One of the standard tools in the arsenal of many maladapted and/or malcontent men is blame. Typically it is aimed elsewhere than the self. That’s something I have tried to avoid doing here and in my life in general. Whenever I am looking for someone or something to blame for my virginal lot, I aim my ire at myself, and society in general, in that order. And while it does not really bare repeating, “society in general” is run by and mostly for straight men (especially rich, mostly older, white straight men). I have tried to avoid blaming “women” as if they are some collective gestalt hive-mind, even if I can’t always help myself from falling into the fallacy of believing certain platitudes about them.
For a lot of men, the original sin behind their hatred of women, or mistreatment of them, or misconception of them, begins with their mothers. The angle of a malformed man blaming his mother for everything is so cliche that it’s a timeless trope of sitcoms and film. Things get worse for men raised by single mothers, an epidemic in a country where so many fathers either skip out or end up in prison (or dead), as they sometimes have to avoid being called “Momma’s boys.” The chilling villain Norman Bates from “PSYCHO” was hardly the first or last of these stereotypes twisted into a horror cliche.
As such I have tried my hardest not to deflect blame for my state of affairs, at least romantically, on my mother. It seems easy, cheap, unfair, and inaccurate. But in my last instalment in August, I wound up going on a bit of a two paragraph tirade against my mother, or how I felt the responsibility of tending to her can get in the way of opportunities or desires. I started the year off with a discussion about caretaking, and she’s been the subject of some other postings (i.e. when she was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2021). At least two readers of that column expressed some opinions about my statements to me in another forum, and it got me thinking about an exchange I had with my mother last year, or the year before.
It was one of many within the kitchen of the apartment we share. A lot of my conversations with her are dripped with sarcasm, which can be mutual. But sometimes truths slip out. At some point I casually mentioned something to the effect of, “Bullies and society were 80% responsible for my lack of esteem, and 20% was you.” I thought I was being charitable, or even realistic. Considering my mother’s been to therapy for many years of her life and had issues with her own mother (my grandmother), I thought she’d either agree or just let it pass. Instead, my mother became angry for daring to attribute 1/5th of my terrible esteem on her. She clearly believed it should be zero percent, because she has loved and supported me without condition or conjecture my entire life, without any judgement or mixed messages. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
I believe I have done a fair job of blaming myself for being the Dateless-Man. If you do a word search of all of my blog postings going back a decade and use keywords like “lame,” “loser,” “boring,” “freak,” “circus freak,” or even “monster,” you will no doubt find dozens of articles (especially in the earlier years, though I’ve only gotten slightly kinder towards myself). I rarely pull punches when it comes to my own self-hatred. The lack of doing so over recent years is more about numbness and repetition than real growth; I can only call myself “lame” so many times before it’s just old hat. I already know I’m lame. There’s no need to repeat it. There are more interesting things to devote time to write about. And I am at a point in my life where I’ve learned to live with my self-described faults. “How can I live my best life, being lame?” is more or less my motto now.
However, I’ve not talked about my life and times with my mother much at all, beyond commenting on some crises of the moment. And in the spirit of her responsibility for my esteem being above zero percent (which I contend anyone but her would consider fair), maybe it is time I did. After all, if I ever do go to real therapy, a therapist would ask about my mother early on, so maybe this could act as a first draft of a response. The first and only therapist (a psychologist) that I had as a teenager (from age 16-18 I think) exclusively blamed EVERYTHING on my mother, which left a bad taste in my mouth even then, so that may be why I have shied away from this topic as well.
However, I do not want this to become a series, and I am already afraid of my mother being misunderstood. I am afraid I am not without bias, and I will concede I am far from blameless. So I will preface some of this article into sections, and get out what I want to get out, so I don’t have to type about it anymore. In other words, pull up a chair and make sure you’re not overstaying your lunch break; this’ll be LONG.
The Good Things & Qualifiers
Let me start off by saying that if I am about to assign even a smidgen of blame for my own mental state as a 42 year old man on my (handicapped, elderly, cancer-stricken) mother, then I have to be fair. I have to also attribute her as being responsible for the many GOOD things in my life, and about me as a person. I want and need to establish that any flaw or negative action she took was not out of something malevolent. In fact, one of the main things I learned about growing up is seeing a parent as a person, with strengths, flaws, traumas, reactions, etc., and not as an omnipotent authority like children do (or I did).
My mother is responsible for my intelligence, my imagination, my morality as a person. She was/is an artist and amateur scientist. Since my biological father (who I usually dub “the sperm donor”) abandoned us and she divorced my step-father, she was the only parent I had, and responsible for all the parental love I ever had (and still have). She taught me that women can be strong, and to not fear that strength, but to respect and honor it. She taught me women can be into geeky things many think are “boys’ stuff” like comic books, cartoons, sci-fi, and so on, so such things never shocked me or turned me into “a gatekeeper.” She taught me that things such as housekeeping, using tools and cooking are not divided by sex. She taught me about responsibility to family through her dedication to her own mother, and to me. And she financially supported me during periods when I was too young to work, or unemployed, or unable to find full time work. She still cooks for me or at least puts in food for me to tend to when I return from errands, which is more than appreciated. I am sure there are dozens more I take for granted.
As a child she kept me safe, almost to a fault. I did not suffer the abuse she did (as far as I remember). I never had to learn about “the birds and the bees” in one shocking moment because such realities about gender and genitals were explained to me over years, with the conversation only getting more complex as I got older. As a child she always answered my questions on a level I could understand and never directly lied to me.
Other lessons were less direct. She taught me how hard it can be to navigate life as a single woman, and how cruel or unhelpful most agencies, doctors, landlords, and/or hospitals can be. Through her own life history, she taught me how commonly women are abused (or have others attempt to abuse them). Through her dating life, she showed me how addictive or immature a lot of men are, even before I knew some of them in my own age range.
One of her defining lesson lines to me in childhood was, “Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things, but that doesn’t make them the same.”
On the other hand, some lessons were unintentional. One was to not waste energy on pointless, petty arguments. I can’t count how much energy we have both wasted on worthless arguments over trivial things. She also taught me, through her eternal disapprovals and how they rarely made her happy, that sometimes good cannot be the enemy of the perfect. Admittedly, I still need to master some of these sometimes. I also learned that some people, no matter what you do, how well you do it, or how much passion you insert into it, can never, ever, ever, be pleased.
