The Clothes My Mother Bought Me When I Was Eight Don't Fit Yet

When my mother bought me clothes, they were over-sized.  When I was a child, she said it was so I could grow into them.  When I was an adolescent, she said the bagginess was slimming.  "I'm not saying you're fat," she sometimes said when I bought my own clothes, "But those clothes make you look fat."  A few times when I came home from high school she showed me baggy, knee-length sweatshirts she had bought for me, enthusiastically explaining how, when she lost just a little more weight, she'd be able to wear them too.  She outweighed me by approximately 100 lbs at the time.

The last time I stayed in my parents' home, I went through some of my old clothes.  I tried on a set of velour sweats I remember my mother buying me when I was eight.  I had been a plump-but-not-technically-overweight child.  I was a healthy-but-not-particularly-skinny adult woman.  I could still pull the waistband of the pants up past my breasts, just as I could when I was eight.  Worn properly, the crotch of the pants hung at my knees, just as it had when I'd worn them to elementary school.  I would never grow into those velour sweats -- or the almost identical set she'd bought in another color -- and that felt encouraging. 

One of the last times I saw my grandmother, she said it was a good thing I'd had so many clothes I didn't wear or else she'd be naked.  She gesticulated towards the shirt and pants she was wearing.  They looked similar to the clothes my mother used to buy for me in both size and style, but they weren't familiar.  They hadn't been mine.  I presume my mother bought them for her and said they'd been mine, for whatever reason.  Or quite possibly she'd bought them, loaded them into my childhood bedroom with many of the shopping bags and unopened HSN boxes she'd filled the room with since I'd left, and given them to my grandmother when she ran across them later, genuinely assuming they'd been mine.  She sometimes confused the things I'd owned and left behind with the things she'd bought and forgotten. 

The last time I wore something she bought me, it was a cheap, black, acrylic sweater she'd bought in every color available -- about nine in total -- when I was in high school.  I liked it because it could survive the dryer.  It was good grocery-shopping, errand-running attire, or so I liked to think.  It also worked years later as extreme maternity wear, flowing comfortably until the day I gave birth, after which point I forced myself to give it up.  I had a nightmare that it was so threadbare it was see-through, but I hadn't noticed until I wore it for a photograph.  I was afraid that might happen in real life.  I didn't want to be a person who could wear threadbare, see-through clothes without even realizing it. 

I took my last knee-length sweatshirt she'd bought me -- a men's XL from my college bookstore -- and let my husband keep it.  He likes it, and it's only a little too big on him.

The Time My Mother Put Me On Antidepressants

When I was in high school, my mother already had a knack for finding doctors who would prescribe whatever she asked for.  I remember her taking me to an ENT and asking for a specific dosage of Augmentin, and he just wrote the prescription.  I don't remember what was wrong with me, but growing up in a hoard house where the basement had standing water and there was visible mold on the walls, I had a lot of upper respiratory infections, sinusitis, and related ailments.  When I tested positive for a mold allergy, the doctor told me the best thing I could do was avoid having bouquets of flowers in my room.  I spent most of my childhood, as I remember it, on antibiotics.  My mother told me they would bolster my immune system.

I hadn't had a regular doctor since elementary school, when my male pediatrician had insisted on giving me my first breast exam and, subsequently, nightmares.  I'd never liked that doctor, but that was around the time I refused to see him again.  When my mother found out a woman from our church was a hematologist and oncologist, despite my lack of any blood diseases or cancer, she decided to make her my general practitioner.  My first PAP smear was done by that hematologist, though I don't know why.  She was not good at it. 

I remember one day my mother called the hematologist's office while I sat on the couch beside her, and she announced into the phone that her daughter was being "a moody teenager" and needed to be put on antidepressants.  I'd still never been allowed to speak to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist of any kind at that point since, as my mother said, "our family doesn't believe in therapy."  I also made straight A's in school and was absolutely terrified of getting into trouble, so my parents stood to gain very little beyond my own happiness by letting me speak to a professional.  I didn't get to speak to the hematologist either, but she called in a prescription for an antidepressant to our local pharmacy at my mother's behest.

I took the pills my mother gave me.  I thought they might help me get through my final years living in that house, which had been hard.  My mother had been self-medicating with prescription drugs for about three years at that point, some combination of pain killers and muscle relaxants and sleeping pills, though I don't know how consistently she took them back then.  Her behavior was more erratic and confusing than before, but she didn't seem high all the time.

I don't remember what the antidepressant was called, but the pills made me feel self-conscious and anxious in a way I thought I'd long outgrown.  I had been a shy and nervous child, but as I got into high school I'd learned to lock down my fears, put on a smiling mask, and act my way through situations that would have crippled my younger self with social anxiety.  The pills unraveled all that. 

