What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

  The book gave me a greater insight into my own life than any book I had ever read. For the first time I felt like what I had experienced in childhood was not a fragment of my imagination. This paragraph is underlined in both my copies of the book: “Children of borderlines have been down the rabbit hole. They have heard the Queen of Hearts order everyone beheaded. They have attended the mad tea party and argued with the Duchess for the right to think their own thoughts. They grow weary of feeling big one minute and small the next.”1

  Most important, I learned that as the “all bad” firstborn daughter of a borderline mother, I had been at risk for developing the illness myself. It was only through the modeling of other adults and an immersion in literature that I had escaped with less dire and reversible symptoms.

  As I read, I agonized about whether to tell my mother. It felt like knowing that someone was a diabetic and then keeping that information to myself. It felt unfair not to tell her but terrifying to tell her. Then one day on the phone with her, the words came out of my mouth spontaneously. I said I had learned about this condition and that it was not her fault but I thought she might have it. She didn’t get angry; she was receptive. I asked her if I could read her the list of symptoms and she said yes. I read her a list of thirty symptoms. Repeatedly she said, “No, I don’t have that one.” Then I would remind her of a scenario in which she had exhibited that behavior until we had checked off almost every single box.

  I asked if I could send her information and she said yes, and so I sent her a box of books about the condition. She said she received them, and I would try to talk to her about them, ask her if she had read them, and she would brush the questions away. I stopped asking and she never again mentioned the books, not once in the decade that followed. When I do visit my parents—these days, a very rare occasion—I see these books on the living room bookshelf side by side with our childhood books, our college textbooks, just another layer of detritus gathering in the house. She must be loath to throw them out since I gave them to her. Yet she has never been able to grapple with the fact that so many of the behaviors that seem inexplicable to her may have a name.

  I think that I understand my mother so much better now. I know that even as she hurts people she is hurting exponentially more. I’ve watched videos of borderlines in recovery on YouTube explain what it feels like to have a brain that relentlessly attacks the self. Borderlines often have unbearable self-loathing and despair. I recognize that when my mother locked herself away in the shower for hours when we were growing up, she was desperately trying to manage her violent psychic pain.

  I’ve watched a borderline in recovery say, “I would be so cruel. I would make people I loved hurt. I would spew venom at them and see how they were hurt by my words and it would hurt me but I couldn’t stop. It was as if I wanted to keep hurting myself through them.”2 My mother, too, couldn’t seem to stop. She, too, seemed to hurt herself by hurting those she loves. She was terrified of driving people away but she could not stop herself from doing the very thing that made people leave. The only way to protect oneself from this onslaught was to leave her presence. As Understanding the Borderline Mother put it, “The greatest protection the adult child of a borderline has is the ability to leave.”3

  Borderline personality disorder is not curable. No drugs have been found to be effective. However, long-term therapy with a skilled and dedicated professional focused on learning to manage symptoms can lead to a much better quality of life, especially in the realm of interpersonal relationships. My mother has never sought long-term ongoing therapy.

  Memory

  Once when I visited my parents’ home I found a long list taped to the microwave. My dad had listed all the times my mother had humiliated him in public, self-harmed, verbally abused his family, shouted at someone else in the last month. The incidents were dated. He was intuitively attempting to manage her illness and make her remember those moments when she had hurt him deeply in the hope that she would treat him better.

  Incidents that are seared in my mind as well as my sister’s and my father’s were often completely lost to my mother’s memory. I didn’t understand this discrepancy until I read the following: “Studies show that chronically intense emotions damage the part of the brain responsible for memory . . . . Because the borderline mother is unable to remember intensely emotional events, she is unable to learn from experience [my italics]. She may repeat destructive behaviors without remembering previous consequences.”4

  This is the saddest part of our story. My mother remembers a different life than the one we’ve lived with her. The chasm between us is unbridgeable because she often, though not always, cannot remember why a loved one might be hurt and therefore need to emotionally and physically withdraw from her.

  My own memory is also spotty and broken. The day before her wedding, my sister, Namal, and I sat in her best friend’s kitchen talking about our childhoods. I said, “Remember this?” And my sister would say, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Then she would say, “Remember when this happened?” And a memory would leap like a flame into the front of my mind. Her friend sat silent and finally said, “You guys are talking like it wasn’t a big deal. This is absolutely insane stuff.” We looked at her, startled; we hadn’t thought of it as particularly dysfunctional. So much had happened that we normalized what others would not and forgot what most other people would not forget. In this essay I’ve only talked about a few of the memories that are crystal clear. There is a fog of others. It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life that my sister is able to mirror my experience.

  Breaking Away

  Eventually I realized that to reclaim my life I would need to emotionally separate from my parents. Six years ago I told them that I would be engaging with them less, and if they talked about the other partner, I would ask them to stop and if they continued, I would hang up.

