good and the bad. To mourn a mother fully, we have to look back and acknowledge the flip sides of perfection and love. Without this, we remember our mothers as only half of what they were, and we end up trying to mourn someone who simply didn’t exist.
“Mommy was a saint,” my sister once said, several years ago, to a chorus of audible nods. And I thought, a saint? She was charitable and compassionate, and she routinely took care of others first—all that, I maintain, is true. But she was often nervous and unhappy, and she made more than a few decisions that haven’t served me all that well. I don’t particularly like to remember those parts, don’t necessarily want to recall the things she did that even today, from an adult perspective, seem unreasonable or unfair. I want to look over my shoulder and see my mother only as the woman who shared cigarettes and PTA gossip at our kitchen table with her neighborhood
friends; who carefully and methodically combed the knots out of my long, tangled hair before school when I was six; who curled up on my bed and listened patiently to an off-key version of the haftorah I would sing at my bat mitzvah at thirteen; and who clutched a box of tampons and shouted directions at a closed bathroom door to help my best friend in the ninth grade.
But that’s not all of who she was. She was also the mother who constantly coerced her children to hide information from their father so he wouldn’t get upset and, when he slammed the garage door and drove off one night, sat in the kitchen and cried, “What am I going to do? I’m nothing without him”; who was so frustrated with her own constant, unsuccessful dieting that she said nothing about my rapid and deliberate weight loss in 1978 until I had dropped to 102 pounds on a five-foot, seven-inch frame; who screamed at me all the way home from my second failed driver’s license road test, shouting, “If you think I’m going to continue taking time out of my day to drive you around, you can just forget it”; and who turned a sixteen-year-old daughter into a bedroom confidante, telling me all the reasons why she should leave my father as well as all the reasons why she couldn’t and, in the end, turning me against him as well.
I’ve heard that every emotion contains within itself the impulse for its opposite, but where does one end and the other begin? When I think too long about my mother, love and anger and guilt become incestuously intertwined. I have to work actively to separate them out, to differentiate the good from the bad, and, in doing so, to allow my mother to become a composite of positive and negative traits. I couldn’t mourn my mother until I was ready to allow her, after death, to be nothing less—and nothing more—than she had been in life. If I can’t mourn the Bad Mother, a piece of me remains forever connected to the piece of her I refuse to see.
It’s hard to understand how we can harbor negative feelings toward someone we love when the two appear to sit at such competing ends of a spectrum. But negative emotion can bind people together just as tightly as positive emotion does, which is why even daughters of abusive mothers need to mourn the loss. At first, this may sound like a cross between the impossible and the absurd: Why grieve for a mother who gave you virtually nothing but grief? Why bother
mourning if you wanted her to leave, or if her departure freed you, giving you more than you feel you lost?
All ties, positive and negative, have to be evaluated before a daughter can reconcile her mother’s death or departure and move on. When the mother was a victimizer, this process involves a more difficult, more painful, and potentially more confusing journey for the daughter left behind. She often chooses to accentuate the positive, idealizing the lost mother and minimizing the abuse, or she may focus only on the negative, unable to acknowledge that a mother who hurt her so badly could have possibly loved
“Mommy was a saint,” my sister once said, several years ago, to a chorus of audible nods. And I thought, a saint? She was charitable and compassionate, and she routinely took care of others first—all that, I maintain, is true. But she was often nervous and unhappy, and she made more than a few decisions that haven’t served me all that well. I don’t particularly like to remember those parts, don’t necessarily want to recall the things she did that even today, from an adult perspective, seem unreasonable or unfair. I want to look over my shoulder and see my mother only as the woman who shared cigarettes and PTA gossip at our kitchen table with her neighborhood
friends; who carefully and methodically combed the knots out of my long, tangled hair before school when I was six; who curled up on my bed and listened patiently to an off-key version of the haftorah I would sing at my bat mitzvah at thirteen; and who clutched a box of tampons and shouted directions at a closed bathroom door to help my best friend in the ninth grade.
But that’s not all of who she was. She was also the mother who constantly coerced her children to hide information from their father so he wouldn’t get upset and, when he slammed the garage door and drove off one night, sat in the kitchen and cried, “What am I going to do? I’m nothing without him”; who was so frustrated with her own constant, unsuccessful dieting that she said nothing about my rapid and deliberate weight loss in 1978 until I had dropped to 102 pounds on a five-foot, seven-inch frame; who screamed at me all the way home from my second failed driver’s license road test, shouting, “If you think I’m going to continue taking time out of my day to drive you around, you can just forget it”; and who turned a sixteen-year-old daughter into a bedroom confidante, telling me all the reasons why she should leave my father as well as all the reasons why she couldn’t and, in the end, turning me against him as well.
I’ve heard that every emotion contains within itself the impulse for its opposite, but where does one end and the other begin? When I think too long about my mother, love and anger and guilt become incestuously intertwined. I have to work actively to separate them out, to differentiate the good from the bad, and, in doing so, to allow my mother to become a composite of positive and negative traits. I couldn’t mourn my mother until I was ready to allow her, after death, to be nothing less—and nothing more—than she had been in life. If I can’t mourn the Bad Mother, a piece of me remains forever connected to the piece of her I refuse to see.
It’s hard to understand how we can harbor negative feelings toward someone we love when the two appear to sit at such competing ends of a spectrum. But negative emotion can bind people together just as tightly as positive emotion does, which is why even daughters of abusive mothers need to mourn the loss. At first, this may sound like a cross between the impossible and the absurd: Why grieve for a mother who gave you virtually nothing but grief? Why bother
mourning if you wanted her to leave, or if her departure freed you, giving you more than you feel you lost?
All ties, positive and negative, have to be evaluated before a daughter can reconcile her mother’s death or departure and move on. When the mother was a victimizer, this process involves a more difficult, more painful, and potentially more confusing journey for the daughter left behind. She often chooses to accentuate the positive, idealizing the lost mother and minimizing the abuse, or she may focus only on the negative, unable to acknowledge that a mother who hurt her so badly could have possibly loved
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