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 this time with a paycheck and a new relationship. I was left to be the adult—making meals, all the home-and-garden chores, wrangling my little sister, and tending to my grandmother. Filling in all the blank spaces where my mother had once stood.

My mother had always worked, but before that summer she’d worked nearby. Sometimes a second-shift or split-shift so that my sister and I were not left for more than a couple hours in the afternoon after school. Our grandma was there, but she was not physically able to be a babysitter. She was an adult who could be sought for a real problem, but she had real limitations by then. We’d moved to a different suburb, my mother had a longer distance to travel to work, a lot of things in our family seemed to “not go to plan” at the same time. Worst, my grandmother’s emphysema progressed to end-stage—so she wasn’t providing care, she needed care—and suddenly my “helping out at home” was more like 100 hours a week of pure house arrest.

I’d lost a lot; the swim team, even though the year before I’d won two bronze medals at states, all my friends (my best friend moved to Texas that year) and…any remnants of normalcy. Still, 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. I had indoor hobbies. 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 anything tip off 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 she’s still starving for something she never got, and mistaking her own daughter for the one who took it from her.

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.

I didn’t know that their marriage struggled after a few years. That the friends, family, and the church group suggested a marriage oriented retreat. At that event, it was strongly suggested that having a baby would be the answer to their problems. I owe my literal existence to the unsubtle family-formation pressure of the Catholic Church.

I, of course, was the baby.

I, of course, did not manage to fix the problems.

For a couple of years, our little family lived under my grandmother’s roof. I was passed around a lot. I had strong bonds with my grandmother and my aunts. A couple years in, she complained to her oldest sister, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t even win an argument against her.”

I was two. Maybe two-and-a-half.

My wildly unprepared, reluctant mother called in a daughter who was an outlier, precocious beyond reason. Boy, did she want to send me back.

At that point, she decided to have another baby. The second one, she chose to have. One who would be what she thought a daughter ought to be.

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 genuine, developmentally appropriate 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, after they’d actually separated. I didn’t get lunch money, I would scrounge spare change for a bagel and cream cheese. I rejoined the swim team in high school, and plummeted to 85 pounds because training takes calories I just wasn’t getting. 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, mostly because I couldn’t pretend not to see her. If it wasn’t the look in my eyes, it was what flew from my mouth.

What she doled out in return 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. That was for not preventing my grandmother from quietly getting loaded drunk in the other room while I made dinner, the day she found out she had about eighteen months to live. My mother came home from work to find her mother joyfully dancing the czardas in the neighbors’ driveway next door. She flew at me in a blind rage while I drained the pasta.

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. Hide the 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 toned foundation corrected fresh purple bruising. Her subtle pinkish blush was close enough to correct the faded green areas.

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 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 ritual 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, and 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. I never had to do anything like that again. It was enough to know I could.

I was the girl who fed my own mother to the seagulls 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. Usually, I simply say I “survived” my mother. Sometimes barely in the most bluntly literal sense. For one day that summer, I was neither the dutiful daughter nor the punching bag.

As it happened, my mother was diagnosed with her final illness shortly after she turned 60. It bears mention that she did learn and grow from some things that happened in her life, later, by which time I was long gone and a mother of two school-aged children myself. She acknowledged a lot of her fumbles, in time. We didn’t pretend the worst twenty years didn’t happen, but neither did we stay there. It was pointless once everyone could see that the next twenty years wouldn’t.

She even planned lunch with me for my birthday, once. I was forty. She died a little over six months later. I ended up leading the effort to care for her at the end of her life, with the support of her husband and siblings. I never saw that one coming. Maybe it sounds cheesy, but facing something incurable took all the air out of the old container and forced us to look at what actually mattered. What parts of the story could still be unwritten and reworked before it was final? There was possibly more relational understanding between my mother and me forged in the last 90 days of her life than in the forty years preceding. I still had a number of shocking surprises after she died, stories people then felt safe to share.

The rest is just a continuance of an old story: generations of girls with unmet needs who grow into women who can make choices about them. I hated her choices, how she chose to resource her needs, and the fallout. She wasn’t particularly fond of my style of….anything.

There was always a tiny bit of common ground. Either one of us could make the other laugh with an unexpected…..seagull noise.