Originally mailed on June 3, 1996

My mother has gone into therapy. I know this because she called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me so, and to ask whether I would be willing to listen to her tell me some things about her "life choices." She feels a need to explain herself. I said I would think about it.

Nona thought I should do it. "She's your family, Harriet, and family is important. You can't say no to your own mother, not when it's so obviously important to her. Let her tell you what she needs to tell you."

I said, "That argument is bullshit. Some stupid genetic relationship shouldn't matter. What matters is how a person treats you. I'd say my mother hasn't exactly earned the right to my forgiveness and understanding."

Louella thought I should do it. "What harm could it possibly do you to listen to her, Harriet? You don't have to believe her, you don't have to forgive her. You don't even have to respond to her. You just have to let her say what she wants to say."

Hmph. That argument didn't move me, either. There are lots of things that wouldn't hurt me that I don't do. I don't eat mustard, I don't watch horror movies, I don't climb trees to peek at baby robins in their nests. If I did all the things it "couldn't hurt me to do," I'd never have time to work or sleep.

Grandma thought I should do it, to help bring peace to our troubled family. I said, "As far as I'm concerned, she's not my family. You are. And we aren't troubled at all."

Splash thought I should do it. "You should listen to her, Harriet. Aren't you dying to find out what she will say?" And that's what ultimately got me -- curiosity. I couldn't resist hearing her version of things. Now that I've heard it, I'm not sure whether I'm glad or sorry I listened. But here's the story pretty much as she told it to me.

My grandmother was 25 when she married my grandfather. Wallace Wagner, who was 35 at the time. Two and three years later they had daughters, first Ellen, my mother, and then Kate. According to Ellen, Wallace was at best a difficult man and at worst a terror. Although he never hit my grandmother or the girls, he was very controlling. He liked things a certain way, and if things weren't right he could be punishingly cold to my grandmother. He didn't like the girls to make messes or noise, and he didn't like "woman things" left around his house, especially his bedroom. So my grandmother kept all of her things carefully put away in drawers, and tried to make sure the girls did the same. Ellen said that she remembers playing with Kate in the yard, and my grandmother coming out 10 minutes before my grandfather came home to make them clean up all their toys and settle down to do something quiet, like their homework. The girls had to keep everything they owned in their bedroom when they weren't using it, and they had a special place in the garage where their outside toys had to be. Ellen said she doesn't remember her father ever coming into their room. She thinks he got married to have someone to keep his house, but that he wanted to keep everything exactly the way it had been before my grandmother moved in. She said, "The three of us left so little mark on the house that if we weren't standing in the room, you'd never know we lived there."

She blames my grandmother for trying to control the girls so that they wouldn't aggravate their father. According to my mother, their presence was enough to aggravate him, and they often had their dinner before he got home so that he wouldn't have to sit at the table with them, and they weren't allowed to be in the living room while he read the paper or watched TV. He said they "moved too much," and it bothered his concentration. He apparently rarely spoke directly to the girls; he would say, "Miriam, Ellen needs to be sent to her room," or "Miriam, is that Kate's clarinet in the living room?" And Grandma would send Ellen to her room or go get the clarinet and put it away.

So, says Ellen, the atmosphere in the house was so oppressive that of course she and her sister rebelled. By the time they were 12 and 13, they were sneaking out to drink with high school boys, and by the time they were 14 and 15 they were both having sex with "many different boys," so my mother says. Kate was diagnosed with leukemia in 1962, when she was 14, and died three years later. Ellen thinks she would have lived longer if she hadn't fought my grandmother over the treatment, disappearing when she was supposed to have doctor appointments and running away from the hospital whenever she could.

Ellen was 18 when her sister died, and she got married the same year, against her parents' wishes, and mostly, she said, so she wouldn't have to live alone in the house with them. I was born when she was 19, and I was seven when my father died in a one-car drunk-driving accident. Ellen said, "We used to always take you out bar-hopping with us; we'd put you to sleep in the back seat of the car and go from bar to bar or party to party, leaving you asleep in the parking lot. I didn't drink much but I was always afraid he'd get into a fight or go home with some other woman. He was probably behind the wheel with us in the car, as drunk as he was the night he died, dozens of times. I don't remember why we weren't with him that night; maybe he and I had a fight earlier that day or maybe he was cheating on me and had snuck out. But I can't tell you how many times in the next five years I looked at you and thought that he might have killed you. I thought I was a terrible mother for having tried to raise you with a man like that. And I was a worse mother for thinking, once or twice when things were really hard, that it might have been better if we'd died with him.

"When I met Al, I liked him right away. And he was so obviously a good man, the kind of man who would never have anything sordid like a drunken husband in his past -- don't smirk, Harriet, you know what I mean -- that I couldn't bear to tell him the truth about me. I thought he'd disapprove of me. I just didn't talk about my past much, and I never invited him in to our apartment. I didn't say I had no kids, I just didn't mention you. And then he told me he liked my old-fashioned values, and I realized he thought I wasn't inviting him in because it would be inappropriate. How could I tell him the truth then?

