Express Your Self

I always thought that it was me.

I still do. 

Forty years on, I know I still do.

That was bad once, then I managed to make it work. I managed to take that responsibility and make myself responsible for my life, and I moved on.

Only I didn’t quite manage to move on, not completely.

I sit here right now and nothing has changed. Not really it hasn’t. I don’t think I will ever find the words that will show her who I really am. The words I need to unlock this circle of pain that we are trapped in remain elusive.

But then, the pain only resides here now and I think I understand it a little more. This pain is her pain and it hurts me to see her like this. It hurts me to experience that anger rise up effortlessly and so swiftly. Just because I am here. Just because I have the temerity to exist.

I don’t know what you call that. There are no words, and if there are, then the thing the words are applied to is made of a substance that twists and distorts the words that stick. Not that many of the words ever stick.

“You’re making me angry,” she says.

She is stating the obvious, only it is a lie. It is not me who makes her angry. It is her anger and hers alone. I refuse to take part in this charade. I will not meet her anger with my own. She hates me for that. She calls me cold for not losing control too. There was a time that I might have done, but even then I knew I had too much to lose. I’ve always had too much to lose. That painted me into a corner. I was a captive audience to all of this, and an audience I was. I’ve never had any agency here. I play the part she has written for me and the outcome will be hers, regardless of what I say and do.

"That was not my intention," I tell her, and I mean it.

The face that greets my words is creased with rage, but it is the eyes that cause me pain. I will never understand how my mother can look at me like that and I will never know what it is that she sees, only that she does not see me. 

I come here because I live in hope. I come here because this was my home and still is. I come to see my mother because she made me possible and she is a part of me. I come here because there is still time.

Still time for her to let go of that anger. The anger that gets in the way and prevents us from being together in a way I have craved for all my life. If only she could see that. If only she could see that she is that monkey trapped by her own grip on something that she does not need. If she let go, then she would be free. Free to be here and in that moment we would be reconciled and the missing piece of me would be restored and she would be whole again too.

I want this for me.

I want it more for her. 

This is the only place in my life blighted by anger. 

I am a survivor and I have come back to rescue her, but she does not see, she cannot see and when she summons her anger, she hates me. That I am what she uses to summon that anger is a source of deep sorrow for me. I know that she was angry before I ever existed. I know that well of pain is the legacy bequeathed to her by her own mother. 

She knows it too.

And yet, here we are. Dancing the same dance.

Denial deprives her of the words that she needs. Denial protects that anger and it twists her out of shape so that she cannot think straight. That dark emotion washes over everything and takes my hope away. 

“You’ve always been like this,” she tells me, then she awaits a reaction or a swift response from me, and when it is not forthcoming she supplies me with her explanation, “you never make the effort, just swan in here and expect me to act like everything is OK. You’ve never once tried to make amends.”

I did not respond because there was nothing I could say. I used to want to defend myself because all of this is so unfair on the both of us. Then I tried reason. I tried to dissuade her of these notions, of that anger of hers.

She has never listened to me, not even when she was supposedly calm. Her anger was ever present when I was in her presence and I think it is never far from the surface even when I am absent, bubbling and roiling and burning everything away.

She conveniently forgot every incident of anger she bestowed upon me.

And yet she remembered so very clearly all those things that I did that she can use to feed her anger. She can replay them all, in detail, even a life time later. I suppose they are useful to her, and I am not.

Still I try, or is it that I know the steps to this dance of ours and the rhythm takes me? I am never quite sure. It all amounts to the same thing.

“Make amends for what?” I ask my mother.

I am not being belligerent. I do not know. She has never told me. Not once. She has kept me on this hook all of my life. I have tried everything I could, I have done everything there was to do. I have bent over backwards. I have apologised and I have asked her what it is that she wants.

She does not have the words.

I don’t think there are the words, because I am not the cause of her anger. I am not the source of her pain, but she can never acknowledge that because it will mean that she was wrong. That what she did was wrong. Worse still, it will mean that she has to face her own pain. She will have to take a long hard look at herself and she is too frightened to do that.

Looking at me. The real me and not the façade she has built, is too difficult for her. 

I am the easy option, only it isn’t me and it never was. She has never seen me for who I really am. I don’t think I was ever really her daughter. How can I be if she chooses her anger over me and so chooses to see me as something lesser than what I am.

She has made me the sticking plaster on her life.

Only that sticking plaster does not help, it merely masks the real problem.

I want to help her see that and I want to be here for her. Always have, and always will. I want everything to be OK, I want her to be OK… 

I want my mother to love me.

And I want…

SLAP!

Her reply is a slap.

I…

I am right back there again. I am eight years old and my world has just collapsed. 

I did nothing wrong!

