The things my mother taught me.
Give more, give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story. — Garry Shandling
Every time I make my bed, I think of my mom.
My mom makes a bed so precisely. Everything is lined up. There are hard sharp angels. Smooth everything out. Tuck it in, pull it tight. Lately I have been thinking about my mother, and her mother, and I wonder ‘who was the first one to make a bed this way?’ Who learned this and who taught it? Where did it begin?
Bed making has been passed down to me with so many things. Like most mothers and daughters my mom and I have a complicated story. Our relationship is fluid but never easy. There are days when it is only gets harder, though most of the time it is stagnant and unchangeable.
We started moving when I was a baby and we never stopped. Before I was twelve I had lived in eleven homes across two states, attended four elementary schools, changed friends and places so many times. My early life was full of goodbyes. I have a deep aversion to them still. They are hard — they’ve never stopped being hard. When people say goodbye I worry I won’t see them again. I panic and become clingy, or I detach and let go completely. I know I have hurt and confused people with this bizarre self protective (learned) behavior.
From the time I was three, it was my mom and me. My dad had moved (though he was very involved in my life and I saw him a lot). I had no siblings. My mom and I were a unit; it’s very rarely been a peaceful union. I was angry; at the moves, at her for moving us, at my dad for not being there and at the way it felt like she was never fully there even when she was.
There are a few stories I tell myself about my childhood. They’ve played on a loop for so long and memory is tricky. I try not to define them as good or bad, and instead to see them for what they were. My mom was not a great mom. She might even admit this herself. I’ve asked her why we moved so much, she says she doesn’t know but even if she had an answer it wouldn’t change anything. I know she was only trying to keep herself alive and me too — and she did. Here I am.
These are the stories I reveal in therapy which cause my therapist to raise his eyebrows and shake his head. He was the one who told me neglect is a form of abuse. I never thought about it that way before. Having an outside perspective has helped me realize how ‘abnormal’ my experience was compared to so many others.
When I was seven I came home and found my mom in bed with a married friend. I already knew something weird was going on when I found them together (there wasn’t anything physical happening but they were IN the bed and I wasn’t dumb). I walked out of the room crying and sat on the stairs. I remember how confused I felt, I knew this wasn’t right. We were friends with this man and his family (I was close to his son who was my age). My mom came out and sat on the stairs with me and she said, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She thought I was crying for her.
The following spring I was sick and in so much pain I wouldn’t get up off the couch. The pain in my side was intense. My mom got out the medical journal she had (she was a nurse) and read the section about appendicitis. I vividly remember saying “that is what this is!” She was skeptical for some reason (again???). When I stopped being able to walk she took me the hospital (where she worked) and I went into emergency surgery for my, about to rupture, appendix. The anesthesiologist was the guy she was still having an affair with. By this time I had decided I hated him, (duh) and he was the one there administering the drugs to put me to sleep! He asked me if I would like him to tell me a story as I fell asleep and I said “no” and turned my face away from him. Fuck you, dude. I was eight.
In fourth grade I started skipping school. We had moved from the house I loved in Middlebury, Vermont (my home town) to an apartment in Salem, MA an ugly brick building in the middle of a parking lot. For over a week I just didn’t go to school. I hated it; I was bullied by mean girls, I ate lunch alone, I couldn’t fully see the board and needed glasses (something no one seems to have realized for about four months). Eventually the school guidance counselor called my mom to ask where the hell I was and the jig was up. But the school skipping continued through the next two schools (I changed schools for fourth grade, fifth, and then sixth.) I didn’t want to go and didn’t see why I needed to. By this time I had seen the truth about adults; they didn’t know shit. I was a jaded and pissed off nine year old.
Gen X kids were the ‘least parented’ generation in American history as researched by this marketing study. We were the ‘latch key’ kids (a saying my mom still actively hates, maybe because it points out the kind of mom she was, or the kind she could never be). Couples were divorcing, everyone was at work, and kids were on their own. We were feral; out playing in the woods, coming home after dark with scraped knees, then making dinner for ourselves. I was very aware of how to take care of myself — because I had no other options.
As a teenager we went to our family doctor and he asked me a bunch of questions with my mom in the room. He said, have you talked about sex? Have you talked about birth control? Have you talked about drugs? To each question I shook my head no. He kept looking towards my mom, until finally he said “you have some work to do.” As we drove home she turned to me and defensively said “so, what do you want to know!?” I said ‘nothing’ and shook my head. Fuck you, lady.
