My Mom Never Told Me She Loved Me
Posted: Saturday, June 19, 2010
by Randy Vaughan
Like a setting in a Gothic horror novel, the bloated gray clouds race overhead, forced along by the howling winter wind. But the only ghosts lingering here among the cold marble monuments and barren trees are memories. And these rattle their tin cups against invisible bars deep inside my soul where I am their cellmate.
The invisible, though not incorporeal, icy barrier she kept between us in life has now been replaced by freshly packed dirt. With her has been laid to rest even the pretense of feigned relationships. I, like Sisyphus, must strain at the boulder of her memory.
There was the time I tried out for, and made, the eighth-grade basketball team. I was the only kid to show up for every practice and she took me to every game. Sitting alone in the bleachers, she watched as I maintained my bench-warming vigil. Only twice did she get to see me play, and this was for a combined total of less than one minute divided between two games that we were winning by such a large margin that even I posed no serious liability to the "winning effort".
But knowing how my soul churned with the bitter taste of rejection, she never said a word, never put her arm around me and hugged me reassuringly, never lectured me about life's often unfair ways, never encouraged me to try harder in order to prove to the coach how wrong he was, never reached into her past to try to console me with her own childhood stories of heartbreak and dejection.
She knew something, my mom, about life, that it's a path you trod alone, and sometimes in great pain. No, she never tried to tell me everything was going to be all right. But my mom never lied to me, either.
There was the time I shot out my front tooth with my BB-gun. I was as proud of that rifle as a first-time parent. But when that tiny copper ball bounced off the beer can and split my front tooth almost perfectly in half, my mom, in her unique fashion, wasn't there for me.
I had raced through the front door, hand cupped tightly against my mouth in the futile effort to keep air from touching the exposed nerve dangling against my tongue. Examining my injury, she tried to cut the nerve with a pair of scissors from her sewing box. When at last she accepted I couldn't endure the pain, she promised to take me to the dentist first thing Monday morning. And this was Saturday evening.
That night she fixed supper-fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. She didn't offer to fix anything different, something easier for me to eat, like soup. And I didn't ask for anything else, either. I managed, but I've forgotten neither the pain nor how delicious that supper was. You see, she knew that fried chicken, mashed taters, and corn on the cob was my favorite.
She refused to share in my pain. But how could she? She could no more take away my pain than could she enjoy her delicious fried chicken on my behalf. Pain must be endured quietly, patiently, alone.
She had to bail me out of jail, twice. The first time was for riding around the valley and shooting out street-lights with a pellet gun. No lectures. No punishment. Only that cold stare and the knowledge that when I had to pay for the fine and costs of replacing the lights (four of them at nearly ten-dollars each when I was making fifty-cents an hour working after school), it would never happen again.
The second time I had been taken in for drinking and driving. Everything she had to say was spoken through her distant eyes. I wanted to see hurt, anger, something, anything. But nothing except the understanding that teenage boys sometimes do these things and, God willing, live to learn from their mistakes and tell the tale. I did live. I also learned.
People make choices and actions have consequences. We carry the consequences of our actions in a hand-made cart attached to a single-yoke. And the owner of the cart alone can pull it along life's lonely, painful path. None other can share this responsibility.
"Live and learn," she used to say. "Die and know it all." I wish I had said that. She knew a lot, my mom, but showed little. Now she knows much more. Still she shows nothing. She never changes.
My life with her was filled with these little episodes. Like the time we didn't speak for nearly four years. I don't remember what happened, but we would see each other in public, turn and walk away. And again I have to walk away without speaking.
My mom was the philosopher's stone. Unable to cling to her smooth exterior, life was free to bombard me with its base reality. But forced, stoic acceptance of life's relentless assaults turns pain into strength, anger to wisdom, and hurt to understanding. Depending upon her meant relying on myself. Trusting in her meant following my own path. In life she refused to hold my hand and in death her hands remain by her side.
