They say - OK, they say a lot of things, many nonsense. But they also say that boys grow up to marry their mothers (aka somebody just like them) and girls grow up marrying their Daddy. Thinking about it over the years, I think both my brother and I wound up marrying our mother. We just picked different facets of her. He wound up the winner - if that concept applies. At any rate, he picked out her best traits, while I picked out her worst for my 1st marriage. His wife is smart, organized, competent, sociable, and rises to the occasion for the long haul when need arises, like Mom. My ex was controlling, critical, demeaning. We each, my brother and I, knew different sides of Mom. We were born only two years apart, and found two very different people to pick in a mate.
My relationship with Mom was complicated. Years later when I had babies she told me how much she loved me, but had read from "The Expert" Doctor Spock that it was a bad thing to give a young child too much affection. (On the contrary, when learning how to raise mine, I learned it was impossible to give a very young child too much affection. They cry because they need something. Even if it is "just" attention, that is a legitimate need.) I grew up needing attention, but getting scolded for most of what I did to get it. One of those things was telling stories, inventing whatever in order to achieve that goal. I still tell stories - go figure, since you're reading this - but much more carefully these days.
It wasn't just attention seeking that garnered criticism. It seemed everything I did, every time I managed to get Mom's attention, even doing my best to dodge her all-seeing eye, I was in trouble. I no longer have an idea where cause and effect overlap. I just got used to feeling like the black sheep of the family. That only changed when I finally was able to buy my very own home in my 40s: now I was an actual adult! It wasn't a linear change, but came and went. And the time I told my parents something that happened to me as a child, at the prompting of my therapist, before that conversation even ended they decided that maybe it just didn't happen. This was after filling in some of my memory blanks for me surrounding the incident, minutes earlier.
I did escape her for nearly a year. Mom got sick. I grew up knowing she'd needed electric shock therapy, having overheard a conversation she had with some other adults (who? don't know.) describing how it felt afterwards. Later she totally denied it ever happened, yet everything I knew after then points back to it as the most logical explanation. Mom was raised by a narcissistic mother and a very quiet father. (She "married her father", my dad being a quiet personality.) Grandma lied about a lot of things, and I heard once as an explanation for something about Mom, which I can no longer remember what it explained, because the explanation shocked my young mind and overrode everything else, that Mom and her sister were punished as children by being shut up in the dark basement cellar along with bugs and spiders and whatever rodents may have been there, for however long Grandma wanted to leave them there. Assuming half of this is true, it easily would explain her need later for that kind of therapy.
During that time, two very different things happened. I was sent to live with, sequentially, two of Daddy's sisters' families. I got to attend kindergarten, something not existing in rural Minnesota at that time, meaning my brother missed it. Being older and in school full days, he stayed with our father. I suddenly got attention. Adults talked to me, taught me. I learned to write my name, tie my shoes, make a bed, wash my face properly (ahhh, ivory soap!), cross the street safely. In school I got to play with clay and finger paint. Best of all, I was taught the rules by the adults around me rather than scolded for not knowing them yet. It was the first and last time I was given my very own Easter basket and a dressy set of clothes and new shoes for Easter. There is a very rare photo of me as a child, all dressed up, holding that basket.
The other thing that happened is Mom changed, or at least I think she did, losing a lot of her memories. There were no family stories, except from Daddy's side. If I asked questions she didn't have answers, and the message was clear: don't ask. The questions were to be avoided, they weren't important. Other things were. I needed to get good grades in school, put things away, stay out of trouble. That last was ironic as I always seemed to be in trouble. Any kind of conflict whatever, any breaking of a rule even that nobody had bothered to explain, was my fault. I knew better than to come to her with a problem since I knew it would be my fault. There was never advice, just fault finding, and the fault was always mine even when I knew otherwise.
The only exception to that stands out clearly. I had just started 4th grade, in a fairly new school since we'd just moved into town, so the school didn't really have an academic history of me. The teacher decided to sort kids into learners and non-learners by having us read from one of those two inch thick story books that were supposed to last the full school year. (I always had mine read in a couple weeks and spent reading time totally bored.) This time however she didn't get to me and a couple other students before she placed us in our groups. It was agony listening to other kids try to sound out a story, word by painfully mispronounced word. I was miserable. After a few days Mom noticed. I explained why, fully expecting like every other time I had a problem with a teacher that she'd tell me it was my fault. But when she heard that some teacher put her kid in with the slow group, she gave that teacher what-for and I got transferred.
In case you are wondering, most of my teachers disliked me because I was more widely read than they were in certain things and asked questions of the "but what about ______ who says _______ is true" kind. I wasn't trying to embarrass them. I genuinely was looking for better information and just wound up pointing out their gaps in information, or at least topics they weren't prepared for, instead. I'd just figured they had to be smarter than I was, right? How would I learn if I didn't ask, since so little was volunteered?
Bedtime rituals were constant. We'd get into pajamas, get under the covers in our own rooms, and Mom would come in, talk to us, and turn out the light. Her version of talking to me was telling me everything I did wrong that day. Then she wanted a hug. I was only 8 when I turned away from that hug. Somehow my young self figured out the hug was supposed to be love and everything else leading to that point was the opposite. It was dishonest and I refused to be dishonest in that particular way. It took decades to be able to explain it to myself. I certainly couldn't explain it to either of my parents, and they both prodded me about what was going on. I knew Mom was hurt, and I was still unable to change my behavior. I hadn't had enough of the world explained to me yet to know. Not a clue.
Fast forward to college, and meeting a guy who - finally! - was actually interested in me. I was warned against him by others in my dorm, but nobody ever said why. Both my parents were the same way, including not explaining what they saw in him. Since I didn't understand it, had no context for it, I didn't see the issue. I just explained it to myself as some silly version of romantic star-crossed lovers or similar drivel.Years later I figured out that he'd married me because I had all the traits he hated in his mother. He couldn't take it out on her, but I was naive and needy and he could take it out on me. She was grossly obese. He criticized every bit of food I put in my mouth, and of course I put on weight. She was smart and competent in lots of ways, so I couldn't be. She was a good cook, so he wound up making me to this day hate to cook because it was always wrong. If every I made something right, doing it again meant just not enough variety in his menu - we'd had that last month already. And on and on. I simply built up my walls in defense, as this was a familiar place to be. I built good walls. At least, until I saw what he was doing to our kids.
I finally got free of him, and spent years fixing myself so I could begin to fix my kids. Only they know how belated that was and whether it worked, or worked well enough. There's a difference between removing abuse and treating it. Not treating it leads to repetition. I've been dealing with the after effects for decades.
So why write this now?
When a good friend of mine died recently, her daughter handed me the poetry books I'd written and given out back in the early '80s. I recently picked up one and noted that post-it notes were bookmarks for a few particular poems, and curious, read them again to see why. Then I went through the entire volume. At the time it all got written I was divorced, in a support group, and the non-judgmental support and healing I found there, the listening to other people in order to learn about me, all combined to start poems pouring out of me. A couple poems dealt with my childhood and my mom, highlighting a lot of pain, opening even more healing. Now, because I am who I am, it needed to be written down again, this time in prose, and put together as well as I'm able to in order to make sense of it all. In the process, I try to explain where needed, and maybe to forgive... where understanding increasingly allows.
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