My earliest memories were of my tireless mother, "D," always in motion. Cooking, laundering, tidying and scrubbing. I joked with my sisters that, like a vacuum cleaner, I thought cleaning tools were mom's bodily attachments. Even when she was swimming upstream against Fisher-Price, discarded Keds and Barbie Doll clothes, mom would eventually emerge from the chaos, everything neatly folded in its immaculate place.
Every weekday, she was down in the basement at 5am to do some laundry, then, back in the kitchen laying out the assembly-line of lunches for 4 or 5 kids while making or monitoring breakfast. She showered and ushered all of us out to our various bus stops and was off to work herself. At the end of her day, she'd pick up groceries, have dinner on the table by 6 for my father and all of us kids. She'd wash the dishes, pots and pans and prepare for the next day's domestic assault. Saturdays were cleaning days and Sundays we spent an inordinate amount of time at church, for which she usually brought a hamper of food for lunch. We were bathed, fed, clothed in clean and pressed clothes and always knew that home meant our own clean beds, warmth, meals and safety. There were eventually five of us kids with dental and doctor appointments, school rehearsals and performances. She was in charge of all of it.
I think my Mom loved having an orderly house but she never expressed any joy in it. She was a very good home cook but I don't think she enjoyed that either. She loved her children without a doubt, but I would argue it didn't seem like she enjoyed raising us. Everything was an endless chore. Fucking endless. She grieves now that she never stopped to play with us (she rarely did) and I remember her stopping to read a novel once in my life. Valley of the Dolls–so rare that I remember the title. My father worked hard too but nowhere as relentlessly as my mother.
Being a mama's-girl, I tried to please her. Once when I was about 10 years old, I announced that I would clean up after dinner. I washed all the dishes, pots and pans; swept the floor and wiped down the counters and stove. It was so hard and I was so proud. Her only feedback was to pass her fingertips along the formica and say, "the countertops are greasy."
So when I stumbled into adulthood, I knew very little of what my future would hold but I was sure as shit not going to spend my life cleaning house. A wasted life. A feminist affront. I would play with my children. I would be creative, even if it meant household chaos. And I was true to my word. Even with a partner who carried none of my fierce anti-housework baggage and didn't mind cleaning, with two kids and school and work, housework felt like a monster I would never tame. There was no point in fighting it. Besides, I was a narcoleptic and sleepiness piggy-backed onto my sense of defeat. It was utterly impossible.
Recently a lovely friend wrote an article about us in Outsmart (our local gay magazine). It was sweet but made me realize how much I'd rather write my own story than have someone else do it. So, for at least part of this Mini 1000, I'd like to do that. And I am starting with my mother.
I start with my mother with some trepidation. First of all, she is still alive, I don't want to hurt her feelings and I love her dearly. She did so many things well. Raised by alcoholic parents, she was often left to tend to her four younger brothers and fend for herself. Compared to hers, our childhood was completely carefree. She was a part of a different generation. Born shortly after the Great Depression, she married because it was what she was taught to do. Her pendulum swing from her own mother's irresponsibility was to make her life a model of selfless martyrdom. She was, and still is, one of the most duty-driven people I know.
I start with my mother because I empathized with her (though empathy was not a well-developed emotion in D's House of Silent Suffering. Being sick in our home had better involve febrile convulsions, compound fractures or bleeding from an orifice if you wanted any show of sympathy). My father was volatile, demanding and loud. I saw her as a victim because I had a particularly black & white world view--even for a child, I was powerfully drawn to the Good/Evil dichotomy. I needed her affection and got very little of it but she was never cruel to me. And she was funny. When she could release her iron grip on Making House Immaculate, she was quite funny. I needed that like other people need god.
I start with my mother because her domestic perfectionism transferred like osmosis into my creative and academic cells. Doing something extremely well was a way to honor her. I was a smart kid. An over-achiever. I was chubby. I was a religious fanatic. (I had all the components you'd need for a walloping eating disorder except one: I can't throw up. Seriously. My digestive tract is a violently one-way street...but that's a discussion for another essay.)
Finally, I start with my mother because my father frightened me, enraged me and made me feel small in ways that my mother did not. So I needed her. As I have grown I have learned that I am more like my father than I'd have ever thought possible and I loved her because she was not.
As we've grown older, my mother and I, I am continually amazed at how this stoic, duty-driven woman is so full of self-doubt. She skipped her childhood and adolescence and I'm sure learned to measure her worth by how she was perceived as a wife, mother and House Cleaner Extraordinaire. Now that my father has passed and she is well into the great-grandmother phase of her life, it is unsettling to constantly see her devalue herself. At the same time, she is finally able to express some feelings of affection for me and heaps praise on me for my accomplishments. Often, unfortunately, with a nod to her lack of them.
