You might be wondering where, or what, Ogallala is.
Ogallala is a smallish city in Nebraska, USA. It’s named for the Ogallala band of Lakota (Sioux) Indians, who once roamed freely in the Plains, but like all Native Americans were rounded up and planted on reservations during the Westward expansion of white Americans. Ogallala, Nebraska, is now a corn town.
I’ve been on the road or off the grid now for weeks. Lots of thoughts, some jotted down, some evaporated, and some that maddeningly recirculate, playing themselves over and over until they are drowned out by the urge to drag my malfunctioning brain out of its bone box and fry it on the sizzling pavement of I-80.
In particular: the thoughts that forced me to bivouac early in bucolic Ogallala, as I was pelting down the blazing Interstate, trying to get to Michigan to meet a deadline.
I am haunted by the spectre of losing my son. I believe I have lost him. I believe I never had him.
This adult child of mine has never been happy with much, for long, particularly if it had anything to do with me.
He was miserable as a baby, except when eating or preparing food. He learned to cook by watching over my shoulder from his vantage point in the backpack. Since he screamed for whatever chunk of time he was put down, hours at a time, and I mean hours and hours, of necessity for my health and his life, I put him in the backpack and wore him. If he screamed in the backpack, I put him to bed (clean, dry, and fed, of course) and turned on the vacuum cleaner and put in ear plugs and turned up the stereo and went outside and walked around in the yard and wished I still smoked, until his father came home.
“Clap hands, clap hands
Till Daddy comes home
Daddy has money and Mommy has none…”
But his father objected to being handed a screaming baby even before he was properly through the door. In retrospect I don’t blame him.
As a pediatrician, having a “difficult child” proved helpful. It increased my Compassion Quotient.
I’m sure you’ve heard of awful cases where someone shook the baby, or threw it, or did some other act of violence because the baby wouldn’t stop crying. Most of us recoil in horror from these news items, and frequently judge the mother harshly. How could she? How could she?
Thankfully, I never did violence to my perpetually screaming baby. I took him to the doctor every week, sometimes more. My pediatrician patiently explained that he had “colic” (rubbish! colic is what they say when they don’t know why the baby cries) and that it would go away when he grew up (it hasn’t).
I remember even at the time, walking around the back yard in the middle of the night, thinking how grateful I was that I had the emotional resources not to simply throw him into somebody else’s trash bin. Later on, when I turned into the Director of several Pediatric Emergency Departments, I would draw upon that experience when the babies of other, less resourceful parents came in with grievous injuries or worse. As much as I hurt for those babies, I hurt for the parent who loved their child, yet in an instant of just-too-much-over-the-top screaming, snapped, and hurt their own flesh and blood.
Apart from myself, I think no one pities a parent who has hurt, or even killed, their child, in a moment of unpremeditated rage. In fact, I don’t even think it’s rage. I think it’s more simply end of the rope, no more self control, just shut up! Type of thing.
Maybe they didn’t have a back yard, vacuum cleaner, stereo, teeth to grind, nerves of steel. Maybe they didn’t have those resources.
I was grateful for mine.
Looking back, I’m also grateful that it wasn’t just me. Who couldn’t pacify this child, I mean. I feel vindicated.
When I went back to work and school after five months at home, I left the backpack with the babysitter, who muttered something about knowing how to take care of spoiled babies.
When I picked him up at the end of the day, she had that backpack on! She muttered something about weaning him off it by the end of the week.
She wore it, and him, for about two more years. Then we moved.
As far as I can tell, that’s when our troubles first began.
This person to whom I gave birth and did not kill, resents me with a passion. I resent my own mother, for far different reasons, yet I have compassion for her because I am a hated mother. I will not tell her I love her, because I don’t. I don’t confide in her, because whatever I say can and will be used against me.
I have tried to be a good listener to my son. I know I have been, because he has always come to me with his troubles, and I have felt a bit of guilty pleasure in listening: guilty for being pleased that he came to me in his time of trouble, wishing he didn’t have the troubles that brought him to me, yet pleased that he felt comfortable in coming to me for help.
I did my best to help him to become self-sufficient, since that, in my experience, is the best gift one can give a child, second only to unconditional love.
When he got into trouble, I let him flounder a good long while before I bailed him out. And I didn’t just let him off the hook. I got him out of mortal danger, and after that, he had a lot of meaningful work to do.
I feel now as though I’m explaining, justifying, trying to talk myself into believing that I wasn’t a horrible harpy mother like mine was. I’m picking through my brain, finding reasons to believe I did OK.
But more often, I’m picking through my brain, finding every little particle of doubt, possibility of abusive behavior, coldness, emotional distance, unavailability, what?
What happened? Or, more probably, what didn’t happen?
Through the decade of his twenties, it seemed we got along fine. Then came last Thanksgiving. I got gobsmacked, blindsided.
He invited me for dinner. No one else, just me. I thought that was strange, suggested we invite somebody else, or go to someone else’s dinner. No, he didn’t want to.
And he didn’t want help cooking, because he gets impatient with someone else in the kitchen. So I sat on the couch and smoked his weed.
He presented the meal. It looked lovely. He asked me to take a picture of him with his beautiful dishes all arranged on the table. I did.
After dinner I went out and slept in my camper in his parking lot. The next morning I came in and showered while he went to work for a while. When he returned, he made it clear he expected me to leave: immediately.
There was the old threatening feeling I knew so well, the feeling of dark clouds, anger, intimidation, that he had used to get his way as a young adolescent. I hadn’t seen that in twenty years.
I didn’t want to leave just then. I was nursing a migraine, was exhausted from the many hour drive to his place, and I didn’t want to be bullied. I wanted to curl up on the couch and drink coffee and smoke weed and watch cartoons in my pajamas. But it was, after all, his place. Not mine.
He showed me the door.
“I really need my space back, Mom,” was how he put it, and opened the door for me, so I could go through it.
We’ve spoken four times since then. They haven’t been pleasant times. When I ask what happened, what changed, I get a tirade about how I dragged him around when he was a kid, how I wasn’t available emotionally or physically, and I apologize. And he is angry, and doesn’t want to hear how I feel.
And I get all confused. Here is my son, angry at me. I didn’t kill him when he was an angry, inconsolable baby. Why isn’t he grateful? Isn’t he happy that he’s now a successful adult, with a promising career, lots of nice friends, no lack of women friends, enough money for his needs?
My own mother used to tell me I was “shit,” burn me with match heads, just to see me cry. Then she’d laugh and tell me I should grow a thicker skin. And she wonders why I avoid her.
I tried my best to be another kind of mother, the mother I would have chosen if I could have had my choice.
I guess it doesn’t work that way.
