Women…spend half our lives rebelling against our mothers and the next half rebelling against our daughters. – Lois Wyse
As I wrote yesterday, my mother was always disturbed by my “otherness”, especially my visions and apparent clairvoyance. She rationalized these phenomena as “nightmares” (though they occurred while I was completely awake and only frightened her, not me) and declared that they derived from watching “scary movies” or reading “spooky books”, which were henceforth declared off-limits despite the fact that the incidents started long before I could read. This of course made me want to read or see horror fiction even more than before, and I was able to do so because I had a confederate in my paternal grandmother. We called her Maman, a French term for “mommy” which in South Louisiana is commonly applied to grandmothers regardless of their ethnicity. In our family it was pronounced much like “maw-maw”, but I’ve also heard “muh-maw”, “mah-mah”, “mæ- mæ” (“æ” represents the short “a” as in “cat”) and several other versions; similarly, the common term for a godmother is pronounced “nuh-næn”. Her pet name for me was “Little Bo Peep”, and she used it until the day she died (though once I hit my teens it was more often simply “Bo Peep”).
Maman recognized my personality as a case of the “apple not falling far from the tree”, since her late husband (my grandfather) and a number of his dozen siblings had been equally unusual. She declared that the paternal line was descended from the “good people” and that I merely had the Old Blood in greater measure than usual, and that it was neither a good idea to attempt to suppress my natural gifts nor repress my independence. Though she was not an openly unconventional person herself, she seemed to understand and appreciate unconventionality; she had, after all, married my grandfather, and openly favored my second sister (the other “black sheep”) and me. She told me on many occasions that she felt justified in giving us preferential treatment since it was obvious to her that our mother did exactly the opposite, and if I came out all right despite maternal neglect it was largely due to the unconditional love bestowed on me by Maman. When I got older I always found it odd that my mother had never seemed bothered by Maman’s defying her pronouncements or overruling her dictates on my behalf; either she actually didn’t mind (which seems unlikely) or was just trying to keep the peace (if so, I never saw any sign of resentment). It was almost as though she felt I was more my grandmother’s child than hers, or that she was happy to abdicate responsibility for a little witch to someone who felt more comfortable dealing with her.
Indeed, it often seemed that way; from toddlerhood until about the age of 12 I spent the majority of my Friday nights sleeping over at Maman‘s house, and she would always fix pancakes for me the next morning. When I got older she would pay me far too much money to cut her lawn every week, and usually made a cake for me; my favorite one was a simple yellow cake made in a ring pan and drizzled with powdered-sugar icing flavored with a powdered drink mix (I still make it for my husband today, and now it’s one of his favorites). And if she had been to town for a doctor’s appointment or some such prior to one of my visits, she often bought horror comics for me because she knew I liked them. I was allowed to watch as many scary movies as I liked at her house; I have particularly fond memories of a TV movie called Gargoyles which premiered soon after my 6th birthday, largely because it became the basis for a favorite game among the neighborhood children for years afterward. Naturally, I was always the girl who was abducted by the gargoyles and had to be rescued.
When I was a teenager we had many fascinating discussions about history; she enjoyed historical novels and would often pick my brain about the various events or periods dramatized in the books. Like many rural women of her day she only had a 6th-grade education, but she was intelligent and skeptical and one of her favorite topics of conversation was Biblical contradictions and discrepancies, and areas of morality in which she disagreed with the teachings of the Church. Soon after I became engaged to Jack she even told me in private that she thought I should just live with him for a while so as to be sure we were really compatible before marrying. That really didn’t surprise me because when I was a teenager she knew I was sexually active long before my mother did; they both had exactly the same information, but Maman’s eyes were open while my mother saw only what she wished to see. I don’t recall exactly how she let me know that she knew, but she told me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t think less of me for it and that she was sure God didn’t really care about things like that unless they hurt someone. Coming from an uneducated Catholic woman born in rural South Louisiana just prior to the First World War, that was practically heresy.
Maman survived cancer twice, once in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, before finally succumbing to old age in 1997, just months before I started stripping. I’ve often wondered how she would have reacted to it; she was offended by sexual content on television and vocally disapproved of revealing clothes, but I think she would’ve accepted my decision to do it as a means to escape debt. I have no doubt that she would’ve said a novena for me because of it, but for my safety rather than my soul. Though my mother often seemed to think nothing I did was right, Maman seemed to feel I couldn’t do anything wrong.
