The Anniversary

November 8 was my mom's birthday, and I was really taken by surprise when I had a bit of a meltdown over it. My mom died a year ago today, and my year hasn't been anything like what other people told me it would be. My relationship with my mom was such that her death brought a mix of grief, anger, and relief, and after a couple of weeks of grieving, I didn't feel it much.

There was only one time all year--in a Whole Foods in Philadelphia--when I saw something that reminded me of her and felt sad for a minute. And only once, about two months ago, did I have the impulse to talk to her about something. And then I had to laugh at myself because whenever I gave into that impulse while she was alive, it ended badly for me.

I'm surprised, therefore, and a little pissed off, to be having anniversary-of-death related feelings today. But there you have it. Apparently the emotional brain has an internal clock that keeps track of these things. I've been in a very low mood the last few days, and I suppose this is part of it. I suppose, too, that it will pass.

When my parents were alive--oh, there's a Freudian slip. My dad is still alive, but he disowned me at Christmastime last year and I haven't seen him since. Anyway, when my parents were part of our lives, I didn't talk to my kids about the bad stuff in my relationship with them. I wanted my kids to have their own relationship with my parents, whatever that might be. But since they've been gone, I've had opportunities to talk to the older kids about how complicated things were.

One day recently, Word Boy was with me someplace, and I got chatting with an old guy, as I often do. The old guy was going on and on about the pleasures of grandparenthood, and I said, in a making-conversation-way, "Yes, my parents loved being grandparents. My dad says the best part of being a parent is the grandchildren." This is true.

But Word Boy doesn't miss much, and he asked me about it later: if grandma and grandpa like being grandparents so much, how come we hardly ever saw them? And I had to say that my parents did really love being grandparents--to my brother's kids. Why they weren't interested in mine, I don't know. But they weren't. They used to take care of my brother's older two kids all the time, and when he and his wife had a late-life baby a few years ago, my dad even learned to change diapers so they could babysit him, because my mom's arthritis no longer allowed her to do it.

But when I called once, when I was pregnant with Word Boy, to ask if they might watch the Lego Savant for a few hours so Raider and I could go to lunch and a matinee, my mom let me know that they were not, and would not be, available to babysit my kids. I honestly don't know why. I can't even claim that they always liked my brother better because as far as I could tell growing up, they didn't like either one of us. So I couldn't explain it to Word Boy. I could only tell him about it.

Whenever I write about this, somebody e-mails me or comments on Facebook to say, "Su, isn't it time you got over this?" But I would argue that I am over it. I'm living a functional life, I'm in a functional relationship (technically, two functional relationships), I take good care of my kids, I'm loved by my friends and valued in my community.

My parents did a pretty good job of fucking up my childhood, but I unfucked my life all on own.* I don't think it means I'm "not over it" if I still sometimes think about it, or have feelings. And I don't think it means I'm not over it if I refuse to pretend to conform to some narrative where I show my spiritual depth by declaring my mother forgiven. My mother had so many opportunities in her life to change the way she did things: when I asked, in so many words, for things to change during my teenage years; when I reached out to her in my 20s; when my cousin went into rehab and my aunt took a long, hard look at the ways she'd reproduced their upbringing as she was raising her kids; heck, any time during the last 20 years of living next door to my brother and watching him hurt his kids the same way he and I were hurt.** It was her choice, every time, to cling to what she knew instead of working for something better.

It doesn't matter whether I forgive her or not. She made her choices, right up to the end, and she's gone now. I do miss her, but I miss even more the hope I could never let go of that someday I'd have a mother I could trust to be kind to me. I didn't realize until she died how much I was still hoping for that. There's no point in hoping anymore, but I don't suppose I'll ever stop wishing for it.

Footnotes:

* "All on my own" if by "all on my own" you mean with the help of a middle-school librarian, two lesbian high school math teachers, my grandfather's cousin Marion, my great-aunts Hazel and Doris, my friends Carol and Amy, my first woman lover, three particularly helpful therapists, Raider and Toots, and friends too numerous to name.

** I used to be so angry at my brother for his part in what was painful about my childhood that I didn't want to see him get better. I wanted to be better than him. I spent so much of my childhood being tormented and humiliated by him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking down on him. Of course, I wasn't thinking about his children. I'd give just about anything for my niece and nephews to have the world's greatest dad, even if it meant admitting my brother was better than me.

Posted with Blogsy