Trauma Mama
My mother died 20 years ago. I was young, then, and it was such a strange and difficult experience. She and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye. At the time she got sick, I would have described us as close. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now identify all the ways in which she kept me at a distance. In fact, she kept me at a distance all of my life. She always seemed just a little bit annoyed with me. When I would call her (from a friend’s house or something like that) she would sound incredibly irritated to be talking to me. She never liked any of my friends. She often made me feel not good enough (my weight, my hair, my clothes, etc). I spent most of my life with her – and after – feeling incredibly insufficient. Just not good enough.
After she died, I spent several years in a limbo of grief and depression. I struggled to understand who I was without her. I couldn’t imagine how I was living, day to day, without her input. Never mind that her input had often been unkind or insensitive, I still felt I needed it. So, I floundered. From the outside, things probably looked just fine: I had steady jobs and friends and a small social life. I bought a condo and paid my bills and graded my students’ papers. Inside, though, I was a wreck. I was so deeply insecure and rootless. I couldn’t decide what I was even doing with myself. I was genuinely so low most of the time that I couldn’t quite see the forest for the trees.
In the past year, I’ve been seeing a therapist who specializes in trauma. Even though it’s taken me all of my adult life to admit it, I am a victim of trauma. The trauma of being emotionally neglected and dismissed during my developmental years. I find it hard to say this, to be truly honest about how I feel, but I’ve been assured by professionals that it’s real and I don’t have to downplay it. So, I’m trying. Since I’ve started talking about trauma, I have wanted so many times to chat with my mother about how this all happened: why didn’t she love me? Why couldn’t she be happy for me? What did I do that caused this? I wanted this closure with her. If I could just understand what I’d done, I could maybe move past it.
Sometimes, you have an experience that is so ordinary, it’s hard to admit how powerful it is. I am an avid podcast listener. I am always learning new things and understanding the world better though podcasts. Not that long ago, while stuck trying to write a memoir that also addressed a lot of my experiences with my mother, I was listening to the TCM podcast called “Talking Pictures”. Ben Mankiewicz interviews directors and actors about the way movies have influenced their lives. Early in the first season, he interviews Emerald Fennell to talk about her movie Saltburn. At the end, he asks his Super 8 questions that remain the same for every guest. One of those questions is “What was your mother’s favorite movie?” I immediately knew how I would answer that question if Ben Mankiewicz asked me: The Big Chill. However, as soon as I thought it, I had a big chill myself. The Big Chill was famously filmed in Beaufort, South Carolina in a stately old home on The Point and other nearby locations. I had, in 2019, moved to and was currently living in Beaufort, South Carolina. Had I moved here because of her? It felt entirely possible. It changed my whole perspective on my memoir.
A similar thing happened just a couple of weeks ago. I love Rachel Dratch’s podcast “Woo Woo”. She talks to friends about the woo woo experiences of their lives and these often include ghost stories and sometimes astral projection. It’s one of my favorite things to listen to while driving. Not long ago, she had a guest who works as a psychic medium. This woman detailed how she’d long been able to communicate with people who were no longer living and the ways in which she conveyed their messages to their loved ones. This woman also had a website where you could book a Zoom reading with her. Almost in spite of myself, I made an appointment. I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought I would get from the experience, but I also wanted to be open to any kind of closure I might be able to accomplish.
When the day of my reading arrived, I was incredibly nervous. What if this woman was a fraud? What if I’d wasted my time and money doing this? What if she told me something I’d never known and couldn’t process? Why was I doing this to myself? In the end, I logged in for my reading and met with the very kind and generous woman who was going to communicate with my mother – who had been dead for 20 years.
Initially, the information she conveyed felt pretty general. She had suffered in her final days (true), she had had a difficult childhood (true), she was relieved to be shed of her suffering and sadness (who wouldn’t be?). However, when she began to discuss my parents’ marriage, she said something that stopped me cold. She said, “Your mother wants me to tell you that she got married to get out of the house. That was her whole motivation.” This gave me pause because it was so very specific and so very true. My mother had been worried about having to be her grandmother’s caretaker. Her own mother got remarried when my mom graduated from high school. She had moved out of the home where she had raised Mom and was starting a new life. Mom saw the writing on the wall: if she stayed, she’d be Nanny’s nurse for the rest of her life.
What followed was a series of painful but ultimately powerful revelations: my mother felt used and abused as a child and teen. When she gave birth to me, a girl, she worried that I would have the same experience. She believed that by being hard on me, she could make me tougher. Much tougher than she’d been. She had long learned to turn off her feelings and keep things to herself and she did the same with me. Details, words, and phrases all felt so true and real. Suddenly, I understood something that I never had before: she was doing what she thought was the right thing for me. She did this because she loved me. She couldn’t see that this hurt me. It made me not tougher but even more sensitive. It made me question everything about myself. The psychic also told me that Mom now understood how much she’d hurt me and that she regretted it. She was sorry.
I could talk forever about the efficacy of all of this. Was she actually speaking to my dead mother? Was she really conveying these things from an honest space? The truth is, I don’t know, and I ultimately don’t care. For me, this was a life-altering experience. I didn’t feel she was telling me things I wanted to know. Truly, what I would have wanted to hear was something much less realistic. Instead, she told me things that I needed to hear. Things that have helped me understand who I am better than I ever have before.
I still have a lot to process about this experience. I am still in therapy. I am still making progress with the many, many years of doubt and sadness that I’ve with in. I am so grateful, though, that I made the decision to go ahead with the reading. It has given me more than I could have imagined. It wasn’t an easy experience, but it was a vital one. I’ve had so many beautiful and powerful and inspiring experiences, but the painful ones, the difficult ones, have made me who I am. They have shaped me as a person and a writer. They have given my life value and meaning.
