Don't Call Me Mother

by Linda Joy Myers

  Copyright © 2013 by Linda Joy Myers

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-938314-08-7

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  The loss of the daughter to the mother,

  the mother to the daughter,

  is the essential female tragedy.

  — Adrienne Rich

  Introduction to the New Edition

  It’s been seven years since the first edition of Don’t Call Me Mother was published. I’ve had time to reflect on the path I took writing it, and to gather the welcome responses from readers who would write to me about how their story was similar to mine, in some cases sharing the poignant stories of the points of connection between us.

  During the fifteen years it took me to write Don’t Call Me Mother, I journeyed from someone who had a mother but felt like an orphan to someone without a mother who finally felt normal.

  The title comes from a vignette in the book that happened when I was twenty years old, when my mother disclosed how she had kept me a secret from her friends in Chicago, where she’d made a new life. It had to be that way, she told me, and I shouldn’t object or complain. From then until her death thirty years later, I tried to make her accept and love me and my children. I wanted her to admit us past her gate of denial. I wanted more than just acknowledgment of us as a family—as her family. I wanted an open-armed embrace. I wanted an apology. I wanted her to tell me she was wrong to have denied me that long. I wanted acceptance. This was a fantasy I harbored as long as she lived, but as with many fantasies, none of this happened. As I see it now, the hope that she might one day accept me probably helped to keep me from drowning in the darkness of her rejection and cruelty.

  Over the course of my adult life, I worked through therapy and writing to heal myself and find ways to understand my mother and my maternal grandmother. I spent hours doing research in dusty courthouses, local libraries, and in photo archives and newspapers to find clues about the breach in the mother-daughter line. I learned how to tap the story archives each year when I visited my extended Iowa family to see what morsels of truth might rise to the surface. I cobbled together my origins, and the clues I unearthed helped me to have compassion for all the mothers I knew and all the mothers that came before.

  The thing about the dead is that though they can’t speak directly, they whisper to us in dreams, visit in moments of quiet. They never really leave us. I wrote my book believing that if I could come to terms with my confusing and painful multigenerational story that it might heal not just me, but us—all of us, even the dead. I’d read that if we shift our consciousness, if we dig into the depths of our hearts, we can find the light of something better than our own legacy. We can’t change the past, but we can change our relationship to it.

  Many of you know my other books about writing as a healing path—Becoming Whole and The Power of Memoir. In these books I share research by Dr. James Pennebaker about how writing helps to heal trauma, and how it positively affects the immune system. In my “Writing as Healing” workshops, which I’ve been leading for thirteen years, I’ve witnessed how writing the truth without censorship and being received without judgment offers moments of insight, healing, and forgiveness. With my participants I’ve shared joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and watched as the room so often echoed with ahas as stories revealed their wisdom.

  My own story certainly revealed its wisdom to me, something I discovered as I wrote my book. The struggles that were my life had turned into a “story,” which became objective once it lived in the pages of a book. I had tinkered with the manuscript far too long, and when it became a book, I was finally able to leave it behind and look forward. I started a new chapter of my life when the book was published. I felt less shame, and more confident, and felt I’d banished the dark shadows that had always been part of me because of my silence and shame. This was my story, yet, and I’m more than my story. After the book was published, I got to know other women who shared similar stories of struggling to rise toward the light of resolution and forgiveness. I’m grateful for all the letters about our parallel paths of healing and forgiveness.

  In this new edition, I have included an Afterword—the shifts in my life that happened as a result of writing the book. Our stories go on, as do we. When we courageously pursue our healing path, we can be blessed with unforeseen riches. We can also find ourselves living with uncomfortable realities, as I discovered with my Iowa family after my book came out. Not all families are forgiving, and it seems that holding grudges and keeping secrets were part of the heritage of the extended family I’d been a part of.

  There came the day when standing behind my truths meant that my illusions about that family, and my hopes to one day be a part of it, had to be left behind. The secret truths I’d left out of the book became larger than the confessions within. I stood by the Mississippi River one day in August three years after the book came out, symbolically bidding the town and the family goodbye. I visited my mother’s grave for the last time and whispered to the corn fields a final farewell. You can read about how this came about in the section of the Afterword called “Truth, Secrets, Denial: After the Memoir.”

  Through writing my memoir, I finally had the courage to confront the town and the family where I’d lived when I was five, returning to a place of nightmares, only to find that ordinary people live there—with their own scars.

  But the best gift from the memoir—writing it and living itand afterward—was growing a relationship with my daughter, and making us ordinary—two women who love each other and can show it. A mother and a daughter, getting on with life. I’m a grandmother who loves and is loved in return—a first in generations for my family. My goal early in my life was to change the patterns that had wrapped us in darkness for too long. As I hug my grandchildren, I know that I have done that.

  Thus I come full circle—through writing, living, and writing some more. The layers of story are deep, they take us into the labyrinth of our hearts, where we can become free of the past. Free to BE.

