Mother

My mother had a stroke about three weeks ago, and the turn of events has driven home the notion that we come full circle, with the role reversal rendering kids as caregivers and the infirm parent regressing into the lack of self-sufficiency that is one of the hallmarks of childhood.
Along with this descent into dependency comes the inevitability of emotions surfacing that I had segregated and mostly controlled for much of my adult life. My first reaction was decidedly ambivalent but weighted toward pity. To see someone who was previously a robust 81 years old in such decrepit condition elicited that pity. Tempering the pity has been a long-held survival mechanism that I installed to protect myself from my mother's manipulations.
The initial physical toll on her has receded somewhat, but cognitive impairment has remained. When I sit in the rehabilitation facility and watch her attempt to sort out her thoughts, it's disturbingly similar to watching a child attempt to grasp complexities. I've never felt understood by my mother or that she ever considered my feelings to be as remotely as important as her own, but now she literally doesn't understand me. When I walked in her room a few days ago, she asked me if she heard me discussing Gus a few hours earlier. No, I hadn't been there a few hours earlier, let alone discussing my late Labrador.
She has to relearn how to eat, and some of her visitors are inclined to feed her to expedite matters. I can't bear interaction of that nature with her. In feeding a child, you're providing nourishment for someone who has yet to arrive at his full potential; feeding my mother is the equivalent of sustaining a life that is far down the other side of the mountain, but also a life that long ago surrendered its innocence and involved exacting a particular toll from me.
This is the distillation of a life. The innocence of children gives them extraordinary license. The machinations of adults do not.
When I consider her self-serving undertakings, especially as viewed through the prism of the parent I have become, I try to control the flood of emotions. First, I suppress the initial burst of anger, hurt and shame, and allow my rational self an opportunity to reason. She behaved like she did because that's what she knew. She turned around and repeated the cycle instilled in her by her own upbringing. She was just incapable, perhaps, of sorting through her experiences and discarding those that were detrimental. I don't think she had the capacity to acknowledge that there was anything amiss about her upbringing. Her life was idyllic, and her parents were deities. Somewhere along the line, she shut out the realities of fallibility. Her preoccupation with her parents was obsessive, and she provided her own father with end-of-life care that included enemas. So, she was a victim of her own upbringing.
Sometimes the rational self gives way to the angry self. How could she have done this to her own child? How could she have saddled me with guilt that has taken a lifetime over which to gain a measure of control? Why did she never reach a point where her kids' emotional needs were more important than her own? She put an inexcusable amount of pressure on an 8-year-old when she told me that she would kill herself if I turned out like my brothers, for I believed her. She charged me with being responsible for her survival. She denied me a childhood, because she wanted me to be the husband she lacked, without the physical intimacy.
Then there's the undeniable familial bond tugging me in the other direction. This is my mother. She read to me before school when I was a child. She sang to me. I used to call down the hallway, telling her how much I loved her when she put me to bed. More than all the stars. She bought me a dog when I graduated from eighth grade.
But that dog may have been to assuage her own guilt. To make up for the dog she took from me and dropped off in a neighborhood when I was younger than that. That was her solution to my not caring for the dog in the manner she would have preferred. Denying issues, pushing them aside, served her well.
She used to go out at night or on vacation and leave me in the care of my siblings, just kids themselves with too much responsibility thrust upon them. I recall, as a boy of about 9, phoning her preferred social establishment at 1 a.m. trying to track her down. I was in tears, terrified. I was in fear of losing my one remaining parent, and the pit in my stomach threatened to swallow me. I cried when she went on vacation, again out of fear that she wouldn't return, as she sometimes threatened. I hadn't yet gotten to the point at which I didn't want her to return.
She wanted me to go to a particular high school, and when I balked, she shunned me. Same thing with college. She made it appear as if my worth was a direct result of the school with which I was associated. But her sense of worth was at issue. She was unapproachable when I wanted to discuss my reservations.
She was a child of the Depression and seemed to take pride in retaining the habits instilled decades earlier. Money was an overriding factor. I attended school with holes in my shoes. I bore the ridicule of coaches for having worn-down spikes. We could have afforded better, if she hadn't been hell-bent on clinging to that house like a drowning person to a life preserver. Study the practical disciplines. Go after the job with the benefits. Never did she encourage me to follow my heart.
She turned her head the other way. I needed shelter from the violence and drugs, but she allowed my exposure to them. So I smoked the pot and drank the booze. Why wouldn't a sixth-grader? I was collateral damage in her war to satisfy her own needs.
She has enabled my 50-year-old, alcoholic brother to continue that way of life, without having to hold down a job or otherwise pursue assistance. That has mattered more to her than trying to improve relations with her other three sons. As long as she was satisfied. She would still put me in situations that would be damaging if I allowed. That's a source of enormous frustration, that my mother still doesn't care enough, or isn't capable enough, not to put me at risk.
Her mortality, like my own, always seemed so distant, often too distant. I knew intellectually that she was elderly, but there appeared to be little difference from what I had always known. I tried to explain some of this to her while her faculties were more intact, but I failed to break through. She's gone now, and I don't know if she's coming back, but I accepted years ago that an epiphany would never be forthcoming. Maybe it all boils down to there having been too much risk for her to put anyone else's interests above her own, even her children's.