Mother Hunger

When my son turned two, we selected a date for a small family birthday party. A cake was ordered, I bought some plastic tablecloths, and we sent out the word to a dozen or so people who we loved and who loved us. A few weeks before the party, my mother informed me that she wouldn’t be able to come. “I have to work at the retreat at church,” she said. “Carol asked me several months ago, and I just can’t say no to her.” I wanted to retort that she had known her grandson’s birthday for longer than that, but I didn’t say it, and that was that. The day of the party came, and it was fun, and calm, and we all enjoyed our time together. I fielded the questions of “Where is your mother?” as best I could. My son was finally old enough to really get into tearing the paper off his presents, and he ripped into them with gusto.

A few hours into the afternoon, my mother showed up, “But I can’t stay,” she said. “They need me. I have to get back to the retreat.” I turned on my heel and avoided her as much as I could, and forty-five minutes later she was gone again.

In itself, such a thing is not so terrible. It is only a small child’s birthday, and he doesn’t remember it now. If my mother had come to the party without the added fuss, I probably wouldn’t remember it either. So, like so many other things, why does it matter?

In the wake of the birthday party, I had to pause and feel a bit of pain, an old old pain: mother hunger.

I love my mother, and I always will, no matter how difficult our relationship might be. We go through phases where we get along quite well, and sometimes she will surprise me and come out with a little jewel of real wisdom. Just as often, though, and with no warning, she becomes something very different. She holds deep, violent grudges against her own family, curses in front of kids, talks about inappropriate things like blow jobs and suicide attempts at family dinners, picks people to dislike for no apparent reason, and casts judgment on anyone within her reach. She recently wondered aloud whether two of her relatives, who were also present, would end up in heaven with her because they weren’t Catholic. She branded my son as having emotional problems because once, when he was two, he pounded on a closet door at her house when he was angry. Under all of these things is a sort of grasping, constant need for interaction and approval. Whatever you give her, it’s never enough. She is always the wounded, mistreated party, no matter who is left crying at the end of the day.

These interactions and the skin I built up in response did make me stronger. I had to act independently and without sentiment a lot earlier than the people around me. I had to learn to make good decisions for myself and for others, because there was no one to rescue me if I didn’t. I gained the dubious skill of talking people off the ledge, whether figuratively or literally.

But, honestly? Sometimes, when I have a stomach virus or a newborn or a broken heart, I just really want a mother. A squishy, warm, forgiving, encouraging mother. Someone to come over and help; someone who doesn’t push me to counsel and nurture her when I am in need. My own mother has some very warm, maternal traits (and in her better moments she is heart-breakingly generous), but the good times come and go with such bewildering rapidity that they can’t be relied upon. If I call her in distress, she might offer me kind words and hot tea, and come over and help me with my dishes and my laundry. Or, she might say that I need to do a better job of keeping Satan out of my house and then tell me intimate details of her sex life and how her time as a mother was much harder than mine. There is no way of knowing which one of her selves  I will get, so it’s better to not ask, and to just assume she is ready to stab and shock and dismay.

When I was growing up, I thought at first I could repair the broken link between my mother and myself. So many tearful conversations later, I gave that up, but then I noticed that somehow I seemed to collect strange relationships with middle-aged women. I worked as a reader for a visually impaired Psychology student about my mother’s age when I was in college. She was very complimentary and said she thought I was wonderful, until the evening she kept me waiting for two hours and then took offense that I left without waiting longer for her. “You might have been tired,” she said. “But just pause and think about me for a minute.” I quit soon after, to long messages about my disloyalty and selfishness.

Most recently, my relationship with my mother-in-law exploded into a double deluxe fireworks show when, after years of very cordial interaction, out of the blue she sent me a letter to tell me that I needed to influence my husband (her own son) to change his ways and start attending a church of her choosing before Satan got a better foothold in my home. She offered to provide me with a list of acceptable churches to help me along. I declined, and we ceased communication, but that same old part of me mourned over the busted pieces of relationship. Why couldn’t I just have an uncomplicated relationship with a woman who wouldn’t suddenly start telling me I was a disappointment, or worse yet, an agent of Satan? This final explosion in a long line of explosions pushes me to a pinching, punishing vow to never trust an older woman again. Which gets more difficult as I get older myself. In many ways, my mother hunger is so great that I have to cut myself off entirely, like an alcoholic who can’t even be around a drop of it. I can’t seem to have a positive relationship with any motherlike figure, even in a casual, well-boundaried way. The fallout when they fail is so painful that really, I can’t let myself have one at all.

So, when I want something that I just can’t have, what do I do instead? I find some consolation in mothering my own children in a way that soothes their little hearts and my own, but it is often like drawing and sharing water from an empty well. I can’t help but feel a little twinge when I provide one of the intangible jewels to my kids, like the wiping clean of the slate of “bad behavior,” whatever that really is. Every time I could harangue them for their failings but instead, I don’t. Part of the twinge is pride and happiness that I can do for them what was not often done for me. But part of it is another little dose of mourning for my own tender kid self.

Maybe the worst part of the empty well is that I sometimes find myself parenting defensively: teaching my children, essentially, how to get along without me when I finally snap. I feel like the potential for awfulness is a ticking bomb inside of me, like I will one day just break and let go, like my mother did after my brother was born, and I will be lost to them, whether I am physically present for decades longer or not. It feels like a race against the clock to stuff as much love and self-reliance into their little souls as I possibly can before I inevitably betray them. I insert distance between myself and them, don’t always hug as long or as often as I want to, so that they will feel it less when they lose me to insanity.

And then it occurs to me that I might not turn against them at all. That our love and the strength of my mind might last.

As a daughter of ambivalent inheritance, this thought it almost more terrifying than the thought of failure. The hurt-apologize-hurt-apologize cycle is familiar. Old hat. Unconditional affection, though, is completely uncharted. How does one… do that? I have only read about it in books.

My job as a mother might not be to perform perfectly to heal and undo every wound by never slipping, never yelling, never once criticizing or letting down my guard. Maybe, for me, the goal of parenting should just be to keep showing up for work every single day, and keep dropping that bucket down into the empty well. I hear it thunk against the hard-packed earth way down deep underground, but I keep my ears open. And one day when the bucket hits bottom I may hear a tiny splash.