It's late . The windows in my office are open and bugs, drawn by the single light on my desk, are sweeping by, beating their wings against the screen. I'm awake at three because I've got those old time jitters. I've got that free-floating anxiety that kept me up for endless nights in my first youth. It hasn't come over me in a while. But it's here now. That's what the middle of the night is for, looking at moths and listening for ghosts.
Why am I always expecting to be taught a lesson? Why do I feel as if I will be punished into humility and gratitude event though I am busy filling my days with being humble and grateful?
Why do I think I'm not worth anything-- and that I deserve even less than nothing?
Whose praise and forgiveness am I searching for?
What voice do I need to hear? What voice can offer me redemption? Is it too easy to say that I'm scanning the airwaves, turning the dial on a sort of emotional short-wave radio, for my mother's particular speech? Yes, I do realize that there is no phrase from her that reassures me, only ones that threaten. I don't remember any lines from her that help me navigate the complicated life of a middle-aged woman and I'm good at remembering lines. I remember things she said, but none of them help me.
She was scared for me always, worrying that the very worst would indeed happen and that I would end up sad, lonely, and dependent. She thought I would end up pregnant, maybe married, certainly unemployed, and probably unhappy. These ideas--even if they were meant to galvanize my young self into action--did not help me. I don't think those stories scared me into success, even if that is what she hoped they might do. I think they just scared me. And I think I'm still scared of them.
I think I'm still scared of her.
I remember thinking my mother wouldn't come home from shopping, or return from going for a walk. I would sit by the window and only breathe regularly after I saw her from my window. I was afraid that something bad would happen to her.
I remember thinking she would die while sleeping in my bed. From a very early age onwards, I thought that if I breathed at a different time from her, if our breathing wasn't synchronized, I wouldn't die when she died. Her mother died at age fifty; my mother died at age 47. I am older now the age she was the summer she was dying of bone cancer--she was not so very old.
And I am still catching my breath from a death all those years years ago.
Parts of life she genuinely enjoyed. I can picture her at the movies, munching discreetly on contraband popcorn brought from home in a secret bag; getting away with something added to the deliciousness of those moments.
I remember laughter, it's true but there were many more tears than laughs, and that's the real reality, not the nice stories my brother and I tell each other. The funny stories we tell about our mother are funny only in retrospect. She'd get lost driving in the same spot on the same highway every time she return with us in the backseat from the beach. She'd be upset; t became a family joke. Every time she went to the doctor it was a drama because she always thought every visit was the beginning of her death. At a certain point it was. She waited for death like a boarder waiting to be evicted from a rented room. But when she got the news, it was still a surprise.
And me? I'm worse. Here am I, smarty pants, all stupidly nervous, torturing myself in almost the same neurotic way, resorting somehow to these old feminine tricks when I don't need to, when I can do better than this. But the gravitational pull of fear is strong, and that pull, coupled with the magnetic center of habit, is pretty tough stuff to push away. Maybe at some point it was useful, but it isn't useful any longer.
Last night I had a dream around dawn where my mother, young and beautiful, warned me "You're not allowed to be angry at those people who mean you no harm." Easy for her to say, silent and offering no voice for me to find, except in my sleep.
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Gina Barreca's new book is It's Not That I'm Bitter (published by St. Martin's)