I remember in kindergarten my mother bought me an ugly red sweatsuit with clowns on it and insisted I wear it to school.  It looked like pajamas to me -- ugly pajamas at that -- and I desperately didn't want to wear it, but she insisted.  I sobbed and begged, she called me ungrateful, and I spent the entire day I wore it sure that everyone was staring at me, judging me for wearing pajamas to school.  The antidepressants made me feel like that everyday.  My nerves felt raw.  Fortunately, I recognized it must be the pills doing it.

I don't remember how long I took the antidepressants, but I would guess just a few weeks.  They broke me down pretty quickly, and I remember approaching my mother in tears, telling her honestly but melodramatically that I couldn't go on that way -- that I had to stop taking the antidepressants or double the dosage, but I felt terrible all the time and something had to change.  My mother said I wasn't acting any better yet and therefore couldn't stop taking them.  She looked me in the eye and told me to double the dosage, which struck me as odd because -- even though I'd proposed it -- I knew it was dangerous and a bad idea.  Was she calling my bluff?  Had I been bluffing?  Was she serious?  She didn't call the doctor.  I never saw that doctor -- or any doctor -- about the antidepressants, so I took matters into my own hands and just stopped taking the pills.  I know now that you're supposed to taper them off under a doctor's watchful eye, but I didn't have that, and I quickly went back to normal, mildly depressed but high functioning, feeling better than I had in weeks.

Much later, as an adult, I tried to look up those pills online to see why I'd had that reaction to them.  I'd become scared of ever taking antidepressants again, and I thought maybe if I knew what they were I could be sure to avoid them in future without writing off all antidepressants forever.  I tried to request my file from the hematologist's office, but she had retired years ago, her private practice no longer existed in any form, and no one knew what had become of her records.  I remembered the prescription was a generic, and I know it was the '90s.  I also know it had to be something commonly prescribed in order for a hematologist to feel comfortable doling them out.  I'm guessing it was an SSRI like Prozac or Paxil since these were the most common kind of antidepressants on the market at the time.  What I did learn from the internet is that my reaction -- anxiety, essentially -- is a common symptom of SSRI overdose.  I also learned that the starting dosage for these drugs in the '90s was often too much for a lot of patients -- meaning a lot of people had the same problem that I did -- and starting dosages are generally lower now.  Cue "The More You Know" music.

Mother Goes to College

Both my parents came from working class families filled with mostly skilled laborers and artists, where going to college was unusual.  I had always planned to go to college for as long as I can remember, originally planning to attend an Ivy League school and become a doctor, and my parents had been supportive of my ambitions.  One of my cousins started taking a sign language interpretation course so that she could hopefully pay rent while looking for work as an actress.  As I got closer to graduating high school, my mother tried to convince me to do the same.  I could continue living at home and attend a local community college to become a sign language interpreter too and then, she said, I could finance my own four-year degree after that.  This had never been my plan -- neither the extra two years of school nor staying in the same state as my parents -- and I refused. 

When I solidified my college plans and got ready to move out, my mother decided she would go to college too.  She would attend the local community college and become a sign language interpreter.  I thought this was a fantastic idea.  While my older brother, Dante, was still living at home when he hadn't recently been kicked out again by one of our parents, he was no longer treated like a child and my mother seemed to be going through empty nest anxiety.  Second, she had a history of taking jobs for which she was both overqualified and ill suited -- fast food service, warehouse temp work, the paper route -- often followed by getting injured in some way or doing something else that would abruptly end the job.  Finally she was aspiring to a job that required her to become more qualified and might hold her interest too.

My mother was very nervous about the community college entrance exam.  She was a perfectionist.  She told me that, in high school, she had taken remedial classes whenever possible so that she could be the best in the class.  The community college entrance exam covered two years worth of math she hadn't taken.  In preparation for the exam, she bought some geometry and trigonometry flashcards, and I taught the subjects to her.  It was unexpectedly easy.  She understood most concepts without my having to explain them twice.  She was obviously smart -- even at math, which I consider hard -- but she demurred and gave all the credit to my teaching.  She'd never believed she was smart and certainly never expected to go to college.  I understand the second part -- neither of her parents finished high school, they were poor, and she was a girl in the '60s -- but I don't know why they didn't tell her she was smart.  She always told me I was smart, and it is the one thing I never doubt about myself.

She had to write an entrance essay too.  It was riddled with unnecessary commas and all the same cliches she used when she spoke.  In fact, it sounded exactly like how she talked.  If she'd been writing as a character, it would have been fantastic.  Her style required a bit of tweaking and editing for an academic setting, but she was a good writer.  She didn't believe me.

