Author: jnelson

My mother and I had a
strange relationship. (Boy, how many of us could start our autobiographies with
those exact same words, I wonder!) It’s not that it was not a loving
relationship. It was. But it was strangely inverted: inside out and upside
down. I, the child, was the protector, the defender; my mother the one who
needed care and protection from the rigors of reality. I intuited, at a very
early age, as little children often just feel things, that Mum was filled
inside with an aching sadness. It was, of course, my job to fix it, or at very
least to provide a counterbalance.

The first time I remember
this inversion of roles, was with reading. Of course when I was very little my
mother used to read to me, but as soon as I began to learn to read myself, she
had me read to her. Nothing so odd there, I was simply demonstrating my reading
skills. The strange thing was, that pattern remained, really, for the rest of
her life. Before I started my homework I would sit beside her and read the next
installment of the latest novel. When I visited from college or from my U.S.
home, she always wanted me to make time each day to read to her. Late in her
life, in the nursing home, I would read to her until she fell asleep. I have
often thought how much she would have loved recorded books, had they been
around in her day, but actually I’m not too sure about that. I suspect it was
more about the reader being me, so close there beside her.

The other way I was
always called upon to entertain Mum was playing cards and board games.  She loved any and all of them, and was as
excited as a little kid when she won. The result was that I consented to play
games that I felt I had long outgrown when I would have much preferred other
activities, but this was my job. It was my purpose in life. As time went by, I
found myself letting her win. Now, parents sometimes might encourage a child,
perhaps, by losing on purpose occasionally, but I have never heard any child
admit to faking a win for an adult.

My father would have no
truck with games or reading aloud, but in other ways he silently validated this
subliminal need of mine to cheer my mother, to keep her happy, to protect her.  I learned very early on that when he winked
at me, in a way I so loved, it meant that we were now to collude in some fakery
or falsehood so as not to hurt her. Mum’s culinary and needlework skills were,
shall we say, not well developed. Of course, it’s also fair to say that she was
severely handicapped by strict postwar rationing, but I couldn’t help but notice
that other women managed many and various creations with much greater
success.  None of this was ever alluded
to. After every meal, no matter how insipid or just plain burned, Dad would sit
back in his chair, pat his tummy affectionately, wink wickedly at me, and say
with great gusto, ‘By ‘eck but that was grrrand!’ or words to that effect.  

I invariably tried to
emulate his praise, but rarely managed the right degree of enthusiasm.  I wore, without complaint, strange
unidentifiable garments which were too big here and too tight there, and
sometimes had wildly undulating hemlines. My dad suffered more from Mum’s
attempts at knitting. One of my fondest memories is of him donning a
newly-knitted wool hat.  

It was too small, and the
harder he tried to pull it down to cover his shiny bald head, the more
determinedly it sprang back to sit way too high above his ears where it perched
jauntily at a dangerous angle. It came to a weird point at the top and gave my
big, solid, father something of a look of a drunken elf. The anticipated wink
made my urge to giggle almost uncontrollable. 
‘By ‘eck,’ he said, struggling to keep it from popping off the top of
his head, ‘That’ll be grrrand!’

When, in my high school
years, my aunt told me that my parents had had two children before me, both of
whom had died of meningitis at the ages of two and four, my psyche blazed with
newfound light. So it was all real. Mom really did have a huge sadness inside
her. All the time I knew it, but didn’t know it: didn’t know it was real, didn’t
know why. The knowledge changed nothing of our dynamic, it was much too deeply
ingrained. But it did make me feel less crazy, more in control. I was making
conscious choices, rather than everything I did being driven at some
subconscious level.

I could tell endless
tales of ways in which I mothered my mother, but you get the drift. But what
effect did that topsy-turvy relationship have on me at such a vital stage of
character development? Much of my life has been spent un-learning a lot of what
I learned as a child.

I found out quite rapidly
that my desire to fix others’ problems was one which must be denied. In the big
outside world, attempts to do so result in resentment and are doomed to fail.
We can each only fix our own problems, not each other’s.

My competitive spirit, if
I ever had such a thing, was still-born. I simply am incapable of feeling that
will to win which practically everyone else seems to share. So it still feels
unfair to me, to win at all, ever, when I am perfectly happy losing and no-one
else is. But I learned, quite early, that losing on purpose is not appreciated.
I got caught cheating to lose in a card game by two college friends, one of
whom I was madly in love with at the time. Ever after that game, I would catch
her looking intently at me sometimes with a puzzled expression, and our
friendship – which was all it was – was never the same again. Or maybe I just
imagined it. But it cured me of the losing habit, though not of the instinct to
do it.

On the positive side, I
learned to appreciate something done for me or given to me for the effort made,
and the love that drove it, rather than the end result. The first gift my
youngest step-son gave me was a frighteningly huge bottle of perfume. It
obviously came from some low-end dime store. The cloying, sickly-sweet smell it
gave off when opened was literally nauseating. But every morning, for what
seemed like years, I left for work bearing a big dab of the stuff, only to
scrub it off in the car. Just as my dad, leaving the house in his ill-fitting
elfin hat, doubtless stuffed it in his pocket immediately he rounded the
corner.

I am forced to wonder,
looking back on my childhood, if I actually got it all wrong. Did I, by meeting
Mum’s every need as far as I was able, in fact prolong her suffering? Had I
refused to play the mothering role, would she have been forced to be the
mother, and I allowed to be the child? But I was just a child, with no
more than instinct to guide me, and whether I got it right or wrong or some
mixture of both, I suffered too. I knew my mother loved me, but there was
something not quite right there. I felt it deep down in my young soul. I so
longed for a pure, unsullied, mother-love, which was never to be. I still yearn
for it, even as I know it can never be.

But, if I have learned
only one good lesson from my battered inner child, it is not to judge. And
especially not the judge a past which I can do nothing to change. If I got it
all wrong, and maybe my dad did too, we did the wrong things for the very best
of reasons.

We did it all for love.

© 18 Nov 2015  

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