My Mother’s Way

by M. Brandon Robbins

When I was eleven years old, I fell while running through the house and cut my face, right above my left eyebrow, on the corner of the family coffee table. I remember that I felt great pain, and blood puddled under my face as I lay on the floor. I was crying and I was scared.

My mother jumped up from her chair and stood over me. “You clumsy little shit!” she screamed. She bent over and picked up the fragmented pieces of her porcelain ballerina figurine. “You broke it! Do you know how much this costs, you stupid boy?” Her face was a portrait of rage, and her voice reverberated in my ears.

My father came to my side and helped me to my feet. He checked my eyes to make sure I wasn’t concussed and led me to the bathroom. Dad tended my wound, cleaning and bandaging it as he spoke in a low, soft tone. “It’s okay,” he said. “It always bleeds real bad when you cut your face. The cut isn’t actually that deep. It’ll heal up just fine.”

I was crying. Between sobs, I asked him why Mom was more upset about her ballerina figure than me getting hurt.

He sighed. “That’s just your mother’s way.”

I moved back home after college, and Mom never missed an opportunity to remind me that I wasted money on an English degree. “You think you’re some big hotshot intellectual,” she would snarl as I worked on my book after hours of standing on my feet at my minimum wage job. “You’ll never be a famous author. You’ll never be successful. You’re a failure is all you are. A damn failure and that’s all you’ll ever be!”

One night, I was watching a movie with my girlfriend. We shared a bowl of microwave popcorn and were drinking soda straight from the two-liter bottle. Mom stood at my door. I tried to pretend she wasn’t there, but that became impossible when she spoke.

“I don’t know what you see in him,” she said to my date. “All he does is sit around all day, living in his made-up worlds of fairy tale nonsense. He thinks he’s a great writer, but all he writes is bullshit. Nobody’s ever gonna read it. And with a college degree, where does he work? He flips burgers! All that money and time wasted. If he had majored in business like his cousin, he might have made something of himself. But no. He had to major in reading books! Just a miserable failure is all he is.”

I could ignore her no longer. I threw the bowl of popcorn across the room and jolted to my feet. I don’t remember what I said to her, but I remember that it came out jagged and coarse, with tears behind every word. I picked up my backpack, threw some clothes in it, and told my girlfriend that we were leaving. I couldn’t sleep at my girlfriend’s house; her parents wouldn’t allow it. Instead, I spent the night at a cheap hotel. My girlfriend promised to call me in the morning. She never did, and I never saw her again. I went back home the next day, finished packing my clothes and what few possessions I had in a duffel bag and a single suitcase, and never returned.

I spent a year moving from one apartment to another, living with roommates I barely knew. I worked eight hours a day, came home, showered, and wrote for another eight hours. I slept for four hours, revised and edited what I had written for about two hours, and had my one meal a day before heading back to work. Some days, my body would give up, and I’d crash after coming home from work, but for the most part I worked around the clock. I didn’t have any hobbies because I couldn’t afford them. My writing was the only thing I had. It kept me alive.

Dad would call and beg me to come home. He would tell me that he missed me. I would cry as I told him that I couldn’t take Mom’s abuse anymore. I never talked to her, and she never made any attempt to talk to me.

I finished my book. I edited and revised it until I was convinced that it couldn’t possibly be any better. Using the wi-fi at the public library (in my current apartment, we couldn’t afford the Internet), I pitched my book to agents. This went on for six months. I lost count of how many times I was rejected. An agent finally showed interest and spent eight months trying to sell my book to a publisher. An editor offered me a $500 advance. I took it.

I called Dad to give him the good news. He shouted in happiness and pride. “You should come home and celebrate,” he said. “Your mother would be so proud.”

All the ecstatic joy I had experienced drained from me. “No. She wouldn’t.”

Dad sighed. “She would be. She just may not act like it. That’s just your mother’s way.”

The book was a runaway bestseller. I earned back my advance in a month. I was getting substantial royalty checks. It wasn’t long before I quit my day job and started writing full-time. I moved into a nicer apartment. I got cable. I got the Internet. I took up bowling. It felt good to have some free time.

I would write about one book every couple of years. The advances got bigger. The sales piled up. The requests for interviews and speaking engagements started coming in. I started winning awards.

