Mother as Doormat, Mother as Stepping Stone
If I’d kept the kid, I wouldn’t be alone on Christmas. But if I’d kept the kid, there’d be one more thing in this one bedroom apartment that needs a bed. This is, of course, not the only reason I didn’t keep the kid. I could get a crib from the Craigslist free section, easy. You need a crib? Give me 45 minutes and an Allen wrench.
I didn’t keep the kid because I myself am a broken adult. I am a broken adult because I am still a child — a tax paying, divorced child, but a child nonetheless. I never grew up, I just became older. When you don’t go through the traditional motions of aging — choosing a career, selecting a life partner, breeding, et al — it is easy to find yourself in perpetual arrested development. I will never have a mid-life crisis because my entire life has been a series of existential emergencies.
I am artificially a broken adult and biologically a broken woman. The instinct I am told all biological females possess, the instinct to reproduce, has no home in me. Not only have I never visualized an existence which includes motherhood, I’ve never had a dream in which I was a matriarch. I tell others this is because my upbringing was so miserable, so pointless, I would never want to subject another living thing to life’s needless suffering.
This is, of course, maudlin horseshit, the kind that leads to substance abuse. It’s just so much easier to resent your parents than attempt to understand them. It’s easier still to use your allegedly bereft childhood as the excuse for your inability to act responsibly as an adult. I mean, it really is convenient — the fact that the vast majority of the people you’re making these excuses to will never meet the parents you constantly throw under the bus renders doing so the perfect crime.
Despite decades of hemming and hawing, and the sobbing and the sucking and the substance abuse, I can now concede that my childhood really wasn’t all that bad. Did anyone fuck me without my consent? No. (My mother’s boss did insist on my sitting on his lap far too much, but the act wasn’t traumatizing enough to make a personality out of it.) My childhood was lonely and tedious, sure, but it prepared me for the loneliness and tedium of adulthood. I was mostly left to my own devices behind the shut door of my bedroom or out in the wilds of the apricot orchard. Nobody cared what I read or what I watched or whether or not I thought God was real. I realize now this was a gift.
In the home I spent the first 17 years of my life sits a cabinet stuffed with relics of my tender age, board games and tubes of dried up paint and photo albums I assume will only be disposed of when I have to render said home purchasable after my mother dies. There are few pictures of me on the walls, as per the wishes of my mother’s current husband, Rodzilla (I, in typical grown child fashion, continue to call my mother’s husband Rodzilla, as I refuse to refer to him as my stepfather). In this cabinet lies the only proof of the existence of my youth. I look at the photos and see a sun kissed, poorly coiffed kid in bicycle shorts, beaming.
Deep in the bowels of this cabinet, too, sit childhood photos of my father at Christmas time, posing in front of the tree with his sister. Their smiles are pained, forced; you can sense the presence of a raised fist out of frame. His childhood was fucked. But I’m not talking about him.
My adolescence was comparatively idyllic. An only child, I was never at want for anything tangible; each Christmas brought with it an abundance of gifts, whatever plastic shit was pushed that year via the commercials that played in between the inane cartoons I watched without oversight. The same plastic every December, just molded into a different shape. I coveted it all. It’s easy to placate a child when the child is singular.
Side Note: The shape of the plastic, however, was important — if it were molded into a Barbie, which my father’s mother insisted on giving me each Christmas (which I only now realize was an ineffectual attempt to feminize me), kick rocks. I wanted that light bulb-powered pseudo-oven that made fake scorpions.
For a while, I was no longer an only child. But then, as soon as I wasn’t, I was again. Overjoyed with onlyness, I responded by becoming a pill. Oh, you have a kid who died? I’ll raise you that and a living terror. My pubescence was a trial; I cut my own hair and dyed it black, wrote awful poetry on a fucking typewriter, filled my room with semi-functioning electric organs I found outside the Salvation Army. I screamed, slammed doors, begged my mother to institutionalize me. I was the kind of kid that made someone not want to have a kid. But, for Debbie, it was too late.
When I turned 16, my grandfather gave me his deceased aunt’s 1968 Plymouth Barracuda. It was a classic little old lady from Pasadena situation — 64,000 original miles, cherry interior, a Hemi under the hood that went from zero to 60 in the amount of time it takes a sperm to penetrate an ovum. My mother would hide the keys whenever I was grounded, which was often, but I had duplicates hidden around my room. The untenability of this reached its zenith one night when I drove the ‘Cuda around town, sans permission, egging the homes of high school administrators, Blockbuster Video (“Viva independent cinema!” I yelled while doing so...did I mention I was insufferable?) and the local Mormon church. I was, naturally, caught by the police, as I was the only kid in town stupid enough to be committing crimes in a fucking American muscle car. My mother happened to be driving back from a Tool concert in San Jose with Rodzilla when she saw me on the side of the road being interrogated by the cops. Apparently defiling a church is considered...a hate crime? I had no idea. She was beside herself. I felt nothing. I learned nothing.
Our relationship was built out of constant contention. Once, in an argument, she spat, “Fuck you.” I recognized this as something someone says only when they are completely bereft of a response; at the time, I felt as though I had won the argument. I left to meet an author who ended up giving me a job. This only emphasized the amount to which I was right to force her into telling me to get fucked.
In a letter she sent me earlier this year while we weren’t talking (that’s another thing about resenting your parents — you can cling to and cast them aside with equal dexterity), she revealed she felt as though I had abandoned her when I left town as soon as I graduated high school. Ain’t that some shit, I thought upon reading it. I abandoned you? What about all the nights I spent alone in the middle of a goddamned orchard while you were out fucking the guy who managed the meat department at the supermarket where you worked? What about the screaming arguments I’d get in with your now-husband you’d refuse to take a side on? What about the hell I experienced being a sentient being in the cowfuck sticks you chose to raise me in? Why the fuck wouldn’t I leave? I abandoned you? That’s fucking rich.
I didn’t think of her sacrifice as a single mother toiling to still give me my plastics after she ditched my dad and he, and only under duress, would use me as the intermediary for child support checks wherein he’d write the words “blood money” in the memo line. I didn’t think of how lonely she, too, was in the orchard, and how she’d forgive Rodzilla anything in order to not be companionless. I didn’t think of her, period.
I didn’t think of her in my 20s, either, when I’d retreat back home every time I fucked my life up, which was often. (This cycle ended when she wrote me a letter while I was living in Australia informing me that, if I were fucking up again, I could not return to my childhood home; while this felt ineffably harsh at the time, and resulted in me marrying my fuck up so as to prove I hadn’t, once again, fucked up, I now understand it was a necessary step in order for her to maintain a semblance of sanity.)
For years, I didn’t think of her. Well, that’s not true — I did think of her, but only in the context of her disappointing me. Resentment is easy. Understanding is difficult.
Maybe I don’t want a kid because I don’t want my progeny to begrudge me even though I did my best. This thought literally just occurred to me. I am 37 years old. Jesus Christ. I’m sorry, Debbie.