I didn’t know the last day I spent
with my mother would be the last – but she did.
When we were saying goodbye, she
hugged me in a way that was different from how she had hugged me before and
then she told me that I was a wonderful daughter and that she was sorry for
being so hard on me because, although she’d never said it before, she thought I
was perfect. At that moment, I just thought we were having a really
awesome day, but later I knew that she was saying goodbye and at the same time
giving me the greatest gift of my life: Absolution.
It’s something I’ve had a harder
time getting from other members of my family.
Or giving to people who I perceive have wronged me. Forgiveness is a tough one. Maybe it’s because we’re Irish or maybe it’s because
we’re mean but it doesn’t come easy in my family. Never has.
When I was in first grade my
elementary school had a talent show. My
mom suggested I dress up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and sing “Somewhere
over the Rainbow”. Anyone who has ever
heard me sing knows this was a horrible idea.
But my mom insisted that I could and should do it and she would not take
no for an answer. So instead of fighting
her or humiliating myself, I just told her that the talent show was for kids
only, no parents, and that, of course, I would be performing as Dorothy. The day of the talent show when she came to
pick me up she was first greeted by a friend’s mom who asked her why she hadn’t
been at the show to watch me and one of my little friends performing itsy bitsy
spider together. She smiled her super
scary politician fake smile, made up an excuse, grabbed me by the wrist and
walked me to the car in a way that made me feel as if the school parking lot
was the green mile. She spoke to me not
at all on the ride home and then sent me to my room. When she came in to “talk” to me an hour
later, I tried to explain how I didn’t want to hurt her feelings but I just
could not sing alone; she heard none of it.
She felt zero empathy for the shamed, scared, sad little six year old in
front of her. Instead she just stared at me and said “you’re a liar” and
left. And then she brought the incident
up every single time I did anything wrong for the next twenty one years. I have relived that talent show lie so many
times it’s as if it just happened last week, instead of in 1976. That’s a long time to be struggling with
guilt over something you did as a six year old.
It could have been worse, though. At least the six year old talent show lie
didn’t result in my complete banishment.
The possibility of being shut out was always there in my house. My grandmother on my Dad’s side had no
relationship with us. To this day, I
still don’t exactly understand why. I
know she suffered greatly when my grandfather died young from Hodgkin’s disease
and she was left to raise three children on her own. And I understand that kind of hardship can
take a serious toll on a person, but you would think she would have clung to my
father, her only son. She was still talking
to him at least when he married my mother because she is in the pictures, but
sometime between their wedding and my birth, she decided that having a
relationship with my parents was not important to her. There are three sides to that story, but as a
parent, a daughter and a grandchild, I can only believe that she was wrong. Wrong to give up on her son, and wrong to
miss out on a relationship with me and my brothers. I actually met her only once in person. My mother took my brothers and me over to her
house to get some childhood pictures of my dad for a gift she was making
him. I don’t remember much except that
she had a very rambunctious poodle and a lot of pictures of her other
grandchildren but was completely uninterested in us. And trust me, we were cute. A grandmother who could close her heart to us
was a grandmother that I didn’t want or need – but the idea that she lived
thirty minutes from me and didn’t talk to any of us haunted me. How could family be so disposable?
My
mom’s parents, however, were constant presences in our lives. Grandma and Pa visited often and watched us
overnight when my parents had to go out of town. Unfortunately, Pa died suddenly of a heart
attack when I was only eleven. We were
watching TV as a family when suddenly a picture of my brother – Kevin Joseph –
fell off the wall for no reason. The
Irish believe that when this happens someone in the picture is going to
die. So Kevin and I cried and wailed
because we thought he was going to die.
At the same time, across town at my mom’s first cousin’s house, a
picture of St. Joseph fell from the wall, again, for no reason. Hours later my grandfather, Joe Pitts, was
dead. And with him died my family’s
healthy relationship with grandparents.
My
Grandma was not a woman who knew how to be alone. Pa had always taken care of her and when he
was gone, she was lost. She lived for
twelve years after he died, but it wasn’t a life. It was more like just waiting out the days
until she could be reunited with him.
And while I believe the enormity of her loss was real, the way she
handled it was wrong. See she didn’t
just wait out her days in peace; she spent them suffocating my mother with love
disguised as guilt and the two of them battled until they were both broken from
it. Every summer my grandmother would
come to stay with us and while it would always start off fun, it ended the same
way every year – with Grandma sitting outside on her suitcase waiting for
someone to drive her to her sister-in-law’s house and my mom inside crying
wishing that her relationship with her mother wasn’t so hard.
We
didn’t know it at the time because mental illness wasn’t something that people
talked about like they do today, but my mother was severely manic
depressive. I loved my grandmother but I
think her problems had more to do with being self absorbed and profoundly sad,
not mentally ill. Her daughter on the
other hand was sick. And her sickness
permeated not just our family, but of all her relationships and all of ours. When she was happy, she was the best mother
in the world. I remember the good times
and I cannot believe I was so lucky to have a mother like her. She was fun, she was kind, she was the life
of any party. My mom had charisma and
people loved her. We loved her. But we also feared her because you never knew
who you were coming home to – the wonderful mother or the scary one.
