My Nasty Mother Would Have Been 100 Today

Today is the 100th anniversary of my mother Phyllis’s birth. She was mean to me as long as she lived. She lied. She was violent. She was jealous. She was a tangle of affectations she thought made her seem middle-class.

My childhood memories are dim and unhappy – there aren’t long narratives to spin. So I have written about this period in chapters of 100 words. Exactly. Not 99 words and not 101. This form allows me to tell about as much as I am willing to recall of my childhood, one in which I was the captive of the nuclear family, a private turf where no one in the 1950s would think of intervening, even if violence and cruelty were obvious.

Here are three chapters that relate to Phyllis.

The Day I was Gendered in 100 Words
I was born in August Wilson’s Hill District projects. At 3 we moved to a tiny duplex and at 10 we moved to an attached row house – my mother’s determined ascent up the working-class ladder. I was a kid like other kids, playing summer kickball shirtless in the alley behind our row. Until one boy’s snobby mother turned up at our door saying she didn’t want her son playing with a whore. My mother dragged me from the alley by the ear and drove me straight to Woolworth’s to be fitted in the aisle with a training bra. Public humiliation.

Murder and Revenge in 100 Words
“Pets are dirty,” my mother said, forbidding them. Until at Woolworths I saw the turtle in its plastic dish, complete with a pond and palm tree. I had saved up enough dimes from scrubbing the kitchen floor to buy it for myself. That summer I went to sleep-over camp for the first and only time. My mother promised to keep the turtle pond full of water and the pet fed. On my return, I found the turtle swollen up like a ping-pong ball, dead in a dry plate. I buried it under her beloved hydrangeas bush, which never again bloomed.

Phyllis’s Shoe in 100 Words
My mother blamed me for a long labor during which my father abandoned her to go bowling. My dad, Saul, and I were always tight. My first memory is when I was 5 and Phyllis shrieked at me, “He’s mine! Get your own!” I was 11 when my mother scraped the side of the car in a parking lot. Later she told Saul it happened while we were inside shopping. When I contradicted her, she removed her high-heeled shoe to punish me for lying and for trying to turn Saul against her. I still have those scars on my thigh.

Comments

[Gila Svirsky]

oy. we had the same mother. so painful for me to read this.

[SUE C KELMAN]

It is so difficult - if not impossible - to exorcise these memories. I hope that by writing them, putting them on paper, we can put them back in the Pandora's Box where they belong and throw away the key. For some of us, we are simpy unable to remember years at a time...they are just hidden and perhaps are better off not being unearthed. We love you, Sue.

[Ellen]

Okay. Your mother was slightly nastier than mine, since she left visible scars, My scars were all emotional. My mother, also Phyllis, often blamed me for things I had not done, She lied, and chastised me for not learning to tell "white lies," as she did. The best she could offer was back-handed compliments, like "you look better today than you did the other day." Adult friends who knew her called her "frightening." I was fortunate that when she got dementia, she no longer could remember nasty things to say, so I had a healing time with her during her last few months. Neither my sister nor I cried when she died.

[Joan Price]

I'm so sorry. Thank you for sharing this, and I'm sorry you had to endure it. My heart hurts for you.