Godammit, I’m Mad!

Look what my brilliant friend Hammie developed to help non-verbal kids communicate, starring her daughter Grace. If only we could all have mothers like Hammie (and daughters like Grace!)

Costochondritis is an inflammation of the cartilage that connects the ribs to the breastbone. It’s extremely painful and feels like a heart attack that won’t go away. The first time I had it, I called 911 and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I kept whispering to the EMT guys, “Don’t let me die!”

Now I have it again, and here’s why: There is a plague of constant catastrophe and sorrow upon the House of Wolf, and it just keeps coming. There are no locusts (so far) but there are cockroaches. I am learning which kitchen products work best to immobilize them.

I feel there is a biblical aspect to this plague, although I know next to nothing about the bible. I do remember a part about the firstborn sons,  and that’s how this plague began.  My firstborn son nearly died, didn’t die, but his recovery won’t be what we thought.

Then came-ith my Broken Hip, the horror of Kindred, the No Money, the Angry Husband, the Spiteful Teenager, The Leaking Roof, the Pile of Bills, the No Leaving the House, and now the Fucking Costochondritis. It’s like a knife in my heart, which is already broken in several places.

A friend mentioned the story of Job, and I nodded, pretending that I knew what he meant. I know that Job was some guy who god tortured just for fun, but then pretended he was testing Job’s faith.

If god is testing me, I hope he’s happy. I still have no faith, but I’m a simple enough creature to wonder why god wants to punish me. I know intellectually that bad things happen to good people. Bad things are mostly random. People are starving in Africa, but not because god hates them. Knowing this doesn’t bring me closer to god. Knowing he isn’t there doesn’t stop me from resenting him, either.

I sold the Chanel bag that was once my holy grail. Chanel won’t protect you from the lord’s wrath or his indifference. I would give up everything I have just to turn back the clock to August. I would even sign up for more creepy medical  conditions like costochondritis. This sounds like bargaining, right? And bargaining is a stage of grief, but I can’t remember which one.

Just the other night, I watched the first half of Gone With the Wind on TV. I was struck for the first time by how poignantly Scarlett exclaimed, “I want my mother!”  I finally know what she means. I want my mother too, even though she’s dead, and even though she was crazy my whole life.  I get why soldiers call out for Mother when they’re injured on the battle field.  It’s horrible to be out here on your own without a mother to make things better. It’s horrible to be a mother who can’t make things better.

I wasn’t going to end this on a tragicomic note, then I changed my mind, then I changed it back again. It’s a brutal Christmas over here.

How do I hate thee… how could anyone not hate thee?

This reliance on Trig as a crowd pleaser during Mrs. P’s book tour is driving me nuts with helpless rage. Even though the baby is so clearly a prop, her shameless Trigsploitation has struck a chord with the gullible right ring. This is the sort of thing they’re observing:

“She’s going out there as a pro-life woman to say that there’s great joy in special-needs kids — and that we shouldn’t be aborting them.”

Christian conservatives write that “Mother and son have become objects of the left’s unrelenting scorn” and that this reflects “a broader societal bias against disability.”

So now, if you don’t like Mrs. Palin, you’re not only a godless commie, YOU HATE THE DISABLED! You abortionist!

Has anyone  else in politics ever dragged around a special needs kid like this? It seems like some sort of new low. I don’t like the way Trig’s shoes and eye-glasses are optional accessories. I don’t like the way she holds him up like a fisherman showing off a prize winning bass.

I know plenty of moms of special needs kids, and none of them act like they deserve to be president based on their children’s disability. I’ve said it before and I’m compelled to keep saying it. What a fucking cunt!™

** Oooh and by the way, Ann wins the Dead Sweater, Dewayne gets it if Ann declines due to a secret sex tape.

After Jill and Braindance shared their childhood memories of  douche bags, I recalled my own uneasy feelings about those rubber things hanging over the bathtub when I was a kid.

They were certainly a fixture in our bathroom, along with an enema bag and maybe even some other scary medical-looking crap. Wow, our mothers and grandmas were so weird!

Try a Google image search for an actual douche bag, and most of what you’ll find are sickening guys and joke products that refer to the sickening guys. In other words, the old fashioned douche bag is a relic of another time, and its namesake is here to stay.

