Mother Figure |
Issue 18
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“I’ve always known you are one of the kindest, most loving people I know. You weren’t the problem, you were never the bad guy they made you out to be. You just needed someone to love you for who you are.”
As I sat on my camp stool atop the picnic table watching the sunset over Lake Louisa, the December breeze nipping at my ear lobes as the last cars left before the park gates closed, your words through the phone knocked me sideways. The comment was not exactly central to what we were discussing. It was more of a footnote to your attempt to help me work through an unrelated crisis with a mutual friend over a perceived insult, which I would realize several months later was a misconstrued delusion. Similar warped distortions in perception would soon tear my mind apart again for the first time in 25 years. As before, you were trying to help douse another fire from hundreds of miles away. Although we would spend many more hours in the following months hashing out painful memories from our childhood, your passing reference to them that evening was only an add-on to what we were discussing at the moment. But what you said shocked and moved me anyway. I knew you were right, of course. I’ve known it all my life. It’s the secret I’d been afraid to tell the world, but the one I’ve always wanted everyone to know. My wife knows, perhaps also my daughter. Hopefully not any of my guy friends. But how the hell could you know, of all people? In forty-five years, through the decades of fraternal torment and older brother superiority, I’d rarely given you a reason to believe that I am kind. Sure, I’d shown you more than my fair share of vulnerability, tortured you without intention long ago with cross-country calls begging for rescue from problems you couldn’t solve. You were one of the few people who saw how my fragility almost destroyed me the first time. But I’d never shown you the love or the kindness you deserved. Somehow none of that mattered. Once again, you were there to listen and reassure. “You’re going to be alright this time, I promise. We’ll get through this together. I’m so glad you called, Rob.” * * *
By then we’d only begun talking again for about a year, following the worst of many fights over the years. It was obviously your idea to reconnect, not mine. Not that I minded. I’ve just never been one to make the first step at reconciliation after an extended separation.
Before our call in December two winters ago, our relationship had followed the pattern of eighteenth-century European diplomacy, with years of coalition interrupted regularly by strained relations or even outright war. We got off to a rocky start during the fifteen years we lived together as children. Perhaps because of our proximity in age, we were initially never more than rivals for attention. As we aged, our antagonism was formalized by the roles we were groomed for by our parents. An undiagnosed creative who chafed at the prescribed conformity they demanded, I was cast as the defiant older brother, headstrong and disobedient. You were naturally studious, self-motivated, and altruistic, and were taught to be the obedient caregiver, particularly when our mother needed a receptive ear for whatever problem was troubling her. As the daily clashes at home became more heated, our differences pushed us into separate camps that saw no reason to collaborate. I became the center of negative attention, while you were ignored unless needed and dismissed anytime you dared to ask to be heard. Neither of us grew up feeling comfortable in our own skin. It wasn’t until I left for college that we developed a connection, but once the seed was planted, a bond blossomed quickly. We began with what we had in common and vented about our parents. But before long, we were each surprised to detect mutual admiration. Although neither of us had been taught empathy, we intuitively expressed it, perhaps out of a longing to be loved for who we were. Somehow our differences seemed to balance each other out. Within two years you joined me at college, and we began sharing friends and belonging to the same social circle for the first time. Renewed proximity did trigger some of the discord imprinted on us as we grew up. We were closer than most siblings, but our friends knew to not be surprised when friendly banter shifted without warning to reality show bickering. But even the most heated arguments were followed by melodramatic reconciliations. Fundamentally, we grew closer, even as our breach with our parents grew wider. I’d always sensed a void in my life, an unfulfilled need for a parent who was more than just a drill sergeant. Somehow your friendship filled it. Maybe you felt the same way. * * *
Our relationship took an unhealthy turn for you shortly after I left for law school, even if you remain too noble to remember it that way. Long misunderstood psychiatric maladies began taking their toll on me, and within a year of leaving you behind at college, I began to spiral. I became morose, desperate, unable to cope with my struggles, hopeless. And I dragged you down with me.
From the other end of long-distance telephone lines, I called you and only you for help. On too many nights over too many months, you listened helplessly for hours to my fits of inconsolable despair. Sometimes you were able to talk me off the ledge, but sometimes you couldn’t. Perhaps I never threatened to harm myself. So much time has passed, and I can’t remember any words, only feelings. But eventually a precipice was reached. I fell into the abyss and had to be hospitalized. You were always the first to exonerate me from blame for any harm my troubles caused you. I certainly didn’t deliberately try to manipulate your caretaking inclinations. But you did suffer. Tragically, my disintegration inflicted unseen wounds on you that went unattended in your devotion to your duties as nurse and therapist. You were once again being exploited as a sacrificial caregiver, however unintentionally. I eventually recovered. I found the medical help I needed, was transformed and reprogrammed. Within a year I returned to law school, excelled, began a career, found love, married, and eventually found a fulfilling career. We stood beside each other with pride at our weddings. Our spouses became close, and before long we both had children. We shared plenty of good times. Our relationship clearly seemed scripted for the happily ever after. * * *
Life, of course, never follows a script. Careers took us to different cities, initially close enough to allow for frequent reunions, but then eventually to distant regions where we’ve remained ever since. Our lives and social circles changed, and we began having less in common. Time together became brief, and the scope of our relationship began to narrow back to shared memories of the past.