She was afraid the other students would make fun of her.  She was an old, fat lady, she said.  She was self-conscious about her appearance, her eyebrows.  I reassured her and taught her to apply makeup.  First she seemed happy and calmer; when it came time to visit the school, she said it looked ridiculous.

Finally the summer ended and we both started classes.  She made two new friends, one my age and one a little older than Dante.  I was homesick, halfway across the country from anyone I knew, so I called home a lot.  My mother got angrier.  "I let you go to that school because I thought it would make you happy!"  "All you ever do is talk about yourself!"  Aside from the homesickness, I was actually happier.  School was hard, and I had to make all new friends, but having access to healthy food whenever I wanted it, walking outside without anyone stopping me, and living in a clean space with friendly people had a positive effect on me.  Colors looked brighter.  It was literally like a grey veil was lifting.  I was just experiencing new stressors and missed my mother.

She upset one of her new friends by saying her 4-year-old daughter was so fat she looked nine months pregnant.  She didn't understand why her friend was upset.  "It's true!" she insisted.  This was her standard defense when someone became upset at her insults.  Her other friend got married and adopted a toddler.  She told me about each of her friends' marital and sexual problems.  She recounted the stupid decisions they made and how each of them was better and kinder to her than me.  I don't know if her insults were becoming less subtle or if I was becoming more attuned to them. 

Near the end of her two-year degree program, my mother's anxiety attacks reached an apex.  With less than a semester left, she dropped out of her classes.  I couldn't convince her to stick it out.

Chosen & Wanted

I grew up the younger of two non-biological siblings.  My older brother, Dante*, was adopted at birth.  This was near the end of what is sometimes called the "Baby Scoop Era," just before Roe v. Wade.  My mother said she got a call from the adoption agency (or whoever did these things -- I honestly do not know) asking if she "wanted a peanut," "peanut" being a slang term for a premature baby, she said.  He had just been born, unexpectedly early, and my mother had already lost out on twin girls she'd planned to adopt when their mother had changed her mind and decided to keep them.  She still talked about those twin girls sometimes, despite never having met them.  She had planned to dress them alike and call them Missy and Chrissy.  She recycled one of those names for me when I was born.

My mother said Dante's birth mother was fifteen years old.  She said she'd been impregnated by an older man while she was babysitting his children.  I don't know if any of this is true; it's just what my mother told us.  Dante -- my mother said she named him after a soap opera character she liked -- remained in an incubator for somewhere between two weeks and two months until he was strong enough to go home.  My parents had been married for three years when they finally adopted him, and my dad had two years left to live, according to the projected post-accident life span his doctors had predicted.  I wonder if the adoption people knew that.

I'm a little fuzzy on my mother's attempts to become pregnant.  She indicated that she'd tried to get pregnant before adopting, but it hadn't worked.  With my dad being paralyzed from the chest down, I know they'd exclusively tried via artificial insemination.  I don't know if they tried conceiving with his sperm though, or exclusively used donor sperm. 

My mother told me she'd always wanted to experience being pregnant.  She said she'd seen her own mother go through the better part of ten pregnancies in eleven years -- six of which had resulted in live births -- and she'd wanted to experience it herself ever since.  When my brother was five years old, my mother says her reproductive endocrinologist called her to entice her into trying one last time to get pregnant.  The technologies had changed and improved, he'd told her.  She went for an appointment and discovered that one of her Fallopian tubes "trailed off into nothing," as she described it.  They reattached it with minor surgery, and the very next time she was inseminated with anonymous donor sperm -- my father's sperm, Joseph Von Trapp's* sperm -- it worked.  She was finally pregnant.

I don't know if my dad ever wanted children.  My mother said he hadn't started hating Dante until he learned to talk.  She said he hadn't wanted me at all and had told her he hoped she miscarried -- and threatened to hit her until she did.  I don't know if this is true; it's just what my mother told me.  It sounds like the kind of lie she might tell, but it also sounds like something he might say.  He became my defender after I was born, but it almost exclusively made home situations worse.  When I got upset or Dante did something to hurt me, Dad screamed at Dante and my mother.  Sometimes he threw things.  He defended me so much in this fashion that, when she found out Dante had done something to hurt me, my mother would scold and threaten me in advance to make sure I wouldn't say anything that might prompt my dad to start screaming or lashing out.  He also screamed, "Why is that bitch crying again?" when he could hear me crying alone in my room.  He seemed to like me more than he liked anyone else, but he didn't seem to like anyone all that much.  Ours was a complicated family dynamic.