Living
with someone whose whole personality can change without reason is scary. I would leave for school in the morning and I
would be stressing all day about what would happen when I got home. What could set her off? Would she look in my sock drawer and think it
was messy and bring up the talent show lie again? Would she run into one of my friend’s moms
whose daughter she thought was smarter or prettier or thinner than me and
decide to remind me of that? Or would
she have a good day and greet me with hugs and snacks and laughter? I never knew so every day I lived in a world
of complete anxiety. Anxiety so high
that when I think about it now my heart races and I feel like I might cry. Anxiety that I never want my kids to have so
I overcompensate by reminding them after every time out how good or bad, happy
or sad, I always, always love them. Anxiety
that at once paralyzed me and made me want to run far, far away.
Living
in a world where the people closest to you are not people you can depend on
makes it hard to depend on anyone. For
me, it made me not want to deal with anyone who I believed wronged me. So I didn’t give out a lot of second chances,
if I decided I didn’t like you, I just cut ties and moved on. Well, moved on isn’t exactly right. If you’re holding a bitter grudge you have
not moved on and I could hold a grudge like nobody’s business. Combine that with the fact that I have never
been one to shy away from confrontation and I was the kind of person you did
not want as an enemy. I was filled with
so much anger that at one point I had a mental list I kept of people I thought
were so horrible that they were for sure going to hell. Do you think those people wasted a moment of
their time thinking or worrying about me?
No. But I spent hours obsessing
about how awful they were and how they’d wronged me, all the while wasting my own
precious time on people who most likely no longer thought of me at all.
And
then my son Mac was born and as soon as I saw him I wanted my mom. But she wasn’t there. She’d been gone for eight years by the time I
had my first child. In those first stressful
days of motherhood, I thought of her almost every minute. I thought about how hard her job had been and
how I had never understood that while she was alive. I thought about how mad I was that she had
left me and how I would never in a million years be able to do such a thing to
my Mac. And I imagined what a
magnificent grandmother she would have been and cursed her for depriving my
baby of that. I am not manic myself but
in those days I sometimes felt like I was because my mother was constantly on
my mind and the range of emotions I was feeling made me, at last, able to
empathize with her plight. That empathy
allowed me to finally forgive her and that forgiveness freed me from all the
other anger I was holding onto.
I
forgot about grudges. I stopped wasting
time worrying about whether or not people liked me. I just stopped being mad. Instead I spent all my time making sure that
my son was happy and that I was someone he could count on no matter what else
was going on. I took all the good things
I’d learned about parenting from my own almost perfect mother and forgot all
the bad things. And when I did that the
clouds parted and the sun finally shined in.
I
still get mad and there have been a few instances where I have felt someone was
toxic enough that I could no longer hold them dear but overall I cleaned house
of my anger. And I put people who I
thought brought out the worst in me at arm’s length, or sometimes a little
further. I’m lucky that the three people
I love the most – my husband and my two boys – bring out the best in me so I
pulled them in even closer. Losing the
anger was like having gastric bypass – I felt so much lighter. Nothing weighs you down more than a grudge.
When
my mom died, the funeral home for her wake had a line out the door and wrapped
around the corner. People came out of
the woodwork to pay their respects to her and to our family. My brother was mean to some of the guests who
he didn’t think were true friends of my mom.
I was kind to them all because I understood what it was like to have a
relationship with her. I knew that she
was capable of giving you some of the best and worst moments of your life. And so even if toward the end some of those
people had not been as close to her, I believe they came to the wake because
they remembered the good times. And I
believe from her place in heaven she had let go of her grudges and was happy to
see all her friends turn out for her.
The
day of my mother’s funeral my brother was crying in our kitchen. I put my arm around him in a show of
affection and support. He looked me in
the eye and said “I only spoke to you the last ten years because mom made me. Now that she’s gone, you’re dead to me,
too”. I thought my mother’s death would
bring my family closer together but I was wrong. It’s been fifteen years and my brother has
kept his promise. He will not speak to
me. He has not met my children. And he managed to turn my other younger,
gentler brother against me, too. If not
for my dad and my own two children, I would have no blood family at all and
that’s a really hard pill to swallow.
The
thing is I’m not angry. Every couple
months I call or text or email one of my brothers to remind them that I’m still
here. They never answer or reply but it
doesn’t stop me from doing it. I just
want to make sure that on the day they realize the anger has to go, they are
not afraid to call me because I will always be open to their return to my life. And sure, it’s also a little antagonistic but
I’m human right?
My
mom was wearing a black dress with hot pink shoes and a hot pink bag. She was at her skinniest which was always
really important to her and her arms looked great. We sat in the window of The Red Tomato in Bethesda at a tall table and shared a brie
pizza. She said she loved my haircut and
that I looked pretty. Usually she would
say that I “could be so pretty if …” but on that day there was no if. We talked about my job, about our favorite TV
shows and the errands she had to do later that day. We didn’t talk at all about the future, I
guess because she already knew that we didn’t have one. She was dead five days later.
For
a long time when I would think of her, I would picture her on life support. I would remember getting the call from my dad
in the morning and knowing as soon as I heard his voice how things were going
to end. I would remember sitting by her hospital
bedside sobbing and begging her to wake up.
I would remember saying prayers that I knew weren’t going to be answered
because even though her body was right there next to me, she was already
gone. And I’d remember how mad I was at
her for leaving. But I don’t do that
anymore.
Now
when I think of her I choose to remember her in the black dress with the pink
shoes standing on the corner of St Elmo and Norfolk in Bethesda hugging me and
telling me she loved me and then walking away.
I watched her walk down the street that day and I’ve watched her walk
away a million times since then in my mind.
It’s taken a long time, but the gift she gave me at that lunch is
something I’ve finally been able to return.
I love her. I miss her. And I absolutely forgive her. And I’m sure
that makes her feel lighter, even in heaven.
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