My Mother, Part I

My mother was a chronically ill woman. But when people ask me what her diagnosis was, I never know what to answer, because there wasn’t any. Sure, she had elevated blood pressure and was overweight, but she did not, to my knowledge, have any chronic illness. I am confident that what she had was a mental illness which resulted from years of physical and, possibly, sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Wow, that was a loaded sentence that I never thought I would ever verbalize or write. It’s the pile of dog shit on the sidewalk that has been sitting long enough that it developed a protective skin over it that prevents the disgusting odor from escaping. And no one wants to be the shit disturber – the one who steps on the pile and breaks the seal, thus releasing the putrid stench and tracking the mess everywhere. My mother’s childhood is history. My childhood is history. I am a young adult now, and as dramatic and traumatic as the past – both hers and mine – may have been, there is no point in bringing it up if it can’t be changed anyway. So I’ve been able to effectively close my mental ears to any of the past. I like to live in the present and to look forward to the future. I’ve learned to shut out the past and live in the moment. And it’s worked very well.

That is, until now. I’ve now come to realize that you cannot erase the past by ignoring it. That the past is what shapes the present and the future. That ignoring the past is like ignoring the pile of dog turd in the middle of your living room floor and allowing it to develop protective layer. But the turd is still there in its full glory and the protective layer is extremely thin. All it takes is one small disturbance and the stench is released. And it’s worse than it would have otherwise been since it was allowed to ferment and putrefy more than it was to begin with.

Now I want to live in the present and the future. If you want to keep things status quo, then the 800-pound turd in the room can stay there, no harm done. But if you want to grow and advance, then it has to be acknowledged, addressed ad dealt with. If you want to bring new, expensive, beautiful furniture into your living room without first cleaning up the mess, then the very furniture you bring in will disturb the pile. And the pile will get tracked onto the furniture, which will no longer be beautiful and which will, in turn, track the mess around the room.

I’m ready to grow, to move on, and to improve, beautify and enhance my life and my family’s life. I’m under 30, I work at a great company, and I am financially secure. That means that the music stopped. The hustle has calmed down. And now the background noise has become the primary noise. It’s like the time I spent with a friend in Monterey, California, a place known for the seals that call the nearby bay home. By day the city is bustling with tourists and life. The seals are part of the scenery and their barks are hardly heard or noticed. But then when night sets in and the city is asleep, what was once background noise becomes a loud, annoying sound that, for the visitor who is not accustomed to it, can ruin a good night’s sleep.

I never liked background noise. I liked to shut it out with louder primary noises. When showering or brushing my teeth I need a radio on, when relaxing I need a television to be on, and when going to sleep I need a fan or air conditioner on in the background to drown out my thoughts.

But there comes a time when the music stops, the radio needs to be turned off and it is too cold for a fan or air conditioner. It’s time to pay attention to the thoughts and the background noise. It’s time to acknowledge, understand, and to try to learn and grow from the past.

So here goes.

If I had to describe my image of my mother in a single sentence, it would be this: She was always running to doctors and counselors, always carried around a bag filled with countless medications, was always popping pills, lying in bed, eating, and watching TV at all times of day and night. Her life was a blur of lying in bed with the TV on, dozing in and out of sleep, eating in bed, and stepping out to see the doctors who would prescribe the pills that would help her get through the day, and to the therapists who would validate the ways he felt about herself and my father. She was abusive. She hurt and almost killed us at times.  We were beaten mercilessly with wooden hangers, belts and steel bicycle chains. We were locked in tiny, airless closets without oxygen, food or water. She sat on us and suffocated with the full weight of her enormous body.

On one occasion, when I was kicked out of camp, she beat me so hard, so mercilessly, and for so long, I had to pinch her really hard to get her off of me before I lost consciousness or possibly died.

I was an obnoxious child. I knew too much for my own good and I would harass teachers in school and the staff in overnight camp with my big mouth. There was one teacher who was uncomfortably close with certain classmates and I made my discomfort clear, and he despised me for it and banned me from joining the class on the overnight trip to Washington, D.C. that he would take the students on each year. Only now has it occurred to me that it wasn’t so much a punishment as it was his fear of having a keenly observant student with a big mouth on an overnight trip that would leave him alone with all of the other children in another state.

In camp, the counselors would smoke and drink after the campers went to sleep. They tried to hide it from the campers and they were successful at it for the most part. But they met their match in me. I managed to find their secret stashes of beer and cigarettes, and would fish in the garbage cans for the packs and cans, and would make it clear to them that I had found it and that I knew what they were up to. They tried to explain things away, but I was too smart for them. And too smart for my own good.