* These aren't their real names.

My Mother the Virgin

[Warning: I do mention sex in this post.  But as the title might indicate, it's rather limited.]

I want to write about how my parents created their family through adoption and donor conception, but I think I need to explain this part first.  I've mentioned how my dad became paralyzed from the chest down.  He could never walk again, but that was far from being the only side effect.  He had no control over his muscles below his chest.  He couldn't sit up without something to lean against.  He had violent muscle spasms.  He urinated through a catheter into a bag he wore tied to his leg under his pants, and he set aside an evening each week for "bowel training," when he sat on his toilet for hours, screaming curses and attempting to defecate.  He also experienced "counter attacks" -- a clever phrase I imagine came from the VA hospital -- when he catastrophically shat himself without warning, often when we were out for dinner. 

He also couldn't have sex.  He'd been this way since he was 21.  I didn't know that until my mother told me I was conceived via artificial insemination.  Until then, I'd assumed I just didn't understand what my dad physiologically could and could not do. 

I've mentioned that a major facet of my mother's identity seemed to be wrapped up in the fact that she was a virgin.  She told me she had been saving herself for marriage because she knew if she got pregnant out of wedlock (like much of her family) it would "kill" her mother.  I don't know if my grandmother ever told her anything of this nature, or if she intuited it or simply made it up.  My mother has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the topic of sex, to put it mildly, so I can imagine one of the things that appealed to her about my dad might have been her ability to get married and have children -- as she'd always planned to do, either because she really wanted to or simply because it was expected -- without being expected to have sex. 

My mother used to reminisce about her wedding night -- how she and my dad laid on their bed in their new apartment, fully clothed, eating takeout barbecue and watching the traffic out the window.  She told it like it was her fondest memory of marriage.  She really liked watching traffic go by.  When I was a teenager she added a new part to the story:  he had approached her with his flaccid penis in some attempt at intercourse, she had said something along the lines of, "Ew, gross," and he'd never tried to touch her that way again.  It's not the sort of story a mother ought to tell her daughter, but I can't help but feel sorry for both of them.  More rational or hope-filled people might have annulled their marriage after that, but my parents stuck it out for 35 years.  Their misery compounded.

The First Time I Saw My Mother High

My mother has been a teetotaler since before I was born.  When I was a small child, she told me, "We're teetotalers," and when I asked what that meant, she said it meant the strongest thing we drink is tea.  What teetotaler actually stands for is someone who believes in "Total Abstinence" with a capital T -- someone who never imbibes any kind of alcohol (thank you, PBS documentary on Prohibition).  Being a teetotaler seemed to be a big part of my mother's identity, alongside being a mother, a volunteer, and a virgin (more on that another time).

My family is not, in fact, made up entirely of teetotalers.  One of my uncles was an alcoholic and another had a cocaine problem.  Both were good men, but they are dead now.  My mother started abusing prescription drugs when I was about 14, but it took me over a decade to realize what was happening. 

My mother and I took a trip together the summer I turned 14.  That was the first time I remember her talking about how much her hip hurt.  She complained of the pain any time she was expected to walk for any distance.  She took one of my dad's handicapped placards and started using it in her own car so that she wouldn't have to use the regular parking spaces.  She visited multiple doctors, but the only thing anyone could find wrong with her was something one doctor mentioned to do with her heel.  She said the doctor told her she could have surgery on her heel and it might fix the pain in her hip, but that it was very expensive and not likely to work.  She opted to forgo surgery (this was several years after she'd canceled our medical insurance) and simply take muscle relaxants and pain killers while continuing to walk as little as possible.

Her first muscle relaxant was called Soma.  I remember this because I was reading Brave New World in school at the time, and Soma was the name of the hallucinogenic drug in the book.  There was something weird about how she acted when she took Soma.  For as long as I've known her, my mother has been chronically miserable and easy to upset.  Sometimes back then she was happy and fun -- I don't want you to think she wasn't, and I adored her like a duckling loves its mother -- but she was also volatile and usually had several large mood swings per day.  It was the only way I'd ever known her.  My dad was the same way. 

On the Soma, she laughed easily, even at home when there was no one to impress.  Things that might normally set her off just rolled off her shoulder.  She reminisced about how she'd once gotten drunk on wine coolers with a boyfriend at a New Year's Eve party, and when I quickly did the math and pointed out that she must've been underage at the time, she said, "Oh yeah.  I guess I was," and laughed wildly. 

