[essay] This Woman's Work
Dec. 4th, 2006 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thejunipertreeThis is the division/classification essay I wrote for my English Comp class. My professor suggested I should think about entering it into the English department contest because he was quite enamoured with it. Joanna and I jokingly refer to it as the "My mother is a whore and she made me into a whore!" essay, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with my mother being a whore or with me being a whore (well, maybe just a wee bit).
Tara Maguire
10-31-06
English Composition 101
Division/Classification essay
This Woman’s Work
It is said that the most important relationship in a woman’s life is the relationship she has with her mother. No other relationship is as fundamental for learning how to interact with those you love. No other relationship is as primal. Women go through life viewing their mothers as a guideline for their own behavior and as a high water mark to surpass. These relationships tend to be incredibly complex and go through a multitude of different stages throughout a woman’s life. My relationship with my own mother is no different. Our rapport and bond has fluidly evolved through my pre-teens, teen years, my twenties, and then into my thirties where it was abruptly cut short by her death.
I was born the youngest of three children and the only girl. In addition to the misfortune of my being the only girl, I was only related to my two older brothers by our mother and they did not resemble me in the slightest. The two of them are dark-haired and dark-eyed, with deep olive complexions. I have blue eyes, very fair skin, and despite the fact that my hair is now usually a rather startling shade of blue-black, I spent the majority of my young life as a platinum blonde. These differences between us caused me great alarm and dismay. Why did I look so different from them? Was I adopted? The only thing factor that kept me from completely disassociating from the family was my mother. My mother was also fair-skinned, with green eyes, and blonde hair. Admittedly, her blonde coloring came from a Clairol bottle once every six weeks, but such things were of no importance to me. I was blonde; she was blonde. People always spoke of how much we looked alike and nothing made me happier than to hear such a thing. She was my strongest link to familial identity, especially after she divorced my father when I was two years old and struck out on her own as a single mother in the early1970s.
When I was in my pre-teen years, my mother was the entire world to me. She was the authority on everything I could possibly think of. Music, cooking, books, clothes- she knew it all. Her high heels, her nylons, her jangling bracelets, her red lipstick, and her silver cigarette case all communicated to me the concept of womanhood. To this day, these are all things that I am overly fond of and which make me feel incredibly feminine whenever I use them. One of my strongest memories of my mother from this time is of her at a friend’s wedding reception: her light hair curled into a Marilyn Monroe-style bob, she’s standing near the bar with a glass of wine in one hand and a long, thin cigarette in the other. Her head is thrown back, exposing the delicate lines of her throat. She appeared to be a golden demi-goddess and was everything in a woman I ever wanted to be.
As idealized as my image of her was then, she was still just a single mother and frequently worked two or three jobs at one time to keep a roof over our heads. When she wasn’t working, she was usually involved in whatever new drama my brothers had managed to stir up. More often than not, I was alone in the house and left to my own devices. Neither of my brothers weren’t exactly what you would call good kids and they were constantly brought home by the police for shoplifting or vandalism. When they got older, petty thievery and spray-painted buildings became pregnant girlfriends and bedroom marijuana stashes. I, being much younger than the pair of them, was not included in any of their troubles and was usually ignored while our mother attempted to bring some semblance of order to the household. I generally kept to myself and was usually to be found with my nose in a book, so I wasn’t noticed or worried about all that often. My mother knew I was a good kid, a smart kid, and they figured I didn’t need nearly as much supervision as my two half-siblings. Unfortunately, she never realized the impact that this lack of supervision or attention would have on me or my relationship with her.
