Natasha Loewen’s mothering post wraps up the UP CLOSE topic of motherhood for May.  Natasha lives in central Alberta with her husband, four children, and a large yellow lab. She is starting a 4-year B.A. in English this fall, after a 10-year period of full-time mothering. She recently achieved a goal to have a poem published in a literary journal, and she writes online at BecomingSomething.com. She longs to save Dr. House’s soul and believes she could if he’d just give her the chance.

As a child I once fantasized that my mother, at eighteen, was secretly the town whore. I hoped for men sprinkled throughout the world, all possible sperm donors, and that one day my real father would reveal himself from among them. He would be rich–rich enough to afford a McDonald’s birthday party and dance classes for me. He would be overjoyed to know me. He would have abandoned me by accident, not by choice.

For about two years I suspected that my mother was really my aunt, raising me because she was the oldest of five girls, and the youngest, my real mother, could not bear the responsibility. But, I do have a photo, printed long before PhotoShop, of her swelled belly framed by the cliché red and white, polka-dotted, baby-shower bikini. That’s standard evidence, right? And as I age more rapidly than my age should allow, there’s no mistaking her face on mine.

Only these physical similarities convince me that she is my mother and, to this day, I still hold out hope that my biological father is not really my father (though she assures me he’s the only possible candidate). I have no blood siblings.

She raised me alone on welfare, not including the spring break and summer holidays when she farmed me out to relatives who had no business caring for plants, much less children. We never owned a car. We never traveled anywhere. There were no playdates or piano lessons. We welfare children of teen single moms ran feral, finding fun in the large dumpsters aside our apartment complex, and picking berries in the grassy hill across the street.

 All my mother hoped for was a man. All I hoped for was a mother. And so we pretended. We pretended that our insecurities didn’t hurt. She pretended through late-night V.C. Andrews and Stephen King, causing her to sleep away the rest of the day; through television, alcohol, cigarettes, and occasional pot. I pretended as best I could through schooling, friends, and my little red copy of the New Testament that was distributed at school by a local church.

Like all young children, as a young child I adored my mother. She would sing me to sleep and we would argue about who loved the other more. Of course she would always manage to convince me that mothers love their children more than children could ever love their mothers. However, by age six, I doubted, lacking evidence.

My memory is probably selective. I was well-fed, clothed, and housed, but a restful sleep without a drug party booming in the living room was not a guarantee. I don’t remember any cuddly comforts when I fought with my friends or had other insecurities: “Well, I’m not surprised you and Amanda aren’t friends again. I don’t know why anyone would be friends with you.” I remember not one encouragement to higher learning or career aspirations: “Just tell your teacher to f*** off.” I cannot recall lessons about morality–honesty, generosity, service, kindness: “I’m going to steal this and put it in your pocket. That way, if they catch you, they won’t do anything because you’re a kid.”

From about age six on, I mostly only remember bad things. I remember vividly with tastes, and smells, and black, black shadows. I remember thousands of little hurts embedded in my skin and organs, aging me, and embedded in my heart and mind, disabling me in ways that will demand many self-help books and angelic friends.

Now I am the mother. I thought it would be so easy to learn from her mistakes. I had my babies and nursed them from my breasts as much as they sought. I walked them for hours and held them in the shower, skin-to-skin. They slept with me. I poured upon them gentleness and adoration. I taught them to read. I readied them for school and then… they disappeared. And in their places appeared little Natashas who know these elementary school ages so well. I cannot look in their eyes and believe that they love me, and because they don’t love me, because I did not love my mother, I cannot hug them. I am afraid of them, even. How can I trust in something I’ve never experienced?

Then, “the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon,” and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I look at my young, brilliant daughter, for example, so like me in appearance and personality; she seems so far away, writing her own story. I have the power to change the story, but I’m stuck here. Sometimes I do break through the barrier of who-knows-what, this intricate mixture of anxiety and inability to believe in something I’ve never felt, and I take the pen with which she writes and swallow it. I pick her up and dance with her. She beams. And for a moment, I can believe she loves me. For a moment, peace and trust punctuate the thick veil of diffidence and fear that separates us because of me, because of my mother.
It starts with me. Every day is like a new art project. I may have created other paintings in the past that please me, but each time I put brush to canvas I am awash with anxiety and disbelief. I’m no painter. I’ve taken no lessons. So many are better than me. They have natural talent that was nurtured in them. What am I doing? So, after a few feeble efforts, I put away the canvas, ashamed at myself for giving up and yet unable to produce something from nothing. A few months later, I might try again.

As my four children grow, I will no longer see myself in them. I’m experiencing this now with my son. This is the blessing in being essentially orphaned at age twelve, or, as my husband says, in becoming a refugee. While I would have preferred a Claire Huxtable mom, lacking a mom at all is better than trauma after trauma affecting the relationships between my children and me. My story with her as my pretending mother stops at twelve and she becomes just a woman in my life to whom I occasionally speak. The projection onto my children of a scorned and resentful child-version of me will disappear. I will look at them and, seeing only them, I’ll know: Oh, I love them so much! There will be no intricate lines and numbers obstructing my creativity; this mothering is no paint-by-number objective. I will have a clean canvas again, with no memories from which to rebel or model. They will love me, as they always have, but this time I will believe it. Of course, I will always love them more than they love me–real mothers always do.

I am creating my life’s first real mother:  me.

Related posts:

1. Because this is what I’m really thinking about this morning:
2. A Mother’s Gift
3. A Living Sacrifice, part V: Adoption