“The telephone is ringing, is that my mother on the phone?” wails Andy Summers of The Police, like a man having a breakdown, on their calliope-from-hell Synchronicity track Mother. “Telephone is SCREAMING, won’t she LEAVE me alone?” His unmelodic howls are the sound of a child being consumed by Kali, or perhaps Medusa, mythical Devouring Mothers.
No doubt anyone with a distant, indifferent, or downright cruel mother will think that what I’m about to expound upon is a self-indulgent non-problem, and that I’m a horrible, ungrateful child. But those who grew up with mothers who behaved in an over-involved, invasive, controlling, or obsessive manner, all in the name of love, will know exactly what I’m talking about. And know exactly what Summers was yelling about. “Oh mother dear, please listen, and don’t DEVOUR me!”
Far on into life, the umbilical cord is still wrapped around our necks, and we’re suffocating.
**
Psychology that makes use of myths and archetypes, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychology, posits as one of its primary characters the dark counterpart of the loving, nurturing Good Mother: the devouring, engulfing annihilator of identity Jung called the “Terrible Mother.” Terrible not necessarily in the colloquial sense of “bad,” but powerful and demonic: a woman driven by fear, anger, and/or insatiable emotional hunger, seeking to overpower and bind her offspring to her forever.
How confusing for a child to be presented with both mothers at the same time. Love becomes confused with control and manipulation; independence and individuation become like a major insurrection. This is actually not too far afield of the characterization of God that Bible-believing Christians are required to worship. I am the personification of love, so it goes. If I love you, I must control you; if you separate from me, in your selfishness, I will pursue you and blot you out. The destruction is not literal in the case of the Mother (as it is with the Father-God), but more of a smothering of the separate self.
Boys are forced, in the process of becoming men, to separate more decisively from Mother than girls are, an initiation that can prove emotionally crippling and affect all of their later relationships…but girls often have what are called “merged attachments” with their mothers that aren’t exactly healthy, either. Mutual over-identification can result in a claustrophobic lack of boundaries and the snuffing of any conflicting differentiating thoughts or desires. (What gets snuffed, and stuffed, however, doesn’t go away — it just winds up in the pressure cooker of repression, slowly turning to rage that may one day blow the lid off.)
While sons may sacrifice relationship to become autonomous adults, daughters will sacrifice becoming autonomous adults to maintain relationship.
**
I’ve been experiencing bouts of rage, and falling into ancient feedback loops in my brain about the futility of trying to live my own life as an adult, ever since my mother joined Facebook and began hovering over my every move. Not only does it cramp my style and inhibit my self-expression, but I’ve been bombarded with messages inquiring about my cryptic status updates and making judgments about my subject matter. She writes on my wall and comments on my posted items. (My friends, in the meantime, fall silent, and the ones from whom I most want to hear say nothing for weeks.) She even downloaded a photo from my page, blew it up, and began obsessing about whether or not I was eating enough. (What doesn’t make sense is that it’s like pulling teeth to get the smallest financial assist from my parents, but she can waste hours and hours of a day fretting herself into a lather about my imaginary starvation.) She hasn’t said anything publicly humiliating, at least not yet. Most of her public comments sound like the quintessential supportive mother. And she does have those Good Mother qualities: when I was completely dependent and undifferentiated, she was completely loving and nurturing.
But she has become, in effect, my stalker.
There are several good reasons why I moved two thousand miles away from my family of origin. One was to stretch the apron strings to the breaking point, which worked, mostly, for a while, at least in terms of minimizing fresh incidents. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, my mother can pick up where she left off twenty years ago, and virtually micromanage me to her heart’s content.
Could I have ignored her friend request?
**
When I was growing up, she would go through my notebooks. This is how she discovered a “dirty” story I had written in the fourth grade with my best friend Maria. That incident prompted the most humiliating lecture of my entire childhood, with my tight-lipped Puritan mother uttering innumerable uncomfortable euphemisms regarding the sacredness of holy matrimony. (Ever have one of those moments where you wished the ground would open up and swallow you whole?) Maria and Judy Blume were almost entirely responsible for my sexual education. If my mother had had her way, I probably would have believed babies grew from a seed in their mommy’s tummy until I was twenty-five and married to some poor God-fearing boy who would have to break the news to me in our post-nuptial motel room.
