S E E S A W By Mary Eason Dobbs A cousin asked everyone to leave the room so that I could be alone for a few moments with my mother. It was time to put to rest all the hatred, self-pity, and frustrated attempts at loving each other that had gone on all my life. Memories rushed through my head as I knelt alone in her funeral parlor. The bitterness of never having the warmth of a loving relationship, the anguish, we shared over my brothers death. She attacked my father endlessly, and I always regarded him as just short of a saint. Then there was growing up in a home filled with her outbursts that often resulted in my being lashed with a leather belt or hickory switch, of having to wear pants under my dress to school to cover the red welts on my legs. I was always afraid to bring a friend home from school because I never knew if my mother would scream and go into a temper tantrum over the simple clutter of child play, or if she would offer us freshly baked cakes and cookies and help us set up our play houses under the grape arbor. My best friend Martha remembers to this day my making up my bed and leaving a wrinkle, just a wrinkle, under the bedspread, and Mother beating me so hard with Daddy=s leather belt that I was shaking long afterward when she (Martha) went home. I was four years old. I could only focus on a way out of that farm community where everybody knew everyone elses business and then some. I only wanted out, away from it all. I was obsessed with going anywhere at least 500 miles away from home, and my mother. This was all I ever thought about, dreamed about, wrote about in my diaries which she would find and burn. I looked enviously at my friends who had normal mothers in whom they could confide. I could never even have a conversation with my mother, let alone get any feedback from her about adolescent issues. And I was not allowed to get sick around her. If you got sick, she was such a hypochondriac that she would get sicker. I was never allowed to get up on the wrong side of the bed, so I dont know if I had mood swings or not growing up. If I happened to feel good, she could quickly dissolve any good vibes with her own selfish feelings. There was no life but her life around which the world revolved, in her opinion. Going home from school every afternoon meant being at her beck and call to do some ridiculous, menial task that she would dream up just because she couldnt stand to see anyone idle. She lived by the covenant, an idle mind is the devils workshop. I remember her calling me to the kitchen when I was doing my homework to get her a pot or pan from the cabinet beneath her, just because she didn=t want to have to bend down and retrieve it B this happened almost every day when she was cooking supper. So my day-to-day strategy would be on finding a place to hide from her--under the baby grand piano curled up with a book, or running an errand to my grandmothers house just down the road, or simply disappearing into the deep woods behind our house where I had built a secret tree house (with my brothers help, of course). The most practical avenue of escape was through my brother, Billy Tom, whom she adored, and who could do no wrong in her eyes. Whatever the situation, he could handle her and she would back off if he were around. And if we both got in trouble together, you can be sure that I was the only one who would get punished. But he left for Auburn University when I was 13, and I had to face the most difficult years of teenage adolescence alone. My father shielded me as best he could so as not to incur my mothers wrath toward both of us. But he was always busy running to the store for his mother, my Mama Dobbs, or out working on the farm, giving her plenty of time alone with me. Mother would never hit me while my father was around, and to this day, I dont believe he ever knew how bad it was. After a beating (paddling is too mild a word), I could be found crying hysterically by the back door of the house, eyes focused on the dirt road my father would be driving back on. When he turned into the driveway, I would run to meet him and show him the huge red welts from my mother laying in on me. The memory of the Sunday afternoon when I was a sophomore in high school still stands out in my mind. After a particularly violent argument in which she had lit into me while Daddy was still at church, I was pleading with them to get a divorce (practically unheard of in the early 60s in rural Alabama), so that I could go and live in peace with him while I finished high school. It went on all afternoon, with her exercising her particular brand of cruelty toward him. Oh, she could be so mean to both of us when she wanted to. I remember throwing her picture at the mirror in my bedroom, cracking the mirror, and I had to take the replacement cost out of my savings that I had stashed away from baby-sitting for the town doctor twice a week. Every daydream, every hope, started with the day that I could get away from her house, could go as far as possible from her volatile temper and terrifying assaults that would in another time and another place be called child abuse. To complicate the situation, I had suddenly blossomed from a bookish kid who wore glasses into quite an attractive young lady, thanks to contact lenses that my father insisted on buying for me when I was 15. But I never, of course, had my mothers support or assistance. She wouldnt even attend the high school and collegiate beauty pageants. Again, I envied the other girls whose mothers were their cheerleaders, always backstage helping to primp their daughters and always instructing them to smile and pirouette at the judges table, especially when I was in college and my brother would drive down and pick me up to enter various pageants. When I would go home with the rhinestone tiara or winning trophy, I always had to wake her up to tell her that Id won. She would at best be conciliatory when I won various beauty contests like Miss Sand Mountain or Miss Potato Queen.I perennially became the alternate or first runner-up in regional beauty contests, where scholarship money was at stake. As I heard Diane Sawyer say years later, I always won, placed, or showed as in a horse race. Mother was always jealous of me because I had the