In a few days, my littlest arrives for a ten-day stay in the big apple. This is complicated not just because of the strange layout of our railroad apartment the peek a boo doors (bedroom adjacent to living room, french windows in every door, general teeniness) but also because I will be working for most of the week when she is here. The original plan was to have her come over July 4th and extend my three-day weekend during her stay. However, my mother’s time away from home, followed by her desire upon her return to once again reclaim her inalienable rights to control everything in her visible world meant that she wanted to step in and play mother. That is, she wanted to step in and make small complaints, resist the idea of the visit, and generally make a fuss so that it would seem like she contributed to decisions and/or action. She did neither. What she does often accomplish is the complete ruination of events and the spoiling of plans.
Last year, when little was coming to n.y.c. with an 8th grade trip, it made perfect logical sense for her to stay for a long weekend with her old and glamorous city-living sister. I would get to pick her up and escort her away from her overly chaperoned peers, sweep her into a subway and generally play happy host. First, my mother balked. She claimed that Katie was too young (not, apparently to travel, but to. . . ? that aspect of her argument quickly fell apart), then it was too expensive (my father stepped in to say it was important for Katie to spend time with her older sister and so the expensive could be swallowed), then I was a failure, unstable, too busy. Accusations fly subtly but with extreme force from my mother’s lips. At this point, she is starting to use benzodiazepines heavily again and so those lips are often loose, swollen, and thick with extended sleep. She calls in hazes and, upon cleaning up, claims to have no memory of the many things she has said over the years. After these accusations are tearfully recounted to my father he demands that plans be made (thanx for the last-minute martyr intervention pa, would love to have you be a regular player on the team, but understand that ego only allows for guest performances as the “go-between”.) Then my mother informed us that it was too late – her plane ticket could not be changed. This I believed, for some reason, for two months. Then I asked my father to research. Turns out, the lady never called little’s teacher, never asked about changing plane tickets, never researched costs, never did anything but sit by the phone and create excuses. Two months previous, the plane ticket change would have been more than easy; it would have also been free. However, due to the late date (one week before departure) the ticket change cost all of $50. Fifty whole bucks. Even an unstable, unsuccessful (two degrees at 23), no-good, slutty lesbo daughter can afford $50.
And so the visit commenced. I met little at Radio City Music Hall, pulled her away from the visor-wearing mother who was guarding all the middle-schoolers like a frazzled coyote and we took the subway to my house. We didn’t do much on her visit. She told me she would try all different kinds of food – a generous offer since most of my family sticks to the “meat and potato rule” as if it were doctrine and not simply choice. I got her to eat Thai food (we went easy with basil chicken med. spicy), falafel, and fancy cheese and hummus (she had never eaten a pita before and then I packed two meals full of them), Indian food (samosas satisfying the potato requirement), and a few other sundries she had simply never had the chance to try.
We watched too much TV and made cookie dough. We slept in and were exceedingly lazy. All the things I love to be with my littles, but at my parents home never feel at ease doing. At “home”, I am drained, scared, and overwhelmed by an adolescent anger that somehow never finds its end. I am fifteen, snarky, and determined to prove my parents wrong about everything all over again.
It’s an exhausting, humiliating space to enter. Not only am I ashamed of myself, I am quite aware that my parents main struggle is with their own disappointments – in their lives, their children, their choices. Pointing these out, in repeated and painful ways, often makes them wince.
I wish I could say to them: when I am away from you I am full of so much more benevolence. I wonder at the fact of how many children you had, so young, of how strange and kidnapped your life must have seemed to you when you were my age, how many things you gave/give up, how odd it must be to find yourselves approaching fifty, facing one another as near-strangers, your children running as far from you as possible with the college educations you bent over backward to give them. How odd, how sad, how strained. How I love you sometimes, I wish I could tell them. How I admire.
But in Oregon, I am only angry. About the things they said, about their opinions, their politics, about not being allowed to wear tank tops when I was younger. Useless things sometimes, but they seem pressing. Not always for myself, but for the kid they still have at home.
