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May 16, 2006
Vultures & chaos
So Freud says love for our mother can get mixed
up with anger, so if our mother drives us crazy, we tell ourselves
we're looking for someone who isn't mean, but then we end up
with someone mean anyway because love got mixed up with meanness.
Did I ever tell myself I needed to avoid a
love like my mother's? I don't think so. I spent my energy trying
to tell myself she loved me. What did my mother's love feel like?
Tenterhooks. My shoulders are prickling and pinching like vulture
claws falling from above.
Vulture... here's a poem I wrote several years
ago. I thought it was abstraction, but now I see something held
in my body and struggling to escape:
love
that poison egg forced between my lips
love is offered and renounced
I bind my chest tightly
with straps of gauze
even breathing exhausts me
but love emerges
hooked beak
tearing claws
black
oily wings
with a cry louder than death
the massive bird
lifts from my chest
the vulture love arises
no mercy in its shining eye
I'm crying... My mother's anger was metal chairs
crashing into concrete from 22 floors above. I'm feeling really
unsure lately. Reverting to this helpless child state that I
know is unbecoming.
How did my mother's love feel? A New Years
Eve party the year I lived in my stepfather's house. I was 12,
and she let me invite four friends from my old neighborhood.
We spent the whole night drinking wine. She bought the wine and
left. Maybe that's okay. Funny. Two of those friends called last
year. Forty years go by, and they both call in the same month?
Weird. They're both nice, but I don't want to go back. Anyway,
one of the women said she remembered getting drunk for the first
time with me. At 12. And I wondered why my friends' parents never
liked me.
I have so many black spots in my history, like
a 3D grid stretching, with snapshots of memories pinned here
and there. Black air and vapor in the spaces between.
Sleeping together every night in my mother's
bed when I was in high school. Was that okay? Ask Maurie.
I'm afraid I'm fucking up my relationship.
I need to figure things out. I don't want to hurt Bill or drive
him away. I want this to work, but I need to understand the dynamics
of my childhood. I'm desperate to figure it all out. Now.
Breathe. God, I am so lonely. I just had a
horrible vision of being alone in the void in my mind. Looking
out a black edged window with a solid block of life outside.
She fucking tried to kill herself.
All the nights I cried alone the year I was
12, and finally realized nobody gave a shit about me. I finally
realized that I was on my own and alone. We moved away from the
old neighborhood and then my mother married and we moved again
to a seriously scary house in the middle of nowhere with rats
and roaches and bugs in my bed. I woke up one night, threw off
the covers and there were black bugs all over my legs. I screamed,
and my mother came in, and either the bugs were all gone, or
I imagined them, but either way, it still creeps me out. After
that night, I slept in another room in a sleeping bag.
My mother couldn't get along with my stepfather,
and she still acts like a 12-year-old with Malcolm. She's not
a terrific example of how to forge a healthy relationship.
She got hysterical all the time when I was
a kid. I'm not anywhere near that bad, but I feel like I turn
into my mother when I'm pissed. Bill said I suddenly seemed like
a 14-year-old when I got upset with him last week. I was petulant,
foolish and mean for no reason. Except that I was scared. I'm
really unsure of myself with him.
What was it like when my mother was angry?
Fucking fearful. How much fear is normal in childhood? HOW MUCH
FEAR IS NORMAL??? Heart pounding. My mother's anger was significant,
and I feared for my life. Why don't I remember? Why is it not
obvious that her fucking anger was out of control? Have I never
thought about it, or have I always known it. It feels like something
old and familiar that I'm seeing with new eyes. Why does it feel
like a revelation that her anger was fucking huge?
When I was in the sixth grade I liked a tall,
Irish boy with curly hair and freckles. One day I was home alone,
looked him up in the phone book and called. When my mother found
out what I did, she got hysterical. I'd come from the pool, and
I'd just started getting my period, but she locked me out of
the house and made me stand outside, wet, with my period bleeding
down my legs. She knew I was humiliated, because I kept calling
her, but she screamed at me and locked me out of the house because
I called a boy. Is that okay or excessive? I know it made an
impression on me.
I used to stand at the end of the driveway
on summer nights back then, and watch cars drive by, hoping someone
would stop and talk.
One night when I was sleeping at my grandparent's
house, the phone rang late. My grandfather drove away and came
home early in the morning with my mother. She'd tried to kill
herself, and that's when I realized I didn't mean a fucking thing
to her.
Malcolm, the guy my mother lives with, told
me about it a few years ago. He got a call that night from my
mother saying she needed him. He had a private plane (my mother
never dated men without money) and he agreed to meet her at a
deserted airstrip. When he arrived she was hysterical, and suddenly
she headed down the runway at top speed until the end, where
she slammed into a grove of trees. The car was smashed and steaming
as a group of boys emerged from behind the trees where they'd
been camping. The asshole could have killed them all. Jesus,
shouldn't she have been charged with something? But she lived,
and my grandfather took her home.
My room was painted blue. How did my mother
love me?
Maybe someday I'll have the nerve to put a
mirror in this room, but for now this is a safe place. A place
no almost no one knows. This is the rough game.
Just found an old journal entry: If
I wanted to feel safe and strong, what would my protector look
like? My Boddhisatva, standing beside me, would it make me
stronger by entering me? Or by walking beside me. Would
it be outside me? Would I be inside of it? How am I when I
feel strong and safe? Powerful, smooth, relaxed and calm.
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