Forsaken

When you don't get the mother lode

When I was a kid, I loved Aesop’s Fables. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? Of course you do, it’s one of those things that sticks. He was a real jackass, though, wasn’t he? Like how many times are you gonna yell for your entire town to run up the hill to save the sheep and then be like, haha, just kidding. Just wanted to see if you’d be dumb enough to care again.

This is on my mind because I started to text my friend Lauren earlier this morning. I was having a moment, and the moment felt something like: I can’t handle the world right now, my heart hurts. But then I deleted the text because it sounded so terrible out of context, like I really wasn’t okay. And maybe I wasn’t at that moment, but it wasn’t an emergency, either - it was my own fault. It was a normal reaction to being a sensitive person waking up in a violent, nonsensical world in the middle of yet another absolutely ridiculous election cycle with pundits spouting their opinions about the right options in front of us like they’re spitting facts, more children dying everywhere, people screaming at each other on the internet, and essays about beloved authors who turn out to be monstrous, appalling people…and, whatever. I had a moment, and I’ll keep having them. The day I don’t have them is the day I’m really in trouble. See: Krishnamurti, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I knew Lauren would have responded if I texted, though, and that was enough. Knowing you have people is often all you need.

Lauren and Woody. If you haven’t subscribed to Lauren’s Substack, you’re missing out, seriously.

I save texts like that for true emergencies - the kind where you’re just at a loss as to how to face the day. I haven’t had one of those days since the year after my mom died, when I would wake up and make it out to the kitchen to pack lunches for my kids, and sometimes not even have it in me to unload the dishwasher. I’d end up sitting on the linoleum floor with my back pressed up against the refrigerator, weeping into my arm so I wouldn’t wake the house that way. That’s grief, what can you do? That’s when maybe you send a text to a close friend saying you aren’t okay, though I don’t think I did that, even then. But just the “normal” heartbreak of taking in the “regular” and “expected” amount of awful things happening in the world? I doubt most of us are leaning on each other for that at this point. We’re becoming numb to it, which is the most dangerous thing of all. Used to a constant, thrumming low-level anxiety. We should expect better, and we should be better. Anyway, you cannot dine out on horror before your morning coffee and expect to be okay, everyone knows this by now. I knew if I had a cup of coffee, took some deep breaths and directed my attention toward just about anything other than my newsfeed for a little while, I’d be all right. You know - in the world where “all right” means you’re able to do the things you need to do and maybe try to make the world a better place somehow or some way with the new day you’ve been given.

Dani and Otis making the world a better place. Pinch me with the friends I have.

I was talking to my friend Dani this weekend, one of those deep conversations where the act of listening is as intense as the desire to communicate. It’s the only kind of conversation I want to have these days, and she’s one of my favorite people on the whole planet to talk to about the things that matter. We were talking about life and uncertainty and people who feel uncomfortable around grief, and seasons of loss and letting go - and suddenly wanting things that surprise, scare or confound you. It was me talking about that last part. It is the best thing in the world to have people in your life who you can say absolutely anything to and know that it’s fine. I could have sent that text this morning to Dani and she would have responded. I could have sent it to either of my oldest girlfriends - Tracy or Wendy - women I’ve known since we were girls with braces, wearing our hearts on our sleeves in high school before we learned how the world can crush you - my sisters, whether we have the same parents or not. Not one of these women would have been phased by that amount of vulnerability, but probably all of them would have stopped what they were doing and called. That right there is the true gold in life. If you’re counting, that’s four extraordinary people I could have texted in a moment when I was feeling a lot of despair - four outrageously wise, kind, brilliant women. That’s also why I don’t text like that unless I’m really not okay. I don’t ask people to run up the hill unless I mean it, and even when I mean it, I still have to push through my resistance to asking for help. I’m the one who gives help, not the one who needs it. 

Tracy, Wendy and lucky me. Been through it all together, still going.

I am struggling a bit, though. This Alice Munro thing hit a nerve, and it’s an old, deep nerve. If you don’t know what I’m talking about - Nobel laureate, much-revered Canadian short story writer Alice Munro died in May, and this past weekend, her daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s second husband - Andrea’s stepfather - had sexually assaulted her when she was visiting her mother one summer when she was nine years old. The abuse went on for a few years until she hit puberty and was no longer of interest to him. Please insert my utter nausea here. He also told Andrea about other little girls in the neighborhood he liked. She finally told her mother of the abuse when she was twenty-five (more on that later) and Munro left her husband for a few months, but then returned to him and stayed with him until his death, knowing what had happened, but refusing to choose her daughter over her husband. The mind truly boggles, and it boggles more because Munro was known for writing about the inner lives of girls and women, mothers and daughters, the patriarchy, misogyny, and even child abuse and sexual assault. So, yeah. For many of us who loved her work and considered her an icon and a treasure, it was absolutely horrifying to learn of the pain her daughter had endured all these years, and to get a view from inside the house of the artist versus the art. 

