A Time to Pivot
Dear Readers. This is a long chapter from my manuscript, the last I plan to post for a while. You have been gracious in your responses to what I have shared. I hope this chapter evokes empathy and understanding for my mother. Without her, there’s no story.
ON HER WAY back to Arizona for the umpteenth time, my mother had driven a thousand miles to spend a few days with my husband and me, and our two young children. Settled in a small Texas Panhandle community where appearances continued to forge hardened opinions––impressions weighed heavier than facts––my young family strived to live an upright life. The kind I longed for as a child. The kind I had imagined and shaped from scenes in books, and movies, or television.
Moments after her arrival, Mom paced the kitchen floor, the loop growing smaller as her nerves wound tighter. She needed a drink. But it was Sunday. On Sunday, there were no alcohol sales in our town.
Right away she started in about her sister Syble. “The baby,” as family referred to Syble, I saw as having had more advantages than either my mother or her other sister––all three motherless orphans. I braced myself for yet another ironic conversation about Syble.
I struggled to understand why it was always Syble––emblem of suffering and object of pity. Irritation or jealousy, I didn’t know what, made me wonder why Mom remained fixated on her sister Syble, despite all the times Syble had taken advantage of her. Syble wounded her time and again, and then Syble blamed my mother for her own bad choices.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mom exonerated Syble, made excuses for her faults, edited unpleasant scenes because Syble was the baby, and in this conversation, Mom said, “Syble is going to leave us.” I knew she meant Syble was dying.
Syble had reached the end of her hard life. And again, my mother had to defend Syble, modify the story so that Syble could be forgiven. “For Mother’s sake,” my mom would say.
“Have you heard from her?”
I continued to do the dishes, wipe counters, anything to avoid sitting down, getting stuck listening to her moan, to feel myself pinned to a chair, unable to take flight when inevitably she turned her laser-like gaze on me. Growing up, I was her counselor, in the sense that when she had been drinking, I listened as she recounted scenes that caused the pain she had endured throughout her life.
“We talked on the phone a few days ago. The cancer is bad . . . Our uncles all died of cancer . . . Syble has smoked since she was thirteen . . . Syble did everything she could as soon as she could . . . Daddy made her marry that old man.”
These bits I had heard before, replayed, knowing I would hear again the extenuations that mitigated Syble’s mistakes––attempts to explain Syble’s self-destructive cycle.
Recalling Syble, the young girl married to an old man had made Mom laugh.
“Well, I guess Syble just had to escape. We all wanted to escape. Syble didn’t wait.”
Their father arranged for Syble to marry a friend of his, a 27-year-old man. Syble was only 14. The two miss-matched pieces of baggage stayed married for a month.
Who could know whether that unfortunate marriage may have set the course for the rest of my aunt Syble’s life, tragic to the end? But Auntie, my mother’s other sister said, “Syble was wild, and no one knew what to do with her.”
Horrified, I’m thinking, this was child abuse! Beyond my comprehension that a 14-year-old would marry her father’s friend.
“Daddy was living in Electra at the time. The marriage was annulled. Then Syble went back to Marshall, where she met Dago Alexander.” So, that’s where the Alexander came from.
“They were in love,” she said, draping the words “in love” with sarcasm, taking another puff of her cigarette.
After more men than I could remember their names, Syble had only one child, a daughter, and the father, it turned out, couldn’t marry my Aunt Syble because he was already married.
Syble had used long-gone Dago’s last name for baby Michele. Using alias names recurred throughout my mother’s life as a solution employed in awkward situations.
Mom, a legal secretary, would say, “It’s not against the law, you know, to assume another name.” I knew she had listed her maiden name on my school records as Smith (her grandfather’s surname) because she didn’t want to explain why her maiden name and her married name were the same.
I wasn’t crazy about the last name Reeves. I wanted something generic like Jones, or Brown, or Austen, preferably surnames nearer the first letters of the alphabet. But what did I know?
“I remember when Michele was born.” We all lived in Las Vegas then. “Where is Michele now?”
“She’s somewhere in L.A., where Syble is, and Michele won’t have a thing to do with her own mother. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t know. I shouldn’t say.”
