Mothers

This week's essay has been contributed by guest blogger, Momsomniac. I'd like to extend my gratitude to her -- for contributing her memories of my mother and for being such a good friend.

As I thought about how to write this, I realized that much of what I had to say casts my own parents, particularly my mother, in a bad light. So I want to start by stating – emphatically – that my parents are not Bad People. They were barely more than children when they married. To my mind, my mother, who dropped out of high school at 17 to marry my father, was a child. They grew up in relatively traditional working class families, my mother with no small amount of abuse at the hands of her father. So all things considered, they did okay. And if they were unable to untangle the mixed messages they gave me and my sister – words in support of the modern notion that we could be anything we wanted to be and actions in support of the notion that women existed to please men - well, that doesn’t make them bad. It makes them human. So, in light of that ...

I have two stand-out specific memories of Nancy, and two more general ones that I only realize are a reflection of her parenting now that I am, myself, a parent.

All of these memories, as with so many memories, are memories of myself, but with Nancy in them. There are two reasons for this -

One is that I was a teen-ager, and like many teen-agers, as my world expanded with new feelings, thoughts, and desires, it also shrunk to my own line of sight.

The other is that, as Deb has stated earlier, Nancy was not a parent who was ‘ever-present.’ She certainly DID some parenting, as I recall, but she didn’t go out of her way to insert herself into the lives of her children or their friends. That, in a way, makes these first two stand-out memories more special.

The stand-outs:

1) When my parents’ marriage was falling apart, my mother, who had devoted more than half her life to waiting on my father, didn’t handle it well. I never knew what she’d do, or how she’d respond to things. One week-end, the group of us had been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) at Deb’s house and we had just wrapped up the game. As I had been instructed, I called my mother and asked her to come get me.

It was around 5 o’clock. She told me she’d be there at 6 and that I better be out front to meet her. I suppose I spent a little time hanging out with Deb, and then dutifully went out to meet her a little before 6. Six o’clock came and went. No Mom.

After a while, Nancy came out and tried to get me to go back inside. I wouldn’t. I don’t know if Nancy thought I was an unusually obedient child or if she understood I was afraid. In any event, after about another hour, she brought out 2 stools (buckets? chairs? [memory is unreliable]), and she sat outside with me until my mother showed up at 11 that night. I don’t recall if she stared at my mother or if she just turned and walked back inside. I do recall that she didn’t say a word. It felt ... good.

2) I went through puberty when I was in the 3rd Grade. By the time I finished 8th grade, I was tired of my peers trying to touch me and asking questions about my breasts. I was more tired of teachers holding me after class for no reason, or making comments about my body. So I did what any thoughtful pre-teen who felt out of control would do; I developed an eating disorder and lost 30 pounds (I don’t mean to be flip – I just don’t think people realize how much this can be about unwelcome sexual attention).

In any event, by the time we moved to Florida, I looked as if I had never seen puberty and didn’t have any hope of seeing puberty any time soon. This is when I met Deb and her family.

One of the boys in the D&D group “run” by Deb’s brother had insisted I be allowed to play after a conversation he and I had about books. And when I came to the house, Nancy then insisted that Deb be allowed to play. I recall being afraid that all this would cause me to be seen as an interloper, and eventually I was, but not before Deb and I became friends. This was important, because I had moved from a small town where I was well known and well-liked by my peers to a place where everything good about me was seen as a threat to the current order. I needed friends.

I was allowed to spend the night when these games were played solely because Deb existed. A sister to one of “those boys” made the house safe, in my mother’s eyes. Without Deb, I would not have had even this short stint of being a part of a group of friends. And often when I spent the night, I would wake up early and there would be no one awake except for me and Nancy.

I had gradually begun to gain my weight back and I appeared to be going through a very late puberty. And one of these mornings, Nancy tried to talk to me, to get me to talk to her, about how my body was changing. I was rather amused, because she couldn’t have been more wrong about what was happening to me. But on another level, I felt deeply moved that a friend’s mother would be concerned that no one had had this talk with me, and would try to take this on for herself.



General memories that I only realize NOW are about parenting:

1) There was one night I recall running (with the D&D group) all around Deb’s neighborhood, playing Frisbee on the tennis courts, and being chased by “police” because we were out after curfew (likely neighborhood patrol – there was no curfew where I lived a few miles away).

Nancy was no doubt at home, secure that we were pretty good kids and that a group of kids heading out with Frisbees on a beautiful night was nothing to worry about. This was probably normal for Deb and her brother. But I had never felt so free in all my life.

2) Deb and I would spend our nights devising skits, telling stories, and “experimenting” (let’s lie down and try to say the alphabet backwards while we rub our temples and see what happens). At the time, I thought Deb wanted to do these kinds of things because she was younger than me. But over time, I realized that this was just ... Deb.

See, at 13 there were already a LOT of messages in my life about how interested I was supposed to be in boys. These were often not positive messages, more along the lines of what I call the triangle of shame (girls only matter if boys say they do; all boys want is sex; sex is bad), but clearly I was supposed to be very interested. I wasn’t, but I thought I was supposed to be, so I tried. Except for when I hung out with Deb, when it didn’t matter.

She couldn’t have cared less about the boys sleeping in her brother’s room downstairs or what I thought of them. And though it’s clear that she had her own awakening and struggles later, I do suspect that the way she was mothered gave her the freedom to be herself at that time. And as an extension of that, as long as I was with her, I was also free to be myself - utterly indifferent to boys, fascinated by other things entirely, and all ...

So to sum it up, to my mind, Nancy in many ways gave me Deb, who has been my friend since I was about 14. And that was 30 years ago. Who would not be grateful for that?



Momsomniac (Florida, 1985)