I am lying with the Guppins on the cushioned floor in her bedroom, having just read
some sleepy stories, her sucking away on a bottle (I know — tooth decay). It’s nine p.m.,
she nods off, I decide to check my iPhone for messages in the dark, maybe play a few
moves on the fourteen neglected “Words with Friends” games I have going, relax, but
instead I read this email from my mother. Sent to me, but not addressed to me in case it
isn’t clear:
Hi B___ [my brother],
l have just read an email from [me] and she asked how you are and if you are still
coming for a visit this summer and she doesn’t know J___ [my other brother] is also
coming. How do l answer it? l don’t know if she could come anyway and if so it would
only be for an overnight and l would love for [the Guppins] to meet about the only
relatives she has however l don’t want you to be upset. l really don’t want to lie but l
don’t want to spoil even a minute of your holiday either. Tell me what to do, be totally
honest with me and l will happily do it.
Mom
“Spoil a minute of your holiday”
Some context:
My mother is 73. She isn’t all that computer savvy. And she just accidently sent this
email to me, clearly intended for my elder brother “B.” B lives in California. “J” lives in
Australia. Both have large families, three kids each. We are estranged.
The fact that we are estranged has just become very, very clear to me. In fact, the fact
that it is quite possible that my mother (who lives on the other side of Ontario) is also
estranged from me, but keeps it up because her relationship with her closest living
(distance-wise) grandchild, my Guppins, is important to her, is worth putting up with me
for.
Was it really just today that I said to Sir Dick, “I’m feeling happy. I’m feeling really happy!
I love you, I love our life, I love that I have a job [I finally have a job], I’m feeling settled
into our new life in old Smalltown…” Did I really just say that today?
Of course I did.
I start to shake. I think, Oh no. Oh no okay. It’s okay. This is going to hurt, this is going
to mess me up for a few days but I will weather it. I will breathe, I will take half a Xanax, I
will…what? What will I do with the avalanche of feelings I know are about to descend:
Total fear and anxiety
Anger
Defensiveness
Self-doubt and loathing
Self-blame
Confusion
Rage
Days of unspeakable sadness
Still in the dark on the floor with my precious sleeping daughter, I flip to my Facebook
app and look up my brother. I flip to Safari and Google, “How to unfriend someone from
your mobile app.” Because I don’t want to wait another second.
Unfriend my brother. What a joke. I’m thinking: Don’t do it. Just wait. Don’t do anything,
just sit tight and let this play out. I’m thinking: keep your enemies close. I’m thinking: No
one in my family wants me.
My father died three years ago. I helped my mom through it. After my father died I was
there for her. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t change her attitude towards me. I talked to
my therapist about it. Then I confronted her about her and my father’s drinking and
parenting. I was hard on her. I was trying to create some boundaries with my mother.
Which didn’t work. She sees it is totally differently, and ever since it’s been a process
of her being very cold, occasionally warm, but mostly shooting me daggers and saying
things like, “So you didn’t have a totally horrible childhood after all?” whenever I try to be
positive about the past to help ease things.
My brother, who lives on the west coast, was furious with me for Abandoning My Mother
At Christmas. (I didn’t, I just didn’t want to immediately commit to driving four hours
down a dirt road through blizzards with a baby in the backseat to see a person who was
pretty mad at me without deeply considering it.) Our conversation concluded with my
brother counting to ten out loud (how ridiculous, I thought), and hanging up.
The same brother who once visited me when I was working in England in the greatest
gig in my life, only to inform me that our parents always put us second, that they put me
second and didn’t even bother to come. As he did.
Confusion.
Now this.
What do I do? With these feelings?
The email also implies that my other brother, J, also hates me. He’s travelling from
Australia and doesn’t want me to know! I suppose I could have had a clue when years
back he visited (from Australia) and kept changing our plans to see each other the night
before. Or when both of them came for my father’s…well, there was no funeral, my
mother insisted on taking Dad’s ashes and pouring them into the ground behind her
garage next to all the dead dogs. During this…Event of Death, my brothers basically
never spoke to me. And I was paralyzed by, well, grief. I could not connect. I feared I
was going to die from the pain of my father having died practically in front of me after
heart surgery, from having stood before his freshly dead body in the recovery wing,
bloated, tongue protruding, dead. Dead dead dead.
My therapist once told me that children of alcoholics often transfer feelings of
abandonment onto each other. It’s a sibling thing. Well, she sure got that right, because
I have been experiencing feelings of abandonment from both my older brothers for…a
long time.
There were years of intense closeness. There was even competition between them for
my affection. But as we got older, all that changed. To blame. To misunderstanding. To
distance.
I am not blameless. I missed J’s wedding in Australia due to a theatre gig. (My parents
also didn’t go; my dad wasn’t well.) And I once called him in Australia at a bad hour — I
miscalculated — and woke up three crying babies. I now can relate to how much hatred
a mistake like that might fuel.
I admitted once to B that in his presence I feel irrational pain and fear. Irrational? B is
a brutally aggressive uber-conservative male Harvard business grad under a ton of
pressure to be perfect.
Who also, it seems, might be dying. Or not. No one will tell me. I sent him a heartfelt
card. Maybe not so good, but it was something. I ask Mom, she falls apart… It’s some
weird…fungus or something…that subsumed his entire digestive track and now he can’t
get off the steroids.
Oh, I’ll just stop here. I’ll STOP. It’s family. It’s complicated. It’s hard. And I am the
bad guy. I am the one to be exiled. It doesn’t escape me that this is a drama that has
repeated itself over and over in my life.
So what do I do?
I decide to tell the mamas of this blog. I am writing this story now; I am sending it to
them the second I am done. Because they will love me, they might think, “Oh, it’s
Drama Mama, it’s all a little rich,” but I will never feel their judgment because all I have
felt from these women, who are writing with me, bravely, gorgeously, is pure and total
acceptance. Which is why we do it. And East End Mama will edit it, and Secret Weapon
Mama will post it, and the entire world can, if they want, read my mother’s fucking email
because THAT IS THE BEAUTY OF AN ANONYMOUS BLOG.
So do it. Write it. Find your mama friends. And tell THEM. Because it may be the half
Xanax, it may be the shot of tequila I jut downed, but I have stopped shaking and feel a
hell of a lot better.
Here are some guidelines for us all to help me, based on the writings of don Miguel Ruiz
(which we learned about in our mothers’ group):
The Four Agreements
1. Don’t take anything personally.
2. Be impeccable with your word. [I like to think of this as being true to yourself.]
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.
But in the meantime, I’m going to stare at the beautiful sleeping child in my crazy world
and focus on US.
-Drama Mama
[image: Accordion Sea by Brooke Weeber via Mammoth & Company]
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