Predictably, I fought all this mothering. When she threw out the tie-dyed tapestry with Jim Morrison on it that I’d hung over the fluorescent lights in my room at boarding school and that was now hanging over my bed at home, she said, “You don’t need this counterculture bullshit. This isn’t even your generation.” I didn’t even listen to the Doors and had inherited the tapestry from someone at school, but I put up a fight anyway. My point was, Who are you to come in and question my decisions now? You gave that up, remember?
We fought often, mostly because I’d lost my childhood fear of saying the wrong thing and triggering a blowup. I was looking for it now, and I knew what to say, or when to needle her with my stony silence and flattened stare. When I look back, my sixteen-year-old self insists my mom was throwing up all kinds of arbitrary rules and boundaries, that she was changing the game after being complicit in screwing it up in the first place, but the only law from this period I can remember is “get out of bed and get dressed before ten,” the letter of which I obeyed by getting up, dragging on pants, straightening the covers, and lying back down again with my eyes open. She may even have suggested I start thinking about the inevitable task of reenrolling in the tenth grade, but she might as well have asked me to build a functioning jet engine out of Lincoln Logs or redirect the San Gabriel River running through the center of our town. I was so used to feeling ordered around that exercising my own will, pulling myself up by my bootstraps, left me wanting only to dig my heels in and embrace immobility and silence.
One night in particular comes to mind. I don’t know what triggered it, but I decided to come sit in the living room on the ledge of our fireplace hearth, facing my mother on the couch where she had been watching TV, and shout the most awful accusations I could think of, accusations that would echo back at me years later when I found myself married to a Navy man and moving all the time. I told her she was too weak to have left my dad when it would have done her any good; that she put up with a completely unreasonable cycle of abandonments and that it had scarred me permanently and look, now I’m crazy; that she had given me up when I was fifteen because she and my dad were too suckered by a stupid paycheck and that if they had been more creative—or stronger, or smarter, or something—they could have made it work living back here; that neither of them loved me and I hated them back and that they had taken the one thing in the whole world that made any sense, a family, and broken it. I shouted until I was hoarse. She never moved, except once early on, to point the remote at the TV and turn it off. Her face darkened and she crossed her arms over her stomach and listened, and at the end, she said through gritted teeth something so weird and out of character I knew immediately it had come from my psychiatrist: “I understand that you’re upset and I hear you.”
And that was it. I didn’t feel any better. I felt weird, like I had one night out on the soccer fields at St. Stephen’s after the curfew bell when a thunderstorm was blowing in. The air got strange, cottony-feeling, and the hairs on my arms started to rise. I wasn’t doing anything that night, or looking for anyone. I was just sitting on the metal bleachers by the field enjoying being in the wrong place, in the dark. When the lightning started it was all at once and in spidery little sideways flashes all around me. The thunder was instantaneous like a punch to the chest, and the air smelled like burned batteries. I was moving before I’d even fully made the decision to go back inside. I felt like I’d walked in on something or accidentally crossed a boundary, and that for all my playacting with small, human-sized risks, this one, being here, was deeply wrong. Shouting those things at my mother felt like that, like I had charged the air and anything could happen. I had called down the specter of a broken family fully ready for it to be true, believing that it already was, but nothing happened. She understood that I was upset and she heard me? What was that? I went back to my room.
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