Mother's Day Musings

She’d been through psychotherapy as a young adult. Got cured of her neuroses, she said, and graduated, very proud of the gold star of mental health that she claimed.

I wasn’t so sure. I was very young, but most adults I knew didn’t have long, silently mouthed conversations with themselves in the car, complete with head wags and hand gestures. Just who was she talking to? Running errands together was always so weird and uncomfortable. And then there was the compulsive nail biting, frantically chewing half of her nails away, and the random floods of tears. You just never knew when Mom was going to start crying about something.

But she was totally sane. She said so. Said that the reason I turned out “better” than my sister was because she’d gone through therapy. My big sister, my best friend, who I loved and admired, and who had a learning disability that I never knew about until years later.

What Mom did do with her therapy experience was turn it into a weapon. Normal kid stuff that I did, like arguing with my sister or being a bit sassy or even just a quiet mood, would trigger an inquisition. She would probe my feelings, asking leading questions, always herding me in the direction of admitting to a rage towards her that I didn’t know I felt, followed by a tearful confession on my part and a generous forgiveness on her part. Terrified of her disapproval, I was left after each of these sessions feeling like a terrible person full of dark feelings that I needed to work constantly to overcome. Small wonder that Little Women, with its prevailing theme of self-mastery over base and sinful human nature, was my favorite book.

But as I become a young teen, things started to change. Not just because of my parents’ divorce when I was 12 nor even my father’s death when I was 14. I think the first crack in the darknesss was Jennifer. The first day of 7^th grade in a new school I walked into the science lab and looked around. Each table had two seats, and most of the kids in the class had already paired up with friends from 6^th grade. A girl with very curly brown hair and glasses glanced at me, saw my hesitation, and called “Would you like to sit with me?” Gratefully I slid into the empty seat. That was, and remains to this day, Jennifer - the kind of person who just saves a stranger on a Monday morning as easily as breathing. We became friends, and a whole group of cool band kids that Jennifer knew also became my friends, and for the first time in my young life I felt supported, accepted, normal.

There were sleepovers and birthday parties and youth group at the church and movie nights and all the things teenagers do with their friends. School became a refuge, the place where I began to discover that I had power and talent and worth. The ability to run longer and faster in PE class. The ability to make beautiful music in orchestra. The ability to write in English class. The ability to have real conversations, to laugh spontaneously, to dance, to enjoy a moment in the moment, unfettered.

At home, things got worse. I couldn’t keep pretending to be the broken child playing to my mother’s emotional blackmail. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I would say. “I need you to stay out of my head,” I told her. She reacted with rage. Once she even slapped me across the face. I was tall and strong. I knew I could hit her back harder. I didn’t. On that occasion I left home for several days to stay with a friend. I left a note taped to a chair in the middle of my room. She claimed I hadn’t, pretended to have never seen it. I didn’t have a name for that, but I knew she was lying, because when I got home the note was gone and the chair had been moved.

One day, after a particularly nasty fight, I sat alone on my grandmother’s couch, sobbing. I don’t remember what the fight was about. I do remember telling her “We’re not going to agree about this. But I respect you anyway. I need to know that you respect me as a person too, even when we disagree.” She looked at me with that little twisted smile that she had and said nothing. I looked at her face and realized she was mocking me, enjoying the pain she was causing me. To this day I remember the agonizing shock of understanding that I felt in that moment. Alone, I grieved bitterly for what I didn’t have and never had, a mother who loved and protected me. I was on the edge of despair, powerless. But after a while I stopped crying and had a long conversation with myself. I was 15, I told myself, and although it seemed like forever until 18, it really wasn’t. I’d be an adult soon. I would be free. I breathed. For a moment I could see freedom like a shining promise, a promise that gave me the courage to move forward with new strength and the dignity of purpose. I had only the vaguest idea what adulthood was actually like, but I knew it had to be better.

About this time Mom, who had been hunting for a boyfriend since my dad died, started dating a guy named George. George was nice enough. He lived in Fort Worth and he had been my mother’s friend’s lover. Carolee was married to an asexual man (although we didn’t really have words for that then) and was dissatisfied. George was happy to step in and provide for her needs, no strings attached. But I guess the bloom had worn off the relationship, so Carolee fixed George up with Mom. Mom was very proud of her acquisition, making it a point to chase Kit and me out of the house so that they could have “couple time.” Which was annoying when I had homework to do. But George was a bit of a playboy and Mom wanted to get married and have someone take care of her, so when the house across the street from George’s came on the market, she decided to buy it so she could be closer to him.

We had a nice little house in Denton, just down the street from Grandmother. I was very happy in Denton schools. I had zero interest in moving to Fort Worth just as I was about to start my junior year, and I thought chasing George down by moving across the street from him was plain dumb. I told Mom that in no uncertain terms. I realized later that probably sealed my doom. It’s not an accident that when Kit was 16, my parents moved and took her out of the school she loved too. I reluctantly packed my stuff and relocated to east Fort Worth.

In August, the guy I had started dating that spring, Charlie, asked me if I wanted to move in with him. I’d met Charlie through my friend Liz. It never occurred to me that a 23 year old pursing a 16 year old was problematic. None of the guys my own age had ever shown any interest in me. I was flattered. And although I wasn’t in love with him then or ever, I went through the motions and accepted his attentions. I didn’t know what love was or was supposed to feel like anyway. The only relationship advice I ever got was my grandmother asking abruptly one day if I was on the pill. But Charlie’s boss at the bakery had offered him cheap rent on a duplex on the north side of Denton. I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

I had to leave my horse behind in Fort Worth. I never saw her again. Mom sold her and Kit’s horse to a friend of hers with a farm in Jasper Texas.

I finished high school in Denton, lying to the school officials for two years, faking Mom’s signature on every document, and crossing the stage in 1985 wearing purple and gold. I’d gone to prom. I’d taken the honors classes. I’d made As. I’d managed to evade the school counselors and the social workers for two years, and finally I had the freedom I’d dreamed of.

By December, I’d said goodbye to Charlie and sold my ragged little Ford Pinto and given away my viola and joined the Army.

Most people wouldn’t describe basic training and AIT as freedom, but I can’t remember ever being happier than I was then. I was learning in great gulps, and growing strong, and paying my own way for the first time in my life, and traveling, and no drill sergeant could suppress the buoyancy I felt.

I lost everything to become me. With the perspective of age, I mourn what was lost, but I couldn’t have made any other choice and kept my sanity. Now, in my 50s, I have horses again. And I’m making music again with a cheap student fiddle. And I don’t talk to  my mother at all any more. That’s another story to tell.

She broke a lot of the people in her life. But she didn’t break me. I was saved by the Army and by a girl named Jennifer.