By the time she was grown up, it would be accurate to say that the mother-to-be was having a very hard interior time of it indeed.
When she became a mother, things became even harder. The mother’s expectations of her small child were also, it turned out, impossibly high. And every time the child fell short, her natural inclination was to loathe it. In other words, every time it (the child) threatened to compromise the high standards that were all the mother felt she really had, inside, the mother’s instinctive self-loathing tended to project itself outward and downward onto the child itself. This tendency was compounded by the fact that there existed only a very tiny and indistinct separation in the mother’s mind between her own identity and that of her small child. The child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror. Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish, willful, or childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to loathe it.
But she could not loathe it. No good mother can loathe her child or judge it or abuse it or wish it harm in any way. The mother knew this. And her standards for herself as a mother were, as one would expect, extremely high. It was thus that whenever she ‘slipped,’ ‘snapped,’ ‘lost her patience’ and expressed (or even felt) loathing (however brief) for the child, the mother was instantly plunged into such a chasm of self-recrimination and despair that she felt it just could not be borne. Hence the mother was at war. Her expectations were in fundamental conflict. It was a conflict in which she felt her very life was at stake: to fail to overcome her instinctive dissatisfaction with her child would result in a terrible, shattering punishment which she knew she herself would administer, inside. She was determined — desperate — to succeed, to satisfy her expectations of herself as a mother, no matter what it cost.
From an objective perspective, the mother was wildly successful in her efforts at self-control. In her outward conduct toward the child, the mother was indefatigably loving, compassionate, empathetic, patient, warm, effusive, unconditional, and devoid of any apparent capacity to judge or disapprove or withhold love in any form. The more loathsome the child was, the more loving the mother required herself to be. Her conduct was, by any standard of what an outstanding mother might be expected to be, impeccable.
In return, the small child, as it grew, loved the mother more than all other things in the world put together. If it had had the capacity to speak of itself truly somehow, the child would have said that it felt itself to be a very wicked, loathsome child who through some undeserved stroke of good fortune got to have the very best, most loving and patient and beautiful mother in the whole world.
Inside, as the child grew, the mother was filled with self-loathing and despair. Surely, she felt, the fact that the child lied and cheated and terrorized neighborhood pets was her fault; surely the child was simply expressing for all the world to see her own grotesque and pathetic deficiencies as a mother. Thus, when the child stole his class’s UNICEF money or swung a cat by its tail and struck it repeatedly against the sharp corner of a brick home next door, she took the child’s grotesque deficiencies upon herself, rewarding the child’s tears and self-recriminations with an unconditionally loving forgiveness that made her seem to the child to be his lone refuge in a world of impossible expectations and merciless judgment and unending psychic shit. As he (the child) grew, the mother took all that was imperfect in him deep into herself and bore it all and thus absolved him, redeemed and renewed him, even as she added to her own inner fund of loathing.
So it went, throughout his childhood and adolescence, such that, by the time the child was old enough to apply for various licenses and permits, the mother was almost entirely filled, deep inside, with loathing: loathing for herself, for the delinquent and unhappy child, for a world of impossible expectations and merciless judgment. She could not, of course, express any of this. And so the son — desperate, as are all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers — expressed it all for her.
BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
B.I. #20 12-96
NEW HAVEN CT
‘And yet I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed.’
Q.
‘Let me explain. I’m aware of how it might sound, believe me. I can explain. In bed together, in response to some sort of prompt or association, she related an anecdote about hitchhiking and once being picked up by what turned out to be a psychotic serial sex offender who then drove her to a secluded area and raped her and would almost surely have murdered her had she not been able to think effectively on her feet under enormous fear and stress. Irregardless of whatever I might have thought of the quality and substance of the thinking that enabled her to induce him to let her live.’
Q.
‘Neither would I. Who would now, in an era when every — when psychotic serial killers have their own trading cards? I’m concerned in today’s climate to steer clear of any suggestion of anyone quote asking for it, let’s not even go there, but rest assured that it gives one pause about the capacities of judgment involved, or at the very least the naiveté—’
Q.
‘Only that it was perhaps marginally less unbelievable in the context of her type, in that this was what one might call a quote Granola Cruncher, or post-Hippie, New Ager, what have you, in college where one is often first exposed to social taxonomies we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction that im—’
Q.
‘A large outdoor concert-dash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where — it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her proto-typical Cruncher morphology was evident right at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women — it is a less uncommon typology among educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on the blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.’