I remember an assignment from school: write your earliest memory. I know that I bullshitted through it and eloquently elaborated on the first time that I was sick and my dad made me poached eggs and my mom watched Roseanne and soap operas all day. But the truth is that my memories don’t fall along a linear path. I can’t simply stop in at age 12 and say, “Yes, that’s the year I traveled with my family to Florida. I remember that trip well.”
No, instead, I reach into a grab back, where my past is jumbled, without measurable time increments. I can distinguish things not by my age or by how I felt at specific moments. Instead, I remember them in relationship to major events: oh, this happened after we moved to Minnesota. And the memories themselves are images, like silent moving pictures that are always out of focus. If I was looking at someone, I remember his or her movements in jerky succession. If I was looking at the ground, I can see one spot very clearly and several objects in my periphery. I tend to remember a lot of ground pictures.
But tonight, there are three memories that I remember very clearly from my childhood. They have become part of the jumble and I can’t quite seem to recall if these were memories in their entirety, pieced together memories or possibly even dreams. In any case, they were a reflection of some things real.
They all have to do with my mother.
The third is the one that scares me the most to remember it. It haunts me, so it must be real, right? In the first house that I lived in, all the bedrooms were crowded upstairs. There was a master bedroom and two spare rooms for us kids. My older brother small room, while us three younger kids shared the big room. Eventually my dad remodeled the house, extending the upstairs over the kitchen and creating two news bedrooms so we could all have our old room. This meant, that were my closet used to be, there was a hallway. Follow it to the new part and you would have my room on side and my sister’s room on the other, mirror images of each other. Follow to the other end and on your right was the stairs. On the left was the kid’s bathroom. Smack-dab in front of you was my parent’s bedroom.
At night, I used to sneak down the hall and watch tv in my parents room. I don’t remember how their room was set up so that I could see that TV, but I knew the exact spot where I could stand/sit and watch it without them seeing me. I do remember that when you entered the room, immediately to your right was the closet with accordion doors. My parents always hid our Christmas presents in there. In the far left corner was my parent’s bathroom. The room expands out to the left and it was along the far right wall that my parent’s headboard rested. They had nightstands on either side.
My parents fought a lot. When they fought, it was usually about money or my dad’s job. Sometimes my mom would get really upset and my dad would go to dairy queen to get her a dilly bar. They were her favorites.
One night, they fought after we’d all gone to our rooms for the night. My dad found some dairy queen that was open and brought her back the dilly bars. He may have brought other things too, like flowers or a drink, but I only remember the dilly bars because she’d regularly ask him to buy them for her. When he went back into their room, he didn’t shut the door all the way. He probably didn’t think he had to since we were all supposed to be in bed. But when I heard him come back upstairs, I peaked out my door.
I heard noises that I couldn’t make out coming from their room and I crept out to investigate. At the point in the hall where I would sit and watch tv, I could see my mom. She was sitting on the floor between the bed and the far wall. It was a space just wide enough for the nightstand. She had one arm on the bed and the other moved back and forth from the wall and her face, which was distraught and distorted with tears. I don’t remember if her make-up was blurred or if she had her eyes closed or even if she spoke, it all blurs. I do remember her sobbing and making long whining noises as her mouth hung open. She looked terrifying.
Some might look upon a crying person as terribly sad, but the truth is that I thought she was simply frightening. When my dad tried to put the bag of dilly bars on the floor in front of her, she didn’t touch them. He took one out and placed it in her hand. She’d hardly taken it when she threw it at him. She then picked up the bag and threw it and the second dilly bar at him as well. It was the only time she’d had a directed anger during the entire scene, and she’d had to lift her arm of the bed to do it.
I didn’t watch anymore. I couldn’t, I was too afraid. I’m not one who is much for fear, but that’s probably the most afraid I was in my life.
This memory is so haunting because I am afraid of my mother’s unhappiness. The depths of her sadness (as well as her anger), that I saw that day, are her greatest extreme of emotion. She had other occurrences where she got that extreme, but none where I saw her cry, especially like that. And it haunts me because I don’t know if that sadness will return and cause her to do something drastic. But even more frightening, I don’t know if that extreme emotion, and especially that extreme sadness is the same sadness that I see in myself. I never want to put anyone through the complete irrationality and hatred that I saw my father have to deal with that day. This memory still overwhelms me.
My mother’s anger, however, hung with me like a heavy cloak through my childhood. If, when I was very young, I forgot something somewhere (lunch, a sweater etc.) I dreaded telling her because I knew she’d be upset. If I missed the regular bus and had to take the hour later activities bus home, I prayed fervently to all the “souls I’d helped out of Purgatory” that she hadn’t been worried and thus gotten angry. I would feel my heart pound and my mind race with worry when I felt sure that she would be at home, waiting.
The second memory reiterates her anger. It, once again, took place in my first home. We were in what was then the dining room, I believe. It was either right before school started or shortly after. We both knew that I was having trouble getting organized. I don’t think that I was forgetting to do assignments, but that isn’t a hard stretch of the imagination.