(Soon after this my dad bought me Our Body Ourselves when he saw me looking at it in a bookstore, took it from my hands, bought it and handed it back. I learned everything from that book. There are a lot of times I got what I needed from the smallest gestures.)
We never talked about things. So much was unsaid. In the last few years as I finally unpacked so much of this my dad said, you never told me these things. I WAS A KID. As far as I knew, this was just the way it was. I had nothing to compare it to. How would I know anything should be (or could be) different?
Meanwhile I was learning so much from my mom. So many things were hard. Some were great. My mom is funny and thoughtful, she always sends birthday cards and notes to everyone she loves. She is the number one fan of the things she loves. The Beatles, tennis, history (she loves Winston Churchill and FDR, and the Civil War), she holds a ton of facts and information. In 1989 she took me the ‘Right to Abortion’ march in DC. I learned the basis of feminism and social justice from that march, and from her. She used to love throwing parties, she was famous for her “snack plates”, she loves old movies, Hollywood glamour and media. This will all sound familiar to anyone who knows me.
I have spent the last three years unpacking so much about myself, and my mom (and my dad as well but that’s another story). When she came to visit my husband and I for Christmas of 2018 she got pretty drunk at a party (another familiar story, she spent half of my high school graduation party in the bathroom) — it was a not a good visit. I was so sad and angry. In February of 2019 I ended up in the psychiatric hospital, for many reasons, and was subsequently diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. (EDITED to add, three years later, I know now its ADHD) And there is evidence that was passed down too.
She was a nurse for her entire life. Part of me believes she gave all her caring away to strangers, to the elderly patients she cared for and watched die. She didn’t have that much to give to me, and less to give herself. She can’t connect emotionally anymore if she ever could. It’s easier to accept if I see it as something she is incapable of.
Today my mom is 73 years old, she lives alone in an apartment back in my hometown after so many moves. She took Zoloft for many years and it seemed to help but four years ago she went off of it suddenly and never went back. The drop off has been clear to me, and when I point it out to her she says “I’m fine!” and shuts down. She’s defensive and can be hard to reach, apathetic, probably depressed, and fairly isolated. She never stopped trying to change her location to change her life. But, spoiler alert(!) it doesn’t really work because you bring yourself with you, she’s never worked on so many issues. She just moves on.
I still want to fix her. I want to swoop in and take over and make everything right. And, for whatever it is worth, I still do it sometimes. It often seems like she needs to be rescued from herself (abandoning the Zoloft did not help). Logically I know that is not my job, but I don’t feel I can just leave her where she is if I have the capability to help. I recently paid to have her almost all of her belongings moved from a storage unit (where they sat for three years), to her house three states away. A long involved story which is a perfect encapsulation of so many of her poor decisions. I feel compelled to do it. It’s so deep. The codependency. It’s been my entire life. I parented myself; at times it feels like I’ve parented her too.
The strangest dichotomy of my relationship with her is that she loves me more than any other person, as much as she is capable of, and I know that. To stand in the light of someone narcissistic means you are also in their shadow. She built the foundation for me, on which I based so much else. The beginning of my life was the bumpiest part (thank fucking god) and I spent so much of my adulthood trying to undo it.
Whatever the hard things did to me, or for me, got me here. I have a more “successful” life than she has. With most of the moves she was thrown further off course and things got harder, not better.
I have lived in the same home for almost thirteen years, I’ve been with my husband for sixteen years, I’ve had the same job for four. The stability of my life often feels unfamiliar, going against the grain, the pull in my chest which tries to compel to MOVE, CHANGE, to KEEP GOING FORWARD. When certain things don’t go my way I have this deep desire to blow it all up. To throw things on the floor, run out the door. and never come back. To burn every bridge.
Now when I feel these things I remind myself where they came from. These behaviors and whims are the things I learned and did not create. Things I want to put away because I do not need them. They don’t serve. I know how to change because it was all I did for so long. Now I am learning to sit still and look at everything I’ve done and everything I have. To make my bed, to care for my friends, to love as much as my mom cannot express. I can appreciate staying in one place, and growing there. Despite my mom, and because of her.
