It’s Always About the Mother

Laura Kiesel
7 min readSep 10, 2017

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“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dates all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.”

―Agatha Christie, “The Last Séance”

My mother died seven years ago today, but I did not know until many hours later. We had not spoken or seen each other, since that Christmas night when I visited my family home the last time my family would all be alive. On that night, I discovered she was giving my brother drugs and in the argument that ensued, she tried to punch me in the face and screamed that I should never have been born. In return, I pushed her head first into a wall, the sound a thunder clap. It was the day before my birthday. My grandparents stopped speaking to me after this. I was exiled from my family because I was supposedly the one who brought the chaos in, opening the shades and sternly saying that none of this was normal: a mother giving her son cocaine and heroin. A mother who stole from her children, who hit her children, was not normal.

I remember the first time she started to try to slip me pills. After years of saying she hated me, so young I barely remember a time when such words weren’t on the tip of her tongue. That I was the fault of it all: the divorce with my dad, the later separation from my stepfather, the stress that forced her to heroin to cope. Me with my medical issues and repeated surgeries. Me with my constant eruption of hives. Me with my night terrors — the high pitched screams and drenched sheets. I was so difficult to deal with, so strange. So I said no to the pills. My rejection of drug-bonding with my mother was more like a rebellion, partly done out of sheer spite.

In this society, if not every society, it’s always about the mother. I can’t count how many quotes I’ve read in my life that adulate the mother, gift them as the all-defining relationship in a person’s — especially a daughter’s — life. If that relationship wasn’t really worthy of the pedestal it’s been placed on — what does that say about the daughter? I learned firsthand that to question this convention of the mother-daughter bond was something similar to blasphemy. To voice anger or rage or dislike of my mother, made me something akin to an alien or a subhuman — almost inevitably made me the recipient of criticism or rebuke. “She’s your mother!” people would say, appalled, when I called her a bitch or said I hated her, as though the fact alone that she birthed me was enough to entitle her to any atrocity against me and offer her immunity from any reproach on my part. I became aware my reality was defying something deeply sacred. It only reinforced the shame my mother made me feel with her daily abuse — that there was something wrong with me intrinsically for making this relationship so fraught, and then I couldn’t follow God’s grace and still love her unconditionally enough to make her stop doing drugs, stop screaming at me or hitting me. And now, society was saying I was not entitled to my outrage at how she treated me, so I was left again with the impression: something was wrong with me.

The impact my rearing had on me is that I am an angry person. Because what you might learn growing up in a war zone home is anger can offer a kind of armor that nothing else can’t. Not religion or deep breaths. That all the tears in the world cannot wash away the grief or make someone bent on abusing you stop. If anything, tears embolden or incite, offer a smug satisfaction to the abuser, make the target of the abuser even more of a target. Because you can’t be a Buddha when you have someone literally spitting into your face, calling you a cunt and then splitting your lip. My anger started to scare my mother and she was cowed for the first time. Fighting back has advantages that people only in those circumstances can understand.

I have always envied and harbored a strong dislike for people who believe love can save us all, or that there is something to be gained by turning the other cheek. I wonder how many times — if at all — they’ve really been smacked in face in their lives. I suspect not much, if at all. It’s a kind of luxury I can’t even fathom — to have never been hit.

Now as an adult, social interactions exhaust me quickly, if not outright frustrate me. My life — now as someone low income and disabled — is something that always opens itself up to more of the bullshit platitudes I have been hearing all my life in relation to my family predicament. The pat things people say just to say something. Like, “What does not kill you makes you stronger.” This is false. Many disease, of the body, mind and soul, weaken you over time, kill you by a million paper cuts. Or “you’re not lonely, you have yourself.” Almost always spoken to me by people who have intact families, what seems like sturdy marriages, some whom I know for a fact have never spent a single holiday or birthday completely alone where I have spent more than I care to count. I know what it is to be alone and even am somewhat in love with my solitude. But it has its breaking point, like everything. And anyway, my loneliness is not about my ability to spend an evening or eight in a row alone keeping myself company. It’s the kind of lonely that is a gaping hole in the core of me somewhere where the parental love I always wanted but was always denied should have been. It’s the lonely of someone who has always felt the floor underneath her feet has always been too fragile — who never had a firm foundation and had to be “brave” and “strong” from an age where kids should just be fucking kids.

When my mother died, my then-boyfriend and I were in a fight and he had told me the night before he hated me. The morning of my mother’s death, he texted me about an hour after I received the news he was going away for the weekend. This was my life back then: a boyfriend who was often absent and who spent more weekends in other states pickaxing ice on mountains and winter camping in woods with no cell service. To ask him to stick around a weekend was to suffocate him. That he preferred these desolate and frozen places to our warm couch and my company curdled something inside me. But he snapped to attention in the days after my mother’s death: cooking me expansive feats and cleaning up afterwards and letting me fall into comatose-like naps free of the worry I’d wake up and everything would be gone. But a week after her memorial service, he became impatient with my sulking and neediness to have him around more. When I told him my mother’s death was difficult to cope with, he told me this was bullshit. My mother, after all, was someone I had hated for many years, who I wished would die after years of cancer that had whittled her away to an enraged skeleton.

In fairness to him, my grief surprised me as well. It hit me in a way I didn’t understand. Not the traditional kind, the I-miss-her-so-much way. But my world cracked open into a reality I had never 100% faced before that: that there would be no real closure and no apologies for the hurt she caused me. I grieved not so much my mother, but my entire childhood — what I wanted it to be and wasn’t. I grieved the mother I didn’t have and only saw the potential of having in small glimpses. Condolences cards poured in, mostly from my partner’s family, and the old anger simmered. The things those cards said were not true, about her being a great mother, about me losing my guiding light and mentor. So I knew again I was an alien: the kind of grief I was dealing with was not the kind convention acknowledged or society had place for. Not the kind my partner could really empathize with or even comprehend. There was no niche for it, no neat square I could check off.

And now, years later, I still can’t quite make sense of my feelings. They roil around inside me like some weird restlessness, a craving for something I can’t pinpoint or identify. I stare at old pictures of my mother before I was born. Because I always prefer those, before she was the she I knew, before I ever existed. I try to look for something in her and I don’t even know what it is I want to see. I grieve her now as someone who was so hurt that she could only hurt others. I hurt for her and for myself. I think about the ways my life might have been different. What would I be? Would I be healthier, have more financial security? Would relationships and love be more seamless for me? Would I sleep better than so many nights staring at the alarm clock?

I will never know the answers to these questions. But I know that I’m entitled to this grief, as muddy and ambivalent as it is. I am entitled to my history and all of its nuances. The ways it has both broken me and made me resilient. I know these stories matter, stripped bone-bare of the platitudes and averted eyes that would attempt to blanket and invalidate the truth of it all for the sake of some etiquette or in order to perpetuate myths about our civilizations and its people, to make others comforted and assured that love is something straightforward and sensical when it is neither.

So, for those who get it, thank you. For those who don’t, push yourself to sit with it and understand it better.

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Laura Kiesel
Laura Kiesel

Written by Laura Kiesel

Writer w/bylines in the Atlantic, Guardian, Salon, Vice, Politico, etc., covering feminism, sustainability, health. My Patreon is @ https://bit.ly/2YrfCPA

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