Telling on Mom

by: Jarralynne a Work in Progress

I’ve sat through church testimonies where people have been delivered from their philandering ways or they have cast off their days of drink and drugs, but I have never ever heard someone stand and testify about a renewed relationship with their mother. Because, according to the cardinal rules, there can never be anything wrong with your relationship with your mother in the first place, and if there is, you sure better not talk about it .In our community there are some hard and fast rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not. You don’t air your dirty laundry in public, you never speak ill about your mother and you never share secrets with people who are not a part of the family. Period, the three cardinal rules. And I broke each one of them.

In 2002 I met a writer named Po Bronson. He was interested in part of what I shared with him about my mother’s disabling stroke and my decision to take her in. I was happy that he wanted to speak more to us about our experience of coming together after years of separation and one sided estrangement. The most that I thought could come from it, I would tell someone else our story. That was as far as I thought it through. I thought there would be someone else that did not share my last name who would now know everything about what happened. I held only a glimmer of hope that possibly, there was a remote chance, that sharing what we had been through together could create a stronger bond between my mother and I. Even though I had been in therapy, both as a personal choice and a pre-requisite for my Psychology doctorate degree, I had really held back about my feelings around my mother. I knew it fit somehow, but going back there was about as helpful as finding the nail on the road that caused your flat tire. For me, moving forward was all about working on what needed to be fixed today. By the time Po and I met I had decided I would give him the standard information, just enough of my urban drama to keep the story interesting but not enough depth that my story would stand out from any one elses. I’d skim off the top and I was sure that would be enough to fill his notepad. But, when my mother and I met with Po, I didn’t count on two things. The first thing I didn’t count on was the fact that my mother would fess up. My mother shared so many things about what she had done wrong that I found myself saying, "it’s ok, mom." Or "Don’t bring that up, that doesn’t matter any more." She was a runaway train sharing all of the things that had haunted her, times in her life where she should have turned right but instead ended up heading down several roads of bad decisions. The end result was my rocky and tumultuous childhood, where I was racked by feelings of worry over a mother who constantly threatened to kill herself, her kids or both. She spoke freely to Po and in that moment, I didn’t feel like jumping in to share where she left off, I felt like jumping in to save her. "Really, mom things turned out OK, so they couldn’t have been that bad."

The second thing that I didn’t count on is how open Po would be. I marveled at his previous work and told him that I thought he was one of the smartest men that I have met. He pulled back from that and said, seeing what these families go through I feel like there’s just so much that I don’t know. That admittance, that total disclaimer of know it all status was like the Jedi mind trick of self-diclosure for me. Before I spoke with him I had planned to keep the good stuff wrapped tight. He was after all a sandy haired grey eyed West Coast writer listening to a story from a girl that was born and raised on the black side of a Midwestern town that had two claims to fame the year I graduated from high school, the birthplace of aviation and the highest murder rate per capita in the United States. Where I thought we had little in common from our back grounds we were synergistic in the way that he was interested in telling the truth and a large part of me, I had come to realize was interested in sharing the truth. By talking with someone that was not just like me, that had never stepped foot inside the city where I was raised and knew nothing of what it’s like the be a Black woman in the US, I was actually able to share more.

I used Po as a mirror, to help reflect what he actually saw. Sometimes he framed things in a way that were too idealized for me. He called us heroes and I shot that down. We aren’t heroes we are survivors. He said to some that would make us a hero. I felt sorry for him that he invested so much time in us, because after all this was my story that I was interested in sharing, I couldn’t see how it could help any one else really. But, it did. Just since the release of his book I have had countless people come up to me and tell me there stories. These are people from all walks of life, people that are still home in Dayton who remember the town that I describe from my youth. People who hold high posts and positions of high esteem share stories about mentally challenged sisters and drug addicted family members. They want to know how I did it or how do my mom and I make it work from day to day. I didn’t have any answers for them. Ironically, I turned to Po’s writing. His reflection of us was at first, to me, a bit murky. It was hard for me to see us as these people the way he represented us. Although the events were true, taken out of context and then re-assembled as a complete story with a line of conscious was akward for me because I lived that life and there was no thesis statement, guiding principles or over-arching theme. My life with my mother was a series of random incongruous and at times inconceivable events. But, as I read over his story and saw how he dipped into my life as a child and fast forwarded to my career as a Psychologist a pattern of success and love became as clear to me as following a well-written movie. But, this wasn’t a movie, this was my life. The fact that people asked for my help made me think more about what my mother I did to survive, first the life that we had been given and second the choices that each of us had made. I have far more clarity now than I ever had. I’ll accept a badge of hero as a survivor only if it means that I get to turn mine over to my mother and let her have two. My mother and I have been through a lot we have survived poverty and all the ills that go with it and we have survived the uncertain future that arises when a daughter leaves home and has the option to choose how she wants her mother in her life. My mother and I were playing with an out of focused portrait of what significance we hold for one another in our past and present life. By speaking with someone who didn’t know us well, a guy not of our race, our neighborhood or our way of life, held a mirror for us to see our selves in. There was a clarity for us that hadn’t been there before. I found that it was OK to break the old rules, to talk about your momma, and sometimes, it’s OK to let an outsider in. For my mom and I, going through this process, what we are to each other became a clearer and clearer portrait for both of us. It worked for my mom and I because we now both realized that you can’t see the picture, when you are in the frame.

Last changed: 04/11/06