I dreamed about my Mom last night, probably because of today's celebrations for all Mother's on their very well-deserved special day.
I dreamed she was alive, and that she was sober. Neither true.
She's been dead since 1997, and was rarely sober for any extended period in my lifetime. I'm almost 55, but I can hear her voice as clear as a bell, more so than I can some people whom I see daily, and are very alive. Even now, I often catch myself as I begin to dial her old telephone number.
I guess drunks can be funny, at least they are often portrayed that way. Funny — that is, unless you live with one; unless the drunk in your life is also your primary caregiver.
This may not sound like a tribute, but it is. My mother was a tortured soul. Something — I always thought sexual abuse when she was young — compelled her after taking that first drink to never stop. Her heart was broken, as mine is now when I think remember her.
She was a true virtuoso, a classical violinist so good that she was offered a chair in a prestigious orchestra when she was just a young woman from Missouri, not a state from which musicians were normally recruited. This orchestra literally traveled the the U.S. and the world.
I know now that she was afraid — no, terrified — to accept this one-time opportunity, an opportunity that wound have changed her life forever. A choice that would have made this brilliant and beautiful farmer's daughter into a cosmopolitan woman, long before that term was widely used. Instead, she made a different life-changing decision: She married my father.
It was 1950. My father had come back from war (World War II) deciding to become an artist. My parents had been high school sweethearts, so it was easy for him to resume their relationship and to propose. When they wed, my mother had never taken a drink.
My dad was — and is — a natural rebel. He didn't want to follow his father into "The Store," a large department store that his father ran with his two brothers. He hated it with an abiding passion. So, the newlyweds shocked their collective families and moved to California — an art mecca beloved by their fellow members of the "Beat Generation." My mother also wanted desperately to leave, to free herself, from the Midwest, and to finally shake the dust off her clothes and the Bible belt's intolerance.
I think they were happy for a time, but my mother was prone to depression, a disease little discussed in those days. After my birth in 1956, she suffered postpartem depression, again an affliction unheard of when it happened to her.
My father had given my mother her first drink, and he carries the guilt for it to this day. Soon after my birth, she began to drink in secret. She was a 1950's housewife, a stay-at-home mom with a baby and a drinking problem. The only proof my father had of her problem was her increasingly erratic behavior, which we eventually called her being "groggy." Quite a euphemism, that.
I remember her being drunk from the time I was 4, up until she died. I also remember her kindness, generosity, humor and an abundance of love that she showered on me. Her hair was so black that it had blue highlights. She was exotic looking, and strangers of different nationalities always assumed she was a kinswoman. Once, she told some who claimed she was a Native American that she was in fact a member of a particular tribe — one that she made up on the spot. She winked at me, then deadpanned the delivery so that the person believed her.
In reality, she was a German Jew, but her mother's family hid their heritage, never discussing it — even within the family.
My mother was magical, a deeply creative woman of so many contradictions. Suddenly, after a successful symphony with a local orchestra she played in when I was 12, she announced she was simply giving up the violin — forever.
In my childhood, she supported me in everything I ever tried to do. She also threatened suicide numerous times, and ripped out the pages of my father's beloved books to hurt him once when she was drunk. As I grew older, she wasn't the same woman whom I had grown up with. I firmly believe it was because of her untreated alcoholism.
She never admitted to her drinking, but did tell her pastor decades later. My parents divorced, and when I was 18 she inexplicably moved back to the state of her birth — the state she loathed — to care for her aging mother. Her mother had never told her she loved her, or even hugged her when she was a child. Go figure.
I'm an only child, and I'm glad. Our home-life was so messed up, it's good there was only one kid to go through it.
After my mother moved back to Missouri, I married and later divorced. After several years of my own torturous self-reflection, I realized I'm bisexual. I've been with my female partner since 1982.
My mother returned to her conservative roots as soon as she set foot back in her home turf. She drank really heavily while my grandmother remained alive, and even more afterward. Eventually, she married an alcoholic and drank more openly. Abruptly, she told me she sometimes played "the fiddle" at church. I tried to encourage her music, but she backed away from it again and stopped playing.
Her church, Southern Baptist (naturally,) was beyond ultra-conservative. I told her over the phone about my sexuality almost as soon as I had figured it out. I had expected acceptance, if not understanding. Instead, she disowned me, and just for good measure, damned me to hell-fire for all eternity. I sat without moving beside the quiet phone for hours.
From the time I was 18, I was only to see my mother in person twice more, and they are not happy memories.
We were able to reconcile before she died, at least enough for her not to hang up on me when I called.
When I think of her, it is with a heart filled with love, and saddness. I see the beautiful young woman of my childhood. She was a woman with so much talent, compassion, intellect and so much potential. I see her practicing the violin while I literally sat at her feet.
She didn't ask for whatever demons hunted and haunted her, stealing her life, and the world is the worse for it. She didn't deserve the destruction wrought by the disease, or the fact that housewives never admitted to alcoholism in the 1950's or accepted treatment.
It was my mother, afterall, who paid the ultimate price for her drinking. She was miserable, and only 68 when she died.
So on this Mother's Day, I raise a glass of GRAPE JUICE to you, dearest Mom. I hope you have finally found the peace in death that so eluded you in life.
— E
No comments:
Post a Comment