Cross-posted with permission from patriarchal disorder and dated from March 16.
It’s St. Patty’s Day tomorrow, my mother’s birthday, and I’m feeling it. Today, while paying bills, which my mother carried out so much more efficiently than I ever have, I used my solar calculator to figure out that, if she were alive today, she would be 83. When she died at age 55, I had no idea how young she was because I was 28 and clueless. 28 plus 28 = 56, which is how old I am today. There’s a lot I don’t know about being an adult woman with an alive, aging mother. My mother was no saint,but she had moral courage. She tried to do the right thing, she wanted to do the right thing. When my very young cousins (listen to me! I was 10!) were orphaned, she wanted to take care of them like a mother. She wanted simply to open her wings a little wider, breathe a little deeper and find the way to step in to make a devastating abandonment go away. She didn’t, exactly.
She had never had her own needs met. A person who is invisible, taken-for-granted, seen as her husband’s "helpmeet" rather than as a full, complex, mysterious human being, cannot be all things to all people without breaking down. Chances are she would have broken down even without adding four orphans to her own brood of three with their own problems of stuttering, obesity and depression. She had not been a wanted child and she had been orphaned by age sixteen. She did not go to college. She was working as a salesgirl in a department store when she met my father, who was studying for an advanced degree. She was beautiful (though never thin enough by some cultural standards), she could really really really sing, and she was desperate to be recognized in ways I didn’t realize until her deathbed. She was angry and became angrier; she was bitter and became disfigured by embitterment. She was lonely and demanding and sometimes disconnected from the present moment.
Toward the end of her life, when she would spill to me about everything that had turned out not to be what she thought it would or should or could, she would say "I did my best." But nobody believed that she had done her best, and nobody cared, including me. She was a terrifying woman to all that knew her, one minute warm, gracious, giving, compassionate, and the next…we never knew when she would explode in rage. I believe it ate her up. I believe she died of cancer at age 55 because she had never been seen as a person.
On the day she died I stood by her in the ICU as she scrawled notes on a pad. She was yellow and swollen beyond recognition, intubated so that speaking was impossible. I have never seen such fear in a human being’s eyes. She scrawled GOLD. GOLD. GOLD. I didn’t understand. Her maiden name had been Goldberg. She jammed her pencil stub against the pad in my hand. Why didn’t I understand? How could I not understand? I had always been the one to understand. In fact, she’d dumped way too much of it on me when it was inappropriate, when I was still a child. Entirely inappropriate. But here she is 55 and dying and I am 28 and surely nothing is inappropriate now.
Then I got it. "You were gold," I said. Yes. Yes. Yes. There was a fluttering, a release of solitude, a whole body sigh, a gratitude. That I understood meant everything. I understood everything in that moment. A woman who did the right thing for the children of relatives who committed suicide, who knowingly sacrificed her own children in order to do the right thing, only felt her own innate worth while facing death, an early death, a sudden death. Only in the terrifying retrospect of sudden separation from everything that had mattered did she receive validation of the essential quest of her life: to be valued for her SELF.
It matters that she tried to do the right thing, but it’s not her story alone. Many women have mothered past their capacity, have dug so treacherously into their own emotional reserves that there is nothing left. Many women have mothered the lost children of dead sisters, sisters-in-law, even strangers. Historically, women have been morally courageous, generous with their love and resources, self-sacrificing and expecting little in return. They have had to be. I want this to change. I want the burden for compassion, caring and giving to shift. I want it to be shared by all human beings. I want women to be freed from valuation for the services they render to their husbands, their mothers-in-law, their children, their fathers-in-law, their fathers, even to their mothers, and to organizations that prey on their ability to hurt for others. I want all women to feel the value of SELF, to feel it long before the deathbed reckoning. I want them to know it before birth, at birth, during infancy, during childhood, during adolescence, during young adulthood, during adulthood, during maturity, during the aging years, during the breakdown years, surrounded or not surrounded by grandchildren, lauded or not lauded for their "good works." I want it, period. I want it for all women, worldwide. I want it, goddammit. I want it now.
Madama, this is such a powerful piece and so beautifully written. Regarding your mother’s desire to care for your cousins, that was noble and wonderful, and consistent with the tradition of women feeling compassion and taking responsibility for caregiving. A couple of generations ago, families did not scatter to the winds with economic opportunity, but tended to stay in one place, so that caregiving could be share among several women in a family – there was indeed a village to help raise the child. But in a society where the nuclear family rules, the mother is left to bear the caregiving role largely on her own – a heavy burden that can become crushing, especially in tragic circumstances when she’s trying to do the right thing but finds it humanly impossible. I completely concur that EVERYONE should bear the burden of compassion and caring and love. We hear that younger generations of men are increasingly moving to also assume that role. Let’s hope we really are heading in the right direction, but in the meantime, we’ll continue to fight for it.