“What Was Your Mom Like When,. . .?”

 

I’ve never known anyone who was so compartmentalized in my life, as my Mom. When I think of her, it is with intense love, and great regret. I miss her, but I always felt conflicted. We were best at getting along once we lived a thousand miles apart. She was a loving person who had trouble believing she was worth loving and I wish I had understood her more when I was younger. She changed a lot, so that when I remember my Mom, who was 24 when I was born, I remember a different woman than my brother, who was adopted only 4 1/2 years later, remembers. My youngest brother, born when my first brother was 8 and I was 12, had a different mom altogether, even though to the world we all had Priscilla June Miller as our mother. 

When I was a child, Mom was loving, demanding, scary, and unpredictable. She was Eleanor Rigby from the Beatles song, “wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door.”

I understood that line as soon as I heard the song, instantly remembering the screaming woman who had out “the board” to spank me, dropping it in the potato bin when the doorbell rang, the furious scowl transformed into a delighted, welcoming smile as she smoothly pulled open the inner door, unlatched the screen door and beamed, “come in, come in.” to the Avon lady or neighbor who had just “popped in for a visit.”

She might drag me from bed in the middle of the night to beat me with every hanger I had left on the floor of my closet, or to hug me and cry that I had never loved her. But she always smoothed on some lipstick, pulled a precurled wig over her hair, donned a dress with a big twirly skirt and high heels before taking me to school or church. She always kissed me goodbye at the door or before letting me out of the car. 

I didn’t understand as a child, the damage done to her soul by being the odd one out in school. I heard the stories of having to wear two pink Terry cloth towels her mom had sewn together into a “dress” and having to wear thick woolen stockings and a crown of long braids wrapped around her head when the popular girls wore Bobby socks and saddle shoes and a high, short pony tail dancing with every movement. I saw her make excuses to avoid meeting my friends moms, and missed the “they won’t like me” behind the excuses. I knew that her friends were mostly poorer, needier, happy to have her bring groceries and canned food when we came to visit. I missed the belief that no one would like her if they didn’t need something from her. She couldn’t trust friendship without strings attached. 

Later, through my Dad’s devotion and my brother’s needing an advocate, and being there for my Dad during a drawn out cancer battle, she began to see her own worth, but by then I had moved away, and then dementia set in and I was missing her, even if I was in the room with her, and again, I didn’t really understand how her stiffening body betrayed her, and made her need support, until she was gone and I found her in my own aches and fears. Now sometimes I cry or scream for my mama - missing the woman I never really convinced that I loved her and wishing there could be another opportunity to tell her she was enough for me.