Mother's Day traumatizes me.
Because my mother did. As did my grandmother and every other mother figure I've known who's been legally or biologically attached to me. Wherever motherhood has touched me, that bond-of-all-bonds putresced.
Seeing those virtual bouquets on social media, those heart-shaped snapshots inscribed THANK YOU, MOM in frilly script, footage of she-bears cuddling cubs: Three days hence, my spinal fluid is still half-sleet.
I did not ask for this. I know I keep repeating this like someone apprehended with the Crown Jewels or a snake. But the idea that my lifetime of fear and dread might not be my fault remains hazy to me. I never asked to be born, much less to someone who hated herself. I can say this ten thousand times -- with hula poses, and in funny accents: Mooch less to soomwoon. Still I can't feel the depth of it. I can't break through. Narrative numbs me. I remain unready to realize that my default state -- cliff-clinging fear while wanting to punch my own face -- was coded into my DNA, then doubled every day I loved her.
She refused to breastfeed me, but OK, let's say baby-bottles were trendy back then. She made horrible faces at herself in mirrors, hissing Pig. She read me storybooks and screamed that my best friends were sluts whom she would gladly kill. This is my legacy, not purple irises. Not brunch.
Her final words to me -- while under hospice care, on morphine, in a rest home where her doctors said she had to stay, after ten days spent recognizing none of us while chatting merrily to unseen figures, pantomiming hugs and cutting invisible cakes, then suddenly seizing my arm and growling Get me out of here, to which I replied I can't -- were:
So after all the fucking things I've fucking done for you which I never fucking wanted to fucking do, I fucking ask you for one fucking thing which you fucking refuse, which fucking shows me who you really fucking are.
THANK YOU, MOM.
Then again, she'd known me all my life. Why would she lie?
Trauma leaps down the generations like a song. I grew up watching Grandma torment Mom: making her face collapse by hanging up on her. Holiday dinners -- chicken this way, tablecloth and candlesticks this color, honey for the challah, to please Grandma: who refused to attend or, having arrived, threatened to leave. I was fifteen when Grandma tripped over a stranger's dog, broke her hip and died of an embolism after surgery. Mom chanted in her grief I killed my mother, although she had not, then chanted those words all her days, as others pray.
Around her house I found scrawled notes stuffed into drawers: Dear God I am so lonely help me help me.
I could never hate someone so sad.
I've nearly always been a depressed anxious post-bulimarexic hypochondriac who assumes every bruise is leukemia and whose milestones -- graduations, publications, marriage -- induce near-psychotic states in which I believe I am deathly ill. Those sunny days my friends spent raising families, I spent shaking in doctors' waiting rooms, envisioning my slackjawed corpse. Had I called those events panic attacks, they might have at least lessened. But trauma tricks its victims into believing everything -- except itself -- is real.
Fear is to me as breathing is to you. Every emotion you think I display, every behavior, is merely a version or product of fear: that you will yell at me, that I'm about to die (or die of shame), that disaster will strike, that you will leave, that you will stay.
But why? Because Mom (and, just for the record, Dad) screamed cusswords at me, making me pick barehanded through every trash can in the house for items I'd misplaced? Because Mom banned me from the dinner table if I coughed, pointing down the dark hall, booming Get OUT? Because she showed me the stain on the pavement where a speeding car had killed a neighbor-boy riding his bike? She called bikes and cars "death machines." I never rode, and I don't drive.
Is this why I am hypervigilant, searching my body for whatever could be called a symptom? Because I'm afraid to -- but think I deserve to -- die? As punishment for growing up? For contemplating joy?
It was as if we made a pact: No pleasure, anywhere.
My significant other praises me but, when I enter Panic Mode, tells me to change my thoughts, my mind, my personality. Stop imitating your mother, as if this was a choice, as if I was only wearing her hat.
Stop. Stop stop stop. Your problems are imaginary.
They are, but: Having imaginary problems is a problem. We the traumatized, who freeze at every sudden sound, whose every sneeze is an emergency, know our terrors are all the realer for springing from the unreal -- because we feel them, then apologize for them, to ourselves and others who might see us as fools, liars, crazies, criers of wolf.
I never make my terrors up, as if anyone would, for fun. Nor will I say I wouldn't wish this upon my worst enemy because, if I had a worst enemy, I would. I'd so want him or her to hear his or her spouse wailing Why can't you just feel happiness? Why isn't love enough?
Heck yeah, worst enemy: Take that.
Trauma does this to us: Trauma stops time. Not in a fun Back to the Future way but like a grotesque Groundhog Day, in which we feel the same fears again and again and say the same things but learn nothing from experience, attain no expertise, so just repeat, return, repeat.
This is because we're blocked. I know it now. We whose traumas were of the touchless, Mommy-loves-you-but-you-are-a-fucking-pig-whose-pals-I-want-to-murder kind are often unaware that we were even traumatized. Because we believe trauma entails only war and sex, we minimize what happened to us or make fun of it. Meanwhile we're like that fallen star in The Blob, which lies trembling faintly on the grass until poked with a stick, then spurts a fetid gel which swells to monstrous size and eats a town.
We do and do not understand that we contain such blobs. Which we resist releasing, because what if they become huge and engulf the world? Better to face our daily dose of fear than to remember everything, re-live whatever started this. Better to simply stay a fallen star.
Better to never know we have been tricked! And will not regain all we've lost! How could I live with realizing I won't be reimbursed, but simply gave my life away: not knowingly or gladly, as pilgrims give alms, but rather as a hypnotized man hands his wallet to a thief?
I know it now, maybe too late: I have not lived. I looked as if I lived. You thought you saw me, but I was a wind-up toy, and this is why.
I did not see myself as sick. I saw my sufferings as my true self. My mother was much sadder, so compared to her at any moment of the day I seemed a paragon of purloined mirth, my every laugh a stab in her poor back.
Even in therapy, I seldom thought of healing as a thing. I thought: Maybe I'll dull the pain. Maybe I'll learn to stop spoiling my significant other's life. Or make myself a bit less horrible.
It came to me instead, though only recently, that I am not a gross, disgusting, frozen-with-fear asshole -- well, maybe I am, but for a reason. Which was that my mother did her best, but her best was to hate herself and maybe by extension me.
When I was born we had a deal, right? My job was to live. Hers was to keep me safe. I kept my end of it. She told me, after I came home from parties: All your friends are gossiping about you right this minute. Are they saying that you're stupid, clumsy, weird or that you stink? Compared to searing me with matches, this is small, yet it is not.
Don't get me wrong: I love bouquets and bears.
And I could keep reciting anecdotes for yobut see, the narrative seduces me into a singsong dullness behind which I'm blocked. These are just words and they're not getting through to me. Not yet. I could speak for ten thousand years and still not feel.
