Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A Great Divide A Son’s Relationship With His Mother Can Be Uneasy At Best, And Uncomfortable At Worst

Dan Webster Staff Writer

I first cried for my mother when my father called to tell me that she was dead. Even then my abbreviated tears were more for him than for her.

Yes, he was freed from the strain of tending to a woman who for the last few years of her life had been a bed-bound stroke victim. At the same time, he was absent his only wife of nearly half a century.

So as he grieved for her, I grieved for him.

It was an easy out. I could support the parent whom I had grown to love and trust while continuing to dodge mixed emotions involving the parent with whom I would now never be reconciled.

For here is the truth of the matter: I was never comfortable in my mother’s presence.

Many people fail to get along with one parent or another, so I don’t consider myself special in this regard. The fact remains, however, that much of who I am and how I relate to life was shaped by this unhappy mother of four. And much of who I am involves the sense of shame that I inherited from her - a shame that was fostered by secrets.

Our family was virtually defined by secrecy. I have an older half-sister, for example, whose relationship to me never has been fully explained. For many years, I never even knew how old my parents were.

And then there was always the mystery of my mother’s disability.

This much I do know: Elinor Webster was born Elinor Grigsby (later Doolittle) in Brawley, Calif., on Oct. 13, 1920. The oldest of three children, she was said to be an athletic girl. But sometime in her early teens, she suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body that left her with permanent scars and a withered leg.

The cause of those burns remains clouded. One story had her riding a horse past a building site and getting accidentally doused in hot oil. I’m not sure anyone even remembers what really happened, but that’s the vision I’ve carried with me since childhood.

By the time I came along in 1947, my mother was two people: the dutiful spouse of a Navy officer and the mercurial housewife who limped on a bandaged leg.

It was always a guess as to which person was likely to show up at any given moment. The former, a caring, if over-protective, presence, was who we wanted. The latter, a mass of rage who couldn’t help but make targets of the very people she most loved, was who we so often got.

And Mad Mom definitely was someone to avoid. The problem, of course, is that children seldom are able to avoid their parents. I can still feel the pinches and slaps and blows that she would launch in answer to my every attempt at self-determination.

If I or my siblings objected, she would resort to verbal abuse. Her standard ploy was to invite us to leave. “Don’t let the door hit you in the rear on the way out,” she’d say. If we continued to object, we’d have to face Mad Mom’s chief enforcer: Dad and his leather belt.

To this day, the phrase “You just wait till your father gets home” sets my teeth on edge.

Yet I don’t want to make this a diatribe about bad parenting. My intent here is not to blame my mother for being what she must have felt powerless to change. At this point, that would serve no purpose.

In fact, as I stood last November before the friends and family who attended her funeral services, many of whom were weeping, I spoke charitably of the hardships that she had faced throughout her life. How hard was it, I asked, for a disabled woman of limited education to hold together a family without a full-time husband? This was during the Cold War, remember, and Dad was often off somewhere standing guard.

So Mom bought the groceries and drove the carpools and washed our hair and fixed our meals and helped with homework and helmed my Cub Scout den and played Santa Claus and oversaw too many other duties to list here.

I spoke of admiration, and I meant it.

Still, I would love to have spoken with her about the other part - the anger that she wielded like a club along with the hairbrushes, yardsticks, butter knives, extension cords, Lincoln Logs, belts and switches that she would force us to cut ourselves from bushes in the back yard. I would love to have had the chance to look back just once without feeling my own anger, to have had the chance to hold her hand and talk frankly about why each of us, at one time or another, feels this need to dish out pain all in the name of love.

I’ve had such conversations with my father. They began years ago in the corridor of a Navy hospital. The healing between us commenced then and continues as the years pass.

But my mother is dead. Worse, she’d been so in spirit for many years. It’s impossible to have dialogue with someone who sees strangers in her closet. So I’m left to do the work without her.

It’s not impossible. I have friends who understand what I need, a daughter whom I accept just as she is and a father who has become the man I always needed him to be.

Whatever else happens, I am sure of this.

I’m through with secrets.