“I always thought Aunt Syble had the best life of you three sisters.”
“She could have. But she threw away chances. And people. Thought someone or something better would come along. Drinking, smoking, and life caught up with her. She and that gin-drinking old man she lived with smoked marijuana long before the hippies did. When Syble got sick, she couldn’t work. Went on Welfare. That’s why she stayed in California. Benefits.”
I knew better than to get my mother started on Welfare. My mother despised what she considered social engineering––a conspiracy to make people dependent on government.
“Syble made plenty of money working for that chiropractor but then she blew it.” Mom was by now repeating what I knew. Times I lived through and episodes I watched unfold, like a TV series. I had heard whispered Aunt Syble also worked “in the back room” for that chiropractor, euphemism for sexual, illegal procedures. Las Vegas was wide open––a wild West back then.
With faint effort, I tried to divert the conversation from its steady decline.
“Didn’t Aunt Syble meet Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe during the filming of The Misfits?” The man my Aunt Syble lived with at the time owned a ranch next to the film’s location in Beatty. “I always thought Aunt Syble looked a little like Marilyn Monroe,” I said, fumbling for common ground.
“She thought so. With the help from a bottle of Miss Clairol.” We both laughed to think of Aunt Syble’s platinum blonde hair and continued resistance to her natural hair color. Her dark roots belied the truth. Her ratted beehive made me wonder how anyone could go a whole week without combing their hair. Something could live inside that hairdo before the next beauty shop appointment.
Making my way from the kitchen sink, where I had been doing dishes to the other side of the table, where I could see Mom’s face, I said that I loved Aunt Syble too. The summer before I was in the 7th grade, the three of us lived together in a nice apartment in Las Vegas. Records by Hank Williams played on Aunt Syble’s stereo, giving me a glimpse of her honky-tonk life.
I remember watching Aunt Syble as she put on makeup, dressed up to go out on the town or got ready for work. She would turn from her mirror to tell me how beautiful my dark brown eyes were, how when I started wearing makeup, I needed to emphasize my eyes. Aunt Syble talked freely about lovemaking, stating that boys would soon be paying attention to me. She answered questions I could never ask my mom. The only question I remember asking her, “Do people talk while making love?”
Continuing to talk to Mom, “I thought about Aunt Syble the day Marilyn Monroe died.”
“Did you?” The pause and vacant look, however, ended furthering the conversation, intruding any thoughts other than her own tangled web. Weariness after her arrival had deflated her interest.
“Poor, Syble. What she had to endure. How she has suffered,” were the next words out of my mother’s mouth.
From what I could tell, Aunt Syble brought a lot of suffering on herself. She had lived in tornadoes of her own making.
What I saw, Syble, sometimes as if demon-possessed, did more to ensure that my mother never had a happy day when she was around.
Syble had spoiled things for us. When I was in the 7th grade, Syble seduced my mother’s boyfriend to prove that she could. She arranged for my mother to catch her kissing the man who had proposed to my mother. Mom had accepted his proposal of marriage. Mom believed he loved her. An F.B.I. agent, he drove a new Riviera. I remember riding in the backseat of that car feeling safe. He elevated our status. He was the only man Mom ever dated that I wanted her to marry.
It seemed as if Aunt Syble could not stand for my mother to prosper. Aunt Syble had to be the one with money to lend, money to spend, and a nicer place to live. She had to think she was the prettiest woman in the room. She believed that every man was looking at her and every comment about beauty must have referred to her.
To diminish my mother in every way possible seemed a devious challenge––jealousy mingled with an unquenchable desire to feel superior. And when things went bad for Aunt Syble, she got more intentional at undermining others. More determined to make my mother miserable.
Disrupting Mom’s reverie, I said, “Poor Syble? What about me?”
Had I found my voice? After all the years of fear, adapting to my mother’s moods, careful as if stepping around broken glass, had I actually said out loud what I was thinking?
No. Impulse. Without thinking, I seized this opportunity to interject a comparison of our suffering. I thought of hardships I had endured in my childhood, things I did not cause myself, broaching a conversation I had never dared to have with my mom.
“You! You? What about you?”