  There were months of struggle as I tried to break away. My father called and said my mother was so upset I wasn’t talking to her that she had locked herself in the bathroom and he was afraid she was self-harming. He passed her the phone through the crack and I listened as she sobbed and babbled in a child’s voice. At some point she said “I love you” over and over, hundreds of times, in the little girl’s voice. I don’t know if she was saying it to me or to herself or to someone else. I spoke in the old soothing voice until she was coherent and then when I finally hung up, I was exhausted, my entire body hurt, and I was furious with myself for not being able to assert my boundary.

  Months later my father called and said in a broken voice, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to do something bad.” I begged him to hold on as I was in the mountains with bad phone reception. I hung up and then I drove like a banshee down the mountain, calling over and over and getting no answer. Images of his body bleeding on the kitchen floor or prone in their shared bed flashed through my mind. I called my cousin Dinesh, who lives in Sri Lanka and has been my lifelong confidant. “Call the police,” he said. I called Whit. “Call the police,” he said. So despite my own fears about how law enforcement deals with bodies of color, I called the police and talked to an officer who said, “Oh yes. I know that house. I’ve been there before.” I hung up and called my dad again. He answered and said he had gone on a walk to clear his head after a big fight. He was fine now. He asked me why I sounded upset; then he said, “Wait, there’s someone at the door,” and then, “It’s the police.” I said, “Yes, I called them because I didn’t know if you had killed yourself.” He said, “Why did you do that? The neighbors will see.”

  They kept him in a facility for three days. When he came out, he said he had talked to a therapist and it was the best thing that had happened to him because someone had actually listened to him. I asked him if he’d continue. He said no because everyone knows therapists are crooks. If their patients get better, they stop getting paid.

  That was my breaking point. If they weren’t willing to save their own lives, I wasn’t going to
drown with them.

  Love

  I don’t know if the behaviors I saw as a child continue in the house I grew up in. I hope that as they age my parents have found some peaceful coexistence. I do think that they have been able to reinvent themselves as really good grandparents to my sister’s children. As I said before, I see them very infrequently these days. Any more than a few hours in their company and I am assailed by the insurmountable mountain of what we cannot talk about. In their company I find myself turning mute, surly, rude. I become a different person than I know myself to be, a different person than my close ones know me to be. The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.

  It’s important that I also say this: in many ways my mother and father were very good parents. In the various moments that I refused to fulfill the scripted role of a traditional South Asian daughter, they were supportive in ways that most South Asian parents are not. They were always financially generous. Unlike most of my friends, I never had to work in college; I was able to graduate debt-free, a tremendous gift in these days when student debts cripple lives. They took us traveling to places my peers had never even imagined. In an incredible act of largesse, my father recently helped Whit and me buy a house. When I was struggling to sell my first book, my mother sent me checks whenever she could and let me stay in her house in Sri Lanka when I was there. In all these ways, they are sweet and giving people. I know this and I hold it as part of our collective truth. I am sure that my breaking of the silence around my childhood will feel profoundly ungrateful to them. So I need to say I am very grateful for their many gifts.

  When I make a rare visit to the house in which I grew up, I see dozens of pictures of my sister and me, almost all of them from childhood or adolescence. As if clocks stopped then. I know my parents love and miss me. I, too, deeply mourn all that we lost. But I have reached the bottom of my own particular well. There is compassion here but not much hope for connection beyond that.

  When I leave my childhood house, my parents stand outside, waving. She on the front steps, he on the edge of the lawn. They wave and wave as I drive away. They will not go into the house until they lose sight of me. They keep waving until they are very small, like tiny children, in my rearview mirror and then they are gone.

  Then slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself. I have found the ones who know my heart and keep it safe. I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love. I have made my way into myself and learned that love, too, is contagious. I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t even have imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.

  * * *

  Postscript: Six months before this essay was due to be published, I sent it to my mother. This is the email she sent back: “Duwa, I am so proud of you for having the strength to publish this essay! It is going to help a lot of other people. I am very sorry for what took place in our life. I take full responsibility. I cannot change the past!!! I love you very much and hope we can move forward to build a better relationship in the future. I am proud of all your awesome achievements. Love you, Ammi.”

  * * *

  1Christine Ann Larson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship, New York, Rowan & Littlefield, 2004, p. 278.

  2Recovery Mum, “I Felt Like a Child All the Time,” YouTube video, 10:52, December 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=eoqy3WM7YO0.

  3Christine Ann Larson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship, New York, Rowan & Littlefield, 2004, p. 278.

  4Christine Ann Larson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship, New York, Rowan & Littlefield, 2004, p. 278.

