Childhood's end

I'm skipping around with the order a bit. Yesterday's post focused on my father, and I feel like for balance this is a good time to write about my mother. This will be mainly about something that happened when I was nine, and then next week I will get to some things that happened between ages 3 and 6.

That was a totally different relationship. We had a lot of fun with Mom, and appreciated that she liked our music and our friends and was interested in the things we had to say.

That doesn't mean it was conflict free. Her parenting style focused on the things that needed correction. With my insecurities, I often felt like the only things she cared about were my weight and the messiness of my room. 

I don't know if her being different would have been enough to help me get over that sense of wrongness or not. I do know that my father had a strong influence on all of us about apologizing or acknowledging mistakes, and that limited our ability to get past things sometimes.

Regardless, we mostly got along and enjoyed each others' company, and I was fiercely protective of her.

Does that sound backwards?

In the part about my conception yesterday, I almost didn't add the threat about my father looking elsewhere if my mother did not get pregnant. I mean, there are plenty of things that make him sound like a jerk already; why pile on?

He did end up going elsewhere later, and this became another key point in my development.

It happened when I was nine, More details came later, but my first memory of it was one night when Mom was on the couch crying. I think my younger sisters were in bed, and my older siblings were doing other things, and I can guess where my father was. I only remember the two of us, and being so devastated to see her so sad. I tried crooning a song to her to comfort her, but it was not effective.

Sometimes people talk about the moment their childhood ended. I generally think it is a bad sign if you know exactly.

Maybe if it happens when you are a teenager, like someone looks at you funny for trick-or-treating, and you think "I guess I'm not a kid anymore", that could be a little sad, but still okay. (And teenagers are welcome to trick-or-treat at my house, no judgment.)

Nine was too young.

I know that there are things that Mom didn't handle well about it, but I have a lot of sympathy for that. 

My parents married really young. She was 17 and he was 20, and if it wasn't that unusual back then, by now science has told us that neither of their brains were fully developed. 

Also, being Italian, she came from a different culture, and was far away from her family as this happened.

For the most part, I think she did the best that she could, both in terms of how she tried to handle her relationship with him and in how she tried to raise us.

She did not say anything that night, but certain kinds of pain make me mute too. I don't know what she could have said that would have helped. She eventually did tell us that Dad was having an affair, and that I did not know what that meant, and she did not elaborate. He was spending time with someone else, and it was a hurtful thing. 

Should she have kept it from us? There was so much tension during it, and then there were big changes after it that we couldn't ignore, like him stopping going to church and her getting a night job so she would be less dependent on him, I guess. He gave her all of these reasons that he had strayed, like her cleaning too much and not being creative in her cooking, and maybe concerns about money was a part of that, where her bringing in money was one of the rules so he could love her again.

(Look, if you are confused about why the cheater was the one who got to set the conditions, remember this was forty years ago, that he could never admit he was wrong, and that patriarchy sucks.)

Yes, loving our mother would have been a good thing to do for his children. It just went along with a lot of other stuff.

All of this did two things for me. 

One is that my over-functioning, care-giving personality starts here. The seeds were probably already there, and the lack of value for myself that made it so dangerous was definitely already there, but I consider this the beginning of my chronic need to fix everything and make everyone happy. It has evolved and changed over time, but that wrote the script for a lot of my life.

This is also when I became fiercely protective of my mother, and that also affected many life choices. 

It involved some pain when dementia was something that I could not fix or fight off.