Who the hell invented the douche bag? What a maniac. In fact, what a douche! I am thankful to my mom for neglecting to give me any instructions on “feminine hygiene” or anything else. I learned everything I know from my sister, dirty books, and The Hite Report.

But I feel kind of bad about depriving my own kids of the douche bag experience. They never got to feel queasy about their mother’s weird rubber crap in the bathroom. They never knew the frisson of squeamish curiosity that is such a touchstone of childhood. God, I’m a failure.

Perhaps the shit on my dresser will make it up to them.  It seems like it might have that Mom Mystique that could haunt them for the rest of their lives. I’ll have to ask them. Take a look and tell me what you think.

But I am nothing if not a mom.

I was too depressed to write a Mother’s Day thing.  I was planning to link back to Mothers Who Kill, to get a discussion going.  Then I considered posting a photo of my mom, back when she looked young and beautiful and full of hope.  In the end, I went to bed ignoring the subject and feeling sorry for myself. An obscure self-pity. You know the kind, if you’re a mom with teenagers or grown-up children.

I am writing a book in my head about motherhood, and the first chapter will be titled “Relax: Whatever You Do Will Be Wrong!”

The last chapter will describe The Samurai Mom™.  But first I need to bestow the Sister Wolf Samurai Award upon my friend Hammie.  She represents the essence of what being a Samurai Mom™ is all about.

Hammie rides into battle every single day. She will stay on that horse no matter what. She will battle for her children whenever necessary, fearlessly and often thanklessly.  She will battle with her children, too, since raising them involves standing up to them when it would be easier to give in or just hide under the bed.

Hammie’s two kids are autistic, which means she must be their advocate and attorney as well as their mom. She isn’t daunted by the A word, and has made it her business to uncover and celebrate the ‘other side’ of austism, i.e. the gift of the unusual mind.

She is a noble Samurai who constantly finds new ways to help her children blossom, and to cherish their successes. She finds strategies instead of complaining or seeing problems as either/or situations.  She reaches out to parents and kids who seek her wisdom or friendship.

I wish I’d had a mom like Hammie! I wish I could be a mom like Hammie. In difficult situations, mom’s could do a lot worse than ask themselves, “What would Hammie do?”

You can even go to her blog and ask her. She will not only answer, she might just send you a box of chocolate Tim Tams.

Everyone knew that the woman who just had octuplets was crazy, but who knew she’d be crazy and arrogant?

Watching a preview of her interview on NBC, at first I was more horrified by her face than her words. What the hell did Nadya Suleman do to her face, and why isn’t anyone mentioning it?!  She has clearly had a terrible nose-job, leaving her with a tiny miniature of a nose that wouldn’t fool Helen Keller. Then, the inflated lips! What a mess. Perhaps she is going for an Angelina Jolie look, but as in her quest for babies, she is tragically deluded.

As far as I can tell, this woman has a pathological compulsion to acquire children, much like some disturbed people hoard animals. “An animal hoarder is a person who amasses more animals than he/she can properly care for.” Oops! If you substitute babies for animals, the disorder fits her behavior perfectly.

Women who use their children to gratify their own narcissistic needs are discussed at length in Alice Miller’s landmark book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. If you haven’t read it, let me say that it’s often cited as “a book that changed my life.” It’s a book that is pressed upon others as essential reading. If you grew up feeling worthless, if you still struggle to be your ‘real’ self, if you worry that you might screw up your own children, this book will be a transformative experience.

Today I was thinking about childhood, and I recalled my mom screaming theatrically, “Why did god curse me with a child like you?” I remember how sad I felt, and how I wished I knew the answer to her question.

Now I know that what my mother meant was, I can’t control my anger and I can’t deal with the needs of a child.

I have lost my temper with my own kids more times than I want to remember. I hope and pray that I haven’t screwed them up too much. At least I won’t have traumatized them with a face that looks like a duck.

Again, if your mother was/is crazy, this club is for you! Feel free to speak up.

If you had a crazy mother, you will spend your whole life trying to transcend it. If you are a crazy mother, no degree of remorse will ease your heavy heart.