I also probably learned about self-sacrifice being part of life.
As a qualifier, my mother does not come from a life of privilege. She grew up poor in the late 1950s into the 1970s, and her own father abandoned the family (and my grandmother’s family abandoned her). She and her sister had long seeded rivalry issues. Without getting too graphic, my mother’s first sexual experiences were of rape, then gang-rape, then being molested by the only family friend she told about such things for years. She was part of the anti-war, free sex hippie movement of the 60s and 70s, looking for love and approval in rock and roll, recreational drugs and (often) in the arms of other men. She was not capable of romantic monogamy until she was in her mid to late 40s in the 90s. And as mentioned, she spent many years speaking to therapists; from the 1980s into the 90s and then again in the mid-2000s into the 2010s. She had a close friend turned lover (a much older man) die when she was a teenager, and it still impacts her life. The reason she divorced my step-father, who by her accounts was a saint, was because she did not want to hurt him with her own infidelity. She became handicapped after a work related accident at the end of the 90s (when she was about my age now) and things have not gotten better for her. She has had many people in her life that she loved die, and has abandonment issues. Though my mother is defensive of grandma, grandmother was something of a neglectful parent much of the time, as she was still dealing with the loss of her husband (who was himself abusive).
Just typing that all out has made me feel a bit like an ungrateful son, and that is the abridged version.
Trouble In Paradise
I don’t have any complaints about my early childhood (birth to age ten). In fact, considering how poor we were and my own mother’s turmoil, it was about as ideal as it could be. As long as I could remember, my mother was there, as a source of love and comfort. Though we were poor, it was easier to be poor in the 1980s. Home computers, VCRs, and cable TV were luxuries not even many middle class families had. Video game systems were still in their infancy. I was akin to spoiled just by having heaps of action figures. But it was more than that. In the beginning when my father paid child support, we did many things together. We went to a local park daily (and mother would always play with me). We attended museums, circuses, and the planetarium. We saw movies together. Our beloved cat, a yellow tabby, was alive (and a year older than me; I sometimes called him “my kitty brother”). My mother was a source of wisdom, who did her best to answer my questions fairly. When we started going over how boys and girls had “different parts,” she bought a basic biology book as a visual aid. My mother was not handicapped yet, and was still working. She had gigs such as a bank teller and fast food clerk until her last job, as an artist’s model at an art school in the city.
Through me, my mother had something of a second childhood. She enjoyed the time we had together, and the toys she bought for me, and even many of the cartoons I watched. For instance, she definitely was disappointed when I outgrew He-Man. She had me at 25 so she was still relatively young at the time.
“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children,” is a quote by William Makepeace Thackeray, and maybe it is attributable here.
It was only in retrospect years later when I realized hints of some of the behavior which would lead to later angst began here.
For one thing, my mother had an awful temper (which I inherited). If her joy was something to behold, her rage was something to be terrified of. She wasn’t angry with me all the time but when she was, she was not shy about it. It was something that didn’t mellow until menopause, and by then I was fully grown. I’ll discuss this a little more below.
For another, my mother was prone to blame things on me if I was in her immediate vicinity, or at least demand I share the blame. There was one time when I was somewhere between 5-7 years old. We were at a local Burger King and he was paying for our food, and I likely was going on about whatever kid thing I would have been going on about (wanting a toy, wanting to play in the ball-pit area they had at the time, etc.). At some point, my mother dropped a $20 bill as we were leaving. She did not notice until we got about three blocks away. She asked if I’d seen it and knew where she’d dropped it. I had not. At that point, the loss of the $20 (which in the 1980s was worth a lot more than now) officially became my fault. I had distracted her and failed to alert her the minute it happened. We retraced our steps and returned to the restaurant, but that $20 was gone (as would be expected). It began what was to be a familiar instruction from her, which was that my mother expected me to be alert anytime she made a mistake, otherwise it would become all my fault (or half my fault).
Now, you might be thinking, “Gee, you have amazing recall of something that happened when you were barely in grade-school.”
The answer is I don’t. I didn’t have to. My mother brought up that story, again and again and again and again, in countless lectures and arguments, for the better part of 20 years. I know it by heart. It became Exhibit A, in a row of evidence which went well past Z, of why I could not be trusted, or how I’d failed her, in various ways.
It was at this age where I learned that my mother had an edict memory. She could recall every misstep I ever took, every failure I ever had, any act of misbehavior, and pull it up at a whim to bombard me in an argument.
When I was about two years old, I was flailing my arms around, and accidentally cut the side of her eye with my fingernail. This required a visit to the hospital. My mother made sure to mention this any time I flailed around too closely or accidentally hit her when she tickled me, or we were playing in the park. Every time I innocently apologized, as if I could remember or control my actions as a two year old. “You always play too rough,” mother said many times to me.
Part of that blame radius was catching colds. Now, I will concede that children can be germ factories, and that can be annoying. That said, at the time my mother was also heading out to work in public, on buses and trains. It wasn’t long before her job as an artist’s model by the end of the 80s meant she would often be standing around naked for hours at a time in spaces occupied by dozens of people. But anytime she got a cold, I was to blame. She would grill me as to whether I saw any kids “coughing and hacking and hacking and coughing” in class. Whether I did or I didn’t, what could it matter? I didn’t have a hazmat suit. By first or second grade I remember joking to my friends, “My mother would blame me for the common cold if she could.” That always got a laugh, because of how absurd it seemed to a kid.
I may as well end this section with a statement about another iconic moment: a first grade Christmas play. School plays stink, and I was cast as a Christmas Tree, and had to sing a song along some other kids dressed in other self-made costumes of varying quality. I was about 6 years old and very nervous. I obviously could not watch myself from the audience, and it was not filmed. I have no idea what, if anything, any other parents said to my mother. But what I do know is I was the only “tree” who could not stand still or make proper eye contact, despite how many times my mother or the teacher had told me to do so beforehand. My mother found this profoundly embarrassing.
This is another one of those incidents that I only remember because my mother brought it up countless times for at least 20 years. Even at this age, I was learning that my mother’s grievances were eternal. And it at times felt unfair. She could recall every incident of my life, but I could not recall any of hers. Any acknowledged mistake she made was revealed on her terms.