There are whole books on the topic of whether you can still appreciate someone’s art even if you find out later they were a deeply disturbed human being. I think these are decisions we each have to make for ourselves, based on whatever line is a line too far for us. If we’re going to cancel every male writer who’s used his fame to engage in predatory behavior with women or who’s been an open misogynist, I’m sorry to tell you, but there aren’t going to be a lot of male writers left for you to read. But maybe domestic violence or child abuse or allegations of sexual assault are a line too far for you. I think people get into very weird territory when they start trying to defend unthinkable behavior because they love someone’s films, songs, novels. It was different then, they were from a different generation. Maybe just watch the films, sing the songs, or read the novels knowing the artist was a person with no moral compass, or someone who had serious mental health issues or addictions or sociopathy, or was a good writer but a terrible parent, or a person you would never have wanted as a friend. Grapple with your strange need to make their behavior okay on your own time, because there are certain lines people cross that are never going to be okay, and you don’t need to convince yourself otherwise. There are too many people coming out now, saying they knew about what had happened, but remained silent because…because, why? To protect her legacy? Munro’s biographer knew and said she grappled with the shame around all of it for years, but stood by her husband, anyway. She told one of her older daughters she simply couldn’t live without him. The unspoken part of that sentence is, even if it means forsaking my child.

I keep thinking about Munro’s daughter Andrea, and what it must have felt like watching her mother receive accolade after accolade for her writing - particularly because of the way she wrote about women and girls - all the while knowing her mother had forsaken her for her stepfather. What an absolute mindfuck. Anyway, this whole thing really got to me because it hits a nerve. It’s the nerve of: my mother isn’t doing the thing a mother should do. When stepped on, it’s a nerve that brings up a lot of grief. And underneath that feeling of grief are reminders of old questions that swam below the surface of my entire childhood. They shaped the person I became, the way I entered relationships, the bullshit I put up with, and the very long road toward undoing all the damage those questions created. Questions I never would have been asking myself if I’d had a different mom. I’m going to say right here, I do not wish I’d had a different mom. I am who I am because she was who she was. That doesn’t mean I can’t grieve for the younger versions of myself who suffered as a result. But the questions were - why doesn’t she love me the way a mother should love her daughter? Why isn’t she protecting me, believing me, fighting for me, choosing me? What’s broken in me that my own mother can’t love me?

Like the time a man grabbed me in the stairwell on my way to ballet and tried to force himself on me when I was thirteen, saying just don’t move, okay? Right in my ear. And the way I froze at first, terrified and unsure about what was happening, but then managed to get free from him and scramble up the stairwell, nothing but a beating heart and hands and feet that somehow knew how to climb stairs backwards while I wailed in a voice I didn’t recognize, and while he stared at me like I was a science experiment gone wrong, and then backed away and ran down the stairs and out the door. And the way my mom did not come to get me when they called her from the ballet studio and told her what happened, even though I was only three blocks away. Even though I was crying still, and shaking in a way I couldn’t stop, right down to my core. Even though I needed her. 

Or the way I finally went to her when I was sixteen, when I just couldn’t handle it anymore, months after a man had forced himself on me and I hadn’t gotten away, and the way she believed him and not me. I know how that feels. It feels like death, like you’re nothing, like you’re easily thrown to the wolves. Like your mom is going to take the word of a stranger over you. It fucking hurts, maybe worse than the thing that happened because this is your mom, not some stranger. Not some man. Your mom.

