Atonement

by E. Marmer
posted Oct 27, 2015

Found at 2me4art.com

Over my life a particular memory visited me from time to time. Whenever it came, I always gave it its due attention. But it seemed to serve no purpose other than replaying a long ago hurt and, despite the gentler perspective granted with age and experience, always triggered the same painful mix of bio-chemicals that squirted forth when it actually happened so many years ago.

Of late, the memory began popping up more frequently.

At first, I wasn’t even wondering why. Then, when it finally dawned on me that the same episode was running again and again on my brain’s T.V. screen, I began to suspect that the constant replay was a demand to be noticed. Like a loud megaphone: Hey, dummy! Does this remind you of anything?

It was a time in my life when I was a real pain in the ass. Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 11, I was experiencing the fallout from being taken away from a life that worked for me. In that wonderful former life in the Bronx, my older sister Michele played with me more than she socialized with our eldest sister Renee. In that life, my best friend lived directly across the hall from me, and was available most of the time for companionship. In that life, my mother was home most of the time; and, when she did go out without me, I had the security of my best friend’s mom across the hall, or or my grandmother (who lived two floors below us) and never once felt alone. But in this new suburban life I was now in, I hadn’t made any real friends yet, my companionable sister had crossed over and was now a fellow traveler of our eldest sister, and my mother worked as a teacher. Little did I know that day when we were all so proud of her for graduating and huddled together, smiling for the camera to mark the occasion, that I should have been singing a dirge. For my mother of course did the next logical thing, which was to get a job as a teacher. Not that it affected me during school hours. But, after school, in place of my attentive, soft and patient mother, offering snacks and asking me about my day, there was a different mother. This one was stressed. A new teacher, preparing lessons for the next day. Working on her masters degree, and sometimes traveling into the city for evening classes, or spending yet more hours doing her assignments.

My father was also withdrawing. Not that he ever was the warm and cuddly type. He was a cop, and had to keep up his hard-boiled exterior. But when we lived in the Bronx, it was a few simple steps for him to come into the bedroom I shared with my sisters, to tell us some stories, make us laugh or sing to us. Now, we all inhabited our own separate rooms, up a flight of stairs, and my sisters were getting too old for that sort of thing anyway. And, too, he was facing his own wearying challenges. He was now commuting from the suburbs into a part of the Bronx that was getting scarier and more disassociated from that place where he grew up. The absence of any men who really could relate to him on any level in our upward striving suburban community, and the surreal and battering horror of traveling back and forth from dainty civilization to dystopia on a daily basis, caused him to retreat further into his world of books and pipe tobacco when he was home. And my sisters were off tittering about some shared secret knowledge or hanging out with their friends. I was no longer a cute diversion holding any interest for them, and my felt banishment filled me with resentment and longing.

From The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. (London: The Education Company. Orig pub. as The Children’s Encyclopædia 1908), “Ideas” section, Volume I, p. 112.

The final loss, in a twisted turn of poor timing, I also was no longer my mother’s “warm little bundle.” This I learned when she started telling me all the time “Oh you used to be my warm little bundle!” As I was getting larger and losing what was left of my wide-eyed and sweet puppy features, it was not possible, had I even tried, to fool anyone into thinking I still needed slack for my hesitations and cluelessness. People expected me to get with the program, understand my responsibilities, stop expecting time made to soothe and redress my little hurts and disappointments.

One Sunday afternoon in particular I was sadder than usual. My sadness moved into broken-heartedness, and I felt strangely incapacitated, virtually listless. I became convinced that I had some sort of mysterious malady, which only a mother would understand, and certainly have the remedy for, if I could just muster up the energy to call for her, which I did. She was all the way downstairs, using up what free weekend time she had entertaining my Aunt Betty, and so I had to summon up quite a bit of energy for my call of “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” to reach her. That I was in such a sorry state as to be required to use every last bit of my strength to make such an effort only made me that much more broken-hearted. Years later, I understood that what I wanted to see, what I ached to see, was my mother, coming up into the master bedroom (where my incapacitated little body lay), with a gentle reassuring face, soon to be stroking my hair and telling me that if only she could get ride of Aunt Betty she’d be there with me, taking care of me and making everything all right. What I got instead was a slightly exasperated mother, with firmly set lips, who was there to get to the bottom of why her then 9 year old thought she was incapable of walking down the stairs. When I told her that I wasn’t feeling well, she strode over, checked my forehead for heat and looked at me hard, trying to size up which reaction I deserved. I received the, “Well, just rest here and I’ll check on you later” response, which was far short of what I so desperately wanted. She went back down. I spent the next 15 to 20 minutes wondering what went wrong. Why didn’t I get the loving stroking of the hair and the reassurance that our bond remained intact despite all the demands on her time? And, convinced that I didn’t do a good enough job of conveying how broken-hearted I was, I decided as only a 9 year old can that the best way forward was to call her again, and this time really make sure she understood. Although this time I never got to say anything. As soon as I called out my even more plaintive “Mahhhhh-meeeeee!” I could hear Aunt Betty clucking her tongue about what a nuisance I was for my poor mother, and could almost see my mother’s face pained with exhaustion and embarrassment (for Aunt Betty made it clear always that she tolerated no such nonsense from her children). When she appeared at the bedroom door, having made the climb for the second time, someone even more removed from the mother I grieved for was there. I can’t remember what she said, but the words were irrelevant. Her angry expression and tone said it all. I was a burden, whiny, unreasonable and selfish. Something to deal with. Not a hurt little girl, her daughter, without words to express to her mother how alone she felt in her losses. In that moment, I understood fully and perhaps for the first time that my sweet childhood was truly over. I endured the moments of bitter reprimand that followed and said nothing more.