Instead of opening a door, my comment slammed the door shut. My mom bolted from the chair, lunged at me, and I braced for a slap. Her eyes blazed––all fiery darts pointed at me.
“As a child, I suffered too, Mom.” Almost a whisper, these words escaped.
“You know nothing about suffering. What are you talking about? You never went to bed hungry. You slept in a bed. Had indoor plumbing. You never did without anything, you ungrateful bitch.”
I felt my face flush, both from the sting of accusation and the revelation that whatever I felt I had endured, my growing up pains had not registered at all on her scale as suffering.
No father. No sister. No family. Moving all the time. Changing schools. Losing friends. Things that had mattered to me, things that made me feel insecure and frightened, these things did not matter to her. At all.
Not to mention her drinking, which led to constant instability and uncertainty that made me feel like I lived in smoke-filled gloom. Or the years imprisoned with a stalker.
Incredulous and stunned, I sought to defuse the intensity of that moment. Arguments or explanations, either would have met with forceful defense, a waving of her hand to dismiss my ridiculous notions.
Particulars have no meaning in the midst of a rage.
Mom sat back down. Lighting a cigarette, she turned her chair away from the table, away from me and toward the back door, which stood open to let in the afternoon light. Discussions with my mother when she was in this frame of mind could have tracked with a musical score––crescendos ahead, certain to follow the first note––soaring emotions, outbursts that would dramatize various movements and leave the air ringing with echoes of crashing cymbals.
I had not expected to hit a note that would ring so loud or reverberate so far. At that point in the score, her reaction served to mute further queries.
“I suppose I know nothing of what you suffered,” she conceded.
Ebbing blood pressure restored a modest reasonableness. She glanced in my direction but did not make eye contact. In that moment, I had lost her to deeper reflection.
“We have to believe our sufferings are to some good purpose,” she said. “Guess it’s the old saying: ‘I can’t feel your toothache,’” words that to her represented the extent of empathy. She started mumbling, her eyes fixed on the floor as if in a trance.
How many times had I wanted to have conversations with my mother about the effects my dad’s death had had on my life? By this time, even knowing Vernon was not my dad, I had questions I was too afraid to ask. Off limits.
Whether by inference or in self-defense, my default first-person perspective held me to a point of view that needed to change. Where was my voice? Did I have a voice? I couldn’t find my voice. In this moment though, I was no longer a child. I had children of my own. I could speak up. Or could I?
Whether she was reading a book or looking off in the distance as if seeing a ghost appear on the horizon, I had seen my mother pull away from the moment and walk like a wraith in foothills of the past.
Yes, Syble had lived hard and now faced the dying young part, aged 43. She would end up, Mom said, buried as a John Doe because no one would come to claim her body from the L.A. County morgue. Mothering instincts surfaced to soothe the sorrow Mom felt at her inability to intervene as she so often had, to bring Syble’s story to a happier end, an ending my mother could live with.
“I’d go to her if I could,” she said. And I knew she meant if she had the money.
My mother loved Syble in a way she had never loved me. Those formative years in early childhood knit together the three sister’s souls in a way that to pull one thread yanked at the others.
My mother must have been thinking of Syble as she sat at my kitchen table, as if she could see Syble lying in a hospital somewhere in Los Angeles, awaiting another surgery for lung cancer. Or having survived surgery, waiting to depart this life. Alone.
“Our uncles all died of lung cancer,” Mom said, “and I suppose Daddy would have too, except that his drinking got to his liver first.”
My grandfather had died of cirrhosis of the liver. Out to retrieve his mail that day, then back inside his small apartment in Tulare, CA, Joe had fallen. It was Halloween and apparently no one heard his cries or how he beat the floor with his cane. His body was discovered a day or two later.
Drinking seemed to me a more imminent threat than cancer or cirrhosis. Alcoholism and cancer both eat away invisibly, causing damage that lies undetected until a medical or emotional or psychological crisis exposes cumulative effects. From all I could tell, drinking looked like something a person did to himself.
She had described that scene of her father’s death to illustrate the terrors of alcohol abuse. Vernon’s drunkenness and her dad’s too had become something she both feared and abhorred.
