Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (23 page)

Yet it didn’t clear the air or settle anything. Finding the puppy had evoked an entire chain of memories and, in a way, disassembled an understanding I’d constructed about who I was and where I wanted to go with my life. Over the next year, as I spent more time with the puppy—who was growing into a strong, healthy, happy dog—I began to see things in new ways, but it was confusing because it was hard to remember the old ways, and then oddly, I realized that to do that, I needed to go back to where I came from—Cudahy, Wisconsin.

I decided a road trip was in order in January 2012. I stayed at my Uncle Greg’s house. I didn’t feel totally comfortable there, but it was safe enough. He’d kindly agreed to let me stay with him. I had with me a page of notes I’d made, things I wanted to talk to Sandra about. They weren’t discussion points, but rather a black-and-white list of things that she refused to acknowledge. Throughout the years, she’d been asking Michelle if she could explain to her why I had so many negative feelings toward her, and if nothing else, I didn’t really appreciate my mother using my wife as a go-between. We’d had a fight about that very thing, the last time I’d seen her, nearly two years prior. It didn’t seem possible, but somehow, she truly didn’t understand where the dysfunction came from. When I started making notes about what I wanted to say to her, it took no more than ten minutes to fill the page with concrete examples. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. My notes were simply the facts.

I knew, of course, that she would argue about our separate interpretations of the facts, but I was not actually concerned about her interpretation of my notes. I just wanted her to confront the truth. What she did with it was up to her.

While in Cudahy, I called my mother from my cell one day and asked her if we could get together. She was extremely apprehensive, both because of how badly things went the last time I confronted her, albeit aggressively, and because she had always avoided confronting things head on.

We decided to meet on Sunday morning at 11:30. She suggested a restaurant, but I was pretty sure meeting at a restaurant wouldn’t give us the privacy we needed. The last time we tried to talk, there was screaming, and there were tears, and if it happened again, I didn’t want it to happen in a restaurant. Public parks were out for the same reason, but I wanted to talk to her somewhere open and neutral and, the more I thought about it, outdoors. I suggested a cemetery near her house, where we could talk without disturbing anybody.

I pulled into the cemetery at 11:29. Given her track record (after all, she’d missed half my wedding), I could only assume she’d be at least half an hour late, but to my surprise and amazement, she pulled in behind me in her Saturn station wagon, right on time—or, in fact, early.

She pulled up next to me. My mother wasn’t in the best of shape physically, so rather than go for a walk, I got out of my car and took the passenger seat in hers.

“Michelle tells me you’re apprehensive about meeting with me,” I said.

“She wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” my mother replied.

“She’s my wife,” I said. “We don’t keep secrets from each other.”

“I’m just in a very vulnerable place right now,” she said. “Mentally and emotionally. You have a history of saying things that hurt me.”

A more accurate statement would have been to say
we
had a history of saying hurtful things to
each other
. I could certainly own my part of that.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “That’s true. That’s a reasonable thing to say.”

Because that was what we did, hurling accusations back and forth, each of us insisting that the other listen. I decided I was going to listen to what she said. If I didn’t, I had no right to demand to be heard.

“I just don’t know why you wanted to meet with me. Especially after how things went last time. You’re just so negative toward me, and I don’t know why.”

“That’s what’s so frustrating,” I said. “I keep trying to explain, and you never hear it. That’s why I’m here. You act like you just can’t understand why our relationship is so dysfunctional. I really didn’t come here to throw stones or say anything to hurt you. I was hoping to provide some clarity and perspective. I don’t see how we can ever fix this if we don’t figure out what the problem is.”

“Okay,” she said, and she seemed relieved. “I just know you’ve spent your whole life holding grudges against the people you feel have wronged you. My own childhood was horrible, but I still had a relationship with my parents.”

