My Biggest Fear
By: Judy Mclain
Tags: Grief, Secrets, Mothers And Daughters, Relationships, Memoir

…as I consider reading my mother’s journals.

Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas from Pexels

My mother died in 2012. A box filled with her journals has been in my closet ever since, unopened, the journals unread. She was living with my brother when she passed away, as her obituary records, peacefully, at home.

I was there when it happened. I’d been there for weeks, first to find out what exactly was going on with her health and her mental state and then to be there when she crossed over. Before travelling to North Carolina, where she lived, from Florida, where I lived, I’d been communicating with my brother and sister-in-law about their concerns that she was becoming depressed. Her doctor agreed and they had her on Zoloft when I arrived for what was my last visit.

My mother was not depressed. She was separating herself from life. I know the two things sound like the same thing. Depression for my Mom, however, was not a usual state of being. She had been through a lot, certainly more than most people, and she always coped.

I don’t think we should ignore that things had changed for her in recent months.

She had a minor stroke. She couldn’t sleep and her doctor had put her on Ambien. One night after starting the Ambien she fell after awakening while it was still dark and had a hard time rousing my brother. When my brother found her she had wedged herself between her bed and her nightstand and had been there for hours. When he found her she was naked and it was then we found out that she couldn’t tolerate wearing clothes anymore so at night she stripped and regretted having to dress in the morning. She went from having an interest in how she looked, doing her hair, always having on lipstick to wearing the lightest cotton house dress and going barefooted.

She claimed that clothing hurt her body. She was itchy. She was uncomfortable if anything was restricting which included underwear.

Because of her confusion after the stroke and the negative affects of the Ambien my brother and his wife decided she shouldn’t drive anymore.

Mom told my sister-in-law more than once that she wished she was dead. She was facing a move to an assisted living situation because we (my brother, sister-in-law and myself) decided that she would benefit from a living situation that gave her a greater chance of being social. My sister-in-law was trying to launch a new business and my Mom was becoming more and more dependent on her just for social interaction.

There had been many trips back and forth to North Carolina since she had moved there to live with my sibling. My brother’s son was in treatment for a life-ending cancer and my Mom had also been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and was in treatment for awhile. Along with several regular visits a year, I was now taking up the slack when asked. We have two other siblings but their life situations and distance from North Carolina meant that most of the time I was the one asked to assist.

I had always been close to my Mom so I didn’t mind.

I knew about her journals. Sometime after my father died young at 51 years old, she told me she had been given the advice to write down her thoughts when she found herself missing the ability to talk directly to him. I don’t recall if this advice was something she found in a book or if a friend of hers had given it. She had friends who had also been unexpectedly widowed.

My parents were close and had an enviable relationship. They were certainly best friends. My father had my Mom on a pedestal and my mother thought the world of him. All throughout my childhood I caught them making out. I can’t tell you how many times I walked in on them having sex. It seemed to happen almost any time of day — a bit strange when I consider my own sex life over my adult years after my daughter was born. Why were they making love in their bedroom, door unlocked, in the late afternoon when they knew I was home? Who does that? This scenario happened more than once. I think they just couldn’t help themselves.

I am one of four kids. I have three older brothers, the oldest is ten years older than me and the other two are twins who are only fourteen months younger than my oldest brother. The 9 year gap between us had been filled with our middle brother, Mike, who died when he was 13 and I was nine. At nine, all of my brothers were out of the family home, at college and working. We had just previously moved from the town where my brother’s had gone to high school when Mike died so it was a lot of change all at once. My oldest brother got married at 19 to his pregnant first girlfriend. My twin brothers, failing college, joined the Air Force to avoid the Vietnam era draft.

I went from being part of a large family unit to being an only child. Having the family structure changing so drastically was only a part of it. My mother’s grief over the loss of my brother was extreme. Of course it was. It took her years to find her way back into life and I learned to deal with life, at a very tender age, on my own.

Fast forward through my puberty, difficult for anyone but made harder by my mother’s grief, through my early teen years (we moved again, away from the South where we had always lived to New England) and then more change when we moved once more back to the south, New Orleans. I graduated from high school and a year after that my father died.

