I
came out of my mother’s womb kicking and screaming, and I didn’t stop carrying
on until after I was weaned from my mother’s breast. The opinion of our country
doctor, and of my grandmother, was that I had colic, which is defined as “a
severe, often fluctuating pain in the abdomen caused by intestinal gas or
obstruction in the intestines and suffered especially by babies.” I think I was
merely hungry. I think my mother’s milk was insufficient to nourish me, because
as soon as I was weaned from her milk and put on solid food, I settled down. Another
possibility is that my mother’s diet tainted her breast milk. A modern-day treatment
of colic includes eliminating caffeine, cow’s milk, and gas-producing vegetables
from a breastfeeding mother’s diet. From the time of her teen years, my mother
was a caffeine-fiend, and a main staple of her diet was vegetables grown in my
grandmother’s enormous farm-garden. One of my indelible memories of my mother
is watching her at mealtimes, her fork in her right hand and a freshly-pulled,
cleaned, and trimmed scallion in her left hand, a bite from the fork followed
by a bite of a scallion. I wasn’t yet a year old when my mother weaned me, and
I was by then a precocious, curious, fidgety child, talking like a magpie, and
wound up like the Eveready Bunny.
Another widely-held belief is
that a colicky baby’s nervous system is immature at the time of birth, a
phenomenon that renders the infant unable to handle stimuli outside the womb:
sights and sounds, for instance. At the
time of my birth, my Dad was away at Navy Boot Camp. Mom had moved back to her
parent’s farm for the duration, and it was there, in a bedroom of the
farmhouse, that I was born. The household was a raucous one, as six of the
eight young offspring of Mom’s birth family was still under roof, plus my
grandmother and grandfather, and then me. Mom’s youngest sibling Dean was only eight
days shy of seven when I was born. Other than during my young girlhood when I
was still a chatterbox and a jumping bean, throughout the rest of my history, I
have tended toward widely-spaced bursts of energetic chatter and activity, for
during my adolescence, I discovered quiet, my quiet bedroom, and quiet people
to whom I was drawn. I fell in love with quiet. And I just wonder if at the
moment I first emerged into the world, if my soul was jarred by all the
activity, as it still is. I can handle noise only for short spans of time.
Recently my son Frank drove me from my home in Columbus, Ohio to Palm Harbor,
Florida, and back, for a short visit with my sister Susan. Throughout the
entire 36 or more hours of the roundtrip, my son entertained himself with
blasting music on the car’s radio. This is his habit. It energizes him. It
depletes me. And by the time the trip was done, the inside of my head was
ringing, painfully, and my soul just wanted to hunker down in the luxurious,
the deliberate serenity, the utter freedom of my home.
While I was my mother’s first
child, she was not a novice in the care of infants, for she was the eldest
female among her parent’s eight children. As such, Mom acted as backup mother
to her younger siblings for most of her girlhood. In the attached photograph of
Mom and her seven siblings, she is the teenager in the back row, the one
holding her youngest sibling, the infant Dean.
As you might have guessed by now,
the title of this chapter “MY MOTHER’S MILK,” is a metaphor for my relationship
with my mother. That I am introspective is a given, as most highly creative
types are. My reflections often center on my bond with my mother. Mom and I
were devoted to each other, without question, and while outwardly it was
unhampered by dysfunction and inadequacy, a Sherlock Holmes-type of investigation
of it unearths a mother/daughter connection not quite so blemish-free. Strangely,
the glitch in our relationship can be boiled down to one factor, one giveaway
clue: my colicky infancy. The unfortunate truth is that like my mother’s milk
that left me under- and ill-nourished, she was not enough for me in other ways,
as well. This was the case during my formative years, at least.
I suspect that by the time I came
into being, my mother was burned out on babies, on the work tied to babies and
young children. She’d had years of it by then with her younger brothers and
sisters. Then I came along, and rather than being the designer baby she had
dreamed of, I bawled night and day, I bit her nipples with my sharp baby teeth
in utter frustration toward those only instruments available to feed me, and
getting little of what I needed from them. I’ve concluded that the
breastfeeding interaction between us set up a psychological pattern that dogged
us forevermore, one in which my natural need to be nourished by my mother was
thwarted at so many turns, the consequences of which played havoc with her confidence
that she was equipped to respond to my needs, sufficiently. I think she gave
away her power to me out of guilt. Throughout the years Mom and I had together,
her reliable response to me when I solicited her guidance on almost any
situation was, “Why are you asking me? You’re smarter than I am.”
An adjunct to this whole thing is
that I think the basic need of my mother’s soul was quiet. I think she craved
serenity and freedom, and other than for a little while in the last years of
her life, she was allowed very little of it. I inherited my need of those
things from her. She has been gone now for 25 years, and still my need to feed
off her is as strong as the day I was born. My only comfort is my belief that
our story isn’t finished—and someday, somewhere we will be together again, and
then we will get it right in every possible way.
***
“Guardians
and Other Angels,” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO)
is my novel of historical
fiction blended with the true story of my maternal ancestors, including my
mother’s girlhood, a story that takes place during the early to middle
Twentieth Century. It has been compared to Pulitzer Prize winners, “The Grapes
of Wrath,” and “Angela’s Ashes,” as well as to Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke
Horses.”
