Mother's Day

By the time I was in fifth grade, my parents had found Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant that not only had they stopped self-medicating, but they had also found a new social group.  They each started having affairs; my mother became pregnant with another man's child — how do children know these things? — and meanwhile, we siblings, neglected and desperate, clung to a veneer of normalcy that we knew was a lie.

I remember one evening waiting for my father to come home from a trip.  I perched on the fuzzy pink cover on the lid of the commode in my parents' bathroom, watching my mother meticulously apply her makeup, which, to me, had always seemed an interminable, fascinating, exasperating project.  I was aware that my mother was beautiful, that she was admired.  Family legend has it that once my parents ran into Richard Burton in the upstairs section of a 747.  The story goes that when he saw my mother, Burton gasped: "My God!  You look just like Elizabeth!"  She did.  

That night she was transforming herself, and I watched.  The babysitter was coming over, and then my parents would go to a conference with my teacher and then on dinner date.  

When my father came in wearing his airline pilot's uniform, handsome, it struck me: no one will ever know.  No one would know how bad it is.  On various occasions teachers had called me aside to ask whether I was okay, whether I was on some kind of medication that made me "dopey."  So they obviously suspected.  But I knew in that moment, as my mother branded my father with her lipstick kiss, the power of deception.

This morning, this Mother's Day, it is dark and misty, but warm, and as I ran and ran, I thought about that evening, thought about that moment of clarity and rage and helplessness, thought about my people, we who are the children of dangerous mothers.  I feel such deep pity for those women who, through mental illness or toxic narcissism or personality disorders or addiction or their own deep wounds, are not just unable to love and care for their own children, but who neglect and abuse them.  Such loss.

Today I am alone.  My big boy in college still has several weeks before finals, and son 2.o is volunteering at the airport, and, if the weather clears, will probably get in another flight himself.  (Last week he announced, "Good news, Mom! I'm getting better at landing.  Also good news, the hail didn't start until after we were on the ground.")  I thought about that, too, how fortunate I am that they are not broken, that they are brave and unafraid of the world, feel confident of their place in it.  I sometimes laugh that my goal with my boys was to simply not ruin them.  Which is another way of saying that really my dearest hope was that they would thrive in spite of my failings.  So far so good.

This is never a Hallmark holiday for me.  It is always about grief and gratitude.  Mostly gratitude.