My mom was crazy. Even into her forties, my sister was ashamed to let anyone find out. Whenever I meet someone with a crazy mom, I feel an instant kinship, even if their childhood experience was nothing like mine. The burden of a crazy mom sets you apart. You missed out on something that you can barely imagine. But you struggle to forgive her.

I know people who were locked in closets, hit, threatened, screamed at, abandoned, and I know a woman whose mom killed herself on Mother’s Day, knowing her three daughters would find her with a plastic bag over her head.

If your mom was crazy, none of this will shock you. I’m more shocked when an adult friend tells me about a nice day she just had, shopping with her mom. It seems almost otherworldly. How do you get a normal mom, a mom who isn’t either enraged or crying?!?

While PAP Smear takes a break, I’m embarking on a Crazy Mothers Club. We might have a logo, but probably not. Maybe just a secret handshake.

Was (or is) your mom crazy? Here is a place you can talk about it.  Rant, complain, whine, and compare notes. Are you a crazy mom? You can confess, seek counsel, or just bond with other crazy moms. No one gets to be mean to anybody else, i.e., bad vibes will not be tolerated.

Since I fit both categories, I get to be CEO. Annemarie will do the PR and heavy lifting. All other positions are open.

A reader calling herself Kim asks: “Don’t you people have anything better to do than judge other people? I can’t believe how rude you people are!!”

Kim, let me answer you this way: NO, WE DON’T!

Here at Godammit.com, we judge people. We figure that the good lord gave us the ability to make judgements, so why not exercise it? Like the great Gustave Flaubert, we are “severe mais juste.” Strict but fair.

In PAP Smear news, Mrs. P was unable to define “preconditions” and agreed to reveal her medical records IF she does in fact reveal them. Good to know!

In a new interview with People Magazine, Mrs. P and Todd “The Bully” Palin are asked “Who’s the better cook?” Mrs. P answers (god bless her heart) “I’m a better cooker.”  Hahahahaha!

Okay, I have been asked to list “11 Things” about me, and I feel it is my privilege to let the people of this great country and any other land mass to know these eleven things:

1. I buy and hoard red lipstick.
2. I have two adopted adult children who I met in cyberspace.
3. I’m afraid of squirrels.
4. I hate my next door neighbor, Alec.
5. There’s no such thing as too much coffee.
6. I’m blind without contact lenses (and with them, at this point)
7. I once got married in Tijuana, using fake ID.
8. I love “Free Bird.”
9. I am relentless in arguments about word usage.
10. No one will tolerate my singing.
11. I’m planning to launch the Crazy Mothers Club (CMC) for the daughters of crazy mothers, after Nov. 4.*

* Sign-ups on November 6

I watched “Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project” on Sundance last night, unprepared for its intensity. It was described as a documentary about a model-turned-photographer who takes pictures of her schizophrenic mother.

Like “Tarnation,” it sucked me in from the very beginning. It only took a few minutes for me to form the opinion that Tierney Gearon is just as crazy as her 64 year old mother, if not more so. She gets her mother to stand outside in the freezing snow,  wildly taking snapshots as the older woman pleads to go back inside.

Watching this documentary is excruciating but endlessly fascinating. It forces one to confront ideas about motherhood, family, mental illness, and exploitation.

Tierney wants to be a good mother, but when her child sobs, her instinct is to photograph him rather than comfort him. She literally uses her new baby as a prop. But she clearly enjoys an intimacy with her children that is really extraordinary. She speaks to them honestly, and joyously takes part in their games, even when it means letting them jump over her as she lays on the grass, hugely pregnant.

Tierney’s mother is a vibrant old lady who lives alone in a ramshackle house and occasionally lashes out at her manipulative daughter. At one point she screams at Tierney, “I gave you everything! All my love and my beauty! But you won’t help me, you bitch!”  It’s a moment of bitter raw emotion, which cuts to the heart of the matter, I think.

Mothers who do their best are still not good enough, and crazy mothers leave their mark. Craziness runs through Tierney Gearon’s family like a virus, but she doesn’t see it. I worry for her three kids, who will undoubtedly struggle with her craziness and their own, in the end. They will probably become parents of crazy children. Nature loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. In this family, like so many, the trigger is pulled over and over.

