Entry #25: THE WRONG CHILD

When I was little, I was the last child of three, and the only girl. I was cute. I liked to sing. I adored both my parents because they were all I knew. After a long day at work, my father would come home in his suit and tie, a mechanical pencil and slide rule in his shirt pocket, and I would be happy to see him.

My mother hated having me around all day. She once showed me a cartoon of a mother vacuuming, and a toddler following her, dropping crumbs while eating a cookie. “See THAT?” she said, jabbing her finger against the page. “That’s YOU.”

I was confused. I didn’t really understand the cartoon, but her resentment was ferocious. I got that part.

While I was little, my oldest brother, Richard, was the Wrong Child. He was creative and funny, with an uncanny ability to mimic people. He read science fiction, and drew very skillful drawings of space creatures and other oddities of his imagination. He wrote strange stories. He bought comics and monster magazines and taped monster pictures to his bedroom wall. As he got older, he liked beer, and girls. He stayed out too late and wasn’t sorry. He was handsome, he was cool, and he had exactly the right flip in his hair for 1963.

As far as my parents were concerned, he was the worst son on Earth. They wanted a son who would go to Yale and become a lawyer – even though neither of my parents had managed to accomplish this. He was subjected to constant abuse, emotional and physical. He was sent away to camp. He was left home alone while the rest of us summered in Rhode Island. Eventually he just removed himself from the planet, where the criticism of my parents could no longer reach him.

My other brother, one year younger than Richard, was extremely bright and academic. He did not make trouble. A well-rounded and stellar student, he always provided my mother with something to boast about. After Richard died, my other brother decided to play things very, very safe. He saw what happened to creative people.

So then it became my turn to become the Wrong Child. Although I was the only student who took five subjects at the Shipley School, that wasn’t good enough. Although I got a 740 on my SAT, that wasn’t good enough. (My mother consoled me by saying, “That’s OK – you can’t always get 800s.”) Although I was working New York by age 23, that wasn’t good enough. I was supposed to grow up and marry a lawyer from Yale, and I did not come through. My mother told me I had “broken her dreams.”

I've already mentioned in earlier entries that my mother used to tell me there was a "secret Nellie" living inside me - a different personality who agreed with everything she said, but for some reason would not reveal herself. I found this idea disconcerting the first time my mother said it, but I realized it was just another way of indicating she did not like me the way I was.

I am certainly not the only person with this problem. After all, look at “Mommy Dearest”! In my case, there were no wire coat hangers, but there was constant emotional sabotage. My mother would use other people as examples of the kind of daughter she wished she had. No matter how hard I tried to please her, there was always someone FAR better. This game continued for decades. In fact, it never ended.

Who were these Better Daughters?  Mostly they were - in my mother's mind - perfect examples of financial success and filial piety. They had acceptable husbands. They had money. And they were endlessly devoted to their mothers.

"Who are these people you think are so wonderful?" I once challenged my mother, when she complained yet again that I was an inattentive burden and disappointment.

"Lisa," she answered immediately.

Lisa sold weed as a teenager and eventually became a heroin addict. She moved back home with her aged parents because she had lost everything and had nowhere else to go. My mother, with her usual acuity, saw this as an act of loyalty and adoration, and felt I should be more like her.

"She's a drug addict!" I cried.

An addict herself, my mother could not have cared less about details like heroin. She saw what she wanted to see. It was truly grating that my mother held a heroin addict in higher regard than me. I hung up the phone in disbelief. This was clearly a battle I was not going to win. The rules were made up by a crazy person.

On another occasion my mother mentioned a friend of hers who’d had a stroke and, luckily for her, had a Superior Daughter. She said Leah came EVERY DAY to sort out her mother’s medications and read to her. At the time I was living in another state and was hardly in a position to visit my mother every day. I could not compete with a visiting angel like Leah.

My mother repeatedly compared me unfavorably to the mythical Leah. Later on, I found out that Leah did not live anywhere near her mother. It was just a story my mother had made up. She may have convinced herself it was true, but this Perfect Daughter with whom I was thrown into competition did not even exist. Another battle I could never win.

Another favored child was Philip, a man my age with an impeccable pedigree who, according to my mother, had made a fortune in the stock market and was building a large, wonderful home nearby. She went on at length about how successful he was, and asked why I couldn’t be more successful like him. My career in publishing was virtually meaningless to her. She had nothing fantastic to tell her friends about me. I might as well have worked in the bathroom at Grand Central Station.

A few months later she mentioned Philip again, forgetting her first story. Dementia was beginning to make it hard for her to keep her lies straight. This time she said he was using all of his elderly parents’ money to build an enormous house, and that he had not included any space in it for the old folks. So now Philip was on the Naughty List. It was a hollow victory, and short-lived, but still satisfying.

Another favorite was Heather, a woman roughly my age who always agreed with everything my mother said, thoroughly ingratiating herself with her. This annoyed me no end, because most of the things my mother said were simply not true. She loved people who would agree with her, no matter how outlandish her remarks were.

I would disagree with my mother often - telling her she should not refer to her caregivers as “The Africans,” noting that she could not possibly be as blind as she pretended to be, and reminding her that barely 1% of the elderly population could afford to live at home with several full-time caregivers as she did. “Oh ALL my friends live this way!” she exclaimed. No, they did not.

Heather would never make waves by arguing with my mother. She also had money – VERY important to my mother – as well as two sons who apparently were perfect in every way. Because Heather did not need them, my mother gave her gifts from the house. My mother particularly enjoyed giving away things I would have liked to receive myself – not just the valuable things, but items I remembered from my childhood. No gifts for me.

While I was living in Massachusetts, an older woman, Faith, took a keen interest in my parents in their old age, and claimed that she enjoyed them greatly because her own parents were dead. This was highly suspect, because NO ONE enjoyed my parents that much.

Faith intruded into every area of my parents’ lives. When they moved to the retirement place, she went through all their furniture. According to my mother, Faith was helping them decide what to bring with them. I wondered what the hell Faith was up to, but my mother thought she was marvelous and SO supportive, unlike me. In fact, Faith was so nice she once drove all the way from her home to the retirement place, picked up my mother, brought her back to the old Victorian house that was still filled to the rafters with antiques, silver, and china, and then suggested to my mother that she go through all her valuables. No one else was present. To thank her for this thoughtful gesture, my mother gave Faith the most valuable painting and the most valuable sculpture left in the house.

When I heard about this I pointed out it was quite remarkable that Faith was willing to walk off with the most valuable items in the house without even consulting my brother or myself to see if we cared. My mother responded imperiously that she WANTED Faith to have those things because, of course, she was a Better Daughter. No artwork for me.

Obviously I would never be the Right Child. It frustrated me no end that on some level I could not get past the desire to be loved and accepted by my mother. I knew perfectly well that this was like wishing for water to flow uphill, or for summer to follow fall, or for us to light candles with our fingertips, or put stars in our pockets.

But there is one way to win at this hopeless game, and that is by paying it forward – that is, by giving my own children all the unconditional love in the world. I am blessed with two kids, and the minute I saw them I knew I would crawl across broken glass for them if I had to. Certainly they get mad at me. Certainly parenting can be exasperating. But they know I would never change anything about them, and that I would go to the ends of the Earth to help them. I know I’ve made plenty of mistakes as a mother, but lack of love is not one of them. It is my privilege and my honor to adore my kids wholeheartedly, every day.