The best memory I have of my mother is of her singing. Holy fright, could that woman sing! She had a contralto that was out of this world in the best possible way. I used to watch her from the kitchen doorway as she stood over the stove stirring dinner, wrapped in an apron, swaying back and forth with her eyes closed and crooning "I Fall to Pieces," match-for-match with Patsy Cline. The late afternoon sun would come through the kitchen window and bring out the natural red highlights in her auburn hair -- new-copper-penny red, deep, true, ruby red, wildfire red -- and a kind of halo would gather itself around her as her voice rang through the house, twining itself around Patsy's voice and making the air hum as if it were alive. She was so beautiful when she sang. I watched her quietly, hoping that someday I, too, would be that pretty.
People always used to tell me I looked like my mother. I had a love/hate relationship with this concept. Part of me was pleased that I looked like my mother: my mother was beautiful, and what little girl does not want to think that she is maybe even just a little bit beautiful, too? The other part of me resented this with every possible particle of resentment it could muster. Beautiful monsters are still monsters, after all, and I had the idea that one could not exist without the other: if I had my mother's beauty, I was automatically burdened with her ugliness as well. It is no secret that I acted a lot like her. We fought like two cats in a sack, always ready with fangs and claws, and my father used to maintain that this was because we were so much alike we repelled each other. These days, I can admit that there was probably some truth to this statement. I match my mother in stubbornness, I know: if I toed over the line by an inch she'd snatch away two inches, to which I would respond by stealing those two and a third, to which she would respond by snatching four, and so on and so forth. That the line was often in unreasonable places made very little actual difference: teenagers, being teenagers, will toe a line no matter where it is, reasonable or not.
Along with this matched stubbornness came an equally voracious -- and equally as matched -- streak of independence. This, I think, is what led to the two of us falling irreconcilably apart, because this led to jealousy.
My mother, plain and simple, made mistakes and choices that trapped her in a situation she didn't want to be in, and at the time she was too young to figure out how to get back out. The older I got the more it became apparent to her that I would accomplish more than she had accomplished -- I would live independently, I would experience a college-campus lifestyle, I would grow up and move away and know more than Indiana small towns and babies and marriage and budgeting for four -- and she resented me for this, for being the one who got to do all the things she had always wanted to do, before I came along.
She was smart as they come, my mother. She has a genius IQ. She had photo albums full of Math and Science and English awards she won during high school. She could've gone anywhere she wanted, done anything she wanted: Harvard, law school, the space program, international travel to China and Japan in an expensive suit and a business class seat with a glass of wine and a thousand people waiting on her to make the most shrewd, highest-paying decision for corporations and conglomerates. She could have been a neurosurgeon, or a bestselling author, or a thousand other things. The world was at her feet. The possibilities were endless. It must have been the worst kind of hell for her to find herself with two small children, a shaky marriage to a man bent on drinking himself into the ground, and a job waiting tables at White Pines. I can even go so far as to say I understand some of this frustration myself: I'm pretty damn smart in my own right, if I do say so, and circumstances of physical disability and mental health have me trapped in a pro-rated shoebox clawing my way through month after month on less money than some people make in a week and eking my way toward a BSW at a college where accessibility is a foreign term no one has ever encountered. I too could have gone more places, done more things; hell, I could be a Penn right.now. I could be working on a doctorate. I could be in the Rare Books and Special Collections section of the Library of frickin' Congress, handling things no one else is allowed to touch. I'm intelligent enough. I work hard enough. When I want something, I'll run my ass off to get it. But so often I feel like a hamster on a wheel: I run and run and run, and never get anywhere. I bump into a physical impossibility or an income restriction or a depressive episode, and before I know it I'm ten paces behind where I started. My mother must have felt like this every day of her life. Her endless possibilities shrank to a one-inch by one-inch cube and got lost in the dirt, until even the little I feel like I have accomplished seemed like an impossible dream. When I think about it, the level of independence I have acquired must have been something my mother thirsted after with every pore in her body. I have traveled across the country by myself. I have had the guts to move out of state on a whim and a bus ticket with the clothes on my back and some money in my shoe. I can live alone, and thrive that way. My mother has always had someone else to consider, someone else to take care of. Has she ever done something as simple as order a late-night pizza and eat the whole thing by herself with a bottle of wine just because she feels like it? Has she ever fumbled her key in the lock at three a,m. holding a bouquet of roses and wearing someone else's jeans and a secret smile? Somehow I don't think she has.
Not that this excuses the things she did. It doesn't even come close. When your child's best memory of you is watching you from behind your back while you sing because you'll slap her if you see her, you've got a problem. If one of you were to look at me right now and ask me if I love her or not, I would tell you no, and I would mean it. I have no feelings for who she is today, or who she was during almost every single second of my childhood. But I've done a lot of growing up in the many years it has been since most of you last saw me, and today I can acknowledge sympathy for the kid who waded into life too fast and walked in too deep to swim out. Things sucked pretty bad for that kid for a long time. If my mother in her adolescence were one of the girls I have worked with in recent months and years, I'd tell her to turn on her favorite music and talk it out. (Is it just me, or do teenage girls really seem to talk more about what's bothering them when the stereo is on?) We'd go on a road trip to find hidden treasure and dress up for a parade and work our butts off from 9 to 9 at the Relay for Life, so I could watch her be proud of herself for accomplishing something amazing, and when she pulled herself out of last-chance high school by gut and gumption and went off to college, I'd be the one cheering for her the loudest. But my mother didn't have that -- she didn't have anything like that.
If there's one thing I have to thank that woman for, it's for showing me what not to be. It's for making me the kind of strong-willed, independent person who can have the patience of a saint with a 15 year-old girl who acts like she's nine. If my mother had never hurt me, I wouldn't have forged in myself the heart of a social worker, an advocate, a warrior who is passionate about justice and fairness and peace. There's a lot of damage in me that can't be undone, but there's a lot of strength, too, and I never would have found it if I hadn't been forced to fight. I give her a nod for that -- though I still hope she's a dung beetle in her next life.
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