saying goodbye
Posted: Sun May 08, 2011 9:56 pm
My mother was never an easy person to live with. An amazingly gifted artist whose art became everything she loathed and everything she loved in life. An only child, raised in an Irish Catholic family filled with secrets and Catholic guilt. At the age of 19 she sought rescue with my father, the youngest of 13 in a blended Jewish family. So began my mother’s life, an expression of opposites. A quiet, introverted woman who preferred a book or a sketch pad to interaction with others, married a man who dreaded silence, a man whose role as the youngest of 13 taught him early in life that you had to be loud, louder than everyone else in order to be heard. My mother was a person the always listened and never spoke, my father is a person that always spoke and never listened. Some might think these roles struck a balance, but they never did. Eventually my mother lost her voice, digging more and more into herself, lost in the constant din that spewed from my father. She never argued at all his ‘facts’, never selected her own menu at the restaurant, never voiced any opinion about where we would move that year. She quietly accepted her role as sounding board for this man, this all encompassing personality.
During the years of my childhood, among the constant moves, and constant turmoil, my mother continued to do her artwork. She did a bust of Kennedy that became so well known that the Kennedy museum made an offer to purchase it for permanent display. On the day of that offer my mother gathered the bust and all other work she had completed and locked it in the attic of our home. We never saw that work again. But she continued to produce beautiful pieces, all locked away upon completion. Slowly, over the years she lost herself, delving more and more into things she hoped would calm her heart. She changed religions, from Catholic, to Jewish, to Buddhist to extensional channeling. And she changed with fervor, or even ferocity. She began journaling, hundreds of secretive volumes, that to this day my father refuses to read or allow us to read.
When I was 12, we moved again to another home. I returned from school one day to find my 1 year old brother alone in the home, with a 104 fever. My mother had left, just left. We did not see her again for more than a month. And when she returned, there was no mention of her absence. One day she was just back at the dinner table. And this time she was back leaden with drink. And so it continued, living a tenuous life, worried for my mother, worried for my brothers, yet always amazed at her brilliance and sight. As a teen my tolerance for her moods grew shorter and shorter. We were never allowed to celebrate her birthday, or holidays. Mothers Day was laughed at in our family. Hallmark crap, she would say. Yet sometimes her words come back to me. Things that angered me so in the past, I find myself repeating to others now. “Happiness is a choice” and “what you put out to the universe is what you get back”. When I think back to my teen years her pain seems so much clearer now. My mother would cut herself, she could never remember, or would never talk about her past. Her drinking, her searching, her moods. And she so so hated her father. What were the stories she never told us? I will never know.
When I was 17 life changed again. I was sitting at the top of the stairs and had made a derogatory comment about my father. I don’t remember what I said. My mother was very drunk, climbed the stairs and began beating me on the head with a broom handle. I could have moved, I could have run, but I didn’t. I let her hit me on the head three or four times and then I just shifted my weight….just a little…. and my mother went down the stairs and broke her leg. I left that day and never returned to the home. It was a turning point for us both. We did not speak for a year. I graduated high school living in a rooming house and my mother got sober.
I would like to say that everything was better but it was not. I think with sobriety came a reality of her life that made her feel unredeemable. She never drank again. She returned to her art, a darker art, a sadder art. At my age of thirty five my mother began to lose her memory. Senility, dementia took over her life as it had her mother before her. My father controlled every aspect of her day and she never spoke up, she just got quieter and quieter. In her last years my mother and I reached an accord. I found some peace with her that had never existed before. But as I had always done, I mistook her silence for peace I so desperately wanted with my mother. She was never able to cope with the loss of her memory, the deterioration of her intellect. Four years ago, at 72, my mother committed suicide. Alone in her room, without a sound or complaint, she ended her life.
I never gave my mother a Mother’s Day card.
My mother, Arlene
During the years of my childhood, among the constant moves, and constant turmoil, my mother continued to do her artwork. She did a bust of Kennedy that became so well known that the Kennedy museum made an offer to purchase it for permanent display. On the day of that offer my mother gathered the bust and all other work she had completed and locked it in the attic of our home. We never saw that work again. But she continued to produce beautiful pieces, all locked away upon completion. Slowly, over the years she lost herself, delving more and more into things she hoped would calm her heart. She changed religions, from Catholic, to Jewish, to Buddhist to extensional channeling. And she changed with fervor, or even ferocity. She began journaling, hundreds of secretive volumes, that to this day my father refuses to read or allow us to read.
When I was 12, we moved again to another home. I returned from school one day to find my 1 year old brother alone in the home, with a 104 fever. My mother had left, just left. We did not see her again for more than a month. And when she returned, there was no mention of her absence. One day she was just back at the dinner table. And this time she was back leaden with drink. And so it continued, living a tenuous life, worried for my mother, worried for my brothers, yet always amazed at her brilliance and sight. As a teen my tolerance for her moods grew shorter and shorter. We were never allowed to celebrate her birthday, or holidays. Mothers Day was laughed at in our family. Hallmark crap, she would say. Yet sometimes her words come back to me. Things that angered me so in the past, I find myself repeating to others now. “Happiness is a choice” and “what you put out to the universe is what you get back”. When I think back to my teen years her pain seems so much clearer now. My mother would cut herself, she could never remember, or would never talk about her past. Her drinking, her searching, her moods. And she so so hated her father. What were the stories she never told us? I will never know.
When I was 17 life changed again. I was sitting at the top of the stairs and had made a derogatory comment about my father. I don’t remember what I said. My mother was very drunk, climbed the stairs and began beating me on the head with a broom handle. I could have moved, I could have run, but I didn’t. I let her hit me on the head three or four times and then I just shifted my weight….just a little…. and my mother went down the stairs and broke her leg. I left that day and never returned to the home. It was a turning point for us both. We did not speak for a year. I graduated high school living in a rooming house and my mother got sober.
I would like to say that everything was better but it was not. I think with sobriety came a reality of her life that made her feel unredeemable. She never drank again. She returned to her art, a darker art, a sadder art. At my age of thirty five my mother began to lose her memory. Senility, dementia took over her life as it had her mother before her. My father controlled every aspect of her day and she never spoke up, she just got quieter and quieter. In her last years my mother and I reached an accord. I found some peace with her that had never existed before. But as I had always done, I mistook her silence for peace I so desperately wanted with my mother. She was never able to cope with the loss of her memory, the deterioration of her intellect. Four years ago, at 72, my mother committed suicide. Alone in her room, without a sound or complaint, she ended her life.
I never gave my mother a Mother’s Day card.
My mother, Arlene
)
Clarification is good... 
