Mom's icecream
Whenever I see someone on TV digging a spoon into a little round carton of icecream I remember this story. I was just a little kid. Over 4 but not yet in school. We moved to the "new" house, where we stayed put till the kids were raised, when I was four. I went into kindergarten a little early, so this must have been that first summer. Well for that first year I only went to school half days and Mom was stuck being a babysitter the rest of the time. She sure was happy when the school took over the next year. So I remember playing on the kitchen floor, whatever I was doing. My mother called to me and I looked up to listen to her talking to me. She was standing there eating her icecream. We had those square blocks of neapolitan out in the chest freezer and she had this fancy crap, hagen daz or whatever they had in the 60s. She's chowing down with a spoon across the kitchen and starts explaining to me that she's sure I'd like some but "this is mommy's icecream and it's too expensive for you, so you can't have any and that's just too bad."
Sure, it's possible I tried to mooch some, but I remember only that she grabbed my attention to focus on the fact that she isn't sharing with me! The other part I remember is that before too many years passed, if not then, I knew full well she could have given me some icecream from the family stock or she could have quietly put some in a bowl and taken it to a quiet place to eat it with a simple "no, you can't have any icecream." Instead she drilled it into my head again and again by this and so many other signs that I was a lesser being than her and I should grovel and slave in gratitude for her giving me life, shelter and sustenance.
Ironically, it was her constant insulting and disrespect which lost her this gratitude. I might not have hated being alive so much if I hadn't hated being in her house and felt so terribly unwelcome and unvalued. To this day I feel unwelcome and unvalued and never have believed my contributions to be worth anything.
I was thinking again how nobody from Ontario has tried in any way to remedy the rift in our family. They only did so with John so many times because I was the one who pushed for it. Our family gives up on each other for the most part. If you can't make it work on your own, you're clearly deficient and therefor unworthy of success. It's odd, since they all lean on someone to get any where. If we did that trust exercise I would not trust them to catch me. They don't catch one. They toss money ovver the wall now and then to feel less guilty. My mother and father are both to blame, he was so cheap a scotsman would have scoffed! He put the value of a dollar above all else, seeing it as his hedge against famine. We live in a country where famine would have to sit on the land for a decade before we noticed it. There is so much food stocked up that the stuff lost to rot is nothing. If transportation weren't so damn difficult and profiteers so powerful, we'd have no famine on the planet anywhere for all the food that's laying around on the farms waiting to ship somewhere!
Well anyway so that was my thinking of late. I still hate my mother. I still don't feel any responsibility towards her emotionally or physically. I still feel bereft of the basic relationships that should have been my rock in a challenging world. I had to leave Ontario and I loved that place, but I had to leave just to get free of the insanity my mother creates for me. She actively sets me up to look crazy.
One way she does this is the simple business of lying. First she tells you one thing, then she tells you another. The first will be something remarkably wrong or outrageous. The second will be what she insists she said all along, as though she's realizing how wrong she was, but she'll put it all on me, calling me crazy, questioning my memory, etc. I had an eidetic memory in those days, photographic, and lock solid. It's impaired these days by too much thc and sugar and lack of exercise but that woman kept setting me up to doubt my memory and senses.
She would set me up to see something, then make it go away. Set me up to expect something, then pretend she has no idea what I'm talking about. It was all one mind game after another. Lately the mind game had changed. I wasn't tolerating her crap so she switched to a new mind game. This new game was all about making me say something mean as early in the conversation as possible and setting me up to play the bitch. She would start out on the accusation the moment I answered the phone and lay it on with questions and implications and then to ensure I fully explain what's wrong with her, keep encouraging me by telling me I'm right and she really appreciates knowing even though it hurts so much.
I never would learn anything about her life. Eventually if I could get around to stroking her ego enough to please her she'd tell me some minutiae or complaints about her life but mostly the conversatiions just went straight to the torture room from word-one and I'd get off the phone and stay off it asap. That was usually the opening gambit, complaining about me not liking the conversations enough. I would apologize in he early days but after awhile I just didn't care enough about how she felt towards me. Well, when Dad died, really, that's when I quit putting up with it.
I think the thing I really got mad about was her response to his death and the way she treated him the year leading up. He wasn't bedridden like her brother had been, so it's not like she was in the position his wife had ben in, with adult diapers and spoon feeding and sponge bathing. Certainly Dad's needs had gone up and he wasn't the independant man she'd married but mostly he just needed assistance with vision and the usual feeding and care he'd always needed. She would have had to pick up the slack he used to haul, same as when he was gone. But she complained about him for years, hoping he'd die soon, leaving him behind to go party around the world and complain that he didn't come along. When he did die, there was no apparent grief, though I can't believe there wasn't a hole. I mean, he'd been part of her life! or did she feel about him like I do my dog that lived 12 years and made things horrible around here with her incessant barking? that's what she expressed, you know, about my dad, and there was to be no funeral, nor formal memorial. Nothing to invite the people he'd touched over the years to show their respects even. Just nothing. Maybe I couldn't have gone, or maybe I could. I could have enjoyed the video of the memorial or gone via skype. But the option didn't exist. Dad just ceased to be in existence and with him went the last reason I had to be nice to my mother.