I bought a house. I met someone. He was a secretary at my publisher. I asked him to lunch during one of my visits to the home office. He said yes. We got married two years later. Dad came to the wedding. Mom wasn’t invited.

Dad came to visit often. I refused to go back home. We exchanged gifts for Christmas and birthdays.

Mom died when I was forty-two. I didn’t go to the funeral. Dad wanted me to, but I had to tell him no.

It’s been fifty years since that day I cut my forehead on my family’s coffee table and broke my mother’s porcelain ballerina figurine. My father was very sick. He’s almost ninety. I refused to have him put in a nursing home. I arranged to go live with him for a while, at least until hospice care became necessary. My husband understood.

That’s when Mom came back.

I put Dad to bed and was making a cup of herbal tea in the kitchen. I always have a cup of herbal tea in the evenings. It helps me to relax. I looked up and she stood there by the kitchen door. She was older than I remember. When I left home, her hair was a golden blonde; now it was gray. There were creases in her face and her eyes were dim.

I dropped my tea cup. It shattered.

She curled her lip up in anger. “I guess you think you made something of yourself,” she growled. “And I see you got married. To a man. No surprise there for me. I always knew you were queer, bringing those girls home to try and fool me. I know you.”

She was gone in the blink of an eye. I shook my head to try and wake myself from whatever reverie I sank into. I cleaned up the remains of the cup, made another cup of tea, and went to the living room. I read the newspaper and sipped my tea until I was drowsy. I did not sleep well that night.

The next day, I helped my father bathe. I drew his bath, helped him to the tub, eased him down into the soapy water, and washed him from head to toe. The warm water felt good to his aching bones and sore muscles. He didn’t bathe every day. That took too much energy, which made his baths all the more special.

When he was done, I used the utmost care to help him stand and dry off. The last thing I wanted was for him to slip and fall. I wrapped his robe around him and helped him back to his bedroom, where he put on fresh pajamas and reclined to watch old westerns. I crossed the hall to the bathroom to tidy it up. I saw Mom at the far end of the hallway.

“Couldn’t come back home when your mother was sick, could you? You were too good for that. You always thought you were better than me.”

I froze in place. She started walking toward me.

“I see you finally made something of that silly degree of yours. Pure luck, that’s all it is. Dumb, blind luck. You always were a shit writer. I guess people like reading garbage. That’s why you’re so rich. That’s why you think you’re better than us.”

She was close enough for me to touch, but touching her was the last thing I wanted to do.

Without warning, she started screaming at me. As she did, her face changed. Her skin turned ashen and dark circles formed around her eyes. Her teeth sharpened. Her eyes reddened. She reached out with her hands as if to grab my throat, and her fingers ended in claws.

And then she was gone, as quickly and inexplicably as she appeared.

I don’t know how long I stood there, breathing heavily with a chill running up and down my spine. I didn’t move until my father called out for me. I finally managed to uproot myself and went to his room.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Can you bring me some soup? I’m hungry.”

“Sure thing. What kind of soup do you want?”

“Beef vegetable.”

“I’ll be right back with that.” As I left the room, I turned back to ask my father a question. “Dad, did Mom die at home?”

“What?”

“When she died, was it at home, or in a hospital or nursing home?”

“It was right here in this room. Why do you ask?”

I felt another chill. “Just wondering.”

I’ve never been very religious, but I am religious enough to believe in the possibility of Hell. I am convinced that, if it is real, that is where my mother ended up. I’ve never known anybody else so full of rage and hatred. I’ve never known anyone so disgusted with their own child, somebody who made it their mission to abuse me whenever she got the chance.

Of course, to my mother, what she did wasn’t abuse. Abuse only happens when you hit a child, and she never hit me. Words were the instrument of her torment, but you would never convince her that what she did was just as harmful as physical blows. In the few times that I considered making peace with my mother throughout my life, I would tell myself that she honestly didn’t know the damage she was doing. I would tell myself that if she realized that she was hurting me in a very real and permanent way that she would change and treat me with more care. I didn’t know much about her upbringing; my grandparents on her side of the family died when I was very young, and her childhood was never a topic of discussion. I told myself that maybe she had been abused, and that hurt people hurt people.

