Two Not-Quite Mothers
August 30, 2006
As with all childhoods, there is too much to tell in one sitting. My friends all ask why I am so sure I will adopt, and have never been interested in having children of my own flesh. There are a million reasons, but I will start with the start.
My first memory of my mother is when I was approximately 2 years old. I am sitting on the couch, and to my left my big sister, almost 4 at the time, is bawling. To my right my little sister, about 1, is also crying, and I know it’s because everyone else is upset, and I can’t console either of them. My big sister is saying, over and over, ‘just let her go dad, she wants to go.’ Eventually I realize that my mother is trying to leave, and my father is blocking the door, and trying to get her to stay and talk and stop fighting. They go back and forth, from the front door to the porch, dad always blocking the door, and my big sister still crying the same words. I don’t know at the time that there is anything out of the ordinary with her wanting to leave, I have a vague notion that maybe she wants to go to the store. But my sisters’ crying scares me, and pretty soon, I am crying too, an repeating what my big sister is saying, and that seems to be more than dad can take. I am daddie’s girl, and someone needs to comfort us, so he lets her go, and it’s over. She leaves us, and our visits from that day are few, and I can never remember feeling emotionally connected to her, even for a minute.
A few years later, dad brings home yet another girlfriend, and to this day, they tell a cute story about how I woke up when they came home from the bar, and told her she was pretty. But I don’t remember it. My first memory the woman I would soon be instructed to call ‘mommy’ is one of the first times she spent the night, and I woke up and went to my dad’s room to ask for some cereal for breakfast. They were arguing, mostly naked with the door wide open. And I don’t remember what he said to piss her off, but I remember standing there, 5 years old, in the open doorway to my dad’s room, with my sisters separated only by a paper thin apartment wall, and her screaming at my father to ‘drink my piss.’ And I remember being so surprised when she came back the next day, wondering why she was there when she clearly didn’t like us. But the older I get, the more I think I was lucky. This memory, and the ones of the next few months before she moved in, permanently colored my perception of her. If I had ever believed her when she told everyone she met how much she loved us, it would be so much harder to deal with the abuse, and the emotional manipulations that continue to this day.
The only woman who ever made me feel loved and wanted was my grandmother, and I have considered myself motherless since she passed away when I was 12. I have known since I was a child that neither giving birth nor mere physical presence in a house with children makes you a mother - love and effort and understanding are needed as well. I have known since I was a child that when I feel I have a loving home to share, I will share it with children who need a mother, the way my sisters and I have always needed, but never got one.
~ Gayle
August 30th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
I have often wondered if it would be worse to have a mother who could not love and care for her children or to have lost a loving caring mother to death.
In the end, I think it doesn’t really matter. We are the same, we have lost the nurturing that a mother provides and found ways to still grow into loving caring women.
I’m so sorry for what you experienced as a young girl and so happy that you were able to overcome it. Thanks for sharing your story.