Corporal Punishment
This is a touchy subject, but one that certainly would come up if I ever talked to a therapist. I actually don’t personally think this was a huge deal, but I am also not an expert in child psychology. The big caveat at the time is that this subject, or at least its controversy, has as much to do with the time one lived in as anything else.
My mother was born and was a toddler in the late 1950s. Corporal punishment (i.e. hitting a child or doing other “tough” punishments to them) was a common fact of life. No one questioned it unless a kid disappeared or was observed with noticeable marks (i.e. a black eye or a fat lip). As such, few parents hit their kids somewhere noticeable; what, you think spankings on the rear evolved organically? My mother told me stories of being hit with a broom handle on occasion, or one time when she was tied by her hair to a piano leg as punishment by my grandmother, or another female family friend (who was akin to an adopted aunt). “Getting your mouth washed out with soap,” or pepper, was also common, and something mom experienced at times as a child. Mom often declared it ended “when I stopped giving them reason to do it to me,” i.e. being bad. Much as ALF once lamented of Willie Tanner, my mother always had a habit of “turning everything into an abject lesson.”
I was born and was a young kid in the 1980s and early 90s. At this time, corporal punishment was beginning to become controversial. There was an age and socio-economic divide about this. Parents who had grown up in the 50s and 60s when such things were common didn’t know what the fuss was about. And those who spoke out against it tended to be younger and/or urban. It became routine for sitcoms and cartoons to mock “new age parents” who refused to spank their kids, often by making them into extreme doormats who encouraged their children (who were always terrors) when they misbehaved. These mockeries are still common in sitcoms dated into the 2000s, so it’s one of those opinions that will never die until the Boomers retire from media.
The point I am getting to is that I was spanked. It was not my mother’s first resort, but her last; usually after I violated her “three strike” rule (an irony since mom found little interest in most Western sports beyond tennis). Once or twice my mouth was washed with soap or I was force fed pepper, but spanking soon became the punishment of choice. And yes, I mean choice; at some point before I was ten, mother would have me choose my own punishment. I pragmatically chose a spanking, since the after effects didn’t last as long. I could sometimes still taste soap or pepper for hours, but the pain of a spanking was far briefer. Mom sometimes still brags, in any conversation about how she was a good mother who “kept her son out of trouble,” that she “let me choose my own punishment.”
Mom didn’t use her hand beyond an occasional smack on the arm. Once or twice I remember she pressed her nails in anger so hard into my forearm that they broke the skin. But for spanking, the weapon of choice was a particular belt. Since I was attending private Catholic school from kindergarten thru fifth grade, I wore uniforms all the time which came with belts. At some point she bought one that was too large that I’d “grow into,” but until then that was the spanking belt. It’s place was at the top shelf of my dresser drawer. I forget what metric she used for how many spanks or the most or least I got. But I did get them, and that belt was always there. Like many parents, “Do I have to get the belt?” was a common threat to fix misbehavior.
Though not corporal punishment, there was one time I vividly recall my mother losing her temper with me when I was about this age (before ten). We were in the kitchen while she did laundry and I was being a brat. I don’t recall what I was saying but I’ll concede I was likely being a brat. Something I said got on mom’s last nerve, because I was sitting in a chair by the wall and suddenly her hand was around my throat and my head was pressed against the wall. I only recall it because of my own bratty, defiant response: “Go ahead, kill me.”
There was never any kind of squeezing; just her hand was at the neck to press me against the wall. But at that, my mother let me go, the anger draining away.
By sheer convenience, any time I brought this incident up, as an example of my mother losing her temper, she never recalls it. She’s never outright claimed that she thinks I made it up, but she attributes it to her “going black” with anger sometimes. And that is usually the end of it.
A dropped $20? Two decades of shame when it’s me.
Grabbing a kid by the neck? “Hey, who can tell?” if it’s her.
Convenient.
There was a time corporal punishment came to an end. I was about 9-10 years old, and since my mother, at tallest, was never more than about 4′ 11.5”, I was about her size by then. I had decided I was done with spankings, and committed the cardinal sin of hiding the belt. Now, there was a limit to my sneakiness then. I didn’t think to try to throw the belt out, since mom always took down the garbage, nor think to take it with me to school, and get rid of it there, where she could not watch me. The idea of throwing out something which was her property even in that circumstance, was unthinkable to me.
So I hid the belt and eventually when it came time for a spanking, it was not there. I refused to tell her where it was. Because I was ten, my hiding spot for it was not very clever, and she found it before long. Now she was angrier and demanded I “assume the position” upon a guest bed in my room (for when grandma stayed over). I refused. It became a standoff for, I recall, 2-3 hours. I was at the other end of the room and made it clear if she wanted to spank me, she’d have to come and get me. It was one of the sternest and boldest acts of defiance I had ever given her. Eventually mom wanted a compromise; so long as I obeyed her and crossed the room, she would not spank me with the belt. I accused her of lying, and thought she’d hit me the moment I did so. Now she was getting even angrier as she insisted she had never lied to me and always kept her word.
Eventually I crossed the room. True to her word, she did not spank me. I don’t recall her ever using the belt again. Eventually I did grow into it, and used it until it wore out. Mom smacked me in the face a few times as a tween or teenager, but that was sporadic (and usually after I said something pretty rotten).
But it turned out my mother didn’t need corporal punishment anymore. Soon she found a better tool; guilt.
The End Of Childhood
Believe it or not, despite a lot of what was said above, I consider my childhood before age ten to be happy and ideal. I was the class clown in school, Ninja Turtles ruled the world, it was a good time. I knew I was poor but never felt I was poor, if that makes any sense. And I never lamented the lack of a father. Mom never turned me against him or wanted me to hate him; to this day she is mildly defensive of him. He was just “Sir Not Appearing In This Film,” for a “MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL” reference. Any angst or turmoil my mother was going thru, which was a lot, she did her best to keep from me, beyond that temper.
Around this time (the late 1980s-early 90s), grandmother’s health and lucidity started to fail. Her eyesight and hygiene became an issue, and she was gradually becoming less able to manage bills or her apartment alone. She would spend more time “visiting,” including most of the 90s. My bedroom became the ad hoc living room. Mom began to manage her bills, and many times wouldn’t learn of some until they were past due. At times they would argue about it. I was preoccupied and didn’t pay attention to specifics, but I’d know when they fought. Mom was feeling the strain of the beginning of being a caretaker, especially since she thought grandma hadn’t always been supportive of her when she needed it. One of grandma’s favorite lines during these arguments was, “Why don’t you throw me out in the street?” So it’s good to know that guilt being the source of Ki energy for mothers is generational.