  Preface

  Don’t Call Me Mother is both a healing memoir and a spiritual autobiography, a story about pain and transformation, of darkness and light that weaves itself through generations. This book is more than a specific tale of mothers and daughters struggling with the abandonment and undiagnosed mental illness that burned through my family history. It goes beyond abuse and loss, hatred and the holding of grudges. It is a testament to my belief that, under all the hurt and anger, love is buried deep inside each person.

  As a child, I could see this love. I also saw that most adults had forgotten how to find and express it. It gave me joy whenever the beauty of this inner treasure shone through in the grownups around me, and I felt deep disappointment when some remained stubbornly blind to it.

  Now, as a psychotherapist and teacher of memoir writing, I have learned that most humans are on the same path that I traveled—trying to reconnect with the love that was lost, trying to understand how and why things sometimes go terribly wrong.

  The gestation period for art and healing can’t be measured in ordinary time. The final draft of this memoir—woven through with dream and fantasy, memory, and personal histor
y—has been “becoming” for fifteen years, ten years, five years, and two years, each version having a rhythm, direction, and resolution of its own.

  For months at a time, I would try to ignore my family legacy of undiagnosed mental illness, and generations of mothers leaving daughters, despairing of any hope of resolution—but the story kept tugging at me, refusing to leave me in peace.

  At first, I wrote it as fiction, until a fellow workshop member—said, “This is unbelievable. No family acts this way or does these things.”

  I replied, “But it’s all true.”

  “In fiction,” interjected the teacher, “the literal truth doesn’t matter.”

  It was then that I knew the story had to be written as a memoir, a distillation of the truth and the history I had lived and witnessed.

  Like so many children, I made a promise to not to be like my parents when I grew up. But the effect of childhood conditioning is often more powerful than will. The archetype of the wounded healer applies: like many people who are raised in dysfunctional homes, I became a therapist. Psychiatrist Alice Miller, a respected authority on childhood trauma, says that therapists are compassionate witnesses who help reweave our brokenness.

  After working on the story of my life and my family through art, photography, and poetry for many years, I needed to tell the truths that resided beneath the oil on a canvas and between the lines of a poem. I needed to reveal the story that I had implied, hidden, buried, or alluded to, but never put in a scene for open viewing.

  Writing the whole story helped to hasten the healing process that I’d been searching for years in therapy. Wrestling with words and images, putting myself into the story as a character, in the first person, present tense, forced me to integrate the self that I was with the witness I have become. This memoir has given me a profound sense of completion with the past and a wonderful freedom. As I healed through the writing of this book, it too has evolved into a love song to my mother and grandmother, to my great-grandmother and my aunts, my father and grandfather and friends—to all those who saw the spark of love in a little girl and fanned it into flame so I could survive. The women who had once been curses—my eccentric, wild, emotion-wracked mother and grandmother—became my teachers. I believe that the emotional pain I experienced as a child has given me a depth of compassion that benefits my clients and enhances all my relationships.

  Two schools of thought exist about memoir. Some people hunger to find out how other real people struggled, lived, and came to terms with difficult circumstances. Others find the idea of a healing memoir too trite or simplistic.

  As a therapist, workshop leader, and author of Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story, I stand in the former camp. I know that this work—writing down our lives as a journey of healing—is important to us as individuals and to the world. I humbly offer my own story as one of many that cries out to be told.

  Even though the details described in this book are about me, aspects of the story are universal. I hope this book gives you hope and comfort, and helps you to know that you are not alone.

  Tracks to My Heart

  The train bisects the blue and the green, parting wheat fields by the tracks. Mommy and I rub shoulders, sitting in the last car, watching the landscape move backward, as if erasing my childhood, all those times when she would board the train and leave me aching for her. Now, in my dream, we rub shoulders, her perfume lingering. The old longing wrenches my stomach.

  Click-clack, click-clack, the train’s wheels on the track, the language of my past, my future.

  Her face is soft. Her wine-dark eyes glance at me with promise, an endearing look that gives me all I ever wanted. The click-clack ticks away the time, the mother time, moons rising and falling as the years fall like petals in a white garden, our body-and-blood song haunting my dreams. Mommy, where are you?

  Even as she is with me, she is gone.

  The train station is the center of the universe, with tracks going and coming in all directions. People stand shivering in the ever-present plains wind, their hair kicked up violently when a train blows by, especially a freight bound for Chicago where, as I understand it, all sensible trains end up. To me, the Windy City, as I hear my mother and grandmother call it, is the end of the known world. It is where I began and where my mother is off to as the three of us—my mother, Josephine, my grandmother, Frances, and I—stand in a miserable clutch. I am sure they are as miserable as I am, my mothers, standing there with their arms across their chests, hips slung out, like bored movie stars competing for the same part. Maybe that’s what they are doing—vying for the part of good mother, or bad mother, depending on how you define things. To me both of them are beautiful and thrilling.

