Person on the Page

If you had to sum up your relationship with one of your parents in a few words, what would you say?

I struggle to find a way to convey my childhood experiences with my mother quickly and clearly, so that you, my reader, will have a sense of what happened to me. Where is the shorthand for psychological and physical abuse, manipulation and betrayal, fear and shame?

Where is the nutshell into which I can pour years of pain and humiliation so that I can hand it all to you in a tidy nugget?

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During my career as an English professor, when I taught college creative nonfiction writing courses, I sometimes asked my students to think about their parents. I invited them to imagine how they met, how their relationship developed, how they became intimate. I even asked students to imagine the event of their own conception.

If we know anything about our parents’ lives before we were born, it’s probably only what they’ve told us. Their stories may bear the marks of myth and legend, dramatized for our consumption. Their stories play out not in our memories, as they may seem to, but only in our imaginations.

In The Afterlife, a memoir of his relationship with his mother, author Donald Antrim writes,

Our parents’ lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers’ and fathers’ power to shape and interpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them.

We exist, Antrim tells us, because of our parents. Whether we love or hate them, whether they were nurturing or destructive, they exert a singular power over us. For us, they are supernatural beings. They gave us life.

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I have failed to find the shorthand — the neat, efficient way — to tell you about my childhood experiences with my mother. These words are the closest I have come: My mother created the world.

There it is, the myth.

My mother created the world. And she made the rules.

She ground and polished the lens through which I saw the world around me. She wrote the definitions of home and family and a child’s place. She established the rules that were, to me, the laws of my small universe. The rules I followed, or that I failed to follow and so faced her consequences.

The world she created was unmapped terrain, dim and treacherous, full of blind alleys and hairpin curves. A kind of maze where a child was always lost. A domain where draperies were drawn tight against onlookers. A nest of secrets. A place where a child could be used and misused and hurt, with no one to see. Because, after all, it was for the child’s own good.

My mother ruled it all — her realm, her home. Her child: body and mind.

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In her 1987 poem I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds does what I used to invite my students to do. She imagines her parents meeting in college. She sees their relationship beginning and leading toward marriage.

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

Then she writes, I want to go up to them and say Stop, / don’t do it.

Why? Why does she imagine herself trying to prevent her parents from marrying?

Because, she writes,

You are going to do bad things to children.

Is that it?

Has she found in these few words the shorthand to convey to us her troubled relationship with her parents? Does she tell us enough of what we need to know to understand? Enough to imagine what happened to her. To surmise a painful childhood. A legacy of abuse.

Does she hand us the truth, there in a nutshell?

Perhaps. She does so, though, along with the poem’s final line, a warning to her parents:

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

I am determined to tell, too. At the thought, however, I lift my hand to cover my mouth, to keep my mother’s secrets. I try to write the story anyway.

For myself, yes. Because it is my story.

But mainly for those who may be helped by knowing they are not alone in enduring parental abuse. For those who may themselves be struggling to find their own shorthand for what they have endured.

For you, maybe.

For them, for you, I will dare to tell.

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To read more about my relationship with my mother, see these earlier posts.

Quicksand

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Why I Wanted Lucille Ball to Be My Mother

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Cover Image: wa at Pixabay