An icy drizzle starts to fall. I blink but I refuse to shiver or leave. Let others complain and run inside. I cannot because I am my mother's son. The freezing rain, like life, falls upon everyone equally, separating the weak from the strong, the timid from the bold, those who grovel from the independent. It doesn't take six feet of freshly-packed dirt to separate the living from the dead.
My mom was thirty years old when I began to be old enough to have vivid memories of her. But that doesn't stop me from knowing that she always wise, even as a young girl. Her wisdom began when she was an infant and abandoned on a stranger's doorstep. How wise must have been her natural parents to realize that a daughter sheltered and protected by her mother and father would grow to be weak, dependent, crying with each hurt, whining about life's great injustices.
And how wise must have been her adoptive parents, making certain she understood at an early age she was living in a borrowed home with a borrowed family. After all, is not truth a virtue? And isn't virtue flown high like a flag, placed on a pedestal and revered by all?
Like life, truth shows no favorites, assumes no liability for its consequences, cares not how we respond to its impersonal effects. hen splashed by truth's murky puddles, we can complain and struggle to dry ourselves off or shrug and continue on our solitary path, letting truth's unwanted wetness evaporate in its own time. That there are more puddles ahead is inevitable and eventually there will be no more towels or dry clothes.
As a child she accepted her spirit's solitude. She quietly savored those fleeting moments of happiness and expected no one else to help her bear the world of suffering that rested on her shoulders. Who would remember Atlas had someone come along and relieved him of his burden?
So I know that such discernment and understanding is hereditary. Her inheritance is the greatest gift bequeathed her by both her natural and adoptive parents. In turn, she has passed this legacy on to me.
Will I leave this to my daughter? What else can I do? I can't be there every time she gets a boo-boo, or is frightened by the moth on the wall beside her bed, or wakes up crying because some dream-monster was chasing her, or sniffles because she can't find Barbie's shoes.
As she grows older I may not be there when her first boyfriend breaks her heart by leaving her for someone new. I won't be able to take away the hurt she'll feel when she doesn't make the cheerleading squad, or is ostracized by her classmates for befriending the new girl in school, the girl with braces and Coke-bottle glasses whose parents live in the wrong part of town.
And when her heart is about to burst with happiness when she shows me her engagement ring, I won't be able to take away even a tear of joy to make room for later ecstasy when she learns she's pregnant.
So even though she's only five, already I'm passing on my mom's legacy. "Toughen up," I tell her when she shows me her bruised knee. After finally finding the cause of her terror, I point my finger at the harmless moth. "If it bothers you," I say, "make it go away." Sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, I tell her that the monsters in her dreams are nothing compared to the ones in real-life she'll encounter when she's older-schoolmates, bosses, cretins who drive with their eyes open and minds closed, and all the other rude, thoughtless, insensitive people she'll have to learn to deal with. And she's learning that sometimes Barbie likes to go barefooted.
Already she is watching me turn her bruises into personal triumphs, fears into quiet strengths, monsters into friendly acquaintances, and losses into opportunities. Her cart is filling rapidly. And forcing her to pull it alone makes her stronger every day.
Six feet of hardening earth cannot hide my mom's pride.
Will my daughter carry on this tradition with her own children? She will because she'll understand that children are also people, individuals who must pull their splintery wagon of personal responsibility alone, who must continue walking regardless of how soaked they are with life's cold, muddy truths.
The freezing rain is picking up now. The cemetery is deserted except for me and my mom. In death, as in life, she and I are alone. But at long last she can rest because her legacy is safe with me. And I can get on with the business of living.
My mom never told me she loved me.
She didn't have to.
Epilogue: This was written in 1990 and my mom was still alive. She died in 2001. The truth is I have no idea where she and my dad are buried. You see, she and I hadn't spoken before I wrote this nor did we ever speak after. As to temporal and earthy legacies? In typical fashion, she literally had me written out of her will. No worries.
