Montaigne’s Heiress

I got this letter from mother today:

Dear –,

I received your painful note today and I can’t say it is a surprise. I have been aware for a long time that I do not measure up to your standards as a mother and career-wise. I think you have looked around at the world and concluded that other people have so much more than I do. (In a variety of ways.) In some cases it is true but I don’t care what other people have. I only care about us and our relationship. I love you and have always loved you more than anyone else. The decisions I have made about how and where we lived were with your best interests in mind.

I don’t know if you are fully aware that I have struggled with depression most of my adult life and have been on medication off and on for several years but it does not seem to help. I am not offering this as an excuse – it is just a fact of life.

I am very proud of you and your ability to make your way in the world. If you need some space I am willing to give it to you. I will be finished moving [in with her sister E] in about 2 weeks and I hope we can get our relationship on track.

You are what is important to me. Everything else is misc. B.S.

Please stop judging me.

Love you,

Mama Bear

Ok, so let’s consider some basic facts about mother, and some of the things she cites in this letter:

1. She has never, ever, in all of the time I have known her, been to therapy. At least, not that I know of. Maybe when I was too young to remember, but from at least the time I was 11 until now, she has not been to therapy. In fact, she sent ME to therapy in order to manage her emotions. The first time was from age 6-8 with a well known child psychologist. He’s published several books on the psychology of children. I loathed him because he insisted on talking to me in baby-talk, and did my earnest best never, EVER to tell him anything of import, because I sensed his loyalty was to mother, not me. Which probably told him quite a lot. The second time was in TX when I was 12. After 5 sessions of my doing my best to be earnest (despite the guy’s obvious boredom and lack of empathy) the therapist told me that I didn’t need to come and see him any more. When I went out to the car to tell mother (who had always refused to even come into the therapist’s office, much less talk to him about my progress as if she actually gave a good goddamn) she absolutely refused to believe me and barged into the therapist’s office demanding that he diagnose me with something. Anything. Just so that I would be “the crazy one” and she wouldn’t. After she had barged out of the therapist’s office in a huff, I looked in on him again. It doesn’t seem like something that a therapist would say to a kid, but I seem to remember him telling me that my mother was the one with the problem, not me. But like I said, I don’t know if that’s self-mythology or an actual memory. I seem to remember it, though. At the very least, though, that day confirmed what I already knew.
2. Our move to Texas was certainly not taken with my best interests in mind.  I was already established as a straight-A student in the local middle school and had a group (ok, a 3-strong group, which is about as many oft-seen friends as I can stand to have) of quality friends. We lived with my grandparents, who were solidly upper middle-class and provided me with a stable (if not always – or not even usually) pleasant home life. They were wealthy enough to do the simple things in life for me, like, oh… provide me with something nutritious to eat on a regular basis! The move was only proposed by my uncle J and aunt B in order to help aunt E (who had by that time been unemployed for 2 years) with finances by our all three moving in together. Just before the move, aunt E had gotten a job, and therefore resented our unnecessary coming as an imposition. Mother, too, was unable to find work for a good while, and then finally got a job making $5 an hour. When I ate, it was from a gas station using aunt E’s gas credit card, or because grandma had sent me $20 as a present, or because I scraped around under the couch for loose change, or – in dire extremes – because I stole something to eat. Mother refused to (well… she couldn’t) buy groceries, and she also refused to let my grandmother send money for me to buy nutritious food. (I’m not saying she should have taken the help – how embarrassing is it to have your 80-year-old mother providing for your kid when you’re 45 and able to work?! – but she could at least have not undertaken the move in the first place.)
3. She has done her earnest best to deprive me of opportunities whenever she could. A great example is my modeling career. Check out the October 1993 issue of Parents Magazine. I’m in it. Between the ages of 6 and 7 I had a rapidly expanding modeling career. I was starting to get calls almost every week for voiceovers, print ads, and other work as well. For one 15-minute voiceover I made $1000. Mother was extremely jealous of my making this money (all of which she stole, incidentally – she told me she was putting it away for me, and I never saw a dime) and decided to cut short my career by going back to school. She didn’t want a degree in cooking (she hates standing on her feet, and she’s a horrible cook!) but she went back to school anyway, and refused to take me into the city on jobs, and so the calls stopped coming. Then she quit school. Never tried to get a job in that field. The only thing I got out of it was a trip to Europe (I went to a bunch of mother’s classes and impressed one of her professors, who let me play on his computer – a very early Mac – in his office so that I didn’t have to sit through her class, and so he let me come on their class trip to London and Ireland) and a vague sense that mother didn’t like me very much.

So… those are all the old grievances. I hate to trot them out, but it seems fitting at the end of our relationship that I should throw them to the four winds. Mother wants to believe that I’ve stopped seeing her because she was (is!) shiftless and has never had a decent job in her life, or because she uprooted me in the middle of my adolescence to trot me off to an abysmal city that I still don’t like, or whatever other reason. She doesn’t see (and the reason I’ve stopped seeing her is because she cannot and will not see) that the reason I’ve stopped seeing her is because of her utter and total lack of virtue. Because of her lack of empathy. Because of her lack of curiosity about and genuine caring and affection for me. Because she bludgeoned me over the head with the argument from morality and because she expects me to toil my life away to provide her with unearned luxury in her old age and because she thinks that all of the above are virtues.

The ironic thing… the thing straight out of the Department of Exquisite Irony is that she read Rand when she was 16 or 17. She saw the same things at the same age (even though Rand’s ethical arguments leave a lot to be desired) and… she could have lived with integrity. She saw a different path than the one that she was on. And she decided, instead of living with a shred of virtue, to be exactly like Hank Rearden’s mom. Well, if she thinks that she’s going to use my virtue to chain me to a rock (it is soooo ironic that her pet name for me was “Buzzard”), Prometheus-like, for vultures to peck at… she’s wrong. She is so very, very wrong.