good mother
by vickie l. spray

Before my mother was a mother and a wife, she was a daughter and a sister. After she became a mother and a wife, she became a prostitute. Decay is not always something witnessed. And sometimes, no matter what effort is made, the decay is irrevocable.

Before the decay in my mother became irrevocable, she was a Sunday school teacher. She taught children the commandments of the Lord and sometimes invited the preacher for Sunday dinner. Before she became a prostitute, she involved herself in the life of an elderly woman who lived down the street. The woman’s senility had isolated her within a house that had become feces-filled and littered with half-opened cans of beans. My mother tricked the old woman into believing they were going to the grocery store to get food for the old woman’s half-starved cats. I remember that my mother returned from her good-deed ruse, went to her bedroom and did not come out all evening. The next day we (she had four small children at this point in her life) were told that she had taken the woman to a nursing home.

She was a good mother. She could not help herself. It was all she ever wanted to be. I know now that this type of woman, who desires so strongly to be a good mother, will sacrifice almost anything to accomplish that status, Good Mother. But it seems a woman needs more than strong desire to achieve that title for any length of time. With each child that she bears, the ability to fulfill that possibility is sorely diluted. And what of the woman whose tools for motherhood are insufficient?

My mother’s mother was an alcoholic. She died an alcoholic while I was in my mother’s womb. It was not alcoholism that killed my grandmother. It was a bullet. She and her boyfriend had an argument and he shot her. The headlines declared that the police blamed “nagging” as the cause. That was in 1958. I have wondered if that was when my mother’s decay began or if losing her mother to murder accelerated the decay already present.

I know she had begun taking prescription drugs for various symptoms by the time my baby brother was born. His teeth came in discolored and he was slow in his capacity to learn. I remember hushed conversations between my mother and my father and quick endings to those conversations when one of the children came into the room. That was the first time in my life I felt the burden of someone’s shame. It is a heavy feeling that is void of hope. Over the next year, that shame settled like fissures around her mouth and blunted, one by one, the sparks in my mother’s eyes.

She was born beautiful. I have thought a lot about beauty, its burden and its advantages. People are strangely drawn to physically beautiful women as though possessing them could facilitate becoming the person they suspect they could one day become. It is not the fault of a siren that she is beautiful and sings the song of hope.

My mother’s beauty slowly molded itself into a one-layered resource from where she drew all her strength. Even her passion for being a good mother was eventually smothered by the need for the attention and adoration of others. Adoration can be a drug that will assuage the deepest of insecurities. If her husband’s weakness for alcohol stole the attentiveness he would normally pay her, the eyes from the men at the grocery store satisfied her emptiness just enough to get her through another day. Like any kind of drug, the initial use is rarely a danger. Her growing dependence on her beauty and all the perks it brought her coincided with her increasing dependence on prescription drugs. The laws governing patient and doctor relationships were sometimes ignored and so my mother found enough willing doctors to provide her peace-in-a-pill.

She did not spend very much time in front of the mirror. Her long black hair, her brown eyes and full lips needed little enhancing. I often heard the sound of her heels as she walked through the house on her way out the door. To this day I think that sound is the sexiest one in a woman’s repertoire of sounds. My father once remarked that my mother had maintained a great looking body though she had had five children. Even the preacher man, who sometimes came to eat with us on Sundays, would sometimes have to turn his face away from her breasts, smile at one of us children, pat us on the head and reach again for his fork to feed his hunger. He stopped coming to dinner after awhile and we never saw him again after Mom quit teaching Sunday School.

If a woman can be stripped of the world’s expectations, her children’s needs, her husband’s requirements, her religion’s parameters, and her own requirements for perfection, who does she become? If she stands alone, a woman first, a wife, mother, Sunday School teacher and neighbor afterward, who is she? I watched my mother’s weak attempt to shed these titles and install a stronger, well-rounded woman. She got a job as a waitress and came home at nights jingling her pocket full of change. At first she glowed, but soon the lights dimmed again as though her escape route became filled with too much debris. The well-rounded woman did not exist. She was not there. Good looks were what she had when her children were sick with chicken pox and her husband was asleep in front of the television. The one layer had taken over completely. All she had left was her beauty.

Though a woman may act as though she has discarded the title of mother, it is not really possible. A living, breathing life was torn from her womb in the natural progression of life giving. Her body will always remember her child’s legs kicking against her inner lining and arms stretching toward her ribs in the night. Her mind may not hold onto that as the years fill her thoughts with so many other things but her body will never forget that she gave birth to another soul-carrying human being.

My mother cracked one day. She put a razor to her wrist and sliced as hard as she could. She was put into a mental institution where she made leather wallets for the boys and my father and flower arrangements for me. My father took us to see her and we all had a picnic on the institution’s Florida lawn. My mother wore a blue dress and spent much of the time picking blades of grass and tearing them apart. She told us the doctors were soon going to release her. They did release her and she remained with us for as long as she could.
Once again, she strove to be a good mother and succeeded in accomplishing all that has to be accomplished when you have five children and a husband and no mother. The loads of laundry were endless and the food was constantly needing to be prepared, and the dishes had to be done and the house had to be cleaned and the scrape on the knee had to be kissed, and when the husband came home, he needed to be heard because the world did not hear him either.

Years of my mother’s leaving and coming back to sometimes sneak us away from my father, who had become the enemy, are trails full of dust in my mind. At various times the length of her absence from our lives grew until our father put us into foster homes and came for us when she returned. Or sometimes if my father had a willing girlfriend, he would enlist her to help take care of his five children. Eventually, we all stopped believing she was ever going to come home and be a good mother. The last time we saw her, she came to our home where my father had established a household with his future wife and her three boys, bearing presents for all. A woman, a caretaker it seems, accompanied her. I sat as close to her as I could get but held back my heart, as a child will do when their mother has betrayed them. I remember asking my mother about the scar on her inner arm. She said she had cut it with a ham bone. I now know that it was scar tissue from years of shooting drugs.

My mother was strangled by one of her johns. He lay with her for three days after he murdered her, too stoned to get out of the bed. There is the additional horror of someone passing by the room and smelling something awful. It was my mother’s decaying body.

Many of us were lucky enough to have the leaning-over presence of our mother pick us up and cradle us near her breast. It is a feeling many seek to replicate in adult relationships, and of course, never can. We also want desperately to be understood by another human being. Again, something that can never truly be achieved no matter how intimate and close the relationship. And when a mother betrays her child, when a blanket is laid over a piece of glass and then hit with a hammer, no manner of therapy or time can completely heal the shattering. Even if the mother’s weakness, her built-up shame, and her childhood pain was the cause for the betrayal, the child that never becomes the adult in relation to the mother, suffers from this loss.

I was lucky in a way that caused me to eventually choose life instead of death. I believe it was because, in those important years, the years when I was cherished and adored in a way my good mother never was adored, a foundation of self-love somehow formed. Nonetheless, I have fought with my own insanity and come very close to accepting the haunting possibility that I was a woman destined to die a violent death sodden in alcohol and drugs. There were years when my connection to my mother was maintained each time I popped a pill or took a drink.

By choosing life, I obligated myself to heal as best I can and the universe has combined its efforts, it seems, to that end. I have relived the betrayal in a number of ways. Each time, I walk away with the realization that though mothers do not have monuments built for them, the children they provide the world will eventually become the spiritual beings they were meant to become, even if they were not good mothers.

 

Vickie L. Spray lives on six acres outside of Tallahassee with her lover and animals. She writes in a studio built by women and believes that women can heal by joining hands with other women.