HAPPY MOTHERS DAY?

Mother’s Day is the most difficult day of the year for me.

Everyone else takes time to remember their mother and her contribution to their life.

My memories are that I my mother’s contribution to my life was that I survived her, and in so doing became the over-strong personality I am.

Unfortunately my brother and sister were not so lucky.

Over the years, I have discovered I am not the only person who has a hard time with this day.

I think today of one of my best friends from childhood, telling me when we got back in touch after the 30th reunion how his step-mother beat him all those years, and he never said anything to anyone, because everyone “knows” that “the wicked step-mother story” is only in fairy tales. He didn’t date in high school because he was afraid of women, and didn’t marry till he was in his 40s, after many years in therapy to realize women weren’t “the enemy” to be avoided.

I think today of the chiropractor who asked me 30 years ago if I remembered any times an adult might have thrown me against a wall as a child, “because the permanent damage to your lower spine is old.”

Did I remember??!!!

My memory of Mommie Dearest throwing 2-year old me against the hallway wall when she caught me drawing on the wall is just about the only early memory I have! I can still hear him saying “Nowadays, if I saw that X-ray of a child, I would be required to report it to the authorities.” Physical proof the memory was real! Thank God for that now. There was no protection like that, then.

All my childhood, when I had to go see the many osteopaths and chiropractors I was taken to for the chronic back problems I had. “He was born with a bad back” she used to say. They believed her, and so did I. I’ve worn a brace every day since 1995. I’m real good friends with my chiropractor. I see her every other week.

Throughout my childhood, had I said anything to anyone about what was happening in my home, I would have been the one who would have ended up “institutionalized.”

I remember how happy I was after I told my oldest friend in the world - our mothers were sorority sisters in college - what had happened and she later told me she had told her mother, and her mother had replied that she always felt something was wrong, the way the three of us would start acting when we came over for visits, just before Mommie Dearest arrived to take us home. A witness!

All three of us - me, my sister, my brother - were “on the spectrum,” though no one then knew what that was. I was Aspergian, as shown by the fact I started talking at age 11 (an Aspergian trait). My younger brother was Autistic; he didn’t speak intelligibly until just before he turned 5, which allowed him to go to kindergarten; he also wet the bed till around age 9 or 10. My sister, the middle child, was somewhere in between those poles - unable to deal with “social life.”

That made us all “different” from what The Good Doctor Spock’s book said we should be doing at this or that age. And being “different” was a crime in Mommie Dearest’s world. The fact I spoke at age 11 months - ahead of the children of her friends - and said “o-pane” was the first, last, and only “good thing” I ever did in her eyes.

I can never forget what happened to my brother. Hiding behind the bed in my room where I was lucky to live alone, while I listened to her across the hall in the room she had my brother and sister in (Who raises kids that kind of inappropriate way? My brother and I should have been in that larger bedroom, with my sister in the room I was given.), as she raved and screamed at my brother for wetting the bed once again. I can remember her yelling at him to “talk right!” whenever he opened his mouth. I later learned she was ready to institutionalize him if he had been unable to go to kindergarten at the “right” age.

The result of that was a sick relationship in which she always told him he was her “favorite” and how she “only wants the best for you”. He ended up a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities, who died in a self-inflicted traffic accident at age 49 when he drove onto the off-ramp here on Interstate 5 and met an 18-wheeler head-on at what was later estimated by the police to be a combined impact speed over 100 mph. His Blood-Alcohol was .22 and there was major amounts of cocaine and marijuana present. I remember how he used to get drunk and play Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” over and over to the point of distraction.

When I learned of his death in 1999, after having been served the year before with papers to stay away from him since I “caused distress,” I felt guilty for not having protected him, like a big brother should.

I guess I was lucky. At age 10, when she came at me once again with my father’s old Sam Browne Belt. I grabbed hold of it and yelled “You can’t hit me!” and pulled it out of her hands; in so doing I pulled her off-balance and she fell and hit her head against the wall.

I was terrified.

Terrified I had killed my mother, and then terrified when she stood up that she’d really hit me, and terrified she’d tell my father what I had done and something really bad would happen. Instead, she stepped back and I suddenly realized she was afraid of me.

She never went after me with that belt again, and I learned that day that I had to oppose her in Every Single Thing. Which I did. Which is likely why I survived.

I got out of Denver three days after I graduated from high school. The nearest Navy base was 1,000 miles away. Other than five short visits over the 26 years after, I never really went back.

My sister started taking tranquilizers in high school. She took them every day for years. She was a prescription drug abuser. My nephew remembers one day she was driving him home from an event, and got stopped by a cop for driving erratically. She told the cop she was taking a tranquilizer for her health. He told her if she didn’t get out of the car and wait for someone to come and drive them home, he would arrest her.

Today my sister has Alzheimers. There is no record of that in the family, going back several generations. My nephew told me he was told by the doctor that it is the result of a lifetime’s tranquilizer abuse.

My nephew’s one memory of his grandmother is being 5 when she came for a visit, during which he did something to anger her and she came at him with her cane. He remembers his mother, my sister, standing there frozen, until his father stepped in front of her and said “What do you think you’re doing?” At which point she stepped back.

Things almost came close to a positive breakthrough with us, during the week it took my father to die in 1988. My brother and I went back to be with her. We got in a big argument down in the parking garage where they lived, when I said the wrong one was dying (my father having made his peace with me with a very thorough apology for every mistake he had made, followed by the declaration he had always loved me, followed by ten years of the kind of relationship a father and son who love each other are supposed to have).

One night that week, while my brother was over at the hospital with dad, and I was “on alert” with Mommie Dearest, she started talking about her life. When she said that she had “married late” because she had decided in her 20s that she would never marry, the thought went through my mind, “Why didn’t you stick to that?” despite at the same moment knowing what such a decision would have meant for me. Just as we got to where I thought we might go where my father and I had gone ten years earlier, my brother came back and the moment was gone.

The next day, we happened to stop at a McDonald’s for lunch on our way to the hospital. During lunch, she proceeded to tell me how every life decision I had made was “wrong.” That I had decided to “follow a hobby” rather than stay with the “good job” I’d had in Sacramento (the one where the medical flight inspector had told me “whatever it is you’re doing, if you keep doing it, you’re going to have a heart attack before you’re 40"); this, six months after I had beaten 10,000:1 odds and become a member of the WGA.

The day was complete when we drove home that evening and stopped at the local supermarket, where the new manager spotted her and came over. It turned out he’d been one of her students in the “problem school” she’d been transferred to after her behavior got her in trouble with the school system; he told her how glad he was she had been his teacher, because she helped him “turn my life around - I wouldn’t have what I have without you, Mrs. Cleaver.”

That was the last time I ever thought of taking the effort to try and get through to her.

In the years since, with a lot of therapy, I have come to understand that she had what is known as a Borderline Personality. As I have examined the family history I know, I have come to see that she was an abused child, the victim of a father who was the victim of a father who was a Civil War combat veteran filled with untreated PTSD. This stuff is always multi-generational.

Even with all that, when the call came that she had died, when I hung up the phone, I danced around the room and sang “Ding dong! The witch is dead!”

That’s not the response you’re supposed to have to the death of your mother.

So today I will celebrate all those I have come to know over the years - and all those who I never met, whose numbers are far greater than anyone wants to admit - who survived their Mommie Dearest, and found a way to become the Good Person they always were. And I’ll feel sadness for all those who never got that chance.

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