A Mother's Intentions

What a mother should be has been told to me from a young age. I’ve heard the phrase, “It’s just what a mother does!” enough times that I hear the inflections of the words the way my own mother would say it when I read the phrase anywhere. The curve her lips would form after saying that phrase would always cause my own face to grimace. Using that phrase as if it would magically forgive any boundaries crossed, any territories clawed and grasped at by her hands in an effort to get closer to the son she once knew and confided her adult emotions into. After all, her daughter already gave up on her.

From the time I grew consciousness I was an observer into my sister and mother’s relationship. Big brown eyes that bulge out of their sockets in an attempt to understand as much as they can and connect the dots that were missing were constantly watching. What they saw was an angry daughter and a struggling mother amongst other things.

I wish I could say I knew the exact moment that their relationship began to drift into the icy plains my sister lodged her other wants for her life. It could have been because we didn’t have the life my sister saw on television. MTV, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, all outlets for lives and stories my sister would aim and wish to be a part of. The way Britney Spears, Victoria Justice, Demi Lovato, Taylor Swift and more seemed to glisten and gleam like golden idols while our life reflected on the fishbowl screen was one of dust and muck. Something my sister would vocally discuss her disagreements with. 

My mother during this time wasn’t in the best place mentally or physically. The way I viewed it when I was younger was just that my mom was tired relatively often. I’d see her in the kitchen, or on the couch, or lying in bed. Three recurring places where she would alternate between sleep and spurts of energy. Pills in bottles that were piled onto her nightstand would shake as she woke up and began her morning routines. A cacophony that alerted me to her awaking from her slumber. While that meant she was awake, it didn’t correlate to her getting out of bed. There were days where I would find her asleep until the late afternoon. She would blame her medications for making her drowsy, or her back for just feeling out of place that day, or her shoulder has been really acting up lately so she can’t take anyone to the park like she promised days, weeks, months before. I should’ve known better than to trust her. Later the medical conditions would either leave and then come back with a nasty grudge, or a new one would spring up all together. At least they felt spontaneous to us when we were younger. 

My sister’s favorite aunt died the same year we got our house foreclosed on and had to move into a trailer park. Three strikes that hit my sister back to back to back, only to be reinforced as we stayed in said dead aunt’s house for a week until our trailer house was hooked up to amenities. But what were two children to do? 

For me, it sparked a trait I would later go to therapy for; people-pleasing. I wondered why everyone around me was so sad so often. Life could be beautiful and even if I didn’t know what was going on, I knew I could fix it if I tried hard enough. If I try hard enough, anything should be possible is what I believed in for so long. So I was a maid and a jester in one. I cleaned the house, I did the dishes, vacuumed, folded clothes, hell I even began cooking dinner for myself some nights because I wanted to take the stress off of our mother. All the while telling jokes and smiling to each of them. Of course I had moments of lashing out as a growing child, I wasn’t perfect but at least there were no dirty dishes. 

What praise I got for my actions didn’t change the way my family was. Sadness lurked behind the smiles of my mother and father when they would give me thanks for my diligence around the house. Shouts were still echoing from behind closed doors and reached the hallway my sister and I’s rooms were in. Depression is harder to scrub away than grime on plates and everyone knew this except me. This was a lesson I would learn later in life but saw the first glimpses of in my sister and mother to varying degrees. 

While I dealt with the rough family dynamics by overtly embracing positivity and taking on everyone’s problems for no good reason as a twelve year old, my sister was at the age where anger felt correct and right amongst the sadness. She was too young to change her life in ways she wanted and opportunities for what she wanted to do and enjoy in life were dashed across the water due to circumstances out of her control. Singing auditions she would go to were cut early due to puberty causing her acne to come in harshly, sorry sister if you’re reading this. Concerts that we went to had issues such as our new car dying on us in a city two hours away from home. Moments she was going to use to help carve her identity and could possibly become key and interesting moments in her life would always have a bloody thorn that has dug itself into her skin and drug out flesh from her whenever she would look back at them. Yet, one moment that I use as a keystone in mine and her relationship is after a cast party for a musical she was a part of in high school. 