opportunities that she never had when she was growing up. Yet she worked hard teaching fourth grade to provide them. It was the classic mother-daughter conflict, only taken to new heights by her manic-depressive temperament. When I asked my mother for a new evening gown for pageant competition, all hell would break loose. Occasionally, she would force me to make my own gown (she at least taught me how to sew) and to buy my own three-quarter length white pageant gloves and dyed-to-match satin shoes. It seemed to me that she just pretended not to care, masking her resentment over the opportunities that she had worked so hard to give me. It was one of the many conflicts that I could understand only in retrospect. It was not until three years after she died that I learned that I had inherited the same mental illness that she had exhibited all her life. I had literally never heard of manic-depression until I was diagnosed with it in the early 80s while living in Chicago. Only then did I begin to understand her radical mood swings, most likely brought on by her riches to rags life story, according to family legend. Born to relative wealth on the southern end of Lookout Mountain, she was the youngest of 23 children (two sets of 18 and five) sired by a hard-living, whiskey-drinking land owner who by all accounts was manic-depressive. He died in 1915, when my mother was five years old. His chests of gold coins were quickly raided by his older sons, leaving my grandmother penniless. Mothers lifelong feelings of insecurity were firmly entrenched from that day forward, going from the security that money affords to not knowing where the next meal or pair of shoes would come from. Her father had given each of his older children a 40-acre farm and a pair of mules or oxen, or a house in the nearby town of Collinsville. But she grew up with nothing, nada. Now I was just beginning to understand her and maybe even love her, but it was too late, I thought as tears streamed down my face, streaking my make-up and creating wet splotches on the white crocheted dress that she had bought for me to wear to her funeral. So much was going through my head that day in early September, the day of her funeral. Fresh in my mind were the arguments with my aunts that morning over such menial things as the funeral procession and wearing white, rather than black, to her funeral. Then there was all the guilt of never being the obedient daughter following in her footsteps; not taking opportunities to marry and live closer to home, and not having the grandchildren she always craved. I did not follow her footsteps and become a teacher like all my friends (it was, after all, a family tradition). I used to whisper to Daddy that if he saw me acting like her, would he please tell me so I could stop? Youll Miss Me When I=m Dead and Gone with the Wind Thats what she always would say, and I really do miss certain things about my mother. For one thing, she had excellent taste in her home and in her clothing, which I inherited. And things would have been different had she lived beyond the relatively young age of 67 (I am now 67 while editing this, and I feel like so much of my life is ahead of me). For one thing, I would have never moved to Chicago or Washington, as I felt somewhat responsible for my parents,.even though I was 800 miles away. But she knew Fort Lauderdale and felt comfortable there. I used to contemplate having full responsibility for her should my father pass away first. And the thought of having her live in my guest house was not pleasant. I would be at the mercy of her mood swings, and it was like regressive therapy, as I had no interest in going backwards in life. But she would be proud of the homes I have lived in, always good addresses in the best parts of town. She had a hard time accepting my joining the Episcopal church, but a cousin explained to her that it was just the Baptists gone to town. I learned to cook to her standards, although I added a gourmet flair to entertaining. And my style of decorating my homes had to come from her. She let me pick out our new living room furniture when I was 11 years old, and I spent hours looking at Aunt Gracec collection of current home magazines. I was always dreaming of becoming an interior decorator, but my father discouraged that idea because he thought only children of the wealthy could grow up to be interior designers and stockbrokers. I was lucky that he was all for my becoming a journalist, as every one of my classmates who went on to college became a teacher. I think, in retrospect, that my parents= marriage kept me from marrying and having children. At least when I was diagnosed manic-depressive in 1982 when living in Chicago (that was before the term bipolar disorder was invented), I knew that I did not want to have children who would most likely carry this genetic predisposition. After all, it had run in three generations and a fourth would have been expected. She also brought me up to be independent, and I owe her for not marrying the first boy that came along who could provide for me. Independence was my mantra for life, and it was probably the reason I never married, in that I always thought I could provide for myself. My parents conflict-filled marriage also set no example for me. I never thought my brother would marry either, but he came back home instead of pursuing other ambitions. We discussed our parents marriage all the time, and I hated any thought of conflict or arguing all my life due to my fear of turning out just like her. Im sure that my taste for designer clothes also came from her, as she taught me to only buy things that were extremely well made. She also taught me that it was better to have one finely made dress than it was to have several cheaply made items. And shoes! I definitely inherited her taste for fine footwear, as she never shopped for shoes at the inexpensive stores but always at Rutenbergs Guarantee shoe store in Gadsden, known for its fine quality shoes. I used to say that my only regret about my chosen profession of public relations was that my mother never knew what I did for a living. Approximately 2,000 words
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 23:46:29 +0000
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