I feel the indignation swell in my chest even as I shrink away from her. She has risen up against me, but it is not her, I know it cannot be her. She is my Mum and she loves me, she is my world and I need her.

I am trying not to cry, but the shock of it all makes the tears roll down from my eyes all the same. I am confused and scared and I am weak.

This is not happening.

This cannot happen.

Not in my world.

My Mum is better than this.

All of the last forty years are burned away by the heat of the slap and I sit wide eyed at the kitchen table. Staring up at my mother and wondering what it is that I have done.

We are both held in that moment and I think the same thought that came to me when I was eight years old.

Please don’t hit me again.

But she did, and worse. Much, much worse. There was pain and there was humiliation and never once did she speak of any of those moments. Not once did she revisit them. There was no sorry and there was no remorse. 

These moments where she lost control and took her anger out on me were removed from the normal course of the world. They were made special and there were no consequences.

There was no sign of a conscience.

Instead, the anger was righteous and I deserved everything I got. I made mother angry. It was my fault. I had to try harder. I had to make amends.

I was never good enough.

I thank my lucky stars that I saw it for what it was…

Wrong.

It was so very wrong.

I was not forged by anger and pain into the same frightened animal.

I give thanks for that.

Back then, this was my world and my life and I had no other options. I had no escape. I was trapped. I had nowhere to go. I had no one else.

That was not to say that I had no father. My Dad was trapped in the exact same way and he received his fair share of punishment, but he kept the faith and he stayed the course. He was the glue in our family. He loved my mother with all his heart and he sacrificed himself for her, and for me. He wanted us to be OK and he wanted his family to stay together come what may. I suppose he thought that given time it would all turn out alright in the end. 

It was my Dad who saved me. I saw his example and I carried on. He never once raised his hand to anyone. He loved unconditionally.

I sometimes wished he’d left mother. He deserved better. I sometimes wish that he had called out this anger of hers and made her see it for what it was and that she should do something about it.

Maybe he did.

I like to think that he did. The Dad I knew would have said something. I know that and I always have.

The slap has made my ears ring, but there is another quality to it, I hear nothing but the sea crashing against the shore.

And then I hear my anguished, eight year old voice again.

Even with that child’s thought ringing in my ears…

Please don’t hit me again.

I rise up. 

I slowly unfurl and I stand before my mother. I stand before her and I see what the anger does to her. She has made anger her master and in this moment she is diminished and I realise that she sees me as that master and she resents me for it.

My anger is there too.

My anger has always been there.

We all have anger, and anger calls out to anger. Mine has heard that call and it is ready to surge forth and respond in kind, only it will seek to go further and do worse.

I think I once thought that anger was strength. When a giant rises up and strikes you down, it certainly feels like a display of strength. But then, I saw it for what it was, and that was a long time ago now. Anger is chaos and it is hate. Anger is the result of weakness and it prevents the best part of us coming to the fore.

For a single moment I consider hugging this woman, but I remember all the times I have done that in the past and the venom it has elicited. She is not my mother in this moment, she is anger and only anger, and I am made something other by this anger of hers.

There is nothing I can do. She has chosen to write herself off and to write me off in the process. I once thought that I was the instrument of her demise, but this was never about me. Whoever had been born to her and been her child and whatever they had become, she would have used them like this.

I am walking away and leaving the house before I know what I am doing.

I am walking away and the eight year old inside me feels a weight being lifted. It’s going to be OK, you are going to be OK. That was your past, today does not have to be lived like that, your future will not be blighted by anger, especially not your own.

The large and sombre black cars are arriving as I step outside.

I am ushered to an open door at the side of the second car.

“I’m going to make my own way,” I tell the funeral director.

He nods solemnly and I read something like understanding on his face. He’s a professional and that expression is a part of his job, but I think maybe he’s seen it all before in his line of work. Seen the change that a death in the family brings, and the way some may embrace it and others dig in stubbornly and ignore it totally to their own and others detriment. 

I take a lingering look at the hearse and the wreath that says DAD at the side of my dear father’s coffin. That is not the wreath that I bought. Mine sits on the other side of the coffin. Both arrangements are remarkably similar, but maybe they mean something quite different.

My brother’s car pulls up behind the hearse as I walk to my own car. We exchange a look and I nod. He does not return the nod. He looks at me in the exact same way that my Mum looked at me at the kitchen table, and like her, I know that he does not see me through that lens of inherited anger. He shares my mother’s anger and he is growing his own well of pain even now.

As I drive to the crematorium to take a seat near the back of the chapel for my father’s funeral service, I allow myself a last thought on my Mum and my brother. At least it is only me that triggers their anger now. Dad is better off out of it. Then I realise I too am better off out of it, because now my father is gone, there is nothing left for me here. 

And there is nothing left to say.