What I Did for Love, by Gillian

My mother and I had a strange relationship. (Boy, how many of us could start our autobiographies with those exact same words, I wonder!) It's not that it was not a loving relationship. It was. But it was strangely inverted: inside out and upside down. I, the child, was the protector, the defender; my mother the one who needed care and protection from the rigors of reality. I intuited, at a very early age, as little children often just feel things, that Mum was filled inside with an aching sadness. It was, of course, my job to fix it, or at very least to provide a counterbalance.

The first time I remember this inversion of roles, was with reading. Of course when I was very little my mother used to read to me, but as soon as I began to learn to read myself, she had me read to her. Nothing so odd there, I was simply demonstrating my reading skills. The strange thing was, that pattern remained, really, for the rest of her life. Before I started my homework I would sit beside her and read the next installment of the latest novel. When I visited from college or from my U.S. home, she always wanted me to make time each day to read to her. Late in her life, in the nursing home, I would read to her until she fell asleep. I have often thought how much she would have loved recorded books, had they been around in her day, but actually I'm not too sure about that. I suspect it was more about the reader being me, so close there beside her.

The other way I was always called upon to entertain Mum was playing cards and board games.  She loved any and all of them, and was as excited as a little kid when she won. The result was that I consented to play games that I felt I had long outgrown when I would have much preferred other activities, but this was my job. It was my purpose in life. As time went by, I found myself letting her win. Now, parents sometimes might encourage a child, perhaps, by losing on purpose occasionally, but I have never heard any child admit to faking a win for an adult.

My father would have no truck with games or reading aloud, but in other ways he silently validated this subliminal need of mine to cheer my mother, to keep her happy, to protect her.  I learned very early on that when he winked at me, in a way I so loved, it meant that we were now to collude in some fakery or falsehood so as not to hurt her. Mum's culinary and needlework skills were, shall we say, not well developed. Of course, it's also fair to say that she was severely handicapped by strict postwar rationing, but I couldn't help but notice that other women managed many and various creations with much greater success.  None of this was ever alluded to. After every meal, no matter how insipid or just plain burned, Dad would sit back in his chair, pat his tummy affectionately, wink wickedly at me, and say with great gusto, 'By 'eck but that was grrrand!' or words to that effect.  

I invariably tried to emulate his praise, but rarely managed the right degree of enthusiasm.  I wore, without complaint, strange unidentifiable garments which were too big here and too tight there, and sometimes had wildly undulating hemlines. My dad suffered more from Mum's attempts at knitting. One of my fondest memories is of him donning a newly-knitted wool hat.  

It was too small, and the harder he tried to pull it down to cover his shiny bald head, the more determinedly it sprang back to sit way too high above his ears where it perched jauntily at a dangerous angle. It came to a weird point at the top and gave my big, solid, father something of a look of a drunken elf. The anticipated wink made my urge to giggle almost uncontrollable.  'By 'eck,' he said, struggling to keep it from popping off the top of his head, 'That'll be grrrand!'

When, in my high school years, my aunt told me that my parents had had two children before me, both of whom had died of meningitis at the ages of two and four, my psyche blazed with newfound light. So it was all real. Mom really did have a huge sadness inside her. All the time I knew it, but didn't know it: didn't know it was real, didn't know why. The knowledge changed nothing of our dynamic, it was much too deeply ingrained. But it did make me feel less crazy, more in control. I was making conscious choices, rather than everything I did being driven at some subconscious level.

I could tell endless tales of ways in which I mothered my mother, but you get the drift. But what effect did that topsy-turvy relationship have on me at such a vital stage of character development? Much of my life has been spent un-learning a lot of what I learned as a child.

I found out quite rapidly that my desire to fix others' problems was one which must be denied. In the big outside world, attempts to do so result in resentment and are doomed to fail. We can each only fix our own problems, not each other's.

My competitive spirit, if I ever had such a thing, was still-born. I simply am incapable of feeling that will to win which practically everyone else seems to share. So it still feels unfair to me, to win at all, ever, when I am perfectly happy losing and no-one else is. But I learned, quite early, that losing on purpose is not appreciated. I got caught cheating to lose in a card game by two college friends, one of whom I was madly in love with at the time. Ever after that game, I would catch her looking intently at me sometimes with a puzzled expression, and our friendship - which was all it was - was never the same again. Or maybe I just imagined it. But it cured me of the losing habit, though not of the instinct to do it.

On the positive side, I learned to appreciate something done for me or given to me for the effort made, and the love that drove it, rather than the end result. The first gift my youngest step-son gave me was a frighteningly huge bottle of perfume. It obviously came from some low-end dime store. The cloying, sickly-sweet smell it gave off when opened was literally nauseating. But every morning, for what seemed like years, I left for work bearing a big dab of the stuff, only to scrub it off in the car. Just as my dad, leaving the house in his ill-fitting elfin hat, doubtless stuffed it in his pocket immediately he rounded the corner.

I am forced to wonder, looking back on my childhood, if I actually got it all wrong. Did I, by meeting Mum's every need as far as I was able, in fact prolong her suffering? Had I refused to play the mothering role, would she have been forced to be the mother, and I allowed to be the child? But I was just a child, with no more than instinct to guide me, and whether I got it right or wrong or some mixture of both, I suffered too. I knew my mother loved me, but there was something not quite right there. I felt it deep down in my young soul. I so longed for a pure, unsullied, mother-love, which was never to be. I still yearn for it, even as I know it can never be.

But, if I have learned only one good lesson from my battered inner child, it is not to judge. And especially not the judge a past which I can do nothing to change. If I got it all wrong, and maybe my dad did too, we did the wrong things for the very best of reasons.

We did it all for love.

© 18 Nov 2015  

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.