My relationship with my mother was largely about her trying to find ways to get my attention and me looking for ways to not give her any.
Being in a relationship with her has been draining and one-sided. She’s needy and self-centered. She has never asked if I needed help and hasn’t stood by my side for any major shift or milestone in my life. She asks for much and gives mostly to receive recognition.
My mom was the baby of her family, the youngest of four. Her family lived in a tiny one room home, without plumbing, in a small mountainside village in Serbia. Her mother, my grandmother, was a sweet and nurturing woman but soft and meek, especially when it came to her tyrant husband, a rigid veteran of World War 2. My grandfather was stubborn, abusive and unpleasant but I’m told he had a soft spot for my mother and was known to sometimes be gentle with her. I remember meeting him during a trip to Serbia when I was 15. He stood perfectly erect in front of me, his mouth a tight thin line that broke only to introduce himself, his arm extended proudly expecting only a hand shake.
The stories of kids walking miles down a mountain, in the snow, while carrying heavy books, just to go to school is an actual thing my mom, her sister and two brothers had to do. My mother’s walks down the mountain ended somewhere in the 5th grade, along with her education. Theirs was a life hard lived. Food, money and opportunity were very scarce. So at the age of 16, with her parents support, my mother traded poverty and youth for the chance at a better life and was sent to the United States to marry my 29 year old father. She became a wife and mother in a matter of months.
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about a year and a half ago. I started to give a shit roughly six months ago.
I think I was in the 6th grade the first time my mother became “deathly ill”. It was our first summer in Vegas and I hadn’t made any friends yet. That summer, the radio mostly kept me company. It was your typical teen angst+music scenario. I would sit with my tiny little boombox for hours just waiting for someone to make it okay for me to feel my feelings. Making mixtape after mixtape, my fingers working at top speed to catch songs at exactly the right time for minimal commercial interruption.
She dropped me off at the mall one day with money for lunch. Bored out of my mind, I paced the mall, alone, for hours. I wasn’t interested in fashion much, so I wasn’t yet lured into any of the clothing stores but I, eventually, found my way into a record store and completely lost my pathetic little mind. Mariah Carey had been singing her heart out (and mine) that summer and there she was, at the entryway of this store, glowing and beautiful on her self-entitled debut album. I loved every single song Mariah Carey had come out with. I loved every whine, every shriek, every lisped word she uttered. I gladly skipped lunch and bought her tape instead. My 12 year old gooey heart wanted nothing more than to own every single precious word she sang, to replay them whenever I wanted. To emotionally wring myself out, over and over and over again.
My mom figured it out because I was lousy at lying. We were new there, there was barely any money and she was struggling at a new job and there I was, all happy, clutching this brand new cassette tape. I remember walking into our barely furnished apartment in “Crack Alley”, to find a heap on the living room floor. A heap made of blankets, pillows, tissues and my mother, all seemingly being kept alive by a telephone cord that stretched clear across the apartment from the other room and ended straight into the phone at the side of my mothers weepy head. She was sobbing into the telephone about how I had lied. I had betrayed her. I had betrayed her by using money that should have been for lunch and bought music instead and now her blood was about to be all over my hands. I’m pretty sure her phone call ended soon after my arrival, at which point we probably addressed the sudden onset and cause of her illness. I admitted to buying the tape, apologized and probably promised to not ever lie again. She made a full and speedy recovery.
This became a pattern for my mom. She just wasn’t equipped to deal with certain aspects of life. Her coping mechanism for most problems or issues was to beg for attention in one way or another. Begging for attention through drama, illness or sex, trying to establish her sense of self worth. She felt incapable and probably scared – like a 16 year old girl. The “illnesses” brought on by life experiences started to bleed into or turn into actual illnesses and vice versa and to me it all became one big overly theatrical scene with no end in sight. What it was actually, was just a giant puddle of miscommunicated feelings that fell on un-understanding calloused ears.
