Warped Mom

We sit on the pavement of the Palace Parking Lot.  It’s my third Warped Tour with my daughter, Katya.  This year she has blue hair, a septum piercing, and is wearing a Batman cropped top.  The sun is beginning to go down (thank God!), and we are both exhausted, but we have two hours to go before BearTooth plays.  They are the big band this year.  I don’t own a phone, so it seems only fair that during lulls I should get to pull out my paperback—The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez—if only to feel myself thinking … anything.  Thank God, I am still alive, not brain-dead!  “You’re never gonna get it I’m a hazard to myself,” sang the EMO heartthrob Andy Biersack (a.k.a Black) earlier in the afternoon, “I’ll break it to you easy this is hell, this is hell.”  I sang along loudly, thinking, “yes, Andy, this is hell.”  But I keep this thought to myself because Katya thinks I like this stuff and I try, for her sake, to get into the spirit, singing along to the songs I know, pumping my fist in the air, and bouncing up and down when I feel like it but not when some of the more obnoxious singers (like Fronzilla of Attila) issue commands to the crowd:  “You gotta go fuckin nuts!  I don’t wanna see anyone standing still!”  Make me, asshole … is what I’m thinking.  It’s hard to control my inner critic:  it all seems so sad, all the young people thinking that this is self expression; and directly in front of me is a biggish boy wearing a tee shirt that actually says, “Jesus is a cunt.”  Why am I here?  My short practical answer is that the only year I let her go with Zoey and Zoey’s mother, she passed out from dehydration, lack of food, and exhaustion.  In the months leading up to this year’s festival, I asked many times if friends weren’t going.  “I’d rather go with you, Mom.”  This year I understood why.  

 She needs a maternal buffer to give hugs and love.  She puts her head on my shoulder and I rub her back as we sit inside the cool arena to take a break, watching the artists (so-called) on the floor passing trays along a lavish buffet.  She seems lost and maybe even bored.  I look over the printed schedule to see if anything strikes me:  “hey, what about ‘War on Women,’?”  She’s game and we head out in the heat to a smallish crowd watching a band with two women guitarists and a lead singer with green dreadlocks which she whips in circles as she crouches and leaps around the stage, working the crowd, urging us to say things like, “I was RAPED!  I had an ABORTION!”  I can’t say the words in this context, even if the first phrase is true.  Why am I here?  My longer psychological answer is that I identify with my daughter’s struggles to become her own person not just because I was once an adolescent but because I have, for complex reasons, remained trapped in the role of child daughter.      

“Nearly every major character begins his life as the hero of his own fairy tale; then comes a point at which the world and his desires come into conflict and his eyes are opened both about his own errors and the nature of life.”  Gabriel Josipovici on Old Testament characters.

My mother was and, even at 86, still is an amazing storyteller, and I grew up listening to stories in which she was the champion worker who picked peaches, packed blueberries, milked cows, cultivated fields, faster and more diligently than anyone else.  She and her brother were “hellians,” “the worst kids in Nesco,” tipping over outhouses, jumping off barn roofs with umbrellas, racing Packards.  She went to a one-room schoolhouse, taught by her mother, but when she went to public high school, she was a star basketball player and popular … of course.  When her sister, Ruthellen, came to our house to visit, she and my mother, nicknamed Midge, would make lists, while dragging on Kool cigarettes, of the boys and men they had kissed.  I listened.  I loved her stories … loved the extended family life, lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey, that came vividly to life in her hero stories.  I must have been 9 or 10 when I convinced my younger sister Katie to get Mom to let us go down to Jersey in the summer and pack blueberries for the last of the Wescoat blueberry farmers.  We were the only packers (the pickers were migrant workers).  Aunt Ruth shook us awake before dawn and sent us back out to the barn after dark … it was a grueling schedule for two little girls from suburbia, used to running through sprinklers, riding bikes, and playing with friends every lazy summer day.  We lasted two weeks.  For years I accepted my mother’s take on our failed experience:  kids today just don’t know how to work.  Now I think that my work was just fundamentally different:  I was trying to imagine Midge’s magical life.  Going there was my attempt to get inside it, an effort closer to anthropological fieldwork than actual field work. 

As I grew up, I felt like I grew smaller in relation to my larger-than-life mother.  My father died.  I found him dead in a cabin on an Adirondack Lake.  My mother wasn’t there.  With my siblings, I screamed my grief into the fog on a rainy August morning.  My mother arrived, and pulled us into a group hug; but Mom was too strong to cry.  Not then or anytime afterward did she show any sign of weakness.  We were taught to soldier on.  “Lot’s of families lose fathers.”  I took up a permanent post at her kitchen table to keep her company while she cooked turned French Fries in oil and flipped hamburgers for four kids and two elderly parents.  She needed someone, didn’t she?  She must want to talk.  The hole in her chest must hurt like mine.  But she never spoke of missing him or of her feelings.  She never invited me to speak of mine.  She kept telling stories though, but the stories were no longer about South Jersey.  They were about her move to upstate New York and adjustment to suburban housewifery, and in them, she cast my much loved father as some kind of oppressive force from which she could now return to being superhero, Midge. 

