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donnerpartyofone · 6 years

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I don’t ever remember feeling good. I don’t mean to say that I’ve never had moments of happiness, that I don’t love my friends, that I regret getting married; I’m not denying that I’ve had the opportunity to pursue passions in life, or that I feel incredibly lucky to have led my privileged life. I mean that I wanted to kill myself when I was a really little kid. I suffer from an incredibly detailed long term memory that goes back before I reached the age of two, and what I remember about childhood is the scathing heat of embarrassment, itching under a layer of cold sweat, revulsion at the hideousness and impracticality of my own body, horror at a world that was ugly, dirty, cheap, boring and airless, a world that was all these things and that required mandatory participation, a factory that makes nothing. I vacillated between mindless rage, and violent sobbing, which I indulged on purpose in pursuit of catharsis. There wasn’t much that I wanted, because everything seemed so repulsive. The main thing was that I wanted to be left alone, and unseen. Each morning I would wake up gripped by panic, because I knew that once I left my bedroom to come to breakfast, everyone was going to look at me. It would take me what felt like hours to work up the nerve to open the door, and when I did I would begin to scream “DON’T LOOK AT ME! DON’T LOOK AT ME!” like a toddler version of Frank Booth. It’s pretty hilarious to think about, but the truth is that I still feel like doing that every time I show up somewhere.

My earliest memory is of my mother trying to take my picture. It took place in an apartment I couldn’t exactly place, so at first I thought it must have been a dream. I was very little, but I understood enough about what the camera meant--that I was being stared at. I turned away, and was repositioned; then I tried to run away. My mother chased me, increasingly infuriated, until I was cornered behind the hilariously prison-like bars of my crib, where she could photograph me whether I liked it or not. I eventually found the resulting picture of myself agonizing behind the crib, confirming that I remembered being about one-and-a-half, living in an apartment before the house I grew up in. The memory serves as something like a metaphor for everything I have been afraid of--helplessness, captivity, surveillance, and of course, my mother.

There is no doubt that I had a serious chemical problem that caused my catastrophic rages and suicidal ideation, even so early in life. (I would find out about that...well, just a few years ago) But, lest I fall into the trap that therapy so often creates--the belief that everything that is wrong with you is within your own power to change, that sadness and anger are only the result of your own bad attitude, which just needs an adjustment--I have to admit that there is something within all this about my mother. I have traditionally categorized this particular woe as a void of maternal relationship. My mother and I “didn’t get along” or “didn’t really relate”, and then before I was old enough for us to have our first adult conversation, she was dead. As I teased out some anecdotal details of our absence from each other’s lives with my first therapist, that doctor once started one of our sessions by blithely declaring, “So you say your mother hated you!” Actually I never said that, but thanks for illuminating things so brightly, you...fucking asshole. Ironically, one of the things I didn’t like about this young, attractive, waspy therapist was that her Kelly Bundy-ish work attire made it impossible for me to bring up any anxieties I had around my own attractiveness, or my alienation from the rest of my gender. The alienation from the rest of my gender that had certainly begun with my alienation from my mother.

I don’t remember a single nurturing, initiatory experience with my mother. I had my first period young, and when I naturally went to her for help--well, to be fair, I probably told her that I more or less understood how things went, but I still think we probably should have had a longer conversation than just her telling me not to flush maxi pads down the toilet, and coolly dismissing me. I remember the first time I tried on makeup, her makeup of course; as soon as she spotted me, she asked “Are you wearing makeup?” in this razor sharp tone, and scowled at me until I followed her unspoken instruction to go to the bathroom, wash my face, and send myself to my room. Again, no further discussion of makeup, clothing, or general womanhood issues ensued. Similarly, I remember a day when I had become just old enough to pick out some of my own clothes. We went shopping for underwear, and every model she suggested, I just wanted in black. I didn’t realize what kind of rage this was stoking in her until she suddenly snapped, “DON’T YOU WANT ANYTHING OTHER THAN BLACK?” and spun away from me. I had no idea what rule I was breaking to deserve this, although the truth is that probably some primitive part of me understood that it was kind of a sexual problem. In the following years I developed into a huge comic book nerd, spending almost all my time copying what I didn’t really know were pretty sleazy pinup images of female characters out of X-Men comics. I had an inkling that these were sort of horny-looking, but I was really attracted to the drawings, which were heavily cross-hatched and compulsively detailed, according to the predominant style of the '90s. That kind of intense, microscopic linework has always attracted me, and one day I stupidly asked my mother, an artist herself, what she thought of a certain drawing I was studying. Most unfortunately, it was of the White Queen, a really idiotic character whose costume is essentially lingerie. What really interested me about it was the linework, but my hopes of discussing art were dashed when my mother spat “I THINK IT’S BORDERLINE PORNOGRAPHY!” and promptly stormed off. That probably would have been a pretty good time for her to talk with her insecure, confused eleven year old girlchild about feminism, body positivity, or any of the other facts of being a woman that I desperately needed to hear. I didn’t get any of that either when, around the same time, I started trying to talk to her about feeling fat and ugly, and she just threw a diet book at me. When I remember my mother, I most immediately remember the back of her head.

