When the Rage Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

Somewhere when I was about twenty-seven, I stopped speaking to my mother.  I had moved away from Rhode Island to Maryland a year or so earlier, and had a visit from my two sisters, but now I wanted my youngest sister to visit and my mother said no.

We did that in my family.  My father was the model for not-speaking.  He tended to only speak to one of my mother's many brothers and sisters at a time, for what I understood to be some very strange reasons.  From about the time I turned, oh, thirteen, we would "have a fight," meaning that my father would yell at me for something, and we would not speak to each other for several months, sometimes up to six, which would correlate to the time between my birthday and Christmas.  We tended to start speaking again around events.  Again, this is my recollection, which is faulty.  Ask my daughter.

Because she has carried on the tradition, and in a most noble way.  And I have fought it, and fought it, and fought it.  Since she was about thirteen, I think, shortly after we moved from Long Island to Charleston, leaving her father and her friends behind, she began to fly into rages at me.  Much like I would do to my mother when I was her age.  Unlike my father, my mother would not fight back; I wasn't scared of her.  So I would let my temper fly.  I had reason to be angry, my father was rigid and cruel, my mother refused to stand up to him.  This left me isolated from friends, and depressed.

My daughter's rage came from, well, apparently I still don't have a handle on it, because she rages on.  We've had what I thought were years when we were getting closer, dotted with periods when she would get distant.  I would try to ignore what was obviously going on, get angry when she would not come home, be hurt when she was able to effortlessly go months without talking to me, try to talk to her about what was going on.  And all the while ignoring her crazy, insane rage that was on fire against me.

Recently the coldness has become so obvious, she has been ignoring me to the point that I could no longer pretend nothing was going on, and I decided I was so miserable I had to confront it.  What I ended up confronting, to my amazement, was that same rage from her teenage years.  That rage I felt toward my mother when I was my daughter's age.  And it's left me stunned.

Back when I began writing "Ruminations..." I was letting it all hang out.  Not so much ranting against my kids, but ranting against being abandoned by my kids.  Then a few people began to read it, and I decided it wasn't right to be so personal, not fair to the readers, nor to my family.  I am writing this now (to be published at a later time and after a period of consideration) because this is the reality of my life, maybe the most important thing that is happening to me.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  And yet that is what I am wrestling with right now.  Her rage is unapproachable, unstoppable.  Other than no longer being me, I wouldn't have any idea how to change it.  And I have over the years even tried to not be me, to not speak my mind, to pretend everything was fine.  It was a fear of those teenage years (mine and hers), of the awful, untrue things that were said in those rages.

But to ignore her anger at this point is to ignore my own existence, and I couldn't do that.  She couldn't ignore it either, it was seeping into our "normal" conversations.  Neither of us are capable of resolving it, not from this distance, any better than we could when we lived together.

I don't remember how long I went without speaking to my mother.  It seemed like years, but couldn't have been.  Because when she was sixty and I was not that much more than twenty-seven, I got a call from my youngest sister saying that my mother was in the hospital, having a triple bypass.  Of course we reconciled, and I was able to be closer to her for three years, until she died.  When she was sixty-three, which happens to be the age I just turned.

You can't make someone aware of how near we all are to losing each other forever.  For me I was able to come to that awareness before it was too late.  Which makes what we are going through now, me and my daughter, all that more poignant.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  This is a loss I just can't accept, and so I will speak about it, and hope it isn't so.

Resorting to Vacation

I have a bad attitude about being home these days.  Being home means taking care of stuff.  It means mowing the damned lawn, which in a season with plenty of rain and just enough sweltering heat and sun like we have this year you can pretty much watch it grow.  And then mow it again.  And to boot, I ran my mower over a bit of concrete early in the season and have had to deal with whatever it is that has made my blade come loose.  It's been fine for awhile, but still, it's my job to anticipate it coming loose again and to worry about it until it does, or until November, whichever comes first.

And then there are the damned trees.  I am no fan of trees, unless they are ornamental and I have chosen to share my yard with them.  So sue me.  But the ornamentals get diseases and either die or continue to live but taunt me with their fungal growth.  I grew mimosas from seeds that I had taken from the bridge at Wadmalaw Island when I first moved here, because I think flowering mimosas are the most glorious sight ever, even better than the drink.  I was tickled that they grew so abundantly here in the south, and watched the tree that I had apparently planted in the perfect spot as it grew and flowered and grew and flowered for years, until one year it died.  It made me watch it die, as one branch wilted, and I cut it off, and then another wilted and I cut that one off, until finally I realized it was always going to be one step ahead of me, and I just let it go, which I imagine it did with a sigh of relief.  It was heartbreaking.

But the oaks are just another whole damn matter.  I don't care what kind of oak it is, I'm disgusted with all of them, even the one they worship down here, the "live" oak (as opposed to what, the "dead" oak?).  They do die, every year, and at the time of year that things are supposed to be coming alive.  And when they do this dastardly transition from life to death to life again, they spit all kinds of crap onto the earth, which includes my car and my pool.

And don't get me started on the "water oak."  I would say they are the worst of the weeds, but there is so much competition down here.  I have a few ornamentals by the road that are trying hard to survive, but water oaks come up right in the same spot, and I have to cut them back twice a year, which of course I don't, because I refuse to be "Yardwork 'R' Us" in whatever years I have left.

The alternative being to sit on my porch with a good book and get aggravated because I should be:  weeding, cutting, mowing.  And cleaning the algae off the sides of my house, vacuuming my pool, sealing the deck, painting the porch... and I haven't even gotten to housecleaning yet.

I just noticed yesterday that my car, with 174,000 miles on it, appears to be peeling, like the dead skin off a sunburn.  I'd been hoping to settle for just maintaining the working parts of it; as with my philosophy about myself, I'm more concerned with function than cosmetics.

Outside my window, right now, there is a thunderstorm.  But I'm not at home, so I don't have to worry about losing power.  The resort has wifi and cell reception, so for a week anyway I don't have to deal with AT&T.  The biggest crisis I have had this week is that last night I didn't feel like going out to get dinner and I hadn't bought anything to cook, so I popped a bag of popcorn -- provided by the resort -- and ate some shrimp I had bought and boiled on Monday.  I was proud of the way I handled the crisis, but believe me, that's not happening again soon.  I made a run for cheese, olives and crackers this afternoon (no, still not going to cook).

This was an unexpected vacation, as I was unable to rent out my August timeshare this year.  So this vacation week was sandwiched between my annual Rhode Island family birthday reunion / beach fest (one person can make a fest) and an impulsive redweek.com purchase of a very reasonably priced week at Fort Myers Beach at the end of August.

It felt excessive.  Not only do I tend to feel guilty about going away too much, I have a very dear friend who responds to my informing her that I am going on vacation by asking, "Vacation from what?"

But it's worked out so well that I might even do it again next summer.  And I'm thinking about actually taking two weeks to meander up the coast to Rhode Island in the winter, for Christmas, because I am feeling so adventurous.

I worry about what fires I will have to put out when I get home.  Fortunately, there have not as yet been fires, but there are occasionally things that have broken that need tending.  And the grass needs mowing.  Again.  But at least I haven't had to watch it.