I’m going to try to keep this one short and tight. Today it’s snowing in New York City, I am headed to a new somatic therapist in a few hours who takes my insurance (WOW) I have 19$ in my bank account, and my three credit cards are maxed out. I share this because talking about money or the lack of it is good for all of us, and because today I’m not super stressed about the 19 bucks. I have some extra jobs coming my way, and I am housed, fed, and warm. Not small things in America. But of course, if you like to give me money, I will always be very happy about it. My friend Amy and I were recently chatting about how wonderful it is when you get a paying subscriber and you’re hustling. Like it’s the best feeling! 60 bucks! Bam! I wrote a thing and the next day I get some money. I love positive reinforcement. Substack takes $10, but hey the Nazis are off the site right?
As an undergraduate, living in the metropolis of Binghamton, New York (honestly, coming from Jamestown, Binghamton was my first city), my friends and I spent hours shopping at the Salvation Army and in the used furniture and junk stores along Clinton Street. At one of those places, I bought a cheap yellow wooden dresser with five drawers. It had been in a kid’s room and was light enough for me to carry on my own. Once I got it back to our apartment and started to load it up with my underwear, socks, bras, t-shirts, and sweaters, I found scrawled in black ball-point pen ink, “I hate mommy.” The writing was jagged and less than an inch high, hidden along the back slat of the dresser, where a mommy who might be putting away clothes couldn’t see it.
“Look what I found!” I likely called out to my roommates and besties, Chandra and Joel.
We marveled at it for a few seconds and went back to whatever it was we were all doing with all of our bedroom doors opening up into the living room. We only closed our doors if one of us was having sex or wanted privacy on the phone. I loved communal living in Binghamton. Sure we had our drama and fights, but at any given moment we were watching MTV, smoking a bowl, working on a painting or sketch (Chandra), posing for a painting or a sketch (me), reading, cooking, listening to music, dancing, doing homework, eating, lounging, trying on outfits, doing make up, or talking on the phone.
I kept that dresser well into my thirties, painting in black at some point early in my marriage. Every time I moved (which was a lot), I marvelled at the simple, angry unpunctuated “I hate mommy.” I wondered about the kid who had written it, and what had prompted the moment of scrawl. The feeling and the knowledge that it couldn’t be spoken, only written in a secret place. The dresser. The place where mommy puts the clothes that keep you warm. If you have a tidy mommy, the clothes are folded and carefully organized. If your mommy is not tidy or too busy to be tidy or depressed or all manner of other mommy possibilities, maybe the drawer is a mess. Maybe your mommy punished you for not keeping your drawer neat. Maybe mommy spanked you. Maybe daddy did.
I hate mommy. Something you feel, but are not supposed to say. Transgressive. Pure id. The truth in that white hot moment. The truth maybe all of the time.
I love writing. I used to love secrets. Now I hate secrets and wish to tell the few remaining ones I am supposed to keep. I won’t. Not yet. This dresser with this particular inscription found me. It stayed with me when I became a mommy, like a warning, like message in a bottle, like tortured graffitti from the land of the nursery. Who was that brave little kid? Did they say it out loud too? Did they shout it to her face? Were they punished for it?
I hope they’re okay.
Maybe I loved it because I could not say it. I was raised to love my mother unconditionally. My mother was my protector. She’d come from nothing and had a really cool, challenging job, that hardly any women had at the time. She was married to my dad, who she, my brother, and I decided was the true villain of our existence. He was, but it was easy to cast him in that role. He beat us, he yelled, and he was outrageously unreasonable many times a week. Mommy didn’t hit us. Mommy took care of us. Mommy made daddy stop hitting us. Mostly. Mommy ignored my brother hitting me, but that was normal wasn’t it? Siblings hurt each other didn’t they?
I did call my mother, “Mommy,” especially when I needed her. My mother called her mother, “Mother!” often in exasperated tones. My kid calls me “Mama,” which I prefer, and sometimes lately “Mom,” which I have to accept because I don’t want to be a (s)mother.
For most of my teenage and adult life, I was my mother’s best friend. For most of my twenties, I was my mother’s therapist too. My mother confided in me, told me things that no kid needs to know about her parents’ marriage, about her childhood, about dating, about well, pretty much everything. I thought it was really cool that we were best friends and that we talked on the phone every day well into my thirties. My mother wanted me to move home. My mother wanted me to raise my kid near her. My mother wanted me for…
I’m not sure my mother every forgave me when I said I didn’t want to talk on the phone every day. I’d been in therapy, and I was starting to see some unhealthy patterns in my life. I didn’t trust myself. I had constant anxiety. I couldn’t bear to upset my mother. It made me sometimes physically sick. I don’t know exactly when I made that break, maybe when I was a new mother myself, and completely overwhelmed. Maybe around the age of 35 or 36.
It was the beginning of a gradual drift, a reset maybe. Now I’m 51, and my mother has stopped speaking to me. She’s blocked me on her phone and all social media. We’ve taken breaks before, always initiated by me, but this is different. She’s adament. She’s done. She can’t stand conflict. She won’t abide difficult children. She will not say sorry because she doesn’t believe she has ever done anything wrong. She saved my life once, didn’t she?
I could list all the things my mother tells me about me, all of my faults and wrong doings, but I think it would bore your, or maybe its boring to me because I’ve heard it for most of my life. I’ve got to save some stuff for my memoir don’t I?
There’s a book’s worth of stories to get us from 36 to 51. All of the shit that has come out. Woah. It’s astounding to even me. I’ve put the detail of the dresser’s writing into my next novel, but I haven’t really tackled this motherlode of content. Not with any kind of recent reckoning.
What I can tell you is that lately I’ve been thinking of that dresser and the kid who wrote that brave little sentence. I’ve started to allow myself to walk around and think, “I hate my mother.” I’m letting this little girl in me breathe and speak. She’s really pissed off. The adult daughter in me too I guess, though she’s of course more rational, and understands why her mother does the things that she does. She can say, “I love my mom, and I know she did the best that she could.”
Over the holidays—always a difficult and lonely time for so many of us who come from dysfunctional families—I let myself wallow in that dresser drawer. I imagined I was the kid who wrote, “I hate mommy.” I allowed hate to pulse through my veins and heart. It was a pure and ugly anger, an internal temper tantrum, a wail from the crib where my colic, according to family lore, made everyone around me lose their minds.
My friends Jason and Elke, therapists who have trained in what’s called Full Permission Living, would say I need to give myself permission to really feel this rage in my body. I need to hit pillows and scream, and get it all out. I need to roll on rollers and kick and flail around in a supported environment. They’re right. I’m getting there slowly, and writing about it is one step closer to giving myself full(er) permission.
I was not a good wife. I’m definitely not a good daughter. I think I’m a pretty great mom, but ultimately that will be for my daughter to say. I’m a great friend, a pretty attentive lover, and a exceptional teacher. I’m a great writer, but that is a sentence that makes me want to squirm and die.
But what does it mean to be good, great, excellent, exceptional? Really?
If I were bad at every last thing, I’d still be worthy of love.
And you would be too.
Enjoy the typos,
Carley
I think an entire generation of mothers lost it a bit. I blame patriarchy, of course, it's easy to do so. But at what level do we start holding people accountable? Sorry... Mother talk is always hard for me but thanks for writing this. It takes a lot to allow oneself to admit their mother is/was shitty. But for me, it was an important step to healing, so there's that.
I am loving all your Subby pieces. This one is so good. I respect and admire - more than I can say - how truthful and messy you allow yourself to be on the page. It gives me something important to aspire to. As always, thank you Carley.