At any rate, once I turned ten in 1992, the kid gloves were off, as far as my mother was concerned. At that point my mother felt I was grown up enough to help her more, and I had to do so in her own way, obeying her instructions to the letter, about any menial task. She gradually but noticeably became less assuring. And if I was unable to do so, I would get lectures, with my mother pulling forth evidence from my life going all the way back to when I was two about when I did this and that, and how I should “know better.” At some point in kindergarten, someone gave me an IQ test and said I was a genius. This was bad, because my mother expected me to grasp any lesson almost immediately. If I struggled with a task more than twice, her refrain was, “Oh, let me do it myself, you [INSERT INSULT HERE].” Because she learned things, such as cooking, with nothing more than brief observation, I had to learn the same way too, and anything less was failure. If I asked too many questions, now they became “stupid questions” I should have figured out on my own. While there is nothing wrong with kids contributing to the running of a household, I do think it is fair to consider it awkward to go from “Mother Goose” to “General Mommy” (a nickname I called her once during an sarcastic rant, which she loved).
For a lot of people, the “boys don’t cry” mantra was enforced by the fathers or brothers in their life, or pop culture at large. And while pop culture did play a large role, my mother also strictly enforced this. She had a stern, idealized version of what a man should be, and now that I was in double digits I had to work at that. Ironically, her archetype for a man was James Bond (or Captain James T. Kirk), a man who always bucked authority or bent rules to succeed. But in me, she wanted a dutiful little soldier who says, “Yes, M,” and learned with snapshot speed without a flinch. So in a way, my mother was the first woman I could never please. She would not be the last.
By this point I had learned a key lesson, which I sometimes recited to pals at school to giggles: “What Momma doesn’t know won’t hurt me.” It was a play on an old slogan. But this became how I lived. If I got bad news from school, I delayed telling her until the last minute, or until she found out about it on her own. If I was feeling sad or bored or frustrated, even for reasons which had nothing to do with her, I never told her. By now I had learned that my mother was like the police; anything I said can and would be used against me in a later argument (a line I’ve said to her as an adult, which she dislikes and disagrees with). I had always been a shy and introverted child, who never cried even when I got shots. But now is when I learned or at least honed my key defence mechanism, which was to bury. My greatest fear about almost anything slightly controversial about my life was her finding out about it.
Such as, say, the beginning of my fetish regarding seeing girls/women tied up in media in soft bondage. My mother made it abundantly clear that such things were “perverted” and even disliked when such scenes were in movies or TV shows because it “encouraged men.” Now, given her own experience with abuse, this is not an altogether illogical reaction. But it stressed the fact that this element, which seemed to develop alongside with or overlapping the usual, ahem, “sexual discoveries” men learn at about 9-10 years old or so, was a sinful secret to be kept at all costs, even to a degree from myself.
Now, no man I know ever wanted to discuss sex with their mothers, solo or not. Things like masturbation are always moments of personal discovery. But at this stage, a woman who flew off the handle like a banshee if I forgot the right spot to put a utensil I just washed was not the person I’d ask about anything remotely risque or personal.
Part of why my mother shifted in this way was because it was what she had to do around that age. My grandmother was a bit shell-shocked from being abandoned by her husband, and then most of her family. She’d spent months in a coma after a car accident in the 1940s and it was theorized (but never proven or diagnosed) that the after effects caused her problems with processing emotions or logic. But the bottom line was that when my mother was a child she had to assume grown-up responsibilities very quickly, or at the very least had to manage herself, to give grandma one less problem. So to my mother, a ten year old assuming greater responsibilities was a natural progression. Where we disagree is scale and circumstance. But my mother is very dismissive of circumstances…if they don’t fit her argument. In fact, because she was a “better” mother than her own, I should be “better” at adapting!
Around this time (age 10-11), I began to experiment with another mark of independence; leaving the house alone. Yes, people my age sometimes like to talk about the 1980s or even early 1990s when parents just let their kids roam free until the street lamps came on, without any cell phones. My mother lived thru abuse and did not want that to happen to me, so she was very protective. The downside is that I never went anywhere unaccompanied. When she was working she hired babysitters to take me to and from school, and to watch me until she got back around 6-7 p.m. And when grandma was staying over, she would often pick me up from school. On the very rare occasions I visited another kid’s house, my mother brought me over and stayed there until we left. I only had sleep overs with my aunt and cousin (who would drive me back and forth) and once with one friend (the elder son of one of my babysitters).
However, the added wrinkle to grandma staying at the apartment more was that I was often under her “supervision,” and I use the term loosely. Her style was very “relaxed” compared to my mother. At home she was content to watch TV and play solitaire, in between cups of coffee. At the park, unlike mom, grandma would sit at a bench with the other women and “keep an eye on me,” but in practice this meant so long as I put in an appearance once an hour or so, I was fine. At the fast food places, she let me play in the ball-pit or whatever until I wanted to leave. Sure, when I took too long, grandma wasn’t thrilled, but her only “authority” over me was telling my mother. And since she and my mother often bickered, there was that dynamic at play.
So it was under grandma’s “supervision” that I could do things like explore a park unattended, and catch a little league baseball game. Or leave the apartment and head to a comic book store several blocks away to buy comics or play their arcade machines. Or to go a mile away and buy a toy at a strip mall with whatever allowance or gift money I’d saved. I had to be careful to always be back before my mother got home. Now, I never told mom any of this (until I was in my 30s), because she would have called a halt to it immediately.
One day, I miscalculated and by the time I came home, my mother was back. Grandma had told her I’d been out and she was not thrilled. There was an argument but much like with the belt, we came to a compromise (i.e. I had to leave a note about where I was going, curfew began to be established, etc.). And before long, now that I was “allowed” to leave the house unattended, I could now begin to do some of the grocery shopping for the household.