The photos that made Tierney a figure of controversy are beautiful and disturbing. It’s hard to see how they could have been considered pornographic. But she does manage to imbue her pictures with an ineffable weirdness that makes a family picnic look like a satanic ritual. She seems like a courageous survivor who would eat her own kids if they got stranded on a desert island.

Watch this movie if you’re up to it. You can buy it on Amazon.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by mothers who kill. I don’t feel this is necessarily connected to my own mother’s bouts of rage against my existence, which she viewed as a “curse” on her. I was never afraid she would harm me. At least, not until I was in my thirties.

The first case I remember hearing about was a distraught Japanese mother who had walked into the ocean with her young child. The child drowned and the mother survived. She was defended in court by a lawyer who explained that the Japanese culture requires a suicidal mother to take her children with her into death. It is considered an act of love and mercy to spare the abandoned child a life of grief. At the time, I identified with the mother. Perhaps it was just easier than identifying with the child.

Later, Susan Smith drove her two sons into a river and blamed a car-thief. Watching her describe the incident on TV, I felt a chill. I knew she was lying, as did all my friends who were mothers. Still, I didn’t really hold it against her. It was the blatant lie that I found disgusting.

Still later, Andrea Yates. Now there’s a mother who killed. The mind can not comprehend the scope and duration of such madness. The sheer work involved in killing so many children!  Her crime was hard to think about but impossible to cast aside. Details of her life and marriage started to emerge. Her husband knew she was nuts but didn’t see a reason to stop impregnating her. He took up some dubious form of Christianity which necessitated moving his psychotic wife and brood of young children into a van. He left every day to go to his respectable job somewhere, while Andrea Yates sunk deeper into depression. After the trial, I saw a home movie of Andrea sitting in the van, seemingly catatonic while children literally climbed over her, like cockroaches. Of course she had to kill them! I thought, shaken by the images. Who wouldn’t?

Recently, I read that a pair of toddler siblings had wandered away from their home and drowned in a nearby pond. The mother claimed that she only turned her back on them for a moment. Both of the children required special medical care on a daily basis. The mother found time to tie a shiny red ribbon in her hair for a press conference. Note to police: She did it.

Still more recently, a thirty-four year old woman has confessed to killing her two children while her husband was at work. The children were reported to have been stabbed up to 200 times, each.  This mother really meant to kill her children; that much is obvious.

What doesn’t appear to seem obvious to our society is that these women are not really so unusual. What sets them apart is that they crossed a thin line, one that separates thought from deed, impulse from act; and it’s a line most mothers tread more often than anyone wants to admit.

Mothers with colicky babies who seem to never stop crying, mothers with tantrum-throwing toddlers, mothers with chronically sick or destructive or oppositional kids, mothers often isolated all day from reasonable human beings (i.e. adults), mothers of every race and social strata and age group who have no-one to whom to confide the unspeakable words: I HATE HIM!  For every blinding moment of hatred, there may be hours and weeks and years of the deepest sort of love, but those moments are real. You don’t mean that, a husband will reassure the wife who slips up and voices her feeling. But we do. We all hate our kids at times, and we are able to transcend those emotions in order to ensure the survival of our species. We regain our maternal footing and then feel guilty for harboring a single dark thought about our precious angels. Until the next time they keep us awake all night or carve a tick-tack-toe grid on an antique dresser.

Lately, if you are attentive to news reports, you may perceive a trend in mothers who kill. The acts seem unduly savage, like the woman who hacked off her baby’s arms and let it bleed to death while she waited for the cops to arrive. A woman down south has just been arrested for chopping off her daughter’s head with a hedge clipper. In Australia, a woman’s diary has revealed a long history of smothering her babies. Are they monsters or women without resources, like social services and supportive relatives? Is a species that strands women alone with children in a pressure cooker of poverty, fatigue, worry, loneliness, high fructose corn syrup and daytime TV, beginning its journey to extinction?

A new mother who hears her infant’s cry will often start to lactate. The cry affects her pituitary system, providing a biological reminder so the baby won’t starve. But that same system functions also to make the cry literally unbearable. A father or neighbor may tune it out; the mother’s entire being resonates to the sound. When it goes on too long, or too often, she is agitated. According to U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, homicide is the leading cause of injury deaths among infants under one year of age in the United States. In Australia, more infants under the age of one year are murdered than die in car accidents, accidental poisonings, falls or drowning. Oops. Maybe nature went overboard in calibrating this mechanism.