I thought of interrupting her to point out how dysfunctional her relationship with her own parents was, because I’d been thinking a lot about it, but I held my tongue because, again, I’d promised myself I would listen and not interrupt, even when I disagreed with what I was hearing. It was something I knew I needed to work on, in general; when I interact with people, I am often too quick to judge. There was nothing quick or sudden about my relationship with my mother, but the general rule still applied. We’d never understand each other if we couldn’t get through to each other. For most of my life, I had concentrated on how to penetrate her defenses. I’d never thought much about how to lower my own protective armor and drop my shields, but I’d realized, lately, that it had to be a two-way street, so let it begin with me.

“Well, everybody’s different,” I said when she was finished. “No two people are going to react to the same situation the same way, and it doesn’t necessarily mean one way is right and the other is wrong. I can’t really say, ‘You should have done what I did,’ and you can’t tell me I should have done what you did. We just do the best we can, right?”

I couldn’t tell if my words were having any effect, but I was trying hard at least not to make things worse.

“It’s not a competition to see which one of us had the worst childhood,” I said. “Or who has the most right to complain about it. I was able to turn things around for myself in ways that you never could. But you’re right. I hold grudges. We’re both flawed. We’re just not going to get anywhere if you expect me to be you and vice versa.”

It occurred to me that this was probably the longest she’d ever listened to me without interrupting or refuting or contradicting what I was saying. This was a level of mutual courtesy I’d never experienced before with her. Calling it a mutual respect would signify that we’d taken a giant leap, when we were still taking tentative baby steps, but something was different. It was as if we agreed on what we held in common, which was a level of pain or emotional suffering, even though part of the pain we had caused each other. It was like two prizefighters at the end of a long fight, both bruised but both still standing, or two opposing soldiers at the end of a long war. It was time for the war to end.

“I’m sure Mark would have agreed with you about me holding grudges,” I said. “He’d be justified to say he felt that way, so I suppose you are, too. It’s just hard for me to let go when someone doesn’t take responsibility for what they’ve done. There are two sides in every conflict and they won’t get resolved unless both sides own up. Mark was frustrated with me, but he never communicated that. I mean, not as it grew. He just held it in until one day he exploded. Instead of telling me his perspective and working to understand mine, he just took it over the top. He never really tried to solve the problem. I think you and I do the same thing. That’s why our relationship is so horrible. Or that’s one reason, anyway. Do you remember when we went to family counseling, when I was sixteen?”

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “That didn’t work out.”

“Maybe it didn’t work for you,” I said, “but I loved it. What I remember was going into it with an open mind, because I was really curious to see what might happen. And the guy didn’t take sides. He just listened to both of us and gave us honest feedback, whether it was what we wanted to hear or not. He was very objective. I thought so. But it felt like you went in, hoping you’d find an ally who’d take your side against your out-of-control son. You didn’t want to fix things. You wanted to be right. I don’t think the point of family therapy is for one side to say, ‘I give up—you win.’”

She seemed to agree with that, though she still didn’t say anything. I explained to her how I’d been dealing with a lot of issues lately, depression and a general sense of pessimism, and physical back pains. I told her I’d been having problems at work, and problems making favorable impressions on people, and problems with anger and resentment and feeling the need to guard myself all the time. It all started at grade school, with the kids who tormented me, and then middle school, but also at home, with her. Finding our new dog had opened my eyes to a lot of things, including the need to make some changes in my life.

“Let me ask you,” I said. “And this might sound strange, but . . .
did you think it was a good idea for you and Mark to have kids? I mean, at the time, did you think you were ready?”

“I certainly did,” she said.

“I know this is going to sound cold, but given the way things turned out, sometimes, I’ve just wished you hadn’t,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do about it now, obviously, and don’t get me wrong—I’m glad to be alive—but what I endured was just so destructive to me, as a person. There’ve been times when I thought it would have been better not to have me.”

There was a long period of silence, but it wasn’t an awkward silence. I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop or preparing a defense of what I’d said. I was just waiting for what I’d said to sink in. Finally, I thought maybe I needed to lighten the conversation.