Again, I don’t think it is wrong for children to begin to help out, especially in a single parent home. But I do think there is something to the fact that this was an example of me seldom being offered independence. I had to take it, via trickery and guile, from my mother and once we came to a compromise, she usually only viewed it in the prism of how I could help her. My leaving the house made me more useful for errands, so she was willing to compromise. And in fairness, while I didn’t like chores as a kid, learning how to shop is a very useful, universal skill I still use today. Though heaven help me if a store was out of something, and I didn’t know a reasonable alternative, in the era before cell phones. It was often after shopping trips where I forgot an item or didn’t know how to properly buy one or so forth where I often got lectures about learning from mistakes, needing to not need to be told things endlessly, “finding new ways to make mistakes,” and so on.
It was also about this time where my mother really started using her edict memory against me. Because my memory for things was not as sharp as hers, anytime there was a discrepancy, I was always wrong. And I am sure I was wrong a lot. But 100%? And the problem is even when I got older and my memory improved, this default dynamic remained. To this day, if both of us misremember something, I cannot be right. So I often defer to her, to avoid the argument. And that STILL does not make her happy.
Now, my mother’s life about this time was hardly a bed of roses, in her defence. In 1990 when I was 9, our cat died and she took it very, very hard. Not long after she met one of her longer term boyfriends during one of our trips to the beach during the summer, and there was drama with that in addition to me and grandma. And not long after that, my mother had an accident at work, and broke one of her joints. That began the downward spiral of her health, which ultimately led to fibromyalgia (among other things, such as misdiagnoses and at least one unnecessary surgery). Even under the best of circumstances I would have had to grow up a bit during this period. The catch to me is how I rarely got any consideration. My mother was apparently like a farmer in the Midwest from the 1800s.
Finally, if I engaged in any behavior which reminded my mother of bad times with grandma and my aunt in the 60s and 70s, she would yell at me as if she was redressing things with them. Usually this was in regards to being lazy, selfish, or growing too emotional (“My sister was always hysterical”). I also learned that my mother had an edict memory and sought eternal grievances for them, too. My aunt is far from a saint, but my mother still brings up things her kid sister did before she was 8 as if she was demonically possessed from “THE OMEN.” Even I, who often has no love lost for my aunt, sometimes encourage her to let some things go. Every now and then my mother still complains about how her sister wasted food or acted like a spoiled brat before she was ten.
Adolescence, Confidence, and HER Love Life
For some people, hearing or walking in on their parents making love is some deep seeded, traumatizing experience. At the very least with me, my mother was open enough with me that one morning (when I was about 7), when she and her “man of the evening” were having breakfast, I asked, “So, do I have a baby brother yet?” My mother was amused; he was horrified, and they never dated again.
By the early 90s, my step-father was officially history and the new boyfriend from the beach was in; they dated for about a decade. He was a blue collar immigrant laborer who was quite dominated in his life by his mother and elder sister, but to the point that they babied him and he rarely had responsibility. He was also a bit of a moron. My mother usually lamented that I was more mature than he was. He was also an alcoholic, and while he was never violent, I’d seen him stagger in wasted a few times. He liked me, though I didn’t respect him much. But we were occasional allies in the sense that we both were very aware of my mother’s mercurial temper. His immaturity was the key reason why they broke up; he never wanted to move out, because his family managed his bills, and my mother didn’t want to take over that role for him (along with the alcoholism, of course).
But during this period was the first time heard my mother having sex in her room via the thin walls. I won’t say it was traumatizing, but it was certainly something I remember. I actually didn’t mind it; it was a few hours were I could do whatever I wanted in the house. I was discovering anime at about this time, so I usually watched it on video during their “sessions.” But it could get very noisy and my mother didn’t like it when I would sometimes rib her about it when I was being fresh. Admittedly, that kind of thing is low and embarrassing to get from your 12-13 year old son. On the other hand, she STILL would have been throwing in the lost $20 or how I couldn’t stand still in that play during lectures within this period. Only my past was fair game.
In the 90s, I went from a tween to a teenager. My hormones were kicking in. I was finally and clearly taller than her. My mother eventually took me out of private Catholic school for two reasons; she could no longer afford it, and because the staff told her that I was shirking my schoolwork because I was bored, and they thought I was too “gifted” to be able to be challenged by them. Once junior high started I began going to a public school, which was where I was eventually bullied. This undermined my confidence and self-worth considerably. I hid this from my mother as long as I could, and while she did tell some school administrators and teachers, they did nothing and it never stopped (at least that way).
While my mother, of course, is in no way responsible for bullying or a school’s underwhelming response to it (remember, this was the mid-90s), I can’t say she did my confidence any favors, either. By this juncture my mother was unintentionally teaching me a dynamic which she denies, but I experienced and is akin to cognitive dissonance. My mother wanted me to have the utmost confidence in myself and my abilities for a whole host of reasons…while also wanting me to be such an obedient “partner” that I no longer needed to be given orders or instructions, I would simply know what she wanted out of instinctual cohesion. “Believe in yourself and do whatever I say,” was my blunt translation of it (which my mother always denied). My mother would often lecture me about being more confident, then berate me for any mistake or flaw or act of defiance. She simply did not realize how confusing and counter productive that was, and I hardly could explain it.
My mother tried to inject some confidence into me by paying for karate lessons (though much of the money came from grandma). I was initially interested but did not have the discipline for it, but I was afraid to tell my mother that, so I just “faked” going to lessons. Instead I went to video rental places and played video games, or to a card show a local church had weekly. At around this time, I was also mugged outside an arcade I frequented weekly. It wasn’t the first or last time I’d been mugged (I’ve had knives or boxcutters held to my throat at least twice in my life), but it was one of the most severe. I was struck in the face hard enough that my cheek was swollen a while. And I’d fled for help to the strip mall security, and two of the muggers were caught and actually went to trial (where I testified against one of them). That combination eroded any passion for the classes, and by the time the debacle ended I’d cost the family about $900. For about half of my life this was an unforgivable sin. My mother had guilted me about various things before, but this was the cream of the crop.
That episode, which I’d later learned via very recent “conversations” with my mother, was also her main piece of evidence as to why I could not be trusted with anything, including major acts of independence. I didn’t realize how pivotal this was. This incident, which I will wholly admit not being innocent regarding, at age 12-13 would be a defining incident in how my mother saw me, forevermore.
