My mother was, I think, a horribly traumatized woman who lacked the self awareness to grasp and regain her agency, autonomy, and lived experience authority. She was far less complicated than my father, but her injuries and lack of supports lead to a life of learned helplessness that I doubt she could have overcome alone. All that said, I know little about her outside what I was told long ago and my own experiences, which admittedly, are biased.
My mother was born on May 25, 1947 in Heflin, Alabama. Her father was a music director for a well known, international preacher’s band/choir and her mother was, so far as I know, a traditional, stay at home housewife. Her mother died of kidney disease when she was in her teens, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were part of how and why she wound up running across my father, though I have no information on their early lives, how they met, etc.
I know she was an unhappy middle child of three, with an elder and younger brother. I know she was raised in a very traditional, southern baptist household. I know she was kicked out and disowned when she became pregnant with me. I know she married my father because she was pregnant with me, and I know that she did not want the pregnancy or to be married, but was pressured into both as was the way of the times.
She left my father several times, taking me and my younger sister with her over the brief, stormy time of their marriage. Initially, she moved into a weekly room let with us, and her father would watch us while she waited tables at the local Waffle House. In retrospect, looking back with my adult mind, I think while she had her father’s support, she was as close to reclaiming herself and her life (not to mention creating the family she now wanted), and slowly emerging into herself and her family’s life.
This was, of course, the moment in which my father decided to sue for custody. It resulted in a year long mess, a kidnapping by my mother of us, bouncing from rental room to rental room for months until the police finally caught up, arrested her and took us to him. My father, in standard form, viciously pursued and won custody, only to promptly leave us at his mother’s and returned to his nomadic ways.
This series of events and outcomes, it seems, broke my mother’s being. She never fully recovered. She lost custody, but retained visitation. She never exercised it. I do not think it was ‘a thing’ for the courts to make women pay child support and to be sure, my mother never did. She disappeared from my life at age 5 and I did not encounter her again until age 12; by then, she was so completely withdrawn and repressed in herself that we were strangers.
When I was eleven, my sister and I were told by my grandmother than she was looking for my mother as she could not afford to care for us. I raged and went on a hunger strike that saw me diagnosed with anorexia, but no help or therapy or respect for my interests (such things being taboo, not to mention expensive) was forthcoming… It made no difference. We were summarily shipped off with our mother in or around 1978, and she took us into the heart of poverty, south Atlanta style.
My mother dealt with life by keeping herself softly stewed in scotch. She picked up men like some women pick up new shoes. Her primary philosophy seemed to be ‘stay unconscious’ and I knew, even then, that this was because she was desperately, terminally unhappy. But as I was her ash child, no speck rested in my hand that she would smile to see and I was often the recipient of her careful monologues explaining how and why her life could have, should have, would have been so many things… the carefully (usually unspoken) conclusion being that everything wrong with her life began with the accident otherwise known as me.
We fought. Often. At 12, I was keeping house, cooking meals, walking 2m each way to get and schlep groceries and do laundry, taking care of my younger sister, kicking the men out in the morning, getting my mom showered, dressed, and (generally) sober enough to work, and basically being the family caretaker.
We mostly fought over her drinking. But also the men. Fighting over the men stopped when one of them molested my sister and I and we had the predator jailed. But the drinking worsened when the men stopped. Until the day, a Friday afternoon, that I carefully poured out every drop of scotch in the apartment. A weekend in a dry county for a scotch alcoholic was, it seemed, the final straw.
She kicked me out. I was homeless, alone, and on the street. At 13. I didn’t see her again until after the birth of my daughter and within another five years, we were permanently estranged over a falling out regarding her father’s death to leukemia.
I think about her a lot, still. I am sure she had dreams. Hopes. I know that, somewhere in her mind, there lived a woman whose resilience, patience, and belief would someday be rewarded in all the ways culture and society tell us await those who can arbitrarily shove themselves into the various shapes and forms this world requires.
Sitting here older than she ever got to be, I think about how I feel in this moment, when my life is so different from what I dreamed, hoped. I too, have my inner hero who yearns for the rewards promised by the various myths and morality plays of our species.
In myself, I recognize that which must have existed in my mother and, in it, always, we are one and I can have with her the relationship I never could while she lived. I see her astonishing, quiet strength and feel the weight of all the ‘what might have beens’, too. I find I do not blame her nor fault her for how she felt about me. I was the fixed point in her timeline… she never got over being punished for being female, and I think she had an epiphany that broke her.
I would tell you what that was, what she told me it was, but I’m still processing it from the perspective of the me, now, who can see and feel and consider it as more than that child.
She gave up on this world and focused instead, at last, on herself. She stopped drinking. She married a man she loved and who loved her. And so far as I know, lived out her life working at that Waffle House, loving that man, and finding contentment in it. But we remained estranged and I know these things only because my sister continued to update me.
This is how I knew that she died at 56 of an aneurysm whiling changing into her after work clothes in the Waffle House bathroom. I was homeless in Houston at the time… unable to attend the funeral, thus left ignorant of where she is at rest. We never reconciled and, while the weight of that is not zero, it is free of pain – a life-long challenge that became far easier once I realized a woman’s life is relived by generations; ultimately, it is a wise woman who prefers contentment.
I continue to learn from my female ancestors and, in them, find myself. I understand my mother in adult hindsight better, and the tragedy of our story is only intensified through it. Who knows what her life might have been, and seemingly in the end, she too decided to settle for contentment, which I both respect and understand.