MOTHER  

My mother was attractive, intelligent and athletic.  She studied diligently as a youth and continued her education in college and then received a Master’s in education in 1937 from Washington State University.  She taught school in a one room school house and then became a county extension agent in Pacific County and taught poor farmers how to make mattresses and developed this business for farmers into a cottage industry in South Western Washington.  She loved to dance and ski and entertain.  I believe she and my father loved each other very much and once the war was over all she could think about was having a family.  Then she gave birth to my sister, me and my brother and we never got to know that woman ever.

The mother I knew was constantly cleaning our house, getting us ready for school or making dinner.  She was the most obsessed Operations Manager you will ever know.
She wore herself out and was constantly on uppers and downers just to get through the day.  I loved my mother very much as a child and thought I was part of the reason she became sicker and sicker.  I remember her working incredibly hard to show the outside world that our family was “working” and day would turn into day and we wore clean clothes and the house was always immaculately spotless but inside our hearts were broken.  I was the kind of kid who needed a confidant and my mother was not available.
She checked out very early every night most often before we kids went to bed and woke up at 5:30 and started cleaning the house and making breakfast and starting the cycle all over again.  The broom closet in my mother’s home was cleaner than most people’s dinner ware.

As a small child you don’t know what is going on in the heads of your parents because they are such giants and you need to organize you life 300along with theirs to survive but with each passing year my mother became more distant and less present in our emotional lives.  My mother, being Scottish, loved to cook and feed us in a very economical fashion.  On Sunday we would always have Pot Roast and mother would wrap all of the leftovers in tin foil and then on Monday we would have the good leftovers. She would then wrap up those leftovers in even more tin foil and then re-cook the leftovers for Tuesday night.  By Tuesday night the pot roast was pretty awful and that is what my little ten year old heart was feeling like.  All wrapped up in tin foil and pretty dry around the edges.

The pain of the emotional loss of my mother was catching up with me the older I got.
I wanted so badly to be loved by her that every day that I wasn’t embraced by her love was another day I was very mixed up inside.

At times mother would travel to medical clinics for treatment.  She had a poorly done stomach operation when I was young and she became quite a hypochondriac seeking treatment for problems that she had from the operation as well as problems she thought she had.  She was also was in great need of emotional help for her distress that she wasn’t getting from my father or anyone else and I believe she at times checked into mental hospitals when her depression became too much to bear.  I never really knew what happened when she was gone because as a family we never talked about where she was going or what treatments she was having.  She was just gone.  Denial was the rule.  Maybe if we didn’t talk about the problem it would go away.  All I wanted in life was for her to come home and be a loving, in your life, mother like the other kid’s seemed to have and be swooped up in her arms and told that I was the best and her love would protect me from all of the monsters in the world.

 I remember once when we picked her up at the little Omak airport, a friend of my father must have flown her in from a Spokane hospital in a small private plane, that I was so excited she was coming home early and I really believed that she was fixed and our lives would magically transform into a wonderful happy family.  When she got into the car she was still very groggy from all the drugs and possible electric treatments she had received that my mother hardly recognized me.  The entire ride home I was scared she was going to die and I started tapping on the door handle believing that if I tapped that door handle enough times it would wake her out of her stupor and fix her forever.  I remember sitting in the car out in the driveway after my parents had gone into the house still sitting out in the car tapping that door handle hoping I got the magic number of taps on the handle to fix my mother before I came into the house and tried to start our family life all over again.  Unfortunately I didn’t get the right combination of taps made to make my formula work. 

As I said every day this estrangement from my mother lasted I was in a deeper tailspin of confusion and unhappiness.  I couldn’t sort out my problems and I was becoming tremendously accident prone.  The accidents were probably my unconscious mind trying to get my mother’s attention and to force her to shelter me for at least long enough for the danger of the accident to pass.  As I became older, thirteen or fourteen, I began to realize that my mother was never going to stop being so emotionally detached from me and I knew I had to find a way to survive emotionally to grow up.  So I guess that is when I began the process of fooling myself into believing I could get by without my mother’s love in order to cope with the world around me. 

