Tuesday – Irrational and Prophetic
Jul. 27th, 2010 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
I forgot my mother’s birthday this year. Again. Since she’s been dead for most of my life, there were no repercussions for this. I only remembered it on my own birthday, 3 days later. Being 9 months pregnant on her 37th birthday in the middle of a hot Texas July could not have been any fun for her. By her next one, I would have been a cute little just-starting-to-walk toddler, so that one was no doubt more enjoyable for her. The one after that, she would have been 39 and 6 months pregnant with my kid brother. From what I hear, she was angry at the doctor who told her she didn’t need to worry about birth control until I was a bit older (she never did forgive him) and fumed through the whole pregnancy; I doubt she took a day off to stop fuming on her birthday. In fact, I’m pretty sure turning 39 with a 6 month baby-belly only rubbed her nose in the fact that she believed she was “too damn old this.” Turning 40 with two small children and the security of a tubal ligation would have been a day to celebrate. While she loved us, she never stopped be delighted that we were the last children she would ever have. She never worried about having an empty nest.
“I can’t wait until you kids grow up and move away,” she told us. “It will mean my job is done and I can do what I want. Maybe I’ll write a book. Or your father and I will travel.”
She never had an empty nest, though. Her last two, we who she had when she felt she was too damn old to be having anymore damn babies, were still years away from fledging when she died.
“In my next life, I’m not going to have any damn kids*,” she said (and she said it often). For as many times as I heard it, it never made me feel unloved or like a burden (though I was, in fact, simply a much-loved burden). She was good at loving, just not good at biting her tongue. I asked her once, when I was very small and bold enough to ask such questions unabashed, if she wished she didn’t have my younger brother and me.
“No, I don’t wish that, Dolly. I just wish I weren’t so old when I had you.” Fair enough. I wasn’t sure what the whole big thing about her age was to her, since to a child a mother is just a mother and never an age. I was just bummed when she told me there was no chance I was ever getting a baby sister to balance out a family that I believed had way too many boys in it.
Her feelings about this were strong, as my aunt Sylvia could tell you. When my kid brother was an infant I was a toddler 16 months older than he, my parents packed up the car and took us all to an outdoor family gathering. At some point my mother had my kid brother in the back seat of the car with the door opened, holding a diaper pin in her lips while trying to use its twin to re-diaper (they were all made of cloth back then) her squirming youngest son. Meanwhile, I was climbing all over her trying to get her attention away from that annoying squalling interloper who I had not yet learned to accept as a member of the family. My aunt made the comment that my mother was obviously very good at this and it looked like she was ready for a couple of more kids.
“And you can go straight to Hell,” my mother told her. She meant it, too. I am sure of this.
At the age of 35, I carried on the tradition my mother started by having a baby when I was too damn old. In my case, it wasn’t society that thought it so much as it was me thinking in retrospect that it was an awful big lifestyle change to bring about when I was already set in my ways. But I wanted him, and I wanted him badly. Actually I wanted the little girl I thought he would be. If anyone offered to trade him for a daughter now that I have him I would say hell no. At the time when I was expecting, however, I had two friends - one with a baby girl already and another who had one on the way - who had filled their daughter quotas already with previous progeny and were longing for boys. Half in jest, each had agreed to swap me my son for one of their daughters. I didn’t think Jeff would go for it, so I never brought it up him, but I am ashamed to say I thought long and hard about it at the time.
It wasn’t until the last few years that that the idea my mother’s birthday having just passed started making me cry on my own birthday. Not that I mope and sob the whole day long; it’s just that at some point during the day I will need to hide in the lady’s room or perhaps the supply closet and sob quietly to myself for a minute or two. After that I am composed and fine for the rest of the say. I’m not even sure they are my own tears. I think I may be channeling my cousin Leslie Carol’s tears.
