Mo Mhàthair

Desiring to be the best mother she possibly could be, my mother read every book on parenting she could get her hands on.  In the sixties, there were many.  When I was seven or eight, she sat me down to explain what the middle child syndrome was.  Middle children, she said, suffered from a lack of time.  Older children are first doing things that require mother's time; younger children are the most recent at doing things that require mother's time, leaving middle children feeling left out because there's not enough time.

I'm not sure why she told me this.  I wasn't feeling left out.  By the time he turned thirty-five, my father's career was moving at a frightening pace.  This parenting thing would be left to my mother because the world needed my father.  Daddy had coached pee wee baseball for my brothers, but when I got old enough, there wasn't time.  Nobody even asked if I wanted to play. I wasn't recognizing this as a loss, but I think my mother did.

In the early seventies, children born with ADHD and dyslexia had few options.  There were special schools where they could send me, but that would separate me from my friends and my family.  There were drugs, but my father was adamant that I not be given amphetamines or tranquilizers.  One of his associates had a son in my class who was given Ritalin, and his father said it made him a zombie.  I was given tutors at school.  My mother already had an education degree from Belhaven.  She would and did teach herself how to educate a dyslexic child.

Most of what my mother used with me was what we now consider the Montessori Method.  She tried everything she could imagine to give me another way to understand and comprehend letters and words, and sentences.  Since I also had untreated ADHD, these sessions seemed like torture for both of us.  Even though I was the middle child, my mother was spending more time on me than she did the other three.  It didn't seem like loving attention, though; it seemed like a struggle for both of us.   It cost a great deal of effort to teach me to read, but the greatest cost was it began to drive a wedge between my mother and me.

The women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies meant that wives were no longer expected to stay at home.  Modern women got out in the world.  My father's career generated sometimes challenging social obligations for my mother.  On top of that, there was pressure for society women to leave the home and get jobs.  One of Mother's closest friends started the Every Day Gourmet, and my father would ask when my mother was going to do something like that.  

When my parents began dating in high school, my mother made an attempt to maintain a presence in the Presbyterian church she was born into while also holding an equal presence in my father's Methodist church.  She maintained this practice until I was seven or eight, when it just became a matter of not having enough hours in the day.  She dropped her membership in the Presbyterian church she was born into so she would have enough time to teach me to read.  

My grandmother lived with us for six months of the year.  She helped with laundry and cooking.  My mother had a maid named Hattie May Grant.  Children with ADHD can become very introverted because it's difficult for the world to comprehend them.  Hattie was my friend, though; she liked to watch Godzilla movies and watch Dr. Smith chase that robot around like I did.  

Burning the candle on every end, my mother would sometimes just run plain out of energy.  With her mother and Hattie in the house, she'd sometimes sneak off for a nap.  Sometimes, I would crawl into her room and sit on the floor beside her bed and watch her hand over the side of the mattress and listen to her breathing.  I had my mother to myself without distractions and without reading exercises.   Soon someone would need her, or the phone would ring, and the world would take my mother away again, but I had that time.  It mattered.

My mother enjoyed crafts.  Her sister became something of an accomplished painter well into her forties.  Our playroom doubled as my mother's sewing room.   After dinner, Daddy would usually return to work, or some work function, and Mother would commandeer the breakfast table to cut out patterns.

"What are you making?" I would ask.  I was pretty crafty too, although nobody really noticed it yet.

"I'm making a dress for your sister."  

"Can you make something for me?"  

"What would you like?" She smiled.

"How about a cape!" Dracula had a cape, superman had a cape, and magicians had capes.  That would have been so cool.

"I don't know how to make a cape," she said.

"What about something else then?"  If my sister could get a cool dress out of the deal, maybe I could get a cool coat or shirt.

"They don't really make patterns for boy things."  Mother said.  She was telling the truth too.  If you look at the Butterwick website today, they have very little for men.  Maybe a few vests, but not much more.  Even though men's bodies are made of simpler shapes, apparently, our clothes are more complicated.  I'm pretty sure a man made it that way.

They did have a few Halloween costumes.  Pilgrims and elves and clowns.  Mother made a clown costume for my brothers that was passed down to me and my sister.  There's nothing worse than telling a monster-obsessed kid that he had to be a clown for Halloween.

Mother was better at doing girl things because she was a girl.  I think the assumption was that my father would do boy things with me, and he clearly made an effort with my brothers; there was even a photograph in the Clarion Ledger of him swimming with my brothers; by the time I came along, though, he was out of time.  It was basically me and my mother and my Hattie, and neither of them knew how to do boy things.   Daddy did eventually end up spending a fair amount of time fishing with me, but I was nineteen when he first tried and was able to not only load and unload the boat but also able to fix drinks for him and his friends.

The middle child syndrome probably was hitting me really hard, but I was an extraordinarily introverted kid, so a lot of times, I just didn't notice.  Noticing that I had an interest in art and theater, my mother made sure I had a ride to lessons and rehearsals.  She wouldn't stay, but she made sure I got there.  Often my art teacher were women she knew socially.  The first one was Alice Riley, Dr. Carter O'ferral's daughter.  So far, I've done something like a hundred and fifty plays.  My mother only ever attended maybe seven of them.  At first, it was because she just didn't have the time.  Later, it was because we were becoming estranged.

