Mother

I dreamed about my mother last night.  I think I have only dreamed about her one other time since she died six years ago.  At least that I remember.

I didn’t like my mother much.  Not at first though.  At first I loved her, wanted her love, like any other kid wants their mother to love them.  Not that she didn’t love me.  She did as much as she was capable of but that wasn’t enough for me.  I was a needy child.  Somewhere in my teens, I shifted my speech from Mom to the more formal Mother.  And she stayed Mother til she died.

When I, ultimately the middle child, was born, she refused to let the nurse bring her newborn into the room.  It couldn’t possibly be her child because I had dark hair (my mother was blonde).  The distraught nurse had to call my father, a pathologist there at the hospital, to come and assure his wife that I was, indeed, their daughter.  My mother used to tell this story as if it was a joke.  She thought it was funny.

My mother was herself a child of late life.  Her father spoiled her rotten to the resentment of her two older (by a decade) sisters and the dismay of her mother and then he died when she was 15.  My father pretty much picked up where her father left off.

She doted on my younger brother, the only boy, the baby and the heir of the family name; he became the preferred child.  On my older, blonde, pretty sister fell the expectations and attention of the first born.  I think in retrospect, the middle was the best place as I probably had more leeway and less criticism although there was plenty of that.  In the end, the first born and the male heir left, both eventually moving out of state.  

My mother was a born actress.  Her life was the play.  She had several roles that she played and later in my life I could see her shift from one to the next to get what she wanted or to fulfill whatever expectations had been placed on her by society or some of her own crazy fantasies.  We were part of her role as ‘doctor’s wife’.  She liked the idea of children but she didn’t really care for the day to day reality of children.  She was a selfish and self centered woman.  Imperious is usually the word I use to describe her.

The irony is that when she began to fail several years after my father died, the only child she could call for, or rather demand of, aid was me, the one who was probably the most emotionally distant.  She was stuck with the ‘mean one’.  It was a trying time for both of us because she refused to cooperate and move closer in and make it easier for me while her condition required me to be there often and we lived over an hour away.  Eventually she moved out of state to live with my brother who put her in a family home because she really needed someone there 24/7.  Our mother suffered from TIAs and the resultant dementia.

When she finally died I was unexpectedly affected.  I cried where my two siblings did not.  At least not around me.  It took me awhile to understand where this grief came from.  I wasn’t mourning my mother so much as the loss of the possibility of having the kind of mother I wanted.  

In my dream, which was actually just a small part of a much longer dream, she hugged me, a tight and long hug.  One from which, after a moment, I was trying to disentangle myself while she clung, and finally I stepped back.  I woke shortly after that as if that whole scene was shock enough to rouse me.  You see, my mother did not like to be touched.  She shooed her children away from her when they snuggled up on the couch.  She didn’t like hugs or physical expressions of emotion even as she needed to be the center of attention.  And as an old woman she hated having someone hold her arm to steady her.  She could be quite ugly about it.

So I’m wondering what that was about.