That Makes Me Sad

There are words that make me sad:  Ma looks me in the eye, “You’re really so good to me.”

Sometimes followed by an “I love you.”

I don’t doubt she loves me, but I’m never sure if she means what she’s saying at that moment, or if it’s part of her survival mechanism—staying on the good side of the person in control. Battered wives adjust, Stockholm syndrome develops, when you know someone is your only hope of survival you know not to be biting the hand that feeds you, literally, as it were.

She doesn’t always know me, but Ma knows survival.  When we were younger she modeled “walking tough” as we passed through sketchy neighborhoods in the Bronx or the Lower East Side. A latchkey kid, she survived a south Bronx childhood of near poverty during the Great Depression, paternal abandonment, rapes, childhood sexual molestation, two bad marriages, an alcoholic teenager prone to running away & not averse to prostituting herself, breast cancer, skin cancer, and regular old depression.

Opening a photography business with the second of the bad-marriage husbands, in the garage of a foreclosure they’d bought (and where they raised me), there was no money for extras, such as clothes that were not absolutely necessary. Today’s closet holds more than fifty each: jackets, turtlenecks, pants in all the colors, but back then…in a bedroom closet the width of the room, she had: two pairs of pants, three tops, a couple of jackets.  All either red, white or blue,  pulled together & switched around with scarves, so no one would know how little we had. Skilled at the art of misdirection, she could make survival look like success. You don’t forget those skills, that behavior becomes ingrained, it might as well rearrange your DNA.

Ma says she loves me, that I am good to her—within the same few minutes she has asked who I am, who I am to her, what my name is, who my mother is, or where I live.  Or said that this is the first time anyone told her I live with her; that I am not with her every day (I am); or that she doesn’t live here.

Can you love someone you can’t identify?

Leaving her for two, maybe three minutes to get something from the kitchen, when I come back, she frequently asks about the man she had been talking to. Who is me. Not a man, even though she insists that a) it was not me,  b) it was a man, and c) of course she knows I’m not a man she’s not an idiot, goddamnit. In the moments when I am out of sight for less than a minutes and he loses who I am, can she really have a memory of my being good to her?

Maybe. Maybe she is so in the moment that whatever I am to her at that moment is someone she loves, regardless of name or relationship. Outside of her late brother, an uncle or aunt here or there, she can’t remember anyone’s name, but when friends / family call, she recognizes the voice of “someone important” in her life, someone she loves who loves her back. Family members she “never knew” call, their familiar voice triggering feelings of love and safety. There are no anecdotal memories, no remembered and shared history, no laughs over past silliness, all of that is gone. But there are memories of love, triggered by voices of the loved.

Maybe this is how she knows she loves me, knows I am good to her. After sixty-three years of conversations, fights and silliness, I have a voice that makes her feel safe and loved. Familiar even when she can’t say who it belongs to, inside she knows it is the voice of her protector.

“You are really so good to me,” she says, but in that tone of gratitude and tenderness I hear: You are better to me that I deserve. Always fighting to grab some bit of self-worth, for a belief in her value, beyond that of being beautiful. She never felt smart enough, educated enough, worldly enough, never been comfortable in her skin. At ninety & a half (we are back to that part of life where halves & quarters matter again, like when you were five and a half) that’s not going to change. She can talk the talk, but there is no walking the walk.

“You are really so good to me,” she says, as if what I do is extraordinary, which it isn’t. I look after her. I parent her, the same way she did me, although I think I got the better end of that deal. I parent her the way children have always cared for aging parents. I make sure she has all she needs and most of what she wants. Food. Lodging. Companionship. Entertainment. Safety to the best of my ability.

“You are really so good to me,” she says, and she makes me sad. That she cannot see her value to the world, to me. That her fierceness and bravery is fading. That she thinks being loved by someone is a sacrifice they make.

“It’s a pain in the ass, Ma, but it’s not a sacrifice. Giving up a kidney, that’s a sacrifice. Killing virgins and tossing their hearts into volcanos. This?”  This is a living amends for all the crazy I put her through. “It’s my job to keep you safe and free from fear. And make you laugh when I can.”

I do for her what she did for me.
“You are really so good to me.”

My heart cracks open.