This is notable because as I became a teenager, my mother started telling me more about her own youth, often in more detail than I wanted to know. How many teenage sons want to hear about their mothers having old boyfriends or admitting to orgies? Many of these stories became “legends” within the household, such as how much marijuana my mother used to smoke or how she used money that the friend who molested her gave her to travel Europe at age 15. Whereas for me, if I had experimented with marijuana, I would have been disowned, and my curfew was around 8:00 – 10:00 p.m. until the end of high school. I had to leave notes with addresses, names, and telephone numbers of any pal’s house I went to. My mother barely knew that on occasion I did things like venture to the city alone to buy anime. My mother, under no circumstances, would have allowed me to do half the things she did at that age. And to my mother, it was all because of those karate classes. I’d proven I could not have been trusted. To this day she insists that she would have been fine with me leaving the country before age 18 if I’d taken them. I sincerely, avidly doubt it.
But do not call my mother a hypocrite. She will deny this very angrily. And the irony is that EVERYONE is a hypocrite sometimes. There is no shame in occasionally having a human foible. But my mother can’t admit to it, while always can point it out in others (or to me). It’s a sign of an ego…which my mother also denies having. Only other people have massive egos.
While I had to account for anytime I was out, my mother sometimes set a poor example herself. There were many times she would stay overnight at her boyfriend’s place and not notify me until the next day at home. Had I tried to stay overnight at someone’s house without permission I’d have been grounded. During this time, my mother’s health was crashing and before the 90s were finished, she would be legally handicapped, with disability. It took her two years to get it (when I was 17 years old).
In my mother’s defence, during high school my teenage rebellion manifested in cutting classes. My boredom with school manifested again and I was essentially a truant after freshman year. These days such a thing is so serious that Child Protective Services can and will remove a youth from the home for excessive truancy; I know, I was once a social worker handling cases like that. But in the mid to late 90s it was not seem as that extreme a problem. I routinely lied about going to classes and would intercept post cards and even forge transcripts. We had many volatile arguments during my high school years and my mother had every right to be angry with me. The irony is I wasn’t doing drugs or having sex like many truant teens do. I was hanging out with my friends, chatting anime and playing tabletop role playing games — some of which I made myself (with others being stuff like Dungeons & Dragons or White Wolf’s World Of Darkness games). So I was literally skipping classes to be a geek.
But even with that caveat in place, on several occasions my mother threatened to take courses of action which even with a truant may have crossed the line. Several times she threatened to take me to Florida, where she knew my paternal grandfather (who I’d never met) lived and abandon me to the mercy of my deadbeat father. Other times she went on about how as a single mother, she would be blamed if I failed in life or got into legal trouble. Saving the worst for last, on more than one occasion my mother threatened to kill herself if I did not shape up.
By this point in our lives my mother had revealed more details. My biological father was a married man; my mother was the younger mistress (she would have been about 23-24 and he was in his 40s). She insisted he “promised he’d leave his wife,” which every cheating husband since marriage was invented promises. At one point in desperation to reconcile with him, she went to the top of his office building on Wall Street while pregnant with me and threatened to jump. His staff notified him, but he did not respond. Ultimately, she never jumped, but I bring this up because in retrospect it was a threat she’d made before in her life, when feeling absolutely desperate. A time before, she’d attempted to slash her wrists, which she still has a scar from. At times she would retell this story as the ultimate wedge of guilt; that she declined to commit suicide because it would have been unfair to me.
Even at the time, some of the friends I told this to thought it was a bit extreme. “You’ve got to get away from your mother. She’s going to kill you,” one of my more casual chums said.
Well, it’s been about 15 years since and I am still alive!
Anyway, I became the first person on my mother’s side of the family to need a GED to get out of high school. Technically, even this is not true; my mother’s father ran away from home as a youth, joined the circus, then the Merchant Marines (during WWII), and dropped out of school around 9th grade. He then became self-taught with books and made a living as a lecturer and author until he died in his 90s. Yes, lecturing and writing is genetic in the family. But I never heard this story at the time, and it was not an example my mother would have wanted me to emulate. So between the karate debacle and the GED, I suppose my mother had some genuine reasons to not trust me and never give me an inch. But now I was legally an adult and further destiny awaited.
College & Adulthood
This is getting long, even for me. But we’re near the end as beyond this point, the dynamic between my mother and I is more about the culminations of things.
One thing the GED accomplished was allowing me to enter college at age 18 instead of hovering around high school until I was 21 (as I legally could have). It did take me a year or so to shake off bad student habits, but I’ve chronicled my college years from 2014-2015, at least in terms of my lack of a love life. My mother’s love life was thriving, though stressful. She started the millennium by breaking up with the “beach boyfriend” and spending the next two years with a very toxic Wall Street type, and then a more local alcoholic (who was a college teacher). My mother’d actually won a settlement from the job where her accident took place, and after the lawyers robbed her blind, she wound up with about $15,000-$20,000. Rather than use that cash to help us out of our slum-like apartment, she mostly spent it going to clubs she liked for older single women, or times with said men.
Remember, my squandering under a grand for wasted karate lessons was still unforgiveable at this time. At the time I was concentrating on college and aiding with grandma. In 2001, she had a fall which ended her ability to live alone; from then on she needed home care attendants and more aid from us. I would have been 19 years old. And while my mother took the lead on it (and my aunt wiped her hands of it, leaving it all to us) my mother still had time to occasionally take off for days at a time with one of her boyfriends. Since the drunken college professor was local (he lived barely a quarter mile away), she sometimes would go as long as 3 days without even a telephone call. This gave me more alone time, so I didn’t mind, but even I occasionally tried to point out how hypocritical this was, since my mother would have been furious if I was burning through cash spending days with lovers (as a 19 year old sometimes is wont to do). My mother never saw it and always had a justification. One of her gifts is using perfectly logical arguments to justify anything she wants to do. She really should have been a lawyer.
My mother tried to give me romantic advice, and believe it or not she sounded not far removed from a Pick Up Artist. She was all about oozing confidence, dressing well, and doing cold approaches at bars or clubs, like she did. It didn’t dawn on her that I wasn’t very confident, or experienced, and socially, she had a choice. A woman can choose to be direct or choose to be passive, especially in a cold approach setting. A man really can’t. I actually tried going to a bar or club once or twice after I turned 21 as she insisted, mostly to shut her up. It was an abysmal failure, where I wound up spending about $30 on two beers and a door fee (about 21 years ago). I hovered in the vicinity of one single woman for about 2 hours in a place so noisy I could barely think, before calling it quits. Those areas were just not my areas, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought I was lame, and my mother was little better than my pals in encouraging me to go to social places I did not thrive in. It didn’t help that I was broke, and had to worry about two handicapped relatives who ate up a lot of my time outside of college.