She used to go for my jugular sometimes. She’d use something I’d confided in her, something painful or disappointing, and she’d wield it against me with this wild look of victory in her eyes if it served her purpose. When she was angry, she had no filter, no mechanism that made her not say the worst possible thing. But she didn’t win as a result, she just taught me not to confide in her. Not to give her ammunition. Not to turn to her if I wasn’t okay. If she were here, I would not have texted her this morning. I’d have waited until I was feeling better. Of course I compare and contrast, it’s natural. I think about my own kids and how wild fucking horses couldn’t keep me away if they got hurt. My god, the thought of one of my kids crying in the background of a phone call and me not going? There is no way, there is no hurdle, no issue, no reason under the sun that I am not running out the door and getting to them as fast as humanly possible. Believing a stranger over one of my kids? Choosing a partner over either of them? It’s insane, it’s unthinkable, it would not happen. Then I think about my mom, and the obvious place to go is that clearly she didn’t feel about me the way I feel about my own kids, but I don’t think that’s exactly it. It’s that there’s something that’s gone deeply wrong inside a mother who doesn’t mother. It has nothing to do with the kids, it’s a black hole in the mother’s psyche or some unfathomable deficit that feels like the most personal thing in the world when you’re twisting on the end of that knife, but really is not a reflection on you. You’re just a kid trying to survive and make sense of a world where people do things that will never make sense no matter how long you live.

I can’t speak about what made Alice Munro tick as a human being and as a mother, obviously. But I’ve read every article that’s been written about this, everything that’s come to light since Andrea Skinner’s essay because the whole thing has made me feel sick in my soul, sick on behalf of someone I don’t know, sick for all of us with confusing mothers, and somewhere - in one of those articles - she says she first told her mother about the abuse in 1992, after Munro expressed sympathy for the character of a young girl in a book of short stories called Marine Life by Linda Svendson - which I have since ordered. In the story, there’s a character who commits suicide because her stepfather was abusing her, and apparently Alice Munro asked Andrea why she thought the character had taken her life. She expressed enough dismay about it that her daughter thought maybe this was the moment she’d been hoping for, that maybe if her mother felt sadness for a character in a story, maybe she would feel enormous heartache and despair for her own child, even if she was grown now, even if it was too late to stop it. It turned out that was not the case, though. Munro treated the abuse like an infidelity. Her husband sent letters to the whole family saying Andrea had seduced him (this is where I want to scream she was nine), calling her a home-wrecker and threatening to go public with semi-naked photos he’d taken of her at the time of the abuse. What a lovely man, definitely someone you’d choose over your grown child, who is finally asking you to reckon with the monster you’ve married, who is asking you to choose her, instead. But that isn’t the part that struck me (that’s the part that shattered me on behalf of her daughter) - the part that struck me is that somewhere inside her, Munro must have known. The secret in that house must have been evident to her on some level even before Andrea told her, because how else would it be possible that she would ask her daughter - the very person who had experienced abuse at the hands of her stepfather - why the character in this story had taken her life? Why would she think Andrea would know?

Which brings me back to Dani, because her podcast, Family Secrets, is all about this very thing. Secrets that swim below the surface, that pull people under. It’s the weight of carrying them, or the weight of pushing them down so far you’re hiding them from yourself. I think it’s also about what happens when you don’t have people in your life you can confide in, when you feel the need to carry secrets way down deep because shame has you convinced if you told anyone, they couldn’t possibly love you. There are a lot of us who grow up with confusing mothers who make unthinkable decisions, and if you’d like to have your mind blown, listen to this episode of Dani’s podcast that had me driving in Santa Monica with tears streaming down my face.

Here’s the thing - I miss my mother. There is an ever-present ache I’ve learned to live with, because as flawed as she was, and as unable to rise above the issues that made it hard for her to mother me - to love me fully and openly and without question - she was still my mother. She loved me in her own fierce, twisted, confusing way. I feel certain that some of the rage she turned on me was rage that was overflowing because being a woman in this society is not easy, and it was even harder when she was growing up. I don’t think she believed she could save me from men who grab you in stairwells or overpower you after plying you with alcohol at sixteen. Or men on the street who yell obscene things about what they want to do to you while everyone around you ignores it, making you feel like you must be bringing this on yourself, just for existing with breasts. I think she was infuriated by it all, and her reaction to that fury was to push it down and drink until the edges softened, and then unleash it on me, but damn, there are better ways. Ways we just started to explore at the very end of her life, when there was nothing left of her but bones in a bed, and the wide eyes of a person who has had everything taken from her but love. She loved me at the end, completely. And I have people I can text. Sometimes it isn’t your mom who tells you everything is going to be okay when you need to hear it. Sometimes it’s your crew. And I have the best crew imaginable.

I hope Andrea does, too.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about what it’s like to love a mother who struggles to mother, I’ll be here 7/12/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. As ever, thank you for spending some time with me.