It has been at least a week since I have talked to my mother. It is only 4 days before Christmas. I have not sent her Christmas gifts, I forgot her birthday really. I called. Its not that I am not thinking of her if that I do not care. I care intensely. I am thinking about her almost every moment I am not working. I am hating her that she constantly told me I could do anything. I hate that she expected constant perfection. There is so much I would have done if I could be anything less than perfect…
I hate the way she makes me feel. This horrible sense of guilt i have in the fact that we are not close; that I do not like toher. With every hours long conversation filled with a never ending stream of small talk, I am reminded how close we are not. When i was serving on the jury, listening daily to testimony from witnesses to murders, she said she knew how dark people can be; that she could relate. I thought she was about to trust me with a real and intimate part of her life, an explanation for that dark terror i see lurking inside. She just said she would rather not talk about it. It made me so angry. She never actually shared anything of her sadness, her anger, any of the rage so evident in her arguments. This whole time my sister and I have assumed some horrific trauma, a rape or assault, something to explain her psychological composition. I now think it is something in her; her own sanity is so tenuous and intertwined with a depression so subtle that she lives in the trauma of her own mind. What for others is challenging, hurtful and sad, renders triggers fight or flight, most often to fight, and almost always triggered by us. Who can be close to that?
All her accusations that what I did, what we did, cleaning out her house was really an intentional plan concocted to sell her home out from under her. To put her in a nursing home for life, to trap her in the Alzheimer’s ward with a bunch of delusional and sometimes violent elders, because this is where we thought she belonged. Weeks and months while she was in the hospital spent cleaning her house, cleaning, suctioning out years of dust saturating the air, in the walls, in the insulation, in the crawlspaces. Cloroxing spots of mold from corners which had not had fresh air in months (at least). Pulling out 30 year old carpeting. Creating a space where a human being could move around. Somewhere that felt welcoming for a visitor and comfortable enough for a nurse or aide to navigate the narrow pathways.
Is it selfish? Is it selfish of me to want to feel welcome when I visit in my mothers house, instead of trapped in a dollhouse with fragments of a broken past? (She gave me one third of a trifold dressing table mirror once. I still have it. It has a beautiful curve and shape.) Toys which no longer work, a computer at least 10 years old, Tupperware she’s had since she got married in 1963. Nails and screws and hinges, hammer and screwdrivers, rusty, piled in disintegrating cardboard boxes twice the size of a shoebox, so infrequently used that the bed in front of them prevents the drawer they are in from being opened. I have to confess to taking away some items which were not mine. The sundresses she has had since she was 25 that she wore with my father, the interview clothing circa 1981, crepe with flouncy bow tie sewn into the collar. No human could move in that place. It was all too precious. Too delicate, too laden with the past, devoid of present or future. From the moment I walked in I could not breathe. Congested, sneezing, allergies I had not had since I left Connecticut 20 years before. Back to the dread and isolation, the feeling of maintaining constant control and emotional precision. Judy said to me once “she couldn’t keep you in that little box forever.”
Maybe I did. Maybe I did actually clean out that house just to spite her. Maybe I did spend months washing down walls and scrubbing floors and hauling junk out of the basement because I was so angry. Because I hated all those things that had shrunken in on her. Forcing her living world to smaller and smaller proportions. But maybe, maybe I knew instinctively that it was this house which made her sick. These artifacts, collected over years, and left out to collect dust. This is why she would die, why she had a cancer that would kill her.
But she didn’t die. After 4 months in the hospital, and two additional rounds of chemo, her scans came back clean. She lived. And I became the evil, thoughtless and vindictive daughter who had stolen all her things. Her life, she said, I had taken and thrown away along with the 24 truckloads of moldy detritus removed from the basement.