But I could never truly forgive her. It didn’t matter how fucked up her childhood may have been. It didn’t matter how distorted her version of love was. She was my mother. She should have known how to care for me and show me love. If she had a difficult childhood, she should want to spare me that. So I would always push down the want to make amends with her.

Was this why she was back now? Was I being punished for never reaching out to make peace with her? Or was this her wish, to return to the living world just to torment me?

Was this just her way?

There were few places in Dad’s house that didn’t have the pain of memory associated with them. Even my old room, which should have been a safe space where I felt relaxed, triggered visions of my mother yelling and screaming at me. For the first couple of weeks I stayed with Dad, I slept in the living room on the couch. However, I eventually grew tired of waking up groggy with an aching back and stiff joints and decided to brave my old room in hopes of getting a good night’s sleep.

Some nights I slept better than others. On the nights I couldn’t sleep, I pulled out my laptop and worked. I was working on a new book, and my publisher wanted a draft by the end of the year. I was hoping to be finished by Thanksgiving so I could take the rest of the year off. Two nights after I had seen my mother in the hallway, I was having a hard time sleeping, so I spent the better part of the night writing. My old desk was still where it had been when I lived here; it was close to the door, so I could hear Dad if he called for me. It was where I set up when I was working.

I had been writing for about two hours when I stood up to stretch. When I sat back down to work again, I heard her voice behind me. “Still stuck in those fairy tale worlds? Still walking around with your head in the clouds? How old are you? Shouldn’t you have given up that nonsense years ago?”

I turned. She was standing behind me, looking the same way I had seen her last: dark, gnarled, with sharpened teeth and claws for fingernails. “I guess because you’ve got a little bit of money now you think you’re Mr. Big Time. Well, you’ll never be like your cousin. Now that’s a successful man!”

I didn’t want to speak to her. I didn’t want to do anything that would confirm her presence. But I was being led by instinct, and I responded without thinking. “Billy bankrupted three businesses, Mom. He’s not what I would call a successful businessman.”

She gritted her teeth and leaned forward. “Well at least he did something with his life! At least he made something of himself. His businesses may not have worked out, but he turned into a hot shot banker.”

My cousin was the manager of the local branch of one of the smaller corporate banks. “He’s not exactly a hot shot,” I groaned.

“I’d still rather he be my son than you!”

I stood up and leaned into the apparition standing before me. “I’m well aware of that. You took every opportunity to remind me.” I balled my fists. “I never doubted for one second how proud you were of Billy and how much you hated me.”

“And what did you do about it? Did you try to turn your life around and become something respectable? No! You just wrote silly stories for children and adults who wanted to be children.”

“My books have sold millions of copies. People all over the world have been entertained and inspired by my work. You may not approve of what I did with my life, but you will not insult it.”

In an instant, her clawed hand was around my neck. She lifted me off of my feet, and I felt the wall against my back. I took a split second to wonder how a ghost—something that shouldn’t have a corporeal form—was able to do this, but then I realized that it wasn’t a ghost I was dealing with. It was something more. Something more angry and vicious.

She screamed. It was high-pitched but rough, with the intense volume of the heaviest of rock concerts. “I’ll do what I please!” she shouted. “If I say you’re a failure, then you’re a failure! You’ve made lots of money but you’ve made it sitting on your ass in front of a computer all day. You’ve not done real work. You’ve not done something a man can be proud of. You’re a grifter is all you are, selling people fantasies and acting like what you’re doing is so noble.”

I felt her claws dig into my flesh and she lifted me even higher.

“I should have had an abortion.”

She dropped me. I stumbled forward as I hit the ground. When I looked back up, Mom was gone.

I sank to the floor and started to cry. I had always known that Mom never wanted me. She didn’t exactly make that a secret. But she never came out and said it. To hear her do so, even long after her death (perhaps especially long after her death) was more than I could bear. I don’t know how long I sat on the floor, a mess of tears and snot, my knees pulled into my chest with my arms wrapped around them. I was a lost and scared child, and I wanted someone to hold me and tell me that everything was going to be okay.

The next morning, as I cleaned up after his breakfast, Dad asked me what the weather was supposed to be like today.