            The way I found to feel, grieve, and recover (to the extent on ever does) was literature.  I stayed in school to complete a Ph.D. and write a dissertation on the female complaint, titled, “Means to Mourn Some Newer Way.”  I taught in Turkey, got a teaching job in Flint, published a book and many articles, married, adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan, taught in Kazakhstan on a Fulbright.  I have worked hard and made myself some sort of heroine.  But my mother has never read a word of what I’ve written.  “When you go there,” comments my husband, “you lose your personality.”  I shrink into the little girl listening to stories, waiting for an invitation to speak of feelings or ideas. 

“You are safest when you are able to use your feelings on your own behalf,” a wise friend notes, but it has been hard for me to accept that sensitivity, imagination, and a passion for thinking and analyzing can be the very things that make me strong.  My mother still forbids me to drive the 13 hours to her house.  She doesn’t think I’m capable.  She worries if she calls my home in Flint and finds that I’m walking home from the university in the dark—“is it safe?”  To her, I am still very much a child.  It has only been recently, since facing up to my own abuse and taking a stand against my abuser that I’ve distanced myself from her.  When she blamed me for that, something broke inside.  She became less of a hero.

Warped Tour fell at the end of Katya’s two weeks of musical theater camp.  After the festival, she had several dates with friends, and I even let her go to a movie with a boy “friend.”  When I picked her up from Courtland Center cinema, she couldn’t tell me anything about the plot of Dunkirk and smelled strongly of the boy’s cologne.  “I guess it went well,” I said, uncertain what to feel.  That same night she flat out refused to go on the family vacation.  “You didn’t tell me it was for TWO weeks.  I cannot be away for that long.”  “But, I’ve done everything you wanted this summer,” I pleaded weakly, “and I haven’t had a vacation.”  We screamed at each other.  I took the dog out, and came home prepared to read quietly and stick to my guns.  But she wanted to “talk it out,” and lectured me tearfully for an hour and a half … about her struggles, her problems, her fears, her lack of friends.  It went on and on.  Later that night, I decided to skip the New Jersey leg of the vacation even though I had arranged to meet relatives I hadn’t seen in 40 years.  Back in July, I’d written a magazine essay on my mother’s mythologizing of Nesco (the farming settlement where she grew up) that was also an attempt to come to terms with what her place means to me.  It was not easy for me to claim the right to tell the story and parts of it differently than my mother would.  The role reversal felt dangerous almost as if I were striking out against Mom.  This summer trip to Jersey, connected as it was with my personal project, promised to be extra special.  But we always had fun there anyway.  There is the beach, the Atlantic City boardwalk, great seafood, the woods, the ticks, the hotel pool—what’s not to like?—and I couldn’t understand Katya’s preference for her own dark bedroom.  But rather than work on the puzzle, I gave in to her pressure:  cancelled the hotel, cancelled the kennel, and suffered a very angry day … angry at her, at myself, at the world.  When dinnertime rolled around, after I had childishly given her the silent treatment all day, we screamed at each other again. 

I had put off calling my Uncle Bud to say I wasn’t coming.  I just didn’t have the heart.  It was a good thing, too, because my mother called at 7:00 the next morning and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not cancel and that I had to take control.  “Mothers are in charge.” 

Two hours later, Katya rolled out of bed and wandered into my office.  I told her quietly that we had to go to New Jersey, that I deserved a vacation, but that we would shorten the trip, giving her two more days in her twilit comfort zone.  She accepted it, and we both were happy that day. 

Was my mother right?  “Always check things out with me,” she’d said.  I was grateful for the advice but not the added commentary on my approach to mothering—“You have let her run you.”  There it was again:  the same old insinuation that I am incompetent.  But I prefer to think (and I told my mother this) that the fights, the arguments, the almost physical struggle is hard but also important.  My daughter is seen and heard, and I hope she is also learning to see and hear me.  We are parts of a whole, and neither can be content if the other is miserable or if the other silently capitulates.  I’ve raised a screamo singer (she literally was the screamer for a short-lived teen band), and that, to me, is far preferable than a daughter fearful of her own voice and her own aggression.

 

            The night before Warped Tour, I sat in Churchill’s drinking with two former students, and we talked about family and how we are never “done” struggling with our mothers and fathers.  I’d just finished Joyce Carol Oates’ remarkable essay, Boxing, and it struck me that family is the first arena in which we must fight for our lives.  Oates thinks that America’s obsession with sports is “the dark, denied, muted, eclipsed, and wholly unarticulated underside of America’s religion of success.”  This is because sports, especially boxing, is only partly about winning; it is also about losing.  “Failure, hurt, ignominy, disgrace, physical injury, sometimes even death—these are facts of life, perhaps the very bedrock of lives.”  My mother tried to deny the facts of life.  She didn’t let me fight openly, and so I’ve had shadow box.  In any boxing match, if one cannot hit, one can yet be hit and know that he is still alive.  After taking many many hits, I am coming to believe that I am not a human punching bag but have been cultivating pain in the interests of a project that is forming and growing within.  Whether my own mother approves, I know I am a fighter temperamentally, a thinker by trade, and a Warped mother with fists pumping the air.