Becoming

I think that my parents and I have a good relationship, which didn’t come easily for me once I moved out of the house when I was 18, especially the relationship with my mother. A lot of children don’t go through having two moms in one body throughout their lives and not being able to fully grasp what happened to her until they were older.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the changes started, but my mind always links it to two events that happened when I was around nine or ten years old: We moved from our farmhouse in the country into a house on the edge of a small town and my mom decided to get a job outside the house. Suddenly, the woman I had known for almost ten years was no longer there. (To be honest and fair, these probably aren’t truly linked. They most likely simply coincidentally happened at the same time that my mom’s symptoms began.)

MY mom was meticulous about paying bills and budgeting and very conscientious about spending money. We didn’t have much, so we couldn’t really be frivolous with what we did have. MY mom kept notebooks full of hand-written notes, painstakingly written with a piece of carbon between two pages to keep track of whom she’d written about what—letters mainly to businesses about their products, etc. MY mom was home when I got home and asked about my day. MY mom helped keep the house tidy. (Yes, we had chores, but she did help out with housework.) MY mom baked birthday cakes for us each year (neat ones, like a pink wooly worm with licorice whip hairs about its body or a perfect replica of Mickey Mouse’s head) and canned tomatoes and green beans from our garden and baked supper for us at night. MY mom cared for us in so many ways and we knew that she cared, hugging and kissing us before we went to bed and yelling, “I love you!” as we ran up the stairs afterwards.

This new woman in our house? Who was she? This new woman was angry all the time. She was mean and hit us for little reasons—and sometimes no reason at all. Nothing we did was right. This woman came home after we got home from school and didn’t care about our day. This woman threw things all over the house, not bothering to pick things up, and then yelled at us for not picking up after her. She bought things without regard to whether we could use them or needed them, just because they were there—not caring if we had the money for them. She yelled at everyone for any reason she could think of. We no longer had cool birthday cakes, and we were too scared or embarrassed to have our friends over. Anything could become a projectile or a whip of sorts, as long as she was mad enough. This woman didn’t hug or kiss us goodnight any longer, and we didn’t hear “I love you” before we trudged up the stairs for bed each night.

This woman didn’t really seem like a mother any longer; she now seemed to need mothering herself.

Things progressively got worse, even worse than described above. A lot of it I really don’t like to talk about anymore, because it really does no good to hash it out or discuss it with other people—especially people who don’t know me or my parents. Most people don’t know what it’s like to be more responsible than your mother from the age of 11 onward or to feel as though you were the one raising your mother instead of the other way around. Most people don’t understand what it’s like to work so hard to find a way out of that, to think that your only way out is to be so perfect in almost every way—to finally feel when you receive a full-tuition scholarship, not that you’ve done something exciting and finally earned something great, but rather that you finally have a way to escape from being your mom’s mother. Who knows what it’s like to yell at your mom a year after you graduated from college because she stole your credit card number off a bill and used it buy things online? Who else knows what it’s like to only converse with your mother in screaming matches because she makes family life so stressful?

But who else knows what it’s like to finally, finally come to terms with the fact that your mother doesn’t care how much she has hurt you? When you finally get the nerve to tell her, “Mom, all I ever wanted from you was an apology for what you did to me all those years,” all you hear back is, “That won’t change anything, so what’s the point?” That is the point that you realize that your holding these feelings inside didn’t matter to her as much as they did to you. That was the point that you realized you had to forgive her (with no apology on her behalf) and move on—move on because the anger you felt toward her was only hurting you more and more, and she really didn’t care.

I think I was 20 or 21 years old when this occurred to me. My mom didn’t look back at what she had done in any apologetic manner. I was mature enough to find out if she even cared how I felt, and to my chagrin, she didn’t. Instead of using her mental illness diagnosis to help herself and to get help for herself, she used it as an excuse for her actions, as a crutch for everything she did wrong in life. That probably wouldn’t change, but I could. I could do something about how I reacted.

I stopped caring when my mom hurt me or said hateful things. I stopped getting involved when she screwed over other family members. No one was there or helpful when I was being taken advantage of, and I couldn’t continue being my mom’s caretaker. I couldn’t try to change her when she didn’t want to be something different. It just won’t happen, and the screaming matches were always, always my fault anyway, of course. So I just stopped arguing. I stopped bothering.

I know this sounds awful and uncaring, but that’s not the entire truth of the situation. I love my mother, and in many ways, we have a much more open and caring relationship. I take the good and negate the bad, because there is nothing else I can do. I now hold conversations with her without it ending in an all-out verbal brawl. I now discuss life issues with her. I still hope that she will recognize her illness as a way to get help instead of a way out of taking responsibility.

Part of me wonders if I will hit “publish” on this one. I know my mom sometimes reads my blog, but I also know that this has been cathartic for me. Some people need to know that I’m okay with the way things have turned out, even if they aren’t the way that I really want them to be. I can’t change how things are and I can’t change my mom, and I’m done trying to do either. There are so many ways that she’s sabotaged herself, and the only way I can have this relationship is by taking a step back from the entire situation and reminding myself that I have my own life now, my own family, my own worries and cares and problems. I can’t fix my mom. I can’t fix my childhood.

I can only live my own life well and forgive, forgive, forgive. I can only ask my husband to love me, warts and all, and realize myself that I can and have, for the most part, overcome the childhood that threatened to tear me apart and ruin my emotional health. I can only use my mom’s life as a warning for what I could become if I’m not mindful of what I’m doing and who I am. If I ever start to change, if I ever become another woman that I don’t want to be, I don’t want to remain that new woman for the rest of my life. I want to recognize it and accept help. I’m doing everything I now can to be aware of the signs and symptoms for this illness that changes people into something else entirely and I’m making sure that my husband is aware of them as well. I’m making sure that I remain the Jessica my husband married (with normal life and personality changes over the years as we grow together) and that he never has to regret whom I’ve become.

I’m making sure I don’t regret who I become either, whether or not I eventually have the illness myself. Forgiving my mother and moving on was the hardest thing I’ve done in life, but it was the most freeing moment I’ve ever experienced.