The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 2 By Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

I also came to understand the role Intergenerational Silence played in the dance between my mother and father. My mother controlled through silence, a perfect correlate to her husband’s  explosive rages. Silence and Rage make grotesque bedmates, and both destroy relationships.

My mother’s story remained veiled. Except on one occasion, my mother never apologized to me for her actions  so that bridge remains broken.

Everything I know about my mother’s history (and that isn’t much) I learned from her relatives.  I knew she was illegitimate, the daughter of a wealthy and very married senator and my grandmother. She lived a privileged life and was sent to the very best schools/colleges. Once a month she visited with her biological father. By the time my mother was in her twenties she severed this relationship  for unknown reasons. I have no idea if she ever met her half – brothers and sisters. She disliked – blamed (?) my grandmother who was banned from the family when she became pregnant. No doubt shame was an issue for all. My mother lived with my grandmother’s sisters, my great aunts and called my grandmother by her first name. She married twice. The first marriage was annulled by the family. No idea why. Secrets and Silence ruled my mother’s family; and she clearly perfected that tendency. Didn’t anyone recognize that secrets leave holes that cannot be bridged once that person is dead?

 I have continued to search unsuccessfully for anything that would help me to make some sense out of our relationship. That I loved my mother deeply is obvious, but I have to  find a way to accept that I know almost nothing and have no idea what went wrong, or why.

 (Why did she threaten to abandon me as a child? Why did she criticize everything I did? Why did she tell me that I should be like – fill in the blank – anyone but me? Why did she attack me viciously every single time she got drunk? Why did she stop speaking to me for years at a time as an adult for no reason I could ever discern? Why did she betray me with other members of my family up until the time of her death? Why did she refuse to see me for the last twelve years of her life? So much pain. Hauntings. All of them).

  My mother loved animals, (dogs in particular), owls, elephants,  trees, plants and flowers – especially wildflowers just like I do. After baffling long term silences, I would discover that we had grown the same plants during the years she didn’t speak to me. Some deep underground connection kept us intimately connected. I followed her lead and was never without dogs as companions.  I loved reading, classical music, and art like she did.  She created beautiful birthday cards for me during the years we were speaking. Once she brought me a cedar tree in a small pot with no explanation. As a “Tree Woman” who had never spoken to anyone about my relationship with tree beings I was startled but never asked why.  

I have other positive memories. When I was a small child, one night we watched a full moon rise over the horizon from my bedroom window. When the clouds obscured the glorious white blossom I whispered, ‘moon under the covers’ and she made some kind of loving gesture or response.  We picked wild purple violets together, gathered lilacs and lily of the valley, made wreaths, listened and learned about frogs and blowfish. We drew and painted together. Every gift given to anyone was homemade. Once during adolescence my mother kissed me on the back of my neck while I was playing the piano for no apparent reason. When I insisted upon getting married at nineteen, she was vehemently opposed and so furious with me that I left home in raw terror. She wrote me ‘a letter of apology’ in the form of a crow sending me a small painting of the bird and added ‘that she was eating crow’. These memories suggest this mother loved her daughter. Sadly, I could never feel that she did; too many betrayals had left me broken.

 What I never discerned until recently was that I also used Silence as a way to protect myself from fear of my mother’s silences/ a powerful form of abandonment by never asking why she behaved as she did. I remained terrified of her until my father died and I stood up for him, but that’s another story. As a child I drew pictures of myself without a mouth which speaks volumes. I deliberately silenced myself when confronted by others’ cruelty. I was lost and as a young adult  funneled my queries into journaling, where they danced round and round.

 Later, I accrued academic degrees. As a fierce and vocal feminist, I tearlessly/tearfully advocated for all  nature. Mothering the Earth. I also became a  published writer who writes  from a personal standpoint. I continue to write with an honesty that is not part of my family history or the culture in which I live, but its opposite. Family silence creates a climate for personal honesty. The two extremes are related No secrets for me, but I have been told too many times that I am too honest and open for my own good. I believe this is probably true.

 My relationship with my dead mother may remain unhealed but I am no longer acting as judge or jury. She was an incredibly gifted artist that I adored. She was also a very introverted stoic sort of person.

Perhaps most important is the recognition that her life  (like my father’s) was also framed by the  Patriarchal Victorian era when men were kings and women endured but for the most part kept silent.

 I can acknowledge that I will always love my mother even though I never  understood her. Most importantly I  hope that I am  finally learning to put down the whys.

I will never know her story.

Sadly, each spring I cycle through old hauntings during the month my mother died with a hopelessness I cannot describe because we were never reconciled. During the last twelve years, when she chose not to see me making excuse after excuse, again without discernable reason I started to hate her like I once had hated my father. By this time, I realized that my feelings were the result of an overload of pain and were temporary. I stayed with them until they passed. I had no  intention of getting stuck in hatred again.

Ruefully I acknowledge that this month is also the month of my father’s birthday, and the month I buried my brother’s ashes. A month of family sorrows, a time to grieve what has been lost.

The fact that ‘my mother’ came to me on my father’s behalf through a dream at mid-life even though she didn’t seem to be herself moves me deeply, but it doesn’t change the story. The personal aspect of my mother’s relationship with me remains an unhealed wound.

Or does it? Maybe not completely.  

Last night after finishing this saga I  was awakened abruptly at 3 AM by a barred owl that was calling insistently  just outside my window. ‘Whoo whoo who who’, the haunting cries echoed through the night with an eerie resonance.

Last year during this most difficult month barred owls called repeatedly/ insistently from my woods, and for the first time in my life I sensed that these shy and reclusive night birds were in some way trying to comfort me.

 As Ovid says people do turn into other things and perhaps my mother continues to live on as a great horned owl (the owl she drew the most), but also manifests as the barred owl another Queen of the Night who forecasts the future and comforts in times of betrayal and loss?

Postscript for anyone who is interested in writing about their patriarchal roots:  recounting episodes of my family saga has been painful but surprisingly it has opened another door. When I put all my memories together along with the pain/anger and give the story the patriarchal context in which all of us lived, I can see that my mother did love me in her own way. That I can experience this as a truth brings me to a new edge of forgiving us both.

 Love may not be enough to interrupt the patriarchal flow but below it lies a river that murmurs words we can barely comprehend.

The River is Life That Just Is.