A calm restored, Mom began to speak about her dad. Her dad walked with a cane after surviving a car accident where my dad was the driver (not the accident where my dad was killed). They were both drunk, but my granddad blamed Vernon.
“I knew nothing of his suffering. His or Vernon’s. I tormented Daddy for how he made life miserable for us after Mother died.”
She paused, reflecting on which thought to pull out, the way she played with her hair when she read a book. While reading, she would work to isolate a single strand, one hair drawn for its coarseness —pluck!
Continuing to reflect, she said, “He tried to kill himself, you know.”
My granddad had nailed a quilt over the doorway to the room where my mother and her younger sister Joyce were sleeping.
“He turned on the gas in the oven, opened the oven door, waited for asphyxiation. Certain to happen in that tiny apartment.” Mom said her dad kept coming to the doorframe, peeking behind the quilt to make sure his girls were still asleep.
Sensing something was wrong, she bounded out of bed and started crying, “Daddy. Daddy. No! Turn it off, Daddy.” My mom was eight years old.
“I don’t know how I knew he intended to die. It would have killed us all,” she said. “That flimsy quilt wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. It’s a wonder the place didn’t blow up.”
What a scene to picture in my own mind. Dreadful. My mother didn’t need to repeat her stories. I knew them by heart. When she got like this, I wanted to short-circuit her pain receptors with sympathy, repeating “I know, Mom. I know.”
But Mom hated pity more than pain. She wanted someone to punish her. In moments like this one, she tormented herself for her inability as a child to comprehend her father’s pain. As an adult, she tried to make sense of his suffering, calculating ways to empathize and excuse rather than feed the resentment she had toward her dad while he was still alive.
The sins of the fathers trickled down to this moment. He hurt her. She hurt me. Hurting people hurt people.
“And I tormented Vernon for his drinking.” That day, she kept playing with her tangled memories. “I had no idea what it was to be hooked on drink. How they suffered.”
The emphasis on their suffering felt palpable, contagious even.
“I used to be so cruel in my thoughts toward Daddy and Vernon. Now I’m ashamed.” She hung her head. I heard muffled crying.
I was too young to remember my mother running out of the house and down the street to escape my dad––drunk again––chasing her with a loaded gun. With her repeated references to the destructive effects of alcohol, I was scared and perplexed, watching her turn more often to alcohol as a means of soothing her nerves, deadening her pain, masking her guilt. She called it coping.
It seemed to me that my mother tried to atone for her sins, sought to punish herself for circumstances she couldn’t change. It wasn’t coping. It was futility, as her drinking only compounded the interest on the debts she felt she owed. She became a victim of the same kind of torment that had wrecked both her dad’s life and then my dad’s, too.
This cycle made me think of The Little Prince, when the prince meets a drunkard.
“Why do you drink?” asked the prince.
“Because I’m ashamed,” answered the drunkard.
“Why are you ashamed?”
“Because I drink,” he replied.
Only now, in this moment, I could feel Mom suffering, watch her face stretch into pained expressions as she recalled specific instances and irretrievable opportunities to say I’m sorry for hurting you, or else release the sorrow she felt by confessing I forgive you for hurting me.
Perhaps her secretarial training had programmed her to carry a file cabinet stuffed with folders to document the incidents she described. At times like this, she felt obliged to produce evidence to indict and then convict herself.
If hell were only oblivion, to end the cycle of self-recrimination would bring relief. But Mom did not believe hell is oblivion. And neither do I.
As if viewing a slow-motion, silent movie filmed in black-and-white, I watched my mom suffering physically because she needed a drink. It was Sunday. No alcohol in our town. She had even asked me if I had a friend who I could call.
“Don’t you know someone who would have something to drink?”
I felt like a villain knowing that I had a half-pint of whiskey stored in the basement. Medicinal, of course, to make the cough syrup our pediatrician had prescribed: equal parts honey, lemon juice, and whiskey. For years, this same bottle remained out of sight and out of reach from my children because I had determined to protect them from the evils of alcohol.
As I watched her crumple, defeat and fatigue settling as if a shawl had been laid upon her shoulders, I wondered if she would start crying. She seldom cried in front of me, and when she did, her sobs beat on me worse than the blows from a belt. The sound more like groaning.
