In thinking about my mom for my last post, I had an odd, and rather uncomfortable, realization: I think of my mother as two different people, with different names: Mom and Mother. Even in my own head, they are distinct, and when I talk with people about her/them, there is a very clear line between the two. If I am talking about things that she went through, I always call her “my mother.” If I am talking about how brilliant she was, things we did together, or something she taught me, she is “my mom.”
I have no idea why I do this, or when I started making the distinction, but it’s unsettling and confusing. Feeling the need to understand this duality, I tried an experiment: in my head, I said, “My mom went through all these things.” I didn’t even make it through the entire statement before I started crying, the instant tears that rise up in your throat and choke you while making your head throb. It was a horrifying moment of realization, and I felt like I had somehow just inflicted all those awful, painful, agonizing experiences on my completely innocent and wonderfully loving mom. I had never fully associated the horrible things that happened to my mother as having happened to my mom. I’m crying again now as I reflect on the experiment. Somehow, I think I compartmentalized my thinking and my emotions, that these things happened to someone else, not MY MOM.
MY MOM is the woman who taught me to appreciate the feel of bread dough in my hands, the smell of it rising, of it baking, the taste of a chunk of still-warm bread spread with rapidly melting butter. MY MOTHER was the child who cooked and cleaned for her family from a ridiculously young age, who had to scrub the baseboards with a little brush whenever she made my grandmother angry. MY MOM is the woman who took me to Ireland for three weeks before I started college, simply because we both had a weird feeling about a photograph of the ruins of a church we saw in a book. MY MOTHER was the child who was regularly locked out in the fenced-in backyard all day with her three younger siblings to keep them out of my grandmother’s hair. MY MOM is the woman who homeschooled me for most of my life and taught me the essential skill of self-motivated learning. MY MOTHER is the woman who had dreams of becoming a surgeon, but had to give it up after a head injury. MY MOM taught me how to ride a horse and how to take care of them and how they are amazing and beautiful animals. MY MOTHER is the woman who was thrown from a horse, an accident that we believe started the downward spiral to her agonizing death 13 years later. MY MOM is the one who skipped through Disney’s Epcot Center with an open parasol over her head while 13-year-old me, mortified, glowered disapprovingly and stomped along beside her. MY MOTHER is the 52-year-old woman who moved like a 90-year-old, hunched and slow, tentative, pained.
I have no idea how to reconcile my two mothers. Probing the barrier between them is like having a nasty bruise that you can’t leave alone; you know it will hurt, but you can’t stop poking it anyway, trying to find the margins of it, how deeply it is bruised, if some parts of it hurt worse than others when you poke it. If my thoughts drift toward, “My mom went through [some horrible awful thing that hitherto I only thought of my mother as experiencing]” the tears and burning in my throat spring right back up.
Every. Damn. Time.
Comments
I really thought I was alone in this, Lindy. I even think of them in different tenses: My MOM is the woman who switched all the shoes at the Bay so that the right was on the left and the left was on the right. My MOTHER was the woman sitting next to me at her oncology appointment as the doctor explained what we could expect. My MOM is the woman who organized “truck stop dinners” where we ate from-frozen food and could swear at the table. My MOTHER was the woman who self-harmed while I was at school. My MOM is the woman who drove across the country with me just because I wondered how long it would take. My MOTHER was the disfigured patient covered in tumorous lymph nodes, begging not to be remembered like that.
They’re not the same person. They can’t be.
Thank you for giving me so much to think about xo
Author
Hi Kate,
Definitely not alone. That’s interesting about the verb tenses, as well; I will pay more attention to that detail in the future in my own thinking. Both your mom and your mother sound like very interesting people.
“They’re not the same person. They can’t be.” I don’t know about you, but I think for me it’s a coping mechanism, a certain level of compartmentalization and detachment that allows me to function without getting stuck in the “Slough of Despond,” so to speak.
I have begun to wonder if I need to somehow reconcile the two women who were/are my mother in order to heal and move on in a healthy way, though the thought is pretty terrifying. As painful as it is to brush by the thought, delving into it has to be many times worse.
Thanks so much for commenting. As much as I would never wish these things on someone else, it is comforting to know I am not alone.