May 11, 2003

• MOTHER-updated

  
  

  There is a tiny bit of irony in the coincidental way in which my blog from a couple of days ago, about my first stepfather, led to the comment that in turn led to yesterday’s frank portrayal of my mother’s personality.  Then, the comments below made it apparent that my Mama’s blogs were going to run right into Mother’s Day.  How appropriate!  Mama would be so proud.

  
  

  
  

  I wonder what happened to her as a child that led her into those traps?  Must have been pretty bad.
  blankityblank

  
  

  In comments yesterday, I responded:
  I don’t think there was any particular trauma that made her as she was.  She was taught that men were the strong ones and women needed those wiles, that women had to “put one over on” a man and could not approach them as equals or compete with them without cheating.  Plenty of women in my generation and those following mine still play that game.

  
  

  Her attitude toward sex was fairly common in her generation, the standard Victorian thing:  women had to perform their marital duty, but only the bad ones enjoyed it.

  
  

  Now I think it’s appropriate to add that my mother’s youth did, I know, have its share of trauma, in poverty, her mother’s death bearing the child right after Mama, and her father’s harsh discipline and lack of sensitivity shown by his “running off” her young suitor/lover Jim.  Were they actually, physically, lovers?  I don’t know, but maybe so.  If so, Mama was so ashamed of it she would never admit it.  Could she have had an early pregnancy that was hushed up?  Anything is possible… and wouldn’t that be just perfectly (Freudian typo department:  I initially wrote perfuctly) ironic?

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Just think of how many women grew up the same way…it’s a creepy world when that’s the best survival method offered to you.  Most people have a lot of trouble questioning the basic beliefs they grew up with, so it’s no wonder your mom wasn’t able to see a different way of being. 
  LaughingRat

  
  

  “No wonder”??  I wonder.  Despite the fact that Greyfox keeps telling me that when he speaks of “people” he’s not referring to me, I continue to think of myself as a person.  As for me, I’ve always had a lot of trouble NOT questioning everything, including myself and my beliefs.

  
  

  But I am in complete accord with that, “creepy world when that’s the best survival method…” bit.  Creepy, indeed, that for millennia men bought and sold or stole women from each other, beat them into submission and warped their minds and souls.  Creepy even now that some of the creeps blame women and refuse to see how their forefathers created the mess.  I’ve been engaged in an off and on debate here for months on this very topic, mostly with Exmortis.

  
  

  In THIS generation, when the GRANDMOTHERS of young women can remember our efforts and those of our own grandmothers to gain equality for women, it is absurd for any of those young women to behave AS IF they believe themselves to be either inferior to men or entitled to some special privileges just because they are female.  The really creepy thing about all this is that so many members of both sexes work so hard to blind themselves to the historical reality and continue to impede our species’s progress out of that morass.

  
  

  
  

  I feel for who your mother was and wasn’t.  We were raised with so many hang-ups.  I was born in ’39 and believe me it took terrible rebellion and a bunch of guilt on my part to try to get out of the box!  Wasn’t easy and still isn’t.  We were raised on DENIAL   Am so very much living your life with you…thanks in the sharing.  Nancy
  Nanny

  
  

  Yes, Nancy, I went through the same guilt and rebellion.  Can you imagine what it took for my mother’s daughter, trained and conditioned to that body-shame my mother euphemistically called “modesty”, to get up on a little stage and dance topless?  Can you imagine how LIBERATING it was to get over that?!?

