I got violently called out for what I thought was a tongue in cheek aside but which turns out to be an example of my "aggressive personality." I did thank her for telling me but I got no points for owning it. The person I offended is as fragile as glass. Even older than I am she lives on her childhood incest. Maybe that's how she justifies extorting a veritable salary from her now-dead mother all these years. I know *I* had reasons. "You didn't send me away to college," etc., but really I felt cheated my whole life. They told me they couldn't spend anything on me (even energy) because they were saving for their retirement. Yet Mom's cousins, a school teacher and a bookkeeper, managed to put four sons through medical school. They not only retired, they had undying devotion from their boys to the end. Whereas, we, thank god, did have a long and painful end, but we had a hard enough time with ours while they were alive.
Anyhow, the remark. When I thought of it, it sounded like something my father (really mother) would say to me. The gal said, Your sense of humor is too mean for me, and I remembered the argument I had with my Mom in the hearse, with my friend sitting next to me and my Dad lying in the box behind us. "That was his sense of humor," she said for the zillionth time in my life, but she looked like even she didn't believe it. After all, she must have been the primary target, but I only know about my own life with father. He only knew how to be cutting to those he loved. His friends remembered him as a gentleman and a scholar. The rabbi at his funeral repeated what we told him. He loved dogs and babies, books and music. It sounded ridiculous. And none of his friends spoke at the service.
Merrill Markoe opens her book "Cool, Calm and Contentious" with an essay about her crazy mother, who never approved of anything she did. Turns out she never approved of anything anywhere as evidenced by her critical travel journals. After reading those
Markoe says, “My lifelong problems of feeling judged by her and coming up short in all areas became both tolerable and funny.”
I remember in the 70s when I became aware that I didn't enjoy anything. Nothing met my (my mother's) standards. I had to practice not disparaging other people's favorites because it made them really dislike me. I was baffled at first and I resented having to modify my own standards. But I'm still trying to learn that you don't always have to say whatever's on your mind, a lesson I kept trying to ram home to my mother. Read the room, for god sakes.
Indeed, Markoe theorizes in “In Praise of Crazy Mommies” that such a mother turns out to be a common ancestor of comedians — and thus a kind of gift. “For the creatively inclined, growing up under the thumb of a good old-fashioned insensitive, dismissive, difficult, or in some cases wholly unbalanced mommy can be a lot like growing up permanently enrolled in a graduate seminar in comedy.”
This brings us to the conversation about who drives herself to move past it and who ends up wallowing in the sad morass of failure. Merrill the former, me the latter...duh. I'm hoping I'll find a way out as I keep reading the book. Already there are points of disparity that may invalidate any comparison. Merrill was an artist, a painter. She did creative work from the jump.
I'm a consumer of media. I read, I watch, I look. I'm too lazy to create and not driven by any inner artist or author. My only stories are these empty dried up husks of memories... every mean thing they said and did, every insensitive chortle at my pain, every late arrival at my performance, every typo pointed out on my big report. I want to punch them every day and I'm pissed they're dead so I can't tell them how mad I am. I have no stories of sharing, of doing, of telling, of loving. They and their parents left me high and dry, without a leg to stand on.
The bioenergetic therapist was right. How many times did I have to break my leg to get their support? "How could you do this to us," was the first thing she said to me when she arrived at Kings County in response to my spiral fractured femur. That emergency room was like the hospital scene in Reds but her first thought, her first words, were about herself. You'd never know from the outside she was that crazy. To their credit, they did come visit me every night for the entire three months I was in the hospital. That was big and that was good.
Quotes are from
The Washington Post
“Cool, Calm & Contentious,” by Merrill Markoe
By Lisa Zeidner, Published: December 2
found on Merrill Markoe's website
