I really don’t like Mother’s Day. My mom wasn’t a very nice person, at least, not to me. The only times she was nice to me was when her friends were watching and even then I could feel the resistance in her to behaving nicely towards me.
The simple fact is she didn’t want me because she viewed me as defective. I was born with disabilities so I wasn’t perfect. My brother was the perfect blond haired blue and then hazel eyed baby and she adored him until he got brain cancer and then he was defective too. He used to call me after he got cancer and ask why? And that was the only answer I could give him. When she got congestive heart failure a year before he died when his cancer recurred, he came down from Northern California to see her because I asked. He went alone into her room and I have no idea what he said to her but she ended up screaming and having to be sedated and he told me never to call him again about her and he never saw her again.
The thing he wouldn’t forgive her for? The night he had the first seizure and was in the emergency room they called for permission to treat him. She wouldn’t get out of bed and told them to ask his partner at the time. In the 1980s no hospital was going to let a gay partner give permission over his parents authority. When he started to get radiation and chemo, she forbid my dad to drive him because she might need my dad, mind you she had her own car and was perfectly capable of driving herself anywhere she wanted. My dad ended up sneaking out of the house to drive him on one day a week. I did another day and three of his friends in the end stages of AIDS who had higher T cell counts than he did, drove him. All of them would be dead by the time Cam was declared cancer free the first time.
If I asked how I looked in something I was wearing, her answer was always one of two, at night all cats are black or no one will be looking at you. Is it any wonder I couldn’t wait to spend every summer with my grandmother? Whom she hated and the curse she would throw when she was mad was, “you’re just like my mother or you’re just like your father. Neither of which did I think was a bad thing but she did.
She never once complimented me to my face, when I asked her why, she said I might get too proud of myself and big headed. I was molested by the man next door when I was 6 and when as an adult I wanted to ask her why she didn’t do anything, my therapist told me no, you will only be hurt. So, of course I did anyway and her reply was, you aren’t going to make trouble for him are you? And did I want to see the Lane Bryant catalogue and I wasn’t very big then and I didn’t know how to answer her except to ask her if she heard what I said, she told me yes and what difference did it make now? I had to admit my therapist was right all along. And I cried all the drive home.
When she figured out I was a lesbian the thing she was most upset about and literally screamed about? Her not getting any grandchildren, mind you my brother was already out at least to her and I had a little sister still living at home who wouldn’t come out until not long before mom died.
I ended up being the one that made all the care decisions for her before she died and I hated every minute of it. I hardly ever visited her because she would say all the mean things I wondered if she was thinking before the dementia set in and I would go home and cry and I’m afraid I did something she did not want when I did it. She had a horror of dying and kept having my dad revived when he didn’t want to be revived. He used to tear out the IVs to try and make his point and she ignored the fact that he wanted to go. So when it came time, I signed the DNR and never told her I did it. Granted by the time she did go she admitted it was time but I had done it 2 years before because there was no way I wanted her revived for another round of abuse and by then she was abusing everyone that came in contact with her. They had to take the phone out of her room because she would call the police and insist she was being held against her will, seriously? She was refusing to get out of bed by then even though she could have, she refused to have pt or go to the bathroom if she could have someone wait on the. It was a nightmare. She would scream for hours on end until they called for permission to sedate her. The first time I got the call at 9 pm and they said she had been screaming since 9 am, I asked why they hadn’t called by 10 am and they said they thought she would stop. That went on until she died, I would have to go down there and sign the permission to up her dosage because it wasn’t enough.
I so envied other people and their moms growing up but I also had learned that what their mom acted like at home might not be what I saw. Later I learned that wasn’t always true but I knew all about masks and hiding from the moment I could. I learned to never show pain, never show anger, only she was allowed to be angry or my dad but we couldn’t. I couldn’t show I was sick or I was a hypochondriac that led to me fainting in public more than once and almost having a burst appendix. I still question myself and is probably why I waited so long to go to the doctor this time to find out what was wrong and if I do have cancer, I hope I didn’t wait too long. The effects of a horrible mother never go away.
So, yes, I hate Mother’s Day and I always will.
Adventures and Musings of an Arch Druidess 
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