I went to visit my mom in Serbia last September, at the nursing home she has been living in for a little over two years. It’s a quaint little place with the most spectacular views of rolling hills and valleys. The facility is surrounded by small farms and apple orchards where I would sometimes sneak off too for an apple, a breathe or a good cry. The beautiful views on the outside do little to prepare you for all the sad needy eyes that you look into on the inside. All the souls that now need nurturing and mending. The bodies that once took care of themselves that now need looking after and special care.
My mom was moved into the nursing home when it was realized that she was dangerously over taking medications because she would forget she had already taken them. The home is staffed around the clock and she receives routine check-ups with weekly visits by the staff doctor and physical therapist. My mom no longer walks and is bedridden. A symptom, most likely, from all the weight she put on through the years from eating her feelings. Her legs are basically no longer willing to carry her. The summer before last she had a blood infection and had to have a kidney removed. Years before that she underwent back and spine surgery in hopes for some relief from all the aches and pains created by all the weight. Long before that, she had some nerve damage in her face from a root canal ‘gone wrong’, which would cause these long bouts of her talking funny from a flare up of pain in her jaw. And years before that, she had the bone from one of her pinky toes removed – for reasons I cannot remember. And that’s only to name a few.
I was in Serbia for a week and sat beside her bed every day, absorbing who my mother has become and the path that has led her here. I wanted to go while she could still remember, so we could talk and share stories. I shared several stories about me and my life, showed her tons of photos and videos of the beautiful family she continues to be a part of. I reminded her of all the important things she taught me. Thanked her for teaching me to be a strong woman, loyal friend and nurturing mother. She let me talk her into a couple short walks outside with me pushing her in a wheelchair, otherwise she is very content with just laying in her bed, happily adrift in her thoughts. Safely hidden in her room from the world outside. She seems to be tired of doing anything that causes pain or discomfort, sinking happily into her bed without a craving to move or fix anything. Exhausted by all the work and effort her past life required.
Don’t hate me when I say, that perhaps Alzheimer’s is a blessing here. My mom has spent the majority of her adulthood trapped in her mind, questioning herself and every choice she has ever made. She has been consumed by regret and haunted by what was. So, I can’t help but feel some relief at the thought that maybe one day she will be relieved of all the painful memories and triggers she keeps replaying in her mind. She could finally forget.
My mother was an uneducated immigrant forced into growing up quickly. She was the daughter of uneducated, hard working, hard living Serbs. She was emotionally and physically abused. She knew only as much as she knew, as much as she was taught and shown and given. She simply did not possess the tools to cope with parts of her life and for me to expect anything different is just unfair and stupid. My mother did the best she could with what she had.
I have my own coping mechanisms that have gotten me through some tough times in life, not all are healthy but all were simply the only tools I had. Maybe, I too was annoying or foolish to someone, but to me – well, I was just trying to survive.
I may not fully understand her experiences and I certainly have not walked in her shoes. I have not felt her version of pain, of struggle or suffering but I have felt very many of my own. I have felt all the same feelings. I am someones daughter, someones wife and ex-wife. I am a mother and a friend. I have been heartbroken and jealous, sorry and sad, incredibly weak and scared. I have been so afraid, that I felt the fear would swallow me whole, so I turned it into mean red hot anger. Anger so great that it built giant unscalable walls, with me hidden deep inside. Being angry felt safer.
We are the same. We cry the same tears and smile the same smiles, needy of all the same things – love, compassion, empathy, understanding.
We are all the same. Me and my mom. Me and you.
I have stopped creating new languages for how I feel and am learning to embrace every single emotion. No longer burying it deep down inside of me until it erupts, masked as “funny” self deprecation, avoidance or anger . . or illness. I’m learning to accept all of the ways I need to feel. Welcoming it all in – the pain, the sadness or the suffering. Welcoming it and sitting with it and showing it love. Giving love to all my shitty, lousy, no good faults, mistakes, discrepancies and weird habits. Giving love to each and every precious coping mechanism that helped me get to here.
It’s not until you learn to accept and truly love all of the ways that make you, you, that you can begin to offer acceptance and love to those around you.
“A lot of things broke my heart, but fixed my vision.” – Author unknown
