MAZE

 A few years ago I read Joan Brady’s autobiography, The Unmaking of a Dancer—her account of how her mother destroyed her dream of becoming a ballerina. I identified with her so much, I considered calling one of my vignettes “The Unmaking of a Singer,” though it occurred to me that the more global “The Unmaking of a Daughter“ might be even more apt. I got so much negative reinforcement from my mother after our move to California that whatever good feelings I’d ever had about myself faded from memory.

Looking back, I realize that she couldn’t control me through intimidation the way my father had—I wasn’t as afraid of her as I was of him. So she used shaming instead. When she berated me, I didn’t take it lying down. I fought back, trying to defend myself. But while arguing may have felt necessary at the time, in the long run it eroded my self-esteem still further, I felt so bad about the angry person I was becoming.

When I went to my mother for support, she used to tell me that after a day of ministering to her clients’ needs, she had nothing left to give. If I asked her advice about a problem I was having, she found a way to make me feel I’d brought it on myself. If someone had hurt me, she was liable to take their part, saying if I hadn’t done such and such… A curious aspect of what she conveyed to me by always making me the culpable one was that the world was correspondingly benign. I was so deeply conditioned to perceive things this way that I still have a hard time recognizing potential danger—either psychic or physical—from a person or situation.

When I was younger, my mother had told me children were too self-centered to love, as I’ve said. During my teenage years, however, the picture my mother presented of adult life was so bleak that I became afraid to grow up.

In high school, when I belatedly found out my homeroom teacher was married, I felt desolated. I’d entertained the fantasy that maybe, when I was older, he would marry me, and the thing that so powerfully attracted me to him was his playfulness. He was the one grownup in my life who gave me hope that adulthood wasn’t necessarily unrelieved toil and travail.

When I think of the complexities of my relationship with my mother, the image that comes to mind is a maze with no exit. I’ve tried, as an adult, to tell her how unhappy I was during those years, but she has dismissed my suffering, saying everyone is miserable as an adolescent.

As for her rages, she denies she ever had them, despite the fact that my brother remembers them as well as I do. The first time I brought up the subject as an adult, she became so infuriated, she stomped up the stairs, screaming that I was trying to destroy her. The second time, she yelled that I wasn’t welcome in her house if I was going to dredge up the past, though a year later she called me to reconcile. She said then, with a stoical sigh, that she’d realized I had a need to believe what I did.