Forgiving Myself for the Way I Treated My Mom

My mother Joanie was kinder and funnier than any other mom I knew, and I was inordinately proud of her. Unlike my friends’ tidy homes and family dinners, our house was always a pigsty, and our meals were served, stone cold or burned, in front of the TV. I had my own (true) variation on the “dog ate my homework” excuse: “my mom threw my homework away.” Mom and Dad were chain smokers; while we had no other household chores, my sisters and I did have to empty the brimming ashtrays in the mornings (after the ashes had cooled).

Life at home was utter chaos, but we didn’t care. We wouldn’t have traded our mother for all the dusting, vacuuming, put-together moms in the world. They couldn’t tell hilarious stories like Joanie, nor could they sit and listen to our school and relationship dramas with such rapt attention.

Soon after my marriage at age 20, my husband Steve and I moved 1000 miles away to Philadelphia, and had our five children in 10 years. I learned to love having a clean house, and nightly meals at the dining room table. From a distance, I treasured long Saturday morning phone calls with Mom, who always had plenty of time to chat, and an endless desire to hear more about her precious grandkids.

But then Dad died, and Mom (who had never learned to drive) moved from Atlanta to be near me, Steve and the children. I was in the middle of a rocky menopause, and struggling to maintain a peaceful, orderly life. Mom’s arrival upended all my efforts. It was as if I had a sixth child, who needed rides everywhere, who sat for hours, spilling her tea, scattering coffeecake crumbs, and talk-talk-talking. Now that we were living together again, her habits were making me crazy.

Actually, it was the arrival of my bipolar disorder at age 49 that tipped me over. My moods cycled rapidly between mania and depression, but I didn’t know I was sick, and so I blamed my mother. I couldn’t control my impatience, and was annoyed by absolutely everything she said and did. I snarled at her for dawdling in the supermarket, for wasting time on pleasantries with a neighbor. I shrugged off her hugs, and regularly launched obscene rants in her direction.

When Mom’s memory failed rapidly after her dementia diagnosis, I didn’t have an ounce of compassion. For months, I was stuck in mania mode, totally self-absorbed, going on wild spending sprees that wrecked our household budget. When I interacted with Mom at all, I delighted in pointing out that she was repeating herself yet again. Mom was bewildered, hurt, and unable to understand that something was seriously wrong with me. Shortly before I finally saw a psychiatrist and began treatment, Joanie died.

Since then, guilt has consumed me whenever I let myself recall that last year of Mom’s life, that first year of my disease. They were open wounds that never healed, because there had been no moment of comprehension on her part, or tenderness on mine. It was, forever, too late. I wrote a lot about the fracturing of our relationship, but my essay drafts were all failures.

One morning, two decades after Mom’s death, I was complaining to my husband that my attempts to write about that terrible year were still falling flat.

“That’s because you aren’t writing the truth,” Steve said. Steve, who’d been there for everything. “You were not in control of yourself, and neither was she. You were lashing out, but your mom’s chaos was really a trigger. Can you understand that no one was to blame? If you can accept that, maybe that’s your story.”

His words reached me, because I was finally ready to hear them, ready for a reset. My mother and I were no villains, just two people with mental illnesses, doing their best. The end of our lives together did not erase my love for her. I now believe she died knowing that.

That week, thanks to my husband, I wrote the real story. The story you’re reading.