Lonely Girl

A black and white photo of my mother at 6 or 7 sits on my dresser. She is looking off into the distance, hugging her skirt around her thin legs, alone on the back porch of her childhood homes. Her expression suggests that she is unaware of the photographer; she looks small and vulnerable and, most of all, lonely. She seems so unlike the mother I know that it’s hard for me to believe they are the same person. But her name and the year (1948), written in my grandmother’s slanted handwriting, proves otherwise. That picture haunts me, and makes me wonder who my mom really is. Is that lonely, vulnerable child still there, and if she is, why can’t I reach her? Why is my relationship with her fraught with unsaid words?

At age four, while helping dry the dinner dishes, I dropped a Pyrex mixing bowl, part of a set given to my mother for her wedding. It is etched in memory: warm sun shining through the open kitchen window, carrying with it smells of damp earth, green things, the irises blooming in the back yard. The soapy dishwater and the feel of the bowl sliding through my outstretched fingers. The explosion of broken glass. Looking up at my mother’s face, where storm clouds and hail are swiftly gathering, as she exhales my full name, realizing that I have done a Bad Thing. And, for years afterwards, the bedrock belief in two things: that my mother hates me, and that she hates me because of that broken bowl.

She had, to my observation, a placid, unremarkable relationship with her own mother, except for one thing: she always called her “Mother.” Not Mama or Mommy or Mom. Always Mother. She is the only one of her siblings to do this; the others called her “Mama.” It’s an oddly formal name, incongruent with the warm, loving woman, quick to hug and always willing to hold a grandchild on her lap, that I knew as my Grandma. She doted on her grandchildren, apparently more than she did her own children. I wonder if it was painful to watch that, to see how different “Mother” was with me, with my brothers.

But the formal title “Mother” goes hand-in-hand with the lonely, vulnerable expression on the face of that little girl in the picture. I wonder to what extent her childhood perhaps mirrored my own, if she felt unseen or unloved in her own home. Did her mother cut her with unexpected comments — “I wish I’d met you before I met your father” — or casually deride her to strangers in conversations designed for her to overhear? Was she allowed to cry, or did she have to retreat to a bathroom, as I did, shedding silent tears into a dish towel held to her mouth, swallowing screams of rage and anguish that pleaded for release?

I don’t want to feel compassion for my mother at any age. It’s so much easier to hate her as the villain in my life. Letting go of that hate is hard; it sometimes feels like a betrayal of my own frightened, hurting inner child. That child, I tell myself, needs my love and care far more than I need to understand my mother’s mind. But the questions persist.

I do not believe forgiveness is a requirement for healing. But empathy is another thing altogether. Empathy — the act of putting oneself into the shoes of another, of seeing the world through their eyes — is the threshold to the only forgiveness that is required: forgiving ourselves. So I look at the picture, and I try to imagine the kind of life that would create such loneliness. I try to find compassion for the lonely girl my mother once was. “Why couldn’t you love me,” I ask the girl in that picture; in the silence, I hear her small child’s voice reply, “I didn’t know how.”

I want to see my mother whole, to learn who she is today by understanding who she was as a child. But my heart resists, wrapping itself around the familiar pulse of rage that has defined almost the entire length of our relationship. This is, I think, the impact of generational abuse. Children who feel unloved are ill-equipped to love to their own children. Children forced to keep secrets raise children who also keep secrets. Neglect and abuse thrive in such at atmosphere, and the patterns of anger and neglect and self-hatred repeat themselves, generation after generation, creating a dynasty predicated on isolation and silence and, yes, loneliness.

My only connection to my mother’s childhood is through her, and she remains in many ways a locked box. But I understand from my years in therapy how hard true self-awareness is, and the sheer willpower necessary to confront the demons of the past and try to break a new path. I know this for another reason as well: from my determination to break the pattern of generational abuse. To love my children with my entire being; to love them, hold them, protect them at any cost. And although I haven’t been able to shield them entirely from trauma (so much of it inflicted unknowingly by me), I have succeeded in one small way. No child of mine will spend decades on some therapist’s couch, crying because their mother didn’t love them.

My mother hasn’t changed. She is still that lonely girl, hugging her knees and staring off into the distance, waiting, perhaps, for rescue that never came. I cannot save her. I can only tend my own heart, breathe love and life into my own inner child, and work to stop the cycle. My family needs me here, looking forward, not back to a past beyond change or redemption. But I will keep that picture in its place on my dresser. I may never understand my mother, but she is not my destiny.