Mom

So my Mom passed last week. Everyone dies, and she got out pretty easy, just quick heart pains and a few minutes later she was gone. While we weren't very close, in some ways it's been a lot harder on me than I expected. In my mind (in prepping for this inevitability), I'd focused on the grief of her not being there, the loss, her never being able to grow and admit our past and get closure, and so on. All that was easy to understand, and prepare for, and cope with. What is hard is having to re-live the past, bite my tongue, and suffer the indignities around her passing.

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. It's tough when you were there, their actions hurt you, and don't do lies (fictions) well. You have this friction of living in two different realities, with no chance to bridge them.

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. So she couldn't do it. We were arguing once about one of her fictional versions of events (I in my early 20's), 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, or just built firewalls around the past that we couldn't broach in conversation or we'd both get mad. (Me at her lies, and her at my truths). Or some degree of both.

We reached detente. We would both avoid the past 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 my Mom, selling the fiction of having sacrificed for me -- when I was a child that had to raise myself, as I was often more responsible than my parents. So the present, or even the past back to my 20's was fine -- 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. 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 or disappointed you were at that event. And knowing that you can't talk about any of it. That's the hard part.

Photos have a memory, and that memory is attached to feelings. And not all of them are good. In fact, if you had a bad childhood, most of them are not.

• There's a baby picture, that came with a lie about by father
• Oh look, there was the time you forgot my birthday and went out to a party that night instead.
• There's the pictures of the family in the UK, but they left me behind.
• There's the family desert motorcycle rides that I was never included in.
• There's my late College graduation, an accomplishment that "made them most proud of me", but reminds me that my parents didn't help me with college, and were most impressed because I'd go along with a system.
• Look, there's no pictures of Mom in any of our houses -- because she never came to visit us, over 30 years. Late in life, if a bridge tournament was in our city, and it was convenient, we'd do dinner. But that's not the same thing as actually making an effort to visit us.

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. 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 annoyance.

🗒️ NOTE: Now 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: 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 we didn't have kids, partly because karma was likely to pay me back. 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. And 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 deal with. 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 was a difficult child (and worse teen) that could have had an easier life if I didn't buck the systems. 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 them. For self-validation, attention, or economically. Thus it's not all bad... there are just many parts of it, that I don't like to visit. And unfortunately, during funerals, you are forced to revisit it -- and in ways that don't match your reality.

So I don't like the past, because I don't have control over it -- and it wasn't nice to me. I prefer the present, or the future -- I can fix things, be better, adapt, avoid conflict, and so on. All a much better place to be, than having to recognize the abuse (verbal or physical), that I was born of a mistake -- and too often treated like that, or that my parents treated my brother and I so very differently, in front of everyone (to my humiliation, and hurt).

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 tortured that while I don't like to wallow in bad memories, I'm forced to re-live my Mom's life -- and remember the little cuts and indignities that I'd rather not be forced to remember her by.