Mom Guilt is the Worst Guilt

When You’re So Not Perfect

That October afternoon, we sat in Mom’s apartment, filtered sunlight angling across her face.  Even at age eighty-nine, she was beautiful as she sat like royalty on her blue chair. I perched on the ottoman where she was supposed to elevate her swollen feet. As her caregiver, I always tried to make her smile. Smiling felt awkward, though.

I never really knew my mother.

That day, we’d already argued about whether generic ibuprofen or brand name Advil was superior and whether or not she truly needed room service for every meal when she only ate dessert. These were our usual conversations. But then she started talking about my early childhood. She hunched forward, as though her shoulders suddenly bore the weight of the universe.

Mom narrowed her eyes. “The flies,” she said. “A million flies. We lived next door to a stockyard.” She waved away invisible insects without looking at me. “Flies made you sick.”

“Mom.” I squeezed her arthritic hand. “My polio wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

She scowled, as if I hadn’t paid attention. “Flies. A million dirty, filthy flies.”

It was pointless to argue. When I was born, Mom was a junior in high school.  The same year, I contracted polio. I didn’t know much more. How I ended up with paralytic polio was a forbidden topic.

I didn’t mention the epidemic that hit Phoenix that autumn in 1952, when I was just eight months old. It was strictly taboo to talk about how at seventeen, she wasn’t prepared to care for a disabled child. My eyes felt that sharp sting when you try not to cry. “Please don’t blame yourself, Mom. You did the best you could.”

The Salk vaccine was still months away—no way to prevent polio, the same year that at least 52,000 others came down with it too.

I wasn’t ready for what Mom said next. “When you were born . . .” Her voice cracked, and she wouldn’t look at me. She inhaled sharply. “You were so perfect,” she said. “Perfect.”

Perfect? Part of me was insulted. Were perfect? The simple past tense felt like a slap.  I’d fought that imperfect label all my life. In my experience, disabled kids like me had to fight to be treated like everyone else.

We crips and spazzes and retards (as we were called in the good old days) had to work harder, smarter and better to be regarded as normal. We were either pitied, mocked or singled out as overcomers. I’d had all three experiences as I grew up. But Mom never told me what she thought.

Mom and I had such different temperaments that I couldn’t believe she loved me. She worked hard as a full-time secretary, and I always had the feeling that she wished she’d pursued advanced degrees like her older sister. If I’d been in her shoes, I might be tempted to say that teen pregnancy ruined my life.

She never said I ruined her future, but she made sure I had every opportunity to grow and learn. When I was just two, she brought me to Olympian Dick Smith for swimming therapy. I had piano and voice lessons. Suddenly I remembered times she’d advocated for me.

 In third grade, she’d yelled at my teacher to let me carry the class’ potted plant to be watered. In the hospital for crippled children, I was so defeated when my fourth-grade class wrote me letters that were exactly alike—a thinly disguised penmanship lesson. I somehow didn’t see Mom’s weekly typewritten letters as a love gesture from a worried parent. All I knew was that my mother seldom hugged me, never said “I love you,” and rarely smiled.

She’d dozed off now, head back, mouth open as she softly snored. Shadows lengthened across her cheeks. After dropping out of high school to marry a guy she barely knew, what must it have been like to be a teenaged mother?

It must have been frightening to set up housekeeping next door to a cattle yard, where manure reeked, and flies tormented. How terrifying to then discover that your perfect baby daughter has the life-threatening disease that struck fear into entire communities.

For my mother, until the day she observed that I wasn’t moving my left arm, I was perfect. Until I wasn’t.

Somehow, she never recovered.

When I was nine, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of Mom sobbing from her bedroom. She’d had a little too much to drink at a party. “It’s all my fault,” she sobbed. “Linda got polio because of me.” My adoptive father murmured something in-between outbursts, but my heart broke. I knew I’d always have to take care of Mom.

What must it have been like to be a teenaged mother?

My heart still breaks for anyone who suffers with some physical, emotional or mental issue. Real trauma, whether caused by disease, calamity or cruelty can knit itself into your bones. You can try to heal it, work on shedding the shame and holding up your head, and I do.

Still, one’s idea of perfection will almost always be before the shooting, before the stroke, before the polio. On the tsunami days, maybe you just cry your eyes out and nuzzle deeper into God’s mercy.

Mom died last October and sadly, trauma never loosened its grip. I wish I’d taken better care of her, and that she hadn’t suffered so much guilt and shame. All I can do now is to expose the places where the same enemies still stalk my own marrow and run to the mercy seat.

One thing I know for sure is that God comforts all us moms—drunk or sober—who wail in the night. Surely Jesus murmurs compassion over all our infirmities and traumas. To the Spirit, I’m not invisible and neither are you.

Mom snorted a bit and woke herself up. “Going home?” she asked. Dusk had faded to twilight, tinging the room in lavender.

“Yes.” I eased her swollen feet onto the ottoman. “They’ll be here with your dinner soon.”

“I hope it’s cherry pie.” She smiled.

I kissed her forehead. It was perfect.