  But underneath their beauty and power, a secret is buried. A secret that runs in the blood. This moment repeats for the third time what has happened before—a mother leaving a daughter, repeating what Gram did to my mother so long ago, and her mother before her. It will be years before I find out the whole story about the three generations of women who will define my life. At this moment, the ticking bomb is set to go off when my mother gets on the train. No one here claims any knowledge of this dire pattern. I can feel it, though, deep in a silent place inside me, a place of desperation, the beginning of a crack that will split my life open.

  The sun pinks the sky in the west, a place where the eye loves to rest in this open land. Already the lore of its history tickles my curiosity, even though at this moment I am four years old. I hear of Indian chiefs and the frontier, if not from books, then from the pictures all around town proclaiming our cowboy heritage—neon signs, billboards showing an Indian chief in full headdress, peace pipe slung from an arm as casually as a gun. Right now the picture of an Indian, wearing only a blanket and standing in front of the Santa Fe Chief, hangs on the waiting room wall, wreathed in smoke rising like a mysterious code to the ceiling.

  I read the code here, tapping feet in open-toed suede shoes. I stare at my mother’s toes, as if to memorize an intimate part of her, bringing my gaze up her shapely legs, my stomach in a pang, the scenes that brought us to this moment fresh in my mind.

  Mommy and I came here a few months ago from Chicago, where we had lived after my father left. I don’t know much about him, except that he went off to the war, and came back too, but not to us. She cries when she looks at his pictures. Every so often she shows me a small black-and-white photo of a man wearing an army captain’s hat and grinning as he leans casually against a brick building. The crease in his pants is knife sharp. With her slim fingers, she caresses a photograph of herself against the same wall, wearing a big fur coat.

  “That was the night before you were born, a cold night in March. What a wonderful thing that was for your mother.” Mommy often talks about herself like that, as if she wasn’t in the room.

  I remember our time in Chicago, when Mommy would talk on the phone forever in the evening, twisting her hair in tiny ringlets all over her head, or knitting scarves and sweaters. I remember the amber light that shone over her like a halo, and I remember that I’d do anything to get her to scratch my back with her sharp fingernails.

  But a few months ago, we left Chicago; it was my first time on the train. The ride was thrilling: the sound of the whistle, huge clouds of gushing steam, great deep rumblings of the engines that sounded like scary monsters speeding us by green fields and blue skies all around, with little towns along the side of the track and people waving, waving as if they knew us. The whistle tooted a special hello to them. What fun.

  That night the porter unfolded the special bed that was our seat, pulling down a shade made of thick green cloth. I loved the little tent he made for us. My mother had a dreamy look on her face, staring at the sights as the wheels click-clacked beneath us. She wore her cotton nightgown, and I my pajamas. We cuddled between fresh cotton sheets. The train rocked us back and forth, back and forth in a sweet rhythm that one day I would remember as the best moment we ever had, Mommy and me. On the
train, together. The next day, we arrived in Wichita where I met Gram, Mommy’s mother.

  She looked like my mother, with the same pretty face. Her voice was soft as she sifted my fine hair away from my forehead in a gentle gesture and smiled at me with soft brown eyes so dark I couldn’t see the pupils you can see in most people’s eyes. She was nice to me and called me Sugar Pie. But Mommy and Gram—whew—they sure did surprise me by fighting all the time. I’d watch, or hide in the hall, while they yelled, screamed, and cried. Almost every day. It was terrible to hear; it made my skin itch. I scratched the itch, making red marks on my arms. Their cigarette smoke filled the air.

  When Mommy rushed off to work each morning it was quiet and nice in Gram’s little house. Windows let in the sun through the Venetian blinds, making pretty patterns on the hardwood floors. Gram read stories to me, and we made bubbles with soap in the sink. She taught me to eat prunes every morning. I began learning how words make stories come alive—Cinderella, Snow White, the Three Bears. Every day I waited for Mommy to come home. I loved her throaty voice, the way she touched my hair for a moment. I was always slinking around trying to get more hugs out of her, but she was not much for that.

  One evening, everything seemed different. Mommy yelled. Threw down her purse. Lit cigarette after cigarette, the frown between her eyes deepening with each puff. Gram edged around her, as if she were looking for a way to either blow up or not fight at all. Finally the explosion came, my mothers opening and closing angry mouths. I kept my eye on them while I put dishes on the table.

  “I hate this place,” Mother said, stomping her heels on the floor.

  Gram made a nasty face. Their voices had sharp edges, and got so loud I had to put my fingers in my ears. They were so loud, so angry, sounding like screeching birds. Then something happened. Mommy got really quiet, which scared me even more, and said, “That’s it; I’m going back to Chicago.” I can’t say how I knew it, but I could tell that she wasn’t going to take me, and that if she left me now, it would be forever.