My mom is on me because I'm not calling or writing enough. Of course, when I was active I never really called or wrote at all. There would be occasional perfunctory updates, but generally speaking I'd just drift from hangover to hangover without bothering with my family. She'd call me, but I couldn't get off the phone fast enough.
My brothers have a lot of issues with my mom. After all, she married my dad so how fucking smart could she be? She turned a blind eye to the abuse our father heaped on us and the fear and terror and anger that he filled our house with.
I've come to realize that she did the best she could. In the perfect world, my parents would have split up ten years before they finally did. Actually, in the perfect world, they never would've married in the first place.
My mom once told me she did want to divorce my dad much earlier but he threatened to take her to court, humiliate her and take the kids. My mom had some issues that would not have painted her as a fit mother in a court so she backed down. Now I was only about five when this was going on but I wish she had talked to someone else about this at the time because no way in hell would my father have followed through on that threat. The last thing my dad wanted was to be saddled with us kids, trust me.
My brothers argue that if my parents had divorced a lot earlier than our dad would've married someone else, had more kids and we would've been forgotten about. I guess that doesn't seem so bad to me but they argue that there would be no money for us. Well, it's 35 years later and my dad is remarried and there isn't going to be much money for us. I don't really care about money and trust me, there's no fortune there. And anyway, if that had happened maybe my mom could've gotten remarried too although she has notoriously bad taste in men--didn't I mention the married Iranian cab driver? If not, that's another story for another day.
Having said all that, I don't reach out to my mother much these days. Soon after my crash, I reconnected and we talked and emailed a lot. It was great. She saw a son she hadn't seen in decades come gradually back to life. I wanted to be present and show up and share about all I was going through. I wasn't going to hide, ignore the phone or drown myself in the bottle. I was recovering.
But like the Robert DeNiro character in "Awakenings," I've started to fade away from her again. I haven't returned to my bad habits, mind you, I've just pulled back from my mother. I have to force myself to carry on a conversation with her. Once I get going and start talking and opening up a little it is fine, but it is so hard for me to do that.
I think it is partly because I feel that unless I have something to report, there is nothing to say. I can babble here about the mundane bullshit that is life and talk to my friends about the trivial things that fill my day, but for some reason I think I need something deep and profound for my mom. She doesn't want that. She just wants to hear my voice. She's getting older, the health is going. Her brother is in the mid-stages of Alzheimer's disease. I know I need to start just writing some more emails and maybe talk once a week. It won't take much on my part to make her feel good.
Perhaps I can just pick up a phone tomorrow.
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