But I’ll come back to the subject of sex later. My mother’s snooping also enabled her to find the hidden bus ticket I’d bought during my senior year of high school to visit a prospective college a second time. She went into hysterics, as was her wont, thinking I was running away. (I had been planning on telling them at the last minute, with a friend waiting outside to take me to the station; it was the only way I thought I had a chance of pulling it off, in that household.) Ultimately my father decided to let me go, and in the end I wound up attending that college, but ever after I kept all my most personal notes and diaries with me at all times. I carted them to school with me every day, knowing that if I left them at home she would find them and read them.
**
She was always so full of fear, my mother. Maybe it comes naturally with the territory of parenthood, but in her case I believe it was excessive. It could only have been exacerbated by a terrifying belief system in which sinners have to fear falling into the hands of an angry God, and wayward children can wind up in the torturous pits of eternal fire. I took it in through my umbilical cord; I was nourished and weaned on the chemicals of perpetual anxiety. As a child, I was severely punished for going to the corner convenience store alone, and educated with Bible and religious stories about the unrepentant wickedness of the godless world. It’s a wonder I ever learned to go anywhere alone or try anything new. Peril, peril, peril was everywhere; Satan and his demons were hiding in the shrubbery. (Even today my mother is constantly forwarding those viral email alerts about home burglaries and identity thefts and people breaking into your car.)
Ironically, parental overprotectiveness couldn’t prevent me from being molested by a sixteen-year-old neighbor when I was eight. He didn’t do much of anything to me — he mainly wanted me to do something to him — but I never told my parents. For one thing, I didn’t even understand what had just happened, and for another, I didn’t have the language to describe it, thanks to their outstanding sex-ed program. (Parents take note: ignorance does not preserve innocence.)
I have to remind myself how afraid she is, when I get so angry with her…and when I find myself dominated by mostly imagined terrors myself. She seeks to control me when things feel out of control for her. I don’t want to continue that legacy.
**
But I promised we’d come back to the subject of sex, and here we are.
One morning at my grandmother’s house, having stayed overnight on the way to what would be my freshman orientation at my “secular” college (where I’d be on my own), my mother and I were seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. During a lull in the conversation, my mother gazed at me with that solemn, prissy expression that took over the shape of her mouth on those rare occasions she felt compelled to speak about “private” matters, and said, apropos of nothing,“You know, no man will ever satisfy you.”
I just stared, then shrugged, quietly and utterly mortified. What she meant to imply, I’m sure, was that no mere human being could ever fulfill me the way Jesus — if I would just let him — could fulfill my petulant agnostic ass. But her pronouncement had the gravity of a malevolent old wives’ spell. (Later, I would mention this ominous utterance to my more sophisticated and thoroughly atheist best friend from high school, and she would burst out laughing and say, “That doesn’t speak very well of your dad, does it?!!”)
I had no idea then of the difficulties that awaited me. If I had, I would have concluded that I had definitely been cursed. What a damning statement for a mother to make to her sexually emerging daughter! I know it’s superstition to blame those words, and not genetics, for an appallingly (still) misunderstood condition I share with Alfred Kinsey’s wife (one which set him on the path of sex research almost ninety years ago), but a part of me still believes that she and her petty, jealous God were determined to ruin my secular, non-marital sex life. This was meddling of the highest order; even my meddling mother had outdone herself.
The question you probably have reading this is: if it’s genetics, did she suffer from the same painful condition? All I can answer is: it’s likely, although it’s unlikely I’ll ever ask her. (I’ll take a root canal over that conversation any day, thank you very much.) Childbirth could have forced a resolution, but I can’t imagine my mother discussing the problem with anyone, including her doctor (who wouldn’t have understood it anyway). The women in my family are martyrs, gritters of teeth, towel-biters. My ancestors, as the old joke goes, walked ten miles to school in knee-deep snow, and it was uphill both ways.
