They say if you’re doing an autobiography, you should start with your parents, since they indicate best of all where you come from. I probably won’t do an autobiography on this blog, but I will do reflective essays on both my parents. Probably stopping there.
My mother would likely be called, by psychotherapists who still use that term, suffering from “borderline personality disorder.” I’ve read a lot of the lay literature on that topic, and it does seem to fit. She was born Lois Darlene Johnston in 1931. But she was always called by her middle name, which seems to have been a practice in her family. And being innocently called Lois was just one of the things that made her very angry. She lived to be 77, and, for all that time, I was wrong. Sometimes she didn’t know exactly how I was wrong until I spoke, and I learned not to say much around her. This was especially funny during her later years, when she was obviously reporting something she had dreamt or seen on TV. Or when she was certain that she was in the army, or when she was she was seeing eggplants everywhere, or when there were tiny people living in her attic, whose presence was made known by their tiny legs that hung down from the ceiling. But, suffice it to say, anger was her base state, and also that her children were to blame for all her woes.
We were big old California family. My relatives all lived around us, and they are all buried in the same cemetery (back to two sets of great-grandparents). I am aware of how unusual that is these days. My mother was never outside the state of California until she got married. My mother and father were married in 1949. People were supposed to get married after WWII. And in my small hometown it often happened when they were quite young. There just wasn’t much to look forward to otherwise in the Central Valley. I assume my parents had some sort of relationship before their marriage but I don’t know anything about it. It was pretty easy to get married back then. It was encouraged, and everyone was supposed to move up a class. This didn’t happen in my hometown, Modesto, California, which was basically a working-class town and did not change. The middle-class is the highest, and its members are considered rich, though that is not true. Still anyone fortunate enough to get married in the 1940s could look forward to the great American life in the 1950s. With 2.5 children.
The extraordinary decade of the 1960s didn’t work out well for my mother (as I am seeing only now!). She did everything she was supposed to, but that was no guarantee. Her mother died at the age of 49 in 1961 (I remember this grandmother well). Her husband (my father) died in 1968. And her father died the following year. Like I said, the sixties were not good to her. Though it was always as though she was the only person in the world who’d suffered the loss of a loved one, and she’d get angry if something else were suggested. I think she really wanted to die, and she’d expected her children to want to die as well. That we wanted our lives to go on, she took as just another of many insults.
Our little family always revolved around her. This was true when my father was alive as well as after. It was all based her and her moods. My uncle (her brother and only sibling) reports that she was unusual, even as a girl. It’s like nothing ever got through to her. Or that she trusted no one other than herself. Communicating the simplest thing to her was extremely difficult. Even in her old age, when she asked your approval on something, she was really only wanting validation for what she was already planning. And lack of validation just confused her. She was manipulative in the extreme. It’s like, there was no reason to waste breath on language that didn’t manipulate. That’s what it was for anyway. I used to have an image of myself before her (my late sister had the same image) sitting and tied to a chair. Any move I made in any direction was wrong. But so was staying still. There was thus no way out. I was trapped. My whole life turned out be avoiding being trapped. One thing stayed the same always. She was always angry at me. And I was always the cause of all her troubles. And, amazingly, I couldn’t talk to her about it, as that would be insulting. It’s a shitty way to live. Though I am conscious of the ways it worked out positively for me. I learned not to say much around her, and thus I became good at writing. I knew a few things about it, both things that can be expressed in language and those that cannot, but in learning to stifle my spoken voice, I learned to be eloquent on the page instead.
What surprised me most when I was there a lot during her final illness, was the attitudes of friends, neighbors, and other relatives. My sister and I spent a lot of time around her in her last years, and I assumed we were taken to be evil, for living so far away from her, but this was not the case. They took living far away a survival tactic for dealing with this mentally ill person. They even celebrated it. That really changed the blueprint.
Like all good borderlines, she knew how far she could push it and with whom. This meant that she would save her worst episodes for me and my sister, who were thought to be able to take it. We were always at fault anyway. She would have these episodes my sister and I came to call her meltdowns. These were what used be called crying jags, if she drank (which she did not) or if she cried (which she claimed she could not do). And it was impossible to console her when one of these meltdowns occurred, as Peggy and I were responsible for them anyway and to try to console her was deeply insulting. The meltdown just had to run its course. She wouldn’t dream of having a breakdown of that sort before her brother or other people. They only happened for her children.
She would visit us. This is the blueprint for all her visits: She would plan a long visit, though we begged her to cut it short, due to the fact that she had such a horrible time. She would go ahead and book her plane ticket, allowing for a long visit, offering to make it shorter if that’s what we needed. So she’d have to rebook the ticket she’d already booked. And she put it all on us anyway.
Upon her arrival she sat down and did her presentation of the products she had discovered. This could be anything—from a packet of powdered institutional gravy to a bank that seemed to be a stuffed bird of some kind, and the egg-shaped bank seemed to come out his ass. She would often get mad in these presentations. I think the reason was not a lack of response on our part, but that we reacted in the wrong way. It was impossible to know the right way. The rest of her visit was all about avoiding a meltdown. She knew one was coming.
At last, after her meltdown, on boarding the plane she always said, surprisingly, that she’d had a good time. Then Peggy and I would call each other and laugh at her behavior. I realized at some point that my life was all about avoiding her meltdowns and with keeping her at the center. Living otherwise was liberating and happy. But it was very irresponsible.
She died at age 77. I stood by her coffin a long time, staring at her. Until I got shooed away by someone who pointed out that others would like to look. I was trying to communicate with her. Telling her that she had been a very difficult person, but that I was one of the few people who understood her. Mostly she was not understood. I told her that I wished her well.
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