Studies show that the biological role of friendships between women includes the reduction of stress hormones, decreased risk of dementia, a stronger immune system, and many other benefits. Do our friendships help us resist the urge to kill our kids? I’d like to see some research in this area. Did Andrea Yates have a best friend? Somehow, I doubt it. I know that if she’d called me, I would’ve told her years ago to leave that bastard or at least get her tubes tied. Would you bet that any of those notorious mothers had recently enjoyed a nice frappuccino with her girlfriends?

When I was a young mother, I was unprepared for the endless demands of a baby. I rarely got more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. I began to feel like a zombie.  If I went out to a restaurant, my baby woke up in my lap just as my food arrived. I began to resent my husband’s freedom to relax, eat, or leave the house alone. Sometimes, when only motion would lull my son to sleep, I would push his pram back and forth in the hallway until he drifted off. Once, after an eternity of pushing the pram with no effect on the volume of his rhythmic screaming, I pushed hard enough to see his little body flop up and down, like a rag doll. It was mean, I knew, but satisfying.

Don’t get excited! I never did it again. I just remember the feeling of mania born of exhaustion. I learned that when I felt desperate, I could call my older sister, a seasoned mother of two who had seen it all. “Don’t worry” she would intone calmly, “Of course you hate him.” Hearing the inhuman screaming over the phone, she would even sound impressed. “Wow, that’s really awful! You  poor thing.”

I won’t claim that my first born owes his life to my sister, but I do wonder why mothers are expected to cope with so much stress and sleep deprivation, and so little practical and emotional preparation for what motherhood involves. My son grew into an unusually sweet and even compliant child. I was very lucky in that respect. I don’t think he defied a parental command until he was fourteen or fifteen. By then, a woman rarely entertains fantasies of killing her kid; by then, he is more likely to kill her. I heard a novelist say wistfully of parenthood that you spend years pouring everything you have into your child. All your love, patience, tenderness, time, wisdom and money. And if you do it right, he’ll grow up and leave you.

My son grew up and left home. But before he went off to college, I was a new mother once again, with a baby boy who arrived two months early. He was tiny and precious and when I was finally allowed to bring him home from the hospital, he cried continuously. He cried for forty days and forty nights, and then he cried some more. Sometimes, at dawn, I would turn to his weary dad and sob, “What’s the point of him?” I honestly couldn’t remember. At various times throughout his infancy, I rejoiced in the miracle of his survival, or considered him a pitiless human siren designed to shatter my sanity.

Today, my youngest son is twelve years old. When I’m out in a shopping mall and I hear a baby’s relentless screaming, I feel the mother’s pain. A bundle of joy begets a bundle of frayed nerves, at the very least. Every mother is both Mrs. Cleaver and Medea.  Our impulse to protect, under a certain set of circumstances, can give way to an impulse to destroy. As my boy enters adolescence, the form of autism he was born with can produce tantrums of such magnitude that we’ve had to call 911 for help. Like electrical storms, his tantrums terrify the dog and rattle the windows, plunging the household into chaos. My friends ask me how I can stand it.  I shrug and answer that I don’t have a choice.

My mother’s rage when I was growing up was so constant that it just seemed normal. I vowed to do better when I had kids of my own. At some point, during the last decade of her life, she turned her wrath on me with a single-mindedness that I found truly alarming. What if she managed to get a gun? I blocked her phone number, so she called me from payphones. She issued weird demands in the voice of a wicked witch. Eventually, she lost interest or just wanted to make peace. Before she died, I forgave her for everything, of course. She did the best she could as a divorced mother of two young children, in an era when a “divorcee” was shunned as a threat to all decent women.

Tonight, my child and I sit in separate rooms at our computers. The atmosphere is pleasant and harmonious.  A few days ago, a woman in Chicago was arrested for strangling her four year old son with a bed-sheet after he disobeyed her command to stay inside the house while she went to the laundromat. After she killed him, she reportedly went back to finish the laundry.