This is about where my mother decided any “vacation time” I had outside of college was hers, to be used exclusively for chores and errands (and if not I would be guilted). I began lying about vacation times and going to campus when there were no classes, hanging out at the computer labs just to avoid it as much as possible. But that is also where I got more experience writing, and role playing. To a degree this continues today, which is part of why I keep losing vacation days. I’d rather lose them than be forced or guilted into spending them with her. This isn’t to deny that there are always chores and errands to run, nor that I don’t procrastinate. But the concept of destressing is foreign to her…even though she does it all the time.
If I am watching a TV show, my mother is free to interrupt me, at any time, for anything she needs. If I dare speak to her while she is doing likewise, I get a screaming, huffing fit. But, again, my mother is not a hypocrite.
Anyway, things between my aunt and cousins would deteriorate during the 2000s, when she disowned me about I wrote one scathing email about her neglecting her own mother, leaving it to us (despite her having more financial means). The gist of it was that mom and I wanted to keep grandma at home, and my aunt wanted to dump grandma into any nursing home she could find. My grandma occasionally recovered from surgeries in those places from time to time, and they’re worse than prisons unless you’re rich. My aunt did call my mother “a control freak” more than once, and it’s always haunted me.
In 2007, I graduated college, with honors. My mother attended the ceremony, and finally, the GED sin was absolved. She never mentioned it since. From 2008-2010 my mother chose to live with grandma 5-6 days a week because finding good home care attendants was too exhausting. I went over there for a full weekend every other week, and every Sunday. These times were very stressful, with a lot of arguing between my mother, grandmother, and/or myself. It didn’t help that the health care system stunk, misdiagnosing my grandmother many times and often when doctors didn’t have a clue about her symptoms, they prescribed a head-medication and insisted she was nuts. She’d actually had two minor strokes, and by the end grandma was legally blind and needed aid to dress, bathe, go to the bathroom and at times even eat. It was a full time, 24/7 job.
Speaking of jobs, I got my first office gig related to my major in 2008. I was underqualified, and it turned out they really only needed a temp for half a year during an audit period, which they expected would go poorly. Still, I had many questions, but had been so trained by my mother that I prefaced every question with, “Stupid question,” as if to admit it outright. Eventually a co-worker asked, “Why do you think all your questions are stupid?” I didn’t give her the real reason, and from there I got over my angst about asking questions on the job.
At the start of 2010, my grandmother died. There were times my mother was so sick, we wondered if grams would outlive her. We cleared out her apartment and then for the first time in 2.5 years, my mother and I lived together all the time again. I hardly missed being alone 5-6 days a week. My mother’s health has only gotten worse ever since, and for the last 2-3 years she is trying to survive after colon cancer surgery. She currently has a hernia the size of a melon and is looking for a proper surgeon.
During my youth, I used to endure my mother’s tirades by being silent. I knew I could never out argue her. It wasn’t that my mother can’t admit she is wrong, but it takes two circumstances. The first is that she has to be ready to admit she is wrong, which literally every person on Earth says. The second is she needs empirical, independently gathered proof in a format and on a platform she accepts, of overwhelming degree. I am rarely in the mood to go through that. It is, for one thing, why my mother insists that the phrase, “run the gamut” is actually “run the gambit.” One of the many lessons I learned from mother is to pick my battles. That’s why she’s all but become a Trump supporter, and we rarely talk politics anymore. And this is WITHOUT access to Fox News or the Internet.
Now, I am having a harder time letting certain arguments go, and that is not a good thing. My mother probably deserved a good yelling when she was in her 30s grabbing her son by the neck. She doesn’t need it now, in her late 60s with cancer, no matter how much she eggs me on or pushes my buttons.
She’s long since stopped threatening suicide as the maximum guilt card in an argument. No old sick old woman has to; now it’s “Do you want me dead/to die?” when things get bad.
My mother has always lectured me about being too sensitive and having a thin skin. I often joke that all of her yelling at me trained me in how to turn that into a profession (via being a social worker for 8 months and a call center representative for 11 years). Not everyone can retain some level of sanity or dignity being yelled at by strangers calling you every name and insult under the sun, but I can. The irony is that since the end of menopause, my mother has gotten a little less volatile. She frequently apologizes after a nasty argument these days. I don’t know what to make of it.
On the other hand, I had thought I was immune to all of the things she could say to me, until about 2 months ago. During some argument, my mother claimed that all of the things I do for her “are easy.” She believes that since she did more for her mother than I do for her, I am not doing a good job and what I do is not as much of a sacrifice. That one cut me to the bone, and she doesn’t even know it. I know I can’t just say so; my mother will logically explain why my own feelings are wrong, as she always has. Instead I have tried to explain things to her in bits and pieces. For instance, grandma NEEDED more intense care because she was blind and could no longer bathe or feed herself. My mother, thank heaven, does not. She also refuses to acknowledge that while she didn’t wash her hands of tending to her parents as my aunt did, that my mother had a bit more of a life before things went south with a relative than I have. She got to go to Europe. She got to date, even as recently as 11 years ago (via a downstairs neighbor). She got married, divorced, and had a kid in first or second grade before grandma started to self destruct. I never had that. I never had those opportunities.
My mother doesn’t always like my attitude. I could mention her own “sacrifice” for grandma didn’t come without her own arguments, anger, frustration, resentment, and bitterness. And all are fair emotions! But of course, I am the one with the bad memory.
My mother’s current counterargument is that I have plenty of time to have a life…from 9 p.m. to about 2 a.m. weeknights when I am done with work, chores, and dinner, and am often online. She fails to realize that when I leave the house, and it isn’t for work, 75% of the time it is run errands for her (or the household). Or perhaps on Sundays, when I catch up on sleep by conking out for 10+ hours. And in fairness, I have more a more concerted effort to hang out with my few remaining friends in the city this year than the last several; in 8 months we’ve hung out at least 5-6 times and counting. Unfortunately, one of those times resulted in me catching Covid-19 at the end of July. My mother is convinced I was deliberately poisoned, by my friends who want to kill her.
