I’ll be staying home on Sunday. I detest mother’s day. My mother was a violent, drunken narcissist and it would be bordering on impossible to find a time she when was nice to me. I vividly remember when acne started for me. Not because of worrying about dates or classmates. I didn’t have dates because I was what she called her “built in babysitter.” I had to watch her kids while she went out and got drunk. After getting dressed one school day morning, I walked into the kitchen, and my mother gleefully announced, “Debby has a pimple on her nose. She looks just like a witch.”
Nothing I did was right. Nothing I did made her proud. Although I wasn’t allowed to take math and science courses in high school, I put myself through college starting at age 25. I wasn’t allowed to go to college after high school although I badly wanted a college education. I earned two degrees. One in journalism and the other in biology. It was not easy to take science courses having never had any science classes in high school. I did it anyway. My mother refused to come to my graduation because she had to “open up the cottage.” My mother and her husband, hereinafter The Drunk, owned a cottage at a lake in the Southern Tier of New York. My siblings, their friends, and the hired help could spend weekends at the cottage. I wasn’t allowed to go there. One year, The Drunk told Jim to fix the dock at the cottage so there would be a nice place for them to play. Jim declined.
One summer, my mother and siblings went to the cottage during the week, and I had to stay home and babysit The Drunk. I’d spend the day going through cookbooks looking for interesting recipes to make for dinner. The Drunk would always come home late, tell me he had already eaten, and stagger up the stairs to go to bed. I asked to go with my mother and siblings, and she told me I couldn’t.
When I would spend the night at a friend’s house, my mother would tell me after I got home, “It was so peaceful while you were gone.”
Imagine a hurt so deep that even 51 years later I can vividly remember what she said to me.
One year, I got her an especially appropriate mother’s day gift: a Venus flytrap. She let it die. Another year, I drove to her house to give her a mother’s day gift – can’t remember what it was – and sat in her driveway crying. That’s how much I didn’t want to see her. I forced myself to get out of the car, walk up to the front door and ring the doorbell. It never occurred to me to just walk in. It wasn’t my house.
At my maternal grandmother’s funeral, she bragged to the extended family about drinking so much she puked. She then proceeded to talk about her kids growing up. I remained silent simultaneously wishing she said anything about me and dreading her saying anything about me because I knew whatever she said would be hurtful. My sister-in-law said a friend had made a casserole for the family. I silently wondered if it would be okay for me to stay and eat some of the casserole. I wasn’t part of the family. No one threw me out, so I stayed and ate.
One day, my sister-in-law was at my mother’s house. She gave my SIL wine. She didn’t offer me even lukewarm water in a cracked cup. When I mentioned that to her, she made it my fault that I had nothing to drink. After all, she insisted, it was my house. It was never my house.
While I was working between high school and marriage, I asked – I knew better than to just take – to have an egg so I could have an egg salad sandwich for lunch the next day. She refused to let me have an egg.
I don’t have children – a decision I’ve never regretted – because I could never do to another person what was done to me and I knew no other way. One therapy session I asked my psychologist why anyone would want to have children. He thought I was making a joke. I still can’t imagine why anyone would want children. It isn’t easy not to have children. I got pressured by both friends and family who, for some reason, thought biology was destiny. Turning 40 was a relief. People stopped pressuring me because, science notwithstanding, people think pregnancy after age 40 is too dangerous. What an incredible relief to be allowed to be myself.
At age 66, I discovered being without children was one of the healthiest things I’ve done. A biopsy revealed I have a septate uterus. If I had managed to get pregnant, I would have had a 90% chance of a miscarriage. Deciding not to have children didn’t just save my sanity; it may well have saved my life.
Time, and a whole lot of therapy, removed from me a longing to have a mother. I still hate mother’s day.
Deb's Art 