So her doomsaying may have been based in her own unhappy experience. (It was certainly clear growing up that my parents didn’t have an even remotely passionate relationship). All along, however, that same shred of me that maintains a shred of belief in her angry God felt as if this were some kind of punishment — or perhaps a not-quite-perfect answer to her overbearing prayers to preserve my premarital purity. Eventually I figured out what was wrong (one positive about the advent of the Internet) and how to overcome it without the help of the paleolithic medical establishment…but my pet myth will forever be Anderson’s fairy tale of the little mermaid who, in exchange for legs — and by extension everything between them, with which to love her human beloved — has to endure the sensation of walking on knives for the rest of her physical life. (I wonder if I will ever truly feel like a Real Live Girl, to steal from another children’s story, and not just a duct-taped broken doll cheating her way to legitimacy. A cruel joke on someone practically born chasing after boys — like the clubfooted girl who wants only to be a ballerina. Why would a man like Sonny want a broken doll when he could have his pick of Real Live Girls?) This irrational sense of divine persecution still adds to my self-destructive despair during my more suicidal moments.
I would come back for visits during college and find pamphlets like “The Hound of Heaven” on my nightstand, the message of which was that God would hunt you down, like a tireless bloodhound, no matter what you did. The narrow, exclusive, punitive God she believed in, that is. You could run, but you could never escape.
My invasive, fearful, controlling parent wanted nothing so much as for me to believe in her invasive, fearsome, controlling deity…with Whose help she would seem to have successfully sabotaged my budding sexuality. Is it any wonder my shaky twenty-three-year-old self had to get as far away from her as possible? I broke and ran. The Good Daughter sacrificed relationship for the sake of self-preservation.
Unfortunately, I had internalized them both.
**
“And every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end,” Andy moans, his voice cracking with despair. My fear isn’t of dating my mother, it’s of becoming her. I have a horror of driving away the hapless objects of my affections with that same hungry, devouring, engulfing energy, that fearfulness that becomes controlling, the I-love-you that becomes I-annihilate-you. Psychologically speaking, coming from where I come from, I honestly don’t understand how any man could want to have sexual relations with a woman. How could she not remind him of the terrible Mother-Destroyer who could swallow him up forever in her ravenous maw? (Perhaps you gentlemen can enlighten me.)
I wonder sometimes, too, if my exercises in supernatural communication and “manifestation” aren’t as unwelcome, unfair, and controlling a psychic invasion as my mother’s fervent prayers and intentions for her Prodigal child’s return. Or as unnerving as when she tells me she had a sense that I was crying, shortly after one of my dark nights of the soul. I shudder; it’s like having her reading my notebooks again. Even on the spiritual plane, it seems I can’t escape her omnipresent tentacles.
I realize, in my more lucid moments, that she’s simply driven by a natural desire for love and connection, gone dysfunctional and somewhat mad with unaddressed need. And perhaps the unique position of mother as germinator and source instills a built-in sense of ownership and entitlement: I made you, therefore you are mine. Her God, after all, created us to alleviate his own boredom.
But I once joked with a friend that my romantic tendency is to respond to a snowball with an avalanche, overwhelming constitutionally wary males of the species with a glut of sudden emotion. I become fearful; I obsess; I’m jealous. Not unlike my mother and her humanly insecure God. I have my own stalker tendencies, and have been known to Google like a private investigator. I’m not proud of this. It’s constant work, unpacking my own fears, owning my own projections, asking myself why I need to live through someone else. As I said, I understand that we seek to control others when things feel frighteningly out of control for us, and I don’t want to continue that legacy.
But I have no road map for the alternative. I wonder these days if I err too much on the side of caution, reining myself in when I should act. Then again, perhaps action would be just another symptom of my twisted Mother pathology…pursuing at all costs, when the other just wants to be let be. I sincerely don’t know.
What I do know is that the person I most want to hear from doesn’t communicate with me on Facebook (or elsewhere) anymore, while my mother has practically hijacked my homepage. It’s like a virtual drama by a millennial Jean-Paul Sartre, a No Exit of social networking. Hell as your worst online nightmare.
Having written this post to exorcise intolerable feelings and restore my own sanity, I can see the humor in it. It’s actually quite hilarious. As is that insane Police song. A recent visitor to this blog was convinced I was writing a tragicomic novel…and maybe that’s what my life is. My very own Confederacy of Dunces. Or maybe a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.
I open the floor to you, friends: what should I call it? Mamma Mia is taken.
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