When I was very young, there wasn't much that meant more to me than watching my brother be my brother.  I copied everything he did, everything he touched, everything he watched.  Whatever he could do, I wanted to do.  When we lived on Northside Drive, he and Lee Hammond built a treehouse.  To reach it, you had to climb two-by-four steps nailed to the tree like a ladder.  I was too little to reach.  I could see them in the treehouse, and it was all I wanted out of the world to be with them, but I couldn't, so I cried out of frustration.  I was left behind.  

I came to understand that this feeling of being left behind, left alone and forgotten was the primary symptom of middle child syndrome.   I made it considerably worse by being so introverted.  The world was more interested in other people, so I found other ways to occupy my time.  I socialized and mimicked the experience of human connection through my art and, eventually, through my writing.  We didn't know it, but my mother would soon face the greatest crisis yet.

My brother, for all his greatness, began to develop addiction problems.  Because I couldn't bring myself to blame him, I blamed my mother.  Whatever cracks there were in our relationship from this middle child business, I put a spike in them.  When his addiction problems became emotional and psychological problems,  I drove that spike deep into the heart of my relationship with my mother.

I think maybe I was trying to force her to ask me to come back to her, to say, "Let's start over.  You're still my little boy."  I think she was overwhelmed.  She tried to rationalize all this with me, which didn't work because I wasn't feeling rational.  This disease had taken my brother from me and replaced him with a stranger, and I was angry.  Being looked over, being left out, these things I could handle, but now they were taking things from me, and I had no recompense.   My mother tried to explain all these things to me, but I was angry and hurt and not listening.

Like she had done with me, Mother decided to educate herself about my brother's problem.  She returned to college to get a degree in psychology at Millsaps.  Her only intention was to apply whatever they taught her to healing her firstborn.  Our relationship was strained, and now she had even less time to spend with me.  My father flew to Washington several times a year and worked until eight or nine o'clock.  Without mentor or council, I drove in the spike even further, splitting the bond between myself and my mother.  In my mind, she left me and was devoting most of her time to this imposter that looked like my brother.  Pushing myself further away, maybe I thought she'd notice and come to find me.  She didn't.  

We never talked about these things.  We argued.  We argued quite a bit, almost entirely about how none of the things they were trying with my brother were working; his condition was getting worse and worse.  I surprised her by changing the focus of my anger.  "Stop Smoking!" I shouted.  "Haven't you seen what they're saying about cigarettes?"  She didn't stop, so I began hiding her cigarettes.  We argued so much this became the only way I could still tell my mother I loved her.  Eventually, smoking is what killed her.  I wish I had tried harder to make her quit.  I couldn't make her quit, so I started.  When she died, I doubled my own smoking, hoping it'd take me too.

When my sister got married, Mother designed and orchestrated a wedding for nearly a thousand people, filling both Galloway and the Country Club.  When my brother got married, she arranged a smaller wedding in the Galloway Chapel and dinner for fifty at the country club.  When I got married, she had dinner for eight at Nicks's and bought me a cake.  I told her not to do anything.  A weak attempt would hurt more than nothing at all.  It did.

When my father died, it should have driven me closer to my mother, but it drove me further away.  It drove me further away from everyone.  We argued constantly about how to handle his estate while the rest of the world argued over the power vacuum he left.  Both of us needed comfort and consoling and companionship, but so much had passed between us that we couldn't bridge that gap.  I lost my father, but I lost my mother too.  

When I tore my ACL in a theater accident, she insisted I stay at her house after my surgery.  We argued constantly.  I'm not a very good patient.  When her COPD started to threaten her life, she began asking that I stay with her overnight in case she had to be taken to the hospital.  Twice I did end up having to take her.  As her health got worse, so did my marriage, then the imposter who had replaced my brother developed cancer.   In the space of fourteen months, I lost him, then my mother, then my wife.  

Introversion had always been my response to stress.  I went home and locked the door, and refused to see anyone or go anywhere.  I had my books and my movies, and my computer, and that's how I intended to die.  

They say that the problem with a middle child is there isn't enough time.  Older children require time because they do things first; younger children require time because they do things more recently; little girls require more time than little boys; middle children get overlooked.

I don't think I was overlooked nearly so much as I was difficult to see.  Things happening within me made me withdraw from people, even as a child.  My mother loved me, but she suffered from a chronic lack of time.  I went from being her son with the most problems to being the son with the least problems, and I  chose to separate from her because I always chose to separate from people.  It's easier for me to go away than it is to solve the complex and painful connections between people.

When I was six or seven, I developed the chicken pox.  It felt like my skin was burning off.  They demanded I not scratch it because that would cause scars.  My mother gently covered my skin with pink medicine that felt cool when it went on and drew my skin tighter as it dried.  Unable to find relief, I cried and cried.  "Be brave," she said, "Don't scratch," she said.  Miserable, I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't stop itching.  My mother sat on the floor beside my bed and spoke softly to me.  She stayed all night, then the next night, by the third night, the itching wasn't as bad.

My mother loved me.  She taught me to read.  She carried me on trips to lessons and rehearsals and practices and trips to the tote-sum store so I could get comic books.  Life became complicated, and I ran away from her because I always found shelter alone.  Even a mother couldn't salvage the things that were breaking in me.   I can't take any of that back.  I can, at fifty-nine years old, see a lot of it for what it was.  That's some relief.  Time was my enemy.  Now her memory is complex and beautiful, and painful.   My mother loved me.  Time is fleeting, but love endures.