My Mom was a very respectable lady. She was a typical 1950's Mom. I was born in 1956 and all of my siblings but Mike were born in the 1940’s. She stayed at home, kept house, entertained, vacationed, cooked and wore an apron over the dress she donned everyday. She was my Brownie leader. She didn’t have her own hobbies. Her life was her family. When she was 52 my father died in a freak accident. I was states away at college. She was all alone.

Journaling must have been a way for her to keep her sanity. I shudder to think back to her days of being completely alone in the four bedroom house where she had been happily looking forward to my father’s early retirement. He retired only a year prior to his death- they were still getting used to the house with no kids left in it.

They were developing hobbies together. My Dad had always had his own interests. He was an interesting guy. He loved photography, he did woodworking, he did the yard work, he liked to read and listen to music. My parents had always enjoyed doing certain things together. Bird watching, gardening, learning about wine, golfing.

My Mom always maintained her own social circle but it was with other married women. After the men’s work day and on the weekends the women only social events became couples events. Without my Dad she was on the outs.

She did the work to grow her life. She included volunteerism, she added women of different ages to her social life and she moved to a new community where she started off as a single woman after my father’s death. She got a job.

At the end of the day, however, no matter what she had built for herself, she still had to cope with her hours alone. She missed having my Dad to review her experiences with.

These were the origins of her journal. This is what she herself explained to me.

About a year before she died my Mom, who always gave me a book for Christmas, gifted me Diane Keaton’s memoir, Then Again, based on Keaton’s discovery of her mother’s journals. Keaton’s mother warns the reader, that her entries would take “courage” to read. I think that’s why my Mom told me that she was writing down her daily thoughts and I think also the reason she gave me Keaton’s book.

She and I were close but she wasn’t always kind to me. By her own words I wasn’t who she expected. I can best explain our differences by giving a list of my own characteristics. I’m not a follower, I’m philosophical, friendly but not terrifically social, introverted but not shy. I’m artistic, curious, a deep thinker and a truth seeker. My Mom was none of these things. I consider my list to be points of strength and while I know I never held a lot of common ground with my Mom I think she did have a lot of strengths.

We got along fine but I knew never to take conversation into great depths. My mother was a devout Catholic and I’m an atheist who started questioning Mom’s attachment to the church when I was about eight years old.

There was an amount of role reversal in our relationship. She probably wouldn’t have agreed but at some point I became more of a parent to her at the same time she embraced me as more of a friend than a child.

When I say she wasn’t kind it was because of our differences. Instead of telling me she didn’t agree with me she would take jabs. When I was a child she took liberties with my emotions. I think to a certain extent she believed she was toughening me. She herself wasn’t tough but she expected me to be. I’ve written about our complicated relationship.

It is because of this complication that I have not opened the box filled with her journals.

It’s now been seven years since she died. I have to admit, I am curious. There was a reason why, even if she wasn’t cognizant of it herself, she gave me the Diane Keaton memoir.

She supported my writing. I was widowed when I was in my mid-forties and she shined a light on my path through those hard times. She had been through it herself. While journal writing wasn’t my cup of tea in that situation (I had kept a journal previous to losing my first husband but I lacked the focus after his death to continue with it.) I started writing a novel as a way to escape my grief. She was the only person I shared it with. I shared only bits of the entire work but I felt safe sharing my words with her.

My mother loved books and she was entranced with the idea of me being a novelist. She once told me she had dreamed of me being published. I’ve never pursued it.

I think she hoped that her journals would, like Diane Keaton, be a leaping off point for a book for me. Maybe she hoped I would write a book about her.

I don’t know. I know I won’t know until I open the box. I don’t because I fear what could be from her, brutal honesty. Brutal honesty that might hurt. Brutal honesty that isn’t exactly honest. She was often unfair, expected more from me than others. She often dismissed my point of view as “ridiculous”. I am not a frivolous person. When she said I was being ridiculous it was meant to hurt. Or it was over nothing and I still felt hurt.

Since she’s been gone I’ve worked through a lot of the wounds she left me with. Do I want to open up more? Can I still be hurt more or will it be different now. Might I, after all these years, finally be immune?

Immunity from further damage is what I’m hoping for. I’m 63 years old. I feel like I should be able to take whatever it is I might find but I’m still afraid.

Afraid but curious.

The problem with diving off a cliff is that you really don’t know what you might encounter and once you’ve taken the dive, what happens to you will be part of your history. It’s a lot to think about.