Happy You-Survived-Your-Mother Day
MY MOTHER DIDN’T love her mother.
I don’t know if she’d put it that way. But when my grandmother died a few years ago, my mother told me, “I didn’t care.”
Indifference, they say, is the real opposite of love. Hatred is at least an expression of still caring, even if it’s caring about the hurt. I don’t know if that’s true. But my mother’s mother wounded mine over decades, until she apparently wasn’t hurt or didn’t feel it anymore.
Me, I’ve still got hatred running through me.
“To all the mothers!” my friend said, last night, when she and her husband and I clinked cocktail glasses over their kitchen table. Nearby, their kids were safe and seen in a way that I never could have fathomed. I hesitated and made a face, and my friend amended, “To all our mother, Mother Earth.” She sort of chuckled about the hippie-dippie sentiment, though all three of us bow to this entity.
And to that, I said, “Yes. To that.”
Because if I’m being honest: I hate my mother.
I hate my mother because she regularly called me a little shit and a stupid retard. Or, more often, “some kind of retard.” I hate my mother because I don’t believe that she did her best, though that's what trauma-informed people—which I am—say about people to acknowledge that we’re all fucked up and fuck up. I hate my mother because she martyrs herself whenever I bring up the fact that she prioritized her marriage to my father over protecting me. She makes it about her that she, too, was—as an adult—stuck with this liar and con artist and criminal who raped me several thousand times.
I don’t care.
I don’t care about her getting married to him when she was “only” in her mid-twenties. She was 37 when he impregnated me, and while I obviously can’t say from experience, because he forced me into an abortion at 12, I feel like when I was 37, I’d have done differently for my child.
I don’t care about her developmental or generational trauma, because that’s not my job. And I’ve got those in spades, too, beyond an amount that she could imagine. She does not want to hear the details of that, which arguably is her job. She says it’s too hard.
That’s how I find the details of my own childhood, too. But I didn’t have any choice but to survive them then, and I don’t have any choice but to deal with them now if I’m going to survive at all. I can’t say from experience if having my mother hold them would help. Because she won’t.
I hate my mother because of her audacity to opt out.
I hate my mother because I never felt loved. I hate my mother because in photographs from my childhood, posing among foliage, I am clinging to her while she is backing away. I hate my mother because this week, a friend said, “Gabriel’s not the kind of person who takes up any space to let you know he exists in the world,” and while I paid that friend a third of my monthly income to park on their property, I shrink there due as much to my relationship with my mother as to that with my father.
I hate my mother because my abusive relationships were informed by her, too.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
Instead of being indifferent to my mother, I hate my mother because I fucking loved her, even though I never felt like she loved me. I still don’t, despite her many recent protestations to the contrary. They feel like way too little too late. They feel like self-serving shots at her own redemption. Love to me is a verb—not a thing you feel, but a thing you practice—and hearing me out, let alone about hate crimes for which you were present and parenting, is below the minimum fucking requirement.
I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t thought many, many times that I’d feel better if she died so that I couldn’t feel her denigrating me anymore. “Your friend,” she called my live-in boyfriend a couple of years ago, after I’d introduced him as my boyfriend countless times, on top of all the other things.
Today, I’m inviting myself to consider the possibility that in addition to her never loving me, I never loved her.
Again: That was her job. Not mine. If motherhood were a fireable position, I’d have long ago terminated her employment. Maybe I loved her only out of desperation and biology, as she was the only person who not only gave birth to me but was going to feed me, even as I did all the sex tricks demanded by the only other adult person in charge of my life.
While I have some sweet memories of my mother—of her dancing around our living room to The Cure; of her taking me to the queerer parts of Cleveland to see movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which by no fault of hers was racist and transphobic but the best you could hope for by even indie standards at the time (or, frankly, this time)—they’re not enough. Last time we talked, she expressed that I weighed a lot and took a lot of medication, and while I can justify those as projections of self-loathing, I wouldn’t allow anyone else in my life to talk to me that way.
I wouldn’t allow anyone else who talked to me that way in my life.
So I don’t. My mother and I haven’t talked in I don’t even know how many months, and I won’t talk to her again. Because loving myself is the hardest, most crucial thing I do, and engaging with people who set me back is not an option.
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