Here I stood, surveying a grief that would not let go its captive, tentacles of pain choking all hope. Thinking of all the times I had imagined emptying bottles of booze into the kitchen sink—if I were not such a coward—to this moment when I had in my hand the power to alleviate even a trace of suffering in this one anguished soul. This soul to whom good was due.
She had given me life. I had to pivot.
My religious beliefs told me to deny her relief because the preacher said, “I always thought the problem with alcohol was the alcohol,” which made sense to my legalistic, dualistic, and moralistic view of causes and effects.
Prohibition mentality ringing long past the decades of its repeal, moral high ground seemed easiest to defend with total abstinence.
How then can doing wrong be right? Wrong definition or wrong application?
Still, a voice sounded in this wilderness inside my head, countering my reservations with a familiar passage where Paul had told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach.
Grape juice, the teetotaler preacher would intone with certainty, waving overhead a banner of authority to squelch biblical questions, ambiguity, and contradictions.
But the truth was I had become proud of my own abstinence, self-righteous and moralizing about sin. Especially other people’s sins. Drinking alcohol, I convinced myself, will not destroy me as it had degraded others in my family.
“To hell with the preacher,” my mom would say, if she and I were to argue the point.
Though we cannot erase our memories, we can move to change our perspective. Until that moment, I had never appreciated a kind of suffering beyond the reach of reason.
A subtle, deceptive argument, the legalist stakes his arguments on postage stamp-size territory. The truth rises with contour, depth, dimension and seizes the slimmest opportunity to extend mercy.
The thought of gauging, evaluating, and judging my mother’s misery evaporated.
In that moment, to deny or ignore that she had a physical and emotional need for a drink would have been like withholding pain medication for a headache. Unconscionable.
My Sunday school teacher had said, and I had written it down, letting the words soak into my soul. “Mercy is the default position of God. If He can show mercy without injustice, He will.”
In that moment, it was down to me and Mom and God.
Withhold not good from them to whom it is due when it is in the power of your hand to do it. These words emerged, breaking through to my consciousness.
Are those words in the Bible? I couldn’t answer then, but I knew in that moment I had a choice. As an adult, I had a choice. I got to decide. This time––unlike countless times during my childhood and adolescence––I actually had a choice and a voice.
“Mom, we have a little whiskey in the basement. If you would like for me to get it, I will.”
“Do you?” she said, lifting her head a bit, as if it were too difficult to sit up.
“Yes.”
My mother’s favorite book Atlas Shrugged came to mind. Looking at her slumped in the chair, it seemed as if the world itself weighed her down. This one book she had chosen, juxta-posed it against the Bible, pitted atheist philosophy and biblical truth in an arena where reason fought against faith. Neither represents certainty.
These two books funneled down from a massive library of books my mother had read, books that represented her search for truth and meaning and purpose––driven by the desire to make sense of her broken life.
Arguing with me hours on end, Mom had challenged and even attempted to dislodge beliefs that had taken hold in my heart. At one point, I think she thought she could merge both the Bible and anti-Christian philosophy. Tortured by the tension between opposing beliefs, she had in this chapter of her life given way to Objectivist views. Pragmatism, rationalism, individualism tipped the scales. Philosophy persuades the mind but fails to conquer real life problems.
Too many disappointments in God, she would admit. In the same breath, she would concede that throughout her life she had tried for her mother’s sake––a devout Christian––to believe the Bible. Repeated defeats gave way to numbing indifference.
I took a coke out of the refrigerator, set it on the table before heading to the basement. Moving against a tide of internal resistance, I had never foreseen myself complicit in my mother’s addiction.
Did the truth as I saw it differ from the truth viewed from another person’s vantage point? Who or what really mattered here? At this moment, in this space of acute emotional need, how could I define truth? How could I set myself up as judge?
Mom poured a drink and sipped slowly, poised and polite, the way a genteel lady would imbibe, shoulders straightened, and her whole body seemed to unwind as if a coil inside her had loosed. Then she excused herself, retired to the bedroom I had prepared for her, where she slept until the next morning, arising refreshed and in her right mind.
“Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it.”
