May 7, 2008

• Dear Mother,

  Did you ever notice how my name for you evolved as I grew?  Daddy called you “Mommie”, so I started out calling you that.  After he died, I started calling you “Mama”.  I’m not sure I thought that out or had a conscious reason.  I think now that it could have been another of those tactics that you and I came up with to avoid being obsessed with and haunted by memories.

  That bit of hindsight could be way off the mark, of course.  The shift to “Mama” might have been for the same reason as the later shift to “Mother” after I’d gotten married:  because it sounded more grown up.  I did so want to be grown up without having to wait to get there.  Was being grown up important to me because you kept bemoaning the fact that I was growing up too fast?  Maybe, but I don’t think so.

  Daddy always encouraged me to stand tall and reach high, to learn and mature as fast as I could.  I formed the intention of growing up when I learned that the doctors had said I wouldn’t live that long.  I overheard you telling Aunt Katherine about it when I was three years old.  You thought I was asleep.  I didn’t tell you I’d heard that until I was — what… 23 or 24?  I had been eavesdropping when I’d been told to go to sleep, and that was “bad”, so I was afraid to admit that I’d heard.

  I was so scared of your violent fury when I was little that I carried guilt, for more than two decades, over wishing Daddy dead, on the day that he died.  Did I ever confess that to you in any of those long letters or LSD-fueled long distance calls in the 1960s?  Probably not.  I don’t think I ever told anyone, until I told my therapy group in 1974.  By then, I had given up on ever patching up my relationship with you, so telling you about it was a non-issue.

  I don’t know if you can appreciate the humor in this (I never did quite grok what made you laugh at the 3 Stooges and not the Marx Brothers), but usually when I blog about you, people think I’m belittling you, carrying resentment, holding a grudge, or something.  Some of them come to your defense, saying that they are sure you “did your best.”  Do you see the ironic humor in that?  I know that Daddy would see it and laugh.  He was the one who taught me to always do my best, keep trying, and never say, “I can’t.”

  You, on the other hand, didn’t have anyone to teach you that.  You worked really hard at appearing to be hard working.  You taught me how to look busy so my employers would think I was earning my pay.  You turned me into your bookkeeper, cook, mechanic, and general dogsbody by saying, “I can’t.”  You told me outright that a woman had to get a man to do things for her by making him think it had been his own idea from the start.  You also told me that a woman can’t be complete without a man.  The Women’s Liberation Movement came along at the right time to rescue me from the full lifetime consequences of that, for which I am grateful.

  The last time I saw you, on that trip I made from Alaska to Kansas in 1979, to reunite with the daughter you were instrumental in having taken away from me, and to meet my first grandchild, you behaved true to form.  You paid lip service to the conventions you’ve always professed to believe in, and acted out your true feelings.  By then, I had learned enough psychology and had worked in the field enough to recognize your defense mechanisms and your denial.  I didn’t hold any of that against you, and I confronted the crap only long enough to determine that you had no desire or intention to transcend it.  Then I just let it go and concentrated on not letting you bring me down from the pleasure of my reunion and of being a grandma.

  Something I did hold against you at the time, but have forgiven since then, was the role you played in my giving up Carol/Angie for adoption.  I also resented that you made the trip to Wichita from California to testify at the hearing where my “babysitter” petitioned to have my parental rights vacated so she could adopt Marie, while I was working two jobs in an effort to have her back with me, and you never let me know that a hearing was even being held. 

  Was that legal?  It certainly does not seem morally justifiable.  I think I should have had the right to tell the judge my side of the story, or at least to know that this legal maneuvering was going on.  You knew, but I didn’t.  Why was that?  I have wondered about that since I learned about it, after the adoption was finalized.  When I asked you, in ’79, you pulled your favorite evasive maneuver.  You cried.  I’ll bet you never knew how ugly you were every time you screwed up your face and forced out the tears. 

  But all that is done and gone.  You’re gone.  Marie died using cocaine, a couple of years after you died.  Carol/Angie is alive, and denies her resentment for my abandoning her.  I think that could be because the Billie who reared her had a lot in common with the Nellie who reared you.  The two of them even have some physical resemblance.

  In 1986, I came home after having worked two weeks at the Alaska State Fair and found a note hanging on my door.  It said to call the State Troopers.  I called and was told that you had died.  I tried calling Marie, but her phone had been disconnected.  A week or two later, Marie called me.  She said that she had just come from your funeral.  Somehow, the troopers got the message wrong, or whoever called them thought you’d died when that heart attack had put you in the hospital.  You had hung on there in the hospital for a while, while I thought you were dead.

  If I had known you were there, alive, I couldn’t have gone to see you.  I was barely making ends meet, but I would have phoned you.  You probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the conversation.  You never did much like what I had to say, but I would have called you because you were my mother.  For several years after you died, I had recurring dreams in which I wanted to call you but couldn’t recall your number.  I’d think about calling Granny to get your number from her, and then I’d be unable to remember her number, too.

  I haven’t had any of those dreams since I learned how to forgive.  It wasn’t for you, or for anyone else but me, that I chose to forgive everyone for anything and everything.  Holding onto resentments is like taking poison and hoping that the other guy dies.  Much better to get over things than to go under.  I’m over it.

  Your loving daughter,
  Kathy
  

  This is my contribution to the second May Featured_Grownups challenge.

  Anyone can participate.

  Write a letter to your Mother.  It doesn’t matter if she is in heaven or on earth, or someplace else entirely.  Tell her what she means to you…

  Then go here and leave a link to your post.

  You can make it fun, serious; it’s up to you… it’s your blog! ~ feel free to use pictures, songs…you choose, we enjoy!

  This topic runs through the end of MAY (or whenever we get tired of it)

  • 3:22 pm
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