After my martyred father died in 1983, my mother waited a year, as widows are advised, and then moved to Salem, Oregon, where my sister Ann lived with her husband John. My mother, with one of the first doctorates in the country in her field, made the sexist assertion that a daughter was the proper person to take care of an aging mother.
She visited Bainbridge twice after Kate was born, and I went to Oregon to see her with Kate when she was little. By then, Mom was in an assisted living place, as nice as it could be and as depressing; there was one lady who sat in a wheelchair out in the hall talking intently to a doll. Those poor people.
Nancy and I gave her a 90th birthday party, inviting any relatives who would come (about 12). My chief memories of that dinner were that I lied in my little speech about how Mom made me feel secure and safe as a toddler, and Ann’s husband John gathered up all of the leftover dinner rolls to take home.
Then she began to lose it: she claimed that she’d been offered a teaching job a few towns over; she told me details about my life that she should have told my brother Pete; she averred that I was getting fat; she was completely incompetent with her hearing aids, which were entirely necessary to any communication; and, when I showed her Kate’s portable CD player, on which Kate had been watching a Harry Potter movie, she stared, frowning, at the paused image of Harry Potter and asked, “Is he one of yours?”
In my youth and as much later as she could manage it, she completely relieved me of any spirit. I’ve walked around with the words “Please Interrupt Me” printed on my forehead. Once, she was in the kitchen with Nancy while she was cooking, and said, “Oh, so that’s how YOU do that.” Nancy said she thought, so that’s why he’s this way.
I started therapy in 1989, after we’d moved to Durham. To make a long story short, one of my therapists (there’ve been a few) said that my mother’s behavior amounted to child abuse. More than one therapist started our session legs crossed, hands relaxed, and then when I told him something about Mom, he’d frantically pick up a pad and start scribbling. I hope I’m featured in some journal article somewhere. “Mr. J. presented as a healthy, badly-dressed, middle-aged man who turned out to be so fucked up by his mother that I don’t know where to start.”
Let’s forgo the details for now. Probably if I had been able to plumb the depths of self-loathing to which she’d driven me, I’d have been a successful fiction writer. But I just couldn’t endure the pain.
Anyway, dutiful son that I was, I would drive to Dallas, Oregon, a horrible little redneck town where my mother lived. Ann and John had built a place on a hill outside of Dallas. Two observations about Dallas: Their younger daughter Julieanna hated it so much that she graduated a year early so she could get the fuck out; and you can try to get a good meal there, but you won’t. I don’t know how my sister, who went to Goucher, became so enthusiastically rustic.
I was such a dutiful son that one day I loaded Mom’s wheelchair into the rear of my tiny Prius and took her and Kate, maybe five years old then, to lunch. The restaurant was a generic chain trying to be all things to all people: sandwiches, salads, pasta dishes, a daring entrée like chicken parmesan or shrimp some way or another. No ribs, no steaks, but way too many fries and enormous desserts. No alcohol.
I wheeled Mom to the proffered table, and, from then on, she took an inordinate time with everything, the menu, the ordering, especially eating. I could understand that; what did she have to go back to but the staff of mediocre intelligence and all of the sad folks? (Mom thought that the residents weren’t up to her level.)
When it was time to order, the waitress dutifully recited the specials, looking especially at my mother, who gazed beatifically up at her. When she finished, Mom turned to me and asked brightly, “What did she say?” That should have been on her gravestone.
Food came, Mom ate, the slowest lunch ever. I think they must have been able to put together a pasta with butter and cheese for Kate, as she ploughed happily away. The waitress insisted on returning the menus so we could think about dessert; Kate deserved one, having sat through this endless trial (Kate was not a patient kid) and actually eaten quite a bit.
She pointed at the picture of an enormous brownie with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream. I said, “OK, but you may only have half of that. Do you understand?” She nodded. I thought I would have a few bites.
I forget what Mom ordered, but once dessert was served, Mom asked, “Why doesn’t Penny like me?” I calmly held onto the spoon with which I’d had one bite of Kate’s brownie.
Penny is my sister-in-law, married to my brother Pete. Penny is an entirely graceful, funny, intelligent person who had the misfortune to marry into our family (but the good fortune to marry Pete). Having been beaten down by my mother worse than I’d been, Pete was inclined to obey my mother’s orders: call her, and, what doesn’t sound as awful as it was, come home every vacation.
By the time Pete and Penny met, they were both in graduate school in Los Angeles, and we were living in Auburn, Alabama, which was quite a hike and not easy to get to, unless you really liked unsafe little airplanes or a 90 minute drive through the barren Georgia countryside. And then Mom insisted on everyone being thrilled to see each other and sit around talking sociably. There was alcohol, no doubt. But I recall Penny sealing herself into their bedroom and not coming out all day. Brainwashed by my mother and in my mid to late teens, at the time I found that odd: why wouldn’t Pete’s wife want to spend lots of time with us?
Pete and Penny had always lived in LA. Pete worked in the aerospace industry and Penny got her doctorate and then worked for years as a program director.
“Why doesn’t Penny like me?” Mom asked now.
I take a deep breath before I say this: at some point early in their marriage, Dad flew out to LA to convince Pete to divorce Penny. This was the fact that I seized on.
“Well how about, you sent Dad out to LA to convince Pete to divorce Penny. You didn’t think that was getting back to Penny? That’s a real fuck-you, Mom. There’s no coming back from that.” (Pete says his memory is fuzzy on this, but I don’t know why I’d recall it unless I’d heard it from someone. Maybe Mom; maybe she lied.)
She seemed to consider this, and then I could see from her eyes that she had rejected that. Facts were to Mom as facts are to Republicans.
Here’s what I’ve gathered happened over the years, and, most recently, in email exchanges with Penny:
Once Penny told Mom she’d gotten a raise and was proud of it. Mom said, “That’s nothing, Nancy and George are going to be the real money-makers.” Mom loved to play us off against ourselves; I heard similar things about my siblings’ accomplishments.
· After a vacation that Penny and Pete were forced to spend with my parents, Pete, having had his ears filled with Mom’s venom, told Penny that she wasn’t measuring up, wasn’t giving our parents their due. “What’s due them?” Penny would ask. “I just married their son. If he’s happy, they should be happy.” But Mom demanded that everyone pay her tribute.
· When Pete and Penny first came back to Ft. Lauderdale to visit, my grandmother Retan ventured that Penny had a nice figure; Mom said, “I think she’s a little hippy,” right where Penny could hear her, and Mom knew it.
Pete suffered through those years, working as an aerospace engineer on projects involving optical physics, like I know what that means. But thanks to Mom. he lacked confidence in himself and suffered from endless, almost incurable anxiety. Mom did a number on him, and she drove such a wedge between Penny and me that it was years before I could see Penny straight, not really until Pete's recent stroke.
But this time, I absolutely let Mom have it over how she’d treated Penny. By the end, I wasn’t sure she was listening. Or if she was, discounting all of it. Maybe she thought she had done some parental duty or other simply by asking the question.
When I had finally emptied myself of anger and resentment, I put my spoon down and glanced at Kate. She’d eaten the whole brownie. I couldn’t be mad at her.
The next morning, as we were leaving the motel and I was settling Kate into her car seat, she asked, “Do we have to talk about the Jareckes again today?”
I buckled her in nice and tight and answered, “No, we absolutely do not.” For once, I wasn’t going to let my mother spoil another day.
Kate's brownie was bigger than this one.
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