  All About My Mother

  By Brandon Taylor

  My mother didn’t share much of herself with anyone. There’s this idea that Southern families are full of stories, but mine wasn’t. Or, I guess, my family was full of stories, but they didn’t share them, or if they did, the stories came with so high a price that we often didn’t speak for days after divulging them.

  Once, my mother told me that when I was very little, I wouldn’t give up my pacifier. She had tried to break me of it when I was one and then again when I was two, but I wouldn’t. She said that I carried it with me everywhere and sucked and sucked on it, wouldn’t let it out even to sleep. She said that she tried taking it from me when I took my bottle, but that I held it clutched tight in my hand. She could have pried it from my fingers easily. I was a baby, after all, and so could not have resisted her, but her strength failed her again and again at the crucial moment. She pulled on it, and I held it tight in my mouth or my hand, and my eyes filled with fat tears, and I began to make a hiccuping sound, like swallowing something too big for my body. She pulled, and I resisted, and she didn’t have it in her to take it from me.

  But one day my stomach was upset. I had always had an uneasy stomach. Something about me was always hot and feverish, something always upsetting my belly. But on this day, I went into the bathroom alone and threw up, and she came in after me because I was pitched forward into the bowl. She looked down and saw that I was trying to pull my pacifier back out of the vomit. She saw her chance and flushed it away.

  She told me that story for the first time on my birthday when I was turning five, I think. Everyone was in the room laughing at me—at the boy I was, or at the toddler I had been, I couldn’t tell—and she was standing at the counter in the old trailer we lived in together. She put her hand on her hip and shook her head. Then she said, “You were always like that. Greedy.” I felt stung by that comment. I had started putting on weight. I was in husky clothes already. She said it again for good measure, repeated it: “Greedy, greedy.” Her voice rode the swell of the laughter in the room, and I sat on the floor playing with the toy a cousin’s father had bought for me. My face grew hot. And she shook her head again. “You’re spoiled,” she said. Spoiled. Greedy. Someone called me Fat Albert, and the name stuck because my father’s name was Alvin, and they sometimes called him Albert. And I was husky. Fat Albert. That was the gift she gave me on my birthday. That and hot dogs that had been boiled too long and split down the middle on slices of white bread.

  I find the story remarkable for many reasons, chief among which is the fact that my mother couldn’t bring herself to take my pacifier. It amazes me, this act of grace and charity. I wondered at the time what had happened to turn her from someone who wouldn’t take a pacifier from a crying baby into someone who called me greedy on my birthday for eating candy and cake. She often repeated the story, and the second thing that I find remarkable about it is how consistent the story was. When my mother told other stories, they always changed, inflected by her mood or by whatever point she was trying to support with it.

  * * *

  When I was very young, my mother worked as a housekeeper for a local motel. Neither of my parents drove—my mother because she had driven off the road once years before and had developed a complex about it and my father because he was legally blind—and so we didn’t own a car. To get to work, my mother caught a ride with one of my aunts or paid her brother-in-law five dollars to take her and five dollars to pick her up. At the time, we were living on an acre and a half of formerly swampy dirt and cleared brush that sat at the back of my grandparents’ land. My parents never owned any land of their own, and the trailer had been inherited from my grandmother’s sister, who had moved across the property line to live at the bottom of a red-clay hill on my great-grandmother’s land. It’s odd to think about it now, how all of my relatives had clustered together that way, how the children never bought land of their own and stayed with their parents until they were too old or their families were too large and they dropped like overripe fruit into the yard. But
it was convenient for my parents, who, as I said, didn’t drive.

  My mother worked because my father couldn’t. I’ve never asked him what it is that he can see, though I’ve tested the limits of his sight indirectly, the way children often test the range of their parents’ love. I would wait until he was standing still or sitting in a room alone. It was important that he was alone because I didn’t want someone else to call out my name or give the game away. I’d stand just off to the side, or just far enough in the hall, waiting for him to turn toward me. I held myself perfectly still, thinking that if I didn’t breathe or move or make the floor under me groan, he couldn’t use his ears to find me. Sometimes, he’d come into my room and look, briefly, and even if he looked right at me, he didn’t see me. He’d walk into my room, call my name, but not the way you call someone you’re looking at, to draw them to attention. It was the voice you use when you’re searching for someone, when you’re facing a wall of trees that hold something you need out of your sight, and you have to call it, hoping it’ll come to you, hoping it will rise from whatever place it’s sleeping and sweep back toward you like the wind. He’d come into my room and say my name, and then, not seeing me, walk out again. And I’d be right there on the bed or on the floor, right in front of his face. My mother worked, and so we were alone a lot. Another game I liked to play was to wait until his voice grew hoarse and he was tired of saying my name, and then come up behind him and press my face against his damp lower back, and squeeze his sides and say, “I’m right here; you missed me.”