As a kid, however, (and sometimes even now) I was very proud. So even though I knew my fault, I did not want traditional ways of remedying the problem. My thought? I’m not like everyone else. I’m smarter than they are and so I don’t need the extreme fixes that everyone else needs. Sometimes people tried to accommodate me, but even then I still resisted. I wanted to figure things out on my own since no one else seemed to help me. I didn’t want the school’s idea of organization, I wanted my own. Now, I realize that sometimes doing things the way other people recommend can be helpful and insightful. And I do, as they say: swallow the large pill: pride.
As I kid, I just said: fuck it. But my mom wanted to help. So, she went to the store and she bought me a calendar. Each page was a week and it had plenty of space to write down assignments and events. She was very excited about it.
As I continue with this story, I wanted to reiterate the last sentence: She was very excited about it. I say this to hopefully partially convey the embarrassment I still feel at having done to my mother what I did to her that week.
She pulled out folders and other things that I needed (I know this because I remember our dining room table strewn with school supplies in the periphery of my vision). And then came the calendar notebook. I still remember the cover and the ugly pink swirling heart. It was the most repulsive thing I had ever seen. Not only was it pink, the girliest effing color on the planet, but it was also sloppily drawn hearts that looked more like rudimentary Anne Frank (not the artistic stuff that the Anne Frank company produced, but a knock-off brand) than hippie-chic. Even as a child, I didn’t want things that pronounced my age. This thing made other people, preppy people think that I was trying to fit in with the trends of the time. I never cared about trends – if something was legit, it proved itself. Swirly bubble hearts had never proven to be a positive fashion statement. I knew immediately that the calender notebook would be a source of embarrassment to me in two ways: 1. Because it admitted to everyone that I was not smart, but in fact stupid because I had to write things down; 2. Because it not only was it not my style but it was also a lame (probably Cub Foods) attempt at being cool – it was a red flag that I was a wannabe.
So I instantly hated the thing and wanted nothing to do with it. I didn’t say anything to my mom, but put it away in my bag. I didn’t use it and eventually she noticed. Things escalated and I eventually told her that I hated it. She had pushed me to the point of my temper. So she yelled at me to go and get it.
Then, she defeated me. She took a sharp object (I can’t recall if it was a scissors or a knife) to the calendar and tore it shreds. She hacked at the vinyl cover and ripped pages from the spiral binding (which, I remember, she had thought a very positive attribute, since it would allow for easy page turning – it had been one of her selling points to me).
I stood there, simply staring at my mother almost glowing red with anger. I wish I could remember what had made her so mad: my rejection of her gift, her frustration that I wouldn’t let her help me, possibly her new believe that no one would be able to help me? I saw the hot pink pieces of the disgusting calendar fall to the floor and lay messily on our braided rug.
She then told me to clean up the mess and she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. I crumpled to the floor, feeling myself heave as my vision became incessantly blurry. I tried to pick up the pieces and I just couldn’t get my crying under control enough to see them.
Throughout my childhood, it was a sign to me when someone destroyed something. You could be mad and not talk to someone, but the actual action of destroying something that had nothing wrong with it was a sign of true hatred. Looking back now, perhaps it was a sign of insanity, but even so, thinking of destroying something that you cared about because of someone else absolutely breaks my heart. My mom had bought that notebook to help me and she thought her plan was infallible. I don’t think she could have hated me more than she did in the moment she destroyed her plan.
I think in some ways I still haven’t forgiven myself for making her tear up the calendar and that I really never will. The worst part is that if I were to bring this incident up to her now: she’d deny it had ever happened and tell me that I made it up. So, I can’t ask her what exactly had made her so upset. Nor can I apologize for pushing her to that edge.
I think these two memories are what shape my responses to her now. Why I feel so defensive when she’s only telling me that she’s glad I’m home. I hate being home. I hate the dirty bathroom with the toilet I have to unclog. And I hate being forced to go to church to keep her from exploding. I hate having to tell her where I am all the time. I hate her sighs and insistence that she’s praying for me to get smarter because my thinking is so out of whack. I hate that most days she tells me that I’m not ready to date or for a guy, but then sometimes she insists on setting me up with someone who she may or may not yet know or at least being the one to match me up eventually.
I’m fairly certain that I would hate whatever man she picked, even if that was just on principle.
But I don’t know if I’m just waiting for her to suddenly flip out like she did on Friday because I hadn’t responded or had responded curtly to any of her three daily texts, so she sent me a text, which read: “So I will stay the fuck away from you and you can have your life and maybe I will die soon so you can be happy since I have no place with you.”
And so maybe, I’m just waiting on the defense for her to say something offensive or overly critical. And it sucks because when she is happy, I want to enjoy, but I end up actually making her upset by acting annoyed (which I am) when she’s overly cheerful. I guess I’m just saying that I feel like there is a connected between these (and other memories) and now… but I don’t quite know what it is.
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artistic
anxious
crappy
horny
thirsty