The origin story
A note about what I’m sharing today.
This excerpt is different from the vignettes I’ve been sharing with you.
The vignettes are excavation — fragments, scenes, moments I’m pulling up from the past and trying to understand. This is more like a dispatch from the present. Something that happened recently that reminded me exactly why I’m writing this memoir and where it all starts.
My mother is the origin of this story. Not the whole story — but the root of it. The codependency, the compliance, the years of trying to be someone acceptable enough to keep, the hole I’ve spent my adult life trying to fill in ways that didn’t always serve me. It all starts with her.
I’ve been circling how to write about her directly in this memoir (I wrote another piece about her last year). This week she gave me a reason to stop circling.
Last weekend was Mother’s Day.
I say that with all the feelings associated with a complicated relationship with my mother. Actually, let’s call it what it is: it’s an abusive relationship.
Let me start by saying I am extremely proud of how I’ve been able to heal enough to have let go of the Catholic guilt that plagued me from childhood. The mandates that were handed down of how you’re supposed to act and what you owe your family, even if that’s never been a reciprocal relationship. I stopped feeling guilty years ago for never seeing my parents for holidays, for keeping my distance from them, from not making any additional efforts to rebuild our tenuous, often hostile, relationship.
I stopped because I understood that just because I wished something was real, that didn’t mean it was. I stopped because I understood that what was actually real was the every day behavior, the hurtful and sometimes downright dangerous ways in which my family behaved. I stopped because I had nothing left in me to give, and realized that it actually wasn’t my responsibility.
So when Mother’s Day rolls around nowadays, I feel nothing. Except a lot of ugh when the promotional emails start coming. I don’t feel obligated to call, and I definitely don’t feel obligated to visit. But this year, I somehow wound up doing both. I actually didn’t mean to—my impetus was more about seeing my brother, who still suffers from the Catholic guilt and makes the trek from Florida to Massachusetts for EVERY holiday, even the made-up ones. So that was why I made contact.