My mother liked children who were well-behaved and intelligent. I was one of those, but not the other. Of course, my mother’s idea of well-behaved children was both old-fashioned (children are meant to be seen, and not heard) and deeply sexist: boys could be just about anything behaviorally (boys will be boys after all), but girls had to be ladies and ladies were quiet, kept their legs crossed at the ankles, didn’t like boys in an overt way, didn’t like sports or the out of doors, and were virginal until marriage, among other ridiculous characteristics. She hated me, I think. She hated what she thought I was, which was the ruination of her chances, of her plans. I know this because she said so, that I ruined her life, that I was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, that I ruined her plans for herself, her life, her dreams.
She could also be, occasionally, very kind and loving, but, it was never consistent, her niceness, her love, her kindness – and to not know which version of mother I would get created an anxious child and adult, one who had and has a handful of tics and habits meant to compensate, control: the peeling apart and picking of split ends, sniffing fingers, chewing and biting cuticles, pulling out hair, blowing my nose constantly because something was stinking rotten in the state of Denmark, and it seemed it was me.
I was dependent on her, as all children are on a parent or parents, and I loved her. I also hated her, learned to disrespect and actively dislike her, her pettiness, her meanness, her hypocrisy, her lies, stepping on every crack on the way home from grade school, Swart Street to Walnut to Church Street, yet no magical sing-songing rhyme of backs broken or sudden death ever worked. Imagining now, if I had come home to find her dead on the floor, what would that have done to me? Relief and guilt intermingled? Joy and grief? Anyway, it never happened.
I needed her. And I loved her. I loved her. I hated her. It was exhausting. I was of her, blood familiar and common, literally drawn from her flesh and bones, and however much she openly disliked and hated me, however much I hated, disliked, and disrespected her, numbing myself to her numerous cruelties, she was in my flesh, and in my bones. And my father, who was funny and kind and weak and too often at work, rarely home, loved her. He made her laugh and tried to disarm her, tried to make her see how much we – she and I – were alike, a comparison he made many more times than I have fingers and toes, and which, she said, was the worst thing he could say to her, about her, about us.
Wheeling her into the nursing home years, eons later, I wept. I was also jubilant. She had threatened to institutionalize me as a fifteen-year-old, making every hair on my body stand on end, turning my blood cold, but now I was putting her away, and for good. No way out, mother dear, except death. And that cannot come soon enough, mommy. Mother. Mater. There are still days when I want to carve the parts of myself that are like her right the fuck out of me, leaving whatever resembles that powerful, annihilating cunt on the abattoir floor, hosing the blood away. She made me this person I also want to lock away, this woman I hate, love, love, hate.