A Gift of Grace Wrapped in Barbed Wire

Today is Saint Patrick's Day. March 17th. A festive holiday that exists for no other reason than to get blisteringly drunk. Gotta love a holiday like that. I'm part-Irish too, so I can respect the urge. For me, however, St. Patty's day has always had another connotation. 

It's the day my mother died. 

29 years ago today, my mentally ill, intensely nurturing, highly intellectual, especially troubled mother died of an apparently inadvertent drug overdose. Might have been intentional, perhaps not. It depends on your perspective, mostly. I was 6 1/2. 

Men in dark suits collected me from my second grade class. Took me to my neighbor's house, where I waited in the basement for reasons unknown to me. Also unknown to me was the fact that my father was on a business trip, getting the news just before a plane flight (god, how complicated that must have been in the long-before cell phone days?), and they actually had a plane reverse taxi back to the gate so he could return home. 

One of my mother's brothers, who I don't remember at all, told my older brother and I the news (my dad never forgave this uncle for robbing him of this right and responsibility). As I waited in the basement for my father, for what seemed like (and probably) was hours, I remember telling a little baby - or maybe it was a doll - what had just happened to my mother. I probably didn't understand it, but explaining these events to someone even littler than me gave me a certain empowerment that was otherwise completely missing. 

Later that night, father and sons were back home. I'll never forget how trashed the house was. Garbages overturned, house nearly dark, the bed askew. She was found by a neighbor in the bedroom, perhaps on the floor. I had slept at the neighbor's the night before, because my mom didn't "feel well". I remember her crouched on the floor, naked I think, with bruises on her. Where did they come from, I wondered. This is my last visual memory of my mother. Self-inflicted, I am now sure. For years, I presumed that our trashed house was caused by the police investigation. But what if it was her? Did she rocket through the house in a manic rage, throwing over furniture and garbage cans? Did she die in pain? I'll never know, but I can't imagine it was any worse than the pain her life had become, trapped in her past, her delirium and her mental illness.

I saw a lot of emotion in my house growing up. Mostly anger. As a child, you are protective of your mother, and I naturally always thought my dad was in the wrong. He would be locked out of the house, pounding on the door, my mother screaming through the wood. Surely, he must have hurt her badly, right? Right? I recall my mother telling me one night that she was forcing him to sleep in his car because he was evil. It wasn't until at least 15 years later that I realized he was trying to manage the situation, to keep her stable, and to keep my brother and I safe. She once pulled a belt around her neck, threatening to hang herself. In her mania she had also threatened our lives. After I was born, she wrote on the wall that she wanted to kill me. How terrifying it must have been for him, fearing for his sons. Especially with all the traveling he did.

That night was the first time I ever remember seeing my father cry. I know he loved her, but I'm sure he was also crying because he failed to save her. He birthed great, wracking sobs while perched on the edge of the couch, with Dave and I not knowing what to do. I think we hugged him. Or he hugged us. While I don't necessarily remember my father as a cuddly kind of dad, he was a caring, supportive father, and so it's more likely that he pulled us into his embrace. We cried together.

But in the years after her death, those tears were relatively infrequent, and I felt a kind of numbness over what happened. For years, I privately chastised myself for my lack of deep, intense grief over my mother's death. Did this make me a bad person? Cold? Unfeeling? I am relatively quick to emotion in most other cases, and really a romantic at heart despite it all, so this would be inaccurate on the whole.

But when it comes to my mother, it wasn't until last spring that I found out why I developed this way. After her death, my father remarried, I got additional siblings, and though our house was one of the constant movement that only four kids only 5 years apart can create, there was under it all a sense of stability and calm. The chaos of my mother was replaced by the firm, competent hand of my stepmother, who wasn't cuddly either, but was what kids often think a mom is supposed to be: devoted, diligent,a great cook, the taskmaster and judge. Stern but always available, and no matter how frayed she became, she never did things like lock dad out of the house or threaten to hang herself. 

No matter how you look at it, that was better.

I didn't understand it then, and only now do, but I latched onto that stability and wanted to do everything possible to maintain it. I became the good student, the "good" kid. This was relatively easy as a middle child with a complete fuck-up stepbrother, an eldest "golden child" that stepmother put a giant target on (probably because Dave so easily achieved everything my stepbrother couldn't, or didn't want to), and a little sister who was everything that little sisters are supposed to be - self-absorbed, a bit spoiled, charming by half, and a little hellion underneath. 

It was easy to float under the radar. I had a series of private rebellions throughout high school, but I was apparently clever enough to keep most under wraps, and during those earlier years, I was the self-contained, independent, self-reliant, untroubled kid who didn't ask for much and didn't expect much. Just having a sense of calm and security was probably enough for me, that I didn't want to bother anyone with my own adolescent insecurities and fears. My parents were always there for me when I needed them, but I don't recall ever needing them. Or admitting that I actually did. 

I learned to control my own world, because if someone else controlled it, it may spin out of control. Deep down, I learned to fear uncertainty and constant change. This became ingrained in me, and something I'm learning to - and desperately want to - roll back, layer by layer, piece by piece. To find a middle ground that's more flexible, more emotionally sustainable. I wish I knew that about myself years ago. 

I never held my mother's sickness against her. I don't say this to sound holier-than-thou, but rather, I always wanted to appreciate what she did give to me in our short time together - intelligence, creativity, an affinity for storytelling. And her death definitely helped build that self-reliance and independent streak that I don't think I would've found otherwise (her dying made me not want to rely on my stepmother if at all possible, because there was probably a subconscious fear that getting attached could mean losing another parent). 

But that said, I also need to own up to the fact that my mother's chaos also caused one of the least favorite parts of myself. My apprehension over change played a not insignificant role in the collapse of my marriage, because deep down, I just need to know that things are going to be okay. Mothers tell you that. And then I didn't have a mother. And for the brief time I did have a biological mother, I had one for whom nothing was ever okay. Having a wife for whom things were so rarely okay probably instigated reactions and emotions that I couldn't have possibly understood in the moment.

Rosemary gave me many gifts, but that's one I wish I could've politely declined. But no parent wants to pass their damages and issues to their children, and there's no way she could've known. In fact, part of me believes that she may have felt she needed to die in order to free Dave and I from her chaos. Which was, in its own way, a gift. A gift of grace wrapped in barbed wire. 

So St. Patty's day is a day of green beer to go with your eggs and ham. What the hell is it supposed to celebrate, anyway? Hell if I know. I have never felt any urge to blow the doors off this holiday. I'll leave that to other people. At the same time, I rarely feel morose on this anniversary, and most years have little reaction to it other than a private mental note ("Oh, yes, that happened today, didn't it?"). Though this year may be a little different. 

So 29 years later, wherever my mother is, I hope she has the peace she deserves. And if she's still hovering around, unsettled because of whatever damage she may have done to her sons, I would like her to know that, on the whole, we turned out pretty much fine.