During this time, she was still too young to have her own car and getting a license was something both of us wouldn’t do until after high school. As such, our dad took my mother and I with him to go and pick her up from the party and possibly have dinner afterward. As the driving was happening, my mother called my sister to let her know that they were close to the address. No response. My father scoffed in agitation. My mother called again when we were pulling up the driveway. No response. My father was getting mad. My mother called for a third time and got a hold of her. She tells my mom who then tells out loud to my father that she was busy talking to the parent’s of the cast member who was hosting the party and felt that it would be rude to pick up the phone while talking to them. My parents weren’t as understanding as she would have liked. 

While my mom was trying to give a route she could have gone to still pick up the phone and still be respectful, my dad yelled across the car to my mom, “Tell her to hurry her fat ass up!” There was silence on the other side of my mother’s phone. I didn’t hear what happened next but within a minute my sister was storming out of the house and got into the car, slamming the door in the process.

“I heard you call me fat ass, asshole!” She began to yell at him.

“Don’t you sit there and call me an asshole! I’ve been out here for-!” he responded as I just looked out the window into the winter afternoon sky and dissociated the rest of the conversation. 

It was a quick and silent car ride back to our home. Well, silent besides my sister’s sniffles as she cried in the backseat next to me. As we were parked, my father left the car first and headed inside. My mother followed after, years later she would tell us she went inside and ripped him a new hole to spill waste through. Stating that even if he felt that angry, he shouldn’t have done what he did and said what he said. 

Outside of the house still in the car was me and my sister. She hadn’t moved an inch since she found a pose to hold and look out the window with as she cried. You always feel the rest of the world is gone or has vanished when you feel so hurt. I don’t remember any cars passing us by during that entire time, I didn’t even see anyone walking either. The world was quiet with my sister to help amplify how hurt she felt, how betrayed she was. I felt like moving but didn’t know what to do fully. There had been times in the past where I would try to be friends with my sister instead of just siblings and I would be met with harsh resistance. I didn’t know if she wanted me there, but at some point I realized I didn’t really care. My first movement was placing my hand on the center console between the two front seats. Using the hand as a balancing point, I reached forward into the glovebox and retrieved some napkins from one of the plentiful fast food places we had around us in town. I reached out to touch her arm and then took it back quickly in case she needed space. Giving her a tissue in the form of a napkin for her nose and eyes, I said, “Here. I’m sorry.”

She grabs the napkin while still holding her pose and looking out the car window. She gulps and sniffles, as a majority of teenagers who cry do. I didn’t know what to do from there, I kept thinking about what she needed and what she could be thinking. My big brown eyes trying to find an answer somewhere and finding none. So I chose to once again not care, I scooted over in the backseat of the car and got closer to my sister. Wrapping my skinny arms around her and resting my head on her shoulder. Within the second, she turns around and begins to cry more intensely. Putting her head on my shoulder and wetting it viciously with tears of a scorned daughter as she broke her facade of stone. She yelled words and curses toward my father and even my mother too. Cursing the house we were in, cursing our family for where we are now, cursing the cuts on her skin I couldn’t see and wouldn’t know of until years later. 

We stayed in the car for about thirty minutes as she let emotions out I didn’t think she was capable of. It was the most emotion I ever saw out of my sister: she finally let loose. Emotions that felt vulnerable, a vulnerability that she always feared would lead to false hope. 

The next morning however, I woke up to someone sitting on my feet on my bed. Looking through squinted eyes, I saw my sister on my bed playing a video game. I don’t remember exactly what she said but I know it was a diss toward me to some degree. I laughed at it and just watched her keep playing. It was the first time in years that she was in my bedroom with me and playing a video game. I think it’s possible that maybe she knew it wasn’t great, but maybe it really was just okay for now. 

Depression has no bias however. My mother told us this when I was young. She told both my sister and I how she was struggling to find reasons to live and debated ending things multiple times. Listing us as the main reasons that she was still in the land of the living. With her professor that she was doing an internship for eloping the state with no trace and with no reported hours being worked, she could no longer graduate with the degree she was wanting. 

To pursue a job and become a drug addictions counselor, in Colorado, you need at least a Bachelor’s of Science in psychology which alone would take four years or more, partnered with at least one thousand hours of logged apprenticeship under supervision. Well, with no hours, no professor, and no more funds due to how the semester failed her for her apprenticeship, she couldn’t finish college. 

Her own dreams dashed and curb stomped, she had no one to confide in and chose to do such in her children. Something that any clinical therapist would heavily suggest not to do. With her husband out on the road, her classmates not responding to her texts, and having essentially been kicked out of college, she felt it was the only way to get emotions out. My sister and I would later use this moment as a key factor into how we would be constantly afraid of our mother killing herself whenever she was sad. What is a mother to do though?

As she grew with her children, cracks in the relationship she had with our father began to worsen. Harsher and harsher arguments were happening at home and with a newly established line of therapy through her children, she vented to her son constantly about arguments that would take place at home. Even as things began to grow prosperous with both of her children going to highschool, a new house bought and ideas for furnishings rushed through her mind, things should be getting better. 

Yet, her son is worried about getting into college at all and is a perfectionist who cried about dying his white shirt light blue by accident and asks about the family’s finances in fear of foreclosure. Her daughter is distancing herself from her mother every second and the cold shoulder worries her greatly. She tries to engage in school activities that gets her closer to her kids, even if they beg and plead for her not to. Going out of her way on some occasions to go behind her daughter’s back to ask teachers if they need help in the classroom or on trips out of town. Causing her daughter to sulk in the corner with her friends as she watches her mother try to entertain said friends and classmates. 

Distance. Distance is what her daughter began to think of constantly. “If I just get out of this town.”; “If I just get away from this home.”; “If I just had a different mother.” These thoughts I found later in a diary she left behind after moving out. Figuring it was just a regular book I opened it to find my sister’s bubbly handwriting in scratches and letters that screamed off of the page and indented themselves pages deep into the paper. In a moment of manners I closed the book quickly, in a moment of selfishness, I skimmed the book to see if she said anything mean about me as well. Happily, I will say there was only one thing said about me and I remember it being nice. 

After alerting my sister to it still remaining at the house, she replied “Oh god did the parents find it?” and after letting her know that I was the only one who saw it, she was relieved and informed me to either discard it or burn it… I burnt it as if there’s an option for it, who am I to say no to the dramatics of it all?

Dramatics came later as my sister found a man she loved, became engaged to, and planned a wedding for. The drama that partially ruined my sister’s mentality around her wedding was unfortunately something that usually and should lead to divorce between two people. Infidelity happened with my mother’s childhood friend is the simplest way I can describe it. This was something that took my mother’s anger management, if there was any, and snapped it in half. She tried to claw out the eyes of her now ex-childhood friend, took a hammer to her husband’s newly bought truck and only after her son rips the hammer from her hand and screams, “No more!” does she begin to break down crying. Calling her daughter and stating that she doesn’t want to be left alone since her only son was leaving the house for the night because he “just can’t deal with this right now.” Stating that she doesn’t know what she’ll do by herself if she’s left alone. Not knowing that her son and daughter called each other a second after she hung up the conversation and began crying to him about how their mother is a mess. 

How their mother later had to be sent to a hospital out of town for being borderline dead due to her liver giving up on her after years of mixing pain pills and psychotics with alcohol every night. Stating the alcohol helps her back that’s in so much pain, or her shoulder that’s been really trying her today and that’s why she can’t make dinner, or how the alcohol helps her deal with the anger she feels now even though it actually amplifies it. 

How their mother who after a few months of being sober goes back to drinking daily is affecting her short-term and long-term memory as she tries to adjust to taking medication for her newly acquired diabetes. Yet this isn’t a sign that she needs to change or improve or grow from who she was or is. This is a sign to herself that nothing changes and everything gets worse. That her daughter blocking her on all forms of communication is because of her father making it out that she’s the bad guy in every situation. It’s not her fault that she has the intentions of a mother. Yet my sister no longer cares of her intentions. It’s hard to hear those dead to you.