Seagulls and Seething Revenge
By the time I was twelve, my mother was done being a mother. She was busy being a teenager again, except with a paycheck and a new relationship, and I was left to be the adult—making lunches and dinners, all the house chores, wrangling my little sister, and tending to my grandmother. Filling in all the blank spaces where my mother had once stood.
And I made it easy. Being gifted, I didn’t really have to do homework, like ever. Being an introvert, I wasn’t clamoring for social escape like other tweens or teens. Being close with my grandmother, I filled in gaps in her care so readily that my mother never had to think about it, and my grandmother never had to ask. Being so competent, that even my dad—who escaped the chaos into having a job, a side job and a part time college courseload—never thought there were real problems at home. Let alone the authorities, teachers at school, or the extended family.
My mother was not cruel in a cartoon villain way; she was cruel in the way someone can be when they’re still starving for something they never got, and mistaking their own daughter for the one who took it from them. I didn’t yet know about her father’s drinking, how the riots in Detroit curtailed her teenage freedom, or the way her family fractured at a bad time and sent her through three different high schools and households. Or the strict, reactive, uber-controlling survival mode of her own mother’s parenting style: she’d cite “getting ungrounded” as the primary reason she rushed to get married at 18. All of that was beyond me then. I only knew the depth and shape of her hunger, because I was the one she fed it to.
I resented her. She resented me back. (I think it was the other way around.) Neither of us said it aloud, but it hummed under every slammed cupboard, every ignored normal or special need, every sharp word. I don’t think she bought me a single article of clothing after my twelfth birthday, and I remember asking my dad for sheets, towels and a comforter for Christmas the year I was 14. I didn’t get lunch money, I would scrounge spare change for a bagel and cream cheese. My mom bought a car with a zippy engine and a sunroof, a closet full of new clothes, and a tall tower of music CDs. She starved me of everything she could think of, and mostly because I didn’t even pretend not to see her. If it wasn’t my eyes, it was my mouth.
What she doled out was the sort of force that left six inches of scar tissue inside my mouth where braces became deeply embedded into flesh in two places. Silence was cheaper than accountability, so that’s how things stayed. I remember the quiet afterward, the silence that served as both treatment plan and punishment. No first aid, no apologies, no acknowledgment. Just clean yourself up. Pretend it didn’t happen. Later, my grandmother would sneak me her own makeup bag whenever necessary so I could make myself presentable for school after my mother’s cruelty left evidence. I was an artist, I won awards in competition, but this was one of my first applications for color theory, concealer and contour. Grandma’s olive color foundation corrected fresh purple bruising. Her subtle pinkish blush was close enough to correct the older green stuff.
Yet there were gestures—an outing here, a picnic there—as if my mother still wanted to show others in our lives that she showed up for motherhood. Late that summer, right before school started, she announced we were going to the beach. The big one, out at Metro, on Lake St. Clair. My sister and I were each allowed to bring a friend, as though that were proof she was fun, generous, like the other mothers. It was the first time all year. And the first time I’d left the house all summer. Unlike my sister, I wasn’t allowed to go to friends’ houses or make plans very often—even on weekends. Too much to do at home, and by then our grandma did not want to be alone with my sister, who had grown bigger than us, and volatile.
We spread our towels, dragged the cooler onto the sand. My sister and her friend stayed close, angling for ice cream and quarters for the arcade. I stayed down at the shoreline and the boardwalk with my friend, letting the waves numb me, letting distance blur the lines of duty and responsiveness. When I returned for sunscreen, my mother was asleep on the blanket. Her skin was already olive, darkened further by weeks of sun; she never burned, not like me. Taking after my dad’s side that way, I had to fry before I would turn brown. She looked peaceful, almost girlish, her face relaxed in a way I never saw when she was awake, her thick, wavy brown hair tightened into curled tendrils around her ponytail. And something rose up in me—a spark of mischief, age-appropriate, sure—but it was laced with something sharper, darker, closer to revenge.
There was a canister of Planter’s Cheez Balls in the beach bag, neon orange spheres that left sticky dust on your fingers as evidence. I shook them out one by one, surrounding her sleeping form in a ritual circle of fluorescent crumbs. A coronation, or a curse, but most of all a childish act with the impulsiveness I never got to let loose. Ever.
The gulls came quickly. First one, tilting its head with that unnerving sideways eye. Then another. And then a storm of them, wings thrashing, beaks snapping, feet scrabbling on the blanket as if they meant to carry her off. My mother startled awake, screaming and swatting, hair plastered to her forehead, towel whipping at the air. I laughed until my stomach hurt and struggled to catch my breath. My friend laughed too, but her laughter was lighter, uncomplicated. She thought it was comedy. Mine was edged with something deep—part triumph, part grief, part justice doled out by a flock of willing birds who knew nothing of us.
That day on the beach, for a moment, the balance shifted. Mom was the one surrounded, flailing, overwhelmed. I was the one with power, the orchestrator of chaos. It didn’t heal anything. It didn’t change what waited at home. For one day that summer, I wasn’t the responsible one or the punching bag. I was the girl who fed the gulls my own mother in a constellation of processed cheese.
“It was like something right out of The Birds,” she would lament for years. It wasn’t the last time I vexed my mother beyond all reason. It didn’t change the direction of our relationship, or prevent far worse from happening a few years down the line. I simply say I “survived” my mother. Sometimes barely in the most bluntly literal sense. The first two years of my life and the last two years of hers were pretty alright, in terms of our relationship. We call it “even.” The messy middle? Well, that was a “dumpster fire.”
My mother was diagnosed with her final illness shortly after she turned 60. We didn’t pretend the worst twenty years didn’t happen, but neither did we stay there, probably because it was so clear that the next twenty years wouldn’t. Maybe that sounds cheesy, but that took all the air out of the container and forced us to look at what actually mattered. The rest is just a continuance of an old story: generations of girls with unmet needs who grew into women who could make choices. I hated her choices. She wasn’t usually fond of mine. But, either one of us could make the other laugh with an unexpected seagull noise.