A mother's hands

My mother does not have healing hands.

Watching my mother interact with my daughter is giving me a very strange and frank glimpse into my own childhood. It makes me uncomfortable, and yet, I can't stop watching and evaluating and remembering.

I grew up with a persistent need to have every object in its place, and have often been taunted by friends for being a clean freak. However, as a single mother with minimal free time, I sometimes can only get to cleaning every two weeks or so, and it doesn't really bother me as it used to. My focus has shifted to the smile on my daughter's face as my top priority, and all else falls by the wayside. Walking into my parents' oceanview apartment, I realize that my mother has trained my daughter to keep all of her toys together, and to grow accustomed to the bedroom doors remaining closed. My mother will often retreat to her own bedroom to read or call friends, and my father will sit and watch Sesame Street with the Kid.

I now remember my own parents' bedroom door constantly shut, and all of my toys being limited to my bedroom. I remember my mother's hissy fits upon finding toys in the living room. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and calling out for my dad, because calling out for my mom never resulted in her waking up.

As a grandmother, and mother of a single mother, my mother is fantastic. She takes the Kid when she's too sick to go to school and I'm too sick to do anything but sleep, and then she makes soup for everyone. She reads and sings to my daughter. She falls in love with toddler clothes and brings them home. She gets up early to take the Kid so I can still get to work on time. But I've never had the urge to go home to my mom and lay my head in her lap and cry over a crappy boyfriend. If I've ever needed a cool hand on my forehead in the middle of a fever, hers would be the last hand I expected. In fact, as a kid, when I was home sick from school on the sofa, she resented the intrusion and yelled at me to go lay in my own bed. Everything in its place.

I'm not the greatest mother in the world, but I am different. At 35, I now wonder what her childhood was like, and if she felt like her own mother kept her at an arm's distance. She has estranged herself from her sisters (no big loss there), and just last week, admitted to me that she just doesn't like people. At least she's finally being honest. I spent my childhood explaining to my friends before bringing them home that she would probably be incredibly nice to them, but not too be fooled, as she was out of her mind. She would be warm and welcoming when meeting new friends. People looked at me with a raised eyebrow and wondered why I had an intricate defense system, complete with sarcasm and a razor-sharp tongue. Eventually, they would finally have an opportunity to watch her snap, and then I would get invited to go and live at their house indefinitely.

One childhood friend whose mother beat the crap out of her once told me that she preferred her own mother over mine, because at least her mother was consistent.

With limited financial resources and very little time to take care of myself, I wonder how much of this I am passing on to the Kid. My mother always tried to be nice. She always worked very hard to do the right thing and be gracious and warm, but eventually, something would get to her and her head would start rotating on its axis and a flaming pitchfork would appear in her fist. It was the inconsistency that made me nuts, because you never knew what kind of mood she was going to be in. I spent years tiptoeing around her and trying to maintain the serenity of her environment. Then I turned 15 and found scary boyfriends and started crawling out the bedroom window and screaming back when provoked, and it's taken another 10 years to flush that all out of my system.

I want to have healing hands.

I want my daughter to want to do nothing else but come home when the world kicks her in the butt. I want her to feel safe, and loved, and know that I would lay down on railroad tracks for her. I want to be all the good things my mother has shown me, in addition to all of the good things I feel are inside me.

This really is the hardest job.