My teenage years screeched into the family, as most people’s teenage years do. It was the tail-end of the eighties and I had just discovered punk rock rebellion. I swanned around the house with half-shaven, fire engine red hair, Cleopatra eyeliner, combat boots, ripped-up fishnets and carefully tattered suit jackets. My mother, to say the least, now noticed me more often and was not entirely happy with what she was seeing. She wanted to know where her little girl had gone and I pretended I just wanted her to leave me alone. Our fights were epic and the majority of them were really the result of my being a sullen and self-absorbed teenage girl, secretly desperate for any sort of attention. Things like being on punishment for coming home two hours after curfew, not cleaning up spilled hair dye in the bathroom, refusing to bring my report card home for weeks, and not being allowed to date someone seven years my senior were all my subtle little acts of defiance. I never pulled out the big guns in any of our arguments; I never brought up how she paid little attention to me in favor of my brothers and how much it pained me. That was my private hurt; I didn’t share it with anyone.
My mother was the enemy when I was a teenager; she was someone I needed to hide information from at all costs. And I did, constantly. So much of my life had already been spent with her focusing all of her attention on my brothers and their problems that I felt she now had no right to know what was going on in my side of the house. She never knew when I really started smoking (she believed it to be in 1993, it was more like 1987), she had no idea I actually did date the seven-years-my-senior man (that was probably the worst mistake of my life, he turned out to a very important lesson in sociopathic, compulsive liars), and she had no clue when I first began to manifest symptoms of being schizoaffective. I hid everything, all of it. I would rather have died than told my mother any of my secrets. It’s not that I hated her, far from it. I still loved her more than anyone else in the world. But I fancied myself as incredibly misunderstood, neglected, and disenfranchised.
Following my teenage years were the wildly careening years of my twenties. I was living on my own for three years before I even hit twenty and attempting to learn what it was like to be an adult, albeit a drug and alcohol soaked one. One of my brothers was long out of the household and raising his own family, the other brother was still living at home, but attempting to pull himself together and start acting like an adult. This left my mother more time for me and thusly, she and I slowly began to form a tenuous connection as I shakily spread my wings into the world of supporting oneself, but it was a patchwork connection of simultaneously looking to her for advice on everything and not wanting to be seen as less than hip for being close to my mother. On top of that, I was still sore after so many years of being pushed to the side and I refused to let her into my private world. Not surprisingly, we still fought occasionally. One particularly bad squabble resulted in our not speaking for an excess of four months, which I finally apologized for against my will (my father made me do it, to shut us both up because we kept complaining to him). Things got a bit better when I fell into an engagement with my then-boyfriend because she would take me out on day trips for all the things a bride-to-be needs to do. We spent a lot of time together in the year that the wedding was being planned and a link began to form between the two of us that went beyond what our relationship had previously been. Strangely enough, our bond grew even stronger when I left my husband after only a year and a half of marriage. Most likely because in me, she saw the same girl she had been: trapped in a marriage that she blindly stumbled into and anxiously attempting to get out before it’s too late.
After the implosion of my marriage and an aborted attempt at living in Scotland, I found myself once again living at home after having been gone for a number of years and needing to make sense of the convoluted relationship my mother and I had. At twenty-six, I dyed my eggplant purple hair black and got a job in the same mortgage office she worked in. In this new environment, it slowly became clear to me that my mother talked of me a great deal to her friends and co-workers. She had a photo of me on her desk, taken during a short trip to Scotland (not the abruptly halted one I mentioned earlier) and I heard her speak of me in such proud language that it made me blush terribly. I was her “beautiful, heathen daughter” who lived on her own terms. Our co-workers told me how much my mother talked about me during the years she worked in that office before I came; it was like they already knew me. All of this surprised me since I had previously thought for years that my mother had no time for me or even thoughts of me unless it was to argue about something ridiculous. I began to see that all of those years I spent being ignored were because she was trying to keep everything together in one piece and my brothers’ poor behavior caught her focus just by default of being more noticeable.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t to last all that long. When I was twenty-eight, my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer and I became her caretaker. I shuttled her to and from all of her appointments, I filled out state assistance paperwork for her, I advised her on things like living wills and spoke at length with her oncologists about the proper course of treatment. At this point, I was currently laid off from my job and had all the time in the world to cater to her needs. My brothers were distant and uneasy in this situation and that distance served only to strengthen her reliance on me. Our roles reversed and I became the parent, which was very odd and uncomfortable. She came to me with all of her issues and I did my very best to ensure that she was as happy as possible. When she was in the hospital, and later a nursing home, I visited her every day and brought her everything she asked for. I took the place of the inept medical staff and performed all the tasks that they should have been doing. I fed her and washed her hair. I massaged her legs when they swelled up and emptied her dual nephrostomy bags. I took her outside for walks in a wheelchair and cleaned her up when she lost control of her bowels.
