Who's Fault?

Mother's Day makes me reflect AGAIN! about my life and the ways in which my mother influenced it. My mother, Marguerite Beem Hall was the older of two children, and as the daughter of two busy school teachers, she was a latch-key child in the 1920's and '30's when other mothers stayed home with their children. As a graduate of Canton Actual Business College in Canton, Ohio, where her parents taught, she began her adult life as a court stenographer, respected for her ability as a writer/typist with a command of English grammar, mechanics, and punctuation that was not known by many others, then or now. My father made her give up her career. They divorced when I was 16, and Mother was at a disadvantage trying to find work after so many years of housewifery. 

Mother played five instruments, including piano, mandolin, violin, and guitar, and she sang alto harmonies. She gave me the gift of music, teaching me to sing in tune and harmonize as soon as I could talk. She took me to the radio station, to her friend who was known as "The Story Lady," on a radio show so that I could sing. Yes, she had me in Shirley Temple curls, too! 

She started me in piano lessons with a concert pianist when I was 5 years old, but bragged over the years about how my teacher saw my talent and wanted  Mother to "give" me to her (I never knew what that meant), but she refused. "I just couldn't give up my little girl!" Mother would say. Even as a child, I thought Mother's decision was a tragedy. 

When I was in fourth grade, Mother took up puppetry, a project that lasted for years and included my younger sister and me. Mother built a puppet theater with lights around the inside of the window and a curtain that pulled open and shut. After she, my younger sister, and I made up a story, she made puppets for the story out of sawdust mache and sewed their clothes from material scraps.

Our stories were always musicals--vocals with harmonies, accompanied by one of us on a ukelele. All three of us played by then. We wrote new words to familiar song melodies to match the stories and included songs we'd learned in school and scouts. We performed our puppet shows in the communities where we lived. The shows finally ended when the three of us were unable to stop fighting long enough to agree on anything. By then, my sister and I were headed towards careers in music for life.

When it came to me, Mother did not have good parenting skills. Before I started into first grade, I was convinced that I was a rotten child and everything that happened in the family was my fault. Sometime in elementary school I decided to never have a child. I just knew the child would be despicable like me. It was a decision I stuck with, and a wise one. We get our parenting skills from our parents. I would have been the Mother from Hell. 

I must have grown used to my mother's scorn and disgust with me, because I married and had long-term relationships with men like her over and over. It's likely I deserved to be treated with scorn and disrespect in my adult years, but I doubt that as a little child I deserved it.  

I began forgiving my mother in my 50's, after my sister informed me that there are no rules written that require a mother to feed, clothe, and provide shelter for a child. Mother did feed and clothe me and provide shelter, along with protection, at least at first. When my father came home from WWII with a brain injury, Mother told me she could not leave me alone with him in those first few years--he had no impulse control and would have killed me. By the time I was in fifth grade, her protection was over. Maybe she secretly wished he would kill me, because she was away from home attending church and scout leader meetings most nights of the week, leaving my sister and me to our father's whims. 

With brain-injury as the top injury of soldiers returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I worry about those families. My sister and I are the poster children for such a family.

Until my mother died in 2009, she and I spent our lives together in a painful dance. The details would fill volumes. I blamed myself when she died (of course!) and from the last look that she gave me as she lay dying, I could swear that this woman with advanced dementia (who hadn't recognized me for several years) blamed me, too.

When do I stop blaming her for my disappointments? For why I don't have a child of my own? For my years of mental illness? For the years I've had to spend in therapy and on medication? For the years of failed relationships, including the relationship with myself?

Mother and me in mid-1990s

Mother's Day gives me a new kick in the butt every year to grow up and take responsibility for my life. This year it starts with the flowers she planted in the backyard of her home that I was able to inherit last year. She loved plants and flowers like I love them. 

It starts with the satisfying life I've had, immersed in the expression of my heart through gifts that were the same as hers--music and writing.

My blaming ends with the most beautiful sentence ever written--one of the seven last words attributed in the Bible to Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I don't need a divine "Father" to forgive people for me, and I don't believe that forgiveness is called for, because it is inherent in the second part of the sentence: ". . . they know not what they do."

Mother couldn't have known the impact of her behavior on me, and I will never know the depth of the pain and hurt I inflicted on her. In some ways we were blind to each other's needs. If we had known, our dance would have been very different. I believe that.