Mom
My Mom passed last week... here's my reflections on it.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2020-07-05 |
I knew my Mom would die. And I knew it was likely she'd die having never deen able to grow and admit our past and get closure. That always saddened me. It wasn't all that there was between my Mom and I -- there were plenty of good memories, and a lot of shared experiences (both good and bad). The loss of a witness and partner to events. But you can't ever get close to someone who has barriers up and can't admit to uncomfortable truths -- and that was both my parents.
I'd focused on the grief of her not being there. All that was easy to understand, and prepare for, and cope with, for me. (Even years later). What was harder was having to re-live the past, bite my tongue, and suffer the indignities around her passing. The stories people repeated that they'd heard from her, but were quite different from reality (or what I lived through). The people singing the praises -- but dancing around a lot of the rest. People are complex -- and the caricatures many spin in memorials, kind of abrades me. Though I could read between the lines of a few of the testimonials, and smiled inwardly at the shared understanding.
There's a lot of complex past.
My Mom (and her Mom and her brother) had these Italian alternate realities of events -- they'd just imagine what happened, tell the story of how they wanted it to have happened, and then believe it. I became the opposite, as brutally honest towards others and myself as sort of a backlash against the distortions I was forced to suffer. It's tough when you were there, their actions hurt you, and don't do lies well. You have this friction of living in two different realities, with no chance to bridge them -- and any attempts end in warfare.
For years, I'd tried to get her to admit or see my reality -- but to do that would require that she admitted she'd done anything wrong. Or worse, that her actions had been callous or cruel. She just couldn't grow in that way. While in my 20's, we were arguing once about one of her fictional versions of events where I had witnesses and photos, and she said, "I've made it 40 years being this way and I haven't changed yet -- why do you think I'm going to change in the future, or want to change?" It was sort of the epiphany -- I could never have a relationship with her, and get her out of her reality or to accept mine. Nor would I lie to myself to accept hers. So I could just either cut her off right there, or just build firewalls around the past that we both wouldn't broach. We reached detente. We would both avoid the past (or at least the controversial parts, of her imagining herself as the doting Mom, or me reminding her of me cooking meals for myself at age 4 while she and her Husband were out partying) as much as possible.
She was still a self-centered person in the present. But she could also be funny, smart, and entertaining -- and I can deal with other self-centered people, as long as they aren't making me party to their fiction. So the present, or even the past back to my 20's was fine to talk about -- but beyond there was dragons.
Planning for the memorial, writing the eulogy, building a photo montage of her life -- all forces me to look deep and hard at our life and relationship. And that's tough. I'm not bitter, and don't wallow in bitterness or the past. (Nothing to be gained in that, and I'm over it). But seeing photos and realizing, how few with you there are, how much happier she is with her other son, and putting in each vacation/outing photo and remembering how you were hurt, disappointed, or absent from that event is hard. And knowing that you can't talk about any of it, and have to suffer through the praise and fictions of others. That's harder.
None of this is animosity towards my Mom. She was impressive, accomplished a lot, and could be enjoyable to be around. It's only the topic of the "great Mom" card who sacrificed anything for her eldest son, where I have problems.
Photos have a memory attached to feelings:
- There's a baby picture, that came with a lie about by father (told for decades)
- Oh look, there party you went out to and forgot about my birthday
- There's the pictures of the family in the UK, when they left me behind
- There's the family desert motorcycle rides that I wasn't included in
- Look, there's no pictures of Mom in any of our houses -- because she never came to visit us, over 30 years. (We always had to make the effort).
- There's one of my least valued accomplishments (Masters Degree Graduation), that you valued the most -- because I'd capitulated to a system.
Stuff like that.
It doesn't mean I think my Mom was a bad person. Bad people enjoy hurting others, and do it intentionally. My Mom was just self-centered. The vast majority of her slights were completely unintentional. She didn't think of waitstaff as people, or those who were embarrassed by her treatment of them as valid complaints. And I was her biggest mistake (getting pregnant at 18), and she couldn't get over it, and that I cramped her style/fun. So I had to raise myself, and suffer the indignities of her treating her latter (preferred child) as a mediocre mother might, while I was always the annoying reminder of something she preferred not to remember. In her latter years she was mostly over it -- there was still a double standard, but not as bad, and I wasn't a kid that was unprepared to cope with it. But I could focus on the present and ignore the past... unless the purpose of the day is to wallow in the past.
| 🗒️ Note: |
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| Not all of that was her fault. As I'd learned to fend for myself early, so I wasn't exactly an easy child to live with: by the time she was ready to nurture (a little), I was too independent to relax into it. I didn't respect someone trying to exert authority over me, when I was often wiser and more mature. And that was before I hit my sanctimonious teens. So my wife and I didn't have kids, partly because karma was likely to pay me back and give me one of me. But my mother and I never had a parental relationship. |
This isn't to wallow in self-pity. I was provided for in that had room and board. Occasional physical or emotional abuse because I was being difficult (or not having any of my emotional needs met), is a much better childhood than many are forced to suffer though. If the worst thing you can say is you had absentee parents, that broke promises and wouldn't help you out with college (despite having the resources), but they would do the opposite for your brother, it's not exactly calling child welfare stuff. So my childhood wasn't bad compared to many with truly bad luck. My grandparents and uncle did try to compensate growing up, and I had plenty of surrogates: friends mothers who others saw the dynamic and would try to fill the hole. (NOTE: that doesn't always help, because suddenly getting nurturing and compassion reminds you of the sucking chest wound in your life). And again, I could have had an easier life if I didn't buck the system. In the end, it made me very strong and independent: I had to learn to survive on my own, because I could never count on my parents. Thus it's not all bad... there are just many parts of it, that I don't like to revisit. And unfortunately, during funerals, you are forced to revisit it.
So I don't like wallowing in the past, because it blocks moving forward. Plus I don't have control over it like I do my actions in the future. I prefer things I can fix, be better at, adapt to, and so on. All a much better place to be, than remembering the long hard years of growing up with a mother that actively resented what an intrusion on her life you were, and couldn't offer me the dignity to hide it from others.
So I'm a little sad my Mom is gone. A little fatigued in advance that how little she put her house in order before her passing. (As only a selfish person could). A little glad that she passed before she got her life's goal and burned through everything (her goal was to die with the most debt possible): so there's a little something left for me, my brother, and her grandkids. But mostly melancholy, because while I don't like to wallow in bad memories, and this forces me to remember the little cuts and indignities that I'd rather not be forced to remember her by.
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