Ironically, just when I was finally willing to accept my mother as my friend, she became my child. It was difficult to not resent her for this turn of events and lay all the blame in her lap. After all, she had been feeling ill for many months and refused to go to the doctor. I was constantly exhausted from when I stayed late at the nursing home every night and ran errands for her when I didn’t. I had no escape. There were times when she was completely out of her head with pain and didn’t know who I was, or thought I was her own mother and soundly cursed me out. But there were other days when she would smile brightly at me when I walked in the room and ask me how my day had been. It was confusing and distressing. The person who I wanted to go to for comfort and reassurance was the person at the center of my pain. I never knew which way to turn and more often that not, even after a pleasant enough visit, I drove home in frustrated and helpless tears. After two and a half years of this emotional turbulence, my mother died at the age of sixty. She died a little more than a month after my thirtieth birthday.
I’m not the only woman to have gone through such an incredibly complex and distressing relationship with her mother. I’ve not even had it the worst, thankfully. My female friends tell me stories of crack-addicted prostitutes and self-obsessed, thorny-hearted stoics. I don’t envy any of them for what they have gone through, nor are they jealous of my own situation. However, every single one of us knows that we are who are today because of the fundamental effects our mothers had on us. Their influence shapes the women we are. Essentially, that is our mothers’ legacy. Each of the stages of my relationship with my mother has resulted in a profound effect on the person I am now. And despite all the sturm und drang we went through, I’m a better person for having known her.
Tara Maguire
10-31-06
English Composition 101
Division/Classification essay
This Woman’s Work
It is said that the most important relationship in a woman’s life is the relationship she has with her mother. No other relationship is as fundamental for learning how to interact with those you love. No other relationship is as primal. Women go through life viewing their mothers as a guideline for their own behavior and as a high water mark to surpass. These relationships tend to be incredibly complex and go through a multitude of different stages throughout a woman’s life. My relationship with my own mother is no different. Our rapport and bond has fluidly evolved through my pre-teens, teen years, my twenties, and then into my thirties where it was abruptly cut short by her death.
I was born the youngest of three children and the only girl. In addition to the misfortune of my being the only girl, I was only related to my two older brothers by our mother and they did not resemble me in the slightest. The two of them are dark-haired and dark-eyed, with deep olive complexions. I have blue eyes, very fair skin, and despite the fact that my hair is now usually a rather startling shade of blue-black, I spent the majority of my young life as a platinum blonde. These differences between us caused me great alarm and dismay. Why did I look so different from them? Was I adopted? The only thing factor that kept me from completely disassociating from the family was my mother. My mother was also fair-skinned, with green eyes, and blonde hair. Admittedly, her blonde coloring came from a Clairol bottle once every six weeks, but such things were of no importance to me. I was blonde; she was blonde. People always spoke of how much we looked alike and nothing made me happier than to hear such a thing. She was my strongest link to familial identity, especially after she divorced my father when I was two years old and struck out on her own as a single mother in the early1970s.
