I wouldn’t be who I am today if I didn’t share a one-bedroom apartment with my mother when I was in high school. I was the new kid in a school that was known as the rich kids’ school in the area. It was embarrassing.
To say it aloud sounds tragic, but it wasn’t. My mom was a teenager at heart. Not in a buddy ole pal type of way; she was strict with curfews, had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to drugs and alcohol, and worried about me as any mother would.
Mom was single and always ready to mingle. A social butterfly that loved to go out with friends and go out on dates hoping to find romance. Although she didn’t have a ton of luck with it, she loved love. She was out on the town more than I was.
As roommates and a mother/daughter team, it was inevitable that we got on each other’s nerves. She would sing loudly and obnoxiously to get me out of bed and on time for school. That usually worked, but on the days it didn’t, she would literally sit on me (not on the bed, on me!) and bounce until I got up. My cortisol was activated daily! She knew how to push my buttons to validate the nick name I was given as a child “Shirley Witch”.
We also teamed up when we needed. Like when the upstairs neighbor sent a note complaining that we were playing music too loudly in the middle of the day, we went into full defense mode. We responded with a note of our own about him. How he stomped loudly and how we heard loud moans coming from his bedroom when he had a girlfriend over. We were making the point that the walls were thin and we heard him too. It’s a part of apartment living.
Living that closely also magnifies things – it wasn’t all fun and games.
I had my issues with her; most were internalized and went unrecognized for years. I just know a wall went up whenever we were together. One time while we traveled to visit my grandmother, I felt it… my jaw tightening…the guy behind the rental car counter made a comment, something like ‘let’s all relax and get along’, which brought me to the present moment where I could feel what I was doing and snapped out of it. I was suppressing my feelings and not speaking my mind. Instead of dealing with whatever consequences I thought there might be, I put up that wall.
Nowadays when I think of my mom, I don’t think of the wall and the annoyances. It’s like when she died all of that died with her. It’s watching Little House on the Prairie while eating dinner on TV trays together type memories that have stayed with me – and occasionally I sing loudly and obnoxiously to my kids. Time and distance softened what felt hard up close and what once felt like a trap now feels lucky.
Perfect Dysfunction 