Tuesday, May 13, 2008
It wasn't until the fourth year after her death that I truly understood the gifts my mother -- a mess like all of us -- had left me.
May 8, 2005 | After two nights in a row of insomnia, I finally got to bed the other night at a reasonable hour, only to be shaken awake at midnight by my 15-year-old son. My first thought was that we had an intruder, and I reached for the tennis racket I keep by my bed in case I needed to kill someone. "No, no, Mom, I just can't sleep," he cried out plaintively.
"That's terrible," I said, "to wake me, just because you can't sleep."
"But you're my mom," he said. "I'm supposed to come to you with my problems."
The first year after my mother's death, I felt a lot of sadness that I hadn't had a mother to whom I could take my problems. She was my problem, or at any rate, this is what I had always thought and continued to think. Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.
If you asked me, parents were supposed to affect the life of their child in such a way that the child grows up to be responsible, able to participate in life and in community. For instance, you teach a child to play so he can stay healthy, and have fun, but my mother had so pressured me to achieve at tennis that I had migraines until I quit playing tournaments. And you teach a kid to pick up after him or herself, and to make the bed in the mornings, so the kid doesn't see the mother as a servant, vibrating with martyrdom. This teaches a child that she is part of an organism, the household, and must respect her relationship with the other inmates enough to smooth the covers, and remove any socks or juice boxes that are leaving a discernible bump. But the thing is -- and I mean this nicely -- my mother was kind of a slob, and I was too, until I got sober.
The fact that my mother's bed always looked like Krakatoa is actually a decent metaphor for many of the things she forgot to teach me. She made her psychic bed with a mate who felt contempt for women. Her bed was littered with wrappers and crumbs, because she did not know how to separate her pain from the great amount of food she ate, and I had to fight like mad to heal from eating disorders. She didn't know that you can take care of the inside of things -- like people, or your own heart -- by tending to appearances, or surfaces: You put on a little blusher or moisturizer, or you make the bed.
So because she didn't usually teach me things that helped me get through life, I didn't go to her with my problems. I went to a man, to my father. He could listen. He taught me most of life's important rules, the ones I have passed on to my son, Sam: 1) Don't act like a pig. 2) Don't cross the intersection right after the light turns green. 3) When all else fails, follow instructions. 4) Try to take a long walk every day, and keep your eyes and ears open for birds. 5) Assume that all drivers on the road are ignorant of Rules 1 and 2, or that they drive like Nana Miller.
The second year after my mother died, my child became a teenager. I knew by then that adolescents are always trying to shred your respect -- that's their job. They are trying to individuate, which seemed natural when I was doing it with my mother, but which is wrenching now. There was a huge difference, though, in my mother's house when she was raising teenagers. In my house, not everything becomes a pitched battle.
For 35 years now, since I was 16 and Ms. magazine first came out, other girls and women have been telling me their deepest secrets and truths, and we have been laughing ourselves sick -- or, rather, well -- over this stuff. I learned that women could stand up to anyone, and that it was OK to be angry, and that, in fact, if you were over 13 and had been raised in America and were not furious, there was something wrong. So I had gotten to be really angry along the way, but my mother hadn't gotten to be. She stuffed it, she ate at it, and it ate at her and ultimately made her crazy. As a child, I was dependent on someone who was always on the verge of implosion.
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