My mother made me feel the need to flee from her.

Of all the stories that I've written in order to capture what my family is like, this is the one that, for years, I have avoided writing because I didn't know how to say it and because I keep hoping to give it a better ending, one with some kind of heartwarming, happy resolution.  So far, I haven't managed to achieve that kind of resolution.

My sister has told me, when we've discussed this, that sometimes things just don't get resolved, they just have to be accepted.  Mama is 80 years old, feeble but strong willed.  If anything is going to happen to bring about any sort of good resolution, it better happen soon.  (But nothing is going to happen because my mother was doing what she thought was right when she was physically and emotionally abusing my sister Nan and me.)

I am my mother's namesake, the one who shares her birth order position, youngest child.  My role as daughter to my parents matters to me.  I long for a loving, good mother-daughter relationship.  With my father, the loving relationship is there, completely natural, as easy as breathing.  Not so with my mother.  The reason is the dynamic between us.  I think she controls that dynamic.  Control matters to my mother.  (--Look at her early life; it's no wonder!)  Despite my motivation to "get it right" about being my mother's daughter, the majority of the time that relationship is very difficult for me.  I can't "get it right".

Furthermore, I would certainly like to be "one of the good guys" in my own life story --but how can I be a good guy when I am so critical of my own mother and have so many unresolved feelings, complex, hard, and difficult feelings, about her?

I can only bear to take Mama in small doses.   At some point, I end up needing to flee from her, somehow on some level.  She has never respected my boundaries, so this need-to-flee is  self-preservation.  She wants to be my puppet master.  Her disapproval is very painful to me.  She is quick to disapprove, quick to point out inadequacies because she feels justified in doing so, believing that it is righteous to criticize and condemn, believing that she improves things through such correction.  She is harsh, a disciplinarian.

When my first baby finally arrived (after my husband and I had suffered through years of infertility treatments), my mother came to my house to stay for a week after my baby and I came home from the hospital.  Mama brought me a motherhood gift.  It was a book, Dare to Discipline, that she thought I could and should use on my innocent baby.  This says it all.  Without confronting my mother, I threw the book away.  I hope and pray that I would never treat a child (or anyone else) the way she treated me as a child.

"Spare the rod and spoil the child."  How many times have I heard my Mother quote that as gospel, as the approved way "to train up a child in the way he should go"?  She certainly operated as parent based on that standard.  I was spanked several times a day.  I got spanked every time I wasn't perfect, wasn't behaving according to her high standards of perfection.  (Where was the love in this?)  As I've tried to understand her, to not be so hurt by how she treated me, to forgive her, I realize that she reflected her own upbringing --that that was the standard used at the Methodist Orphan's Home in Macon.  My mother is damaged.  She had one hell of a childhood.

Unfortunately, in my childhood, I got my mother's full, undiluted parental attention.  She was a full-time stay-at-home mother until I was eight.  The first few years of my life she spanked Nan and me with my father's razor strap.  Then we got a little dog, SheWee, that had a dog leash.  Daddy switched to a different kind of razor for shaving, and Mama switched to the dog leash for our punishment.  I was sorry, because the dog leash had decorative metal brads on it.  Those really hurt.  Mama had a terrible temper (still does).  I remember hiding under my bed while she was raging, hoping she wouldn't find me.  I also had hiding places in trees in the yard.

I never asked until I was grown why did Daddy allow her to do this.  I know why --she's in control, not him.  Part of the explanation is cultural: he earned the living, she raised the children.  Part of the explanation was that he wasn't at home most of the day; he didn't see much of what happened, the extent and frequency.  Part of it is his personality --he is nonconfrontive, peaceable, tending toward "dependency" in regard to familial relationships.  He was a "Mama's boy" and more!  During my childhood, he was considerably more invested in his "son" role than he was in his "husband" role or "father" role.

