I
My mother taught me how to needlepoint, but not to cross-stitch or embroider. Those other things were too complicated. She taught me to hook rugs and macrame, but not to knit or crochet. She* knew she was supposed to be able to do those things, but she wasn’t good at them.
My mother taught me how to cook, even though she wasn’t very good at it herself. It was part of her duties as a housewife, along with cleaning and sewing, which she also didn’t care for. But, really, who likes house cleaning? There are some people, sure, who find comfort in the repetitive removal of dust from the environment, but for most it is a necessary evil that is either done or isn’t.
My mother taught me that a woman’s role is to sacrifice herself to her husband and her family, to the extent that her Master thesis was on how she’d organized her husband’s home theology library.
She had wanted to be a writer, but she wasn’t very good at it. Creatively, she lived in the shadow of her sister, who had talent as a painter but who had died young, before I’d been born. As my grandfather slipped into dementia, he confused my mother with my dead aunt, and it cut her to the bone each time.
* “She” being the version of her that I formed in my mind as a child, the first of two versions of her that I formed. I don’t really know what the human that held this phantasm in place knew because I never knew who this human truly was. But how often, anyway, do we interact with actual people rather than with the phantasms that we create and place in front of them?
II
My mother wanted to be something other than a mother, but she didn’t seem to be very good at anything, including being a mother, and also she had been raised by her father (who might have sexually abused her) to believe that women weren’t much good for anything other than taking care of men and children.
My uncle and his wife were Christians of a religious flavor enough to the right of my father’s United Methodism that at some point my father and my uncle had to promise not to discuss religion at all. When we visited their home, we kids (including their own) weren’t allowed in the gated living room; that was for adults only. Children were to be seen and not heard, and we were relegated to the basement to play.
My grandfather’s culture involved keeping secrets hidden and putting up an edifice of respectability. This is the rhythm of the Great America that a certain President wants to remake: Abuse behind closed doors, oppression of self behind closed doors, while the rictus smiles of the suburban housewife make it seem like everyone is all so happy.
III
My mother was proud of me. I could write at a level she could never attain, but if she was jealous of that, she didn’t show it. Not like my father: His jealousy of my eloquence dripped from the living room ceiling.
I remember when my father asked how to spell “hors d’oeuvres” and when I didn’t know, he showed a mix of annoyance that I had let him down and schadenfreude that he had found something I didn’t know.
I remember when I asked my mother what “e-pi-tome” meant because I was reading a book, and she laughed softly and said it was “e-pi-to-me” and though at the time I struggled thinking I was being mocked, on reflection I think the laugh was nonjudgmental surprise that her hyperlexic child had met a new word.
My father used to say that my first words were “Please pass the ketchup,” in a story that he told about self-centering power and control. But there’s a whole story there, and my father has intruded on this one enough for now.
As I was writing, these lyrics popped on my headphones, on a song I’ve never heard before: “It’s tougher when I’m in a family of only men / You always have to put your own needs after them.” (Winona Oak, “Mother and Daughter”)
Which brings me to:
IV
My mother had three children. Boys, as far as she knew. After my older brother was born, the goal was to make a girl. After me, I was enough of a challenge as a child that my mother didn’t plan to have any more.
I was a difficult child. I was Autistic in an era when Autism was still largely unheard of, and when it was, it was a word whispered in the shadows. Decades later, when some doctors explored the idea that Autism was caused by a vaccine that was developed (1963) well after the first case of Autism was identified (1911), there was a portion of society that suggested that death and disfigurement from a lack of vaccines was better than living with Autism.
I was not called Autistic at the time. My language delay was attributed to me losing an eye, which happened around my first birthday (my first prosthetic, according to my ocularist’s records, was when I was 16 months old). My mood disorder was attributed to my chaotic household: My parents would rather take personal accountability for my explosiveness than consider the possibility of me having just come that way.
“[Redacted]’s just shy,” my mother would say when I would cling to her leg in social settings. “Once [pronoun] gets to know you….” Except when I threw a birthday party (at her suggestion) to get the kids in the new city (Marine City) to like me, I spent a lot of the time with my mother in the kitchen while the kids hung out in the family room.
I don’t know how much having an Autistic-not-Autistic child strained my parents’ marriage, or strained how much each of them navigated their own issues (my mother: her personality disorder; my father: his own neurodivergence).