When I was in my pre-teen years, my mother was the entire world to me. She was the authority on everything I could possibly think of. Music, cooking, books, clothes- she knew it all. Her high heels, her nylons, her jangling bracelets, her red lipstick, and her silver cigarette case all communicated to me the concept of womanhood. To this day, these are all things that I am overly fond of and which make me feel incredibly feminine whenever I use them. One of my strongest memories of my mother from this time is of her at a friend’s wedding reception: her light hair curled into a Marilyn Monroe-style bob, she’s standing near the bar with a glass of wine in one hand and a long, thin cigarette in the other. Her head is thrown back, exposing the delicate lines of her throat. She appeared to be a golden demi-goddess and was everything in a woman I ever wanted to be.
As idealized as my image of her was then, she was still just a single mother and frequently worked two or three jobs at one time to keep a roof over our heads. When she wasn’t working, she was usually involved in whatever new drama my brothers had managed to stir up. More often than not, I was alone in the house and left to my own devices. Neither of my brothers weren’t exactly what you would call good kids and they were constantly brought home by the police for shoplifting or vandalism. When they got older, petty thievery and spray-painted buildings became pregnant girlfriends and bedroom marijuana stashes. I, being much younger than the pair of them, was not included in any of their troubles and was usually ignored while our mother attempted to bring some semblance of order to the household. I generally kept to myself and was usually to be found with my nose in a book, so I wasn’t noticed or worried about all that often. My mother knew I was a good kid, a smart kid, and they figured I didn’t need nearly as much supervision as my two half-siblings. Unfortunately, she never realized the impact that this lack of supervision or attention would have on me or my relationship with her.
My teenage years screeched into the family, as most people’s teenage years do. It was the tail-end of the eighties and I had just discovered punk rock rebellion. I swanned around the house with half-shaven, fire engine red hair, Cleopatra eyeliner, combat boots, ripped-up fishnets and carefully tattered suit jackets. My mother, to say the least, now noticed me more often and was not entirely happy with what she was seeing. She wanted to know where her little girl had gone and I pretended I just wanted her to leave me alone. Our fights were epic and the majority of them were really the result of my being a sullen and self-absorbed teenage girl, secretly desperate for any sort of attention. Things like being on punishment for coming home two hours after curfew, not cleaning up spilled hair dye in the bathroom, refusing to bring my report card home for weeks, and not being allowed to date someone seven years my senior were all my subtle little acts of defiance. I never pulled out the big guns in any of our arguments; I never brought up how she paid little attention to me in favor of my brothers and how much it pained me. That was my private hurt; I didn’t share it with anyone.
My mother was the enemy when I was a teenager; she was someone I needed to hide information from at all costs. And I did, constantly. So much of my life had already been spent with her focusing all of her attention on my brothers and their problems that I felt she now had no right to know what was going on in my side of the house. She never knew when I really started smoking (she believed it to be in 1993, it was more like 1987), she had no idea I actually did date the seven-years-my-senior man (that was probably the worst mistake of my life, he turned out to a very important lesson in sociopathic, compulsive liars), and she had no clue when I first began to manifest symptoms of being schizoaffective. I hid everything, all of it. I would rather have died than told my mother any of my secrets. It’s not that I hated her, far from it. I still loved her more than anyone else in the world. But I fancied myself as incredibly misunderstood, neglected, and disenfranchised.
Following my teenage years were the wildly careening years of my twenties. I was living on my own for three years before I even hit twenty and attempting to learn what it was like to be an adult, albeit a drug and alcohol soaked one. One of my brothers was long out of the household and raising his own family, the other brother was still living at home, but attempting to pull himself together and start acting like an adult. This left my mother more time for me and thusly, she and I slowly began to form a tenuous connection as I shakily spread my wings into the world of supporting oneself, but it was a patchwork connection of simultaneously looking to her for advice on everything and not wanting to be seen as less than hip for being close to my mother. On top of that, I was still sore after so many years of being pushed to the side and I refused to let her into my private world. Not surprisingly, we still fought occasionally. One particularly bad squabble resulted in our not speaking for an excess of four months, which I finally apologized for against my will (my father made me do it, to shut us both up because we kept complaining to him). Things got a bit better when I fell into an engagement with my then-boyfriend because she would take me out on day trips for all the things a bride-to-be needs to do. We spent a lot of time together in the year that the wedding was being planned and a link began to form between the two of us that went beyond what our relationship had previously been. Strangely enough, our bond grew even stronger when I left my husband after only a year and a half of marriage. Most likely because in me, she saw the same girl she had been: trapped in a marriage that she blindly stumbled into and anxiously attempting to get out before it’s too late.
