My Mother’s Fear of Her Budding Daughter

Trying to Stifle My Adolescence

If I start thinking very hard about masculinity and femininity, I get too confused to even think straight. This is an issue of unbearable complexity for me, and I have never been able to begin to unravel all of its intricacies.

Today is Halloween, and it is a day I have grown to enjoy, because it is a tribute to life’s darker side and to those aspects of our characters which are unclear or undefined. Halloween gives us a healthy opportunity to give expression to our darker impulses and act out some of our unresolved issues about who we are.

And what I am is one major unresolved issue about who I am.

It was an Alice in Wonderland childhood that I had; people were constantly changing and appearing and disappearing, and I never knew who I was or who anyone else was. That caterpillar sitting on top of the mushroom, saying “WHO-O-O-O-O-O ARE YOU-U-U-U-U-U?”; this was a question I never could answer. And there was always the threat of the Queen getting a sudden urge to behead me; it was all so very terrifying.

My mother, fundamentally, did not want me to exist, but since I did exist, she molded me into someone whose purpose was to gratify her needs. When I was younger, she wanted me to be inconsequential and powerless; a drab, homely, studious child.

But at the magic age of twelve, she perceived me as an even greater threat to her. As an adolescent and a sexual female, I now had the power to destroy her.

My mother used a powerful blend of her sexuality and her sadism to control men, and she managed to keep the two men in our family under her total domination. But another budding female in the household just wouldn’t do, and she did everything in her power to stifle my sexual development.

Oh, she was a bitch, my mother, at such a tender and fragile time in my life, she was unutterably cruel. She had so many ways, subtle and overt, of stripping me of my femininity.

One Halloween, she got the idea that it would be hilarious for me to dress up as a Boy Scout. So I wore my brother’s Boy Scout uniform, that ugly, drab thing, and slicked my hair back and wore that stupid hat; and I felt uglier and homelier than usual, and utterly humiliated. And I remember her strongly encouraging me (she had her ways) to buy a boy’s sweater in the basement of Penney’s — it was white, with a zipper up the front, with some gray or black trim on it. Homely and drab and unfeminine is how she wanted me to be.

I struggled desperately during those years of sexual unfolding — struggled to find a “look” I could feel good about. But with each step forward, she kicked me back two, and in the high school years, there was simply no hope of developing any kind of romantic life.

I hated her so desperately for taking yet another thing away from me, and in those years I wanted to kill her more than ever. And so the repressed sexuality and the homicidal impulses became all tied up together; hopelessly entangled. And here I sit, thirty long years later, still tangled in a muddled mass of confusion.

My mother, at age 71, is drinking herself slowly to death. It could not happen soon enough for me, and I must say I derive a certain feeling of vindication as I watch her brutalize herself in much the same way she brutalized me.

There are too, too many Susan Smiths in this world, and way too many children who die either physically or emotionally at the ferocious hands of their mothers.

But for me, still, the question of my identity remains a very perplexing and unresolved concept.