Saturday I went up to grandma’s house to deal with the stuff they set aside for me to sort through. My mom was sick at her house, so it was just me, Uncle Chris, and grandma. Can I just say that when this man says he’s going to clean something he cleans the motherfuck out of it? My childhood bedroom and the room next to it, which was an office when I was a kid, but which was my moms bedroom when Chris and her were young was completely gutted. I’d never seen the bare walls or floor in my entire life. My first impression is how the furniture had actually made the rooms seem larger than they were. Without anything in them, I realized that the bedroom I grew up in is only about 10 feet deep by 8 feet wide. I also saw, for the first time, drawings my mom had put on her walls as a child, drawings that had been covered up with a wall full of other artwork. I wish I thought to get a picture. The plaster is crumbling off the walls, and will probably come down in the near future. But it made me think of my own high school bedroom, where I’d drawn and written on the walls with chalk in a very similar style. There was even a “FUCK YOU” that I was staring at for some time, trying to remember when I’d written it, since it looked exactly like my own handwriting. I stared at it until Chris said ‘Suzi wrote that’ and I realized that I couldn’t have written it since that hadn’t even been my room. Lately I’ve been struck by how similar my mother and I were in childhood.
There’s a part in the 2005 movie Capote that I find myself using a lot at different points in my life. In talking about his attraction to the murderer he ultimately writes In Cold Blood about, Capote says “it’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front.” Not only did my mom and I literally grow up in the same house, one room apart from each other, I left ‘out the front door’ so to speak by moving in with her when I was 13, and she was kicked out at the same age. There are conflicting stories as to weather she was legally emancipated, or if she just got the boot, but the end result’s the same. Of course, one major difference between the two of us in that context is that 13 year old me was addicted to cigarettes. For her it was heroine.
To a certain extent, I think that’s a genetic lottery. My depression has always been situational, not chemical. When left to my own devices, I’m rarely depressed, confused or unmotivated. It’s only when conditions are bad/abusive that I’ve ever been truly depressed. I mean, yeah, I experience depressive episodes from time to time, but they pass quickly and I really think if I didn’t have the childhood I had, they wouldn’t exist. In contrast, my mom has always claimed that her depression is endemic to her personality, that she would have suffered even if she’s been born into a functional family. She says that she has always felt wrong, from a very young age. Whereas I have always felt right. A lot of my frustration and acting out came from knowing I was right, that my family was wrong, and being filled with rage at my impotence in that situation.
So is the difference between myself and my mother merely chemical? If I had been born with the addict gene, with mental illness, would my experience have been different? Would people have been reluctant to help me, to teach me, be generous to me in the ways that they have been my whole life? Would I have been immune to their care even when it was offered?
When I was 14, after a couple nights of drinking grandma’s vodka, and a couple unproductive chemical experiments, I decided that I was done with drugs and alcohol and I didn’t have another drink until I was 22. It wasn’t hard. I just did other stuff. If I had not been able to make that choice, how would my life be different? There’s no way to know. Trying to figure it out might drive a man insane. But I can’t help but see the similarities between me and this woman who I’ve loved, and hated, and felt so much confusion and pain over.
I’m moving into a phase of my life where I’m thinking (in the most abstract sense, so no one get excited) about my own plans for motherhood. There’s a lot of things I know will be done differently for my children. But there are also a lot of ways that we’re still very similar women, and it would behoove me to look at that objectively because trying to ignore it won’t do anybody any good.
By me, age 4. With letter form help from a preschool teacher.