I remember thinking, "I should be happy.  I should be relieved she's relaxed and not upset," but I felt scared.  She hadn't approved of drinking even in moderation even for full adults at any point in my life.  She'd tried to shame her one friend for drinking white wine; she'd warned her that she'd give herself breast cancer like her sister had.  On Soma, my mother seemed like an entirely different person, which maybe should have been a good thing in this instance, but it felt like more of an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" level of change.  Years later, I looked up the drug online and read that this sort of change in behavior is a symptom of overdose.  I had been scared because my mother was high.  I hadn't realized the drug wasn't meant to make her that way.

I remember telling my mother that I didn't like how she seemed so different on the Soma, that it weirded me out.  She said I just didn't want her to feel better. 

If I were to make a timeline of my life, I would include a mark at age 15 labeled "Mother Starts to Go Crazy."  I don't know a better way to word what was happening because I don't know what was happening, but it was one of my life's important landmarks.  A doctor told her she was "perimenopausal" and gave her some pills to make her stop menstruating.  I don't know what else she was taking at the time or even if the pills were relevant, but that was when she started accusing me of "changing," which I probably did at 15, though I tried my hardest not to appear any different to her.  Physically I was already full grown, and it was hard to hide that fact, no matter how much I tried to act like I was still a child at home.  She became increasingly unpredictable.  I became increasingly terrified of doing anything wrong.  Nothing about her or her reactions seemed to make sense anymore.

I only know a handful of the prescription drugs that followed.  There were more muscle relaxants and pain killers.  Sleeping pills became a favorite since she often napped all day, leaving her wired at night, when the anxiety attacks took hold.  When she freaked out at her doctor's insistence that she cut back on the sleeping pills -- that he didn't want her taking them every single day -- I suggested she cut back on the naps and go outside and move around a little during the day so that she would be more tired at night.  I thought I was helping.  "Stop trying to solve my problems!  I just want you to listen!" she said, and her doctor kept prescribing the pills.  Or maybe she found another doctor.  She had a knack for finding ones who would prescribe what she wanted.  Later came the anti-depressants and I'm not sure what else, and that was when things got really bad.

My Mother's Paper Route

Because we lived off my dad's veterans disability checks and social security, my mother said the government limited how much she could earn to $5,000 per year.  Because that is approximately half of what my the government gave my family per month (yes, the checks totaled close to $10k per month tax free -- I know the numbers because I managed my parents' finances for several years -- more on that another time), she never needed to work for a living.  She retired from nursing at the age of 24 when they adopted my older brother, but she took on a handful of odd jobs and get-rich-quick schemes over the years.  This was one of the strangest:  the paper route.

I was in my early teens when my mother got her paper route, which means she was in her early forties.  To me, paper routes were something kids with bicycles did for a first job when they were still too young to be baggers at the local grocery store.  I didn't know any paperboys, but according to TV shows, the child would get up early, get the papers ready, and ride his bike through his route, throwing a paper at each doorstep.  He would finish by sun-up and then do other things.  This was not what my mother did. 

My mother got the papers ready throughout the day while I was at school and sometimes while I was at home.  They were scattered across the living room floor as she worked through them, which might have seemed more foreign if she hadn't already been a hoarder and the floors already strewn with random debris.  I'm not sure how long it took her to roll up the papers and slip them into their plastic casings each day, but I saw her doing it a lot, so it seemed like hours. 

Then when I got home from school, we would load them into the car and she would drive me to the neighborhood where her route was.  Then she told me to get out of the car and deliver the papers door-to-door.  I had to hang them nicely on the door handles, NO! we could not throw them from the car window like people do on TV,  and if someone was outside, I had to hand deliver the paper personally and talk with the person and exchange pleasantries.  She would see if I didn't because she drove slowly down the street, watching me while I walked and delivered papers.  If I hung the paper on a door knob when a person was somewhere outside, even if they were engaged in something like mowing the lawn, she would yell at me to go back and hand deliver the paper.  I was shy, which made interacting with strangers difficult on its own, but doing my mother's paper route in this weird, forced way while she yelled at me from her slow-moving car mortified me.  Sometimes the people she saw outside who she wanted me to hand deliver papers to were my classmates, which was worse.

When we finished her route, it was usually around 4pm and I was famished.  She had pretty much stopped cooking by that point in my life, so then she would take me out to dinner, usually to Denny's, where she complained that it cost as much to feed me as she earned doing her paper route.

Her original plan had been to build a paper route empire.  She said she'd heard of another middle-aged woman who subcontracted out multiple paper routes to local children, taking a cut of their pay while they did all the delivering, and this scalable model appealed to her.  She never made it that far though.  She just drove slowly alongside me, watching me deliver papers every afternoon, until one day she told me she quit.