The Miracle of Birth
Mom and me.
I have never wanted children. Yes, I had baby dolls, including my beloved Pebbles who stuck with me through a terrible haircut, having her arm ripped off by my brothers, losing her clothes, and eventually being rehabilitated at the Doll Hospital in Bell Buckle, TN, at the insistence of my grandmother. But Pebbles was a doll, not a living child. I cannot imagine having a child of my own. The thought of creating something with my own body and loving it and being wholly responsible for it terrifies me. I almost had a panic attack when my dog had a ruptured anal sac. How in the world would I cope with a child?
Despite our so-called progressive society, this is a hard spot to be in for a woman in the South. Some people assume I’m barren. Others think my life must feel incomplete. Still others, I think, want me to breed because they want me to share in their woes. I will not.
Part of the reason I have never wanted to be a mother probably has to do with my own. My mother was no better equipped than me for parenthood, but she came from a time and place where that didn’t really matter. You just had them babies. I have had nightmares about being pregnant since I was old enough to be able to get pregnant. I will probably have them until the day I die.
I say this, because we are not all cut out to be parents and yet some of us have more education and options than others. I’m not making excuses for my mother, but she did the best she could with the tools she had.
Born into a poor blue collar family in Wilson County, TN, Mom did not have the best maternal role model in her life. My grandmother, at least according to my mother, was not loving, and my mother’s childhood was not easy. According to mom, the best option she had in the 60s was to get married and get out of the house. This also involved getting pregnant, first with my oldest brother Jeff and then with my twin brothers, Tom and Tim.
Her escape marriage didn’t last long and that’s where my father came into the picture. My mother was a hairdresser in Lebanon, TN, and would slip next door to the coffee shop in between clients. It was there my father spotted her and asked her out. The rest, as they say, is history.
I came along, unexpectedly, about 7 years after they married. People talk about “accidentally” getting pregnant, but let’s be honest, we all know how it happens. I personally had back up methods to backup methods to make sure this never happened to me. At any rate, I wound up growing up mostly as an only child after my brothers moved out when I was 7 or 8.
Growing up, my mom seemed like Supermom. She made great food, she took care of me when I was sick, she made my clothes. She was actually an incredibly talented seamstress and made all of our curtains, bedspreads, and pillows. She said she tried to teach me to sew, but I didn’t have the patience. I don’t remember that, but I do like to think that I got my love of sewing from her.
She was also very pretty: tall and thin with enormous boobs that I didn’t realize were fake until one morning my dad told me I wasn’t going to school because my mother’s “titty burst.” Apparently her saline implant had leaked out in the middle of the night and she was “lopsided.” Google would have been super helpful back then.
When her boobs were not deflated, she was a snappy dresser, again making a lot of her own clothes or wearing very stylish pieces from brands like Eilieen Fisher. Her nails were always done and she put on her Eterna 27 cream every night, telling me that I would have to start using it one day too.
In short, she was an amazing mom and I loved her so much and I still do. It’s only with hindsight that I can see that things weren’t quite right with her.
There were some things that I realized weren’t right in the moment, like the time I was playing with a friend in the third grade and she broke my Bee Gees Mr Microphone, my prized possession at the time. I went to the bathroom and when I came back, my friend was gone. I asked my mother where she went and she said, “The little bitch went home.” I couldn’t believe she said that. Later, my friend said she was never allowed to come back to my house because my mom had called her a bitch. I didn’t believe that part, but I was too scared to ask my mom about it.
However, I never questioned most of what my mother told me until I was in my 30s and would tell one of her stories to my husband.
One of these stories was the time I came home from Kindergarten and my mother was scared to death because, she said, the superintendent of our condo complex let himself into our condo with his key and tried to rape her. She was able to get away from him and ran up the hill to a friend’s house, where she waited until I got home to come get me. She said we had to be very careful because he could get in our home at any time. I was terrified.
Typing that story out, I can see all of the red flags, the questions that my husband immediately asked me: what did the police say (they were never called), did the superintendent get fired (not that I know of), why was your mother telling you about an attempted rape when you were five (in my mind, why wouldn’t she?)? At the time, though, and for 25 years after, I thought it was a terrible experience that my mother had had to live through, one of many. I thought she was a strong woman for surviving it.
All children live in their parents’ realities, whatever they may be. If your parents believe in Jesus, you probably do too. If your parents are vegetarian, you will be too, at least until you’re old enough to want Taco Bell. My mother’s reality mostly felt pretty safe to me. Later, when I was around 10, she felt like the safest person in my life when my alcoholic father would rage through our home. And maybe she was safe, to a certain extent, but she wasn’t stable or consistent.