Leslie was more my mother’s daughter than I ever got the chance to be. Her relationship with her own mother was volatile, so it was my mother that she turned to when she needed mothering. Her grief for my mother surpassed my own. Considering how big my grief is, that is saying a lot. But it was Leslie, not me, who kept a picture of my mother next to her bed. It was Leslie who talked to my mother daily and claimed her as a guardian angel (a guardian angel who said damn and hell a lot, but that was the kind of angel Leslie needed). It occurs to me that Leslie and I had the polar opposite experiences with our mothers. I was not wanted by my mother, but I was loved unconditionally by her. Leslie was wanted badly by her mother – after all, my aunt and uncle went through all the red tape to adopt her – but my aunt was never able to love and accept her daughter for who she was.
In the grand scheme of things, if you ever have to choose between the two, take it from me: it is better to be loved than wanted. When you are loved, you become wanted even if you were not wanted in the first place. When you are wanted, but not loved, every day is a rejection and a reminder of your shortcomings.
I am haunted by one of my last conversations with Leslie, who called me in anticipation of her 50th birthday. She was describing the photo of my mother that she kept by her bed, and what my mother was wearing in it.
“She was 50 when this was taken,” Leslie said, “I’m reading what mama wrote on the back of it. Oh, Lord, Nina, she was the same age I’m going to be. That’s when she died, wasn’t it? Oh, Lord.” She started to cry. Something about the idea of reaching the age my mother was at the time of her death terrified Leslie, who had lately been thinking about her own death. It had been the main topic of the conversation we were having that day. I think her subconscious knew something was amiss, even though Leslie had no direct knowledge about the brain aneurism that was already a ticking time bomb in her head.
I was familiar with the picture she described and when it was taken. I reassured her that it was not a picture of a dying woman. My mother was 48 in the picture, and her cancer had not been diagnosed yet. “She didn’t die when she was 50, Leslie, she was 51. If you think your death and hers are gonna be linked, you’ve got a whole year to still worry about that,” I teased her.
“You sure about that? She was 51?”
“I’m sure, because I was 15. The numbers of our ages were just transposed on our birthdays that year. That’s always stuck with me.”
“Okay, good. I feel better now. I don’t know why, but I do.” She had stopped crying, I guess reassured that she had another year to live. In truth, she had 4 months.
Before Leslie died, I still cried over my mother maybe three or four times a year. My grief had reached the acceptance stage. Since Leslie died I’ve cried more about my mother’s death than I did in the previous 15 years. Now I cry weekly at least, not mention always on my birthday. Not my mother’s birthday: my own. Maybe my tears are tied to my own aging, of growing closer to the age my mother was when she got ill and began to fade out of my life. Worse, it feels as if I inherited all of my cousin’s grief, plus her fears about her mortality being linked to my mother’s. In another decade I will be hit with the double whammy of wondering if I will outlive them both, or if I will join them by kicking off at the mid-century point with a dependent child still living at home.
Until then I will just ponder it, and duck into the restroom when need be to. I’ll never really stop grieving for them. I will always miss my mother, who didn’t want me but who loved me enough to make up for it. I will always cry for my cousin, who wanted a real mother to make up for the two women – her birth mother and her adoptive mother – who she felt rejected her, and found her in my mother. I’m sure that yesterday’s tears that I cried for less than two minutes in the supply closet belonged to Leslie. She left a lot of tears uncried and somehow I inherited them along with her irrational-but-prophetic fears. I was fine afterward and even felt a little refreshed.
So it goes.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
* Wherever she is now, I hope this is working out for her.
.
.
I forgot my mother’s birthday this year. Again. Since she’s been dead for most of my life, there were no repercussions for this. I only remembered it on my own birthday, 3 days later. Being 9 months pregnant on her 37th birthday in the middle of a hot Texas July could not have been any fun for her. By her next one, I would have been a cute little just-starting-to-walk toddler, so that one was no doubt more enjoyable for her. The one after that, she would have been 39 and 6 months pregnant with my kid brother. From what I hear, she was angry at the doctor who told her she didn’t need to worry about birth control until I was a bit older (she never did forgive him) and fumed through the whole pregnancy; I doubt she took a day off to stop fuming on her birthday. In fact, I’m pretty sure turning 39 with a 6 month baby-belly only rubbed her nose in the fact that she believed she was “too damn old this.” Turning 40 with two small children and the security of a tubal ligation would have been a day to celebrate. While she loved us, she never stopped be delighted that we were the last children she would ever have. She never worried about having an empty nest.
