the pain. the guilt. How I winced, breaking my neck to view my mothers reaction through a side eye. Careful to not show distaste for him on my face. To see my 44 year old mother look at him with desperation.
In an act of numbness or strength her face lost its emotion as she wished me sweet dreams. my sweet mother.
That night, hours later I woke up to fighting. I woke up to his demeaning murmurs and my mothers whimpers. I lay in my bed, just as I had as a child, and heard my adult mother being berated by another man, muffled by a different door and different walls.
My fingers shake as I write this, I sob.
One of the ways I'm like my mother is in perpetual and pathological need.
The predisposition to put ourselves in situations where we always long or want for something.
What we need is only just out of reach. A prerequisite for a romantic relationship is our lovers' inability to understand us at our core.
I am like my mother in that I am a performer.
I am like my mother in that I am flames dancing in a fire, burning brighter and loudly snapping and crackling under a masculine watchful eye.
My mother has unstable and shallow friendships. Her relationships with men have always been her primary source of life. She has no hobbies. She does nothing. She has a job she works at, a lot. She shows up to work but the job is constant male attention. She is the star. she lives around her boyfriends schedule. she used to dabble with me and my sisters schedule in our childhoods. my sister just turned 18, and is moving states away from her. she will be childless, with her boyfriend and her geriatric cat.
I have mastered my mothers choreography in my adult relationships. Denying and repressing my needs and feelings, boundaryless whiteboard of his thoughts and wants and needs, to the perilous oscillation of yells and spitting and great anger of your partner not considering your needs and feelings.
It's hard to write about my mother because I don't know her. but i also know her like i know every inch of my skin. i feel her.
I am never sure I have it right. My therapist, without diagnosing her, says children of cluster b personalities have unstable images of their parents, and through that also themselves.
The ground was always shifting, all the mirrors in my home were shattered.
She was so disarming and charming. Coming to all my field trips as a child, shining in front of my teachers. Ignoring me at home, running from room to room to avoid me, passing me to different homes. Taking me to therapy to decry and sob about how much she loved me, only to record me with her camera phone, laughing maniacally as i cut myself and threatened suicide.
The overblown displays of joyous and spoiled birthdays and christmases, the vocal resentment of having me. She gushed over my boyfriends, almost flirting with them. Vivacious, always. wearing inappropriate clothing to events centered around me and my sister, or my sister's father.
My mother told me casually and passively to be safe when I was 18 and I told her I was escorting. Her friend from her job ( a 31 year old man) had shown her nude photos of me he found on the internet and she texted me that she'd seen them, and told me I looked beautiful.
She then started asking for money. That was the only time we spoke for a while, when she was asking me for money. Money that I made by selling my teenage body.
She was a gust of wind in a living room, and then she'd suck all of the air out.
So many years I thought I was going crazy, my reality constantly questioning and shifting. I believed until last year that I was incapable of creating stable memories. I had rationalized the confusion my mother left with, with my own defective nature. i thought i has a literal disorder that made me incapable of storing memories correctly, that i was pathologically lying about the emotional abuse i endured.
She gaslit me out of my feelings and experienced every chance she could. She painted the world around her, narrative building to make herself the perfect victim of anything. of ANYTHING.
She lied about my dad hitting her, lied about him having an affair and having a child out of that affair. All things you WANT to believe someone wouldn’t lie about. While she simultaneously would start speaking about how often women lie about these things. how hard men have it. Making you think…..surely she would not do both of these things. Everything is shifting and changing colors and every move she makes is a well thought out game. And she'll deny it to her core. And when you “overestimate” her, she regresses into a child right in front of you. But when you treat her like a child she'll grow…towering over you in seconds laughing at how inept you are. How much better and smarter she is.
I am her. In my worst moments I am exactly my mother. And so I can't hate her. I won't even utter it. I type it so I can get it out, but the thought of vocalizing a word like “hate” toward my mother fills me with deep, unrelenting sadness.
I made the decision that i can't not have a relationship with my mother as it stands.
I am too confused, I'm too raw.
I am an open wound and she is vinegar. Even the simple pleasantries of holiday gatherings, I can not stomach anymore. I simply can't fucking do it. I am exhausted.
I am grieving 8 mothers at once.
I feel anger and guilt that I can't show her what her life has become.
I can't shake her awake.
I can't get her to look at her life.
I am so angry, I am homicidal. And I am so sad. And I love her so much. I love her so much and I don't know who I love. I don't know who I'm loving when I love her.
My therapist says hope is going to eat me alive. How do I let go of my mom? if she never changes , if i let go of the hope that some epiphany is going to happen…… if i stop hoping …all there is, is nothingness. i don’t know if ill ever stop hurting or if ill ever stop crying.
My mother, my oracle. I remember her like I was 8 years old watching her read in bed. I remember her belly laughing until she cried. I remember her following her husband around the rooms of our house, physically on her hands and knees gutturally sobbing and shaking, begging him to see how much pain she was in.
I’d hold it for her. I'd give her a place to put it. i wish i was her mother. i wish i could hold her little child body and sweep her sticky hair off her face and kiss her while she cried.
i have never grieved anyone alive. i am in so much pain. i am 25 and i miss her like a child.