It's just noise

There are a lot of things I love about the movie Juno.  I love how the stepmom defends and fights for Juno like she’s her own kid.  I love the bit about the yearly cacti sent by her abandoning mother.  I love how the Jason Bateman character is pretty much every guy I’ve dated since 1990.  But mostly I love the moment when he and Juno get into a fight and as she walks out she throws back at him, “Oh yeah, and that Sonic Youth CD you made for me?  It sucks.  It’s just noise!”

The term “just noise” is something I first heard on one of my favorite TV shows, Intervention.  It’s a term used by Jeff Van Vonderen, one of the interventionists, to describe for the families the sounds they may hear coming out of the interventionee’s mouth once he or she becomes aware that they are the subject of an intervention.  Some of this noise may constitute such statements as “I can do it by myself, I don’t need rehab,” or, “I can’t believe you guys all lied to me, you all suck,” or “I don’t have a problem.” I think I can sum up my (lack of a) relationship with my mother, and my mother in general, with the phrase “I don’t have a problem.”  Which as we all know is just noise.

A little summary.  Many people may assume my mother and I always had a tense relationship.  I can honestly say this is not true.  What’s so staggering and heartbreaking about our current situation is that we always got along great.  My sister (ten years my senior, and has a different dad), my mother and I always were a terrific unit.  We laughed a lot, had great times together, and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company well into adulthood.  Not really knowing my father (more to come on this) I was subject entirely to my mother’s opinions, parenting, and will, as are many children of single parents (as will mine be).  However, my mother has a problem.  The problem is she’s a narcissist.

Like many mental health disorders, there is a vast spectrum of narcissism, and I don’t think my mother falls on the extreme end.  But she definitely has some very damaging personality traits that I believe will eventually kill her (you’ll see why in a minute).  Growing up, we always got along like a house on fire, but even as a very little kid I knew that you simply did not cross my mother.  You did not disagree with her, you did not contradict her.  Her word was law.  Which is a good thing sometimes – we never had that “my mom is my best friend” thing where we felt like we could manipulate and take advantage of her.  Hell to the No.  But I always had this sneaking feeling that if I ever dared assert my individuality in any way that somehow she would find a way to cut me out of her life.  And this is exactly what happened in the fall of 2006.

My mother “parentalized” both of us, in particular my older sister.  She even stated that she had put all this effort into raising us and now it was our turn to take care of her (at one point she had demanded that the entire family, including my cousins, kick in every month to keep her afloat – luckily none of us fell for this).  When I was a kid I always had the sense that I was raising myself, which was punctuated by the fact that I was usually left alone and sometimes downright abandoned – when I was nine she pulled me out of school in Boston for me to go live in another state with my aunt & uncle and cousins for one year while she moved to New York City by herself (I believe she was chasing some guy there which is why she didn’t take me with her right away); a couple of years later she went to Japan for a couple of weeks and left me alone in our midtown apartment to fend for myself; when I was fourteen she remarried and I moved in with my sister in another part of town, essentially beginning my adulthood as a freshman in high school.  All of this behavior was puzzling but at the time I took it in stride, as kids do.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized this is not normal behavior, and started to recognize the emotional scars that come from being abandoned by your own mother (especially when she’s the only parent you have).

Another thing is my sister and I were raised in a crazy Christian cult.  My mother “found” this “religion” when she was pregnant with me, so I am the only person to be raised in it from birth, although amazingly she got her sister, brother in law, and nephews into it as well.  I believe this cult was a perfect fit for her because it justified how she already was – emotionally distant, disconnected, and in desperate need of the illusion of control.  This “religion” states what many of the current Oprah-esque new age-y religions and systems do – that everything, and I mean everything that happens to you is for a reason, that you can control everything that happens in the world by the power of your thought, that you can heal yourself, change weather patterns, get that promotion, etc, by “knowing the truth”  that only good exists, nothing bad exists, ever, including our “bad” material bodies (known as “matter”).  Some of you may be reading this and think “that’s so twisted”, but unfortunately this concept is not new – it’s the basis of many eastern religions and (as mentioned) much of the new age BS that’s been so popular for the last forty years or so.  So factor this mindset in and you’ll see why things went the way they did for us.

