STEPS

CHAPTER NINETEEN Mother to Mother

Time after time, crying for this, for that, her pain shooting out, reaching and lodging in me. How hard it must have been, married to him and always at the mercy of his frustration and his anger. Never quite knowing when he would ignite, the force brutal, menacing. Fucking the Virgin Mary, the Mother she believed in.

"Fuck your God," he would yell. All he could say most days. "Fuck your Cross."

She never once found the strength to protect me from his violence. Something else I carry - a disappointment difficult to explain away. I try to reason, factoring in the culture, the isolation, her stolen childhood. Yet despite finding in her favour, still I struggle to accept her passivity. How does a mother bear witness to her child's abuse? At times support it? I question what she felt those moments, or what she thought, as each event impacted both of us. How does a mother become immune to the tears, to the pain she observes in her child?

Too long subjugated? Assuming and accepting the role of victim? The weight of her secrets too a heavy burden? It feels insufficient, unacceptable; a mother's impassiveness when witnessing her child's pain. I want to consider her my hero, to hold even one instance where her love for me overrode her fear, her ignorance. Because I had to become my own hero in the end, I had to take the necessary steps to secure my safety, and her safety.

Now he mumbles words between laboured breaths, his wrath diffused by the sundry meds. The imposed impotence ever accompanied by fear, increasing dependence making him anxious of everything. More so I will stick him in some home. He lives terrified of me doing this. Each hospital visit wondering if this time. If this day he is put away, sharing space with other forgotten ones.

Sometimes I catch him staring at me, this fear emanating from him. There is some power then, comfort in the idea he is now afraid of me. Despite my knowing I'd never do that. Whoever he'd been, whatever the consequences of his past actions, he remains my father. I could not condemn him for his unwitting ignorance, nor for the circumstances behind his own fracturing.

My mother the screamer now, venting a lifetime of suppressed reactions, yelling at him, at me, at my boys! Witnessing each fresh outburst and wondering when exactly I stopped being her child. Because I no longer feel her child! She is separate from me in this current role, uncaring. Unconcerned.

I long to enfolded in her arms, me to cry, a single time. Her to tell me "Everything will be okay, I love you." But she interprets loving as doing. Cooking, cleaning. All she knows: how to look after needs. She tells me often. "I do everything for you." Reminds me often too of my ungratefulness, my never helping, never appreciating her efforts. "What would you do without me?"

I instead wish she'd stop. Fuck the cooking and cleaning. Notice my desperation, my quiet drowning. Not waving. See me for what I am now, a miserable soul, shut up in a forbidding prison. She bitches about me never leaving my room. Claims I show no interest in anything except myself.

"You've abandoned me, you don't care!"

Curt and bitter outbursts, constantly aimed at my lack of support. Looking at her most days, I marvel at how removed we are. So far my own mother has stopped caring? And have I come full circle, becoming a child again, craving her feeling instead of her doing?

Yes I hold no memories. It bothers me because I fear I am becoming - hell - maybe I have already become her in this too, the trauma of all those days stunting me also. Sometimes looking in the mirror, my face becomes hers. Our features merge, the lines overlaid till I can't discern which are hers and which are mine. They often say, "You look so much like your mother!" It horrifies me, this external comparison. Raises the question: When did I last hug my boys? Tell them I love them? Oh I'm quick to sense discomfort, unease of mind. I offer up words.

Sometimes they work and my sons appreciate my trying. It makes it better. Still, I fear walking in her shoes. I imagine myself doing it, step by step. Not housework, doing for - resorting instead on speech to reach them. Same incompetence though. Will they too one day look back, searching for similar fond memories to cling to?

Yet I love them. The only tangible emotion I can attest to having with certainty. I feel they love me too, despite my gloom. Only they are seldom demonstrative. They rarely hug me - it continues. I fear having in turn affected them, creating beings unable to display affection. An awful thought. Their childhood filled with illness, disease, disaster, gloom... my melancholy.

They never question my aloneness, this all they've ever known. Apart from witnessing the struggles between their father and I, the coldness and bitterness I displayed those times, they've never seen me show affection towards another. No man taking me away from them. No coming home in the early hours, after giving the night to someone else. My time always theirs, my life only ever centred on their living.

A heavy burden for young shoulders; maybe they feel some guilt, thinking they are contributing to this solitude? Yet the alternative is abhorrent to me. Parading prospective new fathers? One after another, because none would be adequate to sustain me for any significant time? Down that road, I'd implode sooner or later.

And could I expose the boys to such implosions? My initial fascination becoming all-encompassing, invading total space; the furious writing, fuelled by anguish - later regret. Total absorption to this thing, over and over trying to identify and label it... Again. They would spot it, the incompleteness, my constant inability to ever become one of two.

It's why I waited, hesitating to see William, waited until they were old enough to perhaps understand - accept what they would witness: Their mother taken up, taken away. Because I would be, the nuances would flow between us and I'd be galvanised once more, scrambling to decipher their meaning. Back in the place where there is no world, no other being except the being with, interpreting the being with. My sons observing this: a version of their mother never suspected, never before encountered...

Not fucking for a decade? Easy. What was there to miss? The intimacy I've craved has never been found in sweat and physical exchange. I've always claimed a higher, more ethereal quest. There is no graspable vulnerability in nakedness, not these days anyway. People shrug off clothes with ease; sex no longer a mystery, only the expected outcome.

No, it's always been the mind for me, the source of the vulnerabilities. The conversations before.The conversations afterwards. Mostly those coming after, the verbal climaxes. Discovering those instances there's nothing of any substance produced by physical contact. Or at best a nothingness coloured by murmurs of regret.