My father was also out of town a lot, which meant me spending a lot of time with a person I was always a little scared of. I was never physically afraid of her, but I was scared of what could set her off or make things go “bad.” Once, we were on our way to the movies and I said something, I don’t remember what, and my mother flew into a rage, saying I didn’t love her, I treated her like a goddamn dog, and she turned the car around and we went home. No amount of crying or pleading could get her to change her mind. She didn’t talk to me for most of the rest of the night, but when she did, it was like nothing happened.
I didn’t know this wasn’t normal. I didn’t know it wasn’t my fault. She would eventually come back to earth and be my mom again and that’s all that really mattered to me in the end.
It was common for her to tell me, as a young child and later as a teenager and young adult, that I was the only reason she had stayed with my father and sometimes, when she was really on a roll, that I was the only reason she had never killed herself. I took that very seriously. I needed to be the best girl I could be.
I spent the entire fourth grade on homebound learning because I was sick, but I don’t remember being sick for a whole year. I remember spending days in bed, watching daytime TV before cable and wishing I could go to school. I remember going shopping with my mom and keeping her company while she sewed and watched Days of Our Lives. This was at the height of my father’s drinking and I’m not sure she didn’t keep me home to keep her company.
There are so many things like this that I think about and, in hindsight, realize were not normal behavior, especially around a child. But as a child, I had nothing to measure my experiences against. My mother’s normal was my normal.
I learned a lot about my mother when she left my father for her friend’s handyman after over 30 years of marriage. I was blindsided. My world was a snow globe turned upside down and I started questioning her, him, and everything I had known up to that point.
The mother/daughter relationship became strained that year, as she wanted to either come stay with me or me to come stay with her. As a 29 year old, this seemed like a bad idea to me, especially since my now sober father wanted me to take his side and come stay with him. I had a job, I was in love, and I wanted to live my own life. I chose myself and I still don’t know if that was the right choice or not. My mother certainly didn’t think so.
When she had left my father, she wouldn’t give any of her kids her phone number. She said my father was dangerous and was having her followed and might have her killed. My father was in bed with double pneumonia, so I thought that was somewhat unlikely. That Christmas she sent me a digital camera, a fairly new gadget at the time, so that I could take pictures of my life and email them to her. I did not.
The next several months were enough to send me to therapy for the first time in my adult life. My mother was drinking, something I had never known her to do, and making wild accusations about my father. My father, meanwhile, was desperate, looking for any way to get my mother back or to get me to contact her for him. I would not.
When my father died a year after the divorce, I hadn’t had time to even process their split, much less his death. Mom called me to ask what the general feeling toward her was like with my father’s family. I told her it wasn’t great, but we would get through it. She cried and said she was so scared to come to the funeral. I told her again it would be OK. She never asked me how I was doing.
It never dawned on me that we wouldn't grieve my father’s death together, but when I began getting calls from family friends asking me how I could be so cruel to my mother and tell her she couldn’t come to the funeral, I realized I was alone. I was first confused and then enraged. I had, of course, never told her anything of the sort, but she had taken my warning and used it to her advantage to get attention. I did not see her at the visitation of friends or the funeral. She didn’t call and she offered no support.
It took me years to understand that this wasn’t “normal” behavior for a mother. I was angry at the time, but it would be a long time before I felt the hurt and grief of essentially losing the mother I always thought I had at the same time I lost my father.
I tried, over the next several years, to have a relationship with her that involved boundaries. I quickly learned that boundaries are not something my mother does. You are either all the way in or all the way out. She wanted me to tell her that I was not mad at her or hurt by anything she had done and I couldn’t do that.
She came to my wedding and promised me she wouldn’t wear anything to embarrass me. She had started dressing young for her age, or any age really, and it could be awkward sometimes. True to her word, she showed up in a pink silk pants suit, looking lovely as always. She hugged me close and cried, again telling me she was terrified of how my father’s family would treat her. It didn’t occur to me until a few years later that she didn’t get me a wedding present.
The last time I talked to my mother, she thought I was turning 40. I was actually turning 39, but potato, potato. She said I was getting pretty old and asked if I was still planning on having kids. I told her I had never really wanted children and she responded, “neither did I,” with no irony at all.
I’m lucky that I always knew what I didn’t want. Sometimes I think that helps more than wanting one thing more than anything, like my mother wanting to get out of her house. I’m grateful I found ways to make options for myself when I planned my own escape from my not quite as crazy home. I’m glad I was smart enough to figure out how not to repeat the patterns my parents had.
I love my mother and I always will. You only get the one, or that’s what everyone tells me. The difference between me and a lot of other daughters, is that I choose to love my mother from across the state. She doesn’t understand that, and neither do a lot of other people, but it’s the only way I can move forward and have a life of my own. “Being there” for my mother would put me in the perilous position Pebbles had been in for so many years: getting dragged around and torn up, with the sole role of consoling one person, my Mom. Pebbles didn’t have a choice in her fate, but I do.