So why the increased frequency of replay? What was I hoping to find in that memory? As early as young adulthood, I had figured out that my mother was in an almost impossible situation, working full time, running our home and raising her girls all without much input or support from my father. I had already worked out that my father was steeling his soft and poetic nature every day for the work of a mercenary, patrolling an unsafe community that was no longer his own. I had already grown to understand that my sisters were just experiencing their own lives with all the complications and transitions that adolescence brings. I had nothing more to learn from that memory, or so I thought.

My own daughter, now 21, has had her own difficult journey. As the first born, she had no older sibling to shelter her when she first entered the world outside of her mother’s arms. She would return home from a difficult day at school to find me, formerly unflagging in my soothing attention, now preoccupied with her younger brother, or in the middle of house chores, or chafing against something gone wrong in my life that I hadn’t put to words or even understood but which only served to unnerve her all the more.

Dreamscape by wbsloan on Flickr

And at those times, when my daughter needed me, I’d deliver a sort of patched together, half-hearted exasperated offering of my own. Sometimes I even lost my patience with her, when all she really wanted was for me to scoop her up and tell her that she was loved, and special, and that I was glad to have her home. Instead, she knew that part of me wished she was still at school, so I could catch my breath, and have just that bit more peace, and maybe somehow get grounded back to who I was. When she came home from her own battles each day, she was greeted, not by the loving, tender mother she wanted, but by the same overwrought mother, with strained smile and limited patience, that I had greeted. The same mother who hoped to fix her daughter’s unhappiness by suggesting better ways to have handled something, as though that would stem the onslaught of painful experiences. The same mother who felt guilty and helpless whenever she witnessed her child’s pain, and never said the right thing. How is it that I determined to do things so differently from my mother, so that my children would not feel the same rejections and misunderstanding I had, but ended up failing so completely in that regard?

Brave and determined soul that she is, my daughter set herself to exorcising all causes for resentments from our relationship while she was still a teenager. After years of less effective confrontations, at 21 she finally developed the language to convey (and I finally refined my listening enough to receive) the simple truth that she had felt like a burden to me. She felt she was the problem child that made everything harder for me… for us. She confessed it to me one night, one night of wonderful, vulnerable, almost scary bonding and revelation. And there it was, at the ready, finally able to reveal why it had been plaguing me: that memory of my own mother, angry with me for needing her when she was barely hanging on herself, and resentful for not knowing how to fix it all, that aching in me and in herself. And I whispered to my darling daughter, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry that I didn’t simply hold you and tell you I loved you, that everything would be okay. That all of it mattered, yes, but that none of it mattered now that you were in my arms.” How long would that have taken? Ten minutes? Ten minutes to soothe a child facing the world without her mother. A child without sheltering siblings and with no trusted friends yet. Why couldn’t I just have simply hugged her, without judgment or the desperate wish that all her problems, that she, the way she was, would just change into something else that would make my life easier? Instead, I contributed to a pattern that would haunt us for years: the lonely and misfit daughter and the overwhelmed, worried and ineffectual mother. I’d come to pick her up from a birthday party, with a dreading expression, expecting before being told that there had been some pain for her in the proceedings, some conflict that all the other children and moms couldn’t understand, or prevent, and wished would magically disappear; and instead of scooping her up and being on her side, I’d wish it would all disappear too. I wished she would just be easier. For my sake as well as hers.

So here is my atonement. To my daughter, for doing exactly what my own mother did, and what her mother did before her. For not wanting to acknowledge the legitimacy, the normalcy, and even the inevitability of the hurts a sensitive child feels when weaned from her mother’s side. For not wanting to explore my part in those hurts, making them worse by adding my own frustration, resentment, guilt and feelings of inadequacy as insult to injury. But my atonement also is to my mother. I atone for having judged her as not up to the task of understanding and comforting an angry, sad, lost child. It is a very difficult task, maybe impossible; I know that now. I atone for my high-handed thinking, when I became an adult, that I was big enough and wise enough to forgive her. There was nothing to forgive. She loved me, and my pain pained her. She was a wonderful, wonderful mother, all the more so in light of all she carried. I atone whole-heartedly, seeking her forgiveness for assessing her and finding her wanting, now understanding finally that all the love and best intentions, all the experiences and memories we swear we will bring to our own child-rearing, may not be enough to overcome the limitations and distortions hammered into us by whatever stressors and unspoken resentments are plaguing us at any given time in our adult lives.

The cycle of hurt between parent and child will continue, I suppose. I pray that my daughter will be able to break it should she have an unhappy child. And I hope in any event that my daughter too comes to understand that I loved her always, and that her pain pained me, and that I wish more than anything that I could redo some of those moments she remembers, bringing the perspective I have now, and taking the hurt away.