Jason said he was going to explain everything to me, about his mom, about how she left when he was little. And how then, senior year of high school, when he turned eighteen, he punched his dad in the face and his dad punched him back and then kicked him out of the house, yelling, “You can come home when you apologize!”
But Jason never apologized. And he never went home. Instead he moved in with his high school girlfriend, Cindy. They had been dating for two years and it was pretty serious. Living at her house with her folks was okay for a couple of weeks, but her parents wouldn’t let him stay forever. Not unless he and Cindy got married. This was the type of small town where people grew up, married each other young, hung around, got local jobs, and had kids of their own, who then started the cycle all over again. So Cindy’s parents wanting a ring on her finger from a mall jewelry store paid for in installments by her high school boyfriend was not out of the ordinary. They would welcome their son-in-law into their home with open arms, but not a young man who was merely their teenage daughter’s boyfriend.
The wrinkle was, Jason wasn’t sure he wanted to get married at eighteen. Having a chronic illness was a curse for all the obvious reasons, but it was also a blessing. It forced him to do research about his health, be an advocate for himself, learn how to ask doctors intelligent questions, and investigate different types of food and exercise. It made him more worldly than the average small-town Georgia kid, and although he held no judgment about those who stayed, he had a sneaking suspicion that his future could hold more than working at the AutoZone in the next town over.
He loved Cindy deeply in that teenage “I might die without you” way, but marrying her seemed like a big decision to have to make under such extreme circumstances. So he turned to the comforting voice of his mother. He called her and filled her in. She didn’t like the idea of Jason getting married one bit, but she took great delight in learning he finally had a major falling-out with his father and hated him as much as she did.
By never being there, she had won. And now that Jason was eighteen and self-sufficient, a man so to speak, she welcomed him into her life and into her home with open arms. He said goodbye to a teary Cindy. She tried to give him back his high school ring, which she proudly wore on her wedding ring finger with a Band-Aid wrapped around the back since it was way too big for her, but he told her to keep it. As a token to remember him by. But she threw it at him and screamed, “I don’t want to remember you!”
He had a sheen of tears in his eyes when he told me about this next part. About how Cindy then immediately regretted throwing the ring and she ran and searched for it in the grass, trying to find where it had landed. The yellow center stone glimmered in the sun, giving her a clue. She picked it back up and held it to her heart and sobbed.
Jason took a Greyhound bus to Fort Lauderdale. He moved in with his mother, became a Florida resident, got his GED instead of finishing out his senior year at a whole new high school, and because of a talent for taking photographs, he got into Florida State University the following semester. He visited his mother on holidays and long weekends, and after he graduated, he moved to Miami to be closer to her, and ever since then she had been an enormous part of his life. Him happy to make up for lost time. Her maybe assuaging her guilt for abandoning him in the first place. Or maybe enjoying being needed by someone not quite as needy as a toddler would have been.
He was going to tell me all this soon, before I met her at his party, but was stalling because he didn’t want me to hear about all his childhood baggage and overanalyze him. Some therapists spend entire careers asking, “How do you feel about your mother?” I did think it was an important question. But I also practiced a more in-the-moment approach. We all have childhood trauma in one form or another. We can dwell on it in therapy, which sometimes unlocks the key to healing and moving forward. But often talking about the current situation is a faster way into change and betterment. Once the milk is spoiled, it has to be thrown out. So throw it out! No need to wallow in the putrid smell of bad childhoods. But when I got on the phone that day, I had no idea how much baggage there was to be unpacked.
I would later understand that I was met with a cold silence because Gertrude abandoned Jason when he was two years old and thus didn’t know the answer to my simple question. She was taken aback and defensive. Like I had asked her about the cake on purpose to call her out, to show how little she knew about her own son, to prove what a terrible mother she had been. She was paranoid that I was out to expose her.
Then she was angry that I was thoughtful enough to have even had the idea to order him a special cake in the first place. Instead of being happy her son was dating an attentive girl, she twisted it around and made it about herself. Classic narcissist behavior. She was so self-absorbed she thought all my actions were in direct relation to her. She was embarrassed she herself hadn’t thought of getting him a sugar-free cake of some sort and that his new troublemaking girlfriend was in essence putting a mirror up to show what a horrible, selfish person she had been and still was.
She spat out, “If you’re trying to make me look bad, it won’t work.”
“I’m just trying to get a cake.”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“I’m not ‘getting smart.’ I’m just stating the actual situation.”
Her anger melted into embarrassment, and the embarrassment quickly turned into shame. And that shame, because it was not addressed in a healthy manner, was regurgitated into an outpouring of hatred. Toward me.
At the birthday party Gertrude played it off with a cool calmness. She gave me a hug that was so icy I felt the contrivance burrow through the fabric of my Grecian dress, past my gold bikini, and into my skin and my muscle and even deep into my bones. But to an onlooker the embrace would have appeared perfectly friendly. She was an attractive lady with medium-length dark brown hair, turquoise earrings with a necklace to match, and an appealing figure. She seemed totally normal, and that was her greatest asset. Her normalcy made my reactions to her seem like I was the crazy one.
Experts in the field of domestic violence have created two categories for abusers: “pit bulls” and “cobras.” The pit bull (and I apologize since I don’t like the idea of propagating the negative image of the pit bull breed since they can be wonderful and there are no bad dogs, only bad owners) is loud, out-of-control, sloppy, aggressive, passionate, and hotheaded. Like a pit bull dog keeps his strong jaws locked once he has his prey in his mouth, once a pit bull abuser latches onto a prize or target, it’s hard for them to let go. However, once they do finally lose their grip and the thing they are grasping escapes from them, they will quickly move on to something else they might want. Pit bulls don’t linger or ruminate or remember. If an abused wife can get away from her pit bull husband, she’ll be all right. Assuming she doesn’t continue her own cycle and fall for another pit bull.