Being the Best Mother isn't Enough

An essay in two parts.

Part I: Did I Make the Right Choice?

A neighbor delivered delicious homemade eggplant lasagna, a thank you for a huddle and some info as they looked into caring for their own parent with dementia. (Also, I think she read my last post, hence, lasagna.)

It was a good choice, the lasagna as well as picking the same assisted living chain Mom had been, for their person. As we talked, I heard myself say that sometimes I regretted bringing Mom to live with me when I did. She was really happy there. If I’d let her stay there and heal her back, she’d have had more community and contact—at least until Covid. That part would’ve been awful, everyone forced to isolate in their own rooms, talking to family through panes of glass. Not an ideal scenario for anyone, but she’s claustrophobic, prone to depression and thoughts of suicide.

April 2018, shattered vertebrae. She’ll move in with me by July.

I shouldn’t use the present tense. She’s none of those things now, but she was six years ago.

She declined during the Pandemic Quarantine anyway, aging, the general progression of dementia compounded the impact of isolation as the senior centers closed down. It would’ve been worse there, I imagine.

What would’ve happened when she went through the sleeping all the time/coma mommy phase. Or the undiagnosed pneumonia. When she had Covid. She wouldn’t have gotten the same care she got here, the same hyper focused attention, not even if they hospitalized her. And hospitalizing a dementia patient speeds the process along—there’s no way for them to ground themselves, nothing is familiar and there too many rapid changes.

There would have been more hospitals, maybe a nursing home, if I’d let her stay and heal in the assisted living after she broke her back.

She’d have had a shorter life if she’d stayed there, but it might’ve been a better life.

I made the best decision I could at the time, which is all we can ever do. We all do best we can with what we know. When we know better, we do better.¹

I wanted to be the best mom to her.

Part II: The Best Moms We Can Be

She was the best mom she could be for me. Sometimes, that’s still not enough.

Her mother, my grandma Ada, did the best she could. She was a single mother during the Depression. Abandoned by the father of her two kids, she worked in the garment industry.

Mom’s childhood memories, paraphrased:

My mother worked all the time. I was left alone, too much. It wasn’t good.
I went to her work, crying for her to come home.
I remember when I was little, standing on line with my her and other mothers to get money.

Her father had been a union electrician. The best I’ve been able to figure is that might have been some kind of union organized alimony or child support.

We stood on line and they gave us money. The men stood on another line, they had the money. Sometimes she would send me to see him, maybe he would feel bad and give me five dollars.

I couldn’t find anything to substantiate any kind of union mechanism that facilitated alimony or child support payments directly. It might have happened exactly like that. Or her child’s mind created that scenario to explain how women receive payments from wayward husbands, the way we all create inaccurate memories from stories we’ve heard.

What she remembered for sure, was being left alone too often, for too long. She was molested more than once. She remembers being in the street, looking for a grown up to take her home. Maybe, that’s how it happened, or maybe that was after. She rarely talked about it and never went into much detail unless I pushed. Pushing revealed distressing things I don’t blame her for forgetting.

I wasn’t raped. He was too big. It didn’t fit.
That’s rape Ma.
Is it? I don’t know.

Now, all those memories are gone, thankfully. What I know is all I’ll ever know about it.

Revictimization & Generational Trauma

She thought she was an attentive mother, that she knew where I was all the time. She went on all the class field trips.

I felt smothered and I felt alone.
Things happened to me, anyway.

I’ve read studies² saying having been raped increases your likelihood of being raped. Can that pass from parent to child, like generational trauma, I wonder? If it does, wow do we protect our children? Our loved ones?

We can’t.

If being the best mother you can be, still can’t keep your children safe, what then?

Every woman I know has been assaulted. And a lot of men, as well. I don’t believe any woman who says she hasn’t been. Denial is a powerful survival tool.

My mother, when still clearheaded in her 80s, was still taking the blame for her molestation at the hands of a beloved family member.

Forty plus years and lots of therapy and navel gazing later, I still take some of the blame for my rape(s). If I’d chosen my friends more wisely. If I wasn’t keeping the company I was keeping. But I was. Do you let yourself off the hook for stupidity? Self-destructive behavior?

Maybe that’s what makes us more likely to be prey. Maybe that explains the stats behind revictimization, that we already carry shame and guilt for things done to us, beyond our control.

Survival

I learned about survival from Mom. She supported us growing up, even though she let the world think it was all my father when I was young. It wasn’t, but that was a world before. It was the Mad Men era, it was Father’s Knows Best days.

Mom and me, we, we have the instincts. She learned how to survive from her mother. Grandma Ada raising and supporting two kids and her own father during the Depression.

I come from strong stock. Secrets keepers. Survivors. No one taught any of us to live. Survival was enough. I’m the third generation of women in my family who’ve accepted survival as being enough.

It’s not.

Being the bestest Mother

I brought her home with me because I wanted to be a good mother to her. The best mother. I wanted to protect her, take care of her. If I could, I’d go back in time and prevent all the awful things, steer her away from all the bad decisions. I don’t know if I made the right choice or if I altered some flow of what would have been the natural end of her life, or just a different life.

Sometimes, being the best mother you can be, isn’t enough. But you do the best you can do.

Today is my birthday.

I’m 67.
You know why god/the universe/your biology gives you babies when you’re still in your teens and twenties? Because at that age you’re still too stupid to know you can’t really keep them safe no matter how hard you try, and you have the energy to try as hard as you can anyway.

At 67, I know I can’t save her.
And I’m still too stupid not to try anyway.

67 years ago.

1. Apologies to Maya Angelou for the paraphrasing.

2. The Repetition Compulsion, 2015; Revictimization: NSVRC 2010