I’m the Mom Now.
I’m nine and sitting with my aunt outside the funeral home at what feels like the second week of my mom’s funeral. I’m numb from shock and I feel like a marionette, a child still young and slowly growing from my family lines.
I’m not sure what they expect from me. I’ve dressed up, sat as quietly as I could manage through visitations next to the waxy shell my mother left behind. I’ve tried to console my younger brother. Tried to take care of my three year old sister. I’ve cried, then made myself stop because I feel my family needs me to be slightly less sad so they are free to cry out their emotions and pity me. This is their ritual, not mine. This is not how I’d choose to remember her, or grieve.
I feel like a prop. But that’s nothing new because I’ve felt like my mother’s understudy for most of my life.
Then, out of almost nowhere my aunt says, “You’ve got to be the mom now, Michele. Your little sister and brother need you to raise them. Your dad can’t really do it.”
It’s uncomfortable then. It makes me feel like I lost more than my mom only a few days ago. My childhood is now over and from here on out I’m the adult in my household’s life. I straighten up, like she’s issued a challenge.
Thirty years later those words aren’t any less sinister or traumatizing. Now I’m on the other side of ten years trying to parent my alcoholic, likely clinically narcissistic father and another twenty of trying to recover after I left his household. I see, logically, how most of my family, with their own traumas, came together to form a system that twisted and damaged those of us who grew up in it. How overlapping generations passed on problematic gender roles and religious ideas, passive aggressive and gaslighting communication styles. How those of us who tried to cut ourselves free (I call us The Cousins regardless of how we’re related and regardless of where we are in our recoveries) became the rejects of the family safety net. It’s a hopeful sounding ideal, but we were so scared and isolated from even each other that we still can’t find the strength to sit down and compare notes.
The aunt that told nine year old me that I was the mom now was herself a foster child of my aunt and uncle, who I grew up with as my uncle’s second wife. The good news is she’s a Cousin now too. She escaped the tangled net of the family and, from the distance glimpses I get of her on social media, found some happiness. But more about her later.
She isn’t wrong. My dad, it turns out, is pathologically unable to be a healthy parent. His own behavior ruined his marriage, but like he couldn’t ever admit his own responsibility in his life, for the next ten years he’ll continue shucking parental responsibility off on any woman he can, very often me. In discussions with friends I’ve been asked if that might have been healthier for my siblings. Maybe. But was it healthy for me is also a fair question to ask.
I have a complicated relationship with my memories of my mother. In the good column; she tried to be joyful, she was stubborn and determined. She was strong. When she kicked my dad out she chose to stand up for herself and her children and when he abandoned her, both financially and as a co-parent to punish her for having the gall to stand up for herself, she never took me aside and damaged my views of him. My father never said a kind word about my mother after her death. But my mother fiercely protected us from the nasty fall out of their divorce, and protected us from seeing what kind of a man he was. She believed hard. She was fiercely independent and learned how to manage a household on the fly, often spending hours every Sunday planning menus and shopping lists down to the penny over the Sunday ads. She hid her struggles from us, trying to protect us from the world.
On the down side; she was a perfectionist and left me with the permanent feeling of inferiority. I remember the first time I received a B on a report card. It was by only a few points and at the end of second grade. And I cried like I’d died because she’d be so upset with me and I would never be a perfect A in her eyes again. She had ideas of what her family should be, and who I should be, ideas that I couldn’t live up to, no matter how hard I tried.
She was dedicated to her religion, so much so that she once made me “break up” with a friend because her mom allowed us to listen to “Manic Monday” while driving in the car. When I asked the family across the street why the boys in the family wore that same little hats on their heads and they invited me to Temple to learn about their way of worshiping, she confronted them and I was never allowed to play with them again. She systematically isolated me from the world around us, in the name of religion, which had lingering effects to my sense of self worth and ability to feel like part of the community. At times I felt stunted in my emotional and social growth.
She dreamed that I would be a wife and a missionary one day. I dreamed that yes, I would get to travel far away from where I was and meet someone who loved and supported me, no matter who I was.
I have a letter she wrote me not long before she died. In it she says that divorcing my father, the very thing I admire her the most for, was her biggest mistake in life and she wished she could take it back. She also says that she hopes I die before I wander off of the Godly path.
Imagine being a teenager and reading, in your mother’s own handwriting, that she wished you dead rather than be someone she didn’t approve of.
I had just as much of a troubled relationship with her very mainstream religion. I stopped believing in it, the way she saw it, when I was six and the pastor explained that animals don’t have souls and won’t go to heaven. Even then my little brain dismissed the ludicrousness of that. Souls were one’s worth. They taught, she taught, that if you didn’t keep yours clean and pure and perfect, you weren’t worth anything. And other living creatures didn’t even have a chance. They were never worth anything. I keenly felt the weight of Original Sin, only to realize how much it was my mother and her religion who made me feel it.