“I think it’s going to be rainy,” I said, “and cold.”

“I haven’t seen rain in a long time. Can you take me outside?”

“Sure. You want to go now?”

“Give me a few minutes to rest from breakfast. Maybe in about fifteen minutes?”

“Okay. I’ll be back.”

I did the breakfast dishes and put in a load of laundry. By that time, it was time to go back and get Dad dressed for his trip outside. Dressing him, situating him in the wheelchair, and rolling him out to the front porch was a lot of work, but he rarely asked to go outside. It was worth indulging him.

We had been sitting outside for ten minutes when the first few drops of chilled rain fell. Within a few moments, it was coming down steadily and rhythmically. There was a cold breeze, and the skies were so gray it almost felt like twilight.

“Your mother loved the rain.”

I looked down at Dad. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want to talk about Mom, but it somehow felt like it didn’t matter what I wanted or didn’t want to talk about. I was not the one on death’s door.

“She would come out here and sit for hours when it rained. She even liked big storms, like hurricanes. She didn’t like people getting hurt by them, but she loved to see how furious the storm could get.”

We were silent for a moment until I spoke up.

“Dad, why did you stay with Mom?”

Dad shrugged. “I loved her.”

“But she was a horrible person. She was especially horrible to me. How could you watch her be so cruel to me?” Tears welled up in my eyes. It took every bit of self-control I could muster to keep from shouting at him, demanding answers to questions I should have asked long, long ago.

Dad sighed. “She was hard on you, I know. I hated to see how she treated you. But that was just her way.”

I shook my head and crossed my arm over my chest. “That’s just her way. That’s what you always said. You said that about every horrible thing she did. You said that every time she yelled at me, every time she abused me.”

Dad furrowed his brow and narrowed his lips. “Your mother never hit you. Don’t you say that she abused you.”

“There’s more types of abuse than physical, Dad. You can abuse somebody emotionally, or mentally. You can hurt their self-worth and their spirit instead of their body. And that’s what Mom did.”

“I’m going to tell you one more time,” Dad said, grimacing, “don’t say that about your mother. She was hard and she always spoke her mind, but she was good to you. She put a roof over your head and food on your table. She was the breadwinner of this family. Her job paid our way more than mine, you know that. She could have kicked either one of us out anytime she wanted to, but she kept making sure we were taken care of.”

“Is that why you stayed with her? You stayed with her because you couldn’t provide for us alone? Dad, that’s a type of abuse, too. It’s called financial abuse. It’s a way to keep somebody under control.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Everything’s abuse to you, isn’t it?”

“I’m telling the truth, and I don’t know why you don’t want to admit it. You know that she hurt me. You know she made me feel worthless. I don’t understand how you can’t see that that’s abuse.”

We were silent again. I actually thought about going inside and leaving him out here to watch the rain until I was ready to continue this conversation, but I couldn’t do it. I looked at his frail body and listened to his wheezing breath, and I just couldn’t harden my heart enough to abandon him.

“Dad,” I finally said. “I know you loved Mom. I know you loved me. I just don’t understand how you could love me and let her treat me like she did. If you were willing to accept the control she had over you, that’s one thing. But you were the one who really wanted me. She never did. How could you just let her treat me any way she wanted to and never say anything?”

Dad widened his eyes, and his jaw dropped. “Son, why do you think that your mother never wanted you?”

I could have told him that she confirmed it last night, but I wasn’t sure how that would go over. “It was obvious, Dad. How could she treat me the way she did if she truly wanted me as a son?”

Dad cast his eyes downward and stared out into the rainstorm beyond the porch. “Your mother kept you because of me. I told her that I would do everything on my own. I would take care of you, feed you when you woke up during the night and everything. I told her that I’d make life as easy for her as possible. Since she gave me you—the greatest gift I could ever have—I didn’t see where I had any right to tell her how she could treat you. She had done the most wonderful thing for me; I didn’t ask anything more of her.”

“Fine, but why did she hate me so much?”

Dad shifted in the wheelchair and looked in every direction except at me. He finally made eye contact with me and took a deep breath. “It’s not that your mother didn’t want children. She didn’t want children so young. She was only twenty-four when you were born. We always agreed that we would have another child when she was older, one we could raise together, one that wouldn’t be solely my responsibility. But before that could happen, she got ovarian cancer. She had to have a hysterectomy. You were just a year old.”