After the implosion of my marriage and an aborted attempt at living in Scotland, I found myself once again living at home after having been gone for a number of years and needing to make sense of the convoluted relationship my mother and I had. At twenty-six, I dyed my eggplant purple hair black and got a job in the same mortgage office she worked in. In this new environment, it slowly became clear to me that my mother talked of me a great deal to her friends and co-workers. She had a photo of me on her desk, taken during a short trip to Scotland (not the abruptly halted one I mentioned earlier) and I heard her speak of me in such proud language that it made me blush terribly. I was her “beautiful, heathen daughter” who lived on her own terms. Our co-workers told me how much my mother talked about me during the years she worked in that office before I came; it was like they already knew me. All of this surprised me since I had previously thought for years that my mother had no time for me or even thoughts of me unless it was to argue about something ridiculous. I began to see that all of those years I spent being ignored were because she was trying to keep everything together in one piece and my brothers’ poor behavior caught her focus just by default of being more noticeable.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t to last all that long. When I was twenty-eight, my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer and I became her caretaker. I shuttled her to and from all of her appointments, I filled out state assistance paperwork for her, I advised her on things like living wills and spoke at length with her oncologists about the proper course of treatment. At this point, I was currently laid off from my job and had all the time in the world to cater to her needs. My brothers were distant and uneasy in this situation and that distance served only to strengthen her reliance on me. Our roles reversed and I became the parent, which was very odd and uncomfortable. She came to me with all of her issues and I did my very best to ensure that she was as happy as possible. When she was in the hospital, and later a nursing home, I visited her every day and brought her everything she asked for. I took the place of the inept medical staff and performed all the tasks that they should have been doing. I fed her and washed her hair. I massaged her legs when they swelled up and emptied her dual nephrostomy bags. I took her outside for walks in a wheelchair and cleaned her up when she lost control of her bowels.
Ironically, just when I was finally willing to accept my mother as my friend, she became my child. It was difficult to not resent her for this turn of events and lay all the blame in her lap. After all, she had been feeling ill for many months and refused to go to the doctor. I was constantly exhausted from when I stayed late at the nursing home every night and ran errands for her when I didn’t. I had no escape. There were times when she was completely out of her head with pain and didn’t know who I was, or thought I was her own mother and soundly cursed me out. But there were other days when she would smile brightly at me when I walked in the room and ask me how my day had been. It was confusing and distressing. The person who I wanted to go to for comfort and reassurance was the person at the center of my pain. I never knew which way to turn and more often that not, even after a pleasant enough visit, I drove home in frustrated and helpless tears. After two and a half years of this emotional turbulence, my mother died at the age of sixty. She died a little more than a month after my thirtieth birthday.
I’m not the only woman to have gone through such an incredibly complex and distressing relationship with her mother. I’ve not even had it the worst, thankfully. My female friends tell me stories of crack-addicted prostitutes and self-obsessed, thorny-hearted stoics. I don’t envy any of them for what they have gone through, nor are they jealous of my own situation. However, every single one of us knows that we are who are today because of the fundamental effects our mothers had on us. Their influence shapes the women we are. Essentially, that is our mothers’ legacy. Each of the stages of my relationship with my mother has resulted in a profound effect on the person I am now. And despite all the sturm und drang we went through, I’m a better person for having known her.
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Date: 2006-12-06 08:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-06 01:24 pm (UTC)