Through these battles it has become clear that my mother does not like me. The way that hurts is nebulous; it rotates around my head and lower intestines, making me dizzy and my bowels loose. If there was something I could do, to win her affections, without completely losing my self respect, there are days when I might. There are other days when I decide that my errors are inexorably wound up with my identity: my queerness, my politics, the fact that I do not live in a small town, that I am not interested in People magazine (at least not in the same way she is accustomed to). Sometimes I think her animosity comes from the belief that I think I’m better then her. I am alternately convinced of this fact (that I am) and terrified that I might feel that way. The strange distance between my larger family and myself – in situation, in experience, in world view – is one that causes the most psychic stress for me. I often reference and use the things my family are – middle and working class, rural, addiction-riddled, big, religious – as markers of my identity. But I also define myself in ways that I don’t even know how to explain to them. “Gay” is one thing, but how do I explain “queer” to my parents without giving them hope that I am a bisexual who will one day see the light, marry well, and make babies for their consumption? The places I go, the music I listen to, the movies I go to see they are all alien to her the way that "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" will remain an alien thing to me. The main difference being, at least I hear about her world, her movies, her music. In much of my family's mind, I might as well be making up most of what I care about.
Is this class shame – I hope not. I hope it is more and less than that. The first time I brought ladyfriend home to meet my fam she said that she could not imagine me coming from anywhere else, but she also could not understand how I came from there at all.
Accordingly the distance between my mother and I continues to grow – I can say little that I feel she deeply understands, she can say little to please me.
The result is that my mother knows nothing about my life, but she has imagined me as some kind of libertine monster, who lives in an unfathomable city, who does crazy things daily that would shock and horrify my grandmothers. She resists giving my little over to me, even for a short period, for fear I might infect her. In her anger about her lot, she has developed a manic drive to push her children toward more and resent their having gone after it.
Story for illustration: growing up my mother always treated me like a sensitive, delicate thing that trembled when yelled at. She would swoon over my stories and drawings. She told me I had a “poet’s soul.” This made me feel smart and intuitive. But when that sensitivity cast her in doubt, when I observed things she did not like spoken about or when she hurt me, she would turn on me. She would call me a liar, a storyteller, and suddenly “imaginative” – the thing I fancied as my gift – was a fatal character flaw, the thing that proved me a listless liar full of self-servicing egotism.
End of saga that ensues every time an interaction with my little is at stake: I get some compromised version of what would be best. My mother stalled so long the trip had to be postponed (and postponed and postponed). I get her for the middle of July, rather than mid June, and for less time then I wanted.
Still I’m excited. I don’t get to see her enough and one on one time is revelatory. I get to see all the little aspects of the person she is untainted by having to act like an angry teenager moping about my parent’s house. She gets to see the city, a different way of living, a tiny apartment, new people, new food, and art. I want more to do with her – I want a more glamorous life, more glamorous activities, more money to afford theatre tickets and fancy dinners. I’m not sure what she thinks of me – I’m not sure what she hopes for herself. I only remember coming from such a small place that even now I feel like the world becomes a larger thing everyday. Where once the variety of grocery stores and brands of mayonnaise I saw when I went away to college caused me great pain and anger at the limited nature of my upbringing – I want her world to be as large and as available as possible.
She is this amazing little beast – so much like me and separate that I could spend days looking at her, talking about her, planning her future. Our relationship is often maternal – our ten years difference and the amount of caretaking I did when she was small – and friendly. I get to be the person who gives her advice, but also the one she asks for said instruction. It is a privileged place, one that my distance helps me to occupy. Strange and sad, how I wish to be closer to my siblings, but sometimes I think that if I were, all our pining and affection for one another might begin to grate, to dissolve, that we would be revealed to be as opposite and alien to one another as we are from our parents.
Of course, I’ve always conjured the most terrible of nightmares for myself. When I was small, my mother used to sit by my bed and wipe my head with a cool rag. She would say “No, no, no. You imagined it. You made it up. Let it go.”