I felt as if I had been punched in the chest. I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or scream or just start running and never stop. I didn’t know if I suddenly understood my mother’s anger or hatred of me or if I doubled down on my resentment for it. All I could do was ask Dad why they never told me.

“We should have,” he said. There were tears in his eyes. “When you got older, we certainly should have told you.”

“Did she blame me for never being able to have children again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Regardless, she certainly hated me for not being her ‘real’ child, didn’t she?”

“I guess so.”

I fought back tears as I came up behind Dad and disengaged the brake on his wheelchair. “Let’s get you inside, Dad. I don’t want you to be too cold.”

For the rest of that day and all the next, I couldn’t focus on anything. I tried to work when I wasn’t tending to Dad, but the words wouldn’t come. When I was sure that Dad was tucked in for his afternoon nap, I tried going for a walk to clear my head; all that accomplished was filling my head with even darker thoughts. Finally, as night fell on the house and I put Dad to bed, I wanted to do nothing more than simply sprawl out in a recliner and revel in the quiet.

That quiet was soon disturbed when I heard Mom speak. “He finally told you, didn’t he? He finally told you that you took my motherhood away from me.”

I sat up in the recliner. My mother—sharp-toothed, ashen-skinned, red-eyed, and clawed—stood at the front door. Suddenly, all of those years of hatred made sense; every hurtful word she said had a perverse logic behind it. Finally knowing the truth, I felt like I could face her like I had never faced her in life.

I stood, my fists at my side as if prepared to fight. “I stole nothing from you. I gave you a chance at motherhood. You should have taken it.”

She slowly walked toward me. “Billy should have been my child. My brother was too young to be a father, and his girlfriend was even younger. But because you had to ruin my body, I never had the chance to have the child I truly wanted. So he got the pride of the family and what did I get?” She sneered. “You.”

I didn’t wait for her to close the distance between us. I dashed forward and faced her head on, jamming my finger where her heart would have been. “And you should have been thankful for me! You should have cherished me. I should have been a blessing to you. But you destroyed what love there could have been between us, and why? Because you were jealous of my uncle? Because I was nothing more than a favor you did for Dad, and I wasn’t the child you really wanted? Do you know how senseless that is? You destroyed being a mother because you couldn’t have everything just the way you wanted it.”

She snarled, showing her teeth. “I worked hard to be worth something. I put in countless hours to earn my education and earn my keep. I deserved to have things the way I wanted them!”

“And I deserved to have a mother that fucking loved me!” I had never shouted so loud in my life. “I don’t want you around here anymore. I want you to leave. I want you gone. I want you to cross over into whatever Hell awaits you. I’m done being your victim. I’m done! Get away from me. Leave!”

She stepped backwards. A panicked look came across her face. “You will not speak to me like that,” she said. Her words were biting but dull. She was losing her strength.

“Oh, I should have spoken to you like this long ago. I should have stood up to you before you died, when it really mattered. But I never did because being around you was painful. I should have dealt with that pain and told you how much you hurt me. I should have held you accountable. I am now, and I’m telling you that you have no more power over me. Now, like I said, be gone from me and be gone from this house, forever.”

Mom stepped away from me, and a look crossed her countenance I had never seen on her before: hurt. I watched the shadows of the darkened living room consume her, and—just as suddenly as she had appeared—she was gone.

I felt like I should have wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I just wanted to sit back down, take a deep breath, and lose myself in the stillness of my father’s house.

I finished my book. It was off to the publisher by Thanksgiving.

By that time, Dad was barely able to get out of bed. Even sitting up caused him pain. I hired a hospice nurse. She took good care of him.

A week before Christmas, she came out of my father’s bedroom and came up to me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “There’s not much time left,” she whispered. “You may want to go sit with him.”

I followed her advice. I pulled a chair up to sit beside Dad. His breathing was strained. I stroked his bald head and told him that I loved him, and I would stay with him until the end.

“I love you, Son,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I wanted to believe she did, too.”

My father closed his eyes and took one final breath. It was raining outside.