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.
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