A memoir--my mother, myself

In the drama I Never Sang for My Father, Robert Anderson tells us that “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.”

I am just beginning to work on excavating my rather complicated relationship with my mother. Actually, some of my last memories of her are so harsh that I have not allowed myself to think much about her since she died 25 years ago this May. But she is my mother, and whether I want to admit it or not, she is still majorly affecting me--or so a soul reader told me many years ago.

This is my mother and father in the late 1970s in Camden, South Carolina, after my dad retired from DuPont.

What is that statement/belief about how we become more like our mothers all of the time. Some of us are even afraid of turning into our mothers. There's an old book entitled My Mother, Myself on my bookshelf, but I have yet to read it.

Once I have completely "figured out" a relationship to the best of my knowledge, then I do breathe easier and feel lighter and am happier. So here goes it with my mother.

Here is my mother Mary Laura Marguerite Clark Drawdy in her early 20s.

My mother was known for her beauty, but the first twelve or so years of my life, I only knew her as my mother, and I adored her. I trusted her and what she did and said. When I was young, she would play a lot with me--she would draw paper dolls and their clothes--and I would color and cut them out. I loved that about her. Later, I would always take her side when she and my father fought with each other. I have already begun to piece her story together as best I can in another blog. When I turned 16, some things happened that made me feel as if my mother had abandoned me; I blogged about the most significant of these events in an earlier entry. Still though, I sometimes hear my mother's voice in my head.

She was indeed a beautiful young woman! Always a fairly petite woman at 5'5", she was not much interested in cooking nor eating and was forever thin.

Generally, once I was on my own here in Tennessee, my parents always lived away from me. So through my 20s and 30s, I visited them at least twice a year--for several days at Christmas and again in the summer. I would always drive far distances to Kansas or Illinois or South Carolina to see them. Though the visits were not always pleasant and sometimes downright disturbing for me, I had thought that they were the norm and that they were expected of me. One of the last times that I visited while my mother was still fairly healthy, she said to me, "I asked your dad, what do you want when you visit?" When such remarks were made, I didn't know how to answer her. Now I believe that I was still desperately searching for some signs of her love for and acceptance of me.

Granted the last 5-10 years of her life, my mother was quite sick with what is now called COPD, and there were no medicines, like today, to give her much help. She was on oxygen the last few years. All of her life until she developed this terrible disease, my mother had smoked--like many people of her generation. When I was a child and got separated from her in a store, I would just wait for her familiar cough and then know where to find her.

Here is my mother in the early 1980s when she had quit coloring her hair in her late 50s. She and my father had retired in SC.  Still a beautiful woman, this was a favorite photo of hers, and she had several copies made.

One of those harsh memories that I have of my mother was after Christmas in 1987. In my late 30s, I had told my parents that I wanted to start making my own Christmases at home with my young family, but my father had coaxed me into visiting my mother in South Carolina once again. Although things were certainly tense and not going well at my home, I left my wayward husband and young child behind and flew to be with my parents.

Again, my mother was in the small town hospital, where she would recover enough to go back home and to be miserable. Pretty much my mother was miserable the last years of her life and not at all pleasant to be around. My father had even made a recording of her in one of her "fits"--bitching him out for his behavior or lacks thereof. He had played the tape for me until I begged him to turn it off. I did not want to hear my mother like that, but I understand why my father needed to share with someone. Dad said that he thought that the reason my mother acted so mean sometimes was because with her COPD, oxygen was not getting to her brain. Still protecting my mother, I tore up that tape after my father died as soon as I got the chance.   

Anyway, back to this particular visit in December 1987: After my rather long trip, my dad picked me up at the nearest airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove me to the hospital in Camden, South Carolina. Because the small hospital was out of space, my mother had been put in a private room in the maternity ward. As I waited outside her room, I heard one of her oldest friends in there with her. My father walked in and proudly announced that he had a surprise for her. When I entered the room with a big smile and went over to give her a hug, she said in the nastiest voice, "Oh, it's you." I was embarrassed and mortified that she would speak to me in that way and in front of her friend Ginny, who was such a loving mother to her own daughter.

After the visit, I allowed a few tears to fall as I waited for my father beside the window that looked in on all of the newborn babies. I felt then such a strong desire to have another baby--to become a mother again. Little did I know, not until a few weeks later, that I was already pregnant with a baby whom I would lose about six weeks later on Valentine's Day.

A few days and a few hospital visits later, my father took me back to the airport in Charlotte. Despite my mother's mood, he and I had had a fairly amiable visit, and as we talked there in the airport, for the first time I felt a real connection to and compassion for my father. Unfortunately, that was the last time that I saw him. He died suddenly and unexpectedly that next summer of a massive heart attack at the age of 64. I was 39 years old.