The Kooky Stuff
I was typing that and then I realized I forgot on crucial element. I barely want to write about this, because to an outsider this seems indefensible. I have mentioned in passing how my mother believes in astrology, but she takes things to extremes. My mother not only genuinely believes in spirits and ghosts, but that psychic powers are real, and that he has some (and so have some of her old, dead friends). She’s “done my chart” and we have had many nasty arguments because I “refuse to change it,” because my planets are in weird places. My mother insists she has witnessed Jedi mind trick like feats from people, and while I don’t believe she is making it up, I am reminded of a line Gambit gave at the end of the first season of 1992’s X-Men: “It’s the best kind of lie. One nobody can prove.”
She insists none of this was under the influence of drugs while she was a hippie. “You have to be really crazy to hallucinate on weed,” is one line I’ve gotten a lot.
Since about 2012, this has deteriorated into a bit of paranoia. My mother has been through an ocean’s worth of trauma, from rapists to abusers to lousy boyfriends, rotten doctors, poverty, terrible apartments and of course, a landlord who tried to evict us from 2018-2022 (I am not questioning why he stopped). But now my mother believes that she is stalked and hunted by a consortium of people dating back to the 70s. She believes some obscure toy awakened psychic powers across the globe that she is more sensitive to, and that evil psychics are after her. Many of her friends have gotten ill or sick due to medical negligence or crime, but she believes it is all interconnected and related.
In frustration I sometimes call it, “The Caca-Dooky Conspiracy.” But that’s rare since this always triggers an argument.
Obviously, there is no international cabal of psychic villains after us. If there were, neither one of us would be alive. She certainly wouldn’t have survived colon cancer surgery, which had a 15% death rate. But she refuses to listen to reason about this, and instead we just don’t talk about it much.
And with a heavy heart, I have to begin a sentence by saying, “I do not think my mother is a racist.” She certainly did not give off those vibes in the 80s and 90s, and she’s had many friends of color. But, again, going back at least a decade or so, post-Obama, her opinions on “certain things” have gotten far, far, far less progressive. As someone who worked in the art community, she tolerated homosexuals in the past; now she is about as enlightened as Bill Maher. She has “less then enlightened” views of Jews, Latinos, and African-Americans, in that order. Many of the people who hurt her (or her sister) in the past, including her rapists, were from these communities, but the grudges she has carried have endured, and she’s judged them based on those poor examples. She is a bit like Archie Bunker from “All In The Family,” in that she can make friends with some people of color as “the good ones,” but maintain some level of ignorance. She has told me at least twice that while “you can date a black woman, I don’t want mixed grandchildren,” as if that is something she can decide. Yet she doesn’t mind Asian or Middle-Eastern people.
Anytime I mention this stuff, usually in less than polite terms, she gets horrifically angry and mentions that she used to have a roommate who was a black lesbian. She then asks me how many roommates of color I’ve had. At that point replying, “I never could move out because I had an old bat threatening to kill herself or drop dead,” would only escalate things.
My mother comes to the worst conclusions about anything. She has never met my friends, so they must be evil. She barely understands computers, so it’s also evil. She seems to take every infomercial seriously and believes any right-wing thing she hears. When I yell, I am being hysterical, and when she does, it’s somehow not. I’ve never wasted one penny chasing after lovers, much less five figures, but it simply feels wrong to “hit back” at a dying old woman sometimes. It’s just easier to eat it, allow the argument to end, and get on with the rest of the day, which is usually mundane or even pleasant.
Conclusions, at Long Last
These days my mother is insisting that I pay for her funeral arrangements in advance. In theory that is not a bad idea. In practice she has chosen a very expensive site and service elsewhere in the state, which I would never visit, which would consume my entire savings. It doesn’t matter if you pay it off at once or in instalments, 30 grand is 30 grand, you know? I am hesitant, to say the least, of burning through money I originally started saving in case we got evicted on a funeral before she has passed. We had a plumbing emergency and I took out cash for that, and it turned out to be less expensive than we thought. For a moment she toyed with the idea of me handing over the rest, as a “down payment” on that stuff. As if it was her money.
For the first time in my life it made me think about the bank account being a joint account. Physically, mom barely leaves the house once every 2 months anymore. And the bank closes early. But even thinking about that send chills down my spine.
“Why don’t you leave?” is a natural question. And up until about 2022, the reasons were financial as well as moral, and emotional. But now? The reason is she would die within months. I don’t hate her, and dumping someone in a nursing home to die, especially someone high functioning, is cruelty only worthy of an enemy. I may hate many things my mother does, or says, or much of how she treats me, but I do not hate HER. I love my mother and she loves me, at least when I please her or haven’t failed her within the past day. And were I to do that, I could not face myself in a mirror.
I may not have much in my life, but I can say I am a good son. A good son does not abandon their mother to die when things get tough, especially near the end. I certainly don’t want her to die, but at this stage, she does not want to move into another apartment, or a condo, and the thought of living together with her elsewhere is akin to a nightmare. So beyond that, my goal is to save up enough to buy a house and quarantine her upstairs at best, or win first prize in the lottery. Neither is very feasible.
The irony, the terrible irony, is that in recent years my mother has shown signs of being genuinely distraught at my lack of a life, or happiness. I often joke, “I know you want me to be happy, even at the cost of making me miserable,” which is another one of my quips she dislikes. And my mother does speak about how wonderful a son I am and how I’ve saved her life…to friends or strangers, whenever she wants to brag about what a good mother she is. She unfortunately mistakes being reliable with being infallible, as far as I am concerned, but in between arguments, things between us can be very nice. And yes, I know exactly what that sounds like. The problem is you can’t choose family.
As a child, I couldn’t imagine having a better mother. As an adult, I sometimes wonder how that wonderful mother could treat me like this. And I worry that some of the worst of myself comes out, too.
So. I typed about my mother, because she is not the sole cause of my datelessness, she is at least one percent responsible. Some dating gurus, like Frank Kermit, blame older male virginity on single mothers and I absolutely hate even hinting at embodying such a low rent stereotype. Now it is as free of my system as it can be for now, and I seek to never go into this again. And I sure hope she doesn’t succumb to her illnesses within a week or two of this. Or ever, really.
Thanks for reading, ye who made it this far.
As always I remain…the Dateless-Man
The New Adventures of Dateless-Man! 