Mother's Day, Then & Now

 Mother’s Day is complicated.  Since the birth of my first child in 1987, Mother’s Day have been joyful for me.  My son was born just before dawn on Mother’s Day of that year, and my husband and I celebrated becoming a nuclear family.  The following Mother’s Day I had the happy realization that I could stay home with Rich and little Billy.  I didn’t have to spend Mother’s Day with my mother.

I have conflicted feelings about that.  “Honor thy mother and thy father” is one of the ten commandments I learned about in church when I was a child on Long Island.  To me, that meant always obey and respect them.  My gifts to my mother then were simple: childish drawings with simple sentiments and sometimes I’d give her one of my treasured possessions.  I hoped these would make her happy.

I could never tell when Mom’s cheerful mood would turn dark, sour and sometimes violent.  I wanted to hide from her when she was like that and often took refuge at my Grandma’s house.  That just made her madder.  She would scream at me, her face seeming to swell to twice its size, eyes bulging, spit flying.  She would strike out at me as I backed away, my arms coming up to cover my face.  She terrified me.

When we moved to Maryland, I had just turned 10.  As I was trying to adjust to a completely different way of life, people with different accents and teachers that taught math in a way I’d never learned, my parents were discovering socializing at Baltimore’s club for the Deaf.  Soon it became a way of our weekend life.

On Long Island, my grandparents, aunts and uncles seemed to keep my parents on the straight and narrow.  They didn’t drink or gamble then.  When they became involved in the club, they were like a couple of kids at a fair.  Alcohol was their cotton candy and gambling was their games of chance. 

Drinking made Mom more unstable.  Weekends at home were unpleasant and sometimes scary.  My brother and I tried to stay out of Mom’s way.  Sometimes Dad became her target and I would hear them fighting from my locked bedroom.  Arguing Deaf people can be quite loud.  My parents would use their voices even though they couldn’t hear each other.  I could hear them, though, exclamations and curses that weren’t understandable.  Then there were the sounds of their hands coming together in angry signs.  Many times the sounds escalated to a sound even scarier: a hand on flesh.

When we were teens, my brother and I would try to intervene but it was impossible to stop them.  I took refuge in my room most of the time while he would run out of the house and disappear with his friends.  One time the fighting was so bad, we both ran to a neighbors’ house.  The couple took us in and we could all hear the fight through our connecting walls.  My brother and I kept our eyes cast down on the floor while the couple tried to comfort us.  Running to the couple was a breach of our dysfunctional family’s rules:  don’t tell anyone about our family.  We didn’t talk.

So, I don’t have clear memories of Mother’s Day once we moved to Baltimore.  I just remember dreading it and hoping the drinking wouldn’t lead to another fight.  The feeling of dread lingered with me until I moved back to Long Island in 1980.  Spending the day with Mom set my nerves on edge, trying to keep her pleased and content.  In those years, my brother absented himself on Mother’s Day.  Sometimes he would leave a bouquet of flowers outside the door.

When I moved back to Long Island, I felt relieved and guilty to be free of visiting Mom on Mother’s Day.  I was relieved because I was miserable and nervous when I was around her and guilty because I wasn’t “honoring” my mother.  After my grandmother passed away in 1980, I lived in her house and found her diary.  I learned some information that added to my guilt.

My mother had suffered physical abuse as a child from her father, my grandfather.  He was a cold, stern man who apparently had a terrible temper of his own.  My grandmother wrote that often my uncles would intervene and rescue her from my grandfather’s fists.  My mother wasn’t always so lucky.  My grandfather would get so angry with her, he’d knock her head against the wall.  I read that diary and felt sympathy and sadness for my mother.  How could my personal memories and this know knowledge be reconciled?

In 1985, I was back in the same cycle of Mother’s Day with Mom: my husband and I moved to Maryland after our wedding because we couldn’t afford life on Long Island any longer.  With a new awareness of why Mom was the way she was, I tried to be forgiving and kind.  It was hard.  It was still scary.  My parents still drank and fought.

It was very hard to “honor” my Mom and Dad. 

Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings were a blessing.  I learned there was really nothing I could say or do to change my parents.  That didn’t mean I had to continue visiting when Mom was in a “mood” or when they were fighting.

Through counseling, my therapist suggested that along with the alcohol abuse, Mom probably had had an undiagnosed mental illness and had never been treated.  She suggested it could’ve been borderline personality disorder because of Mom’s extreme emotional outbursts and suicide attempts (that’s another long story).  It could very well be.

Mom passed away a few years ago.  Before she died, we’d chat through relay on Mother’s Day.  That was “honor” enough.  Having my own children helped me learn that Mother’s Day was something to be celebrated with joy and not fear or tension.