Chew on that, Freud.
Sure, it's possible I tried to mooch some, but I remember only that she grabbed my attention to focus on the fact that she isn't sharing with me! The other part I remember is that before too many years passed, if not then, I knew full well she could have given me some icecream from the family stock or she could have quietly put some in a bowl and taken it to a quiet place to eat it with a simple "no, you can't have any icecream." Instead she drilled it into my head again and again by this and so many other signs that I was a lesser being than her and I should grovel and slave in gratitude for her giving me life, shelter and sustenance.
Ironically, it was her constant insulting and disrespect which lost her this gratitude. I might not have hated being alive so much if I hadn't hated being in her house and felt so terribly unwelcome and unvalued. To this day I feel unwelcome and unvalued and never have believed my contributions to be worth anything.
I was thinking again how nobody from Ontario has tried in any way to remedy the rift in our family. They only did so with John so many times because I was the one who pushed for it. Our family gives up on each other for the most part. If you can't make it work on your own, you're clearly deficient and therefor unworthy of success. It's odd, since they all lean on someone to get any where. If we did that trust exercise I would not trust them to catch me. They don't catch one. They toss money ovver the wall now and then to feel less guilty. My mother and father are both to blame, he was so cheap a scotsman would have scoffed! He put the value of a dollar above all else, seeing it as his hedge against famine. We live in a country where famine would have to sit on the land for a decade before we noticed it. There is so much food stocked up that the stuff lost to rot is nothing. If transportation weren't so damn difficult and profiteers so powerful, we'd have no famine on the planet anywhere for all the food that's laying around on the farms waiting to ship somewhere!
Well anyway so that was my thinking of late. I still hate my mother. I still don't feel any responsibility towards her emotionally or physically. I still feel bereft of the basic relationships that should have been my rock in a challenging world. I had to leave Ontario and I loved that place, but I had to leave just to get free of the insanity my mother creates for me. She actively sets me up to look crazy.
One way she does this is the simple business of lying. First she tells you one thing, then she tells you another. The first will be something remarkably wrong or outrageous. The second will be what she insists she said all along, as though she's realizing how wrong she was, but she'll put it all on me, calling me crazy, questioning my memory, etc. I had an eidetic memory in those days, photographic, and lock solid. It's impaired these days by too much thc and sugar and lack of exercise but that woman kept setting me up to doubt my memory and senses.
She would set me up to see something, then make it go away. Set me up to expect something, then pretend she has no idea what I'm talking about. It was all one mind game after another. Lately the mind game had changed. I wasn't tolerating her crap so she switched to a new mind game. This new game was all about making me say something mean as early in the conversation as possible and setting me up to play the bitch. She would start out on the accusation the moment I answered the phone and lay it on with questions and implications and then to ensure I fully explain what's wrong with her, keep encouraging me by telling me I'm right and she really appreciates knowing even though it hurts so much.
I never would learn anything about her life. Eventually if I could get around to stroking her ego enough to please her she'd tell me some minutiae or complaints about her life but mostly the conversatiions just went straight to the torture room from word-one and I'd get off the phone and stay off it asap. That was usually the opening gambit, complaining about me not liking the conversations enough. I would apologize in he early days but after awhile I just didn't care enough about how she felt towards me. Well, when Dad died, really, that's when I quit putting up with it.
I think the thing I really got mad about was her response to his death and the way she treated him the year leading up. He wasn't bedridden like her brother had been, so it's not like she was in the position his wife had ben in, with adult diapers and spoon feeding and sponge bathing. Certainly Dad's needs had gone up and he wasn't the independant man she'd married but mostly he just needed assistance with vision and the usual feeding and care he'd always needed. She would have had to pick up the slack he used to haul, same as when he was gone. But she complained about him for years, hoping he'd die soon, leaving him behind to go party around the world and complain that he didn't come along. When he did die, there was no apparent grief, though I can't believe there wasn't a hole. I mean, he'd been part of her life! or did she feel about him like I do my dog that lived 12 years and made things horrible around here with her incessant barking? that's what she expressed, you know, about my dad, and there was to be no funeral, nor formal memorial. Nothing to invite the people he'd touched over the years to show their respects even. Just nothing. Maybe I couldn't have gone, or maybe I could. I could have enjoyed the video of the memorial or gone via skype. But the option didn't exist. Dad just ceased to be in existence and with him went the last reason I had to be nice to my mother.
Chew on that, Freud.