“But not so much, lately,” I said. “Michelle tells me you’ve been dating somebody. He’s older?”

She nodded.

“Is he good for you?”

“For the most part, yes,” she said. I was glad for her. She’d never had much luck with men. The words “for the most part” set off alarms, but I wasn’t going to second guess her or warn her, because I didn’t really know the situation.

There was another brief silence. I couldn’t imagine that either one of us was feeling exactly comfortable, but we were there in the car together, paired forever by fate, or blood, or genes, or whatever you want to call it.

“Listen,” I said finally. “I just wanted you to know something. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, talking to Michelle and talking to a therapist, and thinking about how people who’ve been victims can turn around and victimize someone else. Or teach someone how to be a victim. And I wanted you to know that I realized something I never really thought about before. I was thinking about how you grew up. How Roland was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and Alice was, well, emotionally unsupportive, to say the least. I know you called it a ‘chemical imbalance,’ but that makes it sound sort of trivial or minor. And I’m sure it wasn’t trivial or minor to you.”

It was odd, I realized, because in a way, for the first time, I was able to put myself in her shoes, and walk a mile in them, and see things the way she saw them. At the same time, I felt like I’d walked a lot more than a mile and knew, in all the worst ways, what it was like for her, growing up, because she’d done to me what her parents did to her. She taught me what she’d been taught. How was she supposed to know more, or better? I mean, she could—we can all learn more than what our parents taught us, and become better people for it—but that wasn’t her. She was too passive, too unable to take the initiative. Too unlikely to believe she was capable of changing. Or maybe she just hadn’t been interested in learning, even though I’m sure she could see that things hadn’t worked out for her.

“I know growing up on the North Side was hard. And I know that you were singled out, at Catholic school, for being unlike everybody else. By the nuns, and by some of the other students. I know how rough that was for you. You suffered in a lot of the same ways I suffered, at the hands of others. I’d never really considered how much of a victim you were, until recently, and I blamed you for things you couldn’t help. I’m sure you didn’t want to be a victim any more than I did, but I never gave you the benefit of the doubt.”

I felt myself softening inside, and years of bitterness and resentment ever so slightly slipped away as we spoke. I could let go of it—not all of it and not all at once, because this wasn’t going to be one of those dramatic final scenes in the movies where everything gets tied off neatly with a big bow in the ribbon—but even so, it was a turning point. We’d both been left at the bottom of a canyon. I was climbing out. She couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

“I’m not saying it’s an excuse, and it doesn’t make what I went through any less painful, but I understand why it happened. You taught me what your parents taught you. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s how it works. That’s why this is so dysfunctional.”

She nodded again.

“I did a lot of things I regret,” she said.

“But yet you still don’t seem to comprehend why our relationship is so lousy,” I said. “That is why I have created a list for you so you can see my issues with you in black and white. No more of this ‘I just don’t understand why he hates me so much’ stuff.”I handed her the list, which was just a typewritten piece of paper. She read it from start to finish without commenting along the way. I had no idea what she was thinking.

She finally spoke. “You always say I didn’t try to protect you from Robin,” she said. “I can’t agree with that.”

“Maybe you need to pretend otherwise, but you can’t tell me you didn’t know what was going on,” I said. “Even my babysitter saw me nearly throw up one day, when Robin was coming to pick me up, and I was so scared it made me sick.”

“You’re right,” my mother said. “I can’t say I didn’t know.”

Now she was crying. It felt like some sort of veil had lifted from her eyes. Now she was seeing. I felt like I was witnessing an awakening. She seemed different. I could imagine some other mother and son, some other scene from some other movie, where the son would put his arm around his mother and say, “Don’t cry, ma—I still love you,” but that wasn’t us. Not yet, anyway. We’d been in the car for about forty-five minutes, and so far we’d barely made eye contact. I thought we both deserved a lot of credit for not screaming and cursing each other out.