Some other rather harse memories of my mother have to do with my buying a house and my having a baby. Late in life (at 35), I had finally gotten a home of my own. Before purchasing that house, I had lived in various apartments and in a glorified apartments called  condominiums. I had dreamed of a house of my own for years, and one of my favorite pastimes on a Sunday was to drive around and look at houses. Actually, that's how my then husband John and I found our home here in Kingston Springs. By the time we moved into our house, I was nearly 35, and I was so proud of our new home. Back then, I was a crazy perfectionist and kept things spotless. Of course, I just couldn't wait for my parents to visit us and see our new home. When my mother finally came to visit, she sat on the couch in my living room, looked up, and remarked that she had never liked cathedral ceilings. Later she informed me that there was soap scum under the soap dish in the bathtub (The “soap scum” was actually cement!)  and dust on top of my refrigerator (which I was sure that my tall dad had told her).

Also late in life at age 33, I had had my one and only child--a daughter that I named Ellen Clark (after my Granddaddy Clark). Like most parents, John and I loved that little baby s-o-o much. She was definitely the light in our eyes, and of course, we delighted in taking her to visit my parents. My mother had already been a grandmother for 16 years by then. Their only other grandchild, a granddaughter named Shelley and her mother had lived with my parents for several years when she was a toddler. I really didn't think that my mother gave much attention to my daughter Ellen, but I rationalized that she was older and didn't feel well. On one of our visits to SC, my mother declared, "You and John just love Ellen too much." Again I didn't know how to reply to such a remark.

This is my first visit to my parents after Ellen was born. Ellen is about six months old here, and I am 33.  My mother was 59. She died just 6 years later in her mid 60s.

  
After thinking and thinking about my mother and me this morning as I wrote this blog post and in comparing this last picture of her with the first one in the late 1970s, I notice that my mom really doesn't look well as early as 1983. That COPD must have been brewing several years before it got a complete hold of her in the mid 1980s. She may have even felt sicker than she let on. By then I was certainly too enmeshed in my own personal drama, too busy with being a new mother, and teaching in a new school to have much time and energy for her.

Though she never talked about it, I think of her dark-hued childhood, of the hurt and shame she must have felt when her parents divorced in the late 1930s. Though she never mentioned it, her father was an alcoholic, who died when she was 35, and her own mother was geographically and emotionally distant and solemn. Again how sad and shameful when her only sibling and teenaged brother Joe went to jail for robbing a gas station in the early 1940s. Later in her early 30s, how incredibly tragic that she became completely estranged from him for the rest of their lives. How melancholy that my mother never did find the love and acceptance that she was looking for in my father's large family. No wonder my mother depended on her good looks and on my father to make her happy. And of course, both of them eventually failed her.

My mother never worked outside the house once she married my father in her early 20s. For nearly five decades through her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and into her 60s, she was a wife, a mother, and a housewife (married to her house?) Like many in her generation, she was a stay-at-home mother; she was an active mother through her 20s, 30s and mid 40s, while my sister and I were still at home.

Because my father's career moved us around, she could not have held onto a job outside the home for very long anyway. She kept a really clean, uncluttered house, but I do not recall her having a passion for any hobbies or outside interests. Though she put good dinners on the table for us, she eventually became a disinterested cook.

After I left home, at times she turned to drinking, and at times she was severely depressed. Being a life-long housewife had not fulfilled her. When her marriage became unbearably unhappy in her late 40s and she would call me to complain about my father, I encouraged her to leave him, but she did not have the confidence to do so. A few months after he died, she was happy for the first time in a long time, enjoying the birds singing in the mornings and the taste of a Reese's cup. She must have felt free of him and his bi-polar disorder at long last. Unfortunately, my mother died of the COPD in the spring of 1989, a short 10 months after my father’s death. In contrast to what some may think, it was definitely not her grieving for him that took her life. It was her weakend heart from her disease and from her anger at what life dealt her.

I weep now cooling tears of understanding and forgiveness. Mom, I am sorry that I have neglected you for these last 25 years, since your death. I have come to believe that your seeming not to love me was all about you. It was never about me. It's too damn bad that we children take on our parents' shit so much. We always blame ourselves for our parents lack of attention and affection; we think that we have done something to cause our parents not to love us, to deserve their neglect. We project their stuff onto ourselves. But the fact is that my poor mother did not love herself, so how in hell could she love me?

British poet Philip Larkin expresses it so well in his short poem called "This Be The Verse."

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.