As a child I was always worried that it was me who had broken my mother.  I was too loud or too needy or misbehaved so badly or had too many problems and this caused her ability to love back to be broken by my carelessness.  One of my uncles helped this worry along during a summer vacation.  My brother and I were always being sent around to the relatives during the summers and we thought it was because our parents wanted us to get to know our cousins better.  Funny though we always went to visit the cousins and they never came to stay at our house.  One summer night when we were staying in Oregon  my uncle thought I was out playing with the other kids but I had come inside and gone upstairs to grab another baseball mitt when I heard the grown ups talking down in the kitchen.  I quietly scooted down the stairs where I could hear them but they couldn’t see me.  I was curious because I kept hearing my name being brought up so I wanted to find out what the grown ups were talking about.  I came upon the conversation just as my uncle was getting to the point.  He told his friends, who were gathered in their kitchen that night, that the reason my brother and I were there was because we were too much for my mother to handle and the family was worried that my mother was going to have a mental breakdown if she didn’t get away from us boys for long stretches at a time during the summer. 

My heart sunk on that night and I wanted to yell out to everyone that it was her choice to act this way and I was just a kid like any kid and it wasn’t my fault she was going crazy.  But I didn’t.  I quietly went out the back door and walked out into the yard and cried my heart out.  I was thankful that my uncle had brought this problem out into the open and he was right my mother did need a break. It was on that night that I knew I had to find a new way to sort out my emotions.  I would stop bothering my mother and give her some relief from me and begin to sustain myself without being needy of her love.  I would love myself.  That was quite an existential load for a kid of thirteen.  It was scary not to have any emotional backup but it seemed better than going to my mother with my problems.

I began to establish another set of made up ways to meet my emotional needs.  I worked harder at being charming so I never got into situations where I really needed a mother’s love.  I got very good at reading other people to see which way their moods were swinging and what social conditions were being played out so I could always be a few moves ahead of them so that I could escape having trouble with them.  I became everyone’s friend but never too deep a friendship because I never had an innate sense of being secure with what kind of person I was.  I didn’t have a mother telling me I was special and I could do anything I wanted to in life.  And when denial or avoiding problems as they came along didn’t work I would retreat into my inner self and read books and wander off on my own in my own world until the coast was clear.  You see I had a multi-layered approach to emotions it’s just that they were all made up responses instead of just having real feelings.  No one was there to push me into becoming the “special person” inside me or at least someone to say you’re pretty good at this you should do more of it.  No one was there buying me a book and saying you should read about this.  My mother went to bed at 7:30 and said goodnight.  I am thankful that my father would at least blow through my life from time to time with some real emotions or I would have probably never felt another real emotion growing up

Mom, I only wish I had stopped you on one of those many nights when you were going to bed before I even started my homework and said I love you and I miss not spending even a moment with you.  Why don’t you stop working so hard and let’s go for a bike ride or go to ice cream shop or come to my school and see me in a play or watch the band give a concert and oh by the way I play the trombone and maybe you could watch me play little le243ague baseball I really like being a second baseman or how about throwing a snowball at me or let’s go to the school carnival and be in the cake walk or buy a straw hat or go to the movies and eat popcorn or hey I want to be on the debate team     or I’m going out for football what position do you think I would be good at or I think I might like to be a lawyer when I grow up or my sister is going out with boys who drive shiny cars and what’s that all about and do I really have to do my homework because I want to go to college but I don’t want to work that hard.  But I never did ask those questions I just decided to live in a peaceful coexistence with you.  As long as my mother didn’t embarrass me too much I pretty much tried to not bother her.  She needed to go to bed 243at 7:30 because she could find no other way to numb the pain.  I was a little more creative.  I just made up my emotional life.  Even though my new emotional system was a house of cards waiting to tumble it was what allowed me to go on with life with some semblance of emotional stability.  I wasn’t taking uppers or downers to get through the day.  I was just letting a limited amount of feelings to register.  Just enough emotion to fool everyone into believing I was going to be ok.

Agnes MacLean in another time or place could have lived a very rewarding and memorable life.  She was smart and pretty and probably adventurous.  I once started writing a seafaring adventure story set in the Dalmatian Islands in the 1930’s and I immediately saw my mother as the heroine 243of the tale.  I guess deep down I wanted to see her come back to life as the woman she could have been. 

I’m sorry mom if it was me who broke your will.  But I think the truth is that at some point living with dad was just too dysfunctional for you and you decided to slog it out through the rest of your life instead of working things out.  Rather than express what was the problem you decided to turn off your feelings because they were just too much to deal with and somehow get through the day.  Thank you for taking care of me and making sure I got to school on time.  I only hope in the next life to be we can work on the other stuff.

 Love, little Charlie.