Lessons from my mother/Looking into her mirror
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Lessons from my mother/Looking into her mirror |
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Posted by Maria on August 09, 19101 at 15:22:25:
It is interesting what we learn from our mothers.
That men are wanted and needed but not necessarily, necessary.
“No crotch is worth that much,” my mother would say, shaking her head at some
cousin or aunt, who had taken up with a man who was shiftless, an adulterer, an
alcoholic, a woman beater.
And yet, most of my childhood was taken up observing my mother trying to secure
love for herself and financial security for my brother and me. There was my
stepfather, a cowboy hat wearing, dark skinned, pot bellied construction
worker. He brought some stability to our lives, made my mother happy. Except
when she became terribly ill, he didn’t pitch in. She had to have family from
outside come in to take care of us. She divorced him soon after, refusing
alimony, temporary child support, anything. We whined about it for years
later. Especially my brother who looked so much like him, who needed a father
so much. It was 11 or so years after that, that my mother, in one of my
delinquent brother’s many family therapy sessions, that she revealed the whys
and wherefores of the divorce. At 11 years of age, he wanted me to quit
school, to stay home and cook and clean while and he and my mother worked. He
wanted to take my 9 year old brother to the construction sites, “That’s the age
I started working at,” he reportedly said. Our education was everything to my
mother. The thought that ‘some man’ would prevent her children from attending
school was beyond her, beyond her need for security, for love, for physical
warmth.
There was the white man, who loved baseball, and whom I absolutely detested.
Understand, I was 13 or 14, assuming the pose of a tough ghetto gang girl.
What part of “Brown and Proud” would a white man understand? My brother
readily accepted him, since he freely gave my brother money, while any such
offers made my stomach turn. He was a needy man, telling my mom, how his birth
mother had abandoned him, disrupted his life, visiting at late night hours,
until a kind childless couple adopted him. He forget to mention that he was
manic-depressive and a paranoid schizophrenic. I firmly believe that he once
assaulted my mother, while I was away. I was, I am, a big girl and have a big
mouth. He would never have attempted such a thing when I was around. She made
him move out soon after. He came around, late at night, whispering at the
windows. Except he didn’t know my mother had given me her room and I was the
one who heard him. So, one night, when I had had enough, I calmly went and got
the biggest knife I could find in our kitchen and kneeled near the partly open
window. I hoped he would lean in a bit, so I could lop off his ear and his
ridiculously long hair that curled at his shoulders from underneath his
baseball cap. I don’t know if my mother heard him or me, or my brother told,
but the next thing I knew, she pulled the knife from my hand, cranked the
window closed and sent me to bed. He would never be back. As it turned out,
my brother hated him too, and only liked the money that he so freely gave.
Several years later, my mother, in her Mother Theresa mode, was volunteering at
a homeless shelter.
When she informed my brother that the white boy was coming around there (his
parents had kicked him out of their home, too), he insisted my mother quit.
Which she did.
There were others. I just watched, and listened, and learned. Her best
friend’s husband, who came around late at night, like some he-cat yowling
during mating season. I’ll never forget, have never forgotten, her comment as
she slammed the door in his face: “Some men, because they see you alone,
think you will take up the offer of any man, for a roll in the sack.” She was
right.
But there were some too, with good intentions, that she pushed away, at the
slightest sign of anything untoward. She must have had some vision of what her
ideal mate should look like and act like. What it was, I’ll never know.
Imagined slights, minor personality flaws, were held up to the light,
scrutinized, criticized, dissected, before he was so quickly, triumphantly cast
away.
My mother was no beauty. But she had a rounded, hour-glass figure that made
her the envy of her friends, an easy manner coupled with a shyness born of
poverty, early orphan hood, low self-esteem. She did not lack for offers, but
was always scared.
I am no beauty. Sometimes, my weight is up, sometimes down, but I only lacked
male attention when I doubted that I had any redeeming qualities. I am
outspoken and shy, angry and so sad, all at once. I have not, in the past
three or so years, lacked for offers, of any kind. Marriage, mistress, airline
tickets, gold, anything. But I am always scared. You cannot let a person, a
man most especially, into your life and walk away unscathed. I think of my
friend, a male, and such a flirt, that I was surprised at him, when he
said, “You can’t sleep with someone and not give a piece, not a physical part,
but the most intimate, emotional part of you, away.” “The choice is, “he went
on,” who deserves that much value?”
Unlike my mother, I married well. At least at first. Now divorced, with one
child and another on the way, I wonder if she knows how much my life has
mirrored hers, that I, too, wander aimlessly looking for love for me and
security for my children.