Is it true that jealousy is the main reason for the classic mother-daughter conflict?
I’d say that’s a dramatic oversimplification. Though certainly jealousy might play a part in some cases, it certainly couldn’t explain why my mother shunned my second sister and I while spoiling my first and third sisters. I think identification plays a bigger part than jealousy, just as it does for men and their sons; the parent views the same-sex child as a younger version of him- or herself, and either tries to live through that child or keep him/her from repeating the same mistakes. In my mother’s case, perhaps she saw me as representative of her “bad” qualities and my younger sister as representative or her “good” ones, and therefore wished to restrict the bad and nurture the good. But in the end, that’s really just dollar-store psychoanalysis and there’s no real way to know what she was thinking or feeling.
I am getting SOOOOO many echos of Florence King here (not her personal life, which is also worth reading about, but her analysis of Southern behavior). Please, if you haven’t yet done so, give her SOUTHERN LADIES AND GENTLEMEN a try. if you like that, you might also try WASP, WHERE IS THY STING?.
The American South really is like a separate country; as I was saying to Jill Brenneman yesterday, that’s why radical feminism never took root here. Southern women have always been strong and gracious (the archetypal “steel magnolias”); they tend to find the idea that women are dominated and controlled by men to be ridiculous, the notion that we should act like men to be Yankee perversity and the suggestion that rudeness and vulgarity are desirable qualities in a woman to be offensive in the extreme.
Even in the South, the rural South and urban South are almost different countries.
That’s especially true since the huge influx of Yankees into cities like Dallas and Atlanta in the 1970s and ’80s. The old-timey Southern cities like Mobile are very different from the “modern” ones. And the personality of the state of Florida has fractured so badly they need to rename it “Sybil”. 🙁
I remember reading that 75% living in Forsyth County didn’t live there back at the time when it was a Sundown County or when the KKK marched through there. Most of the residents are either too young or immigrants.
Even in the years I lived in Atlanta, things changed a lot. What was once farmland are now malls, businesses, and homes. The immigrant population exploded. Decatur has a strong Indian presence (I went there to buy food a lot) and Chamblee is strongly east Asian and Hispanic.
I don’t remember much of living in the Conch Republic, but I know it’s a place onto itself. 🙂
Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mommies out there and a special kiss to “Little Bo Peep”. 😉
😉
So beautifully written…she sounds like a wonderful Maman to have had around. I bet you miss her, and I bet she would have accepted whatever choices you made, forever,…Thanks for a fab read. Dawny 🙂
Thank you, Dawny; yes, I still miss her very much. I often think how much she would’ve liked my husband, and how pleased she would be that people like my writing even if she didn’t much like what I was writing about. 🙂
So really your mother’s problem was with herself, or aspects of herself she disapproved of.
Not with you and your sister.
I think that’s a good theory, anyway.
“Gargoyles” is now on DVD with director commentary. It was also 1 of my favorites when I was little. I also loved the horror comic books. My mother was a huge Cornel Wilde fan which is 1 reason I watched Gargoyles to begin with. Watching it now it’s not as scary and good as it was to me then, but that’s happened with other movies I loved when I was younger. Some of them I still love as much like the pilot movie for “Night Gallery” (plus the series), “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” and “The Night Stalker” (both the pilot movie and the series). I was glad to see Gargoyles has commentary as 1 sad thing with many older movies is they don’t have commentaries.
Another reason your mother may have looked the other way when it came to Maman’s “interference” was that it let you get what you needed without your mother having to “condone” things. My fifteen year old niece knows that if she needs birth control, I’ll get it for her. Her mother knows this too, and is fine with it. She doesn’t have to worry that getting it for her will be taken as approval of her having sex, and yet the girl will have her BC if she needs it.
So far, the girl doesn’t need it, but that boyfriend of hers looks like a movie star and is very good to her, so it’s good that she can get it if need be.
What a good uncle you are!
I’m pretty much eccentric auntie Tonja who always tells the truth. The nephews love to come and stay for a weekend and ask me about all sorts of things that would make their mother faint.
Well, I try.
[…] been noted by long-time readers that while I mention my mother and sisters from time to time and my Maman (paternal grandmother) and favorite cousin “Jeff” quite frequently, I’ve barely […]