The “L” Word: A Memoir
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Sheila Gross
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr. Alexis Lothian
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 ENGL 985: Archives and Feelings
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 5 November 2013
The “L” Word: A Memoir
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 I love you. Reparative. Injuring. It’s not the actual saying of the endearment that’s injuring but the absence of it. I can count on my fingers how many times I can recall my mother saying, “I love you” to me in my whole life (that’s twenty-five years and seven months). If you ask me to recall the last time she said it, it would be difficult to picture. Probably over a year ago. I have a fleeting memory of her saying it when I was leaving home one weekend to go back to college, but that was before 2010. Is saying “I love you” the confirmation that someone loves you? Someone can still love you if the endearment is never said, right? Is my mom asking these same questions about my love for her? Because if I can count on my fingers how many times she has said it to me, then she can count on her fingers how many times I’ve said it to her. I hear my fiancé saying it to his mother all the time, at the end of every phone conversation, every time we leave his parents’ house. And she says it to me too. She’s said it to me more than my mom has said it to me. “So why don’t you just say it? It’s not difficult. You say it to me all the time.” You would think my fiancé would stop saying these things after the million conversations we’ve had about my mother and I still don’t say it to her. My fiancé is reparative, always has been, always will be. For most of my life, I’ve been injurious.
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¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Like the time I refused to eat my dinner and told my mom I hated her. I was ordered to sit at the dinner table in solitude until I ate my dinner. It was dark outside when my dad broke the silence and told me mom was in her bedroom crying because of what I said to her. He asked me to apologize because I hurt her feelings. I refused. I remember my father telling me at some point within the past few years that my mother would cry every time I said “I hate you” and was often unsure whether I loved her. I can recall seeing my mother cry fewer times than I can recall her saying “I love you.” Crying was viewed as a weakness to my mother. I was so afraid of looking weak that I forced myself to hold in my tears during my grandmother’s funeral in seventh grade. The tears came out later on that night in my bedroom as they did every time I was sad.
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¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Like the time I tried to run away from home. I remember I was wearing a white shirt with yellow flowers and jean overalls. My mom and I were arguing in my bedroom. I was leaning against my desk chair, the same one that sits in the living room of my apartment now, and yelling at my mother. My grandparents lived two houses down the street, so I ran there and sat on their front porch for ten minutes. Then I returned home.
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¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Like the time I kicked in the drywall in the hallway during one of my rages.
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¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Like the time I threw a pop tart at my younger sister across the table during breakfast. Or the time I threw an open pink marker at her while coloring. It hit her in the eye. Or the time I cut her out of every picture I had of her and me and threw the pieces with her in them into her room. Interestingly, my sister and I got along swimmingly when my mom wasn’t around. We’d get off the school bus, run down the street to our house, play music really loudly and have a dance party. Or sometimes we would watch The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring over and over again. Or sometimes we would just talk for hours in her room. My sister couldn’t be kinder. When I was grounded and sent to my room, she would color me pictures and slide them under my door. I would rip them up.
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¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 What plagues me more than these memories is that I can’t remember the reason why I did these things. And I use the word “plague” deliberately because memories like these pop-up too frequently in my everyday life. I have considered the fact that I may have been somewhat bi-polar or depressed. Depression seems to run in my family after all. My maternal grandmother (whose funeral I mentioned) most likely suffered from depression. She never wanted to have six children but the constraints of her religion and position as a wife left her with no choice. She became a hypochondriac and took medication for everything. We suspect her heart failure was from a lethal mixture of drugs. My paternal grandmother was hospitalized for the same reason. Her depression caused her physical pain and the medication caused her to lose her appetite. Her drugs are regulated now that she is in the nursing home. My family history is also polluted with bitterness and regret. My grandmothers and my mother all suffer from these. So when I signed up to present on Anne Cvetkovich’s book on depression, I hoped to find some answer or solution, but I only determined that some of my behavior as a child must have been from depression.