So my mother had been living on and off in Brazil since the 60s.  This is where she met my father, and although I’ve never lived there, I visited her several times in the early 2000’s when she had finally moved there permanently.  Now many of you may ask why an older woman (60+) would choose to move to a very distant, unstable third world country far away from her family.  My answer to that is – good question!!  Anyway, let’s go to the fall of 2006.  My mother is getting more and more entrenched in this cult.  I have been weaseling my way out of it for decades, probably starting when I was around twelve and ratcheting up to full-on disbelief by the time I was about 30.  My mother has also been very ill with a mysterious ailment for decades – my sister and I believe this probably started as a minor uterine tract infection and now after two decades of lack of treatment is probably shutting down her kidneys and will probably kill her.  Did I mention the members of this cult never see doctors or get any medical treatment at all?  Ok, so you see where we’re at.  So it’s November of 2006.  My purse gets stolen at a gig (and this ends up being a huge mess of identity theft, canceling credit cards and closing bank accounts, breaking into my own house, changing the locks on the house and my car – in other words, a HUGE disaster) and then a week later as my car is parked on the street in front of my house someone comes along and smashes it into an accordion and drives away.  As often happens in times of trouble I call her up (at $2.50 a minute) for a little comfort. 

Here’s the funny thing about mothers and their children.  Children will go to their mothers for comfort even when historically none has ever been offered.  This was definitely the case with me.  I don’t know why I expected her to sympathize or offer helpful advice; she of course did neither.  She said I must have done something to bring these things on myself; things like that don’t “just happen”.  She’s never known someone to have the kind of calamities I’ve had in my life (it’s true, I’ve had a lot) and the only reason could possibly be that because I’ve been exposed to “the truth” that I must be being attacked by “forces”.  It was at this point that I took a hard swallow and decided to tell her what I’d been putting off for years – that I simply didn’t believe in our religion anymore.  Deep down I knew this was it; that somehow, some way, she would find a way to cut me off if I told her this.  So I told her, and although in the moment she seemed to not make a big deal out of it, just days later I got THE EMAIL. 

I had been planning all that year to come down to Rio to visit her for Christmas.  I was so excited about this trip because I just loved being there during their summer – the beaches, the soft breezes, the walking around city streets in bikinis and flip flops.  So I had gotten my visa, used my mileage for the flight, and made all the arrangements.  Right around Thanksgiving and just days after our last conversation she sends me an e-mail telling me that she doesn’t want me to come see her.  She says my attitude towards our “religion” is so toxic that she’s afraid to be in close proximity to me, that she has to think of her health and well being.  In other words, she’s afraid being physically close to me will make her sick (this is textbook from our religion, by the way – she wasn’t making this up).  Well, that was it.  I wrote her back and told her I was sick of her choosing this crazy religion over me and that she would never hear from me again.  I stayed home for Christmas.  Then over Christmas she sent me the most evil, hateful e-mail you can imagine.  She told me I was a manipulator and an “emotional blackmailer” and that I had always been this way, ever since I was a baby.  She mentioned that she and my sister had been talking about this a lot and she agreed (my sister has since done a complete 180 from this horrible time – and apologized to me profusely, which I of course accepted!  I understand she was totally manipulated by our mother at the time.  I get it, believe me).  It went on and on.  And I don’t mind admitting that even though I knew it was all just a product of her deranged mind, that she’s not well, and that it had nothing to do with me and was not true about me, that it killed me a little bit inside.  Honestly, I’ll never forgive her for this.  We haven’t spoken in five years and I prefer it that way.  It’s an ugly, horrendous situation.  But you know what?  I’m not her, and she’s not me.  She missed her chance to have a good life, to enjoy parenting.  She’ll miss out on her grandkid(s).  I, on the other hand, have the power to make the experience of being a mom whatever I want it to be.  The rest is just noise.