“I can’t wait until you kids grow up and move away,” she told us. “It will mean my job is done and I can do what I want. Maybe I’ll write a book. Or your father and I will travel.”
She never had an empty nest, though. Her last two, we who she had when she felt she was too damn old to be having anymore damn babies, were still years away from fledging when she died.
“In my next life, I’m not going to have any damn kids*,” she said (and she said it often). For as many times as I heard it, it never made me feel unloved or like a burden (though I was, in fact, simply a much-loved burden). She was good at loving, just not good at biting her tongue. I asked her once, when I was very small and bold enough to ask such questions unabashed, if she wished she didn’t have my younger brother and me.
“No, I don’t wish that, Dolly. I just wish I weren’t so old when I had you.” Fair enough. I wasn’t sure what the whole big thing about her age was to her, since to a child a mother is just a mother and never an age. I was just bummed when she told me there was no chance I was ever getting a baby sister to balance out a family that I believed had way too many boys in it.
Her feelings about this were strong, as my aunt Sylvia could tell you. When my kid brother was an infant I was a toddler 16 months older than he, my parents packed up the car and took us all to an outdoor family gathering. At some point my mother had my kid brother in the back seat of the car with the door opened, holding a diaper pin in her lips while trying to use its twin to re-diaper (they were all made of cloth back then) her squirming youngest son. Meanwhile, I was climbing all over her trying to get her attention away from that annoying squalling interloper who I had not yet learned to accept as a member of the family. My aunt made the comment that my mother was obviously very good at this and it looked like she was ready for a couple of more kids.
“And you can go straight to Hell,” my mother told her. She meant it, too. I am sure of this.
At the age of 35, I carried on the tradition my mother started by having a baby when I was too damn old. In my case, it wasn’t society that thought it so much as it was me thinking in retrospect that it was an awful big lifestyle change to bring about when I was already set in my ways. But I wanted him, and I wanted him badly. Actually I wanted the little girl I thought he would be. If anyone offered to trade him for a daughter now that I have him I would say hell no. At the time when I was expecting, however, I had two friends - one with a baby girl already and another who had one on the way - who had filled their daughter quotas already with previous progeny and were longing for boys. Half in jest, each had agreed to swap me my son for one of their daughters. I didn’t think Jeff would go for it, so I never brought it up him, but I am ashamed to say I thought long and hard about it at the time.
It wasn’t until the last few years that that the idea my mother’s birthday having just passed started making me cry on my own birthday. Not that I mope and sob the whole day long; it’s just that at some point during the day I will need to hide in the lady’s room or perhaps the supply closet and sob quietly to myself for a minute or two. After that I am composed and fine for the rest of the say. I’m not even sure they are my own tears. I think I may be channeling my cousin Leslie Carol’s tears.
Leslie was more my mother’s daughter than I ever got the chance to be. Her relationship with her own mother was volatile, so it was my mother that she turned to when she needed mothering. Her grief for my mother surpassed my own. Considering how big my grief is, that is saying a lot. But it was Leslie, not me, who kept a picture of my mother next to her bed. It was Leslie who talked to my mother daily and claimed her as a guardian angel (a guardian angel who said damn and hell a lot, but that was the kind of angel Leslie needed). It occurs to me that Leslie and I had the polar opposite experiences with our mothers. I was not wanted by my mother, but I was loved unconditionally by her. Leslie was wanted badly by her mother – after all, my aunt and uncle went through all the red tape to adopt her – but my aunt was never able to love and accept her daughter for who she was.
In the grand scheme of things, if you ever have to choose between the two, take it from me: it is better to be loved than wanted. When you are loved, you become wanted even if you were not wanted in the first place. When you are wanted, but not loved, every day is a rejection and a reminder of your shortcomings.
