Kitchen Table Therapy

It took several months for me to get past some of the more difficult feelings I had about my mother.  We were all on the defense for various reasons.  But as we began to let our defenses down, each of us began to give a little.  My sister and the younger of my two brothers started calling me with memories of their own.  My mom even began to acknowledge that there were things she could have done differently.

As Ben and I went our separate ways, I moved into a small apartment in the back of my parents’ garage.  My mom and I would often sit together at the kitchen table and talk.  One of the things my mom has always fixated on were the abuses she suffered as a kid.  Her father had abandoned them when my mother, also the oldest of four, was only five years old.  I had only met him twice in my life.  He had passed away, recently.  My mother always spoke of him with so much reverence.  This stood in stark contrast to how she spoke about my grandmother.

My grandmother had been killed in a car accident while we were in Germany.  Since then, my mother had held a venomous anger against her.   She would talk about the jerk my Grandma had married after her second husband had died.  He would brutally beat all of them.

My mom was in the midst of one of these angry diatribes about my grandma, and I stopped her.  I said, “Mom, I don’t understand why you’ve had so much anger against Grandma.   She never abandoned you.  She just made bad choices.”  Mom considered that.  I continued.  “I just don’t understand why since Grandpa died, it’s been the opposite.  You’ve had nothing but fond memories for him.”

Mom nodded.  “Yeah.  I’ve been hard on Mom.  But she just let Nolan treat us like shit. ”

I said, “but back then, women wouldn’t have been able to raise children on their own.  She needed to have a man in her life.”

Mom said, “You’re right.  I just get so angry when I think of all that stuff.”

I said, “Mom, Grandma died when you were 26 years old and she was 46.  You guys never got the chance to grow up together, like you and I have.  Imagine if she’d had the time to evolve and grow, what kind of Mom could she have been?”

Mom continued, “I just think of all the shit we went through.”  She took my hand.  “But I guess knowing that I went through that kind of shit, doesn’t make it any easier on my kids when I do the same things to them.”

I walked away from that day, thinking about the stupid choices I’d made in my life.  My mom was 18 years old when she had me.  No man in her life to help her support and raise me.  What did I do at 18?  I married a man who controlled my life for 10 years, then killed himself.  What would that have done to a child if we’d had one?  I thought about the stupid mistakes I’d made already.  How much worse could they have been if I’d had four children?  I thought of my mama at 5 years old in her cute little dress, sitting on the front porch, waiting for her daddy to come back home.    She had craved love exactly the way I had.

I’m not thrilled with this entry.  There’s more that I want to say about this, but I feel like it belongs at the close of the story.  If you have questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to send them to me.  It’s really helping me to carve out this story.