After she died I thought that the world would end, literally. She believed so hard and so thoroughly that I didn’t see how any god would allow her to leave the world so painfully. I didn’t understand how the object of her obsession didn’t stomp right down to her funeral and put her back, because the whole act was merely a test of our faith.
I struggled a lot after her coffin slipped into the earth and we turned away.
To begin with my father abandoned me again right away. He wasn’t there for her illness. He wasn’t there to console us or support us. He arrived for the funeral, I saw him a few times, less than I stared at my mother on her silk pillow. Then he was gone again.
When my mother found out she was ill she went very far to avoid depending on anyone else. She taught me, at seven, how to help her clean and flush her PIC line, the tubes that allowed for the doctors to send chemo directly to the organs trying to kill her. An aunt was a nurse and tried to help, but my mother insisted I could do it.
I’ve been told a story, many times, by two of my mother’s sisters about the point at which they realized something bad was going on. They came down for a surprise visit and found my mom too sick to get out of bed and me, at six or seven, trying to cook macaroni and cheese for my 4 year old brother and baby sister. I don’t remember that night, but I do remember that they moved in, because they, unlike The Family (my dad’s side of the family, who we lived close to and engaged with much more often), recognized that it wasn’t a child’s job to be a parent.
Parentification is a psychological term for a toxic relationship where the parent is unable to or unwilling to fulfill the role of being a parent and instead makes the child the responsible party in the relationship. This can be a side effect of Codependency. Parentification is most common in situations where the parent is a Narcissist (in which case the child is held directly responsible for the emotional well being of the parent), or in cases of the parent being an addict (in which the child often becomes the responsible party both emotionally and physically for the parent.)
It happens in situations like mine, too, where the parent is ill in some way and completely rejects outside help. My mother refused adult support, foisting responsibility on me instead, and I wonder sometimes how much longer it would have gone on if my aunts hadn’t made a surprise visit that night.
They moved in with us in revolving shifts, much to the dislike of the other half of my family, who seemed to have almost a possessive view of my mom. She wasn’t their blood, but after she divorced my dad they threw in with her. Ironically, they also weren’t overly eager to help her–and her children–in this time of great need. Until after my mother’s family moved themselves in.
When things began getting real bad The Family–my father’s side–tried to take control of the whole situation. My mother’s side of the family were blocked from access. They were pushed out, lied to, and things were hidden from them. Many of my aunts have told me as an adult that they didn’t even know when her funeral had been until after it happened. And they were systematically cut out of my life as well, with my father’s relatives refusing to answer calls or pass on numbers or addresses that would have enabled that side of the family to reach out to and support us kids.
The Family also decided, as things became terminal, that it was best if we kids didn’t see the bad things going on with my mom.
I hadn’t seen my mom for two weeks. I just knew she was sick and in the hospital. I thought she was having another surgery. Then I was taken to see her. She gave me a cheap Valentine, one of those little cards you get by the dozens for a whole class of kids. Two days later they woke me up and told me she’d died. But I already knew.
I barely saw my mother in the last year of her life. For my own good.
And then, after the funeral my dad breaks the news that he’s going back home, to Georgia, where he lives 800 miles away from us…alone. To “get things ready for us”. Only hours after I was told I was the parent now, it was snatched away again, and I was shipped off to live with a cousin who didn’t want another child in the house. I shouldn’t have been their responsibility, truly. I was not a good child. I was hurt, scared and confused. I was packed off like the Little Princess, the once loved and depended on daughter whose father died and who is locked in the attic, suddenly unworthy.
Much of my identity growing up was in pleasing my mother. I was a sinner and had to cover it. I didn’t believe what she wanted me to, so I had to fake it and pretend that her greatest dreams for me were something I passionately desired too. I had to earn her love and prove I was worthy of her attention and effort. Then I was alone with my memories of who she wanted me to be, and my knowledge of who I actually was.
And I hurt.
I tortured myself with her memory for many years. First in that cousin’s home, where I just existed, lost, fluxing between anger at my situation, anger at the people around me for not just loving me, and numbness. I didn’t see my siblings for almost 4 months. Something had irrevocably broken between us in that time. None of us were family anymore. We were angry with each other, at our forced abandonment of each other. We were angry with the family who isolated us, the dad who abandoned us in our time of need, and angry that we had to pack up every bit of the life we led in a four bedroom two bath big house and squeeze into the 2 bedroom apartment my dad kept in a state so far from everything we knew.
Anger wasn’t making me feel good. So I tried to channel some of the joy I remember my mother for. I held myself, and everyone around me to her standard, at the ripe age of nine. I tried to be who she wanted me to be, who everyone said I should be happy to be. Maybe by being that Michele I could be happy again? I embraced my aunt’s words. I was the mom now. And I was going to force everyone into being what they should be, myself included, rather than the sad little things we’d become.
That was the mom’s role, after all. To form and uphold the ideal of the family, and to fight, blackmail, guilt, control, and coerce the family into meeting that ideal. No matter what.