what my mother taught me

My mother was just 15 years old when she became pregnant with my brother. Her young husband, (by all accounts a sweet, shy, dark-haired lanky boy with a molasses southern accent) was killed shortly after she gave birth. One day an enormous oak tree fell on him, I assume crushing his skull.

She read the Bible for three days straight. She never knew if she really loved him because she was so young. She had been the lead singer in her high school play before becoming pregnant, a pretty young woman with dark eyes and dark hair, her future forever changed.

How she got through parenting my brother alone while grieving both her husband and her childhood, I will never know. What I do know is that about a year later she met my father at a Navy dance. He was due to finish his four year stint in the Navy. Pictures of him show a blonde, good looking man who resembled James Dean. He rolled up his white T-shirts sleeves and slicked back his hair. He smoked cigarettes and drove fast. He was also a high school dropout with severe ADHD and dyslexia. Just a few short months after meeting they eloped, my father dragging my mother 2000 miles across the country away from everything she knew.

The two high school dropouts moved close to his family to a small town. My mom was a housewife and my dad worked at a meat packing plant. One night they were at a bar when my dad poured a full bottle of beer over my mothers head. It was to humiliate her in front of his family. The context is unknown to me.

Was it at this point that my mother began to realize there was something seriously wrong? I wonder what this dawning recognition was like? What excuses did she make for him in those early days when he would abuse my brother, pinching his testicles to silence him? When loved possessions were thrown against the wall? When pets were hurt? When he would drive so fast and erratically she would fear for her life?

How did she rationalize this in the beginning? Perhaps it was her young son and a daughter-on the-way, and being thousands of miles away from her family, that caused her to stay with him. Maybe it was his James Dean good looks or his charisma. At any rate, she stayed. It’s going on 58 years now. She stays.

Like many charming narcissists, he has dozens of friends who have nothing but the most wonderful things to say about him. Everyone in my extended family says that my dad is their favorite uncle, or brother, or cousin. My mother has few and no real friends so she basks in the glory of being the wife of such a man. She is the classic abused wife of a narcissistic abuser and she is his primary enabler.

There have been times when I’ve been physically attacked by my father and her response to me has been “he’s hurting.“ I could catalog the verbal abuse, the borderline sexual abuse, the manipulation and guilt and gaslighting. There’s a lot. But the point here is to write about what my mother has taught me.

What has it taught me to be unprotected, to be so undervalued? At the same time my mother was oddly enmeshed and dependent on me for her psychological well-being. I often remember the two of us happily saying we were best friends. So at the same time that I was not protected, I was used. It has taken me 57 years to unravel this confusion. I got a degree in counseling in order to unravel.

On Thanksgiving of 2018 my father got angry after my husband asked for directions. He was taking the grandkids 4 wheeling. He had to call my father to ask for directions so my father drove to where he was just around the block, and physically threatened my husband. What followed was an enraged ugly diatribe on the worthlessness of my husband and the depth of his hatred of him over the past 30 years. In front of my daughter. My father and I have been estranged ever since.

My mother is understanding of this to a point. I’ve asked my father to get counseling but it hasn’t happened. She campaigns for reconciliation at every phone call. She tells me about all his friends, she talks about what he is doing, how he is. She cooks for him and does his laundry and keeps the house clean. She’s his personal assistant.

She has nothing going on in her own life. She sits at home, Fox news on 24/7, while my father watches COPS reruns in the other room. She mostly just looks at facebook, alternating between envy and judgment. That’s how she spends her time, envying and judging. It makes it hard to find anything to talk about.

I can’t mention much about who I really am to my mother. A recent disclosure that I had attended a Buddhist retreat on death and dying was met with criticism about not following Jesus. Anything threatening or different is too much for her to bear and she still feels the need to course correct, despite the fact that I’m 57 years old, despite the fact that I have stage four breast cancer.

So again, what does she teach me? I’m sure you are wondering by now what could possibly be redeeming about staying in relationship with this woman. Believe me, I’ve been considering going no contact for over a decade. I spent the last three years in therapy dealing solely with this issue. Trying to develop the courage to speak my truth and no longer take care of her psychologically. To let go of the guilt, or to bear the guilt and do it anyway. As I’m writing now, I shake my head wondering “why do I stay?”

Oddly enough, I love my parents. I do not know why I was put on this earth to be parented by those two individual souls. To be fair, they’ve done some things right. They are very affectionate, they say I love you freely and they played with us a lot when we were little. They have financially supported me on three occasions during health crises.

There is a New Age idea out there that we signed some kind of contract before we were born to be incarnated into the exact circumstances that will teach us what we want to learn during that lifetime. I’ve sometimes entertained this thought. It’s a useful exercise to explore what suffering has to offer.

Maybe my contract is this: maybe I asked to learn unconditional love. I think what my mother is teaching me how to unconditionally love someone who makes it extremely difficult. When I am able to, I picture myself extending loving kindness to a soul who is deeply suffering, I no longer see myself as a child but as a fellow traveler whose paths crossed mysteriously with hers. I see myself being compassionate enough to alleviate the suffering of a lonely old woman. I take her history into account. This extension teaches me to love in the hardest place it is for me to love. It teaches me to understand and empathize. It makes me push hard on the edges of my ability to love and to forgive. I feel my heart expand as opposed to shrinking, resenting, and withdrawing.

Who knows? Maybe this is all one big rationalization couched in feel good spirituality. I really don’t know. This is all a work in progress. What I know for sure is that this experience has caused me to cherish love where I have it. I have my own little family that is mostly loving and sweet. I have supportive friends who know me well and love me unconditionally. I’ve definitely learned how not to be a parent. I would like to think my daughter benefits.

So this is what my mother taught me. To fiercely seize love and grow in gratitude for having been granted it elsewhere. I savor that love and affection more every day. So thank you Mom. I‘ll take silver linings wherever I can find them.