Diagnosing Mother
Right now, my mother is somewhere between Colorado and Kentucky, driving her car, disoriented, and probably stoned. I haven’t spoken to her in over two years, but I received a text from my brother a few days ago telling me that my mother was in the hospital, which is something I used to have to deal with, not my brother. My brother did not tell me that my mother is driving back to Kentucky because he threw her out. “I told her I can’t have her toxic crap around my family,” he later tells me. But by that time, he is talking to her again.
Of course, “right now” is relative. I wrote that years ago and by now, she will have long ago arrived at her destination and a week later, after an ugly fight with the friend she moved in with, she will have moved on. It used to take longer for her to turn on people, to ‘split’ on them, but her age and her increasing use of weed has significantly decreased the time it takes for her to split on someone. Or it could be something else. Her own mother also got harder with age, quicker to turn on someone for what seemed like ridiculous reasons. They say certain diagnoses such as Borderline Personality Disorder run in families. Or, you’re more likely to be diagnosed BPD if one of your parents was as well.
What runs in families is different if you ask doctors or families. In families, it can be meanness, a taste for lemon meringue pie, hardheadedness, bad taste in men, queerness. For doctors it’s usually something that can be diagnosed with a genetic test, something obviously encoded in our genes like alcoholism. Or depression. Difficult to know what a doctor means by “hereditary” when we are blamed for the symptoms of disorder even when it is written in our genetic code.
There are many more kinds of mental illness (diagnoses) than mothers. I was a reader and I learned from books, music, and what TV I was allowed to watch, about mothers. They were nurturing/kind or they were evil/abusive/even murderous (step) mothers. There was no room for any other kind.
Think of all those mothers from early TV shows: Samantha on Bewitched forced to subdue and swallow her own unimaginable power for her boring, “normal” mortal husband. She is considered a good mother and wife as long as she can control her own powers (assure her husband that he is more powerful than she is) and later, her daughter’s.
Think Medea whose story as it has been retold and retranslated by men as the ultimate murdering mother who kills her children to punish her always absent and philandering husband, their father. She’s the crazy ex men love to talk about as if her particular evil was kept hidden from them until they were trapped in marriage and fatherhood. The ultimate bait and switch. But, of course, it’s women who have to deal with the real bait and switch.
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“I know you don’t want to talk about her, but…” this is how my Dad starts on the phone and before I can say anything he is telling me about my mother anyway. I’ve always been more like my Dad in a lot of ways. We both love to read and write. We both like to fix things and we tend to assume we will know how to fix a thing and that our solution won’t make things worse. But sometimes fixing a thing is just about making it appear normal to meet the expectations of others. Sometimes fixing something doesn’t fix anything.
One of the definitions of “fix” is to fix in place and/or time. “to give a permanent or final form” is one of Merriam-Webster’s. Human relationships don’t have permanent or final forms until they do and then they are no longer a human relationship, they are dead. Many parents fall into the trap of trying to fix their children in time. Usually a time when they were dependent on their parents and trusted them completely, doing whatever a parent told them to do because, really, they had no choice.
Right now, I am on the phone with my father who tells me that she is moving into an assisted living facility. She will have her own apartment. The chef is celiac so she can eat all the food. She was living in a different house in Lexington (not the one we spent hundreds of hours fixing up for her, not the one she kicked us out of), but the upkeep was too much for her. I didn’t ask to know these things, but now I do. Now I imagine the place she will live in soon. I know where it is. It is part of the golf course we lived next to when we first moved to Lexington so my father could teach at the University. I remember the golf balls in the yard. I was four. I remember a bee sting. I remember a sick robin. There is a picture of me petting a robin in the front yard of that suburban box house.
So now she is alive again and the many versions of her I’ve created, that she’s created. The mother who died of COVID19. The mother who didn’t. The mother who didn’t tell me she had always hated my wife. The mother who didn’t tell me I was a loser and would always be a loser. The mother who didn’t undermine me every way she could. The mother who didn’t move us to someone else’s dilapidated farmhouse in the country with no heat because she had the hots for the owner. The mothers who did. I don’t know what to do with all of these mothers.
Then there is the me who is so angry with her. The me who feels sorry for this woman who is so lonely and terrified, this woman who would rather ruin relationships permanently than face the possibility that someone might abandon her. The me who wants to forgive and forget. Again. But knows it will all just happen again. History repeats because these relationship dynamics are deep grooves in spacetime, deep grooves our thoughts fall into, our behavior following in a decaying orbit around this dead star. I don’t know what to do with all of these me’s.
Right now she has moved on and had another “incident.” She is in the hospital. My brother and my ex-stepmother are dealing with this situation me and my wife have dealt with multiple times. She stops taking her medication and ends up in the hospital. To them this is a new and serious incident, but I know the shape of this drama and its outcome.
