#but the dad has no balls and thus won't divorce her

[duanecbrooks]

On (Still) Being Torn     It was almost ten years ago that my Mom died and I remain conflicted concerning her death. There is still a titanic struggle between my intellectual self and my emotional/psychological self about her passing.           I'll explain what I mean.             Let me first say, however, that for the overwhelming majority of the time she was alive, Elizabeth Irene Brooks was, quite simply, one of the genuinely great mothers of all time, if not the genuinely greatest. The earliest memory I have of her is this time she, I, and a group of neighborhood kids were playing ball outside and it began sprinkling. Being in that I was at the time not a very social person, I pointed out the sprinkling (my exact words being: "It's starting to rain") in the hope that the game would end and I could go back inside. Mom's affectionate response: "You won't melt or lump."     And there other facets of this woman that deserve mention. The way she consistently cooked and cleaned for me. The fact that, for the rest of her life, even though she and my Dad divorced, she never in any sense tried to poison my mind against him, always, always speaking well of him (Indeed, when one time it was arranged that my Dad would certainly, definitely visit us--when said divorced was final, he took up residence in New Jersey with his new wife Terry, where he lived right up to the day he died--she went into sheer glee, joyously grabbing both of my hands and literally doing a jig with me). The way she was an uber-solid, never-wavering brick while I was going through what was easily the worst period of my Asperger's (Actually, there was one time--one time--that she hit me that I'll go into later. However, as I'll explain, I richly deserved it).               And there are other times that are worthy of remembering. During my adolescence Mom bore a striking resemblance to this dazzlingly beautiful black singer/actor named Barbara McNair, who was quite popular at the time. While I was in the hospital recuperating from an injury that happened to me at school, Mom came to visit me and, while she was there, I told my hospital roommate how much Mom resembled the aforementioned performer. After my hospital roomie and I talked for a while, Mom, sporting a grin, asserted: "I wish I had [McNair's] money." Later, also grinning, she told my roommate, regarding me: "You want to know anything about show business, you ask this boy." Also: I used to regularly write letters-to-the-editor to my hometown newspaper The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other publications, which, more often than not, would be printed. Eventually Mom, without any urging from me whatsoever, collected literally all of my printed missives and compiled them in a quite attractive and quite sizable binder. And not once, not once, did Mom ever ask me: "Why are you wasting your time on that meaningless stuff?" And as for that one time Mom hit me, it was during the 1980s, when I was deep, deep, deep into my Asperger's--in point of fact, as was mentioned earlier, honestly the deepest I'd ever been. Mom and I were having this very forceful argument--about what, sad to say, has long escaped my memory--and in the midst of it, freely displaying an arrogance and a callousness that to this day shame me, I said to Mom: "The hell with you" and turned away. To this Mom of course spun me back around to her and gave me a good, hard left hook (Even then she showed me unconditional love, saying to me after she'd done it: "'The hell with you.' Now what kind of way is that for a son to talk to his mother?").               Yet when Mom took ill, her usually giving, usually loving demeanor changed and changed majorly. She became snappish, intolerant, and flat-out mean-minded.             Here are examples.                   .One day while we were riding along looking for the office of this doctor with whom she'd made an appointment. There was a very long stretch of time when we couldn't find said office so I, alas, engaged in my lifelong habit of playing with my fingers. "Don't play with your fingers!" Mom screeched. "Watch the numbers [of the houses we were passing], please!" And even though I immediately got on Mom for screaming at me, she didn't apologize until around a week later.          .Mom had developed a deep girl-crush on the professional-men's-tennis sex symbol Roger Federer. One night the two of us were in her room watching him play and the time came when I had to take my meds and go to bed. Yet Mom, completely ignoring the fact that I had to take much-needed, indeed, crucial medication, insisted that I stay and watch Federer make this play. And some time later, I was home alone and I was planning to go someplace and I was speaking to Mom over the phone--where she was at the time, alas, has completely left my memory--and she actually wanted me to stay home and watch this televised match Federer was scheduled to play so I could tell her about it when she got back home.                   .One morning I was in bed and Mom was standing over me and out of the blue she snappishly said: "I wish you'd go out and clean off the snow [from the driveway]." When I protested her language and her demanding tone, she quickly shut me down ("All right, don't get excited. Forget about it").                   .Mom at last finally had to be put in a hospice. During a visit I made to her we got into an argument wherein I expressed firm resentment over Mom's incessant "attacks." At this she snarled: "You deserve to be attacked!"                   .The absolute final remark I heard Mom say before she died was, when she got out of bed despite the fact that she was clearly too weak to do so and I ordered her to lie back down, her angrily complaining that I was "hollering" at her.                     And thus it would go. Allow me to say right here and right now that I am perfectly aware that Mom said the things she did and behaved the way she did because she was facing the one situation in her life about which she could do nothing--namely her upcoming death--and it frustrated, indeed, scared the crap out of her. Therefore, when she lashed out, she was lashing out not at me but at the one condition in her life over which she had absolutely, positively no control. And: I am also fully aware that, in dredging up the times Mom was hurtful and offensive--which, it shames me to say, I repeatedly do--I'm entirely bypassing, in fact, entirely backhanding the vast majority of my time with her during which she was, to come right out with it, simply one of the most outstanding mothers of all time, if not the most outstanding. And I know full well that if Mom had been completely together, if she could have somehow stood outside herself and could have heard and saw what she was saying and how she was behaving toward me, she would have been fiercely remorseful. It brings to mind what the towering Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote:                                                   "O wad some Power the giftie gie us                                        To see outsels as ithers see us!"                   However, all this knowledge is entirely in my head. It after all this time has not fully reached my heart.               Other factors that are impacting my feelings: In point of fact--and let it be noted that I'm profusely wincing as I say this--I have and have long had a Carol Brady/Shirley Partridge/Clair Huxtable-influenced notion of what a mother, and especially a black mother, is supposed to be. Thus, in being hurtful and offensive like she was--and permit me to say that I fully realize how this sounds--Mom to me was failing to live up to Clair Huxtable standards. Then, too, it still hurts me that my own mother was behaving so negatively towards her own son. I have and have long had this vision, it saddens me to say, of mothers as always-patient, always-affectionate, always-loving. Mom's words and behavior during her final days gravely wounded that vision (In truth, I continue to have the attitude that Drew Barrymore compensated for being the monumentally bratty, monumentally immature, monumentally selfish mother she was in Riding In Cars With Boys by being the greatly warm, greatly attentive, greatly loving mother she was in Blended). That these outlooks completely, completely ignore and, in fact, swat away the facts that Mom was 1) dying and 2) human is knowledge that I wholly realize intellectually. However, I regret to say, it has not fully gotten through emotionally/psychologically.     So I continue to go through the tortures of the damned concerning Mom's death. On the one hand, I am mightily bitter and mightily resentful regarding the fiercely angry, fiercely intolerant, very often venomous woman she was during her last period. On the other hand, I know full well in my head, not, alas, in my heart, that such bitterness and such resentment not only display titanic insensitivity concerning the considerable fear--indeed, the considerable anguish--that Mom felt but also wholly obscures the fact that, during the great majority of my time knowing her, she was, to employ a line from the hit 1990s number, "the closest thing to perfect that I've ever seen."