Plus there’s the story of how I wasn’t really a boy, either, but I didn’t know the language for that and tried too hard to be a boy. But that’s another story, and I have intruded on this one enough for now.
V
My mother was a victim of her environment.
But aren’t we all?
It is possible to do two things at once, and in this case I can empathize for the ways in which my mother had to navigate a society that degraded her value as an individual while I also hold her accountable for the way in which she made her victimhood such a central part of her identity.
It is possible to do two things at once, and in this case I can accept that the worst parts of her abusive behavior were the result of a personality disorder over which she had little control while I also acknowledge that keeping my distance as an adult was the right thing for me.
She was in therapy most of the time that she was an active part of my life, but as far as I can tell, all that really did was reinforce her sense of victimhood. If her therapists were suggesting that there were things she could do, that never came back to my experience with her.
My father, for his part, distrusted therapy. This summer I found letters between the two of them, arguing over whether my younger brother (then a minor) ought to be in therapy. She said yes; my father said no, because therapy had messed me up.
Which I now believe was his code for therapy not fixing me. Because therapy can’t fix Autism. Nothing can fix Autism, just as nothing can fix Personality Disorders.
As an adult, though, I am accountable for my Autism. I am accountable for the way in which my Rejection Sensitivity causes me to get overwhelmed and panic when I have to stand up for myself to any level of conflict. I am accountable for how my sensitivity to certain odors and sounds gets me agitated enough that I have meltdowns, sometimes violent ones.
This is what the focus of therapy ought to be for someone like me.
This is what the focus of therapy ought to be for someone like my mother.
I don’t know what therapy was like for my mother. I know that she struggled with pharmacological addiction for most of the time that she was an active part of my life. I once found my own unused tranqs in her drawer, mostly used. When there was a news story about a local drugstore that had been busted for filling already-filled scripts, it was her favorite drugstore.
VI
My mother wore her victimhood as a Scarlet Letter, as an excuse, as a reason to wallow in her self-created web of betrayal.
I will not exonerate the sins of my father. He was a deeply flawed person. He, too, was a victim of his environment, and while he did not live as a victim as much as my mother did, there were also ways in which he tormented his family and relied on his environment as an excuse.
My mother wallowed in the betrayal of my father’s imperfections as an excuse to never move forward. After their divorce, she treaded water, moving from buoy to buoy, from eventual betrayal to eventual betrayal.
And then she died.
And that was that. The end of a redemptive story arc that never found redemption. Some stories just end. Some movies we sit through the entire length of, waiting for a denouement that never comes.
If her feminine duty was to serve others, perhaps the only redemption arcs she serves are those of others. Like mine.
Perhaps her redemption comes post mortem, through the acceptance that life isn’t the movies, that sometimes some people just never get better. Their bodies just fail to work anymore, and that’s that.
VII
My mother tried to play the proper role of motherhood; she taught me the things a mother ought to teach the daughter she believed she’d never have.
But when she got tired of playing the role, she crashed, and crashed hard. When she could no longer play that part, due in part to her own choices, she had no identity to fill the void with. And for my own part, I flew too close to that sun and it melted my wings.
She let every part of herself atrophy except that bitter betrayal. The last time I saw her, that was all she had left.
VIII
I believe there are very few truly evil people in the world. Maybe nobody. Maybe even the worst of people in the world are the product of their internal brain dysfunctions and the poisons of the environment around them. Maybe.
We are each dealt a hand. Some of us get very good hands; some of us get very bad ones. We are each of us responsible for taking that hand and living the best lives we can with them. For overcoming the nonsense that the world, and our own brains, have given to us and not passing it along to others.
We all make mistakes, sure. But at some point we need to stop living in our own victimhood and make our own way.
We are what we do.
IX
Carolyn Ruth, born Carolyn Ruth Williams, married as Carolyn Ruth Kershaw, born December 8, 1940 (Council Bluffs, IA), died December 8, 2024 (Kalamazoo, MI), daughter of Earl Williams (1905-1982) and Frieda (Heyl) Williams (1908-1964), sister of Elizabeth Mae Nichols (1930-1962) and Donald Earl Williams (1933-2021). Survived by three children. Interred in Council Bluffs, IA, with her parents.
So sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing.