The Psyche Protects

The psyche protects us and the body remembers. I had a visceral loathing of my mother from an early age and I still do even though she is dead. If I hear or see a gesture imitating her usually from a photograph or a phrase by a sibling I cringe and wince and fill with disgust. The curve of my sister's thumb or her fake mask smile. The dumb expressions repeated ad nauseam. "I always thought my teacher's lived under their desks!" Or wanting OVERNIGHT SUCCESS without knowing anything about your latest business venture. Starting a TV show or opening a restaurant. It's a very New York problem. Do your homework girl.

I still have zero, ZILCH good memories of my mother. In fact MOTHER is a dirty word for me. MOTHER is a CURSE.  I decided the family dog was my mother. He was male but I was five. He was my mother.

My mother was always rehearsing her death. That was the hook. The other hook was her second husband's money. All of their friends thought they were interesting and amazing because they had good taste and fine wines and a view out the window. They gave out copper pots and burgundy wine glasses to clients. They had a country house with a renovated kitchen and barn. So what! I'd rather sit on a box in Central Falls next to a dumpster reeking of raw sewage than spend time with them. 

All of this is hilarious and tragic to me. Underneath she was a sexually abused child, an abandoned wife during her first marriage, a woman with a spine "deformity" from scoliosis and a stuck and addicted bi-polar brain. She wanted MY APPROVAL. Excuse me, I wanted a parent who gives a shit.

She hated children yet tried to be involved with writing and illustrating children's books. This was true for both of my biological parents. They both wrote for children but were serial abandoners of their own children. Really they were in advertising. They did that for the money and each child Sonia birthed was progressively and dangerously premature. Thank God her doctor, Dr. "Jerry" Edelmann, said NO MORE!!

I can't imagine her bringing more humans into the world. And destroying them, raping and pillaging.

I was the second child from the first disaster elopement. She dragged me off to a million doctors, therapists, a wart doctor, a chiropractor, really any doctor that would listen to her. She became a Munchausen's by Proxy Monster Mother. Even my beloved Grandma Sophie wondered aloud why I had received three major surgeries by the age of six. All of them unnecessary, it turns out. I was her sacrificial lamb, scapegoat, whipping boy.

I knew my mother was unsafe. I was sure she was poisoning me. In a sense she was. I had to hurry up and escape.

Starting at age 13, I planned my escape. I began collecting cast iron frying pans at the flea market for my future apartment. I imagined having a few spider plants and a record player and Joni Mitchell playing on rainy days. I imagined Philadelphia would be my new home since I went there for a summer camp friend's parents wedding when I was 15.

Sonia was always using me as a confidant, like when she told me she was addicted to speed or had tried pot. She never knew I was a child, let alone her child. I was there to serve her whims. End of story. She did not eat meals with me except on rare occasions. Our housekeeper made me lunch, breakfast, and dinner. My mother sometimes showed up and would gnaw on a gigantic marrow bone while wearing blood red lipstick, grossing me out. Or eat cold congealed chicken soup standing at the fridge with a spoon. Other than those memories I have no idea what foods and beverages she liked. She was always saying no to everything including all of the things we wanted as kids. No candy, no cookies, no comic books, no television. No. no. no. No reading!

I know very little about her in the day to day ways. I knew my in-laws much better than my parents. True I ran away at 15 (and 16, and 17). But still. My formative years were de-formative.