My mother was not a nice person. I say this not to imply she was constantly cruel, but rather to clarify that she put absolutely no effort into being nice. To anyone.
Ultimately, I think we place too much emphasis on empty courtesy over authentic kindness in this culture so niceness isn’t a quality I put a lot of value in. That said, she had a way of talking both about and to her children that strays about as far away from nice as you can get.
I was born profoundly cross-eyed. It runs in the family on both sides, but no one else has ever had such a severe case as mine. I was also a redhead, like my dad, and she would joke that had I been born a hundred years ago, it was likely they would have labeled me a devil spawn and left me on a hillside.
She said a lot of things like that. Quips she clearly found amusing or colorful and repeated so often they became part of the lexicon of my childhood. She told my sister frequently that having a baby at 17 was a mistake. But, she didn’t put it that way. Instead she would look at her and say “You ruined my life” or “If abortion had been legal that year…”
The messages for me were different. They were less vitriolic, as a rule. While she resented my sister for the fact of her existence, I was to blame for a variety of character flaws personal to me. Among the list of my sins:
- I had been “the worst” baby. I never stopped crying
- I had been “born disapproving of her”
- I was intolerably conceited and she claimed “the universe gave you that lazy eye to keep you from becoming the most vain creature on the planet”
- That while my sister had been a mistake, I was at best a social blunder
Children rarely pause to consider the things their parents say to them as to the content of the claim. It certainly didn’t occur to me until much later that everything she ever said about me was really about her.
When my daughter was born she had terrible colic. She cried a lot as a result. Once, when my mother came to visit she said, “Jesus, she’s even worse than you were!” Objectively, she didn’t cry that much. Suddenly, this vision I had of myself as having cried non-stop for my entire infancy was called into question. It dawned on me that her experience of my difficulty as a baby was likely unrelated to how I behaved and tied primarily to her disinterest in parenting.
I had never really understood what she meant when she said I was born disapproving of her; if I was looking down my nose at her, blame the strabismus? I did challenge her a lot as a child. More, I think, than most children might. I knew she wasn’t making choices that put our well-being first and I criticized her for it. But, to attribute that to a baby never made any sense to me. After becoming a parent myself, I realized it was almost certainly a response to feeling a sense of guilt over her ambivalence about motherhood.
Vanity was, far and away, the quality she derided most vehemently. In retrospect it’s impossible to interpret this as anything other than misdirected self-hatred. She was beautiful, but she never felt she gained the advantage she felt entitled to because of it. In my case, I was an awkward, poorly dressed, and malnourished child that no one would accuse of being fussy about my looks. I had no concept I might grow up to be attractive, nor the expectation of the admiration of others because of it.
What I DID have was a confidence that I deserved better than what I was getting. Both from her in particular, and from life in general. My childhood was full of chaos and danger. My mother did nothing to protect us from that, and in many cases acted in direct opposition to what would benefit us. I knew she was wrong, I knew she should be doing better, and I had no problem telling her so.
To her, wanting to be safe and cared for – believing myself worthy of those things – made me vain. Deciding I could make different choices and create a better life for myself in the future was arrogant. When I started actively taking steps to achieve that and having precisely the outcomes I imagined for myself she would hiss “You are such a fucking princess.” This was her fiercest expression of contempt.
Though she said it to shame me, I said “You’re goddamned right” and embraced it wholeheartedly.
I do not know how I came by the character that allowed me to see past her vision of the world. My sister, who suffered far worse at the hands of both my mother and others, accepted the ugliness as unavoidable. Her life mirrored our mother’s in significant ways; almost as though she could not imagine a different outcome than the one written for her, no matter how awful it was.
Whatever was present in me, I am deeply grateful for it. Though we were estranged for the last nine years of her life, I know she would have been absolutely stunned to see what has become of me. The professional success, the travel, the security I have created for myself; all of these things she saw as unattainable and too much to hope for are firmly established facts for me.
And if it be vanity to believe in my own inherent worth, step aside so I can get a clear shot of myself in the mirror.
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