It shocked me to find out that Dr. Seuss didn't write the children's book, Are You My Mother?. Since I can remember, that little book made tears fall from my eyes. What a dumb thing to cry over, right? I thought that today in the bookstore as I felt the well behind my eyes start to swell. We just celebrated Mother's Day, I'm 26 years old, shouldn't time have made things better? Better? No... it's just made things change.
I remember that time when I was five years old watching Aunt Donna sing loudly by the radio in the kitchen. Now I know she was drinking too much. My Momma walked in and sat down at the table and I climbed up onto her lap to be embraced. Aunt Donna was treated differently than everyone else, now I know it's because she has Schizophrenia. To a five-year-old it just seemed she was overly imaginative, in a shameful way. In a way that made everyone scoff when she didn't make sense.
As Aunt Donna's voice softened to a whisper, she swayed over to the table in front of me and Momma. "She's not your Momma," she yelled, "I am." I looked back and forth between the two, my tiny heart shattering from the truth. I ended up kicking, screaming, crying, and falling asleep gasping all night. At five years old, the truth hit me too hard. Turns out Momma was Donna's mother, and I was Donna's daughter.
The daughter of the weird one, the strange one, the one who made no sense. The one treated like a child although she was way too big. The one they all called, "Crazy." So there I was, a baby, and found I had an innate sense of shame and unworthiness. I didn't belong. My mother wasn't my mother and I've struggled with that my whole life.
Momma was 57 when she adopted me because people with Schizophrenia are sometimes unable to care for children. I'll spare those details. I grew up watching Donna curiously and terrified that I may have the same fate. I grew up in fear and shame. I felt like a burden on my whole family. No matter how small I tried to shrink myself, being alive meant imposing someone with extra weight when they hadn't asked for it.
It upset me when I couldn't take care of Momma when she got sick, like she always did for me. Momma fell ill with Leukemia and I watched her be slowly washed away. It was like a six-month tide of waves pulling her out to sea. Her hair, the fullness in her cheeks, her grip on reality, wave after wave, until the last day when I watched her sink. It was the day after my 19th birthday. Her last words to me were, "Happy Birthday, I love you."
Donna was there that day, too. She handed me some blue pills shortly after the hearse pulled out of the driveway. She told me they would help. They didn't stop me from crying and screaming at God, but they did help reality fade a little, like someone applied a hazy filter. Like a lucid dream. In a way, the first 20 years of my life felt like that.
I haven't seen or spoke to Donna in almost seven years. Sometimes I want to go back and ask her if she's my mother, but sadly, there's no predicting her answer.
Dr. Seuss didn't even write that book...