  
  

  I agree that we were raised on denial, and I cringe when I see how pervasive that denial still is in our culture.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  I like your blunt record of memories.  I do feel sad for people like your mother, but I do  understand that the times made them who they are.
  Whateva

  
  

  
  

  I feel as if I just read the memoir of Blanche Dubois’ daughter-never-born.
  I’ve always liked your unflinching style.
  Thanks.
  MyKi_Whatzerface

  
  

  The first time I saw Streetcar, MyKi, I saw and heard my mother in Blanche.  It was painful, but not nearly so painful as seeing and hearing echoes of Blanche and Mama in my own daughters.  Mama, bless her heart and damn her soul, had a hand in that.  She, who was so driven to have a child of her own, did everything in her power to remove my children from my custody and care (and finagled, in the process, to maintain her own contact with and influence over the elder of them).  As futile as I know it is to think of what might have been, I still think I might have reared my girls to be more independent in their thinking and more responsible in their actions.  Who knows? 

  
  

  All I really know about that is how painful it was for me living without my kids and with that judgment Mama laid on me, that I was an unfit mother. I BELIEVED her, and it devastated me.  Even her own sister knew better.  My Aunt Alice set me straight on that score on my last visit to her and Mama in 1979.  She told me I had been a good mother in those three years that I had Marie, and that she had opposed my mother’s efforts to get the girls away from me.  I now know that I am a better mother than my own mother was, but it’s no consolation to me, nor to Marie’s orphaned kids.

  
  

  Celeste, it was so much more than “the times” that made Mama what she was.  There was karma involved there, too.  Some people come back and redress or balance the karma from past lives, while others come back and just repeat old patterns.  Mama, in that life, was among that latter group.  If there was any single force more than another that worked to make her as she was, that force was fear.  Fear was the keynote of my mother’s life, and after my father’s death it became mine for a couple of decades.  Mama chose to run scared instead of facing her fears.  She suffered the consequences, and she really did suffer.

  
  

  Mama smoked to “calm her nerves.”  She drank to “unwind”.  She ate starch and sugar addictively and, unable to simply live with herself as she was, she wore constricting “foundation garments”–girdles and support hose, to hold in and try (unsuccessfully) to hide the results of her gluttony. 

  
  

  She ceaselessly pursued men, looking for one who would have her.  She found a series of them who stayed around for a while, and she endured many sorts of humiliation and abuse just so she could be acceptably paired off and hold her head up in society.  She also ceaselessly criticized and cut on other women who did likewise. 

  
  

  If there was ever even the merest chink in her denial, if she ever caught a glimpse of her hypocrisy, she must have hated herself.  I was there a few times when in the truth that comes with drunkenness she bared her soul and blubbered out her self-revulsion.  Both her indulgences and her denial were choices she made.  Nobody forced her to run scared.  I know that is true, because I broke out of the same conditioning she knuckled under to.  I stopped running, faced my fears and –VOILA!– the fears backed off.  Mama never made that effort, never discovered that joyous reward.

  
  

  Happy Mother’s Day.

  
  

  Update/Addendum

  
  

  As I reread this for the third or fourth time, it struck me that there is a little in-joke there that practically no living person on the planet besides myself would “get”.

  
  

  I’m referring to the, “bless her heart and damn her soul” bit.  That’s not the sort of phraseology I use, since neither the giving of blessings nor damnation falls within my belief system.  That’s Mama speaking.  When I say dammit, it’s usually because I’ve already used “shit” and “fuck” redundantly and am looking for a new expletive.

  
  

  I can’t recall ever having used that phrase before, but Mama used it frequently.  It was a sort of formula or mantra for her, a way, I suppose, through the “blessing” to scoot out from under the onus of the “damning”.  It typifies her hypocrisy. 

  
  

  I never heard Mama say, “Bless his heart and damn his soul.”  Mama apparently loved men and hated women, in general.  Other women were her rivals, competitors, and, I suppose, constant reminders of her own shortcomings.  The ones she picked on the most were successful women, beautiful women, happy ones.

  
  

  It was her style to try and make herself feel bigger by cutting other people down.  Daddy didn’t raise me that way, but after he died I picked up Mama’s attitudes.  It took imprisonment with 60-some women to teach me to love my own sex.  It took therapy to enable me to stop trying to build myself up at others’ expense. 

  • 3:38 pm
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