But perhaps this will move you. While re-typing this from the original, Madison, our younger daughter, has been watching "The Sound of Music." How many thirteen year-old girls love that movie, right? And one of the songs from that movie is, of course, "Edelweiss".
Well, just a few years before my dad died (that was '91) Lisa (my wife) and I were at my parents' house and I was messing around on the piano. I'd tried for years to get my mom to teach me (she played a great gospel-ragtime style) but it just never worked out. No surprise there. But that day while I sat there, she came into the living room, handed me a box, and said, "This is so you'll know I love you." I opened it. It was a grand-piano music box. The song it plays is "Edelweiss".
So yes, before it was all over between us, she did tell me she loved me, and still does every time I look at that wee-piano which sits on top of my digital piano.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)I'm speechless at your mother's abuse.I've wrestled with "trying to figure her out" my entire lifetime, Jennifer. She was an orphan, you see, quite literally found on a doorstep. One would think "family" would've been everything to her. I've heard her stories of her youth and few were "happy". So I truly believe her intentions were well meant, that she knew life could be difficult as hell and her most important responsibility was to prepare me for that. Put succinctly as possible: She was self-reliant and independent to the point of obsession and so for me, one of the most difficult things I've had to learn in life is to let other people actually "be there" for me, to accept help from others. (I've an older brother to whom I've not spoken now for, oh, pushing six years. I often think that the Vaughan's, being Welsh, were cursed by a witch or something in the past....a very "troubled" clan if ever there was...."I understand what you're saying, Randy. It's very very hard to deal with having been hurt by a mother's incapacity to give the love we needed as a child. And especially hard when the mother had a difficult time as a child. I have a similar story, and like you have spent my life trying to figure out my mother, and felling sorry for her, and making excuses for her. Also had to walk away from my siblings! And had to learn to let other people be there for me.I'm just going through a phase where I've realized that I sink much more effort into understanding my mother than she ever does or has done into me! And there's only one reason I know everything about how tough it was for her - that's because she never stopped telling me. I have to work very hard to focus on my own needs more than I do on hers.
Some mothers milk their "difficult childhoods", and some don't. It makes it very challenging for the child who is naturally compassionate, as you obviously are. By the way I also have Welsh background! Amazing.
Yep, my mom's "tag line" to me, perhaps her first words if I could remember them, were "Toughen up, little boy. I'm not always going to be around to take care of you." Her entire philosophy of life was reduced to:1. To rely on others is to be disappointed.2. Live and learn. Die and know it all.Maybe we need to go back to Wales and find out what the hell is going on?
As I read this article, I felt that cold brittle Siberian wind blow through my soul once again. I think I knew with my first conscious thought that I would be on my own in this world- I determined at an early age to break that frozen emotional chain that trailed down through the generations like a yoke encircling the necks of my ancestors with it's glacier-like grip until it reached out to grasp me and my brothers and sisters in it's icy tentacles.I built my own hearth of warmth in my own country, and kindled the flames with the love for my babies- a love I demonstrated copiously, (everyone used to exclaim-( "you're gonna eat that baby plum up Ella!)I continued this all through their lives- still do- you can imagine how that went over in their teens- but secretly, I knew they didn't mind- it was something they were used to. I demonstrated self-reliance and reality with my own actions and words, but they always knew, and still do, that the warm hearth of our love was always there when they needed respite from the cold winds of the world. Painful detrimental chains of inheritance must be broken at some point in time- and a new one began. A hug and a kiss can help heal a broken heart. Always- Ella P.S. I'm of German ancestrySee? Germanic, Celtic...we're all screwed, I think. When I left home, it was with two absolutes: No screaming, hitting, slamming, or throwing (entirely too much of that growing up). And while with my past of nearly sixty employers I have proven I'm not the "best provider" in the world, just like you, I make damned sure that those people whom I love know that I love them and that my life has been made better because of them....
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