This all makes my mother sound like some sort of tyrannical throwback housewife, but none one would have told you that about her. Mom was “cool”. A playfully subversive hippie painter from Brown who loved kitsch and camp, she filled our house with old pulp novels, 3D horror comics, bootlegs of Mystery Science Theater 3000, tapes of Warhol’s Frankenstein and Dracula. She was a striking dresser, imperiously intelligent, and brutally funny. She was outrageously popular among everyone who knew her. The strange truth, though, was that while she had the outward appearance of a mischievous hipster on the cutting edge of culture, on the inside she had a rigid resistance to anything she considered psychologically or emotionally abnormal. Sadness and frustration were unacceptable, antisocial qualities, inconveniences that were grounds for rejection. So, as if she’d been cursed by a spiteful witch, instead of having a fun, affectionate, curious, creative mini-me, her first born turned out to be a taciturn suicide case, constantly quivering with fear and rage--the ultimate in uncoolness. I have a recollection of being around 12 and complaining to her about a friend of mine who was (also) sort of a drip and a drama queen. My mother’s advice to me was to say to my difficult friend, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” which is a clever way of expressing sympathy while giving no credit at all to the sources of the person’s pain. Even at that young age, I kind of thought...hey wait a minute, that’s exactly what she’s been saying to me!

Lest anyone think of her as some sort of roundly superior specimen, I can also say that she was sort of a nerd. She had a huge number of allergies, and also asthma, which she passed on to my brother and me. (And ironically, my lifelong snorting and snuffling and sneezing became one of the many things about me that visibly disgusted her) This, combined with my father’s amorphous environmental illnesses (see: the brilliant Todd Haynes movie SAFE), compelled my parents to try to move house. When I was about 11, we moved across our grimy, depressed city to a much bigger house in a nicer neighborhood. Shortly after we got settled, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Her doctor’s advice was to go home and make her peace, immediately, but she shocked everyone by surviving for at least another three years. When people hear that, they always respond as if it must have been some sort of beautiful miracle. No one who has lived with the dying could think this. Our lives turned into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, quickly and consistently, every day a frank, unromantic confrontation with mortality, until it was over.

What could I possibly feel? This person who was a virtual stranger to me, who didn’t like me, who turned into a rotting corpse in front of me, had died in agony. Instead of trying to raise a happy, healthy person, she had sat back expecting me to seduce her, and I had failed. So, I didn’t know what the loss of her really meant. I would never understand anything about maternity, and I would never figure out anything about being a woman that I didn’t ultimately make up for myself. The only thing I really knew about first hand was death. I didn’t understand much of anything about my mother’s actual biological reality, because no one really communicated with me about it, but I knew for sure that the human body is a bunch of bullshit and there is just no reason to be precious about it, ever. Unfortunately, one is never left in dignified solitude with their own interpretation of death. Death is a curse that befalls the living, who are then suddenly and disproportionately responsible for each other’s feelings. This is never more true than when you physically resemble the dead. You become everybody’s confessor, the person with whom they try to relive their experience with the living, and you better be nice about it--even if you are technically more entitled to grief and resentment and anguish than anybody in the room. And of course, this was never more true than with someone who had always frightened me more than my mother: my mother’s mother.

#the big story #long post

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