I wouldn't have believed them. If they told me I'd be here at 40 at this very odd place on the precipice of losing nearly everything I've held dear--rewind, replay, repeat--I wouldn't have believed them. My family, my self, my future--all resting on unsteady ground.
I thought I had the biggest loss once upon a time, when I was very young, and I thought no other empty space would ever compare to that. With my dad dead, the only loss I could imagine being greater than that, at six, was my mother. Things would get bad, very bad, and I had my mantra: at least my mother's alive. I would watch others die, move away, go away, and I would repeat the mantra: I still have my mother.
At the same time, I watched my mother and step-father drink, retreated from the odd and uncomfortable situations that resulted from their nightly insobriety, and my mantra became just as uncomfortable to me. It was starting to not work. I wasn't hers; I wasn't mine. I was just incomplete. I tried to complete myself with my worthy spouse, then a deacde later with a child. But, big surprise, that doesn't work. Not for long. At least not forever. Joke's on me.
I did not come to this mother mantra all alone, I now realize. It's something that she nurtured in me--she needed me to be hers. She herself had been through great trauma. And so, it was fed to me. An unhealthy diet of "love" by control, and me willing to eat and repeat, knowing no other way.
It's not all her fault. And I love her still. But I hate what she's done. She takes no responsibility--she won't look at this.
Not won't. Can't.
Did I mention I haven't spoken to my mother in nearly a month now? Yes. Well. To you that may seem like no big deal. To me, it's nothing short of miraculous. I have never gone more than a week--two during a particularly nasty family blow up--without hearing her voice. We were once so close. The problem was, we were mostly always way too close. I let myself subsist on her. And she let me. To the detriment of all other relationships.
And so I've asked her for space, now--time to be with me. And I've gotten it, and a month has ticked by.
George away. Jenna in school. No mother to direct and intercept my feelings. I'm here with me. Really here with me.
And I've discovered why I never tried this before: The movies that play backward in my head are not very comforting. I'm seeing them for the first time. They are unraveling what I thought was so, a little at a time, and in their place I'm left with what really was. Freeze frame:
He's behind the wheel for the hundredth time in a condition that by any account, even in the 70s, is illegal. And she is in the front seat, staring straight ahead, no seat belt--her role is not to challenge him, only to control him through her reactions. I whisper to her, "Why don't YOU drive?" Even I know, from car rides past, weaving in and out of his lane of choice, me gripping the side door, that it will be a dicey ride home. She doesn't ever take the keys from him.
This is the part of this backwards movie I'd like to remember a different way: A police car pulls us over, he blows, he goes to jail, something. Something to change what was. But that never happened. We always made it home. See, she was right to let him drive. Everything turned out fine.
Nothing was ever fine.
But me, I am going to be fine.
I am going to be FUCKING fine because I'm finding me, and I'm finding out.