My father is very henpecked and intimidated by my mother.  He rationalizes this to his own satisfaction by filtering it through his genuine "high nurturance" trait --he "takes care of her", soothing her.  In retirement, he is (ironically) now the one left at home with this tyrant.  Hopefully she is more benevolent to him than she was with us --she was never particularly benevolent towards her daughters.  Unfortunately, mother oftens alienates the family and neighbors who try to help Daddy and her. --Daddy is legally blind and can't drive; Mama uses a walker, has diabetic retinopathy and shouldn't be driving: when she had chemotherapy, she could not drive after the treatments.  Her attitude towards those who would help is ultimately, "My way or the highway," and "You can just kiss my ass."  Aunt Joyce no longer tries.  Aunt JoAnn avoids Mama but reaches out to Daddy.  Daddy is able to charm and endear, so people are willing to assist him.  He seems to be able to keep his and Mama's living situation functional.  They have stonewalled my efforts to entice them into moving into "independent living" seniors apartments with van service, etc., near my home.

Mama treated me during childhood not much better outside the home, when in public in the presence of others significant to me.  To remember just one time, there was the Senior cut day class party at the end of my senior year in high school.  Seniors met at the school and rode in a caravan of cars to the party at a nearby lake, allowing those without cars to catch rides.  My mother was sitting in the front passenger seat of our family car, going as a chaperone.  I was a good driver who had never gotten a ticket, much less had a wreck, completely reliable, a conscientious honor student, the class valedictorian.  I ended up with a car full of riders, my classmates.  The speed limit on the road was 65.  My mother self-righteously told me in front of my peers, "You don't need to drive over 55!" and she reached over and set the car's speed guard at 55. This meant that an irritating squealer sounded when the speed reached 55, so I could not even go 55.  Everyone in the caravan passed me.  I could not keep up.  She did not care that this embarrassed me in front of my friends, nor did she care that she failed to respect me, who had a record of responsible driving.  She felt justified.  She thought she was right.  Multiply this incident by hundreds, probably thousands of other such times, very routine, and that's what my life was like, a neck pecked raw at the bottom of her pecking order.  Whenever I spend time with her even now, she resumes her habit of "being right" at my expense.  May God spare me from self-righteousness and cruelty.

When my sister finished Emory University and got her first job programming computers at the Communicable Disease Center, she rented a room over the garage in a professor's home adjoining the Emory campus.  The professor and his wife had a 18-year-old son still at home.  Nan was 22.  The son and Nan became friends.  One night the boy kissed her.  Without Nan realizing it, he had reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra.  That night after he left and she prepared for bed, discovering that and rethinking what had happened, Nan telephoned me and confided.  She was confused.  I thought that Nan was in an environment that was not safe for her.  I told my parents.  Maybe I was wrong to do that, a mistake of the head but not the heart.  It was horrible to hear my mother's lengthy reaction.  She said she would rather a daughter of hers die than for that daughter to let a boy take off her bra.  Mama meant it.  Now that I have daughters of my own, I know beyond a shadow of any doubt I could NEVER say that about my daughters and mean it.  But my mother did.  Nan was quickly moved into a nicer, better situation, sharing an apartment with a girl she knew in high school at an Atlanta apartment complex with a swimming pool.  A couple of years ago I read in the newspaper about two teenage girls in the Middle East being murdered by their families for losing their virginity, and I recognized and understood exactly what had happened, the dynamic that was present.  My mother would have approved.

Here's the resolution that I do have with the situation of being my mother's daughter.  I know that I love her.  Sometimes I even like her.  I admire how brave she is.  I know that I am doing/will continue to do my duty, do the right thing by her to the best of my ability.  Being able to honestly say that gives a degree of resolution that I can live with.  I am grateful beyond words that I am an adult now and no longer have to live in my parents' home anymore.  I am grateful that I have daughters of my own and enjoy a warm, beautiful relationship with them --damage control matters: I wanted any abuse to end with me and to be healed.  I am grateful at last I now live under Grace, not under law.  Though Mama might expect perfection, my Father in Heaven doesn't.  Realizing God's love for me does restore the much needed benevolence into a world that seemed malevolent  When Christians realize we can't solve/can't handle/can't fully grasp something that matters very much, we learn to turn it over to God.  I continue to surrender my relationship with my mother to God and to trust Him to work His will in me.  He has promised to be sufficient for my needs.  I am standing on that promise.  He is sufficient; in fact, He is the only thing that can be.  The pathway to God begins with brokenness, exactly like the Beatitudes say.