“Lacking a power for good, she sought power through manipulating her children. The mind that once was engaged in reading every major writer of the day now settled for cheap romances, murder mysteries, and a comfortable fuzz of tranquilizers and brandy at the end of the day. No one had directly willed her decline. It was the outcome of many impersonal forces, which had combined to emphasize her vulnerabilities. The medical fashion of the day decreed that troubled middle-aged women be given tranquilizers and sedatives. She, once a rebel, had acquiesced in settling down to live the life of an affluent woman.” – Jill Ker Conway, ‘The Road from Coorain‘
A decent look into mid-century modern women’s lives, middle class women, women of comfort and affluence – although my mother, one of them, wasn’t ever a rebel. If she had been, maybe she would have been happier, and less resentful, less a narcissist, less desperate for approval, desperate for meaning, for affirmation, for her children to reflect her best (and in my case, her worst) qualities and unrealized dreams.
All her darkness, all her light; she had so many wonderful qualities that were twisted by her culture, her religion, her family, and the times in which she was born as well as her adherence to a set of values and beliefs that, in the end and the beginning, harmed her. Good God what a waste of a first class brain.
Twisted by her own temperament, which sought, ultimately, comfort, familiarity, friends who looked up to her yet rarely – if ever – challenged her, losing herself in the tired old tropes of what constituted success: husband, children, womanliness, family, a good life, happiness, societal approval – all rather than grounding her acts and beliefs in lived, compassionately viewed, human experience. All rather than grounding her choices in what she actually wanted and needed for herself.
Dorothy means beloved of God. My mother had a good life in many, many ways, and was blessed, fortunate, lucky and thus, one could say beloved of her God. I loved her very much, I respected her intelligence, even while that intellect was wasted, was misused, was used by her to punish me for my many (to her) transgressions.
Worse, I began to believe her, despite my own intellectual gifts. You see, if my mother, who knew me better than anyone else, because ‘mother’, and who was also the smartest woman in town because people said so to me (your mom is super intimidating), if that woman, my mother, thought I was a., b., and c., if mother said I was insane, a liar, was going to be an alcoholic, a pregnant teen – then she had to know something, see something, and maybe, just maybe – she was right? She had to know, to see something in and about me, something essential and true, right?
I loved her very much, yet to save myself I learned to both hate and disrespect her, closing my heart to her and others. I went to war with her, and myself, because I was, in part, of her, her child. Still, her lies and hypocrisies, her rationalizations, her abuses of all those around her because ‘we owed her’ and she ‘owned us’ by virtue (what a misuse of that word) of her suffering at having given birth to us. To me. Just me.
My siblings? They were good; they were satisfactory; they were much more compliant, in line with her view of what a proper child should be. She didn’t tell them she never wanted children; she said this only to me. My defiance, my refusal to be what she wanted me to be (silent, always agreeable, pallid, frail, ladylike, endlessly polite to my elders if I did speak, weak, and afraid – mostly of her) was her cross to bear, as she said many times throughout my childhood.
I know her childhood was filled with hurts, loss, sorrow, poverty, shame and other deprivations I can only begin to guess at. I believe but don’t know for sure that there were all types of abuse going on in the house of her childhood. Dorothy, beloved of God, I know you suffered, I know you were in the grip of emotions and un-excavated hurts you had no capacity to heal, so great was your fear, your compliance. I know you did the best you could.
*Today is – or would be – my mother’s 98th birthday. Diego the wonder dog turns 4 today as well (what was I thinking!). Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American writer, academic, and the first woman president of Smith College, a role she assumed in 1975, a ‘mere’ 104 years after it was founded as a college for women. Her memoir ‘The Road from Coorain’ is a fascinating read, if you enjoy memoir, or are interested in Australia, and sheep station life in the 1930s and ’40s – and what happened after that (road from, not to). Coorain is aboriginal for ‘windy place’. More on Conway here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Ker_Conway