"And then I found out you liked girls, and I knew he'd never want a stepdaughter who was gay. I told myself that was just another sign of what a bad mother I'd been, and that you'd be better off without me, and I left you.

"My therapist says we re-create the patterns our parents set. Al was a hardworking, sober man, like my father, so of course I thought he didn't want my children around. And when I abandoned you, I was making you disappear just like my mother tried to make us disappear by keeping us out of our father's sight. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd been telling myself since you were born that I was a bad mother, so eventually I did the worse thing a mother can do. I was wrong to do it, Harriet, and I've been sorry every day since."

Man. She dumped that load on me and then sat there on my futon crying. What was I supposed to say? "Thank you for telling me this, Mother?" "All is forgiven, Mother?" I said, "Um... can I get you a cold drink or something?"

She said, "No. I just wanted to tell you that. I can go now." And she got up. We stood awkwardly at the door for a bit. I wondered if she wanted a hug but I didn't want to give her one, so eventually she left.

Of course, I immediately went to Grandma to squeal on my mother. "You wouldn't believe what she said about you!" I told her, expecting her to be outraged. The Grandma Ellen described is nothing like the Grandma who raised me. But Grandma said, "Your mother was telling the truth, as she sees it. I might not agree, but she has the right to her own version of the truth."

I said, "But doesn't it upset you? I mean, you raised me and I can't imagine you being a mother like Ellen described. I'm angry at her."

Grandma said, "Well, I do get angry at your mother because I think sometimes she wants to pass the blame for her own bad decisions back up the line to me. And I think she forgets many good things about our family life, and about her father.

"Ellen and Kate never understood that their father worked a very stressful, loud job on the assembly line at Oldsmobile, and he wanted quiet when he got home, especially if he was on midnights and trying to sleep during the day. She tells the story of her childhood like they were never allowed to run and play, but much of the time Wallace was working the evening shift and it was just us three at home from when they got home from school until past their bedtime, and believe me they ran and screamed through the house and yard. Ellen says they were hidden away and Wallace never saw their room, but he and I used to check on them together when he got home from work late at night. They were always sleeping. And if I fed the girls apart from their father, it was because children can't wait until 10 p.m. for their dinner. Ellen and Kate didn't see their father much, and when they did he was tired and cranky and demanded a quiet tidy house to rest in. It wasn't that he didn't love them, or rejected them. It was what he needed to be able to work that job. Ellen remembers it differently. And maybe it's true that a mother doing her best can still damage her children. I just don't know."

I said, "If Ellen thinks you were such a rotten mother, why is she so close to you now?"

Grandma said, "Well, Ellen's childhood was a long time ago, and I have changed in her eyes. And when I took you in, I saved her from her very worst mistake -- think what might have happened to you if that social worker hadn't been able to track me down! She's never said so, but she's grateful to me and, for your sake, she forgives a great deal."

I said, "She's never told you she's grateful to you for taking me in when she dumped me at the mall? I don't believe it!"

Grandma said, "I expect I'll be getting a talk much like the one you just had with Ellen soon. Remember, for a very long time she wouldn't even refer directly to the fact that I raised you, or admit to herself that it wasn't a decision she and I made together. She's beginning to own up to it now, and pretty soon she'll come by to tell me how relieved and happy she was to find out you were with me."

Hmph. What a can of worms. Do other people have families like this? The only thing I've ever seen that comes close is on Louella's soap opera, people trying to slowly poison their spouses and former wives coming back from the dead and children you didn't know you had showing up unexpectedly.

I wish I'd asked my mother to tell me one good thing about my childhood with her. I don't remember much of it. When she first left me, I thought it was a mistake, or that she was in an accident or something, but the social worker said moms who plan to come back don't give their kids a hundred dollars for an afternoon at the mall. The social worker had found the money in my wallet, where my mother had hidden it for me to find later. I remember looking at the money, five $20 bills, and I decided the social worker was right, and after that I tried to forget about my mother as much as I could. Now I wish I could remember more, especially if I could remember her putting me to bed safe, maybe, or a special place we used to go together on Saturday afternoons.

I wish I'd asked my mother, "What did you think had become of me, the two years between when you left me and when you called your mother to tell her you'd had a son, and found out I was with her? Did you think I was a prostitute or a drug addict, did you imagine I'd been adopted by someone wealthy, did you try not to think about me at all?" Louella's puppy got out of the yard once and was gone for two days, and we were all frantic from the uncertainty of her fate, and when Louella called to say a neighbor had found her we both cried. I wish I'd asked my mother, "Did you love me more than Louella loves her puppy?"

Oh, listen to me get pathetic. I was supposed to be at Louella's ten minutes ago to help paint her dining room and here I am crying over my sad childhood instead. I'd better go. Don't worry about me -- I'm sad, but otherwise I'm fine.

Love,

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