Eventually they found some type of excuse to kick me out of camp. As I mentioned earlier, I was a hypochondriac as a small child and would have frequent attacks of health-related anxiety and panic. Having heard by then that cigarette smoke was hazardous to your health without knowing fully exactly how and why, I was convinced that simply smelling cigarette smoke was dangerous.

When I would lie in bed at night and smell the counselors smoking on the porch of the bunkhouse, I would begin to panic, thinking that I would die from inhaling the secondhand smoke. On one occasion, the anxiety about the cigarette smoke led to an all-out panic, which led to numbness and paralysis. Although it was the panic itself that had caused me to go into shock, I was convinced that it was my inhaling the cigarette smoke that had caused the symptoms.

I was taken to the hospital in the middle of the night where an obviously tired counselor was forced to stay with me until I was released a few hours later. True to form, I told the doctor that the counselors’ smoking cigarette near the young campers had made me sick. This infuriated the camp staff whom I was throwing under the bus, and this time on the record.

Anyhow, they now had the excuse they needed to send me home. It was a medical issue. Because of my hospital stay, they claimed, it was important that I go home for a few days – or maybe for the rest of the summer.

But what they didn’t know was that sending me home would be more hazardous to my health than the secondhand cigarette smoke. You see, my mother looked forward to the two-month overnight camp because it was an opportunity for her to get rid of all the children and the noise and to have some time for herself. It was like school on steroids.

You see, my mother counted on the hours we were in school as a mini-vacation of peace and quiet. When we came home from school it was a disruption and an annoyance. And when one of us was home sick, that was tantamount to raining on her parade. Here she thought she would have a few child-free hours of quiet, and now she would be bothered by an annoying little brat on her head, and with having to schedule a doctor’s appointment and shlep out of the house.

So the two months of camp were a real reprieve. And any disturbance of that expectation was a real bummer. That summer my parents had rented a summer home in not too far from where my camp was located. My father would spend most of the week in the city where he worked, and he would come up for the weekends and return to the city on Monday. My two youngest siblings were very young and spent most of their days in day camp or outside in the common area, so they were not much of a disturbance to her.

So when I showed up in middle of the summer, it was like a hailstorm disrupting her day at the beach. I don’t remember if it was a minute or an hour before the brutal beatings began. All I remember is a relentless, merciless beating with a wooden hanger and a leather belt. The whacks rained down on every bone in my body without exaggeration for what must have been hours. There would be an occasional short interruption, after which the brutality would resume with even more force and vigor.

I remember at some point trying to run from her room into the kitchen where my little brother and sister slept, and said “please call for help”, but they were two young and too scared to do anything or know what to do. At another point, I was locked in the tiny bathroom. I opened the small window and started screaming for help, hoping a neighbor would hear me. But no one did, and now she was even more infuriated. She took me from the bathroom, beat me some more, and threw me into the tiny closet in her bedroom.

I was bruised and wary, but worse than anything I was thirsty. My mouth felt like cotton and I thought I was going pass out. I begged from the closet for some water, but she refused. Finally, in desperation, I made a mad dash from the closet to the bedroom door, but I didn’t make it. She grabbed me, threw me on the bed, beat me passionately, and then in a burst of insane rage, she put her entire body weight on top of me, smashing and suffocating me. At the point where it felt like I was going to die, I reached up and pinched whatever part of her I could grab between my fingers. I knew that the pinch would have severe consequences, but it was literally a matter of survival at that point.

Luckily, the pinch caused her to pull back for a second, allowing me to suck in a breath. Even more infuriated, she proceeded to viciously beat me some more before throwing me back into the closet.

“I’m so thirsty, I feel like I’m gonna die,” I muttered weakly from inside the closet.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I could hear her leaving the room. She returned a few seconds later and opened the closet door. She held a mug with water in her hand which I thought she was going to give to me, but she instead splashed the water in my face. Luckily, I got a drop of the water in my mouth which was enough to restart my salivary system.

After that, I stayed quietly in the closet and I don’t remember where I spent the rest of the night. The next morning, my mother woke up and was about to leave for the day. When she saw that I was riddled with sores and bruises from head to toe, she became afraid that the neighbors would see me all bruised up, and warned me that I had better not step outside for the entire day and that I had better not let anyone see me or say anything to anyone about the beatings. She then left for the day, and I stayed inside all day. And all of the next day. And the entire day after that.

And then I emerged, my bruises – the visible ones – having subsided. I was approached by a friend of my mother who lived in a neighboring summer home. “Were you here the past few days?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you around.”

I mumbled some answer but did not tell her about what had happened and why I was holed up for three days. That was my secret.