Imperfect Beings

Reflections on what would be my mother's 100th birthday

“Why are you sad, Mommy?” I asked when I noticed Mom’s face was tear-stained, her make-up running.

“You’re too young to understand.” She said.

“No, I’m not.” I thought we were playing a guessing game.

“I’ll tell you about it when you’re older.”

“Tell me about what?” I asked thinking I was getting closer.

“Nothing you’d understand.”

“I can understand, tell me.” I put on a very sympathetic face for a three-year-old. This made Mom smile, but she still shook her head no.

Several years later, Mom gave me a long name for what was wrong with her, why she was sometimes sad or angry. Mom had a disease. She had regular appointments with a special doctor in Rochester.  He gave her pills.  I shouldn’t worry.

But I did.  I didn’t understand what was wrong with her and if the pills were working. Was she getting better? How would I know? What if she got worse? How would I know? And why couldn’t I help? Perhaps, I asked another worrying question: “Could I get this disease?”

“It’s not contagious,” Mom said.

“Then how did you get it?” I asked. “How do you know I won’t get it?”

Another year or five went by. Mom told me that she got her disease from her mother because her mother didn’t feed her when she was a baby. This grandmother had died of breast cancer before I was born. I never met her. But Mom said this grandma was a bad mother. She had no milk for Mom. Mom had nothing to eat for several days. Mom lost weight. Mom got very angry. Mom had never gotten over this anger.

I found this explanation confusing. I didn’t remember being a baby. My earliest memory was from when I was two, when I woke up from a nap and started singing “Row, row, row your boat,” in my crib. Then Mom came to pick me up.

Did Mom really remember her first week of life? Mom had plenty of food to eat now. Our refrigerator was full. I asked question after question, but Mom wouldn’t say more….

Except to say that I was to share this with NO ONE. No discussion of the special doctor, pills, or disease with a long name. This was not like the measles, mumps, or chicken pox. You didn’t tell the neighbors. You didn’t tell Grandma. You didn’t talk about this outside the home.

Mom considered this information her secret, not my secret.

Mom would have turned 100 last week.  She grew up in a time and place  where Sigmund Freud’s theories were all the rage. Maybe a psychiatrist blamed my grandmother for Mom’s illness. Or maybe, when Mom concocted her theory, no one disabused her of the notion. Maybe over the years, Mom turned to a different explanation. If she arrived on one, she never told me. She died in 2017. As far as I knew she never felt cured, and she might have still been blaming her illness on her first week of life.

Keeping Mom’s secret meant I had to keep the world at arm’s distance. If I arrived at Grandma’s upset about something at home, I shrugged my feelings off. If in school, we were discussing heredity and mental illness, I kept my thoughts to myself. When a friend told me her father had been hospitalized for depression, I was understated in my understanding so as not to breach Mom’s trust.

What a relief it was finally to leave home, to meet people who wouldn’t bump into Mom at the grocery store. Now, I thought, I could live my life. I could frame things as they made sense to me. I could form honest relationships without secrets.

I found it wasn’t so easy. What had I learned as a child that seemed relevant in the present? If no one knew my family, why would they be interested? I didn’t want to come off as a complainer. That would make me sound like Mom, blaming someone else for my problems.

Every once and so often as the decades went by, I’d try to open up another discussion with Mom, wondering if I was finally old enough for her to trust. But she always side-stepped, even if we were discussing a family member’s suicide, or long-term depression, or story about a mis-adventure in the psychiatric system. Her inner life remained closed to me.

I sat with Mom at her deathbed realizing the time for questions and answers had long ago passed. I held her hand, watched her chest rise to take in its final breath. We were two imperfect beings coming and going, trying to find peace.