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¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Like the time I hid in the spare bedroom closet at my maternal grandmother’s house on Christmas Day. I was wearing a black velvet dress, white tights with black polka dots, and my hair was curly from the pink sponge curlers I had slept in overnight. Pink sponge curlers were a treat because my mom only rolled up mine and my sister’s hair in them on holidays and special occasions. But from a night of tossing and turning from the uncomfortable curlers and anticipation for presents from Santa and sitting through a crowded and long church service that morning, the special feeling of the pink curlers startied to wear off. I don’t know what exactly prompted me to do it, but I found myself in the closet in the spare bedroom. It was so cold upstairs in my grandmother’s house. I kept fantasizing that when my mother found me she would embrace me and say that she was missing me at the party downstairs. It was a fantasy. She discovered me in the closet but there was no embrace, just a scolding. Why was I acting so childish and hiding in the closet? I was ordered to return downstairs immediately. Perhaps I deserved the scolding; I can’t remember if I had misbehaved earlier in the day.
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¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Cvetkovich’s book was insightful, but it didn’t provide any help with my emotional reaction to these memories. I suppose I started my own version of The Depression Journals last year when I was feeling particularly depressed about these memories, but it didn’t last long. “The Postive Journal.” Every day I forced myself to write at least one positive thing about myself. It helped a little, but journaling just wasn’t for me. Just ask the other three attempts at journaling that are collecting dust on my book shelf. I could relate somewhat to Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her mother in Are You My Mother, such as when her mother stopped tucking her in to bed and saying “I love you,” and the fact Bechdel struggled so much with her relationship with her mother. But I don’t want to relate, I want to heal. The taped up broken heart I pulled out of my construction paper music box last week during our craft session was a bit of a fabrication. There is still some more damage to repair.
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¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 I wonder if I can have a reparative relationship with my mother. I wonder if it’s too late. Wondering this makes me even more emotional, but when I try to put back together the broken pieces with my mother, it never works. I’ve written a couple letters to her and I’ve apologized for my unruly behavior growing up. I’ve determined my mom has trouble showing her own emotions because she always brushes off these conversations by saying everything is okay and it was in the past. For me, it is very much the present. Lately, when I happen to mention my regret, she gets frustrated and tells me to get over it. I try not to let this hurt me because I know she had a troubled life, especially growing up. If I would have known years ago that my mother was verbally abused by her father, that her family thought of her as the “fat daughter,” that her three older sisters wouldn’t call her when they came home to visit because my mother was the first one to get married, that she never received the proper thanks for taking care of her mother, that she never felt loved by her mother, that she feels like the odd-one-out in her family even today, I may have acted differently.
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¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 My mother and I are very similar in the end. She still hasn’t reckoned with her childhood traumas and neither have I. However, I am no longer the injurious person I used to be. Do I keep trying to mend the past with her or do I focus on boosting her confidence and self-worth? It’s difficult to do the latter because it seems like nothing I say ever makes her feel better. My mom has always been there for me, though, and always will be. She comforted me and called parents when I was bullied throughout elementary and middle school. She comforted me when I was upset after the last football game I cheered at and after my last dance recital. She boosted my confidence on many occasions and supported me in all my endeavors. She has provided for me and sacrificed so much for me and my sister to have a good life. In many ways, she’s an excellent mother, and in many ways, I’m an excellent daughter. This relationship is a two-way street, as with any relationship, and hopefully one day, one of us will break that silence barrier and say the “L” word.
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¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Works Cited
¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Boston: Mariner Books, 2012. Print.
¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Cvetkovich, Anne. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Print.
Dear Sheila,
I find your words really touching and I appreciate sharing your memories with us. In fact, I am still wondering that I do have the same attitude with my mother. I knew that she loves me and I do love her more, but I don’t know why she stopped saying” I love you” long time ago. Today, my mother is the most close person to me in world. Even I am physically far away from her, we are close to each other as we call each other very often. What makes me so uncomfortable that I would like to tell her that “I love you mom”, but I can’t because she does not say it to me either. Today, I am a father of two littel daughters and I am saying “I love you babeis” every day but, I keep asking myself why can’t I say it to my mom too?