This Rage

I have always said my parents did they best they could with my brother and I given the resources they had.

My mother's mother died of complications with Diabetes when my mother was 16. And even when she was alive and not sick, she wasn't the greatest role model. In fact I don't recall even one positive story of her. My mother rarely talked of her. I know she was divorced from my Biological grandfather, and had remarried a man who also had two daughter like herself. They then has two more daughters together, for a total of 6 kids. When my Grandmother got sick the 6 sisters were scattered about to many friends and family for care while my grandfather cared for my grandmother. My mother wasn't with them when my grandmother passed away. It was decided in the aftermath of my Grandmother's death that most of the kids would go to foster care, as my Grandfather was not able to care for the 6 young girls. My mother was old enough that she was able to spend the remainder of her youth with family friends. The picture that was always painted of my grandparents was they were overwhelmed.

And so it seems with my own mother, she was frequently overwhelmed. And how she choose to deal with my brother and I was to "beat" us into submission. We were to do as we were told or suffer the physical consequences. She was not adverse to hitting us herself, but she preferred the "When you Father gets home..." routine of having us wait for our punishment. I hated hearing his truck pull up on those days. I learned at a very young age to become compliant to avoid my mother's rage. I seemed to be better at this than my brother, who never out grew this corporal punishment. I mostly learned to never stray outside the acceptable boundary of what I knew wouldn't get me into trouble. My brother, however, strayed often and suffered greatly. There was one such time that really stands out in my mind as an example of my Mother, so overwhelmed and just in rage.

It was no small feat to take us to Disneyland. I was 9 or 10 and my brother was about 8. My mom and her friend T (who had 2 girls around my age) planned to make the 10 hour trek south to the Magical Kingdom. There was months of planning for this trip. It was talked about so much I began to believe it would never happen. But eventually it did.

We all drove together in my Mom's big yellow pickup with a camper shell on the back. The four of us kids all rode together in the back (back then it was legal to ride in the back of a truck with out a seat belt). My Aunt Plant, lived in So. Cal at the time, so we had all planned to stay with her for a few days we were in So. Cal. She also had one son my age. A house full of excited little kidlets for several days, oh what fun.

I can remember little about our day at Disney, except that my Mom had matching shirts made for all us kids fearing that she would loose one of us in the crowd.

On the last night we were there all of us kids we playing together when my brother piped up with "What is an erection?" Since I was "so much" older (18 months makes all the difference here) and wiser (from having my first sex ed class in school) I proceeded to answer his question. All of the other kids piped in as well with there thoughts, but what we didn't know was that we had acquired an audience of adults listening to us from the other side of the door. I still to this day don't understand what the big deal was, but apparently they didn't like us discussing this subject matter. I was verbally reprimanded (being the oldest and apparently the one who "led" the discussion) and I remember my Mom being very mad and embarrassed. In my little mind I equated the embarrassment with me (I must be bad), when in reality my Mom was probably embarrassed by the subject and not equipped to have frank discussions about sexuality. In fact I don't EVER recall my mom discussing the "Birds and the Bees" (The only parental sex talk I remember when I was growing up was with with my God-Mother). So we kidlets went back to playing and avoiding the "Forbidden Subject".

Now I'm sure there was more that happened this weekend, especially since my brother was prone to acting out and was frequently in trouble for his behavior. I can only remember the offense that was the breaking point for my mother, and that was when my brother decided that it would be funny to run down the hall with a pair of girls' underwear on his head. The underwear he chose happen to belong to one of T's girls, who was the most modest of the bunch. And then the dam broke, and my mother figuratively "Dropped her basket". I was terrified of my mother in that moment. I'm not sure I have ever seen her that mad. My brother was hauled out to the garage where he was bent over a weight bench and beat. I remember hearing the sound of the belt as it struck his bare skin. There was no where in the house to hide from his screaming. The other adults were mortified by my Mom's over reaction. All the kids were put to bed, but I'm not sure any of us slept.

We left the next morning. My Mom was still in a rage. She loaded us in the back of the truck, us girls towards the front and my brother was told to lie next to the tailgate and not move for the whole trip home. All the while she ranted and raved about what awful kids we were and how embarrassed she was by our behavior and that she couldn't take us anywhere. It was the worst car trip ever.

So this weekend, when I took my own kidlets camping I had a moment where I lost it. My temper getting the best of me after working so very hard to put together a nice summer weekend for my family, who could not possibly comprehend all that must go into preparing for these type of trips. After all they are kids, self-centered by nature. They were bickering and being generally ungrateful, and in a moment of pure frustration this rage came over me. I got angry and yelled and threatened to pack everything up and drive home and then it happened. I looked at DQ, tears in her eyes and I remembered my mother, and I saw her rage and how I remembered it as a child. The fear: "I am a BAD mother!" smacked me right in the face.

I know I don't want to be that kind of mother, but as my mother's mother before her, my examples are fraught with less than stellar coping skills. I would like to believe that the fact that I can stand back in the moment and say I don't want to parent like this is better than my own mother did. But that isn't enough.

Later in the car, I admitted to DQ that I was sorry I lost my temper. We talked about this and I explained that even adults can make mistakes and bad choices about how we deal with frustration. Saying out loud to her that this was more about my ability to cope than it was about her bratty behavior was important. For most of my childhood, I KNEW that I was a bad kid. Because if I were better, she wouldn't be so angry and depressed all of the time. This believe took root in me and grew like a weed. And so began many years of trying to "take care" of the people around me assuming my behavior was the cause for their choices. If I were better, they would be better to me.

DQ and DPJ are not responsible for my behavior. This rage is mine. If I could swallow this like John Coffey in The Green Mile swallowed the cancer of the warden's wife, I would. Take it all in and let it die with me. My only hope is not to pass it on to my daughter as her only way to cope.