I am haunted by one of my last conversations with Leslie, who called me in anticipation of her 50th birthday. She was describing the photo of my mother that she kept by her bed, and what my mother was wearing in it.
“She was 50 when this was taken,” Leslie said, “I’m reading what mama wrote on the back of it. Oh, Lord, Nina, she was the same age I’m going to be. That’s when she died, wasn’t it? Oh, Lord.” She started to cry. Something about the idea of reaching the age my mother was at the time of her death terrified Leslie, who had lately been thinking about her own death. It had been the main topic of the conversation we were having that day. I think her subconscious knew something was amiss, even though Leslie had no direct knowledge about the brain aneurism that was already a ticking time bomb in her head.
I was familiar with the picture she described and when it was taken. I reassured her that it was not a picture of a dying woman. My mother was 48 in the picture, and her cancer had not been diagnosed yet. “She didn’t die when she was 50, Leslie, she was 51. If you think your death and hers are gonna be linked, you’ve got a whole year to still worry about that,” I teased her.
“You sure about that? She was 51?”
“I’m sure, because I was 15. The numbers of our ages were just transposed on our birthdays that year. That’s always stuck with me.”
“Okay, good. I feel better now. I don’t know why, but I do.” She had stopped crying, I guess reassured that she had another year to live. In truth, she had 4 months.
Before Leslie died, I still cried over my mother maybe three or four times a year. My grief had reached the acceptance stage. Since Leslie died I’ve cried more about my mother’s death than I did in the previous 15 years. Now I cry weekly at least, not mention always on my birthday. Not my mother’s birthday: my own. Maybe my tears are tied to my own aging, of growing closer to the age my mother was when she got ill and began to fade out of my life. Worse, it feels as if I inherited all of my cousin’s grief, plus her fears about her mortality being linked to my mother’s. In another decade I will be hit with the double whammy of wondering if I will outlive them both, or if I will join them by kicking off at the mid-century point with a dependent child still living at home.
Until then I will just ponder it, and duck into the restroom when need be to. I’ll never really stop grieving for them. I will always miss my mother, who didn’t want me but who loved me enough to make up for it. I will always cry for my cousin, who wanted a real mother to make up for the two women – her birth mother and her adoptive mother – who she felt rejected her, and found her in my mother. I’m sure that yesterday’s tears that I cried for less than two minutes in the supply closet belonged to Leslie. She left a lot of tears uncried and somehow I inherited them along with her irrational-but-prophetic fears. I was fine afterward and even felt a little refreshed.
So it goes.
* Wherever she is now, I hope this is working out for her.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-07-27 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-27 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 01:30 am (UTC)My children are both wanted and loved (at least I hope they feel that way) but my...I still feel bad that who would have been my 3rd child (miscarriage) was not wanted at first. I grew to want him/her, then I lost the baby.
But that did make my true number 3 more wanted.
Motherhood is a funny thing. You love them so much...but, as a mom, I am so imperfect.
::hugs:: Your mother sounds very special. I like it when people speak really honestly, as it sounds like she did.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 02:56 pm (UTC)Love makes up for a lot of our shortcomings. I'm not perfect, but the love I have for him is. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 04:43 am (UTC)I never doubted that my mother loved me, and I know I was **wanted**...but I have never been able to be the daughter she wanted me to be. This often makes me sad, but I cannot become Sandra Dee.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 03:02 pm (UTC)The best love is always felt and given in spite of our imperfections; love that is given because of your situation (parent, child, lover) but limited because of your perceived shortcomings is lacking in quality.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 07:13 pm (UTC)However the two of them are close now, psychically attached even. And me, the "planned one" well I've always been left out of their sphere and I rarely even talk to them. So much for being wanted.
Your post brought tears to my eyes. Again. xoxo
no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 02:07 am (UTC)In my family, it is the two sons my father favored the least who are the closest two him and the most help in his old age. It's as if withholding love from a child creates a neediness that ties them to you, while loving them and building them up encourages them to fly away when they grow up.