Much as we might have liked to distance ourselves from our childhoods, I found doing so difficult when we and our parents reunited. Perhaps you did also. Despite viewing myself as a completely different person, their company always seemed to turn me be back into the abrasive limit-tester. Without conscious intent and perhaps born of adolescent jealousy, I sank back into bad habits of antagonizing the perfect sister that I’d forgotten had also grown up unhappy. I never liked the person I became around our family. I remained troubled after my crisis during law school, even if I didn’t realize it until recently. As much control as I may have gained over my gloomy impulses, I still fundamentally viewed the world and myself through a distorted misanthropic lens. I tagged myself as unappreciated and miscast and allowed the resulting bitterness to fester and metastasize. Somehow, through the confusion of distance and abbreviated time together, it all caused me to reconsider our relationship and the differences that I had previously appreciated. Without you knowing, I began assigning nefarious inaccurate motivations to things you said that bothered me, began taking unjustifiable offense at perceived slights that had no ill intent. Over time, my faith in you deteriorated, and insignificant conflicts became more pronounced and often went unreconciled. I suppose I became more stubborn, less empathetic. I brooded more about foibles I’d unfairly assigned to you and closed my mind to proof that I was mistaken. I began recasting the intimacy we fostered in college as ephemeral and prepared to move on by minimizing your role in my life. It all finally culminated in an explosion shortly before Christmas, an interrupted reunion, and an unspoken agreement to discontinue communication. I chose to ignore the consideration of whether the break should be permanent or how long it should last. I’d honed long-term separations as a tool for coping with pain, and I was prepared for the burns of any accompanying grief. I’d given up any meaningful connection with our parents long before when I was much more fragile, and although I knew that amputating our connection would be much more painful, I was prepared to risk it. I now know that the break and the ensuing years were painful for you. They brought to greater light all the harm caused by our dysfunctional childhoods and perhaps even the agony I put you through during my crisis in law school. I’d like the think the trials you endured to cope with our separation helped to fortify your defenses to mistreatment, to immunize you from any future harm I might cause, however inadvertently. Or maybe I’m just searching for a silver lining to a tragic mistake that wasted too many years. * * *
My reckoning with the past did not come until much later, and ironically began in earnest just months after you re-established diplomatic relations. For years those warped perceptions I later learned to call cognitive distortions had been undermining a crumbling foundation weakened by work-related stress and unhealthy coping methods. A year of unnoticed decline eventually triggered the crisis we discussed during my call on that chilly December evening from the state park. By the end of the month I was in total freefall—one much less lethal than the one you watched from afar twenty-five years earlier, but also much more intense and longer-lasting. I was about to begin the hardest year of my adult life.
When we talked that night, we were still moving cautiously in reviving our relationship. When I finally understood the scope of my crisis not long after we spoke, I decided to spare you from the role you played before, despite your willingness to save me again. We agreed that you would instead counsel my wife and guide her through the disorienting road ahead, for which she had no training or experience. There would be no more desperate midnight calls. You’d instead console a fellow caregiver unburdened by mania who you could more easily help from far away. You’d be shielded from the more acute pain of watching someone you love disintegrate without being able to stop it, but you could still help me by being a good mother to my wife. My discovery of all the lies my disease had tricked me into believing about you was one of the early milestones in my recovery. As I finally began to appreciate the beautiful person you are, I realized that I had never actually attempted to know you at all. Our relationship had always revolved around me. I never sincerely asked about you, never listened to you, never heard you. Perhaps I was too accustomed to my childhood role as the center of attention, or maybe it was just narcissism or ego. I had always forced you to play the same unfitting role you were assigned by our parents. I’m sure it was natural for you to play along. Realizing that it all had to change was an empowering moment in my recovery. After reconciling the past, I insisted on treating the resumption of our relationship as a rebirth. It was time to finally prioritize what you thought and felt and wanted. Appreciating you for who you are somehow helped me to better understand and love myself. Our calls became more frequent, happier and less tense. Eventually we reunited in person for the first time in a decade, spent the night in the same building for the first time in nearly 20 years. It was the first time I could remember us being together without sharing a single unpleasant word. You’ve now become the mother neither of us ever had. Someone who will listen in a time of need without lecturing, who will reassure and encourage without being bothered or judging. Having never had anyone to reliably turn for comfort on difficult days, you somehow became a virtuoso at finding just the right words to say to someone buckling under duress. You always set aside your own feelings and provide an ear and a shoulder and liberate those you love to hold out their scars without fear. I suppose it comes naturally. I’m sure your children see what I see, and I know how critical it is for you to show them the unconditional empathy you never received. Having devoted much of our childhood to learning which buttons to press to upset you, I now derive pleasure in exploring ways to repay the kindness you’ve shown me over the years. You don’t care much for gifts or trinkets. Simple complements during our long-distance calls seem to work best. My favorite is to remind you that you’re a wonderful mother. No one knows better than me. |
ROB ROGERS is a writer and attorney from Orlando, Florida. His first book, "Finding My Way Home: Fighting Depression Backpacking in Central Florida,” won the Bronze Medal for Autobiography/Memoir at the 2025 FAPA President’s Book Awards. Rob’s essays have been published in Ponder Review, Four Tulips, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.
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