I feel like I’ve pulled the Wheel of Fortune lately. I know deep down, that it’s good that I’m dealing with my issues with my mother. As Mother’s Day approaches, I know I need to do something about the anger I have towards her and how she has treated me.
I was born on a Friday before Mother’s Day. My mother always said I was her present, and that it was fitting she got to take me home on Mother’s Day. I was her Toni Jo. She liked to tell everyone how she had my name picked out since she was fifteen, and she waited ten years to get me, like a reward for something I suppose. She had an image of me, and a future picked out for me long before I ever arrived.
I was a reason for her to brag. The tiny child that could read very early, that played bank instead of house. But I never felt like my ideas or ambitions were fostered. Please don’t get me wrong – my childhood wasn’t a complete tragedy, but looking back, some things look different from an adult’s perspective than they did from the dependent child’s.
My mother didn’t want us to succeed if she couldn’t get the credit for it. I always wondered why out of myself and my two sisters, none of us graduated from high school. It’s not like we were stupid. We just didn’t have the encouragement or incentive to stay in school. My mother did take my younger sister to the courthouse to have her married off at sixteen, but refused to come to my wedding. Instead, when she found out my father’s last wife was coming, she insisted the woman would bring a gun on the plane and kill her at my wedding. She made sure that my grandparents and my youngest sister, my maid-of-honor, did not go either, as a show of solidarity maybe. My youngest sister knew better and didn’t even ask her to come when she was married by the JP.
I don’t know now if my mother ever really had the capacity to love me, the real me, and not her Toni Jo. Maybe that’s why I don’t use my name when I blog. I find it interesting also that both of my sisters go by nicknames too. Do they, too, disassociate their real selves with the projection of the proper daughters our mother had for us?
